FOUR days before D-Day, Ken Lodge got a free transfer from the Durham Light Infantry to the Green Howards and joined them in time for some last minute training scrambling down nets into landing craft.

He and about six other Durhams were charged with getting the Yorkshire regiment's wireless batteries ashore.

"I was up to my knees in water and we had to pull these batteries off the craft with rope," he recalls. "We got them on a barrow and pushed them up the beach keeping behind the white tape showing where the mine-clearers had been, otherwise we'd get blown up."

He's speaking having just laid a memorial wreath at the Green Howards' monument in Crpon. A couple of hundred yards to his back is the farmhouse where Stan Hollis achieved his second miracle of D-Day.

Sixty years on, Ken, 79, of Pelton, near Chester-le-Street, is still confused about his role on the day.

"We were wondering what to do with the batteries so we put them in a shellhole and waited," he says.

"We waited on the beach all day with a great view of the armada off shore, a very high tide and a few dead sailors in the water.

"I saw a sailor rescue three men off the beach, the swell was fantastic, the sea was pounding them and they were hanging on for grim death. He should have got a medal."

Come mid-afternoon, the batteries were still unclaimed so Ken and his men just "gave up on them" and left the beach.

"They came early in the morning with a fifteen-hundred weight truck and said 'where's the batteries'?" he says. " 'Down there somewhere' we said. And they're still there, for all I know. To me it was just a waste of time."

After D-Day, he rejoined the Durhams and found, as so many soldiers did, getting off the beaches was the easy part: the battle for Normandy would be bloody.