大象传媒

As told by William Thorpe

I was in the Army: I was in the D-Day Landings. You spoke to a man one minute, the next he was gone. We went onto the beach in a landing craft. A man behind me said, "I'm not afraid of the Germans. I'm afraid of that water.! I never swa him again, he was gone the next minute. The landing craft ran onto a sandbank, with eight or nine feet of water on the other side: people who thought we leaping off onto another beach got drowned. I came ashore on Sword Beach, I waded ashore. They all had these names, all the way along to Cherbourg. We were stuck on that beach for six weeks. If the Panzer divisions had come at us, we'd have been driven back into the sea. The Germans were mistaken about where the invasion would be.
We invaded Normandy, then we were moved to Arromanches, and the engineers built a big dock called a Mulberry Harbour. We took the ships full of Army supplies in there, and lorries took the supplies inland. We went to Caen, which had been bombed by 1,000 planes and not a house was standing. The place stunk of death. You weren't allowed there unless you had essential business there. From France we went to Antwerp, where there were big docks, and when we got there we headed for a cafe and the owner said," This morning I was serving Germans and this afternoon I'm serving the British." The Allied Forces ahd moved so quickly that the Germans were running out of Antwerp at one end as we were running into it at the other.
One time I was in Dover, and the Germans shelled Dover from across the Channel every day of the week, so all the civilians were evacuated, there were only services personnel there.
The first night they bombed London I was on leave; I came here from Guidford and found everything on fire. There was a rubber works and an oil depout at Silvertown, and all these inflammables made it a river of fire in Silvertown.

漏 Copyright of content contributed to this Archive rests with the author. Find out how you can use this.