From D-Day to a Defeated Germany

Pete Morris was twenty years of age when he enlisted in the Royal Signals in 1939. He was, he says, pitchforked into adulthood without the luxury of being allowed a mistake or two. And yet he had a very good war. Promoted to Lance Corporal almost immediately because of his previously gained expertise in Morse, Pete rose to lead a team of radio operators, attached to a Royal Artillery unit, on the long journey across Europe from the Signals Training Centre in Prestatyn.

Pete's account of Operation Overlord begins with his training and equipment for the D-Day landings, including the famous Hobart's 'funnies'. On 6 June 1944, his unit went ashore on Jig Sector on Gold Beach at 06.00 hours; his description of the events that historic day is just one highlight of a rich narrative.

Ove the months that followed Pete was in the vanguard of the Allied advance towards the Third Reich itself. Having provided an ordinary soldier's assessment of the doomed Operation Market Garden, he also recounts his experiences inside Germany itself.

In this memoir, Pete not only captures the reality of soldiering, but also the terrible excitement. Some of his anecdotes are technical, for example when we learn how he mended a tower clock, and how he solved the problem of keeping radio batteries charged when on the move in wartime. Some are wry, such as the time when too much cider-drinking led to nettle stings bad enough to make a man suspected of a self-inflicted wound. And this is war, so there is tragedy too: starving civilians in Belgium and the Netherlands; and the stench of death, in the Falaise Pocket and at Bergen Belsen, which Pete saw only days after the camp had been liberated.

Pete tells us his memoir is concerned only with soldiering, but there are plenty of glimpses of the man as well as the soldier in this extraordinary document, which tells an engrossing story of one man's progress through companionship and horror to a premature and hard-earned maturity.