THIS week's D-Day special brought back memories for Margaret Littlefair who has lived all of her life in the Teesdale village of Hilton, between Staindrop and Ingleton.
“We were on a farm, and the soldiers used to often come on manoeuvres, shooting and chasing each other,” she says. There were six huge Army camps in Teesdale training men for D-Day, with the one at Stainton probably being the closest to Hilton.
Most strikingly, Margaret, who was 12 at the time, remembers a company of Scottish soldiers in their kilts and led by bagpipers marching into the village one day.
“As soon as they got to our yard, they kicked off their boots and put their feet in the horse troughs,” she says. “They had marched from Scotland. A food wagon had earlier dropped off supplies for them and they slept the night.
“Next morning I remember them marching their way down through the village, bagpipes playing, and me and my younger sister, Joan, ran after them singing ‘We’ll meet again…’, the Vera Lynn song.
“After the war, we went on our first holiday to Blackpool. We couldn’t get petrol as it was still rationed so we went by train, and in the carriage was a soldier who remembered coming to the farm and putting his feet in the trough.
“He said they had marched their way down to south England and went across for D-Day.
“He’d been injured, and he said only a handful of them had come back.”
THIS is the letter that Captain William Oliver Henderson read to his crew as they pushed away from the British shores into the Channel early in the morning of June 6, 1944. With the sea crammed with more than 7,000 vessels, the crew of SS Knowlton, an ageing cargo ship, must have known they were involved in something big, but until their captain, from Croxdale, read the letter from Admiral Sir Bertram Home Ramsay, the commander of the naval invasion, they did not know what.
“I can imagine him 75 years ago on the deck of this old rust bucket reading this notice out to the crew who didn’t know what they were doing,” says his grandson, Colin Hurworth, of Nunthorpe.
Capt Henderson had been born in Witton-le-Wear in 1894, had served with the Royal Engineers during the First World War, and had then joined the merchant navy.
His D-Day carrying supplies to the Normandy beaches was really only just beginning when he read out the letter because another piece of paper in the family archive shows that he was Mentioned-in-Despatches for his bravery on that day.
“All we know is that he took his ship in under enemy fire and rescued some soldiers who were in the water,” says Colin.
Capt Henderson retired from the merchant navy in the mid-1950s and, having had Croxdale as his base when at sea, moved to Phoenix House, which was the colliery manager’s house at Phoenix Row, near Witton Park.
WE are grateful to Peter White for telling us more about this picture which appeared in last week’s Memories when we only knew it showed the flag-covered body of “Major Aowie” outside the ruins of St Croix church in Saint Lo in Normandy.
Saint Lo was a strategically important town. As long as the Germans held it, the Allies would struggle to break out eastwards into the rest of France. The Americans bombed it on D-Day, killing hundreds of civilians, and as the Allies neared it in July 1944, the Germans reduced it to rubble – it was 95 per cent destroyed and nicknamed “the capital of the ruins”.
Major Thomas Dry Howie, commander of the 3rd Battalion of the 116th Infantry Division of the US army was instructed to capture it, but first he had to relieve his 2nd Battalion which had become surrounded by Germans. Using only hand grenades and bayonets, Howie personally led his outnumbered forces through the enemy line and rescued the men.
He then gave the order to push on to Saint Lo, but was almost immediately killed by shrapnel.
Consequently, his men strapped his body draped in the Stars and Stripes to the front of their lead Jeep so that he was the first American to enter, and liberate, Saint Lo. They then placed his body in front of the ruined church so that his men, and French civilians, could pay tribute to him.
For operational reasons, his name was not released, and he became known as “the Major of Saint Lo”. Due to the power of the imagery of the American flag amid the French ruins, he became iconic of the US sacrifices to free Europe.
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