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A Biography of Ben during World War II serving in the
Fleet Air Arm in Great Britain, Indian Ocean, the Pacific and United States of America.
A very interesting account of those war years and of his
training in the US navy.
Enquiries for this book email us
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Kiwi Lieutenant
Jack Ingham
DSC, RN
Getting 200 men of the 51st Highland
Division across the English Channel on D-Day was the task set for Kiwi
Lieutenant Jack Ingham DSC, RN and
his crew of LCI(L) 110 as part of
The Big Show
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Lieutenant Jack Ingham, 1943 |
The wind was easing, the seas
weren’t quite as bad, and about midnight came the drone overhead, hundreds and
hundreds of planes going across.
This was the bombers first, they
were going to do what damage they could on the beaches. And then the clouds
parted every now and again and you could see the shapes going over, hundreds and
hundreds of planes. Then there was a lull, and then another batch of planes came
across, and made a different noise from the bombers and these were the Dakotas
towing the gliders and the parachutists. We knew we were getting close to France
by that time. The messenger on board, he looked up and said, ‘glad I’m not one
of those guys.’ Didn’t fancy their job.
Keeping station was pretty
difficult because of the weather conditions, keeping in your right place in the
line of ships and those of you abreast of each other. I went down a couple of
times and had a cup of coffee, but with Tiddly being so young and inexperienced
I wouldn’t have slept anyway, so I spent most of the time on the bridge.
As dawn was breaking, each second
that it got lighter there’d be more ships you could see further out, just an
amazing sight. Ships of all shapes and sizes, and very comforting to see the big
battleships there. The sea was thick with them. It idly crossed my mind that
there was a heck of lot of responsibility put into a lot of young heads. I’m
sure that’s the usual thing in war, isn’t it? It’s the young ones that do the
business and the older ones, that direct the business. But the hard work was
being done by people of my age, and there were thousands, all on the same
business. They could have been bankers, they could have been post office
employees, could have been gardeners. And yes, I felt, not exactly arrogant, but
very comfortable with the fact that we were managing it and doing it so well.
At dawn we were about fifteen miles
off Juno Beach. This was quite different from what we’d been used to. The other
invasions had usually taken place at dawn to get the element of surprise that is
most critical, and as far as possible at high tide, so that when you landed the
troops they only had a small amount of space to get out from the boat over sand
and into action. But this time they reversed things, and because of the number
of beach obstacles that had to be demolished to get anywhere near the beach
itself, they decided to wait for low tide and daylight so the frogmen could have
a reasonable chance of destroying the beach obstacles.
Frogmen had been landed from small
assault craft to destroy the obstacles and defuse the mines attached to many of
them. As Jack’s ship approached Juno Beach the noise of battle was almost
overpowering.
Endless gunfire from ships, the
warships, from the cruisers, from the destroyers, and they were all belting hell
out of enemy artillery positions trying to silence them. And the storm itself
was pretty noisy, of course, but no it was the gunfire. You had to shout at all
to make yourself heard. Every time you shouted a command down the voice-pipe
they had to repeat it back to you to make sure they heard it properly.
The first wave went in at low tide,
ahead of us, and as a matter of fact as we got nearer a lot of those craft were
coming back, returning. And our job – we were going in at half tide, and our
51st were hoping to land on beaches that were in our possession, or fairly
secure. That was nearly the case, not quite. The wind was still roaring, still
very fierce. The sea was up, and it made maneuvering pretty difficult. So it was
time for ours to land, the beaches were getting pretty littered with wreckage.
Landing craft that had been mined and holed and landing craft that had been shot
up on a beach and that sort of stuff. And getting closer, there were plenty of
bodies floating around too. Didn’t let your mind dwell on that because you could
have been the next one. Getting these guys on the beach, that was all that
mattered. And this is where training came into it, really. You had all the
techniques of doing so, but you had to be careful that you used them and you
didn’t get sloppy or haphazard about it because you’d be the next wreckage. So
the CO of the troops, he was on the bridge with me and getting very interested
as we got closer, and of course when you got close enough he was down with his
troops there, getting them ready to get off.
Being a good keen Scotsman he had a
little hip flask in his pocket and we had nips of that, whisky.
We realised why we’d been training
in those sort of conditions. The tide is sweeping you downwards and so you have
to go in like a crab, pointing ‘up there’ and hoping to get ‘down there’. All
our practice had been beautifully done like a military parade ground. They’d
gone in one, two, three together, beached, drawn off. The next three together,
drawn off – all very good, you see, because there was no opposition and no
strong winds. And when we got close enough, Commander Villiers recognised this
wasn’t going to happen, so he just ordered, ‘Beach independently’. And so it was
up to each one of us to find a gap that we thought was suitable and get
cracking.
It was up to yourself then. I saw a
fellow officer going in and I was behind him. And he had one go and it wasn’t
suitable, he’d hit a sandbank first, so he cleared off and I came in alongside
him and got on the same sandbank. Water was too deep to get the troops off, so
we kedged off and tried another way. But then you had to be careful that further
down there might have been some wreckage and some more beach obstacles. But I
went in again, had got quite close, got pretty good on the beach, got over the
sandbank OK, and that wasn’t a worry, because getting over the sandbank full
with troops meant that coming off I’d be floating lighter, so that wasn’t a
worry, and we got in much better the second time, and sent two boys over on each
ramp to test the depth of the water. It was up to their waist, and so I told the
CO troops that might be the best I could manage and was he prepared to get off
in that depth? And so off they went.
It was a gut-wrenching moment to
see them going off. When you beach, you ride up onto the surf, onto the beach or
as close as you can, and then these two ramps are lowered. It’s a steep run down
to the beach and then, when the troops are all off, you pull the ramps up.
Jack vividly remembers watching as
the 200 troops ran down the ramps, with gear.
Heavily, heavily laden and that’s
why, had they been in water much deeper, with the wave action they would have
been swept off their feet and no chance of getting up once they were down. But
they did, all except six. The wind had driven me off by then and I would have
had to have made another beaching to get these six off, and that was a bit of a
worry because we’d been told to get the ship back unscathed as far as possible,
to get the next load across the Channel. There was one of the smaller craft,
just coming off empty, so we hailed him and said, ‘Can you take six ashore for
me?’ He said, ‘Yeah, pop them over’, so they got ashore.
And were you aware of watching
all of them?
Yes. Yes. Before they went, the CO
came up and shook hands.
What did he say?
‘Thanks for the ride’.
There was still a fair bit of
activity, light arms fire coming from the shore and howitzers that hadn’t been
silenced. There was a fair bit of fireworks still as well as the congestion on
the beach. The beach looked like a wrecker’s yard. But strangely enough none of
the fellows got hit aboard, although there was plenty of rattling going on,
small arms fire hitting the boat. Quite a number of landing craft had gone down.
Some of them were on the beach burning, and some that had sunk were in the
water. And there were plenty of bodies floating about.
When they got onto the sand, did any of the troops turnaround?
Yeah. Waved, God bless us. I felt
pretty satisfied, satisfied that I’d got them that far, and sorry as hell to see
them go.
Jack heard later that the troops
from his ship did well in France. He was awarded a Distinguished Service Cross
for his actions on D-Day, but considers the award for his ship, rather than for
himself personally.
Between D-Day and November 1944,
Jack’s landing craft made between 30 and 40 trips across the Channel, taking
more troops over and bringing back the wounded. On one occasion, soon after
D-Day, they returned to England with German prisoners.
In early December he and the crew
of LCI(L) 110 took their ship to Scotland where, along with hundreds of others,
it was to be scrapped.
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