D-Day veteran Bill makes an annual pilgrimage to France to pay tribute | UK | News

D-Day veteran Bill makes an annual pilgrimage to France to pay tribute | UK | News

D-Day hero Bill Gladden’s war only lasted 12 days but he has always made an annual pilgrimage to France to remind himself of the horrors he witnessed.

This year will be especially poignant as Bill, 100, returns as one of the oldest surviving British veterans.

The 80th anniversary of the Normandy invasion by the Allies on June 6 will likely be his last chance to pay his respects to comrades who died.

Bill, whose wife of 52 years, Marie, died in 2010, said: “It’s always very emotional, but this year more than most.”

The Daily Express reader from Haverhill, Suffolk, was 20 on D-Day and serving with the Royal Armoured Corps, attached to the crack 6th Airborne Reconnaissance Regiment. He flew into Normandy in a Hamilcar glider carrying a Tetrarch Tank and eight 350cc Matchless Motorbikes, towed by a Halifax bomber. The crew was the first to fly a tank straight into action.

On June 15 he was holed up in an orchard when two shells fell, killing seven colleagues including Troopers Alfred Friend and Joseph Musgrave. Bill took them into a nearby barn but their injuries were so severe they died.

Three days later he was himself shot. His leg hanging, he was carried to the same barn and spent the next three years in hospital having to learn to walk again.

His niece Kaye Thorpe said: “To me he is the definition of a hero.”

Cet article est apparu en premier en ANGLAIS sur https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/1875861/d-day-veteran-bill-annual-pilgrimage-france-pay-tribute


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