Crowds pay respect to WW2 veteran

A 96-year-old war veteran was given a rousing send-off recently when dozens of civilians and military personnel turned out at his funeral.

It was standing room only at the ceremony for Denis Icke in July as members of the Royal Parachute Regiment in Colchester and The Royal British Legion’s Norwich and Riders branches paid tribute.

The funeral at Earlham Crematorium in Norwich, East Anglia, was arranged by SAIF member Andy Free Independent Family Funeral Directors in Attleborough.

According to the Eastern Daily Press newspaper, Denis’s son Stewart, 65, wanted to invite people to the funeral as his parents had few surviving friends, and he said it would mean a lot to his mother Madge, 94.

As a young man, Denis was dropped into Arnhem in the Netherlands in 1944 as part of the ill-fated raid Operation Market Garden.

The invasion was intended as a co-ordinated push to seize key bridges and allow the Allies to break through Nazi defences. But it went disastrously wrong and Denis only escaped as he was a strong swimmer and jumped into the River Rhine in a hail of machine gun fire.

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