‘I’ll come every year’: Veteran visits friend’s grave after 70-year search
Seventy-five years ago tomorrow, Sonny Everest stood in the killing fields beyond the beaches of Normandy and watched as five divebombing Stukas strafed a truck driven by his best friend, Charlie Knight.
The attack happened moments after they had bumped into each other by chance for the first time since joining the Army – and it was the last time they would ever see each other again.
After the war, Mr Everest spent years searching for his friend’s grave until discovering two years ago that Mr Knight was buried in Bayeux.
After the official D-Day anniversary commemorations were finished last week and dignitaries led by the Prince of Wales departed, Mr Everest wanted to pay his own personal tribute.
Aided by two walking sticks, the 95-year-old stood alone among the gleaming headstones and crossed himself before placing a cross bearing a handwritten note at his grave: “To my best friend Charlie Knight, gone but always in our memory”.
The pair met when they were 16 years old after joining the Home Guard. They lived in the same block of flats in Kensington, west London, and were stationed at a nearby depot. Their role was to prepare to blow up a local rail and canal bridge in case of Nazi invasion, to stop the Germans advancing through Shepherds Bush. In their spare time, the pair would go ice skating together at Cricklewood.
Mr Everest was the first to join the Army when he turned 18, being posted to the Royal Corps of Signals and moving to Bradford. Mr Knight joined the Royal Army Service Corps and the pair lost touch.
Mr Everest arrived on Juno Beach in Normandy the morning after D-Day, as a driver mechanic in a Sherman tank unit. They were placed at the tip of the Allied advance through Normandy, where the fighting was at its most fierce.
The Germans used 88mm armourpiercing shells against the tanks, which would incinerate the crews inside. “We lost so many of us beyond the beach,” Mr Everest recalls. “They tried to drive us back into the sea several times.”
On June 10, a few miles inland at Bény-sur-Mer, the unit paused at a water stop to reload when Mr Everest heard Mr Knight’s familiar voice call his name from a truck.
“As I looked, five screaming Stukas
came down and splattered everything,” he says. “They made three runs and the bullets hit all over the truck. Even the cows in the field we were in got hit. I don’t know how many people were killed.”
Mr Everest took shelter under a vehicle but left a foot sticking out, which the bullets missed by an inch.
As soon as the aircraft had disappeared, his unit were ordered to advance once more. He remained fighting until the end of the war, pushing first through Belgium and into Holland and Denmark in a series of brutal tank battles.
Of all the many comrades laid waste during the advance, Mr Knight always stuck in his mind. Because he had not seen the body, Mr Everest nursed the hope against hope that his friend had somehow survived.
Mr Everest left the military in 1947 and returned home to his wife, Christina, whom he had married in the months before D-Day. The pair had two sons and remained together for 70 years until she died of a stroke on their platinum wedding anniversary.
Mr Knight’s parents had passed away during the war, so Mr Everest had no means of trying to trace his friend’s family.
Prior to 2017, he had never returned to Normandy, as the memories of Mr Knight’s death were still too painful.
However, he could not be at peace until he discovered where his friend was buried. After his son Roger contacted the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, which runs the cemetery, the grave belonging to WC Knight was traced to Bayeux.
Mr Everest has laid flowers at his friend’s grave for the past two D-Day anniversaries and last week also placed a wreath for his friend at the cross of sacrifice in the cemetery, where veterans lined up last week to honour the fallen. As he did, a solitary tear ran down his face.
“I will keep coming here now to see him every year until the end,” he says.