“It was the first time in the history of the RAF that technicians had gone in with invasion troops, practically right from the word go,” Sid, now 98, recalled last week. “We were there to give aerial radar cover for the troops. They didn’t want another Dunkirk,” he said, referring to the mass troop evacuation from northern France four years earlier.
Days before his ship arrived in Nazi-occupied France, in June 1944, the London-born Sid had watched from his base on Salisbury Plain as the huge aerial armada flew over. It was a sight he would never forget – the start of the largest seaborne invasion in history. When they disembarked on the beach, a major concern for the wireless operators was friendly fire, as their blue RAF uniforms – which looked more grey than blue when wet – were misidentified from the air as Wehrmacht apparel.
Allied aircraft opened fire on the group several times, although the only damage sustained in his area was to vehicles and a communications aerial. The boys in blue were then kitted out temporarily in khaki uniform, to lessen the risk. Over the following months, Sid and his mates were moved around a lot.
He had one visit home, in early 1945, and since his family didn’t own a phone, his arrival was unannounced. “I remember knocking at the door, and when my mother answered, I asked ‘What’s for lunch?’” Sid was in newly-liberated Hamburg when Nazi Germany surrendered in May 1945, and remembers allied troops handing out slabs o.
