"It was wonderfully Lone D-Day: 80th anniversary

Remembering Lawrence Burn, the last veteran of the regiment that spearheaded the Normandy landings at Sword Beach on 6 June 1944

- Allan Mallinson

IN THE GREY dawn of D-Day, 6 June 1944, 20-year-old Trooper Lawrence Burn’s 35-tonne DD (duplex-drive) Sherman tank, its flotation screen raised, edged down the ramp of the landing craft into the English Channel. The storm that had forced the postponement of the Normandy landings for 24 hours had passed but 5,000 yards from the shore there was still quite a swell.

With the tank settled low in the water, just three feet or so of freeboard, the driver engaged the two propellers driven by off-takes from the rear sprockets (hence ‘duplex drive’) and headed for Sword Beach, the most easterly and most critical of the Normandy landing zones. If things went well, in 50 minutes’ time it and 39 others of the 13th/18th Royal Hussars (Queen Mary’s Own) would ‘touch down’ and give covering fire for the infantry who were to assault directly from their landing craft a few minutes later.

But there were plenty of things that could go wrong. The swell could overwhelm them or landing craft could run into them; engines could fail; there were mines and obstacles at both the high- and low-water marks on the beach; and the Germans could bring accurate fire to bear if they spotted them. Burn and his fellow crewmen (including his elder brother, who was the codriver and hull machine-gunner) could only hope that their DD would be so low in the water as to be barely noticeable but not so low that the waves would lap over the canvas screen. In the end they just had to trust their training.