I have posted before about my father’s service in WWII. Yesterday was, of course, D-Day, perhaps the most critical day of the war. My father had fought in North Africa and Italy before landing at Arromanches on D-Day +1.
Dad’s battle honours include the Normandy battles of Arromanches, Villers Bocage, and Caen, then twelve more battles before the final capture of Hamburg. Dad spent time in hospital in Hamburg for some degree of what we know now as PTSD, hardly surprising after five years of being shelled and shot at.
Claire and I visited the Valiant Soldier in Buckfastleigh today. The building is 18th century and it was a public house from 1813 until 1965. It is now a museum, a time capsule of life in the last century. Today they had newspapers on display from D-Day and the immediate aftermath. The Daily Mail of July 19th 1944 reports: “Caen – The Big Break-Through” and the Evening Herald of Tuesday 6th June reported the armada of over four thousand ships and the D-Day invasion itself. The Daily Mail of Friday June 9th has the headline “Allies Five Miles Beyond Bayeux. There is a photograph which may be of Arromanches, where my father landed. It’s sixteen miles from Bayeux to Villers Bocage, so my father was right up there somewhere.
There was an excellent documentary on the BBC recently called Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies. It was written and presented by Ben Macintyre and told how double agents helped deceive the Germans into believing that the invasion would be in the Calais area.
I’m immensely proud of my father’s service in WWII. I’m also proud of my more distant relative on my mother’s side, Sir Anthony Standen. He played his part as a spy feeding detailed information on the Spanish Armada to Sir Francis Walsingham, preventing the sea-borne invasion of England. I’ve told Sir Anthony’s story in The Spy who Sank the Armada.