大象传媒

As a Marine Commando, I went over with the Canadians on D-Day, landing on Juno Beach. I was in a signal unit and one day went out with an armed escort to lay a field telephone cable. We had to raise the cable over a road joining the main road, so we climbed on a low wall to drape it over a tree. When we were standing on this wall, which was approximately 3 feet high, the Germans, who were very close, started firing at us and we could hear the bullets zipping through the branches of the tree and hitting the wall we were standing on. The officer and sergeant called to us to get down quickly but we refused until a ladder was brought, just in case we hurt ourselves when we jumped!

We went to repair a field cable and when we arrived, the officer asked which way we had come. When we explained that we had walked through this orchard, he told us how lucky we were, as they had just laid a minefield there. We said we would go back a different way and were walking across a cornfield when we saw a low flying plane approaching. I said to my mates, 鈥淒on鈥檛 worry, it鈥檚 a spitfire.鈥� When we saw the swastika on the side we realised it was a Messerschmitt 109. We ducked very quickly as it began machine gunning the unit we had just left. I will leave it to your imagination to guess what my mates called me for mis-identifying the plane!

I was blown up and wounded in Normandy at 2.10 on Sunday 18th June 1945 and after being evacuated, was sent to a number of hospitals before ending up in a convalescent home near Reading. When I was fit I returned to the holding unit in Wrexham and was due to go to Ceylon to fight the Japanese, as the European War was over, but both atomic bombs were dropped and Japan surrendered, so I didn鈥檛 have to go. I was demobbed in 1946.

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