Former paratrooper remembers wait for D-Day invasion after flying in on glider
Corporal Peter Belcher, now aged 100, and his colleagues were flown in on gliders to capture vital bridges ahead of the seaborne invasion.
As Allied troops were making their way over the Channel for the D-Day landings, Corporal Peter Belcher and his battalion were already in place in Normandy, waiting.
Mr Belcher, now 100, and his colleagues from the Airborne Regiment, 4th Battalion Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry were flown in on gliders to capture vital bridges ahead of the seaborne invasion.
Setting off at about 8pm on June 5 1944 from RAF Harwell in Berkshire, he and five of his colleagues sat in the back of the glider, with a six-pounder anti-tank gun, as it circled round above England before eventually landing in Normandy at about midnight.
Speaking to the PA news agency at Broughton House veterans’ care home in Salford, Greater Manchester, Mr Belcher said: “I was scared. It goes very quiet. You hear the drone of the plane all the way, you see, and then suddenly it goes quiet. You can hear a pin drop.”
Mr Belcher, who grew up in Wiltshire but moved to Manchester after the war, got to Normandy after the first arrivals and then had to “dig in”.
He said: “Our job then was to keep low until we heard the guns from the sea at 4 o’clock in the morning.”
