YOU had to be careful who you put in the back of your ambulance during the Normandy invasion.

"When the French Canadians landed, several were captured and later shot by the Germans," said John Laming, from Rough Common, near Canterbury. "So you never carried French Canadians and Germans together. They would have killed one another.

"It was the same with the Poles and the Germans. There was no love lost there either."

John became an ambulance driver after being assigned to the Royal Army Service Corps. He had been trained to drive anything from a motorbike to a tank transporter.

After landing on Juno beach his job was to support Canadian troops.

"The main injuries were bullet and shrapnel wounds," he said. "Some had terrible burns, others had lost limbs.

"I remember picking a chap up on a stretcher and he was much lighter than I would have expected. He'd trodden on a mine and lost a leg a foot and an arm.

"At one time there was so much happening I didn't sleep for two days. When I drove into the orchard where we were based I was asleep at the wheel."

Driving at night was difficult because ambulances were not allowed to use headlights. After getting totally lost in the Bocage country, John and another driver almost ran into a patrolling Tiger tank. A quick reverse down narrow country lanes saved them.

At Driel, in Holland, John helped pick up troops escaping across the Rhine from Oosterbeck after the failed raid on Arnhem.

"They'd either pulled themselves across on a rope or some just swam across," he said. "We were being shelled all the time. The men were all soaking. They were all over the ambulance, on the bonnet and everywhere. We couldn't use lights at all and military police guided us with lighted cigarettes."

After crossing into Germany John became involved in a long and mysterious journey to pick up four men from the Buchenwald concentration camp. By the time they arrived one of the men had died and the other was too weak to travel. 

"We were told the men were to be flown to England," he said. "I have often wondered who they were and why they were so important to us."

Shortly after that, John's ambulance ran over a mine. "I didn't know much about it," he said. "I was flown back to Brussels and taken to Louvain Hospital in Belgium, where I had carried several casualties myself. While I was there I got diphtheria."

Ambulance drivers were given sandbags to put under their feet to protect them if they went over a mine. Mostly these became worn and ragged so that drivers threw them out. But John had protected his with a piece of old lino and kept it in place.

It was a precaution that saved his life.