Richard Trelease

Richard volunteered to join the Armed Forces at 17 years old, but couldn’t be accepted until he was 18. Richard enrolled in the Navy and worked his way up the ranks, starting as a Midshipman, and reached the rank of Lieutenant. Richard hoped to follow in his brothers footsteps and join the Fleet Air Arm and had completed a lot of flying training, but he was assigned a role as a radar operator and navigator on a motor launch vessel.

Richard remembers in mid May being given what he describes as an “unusual operation” where about 8 motor launchers were tasked to lay “experimental” buoys” in precise locations at mile-apart intervals along a specific latitude along the French coast. This operation took several hours overnight, and soon learnt that the purpose of those marker buoys when they received their instructions for Operation Overlord, the Normandy landings.

Richard’s crew started work with the Canadian artillery in preparation for June 6th, and remembers on the 5th June when the operation was due to begin, Eisenhower’s decision to postpone for 24 hours until the 6th because of the terrible weather. Richard left for Normandy on D-Day itself (6th June), and part of his role was to do ranging for the guns and navigation. Richard described this as having to “judge the distance and give the artillery guidance from that. I’d shout a countdown from 10 to zero up the voice pipe and when it got to zero the Majors would shout to ‘open fire’ when we were at either 10,000 yards or 5,000 yards out.” Richard’s crew were firing ashore the support the Canadian troops that were landing onto Juno beach.

Richard has now settled in the Vale of Glamorgan, and celebrated his 100th birthday just a few weeks after he attended the 80th anniversary of D-Day commemorative events in Normandy in June 2024 with the Royal British Legion.