About a year or so before the preparations for D.Day were organised, the American regiment, the Rangers appeared in Bude in North Cornwall. The late Dorothy Cauchi (formerly Waterman) who was a 41 year old mother at the time, recalled the following:

The G.I's were billetted in houses in the town and district. Of course we civilians knew nothing of the D. Day preparations. The black G.I's were put in a camp at Widemouth Bay, a few miles along the coast and the white soldiers were based in Bude and Stratton.

They set up their field kitchens on a grassy stretch of land very near the sea, right next to the tennis courts and playing field of the school where my children attended. The school itself was very near too. At the entrance door to the school there was a small pile of stone cannon balls which had been fired at the Battle of Stamford Hill during the Civil War, in this case a victory for the Royalists. One of these cannon balls, each of granite and about as big as half a football had neatly removed the spire from the Church at Poughill, just at the top of Stamford Hill, the scene of the battle. The Church spire had landed almost undamaged in an upright position, like a neatly sliced off carrot and had survived the centuries in a garden at the scene of the historical battle.

The American soldiers, dedicated souvenir hunters, had stolen these cannon balls, with the intention of taking them back to America as historic spoils of the campaign.

A mile or two along the coast from Bude there was the large Anti Aircraft Camp, Cleeve Camp - their guns firing over the valley between the camp and Bude, discharging shells harmlessly into the sea.

The Americans must have wandered round the closely guarded perimeter and discovered the church Morwenstow. Here in the churchyard were buried the bodies of drowned sailors from ships wrecked on the rocks below. Among these graves stood the painted, carved wooden figure-head of the sailing ship 'Caledonia'. The Scottish Clansman, wore the 'Bonet', had a small round shield in his left hand to protect his body and the short clamore (short sword) in his right hand. This was indeed a souvenir not to be missed and the Americans stole that too. How they proposed to smuggle stone cannon balls and life sized ships figure-heads into America is hard to imagine.

The Caledonia was one of the victims of the Hartland Race, a swift deadly current between Lundy Island and the North Coast of Devon and Cornwall. Sailing ships caught in this current during a storm were usually counted as lost if they could not manage to run before the storm and put in at Bude Haven.

The Victorian, eccentric gifted vicarof Morwenstow, Robert Stephen Hawker, would send his servants, or accompany them, down the steep cliff track to the beach after a bad storm to recover bodies of the drowned men and given them a Christian burial.

With the wreck of the Caledonia, the figure-head was washed up too and was placed as a memorial over the victims' graves. The Americans thought this a romantic story and planned to scoop this little bit of history and take it back home with them. The old Vicar, dressed as usual in fisherman's leather thigh boots and heavy woollen jersey with a large red cross knotted in the front, not only organised the collection of the dead men but on the occasion of the Caledonia, rescued the only survivor ( a Guernsey man), the carpenter who clung to the main mast, and was washed in, bruised but alive. TheVicar nursed him back to health. He was able to return to his home in Guernsey and the vicar was rewarded with the gift of a Guernsey cow, but that is another story!

When the Rangers were ordered to move in preparation of D.Day, the cooks in the field kitchen offered drums of cooking fat, jam and other stores, to the children. Most of them took it back to their homes where it was welcome, for all food was short then. In this clearing up before departure the soldiers built a huge bonfire and anything they could not take with them was thrown on to the flames, even bicycles. The missing cannon balls were discovered and returned to their place before the school door and the figure-head of the Caledonia were restored to mark the graves of the dead sailors, in Morwenstow Churchyard.