Description
Charles Jeffries was born in 1922 and served in the Highland Light Infantry.
He came back from fighting in North Africa to get ready for the invasion of France. It poured with rain the night before so it was cancelled. They were all young boys, eighteen, nineteen and war then was quite an aspiration for them – he thought let’s go to war, we can do it. The next morning they landed on Sword beach, and his feelings at that time had now changed! It was absolutely horrific. Seeing men float around in the water, limbs off, just absolutely horrendous.
Charles’s target was the town of Caen. He arrived at Hill 112; there were German reinforcements and some of the best fighters of the German army on that hill. He was called out of a trench to get a cup of tea and a shell burst in front of him and received a wound to his leg and taken back to a field hospital and within a few hours he was put on a Dakota aircraft and taken back to England.
Charles eventually got back to his Battalion who by now were in Belgium, moved up to Holland then into the Reichswald Forest. He finished up in Hamburg, Germany for the end of the war.
After the war he went back home to his trade as a Milliner making ladies hats. Charles married and had two daughters.
‘One remembers the good times, you think of the bad times but you remember the good times.’
Print taken from the book ‘A TIME TO FIGHT Living and Remembering WWII’
