Mervyn served with the Royal Army Ordnance Corps on D-Day (Image: PA)
Hero soldier Mervyn Kersh toasted his 100th birthday at a glittering surprise party held by royal appointment.
The decorated D-Day veteran stormed ashore on Gold Beach in June 1944, was part of the bloody fight to capture occupied France, and later helped liberate Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
Stunned Mervyn was honoured with a special gold-embossed card from the King and Queen at his birthday bash at the prestigious Union Jack Club in London.
The hand-signed greeting read: “We are so pleased to know you are celebrating your one hundredth birthday. This brings our warmest congratulations and heartfelt good wishes on such a special occasion.”
As a proud and practising Jew, the Second World War was a deeply personal fight, but his war was nearly over before it started with his religion almost led to his arrest and imprisonment.
Before he was due to depart for Normandy in June, 1944, Private Kersh, serving with the Royal Army Ordnance Corps, was ordered to see his commanding officer.
He demanded an explanation as to why the 19-year-old soldier was stubbornly refusing to eat his Army rations of tinned beef and vegetables, and only surviving on canned peaches. His superiors suspected he was trying to dodge the war by making himself too frail to fight for the liberation of Europe.
Mervyn recalled: “I said that was the last thing I wanted to do. I’m Jewish. I didn’t eat anything that wasn’t kosher as far as I could help it.” The charges were dropped.
Normandy vet Mervyn Kersh reads a special birthday card from the King and Queen (Image: PA)
His role in the invasion was to help ensure a steady flow of vehicles to supply British Army units fighting their way to Berlin.
But it was at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany that Mervyn witnessed the abject horror of war. Initially a POW camp for Allied soldiers it became a Nazi concentration camp in 1943. British troops liberated the camp on April 15, 1945, finding tens of thousands of starving prisoners and thousands of unburied bodies. It is estimated 70,000 Jews died there.
Mervyn was greeted with the sight of typhus-ridden and skeletal prisoners still wearing striped prison uniforms.
Desperate to help, he gave some of his chocolate rations to starving inmates, but the selfless act of kindness still haunts him.
He said: “I found out afterwards that was the worst thing you could give starving people. How many died from that? I don’t know. But I didn’t know it at the time.
“I could almost say [going to war] was a crusade, if that’s not the wrong word. To me, this had a purpose. It wasn’t just a game or passing the time it was to put the Germans out of action as long as possible.
“We knew what was happening. [We] didn’t know the extent of it, but we knew they had gas chambers. They were killing people, shooting them, hanging them.”
Private Kersh was serving with the Royal Army Ordnance Corps on D-Day in 1944 (Image: Mervyn Kersh)
The hero recalled: “It took us 14-hours to cross [the Channel] and one of the sailors told me that we were adrift to the west a little. Nevertheless we reached the Normandy beach intended which was codenamed Gold Beach. Our sector was codenamed ‘Jig’ and was the western end of the British line next to the Americans at Omaha Beach. They had suffered enormous casualties being unable to get beyond the beach for safer ground, but the British had cleared their cliffs and when I landed we merely had to ride up the ramp road to the top. I was very fortunate that we landed while the Germans were reeling and before they regrouped.
“At the top of the cliff ramp, in Port-en-Bessin, the villagers cheered us and offered us glasses of wine and flowers as we slowly moved ahead.”
Mervyn, who rose through the ranks to finish his army career as Acting Warrant Officer, serving in Egypt before being demobbed in 1946, was treated to a surprise shindig thrown by his daughter Lynne and the Taxi Charity for Military Veterans. VIP guests included fellow D-Day chums Norrie Bartlett, Dorothea Barron, Marie Scott and Harry Rice.
Mervyn also received a special birthday video message from Chief Rabbi, Sir Ephraim Mirvis, who affectionately referred to him as Merv, and was presented with hundreds of birthday cards from Dutch schoolchildren, and a celebratory cake.
Mervyn, an ambassador for the Normandy Memorial Trust, joked: “At the lofty age of 100 I have no need for any personal gifts – I have all the socks and scarves that anyone could wish for.”
He added: “The Taxi Charity for Military Veterans have taken me and Lynne to wonderful places and events, here and very often abroad, and have enhanced my life in so many ways. They are an amazing group of selfless people who do much needed and brilliant work.”