NORMANDY veterans are offering schools in York a final opportunity for their pupils to learn first hand about D-Day.

Ken Smith, secretary of the York Normandy Veterans, said he and a fellow former serviceman, Ken Cooke, were available to go into schools and give a unique history lesson on the crucial Allied invasion of France in 1944.

"We can talk about our personal experiences, and show them our medals, and take an information board in with us," said Mr Smith, from Wheldrake.

"We have offered this before but not had a great take-up. I wrote to Fulford School, which is not that far from where I live, but did not get a reply, and the same thing happened when I wrote to the council.

"We were asked to go in to Fishergate School and it went very well, but there may be others out there who would like us to come in.

"But we are both into our 90s now, and we may not be able to do it for much longer."

He said that while he was collecting for the annual Poppy Appeal at the York Designer Outlet earlier this month, several teachers had come up to him from schools in cities elsewhere in the North of England and asked if he could come and talk to their children, but he was getting too old to go much further afield than York.

Mr Smith has spoken to The Press previously of his Normandy experiences, telling he leapt off the landing craft in rough seas, desperately trying to keep his gun above the water, with the craft in front going around in circles after taking a direct hit but with borders preventing him going to help.

He said he was shaking violently. "I wasn't scared, I was terrified," he said. "There were bodies rolling in the surf and you brushed against them as you went ashore. At 19 I'd never seen a dead body before. I grew up very quickly that day."

Mr Smith said he felt a hand on his shoulder and when he turned round there was a small lad who said in a quivering voice: 'I'm scared mate'.

"I told him we'd stick together and look out for each other," says Mr Smith. "The shaking stopped, I had reason to show example. We splashed through the water and zigzagged up the beach.

"When I got halfway up he went down. But you weren't allowed to stop, that was seen as an excuse not to go forward, I had to let him go."

Lorna Savage, head of Fulford School, said that to the best of her knowledge, she had not received any information about this and as a history teacher, it would have caught her attention straight away.

She said the school taught about the Second World War as part of the curriculum and so would be very interested in the opportunity offered by Mr Smith. "Ideally we’d like to run a session of this nature after school so we could open the offer up to parents as well as students. We’d certainly like to be involved in what is a unique opportunity to hear a first- hand account of these experiences."

Maxine Squire, Assistant Director at City of York Council, said: “We are very grateful to Ken for his offer to support our schools in providing young people with the opportunity to enrich their studies about World War 2 through ‘living history’.

"We will re-circulate details of this offer to our extremely busy schools for them to take up, if they are able.”