Michael Lynch's Journey from Normandy to the Rhine and onto Japan

Michael was an NCO in the British Army. He started out driving trucks but was trained to drive to a DUKW. He said his training for D-Day was intense and repetitive and that somehow the army found a beach that closely resembled SWORD beach where he went ashore. He may have participated in a FORTITUDE deception operation. The DUKWs were ostentatiously driven north and then at their destination taken into a shed, hidden, and taken south again almost immediately. Michael didn't go ashore in the first wave but later on in the morning once the beach was secured; he took supplies ashore and took Wehrmacht PoWs back to the ships (although I can't be sure about that).

As his unit moved forward through France they were at one point sent forward to a gap in the line. Michael and his vehicles arrived on some high ground and, after checking, discovered German AFV - he said Tigers although that is unlikely. At this point Michael realised his men could offer no useful resistance and quietly withdrew; nobody was any the wiser. Moving through France one of his men accidently killed a French civilian. The soldier was enormously distressed but Michael reassured him it was just one of those countless wartime incidents. Michael played a minor role in Operation Market Garden, probably bringing out troops from Oosterbeek. He claimed to have crossed the Nijmegen bridge under fire but this is almost certainly untrue. He almost certainly participated in Operations PLUNDER and VARSITY. He described crossing a fast-flowing river with great difficulty, the stern of the vehicle being pushed downstream making landing at a particular spot well nigh impossible (I've driven a DUKW, they are a challenge).

He described entering Germany and being taken aback by the level of destruction he witnessed. He said all he saw were starving women, children, and old men. After VE Day he was shipped out to India to train for the invasion of Japan. He described an officer telling the troops twice that the US had dropped one bomb on a city and obliterated it completely, nobody believed him. Michael was relieved when he was not required to invade Japan.