Once off the beach near Ouistreham, Harry Mackrell helped manoeuvre a six-pounder anti-tank gun to a position behind a low hedge, with the barrel projecting through. The gun-crew was part of the 5th Battalion of the King’s Liverpool Regiment, which were among special forces set up to storm Sword Beach.
“Something was obstructing the barrel of the gun,” he said. “My sergeant ordered me to jump over the hedge and clear whatever it was.
“I put my rifle down, vaulted over and landed on an enemy soldier. And I was without my rifle, so I whipped out my bayonet and stuck it against his neck. ‘Me Ruski,’ he said. It turned out he was a Russian who had been forced to fight for the Germans.
“I liberated his watch, gave him a cigarette, and indicated to him that he should get over the hedge and head off towards the Military Police. That was my first contact with the enemy.”
Harry had volunteered for the army in May 1939, and was sent to Gibraltar, where he spent three years digging tunnels and gun emplacements out of solid rock. Back in England he practised wet landings, from troop carriers, around the Firth of Forth.
When the time came to head south, he and his companions joined a traffic jam of all kinds of military vehicles. “There were trucks, tanks, artillery pieces and vehicles of all shapes and sizes everywhere you looked and as far as the eye could see,” he said.
They boarded an infantry landing ship at Seaford and set off for France some time on June 5 1944. “As far as you could see there were ships, thousands of them, tugs, battleships, cruisers, destroyers. It seemed you could walk across the channel without getting wet.”
As the ship grounded on Sword Beach at 0715 on D-Day, it hit a mine and was holed. One man, who turned out to be the ship’s cook, was dead in the water.
Men disembarked down two staircases on either side of the bows of the ship. “When we got to the bottom we went under water for a couple of seconds before emerging onto the beach,” he said. “Our clothes were soggy for two days. Our job was to make the beach safe for those coming up behind. I couldn’t get off that beach quick enough. There were bodies in the water, tanks on fire, and more bodies on the beach.
“I legged it up to the sea wall, about 300 yards. By this time the Germans had woken up and we were getting mortared and shelled repeatedly. We got most of our chaps together and positioned our gun on the first lateral road above the beach.”
Harrys unit held its gun position for some time but was then moved slowly in the direction of Caen. The gun was towed by an Oxford Bren gun carrier. “I don’t think they could ever organise such a thing as D-Day again,” he said. “They thought of everything. We even had French money. They gave us French letters, not for immoral purposes but to cover the end of our rifles so they wouldn’t fill up with water.
“I saw the bombing of Caen from a hillside,” he said. “The sky was black with planes, and even though we were several miles away we were covered in dust. It reduced the town to rubble, which made it difficult for our tanks to get through.”
In August Harry’s unit was ordered to join the 4th Battalion of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers at Falaise. “You never saw such a sight,” he said. “Bodies everywhere. Not just men but horses and cows, bloated, on their backs with legs in the air. The smell was overpowering and clung to our clothes. We could smell it for days.”
After the War Harry went to work on the building of Dungeness nuclear power station. At the time I met him he was living in New Romney.