D-Day Hero
Despite the enormity of the operation and the scale of fighting on 6 June 1944, D-Day, only one soldier was awarded the Victoria Cross for actions during the Normandy landings.
By 1944, Company Sergeant Major Stan Hollis was no stranger to combat after having seen action with the BEF in France, at Dunkirk, El Alamein and in Sicily. As such, he was one of the ‘old hands’ of his unit, D Company, 6th Battalion Green Howards, and a man younger soldiers looked to when they were in a sticky situation. And it was a sticky situation that earned Stan Hollis his Victoria Cross on D-Day.
Stan’s battalion was one of the two in the first wave of landings on Gold Beach, and being one of the most experienced men of the unit, he was in charge of three machine gun and three mortar teams to cover the advance off the beach, up a hill, and towards their objective: the heavy artillery position at Mount Fleury.
Their first objective, a house that overlooked the beach, was where that Stan performed the first of two acts that earned him the only VC of D-Day.
When the lead platoons had just passed the house, they came under fire from a machine gun in a pillbox against the garden wall. Hollis charged 30 yards over open ground, under fire, stuck his Sten gun into the pillbox slit and emptied the magazine. He then lay on top of the pillbox and dropped a grenade inside, before jumping down and taking the surviving occupants prisoner. He then saw a slit trench leading away to a second pillbox in the garden of the house.
Advancing down it alone, he captured the fortification and all those in it; in all, capturing 30 Germans. Later that morning, he was involved in the second action which contributed to his award.
By this time, he was acting commander of 16 Platoon, its officer having been killed. Spotting a field gun hidden in a hedge, he took a PIAT, and accompanied by two Bren gunners, he crawled through a rhubarb patch to get close enough to try a PIAT shot. Unfortunately, he missed. The gun, about 100 yards distant, then turned and fired on Hollis and his team but miraculously missed. Hollis shouted to retreat but unfortunately, the men either hadn’t heard him or were too afraid to run.
He then took a Bren gun and advanced into the open, firing from the hip to attract the attention of the German gunners. This enabled the two Bren gunners to run back to cover. Astoundingly, and although standing in plain sight, Hollis was not hit.
In September 1944, he was wounded in the leg and evacuated to England where he was decorated with his VC by King George VI that October.
Surviving the war, he worked first in a steelworks and then as partner in a motor repair business before becoming a publican and landlord of a pub he named ‘The Green Howard’. He died of a stroke in 1972 and lies buried in Middlesbrough, his hometown and town of birth.