Just been watching the Remembrance program on telly. To think we've probably all thought at some point, "I can't be bothered to go out today, its raining", or "I wish I didn't have to go to work today", or "I can't do that, its hard work". Then you hear some of the stories and see some of the video footage of what some people achieved and in the unimaginable circumstances they did it in. There was one bit in the program that I don't mind admitting, moved me almost to tears. A chap who was 15 years old at the time, went to sea for the first time, to Normandy. He's made a song about it. Very powerful stuff. Here he is.
Very moving clueless. He is very sprightly for his age, in better nick than my Father-in-Law who was also there on 6th June. Father-in-Law's platoon were the first soldiers to set foot on Gold Beach at 6:30am, to mine-sweep (by hand) the sand and clear a path for the second wave of troops coming behind. He has some graphic stories to tell, all the frogmen who were sent ahead at daybreak to clear the anti-tank obstacles had been killed and were floating in the sea. He was just a young man in his 20s, conscripted into something he knew nothing about. His regiment had already spent 2 years in India before he joined for the allied landings on Sicily and Italy, no leave home in those days. They fought for weeks on end without even a change of clothes, it puts things into perspective compared to the modern day.
I can't go to northern France without visiting the cemeteries but it wasn't just then either. In 1994 I met a lady at Aramanche beach whose husband had died earlier that year and she was given the cause of death as consequences of wounds received during the landings. It was the first time she'd felt able to visit the beaches and he'd never been able to go back.
