When I was 16 years old my Mother presented me with my Father’s cigarette case, which contained his last letter home before he crossed the Channel for the invasion of Normandy. My Father was a private in the Hallamshire Battalion of The York and Lancaster Regiment. He was killed in action on 16 June 1944 outside the village of Audrieu. The village in which he was killed became infamous as the site of an SS atrocity when they killed 24 Canadian and 2 British POWs. The SS had used the chateau as their headquarters and my father was killed in the adjacent woods. He was originally buried in a field grave and later removed to the British cemetery in Bayeaux.
