D-Day veteran, 102, meets grandson of WW2 commander

One of the last surviving D-Day veterans has met the grandson of the legendary WW2 commander Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery.

Richard Brock, 102, from Lancaster, visited a defence firm in Stockport, where the Boxer armoured vehicle is built, and met Henry Montgomery, 3rd Viscount Montgomery of Alamein.

Brock landed on Gold beach in June 1944 and is now believed to be the last remaining member of the East Lancashire Regiment.

"The landing of course was horrendous and your heart was beating because your mates were being popped off but we managed to advance towards Hill 112 near Caen," he said.

"You see your mates going left, right and centre and I thought to myself that - I'm 20, I've had a good life - but I was lucky because I was driving a Bren Gun Carrier with armour plating and that saved my life."

"Anybody who said they weren't frightened is a liar - but it was either them or us".

Brock, who served with D Company, 1st Battalion, later took part in the Battle of Arnhem (Operation Market Garden) and the Battle of the Bulge.

He was also among the soldiers who witnessed the horrific aftermath of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp just days after its liberation.

Remarkably, he was one of only 19 soldiers out of a 130-man company to survive the war and he was later awarded the prestigious Légion d'honneur by France.

At the factory in Heaton Chapel the veteran met the grandson of Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, Henry Montgomery.

He was a legendary war hero who fought in the trenches during WW1 and later commanded the Allied forces to a pivotal victory over Axis powers at the Battle of El Alamein in 1942.

Henry Montgomery told BBC Radio Manchester his grandfather carried the awesome weight of responsibility for the rest of his his life.

He said: "I feel that grandfather held that trauma buried deep within him and he never had an outlet for being able to offload that.

"It was only in the last few years of his life, when he was bedridden with dementia, that he began to talk about the number of people who died - but he never talked about it consciously - it was almost as if the trauma was coming out of him".

Field Marshal Montgomery, who commanded Allied ground forces during the Operation Overlord D-Day landings in Normandy, died in 1976 at the age of 88.

During the war, Sgt Brock drove a Bren-Gun infantry support vehicle, which performs the same function on the battlefield as the Boxer universal carrier does today.

Every Boxer armoured vehicle which is made for the British Army starts its life in the historical KNDS manufacturing facility at Heaton Chapel.

Tom Waite, the business development director from KNDS UK, said: "The universal carrier literally replaced the pack-horse within the British Army and is an all-round mobility vehicle that can do a huge amount of jobs on the battlefield.

"As a country, we must defend ourselves and these vehicles are absolutely part of that deterrent - to help ensure that a third world war does not happen."