WE ARE sad to report on the passing of Frederick ‘Fred’ Milward of the 9th Parachute Battalion, the unit which took and neutralised the German gun battery at Merville on D-Day.
Fred, who was born in Ticehurst, East Sussex, on 16 January, 1924, had served first with the Home Guard at Westfield, also in East Sussex, during the first two years of the war before joining up with the Royal Sussex Regiment in 1941 and later volunteering for the newly-formed Parachute Regiment. According to Fred, volunteering for the Parachute Regiment had much more to with the fact that members of the regiment were issued with double rations of cigarettes than any desire for action, glamour or glory. However, Fred’s war was destined to be one of desperate and frantic action – and a good deal of action, glamour and glory! It would also see his part in one of the key Allied objectives of D-Day on 6 June 1944.
According to Fred, his service with the local Home Guard was not without incident and he recalled an amusing and very Dad’s Army-esque episode when a Dornier 17-Z was shot down near the village on 15 September, 1940. Rushing to the scene, ‘armed’ with a motley collection of sticks, pikes, kitchen knives and shotguns, the…
