05/06/2024
IMAGINE...............
Imagine being cooped up in a small metal box with an open-top, carrying the weight of another small human on your back, being thrown around against others, who are themselves burdened like pack animals, by a buffeting sea. Imagine also, the smells and sounds that batter your senses, rough serge uniform chafing your back and shoulders where your pack rests, and between your legs, because there is nowhere to relieve yourself except where you stand and in what you stand in. On your head, a 9lb steel weight held on with a single strap, which periodically, and without warning, pitches downwards over your eyes, blinding you because the weight you are carrying on your back knocks the edge and the whole thing flies forward. Picture this, as well as being deafened by the constant cacophony of large and small calibre guns hurling shells at an unseen enemy and the sudden realization that the woodpeckers you hear are the ping of machine-gun bullets on the sides of your flimsy landing craft. Imagine the smells of fear and urine and sweat and cordite that assault your nose and the discomfort of the water that sloshes around in the hold of your LCI soaking your boots and socks. Imagine doing this with 30 others crammed into a tiny space, knowing that when the ramp goes down you will take yourself, your weight, your fear, your hopes, your life and that of your loved ones out onto a sandy beach full of obstacles and surveyed by an enemy, man for man as good as if not better at the profession of arms than you, who will be straining every single iota of his being to kill you.
Imagine standing in the door of a twin-engine propellor driven aircraft, flying in darkness, in a swarm of like aircraft. Imagine watching the lazy red and green necklaces of anti-aircraft fire climb towards you, knowing the thin skin of the aircraft would probably not stop a BB pellet much less a 20mm or larger round. Imagine the weight on your leg with ammo and water and food plus a weapon strapped to you as well. Picture the sounds and nauseousness caused by the aircraft throwing itself right and left to avoid anti-aircraft fire as you see another of its kind burst into flames and drop away from the mainstream, so that the flak can feast on its burning, dying, plummeting carcass. Imagine watching as comrades vainly exit the dying craft with burning parachutes and fervently prey to whatever supreme entity that you honour, to get you out of this death trap and onto the ground where at least you can fight back.
Imagine sitting in a wooden glider, no engine, having been cast off from your mothercraft, smelling the apprehension of those hardy souls around you as the flimsy craft slides silently through the summer night sky buffeted by increasing winds. Imagine getting the word that you are about to land and linking arms with your comrades, most of whom do not expect to see the next sunrise. Imagine your securest conviction; of being a survivor, ebb quickly and surely away on the final approach as the Horsa dips and rises – the pilots fighting to make sure it is as close as possible to the target. Imagine the adrenalin surge as it makes its final dip and rams into the sandy Normandy earth, ripping through wire and positions in a mad rush of noise, vibration and terror before coming to a halt as the nose slews. Imagine the aggression and the sheer ferocity with which you and your fellow Brits erupt from the wrecked glider to see the terror and fear on the mixture of young and old Germans faces regarding your dervish-like onslaught as one would regard the visitation of aliens from another universe.
Imagine sitting in an office in Whitehall, getting less information than you would get on an old fashioned iPhone 3, looking at statements that would be broadcast if you won and if you had to withdraw, knowing that the whole future of the war and the freedom of the world was on your shoulders.
All this was done in the name of freedom. So that people could walk the streets and practice their own beliefs and have equality and a stake in choosing who governs them. It was not hotly debated, nor sparked protest marches or Defence leagues, it was just done because that’s what was needed. People of all colours and creeds did it because that’s what was needed. People compromised enough to make sure that it was done – yep, you got it, because that’s what was needed. 76 years on, the sheer scale and complexity is staggering to contemplate. The freedoms it has guaranteed are the very freedoms that base and evil people have exploited to divide and splinter our society. The re-visitation of D Day is not simply to remember the endeavour and sheer courage of those who fulfilled those imaginings, it is to remind us that evil and base people have always existed, they didn’t start with racism, terrorism or a pandemic. We need more people to understand that whatever evil and base occurrence that may trouble us, the inherent nature of man will always prevail.
I publish this every year, simply because my old man was one of the above and 80 years ago he was poised for the beginning of the end, after North Africa, Sicily and Italy.
