On the 6th of June 1944, more than 5,000 Allied vessels crossed the English Channel to storm the German-occupied beaches of Normandy.

The D-Day invasion was preceded by more than 1,200 aircraft and nearly 160,000 troops landed on the beaches of France that day. By the end of August, more than 2 million Allied troops were in France and on a path to end the war in Europe

One man who remembers the events of that day is 95-year-old local David Birt, who served aboard the Leander-class cruiser HMS Ajax.

Born in the East Riding of Yorkshire, David had joined the Royal Navy in 1942 at just 17 years of age.

“I thought the war was ending and I didn't want to miss out,” said David, who is now a resident at Gosling Creek Aged Care.

“Young people used to think, I don't want to miss out and they all used to try to join up as quickly as they could. That's what they thought; that it was good fun.

“Now, I'd never been to sea! I wanted to join the air force and they wouldn't take you until you were 18, but I suddenly realised that you could join the Navy at 17-and-a-half. So I joined the navy.”

After ‘passing out,’ David joined the crew of Ajax as a radar operator.

“It was known as RDF (Range and Direction Finding) in those days not radar. The word radar came in about 1943 roundabout then,” said David.

“We were very busy; I joined Ajax in December 1942 and we went straight away into the Mediterranean and we did a lot of works there… we did exploits around Italy and Greece and the Greek Island, because they were held by the enemy… We spent our time in the Mediterranean, except for the Normandy Landing.

“We got sent back to Scapa Flow and we knew there was something going to happen… It was a tremendous sight! You could see all the ships, there were masses of them, you couldn't sort it out, thousands of ships in the English Channel going across it was just incredible!”

Leading the assault by Canadian and British forces on Gold Beach (the centre beach of the five D-Day landing sites), Ajax was the first ship to open fire at the enemy batteries

Three of the four large guns of the Longues-sur-Mer battery were disabled by direct hits from the Ajax and Argonaut that morning.

“We did quite well,” said David. “We did a lot of training of course, but in the Eastern Mediterranean… We did a lot of practice landing on island in Greece, in the Aegean Sea, so really the big one — the landing in Normandy — just came as part of the job.”

Practice is one thing, but it must be different when the enemy is firing back?

“Oh yeah plenty of people [were firing back], but we fired more back at them! And there were a lot of ships that were backing us; we fired more than they could possibly fire at us, so they were probably more frightened than we were… I don't think any of us were scared though, it was just a case of getting on with the job. It never came into your head that you were going to be in trouble.”

It was less than a year after the landings at Normandy that Germany surrendered. David and the crew of Ajax the found themselves dispatched to continue the fight against Japan.

“We were in the Mediterranean, but then towards the end of the war they sent us through the Suez Canal and I thought, ‘Oh my goodness, we are going to Japan!’ We went through the Suez Canal to the north part of Africa in the Red Sea. We were there about a week and then they sent us back. We thought, that's funny… but then we realised that the Japanese had given up!”

Coming out of the Navy, David found jobs hard to come by and so he actually reenlisted and went on to spend a further eight years in the air force.

“The reason I joined the air force was that I was scared of going to sea away from home again! so I joined the air force and spent eight years at air bases all over England.”

David was not the only member of his family to serve during the war; all six of his brothers also enlisted.

“Three in the air force and three in the army, I was the only one in the navy. All survived, strange as it may seem. One lost part of one of his fingers. A bullet passed through it, but that's all.

“It’s just as well we got through it in one piece, but we had a lot of fun one way or another… It just never entered our heads that we were not going to win. As far as we were concerned whenever we took on things, we always seemed to come out the best.”

We’d like to wish a very happy birthday to David, who turned 95 just last week.

Remembering Normandy