This week and next, The Northern Echo is serialising the story of Sergeant Charles Eagles, 79, from Sunderland, who landed at Normandy on D-Day.

Part 4: Saving Lieutenant Williams

THE cornfield was triangular, and we were to advance through it towards the apex where there was a wood that we had to capture. It was June 14, 1944, eight days after D-Day and the worst day of my war.

The old stone white church of Lingvres was on our right along with A Company; to our left was B Company as the field fell away slightly down to a tree-lined beck. I was in the middle in one of two personnel carriers - vehicles that had been detailed to act as bodyguards for Colonel Humphrey Woods.

He was the commanding officer of the 9th Battalion of the Durham Light Infantry, and was in a third carrier to our right.

He was 28, a popular CO from Hertfordshire, decorated with a Distinguished Service Order and a Military Cross from his time in the desert.

From behind us, our 25-pounder guns opened up and directed a sustained barrage at the wood; overhead roared the US Typhoon planes, each releasing two bombs and ten rockets, straddling and plastering the wood. It literally danced in front of the eyes, and it was impossible - absolutely impossible - that anything could have survived within it.

Then there was silence, about seven or so minutes of it, as the Durham Light Infantry pushed through the field towards the wood. The men were well spread out, rifles at port position (ready in front of them like on the end sequence of Dad's Army), wading through the waist-high corn. It was a First World War advance.

Beside me was Lieutenant Jack Williams who was the one I looked up to. He was born in Brandon, County Durham, and now lived in Spennymoor where his father was a miner. In fact, his father had been in the DLI during the First World War. He'd been gassed at Ypres and had lost a leg.

Suddenly, about 500 yards up the cornfield, all hell broke loose. A German tank in the left side of the wood opened up without warning, followed by another to the right. Withering Spandau (machine gun) fire shot across the cornfield. The gunfire was so intense that it cut the corn like a scythe, and men were falling with it, left, right and centre of me. It was a First World War massacre.

I jumped out of my personnel carrier and ran alongside it. Jack asked me what I was doing. I wasn't sure; I just felt uneasy. He followed me out, and a minute or so later the carriers were hit by mortar fire. Our driver, a young ginger-headed lad who I think was Private Arthur Mortimer, was in a terrible state. Dead. Killed instantly.

We ran over to the second carrier and pulled a corporal clear. He was screaming in agony because his leg and arm had been blown off.

There were dead and dying all around us, and gruesome screams filled the air, competing with dreadful sound of gunfire. Jack screamed at me "this way" and he dashed over to Col Woods' carrier.

The Colonel looked towards Jack and shouted an order at him. Jack then turned and starting running towards me. As he came closer, he started to stagger in slow motion, getting lower and lower in the corn until he sprawled at my feet, blood pouring from his thighs.

"Take a look, Eagles," he gasped. "If they've shot my balls off, shoot me."

I pretended to look and said: "You're okay."

Somehow, I managed to get him up and across my shoulders and - how, I'll never understand - I carried him 50 yards - maybe 150 yards, I don't know - across the field until I spotted a medic. I dropped Jack at his feet like a sack.

As the medic began to attend to his injuries, Jack managed to say to me: "I'm okay, laddie. Get yourself back." Then he passed out.

This, though, was just the start of his extraordinary escape.

When they got him back to a mobile surgical hospital, they found that he had received a gunshot wound to the right hip.

A bullet had passed through his left shinbone and another had hit him just above his left knee, shattering about an inch-and-a-half of bone. So serious were his injuries, that they decided to amputate his left leg - the same fate as had befallen his father in the First World War.

They completed the paperwork and he was moved to a surgeon's table. But then the field hospital was flooded with casualties demanding immediate attention. Jack's wounds were dressed and he was forgotten about, eventually ending up back in Spennymoor with both his legs intact. His medical records, though, said otherwise, and he had a hell of a job when he came to rejoin his unit, persuading them that this two-legged man standing before them was the one-legged chap that the paperwork told them to expect.

For me, though, I had to fulfil what I believed would be Jack's last request, and I ran - through the gunfire - to Col Woods.

Adapted by Chris Lloyd

* Tomorrow: Part 5: Death of the Colonel.