D-Day 75: As the anniversary nears, we’re telling the stories of ordinary people who made extraordinary sacrifices...
Patricia Davies, now 96, from Lancashire, was a Chief Petty Officer for the Women’s Royal Naval Service and recalls the excitement at Dover ahead of D-Day.
I had learnt German from the family refugee cook who was Austrian. They needed people as interceptors, so I took a German language exam and was trained as a special duties linguist.
We intercepted German naval radio messages and we were based in little secret stations on the east and south coast of England, within range of German ships.
I was at Dover, which was the most exciting of my three stations as we were just 22 miles from France, we were getting a lot of traffic from coastal defences with torpedo boats coming out of the harbours of Boulogne and Calais.
The Germans would use their long-range guns to shell British convoys going past under our cliff. It was a very lively place indeed and very LINGUIST Patricia Davies interesting being there for D-Day. We saw all the bits for the Mulberry harbour and landing craft going past in convoys. We had to misinform the Germans, making them think we were going to land in Calais rather than Normandy.
I even saw Churchill and Monty on one occasion when they came down to look across at the French coast from Dover, and they obviously hoped they would be seen.
When the German fleet capitulated, I went up to Admiralty in London as a translator and then to General Eisenhower’s London intelligence HQ, which was at a shop’s top floor. We went in the back door so no one would notice, or so it was hoped.
Large numbers of American Army, British Army and Navy, and people who knew German went through documents that had been captured at various German administrative headquarters to find out who were war criminals and ought to be brought to trial at Nuremburg.
The war seemed to go on and on, you did not know when or how it would end. In a way we did not have our late teenage years because many people went from school into the kind of job which was far more responsible than you would ever normally have had at 18. We were conscious in our listening job that we must get an absolutely accurate record.
We felt quite privileged to be contributing to the defence of the country.
■ Extract from A Time to Fight: Living and Remembering WWII by Robert Anderson published by Unicorn, £15 © Robert D. Anderson, 2019
We made the enemy think the landings would not be in Normandy