Small world isn't it

I've been researching as much as I can about George Hayes my uncle who's picture you can see on the left here..... this was dated 1943 so a year or so before D-Day..... he was killed on the 7th June 1944 the day after D-Day....

After interrogating Google and various other search engines to the very limits of their capabilities..... I stumbled across a post made in 2004 by a woman called Jo in New Zealand who was passing comment on one of the books I had been after one called "Forrard" and the other "Europe Revisited" both books were written by soldiers who served in 1st East Riding Yeomanry and both obviously gave background about what went on .... unfortunately both books are out of print and the ones that are on sale are going for ridiculous prices.... So I cheekily asked if she could scan the books for anything that mentioned George on or around the 7th June 1944.

Anyway I sent off a mail to this 2004 email address in New Zealand fully expecting it to bounce considering it was 6 years old.... but Jo answered me !!! much to my delight... it turned out that her father also served in 1st ERY and not only that but that he had kept a diary of what happened from D-Day onwards.....

Now this is where it gets very interesting.....

Although she couldn't remember where his diary had been posted she did give me the title which with my bloodhound DNA + Google I am pretty certain I've found it...

I knew that George was the very first soldier of 1st ERY to lose his life but I didn't really have any concrete evidence exactly how.....until I found the very diary Jo had been talking about here

The give away line is "our first casualty" thereby confirming it was George Hayes... He was killed because he wouldn't sleep under his battle tank, and on that night a shell landed close to where he was sleeping.... there seemed to be some argument at the time about the safety of sleeping under tanks......mainly because the ground was so soft and battle tanks do tend to sink in soft ground when stationary and if you're sleeping underneath it ... well you can guess the rest..... Of course he may still have been killed had he slept under his tank, we don't know exactly what happened that night, the only consolation I suppose was the fact that he was asleep when it happened, so he probably got killed instantly unlike some of his fellow soldiers.....

I am amazed and utterly gobsmacked at how a simple enquiry which could have been missed can reveal so much... and like the title says ......

"Small world isn't it"