D-Day 80th anniversary special - by Robin Scott-Elliot

Bob Johns paused on the stairs and cocked his head to one side. He could hear his father’s snores. He smiled to himself and stepped carefully down into the hall of 129 Jervis Road, the small, terraced house in Portsmouth where he’d spent the first 14 years of his life.

Outside, he pulled the front door quietly shut behind him and sat on the steps to put his shoes on before plunging his hands into his pockets, turning up his jacket collar and hurrying off past the Royal Navy dockyards. Did he look back? If he did it would have been the last time Bob Johns ever saw home.

Bob Johns

Fast forward a couple of years, to the early hours of 6 June 1944 and Bob Johns was taking a deep breath before leaping into the night sky above Normandy, one of the first… I was going to say men to take part in D-day but Bob Johns was not a man, he was a boy. Bob Johns was 16, and he shouldn’t have been there.

His story is one of so many found within the history of Operation Overlord, the Allied invasion of Europe 80 years ago, the day of days for so many young men and the end of days for plenty among them.

I have read and written plenty about D-day – including a podcast, Wars That Shaped The World – and been interested in it since I was a teenager and persuaded my parents to drive us from our home in Belgium so I could go and walk the ground, see Pegasus Bridge, Omaha beach, St Mere Eglise and all the other places that fill the history books.

Yet for all that I only came across the story of Bob Johns this week, stumbled over it while looking up something else. It’s why history fascinates me – there is always something new to learn, to discover to understand. History is always alive.

I can’t remember if we stopped in Ranville on that teenage trip or subsequent visits. Ranville, a small Norman village, occupies a footnote in history – it was the first village or town in France to be liberated. Among the men of the 6th Airborne Division who drove the Germans out at 2.30am was the boy Bob.

He's still there in Ranville, laid to rest forever in the war cemetery outside the village. On his white marble tombstone, the curved top matching all the other 2,417 graves, is carved the winged badge of the Parachute Regiment, the date of his death and his age, 16. It’s an age that places him exactly between my two daughters.

Bob's grave

There is an inscription on it, requested by his parents, Henry and Daisy… ‘He died as he lived, fearlessly.’

He was the second of Henry and Daisy’s five children to be killed in the war. His eldest brother, William, had been lost at sea in 1940 when his submarine was sunk in the Atlantic.

Perhaps that’s where the impulse came from for Bob to run off and join the army. When he turned up at the recruiting office, the sergeant must have had his suspicions, although Bob was tall and broad for his age – but nevertheless his age was only 14. The sergeant looked the other way and Bob was in.

By January 1944 he had sailed through the parachute training school. “He loved being a paratrooper,” his commanding officer, Jack Watson, was to recall after the war. “He was a very big chap and very capable. He was always ready to help people and really was fearless.”

He jumped into Normandy not long after the clock had hurried past midnight on 6 June to signal the beginning of D-day. Bob and his company were to spend 11 days on the frontline around Ranville and after a brief break were back in action in the bloody battle for Normandy. Some veterans have described this as the time of their lives, and from what we know of Bob this does sound like the time of his young life.

Back home, that was not how his parents saw it. When he’d disappeared, they searched with mounting desperation for their son. Not a single friend knew where he’d gone, or if they did they didn’t let on. The local recruitment office said they’d not seen him (he must have joined up away from Portsmouth). Henry and Daisy filled an ‘Under-age enlistment’ form and waited for the army to send him home to his mum and dad. Except this was not a priority within the armed forces – there was a war on.

At last, the Military Police picked up his trail. He was tracked down to his unit, the 13th (South Lancs) battalion of the Parachute regiment. Two MPs were dispatched across the Channel to find Bob – he was two young to fight. He should not be in Normandy.

On 23 July 1944, Bob was two days from turning 17. He’d no idea the net was closing in on him. He had a war to fight, a war he’d been fighting for six weeks. His platoon was dug in at the Le Mesnil crossroads. At 10am firing broke out. This is how his battalion’s war diary recorded what happened.

“At 1140hrs an OR [other rank] of the Anti-Rank Platoon was shot dead by a sniper from the area 146725. In retaliation we attacked [the sniper’s position] with mortars and PIATs at 1400hrs.”

That was it – the OR was Bob Johns, shot dead by a German sniper. Coincidentally, I read of the death of my great uncle Ronnie in the First World War in the same way; a brief sentence in a war diary that ends with him being shot by a sniper.

A few days later the two MPs arrived in Normandy with orders to take Bob Johns home to his mum and dad. They were too late. Instead of their son Harry and Daisy received a telegram… their boy Bob was dead for king and country, aged 16.

Robin Scott-Elliot has been a sports journalist for 25 years with the BBC, ITV, the Sunday Times, the Independent and the ‘i’, covering every sport you can think of and a few you probably can’t. He threw that all away to move home to Scotland and chase his dream of writing books instead of football reports. Once there his daughters persuaded him to write a story for them and that is how his career as a children's author began. Finding Treasure Island is his latest book and is published by Cranachan.

Olympics - by Robin Scott-Elliot

It took the time you have spent reading these words, and probably the rest of this sentence as well for my favourite ever Olympic moment to happen. Actually, probably these as well… I need enough to cover 9.63 seconds.

That was the blink of an eye Usain Bolt needed to win the men’s 100m gold on a warm, raucous July evening in London in 2012. I was sitting up in the media seats, just above the finish line. I’ve watched and written about sport for 25 years, all around the world, but this was the night of nights because I love the Olympic Games.

I’m fortunate enough to have been to three, the first in Sydney in 2000. But having it in London was special – I could walk to the stadium from my house. Imagine walking from your house to see the fastest man the world has ever seen win the greatest event of the Olympic Games! When I was growing-up I loved watching the Olympics, and no event more than the one to determine the fastest person on the planet. In the moments before the starting gun fired, the hairs on the back of my neck would stand up when the commentator said sotto voce, as they always did, “the final of the men’s 100m…”

My view as Usain Bolt won 100m gold in London

(Copyright Robin Scott-Elliot)

There’s no Usain Bolt anymore – I’d have him as the greatest sports person I’ve ever seen – but there are, of course, still the Olympics and there is plenty to look forward to in Paris from 26 July. The opening ceremony will see each country float down the Seine on a flotilla of boats from Albania to Zimbabwe, the A to Z of the world (although thankfully there will be no R for Russia).

Every Games has a story of its own. There will be heroes and villains – every good story needs a good villain – there will be (sporting) tragedies and improbable triumphs all played out to the backdrop of one of the world’s great cities.

The countdown proper has begun to Paris 2024 with the arrival of the Olympic torch in France this week. This will be the third time Paris has hosted the Olympics yet it’s still 100 years since the world’s best athletes last gathered in the French capital. In 1924, only 135 of them were women out of more than 3,000. This summer there will be around 10,500 athletes in all, half of them women – the first 50/50 split in Olympic history.

Modern Olympic history begins in 1896 with the first Games in Athens, held there because the ancient games had been born in Greece. The very first is believed to have taken place in 776BC.

Paris’s first Games came in 1900 when events such as underwater swimming – take a deep breath and off you go! – cricket and pigeon shooting… with live (soon to be dead) pigeons.

The London 2012 stadium

(Copyright Robin Scott-Elliot)

The 1924 Olympics in Paris became famous in Britain as the ‘Chariots of Fire’ Games, Eric Liddell and Harold Abrahams winning gold medals. There was also gold in the pool for the American Gertrude Ederle who a year later was to become the first woman to swim the Channel. The 1924 US Olympics team were given a ticker-tape parade in New York for topping the medal table; Ederle received one all of her own for swimming the Channel for which an estimated two million people turned out.

Olympic heroes last through the ages, and often mean something beyond their sport… Jesse Owens winning four golds in Berlin in 1936, Fanny Blankers Coen winning four of her own in London in 1948, 14-year-old Nadia Comaneci producing the perfect 10 in Montreal in 1976.

There has too always been a dark side to the sport; from doping to corruption to protest, such as Tommie Smith and John Carlos with their Black Power salute in 1968. And there’s been real tragedy, the murder of Israeli athletes and coaches and a West German policeman by terrorists in 1972. 

There are, thankfully, so many uplifting stories to find in 128 years of modern Olympic history, so many well-I-never tales. Here’s one from the last time the Games were in Paris. Johnny Weissmuller was born in what is now Romania and arrived on Ellis Island in his mother’s arms before he turned one. After catching polio as a child his doctor advised his parents to take him swimming to aid his recovery. He was a natural – by the time he arrived in Paris he was already a world record holder. He won three gold medals, and a bronze in water polo, and added two more in Amsterdam four years later. After he hung up his trunks, Weissmuller switched to acting and was cast as Tarzan – he was to star in a dozen Tarzan movies (in between five marriages) and become one of the best-known actors in the world. He’s remembered today as a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and features on the album cover of The Beatles’ Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

In Sydney for the 2000 Olympics

(Copyright Robin Scott-Elliot)

Who will be the stories of this Paris Games? Let me give you a couple of names to look out for, one British – Sky Brown, who turns 16 just before the Games. She’s a world champion skateboarder and could turn her bronze in Tokyo into gold in Paris. And my other one to watch is Summer McIntosh. She’s from Canada, she’s 17 and she could win as many golds as Tarzan himself.

Robin Scott-Elliot has been a sports journalist for 25 years with the BBC, ITV, the Sunday Times, the Independent and the ‘i’, covering every sport you can think of and a few you probably can’t. He threw that all away to move home to Scotland and chase his dream of writing books instead of football reports. Once there his daughters persuaded him to write a story for them and that is how his career as a children's author began. Finding Treasure Island is his latest book and is published by Cranachan.

My family’s tragic band of brothers - by Robin Scott-Elliot

 

History was my favourite subject at school and it still fascinates me today – I’ve always got a pile of history books next to my bed (my favourite place to read!). What interests me most about history is not the big picture, the great canvas that shows the rise and fall of empires and kings and queens, but the all the small portraits of the people who make up history. I want to know about those in the frontline, the led not the leaders and that’s why I have a fascination with family history.

This is what got me into history in the first place – my family story. Everyone will have something in their family history worth sharing. I help put together a podcast (We Have Ways Family Stories) in which listeners send in stories of their relatives from the Second World War. Hundreds were sent in. These range from tales of brave men and women doing incredible things… to those whose battle was just to stay alive… to those whose part in history almost makes you laugh.

One listener told of a relative who worked at a top-secret weapons factory. The roof was covered in grass to make it look like a field with a few wooden cows and sheep scattered around. This person’s job was to climb up on to the roof each morning and move the cows and sheep around in case the Germans realised they were always in the same place.

So, everyone’s family has a story but you have to go out and look for it. That’s what I did with mine and it’s one of the main reasons I became obsessed with history.

Bertie Anderson

I’ve an old photograph hanging in my house of my great-granddad, WH Anderson, known as Bertie. It’s been handed down the family and I grew up hearing stories of Bertie and his three brothers, Ronnie, Charlie and Teddie. They were all killed in the First World War and so I decided I wanted to write their story so we would have a way of always remembering them and their short lives.

The Anderson brothers

This is what I found out…

When war began in the hot summer of 1914, Charlie Anderson, a lieutenant in the Highland Light Infantry, wrote home that he “was so glad we will all be in this one together.” Charlie, like many Britons and in particular British soldiers, was excited at the thought of going to war. He pictured marching off to fight the Germans with his three brothers at his side. But by the time his brothers arrived in France, Charlie was already dead.

Charlie’s war lasted eight days. He went into the trenches on 11 December 1914. On 19 December he took part in an attack on the German lines and was never seen again. His body was never found. His parents, Nora and Willie, were told he was missing, but that didn’t mean he was dead. They had to wait seven terrible months until it was confirmed Charlie was gone forever.

By then Ronnie was at the front. He joined Charlie’s battalion, determined to ‘do his bit’, as people at the time used to say.

He lasted longer than Charlie, but not by long. In October 1915, Ronnie, a tall man with long legs, didn’t notice he’d stopped by a place in the trench which was not as deep as the rest. He was shot by a sniper.

What must this have been like for the two remaining brothers, Bertie and Teddie? What about Nora and Willie? Two of their children gone, the remaining two now at the front and in daily danger of suffering the same fate. What was it like to live like that for day after day, month after month, year after year?

Teddie Anderson

By March 1918, Teddie was in the Royal Flying Corps – he left school and joined up. The first time he went abroad was to go to war. If you lasted six months at the front as a pilot, you were sent home to be an instructor – most pilots didn’t last that long. Teddie sent long letters home from France. In one he wrote about singing all the way home after surviving a raid on some German observation balloons. I picture him sitting in the cockpit, swaddled in his massive leather coat with its fur collar, scarf flapping in the wind and goggles fixed tight, shouting out his song. I wonder what song it was?

On 16 March 1918, Teddie, now an instructor in Kent, suffered a catastrophic engine failure while on a test flight. His injuries were fatal. “He slipped away to a better place,” the nurse who treated him wrote to Nora.

Nora put a thin black line through 16 on her pocket March calendar. Nine days later she made another mark.

On 21 March, the Germans launched a huge attack, a last bid to win the war. Bertie and his men of the Highland Light Infantry stood in their way. On 25 March he was killed. He’d spent his final day leading his men in attack after attack. He died a hero – later awarded a Victoria Cross. The medal is in the Imperial War Museum along with photographs and the story of him and his brothers. When I go to London, I go and see the medal. It feels like I’m saying hello.

The telegram sent to Bertie's wife, Gertie,
 informing her that he'd been killed

Bertie never knew of the medal, or the fact he would be considered a hero. I wonder what Nora, his mother, made of it. Four children, all gone in the space of four years. How do you cope with that? She made an album about her boys, photographs and letters and newspaper cuttings, everything she had of them. All she had left of them.

I’ve got the album. I’m looking after it until I hand it on to my children and I hope they will hand it on in due course. And that way someone will always remember Nora’s boys, Bertie, Ronnie, Charlie and Teddie.

Robin Scott-Elliot has been a sports journalist for 25 years with the BBC, ITV, the Sunday Times, the Independent and the ‘i’, covering every sport you can think of and a few you probably can’t. He threw that all away to move home to Scotland and chase his dream of writing books instead of football reports. Once there his daughters persuaded him to write a story for them and that is how his career as a children's author began. Finding Treasure Island is his latest book and is published by Cranachan.