Sergeant
Major Harry Griffin, 27, was with REME, attached to 151 Brigade, 50 Division
and had fought at Dunkirk, in North Africa and in Sicily. He landed on
Gold Beach early on 6th June 1944.
"The weather
had begun to turn. We finally got down to the boats and we were on a landing
craft tank which was crammed full of different vehicles.
We suddenly
heard that the whole thing would be delayed for 24 hours, so I decided
to have a good tuck in, we were on the American rations and I think I
had steak and kidney pudding followed by rice pudding and an hour after
that we sailed.
And it was
so rough , in no time at all we were all violently seasick.
We finally
neared the French coast, we could plainly see all the obstacles that were
cemented into the ground and there were loose marine mines floating around.
The naval
chappy in charge of our LCT, he was quite a young fellow, but he kept
a very very cool head, there was a massive crafts coming in of all types,
shapes, sizes everything and it was just jam-packed right through to the
beach.
Another LCT
came and drew up alongside us loaded with rockets, and let off a huge
blast of those which demolished some housed just on our left.
And all of
a sudden the chap in charge of our boat saw an opening, went straight
in, got us right up, and we got down to a dry landing.
When I arrived
on the beach, to be honest, I thought 'Thank god we're getting on to dry
land". We were so violently sea sick on the journey across that in effect
it was a blessing in disguise because sea sickness is an awful feeling.
When you've
really got it bad, it overcomes fear. I said to the driver "put your foot
down" and we belted up the beach which was quite an incline up, got to
the top of the beach and turned left as we knew from our contour maps
where we should link up with brigade HQ.
And suddenly
the jeep came to a full stop and I thought "God what's happened here"
as we were right on the skyline and I thought "we must be visible for
miles".
I dived underneath
to see what had happened and found that we had picked up a load of signals
telephone wire they hadn't had time to bury and was laying loose on the
beach had locked itself round the prop shaft and brought us to a standstill.
So I got up
again spitting dust and sand as everything was passing by us: tanks, infantries,
you name it, and was kicking up dust and sand.
I grabbed
a pair of pliers out of a toolkit I had handy, cutting away.
Finally I
got it clear, got up again, and to my amazement, my two lads were standing
there with their half mess tins out and a French civilian who had appeared
from nowhere was filling their mess tins with Calvados.
After a few
well-chosen words to them we carried on and finally came up to an open
farmyard with a big white gate we drove into and we then started work
on the vehicles which were coming in to us.
Many of them
had wet landings and were soaked and the engines were soaked through and
that.
We carried
on work right up until the last vestige of light.
Dead tired
we crawled into a ditch at the end of the field and spent the night there.
That was my
first night back in France.
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