Female guard of honour for D-Day hero Rose, 107
A D-DAY heroine was given an all-female RAF guard of honour at her funeral in a mark of respect for the key role she played in the war.
Rose Davies worked as a radar operator and was a critical part of the covert nerve centre that launched the Allied invasion of France on June 6, 1944, controlling the flotilla as it crossed the Channel.
Rose, part of a dwindling band of Second World War veterans, was 107 when she died.
Personnel from RAF Shawbury, Shropshire, which trains UK and international flying aces, flanked her coffin as it was carried into St Chad’s Church in her home town of Shrewsbury.
The Rev Chris Walker, a close friend who led the service, said Rose had enjoyed a “most remarkable human life” and, lost for words, simply added: “Golly, what a woman.”
D-Day, the greatest air and sea invasion in history, saw 156,000 Allied soldiers storm five beaches along the
Normandy coast in a bid to liberate Nazioccupied France and Europe. Tens of thousands of troops set sail from Britain as part of a Royal Navy convoy.
The service was told that mother, grandmother and great-grandmother Rose, stationed on the Isle of Wight, knew when “one could not see the water between the ships” that many
of the soldiers, sailors and airmen who set off would never return home.
Rose later became a volunteer “befriender”, providing a listening ear and comforting chat to lonely and isolated people.
Linton Waters, of the Omega charity she helped, said she “kept people alive” during and after the war.
He added: “She would have saved lives in her radar work keeping watch over the fleet. And there are probably people living because of her charity work.”
Rose was widowed after the death of husband Wilf. The couple had sons Jonathan and Michael. She was a grandmother to Abigail, Andrew and Edward, and great-grandmother to George, Freddie, Jago and Myles.
She was a Samaritan for 40 years and vice-president of the Shropshire branch of the Royal Air Forces Association.
Immortalised
D-Day saw soldiers from Britain, the Commonwealth, America and Allied nations storm Sword, Gold, Utah, Omaha and Juno beaches.
Few expected the mission to succeed, but it launched the invasion of German-occupied Western Europe and hastened the end of the Second World War.
The names of 22,442 soldiers who died under British command during the landings are immortalised on the British Normandy Memorial in Ver-sur-Mer, northern France.
It will be the centrepiece of global commemorations in June when the world falls silent to mark the 80th anniversary of the landings.