Normandy veterans 65th anniversary

Adrian Roberts · Jun 4, 2009

Telegraph interview of two D-Day veterans:

D-Day 65 years on: My return to Normandy - Telegraph

Friday marks the 65th anniversary of the D-Day landings. Here, one veteran reveals why, for the first time, he has returned to Normandy.

Ken Scott, D-Day veteran, visits Gold Beach, Normandy for the first time in 65 years Photo: EDDIE MULHOLLAND
"Did it happen?" asks Ken Scott, surveying the flat, seaweed-strewn expanse of sand that is Gold Beach. "So tranquil now, so peaceful. Look at that sea. Beautiful!"

The beach is empty, save for a mother and daughter sitting under the beating sun. Holiday villas look down on to the sand, still shuttered; not yet ready for summer. To the west, the coast of Normandy falls away into the haze.

Ken was 28 then, a sergeant in the Durham Light Infantry, part of the 50th Division, "Fifty Div", a minute cog in a gigantic machine. Eight divisions, three of them airborne, some 160,000 men from Britain, the United States and Canada descending on an area 50 miles wide. Supporting them was an aerial armada of 11,600 bombers, fighters and transports, and a naval armada of 6,900 vessels – battleships, cruisers, destroyers, minesweepers, torpedo boats and landing craft of all types.

Short of a disastrous storm, the Allies could hardly fail to secure a lodgement in the Bay of the Seine, so vast were the forces hurled at the German occupiers. But strategic certainty meant nothing to people like Ken Scott, fighting their private battles on Gold, Juno, Sword, Omaha and Utah.

A quartermaster, Ken did not have to wade ashore. He sat in the passenger seat of a recovery truck, a nice, soft-skinned target for German mortar and artillery fire.

"As we sailed across the Channel, everything was so quiet and we looked at each other with apprehension. The only talk was when someone offered someone else a cigarette."

Then dawn broke and the bow door of the landing craft opened and it was "Go, go, go!" Ken saw lots of things then, the detritus of invasion: knocked-out vehicles, shell-shocked German prisoners of war relieved that their war was over, and other things he does not care to recall.

"The sea's not pink today," he says. "Nothing is being washed up."

His memory of that day is divided into flashes: the beachmaster telling his driver to get on with it and get that bloody truck off the beach, and the relief of finding a sunken lane providing cover.

"There was a sign on the beach saying 'Brighton Road'. I had been living in Brighton when I joined up. It didn't look much like Brighton, I can tell you."

Ken is 93 now and it is his first visit to Gold Beach since D-Day. The vast majority of the 900 or so British veterans visiting Normandy this weekend have done so before, but Ken, from Wootton Bassett, Wiltshire, had no particular desire to do so. His son John, 47, suggested that he return before age and infirmity proved too much, and he felt a certain responsibility to pay one visit.

"I didn't particularly want to go back – it wasn't that welcoming the first time," he jokes, and then more seriously: "It's done, isn't it? The past. You want to obliterate it, to forget about it."

We move down Gold Beach towards Arromanche, where the skeleton of the great Mulberry harbour rots slowly in the sea. Great concrete and steel casements, built in British shipyards and towed across the Channel, they were the building blocks of a portable port – the Allies knew the Germans would do all in their power to prevent the capture of a port to reduce the volume of reinforcements and supplies flowing into the battle zone.

"Lovely here, isn't it?" says Ken. One gains the impression that he never visited Normandy in the sense that people in peacetime visit a place – that it could have been anywhere. War tends to do that, to erase the identity of a place. All battlefields are the same mess.

Some 20 members of the Wiltshire branch of the Royal British Legion have made it back this year. Despite being five years older (the youngest Normandy veteran must be 83), they have returned in similar numbers to those who attended the 60th anniversary in 2004. By the 70th anniversary, the majority of survivors will have reached 90, and march-pasts will be a thing of the past.

"This will be the last time so many veterans make the pilgrimage back to the beaches where so many of them lost friends and family," says Annabelle Fuller, spokesman for the Royal British Legion.

Whitehall adopts a strictly bureaucratic approach to anniversaries and the 60th anniversary was decreed to be the last major commemoration. There was no question of the Queen attending the 65th anniversary, and invitations from the Legion to the Prince of Wales and Princess Royal were politely refused. Then Barack Obama decided to attend a commemoration in the American sector and Downing Street found itself suddenly short of a brilliant photo opportunity. Result: Gordon Brown will be standing at the side of the presidents of the United States and France tomorrow. Following a last-minute change of heart, the Prince of Wales will also attend a service of remembrance at Bayeux and take the salute during a march-past of veterans in Arromanches.

Christopher Hellings, 85, is another member of the Wiltshire contingent. A gunner in the East Riding of Yorkshire Yeomanry, he witnessed D-Day through the periscope of a Sherman tank. It was his first time in battle and he was 20 years old.

"There was a snorkel from the exhaust and we were sealed in, in case the water was deep. We were an hour late. I saw the beach from a periscope, two houses in ruins."

What was his impression of the day?

"Frightened."

Did it feel real?

"Oh God, yes. It felt real. The third day, the tank got hit and we had to bail out. The flash was right in front of my eyes – an 88 millimeter shell. Another hit the other side of the turret and the radio operator lost three fingers. He spent a year in hospital peppered in shrapnel. I have never seen him since. Jim Burrows – he lives north of Liverpool."

It is the fourth time Mr Hellings has visited Normandy. He is happy to be here again, but is annoyed about one thing. "Being here without our lady, our Queen, is a very sore point. We are very annoyed about that."

But what about protocol? The government does not recognize 65 years as a significant date.

"Are we supposed to attend the 100th anniversary? Will they pay us a pension until ten?"

At least Gordon Brown will be around, escaping the horrors of the European Parliament and county council election results. "Oh good God! Mind you, it could be worse with someone else."

Ken Scott is walking along Gold Beach with his son when a party of young British soldiers appear, trainees in the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers here to mark the contribution of their parent unit, 3rd British Division. They gather round as Mr Scott remembers that day 65 years ago.

"There's no hatred left, none at all," he says. "We have to move on and forget, but I felt it was my duty to come back and be reverent. There are no stains on the beach now, no bodies being washed up. The tide has cleaned this beach but it is the same beach we came up on."

And what was it like, really, 65 years ago?

"What was it like? If you were not there you will never know. Go to a cemetery and look at every cross and think of each one as a son or a husband or a father of children and count them, and then you might know a little."

He collects some sand from the beach and places it in a plastic bag.

"Let's go home," he says. "It's over now."
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Kyt · Jun 5, 2009

For those in Britain, live coverage starts on BBC1 at 16.20 (until 18.00hrs. Then further D-Day programming will start at 19.00 on BBC4, running through to 22.30). I hope the BBC will pay more attention to talking to the veterans than focussing on the "dignitaries". Stories, like the one above, need to be recorded on video as well as print.

Antipodean Andy · Jun 7, 2009

Good to see Prince Charles there.

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