D Day

[Foxbat]

I’m watching the D Day events from Normandy and I’m finding it a profoundly moving experience.
Like many here, I have family members no longer with us who served in WW2. Two I know of (my grandfather and uncle) were involved in the Normandy landings.

When I was young, I was very lucky because that same grandfather of mine made it a mission of his to not only visit Normandy regularly, but often took me with him. In the sixties, as a child, I wandered the beach at Arromanches, where an old landing craft still lay rusting away. We visited the graveyards and paid our respects and we often would also visit the Ardennes (Battle Of The Bulge) and I renember us driving by an old German antitank gun still at the side of the road.

Here’s the odd thing. Despite taking me around all of those places, my grandfather never actually told me what he did. It was only after he died that I discovered he’d been with Lovat’s Commandos.

Perhaps in his own way he didn’t talk about it because he just wanted to forget, and yet, his actions seemed to contradict this. I’ll never understand what he thought or felt but I do know that none of us here now or in the future should ever forget the sacrifice of those who fought through the greatest war in history.

 

[Foxbat]

My grandfather (on the right) Malta 1934

 

[Tirellan]

My father was Merchant Navy as was on a ship in Torbay, part of a flotilla of ships that would try to take the troops of the beaches if it all went wrong.

 

[paranoid marvin]

An amphibious assault is one of the most hazardous types of military attack. It's why Hitler abandoned his plan to invade England. Get it wrong, and it could have been a year - perhaps two - before they could have tried again.

You can only stand in awe of the bravery those young men faced, jumping out of aeroplanes and packed into landing craft. Knowing that a hail of bullets awaited you at your destination. You could be the strongest, the fastest, the fittest soldier in your platoon; but whether you survived or not would come down to pure luck.

 

[hitmouse]

My grandfather (on the right) Malta 1934
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I also have a signed letter from Monty to my grandfather. My wife has a letter from Churchill to her grandmother after her grandfather’s ship had been sunk in the Atlantic by a U boat with all hands. He turned up about 3 weeks later, his drifting lifeboat having been picked up by a US Destroyer.
Interesting how these things are still so significant 80 years later.

 

[Laura R Hepworth]

Both of my grandfathers were in WWII. One was a merchant marine and the other was in the army in charge of a tank platoon (battalion? not sure which is the correct term).

I don't know a whole lot about my grandfather that was in the merchant marines wartime experience, but I do know about my other grandfather's experiences (very thankfully, we were able to get an audio recording of him sharing them so they wouldn't be lost). He was an army lieutenant in charge of six tanks, but he was highly claustrophobic so he had to ride with his head outside the tank (he won more than one purple heart because of injuries related to that along with other medals for his service including the silver star). He was part of a U.S. detail that was attached to the British troops that liberated Anne Frank's concentration camp and was also involved in the liberation of Auschwitz. On D-Day, my grandfather was also at Normandy, but he wasn't on the beach. He and his tanks were behind German lines shelling the encampments so the troops could get off the beach.

At Thanksgiving last year, one of my cousins read us a letter she had found online written by a soldier during WWII writing to one of his sisters about the horrors he'd seen at the concentration camps he'd helped liberate. It was impossible not to cry while listening to it and those were just the ones he said he could actually put into words; it was made all the harder though when she came to read the end of the letter and come to find out that it had been my grandfather that wrote it. We have absolutely no idea how it ended up on the internet and neither do my great aunt's family (they actually still have the letter), but I'm very glad it did as it's important to remember what happened.

 

[CupofJoe]

There is a family joke/myth that my great half-uncle [my mother’s stepbrother] was involved in D-Day for about 2 minutes. The details vary from teller to teller and usually grow with the application of whiskey [and he died before I could ask him]. Story one is that he was shot in the foot by someone as they tripped and fell of their landing craft. Or he jumped off the LC and broke his ankle on something under the water. Either way, he was load back on to the LC and taken back for treatment. Eventually he was invalided out. I remember him as an old man with a bad limp.
To what I know, he was the only member of my mother's family to serve in the Armed Forces in WWII.