Tributes paid to D-Day veteran from South Shields following his death, aged 95
The son of a South Tyneside D-Day veteran who passed away this year has spoken of his late father’s frank and unvarnished accounts of conflict.
As a ‘frightened teenager’ Felix Wilenius, who was born and lived out most of his 95 years in South Shields, was deployed at Gold Beach as part of the first day of the Normandy landings.
His son, Paul, a seasoned journalist also originally from South Shields, spoke to The Gazette about his father’s frank re-tellings of his role in the historic land invasion in which 10,000 Allied troops are thought to have lost their lives.
"On the war records, he never talked about it much until later on in life,” Mr Wilenius said of his father’s sober accounts of the conflict.
"He admitted in his later years: ‘We weren’t heroes. We just wanted to survive and comeback home alive.’ He didn’t see the glory in it, as some people do.
"I then offered to take him back to Normandy and he said he didn’t want to go – it had too many bad memories.
“In the days and weeks after the landing, so many of the men in his regiment were killed or injured. Felix himself was lying in a foxhole when a German ‘88 shell hit the tree near him and he received shrapnel wounds to his chest and arm.”
Mr Wilenius was at that point evacuated to the UK. He spent the following weeks and months recuperating in Dundee.
“He returned to the frontline near Nijmegen,” Paul continued, “just before the big push over the Rhine and into the heart of Germany.
"Surprisingly he said many of the German soldiers were exhausted and starving and just laid down their weapons and gave up. He said later: ‘Some of them were in a terrible state and just wanted to be taken prisoner'.
“He was with the Allied Forces as they quickly swept across German until they stopped before Berlin.
"Then he was part of the occupying force and later he was involved in the dismantling of the Krups arms factories in Essen. It was there he met his wife Herta, and he brought her back to South Shields.”
Upon returning to South Tyneside, Mr Wilenius worked for the Northern bus lines and the Metro before eventually retiring.
He passed away peacefully at the Cheviot Court Care Home in South Shields on Sunday, January 3.
