A VETERAN of the Normandy landings is trying to find descendants of a Didcot army officer who looked after him during the Second World War.

Ernest Adams, 86, from Newport, South Wales, says that Warrant Officer Nicholson looked after dozens of young RAF recruits, becoming a father figure to them as they prepared to land in France.

Now Mr Adams, who is recovering from a serious operation, wants to find WO Nicholson’s family to thank them for his support 65 years ago.

He cannot remember WO Nicholson’s first name, but he knows he used to get off the train at Didcot when troops were on leave.

Just one blurred photograph in his possession shows Nicholson, a First World War veteran then aged in his 40s, posing with his troops with one arm in a sling.

Mr Adams first met Nicholson in early 1944, when he was posted to join 84 Group HQ, 2nd Tactical Air Force, in Surrey.

In June, they landed on Gold Beach, Normandy, shortly after D-Day to support the 1st Canadian Army as it swept through France.

The eve of battle speech that the war-hardened Nicholson gave to his young troops in Normandy has stayed with Mr Adams ever since. He told the Oxford Mail: “Right at the start, Nick said to us: ‘We have a hell of a job in front of us, and I don’t want to see any one of you not doing what you have to.

‘No matter what that is, do it. Do not rely on your mates having to do it.

‘It’s your life in your hands. Don’t hesitate.’ “He warned us that there would be losses and that war was something we would never forget.

“He told us to try to remember the good as well as the bad moments and accept them as something that had to be done.”

Later in the campaign, after facing the realities of war in a series of gun battles with retreating German troops, Nicholson told Mr Adams, then 21: “I know and understand how you feel. I was in the last bloody war.”

Mr Adams said: “He was our mentor, and our father figure.

“My thoughts on finding any of his family so late in my life were to let them appreciate just how he was so respected by the lads.”