Ah it goes - the weather is starting to warm up nicely and the girls wearing prettier clothes - can't complain too much!

Are you still having to deal with storms or have they subsided a bit?

In the early hours of the morning, three days before D-Day, they were dropped by a Wellington into rough, rolling Brittany country with rocky outcrops, with Pelham-Burn carrying detonators in a cotton-wool-lined box taped to his chest. After burying their parachutes in the bracken, they moved as fast and silently as possible to within 200 yards of their objective, where a hut with a single window and a sentry stood before the mast.

Pelham-Burn cut the telephone line. Clayton dealt with the sentry. The charges were taped to the mast and the time pencils set with a 20-minute delay. The whole operation had taken four minutes. As they were creeping away, there was a flash of light followed by a great explosion: one of the pencils had detonated prematurely.

Germans ran out of the hut firing in all directions. A dispatch rider on a motorcycle started off down the road, and Pelham-Burn had to shoot him despite the fact that this revealed their position.

The two sergeants picked off the rest of the Germans with single, well-aimed shots. The mast was a pile of charred and twisted girders.

Pelham-Burn led the way to a small farm that was to be their “safe house”. For the next five days, the three men hid in the hay in a small cupboard-like extension of the barn. They were then picked up by Lysander.