Douglas Bentley

What happened was that I happened to see on the notice board, they were looking for volunteers for combined operations. So I didn’t know very much about it but I decided to put my name down for it. And sure enough, I got accepted to combined operations. And I was in Halifax, [Nova Scotia] at the time. We went right across Canada on a train and I ended up in Comox, B.C., which was the training facility for the [Royal Canadian] Navy. And I took the course there and I finished that and I became a combined operations and I was allowed to wear the badge that was given to me. So then I went home on leave again when I finished the course. We had ten days leave and everybody got on the train and wherever you lived, you were allowed to get off the train at that spot and spend your ten days leave and then report back to Halifax, which I did. Then, when I got back to Halifax, then I found out they were going to ship me out to England and I was going to go on a troop ship to England. Which I did, and when I got there, the HMCS Niobe which was the naval base in [Greenock,] Scotland for the Canadian Navy, it was filled up, I guess, with people and they didn’t have any room. So they sent us to a battleship, I guess it was, that was in dry dock and we slept aboard the battleship. Then when I found out that I wasn’t going to be in combined, really, I wasn’t going to be as a naval commando any more, I was going to be assigned to a landing craft. So, after I finished there, I went on a few other courses in different places in Scotland and in England, and then I was assigned to a landing craft which was based in Grimsby, England. And so we went to Grimsby and we picked up the landing craft and there was quite a number of different people and I didn’t know anybody. They were all from all over the different places and we got on the landing craft. And then we left Grimsby after we got refitted and we sailed down to, we were supposed to head to, Southampton, [England]. It took us quite awhile to get there for some reason. And when we were in Southampton, then we ended up taking some courses, there, related to landing craft. And then, just prior to D-Day, I guess on June 5th, [1944] we picked up our soldiers. They were came down, and they went aboard the ship, aboard the landing craft and they were from the Highland Light Infantry. So they came aboard and they had bikes with them and they had to bring their bikes with them and they stored their bikes all along the side of the ship. And then we sailed on D-Day, on June 6th, and we landed in Bernières-sur-Mer. And we dropped the troops off there and they went ashore. Doing the landing, unfortunately, we happened to hit one of the land mines on the beach, and they blew a hole in the bow of the ship. But fortunately, nobody was hurt and the damage was not too extensive. We were able to plug it up so we were able to sail back to England after the landings, and we were able to chug along. And our bow was fairly low in the water but we were okay and we got back there to England. And then we went in for a refit to get the hole repaired at Portsmouth. And we stayed a few days there in Portsmouth until we got the thing fixed up. So, we were landing craft and we were still able to facilitate. By the way, I never mentioned the fact that we were on a Landing Craft Infantry, LCIL Large, Landing Craft Infantry (Large.) And it carried about 150 to maybe 200 troops. And on the landing craft, what we did was, we had ramps on either side of the bow and these ramps were lowered, and the men went down the ramps into the water, and then they went ashore.