When did you sign up with the armed forces?
I joined the Royal Navy in December 1942 and was sent to HMS Collingwood in Fareham for a signallers course. I spent three months there before they shut the signalling school and I was transferred to Skegness. It was here that I became a signalman-trained operator until a draft came for combined operations on landing craft, and I was sent to an LCG (Landing Craft, Gun) ship for close-in work on beach landings. I joined a flotilla at Glasgow and we did gun-firing courses and then moved to the south coast to do full-scale landings at Studland Bay, aiming at on-shore targets with live ammo.
How were you involved in D-Day?
We loaded the armoury to its full extent and took on army gunners and wireless operators. On the morning of the landings we were assigned to Gold Beach, where the opposition wasn’t at its strongest.
We all took off from the south coast and, although everyone was fully aware that the landing was on, we only got the official sealed order when we were at sea. We’d practised for so long, D-Day felt overdue. I was on the flotilla leader so we gave signals to all the other craft using flags and Aldis lamps.
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Denne historien er fra Issue 133-utgaven av History of War.
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NAUMACHIA TRUTH BEHIND ROME'S GLADIATOR SEA BATTLES
In their quest for evermore novel and bloody entertainment, the Romans staged enormous naval fights on artificial lakes
OPERATION MANNA
In late April 1945, millions of Dutch civilians were starving as Nazi retribution for the failed Operation Market Garden cut off supplies. eet as In response, Allied bombers launched a risky mission to air-drop food
GASSING HITLER
Just a month before the end of WWI, the future Fuhrer was blinded by a British shell and invalided away from the frontline. Over a century later, has the artillery brigade that launched the fateful attack finally been identified?
SALAMANCA
After years of largely defensive campaigning, Lieutenant General Arthur Wellesley went on the offensive against a French invasion of Andalusia
HUMBERT 'ROCKY'VERSACE
Early in the Vietnam War, a dedicated US Special Forces officer defied his merciless Viet Cong captors and inspired his fellow POWs to survive
LEYTE 1944 SINKING THE RISING SUN
One of the more difficult island campaigns in WWII's Pacific Theatre saw a brutal months-long fight that exhausted Japan’s military strength
MAD DAWN
How technology transformed strategic thinking and military doctrine from the Cold War to the current day
BRUSHES WITH ARMAGEDDON
Humanity came close to self-annihilation with the Cuban Missile Crisis, Broken Arrows’ and other nuclear near misses
THE DEADLY RACE
How the road to peace led to an arms contest between the USA and USSR, with prototypes, proliferation and the world’s biggest bomb
THE MANHATTAN PROJECT
Einstein, Oppenheimer and the race to beat Hitler to the bomb. How a science project in the desert helped win a war
