NEARLY 40 years after Allied forces stormed the beaches of Normandy, I went there on a school trip.
While I remember shuffling round the Bayeux Tapestry and the gift shops of Mont St Michel, the neat rows of white war graves meant little to the 13-year-old me.
We weren’t taught about the war at school. It was just something my dad watched on heavyweight documentaries. I knew a bit about the First World War, mainly through the war poetry I studied for English Lit, but not much about WW2.
My grandad served in North Africa, but I’ve only ever known him as a young man in uniform in a framed photograph.
It wasn’t until I became a journalist, and interviewed war veterans, that I began to take in the profound human stories of a conflict that for me was romanticised in films and TV dramas about evacuees’ adventures, handsome GIs and land girls in painted nylons.
Today is the 80th anniversary of the D-Day landings. Early on June 6, 1944 tens of thousands of troops assembled for the largest seaborne invasion in history - which would pave the way for eventual victory.
As dawn broke, British and American warships bombarded the Normandy beaches. It was a remarkable achievement, involving meticulous planning and great courage. And, of course, massive loss of life; some men drowned after jumping into deep water, others disappeared under landing craft, and those who reached the beaches came up against heavy German fire. But by the end of the day 130,000 US, British and Canadian troops had made it ashore across the five beaches, gaining a firm foothold in Nazi-occupied France.
The generations, like mine, that came afterwards owe our freedom to that war. It is something I have been mindful of whenever I’ve met anyone who served in the conflict. As another milestone of war is commemorated today, there are fewer survivors to share their memories. Some have left audio recordings, preserved by organisations like the Imperial War Museum and Commonwealth War Graves Commission, some have left TV, radio and newspaper interviews. Others never got to tell their story because, for a long time, people just didn’t talk about the war.
It has been a privilege for me to meet WW2 servicemen over the years and talk to them about their experiences. I confess I knew little of the campaigns and battles they took part in (I’ve had to look up things like ‘Dunkirk’ and ‘Dambusters’ as I wasn’t entirely sure what they were) but I’ve always found talking to these veterans a fascinating and humbling experience.
I will never forget the man who wept as he recalled the horrors of a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp, where he was tortured and forced to dig his own grave.
Or the charming 96-year-old who showed me his flight log book and escape kit, containing a German phrasebook and silk scarf map, from his days with the legendary 617 squadron. “I never really expected to survive the war,” he said, in quite a matter-of-fact way.
Or the Bradford man who was Yorkshire’s last surviving Chindit. Airlifted into Burma, he was shot by a sniper as he hacked through the jungle with a machete - his life saved by the men who defied orders to leave the wounded behind. “They were the best lads I ever knew,” he said quietly, gazing into the past.
Or the 100-year-old who told me of dodging shellfire and hiding out in abandoned farmhouses as he made the long walk to Dunkirk beach. He was 20 when he took part in the Dunkirk evacuation. Bullets rained down as he waded through the sea to the fishing boat that took him to safety. “The German planes were so low I could see the pilots,” he recalled.
I didn’t learn about the war at school, but I learned so much from sitting with these veterans, and others, in their living-rooms and hearing their stories. Not one of them glorified their experiences - they were simply ordinary men, caught up in extraordinary circumstances, and they just got on with it.
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