Leonard Chandler testimony – Page 2
D-Day veteran – Royal Naval Reserve
Leonard Chandler’s account continues:
“One night we had a ‘red alert’, as some ships feared an attack by frogmen. During the alert, while HMS HEMERALD was adrift, we heard an extremely loud detonation: the ORP DRAGON, manned by a Polish crew, had just struck a mine. Less than an hour later, an unidentified object was spotted 200 meters from our side. It was illuminated by a searchlight (I remember there was a lot of fog, which limited our field of vision), and from our position on the platform, we were convinced it was two men sitting on a plastic sheet. A marine was ordered to open fire and shoot them. They were in fact two survivors from ORP DRAGON clinging to a 205-liter oil tank. The next morning, I went to the deck where They were. One of them was dead, and his uniform had been covered with the following inscription: “They were not on our side.” But of course they were.
In the cemetery near Ryes is buried a Pole (I visited this cemetery on June 6, 1994), and I wondered if he wasn’t the one who had been tragically killed. Again, “Friendly Fire.” The ORP Dragon was later towed and sunk off Arromanches to serve as a breakwater during the construction of the Mulberry harbor. One day, there was a raid over Caen, and we watched the 500 bombers fly overhead. We saw American rockets being fired at Omaha Beach, but we didn’t know what they were. Sometimes planes were chased by searchlights, and all the anti-aircraft batteries opened fire, but they didn’t They didn’t venture over the sea and only flew over Normandy. And there was always this fog that never cleared.
We stayed off Arromanches for three weeks. The maximum range of our guns was 30 kilometers, and after three weeks, the ground forces had exceeded this limit. We then returned to Portsmouth to resupply for a few days, then returned to our position at Arromanches, where we stayed for another three weeks.
In Portsmouth, I heard my first “doodlebug” (the nickname given by the British to German V-1 rockets that crashed in England – in English: “Doodlebug”), which made as much noise as if it had landed a few streets away. Before this incident, we sometimes saw them off Arromanches and Le Havre, but we didn’t know what they were.
Just after VE Day (Victory in Europe Day): VE Day: May 8, 1945), I met a prisoner of war who was a German petty officer and who was on guard duty on D-Day at the Le Havre naval base. He told me he hadn’t realized an invasion was underway until the artificial fog cleared and he saw the warships and landing craft. I asked him if he hadn’t heard the noise anyway, and he replied yes, but that he and those on guard at the same post had heard similar noises many times before!
Leonard Chandler
