The man Cyril Horry was silent. He never got married and lived a solitary life. “He was a grumpy type,” says Ian, his 71-year-old nephew.
“After what he had been through, you could never really connect with him, even though we used to go fishing together. He never, ever disclosed his actions to anyone.”
Cyril’s younger brother was Jack, Ian’s father. But he died, aged 57, years before Cyril.
Originally from Basford in the 1920s, the four brothers were all keen to enlist in the Navy as teenagers, much like thousands of other people.
Both Jack and Cyril participated in the Second World War. But neither ever mentioned their adventures much.
Only towards the end of his life, before he passed away in 2016, did Cyril begin to provide some details about his background in response to a question from his nephew.
When he enlisted in the Navy in 1940 at the age of 17, he was assigned to missions in the Atlantic.
There, he made a Brummie friend named Tug Wilson. The two were sent to use sledgehammers to smash through ice that had formed over oceanic superstructures.
Soon after, though, they came upon an advertisement asking for people to join them for special missions that they weren’t sure about. It paid an extra shilling per week.
Both of them were sold. It transpired that they were to serve in the Royal Navy’s Coast Forces section, which ran plywood torpedo boats and motor launches in the North Sea and English Channel.
The two participated in a number of daring actions together, such as the rescue of agents from concentration camps who were dispatched to Scandinavia by Resistance forces in order to be gathered and transported to England.
They were going to inform the British about the Holocaust there. The terror hardly seemed real.
In 1942, Cyril and Tug took part in the historic St Nazaire Raid, in which a British destroyer boat, posing as a German vessel, crashed into the Normandie pier, causing it to explode and be destroyed.
In British naval circles, the raid is regarded as the greatest of all time. 169 men were killed in the operation out of the 612 men that went on it.
An further 215 people were detained. Out of them, just 228 came back. All but one of the sixteen or so motor launchers that followed the destroyers were destroyed in the counterattack.
Only Uncle Cyril’s boat made it back. On the way home, his friend passed away in his arms. Two days prior to the D-Day landings, on June 4, 1944, two years later, Cyril and Tug were sent across to the Normandy coast.
They were clueless as to why, as even the personnel assigned to participate in Operation Neptune were kept completely in the dark about its scope and ultimate goal.
Their task was to counter the threat posed to allied ships by the swift German “E” attack boats. The torpedoes would conceal themselves at night by docking in river estuaries.
The crew was given instructions to meet up with a submarine and send signals out to sea the following evening, on June 5.
Unbeknownst to the buddies, these were intended to direct the allied ships onto Sword Beach, one of the invasion’s five primary landing zones.
Therefore, Tug believed his time had come when one appeared over the horizon on June 6 at just past 4 am, piercing the mist. He assumed it was German.
“We’re on board now, buddy,” he said to Cyril. However, the Basford boy was aware that HMS Warspite was the figure emerging from the shadows. It fired its initial shots at the German forts from 26,000 yards offshore as the clock struck five.
Following the operation, the torpedoes were sent to Omaha Beach, the site of the American operation’s launch, however it was unclear if it was successful. Once they arrived, it was obvious.
Ian recalls telling Uncle Cyril, “He told me you have never seen such a sight in all your life.” He claimed that it was difficult for them to cross the sea. Everywhere you looked, there were floating bodies.
In reality, the sea was crimson.” Ian goes on. It was an experience that you will never forget. Some of the sights he had witnessed used to haunt him.”
The soldiers who did make it out of the conflict, like Cyril, resumed their regular lives as if it had never happened.
He separated himself from the early 1940s events and pursued a career as a plasterer.
His generation was not unlike in many ways. Regardless, the specifics of the Coastal Forces’ participation in World War II, particularly the deaths they had sustained, were maintained in highly classified records for decades.
Cyril’s story, which had never been revealed to the public previously, came to light only after his nephew inquired.
“He would tell me these things and had no idea of the significance of them,” Ian says.
Anniversary ceremonies honoring the D-Day generation, the youngest of which is approaching 100 years old, are essential in raising public awareness of the amazing achievements these soldiers made. Words alone cannot express the sacrifices these men made.
Ian is really proud of this as a descendent, and he wanted to share Cyril’s tale for the first time.
The boys who made such sacrifices were impressionable, carefree youths who were eager to fight but had no idea what they were getting themselves into.
In the end, it had an absolutely horrific effect on them in many situations.
“However, he was trembling after it ended. It would not leave his mind.”
“When he was about to take action, he said it was the greatest thrill of his life,” Ian recalls his uncle Cyril, who was in his early nineties when he passed away.