In remembrance of Irish boys lost

BILL FITZMAURICE saw the tank thundering towards his outfit and heard his own voice join a chorus of warning cries as its guns began firing.

To this day he doesn’t know what became of some of the men around him but even as he lay in agony, his left arm almost severed from a round, he knew he was one of the lucky ones. In a haze of pain and weakness from blood loss the young Limerick man was picked up by soldiers sifting through the crumpled heaps of their comrades trying to sort the dead from the wounded and was bundled away.

Help lay off-shore on the hospital ships and the chaos and carnage of the besieged Normandy beaches lay in between, a nightmare journey for a wounded man who could not hold a rifle, but Bill says he never lost faith that he would reach safety because he never lost faith in his fellow soldiers.

The only time he was really scared was when he reached England days later with his wound ravaged with infection and a surgeon appeared with two scalpels and informed him the arm would have to go.

Bill had woken from unconsciousness some time earlier to the sound of a heart-warmingly familiar accent inquiring cheerfully: “So what part of the bog are you from?”

Now he heard that same voice from the same young Irish nurse, only this time she adopted a tone so stern not even a surgeon would defy it. “You’re not taking his arm,” she ordered. The surgeon obeyed.

At the British war cemetery at Ranville, he knelt by the grave of his commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel A.P. Johnson, a Newtownards native whose wife was pregnant with their first child when he died six days after D-Day.

“He was reading a map when the bomb came down. He didn’t die straightaway and all he wanted was to know his wife and baby would be all right.”

At another plot at Cambes filled with more simple white headstones, fellow D-Day veteran Tommy Meehan paid respects to his good friend, gunner Sammy Glass, who died at his feet.

Each cemetery held the sorrowful memories of hundreds of other young Irish lives lost.

Names like Kelly, Connolly, Delahunt, Barrett and Clarke featured in every line of meticulously tended graves. They were all in their twenties, most just 20 or 22.

“I was just a boy,” said Bill. “We were all just boys.”