I never had the opportunity to discuss D-Day with my Great Uncle, he passed away in early 1992 when I was just 8 years old. However, I do have a vague recollection of something he told me. One easter as a family we visited HMS Belfast, the Second World War cruiser that is moored in the Thames in London. After the visit I wanted to learn more about the Navy in World War II so that holiday Monday off we went to see my Uncle Tom, who had been in the Navy at during the War. It was then whilst showing him the poster of the great ship that I had chosen as my souvenir. He went on to tell me how he was on this small boat near the cruiser when she opened up, I did not know at the time but he was talking about D-Day.
Thomes Frederick Lawrence from Barking, Essex, the son of a Great War veteran, was a 19-year-old signaller in the Royal Navy and was serving onboard one of the Royal Navy’s Landing Craft Infantry Small, 534. On the morning of 6th June 1944 HMLCI(S) 534 was stationed in the Bay of the Seine, when the grand ships of the Royal Navy opened fire on the their pr-arranged targets of Hitler’s Atlantic Wall, the fortified coastline the Hitler had ordered to be constructed from Norway to the Spanish boarder to protect his Fortress Europe form Allied Invasion. Soon it would be the crew of HMLCI(S) 534 turn to enter the action, ferry the waiting infantrymen from the larger ships to Gold Beach between the small Normandy seafront villages of Arromanches and La Riviere.
His diary that I am privileged to have in my possession tells that his vessel had a few near misses from shells from the German coastal defences quite possibly from the large battery at Longues. His diary reveals little else about that day other than he went to bed at 10pm, dead tired. HMLCI(S) would remain on station for the next week, his diary describes taking the Admiral to the beach on the 8th and that it was not until the 10th that he had the opportunity to change his trousers and underwear.
Then on the 12th Tommy stepped foot on French soil. Amongst the collection of his papers is also the after-action card, these small postcodes were produced so that servicemen could inform loved ones back home what had happened to them. So that these could be delivered quickly and to avoid having to censor them they were pre-printed and all the serviceman had to do was delete as appropriate. One of the ones in my collection is dated 7th June ‘44.
In July 2022 I was luck enough to follow in his footsteps when I took a holiday to Normandy, one of the first places that I wanted to visit was Gold Beach. As I drove my old Renaut Clio I was playing an even older cassette tape. It was a recording of the 1991 Royal Tournament with the Band of the Royal Marines. As I pulled off the Bayeux ring road and started to drive towards Arromanches it clicked over on to side 2 and the finale of the show and the most rousing of the music. As I crested the road and got my first view of the beach the band began playing Britannic Salute a mash up of Rule Britannia and Land of Hope and Glory. This was the cue the windows went down, the volume cranked up, my eyes started to well up. In my head I could see the vessels laying there off the shore. It might have taken me 30 years but I had made it to the location of my uncles story he had told me whilst sitting on his knee in the living room.
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