An English connect to D-Day

Accounts of D-Day landings in Normandy in 1944 during WW2 remind me of the stories my late mother related of the time when US soldiers descended, sometime in 1943, on her picture-postcard village of Ramsbury in England to train for the Allied invasion.

Her reminiscences related mostly to unlimited supplies of chocolate, butter and coffee that the GIs seemed effortlessly to supply to a population starved of such goodies in the times of severe rationing. She also recalled Private First Class Vincent Clarke, who wooed her sister Grace, later marrying her. But not before he was parachuted into France with the first wave of Allied troops and had his leg shot to smithereens by a hail of German machine-gun fire. His leg was amputated and after some traumatic months, he got used to a wooden, and later, a fibreglass limb.

A two-hour drive from London, Ramsbury was one of the villages chosen by the Lords of the Admiralty to simulate parachute landings in France. Its undulating hills and many streams were similar to the terrain where the Allied troops were to descend in the upcoming invasion. Days before the arrival of the GIs, there was hectic activity in and around Ramsbury. Army jeeps carrying senior military officers drove up frequently from war-torn London, scoured the countryside around the quiet village and left. The next few months witnessed a two-way education programme between locals and outsiders. It resulted in Ramsbury yokels gawking less openly at the Yankees, while the latter reciprocated by drinking insipid tea with the natives, realising that Yorkshire pudding was not actually pudding, and sometimes, having a glass of tepid beer at the village pub owned by my grandfather.

For the GIs in battle fatigues, the days were filled with war games against the backdrop of the near-constant drone of transport aircraft which disgorged soldiers practising parachute drops. Many a Ramsbury damsel, recalled my mother, ended up sporting white silken dresses from the discarded silk parachutes.

But one night in April 1944 — two months before the D-Day landings began — there was feverish activity inside the heavily guarded US base, followed by an incessant motorcade of vehicles making its way to London; and the GIs were gone. The villagers knew that the time had come for the US soldiers to play with real bullets.

A few returned after the war and tried to track down acquaintances. For many the quest ended in the quaint church graveyard, where they placed flowers on the graves of those who had once befriended raw GIs destined for the bloody Normandy beaches.