A VETERAN of the D-Day Landings believes it is still important to recall the sacrifice made by his comrades 80 years on.
Ted Davidson was aged just 18 when, as a Scots Guard, he took part in Normandy campaign on June 6, 1944.
He was tasked with rolling out his Churchill tank onto Sword Beach, and onwards to support British and US forces in the capture of Caen.
Later Ted, now 98, would recall how "it was like being in an inferno" as he formed part of the advance, the first time his feet had touched foreign soil.
His exploits would not go unheralded - four years ago he was awarded with the French Legion d'Honneur medal.
Ted, from Padiham, told the Telegraph: "It's good that people are still remembering what happened at D-Day. There's not many of us left now.
"They had wanted me to go to Normandy this year but I marked the 75th anniversary and I've got to watch myself now.
"But I will be at home and thinking about what happened in 1944."
Originally from Cheshire, Ted was living with his aunt in Edinburgh in 1939. He was 17 when he enlisted in the Army.
He said previously: “I was in the Black Watch to start with, which was the Scottish infantry, but as I was only 17 I was too young to go abroad. I was basically in a holding unit, which was very boring.
“There was a noticeboard and every morning it said they wanted volunteers who were 5ft 10ins and over.
“I didn’t know what I was volunteering for, but I signed up anyway.”
Ted, a former vice-president of the Burnley and Padiham branch of the Royal British Legion, signed up for the Scots Guards Third Tank Battalion and was posted to Bovington in Dorset where he trained with the Royal Tank Regiment.
Recalling his deployment, he added: "It was very rough going across and everybody was seasick. The floors of the landing crafts were made of steel and the tanks were chained to the floor.
“But one or two of them broke loose and slid around a bit. We thought it was going to be a piece of cake but it clearly wasn’t."
He admits to being apprehensive but when his tank hit the beach he knew what he had to do.
He said: “There was still quite a lot of beach fighting when we got there. We had to find the right spot as the tanks were more than 50 tonnes.
“Some tanks had one or two problems getting up the beach and some got damaged but it was just a case of getting on with it. I could see flashes and gunfire but in a tank you are very limited."
Later he witnessed tanks being lost and his own crew were ambushed by a Panzer anti-tank unit several miles inland.
His outfit survived and Ted later service in the Netherlands, ending up on the Baltic coast of Germany.
He stayed on in Germany for two years after the war before returning home and eventually became a policeman in the West Midlands, which is where he met his late wife, Dorothy.
Then he took a college course in groundsmanship and was offered a job at Burnley FC in 1977, spending more than a decade looking after the club’s training ground at Gawthorpe.
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