The last thing the enemy expected of course…

D-Day 75th Anniversary

“The last thing the enemy expected of course…”

Sergeant John Dyke of the 2nd Tactical Airforce

This week, the commemorations of D-Day have been all around. As it happens, where we live is right in the thick of it. The main service was held on Southsea Common, just a few miles away; we could see the coloured smoke left by the Red Arrows from where I sit. Broadcasts were made from Southwick House just up the road, where the D-Day Landings were planned; the plants in the picture were grown and tended by my family’s team at the nursery.

I’m always moved by what an incredible sacrifice that generation made for us all, not least because my beloved grandmother was so shaped by these experiences, her first husband being in the second wave. He, like many I understand, left his base beforehand, without permission, to marry my grandmother at the tender age of 17. I cannot imagine what it was like for either of them, and my heart goes out to all touched by this.

I have found the whole thing rather upsetting to be honest, and I think this comes from a desire to show the people who fought for our freedoms that we are deserving of them; especially now that the surviving veterans are in their 90s and beyond. Soon their living memory will be entrusted to their descendants. Here is where I turn to the words of a very dear friend, who’s brave and beautiful father shared some memories with him a couple of years ago. This moving tale I feel should be shared. I only met John briefly a couple of times, but his gentle nature and dry humour did not escape me. These are the experiences that shape a generation.

With love to all, Dx

By Matthew Dyke, for his father John, August 23rd 2016

A little earlier this month he enjoyed his 92nd birthday. (I promised him I’d share his picture with his niece and nephew, but without sharing his full birthdate in cyberspace – he said he wants people to know he is secretly 54.) He is Sergeant John Dyke of the 2nd Tactical Airforce, he is my hero, he is my dad.

Sweet birthdays so often turn back to earliest memories, then memories of conflict, of friends lost in the bloom of youth. Bitter memories that bite, of seats left empty and mourned, more than seven decades on. 

Nights were difficult enough as a child growing up, without a World War developing. My dad recalls his mother’s asthma attacks – no inhalers then, steam and a back rub had to do for mum. Soon after, wartime in childhood Portsmouth meant scrambling down to the air raid shelter in the garden, when the siren sounded. Then sprinting back out to fetch my grandmother’s teeth from a shaking house. Dad recalls the terrifying whistling devices added to intimidate those beneath the bombs as they fell.

My teenage father was added to the list of local Air Raid Precautions personnel. This meant being equipped with a bucket and a stirrup pump to deal with burning, crumbling buildings. Because nothing says dealing with enemy bombing campaigns, like sitting a nervous teenage boy in the dark in a Southsea hotel. With a bucket. Its the last thing the enemy expected of course….

Dad also started his working life, as an Office boy. A firm of solicitors, who also collected local rents. Early into the new job, he arrived to find a crime scene. The boss, the secretary and the contents of the safe had all run off into the sunset together. . 

Before he knew it, military call up papers arrived. He was conscripted into the Royal Air Force. He would have gone willingly. Dad tried to bluff his way through a medical, wanting to fly despite one dodgy eye. The weak eye was probably caused by trying to catch a cricket ball using his face during a game on Southsea Common. (“I wanted to be like Errol Flynn” he explained to me.) Blagging his way through the first medical, thanks to a clerical error, he was only caught out by a second test, once a new Commanding Officer arrived. A one-eyed pilot or gunner may have been the last thing the enemy expected of course… but this probably saved his life. He became Ground Crew, logistics for Fighter crew. 

Dad survived basic training with a drill sergeant who revelled in the name Sergeant Pain (“Don’t anyone try to hang yourself in the toilets. Your braces are made of rubber. It has been tried. You just bounce”. “Can you hear the birds? They are taking the piss out of you.”), 

When the war moved into its last chapters, he found himself jumping out of a Landing Craft onto a Normandy beach as part of the D-day invasion. He cannot recall which one of those slaughter-bench beaches he wandered onto – we think it was probably “Juno” or “Sword”, maybe “Gold”.

That June morning, in a precious break between storms, waves of tens of thousands men ran, yomped and waded out of the sea, from out of those ocean waves. They came because they had planned it for years. Brits, Yanks, Canadians. They came because the most famous weather forecast and forecaster promised a break in the storms. Australians, Belgians. They came because an American President tucked behind a Hill in Portsmouth said “OK, lets go”. French, Greeks, Kiwis. They rushed into Hitler’s fortress, to turn off its lights. Dutch, Poles. And my dad. 

His priorities remained… unique… pausing to change his unbearably wet socks. He recalls a Commanding Officer shouting at him but explains to me now how cold the water – and socks – were. Probably the last thing the enemy expected though. 

Dad travelled with his Fighter Squadron through France and into Germany, at one point being stationed close to the newly liberated Belsen Concentration Camp. 

I cannot imagine what he went through, especially seeing friends just disappear from the world. “If I’m not back, you can have my breakfast” was always more than a line in a movie. Dad recalls having to get out of the way for American infantry re-enforcements on D-day, probably from Gosport and wonders now about their fate.

He went on to start a family at 41, raising my brother and I on his own, from the ages of 6 and 8 while working full-time, when suddenly widowed. 

I sit with him now. 
“Great for 92. You don’t have a wrinkle on you.” 
“Do you want me to take all my clothes off!”
We giggle like conspiring schoolboys. I wait a bit and ask some more, again. It seems the the right thing to do now. 

He is my hero, 
He is my dad… 
I have only one of these things.