“It was all very official, three of us received the medal from the President … for helping to serve France during the German Occupation,” the sprightly 92-year-old said.

“The best part was that all my family were there, the first time so many of us had been together for a long time.” 

And as to the details of what Sandy did to receive the prestigious award: “Well it was all happenstance really – I happened to be there, I happened to be doing nothing and I happened to volunteer.”

Sandy was only 17 when the war landed on his Portsmouth doorstep – in fact that first raid knocked down his school and put a sudden end to his formal education.

Needing to find a job and coming from a naval family, Sandy applied to be a boy seaman … “the lowest of the low” as his wife Cynthia put it.

He was accepted in January 1944 and embarked on a training ship off the Isle of Man.

At the end of May he was transferred back to Portsmouth. While waiting for a posting he and some other young blokes were housed in Nissan huts in the woods outside the harbour city.

“We were hanging around with nothing to do, just waiting … then we realised that D-Day (June 6, 1944) had started. There were solid lines of tanks and vehicles and guns and aircraft passing.

“Then they were asking for volunteers “for hazardous duty” … we were young and bored and said yes. So we were loaded on a landing craft packed with emergency supplies and took off for one of the beaches in France.”

That beach was Omaha, the bloodiest of the D-Day beaches, where due to poor intelligence and an underestimation of the strength of German forces, 2,400 US troops were wounded or lost their lives.

Under German fire Sandy and others worked as stevedores, carrying supplies from the boats onto the beach.

Asked how that felt, Sandy said: “It was a massacre all around –but I never believed they were going to hit me.”

“We were on the beach for about a week and by the end the German front line had been pushed right back.”

That unfailing confidence clearly worked and Sandy went on to have a long career as an electronics engineer in the Royal Navy. He was seconded to the Australian Navy in 1961, coming with Cynthia and their two small children. They stayed, moving to a farm in Viewmont in 1981 and later retiring in Hyland Park.