Maurice Sadler
D-Day veteran
MAURICE SADLER, who has died at 96, was a Scarborough veteran of the Normandy landings who was in later life awarded France’s highest military honour, the Légion d’honneur.
Born in Middlesex, he had signed up to the Royal Marines in May 1942 when he was 17 – a year after his brother, Edward, four years his senior, had been among the 1,415 personnel killed in the sinking of the battlecruiser HMS Hood by the German ship, Bismarck.
His parents had mixed reactions. “My father was alright but my mother was very upset. She had a nervous breakdown when she had heard about my brother,” he said. “But with me, she came around eventually because I felt I had got to do it. There was a war on and all the young blokes were joining up. I didn’t see why I should stay behind.”
He went along with five friends with the intention of joining the Navy but was deemed too tall and was told to apply for the Marines instead.
After specialist gunnery training in Portsmouth, he was assigned to Landing Craft Flak 21, charged with escorting convoys along the British coast which were at risk of attack from German planes.
On D-Day, he served as a gunner responsible for taking out German snipers and machine gun positions on board a support craft assisting Canadian soldiers landing on Juno beach.
Despite the horrors unfolding in front of him, he said he had no time for fear in the midst of battle.
“You could see these people firing at us and see shells landing alongside the ship,” he told The Yorkshire Post two years ago. “We had to try and pick out where they were coming from.”
Mr Sadler and his 90 fellow Royal Marines were later sent to Gold Beach to bombard the German positions before returning to Juno. He said his main feeling at the end of an historic day was relief.
“We were very glad that nobody had got hurt on our ship. There were only two chaps who got slightly injured by shrapnel when the bullets had hit the sides of the ship. We were quite happy we had managed to do our job,” he said.
He spent 16 weeks at sea after D-Day, protecting the Allied supply route known as the ‘Trout Line’ from attack by German aircraft, torpedo boats and small motor boats packed with explosives. The assignment, he recalled, was more nervewracking than D-Day in some respects.
“We had to go up and down looking for one and two-man submarines that were trying to sink our ships. I was scared then. If you did get hit, you knew it was your lot. Two LCFs went down and we lost quite a lot of friends,” he said.
It was after this posting that he met his wifeto-be, Mary Burke, who hailed from a military family in Coventry and who as a 16-year-old had been working in the Owen Owen department store in the city until it was destroyed in the German blitz in November 1940. In 1943, she signed up to the Women’s Royal Naval Service and was posted to HMS Robertson in Sandwich in Kent, a supply base for landing craft. The pair met after Maurice was posted there following D-Day.
His last wartime posting was to the support staff of the Royal Marines School of Music in Scarborough, which, he said, was “like a holiday to us after what we had been through”.
He and Mary married in Coventry and celebrated their 75th wedding anniversary in May this year. They lived initially in London but moved to Coventry in the 1960s when Mr Sadler got a job working for Rolls Royce Aero Engines. After retirement in 1990, the couple returned to Scarborough, where their daughter and her family had settled.
Mr Sadler set up a Royal Marine Association branch in the town but said few members now remained. In retirement, he became honorary president of the Scarborough branch of the Royal Marines Association, and in 2016 he and his daughter, Barbara, attended a garden party at Buckingham Palace.
He and Mary had two children, four great-grandchildren and one great-great grandchild.