1262 Gnr. Raymond Gibbs British Army 72nd Medium Regiment Royal Artillery I was in the 72nd Medium Regiment Royal Artillery. When I joined I was 21 years of age. It was very tough up to the invasion we had a very big exercise in England and there were quite a lot of casualties, motorbike accidents and lorry accidents, it went on for quite a long time
We were moved then, all of a sudden to Berwick on Tweed on the Scottish border. I think it was to confuse the enemy as to where our Regiment was but Lord Haw-haw told us where we were going! We stopped up there a fortnight and then we were moved straight down to East Ham Docks. It was an Assembly Area outside the Docks in East Ham and to make certain that none of us went on leave or went home, they put barbed wire round it. Then, one morning we were told to move out. We went down into the Docks and then, all of a sudden, they said your all going to march back again! I don't know what all that was for! So then we went down the next day to board this ship. Well, of course I'd never been on a big ship in my life and so it was all exciting to me. Then we sailed off round the Isle of Wight towards the D-day beaches. On the way over we were talking to some of the medical staff and they put us in the wrong frame of mind because they would tell us how terrible it was on the beaches and the casualties. We came up alongside two British battleships and they were firing over the heads of our boat, inland, at the enemy positions. I had never heard a battleship open up and they opened up and went right over the back of us and then I could see traces of bullets and I thought, this is it! and I started to feel frightened.
We landed and drove off. We got onto the Landing Craft together with the ammunition trucks and then we drove onto the beach. Our trucks were all waterproofed so that you could go in water with them and the exhaust was turned up in the air. So we landed and I went down like that and the water came up higher and higher and I wondered if I would come out the other side because there were so many men drowned in tanks and in lorries.
As soon as we landed, whether it was a stray German shell or what or a lucky one a shell came over and it hit a big tree and of course on impact a shell will scatter into hundreds of pieces and it scattered all over what we called the MT line (the wagon line) well there was 8 men got hit straight away. The next thing happened as we were just going to drive off. We just got off the sand and I looked at the bank and there were two or three men who had been hastily buried - they hadn't been covered over, they had just thrown dirt over them, well of course, that did us straight away now, we'd never seen anything like that at all. There had been a terrific amount of hand to hand fighting. We came across British Infantry who had been in a farmhouse and met the Germans head on. There was German dead and British dead so there must have been bitter fighting.
What brought it home to me was the dead and the way that they were left there. You just couldn't get over that at all really. You know they were just left there, their helmet laid on their body and they were just only partly covered up, or a rifle by the side of them with some make-shift cross. The smell of dead horses and cows, oh it was terrible. You would go to a field and see these bloated cows on their backs all over the place, just horses and bodies it was a sweet, peculiar smell.
The luxury of going to a lavatory was the supreme thing so they would put a trip wire on the lavatory door or on the chain, you had to be careful not to touch anything. I was very frightened when there was these moaning minnies. They were these multi-barrelled mortars they would moan and you wouldn't know where they were going to drop. They would come over the trenches and you had to catch hold of your knees to stop them shaking.
We lost our second in command when he went into a German Ammunition Dump. Well the German ammunition boxes were marvellous. We used to use these to put cigarettes in. They weren't in tin, they were beautiful wood. So we would go in and pick things up. This time there was a ratchet mine! That’s a mine that goes off after a number of lorries go over it, usually about the fifth. He went in to pick up a box, I'd been in there and a couple more had been in there. He was unlucky and came out on the fifth and his jeep blew up. It killed him blew his legs off. The worse thing of the lot was when you saw your pals killed, that did really knock you for six. Once when we heard someone had been killed, we found out it was twins that had been killed. They were expert athletes and were in their prime and they had won everything within the Regiment, boxing any sport they went in for, they won it. But to know that they had been killed it just wasn't right. Another time, this chap came back into our gun pit and said I think I've been hit and he died, just like that.
I'll never forget their faces.
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