On 5 June 1944, 12-year-old Peter Powis was amongst a group of boys playing cricket at Sherborne Prep School when suddenly the sky above them was full of ‘hundreds and hundreds of aircraft, mostly Whitley and Halifax bombers towing strings of gliders, crossing the sky, from horizon to horizon, flying sort-of south east.’
This was the commencement of Operation Overlord, the cross-channel invasion of northern France by the Western Allies. Originally set for 5 June 1944, due to poor weather the invasion was delayed until the following day when just after midnight the assault began with paratroopers landing in Normandy.
One of the gliders that flew over Sherborne that day may have been carrying 20-year-old Ambrose Austin, the only Shirburnian known to have died during the Normandy landings on D-Day.
Ambrose had left Sherborne School in December 1941 and gone on to Oriel College, Oxford, before obtaining a commission on 22 May 1943 into the 60th Rifles. In 1944, Lieutenant Austin transferred to the 12th (Green Howards) Parachute Battalion who with the 13th Battalion were tasked during Operation Overlord with capturing the village of Ranville in Normandy. Although Ranville became famous as the first village in France liberated by the British forces, Lieutenant Austin was reported missing soon after the drop and it is believed he was killed almost immediately.
Born in Amersham on 29 February 1924, the only child of the Rev. Wentworth Murray Austin (1880-1954) and Celia Mary Austin (née Aldred) (1889-1970), Ambrose came to Sherborne School in September 1937 and joined Lyon House. During his time at the School, he was a House Prefect and a Corporal in the Junior Training Corps (JTC).
In July 1945, Ambrose’s housemaster, Alec Trelawny-Ross, wrote a touching obituary for him in which he remembered his ‘happy disposition which made him a host of friends, for the soundness that made one feel he must automatically by-pass what was second rate, and for the perfect form of his tackling on the footer field. He was a keen rider, and on leaving Oxford to serve he quickly went into a Parachute Regiment. He was dropped ‘on the bridge’ on ‘D’ Day and has not been seen or heard of since. There can be no real hope of his survival. In his short life he showed a courage and an outlook on life which will be an abiding example to his friends.’
Although Lieutenant Ambrose Austin has no known burial place, his is one of the 22,442 names inscribed on the British Normandy Memorial commemorating those who fell on D-Day and during the Battle of Normandy. He is also remembered on the Bayeux Memorial in Normandy, at Oriel College, Oxford, on a war memorial bell at the church of St Mary & St Giles in Buckerell, Devon, and at Sherborne School on the War Memorial staircase and the Lyon House War Memorial.
We will remember them.
Read about other Shirburnians involved in the D-Day Landings:
Find out more about Sherborne School and the Second World War
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Posted 4 June 2024 by Sherborne School Archives.