D-Day: ‘An act of love saved my grandpop’ – how a framed photo of veteran’s wife saved his life
When my grandfather Charles “Charlie” Truman reached the shores of Normandy on 6 June 1944 as part of 150,000 Allied troops seeking to free France – and the rest of Western Europe – of the Nazis, he didn’t think he would ever be seeing his pregnant wife again.
But a decision he made the night before ended up saving his life.
Then 26, he was among the first of 150,000 Allied troops landing on Sword Beach for Operation Overlord, the historic invasion of northern France which would end up marking the beginning of the end of the Second World War.
Wounded British troops at Sword Beach on 6 June 1944 Pic: AP/British Navy
On the night before the invasion and as troops descended into the landing craft, they were ordered to leave their bags behind.
My grandpop, as I called him, was never really one to disobey but faced by the daunting uncertainty of what kind of fate awaited him, he decided to keep one item: a silver frame with a picture of his wife Joyce.
She was five months pregnant with their first daughter – my aunt.
Charlie at the time was 26 and an infantryman
At dawn, a few hours after making that impulsive decision, he was running hard and fast, pushing inland after landing on the Normandy beach.
Their objective was a German bunker complex codenamed Hillman.
He ran ahead of his company, unaware of the size of the Hillman fortress ahead of him – an aerial photo provided by intelligence just days before D-Day showed the fortification covered in vegetation, thus rendering the real scale of it invisible.
My granddad was shot twice as he ran towards a German bunker complex
Underground, 60 German soldiers were inside the network of bunkers.
Charlie and his comrades from A Company came under heavy machine gun fire, as they advanced with fixed bayonets.
The troops were aiming for a bunker complex codenamed Hillman
Charlie was spotted by German gunners and shot down by enemy fire.
One bullet hit Charles in the lungs and knocked him down. A second round came in immediately, this time aimed at his chest.
That second bullet hit what became my grandfather’s personal body armour – that silver photo frame – and deflected through his arm.
He patched himself up with the single dressing he had, and started to crawl back down towards the beach.
Losing a dangerous amount of blood, he had to stop. Help came when fellow troops found him and carried him back where he awaited the medic boats, with shrapnel falling all around the casualties along the shoreline.
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Charlie took his sweetheart with him for Operation Overlord
Unlike so many of his comrades that day, Charlie made it back to England. He spent 16 weeks in chest units all over the country.
A brief telegram was sent to my pregnant grandmother explaining her husband was in a critical condition.
She made her way down alone to the south coast to find him, not knowing what condition he was in.
It had been bad – at one point he was removed from resuscitation and read his last rites, but he pulled through.
My grandfather, like so many other veterans who survived that D-Day, didn’t repeat the stories very often.
I know it troubled him for years. But when he did, he always said that a combination of luck and love had saved him in those moments.
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It’s hard to pick out the most memorable survival stories from the veterans of D-Day, especially when it becomes ingrained within your own family’s history.
My grandfather, Charles “Charlie” Truman was born and raised in Lincolnshire. He started working from seven years old, making deliveries for the family’s butcher shop, whilst learning the trade along the way.
He left school at 14 and became a full-time butcher until the outbreak of war in 1939.
Sophie Garratt’s D-Day granddad’s running team
The same year, he joined the Suffolk Regiment (now Royal Anglian Regiment), and became the runner for his company.
Runners were expected to carry out their duties swiftly. As Charlie had always excelled at cross-country, he was a natural for this job.
As a child, he would let me run my fingers on the bullet wounds, never really wanting to go into the fear and horror he would have seen that day.
He lost several friends, and was so close to death himself, spared only by an act of love.
Charlie Truman died in December 2011.
Ramesh lives in fear every day. A police siren is enough to alarm him.
He’s one of up to 400,000 visa overstayers in the UK, one lawyer we spoke to believes.
It’s only an estimate because the Home Office has stopped collecting figures – which were unreliable in the first place.
Britain is being laughed at, one man told us, “because they know it’s a soft country”.
‘Ramesh’ came to the UK from India
We meet Ramesh (not his real name) at a Gurdwara, a Sikh place of worship, where he goes for food and support.
He insists he can’t return to India where he claims he was involved in political activism.
Ramesh says he came to the UK on a student visa in 2023, but it was cancelled when he failed to continue his studies after being involved in a serious accident.
He tells us he is doing cash-in-hand work for people who he knows through the community where he is living and is currently working on a house extension where he gets paid as little as £50 for nine hours labouring.
“It’s very difficult for me to live in the UK without my Indian or Pakistani community – also because there are a lot of Pakistani people who give me work in their houses for cleaning and for household things,” he adds.
‘What will become of people like us?’
Anike has lived in limbo for 12 years.
Now living in Greater Manchester, she came to the UK from Nigeria when her sister Esther was diagnosed with a brain tumour – she had a multi-entry visa but was supposed to leave after three months.
Esther had serious complications from brain surgery and says she is reliant on her sister for care.
Immigration officials are in touch with her because she has to digitally sign in every month.
Anike has had seven failed applications for leave to remain on compassionate grounds refused but is now desperate to have her status settled – afraid of the shifting public mood over migration.
“Everybody is thinking ‘what will become of people like us?'” she adds.
‘It’s a shambles’
The government can’t say with any degree of accuracy how many visa overstayers there are in Britain – no data has been collated for five-and-a-half years.
But piecing together multiple accounts from community leaders and lawyers the picture we’ve built is stark.
Immigration lawyer Harjap Singh Bhangal told us he believed there could be several hundred thousand visa overstayers currently in Britain.
He says: “At this time, there’s definitely in excess of about 200,000 people overstaying in the UK. It might even be closer to 300,000, it could even be 400,000.”
Asked what evidence he has for this he replies: “Every day I see at least one overstayer, any immigration lawyers like me see overstayers and that is the bulk of the work for immigration lawyers.
“The Home Office doesn’t have any accurate data because we don’t have exit controls. It’s a shambles. It’s an institution where every wall in the building is cracked.”
The number of those who are overstaying visas and working cash in hand is also virtually impossible to measure.
‘They know Britain is a soft country’
“They’re laughing at us because they know Britain is a soft country, where you won’t be picked up easily,” says the local man we’ve arranged to meet as part of our investigation.
We’re in Kingsbury in northwest London – an area which people say has been transformed over the past five years as post-Brexit visa opportunities opened up for people coming from South Asia.
‘Mini-Mumbai’
The man we’re talking to lives in the community and helps with events here. He doesn’t want to be identified but raises serious questions about visa abuse.
“Since the last five years, a huge amount of people have come in this country on this visiting visa, and they come with one thing in mind – to overstay and work in cash,” he says.
“This area is easy to live in because they know they can survive. It looks like as if you are walking through mini-Mumbai.”
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‘The system is more than broken’
‘It’s taxpayers who are paying’
And he claims economic migrants are regularly arriving – who’ve paid strangers to pretend they’re a friend or relative in order to obtain a visitor visa to get to Britain.
He says: “I’ve come across so many people who have come this way into this country. It’s widespread. When I talk to these people, they literally tell me, ‘Oh, someone is coming tomorrow, day after tomorrow, someone is coming’.
“Because they’re hidden they may not be claiming benefits, but they can access emergency healthcare and their children can go to school.
“And who is paying for it? It’s the taxpayers who are paying for all this,” says the man we’ve met in north London.
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A Home Office spokesperson said: “We will not tolerate any abuse of our immigration system and anyone found to be breaking the rules will be liable to have enforcement action taken against them.
“In the first year of this government, we have returned 35,000 people with no right to be here – a 13% rise compared to the previous year.
“Arrests and raids for illegal working have soared to their highest levels since records began, up 63% and 51%.”
The government can’t say with accuracy how many visa overstayers there are in Britain – no data has been collated for five-and-a-half years.
Sky News has spoken to immigration lawyers about the numbers, and one believes there could be as many as 400,000 living across the country.
Harjap Singh Bhangal described the situation as a “shambles”.
“The Home Office doesn’t have any accurate data because we don’t have exit controls. It’s a shambles. It’s an institution where every wall in the building is cracked,” he told Sky’s Lisa Holland.
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The visa overstayers in ‘soft’ Britain
Why doesn’t the government know?
The Home Office used to gather data on visa overstayers by effectively checking a list of passport numbers associated with visas against a list of passport numbers of people leaving the UK, taken from airlines and other international travel providers.
If there was a passport number match in the arrivals and departures part of their database, that person was recorded to have left when they should have. If there wasn’t, they were a potential overstayer.
They stopped producing the figures because a combination of Brexit and COVID added complications that made the Home Office conclude they wouldn’t be able to get to a reliable number using the same method.
It’s now four and a half years since EU citizens had freedom of movement to the UK revoked, and more than three and a half years since pandemic-era travel restrictions ended.
And yet we are still waiting to see what a new method might look like.
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The old method wasn’t perfect. If someone changed their passport while in the UK, for example, or if the airline or individual entered the number wrong when they were leaving, there wouldn’t be a match.
The Home Office regarded the statistics as likely overestimating the true number of overstayers, and the Office for National Statistics designated the figures as “experimental” rather than “official” statistics, meaning the conclusions should be treated with caution. But they were a reasonable best guess.
With all that in mind, between April 2016 and March 2020 upwards of 250,000 people were flagged as potential overstayers, equivalent to 63,000 per year.
That’s more than the 190,000 people who are recorded to have arrived in the UK on small boats since 2018.
It represents 3.5% of the seven million visas that expired over that period, so at least 96.5% of people left when they should.
Other Home Office data reveals that more than 13 million visas were issued between 2020 and the end of June 2025, including a record 3.4 million in 2023.
But what we don’t know is how many have expired, which means it’s difficult for us to even guess how many people might have overstayed.
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