and he s one of them. and it s so important to keep this history really, really. you know, it s important for kids and for everybody to know about the history. on d day, as the allied invasion of northern france began, ralph was the signaller on board one of these a landing craft tank. this is the last surviving lct as they were known. it sits outside the d day story museum in portsmouth. ralph has a vivid memory of climbing down from the bridge when he heard the metallic pinging sound of german snipers bullets hitting the metal of the craft around him. i was going down, you could hear ping, ping, ping. i thought. they re after me, them snipers! and they got german snipers in the houses, in the houses there, so i dropped and threw myself into where the. . .where
and i m sure there s many out there that haven t felt able or wanting to do that. so any kind of information we can have that pulls in that history to keep it alive, because it s so important, that s why we re here. you know, we have to remember what that day meant for everybody. do you feel like a hero? if i called you a hero, what would you think? well, as i say, to me it was a job. it was to be done, and you did it to your best ability. and having said that, that s about it. i thought you might say that. yeah! 80 years on, and ralph is one of the few remaining voices. and today he speaks notjust for himself, but for his more than 22,400 comrades who can t talk to us.
wanted to be a sailor. bit of saltwater in the blood, maybe, somewhere? possibly, somewhere. there somewhere. we re meeting ralph alongside his granddaughter, the actor vicky mcclure. in common with many veterans, he never spoke about his role on d day, but when he began to open up, the two of them travelled back to normandy and to the towns ralph helped to liberate. it was only really in the recent years that we ve found all this out. he s my granddad, that s all i ve ever known, you know, mint humbug as i walked through the door, football, you know, the usual sort of stuff. so when this did come about and we did start learning more about his time in the second world war, it. yeah, it was news to me because i didn t learn about it at school, i was really clear about that. ijust, you know, ithink it s so important. there is a handful of people left now that were there that day,