- Contributed by听
- SusanDW
- People in story:听
- Tim Dudley-Ward
- Location of story:听
- D Day landing to D Day + 8 Gold Sector
- Background to story:听
- Army
- Article ID:听
- A3533339
- Contributed on:听
- 17 January 2005
My Father served with the 1st Btn Hampshire Regiment throughout the War. He was conscripted in 1940 and my Mother kept all the letters he sent home between 1940 and 1945. He served in Egypt (1940-1941), Malta (1941-1943), Scicily, Italy and finally took part in the D Day landings in 1944. He was wounded on D Day +8 at La Senaudiere.On D Day he was with SP Company. Assault Pioneer Platoon. Below is an exert from a letter sent from England after he had been wounded:
City Hospital, Nottingham.
23rd June 1944.
...I don't know if you want to know anything of what happened during my short stay in France ? To begin with they nearly drowned us by landing too far out. We were wearing waders up to our arm pits and as we dashed off the boat the water was that deep it just surged over us. As a result the damm things got full of water and together with the equipment and a strong tide running along the shore we had a rough time for a couple of minutes. I just cut everything loose and swam for it. Our next job was to clear a mine field. We did this by prodding with pieces of steel wire - was my heart in my throat expecting one to go off at any moment. I did not have to wait long. A bulldozer hit one but nobody was hurt. When the tide went out, we salvaged our guns which had been under water and got cracking on cleaning them up. We caught the others up on the second day and the following few days consisted of supporting the 1st Companies. On the 13th we caught it hot and strong. A crowd of fellows and myself got pinned down between the two lines with both sides slinging everything they had at each other. I decided to get out so another fellow and myself made a dash for it and much to our own suprise we made it. Then Topper (Platoon Cdr) asked me to go along with him as I was the only one of his Platoon he could find and we picked up three others on the way. We lined a bank to help give covering fire but this was as far as any of us got. Over came the bomb. I felt the shrapnel bang into my leg and when the dust cleared I saw the others were dead. By the time I had crawled to the road our boys had gone forward so I was OK. A Padre and a stretcher beared helped me back to the ADS and that was the end of my fighting career for a while.
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