D-Day: 'I remember the Normandy landings being as horrific as in the Steven Spielberg film Saving Private Ryan,' recalled Ulsterman who was there

I interviewed Stanley Burrows 20 years ago on the 60th annviersary of D-Day. He had been among hundreds of members of the 2nd Battalion Royal Ulster Rifles (RUR) who landed on the beach codenamed Sword on June 6 1944. "The film brings home the horror. You see wounded with their legs blown off," said Stanley, who was a 22-year-lance corporal at the time.

The craft carrying his company was struck by a shell. The boat was still in eight feet of water, with each man carrying a heavy backpack, gun and a bicycle – circumstances in which they could easily drown.

Stanley talked to me when I was a reporter at the Belfast Telegraph, as did Bill McConnell and Sam Lowry. They were also recounting parts of their stories in a BBC One Northern Ireland documentary We Fought on D Day. “Just before we finally left, the men were told to write a last letter home, and there were some very solemn moments. I was writing to my mother to tell her much I loved her, something I should have told her years before.”

Stanley, aged 82 when I talked to him, died months later, in October 2004.

Bill, another RUR D-Day veteran, lived past the 70th anniversary, and died aged 94 in late 2018. On the evening of June 6 1944 he had flown over the French coast and looked down at fellow Allied soldiers landing on the Normandy beaches. "You couldn't see the sea for ships. The Germans were fighting back fiercely and there was flak coming up all round us."

Originally from Ballyclare, Bill joined the Army as an underage recruit in 1941. "Everyone was looking forward to seeing what war was like,” the north Belfast man recalled. “We soon found out."

On the morning after D Day, the RUR tried to take the village of St Honerine. “We were inside an arc of fire which we couldn't get out of. All hell broke loose – quite a few of us were killed and some were taken prisoner.”

Bill felt sure he was going to die. “It lasted for hours, which seemed like an eternity. I prayed many times.”

Shortly after being flown in behind enemy lines on D-Day, Sam Lowry was crawling across a French field when he realised that a German foot patrol was passing a few feet away. The RUR man and his fellow reconnaissance soldier lay frozen as the enemy troops passed by. When the patrol had gone, Sam, a 22-year-old platoon sergeant from Carrick, found he was lying on the body of a dead British soldier.

Sam, aged 82 in 2004, urged people not to romanticise war: "I say that when they see a military parade passing by they should not just look at the brass band and the glitter. They should look at the tail of the procession — the crippled, the wounded, the blinded, the legless. I am not a pacifist by any means but sometimes it makes you wonder whether war is right."

Sam said of his memories. "It now seems so vague and distant and terrible that it has a dreamlike quality."

He added: "Grotesque comes close to describing it. The dictionary describes it as meaning odd. What we saw was odd and ugly. One has only got to go into a place where there was hand to hand fighting and look at the results."

• Ben Lowry (@BenLowry2) is News Letter editor