'We need young people to learn to avoid terrible wars - there are no winners'

11 November 2023 , 19:23

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Stan Ford (Image: Bath Chronicle)

Veteran sailor Stan Ford vividly remembers being hurled through the air and into the English Channel after a German submarine missile hit his ship outside Normandy.

It was August 18, 1944 and Stan, then 19, recalls it taking just four minutes for HMS Fratton to sink. The sailor, who was manning the ship’s gun turret in the attack, was one of 38 crew members rescued. He woke up in the Gold Beach field hospital in Normandy with a fractured spine and leg injuries that left him needing calipers for life.

“I heard this terrific noise and then suddenly I was in the air,” he recalls. “It happened so quickly. There were people in the water with me and I just did my best to float until the small rescue boats came to pick me up. When I woke up and they told me what had happened, I was so shocked. I realised how lucky I was.”

Stan in 1943 (Bath Chronicle)

Stan, who joined the Royal Navy in 1943, says of the D-Day landings, for which he helped escort men and supplies to France: “I remember seeing so many ships across the ocean, it was amazing. I thought, ‘We aren’t going to lose the war’.” After peace was declared, Stan returned home to future wife Eileen to work in the furniture industry and they had two daughters.

The 98-year-old, from Bristol, will attend today’s remembrance events with the Spirit of Normandy Trust. He adds: “We need the young people to see, listen and learn about it all so they can work to avoid these things, so we don’t have these terrible wars. There are no winners.”

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Working in the furniture industry, he has visited Normandy every year, including last year, when he helped spread the ashes of the daughter of William Wallace, who died on HMS Fratton, above the ship’s remains at sea. “It was her last wish that she could be with her dad,” he says.

Stan, who attended the Cenotaph March Past for the first time last year, adds: “I was very humbled to be there and remember the friends I lost on my ship.”

Louise Lazell