A friend was born in England in 1941 and now lives in the US. He sent me this on June 6th of this year.

John’s Recollection of D-Day, 6 June 1944

The clearest memory I have of my early childhood occurred on 6 June 1944. This was D-Day - the day the Allies invaded France. I lived in the south of England next to a Spitfire airfield and was three years old. I remember looking into the sky and seeing it full of airplanes. They were flying very low and the noise was terrific. It was a dull day, but it became as dark as dusk when all these machines filled the air. It created a lot of excitement. People ran out of their houses and cheered.
In the twenty-four hours of 6 June the Allies flew over 14,600 sorties from airfields just north of where I lived. Their first objective was to destroy by bombing the enemy’s shore defenses prior to the seaborne assault of the army on the beaches of Normandy. At the same time, 20,000 airborne troops were flown in Dakota C-47 transport aircraft towing gliders. The objective of the airborne landings was to seize key objectives some distance behind the beaches to ease the egress of the amphibious forces off the beaches. The flights began at one in the morning and continued all day until nine at night. Having made one drop the aircraft returned to base to pick-up another group of paratroopers, some towing gliders full of artillery equipment. Over 4,000 Allied troops died that first day.
Exactly one week after D-Day, Hitler retaliated by launching an attack on London with V-1 flying bombs. My mother used to tell us that we were safe all the time we could hear the engine going. That meant it was going to fly over us, but once the engine stopped, it would dive to earth and that was the time for me to dive under the bed and shout: “Bang planes Mummy, bang planes.” Then in September of the same year the Germans launched V-2 rockets at London.
My mother and older brother experienced these events. I was fortunate to have survived the heavy bombing of our neighborhood during those five years. (A neighbor’s house and its occupants were not so lucky). Over 60,000 civilians were killed by bombing during the war in England.
My father was in Burma fighting the Japanese and did not return home until a year later. I was four years old when I first met him!

My father served in Darwin, an uncle in Borneo, and another uncle in New Guinea.

My fathers job was breaking Japanese codes.
He had much contact with the Japanese prisoners of war,
probably to extract information.
Amongst other things he learned jui jitsu from them...
I wonder if it was the hard way or the easy way.

The uncle in Borneo was an Artificer,
and the man in New Guinea, a Dispatch Rider.

If it wasn't for the US in the Pacific, the cruel
and determined Japanese troops would have
over run Borneo, New Guinea and Australia.
My father and uncles would most likely not have survived
and I would not have been conceived.

Thanks for your help.

The photo below is the Dispatch Rider.

What would he have thought, if he new at the time that
the photo being taken, was one day going to be propped
up on a Japanese camera, to be photographed
by another camera made in Japan?