Edmond Shrimpton known as Ping joined the Royal Navy at the age of sixteen because he couldn’t wait to do something in the war. He lied about his age and said he lost his birth certificate in an air raid. Of course the officials asked him to send a copy to them but he never did and they never asked again they would have been too busy.

Ping’s job in the Royal Navy was to listen for submarines. He used an echo sounder. It worked by putting a sound down into water and then listening for it to come back to you. When it came back up it went ‘ping’ and if it gave two ‘pings’ he knew there was something underneath the ship and that’s why he was called Ping.

Ping remembers vividly feeling for the young sailors being tossed about in the landing crafts. They were scared, wet and seasick. He knew they had to do a good job of knocking out the gun placements on Juno and Gold beaches to give these youngsters a chance.

“ Our task was to bombard the shore installations, to land our troops on those beaches, and to give them the best chance of success. That night, the violent storm hit us. High winds and seas forced the convoys to reverse course – a very difficult manoeuvre. The crew of HMS Belfast, many of us 19 and 20 years of age, were considered battle-hardened. As we looked at the troops being tossed around in Landing Craft, others crowded on open decks of transporters, cold, wet, scared and violently seasick. These were the men who very soon had to storm those beaches. We prayed for them.

When dawn broke on 6th June1944, the naval ships crept into the Normandy coast and anchored. Then the bombardment began. It was awesome. Battleships, Cruisers, Destroyers, all with their specific targets, pounded the beach defences relentlessly. As we lifted the bombardment, the Landing Craft went in. Troops leapt into the waves and moved up the beaches like a line of ants.”

He recalls,” On Boxing Day 1943 HMS Belfast took part in an epic sea battle off the North Cape. We had to prevent the great German Battleship the Scharnhorst from attacking a convoy. For two days we tracked the Scharnhorst finally sinking her on Boxing Day.

Bob with HMS Belfast on the 60th Anniversary of D Day

60th Anniversary picture featuring Bob