IT WAS the sound of shrapnel scraping alongside the hull of the ship that set the raw young rating screaming.

His shipmate, battle-hardened and battle-scarred Horace Sage, aged 19, could do nothing to pacify him, that was done by another matelot who brought a lump of wood down on the teenager's head.

"He was taken away and I never saw him again," said Horace, recalling the night before D-Day.

"If it had been the First World War he'd have been shot for cowardice. He wasn't a coward, he was just a claustrophobic youngster whose nerves were shot away by all he'd been through."

And Horace, a Royal Marine who had been wounded twice, settled back in the cramped X-gun turret of the warship HMS Bellona.

Moored off Omaha beach, Horace and his fellow Marines were to witness the bitter fighting and its bloody aftermath.

"The Americans had these tanks which were supposed to be able to get ashore they didn't. Instead they capsized hundreds of them. The following day we were pulling their bodies out of the water and laying them on the deck."

Horace had already faced down death on the Russian convoys where the weather joined forces with the German Navy and Air Force as an enemy. "It was very rough!"

He'd signed on with the Marines as a 16-year-old an orphan who had to shift for himself.

"I was born at the end of Milton High Street but my father was killed in the brickfields, six weeks before I was born and my mother was bed-ridden after that, dying of dropsy a few years later."

Horace had to get an old lady he knew to sign the papers for him to enlist in the Marines by then he already had a sweetheart, Joan, who he had met a year earlier.

Since D-Day Horace has returned to the beach he last saw littered with broken bodies, washed by a blood-red sea.

"My son Colin took me back and I went to that big American cemetery there and the guide saw me and said 'Were you there?'

"I told him I was and he asked me to tell his tour party what it had been like."

Horace escaped to tell the tale, married Joan, became a butcher and settled in Bramblesfield Lane, Kemsley.