Previous chapter: D-Day – Preparations
June 1944
It [Hursley Park] was then a big empty house with a lot of woodland around it and in these woods were loudspeakers slung through all the trees. In order to sort the vehicles out into shiploads, every crew on the truck was given the number of the ship they were to get on board. This meant that the whole of the unit was split up. There were only four or five trucks from my unit that were going on this one ship that we went on, in order presumably to make sure that if the ship went down they didn’t lose a complete unit.
We all went to sleep around these trucks, with these Tannoys shouting out numbers all night, it seemed, until about four o’clock in the morning we all woke up instantly and said, ‘That’s our number’. It’s amazing how you can listen to a number when you’re sound asleep.
We climbed on the truck and drove off in the early morning down the Hursley Road into Chandlers Ford. I can remember coming into the main road at Chandlers Ford in this convoy of trucks and all the men going to work were standing there. They knew darn well what we were doing and they were making quite a demonstration, ‘Good luck lads’ and so on, and we eventually drove into Southampton down to what is now Mayflower Park but then was just a railway siding, along the front of which they’d built ramps of concrete blocks to enable landing craft to come right up and drop their gates straight on to the level of the sea front.
We spent ages sitting around in thousands of vehicles blocking the Western Esplanade completely. We had strict orders not to move, not to get off the vehicles etc. but somehow or other we found there was a little shop up one of the side streets there under the wall (it’s not there any more, I looked the other day) and we were starving hungry. Amongst everything they’d forgotten to give us anything to eat. I went up to this shop and the old lady running it, I told her what the situation was and we bought a loaf of bread and she gave us half a pound of butter which must have been from under the counter and a pot of jam and we all sat round eating this illicit bread and jam and luckily nobody spotted us so we didn’t get punished.
Eventually our turn came to go on board one of these big US landing ships and these had upper and lower decks. The bottom deck was reserved for tanks and the upper deck for vehicles. Every one was packed in tightly and so there must have been about 40 trucks on the upper deck. We went off down almost opposite Hythe Pier in a queue, just like parking in a street really. The Mulberry harbour was lying all down the side of the water there in Dibden Bay. We had no idea what it was for then but there were massive great pieces of concrete, which had been floated in after being manufactured somewhere else I suppose.
The weather was terrible, it rained and blew and we were all sitting around wondering what it was all going to be like and they suddenly announced it was off. So we all sat there. Once again the food situation was such that they had enough rations on board for one day but not for two days so we went rather hungry the next day except that they hastily produced food, which was brought out to us. I was quite surprised to find that this landing ship had its own bakery on board and the Americans were busy cooking bread. The first white bread we had seen for years. It was absolutely snowy white and I’m afraid it was also completely tasteless. But it was obviously the kind of bread Americans liked and this is what they cooked. There was also coffee on constant tap from various; I think they called them silexes, from around the ship. Tea was out. It was coffee or nothing.
We sat around and sat around and suddenly the following night we picked up anchor and off we went. It was in the evening. It must have been six or seven o’clock I suppose. That would have been 5th June. Once we got out the other side of the Isle of Wight the ship started rolling unmercifully. It was extremely rough out there and the sky was full of great black clouds and the light was disappearing. I remember leaning on the rail of the upper deck of this ship and looking back at the Isle of Wight and wondering whether we would ever see it again. It got pitch dark and rained. The ship was rolling so badly that all the vehicles on the top deck had to be chained down tighter. We’d chained them down when we got on board but there was a danger they were going to fall over the side and we were crawling about under these trucks in the pitch dark on our hands and knees and finding the chains (we couldn’t use any lights of course) and screwing the chains up tighter and we got soaked to the skin.
We eventually trundled off below to get any sleep there might be. None of us slept very much, pretty obviously, and when the morning came I went up on deck again and you could see a wild, wild sky all broken up with white caps, the wind blowing and great waves rolling along and a huge line of ships in front of us and another huge one behind and to either side. Almost in front of us, one of these landing ships was towing a very large raft on which was a big mechanical crane or excavator with a long crane-like jib on it and the thing was sticking up in the air 40 or 50 feet I should think and it was rolling so badly that the raft was taken up at terrific angles and eventually the whole darn thing went completely upside down and everybody went merrily along towing the raft behind but I often wonder whether the thing was chained down still hanging on underneath or whether it simply fell straight to the bottom. The sea was actually quite full of debris, small landing craft, boats and bits and pieces of all descriptions were floating about in the water as we sailed along.