Youngest casualty of D-Day was Darwen lad aged just 16

He showed the veteran sergeant several certificates he had won for shooting in the Home Guard against much older and more experienced men.

“I want to join up and fight,” explained the Darwen lad.

It was late 1942. A few weeks later he was training with the Durham Light Infantry

At home in Radford Street, his parents, Jack and Fanny Banks, admired his courage but asked that, if ever he was being sent abroad to fight, he would tell them so they could reveal his true age to the military authorities who would boot him out of the Army and send him home.

For Jack was just 15 when he joined up, determined to fulfil his schoolboy ambition to become a soldier and fight in the war.

But, of course, as Jack and his pals gathered in secrecy on the south coast in the late May of 1944, there was no chance of him being able to fulfil his promise to his Mum. Not that he would have tried very hard.

As early June and D-Day approached, Jack Banks was just 16.

He went in with the 8th battalion of the Durham’s that first morning and took part in several attacks and rearguard actions till, on July 21, close to Bayeux, his company was being held up by a heavily fortified machine-gun post.

Three volunteers stepped forward to tackle it; one of them was Jack Banks.

His two pals were killed by mortar fire and Jack was badly wounded in the thigh. He died that night.

Jack, who went to Holy Trinity and Spring Bank Schools, worked for a short period at Shaws, Hoddlesden, before joining up.

He is buried just south of Bayeux, at Chouain, in one of smallest of the Commonwealth War Graves in Normandy with just 47 graves in three sweeps.

Jack’s headstone is engraved “Aged 16” and carries an inscription chosen by his parents: “God will tell us why, some day, he broke our hearts and took you away.”

Only one other 16-year-old – a Czech soldier – was killed in the D-Day invasion.