A solitary D-Day veteran has been pictured saluting his fallen comrades while sat among their gravestones in a moving image to mark 80 years since the Normandy landings.
Former codebreaker Bernard Morgan, from Crewe in Cheshire, signed up to join the war effort on his 18th birthday in February 1942.
At just 20-years-old he was the youngest RAF Sergeant to land in Normandy and one of the first to discover the war had ended when he deciphered a secret telex which read: ‘The German war is now over… The surrender is effective some time tomorrow’.
To mark the 80th anniversary of D-Day, Mr Morgan, now 100, journeyed to Normandy this week with over 30 former serviceman.
In one particularly moving photograph, Mr Morgan can be seen sitting in his wheelchair and saluting the graves of his fallen comrades.
Mr Morgan has been to visit the graves in Normandy previously with his daughter.
The D-Day veteran previously told : ‘I always think about the three wireless operators that I lost in Normandy. They were the lads bringing me the messages.
‘One of them was 19 and two of them were 20, and whenever I go to Normandy, I always go to their graves.’
On D-Day, Mr Morgan landed in Normandy on Gold Beach, carrying a large cypher machine used to decode orders.
Recalling his memories of that day, Mr Morgan told the BBC: ‘When we landed, it was sad to see all the dead soldiers lying on the beach. The first time I’d ever seen a dead person.
‘Sadly they jumped out of the landing craft, different type of landing craft to ours, where the front door came down. They dropped in the water, it was so deep, all the equipment they were carrying weighed them down and they drowned.’
It was the largest invasion ever assembled which saw 156,000 Allied troops land on Normandy beachheads by sea and by air and around 4,400 men were killed.
During the journey across the Channel yesterday, a wreath was thrown into the sea by Harry Birdsall, 98, and Alec Penstone, 98, in memory of those who never made it ashore.
In the moving display both stood saluting to the Last Post, while all the veterans sang Land Of Hope And Glory before they were cheered by the other passengers.
On Tuesday, Mr Morgan — alongside three other veterans — brought some of their most treasured wartime tributes to Buckingham Palace as they met the King and Queen. Mr Morgan brought a a still pristine pair of football boots.
When asked by the Queen what his recollections of D-Day were, Mr Morgan said: ‘When we came off our landing ship tank, down on the beach the army were there collecting the poor soldiers who drowned on the initial landing.’
After the War, Mr Morgan worked on the railways and at Crewe Alexandra where he was a turnstile operator for 57 years.