IN THE GREY dawn of D-Day, 6 June 1944, 20-year-old Trooper Lawrence Burn’s 35-tonne DD (duplex-drive) Sherman tank, its flotation screen raised, edged down the ramp of the landing craft into the English Channel. The storm that had forced the postponement of the Normandy landings for 24 hours had passed but 5,000 yards from the shore there was still quite a swell.
With the tank settled low in the water, just three feet or so of freeboard, the driver engaged the two propellers driven by off-takes from the rear sprockets (hence ‘duplex drive’) and headed for Sword Beach, the most easterly and most critical of the Normandy landing zones. If things went well, in 50 minutes’ time it and 39 others of the 13th/18th Royal Hussars (Queen Mary’s Own) would ‘touch down’ and give covering fire for the infantry who were to assault directly from their landing craft a few minutes later.
But there were plenty of things that could go wrong. The swell could overwhelm them or landing craft could run into them; engines could fail; there were mines and obstacles at both the high- and low-water marks on the beach; and the Germans could bring accurate fire to bear if they spotted them. Burn and his fellow crewmen (including his elder brother, who was the codriver and hull machine-gunner) could only hope that their DD would be so low in the water as to be barely noticeable but not so low that the waves would lap over the canvas screen. In the end they just had to trust their training.
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Diese Geschichte stammt aus der June 2024-Ausgabe von The Field.
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Rory Stewart - The former Cabinet minister and hit podcast host talks to Alec Marsh about the parlous state of British politics, land management and his deep love of the countryside
The gently spoken 51-year-old former Conservative Cabinet minister is a countryman at heart. That's clear: he even changes into a tweed waistcoat for the interview, which takes place at his London home and begins with a question about his precise career status. Having resigned from the Commons and the Conservative Party in 2019, the former diplomat and soldier has reinvented himself, first with an unconventional but promising run as an independent for the London mayoralty (abandoned because of COVID19 in 2020) and then as a media figure, co-hosting one of the country's most popular podcasts, The Rest Is Politics, alongside Alastair Campbell, the former Labour spin doctor.
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