Legacies of d-day

In 2023, the Royal British Legion commissioned me to photograph and interview the few remaining D-Day veterans in preparation for the 80th anniversary of the D-Day landings in June 2024.

Over the following months, I travelled all over Britain, photographing and interviewing 13 individuals aged between 99 and 104.

Virtually all of those who fought in WW2 were conscripted. They weren’t professional soldiers; meeting these ordinary yet extraordinary people who were barely adults when they fought for our freedom has been a humbling experience.

The work is exhibited at the newly built Winston Churchill Pavilion in Normandy and the National Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire.

 Jack Quinn

Sheffield-born Jack was among the first troops to reach the French coast on D-Day. He arrived on Gold Beach five minutes before midnight on June 5, 1944.

The then-19-year-old Royal Marine was the coxswain of a 60-foot boat. His job was to work with frogmen to destroy German sea defences before the main invasion began.

Just below the waves off the French coast, the Germans had placed metal structures that were designed to shred the hulls of landing craft. Jack and the frogmen had spent weeks training on British beaches, where replica defences were created. Jack said these had to be cut in a particular way to cause them to fall flat onto the seabed out of harm’s way. All this was done in the pitch dark, within easy range of the thousands of German soldiers on the beach.

Later, during the D-Day invasion itself, he went against orders and rescued the crew of a French craft that was on fire and drifting into a minefield. For this courageous act, Jack was awarded the Croix de Guerre, the French equivalent of the Victoria Cross.

In Jack’s words, ‘I just did my job', adding: "A lot of other men did valiant things, but nobody saw them doing it."

Jack, who worked for most of his life as a lorry driver, went on to have six children, including two stepchildren. Jack was a friendly and eloquent man, and his description, in his thick Yorkshire accent, really brought those incredible events of 80 years ago to life.

Jack passed away at the age of 99 on January 26, 2024, about a month after I took this shot.

jim Glennie

On D-Day, Jim and his mates from the 51st Highland Division of the Gordon Highlanders landed at Sword Beach. 

 He had his rifle and ‘his best friend’ -  his shovel. The gun was useful, but in Jim’s opinion, in a bad situation, it was digging in that saved the day.

Jim’s other best friend was Bill Norrie, who, like Jim, was also from Turriff in Aberdeenshire. Jim was standing right next to him when he was shot dead by the Germans. He actually saw the guy who did it, a soldier with a submachine gun on top of a tank. Jim was desperate to stand up and take revenge. But he knew that if he did, he’d be with his friend in the grave. 

Not long after, Jim was shot, wounded and captured. 

As the German soldiers marched him away, one of them started pushing Jim around. 18-year-old Jim wasn’t having this and began to fight back. The soldier immediately lifted his gun and was about to shoot Jim in the head when his commanding officer pushed his arm down and said that he couldn’t shoot a wounded soldier.

In the German hospital, the doctor who attended to Jim’s wounds loved to play golf, so he was interested in all the famous Scottish courses and became friendly with Jim. 

He said that he was going to leave the bullet in Jim’s arm for a few weeks so it could work its way closer to the surface and would be easier to remove. He said this would happen naturally as the body rejects the foreign object. 

Sure enough, after a few weeks, the bullet was close enough to the surface for the doctor to remove it easily. 

He let Jim keep the bullet. Jim then spent the next seven months in the Stalag-IV POW camp in Germany until the end of the war when their German guards just walked off.

Jim and a couple of Canadian soldiers stole a car belonging to the Mayor of Leipzig and used it to drive back to the Allied lines. 

After the war, Jim worked as a welder for most of his life. He is 98 and still lives independently. He still has his original cap from 80 years ago. 

He wishes that he still had that bullet, but unfortunately, it was taken away from him when he was put in the POW camp.

PETER LOVETT

A landing craft is a four-sided floating metal box. When the craft hits the beach, the front wall falls down, creating a ramp that allows the soldiers to run onto the beach.

Peter said that his craft landed on a quiet part of the beach on D-Day. He and his mates, who were packed in like sardines, didn’t come under too much fire as they ran up the beach to the relative shelter of the dunes.

He said that ‘in the lottery of war’, some of his comrades were not so fortunate. If a craft landed directly opposite a German pill box, as soon as the ramp came down, the trapped soldiers were all killed before stepping foot on the beach.

Peter’s helmet had a white band that meant he was required to stay on the beach to assist with the landings.

Where the sand was soft, netting was stretched across the surface to help the vehicles cross the beach.

There were dead bodies everywhere, and those driving trucks and tanks had no choice but to drive straight over them. Bodies were imprinted into the sand. Peter was commanded to retrieve them and to get their dog tags. He pulled at the hand of one of the dead, but the arm just detached from the body.

He was only 18 and said to his sergeant, 'This is a bit of a gruesome job, sir."

The sergeant replied, “Son, those chaps have mums who will want to know what's happened to their little boy. You get those tags so you can put their minds at rest.”

Peter soon learnt that the best way to retrieve the dead was to pull them out by their coats rather than by limbs.

Once the beach was secured, the landings continued as more soldiers disembarked from the landing craft and moved up towards the battle raging on inland. 

Peter would be recovering a body, and a terrified soldier would offer to help to avoid leaving the beach.

When the sergeant spotted those who weren’t wearing the helmets with the white band, they were told, with the aid of a rifle, to get off the beach and into the battle.

Peter went on to fight across Europe and was one of the soldiers who parachuted into Germany, where he encountered another example of the lottery of war…

Peter was part of the 9th Parachute Battalion in ‘Operation Varsity’, the largest airborne operation ever conducted on a single day and in one location.  Involving more than 16,000 paratroopers and several thousand aircraft

As he parachuted down, he came under enemy fire. His parachute drifted off course and came down on the edge of a wood, but he managed to land safely. Once landed, he headed towards the blue smoke, indicating the DZ drop zone. Running towards it, he saw one of his mates, Harry Holton, on the ground. He’d been shot in the hand, and also, his front teeth were broken.

He told Peter that he landed right next to a German Submachine gun post and, because he was shot in the hand, had to use his teeth to pull the pin from the grenade before throwing it. He must’ve thrown it well because the Germans were dead.

In doing so, he had saved his own and undoubtedly Peters’s life. Peter explained that pulling a pin from a grenade isn’t anything as easy as one sees in the movies, which explains why his mate had damaged all his teeth.

When Harry was taken to the hospital, the doctors saw that bullets had strafed him in 5 places around his body. It was a miracle that he had survived, as he must’ve parachuted through a hail of submachine fire.

At 99, Peter is still over 6 feet tall. To the enemy, he must have stood out back then when people were generally shorter. Despite fighting across Europe with his comrades, he got through the war without injury.

His primary weapon was a Bren gun, which is a heavy handheld machine gun. He puts his survival down to always keeping moving. Peter would fire and then move because he knew that as soon as the enemy spotted where the fire was coming from, they’d send over thier 34 Mortar. “Then you’d get ripped to pieces.” Peter believes that the soldiers who stayed put didn’t survive.

As Allied forces pushed into Germany. Peter vividly remembers seeing the concrete gun towers on the outskirts of Berlin. Young German boys who couldn’t have been much older than 14 were on the staircase, quietly queuing to go up to the top of the tower. When it was their turn, they had to climb over the bodies of their dead comrades to get to the gun before being killed themselves.

He encountered other teenage German soldiers from an officer training unit. They were brainwashed and were so hard to fight because they wouldn’t surrender, and despite them being so young, the Allies had no choice but to kill them all.

The Allies met up with the Russians as the war drew to a close. Peter said that many Russian raw recruits were barely given weapons and had to pick them up from the dead as they advanced.

Peter said that the British troops also used German-made guns if needed. It was common practice for soldiers to use any better-quality weapons they found during the battles.

Peter had a Schmeisser, which he found on a dead German, and a brand-new Mauser, which he’d got from an abandoned German munitions factory.  German ammunition was also prized because the bullets were polished and smooth. According to Peter, the British ammunition wasn’t a patch on it, with rougher edges that could jam the gun.

Once the war was over, like many soldiers, Peter took his guns back to England. His dad was very proud of Peter’s achievements and took him to the pub for a drink while wearing his beret. However, his dad was nervous about having the guns in the house and handed them to the police. Peter wasn’t happy at all with this, but despite having been part of the D-Day landings, fighting in the battle of the Bulge, parachuting into Germany and fighting right up to the very end of the war, he was still only 20 years old and had to listen to his dad.

Marie Scott

At 17, Marie was three weeks underage when she volunteered for the Women's Royal Naval Service in February 1944. She went on to train as a radio operator and was posted to Fort Southwick, the secret underground operations centre that coordinated the D-Day landings. 

A vast armada was gearing up for D-Day all along the south coast around Portsmouth. There were so many ships that crossing the Solent to the Isle of Wight was said to be possible without touching the water.

Marie worked with eight other young women, three from each service: the RAF, The Navy, and the Army. They worked deep underground, transmitting and receiving messages. 

Marie had no idea that the D-Day landings had commenced until "Suddenly, in my earphones, I was on the beaches in Normandy. I heard everything because they were the troops landing on the beaches. For a moment, I was a bit bemused. I didn't know quite what was happening.  I had the sounds of war in my ears: machine gun fire, cannon fire, bombs, men shouting orders, men screaming. All those sounds of the chaos of war."

Once Marie overcame this shock, her training kicked in. 

Before the war, a 17-year-old girl would never have been given such a huge responsibility. But the men were away fighting, and it was down to young women like Marie to come into their own and prove that they were up to the task.

She spent the next 24 hours on duty transmitting and receiving messages. All the ships had gone when she eventually surfaced from the operations centre. Portsmouth Harbour was empty.

Eighty years have passed, but Marie will never forget what she heard in her headphones on D-Day.  "What I can tell you is, faced with real sounds, not a film, nothing like that, faced with the real sounds of war, you realise how horrifying it is. And that has stayed with me."

Bill Gladden

When most people think of D-Day, they imagine Allied troops running from landing craft onto French beaches.

Bill, a 6th Airborne Armoured Recce Regiment scout, had a different experience.

He and five other soldiers, all on motorbikes, arrived by glider. Also on board was a fully operational tank with crew. It was the first time gliders had been used to transport tanks.

The enormous glider, made of mainly plywood and canvas, was towed up into the air by a four-engined Halifax Bomber. Bill was squeezed into a tiny space between the tank and the glider’s fuselage. The tank was just inches away from his face. He was so cramped that he could only stand and couldn’t see a thing.

A porthole was at the top of the glider, and 20-year-old Bill decided to climb on top of the tank to get a better view. 

Once he managed this, he still couldn’t see much, just the other identical gliders flying in formation alongside his.  He was about to climb back down when he heard the sound of the tow cable being released. Once this had happened, orders were to remain completely still to ensure that the glider’s weight remained evenly distributed.

As ordered, Bill froze and spent the remainder of the journey lying flat on the tank.

Unsurprisingly, only some of the gliders flying into a battle made it.

One was lost over the English Channel when the tank broke loose of its shackles and crashed through the nose of the glider that was carrying it, causing both to fall into the sea mid-flight

Of those that weren’t shot down and managed to land in France, some crashed into rivers or German defences, killing all on board, but Bill’s Glider survived. 

It wasn’t long before Bill came under fire, and two of his comrades were shot. Bill managed to carry them to a nearby barn, which was being used as a medical post. Unfortunately, neither survived, and Bill had to leave them to join the battle.

I asked Bill if he felt scared, especially upon seeing a fellow countryman die in his arms. Bill replied, "We had a job to do, and I don't feel I was particularly brave. In the army, you do what you are told and get on with it. We all just wanted to get the job done and go home to our families."

Two weeks after D-Day, Bill was shot by machine gun fire, and he was carried to the same barn where, previously, he had taken his comrades. The injury was so bad that Bill nearly died; his foot was just hanging on by a tendon. He was evacuated back to England and spent the next three years in hospital recuperating. 

Recently, Bill returned to the same village in France and stood in the same barn. He said he found it a moving experience to be back there after all those years and joked that somewhere in the area, there must be a bit of his tibia.

Bill's passion is painting, mainly watercolours. The horse in the painting that Bill is holding was there on the day he landed in France. He vividly remembers the terrified creature running madly around the field as the tanks rolled from the gliders. If I had been in that field on D-Day, I'm certain that I would have behaved more like that horse rather than just 'getting on with the job' as Bill did.

100-year-old Bill passed away in April, a couple of months after I had the honour of photographing him.

Don Sheppard

Donald Sheppard was born on 4th May 1920 in the village of Laindon In Essex.

He left school at 14 and worked delivering telegrams for the post office. When war broke out, he volunteered to join the Navy but was rejected because of his eyesight.

As the war progressed, the authorities decided that his eyes were no longer a problem, and he was conscripted and sent to Colchester Barracks to train as a Royal Engineer.

At first, he served in North Africa, but his division was called back to England for the invasion of Europe.

On D-Day, as his ship approached the French coast, Don said that nobody showed their feelings but that inwardly, everyone was frightened - he joked that had no idea how many cigarettes he smoked, “We were being strafed by a couple of German fighters coming over, and it was like hell let loose. All our battleships firing over our heads, rockets and all stuff firing, the sea was pretty rough, and eventually, we landed between Sword and Juno Beach.”

On D-Day night. His unit was sheltering in the woods when German bombers dropped fragmentation bombs that exploded in the air, raining shrapnel down on Don and his comrades. Don felt one hit him in the leg. It was nothing serious, and he had bandages and morphine, so he wrapped his leg up and carried on fighting. He didn’t even bother reporting it, and eventually, it healed.

Sixty years later, when Don was in his eighties, he had suspected cancer and, at the hospital, had a CT scan. The doctor said you don’t have cancer, but you have a slither of shrapnel stuck in your lung. Over the last six decades, the German shrapnel had travelled from his leg and into his lung, where it remains today.

“It was an adventure when you were young, but now, after 80 years, I sit here and wonder. From the day my division landed to the end of the war, we lost 9000 men - I look back on it, and all I can think is what a waste of life.”

Don was an incredibly friendly and articulate man. Talking to him as he drank his glass of white wine, it was hard to believe he was 104 years old.