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France - the beach at Aramache June 1944

I was driving along; I was the co-driver to a man named Shaw — a sergeant of course.

“ I’m sergeant, I’ll drive. You’re only a corporal, you’ll be co-driver.�

And this guy poodled along, dead flat road, straight as a die, mile after mile in third gear, at thirty miles an hour. We started going up a hill, so what did he do? He started accelerating and then changed up into top and flogged it up this hill in top gear. When he got to the top, he changed down into third and we carried on poodling along at thirty miles an hour in third gear. I kept looking at him and thinking to myself, what a twit!

Another story concerning this particular Sergeant Shaw. We were sitting in our wagons; it was two o’clock in the morning of — what would it have been — the 17 June 1944. This was D-day plus 11 and we were waiting our turn to drop down onto the beach, up out of the bowels of the landing craft tank, onto the beach at Aramache. I was in the co-driver’s seat again and this time it was Sergeant Burchell driving, (my Sergeant Burchell). I was a corporal, of course. He was a sergeant, so he drove. (It’s my bat, so I’ll bat first). So anyway, we were told to take our turn — once we started moving forward, and got into four-wheel drive, to just get on the ramp and it would just take itself. I mean it was a heavily laden vehicle. Full. Lots of ammunition, lots of machine guns, 20 mm Hispano canon they are. They were an Italian make, would you believe. Beautiful guns. 20 mm bore. Lot of ammo, load of rockets. Each typhoon carried 8 rockets: 4 under each wing. (Another story. I had 8 of them set off over my head once. Beautiful sound*). Waiting our turn to go: who was in front of us? Sergeant Shaw, the thirty miles an hour king - in top. He got to the top of the ramp and put his foot on the throttle. You were supposed to wait until you got to the bottom of the ramp before you put your foot on the throttle and drag the front wheels from under the vehicle, putting the back of the vehicle back down on to the sand. The angle of the ramp, incidentally, because we’d done a dry landing, was about 60 to horizontal and not 45, as it should have been. So we were virtually nose-diving. He started going down and you could see daylight suddenly appearing all round the wagon, just becoming light — about five o’clock in the morning. He put his foot hard down on the throttle at the top of the ramp and nose-dived. And when I say nose dived, he literally buried his nose in the sand and you imagine this three ton wagon, that’s the tare weight, loaded up with ammunition, rockets and whatever — machine guns, 20 mm Hispano machine guns. (Not exactly a load of cream puffs, as Arthur (French) used to call them when he used to deliver cream puffs in Sheffield, somewhere, near Southland, anyway).

So he hit the sand so hard, the vehicle bounced backwards and the blokes in the back of course were mixed up with a pile of boxes — and heavy boxes they were too — and the language! My dear fellow, the language — well, I’ve not heard anything quite so bad since. Or before for that matter! It was appalling. It was really offensive language. I don’t know what the driver thought about what they were calling him. (This is Sergeant Shaw, the 30 mile an hour in top gear guy who changes up going up hill.)

(I’d think of my mum at times when I used to see things like that. She used to look at me in my ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ Guard uniform as I was going off onto parade, and she used to say to me ‘Teddy, why should England tremble?’ I think to myself, well, there are guys who are a bit worse than I am. Fortunately, or unfortunately. I don’t know.)

Bear in mind we’d been up most of the night; we’d been in the Solent, crossing across from somewhere near Portsmouth, I suppose, across to a French town whose name I can’t remember. We’d all got a bit of a twitch on there, because we didn’t really know whether the beach has been cleared, or whether there were a few isolated pockets of resistance, which seemed to be how the Germans worked. They would retreat, leaving a few nuts behind to try and pick off a few of us as soon as we landed. So we were sitting there fully exposed, if you like, as the vehicle went up the inside ramp. It came up to the top and we were looking up at the sky, and then suddenly, the front wheels started going down the other ramp, and going gradually down, down, down and then we started seeing the village through all this murky darkness. The village appeared and then the sand. We were moving all the time and we suddenly started going down the sand and of course, we did it properly, didn’t we? We let the thing coast down on its own and it worked very well - it just chugged along - the front wheels pulled the front of the vehicle out from under us and we landed gently on the land and then Reg Burchell took over and away we went. We had no problems, except for the fact that we couldn’t quite make up our minds whether we should have our lights on, or our lights off. The squaddies guided us on the sand — a whole line of them that we could see. Well, this is June 1944, so June 1944, how old am I? I’m 21. I had a smashing 21st birthday party in the NAAFI canteen before we came over. Even knocked my pint of beer over in the crowd. Couldn’t find my way back to the bar to get another one. What a way to spend a 21st birthday!

We’d come off the beaches, the soldiers told us to put the lights on, then lights off. By the time they’d decided which way it was light anyway, so it didn’t matter a bugger whether they were on or off. We were being shelled a little bit. We had little bit of shells dropping around us, not too much. We stopped in a country lane and made a mug of tea. This was out of this compo pack. Compo pack was a very hard cube of whitish material, which was compressed sugar, tea and milk. It was supposed to make — we read afterwards — half a pint of tea. There was Reg Burchell, my sergeant driver and me — Corporal Knighton — sitting in the cab, it was starting to rain of course but we were all right, Jack. There were these two poor sods between the back of the cab and the front of the canopy, which covers the back of the wagon with a machine gun up there. They had a machine gun. What they were supposed to do with that, I don’t know, because it wasn’t fixed anywhere. They had to sort of hold it on whatever. One on his back, I suppose, and used that as a mount to shoot down anything that had the audacity to have a go at us. What a war! Anyway, I made this cup of tea using the water out of my water bottle. Very well in theory, you know, the boffins working all this out — I never mentioned the 24-hour pack. 24-hour ration pack, you even got two sheets of toilet paper! Now who in the world decided that two sheets of toilet paper were enough for soldiers, airforce men whatever, who had a twitch. Must have been bloody mad!

Anyway, back to this cup of tea. There was a little tiny tray, beautifully designed out of pressed tin, which sort of opened up. It made a little tripod and you put a methylated spirits pellet in the little tub and you put that under the mug. You put your mug of water on this little tripod with your cube of milk, sugar and tea in it and you just waited for it to boil. It was quite good, quite efficient. Quite good combustion and exchange of heat from this pellet and in no time, the water was boiling and there it was, a little pint of tea made out of a pellet. It was supposed to make half a pint of tea and we were gleefully passing this around between us. In and out of the back sort of sliding shutter. It was delicious. Bloody weakest cup of tea I’ve ever drunk, but it was wet and it was hot and it was very, very satisfying, somehow. Warming in spirit, if not in body or whatever the word is.

Anyway, I’m still trying to get to this story about coming off the beaches. I don’t quite know where along this road we were, but we stopped somewhere. I don’t know whether it was the tea making incident or what, but I think it was still dark and I was in a 3 ton Bedford which was quite a high vehicle — the cab was sort of over the front wheels, as it were. You were way over the front wheels. Looking down outside I said for “Christ’s sake, Reg, don’t come over here anymore this side. There’s a 3 ft diameter hole down here, just by the wheel.�
He said ‘Is there?’
I said ‘yeah, what’s it like your side?’
And he looked outside his window and looked down and said ‘Christ! I’ve got one this side, too.’
We’d come down this country lane, spot on, centre line between these two holes which were obviously manholes of some sort, some sort of defence, I suppose to slow up anything that happened to be coming down the lane. We’d stopped with our wheels just inside the sort of periphery, the circumference of the two holes. That’s another thing that sticks in one’s mind, another little close one, a near miss, as it were. I tell you, if all the near misses had come off, I wouldn’t be sitting here with this lot around me trying to dictate this lot into this machine. This symbol of high tech, present-day life.

*Each Typhoon carried eight of them (rockets), four under each wing and we had aeroplanes all round. We’ve landed in Normandy, we’ve been in Normandy for a few days, I suppose, maybe even weeks. We were all working on the aircraft doing servicing of one sort or another. I was working on the guns, of course, of one aeroplane. We had instrument bashers; we had electricians; we had all sorts of engine fitters and body — fuselage — guys. We were all conscientiously working away there, all nice and peaceful, it was. You wouldn’t believe it, suddenly there was this (indescribable) noise. The electrician, who was doing the circuit check, not realising that they were all plugged in, had fired two banks of rockets. The tail was down, it wasn’t at what they called flight level, so the rockets all went up in the air. Unfortunately, they all landed in the bomb dump where a squad of blokes was loading bombs and rockets onto the lorries.

We’d all scarpered, of course. I’ve never moved across a field so fast in my life! There was a ditch down one side and I found myself piled into this ditch in amongst a few others, all sort of wondering what the hell that was. Never heard anything like it. Worse than anything we’d ever heard. And then a sergeant put his head over the hedge and said

“Oh, what are you doing down there? It needs extinguishing. Go over — that bloody bomb dump’s alight. Go on. Get over there.�

So off we went, extinguisher — couldn’t find an extinguisher. Couldn’t find an extinguisher anyway. Anyway, we found one eventually and got ourselves to the bomb dump and the boxes were crackling away there, bangs and bombs going off — small rounds they were — only 303 stuff, for the small machine guns.

One of our blokes had been sitting in the cab of his lorry — just driven in. And it (the rocket) had gone through the viewing area in the middle of the back of the lorry — you look through it when you’re reversing — through the windscreen and out front and not caused him any harm at all. The only damage was one of the blokes got something in his leg — a bit of metal.
(Ted was in hospital suffering from lung cancer when he dictated these stories. He died 24/12/1999.)

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