A 100-year-old RAF veteran who will be leading VE Day processions on Monday has recalled being “gobsmacked” after bumping into his father by chance during the Allied invasion of Normandy.
Alan Kennett, who will turn 101 on May 29, will formally start a military procession of 1,300 members of the armed forces marching through the streets of central London.
In an interview with the PA news agency organised by the Royal British Legion, Mr Kennett remembered working on one of the aircraft after landing in Normandy when “one of the lads” came up and informed him a soldier was looking for him.
“Then up comes my father – I had no idea he was there,” he said, as he remembered meeting his father Leonard.
“I was gobsmacked. It was pure chance. We just congratulated each other and it was in the local newspaper.
“We had a little chat for half an hour or so and then he left – I never saw him again for the rest of the war.”
Mr Kennett, from Lichfield, was 18 years old when he joined the RAF in 1942 and the story of him meeting his father Leonard made the papers at the time.
The procession will head from Parliament Square to Whitehall, then to Trafalgar Square, Admiralty Arch, The Mall, and finally to Buckingham Palace.
It will formally begin with Warrant Officer Emmy Jones, a young air cadet, handing over the Commonwealth War Graves’ Torch For Peace to Mr Kennett.
“I will feel very proud – to think I’m still here,” he said.
“I just remember those that didn’t come back, that’s the thing that sticks in my mind. I’m lucky.
“I got out. There’s a lot that didn’t believe me. Luck of the draw. It shouldn’t be forgotten.”
After the D-Day landings as Germany’s surrender approached, Mr Kennett was in Celle, near Belsen, in a cinema with other men in his unit as the “whole thing slowed down”.
He recalls how the Battle of Britain pilot and senior officer Johnnie Johnson, who he referred to as “Cowboy Johnson” for his recognisable two six-gun revolvers at his waist, burst into the cinema shouting: “I’ve just come to tell you that the war has finished.”
Mr Kennett said: “The whole place erupted and of course it became one great party.
“The next thing, we were loaded up off back to the UK.”
The 100-year-old, who worked with a variety of aircraft but insisted he loved nothing more than the Spitfires, also recalled having a streak of “general mischief” during his service.
He added: “My commanding officer said I had a record of four-and-a-half years of ‘undetected crime’.
“When we were down in Kent, I was refuelling one evening after an early night flight, and it was wet. I put the pipe on the tanker and as I moved back I slipped.
“Next morning when they expected the aircraft there was a hole in the mainframe.
“I denied – I said ‘no, I can’t remember anything’.”
Mr Kennett is one of 30 Second World War veterans the Royal British Legion is supporting to attend a tea party at Buckingham Palace on Monday with their patron, the King.
The Royal British Legion said: “As the nation’s largest military charity and champion of Remembrance we are dedicated to ensuring the service and sacrifice of the Second World War generation is never forgotten.”
