On June 6 1944, Canterbury University-educated Glover guided Lord Lovat’s 6th Commando Brigade 2 Troop to the French coast during the opening salvos of Operation Overlord.
While Glover’s recollections were printed by Caxton Press – the publishing house he founded in 1937 – before Germany surrendered, a poem based on that momentous amphibious landing lay unread in Christchurch for decades.
Corporal Elmer Grantham might not have mastered Glover’s grasp of assonance, enjambment or symbolism, but the Royal Marines Commando, who also fought under Lord Lovat on D-Day, did compose 33 rhyming verses while stationed in Eindhoven in the Netherlands.
In November 1944 he finished SS FSS SAGA, which reads like code, appropriate perhaps as Grantham worked in counter-espionage, seeking out Nazi sympathisers as France, Belgium and the Netherlands were liberated.
Special Service Field Security Section Saga was discovered by his son Dave after Grantham died in 1983, three days short of his 72nd birthday. The full poem can be read on page 8.
Like legions of veterans, Elmer Grantham neither glorified war, or talked extensively of his ordeal, preferring the poem to speak on his behalf, although it was lumped among boxed personal belongings.
Grantham’s medals were not in the treasure trove, Dave applied for them posthumously.
“Dad only got the ribbons after the war. He said he wasn’t interested in getting the medals.
“He was a pretty reserved guy. He never described what it was like on the beaches.
“I don’t know if he just wanted to forget it all. It must have been pretty horrific. He never talked about people he knew being killed.”
His son does not remember a review, glowing or otherwise, of Hollywood’s take on D-Day starring John Wayne.
“All I remember is I asked if I could go to it but I was a bit young (10 or 11) at that stage.”
Grantham’s six children knew dad was a Royal Marine but never forced the issue while growing up in New Brighton, then Linwood.Dave now lives in Lincoln.
“After he died I was talking to a guy, probably 10 years later, and I said Dad was at D-Day. He asked: ‘What beach did he land on?’ I said ‘a sandy one’, I suppose. I didn’t even know they were divided up (to Gold/Sword/Juno/Utah/Omaha),” Dave Grantham said.
“I remember we weren’t allowed to play with (toy) guns. I won a cap gun at some competition, he took it off me and exchanged it for a book.
“We had broomsticks we pretended were guns but anything that resembled a proper gun, he didn’t want to know about it.”
Grantham shared one D-Day anecdote, though it focused on Lord Lovat’s Canadian-born bagpiper Private Bill Millin, who died in 2010.
Dubbed the ‘Mad Piper’, Millin famously played “Highland Laddie” to boost morale while waist deep off Sword Beach as fallen soldiers drifted by.
“He said the men were getting shot all around him but nobody would shoot the bagpiper. It’s been suggested the Germans spared Millin thinking he was insane.”
There was the slit trench dug for cover only to be requisitioned as an officers’ latrine and a fortunate case of non-mistaken identity when he was stopped by the French Resistance while riding a German-made bicycle.
A pushbike was Grantham’s preferred mode of transport, while soldiers requested packets of Craven A cigarettes or ginger and honey biscuits from home, he had an unusual request for his sweetheart, wife Erica.
“Dad regularly asked her to send over tyre valves because they were in short supply. He was a cyclist all his life – he didn’t have a car until Mum was 55. She got her licence so we got a Morris Minor.”
Grantham, who would regularly pedal a single-speed bike to Marlborough and the West Coast, was found dead on a footpath, the retired teacher died while cycling home from a church meeting against a howling southerly.
Despite never joining the Royal New Zealand Returned and Services Association or ever taking part in an Anzac Day commemoration, Grantham certainly identified as a proud New Zealander.
He was born into a life of privilege in Chailey, a village and civil parish in East Sussex, in 1911. A census that year recorded the family as having seven servants.
A cousin, Alexander Grantham, was later appointed governor of Hong Kong from 1947 to 1957, having previously held the post in Fiji.
“He hated the whole English class system,” Dave Grantham explained.
Grantham initially worked on a farm in Tokomaru Bay on the East Coast before gravitating south to Christchurch where he worked as an accounts clerk for the Young Men’s Christian Association.
Reluctantly coaxed back to England by his brother Derick shortly after World War 2 broke out in 1939, Grantham’s accountancy background meant he was initially a reserved occupation so exempt from military service.
A bookkeeper by day and fire warden by night during The Blitz, Grantham met and married Swiss national Erica, a translator at the BBC, after asking her for directions to the Woodbury Down Baptist Church in South Tottenham.
Appropriately, they married in the church in 1941 and the following year Grantham was called up, and opted for the Royal Marines.
After the adrenaline rush of storming the beaches under heavy fire, boredom soon set in for Grantham as spies were either in deep cover, or non-existent.
He received devastating news in August 1944 when learning Derick was missing in action after parachuting from his Typhoon fighter over German-held territory.
Grantham boldly rode his motorbike to the approximate landing zone but could not find his brother, who was ultimately killed by shell fire while returning to Allied lines.
Once the Germans surrendered on May 8, 1945, while Grantham was in Selsingen between Bremen and Hamburg, there were rumours of a switch to the war with Japan but that never eventuated before the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Desperate to return to New Zealand as soon as possible, Grantham booked passage for Erica and two daughters Ruth and Esther on the New Zealand Shipping Company liner Rangitata’s first post-war voyage to Auckland in August 1947.
“He thought New Zealand was the greatest country in the world, without a doubt,” Dave said.
retired in 1976. Erica passed away in 2011, aged 97.
Grantham never set foot in Normandy again, though Dave made a pilgrimage in 2006.
“I couldn’t believe on a nice sunny day what it must have been like in 1944,” he said.
Dave Grantham did not see it, but a poem also features in the Musee Memorial Batallie de Normandie in Bayeux, another verse indelibly linked to D-Day’s codename: Operation Overlord.
Lines from Chanson d’automne (Autumn Song) by Paul Verlaine (1844-1896) were used to send messages from the Special Operations Executive to the French Resistance about the timing of the impending invasion.
The BBC’s Radio Londres broadcast the first three lines on June 1 to advise Operation Overlord would start within two weeks:
Les sanglots longs
Des violons
De l’automne.
Then, on June 5 at 11.15pm the following message confirmed the invasion would start within 48 hours, so sabotage operations could be launched:
Blessent mon coeur
D’une langueur
Monotone.
Special Service Field Security Section Saga
Corporal Elmer Grantham’s poem SS FSS SAGA was completed in 1944 but remained undiscovered until it was found by his son after Grantham’s death in 1983.
The time has come the walrus said,
To speak of many things;
And so I write of all our lads -
Not cabbages and kings.
SS Brigades - we were attached
To numbers one and four.
Group thought they wanted ten of us
Ten sergeants and no more.
On June the fifth we got on board
And crossed the sea that night,
And when to France we stepped ashore
You should have seen the sight.
A ship was hit, a tank ablaze
Some corpses here and there:
Then Scottie got his bagpipes out -
What noises rent the air!
Of course there were unlucky ones
And one of them was Bill
Who got a wound: and then as well
A prisoner is our Phil.
That meant there were but eight of us
To carry on the job;
Old Jim was boss of three of us,
And three were under Bob.
Far from our beach Bob’s boys did land
I can’t recount their deeds,
But when they came to visit us
They spoke about their feeds.
At Ouistreham we set foot on shore
And off the beach we got;
As we went through the mile of marsh
The mortaring was hot.
At Benouville we struck the bridge
And there with Airborne met;
That bridge was under sniper’s fire -
We ran - it made us sweat.
***
Then D plus 212 Le Plein was reached
And there we stopped at last;
It was our home for eight short weeks -
I thought they quickly passed.
We dug two trenches for our home
Then camouflaged with green;
We missed a night and they became
The officers’ latrine.
Security - we did it not
For there was none to do.
We counted up the civvies there
They totalled two nine two.
We chased some cows, the cider fetched
And handled horses too;
Beside the bridge we wrote and read -
There was nowt else to do.
Poor Jim had awful luck that day
While eating up his stew;
His Uncle Harry came along -
He knew not what to do.
He dropped his mess tin, knife and fork
And to his feet he stood;
The brig. I think was liverish -
His language was not good.
When all was quiet upon our front
Our Captain he came out;
He kindly spent two hours with us -
A lot he talked about.
He promised us we’d soon be home
And messed around no more;
But, with his wine forgot his word.
No wonder we felt sore.
When August came we had a move
And joined the Airborne crowd;
At Ranville school we stayed three
weeks - Chef Albert did us proud.
One August day Birch came again,
With Hugh and Reg as well;
He had big plans “to loot or buy”
But that I must not tell.
At Pont l’Eveque the circus met,
Then on to Beuzeville went,
But there again they kicked us out
So Bolbec saw the tent.
‘Twas there we spent a week in peace,
Then travelled to and fro
Until Le Havre had given in
Our bombs had laid it low.
We set about our various jobs -
A farce it seemed to me;
Though none of us quite caught a spy
Joe says he caught a flea.
Then au revoir to France and frogs
The troupe moved east nor’ east;
At Mechelen then we stopped two weeks
And with the monks did feast.
In Holland was our great big show -
For once some work was done;
But that was just a prelude to
Beneath the Rising Sun.
Then orders came which called us home,
How many tears were shed?
We wonder if we dip our leave;
Japan - it lays ahead.
Now here’s a list of all our stars,
With some their special act;
They may not seem spectacular
But we must show some tact.
V.P was boss of all the boys
With Reg his M.O.A.
Hugh Sharpley made the third of them
In England on D-Day.
We have our Joe who trouble courts
While doing what he shouldn’t;
Then Elmer argues black is white -
Oh how we wish he wouldn’t.
Professor Jim is one of us
With all his absentmindedness.
While boozing Bert has one big heart
Just full of loving kindness.
Bob Vass - he is the foreigner
From Scotland far away,
While P.J Smith is office stooge;
How good I will not say.
Then Jerry is our chauffeur boy
Who fetches food and mail,
While Bobby James interrogates
Our criminals in jail.
Bill Beastall came back once again -
So keen to join the fold,
And Winnie having OCTU failed
Came out to bash, I’m told.
And now the time has come I think
To lay me down my pen;
There’s work to do, some spies to catch
One day we’ll start again.
