GEORGE Scriven reflected about life and death in war. "There's no great skill in survival," the octogenarian explained.

"It's your instinct to survive. Yes, being a regular soldier did help to a point - experience enabled you to recognise dangers. But it's really all about luck whether you lived or whether you died. Either your name's on the bullet or it's not.

"There's nothing really you can do about that, is there?''

George, who served in the Hampshire Regiment's anti-tank platoon, was among the first wave of thousands of Allied servicemen who rushed out of the flat-bottomed landing crafts and were indiscriminately cut down by gunfire from fierce German resistance.

He was spared. Death was too busy elsewhere to claim him.

Understandably, he saw terrible things in war that still have never lost their power to shock and upset him all these years on.

Last week George, 83, stood on the cliffs near Arromanches on the Normandy coastline overlooking the very spot where he came ashore.

Much, understandably, has changed.

Architecture was not exactly in the front of his mind that day - June 6, 1944.

But, curiously, a large chateau with its commanding view is forever etched in his memory.

"It was over to my right as we landed,'' he recalled. "Strange that I should remember that and forget other things.''

The house, occupied by a woman and her three daughters and transformed into an emergency field station, has long gone.

But other things remain.

On a day when the sky stretches as an infinity of blue, fragments of the unique Mulberry Harbour are gently lapped by the millpond that is the English Channel. Yachts laze across the waters.

On the front, a notice forbids anyone clambering over the solid pillbox that was used to awesome effect to knock out Allied tanks and still looks almost impregnable.

Only the throaty roar of a tractor bursting into life as it eases a boat down a slipway, breaks the silence.

No greater contrast could there be that historic day when soldiers, seamen and fliers stepped into the gates of hell. Battle hardened, George had no illusions about what was to unfold.

Southampton born and bred, the exuberance of youth had led him to fib about his age and he joined up a year before he should, at 15.

A year on and war was declared when he was stationed in Egypt.

He was already a veteran of two other landings, in North Africa and Sicily, before Normandy.

"I knew what was coming,'' he recalled. "You had to expect the worst and prepare for it as best you could.''

It was not until his craft had left Southampton on a far from flaming June evening that he understood where it was heading.

As the boat kept repeatedly being lifted into the air and crashed down on to the choppy sea, most of his shipmates suffered seasickness.

George didn't, but what irked him was going without his cuppa. "I wanted a cup of tea but we just couldn't brew up."

As day dawned, the landing craft was just off the French coastline and the order to go in was given. As he braced himself for the crunch of the boat hitting the shore, it suddenly struck a Belgian Gate, one of the series of beach defences planted by the Germans, ten feet high and topped with anti-tank mines.

"It exploded and a couple of the fellows were badly wounded,'' he recalled. "I was at the back of the boat and jumped onto another LCT that came alongside to my left.

"You felt terribly queasy in your stomach, just waiting those very last few seconds for the ramp to go down.

"There was an order to keep our heads down and we went rushing out. There was chaos and it was every man for himself. You had a job to do and you got on with it.''

Fate was to smile on the platoon. Unlike other fighters, they did not have to wade through waist-high water to reach the beach - in fact they hardly got wet.

And there was little gunfire as they got on with their mine-detecting work.

"I was never so thankful, though you could hear it further up the beach. All that gunfire and the explosions with the navy pounding the German defences.''

George followed another solider to crawl across the sand. "I knew if it was safe for him, then it must be safe for me,'' he remarked with a smile.

And safe it was - but not for another soldier. "I found one of our boys propped up by a pillbox. He was badly wounded. I didn't realise how at first, then he leant forward and I saw heavy shrapnel in his back. I don't think he survived. One of the sadnesses of war is that it doesn't pay you to get too friendly with someone. You simply didn't know how long he might survive. You can then understand the emotion at the loss of seeing or knowing he has been killed.

"I was lucky. I remember walking down the road later that day and saw what remained of a German - just a leg inside a leather boot.

" That has stuck in my mind more than anything else, yet I had been used to warfare. You saw some terrible sights, too terrible to put into words.''

George - who lives in Eastleigh - went on to fight in Holland and Germany before being demobbed after the war when he went to work as a machinist at Pirelli.

He has since returned to Normandy several times. In a few days he will go there again, but for the last time, to pay his respects to his fallen comrades who paid the ultimate price for their heroism as they played their own individual role in a monumental achievement.

"It's always an emotional experience," he said. You think of friends and comrades who fell and never came home. Those friends and comrades who were there one day and gone the next. It also brings home the folly and stupidity of war.''

HAMPSHIRE AT WAR: THROUGH THE EYES OF THE ECHO - A 132 GLOSSY BOOK PUBLISHED BY THE SOUTHERN DAILY ECHO IS AVAILABLE PRICED £7.50 FROM LOCAL NEWSAGENTS, BY TELEPHONING 023 8042 4722.