JACK MATHER, formerly of Bury but now living in Heywood

I was a member of a Landing Ship Infantry HMS St Helier when we set sail from Cowes, on the Isle of Wight, on June 5, 1944, loaded with troops from the 3rd Canadian Infantry Brigade.

At the time we thought this was another 'exercise', of which we had several.

However, during the course of the trip, the captain read us a memo from Eisenhower saying we were now part of the invasion fleet and "best of luck".

We arrived off the French coast early on June 6 and disembarked the troops into the six landing craft that we carried.

I was on duty at the time in the wireless office and we anchored out there for a few hours until five of the landing craft came back full of wounded soldiers. One of our craft was lost.

There was quite a lot of gunfire about but luckily we managed to return to our base and the wounded men were taken off and we reloaded with another shipload of troops to make our way back to Arromanches.

I understood later this was Juno beach.

We eventually made three or four trips a week to France until 1945 when the ship was in collision in the Channel and put out of action.