JESSICA NASH
My name is Jessica Nash. I was born in 1983, so that makes me 15. I’ve lived in Surbiton, Surrey my whole life.

KEN
I joined the Royal Navy in 1941, two years after the Second World War started and went through the war until the culmination of it was D-Day when we landed on the Normandy beaches. I was on a landing craft that took in the American Soldiers into Omaha Beach. That was the beginning of the end of the war.

JESSICA
I’ve seen three films about World War II. I’ve seen Saving Private Ryan and that was really moving, I actually cried when I saw that. I didn’t realise what the soldiers went through really at all until I’d seen that. I’ve seen The Longest Day and I’ve seen Schindler’s List.

KEN
I have seen so many bad things. Things in situations where I was very near to death and saw other people die when maybe I should have died instead. I escaped all this. I never was a hero. I was just as frightened as any other man.

JESSICA
You see old men in the street just walking down the road and you just ignore them and think, ‘Oh God, they’re walking so slow, they’re in my way.’ But you don’t actually realise that they fought for the country and they went through something that people my age will never understand.

How old were you when you joined that Navy?

KEN
Fifteen years old.

JESSICA
Fifteen? So you were my age.

KEN
Just after my fifteenth birthday. About your age now. I was a bit bigger than you are. I joined illegally because I forged my age. I went in and the boy says ‘How old are you?’ and I says ‘Sixteen’. He says, ‘You still need your father’s permission.’ He gave me a form and a pen.

JESSICA
Did you have to get your father’s permission?

KEN
No. He sent me out and told me to come back with the thing signed and I went outside, signed it - it was obvious what he was talking about - and I signed it and gave it back. And he said, ‘That’s OK. That’s it. You’re in.’

JESSICA
What did your parents say?

KEN
They didn’t know I’d gone. I get a letter one morning in the post. I opened it because it was in my name and inside was a piece of paper telling me where I had to go and a shilling stuck, because that’s what was known as the King’s Shilling. Once you’d accepted that... That was two weeks’ pocket money for me, so that was worth doing in the first place.

JESSICA
How did you look all that time ago? What was your uniform like?

KEN
The uniform was very very smart. It was very tight. That’s the way we had them made, like a pair of corsets really.

JESSICA
Really?

KEN
It was really hard to get on, the top half of it. The trousers had bell-bottoms.

JESSICA
So was this the similar sort of boat that you sailed across on?

KEN
This was the kind of boat that I went across to the D-Day landings on.

JESSICA
So was it just all flat here? There was nowhere for anyone to sit or...

KEN
No seats, just stand up. There would have been 64, 65 men as you can see there, they would have been a bit crowded but they were all in there and we sailed all night on one of these small things with the waves coming over the top.

JESSICA
Was there any bathroom facilities? Where could you go to the toilet?

KEN
No, just where you are.

JESSICA
Really?

KEN
Just where you are, yes. I’m afraid it was a bit like the boys that go to the moon - they don’t have toilets. This was very primitive. It’s even primitive now.

JESSICA
I was thinking that, it’s very basic.

KEN
There’s no comfort whatsoever in one of these things. They were not built for comfort, they were only built for a specific job, to get men onto a beach.

It’s about 55 years ago that I came over here first time, to invade France, with a whole Armada of ships. I was in a landing craft. We had been practising for many many months and even on that day we didn’t know we were coming over. There were 65 men on board on a small landing craft and they were soldiers, they were not used to the sea at all, and they were very very sick.

JESSICA
Was there any food or drink?

KEN
No, except they had some small rations in their bags. There was no food supplied on the ship and by this time they’d all run out of cigarettes as well and everybody smoked in those days. The sea was completely covered in ships. The whole of this Channel was completely black with ships.

JESSICA
Is this the same sort of route that you took?

KEN
This is roughly the same kind of route we took, yes.

JESSICA
What type of training did you do?

KEN
We trained on the beaches of Dorset and Devon which are very similar to the beaches of France.

JESSICA
It gave them a picture...

KEN
It gave them a picture and they made it as life-like as possible by using live ammunition fired over their heads. But these poor men on the front of that boat suffered all the way over. And of course when we got there, you know the story of that and you know we’re going to see some of these places. My first time to come back. I’ve never come back before. I’ve always really wanted to come back - it makes you feel... it’s a sentimental thing. I didn’t want to come back with a group of men. It’s not the same thing - I just wanted to do it more or less on my own, but it’s nice to have you with me.

It was June 6th 1944 when the Allies invaded here on this beach and other beaches. And the idea of course was to take Cherbourg which is round there. They needed somewhere they could bring big ships in and big stuff, tanks.

JESSICA
So it was essential for...

KEN
Essential, absolutely essential.

JESSICA
How do you feel coming back here for the first time?

KEN
It’s very sad. It’s difficult for me to analyse my emotions at this moment because the day is a day that you could never forget and it’s so peaceful now when you look at it, you wouldn’t ever think that something like that could occur. We were out there for twelve hours waiting to come in because the weather was so bad. But when we did start, round about half past four, five o’clock in the morning,

we came in under great opposing fire, they were firing at us, from everything they had. The men rushed onto the beaches.

JESSICA
What was the beach like, when you saw it?

KEN
I wasn’t on the first wave in. There were dead people here when I get here and they were littered all over and the men coming off just ignored that, ran over them and in. We weren’t supposed to take anybody off - we were ordered not to - but it’s impossible when you see a man lying and he’s badly wounded, to leave him there, so we did take a few back to the ships. What they did with them on the ships we don’t’ know.

JESSICA
So you were told by your Commander that you had to drop them off...

KEN
Drop them off and leave them. Leave them. But no way can you do that, nobody with a heart could possibly leave a man lying, dying if you could do something about it.

JESSICA
When the soldiers just came off the boats, did they have to get up these cliffs?

KEN
That was the thing they had to do, was get up those cliffs. You can see it was a very difficult thing to do. And of course then there was aircraft coming in, dropping things and soldiers were coming in, and behind - paratroopers.

JESSICA
So the soldiers that came off from the boats on to the beach had to get up on the cliffs and the aeroplanes went over and got them from behind and the Germans were stuck in the middle?

KEN
They went over and dropped men. That was it.

JESSICA
Did the soldiers all just run off the boat or did some stay, were they scared?

KEN
No. I never saw one man who didn’t go. I never saw one man that didn’t go. I didn’t see a coward amongst them. The American Soldiers that I saw go up this beach were some of the bravest people I have ever seen in my life. But the Germans were ready for us and the Germans were good fighters. They were determined to defend this place. The idea of any kind of a battle is if you can get above your enemy, you’ve always got the advantage.

JESSICA
We’ve come in and the soldiers have been sick...

KEN
We were at a great disadvantage.

JESSICA
Soaking wet...

KEN
We were coming in on the low ground here to try and get to the high ground up there.

JESSICA
How did you feel the first few times when the boat pulled up on to the shore and dropped the troops off?

KEN
You’re so full of adrenaline, there’s no way out - you’re not going to back down, you’re not going to run away, you can’t run away. There’s only one way and that’s the way forward. You analyse your feelings afterwards and it was great fear, because you tremble, afterwards. But at the time you don’t. Soldiers and sailors throughout all history have had to do similar things and we’re not heroes, it’s just something that you’re trained to do, you’ve trained so long to do it. So many times we did it before that, on beaches over in England we landed troops all the time. So we knew what we were going to do, exactly, every detail was all rehearsed. It was like rehearsing a play.

JESSICA
Looking back, do you think you’re lucky to be alive?

KEN
I am extremely lucky to be alive, yes. Everything was red. The sand was red with blood. A human being has over eight or nine pints of blood. It all comes out when they’re dead, when they’ve been shot. It soaks into the sand.

JESSICA
There’s things like that in Saving Private Ryan. They were putting their helmets on when they fell off in the water and as they put them back on they were just full of...

KEN
Blood. That’s true. That’s the way it was.

There were 22,000 men of various nationalities who were killed in this campaign to re-take France. 9,000 of them are in this cemetery, American soldiers here.

JESSICA
Are the soldiers actually buried here?

KEN
They are buried here. Each one of these graves will contain a soldier whose name is on that stone. I find it very moving. I find it very moving. What do you think about it yourself?

JESSICA
You see the figures and the amounts of people that actually died, in books and you hear about it, but coming here and seeing all these graves and this is only the American ones, it really makes you think and realise just what...

KEN
If you look in each direction, almost as far as you can see, there are people who died for a cause - in my opinion a very good cause. I was 19 coming up to 20 when I came here the first time with these soldiers, to bring them here. A lot of these people who are dead here, I possibly brought in. You are 15 coming up to 16, if it happened to you, what would you think?

JESSICA
I would not want to be involved in a war at all. I would not want to go off and start fighting and to be honest, I know it sounds really selfish but I would probably try my best to get out of it some sort of way.

KEN
I personally think that what I did, not only what I did but what many others like me did, was to try and stop other people from having to do it. We didn’t ever want anyone else to have to do it.

JESSICA
I have a lot of respect for you and the people who did that.

KEN
And all these men who are buried here had, I’m sure, the same idea as I have. We did it for that. We weren’t completely successful because they are still fighting wars and doing things like that now. We did it for that very reason and we were idealistic. Think of all the mothers who lost their sons, wives who lost their husbands, children who lost their fathers. Terrible business, war.

END