Dad's Normandy Landing - June 1944

As we come to mark the 75th anniversary  of the D-Day Landings in 1944, I look back at what my father, John Weston of Blackpool,  must have experienced  during the war.  

  He often talked about his war experiences and I am afraid it did provoke the reaction at times of “Not the war again, Dad”. We used to tease him about being in the Intelligence Service.  It was only later that we came to realise what a life-defining period it was.  I persuaded him to write an account for me, and this combined with  photographs and letters I found after my parent's death, provided the basis for me writing a  family history narrative. 

Dad  served in the RAF Codes & Ciphers Branch and was indoctrinated into the mysteries of Enigma and the One-Time Pad code, with training at Bletchley Park and Whitehall. London.  He then became part of the Special Liaison Unit, a team of analysts formed by  Frederick Winterbotham to scan, digest, and file the messages, with channels established for forwarding key messages to the appropriate field commands.

It was strange for me to visit Bletchley Park and the Cabinet War Rooms in London  and to know that I was following in the footsteps of my father. 

After training, Dad   was seconded to General Bradley’s US 12th Army Group HQ. He landed at Omaha beach just after D-Day and advanced via St. Mere Eglise, Avranches, Versailles, Paris, Verdun and Luxembourg through to Wiesbaden in Germany. Immediately after VE Day he was posted to Burma where he wa on VJ Day.
 
Dad was happy to talk about his experiences, but I am sure  they were an edited,  sanitized  version.  We never heard about the awful scenes he must have witnessed on Omaha beach,  on the fighting in the march through France, during the Battle of Bulge in the depths of winter, and  on into Germany.  He still felt bound by the Official Secrets Act  on what he could tell us.

Here is brief eye witness account of landing in France in 1944, just after D.Day. 

"The day came when we moved to Southampton.  There were eight of us in a team handling ULTRA intelligence.  Like many more, we were in a camp and not allowed out or to make any phone calls.

It was Sunday when we made our way in our operations vehicle to the harbour and boarded a landing craft vehicle.  We zig-zagged our way across the Channel  (to avoid enemy submarines)  and arrived off the beach at around 11pm, some distance off our landing point.  Sporadic bombing went on during the night from high level German bombers. We slept where we could on the craft.  Just as dawn was breaking,  at 04.00am the captain started up the engines (there was quite a roar) and we moved in  fast to the beach.  The ramp was dropped, we drove off.  We were in France! 

I recall seeing a large sign OMAHA as we moved in.  Engineers had blasted a make shift rod up the cliff and off we set. 

The first place we made for was Saint Mere Eglise, the first village to be liberated by the US 89th Airborne Division.  It was badly bombed and the roads rutted. 

We made our way to a little village near a copse – Laval. It had rained heavily and became very humid. In a clearing the GIs had set up trestle tables to hand out meals. We had portioned trays, but the Americans just had billycans to hold the meal of chicken and peaches. There were millions of wasps committing suicide in the fruit juice.

That first night I slept in a PUP tent (one man), but during the night it poured down and around 2a.m. my tent was flooded and my sleeping bag was in two inches of water. There was a lot of thunder and some animals around went berserk. I managed to sort myself out and was on duty the next day at 8a.m.to get our equipment organized for the advance through Normandy onto Paris."

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