In 1944, he was among the Royal Artillery troops who swarmed ashore in Normandy on D-Day, after eight days at sea in a Bren gun carrier.
Surviving the landing under a hail of German machine gun fire, he dug a slit trench to sleep in, but was ordered out of it by an officer, who commandeered it for himself. He slept under a tree, and in the morning found the officer dead in the trench, killed by enemy fire.
In a service at Swaffham Prior church celebrating Eric’s life, his daughter Hilary Marsh said: “He went on to Caen, from where he wrote home in a censored letter to his parents that he was where the millstones came from, for Fosters Mill in Swaffham Prior.
“He went on with his unit to liberate France, and the Netherlands, then on into Gerrmany, later joining a peace-keeping force in Palestine and Egypt.