For the recent 70th anniversary of the D-Day landings, Manx war hero Hector Duff travelled to Normandy, where he attended services and spent some time filming with ITV (he’s pictured here with This Morning presenter Denise Robinson). During the trip, Hector, 94, was one of 50 veterans to be awarded the French Legion d’honneur, the country’s highest accolade. Hector has spent the last 12 years visiting Manx schools, passing on his experiences to young people, as part of an initiative he started with the late Harry Bacon, and for which he was awarded the Tynwald Honour at this year’s Tynwald Day. We were only too pleased to play our small part in helping Hector reach Normandy for the anniversary, and he kindly took the time to speak to us about the trip, but also about the time he headed off to war on board a Steam Packet Company vessel, aged 19:
ON THE 70TH ANNIVERSARY:
‘We travelled over for the June 6th anniversary on Ben-my-Chree, and I spent a little time in the south of England for my regiment, with other celebrations in Portsmouth and Gloucester, before heading across to Normandy on Brittany Ferries.
‘We went to Grandcamp Maisey, where the Rangers landed, and went to a museum there. The first thing that caught my eye was a picture of a boat, and I had a closer look at it and it was Ben-my-Chree at Normandy, which had been presented by Ivor Ramsden from the Manx Aviation and Military Museum at Ronaldsway.
‘Then we travelled up and down to all the beaches, and we were treated like royalty – once they knew you were a veteran, they signed you through everywhere. We had a marvellous time at the beaches, and went to most of the ceremonies, including marching with more than 40 veterans at Colleville-Montgomery.
‘There were just over 100 veterans in Normandy, and I was very proud to be one of fifty to be awarded the French Legion d'honneur. I was interviewed for almost three days by ITV, in Portsmouth before we left and then in Bayeux Cemetery, which was very emotional, and on the beaches too.’
ON THE SURVIVING VETERANS:
‘There aren’t many Normandy veterans left now and the Normandy Veterans Association is disbanding this year. In October it will lay up its National Standard at a service at St Margaret’s Church, in the grounds of Westminster Abbey, to which I’ve been invited.
‘There are only eight or nine of us surviving members in the Island, and most of the members are housebound. But we will continue to have social meetings – we enjoy it, but it is getting to the point where we have to think how long we can carry on meeting for. But we will meet for as long as we can – and when we do meet, we very seldom talk about Normandy!
‘One of our members was going to go to the 70th anniversary, but he died on May 29th. He had booked his trip to Normandy. His family and I got together, and with the help of the undertaker, we got some ashes and I took those away with me and scattered them on Gold Beach, which was where he had landed.
‘So, yes, there are some sad times. You do get hardened to these things, and it was such a long time ago that you put them behind you. But you never ever forget it; the landings at Normandy were terrible. You never forget seeing the number of boats – I knew immediately, that as soon as we joined the convoy and I saw the number of boats, I thought to myself, well no country can withstand the force that we are going to put in.
‘And I realised then that it was going to be the beginning of the end. So in some ways we were looking forward to that, but we knew it was going to be a hard struggle ahead.
‘You never ever knew if your time was going to come – you were always surprised that you outlived yesterday. You never ever thought you would go home alive. There was one chap who fought with me all through the desert, and through France and through Belgium, and in Italy – and about three weeks before the end of the war, he was killed.
ON GOING TO WAR:
‘I was living in Michael when the war started, and we spent the night in Belmont Terrace in Douglas. In the morning, we walked down in groups to the pier. About 30 of us went over. I can’t the exact date, and I can’t remember which boat it was – it may have been the Peel Castle or Rushen Castle – but I was very young and naive in those days, and I didn’t take much notice. After the war, and indeed during it, many of the boys said you should be taking notes, but at that time I never thought about doing it.
‘We went to Carlisle and I did my training as an infantryman – and then Dunkirk happened [in May 1940], and the boys came back from Dunkirk and I joined their regiment, the Lancashire Fusiliers, and they said, “Whatever you do, don’t stay with us in the infantry – we’ve walked all over France, Belgium and Holland!”
‘So I volunteered for the tank corps and I was accepted and joined the 7th Armoured Division, the Desert Rats. One of the men said that by the time they taught me to drive a tank, the war would be over. But within nine months I was in Egypt, and I was there for between two and a half and three years.
‘We were all young and didn’t know what to expect – when you’re young and going into battle, you’re a bit apprehensive, thinking well, this may be my last trip. But I don’t remember, even when I was training to fire machine guns, thinking at any time that “this is going to be awful”.
‘We weren’t put on this world to kill men, but you knew that man on the other side facing you, if you were in range to kill him, then he was in range to kill you. You had to think about things like that. But I can’t honestly say that we worried or thought about that at the time. We just never thought it could happen. Or we were always hoping that war would finish.
‘We were only young, just over 19. We didn’t know what war meant and we knew nothing about World War I, we were never taught about that at school – the Battle of Hastings was what we learned. But I don’t think for one moment that I thought, my God, I shouldn’t be in here, I’m likely to get killed. But once you got into action, you did. And you realised then that you were going to be very lucky to come out of it alive.
‘I never thought for one moment that I would have done. I watched many times the infantry men marching. And they would come with us, not in front of us, and you’d see a big long line and then you’d see one going down, and then another, and I used to think what it must be like, sitting there walking with them, thinking “there’s Jimmy gone, or Jack gone – who is going to be next?”
‘We used to think the same in the tanks – if one of our tanks on our flank got knocked out, we’d think well, we’re going to be the next.
‘I remember after we’d got into the war, there was one of my crew, who was older than me; I used to get a bit weepy when seeing one of our tanks knocked out, and he’d say to me, “look here Mac [Hector’s middle name is MacDonald], there is a day when we are born, a period to live, and a day when we die, and there’s nothing you can do about it. And he was right.’
