The Story of LES BAYNTON

...We were raided by the Luftwaffe the night before. Next day I watched a badly damaged American Flying Fortress bomber circling overhead. The crew bailed out by parachute before it crashed out of sight.

We bivouacked in a holding area. First order of the day was looking for extra rations so we took some tins over to the nearest farmhouse to barter for eggs or whatever we could get. We were all surprised to see so much evidence of relative prosperity, of butter, eggs, milk, and bread. It's rich farmland over there so I suppose the farmers had been selling their produce to the Wehrmacht as well as to their own town folk. Looking back, I’m not sure that they were very pleased to see us. We had brought the war to their doorstep, which couldn’t have been very welcome, for they appeared to have been doing very nicely.

We were ordered to move to a hamlet near Tilly–sur–Seulles called St. Pierre. Our platoon set off across country in a convoy of which we in our half-track were the last.

We stopped to pick up a dispatch rider and his motorcycle. He had become pinned down by a sniper hidden in a cornfield. We started off again but came to a junction and there was no way of knowing which way the others had gone... we guessed and turned right. As it happened, this took us through enemy lines and livened up our journey! In the end, we ended up with the rest of the platoon and all was well...