Troops carried wooden crosses that would mark their graves
THE TROOPS who landed on the beaches of Normandy were not short of equipment – many were so weighed down with guns, ammunition and grenades that they struggled to make it out of the water.
But there was something else that many had stowed away, and which they hoped they would never have cause to use: wooden crosses.
If they or one of their comrades were killed, burials were carried out where they had fallen, before their units continued their fight eastwards towards Germany.
“It’s a painful reminder of what the war was like for these soldiers, to think that you would be in a boat or on a tank, going into war, holding or carrying the cross that you might then be buried under,” said
Chris Anderson of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission.
The locations were recorded, and it was only after the fighting had ended that the bodies were retrieved and taken to cemeteries such as the one at Bayeux, where yesterday veterans gathered as they made their way from the cathedral service, half a mile away.
Hundreds lined the streets to clap and cheer the parade.
The scenes were redolent of those 75 years earlier, when, on the outskirts of Bayeux, the first large town to be liberated, locals threw flowers on Allied tanks and offered up bottles of cider to the troops.
Among those on the march yesterday was a six-year-old boy, who proudly wore his great-uncle’s medals.
George Sayer, dressed in a suit and tie, visited the cemetery with 10 members of his family to “honour uncle George”.
His ancestor, who was also called George Sayer, was in one of the first landing craft on Sword Beach. He had planned to come to Bayeux in person, but died about 18 months ago, aged 93.
“Uncle George’s son Kerry requested that little George wear his medals,” said Pat Sayer, George’s Jnr’s grandmother.