A 99-year-old D-Day veteran who protected the Allied armada from a fleet of German submarines thought his life would be “short but not very sweet”.
Alec Penstone was just 15 years old and working in a factory when the war began.
By June 6, 1944, he was three decks below a Royal Navy ship protecting tens of thousands of lives.
He promised his father, who witnessed the horrors of the trenches in the First World War, that he would serve at sea.
Joining other D-Day survivors at the Union Jack Club in London for an event organised by charities Spirit of Normandy Trust and British Normandy Memorial ahead of the 80th anniversary of the landings, he said: “I’m amazed to still be here. I certainly didn’t expect to be at my time of life.”
After finishing training as a Hydrographic Officer in 1943, he served on submarines before moving to HMS Campania, an escort aircraft carrier running supplies on the Arctic Convoys to Britain’s ally the Soviet Union.
In June 1944, they sailed into the Normandy area minesweeping and guarding the fleet from the fleet of U-boats stationed at Brest off the coast of northern France.
“I did not land anywhere,” he said. “I was just the cover force to protect the invasion fleet going over. If they’d come out in the numbers they had they would have decimated the whole idea of the Normandy landings.
“As it was, it was quite a near thing.
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The U-boat pens at Brest were heavily protected and difficult to destroy.
“The RAF had tried to bomb them several times, but they had 18ft of concrete over the top of them,” Alec said.
“They had to come out just below periscope depth where we used to wait for them.”
Alec and his crew spent a week in Normandy’s waters at constant action stations. The deadly U-boats were notorious during the Second World War in which time they sunk 5,000 ships.
“We certainly managed to stop them coming out. Unfortunately, one managed to get through from the arctic way and torpedoed one of the ships there with tremendous loss of life.
“Luckily we prevented anything happening like that.”
Alec who now lives in the Isle of Wight, made 10 crucial crossings through the Arctic for which he wears a white beret, but his contribution to the success of D-Day stands out, all of which he’s written about in a book.
“I'm proud of being able to do all that rather than sit back and let somebody else do it.”
Years later he received the Legion d'honneur, France's highest decoration, for his service in freeing the country from Nazi tyranny.
Returning home, he married his fiancee Gladys whom he’d met on Christmas Eve. Yet only days after the wedding, Alec was sent to the Far East where he took the surrender of Hong Kong from the Japanese.
“I’m still alive and I don't know why. I lost my lovely wife after 77 years of marriage and I expected to be long gone before her.”
For the 80th anniversary of the invasion, Alec is returning to Normandy with the Spirit of Normandy Trust.
He remembers how badly the war was going before D-Day and how quickly the tide turned.
“After Dunkirk, we stood alone with nobody to help us. We realised we were in a precarious position. We thought we were doomed.
“As luck would have it, we’re still around. Britain carries on.”
