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.