Sheffield D-Day veteran who did not like to be called a hero dies aged 97

Gordon Drabble, a founder member and president of the Sheffield branch of the Normandy Veterans’ Association which he served for 37 years, passed away at the home in Lodge Moor he shared with wife Vi.

He died just four days short of the 78th anniversary of D-Day – an occasion he commemorated throughout his life with numerous return visits to France.

He was awarded the Legion d’Honneur in 2016 and was made an Honorary Citizen of Thury-Harcourt, the Normandy town his regiment helped to liberate, in 2014.

“You don’t forget some things – the horror of it,” he told The Star in 2009 for the 65th anniversary of D-Day. “You remember the bad times, too well sometimes.”

Gordon was a teenage infantryman when he landed on Gold Beach in Normandy three or four days after D-Day in June 1944.

Two months in he was wounded by shellfire during the Battle of Falaise Gap, and was even torpedoed on the ship sailing him home.

Daughter Margaret, 73, told The Star: “There were plenty of times he could have died in the war, and we always thought he was invincible. But he didn’t talk about any of these things until much later; we didn’t really know any of it as children. When he got older he went into schools and gave talks about his experiences.

“He was a lovely dad; the best. Everybody always says what a gent he was, and he was – he was kind, cheerful, always chatty and smiley, and his grandchildren loved him to bits. He was smiling right until the end.”

Gordon was brought up on Stothard Road in Crookes and worked initially for a cooperage before becoming a civil defence messenger boy at the start of WWII. He volunteered as an 18-year-old in 1942 and was called up in 1943 before being posted to Dover.

“Before D-Day we were stationed in Kent as decoys, with dummy tanks and dummy guns,” he remembered. “We were causing a diversion to make the Germans think we would be going over to Calais. We would get in barges, go out to sea a bit, and come back. It was all a ruse to confuse them, which it did. Even after the first landings on June 6 the Germans still thought D-Day was a diversionary tactic and failed to move their armour.”

Gordon, who by 1944 was a 19-year-old lance corporal with the South Staffordshire Regiment, was in a follow-up unit of soldiers who landed on Gold Beach on D+3 or 4.

“By then the beach had already been taken so we weren’t under attack the way the first wave of infantry had been. Bayeux had also been taken, so we moved up to Caen ready for attack. Even so we had casualties in those early stages, killed by shellfire. At one place I had one of our sergeants killed at the side of me by machine gun fire. He is buried in a cemetery in Fontenay.

“I was wounded in the August. I got a flesh wound in the arm, and was helping two other injured men to a first aid post in an old German bunker when the Germans started shelling again. The top of the bunker was hit and I was injured again in the shoulder into my chest.

“I got to a hospital in Bayeux but could hardly move my arm at all by the time I got to the beach again. And I was on the ship sailing for Portsmouth when it was torpedoed – I was in a cabin at the top and I was thrown from my bunk. I crawled out on deck and was eventually evacuated onto a destroyer which got me home.”

Gordon was demobbed in 1947 after postings around the Middle East, and later enjoyed a long career in sales with Cadbury.

He had two daughters, Margaret and Judith, and four grandchildren, and after the death of his first wife found love again with second wife Vi, now 92. They married in 1993 and shared Vi’s nine grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.

“I feel very lucky to have survived the war,” said Gordon in 2009, “but I don’t like the word heroes. I don’t think it’s apt. Everybody was in it together; you just got on with it. There were times when you were scared but you just kept going. You didn’t want to let anybody down.”