Veterans gather at National Memorial Arboretum to mark 80th anniversary of D-Day landings
Watch as veterans and their families gathered at the National Memorial Arboretum
Veterans and their families have gathered at the National Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire, to mark the 80th anniversary of the D-Day landings.
On June the 6th 1944 thousands of ships and landing craft took 160,000 Allied soldiers to the beaches of Normandy.
It led to the liberation of France and ultimately to the end of the Second World War.
26 veterans gathered to honour the surviving veterans and remember the selfless bravery of the men and women who played their part in the momentous Battle of Normandy.
ITV Central has been speaking to veterans from across the Midlands:
Ralph McClure, 99, Nottingham
Ralph was a signalman on board HMS LCT 952 and initially landed on the British section of Sword Beach. He signed-up at 17, when he was a butcher, 6 months before he was due to be called-up.
Ralph left Newhaven on D-Day in a tank landing ship, taking tanks and then cargo/supplies to the troops on the ground in Normandy. He was there for 6 weeks from D-Day itself. "I have a memory of seeing Churchill arriving at the beaches in France. He came along the beach acknowledging the troops with his usual cigar in his mouth.
The Army had made a passage for him between vehicles and equipment. I saw him put out his cigar out and threw the stub away and about 15 or 20 squaddies dived towards it to get it as a souvenir!"
Lewis Rose, Derby/Mickleover
Lewis was 19 when he landed on Gold Beach on D-day. He travelled in a tank from Winchester down to Southampton on 3rd June, before travelling on the 5th.
He remembers HMS Belfast firing at the back of them and feeling like sitting ducks, waiting in the ocean. Lewis was on the beach for a few months, before travelling through France then to Belgium and just going as the front line.
Tom Hill, Solihull
Tom volunteered for the Royal Marines on 5th May 1943 - saying he wanted to 'do his bit for the country'. In the days before the landings, Tom and his crew were sent to Portsmouth to pick up troops and return them to the Empire Battleaxe, travelling through choppy waters in the Solent and not knowing why they were ferrying troops to the ship.
His main job was to crew the landing craft and navigate 8 miles through choppy waters each way from ship to beach - taking 35 troops across each time. He landed on the extreme left of Sword Beach in the second wave around 7:25am.
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