 He next opened his eyes in a field hospital on Gold Beach, Normandy with a fractured spine and two injured legs. He still wears callipers to this day. Stan's life was saved that day, but he has thought about the crewmates who didn't make it ever since. 'It was actually a soldier in the next bed that helped me come around when he was speaking to me and encouraging me,' he says. 'That was when I started to think about the family and all the people that I knew, and the 31 of my friends and crew members that lost their lives.){kind=link}
WW2 sailor Stan Ford was just 19 when his ship the HMS Fratton was struck by a missile from a German midget sub which left him fighting to stay afloat in the English Channel
Stan Ford doesn’t remember the sound of the explosion, but he remembers the feeling.
It was strange, weightless, floating⦠then nothing. He woke up in the cold English Channel, fighting to stay afloat.
Moments before the sailor, then 19, had been standing inside his gun turret on the HMS Fratton, when a missile from a German midget submarine hit the ship and blasted him into the air.
It took just four minutes for the entire vessel to sink on 18 August 1944 near the Normandy coastline, taking with it 31 crew members.