Cecil Newton, trooper who saw fierce action in tanks after D-Day until badly wounded by enemy fire
Cecil Newton, who has died aged 101, was one of the first soldiers to land on the Normandy beaches on D-Day, June 6 1944, and was severely wounded in Germany five months later.
In mid-November 1944, in Operation Clipper, British 30 Corps and 84th US Infantry Division took part in an offensive to reduce the German salient (or bulge) at Geilenkirchen, about 15 miles north of Aachen. The 4th/7th Royal Dragoon Guards, supported by 1st Battalion The Worcestershire Regiment, were ordered to attack the village of Tripsrath, and Newton was a gunner operator in one of 4/7 RDG's Sherman tanks.
As Newton later recalled in a privately published memoir, they arrived in darkness at some farm buildings on high ground overlooking the village. It was raining hard and muddy underfoot. The Germans were shelling the area with Nebelwerfer rocket launchers and these 'Moaning Minnies' were screaming overhead.
A night attack was expected, so the tank crews dug a trench away from the houses and roofed it with a door. Throughout the night they waited with Browning machine guns, listening to the German tanks moving into position. At first light on the morning of November 19, the tanks started to move down the hill just as the German gunners had found the range of the farm and were demolishing the buildings.
Reduced to two tanks, 4th Troop moved into the village's rubble-strewn, deserted streets, stopped at a row of terrace houses and opened fire on the enemy in a building further up the road. The Germans, however, had set a trap for them by giving way in the centre before attacking from the flanks.
Newton's troop leader's tank was ambushed from a side road and set ablaze. The crew carried the gunner into cover behind a house where he died. Newton's tank came under a burst of machine gun fire which knocked out the periscope. Motoring rapidly up the road behind them came a German 88mm self-propelled gun.
Newton prepared for a quick exit and scrambled out of his cumbersome tank suit. His tank commander yelled, 'Bale out!' over the intercom. There was a loud explosion. Newton felt his left leg being hit. As he hauled himself out, standing on top of the turret with the lower part of his leg waving backwards and forwards, he wondered how he was going to get down from the tank.
This was decided for him when a German infantryman shot him in the back. This pitched him off the tank and he fell in the road. As he lay there, with the enemy on the other side of the tank, the co- driver, Trooper Cliff Ford, rushed out of the doorway of the terrace house where he had taken refuge. A grenade was thrown at him, wounding him in the leg, but he managed to pull Newton into the house and help him on to a bed.
With a piece of a parachute that he was using as a scarf, Newton put a tourniquet around his thigh to stop the bleeding and tightened it with a revolver. He slipped the small German pistol that he was carrying under the bed in case he was captured. The Germans were not kind to prisoners that they found with any of their equipment.
The platoon leader had a tube of morphine which helped to ease the pain that Newton was in. The burning tank set the window frames on fire and prevented the German infantry from coming into the house but the village was still surrounded by the enemy.
For 12 hours, his friend, Trooper Hugh 'Buster' Brown, kept Newton alive and it was about 7.30 pm when stretcher bearers were eventually able to reach him and load him on to a Bren gun carrier and take him to the Forward Casualty Clearing Station.
Hugh Cecil Newton was born at Llanrwst, Wales, on Boxing Day 1923. His father was a cotton broker in Karachi and Bombay (now Mumbai) and returned to London to run the office of The Hindu newspaper. Before the outbreak of war he joined the Air Raid Precautions (ARP) unit and the house became a Warden's Post, with sandbags around the front door.
The family lived in Muswell Hill, north London. Young Cecil's elder sister joined the WAAF. He and his brother were educated at Stationers' Company School which had been evacuated to Wisbech, Cambridgeshire. On leaving school, Cecil joined the Civil Service as an RN clerk at the Admiralty in Leicester Square, London.
In June 1941, aged 17, he joined the Home Guard. He practised street fighting in derelict bombed houses. Late one night, running down the hill when guard duty finished to get to the pub before closing, he was stopped by an elderly lady who asked whether the Germans had arrived.
A year later Newton volunteered for the Army and in August 1942 he was posted to Bovington Camp, Dorset. The training with the 58th Training Regiment RAC included instructions on Valentine and Churchill tanks, gunnery at Lulworth Ranges and revolver practice.
Newton joined 4/7 RDG, stationed at Heveningham Camp, Suffolk, where the regiment was equipped with Valentine and Sherman tanks. Social life was restricted to a trip in the 'Passion Wagon' to a dance at Beccles. These events were chaperoned unofficially by local matrons. On one occasion, a girl in the dance hall was told to sit up and pull her skirt down. Another time, the troop sergeant returned to the truck with scratch marks on his face.
At Fritton, Norfolk, they trained on the lakes with top-secret Duplex Drive (DD) amphibious tanks. In preparation for D-Day, the regiment moved to a sealed camp at Fawley Wood near Southampton. Briefing for the landing took place in a large tent. There were photographs of the beach and the defences, showing metal stanchions with shells or mines attached to the top and reports from frogmen who had landed to reconnoitre.
On the morning of June 3 (D-3), the tanks of 4/7 RDG, part of 8th Independent Armoured Brigade, 50th (Northumbrian) Division, headed for the 'hards' (concrete slipways) at Lepe on Stanswood Bay in the Solent to load onto Landing Craft Tanks (LCTs). Newton was in 4th Troop 'B' Squadron as combined gunner and radio operator in the troop corporal's tank.
Stormy weather kept the craft in the Solent until June 5 when the flotilla sailed for France. Newton slung his hammock between the tank and the side of the LCT, but the weather became so bad that sleep was impossible.
Off the Normandy coast, the sea was so rough that the tanks could not 'swim in' and had to be driven along the seabed with their amphibious screens up. The battleships had started firing on the enemy coastal defences at first light, and shortly after 0700 hours the ramp of the LCT was lowered.
Newton's tank went down the ramp and threaded its way through the sea defences. Their orders were to attack a blockhouse on the right flank of Gold Beach and knock out its 50mm gun. A Churchill tank, accompanied by the Green Howards infantry, was trying to climb up towards it, while over the radio its commander was shouting that his periscope had been shot away and he was unable to see to fire.
Newton's tank stood off in the shallows and they engaged the blockhouse with the 75mm gun loaded with high-explosive ammunition. One of the shells went through the aperture of the blockhouse and the soldiers inside ran out with their hands up and surrendered.
His tank then fell into a large concealed shell hole and got stuck. The co-driver narrowly escaped being drowned while trying to attach a tow-rope to the submerged tank and its rescue had to be abandoned.
The air was thick with concrete dust. Close by was the half-demolished entrance to an underground bunker. Some sailors were throwing lumps of concrete at a half-buried German in a slit trench. Newton grabbed the nearest by the arm and told him to stop it. The man turned round and threatened to hit him. 'They killed my mates,' he said. The stretcher-bearers took the German away.
On the incoming tide, the bodies of two soldiers rolled about in the surf. There was the continuous crash of explosions as the incoming LCTs hit the mines and shells of the sea defences. Newton went inland on a lorry and camped in a meadow that night.
After the D-Day landing, he and the rest of his tank crew were billeted at the village of Ver-Sur-Mer for a week. At times, they went to the beach to help unload the supplies from lorries. The beach was riddled with dugouts and the troops were living like rabbits in burrows.
The Normandy terrain with its sunken lanes, high hedges and small orchards greatly favoured the Germans. A Sherman would plunge into a lane and rear up the other bank exposing its belly and providing an ideal target for an anti-tank gun. The training had been in flat, open country around Newmarket and all the tactics for survival had to be re-learned. The tank crews also knew nothing about fighting in built-up areas, where the enemy might be sniping or lobbing grenades from upper rooms.
On June 13, they rejoined 4/7 RDG and took over a new Sherman. In the days following, in ferocious battles around the villages of Verrières and Lingèvres, many tanks were lost , the 6th Battalion Durham Light Infantry suffered more than 100 casualties and 11 troopers of 4/7 RDG were killed.
Among them were many of Newton's best friends. Their deaths, and the image of infantrymen advancing through a field with chest-high corn and being mown down by machine guns opening up from a sunken lane haunted him for the rest of his days.
He took part in the break-out from Normandy, the crossing of the River Seine at Vernon, the liberation of Lille and the operation to support the paratroopers in their ill-fated attempt to capture bridges on the Lower Rhine and establish an Allied invasion route into northern Germany.
On the great push eastwards, it was not unusual to see people weeping or singing their National Anthem at the tops of their voices. If the tanks halted, food and flowers appeared from everywhere. In one small village, the female population ran out and insisted on kissing the whole crew. Members of the Resistance would climb on to the tank and fire their guns in the air.
One morning, they concealed the tank while keeping watch on a main road thronged with retreating Germans. While the tank was stationary, unknown to Newton, two villagers came up to warn his tank commander that some farm buildings nearby were occupied by a German infantry platoon.
Newton wanted to relieve himself and with a few moments to spare, he urinated into an empty wine bottle. It was already part full from previous use and he replaced the cork and opened a small hatch to push it out. Instead of falling to the ground it was gently taken from his hands. Looking out through the periscope, he saw the pair of villagers walking down the lane, one of them showing to his admiring comrade the present the British had given him for the information.
At Nijmegen, members of the Dutch Resistance were parading two young women with shaved heads and carrying placards bearing the inscription 'German prostitutes'. A convent took the girls in and gave them wigs to cover their heads. At Driel, Newton watched Dakota aircraft flying nose to tail, very low, dropping supplies to the beleaguered paratroops on the far side of the Rhine.
One morning he reported to the squadron leader's office to be told that he was being sent back to England to be granted a commission. Fate, however, decreed otherwise: the next day came the order to mount an attack on Tripsrath.
In early December 1944, Newton was transferred to the 101st British General Hospital, Louvain, Belgium. He had gunshot wounds in the back, a bullet which could not be removed from his chest, a compound fracture of the tibia and fibula and he had developed gas gangrene.
He was flown to RAF Lyneham, Wiltshire, and, after treatment at Derby City Hospital, in January 1945 he was transferred to Hill End Hospital, St Albans. After convalescing for a few months in a country house, in August 1945 he was invalided out of the Army.
While on a home visit, Newton learnt that his brother, Frederic, a lieutenant serving with the 5th Royal Tank Regiment, had been killed in April. In an act of treachery, he had been shot by Germans pretending to surrender.
Newton wrote his memoirs, A Trooper's Tale, while recovering from his injuries, and in 1994 he returned to Normandy. Travelling around by bicycle, he met survivors with whom he had served and received a wonderful welcome from the French, Belgian and Dutch people.
Over the years, he worked to erect memorials to those who had been killed in Normandy – at Creully, Verrières, Lingèvres, Cristot, Tessel and Gisors; at Oostham in Belgium; and at Lepe on the Solent, where they had embarked for France.
Almost every year, for the next 30 years, Newton attended commemorations to make certain that the names of the 127 soldiers of 4/7 RDG who had been killed in western Europe were read out at the large regimental memorial at Creully. In 2016 he was appointed a Chevalier of the Légion d'honneur, and the Creully Primary School was named after him.
On his return to civilian life, Newton went into the building industry. Having qualified as a chartered quantity surveyor, he established an office at Swindon and became the senior partner.
Settled in a village near Marlborough in Wiltshire he enjoyed bird-watching, cycling and painting in England and France.
Cecil Newton married, in 1955, Joy Lidstone. She died in 2012 and he is survived by two sons and a daughter.
Cecil Newton, born December 26 1923, died May 1 2025
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