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.