大象传媒

This is Tom Dwyer's account of his D-Day:

I was 22 years old on D-Day, and a gunner in the army.

We were so na茂ve that we didn't know where we were going that day until we boarded the mother ship and were each given 200 French francs. Then, even the dimmest of us knew our destination.

Before we left the marshalling area, we were told that we had a 50/50 chance of survival. I wasn't particularly worried, because our army was at the peak of its development, we were all fit and we had great equipment. We had been preparing for the invasion for over a year, up in the Cheviot Hills, training with live ammunition.

On the morning of D-Day, we boarded the 'mother' ship and set off early in the morning. We were playing cards; we had a bucket of English coppers as we didn't think we'd need them again. Our French money we kept for when we arrived.

When we landed I was in the advance party of our battery, driving a three-ton truck loaded with 60 shells. The guy who drove off the landing craft in front of me was in a little wireless van, and he vanished in a pile of bubbles. 'Keep going, keep going,' people were shouting, and I just drove straight on. If you took your foot off the accelerator the vehicle might stall. It was very difficult to drive, as there were sandbags all around the accelerator in case you went over a mine.

The beach parties who had landed before us had cleared the mines, and had put white tape along the corridor where they'd cleared them. It was important to stick within the confines of that white tape. One guy went over the line and bang, he went over a shell. The Germans used to dig their big ammo shells into the ground, put a steel rod and a flat steel plate on top, and if you go over that - boom.

I didn't get bothered by what I was seeing. We were so well trained, we weren't a Dunkirk army. I knew if even a small piece of steel hit me in the brain, that was it, and there were a lot of them flying around. When a shell exploded, it went kchung! and you could hear things flying past your ears. It might only be a small bit of a shell, but if it gets you in a vital part, you've had your chips. But you don't think about it, and I never saw any panic. We had been so well trained.

For want of a better word, it was exciting. It wasn't depressing, put it that way. We knew that once we got up on to that beach we were going to chase hell out of the Germans, that was our aim. We knew how they treated our people at Dunkirk and all that, and we were going to give them a piece of their own medicine.

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