How YOU can walk in the footsteps of heroes for the 80th anniversary of VE-Day

The survivors and the children walked solemnly down the aisle, hand in hand. Beth and Kumar, Marge and Tracey, Bernard and Isha. The old helped the young recite the names of the youngsters who didn’t make it through those nights on the open ocean: James Spencer, five; Betty Unwin, 12; 15-year-old Joan Irving… and 90 others. It was 2000 and I was in the congregation at a service of remembrance to honour evacuee children who died when the British ocean liner SS City of Benares was struck by German torpedoes on September 17, 1940.

Led by a purple-haired headmistress, this multi-ethnic group of Londoners old and new sang rousing hymns – the same hymns the boys and girls in the lifeboats had sung to keep their spirits up: He Who Would Valiant Be, O God Our Help in Ages Past and Abide With Me. People were openly weeping. I was there with my friend, Bess Walder. In 1940, aged just 14, she clung to an overturned lifeboat for almost two days. On the other side of it was another teenager, Beth Cummings.

They saw other survivors drift into unconsciousness, lose their grip and slip into the water but they held onto each other and to the rough wooden slats, until finally they heard an approaching Royal Navy destroyer.Above the sound of the storm, they could catch “Hold on, hold on we’re coming!” shouted by seaman Albert Gorman from HMS Hurricane. It took him several minutes to prise Bess’s hands away from the lifeboat, so tightly had she been gripping for so many hours. And Albert was with her 60 years later at the service, too.

The repeated battering of her body against the underside of the wooden boat left Bess with internal injuries so serious that she could never become a mother. But the bonds created that night ran deep and created a kind of family of their own. In 1947, Bess married Beth’s older brother, Geoffrey, and the sisters-in-law were close throughout the rest of their lives.

The courage and endurance of these two young women was truly inspirational – and their survival a genuine miracle – which is why I included their story in a documentary series I made, and a book I wrote, called Finest Hour. “All of them, all the hard brave men and women, still just within reach,” are the words that closed that book. And back then, they truly were reachable.

When I did my research in 1998 and 1999, I was able to sit and speak with some phenomenal 70 and 80-somethings, extracting deeply personal stories that were still vivid in the minds of Bess, Beth, Edith Heap, Peter Vaux, Iain Nethercott and so many others. Tears came to former Women’s Air Force member Edith when she told me how her fighter pilot fiancé Denis Wissler had died in 1940, his Hurricane shot down in flames, while she was listening to the battle he was fighting in, high above the English Channel. Those tears were followed by a sharp, self-reproachful “Oh. Shut up!” For me, that perfectly captured the grit and stoicism of her generation.

It’s different now. The final volume in my Finest Hour trilogy is being published next month and, even as I was writing it, I could see from the obituary pages that the remaining centenarians of the Second World War were slipping away fast. Harry Howath, who fought on D-Day; Thomas Dobie, who flew supply planes into Burma; Harry Hughes, who survived numerous bombing raids over Berlin; Mike Hickie, who served in submarines in the Indian Ocean; Bob Steen, who battled all the way from Normandy to Cologne. This is why the opportunity to travel in the company of a veteran is so special now, and I’m certain that anybody who goes on this extraordinary Leger Battlefield coach tour to Normandy in May will find it richly rewarding.

And I do hope there’s gin. One of my favourite experiences with the wartime generation came a few years after that north London church service for the SS City of Benares. I gathered together the “cast” of Finest Hour for a long and rather indulgent BBQ in my garden. I was able to introduce my own children to survivors of Dunkirk, Battle of Britain pilots and even Marion Holmes, who had served Winston Churchill in Downing Street at the height of the Blitz.

I will never forget the look on the taxi driver’s face when Bob Doe – one of the great Spitfire aces – got into the back of his car and lit up the latest in a long series of cigarettes.

“You can’t do that in my cab, mate,” said the driver, to which Bob replied, as he puffed away happily: “I’m sure we’re going to have an excellent conversation all about it, young man.” If you’d survived dogfights with Messerschmitts over Kent, then you were maybe forgiven for taking a relaxed attitude to the rules – and indeed your own health – for the rest of your life! But it wasn’t always Benson and Hedges and G&Ts. That generation experienced stress and loss like no other, and its members never received the sort of counselling and support that they would today (although the idea of someone asking Bob Doe to “centre your pain” rather amuses me).

Edith Heap, who battled tears in front of my camera, lived the rest of her life mourning her wartime fiancé, Denis Wissler. When I visited her in Ilkley, West Yorkshire, it was his picture – not that of her ex-husband – that stood by her bed. And she still treasured her old WAAF uniform, inside which she had sewn his pilot “wings” so that they would press against her heart.

As they got older, some of them did grow disenchanted, looking at modern Britain and wondering if their sacrifices had all been worth it, and asking themselves if today’s teenagers could find the courage and purpose to stand up, as they had done.

It’s not for me to say if they were right or wrong about this, but it’s worth remembering that in the 1930s there were many people who did not think that the “soft and pampered young” of that era could stand the test of war – and yet they did.

Those of you lucky enough to travel through Normandy in May will embark on an unforgettable journey of discovery, visiting iconic locations where history unfolded – including Sword and Gold Beaches, where thousands of British troops landed on D-Day in perhaps the most extraordinary, important operation of the entire war.

You’ll be walking in the footsteps of heroes, quite literally.

Paul Reed, Leger’s head battlefield guide, who will be leading the Express tour, said: “It’s an incredible experience to stand at the Gondrée Café, the first liberated building in France in 1944, knowing it echoed to the sound of gunfire in the early hours of D-Day, witnessed the first battle casualties, and is still owned by the same family 80 years later.

“A good battlefield tour enables you to reach out and touch history – the bullet marks on the original Pegasus Bridge, the smooth metal of the guns that tried to defeat the Allied landings, the sand of the beaches running through your fingers that was once drenched in blood, and the stillness of the war cemeteries where the heroes of D-Day rest. Here is a connection to history like no other.

“As you walk among the Airborne graves at Ranville, you get a sense of the men who came to liberate Europe in 1944 – some as young as 16, one buried with his dog, Glenn; a poet who fought in the Western Desert; and a Commando officer named after an uncle killed in the First World War.

“Here, the pathways of history and sacrifice cross strongly. Remembering VE Day in Normandy will give our tour a unique way to honour all those men and women who stood up for a righteous cause and defeated Nazi Germany in 1945 – the ‘Great Generation’ and one whose memory must live on beyond their years.”

You’ll also see where D-Day’s only Victoria Cross was won by Sergeant Stan Hollis of the Green Howards, and the remains of the German bunkers he charged that day.

But for all of the places that you will visit, I feel certain that the one thing that will linger longest in your memory is the experience of seeing them alongside Ken Cooke, who landed at Gold Beach as an 18-year-old and later fought his way into Germany. And if he does decide to light up a Benson or two, please be forgiving!

• Phil Craig’s new book, 1945: The Reckoning, is published by Hodder priced at £25 on April 24

Ken Cooke will share his wartime experiences:

Special guest on the Express/Leger Battlefield Tours VE Day coach tour will be Normandy veteran Ken Cooke. The 99-year-old was an 18-year-old conscript when he went from working in a Royal Ordnance Factory to arriving on the D-Day beaches as an infantryman with 7th Battalion, the Green Howards.

Ken landed with British forces on Gold Beach, the five-mile stretch between La Rivière and Longuessur-Mer. His craft stopped a couple of feet from the sand at 7.45am. “I stepped into about six inches of water. There were rockets going over my head,” he recalled. “There were bullets buzzing about but I wasn’t bothered about that. The only way I can explain it, it was like I stepped in a puddle. That was how I felt. I wasn’t bothered by the bullets – I was worried about my socks.” Ken, from York, was seriously injured on July 4 and evacuated back to Britain. He later rejoined British forces and fought along the Rhine and into Germany.

He recalls: “We were going along this road, by a hedgerow. We knelt down to have a rest and I don’t know whether it was an 88mm shell that had come over and hit a tree or an air burst where a shell explodes in the air. But I heard shouting and screaming and I felt something in my back and my legs.”

After the war, Ken worked at the confectionery giant Rowntree’s in York, where he met his wife, Joan, then retired more than four decades later. His son Stephen says: “Dad’s been back many times and it’s always special, but sadly there are fewer and fewer veterans left.”