Battered with a claw hammer by burglar, D-Day veteran who danced with Camilla
A VETERAN honoured for his bravery during the D-Day invasion was beaten with a claw hammer when he opened his door to a burglar.
Jim Booth, 96, remains in hospital with life-threatening injuries after being savagely attacked on the steps of his bungalow.
Grandfather Mr Booth, from Taunton, Somerset, was found bloodied and dazed by his neighbours after the attack at 4pm on Wednesday.
Police said the war hero, who once danced with the Duchess of Cornwall at a Royal Navy veterans’ event, was the victim of a ‘distraction burglary’.
He had opened his door to a young man offering to carry out work on his house. When he refused the offer, the thug battered him senseless with the hammer.
Mr Booth stumbled out of his house, blood streaming from his head, and was found by a passing woman. His neighbour William Watkins took him in and called the emergency services.
Mr Watkins, 86, said: ‘I sat him down in a chair and rang the police. There was a lot of blood. He was in a hell of state.’
Detectives have vowed to catch the thug, who was described as a white, athletic, dark-haired, cleanshaven man in his mid-30s.
In August 2015, Mr Booth danced with Camilla at the veterans’ event in Taunton.
He was the only survivor of a tenman team that spent five days in two mini- submarines, half a mile underwater, guiding Allied landing craft to Sword Beach on D-Day in 1944. He and the team spied on Nazi troops across the shorelines before shining beacons across the sea to guide Allied forces away from treacherous rocks.
His bravery during the invasion earned him the Croix de Guerre French military medal.
Reliving his wartime mission in an interview in 2014, Mr Booth said: ‘People don’t realise how difficult it was to navigate – there was no satnav and we had to do it the oldfashioned way using charts.
‘You couldn’t stand up and we had to share a sleeping bag – it was very smelly. I was either on the steering wheel or the periscope, and we had very basic food like baked beans or soup. When we found out the mission had been delayed for 24 hours we were worried we might run out of oxygen – we nearly did, but we were okay.’
A spokesman for Avon and Somerset Police said: ‘This was a vicious and sickening attack on an elderly man in his own home and we’ve launched a full-scale investigation to find the person who did this.
‘Offences of this magnitude are rare but I’d like to reassure residents that we’re using all necessary resources to investigate this crime.’
‘There was a lot of blood’