A KEEN cyclist, Kenneth Oldham was on his way to Derbyshire on his bike when Neville Chamberlain announced Britain was at war with Germany in September 1939.

The cobbler’s apprentice received his calling up papers in 1940 and had to report to Peninsula Barracks in Warrington at the age of 20, where he joined the 13th South Lancashire Battalion of the British Army and began his basic training.

Soon after, Kenneth’s brother, who had suffered from pneumonia from a young age, died and Kenneth was allowed compassionate leave to attend the funeral in Ashton.

On the way back from the funeral he lay almost on his back in the sidecar of a motorbike, looking up at German bombs falling from the night sky during Manchester’s heaviest blitz. The war was closer now and Kenneth knew it was a matter of time before he had to fight.

His battalion was posted at various locations around England during the initial war years before becoming part of the British Army’s Parachute Regiment – the men were told by their commanding officers they would all be volunteering to become paras, no questions asked.

Kenneth landed on the Normandy beaches two days after D-Day at Arromanches – despite now being a trained para, he arrived on a landing craft – and one of his first jobs was to bury the victims of the German shells and machine guns, many of whom were Kenneth’s friends.

“The Germans were very accurate and we had no defence against them at all,” recalls Kenneth.

“You can’t describe the noise and the power when those things went off.”

He said he specifically remembers one soldier in his unit, a First World War veteran, who was overly keen to “find these bloody Germans” putting his head over a fence to see.

Seconds later, he was hit by a sniper and dropped down dead in front of Kenneth.

He also remembers two conscientious objectors in his unit, who he describes as “the true heroes”.

“They landed in France without a rifle, without any side arms or any means of protecting themselves, they just had their red crosses on their arms, that was very brave,” he said.

Another strong memory is of his friend, Harry, who was killed on the South coast during D-Day preparations when a mortar bomb landed directly in a trench he was digging. He had just heard news that his wife had given birth to a baby daughter, who he would never meet.

Kenneth, now 96 and who lives in Unsworth, Bury, where he has spent most of his life since the war, has been back to Normandy several times.

He said: “I often thought about my colleagues who died when I went back.

“At the time I didn’t think about it so much because I was in my twenties and you don’t think as much.

“But I lost so many; I consider myself very, very lucky.

“It’s all luck, there is no other way of putting it. Yes, you do wonder why did you survive, but it’s just luck.”

After Normandy, Kenneth’s battalion saw more fighting as they travelled through Europe chasing the retreating Germans.

But in 1945 when Victory in Europe was declared, the war did not end for the 13th South Lancashire Battalion. The regiment travelled to the Far East to fight the Japanese, where it toured India, Singapore and Java, Indonesia.

Kenneth’s memorabilia from his time as a para includes a silk Japanese flag and a pair of binoculars taken from around the neck of a dead German soldier. He also had a luger pistol but, having seen enough horror and bloodshed, he decided to throw it into the Mediterranean Sea on his way back to England at the end of the war.

In August Kenneth was awarded the Legion D’Honneur, France’s highest military honour, at the Allied Air Forces Memorial Day at the Yorkshire Air Museum in York.