War diaries revealed the horrors my father locked away forever

Today Brian M Walker will stand on a beach in France and reflect on his dad Leslie’s crucial role in the invasion

TODAY my brother Michael and I will stand on a beach on the Normandy coast. This beach is known as ‘Gold’ beach and it is where our father, Leslie Walker, landed on the morning of June 6, 1944 at the beginning of Operation Overlord, or D-Day as it is known.

Two points are of interest about his participation in the first day of the greatest amphibious invasion the world has ever experienced. The first is that he did not carry a weapon. He was a chaplain and so was unarmed.

The second is that he never talked afterwards about this day or his experiences in Europe over the next 10 months. Growing up, we knew he had been a chaplain because at church services he always wore proudly the scarf of the Royal Corps of Chaplains. But he refused to talk about these events, apart from sometimes remarking that war was hell.

In his effort to draw a veil over these events, however, there was something that our father forgot. One of his sons became an historian.

Recently I set out to find out what happened to him on D-Day.

I obtained a copy of his ‘partic- ulars of service' from central Army records in Glasgow. It recorded that on November 5, 1943 he was granted an emergency commission as “a chaplain to the forces, 4th class”, with the rank of captain. In late November he was sent to the 6th Battalion of the Border Regiment, originally from the north of England but now based at Ayr in Scotland. Crucially, it was part of the 10th Beach Group, which meant it would have a key role in any invasion.

From a history of this battalion, we can read that the next three months were spent in intensive training, followed by a move to a base at Brockenhurst in Hampshire. Shortly afterwards the invasion began.

Last Saturday I went to the National Archives at Kew in London to look at the war diary of the 6 th Border Battalion. This showed how the 6th Border Battalion formed the nucleus of the 10th Beach Group.

The task of a Beach Group was to land with the assault troops and then organise the base at the beach, which included a hospital, petrol and ammunition dumps, and port facilities, including one of the Mulberry Harbours at Arromanche.

The diary records that all personnel were moved to Southhampton and then divided into ships before sailing from the Solent on June 5 .

Their arrival at Gold beach on June 6 on the first tide is not described in detail, but it is likely that the worst of the fighting was over when they arrived. While his arrival on the beach may not have been especially challenging, the rest of the day must have been traumatic.

One of the roles of a chaplain was to give comfort to wounded and dying soldiers and to bury the dead. It is very likely that my father would have been fully occupied with these painful duties.

Over the following weeks this Beach Group played a very successful role in the arrival and movement of supplies. Between June 9 and July 8, 39,040 vehicles and 51,156 tons of supplies were brought ashore at Gold. Then in August, the 6th Border Battalion was disbanded and the soldiers were sent to reinforce other regiments.

By this stage, however, my father had already gone. His Army record shows how, on July 2, he was posted to HQ 30 Corps. What this meant was that he had now