IT WASN'T until the end of June that John Marsh crossed to Normandy. But on the 5^th June, which should have been D-Day, he was very much in on the action.

John, from Wingham in Kent, was attached to an RAF mobile signals unit. While stationed at Cosham, near Bournemouth, he volunteered military style - "you, you and you" - for messenger duties at Combined Headquarters.

"We had to carry teleprinter messages to the ops room where there was this huge table with a map drawn on it, and dozens of tiny flags. The messages were coming thick and fast so I knew something was happening.

"There was an Air Vice Marshall looking down on it all, and WRENS, all looking like film stars moving the flags about. Of course these represented the convoys moving towards Normandy."

On June 30 he and his unit set off for Normandy aboard an LCT. John had been given a Bren gun and he sat on camouflage netting in a space behind the cab of the three-ton Bedford.

"It gave me a wonderful view of all the shipping," he said. "Two miles before we landed all these bodies came floating past - Americans. They must have come from Omaha. That sobered us up quite a bit.

"It was a beautiful crossing. Like a millpond. We landed at Juno Beach where there were a lot of German prisoners waiting to be taken back to England. They were a cocky lot, strutting about as if they'd won the war."

John carried his Bren gun throughout the campaign and never fired it once. The driver of his truck was Eric Sykes, who survived to be one of Britain's top comedy writers and performers.

"He was a bit of a comedian even then," said John. "Always cracking jokes. When we got to Germany he took part in a concert party written by Denis Norden and produced by Bill Frazer of Bootsie and Snudge fame."

The unit John was attached to had the responsibility of sending back information by radio which was used to locate strategic targets for the RAF. He saw the results of their work as they passed through Caen, so reduced to rubble that a bulldozer had to carve a roadway for them.

"Worse than that was the Falaise Gap," he said. "It was like Dante's Inferno. There were bodies all over the place and dead horses everywhere.

"RAF Typhoons did all that with their rockets." 

By the time John's unit crossed the Rhine into Germany the local people were hanging sheets out of windows to announce their capitulation.

After the Armistice he stayed on in Germany for two years. "At Celle I had my best job every - barman in the Sergeans' Mess," he said. "It was fantastic. I didn't draw wages for six months."

Back home real life kicked in again. He found work at Snowdown Colliery as a miner and spent the next 35 years working underground.