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I REMEMBER……………………
Many people do not appreciate that not only the Army landed on D-Day but many RAF as well, for HQ had to be on the spot to co-ordinate air operations. And the Airfield Construction units of which I was a member, had to get straight to work to build air-strips to allow our planes to land. We levelled fields and made landing strips using long narrow strips of steel plate which linked together like lego, and made a runway. Each runway had to be about 3600 feet long, so you can see that much material had to be brought on shore before our planes could operate from Normandy.
At the beginning we all slept where we could, and I recall I had a very nice ditch running beside an orchard, conveniently covered with a farm cart and bales of straw. We saw no sign of the farmer as local people had been warned to leave the area. We were delighted to find plenty of cider about, and promptly filled our water cans, only to find that we could then not make tea! As the Mulberry Harbour became fully operational supplies became available, and we slept in tents at our HQ. Food came in ration boxes; one box held rations for one man for seven days or seven men for one day. The contents were varied, and we soon learned which pack had the tinned fruit! But there were not many of them! Most of the rations were tinned or hydrated and some were in self-heating cans. These had a heating element down the centre of the can, and when you pulled the strip off it ignited and heated the contents. Bread was not available until mobile bakeries were set up after some weeks, and hard biscuits were issued - and I mean hard -like concrete! But we found that, if you broke them up - and that was no easy thing - and put them in soup or stew, they expanded until they were something like dumplings.
We also had one man ration boxes, which contained biscuits, dried meat powder and a sort of block which, when heated in water, became porridge. There were also matches, a few cigarettes and a few sheets of toilet paper! I think there was also chocolate.
Alan Jump, RAF

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