A proud D-Day veteran explains why he will never join comrades revisiting Normandy (From Bournemouth Echo)

A proud D-Day veteran explains why he will never join comrades revisiting Normandy

7:00am Monday 18th May 2009

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A DWINDLING group of veterans will cross the channel for the 65th anniversary of D-Day – but one Swanage man will never join them.

Dave Squirrell does not want to remember some of the things he saw that day.

“It stirs your memory up too much,” said the 89-year-old.

His story is a warning that remembrance should not become cosy nostalgia.

He was then a junior officer whose job was to recover and repair tanks, often under enemy fire, and often in the bloody aftermath of a tank’s destruction.

Col Squirrell said: “Our padre was a very brave man. I was concerned about rescuing the tanks. He would rescue the remains of our chaps out of the turrets. He didn’t seem to bat an eyelid.”

D-Day was only the first day of a 12-month battle through France to Germany, and it was not the only theatre of war.

Col Squirrell said: “I think, why do we make so much fuss about D-Day? Because the war in Italy was in worse conditions.”

He landed in the evening to the sound of shells from the British battleships going overhead “like tube trains”.

Gold Beach was a confused mass of vehicles and the dead and dying of the landing force lay where they fell.

The next day he was taking cover next to a man whose tank was hit and burning.

Col Squirrell said: “The commanding officer prodded me in the back and said: ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ “I said I was trying to stay alive. He said: ‘I didn’t send you here to stay alive. Get up and do something’. So I got up and did something!”

The British and American tanks were no match for the German machines, one-on-one, but they were far more numerous.

“We lost 200 tanks in a week but those 200 would be back again in a week. The Americans were building them like sausage machines. Bloody useless tanks they were too.”

One day near Caen they gathered with the padre for a service.

Col Squirrel pointed to the distant German tanks and said the Germans were probably having a service themselves. The padre said: ‘But we’re in the right’. I said: ‘But the Germans think they’re in the right’. He said: ‘I’ll think about the answer’.

“At every reunion when I saw him I asked him: ‘Have you got the answer yet?’ He never did.

“There is no answer. They were praying for help to kill us. And we were praying for help to kill them. Wars are stupid. They just kill people and don’t prove anything.”

Soldiers who cracked under fire were labelled battle exhausted and sent home and Col Squirrel had sympathy for their plight.

He said: “I used to get bloody frightened. My knees used to knock. I often used to wonder if the soldiers could hear them!

“If I was a soldier I might have run away! But you think as an officer you have to stay.

“By the end of the war I was a bit bomb happy because we’d lived in minefields for so long. I think we were all a bit like that. Towards the end you were trying to hang on to your life.”

He was mentioned in despatches for his brave recovery work when a British unit suffered 140 casualties from 300 men attacking a “pocket of resistance” at the Dutch village of Broekhuizen.

“I’ve never seen so many dead men,” he said.

He was a bank clerk in Ealing before the war, and afterwards his posts included senior instructor in the school of tank technology at Bovington, and project manager for the Chieftain Tank.

He retired as a colonel in 1974 and came to live in Swanage with his late wife, Linda, in 1981, near Cauldron Barn Farm, where his family came on camping holidays in the 1920s.

Col Squirrell is proud of his service and units but despairs at the waste.

He said: “There was a programme on TV about Operation Goodwood [a bloody battle to break out of the Normandy beachhead]. I wished I hadn’t watched because I couldn’t sleep because it works your mind up. You don’t want to be reminded of these things.”

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