Dan Snow's History Hit - The Veteran Searching for his D-Day Shipwreck

Episode Date: June 5, 2022

On June 6, 1944, D-Day, Patrick Thomas, a young Royal Navy telegraphist, boarded the craft in Portsmouth. The boat was part of the first wave on Sword Beach, covering communications for land battles while providing defence from enemy ships and torpedoes. On June 25, it was hit by an acoustic mine and almost all of the men on board were trapped inside. Knocked unconscious, Patrick awoke in the water in time to see his friends and the craft sink. Unsure exactly where the vessel went down, the families of the deceased had never had a place to honour the fallen.Then, in Normandy in 2015, Patrick met a young archaeologist called John Henry Phillips and the pair struck up a close friendship. Moved by Patrick’s story, John embarked on an extraordinary mission to find the landing craft that sank on D-Day and enable Patrick and the families to finally lay the memories of their loved ones to rest. But, as with any shipwreck, locating it wouldn’t be easy.Produced by Mariana Des ForgesMixed and Mastered by Dougal PatmoreArchive courtesy of BBC and ‘No Roses on a Sailor’s Grave,’ distributed by Go Button Media.If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download the History Hit app please go to the Android or Apple store.

This is the BBC Home Service. Here is a special bulletin read by John Snagg. D-Day has come. Early this morning the Allies began the assault on the northwestern face of Hitler's European fortress. Under the command of General Eisenhower, Allied naval forces supported by strong air forces began landing Allied armies this morning on the northern coast of France. On the morning of the 6th of June 1944, families across Britain sat in their living rooms around the wireless listening to this announcement from the BBC. Journalists embedded on the front lines had given hints of paratroopers landing in France

through the early morning, but any doubts about the great Allied invasion dissipated with that 9.32am broadcast from John Snagg. It was probably the most significant broadcast of the Second World War, because it marked, whether it was realised at the time or not, the turning point,

the beginning of the end. D-Day was the first day of the Normandy invasion by British, Canadian, American and other allied forces to liberate Western Europe from the grip of Nazi occupation. It would be the largest and most ambitious amphibious invasion in the history of warfare, codenamed Operation Overlord. Asian history of warfare, codenamed Operation Overlord. May 1944 initially was the chosen month for the launch of the operation, but difficulties in assembling the landing craft forced postponement until June. General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the American supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force, had chosen June the 5th as an unalterable date for the assault. chosen June the 5th as an unalterable date for the assault. As the day approached, bad weather set in and he altered it, reluctantly calling a 24-hour postponement. As the weather broke on the 5th,

Eisenhower gave the command to go. Immediately, an armada of 3,000 landing craft and an equal number of naval vessels, some carrying men and supplies, others designed to bombard the coast, began closing in on the Normandy coast. That night 822 aircraft carrying parachutists or towing gliders roared overhead to the landing zones just beyond the beaches. They were just a fraction of the air armada of 13,000 aircraft that would support operations on D-Day. The coast of Normandy and France was divided into five beaches, codenamed Omaha, Utah, Gold, Juneau and Sword. Every unit that landed had a very clear target and a job to do once they'd got ashore.

19-year-old Patrick Thomas, a Royal Navy radio operator, who on the 6th of June 1944 was aboard a landing craft like thousands of other soldiers, preparing for a day that would change the course of history. His landing craft, LCH 185, arrived at Sword Beach at 7.25am delivering the first wave of Royal Marine commandos. Through the day his craft went back and forward delivering infantry onto the French coast. In the weeks that followed Patrick remained on the landing craft delivering soldiers across the channel. Eventually his vessel moved to what they called the Trout Line, a defensive line of landing craft designed to stop German surface vessels,

like their legendary E-boats or human torpedoes, from breaking through and attacking the Allied naval effort. But on the 25th of June 1944, Patrick's landing craft struck an acoustic mine. Patrick was one of only a handful of survivors. His boat went down, with most of them trapped on board. Friends and comrades. The trauma of the experience never left Patrick in the decades after the war. Then in 2015, Patrick met a young archaeologist called John Henry Phillips, who offered a once in aetime opportunity.

Inspired by their unexpected bond, John promised Patrick they'd search for the shipwreck of his landing craft that sunk off the coast of Normandy in those history-defining days of 1944. So, this is our anniversary episode of Dan Snow's History Hit, and this year we're bringing you an emotional story of a devastating war, an unlikely life-changing friendship, and a quest to honour a wartime home and a family lost over 75 years ago. Enjoy. John, how did you first meet Patrick? I met Patrick when I volunteered on a charity project that took D-Day veterans back to Normandy.

And when I got to France, I was left off the rooming list of the project and Patrick had a spare bed in his little hotel suite. So I sheepishly knocked on the door and said, can I please come and stay? And he kindly took me in and yeah, kickstarted this whole adventure. Patrick, do you remember young John knocking on your door? He was a bit different in those days but we all change don't we? We do. He got nowhere to live you see so he came knocking on the door so yes so he could stay the night that's right wasn't it the night that's right yeah that's right yeah

was he a good roommate yes he was all right and then you became friends yeah yeah we spent uh the week together going to all the parades and the cemeteries and um went to Lay a wreath at his friend who died in the sinking of his ship his grave And yeah, we just had a great time stayed in touch And we met up again a year later for the commemorations again. Did you enjoy going to the commemorations? Oh Yes, but I don't go now. I'm Oh yes, but I don't go now. I'm going on 98. Tell me how you came to volunteer to join the Navy.

In pre-war years, I had an older sister and two other brothers. There were three boys. And we knew with the rise of Hitler and other dictators that war was going to happen. And of course my mother realised this and she had three sons and she knew those three sons would be at war in a very short time. war in a very short time and of course on these I think it was a third of September 1939 we declared war on Germany and of course then they immediately started to bombers my brother had already volunteered. My oldest brother for the army, my younger brother,

he joined as a regular. He was shot through the mouth driving a tank. And of course I volunteered. I wouldn't want to have served in peacetime, only in the war years. How old were you?

I was 17 initially. I volunteered in 1941. I wrote to Stone in Staffordshire. I was living in Shropshire. And they said to wait until I got the call-up papers. And I did. I had the medical for the Royal Navy. And that's how I started my career off.

And because I was into wireless telegraphy, I entered as a telegraphist. So when DJ occurred, I'd been on constant wireless watch for a long time. I went on the upper deck and I saw us approaching Normandy, the beach. And I remember clearly at one point the beach was completely blacked out and the noise was tremendous. blacked out and the noise was tremendous. So we put these marine commandos ashore and we joined what was known as I think the pipeline guarding our eastern flank from the Germans coming in.

Can you tell me more about the landing craft you were on? Can you tell me more about the landing craft you were on? What I saw was a shoreline and these beautiful houses. Everything was peaceful and I thought what lovely houses. And then of course as we went to the beach then everything opened up and I think there were about five or seven thousand ships on a fifty mile front stretching from east to west and then and when everything opened up, it was something that nobody will ever witness again. And the noise was terrific. Were you in the first wave? Yes, we were in the first wave, 6.30 in the morning.

A lot of planning went into it, of course. Was there lots of German fire? A lot of planning went into it, of course. Was there lots of German fire? The Germans replied, I remember the Rattler machine gun bullets on the hull of the craft. I can't remember much about what the Germans were doing, but I saw our troops land and I admired them. And these funnies, the tanks with big chains on them, exploding mines on the beach.

And of course, I saw the initial landing, I was on the upper deck, I saw these flail tanks, and all the action on the beach, on our sector, got to realise it was a 50-mile front and we were on the extreme left on Sword Beach. After the initial landings, we withdrew and we joined the, what do they call it? Trout line. That's right, the trout line, guarding our eastern flank from the Germans coming in. And so that's what we were doing.

They were there for three weeks, and I think on the 25th of June 1944, a mine blew us up. And do you remember hitting the mine? I was knackered. I was so tired. I'd been... I'd had no sleep. I don't know how the soldiers got on, because we'd been working for a long time, watch and watch about. Two hours on, two hours off. So when we moved to the trout line, I got a deck chair out and lay on the fo'c'sle

and fell fast asleep. And of course, the next thing I knew, there was this tremendous explosion, and I was covered in blood and oil from something in my head and she started to turn to port gradually and I realised I couldn't stay on board

but I thought for a second can I take these boots off and I knew I didn't have time I had no choice but to get in the water which I did and of course there were a lot of badly injured men panicking about to die and I managed to get away from the scene and she turned over and there she was upside down I managed to get away

and a McClough and a LCG landing craft gun threw me a line and pulled me inboard but obviously it trapped a lot of people down below. And one incident, a very brave man, there was a hatch.

He went down this chain ladder and when he got down into the wireless office, there were the crew of wireless operators, some dead, some injured some panicking knowing and the companionway door burst open and the sea came rushing in and he managed to get up in time before she turned completely, taking the rest of the crew with her, young men. So I was very fortunate. Did you tell John this story when you were in Normandy with him? Oh yes. A few times. That's right. When you heard this story it must have triggered something in you?

Yeah, it just amazed me when Patrick told me this story that seemingly had kind of been forgotten it kind of been lost and I think that's because most of the crew went down with the landing craft 35 people went down that day and there just seemed to be this sense of just almighty sadness to Patrick's tale. And when did you decide to keep going, pursue it, take more of an interest? About a year later, I'd say. The more we spoke, I used to come down and see Pat and talk to him about Normandy quite often.

And yeah, it just kind of came from that. And then we were in Normandy again a year later and I had this idea to put this memorial up in Leon's tomato which is where Patrick was near on D-Day and then I kind of spiraled into this idea to look for a shipwreck and yeah we went from that why did you want to find the shipwreck it was my respect for my lost shipmates so John what John, what was your plan? You came up with a mad plan. What was it? Yeah, my mad plan was to try and find the wreck

of Patrick's landing craft, LCH 185, because we knew it went down on 25 June somewhere off Normandy. And Patrick, when we'd spoken about it in the past, he thought it would be quite fitting to sort of find the place where his friends ultimately ended up. So I promised Pat I'd try and find the wreck, and I learnt to scuba dive, and then it all just kind of spiralled from there.

Big snowball effect, and yeah. You're listening to Down Snow's History here. We're talking about hunting the lost landing craft of D-Day. More coming up. Hi there. I'm Kate Lister, sex historian and author, and I am the host of Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex, scandal and society, a new podcast from History Hit.

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so i want to hear a bit more about how the underwater archaeology went so we come down to the seafront here at eastbourne we're looking over the channel now over that horizon that's where you donned your uh waterproofs yeah yeah so yeah i uh i learned to dive and i launched a shipwreck expedition and I headed out into the English Channel about five miles off from Lyon-sur-Mer in Normandy. What led you to go from volunteering, hanging out with wonderful people like Patrick to actually leading an expedition to find a ship? A lot of mid-twenties bluster, I think. A lot of energy and it's sort of a mad idea to try and do this thing for my friend to bring a bit of closure to a old tragedy I suppose. Did he feel that it was unresolved that he really wanted to find the shipwreck? Yeah there was definitely this sense that he had always wondered where his friends ended up there was no place to commemorate them only four bodies were ever recovered from the shipwreck itself so I think he really welcomed the idea of having that exact spot where he knew he could go over the wreck and lay a reef let's see and where did you even start you weren't a

diver where did you start no yeah i had to learn to dive which was um quite a strange sensation i learned to dive in a quarry in leicester in the freezing cold and then from that i got a dive team together and went to Normandy. And funding as well, you're being very modest, but I mean, it's quite a big operation. Yeah, well, we crowdfunded quite a lot of it. We were very lucky. There was a lot of supporters that wanted to see Patrick

get his closure as well. And that really did a lot of good for us. And like today, I mean, this is allegedly a summer's day and we're down here. It's pretty grim. It's very, very windy. There's a swell running. Normandy's not an easy place to conduct amphibious operations. No, no and it wasn't an easy place to dive especially when I'd barely done any

diving at all I think the dive team were a bit worried about that. Yeah it was crazy I had five days to do it and a storm brought my dives down to just the one single dive to go down to this wreck. Yeah, it was very much down to the wire. Come into the void and use the wind as a break. You'll see that the rise up represents the target. It has jumped up from... that's the highest point we've seen so far. We were desperate to get in the water and go down, dive it, see what we could see. It was going to be a disaster if we hadn't found anything.

Ready? Go! So you'd used sonar to build up a picture of where there might be points of interest and you went and did some proving dives on that yeah so we were lucky we had um a team who'd done their own sonar expedition a few years before and they had to kind of map the whole of the normandy coastline and they were able to give us some targets and one of them looked to be quite a good fit for the wreck we were looking for but the only way you can ever find that stuff out for real is to go down there and actually see it for yourself and take the measurements and do the archaeology and so you overcame the bureaucracy the weather Anything to the boats is always a nightmare, but you actually managed to get in the water

So what do you see when you're done? It was amazing I went down there the sensation was instantly different because I'd only ever dived in a quarry It sounds silly, but just going diagonally down a rope Oh, you know the current pulling it away. That from the start was crazy and then yeah it got down there and the wreck was in an absolutely terrible way, both from the mine itself that had blown it up and also from the scrapping of the wrecks that happened afterwards. Oh really? Other salvages have been down there? Yeah, yeah over the decades since so it was in a really bad condition which obviously may do in any sort of archaeological surveying quite hard but there was sort of a beauty to it in a way because there was a lot

of life down there there was a lot of fish down there it was sort of a living wreck in that sense and that was quite surreal i suppose it was uh it was amazing yeah what did that survey tell you was it was it a landing craft it was definitely a landing craft yeah yeah it was definitely landing craft that been there on d-day taking part in the trout line afterwards and like Patrick said it turned over so that it very much looked to be the right landing craft. And so Patrick was thrilled by this was he? Yeah he was really thrilled and when I came back up and was able to pat him on the shoulder and say I went down there Pat you know I went down there on behalf of you and we've been down to the bottom of the seabed to bring the story to a close he was totally overcome with emotion in a way that he'd been emotional throughout the search but this was a different

sort of emotion it was almost like kind of lost the oxygen in him you know he was like overcome with emotion had to actually walk off for the first time john John. I did it. You've done, had to get up with it. Yeah, good, good. Good though, good though. I was quite taken aback by how much like a boat it actually is, you know, you can still travel down it. It's big. The images don't really do justice to how big it is.

It is big down there. It's peaceful, it's peaceful down there. Never, I never thought the shortest thing would ever happen, not to me. Do you feel like us being here and finding the target and diving it and you being here, is that any sense of a full circle? It is in that sense. I never thought I would react like this. It's a lot to take in eh? And he was able to lay that reef which is very important to him. Yeah it was very

important and we were really lucky because the local lifeboat crew came down with this huge orange lifeboat, took Pat out, spent a lot of time kind of going back and forth making sure that we were right over the top of this wreck and then Patrick was able to go to the water and lay a reef over the edge and he was able to read the poem the no roses on the sailor's grave poem that he'd not been able to read the day before because he was overcome with emotion and yeah I laid some roses and it was all a very wonderful moment so mission accomplished yeah well yeah it seemed it at the time

so what happened next So what happened next? So what happened next, well, I also, I promised to build Patrick a memorial. So then I spent a while doing that. We unveiled a memorial in Lyon-sur-Mer. And some veterans came and this beautiful permanent commemoration to his true on the shore. And then in the months that passed, we were able to do more archaeological investigation of the data that we brought back and it while it was a landing craft it was a landing craft gun rather than a landing craft headquarters which was Patrick's craft so as it turned out it wasn't Patrick's wreck but that didn't seem to matter to Pat I must say for him the closure had already

happened people kind of taking an interest in that story bringing in the families we found the brother of Jack Barringer the friend that he lost on the day he came to the memorial unveiling and there was definitely a sense that just being remembered was almost finding the wreck and I know that sounds sort of uh well you found it you found a D-Day wreck yeah well we identified a D-Day wreck yeah and, well, we identified a D-Day wreck, yeah. And that was, I mean, that was amazing. It added something to the archaeological record, absolutely. I can see it had been very moving for him. Have you identified the number of the wreck you did find?

Well, it was between three. There was a lot of wrecks that went down in that area, obviously. And it was between three. The one that seemed most likely was called LCG 1062. I mean, like I say, the wreck's down there in such bad condition. So it's the most likely scenario. It was called LCG 1062. I mean, like I say, the wrecks down there is such bad condition. So it's the most likely scenario, but. You became really good mates with someone who's much, much older than you.

What was that experience like? It was strange. We just got on so well. And I think my own granddad had died a couple of years before and he was a World War II veteran. The more time has passed since the search, I sort of realized I was kind of like making up for that lost time, you know,

not asking my own granddad enough. And I sort of really enjoyed that opportunity to sit with a guy who'd taken part in such an amazing moment in history. You know, the first wave at Salt Beach and to be able to sit with him over a cup of tea in the afternoon and just hear his stories was something that I'd neglected to do myself in my own life. Perhaps that's why we got on so well, I'm not sure. He was lit up when you walked into the room. It's amazing, so he's obviously incredibly fond of you. Have you been in touch with him during lockdown? Yeah, we FaceTime.

He's quite good at that sort of thing. Normally the phone is a little bit too close to his face, so you kind of get a view of his nose. We do chat and he remembers the shipwreck search and he recalls it fondly. It's nice, it's nice to know that, you know, that's what he's been thinking about during such hard times lately.

Since finding a young person like you could make such a big exhibition come together, what's next? Have you got other plans? Well, people have brought me different ideas to look for different things, but I'm well aware of how much work went into looking for the wreck of LCH 185. So at the moment I've been concentrating on doing a Romany archaeology in the New Forest, uncovering those tales that's a forgotten part of English history, which has been really nice and a nice calm thing to do after. A little bit steady. Yeah, yeah. What about going back out to look at those D-Day wrecks and maybe even identify which

one might be Patrick's? Yeah, I mean, I'm sure I could be tempted out to do it again. I mean, if you want to get your dry suit on, Dan, we'll get down there and give it another go. Unfortunately, I can feel myself getting tempted. Against my better judgement. It grips you doesn't it? It grips you. After all these years, 74, very nearly, and they brought it all to the surface now I think, I'm so fiddly-dee. And... Ah, there. Anyway, I'm so pleased you've done this. And it's great to think that all you people have taken such an interest.

I never thought I it take me. Thanks for listening, everybody. That was John Henry Phillips and Patrick Thomas. John's book about their story is called The Search. You can watch a documentary in which I interview both these two wonderful gentlemen

and we feature lots of footage from john's search for the ship on history hit tv you simply follow the link in the notes of this podcast you head over to history at tv and you can watch it all you get first two weeks for free so go and check it all out thanks for listening Thank you. you