Service Record

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"From Sicily I was sent back to hospital in Salisbury for treatment on my ears, after a some time I was regraded down to not fit for active service. I was put in a holding Battalion, all odds and sods down there. Just stupid jobs like painting stones white and all that and I met two chaps from Catterick who I trained with. They were on their way to Bovingdon and to join the 3rd Royal Tank Regiment for the invasion of Normandy. We went out one night for a drink and under the influence of alcohol, I presume, they encouraged me to join them in this tank regiment which I told them was out of the question because of my condition."

"My next step was to try to get regraded, I went back to the doctor and had a little chat with him and said my ears not too bad now. He tested me and he said I was lying, I said overall I'm pretty good and with a headset on I can here all right so he reluctantly regraded me again."

"When I joined a my new regiment I was back on the same tank, the Sherman, which I knew pretty well inside and out. But there again, I joined chaps who had come back from North Africa and I encountered the same feelings, problems, again and it took a few weeks to get in with the team. There was a lot of  mutinous talk, well it really wasn't mutinous at all, at one time they refused to go on parade. They felt they had done enough. They couldn't understand why they had been brought back from North Africa when there were thousands of troops in England who hadn't done anything yet. Montgomery brought back his spearhead divisions, the 51st Highland Division, Infantry and the 7th Armoured Division from North Africa to spearhead his landing. They had come from Africa and done a bit in Sicily as well, so they had been out there a couple of years and done enough. They were older than me, I was the young one in my company the average age was about 25 I was under 20. Anyway we got back to training on Salisbury Plain,  various exercises and talks about beach landings, we had beached exercises coming off the landing craft and we were issued with DD tanks which were duplex drive Shermans. They have a screen around the tank to allow it to float in water. "

"With the arrival of the invasion we loaded up at Weymouth and sat around for a couple of days because the invasion was abandoned for 48 hours because of bad weather. They decided it was on again for 6th June. We saw all the aircraft flying, thousands of aircraft, over for that evening June 5th. They carried the paratroops because they were dropping at night. So we knew it was on, and then the assault troops went before us, the beach assault troops Engineers to clear the beaches of the mines and then the infantry assault troops to blast the pillboxes. And then it was our turn, we went in on the evening of 6th June on Sword Beach.  Each company sent their reconnaissance troop over first because we have to find a place for the regiment to concentrate once we have landed, to get together because when you landed some landing craft were way up in the wrong place. We had to get a concentrated place and sort it out and then guide the rest of the tanks when they did come to this area."

"We didn't suffer many casualties going in, I know all our tanks got ashore of my troop. I could get off the landing craft OK and when the tracks bit on the sand underneath as we were starting up the beach you were going into shell holes and bomb craters, at times I thought thing was going to turn over. That evening we ended up half a mile inland in an orchard. The officers were running around giving orders and our main job then was to cover the infantry give them some support. We had no sleep that first night, or the previous day, it was all a matter of getting ourselves aclimatised and with the tension around sleep was out the question anyway. We were on a high, there were some terrible things happening. The infantry were under the cosh and everybody was trying to get things sorted out. The following morning it got a bit sticky and we heard that there was a counter attack coming in, I think it was the 9th SS Panzer Division, they were trying to drive us back to the beach again. There was a heck of a bombardment going on by the time we'd moved forward another mile but the infantry gradually pulled back and we gradually pulled back and that was the first time I saw a German tank. It was about 1000 yards away, quite close and they were firing like billy-o. We answered, I don't know the results of our fire, as a driver I was ducking and diving, trying to keep under cover myself. After about three hours it died down and everybody regrouped, we were about two miles inland."