It sank in about three minutes, broken off, that woke us up and it wasn't a quiet picnic that we were going on, it was serious. It's 80 years since D-Day, British American and Canadian forces attacked German troops on beaches in Normandy in 1944, in what was the largest seaborn invasion in history. It was a crucial turning point in the Second World War, which led to victory in Europe the following year. Reporter Reese Griffiths has been speaking to John Roberts from Whittstable, who was a 20-year-old Royal Navy officer, on board destroyer HMS Serapis at the time of Operation Overlord. He's been describing his role at that time. We all knew there was going to be a D-Day of some sort. The war couldn't end without us invading Europe and defeating the Nazis, but we didn't know where it all were. But we did some practice bombarding with an army officer spotting for us and then at the beginning of June we went down to Portsmouth and there were 40 destroyers down there. I had never seen more than about 10 at once to see 40 all in one place. It was amazing. It was also amazing that there were 40 destroyers, but there were probably 500 ships all together. We were not attacked in any way. The security had been wonderful, both as security anyway and also because we had misled the Germans into thinking we might be going to invade up here, over to Calais, or we might invade the other side of the Thames. We kept Hitler guessing as to where we would land. It was a remarkably successful deception, wasn't it? Incredible. I think it was the US First Army group that they invented to consider, I think George Patton was... He pretended he was at an army group in Kent. Incredible, I think, Shepperton Film Studios were making mock tanks and all this incredible, remarkable deception. I think even they were intercepting signals that the high command of the Wehrmacht was still saying, "No, it's a faint, it's a faint. They'll be coming across the chains to the part of Calais." The more you think about overlords and the scale of that operation the more it staggers you about what a feat of planning and preparation was to pull off. I always thought it was very sad that the Admiral, by Admiral Russell, he planned Dunkirk. He was in Dover and he planned Dunkirk. That really was a miracle too. It was he who planned the naval side of overlords. Sadly, he was killed in an aircraft crash about two weeks after D-Day. I think of all the senior people who deserved to be rewarded, it was him. Perhaps a name that maybe yes has been written out of the history a little bit in the hotel about it, because maybe with D-Day we talk a lot about the soldiers onto the beaches, but it wasn't a lot had to work across the entire scope of an incredibly large theatre to bring that to happen. I've been interviewed by two German organisations. They're sort of news organisations. Both times it was a woman questioning me. One of them said, "While we were going across the night before the landings, we were not going to win." I never really thought about that before, but I said quite apart from all the deception, we were very lucky that because of the storm, Rommel didn't think we could possibly begin to come across and he'd gone back to have his birthday with his wife. Hitler was asleep and nobody dared wake him up. Because Hitler thought we might be going to come here, two or three of the Panzer divisions were up here instead of in Normandy. That meant that we had about 48-hour stars. When did you arrive then in Portsmouth, how many days before D-Day held up? We arrived, I think it was about four days before. It's not really part of the landing history, but I was my jobs in the ship. When I did the technical courses after they were down, I was invited to say how I wanted to specialise. Did I want to become a specialist gunry officer or torpedo officer or what? We were all nineteen and the rumour was that if they couldn't grant you what you wanted, you were pressed and into submarines. That was the last thing I wanted. I put down that I wanted to specialise in anti-submarine, and that's what I became an anti-submarine officer dealing with Azdyk and Sonar, and I was the Sonar officer in Serapis. But also in harbour, I ran the ship's office, which included paying the sailors. While we were at Spithead, nobody was allowed out of the ship. Except me and I was allowed to go ashore and collect pay because we were going to be away during a pay day, and if I didn't get it before we went, if we were sunk, they might not get it. I went ashore, I came back with the pay, and I had an assistant and we counted out all the money, and we discovered at the end that we had £500 too much. The paymaster had given us an extra £500 in award. I wasn't allowed to go ashore and handed back, and I couldn't communicate with him. It was about a week later when we went back to Portsmouth or something, that all the jetty was a very white-faced paymaster, ready to ask, did I have £500 too much? Yeah, I'm sure. That was a lot of money. It was, yeah. We were there about five days, and at night there were one or two sort of half air raids, but no damage is ever done to anybody. And then of course the gale blew up the day before G-Day should have been, and then luckily there was a slight break in the chain of wet weather coming across, and Eisenhower was brave enough to take the plunge and say, "Let's go." And for yourself I mean, I guess in terms of the secrecy, did you realise when you sailed to Portsmouth that this was what was about to happen? Or was it still at that stage very, the mission wasn't communicated? Because the secrecy was incredible, obviously, around. Well, none of us, not even the captain, knew where the invasion was going to be. I mean, we all knew when we'd known for ages that there was going to be an invasion of France, but we didn't know until I think it was the morning of the 5th when the captain was told he could open the envelope with all the instructions for our ship. And we actually got underway about six hours later. And our job was to leave. We actually led the Armada because during the years before, as well as building what they called the Atlantic Wall, which was from Norway down to Spain, the Germans had sown 50,000 mines in the channel, and it was virtually impossible to go across without minesweepers going first. Minesweepers don't have much of a gun. And the Germans had destroyers in Lahav and in Sherburg. And to protect them, if they did come out, we led the way behind the minesweepers so that we could protect them if the Germans came out. And I said in the account that I wrote afterwards crossing the channel, there were, I think, about 25 minesweepers ahead of us. And they go quite slowly, about 10 knots. And that was very slow for us. We were just following them. And it was quiet. And you could hear the sea lapping against the ship's side. And every night again, you had a plop in the water, and it was a minesweeper putting a boy in the sea for the ships behind, you know, for them to follow. And we got to about six or seven miles from the French coast by five o'clock in the morning. And suddenly there was a loud bang. And it was a destroyer that was next to us, about a thousand yards on our port side. It had been torpedoed by a German fast patrol boat, which hadn't come out for us. They used to come out every night anyway, in case there was something there. Until they're surprised, they saw all these ships, so they fired off their torpedoes. And one of them hit the destroyer next to us, which I always thought was rather sad. It was manned by Norwegians, Norwegians who'd escaped from Norway during the war. With that being sunk, it sank in about three minutes, broken off. That woke us up, and it wasn't a quiet picnic that we were going on. It was serious. And we waited a little bit then, because the minesweepers that came first were larger ones, where the water was deep enough for them. But as we got within about six miles of the coast, the water was shallow, and so we had to have smaller minesweepers to take us into three miles from the coast, which was where we stopped, and from where we did our bombarding. And so what was the role of Sephres? I understand, yes, it was to, I guess, provide that quite heavy fire into positions to help support and suppress the German defence of the coast. Yes, of course, with our reconnaissance, and also the information that the French resistance had been sending across, we had information as to where all the German defences were, you know, their battery guns and things like that. And there were three battleships out to see from us, and then there were about eight or ten cruisers with the next-size guns in between the battleships and us, and then there was us with our guns. And from about a half hour, six onwards, we started firing at these targets, and the noise was terrific. And then at about a quarter-part-seven, I think it was, I had a lot of aircraft, including three or four hundred flying fortresses flew. They flew along the beach. They didn't fly across it, because they'd only be going up one part. They went along it, and all the way along, they were dropping five hundred pound bombs. So all the German defences were being destroyed in that last half hour or so before the soldiers landed. And then there were rocket ships, or rocket vessels, rather like you normally see the Russians using. They had about twenty-five rockets, and they'd be about one mile off the coast, and they'd far the twenty-five rockets, but they'd all go swoosh and then come down on the beach, all ahead of the soldiers landing. Another thing that one of the Germans asked me, they said, "Have you ever thought as to how remarkable the coordination of everything was?" And it was a hundred and fifty thousand human beings, and yet they were ordered, so the plan never wavered. And I think on the programme last night, some people said, "We were on the beach, we knew where we were, we knew where we had to go." Everything was on the plan, and it worked perfectly. The Germans, who normally planned things well themselves, they admired us for how well we did it. Yeah, I mean, with hindsight you look back and you guess, you think, "Well, it worked." You almost think that history has an inevitability about it, but it doesn't, there's nothing inevitable in anything we do, and it is incredible because the smallest, you know, one part of that great machine breaks down and then the next thing and the next thing, and it could have been, there's no, it wasn't preordained that it was going to be a success, but it proved to be so. I think we were lucky on our gold, which was our beach. The shore was fairly low, it wasn't like the American beach, which had cliffs, they had to go up. I think, I don't know whether they thought about it, but I think we had the best beach to land on, and that's why everything went like clockwork, but I think at the American end, there were quite a lot of errors, sometimes there were some tanks, I think, which were supposed to land in water so deep, but not deeper, and they were put into the water when it was too deep, and they just sank with the cruise inside them. Given the scale of the operation and the Germans would be firing, you're bombarding the shore there, did you think in that moment, or maybe afterwards, about the men who were landing on the beaches and what they must have been experiencing in that moment? I think we were three miles off the beach, so the small landing craft that they'd been put in to actually land, they came past us, so we cheered them and waved them on, and I, and I'm sure all of us, felt, "Thank goodness, I'm not one of them," and it was about eleven o'clock in the morning when one or two boats started coming back with wounded people, because they went to facilities on shore immediately, and we had a sick bay, and we had a doctor on board, so we got about a dozen soldiers who had been badly wounded, and we kept on firing, we went on firing till about eleven o'clock, and by then we'd used almost half a month of ammunition that we had on the ship, so we didn't want to run out, so we slowed down then, but our main job, having fired at the targets that we knew about, there was an army officer on shore, and he was in contact with us by radio, and whenever he came across a group of soldiers, or tanks, or guns, he contacted us and said there's a target here, and he said one, two, three, four, five, six, and we knew where that was relative to where we were, and we fired about twenty-five rounds at it, and then with luck he came back and said, "Well done, you've destroyed them." And you said eleven o'clock, I assume, was that eleven a.m., and so how long were you at sea then supporting the landing? Well we were supporting the landing, as it were, supporting the army on shore for about three or four days, and by then the army got far enough inland for our guns not to reach them, so for the next eight or nine days, our job was at night to stop the German destroyers from the half coming out and attacking the supply ships, because you know there was that thing, the Mulberry Harbour, which was artificially built and everything, if the Germans could have destroyed that, that would have made a big difference, so our job was to make sure all the Germans never got that far, and in fact there were about twenty or so of our destroyers doing that, and the Germans never achieved anything. [Music] [Music] [BLANK_AUDIO]
