There were bodies everywhere... on the beach and floating past us

Those who survived the bullets and the shells are a dwindling bunch. Most have told their tales by now, but Trevor Stacey, of Westcliff, has stayed silent about his experiences until he talked to the Echo this month.

Unlike other veterans, Trevor decided to leave the war behind him. He took little part in commemorations or old comrades’ get-togethers. “I sold my medals for cash,” he says.

“You can’t eat a medal.”

Things have changed. Trevor is 94 this month. Still sprightly and almost bursting with life, he is nowmore than anxious to talk about his past. For him, the Normandy beaches were just one tough interlude in a tough life, much of it spent in the boxing ring.

The chance to join the Royal Marines and wear a smart uniformwas an escape from the world of the Barry docks in south Wales, where he had been born and brought up in a family of six brothers and four sisters.

Before joining up he worked as a slaughterman, toilet cleaner and prize-fighter.

He describes himself as “a bit of a renegade”, and he had already served 14 days in military prison for “pissing on an MP’s (military policeman’s) bed.”

But the marine commanders recognised a natural fighter when they saw one, and transferred him to a tough assault unit, No 47.

After basic training at the Royal Marines camp near Exeter, Trevor learnt Morse and semaphore at Plymouth to prepare his for his specialist role and a field radio operator.

After that, he and his mates were bundled about on training exercises from Scotland to the Isle of Wight to Dorchester to Swansea, all in preparation for the D-Day landings. One of these locations was a place in Essex that he had never heard of, but which he fell in love with, and would come to call home – Westcliff.

Trevor recalls one training exercise, in Scotland, particularly vividly. “We left our assault craft at dead of night to capture a farmhouse. We did it alright, returned to the carrier, and were sent back again, because we had captured the wrong farmhouses.”

The rain was unrelenting, so the unit took refuge in the nearest building. It turned out to be a pig sty. “Nobody would come near us for a long time after that,” he says.

Aftr months of training and mental preparation, suddenly it was all for real. While other DDay veterans offer precise minute-by-minute accounts of their landing, Trevor remembers it more as a blur of noise and confusion, punctuated by a few vivid observations. He landed on Juno beach between 7.30am and 8pm.

“It was chaos. There were bodies everywhere, on the beach and floating past the landing craft,” he says. “The ones in the water were white from the salt. They had no eyes. The fish had eaten them already.”

The German artillery had found the range of the beach.

“This ‘whoosh’ was coming over the top of us,” says Trevor. “And then this noise like a plane had hit the sand. This big bloke started to scream: ‘Get off the beach!’ We did what he said.”

The Marines of 47th unit sprinted inland until the “whooshes” were a bit further away from their ear-drums, and by evening they had made their way a few miles inland.

Trevor says: “I somehow got mixed up with this bunch of Canadians. There was this town square, with a church spire about 80ft high. There had been a sniper at the top of the spire. The spire had been shelled and there was a hole right up through the centre from top to bottom where we had turned the guns on it.

But the spire was still standing.”

After a few days, signalmen were recalled to the beaches.

During the night on the beach, one member of Trevor’s team trod on a mine. Trevor was in a tent, reading a book at the time.

“This piece of shrapnel passed straight through the tent,” he says.

“The bloke who set the mine off wasn’t killed, but he ended up with a plate in his head,” says Trevor. “And you know what?

Years later I bumped into him again when I was having my hair cut. He had hairdresser’s place opposite the Co-Op here in Southend.”

There was also regular shelling from a vast gun mounted on a railway bogey.

“The Germans ran it into a railway tunnel during the day, and then ran it out at night-time to shell us,” Trevor says. “It killed one man I knew, called Voysey.”

Having been in the thick of the first few harrowing days of the Normandy landings, Trevor was sent on leave, which he spent at HMS Westcliff, the vast naval camp that spread along the cliffs from Southend Pier to Chalkwell.

It was during this spell that he met and married his wife, Ivy.

They were married for 60 years before her death. During this time, Trevor was offered the chance to play for Plymouth FC, but turned it down because of his marriage.

After resting up, Trevor’s unit was sent to Poona, in India, to train for the assault on Japan.

“Then they dropped the atom bombs on Japan, and thank God they did,” Trevor says.

By now, however, the war had already taken its, delayed, toll on him. He woke up in hospital and was told that he had had a breakdown, threatening another man with a club hammer.

“There were thousands like me,” he says. “The war had got into our heads. I was luckier than a lot of them. I got demobbed and sorted myself out.”

After the war, Trevor trained as a bricklayer, and worked on sites all over Southend. The vicarage in Mendip Crescent is his handiwork, along with “the old folks’ home in Valkyrie Road”.

The years have made Trevor philosophical, as well as grateful for the life that he has been able to lead, while so many of his mates stayed behind on the Normandy beaches.

Trevor has compiled a handwritten memoir of his life, and it ends with this reflection: “When I was in France I used to look at bodies, and think I’m glad it’s you and not me.

“Then a thought struckme quite vividly that these were somebody’s sons. Some families lost two or three in the war.

“When I was on leave in Westcliff, I had a drink with two brothers. Next week they were both back in the war, and both gone by the end of the week.”