"It was hell on earth"
To mark the 80th anniversary of the Normandy landings, RT talks to Richard Brock, one of the last D-Day survivors whose courage made the operation a success — and secured our freedom
Eighty years after D-Day, it’s the colossal barrage of ammunition fire that Richard Brock remembers. Just a week out of his teens, his very first experience of action was scrambling ashore at Normandy’s Gold Beach as part of the largest seaborne invasion in history.
“The massive noise of battleship gunfire right over our heads targeting the coastal defences was horrendous – like hell on earth,” remembers Brock, of the East Lancashire Regiment’s 1st Battalion. “We were the support troops, so by then the Germans had got organised and we were getting all the heavy stuff from them, too.”
For Brock, it was just the start of a 12-month odyssey as he helped liberate parts of France and the Netherlands, as well as Belsen concentration camp in northern Germany. Covering hundreds of miles, he slept under trees, in hedges and in foxholes, constantly in danger before the Allies were victorious.
Born on the Wirral before moving to Lancaster as an infant, Brock – now on the brink of his 100th birthday – had never been outside northern England when he was called up at 18. He spent almost two years training on Salisbury Plain, the South Downs and Brecon Beacons before going to Kent, where his regiment prepared for D-Day. With the rank of Driver IC (In Charge), he learnt how to waterproof his vehicle and drive in waist-deep water.
You'd be talking to a chap… the next minute he'd be dead
“One day in the spring, Monty [General Bernard Montgomery] came to visit us,” says Brock, of the officer in command of all Allied ground forces during the Normandy invasion. “He wasn’t aloof, like some. He said, ‘Gather round, lads. There’s a big do coming off. I can’t tell you where, although you’ll find out. But I want you to be prepared.’”
Brock hadn’t any idea of his destination when his ship, the Ocean Vigil, set off down the Thames Estuary with 2,000 men on board. His regiment made landfall in Normandy on D-Day plus two, Thursday 8 June, under heavy fire.
“The advance troops had gone ahead, but Monty held us back in case there was a weakness in the line,” he explains. “We were dive-bombed, lying on the ground with the earth shaking. You wondered what the hell you were going into. We dug in, taking shelter from air bursts, and gradually advanced.
“I was carrying supplies for others on the front line – rations, ammunition, hand grenades. I drove a Bren Gun Carrier and was always frightened of bazookas. I’d seen what they could do.”
Brock was in HQ Company, which landed on Gold Beach with 130 men. “By the time the hostilities finished a year later, there were 19 of us left. You’d be talking to a chap, and the next minute he’d be dead. Patrols would go out ahead of us, not come back, and then we’d find all of them shot dead. These were men I knew. You’d see terrible things. Death… the stench of carnage. I smelled it twice, in Normandy and at Belsen.”
Brock was among those who entered the concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen on the second day of its Allied liberation in April 1945, by which time 50,000 people were estimated to have been murdered there. It still held 60,000 inmates, living among 13,000 unburied bodies.
“There was a huge sign warning of typhoid,” says Brock. “Dead people were scattered all over. So many injured and dying, and the rest just skeletons walking around. The smell of death was atrocious.
What the lads went through must never be forgotten
“As we approached, the poor sods who were barely alive cowered down, as if we were about to whip them. It was pitiful. I asked my co-driver, ‘Where is God, to allow such suffering?’ I was only there for a day or so, but it stays with you. I used to have nightmares, waking up shouting.”
After the war, Brock worked as a butcher and married his childhood sweetheart Pat, who died last year. As he speaks – he still lives independently in the Lancaster home they shared – he looks at her photograph and his voice wavers at the mention of her. “Having good family – three sons, six grandchildren, two great-grandchildren – keeps me young. They look after me, and I like to potter around.”
One week before the 80th anniversary of D-Day, Brock will reach his centenary, and will be marking it with “a buffet and a natter for 70 people” at Morecambe Golf Club. On 5 June he will meet the Princess Royal and read a poem at the Bayeux War Cemetery commemorations – see page 17 for broadcast details. The next day both he and fellow veteran Ken Benbow will be at the British Normandy Memorial. Within sight of Gold Beach, the Memorial bears the names of the 22,442 service personnel from 30 countries under British command who fell during the Battle of Normandy.
“It means everything to be there,” says Brock. “I’m doing it for the pals that fell. There will be a lot of memories, thinking of the smashing mates that didn’t make it. What the lads went through must never be forgotten.
“It doesn’t seem possible that D-Day was 80 years ago. I did what I had to do, and kept my head down. I was just lucky.”
