Brooding ’bout my generation

Sixty years on, the crossing to Normandy was flat as a millpond, the sun shone, the helicopter from the Portsmouth to Ouistreham ferry’s British destroyer escort (there were three other destroyers, one French, one American, one Canadian) performed all sorts of clever tricks for our amusement, and our welcoming party comprised a Royal Marine and, later in the evening, a magnificent fireworks display from Omaha all the way to Sword. ‘Bet you wish it had been like this on D-Day,’ I said to George Amos, late of 47 RM commando, as we gazed over a sea rather different from the boiling, grey, vomitous, shell-ravaged killing zone which had claimed nearly a third of his unit killed, wounded or missing in June 1944. ‘Not really,’ he replied after some thought. ‘If the weather had been like this Rommel would never have gone off to his wife’s birthday and a lot more of us would have ended up killed.’

This is the great thing about second world war veterans — and one of the main reasons why I felt so privileged to be going back with a group of them. They measure their words carefully; they tell it like it was. They’ve seen the very worst the world has to throw at them and they know there’s not an awful lot of time left. Why waste it on small talk?

My party of 20 veterans was among the last remnants of a Royal Marine commando unit responsible for one of the most spectacular but surprisingly little known feats of the war — the capture of the vital strategic town of Port-en-Bessin, destination for the Allies’ oil pipeline under the ocean (Pluto). They landed bedraggled and depleted on 6 June, having lost most of their mortars, Bangalore torpedoes, machine-guns and small arms on the way in, and then had to fight their way through 12 miles of enemy lines, capturing whatever weaponry they could en route.