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As we approached the shore, the order came to
lower the ramp, with us we had a sailor, in bathing
costume only, and his job was to test the depth of the
water, before myself and my section dis-embarked, well
he jumped, and I have never seen him since, he
just vanished, now attired as I was, plus a Bangalor
torpedo for blowing the wire, I am afraid I hesitated
at jumping right after him, even if the order was
"get off that boat", and my platoon officer was
certainly letting me know about that, and all
the time the beach of course was getting nearer
so I jumped and hardly got wet at all, in
a few minutes we were up the beach, and found
that our landing craft had put us ashore, right
on the nail, straight ahead of us was the lighthouse.
The bombardment had been so effective that paths
had been cleared through the wires of the mine field
for us, altho' wether or not it had cleared the mines
we did not know, that was a chance we had to
take, our platoon took up its position beyond
the mine field while the rest of the Coy fanned out
for the attack on the lighthouse area; there was a
lot of small arms fire flying around but otherwise
things seemed to be going well, one or two casualties
who were being attended to by the Stretcher Bearers,
and then we moved forward again towards the Light
House; and before we knew were we where, we had
taken it, a few very shaken German soldiers were
taken prisoner, and they did not seem to know
what was going to happen to them.
We consolidated our position, which was a maze of
trenches surrounding the lighthouse; and it gave
us a good view of the ground ahead, which seemed to
be deserted. But on our left flank a differant battle
to our comparativly easy one was being fought out.
"D. Coy" were really having a sticky time, and we found
out later that they had been put ashore a little of
the mark, and were having a very tough time indeed,
this came home to me more, as untill about two weeks previous
I had been in D Coy and I had some very good friends amongst those boys