Page 130 - The Light Dragoon 2024

Mr L A Burn
Died 5 December 2023
Served 1942 – 1947
In the grey dawn of D-Day, June 6, 1944, 20-year-old Trooper Lawrence Burn’s 35-tonne DD (duplex-drive)
Sherman tank, its canvas flotation screen raised, edged down the ramp of the landing craft into the Channel. The tank settled low in the water — just 3ft of freeboard — the driver engaged the two propellers driven by off-takes from the rear sprockets, and headed for Sword Beach, the easternmost of the Normandy landing zones 5,000 yards away.
The idea of the “DD” was to get ashore so low in the water as to be unnoticeable or else to look like a small boat, and put down suppressive fire so that the infantry could assault directly from their landing craft and get across the open beach into cover. Steering was by tiller operated by the tank commander standing on the turret, in Burn’s tank Lieutenant Derek Spencer. On the engine deck behind Spencer, unable to see over the screen, were the other three members of the crew: Burn (the gunner), the loader/radio operator, and the co-driver/hull machinegunner, Burn’s adoptive elder brother Peter.
They had had a rough crossing from Portsmouth. The storm that had delayed the landings for 24 hours had barely past, the wind still force 5. All five men had thrown up at least once into a bucket hung on the back of the tank (the planners had thought of everything). “It wouldn’t have bothered me whether the thing had sunk or not, I was so seasick,” Burn recalled.
Their Sherman and the other 39 of the 13th/18th Royal Hussars’ (13/18H) two DD squadrons had a 50-minute swim ahead of them to “touch down” at H-Hour minus seven and a half minutes — H Hour being the time the assaulting infantry would land. The squadron leader, Major Derek Wormald, steering his own tank, reported afterwards that on launching he “could see that we were approximately opposite the church in Lion-sur-Mer and that our beach was about 45 degrees to our port bow. No bombing had started on the beach and the houses were clearly visible.”
All that Burn could hope for was that the Germans did not see them, that the swell rose no higher, and that no landing craft ran into them. They wore the Davis submarine escape apparatus and “Mae West” life jackets, and they had an inflatable dinghy, but Burn could not swim.
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Five hundred yards out, all but Spencer climbed inside to prepare for “touchdown”.
The loader fed a 75mm HE round into the breach in anticipation. Two hundred yards on, as the tracks made contact with the beach some 300 yards below high-water mark, the Germans opened fire. Spencer guided the driver by intercom another 50 yards, managing to avoid the steel obstacles with their Teller anti-tank mines, until the water was shallow enough to break the pneumatic struts to drop the screen, and Burn was at last able to see his targets. He recalled the sudden realisation that “there was nothing and no one in front of us but Germans”.
Burn in 1947, the year of his discharge and brief return to working at Burton’s
Burn’s tank put down as much fire as it could until the men of the South Lancashire Regiment assaulting that sector of Sword Beach made it to the seawall, and then prepared to advance. However, they had landed on a rising tide, water had now flooded the engine compartment and the engine would not restart. Spencer called for his troop sergeant to back his tank to the front of theirs so that they could cross-load the machineguns and ammunition and take the crew up the beach. Meanwhile, Burn traversed and elevated his 75mm and fired off all the HE ammunition inland.
Although the beach was now under consid- erable fire from artillery and mortars, they managed to make it to the sand dunes unscathed, Burn’s brother even salvaging “all his tins of cigarettes”. Remarkably, they were quick to get a replacement Sherman and rejoined the action towards midday. That night they bivouacked in Hermanville- sur-Mer just a mile inland, and “slept out by the side of our tanks, but then we were stonked. So I immediately went under the tank and ever after that I always slept in the tank.” Burn had nicknamed his tank “Icanhopit”, so the replacement was “IcanhopitII”. By the end of the war, he was in “IcanhopitIV”.
Lawrence “Laurie” Andrew Burn was born in a home for unmarried mothers in Bradford in 1924, and adopted by an aunt and uncle informally, for there was no legal provision for adoption until 1926. After primary school he attended Harrogate Technical College before becoming a salesman at Montague Burton’s, the “Tailors of Taste”.
When war broke out he joined the Home Guard as soon as he was old enough, and then in 1942, when his brother came home one day and said he had enlisted, went out the next day and enlisted too. His brother had met some hussars in the dance hall in Harrogate who were encamped at nearby Skipton, the regiment having been sent to Yorkshire to re-form and re-equip after Dunkirk. The brothers thought they would therefore be doing their training near home. Instead they were sent to the Royal
Armoured Corps centre at Bovington in Dorset.
Burn, 5ft 10in tall, slim, fit and thoughtful, took to both driver and gunnery training well, but being an observant Methodist, objected to his exclusion from worship: “The Catholics were allowed to go at 8am on a Sunday, and the C of E at 10am, but the ‘odds and sods’, as they called us, were given duties to do, such as scrubbing the wooden floors. Sergeant Hayter gave us a piece of soap and a brush and said, ‘Get on with it,’ you know. I said, ‘Excuse me, sergeant, we’re not prisoners.’ He said, ‘Well you bloody well will be soon if you don’t get on with that.’ So we got that changed, so the ‘odds and sods’ could go to worship.”
After their six months’ training the brothers were posted back to 13/18H, who by this stage had been designated a “water assault regiment” and moved to Wickham Market in Suffolk for flotation training with Valentine tanks on Fritton Lake. Conversion training on the Sherman followed, after which the crews went to Gosport in Hampshire for familiarisation with the Davis apparatus: “There was a big water tank for escape training. We were dressed in denim and we had to get inside the empty tank and climb about 20ft down a ladder and into a Sherman tank at the bottom. Once inside we had to sit in our positions and then the water was poured in. We had to wait till it was up to our chins and then put on a nose clip and turn on the oxygen. At that point divers would glide down from the top of the tank, tap us on the shoulder and that was our cue to get out of the tank and to make our way to the surface. Some of the lads forgot to take their nose clips off and were going red in the face. That was quite an experience, because I couldn’t swim.”
AM
LADIES
Throughout the year HHQ were informed of the following were lost to the Regimental family and Association.
Mrs Maureen Colvin
Died 4 March 2023 aged 88.
Widow of Mr F H Colvin who served 13/18 H 1947 – 1969
Mrs Cherry Howard
Died 1 April 2023 aged 86.
Widow of Mr J R L Howard who served 13/18 H 1946 – 1978.
Mrs Andrea Hudson
Died 20 June 2023 aged 55.
Wife of Mr N Hudson who served 13/18 H & LD 1984 – 2001.
The Regimental Journal of The Light Dragoons
128