It was an honour and a pleasure to recently accompany my 90 year old Grandad, Ken Reynolds, to the D-Day ceremonies which took place in Normandy.At an early age, Grandad signed up for the Local Defence Volunteers (later the Home Guard) in Rushall where he lived as soon as he heard the radio broadcast by  Anthony Eden, then Secretary of State for War, saying the organisation had been created.

Grandad went on to be a bombardier in 53rd Regiment the Royal Artillery. Aged just 20 when he went ashore on an    American landing craft after D-Day with a battery of big guns.

The days and weeks beyond D-Day were a nightmare of sudden ambushes, with the Germans dropping bombs around Grandad. A German 88 shell came straight through one of the nets, straight into the ground. It was about a yard away from them and the troops braced themselves for death.

However, Ordnance Corps came and defused it and took it away. Later Grandad heard that inside the fuse was a little card with a message written in Czech. A slave labourer in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia had deliberately sabotaged the shell in a munitions factory, despite the risk of instant execution had the Germans found out.

Grandad was a leading light in the Normandy Veterans Association and was awarded the Legion D’Honneur at the French Embassy in London in 2004.

June 2014