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Mr Sheppard served as a dispatch rider for the Royal Engineers and arrived on Juno seaside in a landing ship tank
A D-Day veteran who helped liberate the Bergen-Belsen focus camp has died aged 104.
Donald ‘Don’ Sheppard, a dispatch rider for the Royal Engineers, landed on Juno seaside on June 6 1944 in a landing ship tank.
Some 156,000 British, American and Canadian troops launched from the ocean and air onto French soil in a single in all the most a hit militia operations in history, which this year well-known its Eightieth anniversary.
On Sunday, the British Normandy Memorial legend posted a tribute remembering Mr Sheppard on X.
We’re saddened to hear of the demise of 104 year dilapidated D-Day Veteran Donald Sheppard.
Donald attended the virtual opening of the Memorial in 2021 & functions within the Winston Churchill Centre @PoppyLegion exhibition.
Taking into consideration of Donald’s wife Sandra & household.
Leisure in Peace Don. ❤️ pic.twitter.com/JkBslnx8hB— British Normandy Memorial (@britishmemorial) September 8, 2024
In a 2019 interview, Mr Sheppard, from Basildon, Essex, described D-Day as a “spoil of existence” however recognised the landings as being “so crucial”.
He mentioned: “I know we had to shield ourselves… however young guys bask in me 20, 21, who never lasted five minutes, some of them bought killed old to they bought off the boat.
“Tragic, totally.”
When he arrived at Juno seaside spherical 4.30pm, Mr Sheppard mentioned the Germans had “genuinely bought the gap and shells had been coming over bask in rain”, with battleships furthermore firing over their heads.
“We lost moderately about a guys,” he mentioned. “We (the survivors) had been lucky genuinely.”
After breaking by diagram of Nazi strains within the August, he persevered by diagram of to Belgium, Holland and at last Germany – including to the Bergen-Belsen focus camp.
Talking of his abilities, Mr Sheppard mentioned: “I shall never omit that for the rest of my existence. How one human might perhaps presumably presumably perhaps also make that to yet another.”
The most efficient injure he bought all the diagram by diagram of the warfare modified into a decrease to his leg as he took duvet in a ditch as German bombs fell.
But after clinical tests and scans some seven decades later, it modified into found he had a sliver of shrapnel sitting in his lung.
Mr Sheppard mentioned the allotment of steel had never introduced on any health complications.
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