'I would do it all again': D-Day heroes recount their experiences (2024)

It wasn't until after the thundering guns and screams of men on the beaches of northern France grew quiet that Les Underwood knew he had taken part in the D-Day landings.

The Royal Navy gunner was one of 160,000 men sailing in a vast armada of 3,000 landing craft, 2,500 ships and 500 ancillary craft and merchant vessels, tasked with launching the liberation of Europe.

But while the 98-year-old still recalls with vivid clarity what he saw and heard as the allied assault began that day, his humble retelling is typical of many valiant D-Day veterans - he just did his job.

'All you could hear was guns going and men screaming,' he said. 'They didn't know what was going on. I didn't know it was D-Day and them boys didn't know it was D-Day, they just thought they were going somewhere.'

That morning Mr Underwood added to the cacophony of allied, German and French fire from the side of a Merchant Navy vessel as it supported 25,000 British soldiers while they landed on occupied French soil.

The battle that ensued as Allied troops stormed the Normandy beaches on June 6, 1944, is regarded by many historians as the 'beginning of the end' for Nazi Germany and was undoubtedly a key turning point in the war.

Now, so many years later, D-Day veterans like Mr Underwood are returning to France for the 80th anniversary, to remember fallen friends and ensure the bravery of those present that day is never forgotten.

At the age of 98, Mr Underwood, of Romford, Essex is one of the more youthful D-Day veterans as he lied about his age to join up. Aged 15, he had taken a permission slip home to his mother who signed it. 'She said I needed a bit of discipline,' he recalled. 'And I got it.'

'All the memories come back,' he told MailOnline of the anniversary. 'On D-Day it was absolutely chaos. All the naval ships were firing, we were firing, the Germans were firing.

'Soldiers climbing off the ship into the landing craft, some thought it was shallow water, but it wasn't. Some went straight under.'

Mr Underwood had been stationed on a Merchant Navy ship to protect it from Nazi U-boats and Messerschmitt's while it made the journey to Russia, but at the last minute the ship was diverted to join the D-Day assault.

He only realised the part he had played in D-Day when he received a phone call many years later asking if he wanted to return to Normandy.

'I've never been to Normandy', he replied, only discovering the truth when he was shown proof he had been there, so closely guarded were the details of the allied assault that day.

Yet despite the horrors he witnessed, Mr Underwood insists that he 'wouldn't hesitate' to join an allied assault again, in a true testament to the British wartime spirit.

'If I was a fit man and it came to it again I would do the same thing, I wouldn't hesitate,' he said. 'It was the privilege of my life to help do what I did. To me it wasn't anything marvellous. I would do it all again if I had to.'

Mr Underwood was one of the many D-Day veterans sharing his memories at a recent commemoration event held by the Taxi Charity for Military Veterans and financial firm CBOE.

The veterans are planning to make the journey to Normandy for the 80th anniversary of D-Day - with transport provided by the charity.

But the veterans, who are all nearly 100 years old and many older, have said despite the annual commemorations of the event that youngsters should show more respect for the occasion.

Many of the ex-servicemen and women, who are among the final few D-Day veterans left alive, were shocked to learn fewer than half of young UK adults know what D-Day is.

Private Mervyn Kersh, of the 17 Vehicle Company, Royal Army Ordnance Corps (RAOC), was part of the backup which helped resupply the 156,000 troops who took part in the D-Day landings. His is another extraordinary story of the many that were written in those days.

The 99-year-old Jewish soldier stepped ashore in sector Jig on Gold Beach as planned three days after the Normandy Landings, in June 1944. What he saw and heard immediately brought home the brutal reality of what those who had stormed the beaches days before faced.

He said: 'You heard the shells going over from the land and the big ships firing these huge shells back. It was then I began to realise that it was war and not an adventure.'

Mr Kersh joined the British Army at the age of 18 in 1943 and assumed he would join the Royal Engineers as his hobby was map-drawing. However, due to what he was told was a clerical error, his role became to supply weapons, ammunition and equipment to troops in forward positions.

The father-of-three spent his six-week basic training freezing in the summer snow of Lanarkshire, Scotland, with the Black Watch. But no amount of training would prepare him for what the then 19-year-old would see as he advanced across Europe with the allies.

'I went there to replace those that had been killed. I fell asleep at 5am and I woke up and saw the outline of France', he said.

'I could hear the shells going overhead from the big ships to land and from land returning to back to the ships.

'I got out my Book of Psalms and read something appropriate, and it worked because I'm still here.'

Less than a year after D-Day, Mr Kersh was among the British troops involved in the liberation of the brutal Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where Anne Frank and her sister Margot had died in February or March 1945.

On the day that Mr Kersh and allied soldiers entered the camp, they discovered about 60,000 skeletal, half-dead prisoners inside, and another 13,000 unburied corpses left behind by fleeing SS prison guards.

More than 70,000 people are thought to have died at Bergen-Belsen during the course of the war, and what those brave liberators saw that day would haunt them forever.

Mr Kersh was awarded the Legion d'Honneur - France's highest order of merit - in 2015 for his participation in the Normandy campaign. He was also honoured in 2020 by prime minister Boris Johnson for his 'tireless efforts' in teaching young people about the war.

But he said despite his best efforts, more needs to be done to teach young Brits about what happened on that momentous day.

'They do need to know what it means and how they have got where they are because of D-Day', he said. 'I talk at schools and clubs but I like to talk to children 14-18 so they can understand it better. I do speak to younger ones but to them it is just a game.'

While brave British men put their lives on the line to free Europe from the tyranny of the Nazis, many thousands of women played an equally important role in the war effort on British soil.

Marie Scott, 97, was a member of the Women's Royal Naval Service (Wrens). Despite being only 17 when D-Day commenced, she was one of some 700 people who worked as a radio transmitter at Fort Southwick in Portsmouth - the communications centre for D-Day.

'I went on duty just before D-Day, I think it was the day before,' she recalled. 'As we passed the harbour, you couldn't see any water, you really couldn't, the whole harbour was tightly packed with ships, which was a very imposing sight.'

She added: 'On D-Day itself I was in Portsmouth, deep underground in tunnels that had been dug into the cliffs that were overlooking Portsmouth harbour.

'It was a place called Fort Southwick and it was a deep underground HQ for C&C (command and control) Portsmouth. What I didn't know at the time [is] it was also a pivotal part as the Supreme HQ for the whole expedition.'

On D-Day Ms Scott, who married and had three children, played a vital role in co-ordinating the assault on the Normandy beaches as she sent and received coded messages containing orders so secretive that she didn't know their meaning.

Despite being deep underground in the chalk cliffs overlooking the Solent, the cries of soldiers and the deep booming of shells echoed in Ms Scott's ears as she passed orders from top brass onto men on the beaches.

'I suddenly heard rapid machine gun fire, continuous machine gun fire, very loud in my years,' she said. 'Cannon fire, bombs dropping, men shouting orders, men screaming. You heard the total sounds of the chaos of war.

'I must confess I was distracted for a few seconds, but then I realised we both had jobs to do that were fairly important so we got on and did them. We got through D-Day like that.

'I was terrified for those young men who were about to lay their lives on the line. These thoughts were flitting around in my head with the sounds still ringing in my ears. It is a day I shall never ever forget - never. But we got through it.

'When I came back above ground, when my shift was finished, there wasn't a boat to be found. They were all in France.'

The Wrens played a vital role in helping Allied military leaders establish that Hitler and his troops had fallen for their propaganda campaign.

Just before D-Day they revealed that Hitler had believed their canny deception campaign to convince him that the invasion force would land in the Pas-de-Calais, not the Normandy beaches. Nicknamed Operation Fortitude, the Allied plan used dummy and inflatable tanks to confuse German forces.

Even once the invasion had begun they kept the Germans guessing about whether another landing would follow elsewhere. As a result Hitler kept vital forces in the Pas-de-Calais - well to the north of the Normandy beaches - until the Allies were already overrunning his troops.

Ms Scott said she thinks it is 'so sad' that young people don't comprehend the bravery of those who took part in D-Day, adding: 'Especially for the younger generation, they should know about WW2. I loathe war, war is horrendous. But some wars, very few, are justified. And WW2 was one of them.'

Another of the women who played a vital part in the D-Day operation was 99-year-old Dorothea Barron.

Diminutive in stature but certainly not in character, Ms Barron was so determined to join the Wrens that she put her hair up in a bun and hid cardboard in her shoes after she was told she had to be at least 5-foot-3 to join up.

'I stood very tall and they said 'hmmmm,' she recalled. 'And then they saw I was so determined, they allowed me to crawl in.'

Nicknamed Pixie, she became a signaller, using a lamp and Morse code signals to communicate between boats.

As an 18-year-old rating in the Wrens, Ms Barron was part of the team that developed the Mulberry harbours, the system of breakwaters, pontoons and floating roadways that were built on the coast of Normandy.

Working in an observation tower in a secret location off the coast of Scotland, Ms Barron had no idea that the men she was watching over were training for the biggest operation of the war.

Two million soldiers, four million tonnes of supplies and 500,000 vehicles rolled onto the beaches of northern France from the two Mulberry harbours by the end of 1944, undoubtedly contributing to Allied victory.

The 99-year-old, from Bishop's Stortford, Essex, recently took a flight in a WW2-era plane to commemorate the 80th anniversary of D-Day.

She told MailOnline: 'We were all treated as sisters by the sailors… We were all together and were determined to get rid of the Nazi regime. Not the Germans as people - but the regime.

'Nobody has taken any notice of us for donkey's years but now since I'm almost 100 people have started to take notice.'

Ms Barron, who seems far younger than her 99 years, still lives in the thatched cottage she and her late husband bought soon after the war.

Dressed in her grandson's old white cricket trousers, she teaches yoga to people 20-years her junior in her local village hall every week.

While the brave men who stormed the beaches were showered with gifts of flowers and wine as they liberated French towns on their way towards Berlin, others who played a vital role in the victory that day had to wait many years for their part to be recognised.

Ruth Bourne, 98, was part of a team that cracked coded German messages and alerted the allies to the locations of 'ten or twelve of Hitler's divisions' in northern France, potentially altering the course of D-Day and the war itself.

The secret oath taken by workers at the top-secret Bletchley Park site meant they had to keep silent for 30 years, and both of Ms Bourne's parents died before she could tell them of her role in the war.

After joining the Wrens straight from sixth form, Ms Bourne travelled down from Birmingham to work at Bletchley Park from 1944 to 1946 as part of a remarkable operation involving 1,800 women.

'We were told by the Wrens petty officer that we were going to do secret work,' she said. 'There'd be no promotion, the pay was the lowest rating, it was anti-social hours, and so if we didn't want to do it, now was the time to say and we'd be transferred to another category. We all said yes.'

Bletchley Park was used by allied scientists and mathematicians including Alan Turing as the base for its code breaking operations as they attempted to crack the Nazi Enigma code.

Ms Bourne worked on the Bombe machines - designed by Mr Turing - which were made to decipher the Enigma machines the Nazis used to send secret messages. She was responsible for fixing the circuits and changing the drums which mimicked the Enigma rotors.

Before her work at Bletchley Park could begin, she was forced to sign the Official Secrets Act in front of an officer.

The vow to secrecy was taken so seriously that Ms Bourne only realised the true scope and significance of the operation she was involved in when in F. W. Winterbotham's book the Ultra Secret was published in 1974.

'All we were ever told is we were breaking German codes', she said.

'After the Atomic bombs were dropped, within days we were dismantling the machines. Then they had to figure out what to do with a bunch of people who were useless.'

Following the war, Ms Bourne, of North Finchley, London, married an RAF officer and, after a brief stint as a Kindergarten teacher, set up a launderette franchise with her husband. She later became a campaigner to save Bletchley Park when it was considered for demolition.

The campaign successfully saved Bletchley and the site now hosts a museum run by The Bletchley Park Trust which receives hundreds of thousands of visitors each year.

Ms Bourne did not receive a Bletchley Park medal until the late 1990s and only received the Legion d'Honneur - France's highest honour - in 2019 aged 94.

Reflecting on the work that women did at Bletchley Park did, Ms Bourne said she feels 'privileged' to have played an integral part in the events of D-Day.

She said: 'Now I know how important the work was… When it all came out, the importance of what we'd done, I was very privileged to have been chosen.'