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BULLDOG TO WILD BOAR-D.DAY

‘Bulldog to wild boar you will receive some more visitors tonight. The wind is blowing the torches’.

Intended to be impenetrable to the enemy, these messages were crystal clear for the cells to which they were broadcast, but eventually it came time to launch the military assault.

The craft was an LCT (a tank landing craft). They were flat bottomed like a barge with the engine room at the back.

I felt all right on the way out. It was so rough; most of the men were sea sick. I got myself curled up in the chain lock and went to sleep. I slept most of the way across.

The going in was very very well planned. All in sequence but of course we had a particular role to play in as much as we had to fire our guns as we went in on a rocking and rolling ship.
At first light we were all awakened and as soon as we had got ourselves sorted, the guns were loaded and we were firing at targets just beyond the beach. I don’t know how accurate we were because although the target wasn’t moving, not only were we moving forward, we were moving up and down as well. So it was a matter of judging the distance for the next round and when the vessel became almost horizontal we fired., otherwise if you fired when the nose was dipping the shell was going to fall short, which you could not allow to happen, otherwise they would be landing amongst your own troops. The Germans were not sending much ammunition back, we were quite surprised.

As the craft ran into the beach, down went the ramp off went the bren gun carrier when there was a terrific explosion at the ramp and the ramp was absolutely buckled and twisted and useless.
We thought at first it was a mine, and then there was a terrific explosion in the engine room and we thought we couldn’t have hit a mine at the back because we had already come over that bit of ground, but we were still afloat even though the nose was touching the beach, and the ship’s naval captain ordered us to abandon ship, and he and his crew went overboard and swam ashore and we never saw them again.
So there we were stuck, we couldn’t get off and we couldn’t move, we just sat there for a while whilst the craft around us were unloading, but as the tide went down, eventually the vessel grounded. The flotation compartments underneath hadn’t been hulled at all, and we just floated until she bottomed on the sand when the tide went out.
We waited for something to happen, because we couldn’t do anything. We were in radio contact with the rest of the battery and meantime they had gone ashore and taken up a gun position and had a target to engage. We got the data to supply us with the information, and did the necessary calculations and started firing with them. We had only fired a few rounds when crump - one shell landed the one side of us and another on the other side of us. There was a German on a headland that hadn’t been captured and it was this blighter who had hit our ramp and hit our engine room! He then just left us alone. Having got our range hitting all round our engine room he could have hit us amidships, but he didn’t he put one shell one side of us and another shell the other side of us, and didn’t fire any more — a gentleman gunner, obviously. We stopped firing and he did. So we just sat there until about mid day and then of course we were high and dry, and there were these beach masters with all their equipment. A lot of them were Churchill adapted Churchill tanks, the flails, bulldozers, goodness knows what. Used to explode the mines, and to do any clearing up. One of them came over to our landing craft to look at the damage at the front, and connected a chain onto the ramp, went into reverse and ripped the ramp off, no bother at all. He turned around with the bulldozer front and shovelled sand up and built us a big sand ramp at the front and we just drove off.
We went ashore, this was about mid day.

This story was submitted to the People's War site by June Woodhouse (volunteer) of the CSV Action Desk at ´óÏó´«Ã½ Hereford and Worcester on behalf of A Ayshford (author) and has been added to the site with his permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

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