Sign up to The Irish Times Archive (1859 - 2008)My Account »
Sat 09 Sep 2010Beauty eked out from the carnage
MEMOIR: Bomber CountyBy Daniel Swift Hamish Hamilton, 269pp. £20
MY FATHER TOLD ME that he wrote poetry on the night of June 5th, 1944, as he sat in his tank aboard a landing craft en route from Portsmouth to Normandy. At 6.30am the next day he rolled down into a fast-running tide and up a beach into the most intensive firefight ever seen in military history. Shortly afterwards, when his tank was disabled, he commandeered another, but that too was hit. He disembarked and with another soldier climbed up the sand dunes and spent the next 20 minutes disarming landmines by hand in order to let the surviving tanks through.
Choose a Subscription type - required
