D-Day hero opens war on last hurrah

Veteran makes a pilgrimage to his regimental museum and is welcomed with guard of honour

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Centenarian Don was on the second wave of landings, a few days after the initial assault on June 6, 1944, and remembers looking at his comrades in the Cameronians’ 9th Battalion on the boat across the Channel and wondering how many of them would return. Very few of them ever did.

Although the fighting as they landed was relatively lighter than the first wave had faced, their approach brought its own brand of horrors.

He said: “While we were wading ashore, we did so with the bodies of our countrymen bumping against us as they floated in the shallows. They were just young men, at the start of their lives.”

Over the following weeks, the fighting was some of the fiercest of the conflict and, as light infantry, Don and his comrades faced the worst of that. This was especially the case when they came up against the fanatics of the 12th SS Panzer Division in the battle for Hill 112, outside Caen, in one of the most decisive battles of the Second World War.

After 10 ten weeks of fierce fighting and the loss of 10,000 men, the Allies eventually seized control of one of the most important battlegrounds in northern France, allowing them to retake Caen and continue the liberation of Europe.

It was during this assault that Don’s company was advancing through woods and had to pass across a large clearing.

They came under heavy machine gun fire that pinned them down, stopping them from moving in any direction.

“It turned out that the machine guns weren’t meant to get us in themselves,” Don said. “It was a tactic - they wanted to keep us on that spot, because they had their mortar ranged in on there.