Description
Alan Gullis was born in Wiltshire in 1925 and called up in 1942. He joined the Royal Army Service Corps; and worked on the Mulberry Harbour at Sword Beach, Arromanches, Normandy, taking supplies on and off to the units.
One of Alan’s main duties was to make sure the supplies were correctly designated for the Bayeux Bypass. The Royal Engineers had to gouge a cut-through, five lanes wide because Bayeux was a priority to capture to save the cathedral and its tapestries. The jeeps they supplied carried 240 jerrycans of fuel on board, so he was thankful that he had Spitfires flying above to give him air cover.
Alan was eventually assigned to a Regimental Police unit heading for Lille, as it was short of men. He then progressed into Nijmegen, Holland and was then given a new posting as a driver for a Captain from the Army Catering Corps driving him all the way to Berlin, as he was in charge of catering for Churchill’s Mess at the Berlin Potsdam Conference in July 1945.
Alan had married Edna a month before D-Day and in 1945 after the war, he met her with open arms at the train platform back in England. Alan got a job as a driver with the RAF, then left to drive coaches all over the country for a local firm until his retirement. Alan had two sons and one daughter.
