WAVE AFTER WAVE: Landing craft speed across the English Channel on one of the many return trip after D-Day, transporting reinforcements and bringing back wounded and German POWs.

Getting 200 men of the 51st Highland Division across the English Channel on D-Day was the task set for Kiwi Lieutenant Jack Ingham DSC, RN and his crew of LCI(L) 110 as part of

The Big Show

	Lieutenant Jack Ingham, 1943

The wind was easing, the seas weren’t quite as bad, and about midnight came the drone overhead, hundreds and hundreds of planes going across.

This was the bombers first, they were going to do what damage they could on the beaches. And then the clouds parted every now and again and you could see the shapes going over, hundreds and hundreds of planes. Then there was a lull, and then another batch of planes came across, and made a different noise from the bombers and these were the Dakotas towing the gliders and the parachutists. We knew we were getting close to France by that time. The messenger on board, he looked up and said, ‘glad I’m not one of those guys.’ Didn’t fancy their job.

Keeping station was pretty difficult because of the weather conditions, keeping in your right place in the line of ships and those of you abreast of each other. I went down a couple of times and had a cup of coffee, but with Tiddly being so young and inexperienced I wouldn’t have slept anyway, so I spent most of the time on the bridge.

As dawn was breaking, each second that it got lighter there’d be more ships you could see further out, just an amazing sight. Ships of all shapes and sizes, and very comforting to see the big battleships there. The sea was thick with them. It idly crossed my mind that there was a heck of lot of responsibility put into a lot of young heads. I’m sure that’s the usual thing in war, isn’t it? It’s the young ones that do the business and the older ones, that direct the business. But the hard work was being done by people of my age, and there were thousands, all on the same business. They could have been bankers, they could have been post office employees, could have been gardeners. And yes, I felt, not exactly arrogant, but very comfortable with the fact that we were managing it and doing it so well.

At dawn we were about fifteen miles off Juno Beach. This was quite different from what we’d been used to. The other invasions had usually taken place at dawn to get the element of surprise that is most critical, and as far as possible at high tide, so that when you landed the troops they only had a small amount of space to get out from the boat over sand and into action. But this time they reversed things, and because of the number of beach obstacles that had to be demolished to get anywhere near the beach itself, they decided to wait for low tide and daylight so the frogmen could have a reasonable chance of destroying the beach obstacles.

Frogmen had been landed from small assault craft to destroy the obstacles and defuse the mines attached to many of them. As Jack’s ship approached Juno Beach the noise of battle was almost overpowering.

Endless gunfire from ships, the warships, from the cruisers, from the destroyers, and they were all belting hell out of enemy artillery positions trying to silence them. And the storm itself was pretty noisy, of course, but no it was the gunfire. You had to shout at all to make yourself heard. Every time you shouted a command down the voice-pipe they had to repeat it back to you to make sure they heard it properly.

The first wave went in at low tide, ahead of us, and as a matter of fact as we got nearer a lot of those craft were coming back, returning. And our job – we were going in at half tide, and our 51st were hoping to land on beaches that were in our possession, or fairly secure. That was nearly the case, not quite. The wind was still roaring, still very fierce. The sea was up, and it made manoeuvring pretty difficult. So it was time for ours to land, the beaches were getting pretty littered with wreckage. Landing craft that had been mined and holed and landing craft that had been shot up on a beach and that sort of stuff. And getting closer, there were plenty of bodies floating around too. Didn’t let your mind dwell on that because you could have been the next one. Getting these guys on the beach, that was all that mattered. And this is where training came into it, really. You had all the techniques of doing so, but you had to be careful that you used them and you didn’t get sloppy or haphazard about it because you’d be the next wreckage. So the CO of the troops, he was on the bridge with me and getting very interested as we got closer, and of course when you got close enough he was down with his troops there, getting them ready to get off.

Being a good keen Scotsman he had a little hip flask in his pocket and we had nips of that, whisky.

We realised why we’d been training in those sort of conditions. The tide is sweeping you downwards and so you have to go in like a crab, pointing ‘up there’ and hoping to get ‘down there’. All our practice had been beautifully done like a military parade ground. They’d gone in one, two, three together, beached, drawn off. The next three together, drawn off – all very good, you see, because there was no opposition and no strong winds. And when we got close enough, Commander Villiers recognised this wasn’t going to happen, so he just ordered, ‘Beach independently’. And so it was up to each one of us to find a gap that we thought was suitable and get cracking.

It was up to yourself then. I saw a fellow officer going in and I was behind him. And he had one go and it wasn’t suitable, he’d hit a sandbank first, so he cleared off and I came in alongside him and got on the same sandbank. Water was too deep to get the troops off, so we kedged off and tried another way. But then you had to be careful that further down there might have been some wreckage and some more beach obstacles. But I went in again, had got quite close, got pretty good on the beach, got over the sandbank OK, and that wasn’t a worry, because getting over the sandbank full with troops meant that coming off I’d be floating lighter, so that wasn’t a worry, and we got in much better the second time, and sent two boys over on each ramp to test the depth of the water. It was up to their waist, and so I told the CO troops that might be the best I could manage and was he prepared to get off in that depth? And so off they went.

It was a gut-wrenching moment to see them going off. When you beach, you ride up onto the surf, onto the beach or as close as you can, and then these two ramps are lowered. It’s a steep run down to the beach and then, when the troops are all off, you pull the ramps up.

Jack vividly remembers watching as the 200 troops ran down the ramps, with gear.

Heavily, heavily laden and that’s why, had they been in water much deeper, with the wave action they would have been swept off their feet and no chance of getting up once they were down. But they did, all except six. The wind had driven me off by then and I would have had to have made another beaching to get these six off, and that was a bit of a worry because we’d been told to get the ship back unscathed as far as possible, to get the next load across the Channel. There was one of the smaller craft, just coming off empty, so we hailed him and said, ‘Can you take six ashore for me?’ He said, ‘Yeah, pop them over’, so they got ashore.

And were you aware of watching all of them?

Yes. Yes. Before they went, the CO came up and shook hands.

What did he say?

‘Thanks for the ride’.

There was still a fair bit of activity, light arms fire coming from the shore and howitzers that hadn’t been silenced. There was a fair bit of fireworks still as well as the congestion on the beach. The beach looked like a wrecker’s yard. But strangely enough none of the fellows got hit aboard, although there was plenty of rattling going on, small arms fire hitting the boat. Quite a number of landing craft had gone down. Some of them were on the beach burning, and some that had sunk were in the water. And there were plenty of bodies floating about.

When they got onto the sand, did any of the troops turnaround?

Yeah. Waved, God bless us. I felt pretty satisfied, satisfied that I’d got them that far, and sorry as hell to see them go.

Jack heard later that the troops from his ship did well in France. He was awarded a Distinguished Service Cross for his actions on D-Day, but considers the award for his ship, rather than for himself personally.

Between D-Day and November 1944, Jack’s landing craft made between 30 and 40 trips across the Channel, taking more troops over and bringing back the wounded. On one occasion, soon after D-Day, they returned to England with German prisoners.

In early December he and the crew of LCI(L) 110 took their ship to Scotland where, along with hundreds of others, it was to be scrapped.

An excerpt from The Big Show, New Zealanders, D-Day and the War in Europe edited by Allison Parr. Published by Auckland University Press in association with the Ministry for Culture and Heritage.

Related link

D-Day Exhibition (NZHistory site)
www.nzhistory.net.nz/war/dday