The Battle of Totton 1944
This account and request for information was first published in the “New Milton Advertiser & Lymington Times (Letters to the Editor) on 4th June 1994. If you are able to help with additional information and/or recollections please add a comment or two.
BATTLE OF TOTTON
Sir, With everyone over the age of about 55 busy racking their brains for recollections of the D-Day period, I wonder if any of your readers can supply any details to augment my own somewhat hazy memories of what I have always thought of as the “Battle of Totton”.
I was only about eight years old at the time, and I have never seen anything in print about this event which, I feel sure, must have formed part of the preparations for the Normandy landings – although I cannot put any definite date to it. From the balcony outside my home – a first floor flat above what was then Coblands Garage, near where Totton High Street joins the bypass – there was an excellent view down across the upper reaches of Southampton Water, from Redbridge right down to the Docks.
I can recall standing there and watching troops pouring from landing craft (LCIs, I think) onto Eling Great Marsh, and making their way up to the by-pass amid a hail of (blank) small arms and machine gun fire augmented by smoke mortars. At one stage a detachment of bren gun carriers was drawn up on the garage forecourt – but whether they belonged to the attacking or defending forces I am not sure. I can remember seeing men running along the by-pass and falling as if cut down by withering fire; but I have no recollection of the outcome of the battle – to an eight-year-old schoolboy it wasn’t obvious who “won” and who “lost”!
Only one other vivid memory remains – that of a soldier armed with a bren gun, concealed amid tall docks and nettles on a patch of waste ground where his field of fire would have covered the whole of the lower part of High Street. All of the children from the street had played truant from school that day to watch the proceedings – and this poor man spent much of his day surrounded by a crowd of youngsters, all begging him to “Go on mister – fire it!”. I have often wondered what became of that remarkably patient soldier, and whether he survived the real battles when the time came.
Recollection by Mr R.N.G.