We Fought on D-Day

BIRDSONG

They shall grow not old, as we who are left grow old:

Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.

At the going down of the sun and in the morning,

We will remember them.

-MEN IN UNISON:

-We will remember them.

THUNDER RUMBLES

THUNDERCLAPS

Up this way, up this way!

-You go!

-Target!

-Let's go!

D-Day itself was... Oh, it was rough.

But in its own way, it was partly a dream to me.

GUNFIRE AND EXPLOSIONS

The next day wasn't a dream.

RAPID GUNFIRE

We were all young, and to us, it was an experience.

I said to myself on the first day,

"If this is going to be war, this is great."

But unfortunately, it wasn't. It changed that night.

Get down!

We'd never been in battle.

So we imagined ourselves as John Waynes or somebody like that -

we're going to storm the place and take it all ourselves.

But when it comes to the real thing, your whole attitudes change.

All of a sudden, you found yourselves men overnight.

Terrible. Scared, not knowing what was going to happen.

You never know from one minute to the next

whether you're going to live or die.

I could hear the screams of some men who were hit.

To this very day, I can hear them.

Many of those men that went in on those actions

that I took part in,

as far as I'm concerned, they were all heroes.

All heroes.

THUNDER RUMBLES

In preparation for the Allied invasion of France,

by 1944,

the German forces had built a formidable line of defence

along the coast of northern France.

Constructed by Field Marshal Rommel,

it was Adolf Hitler's Atlantic Wall.

Stationed in the South of England,

men from the Royal Ulster Rifles prepared to take on Hitler's forces

and to take part in the biggest military invasion in history.

They were all ordinary fellas.

There's none of them put-ons or upstarts or anything like that.

MARCHING FEET

All run-of-the-mill fellas, some of them were farmers,

some of them were unemployed like myself.

There was fellas from...

down south,

there was fellas from Derry,

there was fellas from Belfast.

There was fellas from all over Northern Ireland, more or less.

Isolated from their family and friends,

the Royal Ulster Rifles were moved to top-secret transit camps

to make final preparations for D-Day.

The transit camp was like everywhere else - an army camp.

You weren't allowed out,

we were confined mostly to our own tents.

The canteen was open and that was that.

As D-Day approached,

an unexpected visitor arrived to boost the men's morale.

They said, somebody coming to... They never said who it was.

Then we got there and they says,

"Right, now all the tall people,

"get to the back,

"and short ones get to the front."

And then there was a platform.

And then this jeep drove up.

And then, Field Marshal Montgomery come on top.

He was our hero. He inspired us,

he gave us the courage

to go forward

and we looked up to him.

MONTGOMERY: 'On the eve of this great adventure,

'to us is given the honour of striking a blow for freedom...'

We were looking under his feet, you see,

and he was looking down on us, you see.

We were looking up at him.

He just told us just to be brave and to do what we had to do.

And our objective was, he says, "If we get our objectives

"on the beach in D-Day, we've done a good job."

'And with enthusiasm for the contest, let us go forward to victory.'

He says to me, "Where do you come from?"

"Sir, I come from Northern Ireland."

He says, "Then you're an Ulsterman."

"Yes, sir."

He says, "If I can't get anybody to fight with,

"we'll fight among ourselves." That's the words. That's the words.

As it's true, I'll never forget that, never.

Finally, in the first week of June, 1944,

the soldiers were mobilised for the invasion of France.

The countdown to D-Day was almost complete.

RHYTHMIC DRUMBEATS

This is it. You'd have heard somebody saying, "This is it.

"This is the big scheme."

It was funny, going through some villages, you know.

People honestly thought,

"There are those boys, out on exercise again."

They'd no idea we were on our way to France.

We were fit, we were young soldiers

and we couldn't wait to get into action.

The men from the 2nd Battalion Royal Ulster Rifles

began their overnight journey to the beaches of Normandy.

But it was men from the Antrim Parachute Squadron

who were among the first to land in France.

All bang on. Everything's bang on.

They were dropped behind German lines

several hours before the beach invasions.

We were taking off at 11 o'clock at night on 5th June.

If anybody was scared, they weren't really showing it,

because they were so worked up

about what they were doing.

They hadn't time to feel scared, you know.

We'd been training for months and months,

we just hadn't time to feel scared.

One lad I knew well, bit younger than me, came to me,

he says, "Jimmy, I think I'm going to be killed." I said, "What?

"Everybody could be killed here. One shell, that'll...

"You and I together, we're blown to bits.

"Don't think about that at all."

He said, "I've got a premonition."

A few days later, he was, he was killed. He and two other fellas.

Three of them, one mortar bomb got the three of them. Three nice lads.

You've got to concentrate on landing.

Don't land with one leg in the air

or headfirst, make sure you're in position,

feet together, knees bent and, as you hit the ground, roll.

When I landed, I landed on my own. Didn't know where the hell I was.

Lo and behold, there was a signpost. I couldn't believe it.

The Germans, I was told by the French later,

that they left all the signposts up

so that they could find their way around

because they were in a strange country.

So once I saw that, from my memory of the maps and where everything...

I knew exactly where I was.

Having landed behind enemy lines during the early hours of D-Day,

Jimmy Bowden and his comrades

had to prepare the way for the airborne invasion.

The objective was to blow up poles

to make a runway for the gliders coming in.

And it was imperative we got those done before three o'clock.

The general said he was coming in at three o'clock no matter what.

So we decided we'd have to get those poles down.

Meanwhile, the troops at sea

were on their way towards the coast of Normandy.

Towards the beaches, codenamed Utah,

Omaha,

Gold, Juno

and Sword.

On the way over, it began to get very, very rough.

And the ship was bobbing up and down because they were flat-bottomed.

A lot of them are sick because we're not...

you're never used to the sea,

of course we was on land all the time.

That's why everybody who was sailing kept quiet, never said nothing.

They've got nothing to talk about, only what's going to happen,

only what they're going to expect.

We were told we could write a letter home

but it wouldn't be posted until after the D-Day landings.

And these, writing these letters was a bit sad.

It was sad for me, because I can remember to this day

writing to my mother,

telling her how much I love her, and telling the family and all,

things that I should have told them

when I was living and in amongst them.

What was going through my mind at that moment was,

in the First World War, my grandmother had lost her son.

And I couldn't help thinking of that. Would I be one of the ones?

And how would my mother take it and how would she feel?

And I had said in the letter that if anything happened to me,

I hoped she would go on in life the way she'd always done,

with a nice, good smile on her face.

And remember that I was only one of thousands.

And just be proud that her son had died for his country.

As their comrades neared the Normandy beaches,

back in England, the men of the 1st Battalion Royal Ulster Rifles

were about to leave for France.

We weren't told anything. We weren't told anything at all.

We were brought out on the airfield,

the gliders were lined up,

and each company was given a glider.

This was the day that we'd been trained for.

And naturally enough...

People were a bit tense, you know what I mean?

First time going into action, in the glider.

Knowing that you're going to get hit with flak and not knowing

if there's going to be planes come at you, or whatever.

So it was scary at the time, you know.

Inside each glider, a platoon of up to 30 men

prepared for the hazardous journey into enemy territory.

The gliders take to the air.

"Mick, you and I are in a glider.

"We have no chutes, we're in a plywood coffin" -

that's what the boys used to call it.

The portholes in it are Cellophane -

you could stick your finger through them.

And if you sit down hard on the seat, you'd have went through it.

Like paper, you could near blow through them.

And you're always worried, the way they were built,

they could've fell in two halves, you know?

I would say it was a death trap.

The men were quiet. You'd get the odd one making a wee sickly joke.

And what was going through my officer's mind,

he was probably saying,

"What am I going to do when I get ashore here?

"How are these boys go to perform?" All those sort of things.

Truthfully...like,

I joined up knowing there's a war on for a start.

I knew at some time or other

that I was going to have to go into action.

So it really, to be honest,

it didn't really annoy me none, you know?

Not really, you know.

You know? Because I accepted, actually, it was...

full of excitement, more than anything, you know.

We were flying over the Channel

and I happened to look out, just look out,

just seeing the port, all these big ships and all was down below.

And the sea was bubbling up.

All I could see was ships.

But I was thinking, "Well, at least there's a load more

"going over here, we're all right." That's all I could think of.

It looked impressive, there's no two ways about it.

The air was just covered with aircraft of every description.

Bombers, gliders, the airborne going over, the paratroopers going over.

And it was this tremendous feeling that you had just such support -

to see all that overhead and all that around you,

you felt almost that nothing could touch you.

As the airborne troops flew overhead,

the men of the 2nd Battalion Royal Ulster Rifles

were about to go into action on Sword Beach.

The furious battle to liberate Europe was under way.

EXPLOSIONS

When we got about maybe half a mile out,

we could see the rest of the brigade. They were in front of us.

There was just a whole crowd in front, like a big triangle.

When we come in near the beach,

the ship that I was on set down in about eight feet of water.

Now, eight feet of water is enough to drown any man

with 56lb of gear, and a Bren gun, and a bicycle, and all that.

You would go down to Davy Jones' Locker

and you wouldn't rise too easily.

GUNFIRE

Nobody was going to get in that water.

You'd all your equipment, and then you had a bicycle on one arm

and some people had Bren guns and mortars, all on their shoulders.

And picks and shovels.

GUNFIRE

Every single man, from the CO down, had a bicycle.

I made a decision when I was on the boat

that I couldn't get off with all that weight.

So I just lifted the bicycle, threw it over the side,

and that was a wee bit lighter, left me with my Bren gun and my gear.

Got my rifle, wrapped my sling around the handlebar,

put the butt onto the seat, hoisted it onto my shoulder

and held on to the rifle,

so it wouldn't come off and into the water.

That left that hand free

and I just walked down the ramp into the water.

GUNFIRE

I put the rope underneath my arm and I held the Bren gun -

I used to call it Betsy. And it wasn't any name

of a girlfriend or anything, it was just a habit I had.

I had it over my shoulder, I says,

"Betsy, you're going to get baptised."

There was a great swell on the water.

And whenever it would come in on your back,

it was pushing you forward.

And whenever it was coming back out again,

it was catching you and pulling you back again.

The water was just splashing right over your head, splashing away.

I was actually up to my neck, holding on to the rope.

You might be standing there, holding on,

and a sniper, maybe some machine-gun fire and things like that there.

GUNFIRE

As we made our way in, there was a large quantity of shells

and mortar fire, all falling on the beach.

And there were these houses, and there was German snipers

and people like that and then, there was, of course, in the background,

there was the artillery fire and the mortar fire,

all landing on the beach.

GUNFIRE

All I was doing was...

"Get off! Get off!"

Cos you could see, every now and again, shellfire landing

and it was just a matter of, "Get off!"

GUNFIRE

We quickly made our way up to the place called...

It was just off the shore. ..Lion sur Mer.

We got there, which was the assembly point.

After flying over Sword Beach, and the River Orne,

the 1st Battalion Royal Ulster Rifles landed

south of the village of Ranville.

It was up to the pilot to get you to the destination that you want.

Taking into account, going into France,

they had spikes and everything up in the fields and that.

And, sure enough, the gliders came in over our heads, over the wood.

It must've been their mark, coming in, was the wood.

And they came right over our heads and landed.

Underneath the glider was a chute.

The glider is supposed to land on that chute

and it's supposed to land flat.

But with the fields and hedgerows, they couldn't.

So the one we were in, the chute hit the hedgerow

and we just turned up,

and we were all thrown from the back of the glider

to the front of the glider, on top of the pilots.

All of a sudden, if you're at the back of a glider,

you can hear the crunch.

You have then got to get some of the men out,

forming defensive positions all round the glider,

and then taking part in the whole linking up

in the particular D-Day operation.

We formed up to attack.

Go! Go! Up this way! Up this way!

Out of all the dust and dirt and all, came these fellas running.

And they had Vickers machine guns.

Like, they ran past us, shouting,

and we knew they were Ulster Rifles, all right!

And they were going into action.

Let's go!

GUNFIRE AND EXPLOSIONS

The village of Longueval and Ranville -

this was our main object when we landed.

It was to land and secure them two villages.

Which...we did.

After their successful D-Day landings,

the men dug in for their first night in the battlefield.

Of course, I thought I was doing a smart thing on the boat.

I put a pair of socks into my mess tin.

So's I'd have a pair of dry socks.

So, whenever we dug in for the night, er, we always dug our tents,

a pair of us, and we always dug a hole in the side wall of the trench

and we were able to make a drop of tea in that.

Cos we had the equipment for doing that,

our hardtack, as they called it.

And, er...

..I took my mess tin out and...

..I had to take my socks out!

HE CHUCKLES

They were... They were wringing, so I'd no need to change my socks.

So I just hung the ones that I had on

up on a bit of hedge at the back of us to let them dry out!

But, for the young soldiers,

the reality of war began to hit home

as darkness fell on D-Day.

GUNFIRE AND EXPLOSIONS

Everything was all right until the night-time.

It was very frightening, very scary.

Because I was on my own in a foreign country.

Just realising that war was war,

was different to what I thought when we were landing.

Completely different.

EXPLOSIONS

Scared, not knowing what was going to happen.

Nobody knew who was there, we didn't know who was who.

You know, because we didn't know who got off the craft and who didn't.

All you knew, all you were interested in was your own section,

your own platoon.

The one I was in was the one my mate was in, he was on guard.

And I came over, they started firing the 88 millimetre.

And, unflatteringly, I wanted my mum.

But my mum was dead.

I'm not afraid to admit it.

And I'm sure I wasn't the only one.

GUNFIRE AND EXPLOSIONS

The captain came along and he said to me,

"You all right, McConnell?" I says, "No, I want my mum."

So he just shook me

and he just touched me on the chin with the back of his hand.

Brought me round to reality.

Brought back my senses again, let's put it that way.

GUNFIRE FADES

BIRDSONG

I felt a bit brighter.

At dawn I'm sure everybody was the same as me.

When the dawn come, maybe you could have give it a clap.

The city of Caen was the German stronghold in Normandy.

But for the Allies, it was the gateway to Paris.

After his traumatic night, Bill McConnell and a small group of men

were selected to travel undercover to Caen

on a dangerous but vital mission.

We got orders to find out the strength of the German army

because, again, they were told very little.

And we got picked up by one of the French Resistance.

An old civilian truck where the French came and took us all.

When we got there, there was a garrison there,

and that's some soldiers, I can assure you.

It was just outside the fort

where the Germans were very, very...

There were thousands of them there.

We were standing at the bottom of that fort, but not for long.

Captain Martin was away, we thought we'd lost him,

he'd been taken, because he was away for about a half an hour.

And we had to stand and hide there and the Germans are walking up and down the blinking road.

I'd never seen any Germans in reality before.

But I was in their midst, walking amongst them.

And if we had have been caught, well, that was it.

But we knew the consequences.

Apparently we were to go in to take Cambes.

I'm glad we didn't have to go in and try and take it that morning.

Or that night, or we'd have been slaughtered.

It was decided that the men of 2nd Battalion who had landed

at Sword Beach would advance toward Caen.

But first, they had to capture Cambes Wood.

The information they'd got - that the main entrance to Caen

wasn't heavily defended. And that was Cambes.

The Germans were supposed to be there.

And that was the first attack we were making on the way to Caen.

When we were advancing closer, it was very, very heavy corn.

A thick corn. And it was up above our waist.

Must've been about 1,500 yards across that field.

And there was shelling and mortaring going on and all the rest of it.

GUNFIRE AND EXPLOSIONS

We advanced with calmness and steadiness

and kept in line all the way up.

We were told then we were attacking and we could see a hedge,

and then whenever you got across the hedge and then you saw the wall,

and it was ten foot high.

You'd no chance of getting over that.

We had no scaling gear,

we were told nothing about climbing over walls or anything.

And when they'd done a reconnaissance on it,

they couldn't see very well to see what was inside

and what was happening.

So they didn't know really what they were up against.

Whether it was a shell of our own or what had hit the wall,

there was a big U-shape hole in the wall.

The gap will always be in my mind

and the thing that always hits me

is, "Will you come into my parlour, said the spider to the fly."

Cos it just looked like an invitation in but you weren't going to get out.

And whenever you went into the woods,

you were just met with tree after tree.

You were more or less dodging round the trees to move along.

And whenever you got down then, you were crawling round them.

But when we got in about, I would say, a good three parts of the way

into that wood to the left...

EXPLOSIONS AND SHOUTING

..the machine gun in front, that opened up,

and the machine gun to the left opened up.

MACHINE GUN FIRE AND SHOUTING

They had to retreat, leaving a lot of their dead behind.

Their company commander was killed

and some of our own lads was left behind in that wood.

In their first experience of close combat,

the men had suffered serious casualties.

But they were determined to capture Cambes Wood,

and went into battle once again.

They made a second attack across the same cornfield.

And the shelling was heavier on this occasion.

But I kept going on anyway and the next thing, about, I would say,

it wouldn't be any more than six or eight yards from me,

seeing this thing land and explode, and the next thing...

EXPLOSION AND SCREAMING

..I had got it.

There was a ditch, so I went in there

and two stretcher-bearers come in.

A serious shrapnel wound to his right shoulder

had brought Richard Keegan's war in Normandy to an end.

But for Richard's comrades,

the worst was yet to come in the battle for Cambes Wood.

Went right up through that wood till we got up to a big farmhouse

and then when we got to the farmhouse, we took up position.

And for five solid hours, we were mortared and shelled.

Five hours non-stop.

Mortar bombs and mortars.

They were just... They was lying there with their legs blown off

and things like that. No trenches. Just what the enemy had dug.

We lost a tremendous number of men.

Somewhere near 200 were wounded or killed, and that is a powerful lot

out of a battalion, was wounded or killed on that particular day.

And it wasn't till afterwards when you stopped

and you started to defend the woods you were in and you looked back

and you saw your mates there and saw them wounded so badly

and some of them killed, that it really hit you

and really went home to you.

Across the River Orne, the men from 1st Battalion

were waiting for orders to advance.

Within hours, it turned into a day

that the young soldiers would never forget.

On the morning of the 7th June, we were lying at Longueval

and at seven o'clock in the morning we were supposed to do an attack.

But the attack was held up until midday,

until the naval guns

and the Canadian artillery were supporting us.

We were told by intelligence that the enemy was light in St Honorine.

At 12 o'clock, we were given the order to advance.

As I went up the cornfield, there's a little hillock there

and as soon as I got over the top of it to go down into the dip,

we seen what we thought was a fence in front of us

but this fence... started moving back.

We thought we were seeing things.

Then the guns started shelling our guns.

The Germans were firing from St Honorine,

the Navy was firing from the sea

and the Canadians were firing below us

on the other side of the river,

and they were hitting us and we were caught in an arc of fire

where we couldn't move forward, back or sideways.

It's different, your enemy wounding you and killing you,

but when it comes to some of our regiment...

They might have had a bit of gumption.

We were pinned down with heavy fire. We had to pull back.

We couldn't have held the position.

All we were doing was getting casualties and nothing in return.

For the men, the casualties were not only fellow soldiers,

but sometimes best friends.

In the morning of attacking St Honorine,

there was a friend of mine I went to school with, Bobby Stevenson.

Bobby went to 1st Battalion the same time as I did,

from the Young Soldiers Battalion.

On the advance, Bobby Stevenson shouted me...

He said, "Bill, I'll see you afterwards."

But I happened to turn around

and there's a shell, an 88 millimetre.

And he was blown to pieces.

Now, there wasn't a senior officer near him.

When this happens, there must be a senior officer present

to say that the man's been killed.

There wasn't even his bootlaces.

Some of your comrades get hit or get killed,

you're sorry and that,

and you feel rotten,

but you can't let it get you down.

You can't just let it get you down, you know?

We were cut off for a few days

and things were not very good.

We came under a lot of shells and that there.

They had what you called, they called it the Moaning Minnies.

They were more or less like blasts.

You used to hear the Moaning Minnie.

The mortar was fired... I think it was five.

It went boom...boom...

boom...boom...

and then a wee pause,

and then boom!

Dreadful. Really, really dreadful. There's no doubt about it.

You know? You're always saying, "Maybe the next one's for me",

sort of thing, but that was scary.

It was very, very scary, you know?

So it was. Cos they really pumped the shells in, really did.

For the men cut off in Longueval,

the effects of war were beginning to take their toll.

When you move in to bury dead people -

wounded, grotesque horrors -

you can't describe the horror.

Words won't describe them.

Even paintings won't describe them.

It just beggars description, really.

War is grotesque.

You could never describe the horrors of war to any one particular person.

Couldn't aptly describe them.

Oh, I could go into details, lurid details...

The physical damage, the mental damage -

you couldn't describe it.

For five weeks, Caen, the so-called Gateway to Paris,

remained the Allies' objective.

But only after a huge aerial bombardment

was the heavily defended city finally liberated.

We saw these planes coming over our head,

and we knew Caen to be three miles away from where we were.

Actually could see the bombs dropping on Caen,

and, with the guns, you could feel the ground shaking under our feet.

How in the name those people lived through that...

The destruction going on the whole night long,

whole night long...

and then it stopped after that, the daylight came,

knowing we had to go and attack.

And nobody knew what to expect going into it.

The rubble was still all over the roads, no roads or nothing,

you couldn't get...

You were lucky to get walking on them.

It was really in a bad mess.

It was mad. The only thing standing was the church.

That was the capital of Normandy, and we took the capital of Normandy.

That was the first city in Europe to be liberated.

You knew that the people of France would be delighted to be liberated.

People were so glad, so happy, you know?

Showed their appreciation.

Everybody was pleased. The officers and everybody was pleased.

Even they got from Montgomery himself,

although it took a long time, he said they achieved

their objective and it makes all the difference now to the war.

That's all they wanted.

ALL: Hurray!

Not all the soldiers were fortunate enough

to experience the joys of liberation.

Badly injured on the battlefield,

Stanley Burrows had already been sent back to England,

reluctantly parted from his comrades...

..and his best friend from Belfast.

I didn't want to go.

They weren't severe burns

like people would get out of these flame-throwers.

And I thought I'd be all right if I stayed the night

and stayed along with my old pal Crangles.

Crangles was one of the best chums I ever had.

We got on terribly well together.

We went through all the scrapes

and things that you go through in army life together...

The boys that bullied and the boys that didn't,

and we looked after each other,

and watched over each other's shoulders for one another

in that way that good comrades do within the Forces.

When I was in hospital,

my mother had wrote to the medical staff

to find out all about just what was to happen to me.

And the letter arrived, and in it she told me then

that Crangles had been killed.

And that was very, very sad to me to hear that.

Here's somebody I've soldiered with for all these years

and now he's killed, and I wondered just what happened,

the way it happened,

and that's one of the reasons I was anxious to get back,

to see if I could get any details about where he was

and where he was buried and all the rest.

When I went back and I saw the beautiful graves

and the way they were looked after, a big burden had left me.

And here I was, I saw Crangles' grave and I tell you,

I shed a tear or two. I...

Excuse me... I felt it very much.

It touched me.

It does. Even now to talk about it. It touched me.

He was a dear pal,

who meant the world to me.

When I go back, it makes me live it all over again.

It all comes back to you

but you can't help feeling it. It's just there with you,

and I think you'll go to the grave with it.

It will always be something that you'll remember all your life.

I have asked that my ashes be scattered in Ranville Cemetery

beside the Airborne Cross, that's one of my wishes.

I think I belong there.

With the boys that I would know.

I can still see faces of people there as I knew them,

before they were killed.

The arching at the cemetery in Bayeux

is for the people who are still missing.

A lot of them we know to be killed.

Except there was a senior officer present,

they're still down as missing in action.

There's Bobby Stevenson's name on that.

I can still see him.

Even though it's only in the name on the wall.

He's still there with me.

Times was... you have to shake your head sometimes

trying to forget about it, and you can't. I can't.

I don't think I ever will do.

Just what it means.

'The people of Longueval are very great with the Ulster Rifles.'

Longueval was a place which we relieved on the 7th June,

and that's why we put the memorial there.

Like the 2nd Battalion, they done Cambes-en-Plaine

on the 7th to the 9th June.

And that's why we put the memorial there as well, for the 2nd Battalion.

You know the old saying,

they give their today for your tomorrow,

that's very, very true.

Very true. People will remember that.

This is something that happened,

that if the world had have been a better place,

wouldn't have happened.

But when it did happen,

and the men went out and fought for what was right,

then it was worthwhile.

Even those killed, wounded, lost limbs and all the rest of it,

it was, at the bitter end, worthwhile,

because it sort of made a better place for us to live in.