D-Day 80 The Last Veterans: Joan Johnson

Joan Johnson, Age 98, Auxiliary Territorial Service

Interviewed 17 November 2023

Joining the Women's Land Army at the age of 18 Joan Johnson later transferred to the ATS and became a driver.

She had trained at the same base as Queen Elizabeth where she learned to drive vehicles including Dodge trucks and Bedford three-ton trucks as well as motorbikes.

In the run up to D-Day she served as a convoy driver, taking vehicles to Channel ports where preparations were underway to load them onto ships ahead of the landings.

She said: "It was hard work because you had no assistance, especially the handbrake which was on a ratchet, you had to pull it up.

"So every morning you had to check everything. It took time to get it on the road."

Women in the ATS did an essential job as drivers and mechanics and were pressed into action in the long months leading up to the invasion.

"The exact locations to drop the lorries were kept secret from her at a time when much of the South coast was cut off from the general public - and when the Allies were slowly building up caches of vehicles and supplies. 

"There were no signposts," she said.

"Nobody knew where we were going. We had a dispatch rider to take us so we didn’t know where we were. We just knew we were near the coast."

She remembers parking the vehicles in remote and often wooded sites where they were then camouflaged. Before being driven back to base ahead of a repeat journey the next day. 

"I was so pleased after it was all over," she said.

"And then I had to think about what I would do with my life."

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