THEY say an army marches on its stomach and with Dennis – “Tiny” – Sear as cook, the 210 Field Company Royal Engineers 30 Corps did not go hungry.

So appreciative were they that at the end of the campaign they presented him with a commemorative shield, which he still treasures. 

D-Day proper saw Dennis perilously descending a rope ladder into a landing craft in which they spent a rough and uncomfortable night. Next day they landed and marched four miles towards the front line.

Mostly the meals he prepared were made up of canned “delicacies” such as McConnochies’, a greasy stew, tinned sausages and hard tack biscuits, which were “like bricks”. Breakfast was invariably porridge.

“Sometimes someone would come back with a small pig, which added a bit of variety,” he said. “And you might find potatoes growing.” 

When Dennis attempted to despatch a pig with his Sten gun the weapon, though set on single shot, went off like a machine gun nearly decapitating the beast.

Many of Dennis’s comrades couldn’t read or write and they turned to him to help them with letters home. It gave him an insight into their private lives, but he never divulged what they contained.

His commanding officer found out about it and called Dennis in for what he thought was going to be a dressing down. In fact he was congratulated. “You’re doing more for the morale of these people than ever I can,” he told him.

Dennis recalls digging his Guy cookhouse wagon – named Maud after his fiancé – into the banks of the Rhine to shield it from the “moaning minnies” while the 210 Field Company constructed a section of “Lambeth Bridge”, which enabled troops to cross the Rhine at Rees, Germany. “We lost 21 men on that operation,” he said.

He also recalls some of the men crossing the Rhine at night in canvas boats to rescue 138 paratroopers in hiding following the Arnhem debacle. As they came ashore, soaking and cold, he was there to hand them a steaming cup of tea.

“One of the places I will never forget is Belsen,” said Dennis. “Our chaps went in and forced the German guards to rebury the dead, respectfully, side by side in long trenches. The bodies were then covered in quicklime."

“During our four days there I never opened my kitbag,” he said. “When I eventually did open it again miles away from there, the stench of that place just came out of it." 

“That was the most horrible time of the war.” 

Dennis married Maud during a brief home leave in the last few days of the war. He served in Palestine and Egypt before being demobbed in 1947. 

Now 86, Dennis and Maud are living in Canterbury.