D-Day 75th anniversary — How I found out my fiancé had been killed on Sword Beach and helped draw D-Day secret landing maps
ON Thursday it will be 75 years since more than 160,000 servicemen set sail to Normandy to liberate France from the Nazis in a daring top-secret assault known as D-Day.
Today, there are only a few thousand left – all men in their nineties.
Many will return to Normandy this week, including 300 veterans on a ship chartered by the Royal British Legion.
Some of those returning heroes – and the women who played a vital role in events from home shores tell their stories of June 6 and the following 77 days of the campaign that changed Europe’s face for ever.
Marion Loveland
Wren Third Officer, Royal Navy
MARION LOVELAND was working in the Navy pay office on D-Day.
But she remembers June 6 for all the wrong reasons because her fiancé, marine commando Alec Aldis, died serving his country on Sword Beach.
Marion, 97, from Southampton, recalls: “Alec and I hadn’t told anyone about us.
I read in the lists he’d been killed and from then on I lost my love of service and left the Navy.”
Marion was familiar with Forces life, as her father was a colonel in the Royal Marines and her mother was a Wren during World War One.
Marion says: “I grew up on a barracks so it was a life I already knew. I’d got a job at BP in London but then war broke out so I signed up to serve.”
The 18-year-old was posted to Eastney Barracks, Hants, where her father served, and it is there she met Alec, a signal officer in 41 Commando Royal Marines.
'HE'D BEEN KIA'
She says: “He was very reticent to pursue anything because of who my father was.”
With the war ratcheting up, Marion was posted to The Old Naval College in Greenwich, far from her fiancé.
She recalls: “The last time I saw Alec, a few days before D-Day, he asked me to marry him at Christmas when he got back.”
But Alec landed on Sword Beach, which had very little cover, and was killed. Marion recalls: “I was at work and saw a report saying he’d been KIA.
It affected me badly and after that I wanted to leave the Navy.”
While her engagement had been a secret, Marion’s parents knew she had suffered a loss.
She says: “Dad didn’t know the details but they knew I’d been hugely affected.”
Marion returned to her job at BP and met her husband Stuart, who she married in 1947.
While she will pay her respects today to those who lost their lives, she will also be celebrating her 98th birthday. She says: “It is D-Day memorials first then maybe lunch in a restaurant.”
On her birthday in 1944, she recalls: “I went to dinner with friends and saw planes flying over. “It didn’t even cross my mind that Alec wouldn’t come back.”
Read the remarkable stories of the returning veterans from our superb souvenir pullout
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- D-Day veteran remembers not caring about the German loss of life but how seeing the horses being killed really stuck with him
- One of Britain's last surviving D-Day heroes talks of liberating France with a fold-up bike and a misfiring gun
- Two fearless D-Day veterans in their nineties are to parachute into Normandy, 75 years after they first landed there
- Rod Stewart sang his hit Sailing to D-Day veterans ahead of 75th anniversary
Christian Lamb
Plottings Officer, Royal Navy
WHEN teenager Christian Lamb joined the Wrens, one of her main concerns was what type of hat she would wear.
But her skills landed her in Churchill’s office in Whitehall making top-secret maps for the D-Day invasion.
Now, 99, Christian, from Battersea, South West London, recalls: “I joined the Wrens in 1939 at 19.
I discovered I was going to be a rating, so I wouldn’t have an officer’s hat. Disaster!
“I had to have the worst hat instead.” Christian was offered a job at head office but says: “I had joined to be surrounded by naval ships full of luscious- looking sailors.
So I said, ‘No thanks!’ ” Transferred to Plymouth as a plottings officer working on the radar covering the Atlantic, she would enjoy nights out with submariners returning from the Med.
She says: “We all had great fun and parties on board the submarines.”Later transferred to Belfast, Christian met John Lamb, a First Lieutenant.
CHURCHILL'S OFFICE
She recalls: “We got engaged in ten days. We were married for about 70 years with three children and seven grandchildren.”
Christian was transferred to Churchill’s Whitehall office in 1943 where she helped prepare maps for the Normandy landings under total secrecy.
She says: “There were many of us working on individual pieces of the jigsaw but none of us knew what the others were doing.
My brief was to pinpoint everything identifiable that could be seen from the bridge of an approaching landing craft.
“The large-scale Ordnance Survey maps showed all those roads, churches, castles and every possible feature that would be visible. “Anything notable, I put on my maps.
It had to be accurate. “Churchill had an office upstairs and we used to see secret people doing all sorts of exciting things.”
Christian was then posted to Falmouth to join her husband, who had returned with a convoy.
She says: “When D-Day came, I remember hearing reports on the radio. "It was absolutely thrilling. They probably used my maps to make a base for their plans.”
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Patricia Davies
Special Duties Linguist, Women's Royal Naval Service
AS a schoolgirl recovering at home from tuberculosis, Patricia Davies passed the time by chatting to the Austrian cook and housemaid who had been hired to help her mother.
By the outbreak of war, she was 16 and fluent in German – making her the perfect recruit as a Wren translator.
Now 95, Patricia, from Chiswick, West London, said: “I joined in the spring of 1942, aged 18, and I was a special duties linguist, trained to intercept German naval radio signals.
“We were based on an isolated little radio receiving station on top of the cliff in Dover.
Churchill visited five times in order to be seen in the area as part of Operation Fortitude – to make the Germans think we were going to land at Calais.
“I’d been on night duty and came out of this building at eight o’clock in the morning and there was Churchill coming up the cliff path and I think Monty was with him and a lot of staff officers.
“I thought, ‘What on earth was the Prime Minister doing on top of our isolated cliff at eight o’clock on a spring morning?’
HELLFIRE CORNER
Of course, he went to look at the coast opposite and no doubt intended to be seen in the area.” She continued: “We were all intensely aware D-Day was going to happen.
“Our Wren officer went on June 5 to Dover Castle to get sealed orders, but the invasion was postponed because of the weather, so we were all on edge.
“Then at about four the next morning, one of the Wrens who had been on duty came rushing round all of our bedrooms, saying, ‘It’s started, it’s started!’
“We got dressed and went out on top of the cliff, but there was nothing you could see from where we were.
“There was always a lot of shelling of Dover – which was known as Hellfire Corner. They shelled the town and also tried to hit these convoys that passed by right underneath the cliff.
“We saw one little ship hit directly by a shell and it exploded and caught fire. That was very sad.”
Patricia added: “My 21st birthday was a week after D-Day and I was very unsure whether we would be able to celebrate but we did.
“Our friends came to our Wrens’ station and we had a proper party.” After the war, Patricia became a BBC producer, working on The Sky At Night.
She said: “I still keep in touch with two of my colleagues, both well into their nineties, and we did go back to Dover last spring for our first return to our station on top of the cliff.
“The house is now a luxury hotel – slightly different inside from when it was full of radio sets and bunks.”
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