We Will Remember Them: Veterans return to Normandy in private planes

The 90-year-old is one of four Midlands members of the Normandy Veterans Association being flown in by advertising executive Trevor Beattie, who is helping fund the trip for the veterans and their families through charitable donations to his Jack and Ada Beattie Foundation.

Three small aircraft will take them from Northamptonshire and give them a chance to glimpse from the air the beaches where Allied forces landed on D-Day, June 6 1944.

Mr Beattie, who was educated at Wolverhampton Polytechnic and went on to create iconic ad campaigns for French Connection and Wonderbra appealed for donations in order to keep the promise made to veterans that 'we will remember them'.

He says: "On June 6 2009, more than 800 Veterans were able to attend the Commemoration of D-Day 65, with 637 formally marching to the ceremony at the Bayeux War Cemetery in Normandy.

"When I first had the privilege of meeting the Heroes of Normandy, they wryly referred to themselves as 'forgotten but not gone'. If Project Overlord had proved anything, it was that they were anything but.

"The prayer of the National Veterans Association concludes with the line 'we will remember them'. That is a promise which The Jack And Ada Beattie Foundation plans to keep."

Mr Reynolds, a bombardier in 53rd Regiment the Royal Artillery was aged just 20 when he went ashore on an American landing craft after D-Day with a battery of big guns.

He told how in August 1944, a few months after the Normandy landings, he watched as four German warplanes came over low, looking for targets.

Bombardier Reynolds grabbed a Bren gun.

"The Bren magazines were loaded with one in five tracer rounds so you could see where they were going," he said.

"I said to my mate, 'Come on, Mick, let's have a go at this one'. I was hosing away with the Bren and Mick was pushing in the mags.

"It was definitely us that got it. You could see the bullets going into the Messerschmitt's engine. Then he started gaining height and he baled out. Mick said, 'Go on, shoot!' but I was the NCO and I said no. Anyway, when he landed Mick ran out to get him. This German was in a beautiful pale blue uniform and he handed Mick his wristwatch. I bet he wouldn't have done that if he'd known Mick had wanted to shoot him."

Much will rightly be made this week of the pivotal importance of D-Day, June 6 1944, but the Normandy campaign went far beyond that.

The days and weeks beyond D-Day were a nightmare of sudden ambushes, with the Germans holding the high ground.

"They could see everything that moved," says Mr Reynolds, of Hednesford.

"They could almost see you change your mind."

He told of how a German mortarman lobbed bombs around him as he inched along a hedgerow.

"He could have killed me at any time but he just kept straddling me. He was playing with me."

"You had to shift about 20 tons of earth to dig the guns in," he said.

"The camouflage net went over and there was a sort of opening for the barrel.

"Anyway, this German 88 shell came straight through the net, wallop, straight into the ground. It was about a yard away from me." The group of British gunners braced themselves for death.

"We just looked at the shell," Mr Reynolds says.

"Absolute silence. It was smoking a bit and then the smoke stopped. After a while I picked up the field telephone and explained what had happened."

"A couple of blokes from the Ordnance Corps came and defused it and took it away. We heard later that inside the fuse was a little card with a message written in Czech."

They had been saved by a slave labourer in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia who had deliberately sabotaged an 88mm shell in a munitions factory, despite the risk of instant execution had the Germans found out.

Mr Reynolds, grandfather of Wolverhampton North East MP Emma Reynolds, is a leading light in the Normandy Veterans Association.

Five years ago he had to consider the possibility that the 65th anniversary visit of veterans to those beaches would be the last.

But here they are again, heading over to France for the 70th, although after this the association will disband, due to the advancing age of its members.

His fellow Normandy veterans on the trip are 90-year-old Geoff Ensor from Merry Hill in Wolverhampton, 88-year-old Ron Davies from Walsall and Frank Corbett from Bloxwich.

"It's just time, I suppose," says Mr Reynolds.

"There's so few of us left now."

He did his duty from an early age, signing up for the Local Defence Volunteers (later the Home Guard) in Rushall where he lived as soon as he heard the radio broadcast by Anthony Eden, then Secretary of State for War, saying the organisation had been created.

Asked if there should be an effort be made to ensure younger people commemorate D-Day once the veterans are no longer with us, he replies: "Young people have other things on their minds.

"Life is different now. The thing about our days was everyone was trying to help each other out.

"Nobody quibbled about it. You either went into soldiering or were an air raid warden or did something.

"We all knew that Hitler was a bugger and that if we didn't do our bit he'd have been over here."

Tomorrow the veterans and their families will remember those who did not come back after 100,000 British, American and Canadian troops stormed ashore on five French beaches to begin the liberation of western Europe.

Hundreds of thousands more, including Mr Reynolds's regiment, landed in the days that followed.

Soon after the 2004 celebration, to his surprise, father of two Mr Reynolds was summoned to the French Embassy in London to be presented with the medal of the Legion D'Honneur.

"I have no idea what for," he says.

"Something about services to the Republic."

But while the ceremonies involving the The Queen, Prime Minister David Cameron and US President Barack Obama will focus on the servicemen of the Allied forces who lost their lives and the extraordinary efforts of the veterans who created the pivotal point of the Second World War, Mr Reynolds will also remember others.

"We lost a lot of lads but the people I also think about were those in the concentration camps.

"We didn't think about what we were doing at the time. We were young men, I was in my 20s, and we didn't see the bloody danger we were in.

"It was exhilarating to shoot at German planes.

"We didn't think about anything else. We were there. We were together. And we did the best we could."