Personal Accounts on D-Day and Today…
I remember D-Day well. I was in elementary school on June 6th 1944 when suddenly classes were cancelled and we were all lead into the main hall of the school. The Headmistress announced that the invasion of Europe had begun. This was all she knew about it. I stood up and said that my father was there and he would take care of everything.
My father was a Staff Sergeant in the Royal Engineers of the British army. He had told my mother that he would be one of the first to land when the invasion took place. She was sworn to secrecy but, of course, she told me, again in secret. His job was to ensure that the roads and bridges were in place to allow the troops to advance quickly. He often talked about the problems of repairing the bridge over the Caen canal that had been destroyed and was holding up the advance.
He saw many horrific sights and was affected by this for the rest of his life. Shortly after arriving in Normandy, he was scheduled to rendezvous with other engineers. Fortunately, he was slightly delayed and as he approached the meeting place he saw an explosion in front of him. There had been a direct hit by a shell that destroyed the vehicle in which they were to meet. Everyone there was dead as he would have been, if he had been on time.
Later he was walking across a field with a colleague who was a couple hundred yards away from him when a shell landed near them. He was fine but his colleague fell to the ground. When my father got to him he was in tears holding his right hand up from which his thumb had been destroyed by the blast. He said “I won’t be able to write our Peggy now”. My father promised to write for him. What the man seemed not to realize was that his chest had also been destroyed as well and he had only minutes to live. He died in my father’s arms. My dad wondered how his wife would handle the notice from the army that he was dead.
Images like these haunted him all his life.
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What upset him most, however, was that the people he liked most were the Germans. Immediately after the war ended he was involved in repairing the infrastructure of the cities and towns that had been destroyed. He was in charge somewhere near Cologne. It was not going well. One day a German officer came into his office and saluted him. He suggested that the restoration effort was not effective and said it would improve with German rather than British supervision. He offered his help. He gave his word as a fellow officer that he would not cause any problems for my father. Eventually, they shook hands and the German organized the work crews effectively and the work was completed much faster. They became friends and my father could not understand why they had been trying to kill each other just a few weeks earlier.
He blamed politicians and was very upset when Churchill, shortly after the war, warned the world about the dangers of Russia, when Russia had been presented a gallant ally throughout the war with Germany. It seemed that the war to end all wars had been a failure.
The first Christmas after the war, when my father was back home, he suddenly announced one day that he had invited two German prisoners of war for Christmas dinner with us. I was shocked and a scared. They arrived on Christmas morning and I kept a safe distance from them until I realized they spoke perfect English and were very friendly and charming. Not at all what I had expected. They could not buy us any presents but gave my mother something they had made to decorate the table. We laughed and talked throughout the meal and afterwards they spent time with me playing with my presents. I was sorry to see them go.
My father would have been distressed by all the turmoil he would see in the world today. It was not what he fought for. War for him was obscene and he had no time for anniversaries or other acknowledgements of the war which he felt was best forgotten.
I now live in Canada. My father was assigned to work with Canadian troops who impressed him immensely. He found them to be hard working, tough and fearless. I think he was quite pleased when I came to work here and managed to survive.
