Peterborough resident Denis Garrod was just a teenager when he took part in the greatest amphibious military operation in history: D-Day, the invasion of Normandy.
On Wednesday, Garrod said he’s still in awe of the scope of the operation which involved landing thousands of tanks, trucks and guns, and tens of thousands of troops on France’s Normandy coastline and getting them safely ashore.
“Whatever we were told to do, we did,” said Garrod, who served on a naval vessel. “We had a job to do and we did it.”
Nicknamed “Wires,” Garrod was an electrician serving on board landing craft tank (LCT) #980, a 200-foot, 600-ton ship designed to land tanks and other vehicles on a hostile shore.
On the way onto the beach code-named “Sword,” the LCT struck a mine, which blew a hole in the ramp at the bow, Garrod said.
Garrod recalls his skipper, knowing he couldn’t miss all of the beach obstacles, hit this one perfectly.
“We were able to get every piece of equipment unloaded,” he said. “You’d almost think that he had planted the explosives on the door to blow a hole in there because the vehicles just straddled the hole.”
Garrod says he’s still amazed by the amount of work that planners did to make sure the ships, equipment and men ended up in the right spot.
“We didn’t know where those soldiers were going to go after they left our ship,” he said. “But all we did know is some went straight out from the ship, some went to the left, some went to the right.
“We had no idea of where they were going to wind up. Maybe they didn’t have any idea either.”
After landing their vehicles, and subjected to German shellfire, Garrod was supposed to help winch the damaged ramp at the front of the ship into place.
However, he was sent to the stern of the ship for another job and that’s when a shell struck.
“The two-man winch was manned by my buddy and the first lieutenant who came in and took my place,” he said. “As soon as he got into the winch locker, I beat it to the stern. My buddy on the other winch handle said to me ‘Wires, you hadn’t even made it to the stern of the ship when the first lieutenant was killed.”
After burying the first lieutenant at sea, Garrod’s LCT returned to England for repairs.
In 1946, with the war over, and LCT 980 scrapped, Garrod emigrated to Canada, where he started a family and began a career in Peterborough at General Electric.
WATCH (Nov. 2018): Second World War veteran Denis Garrod remembers his role in D-Day