GETTY / PA HMS Belfast is celebrating its 80th birthday

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Belfast, launched on St Patrick’s Day in 1938, served throughout the Second World War and beyond before being brought under Tower Bridge and moored permanently in the Pool of London in 1971. Now owned by the Imperial War Museum, she is open to the public every day, giving a glimpse of what wartime was like aboard a battleship boasting 12 six-inch guns capable of hitting targets 12 miles away. Among Belfast’s battle honours are helping to sink the feared German battleship Scharnhorst in December 1943 and firing some of the first shots of D-Day in June 1944. She went on to see action in the Korean war between 1950 and 1952. Among the men gathered aboard her to pay tribute on the eve of this year’s St Patrick’s Day were D-Day veterans Ted Cordery and Donald Hunter who witnessed first hand the light cruiser’s relentless destruction of the German shore batteries.

TIM CLARKE Ted Cordery remembers the horrors of D-Day upon HMS Belfast

We were between Belfast and the shore and she was engaging the coastal batteries, firing broadsides so all the guns on the side facing the shore were firing together. We were too close for comfort. My ears were battered. It was so bad that I was completel Donald Hunter

Ted, 94, from Oxford, a leading seaman in the war, was close to tears as he recalled: “It was bloody awful. I was always on the upper deck and there were so many guns going off all around. I also saw a lot of landing craft going in. "I saw so many men dropped early. They were loaded up with all their equipment and just drowned in the water. Poor buggers. “They had crossed the Channel, were probably seasick, probably very frightened and then they just drowned and we saw their bodies floating past.” Ted operated the crane which lifted the wounded on to the Belfast to take them back to Britain for treatment. He said: “I will never forget those men. They had awful injuries, their faces blown away. It was terrible. That’s war. “I will take the vision of them to my death bed. It always upsets me when I talk about it. They were all someone’s husband, brother, son or father.”

TIM CLARKE Donald Hunter said the arctic convoys were 'hell on earth'

Donald, 92, from Ashford in Kent, was in the Merchant Navy and aboard the Royal Fleet Auxiliary ship Empire Pickwick as a radio officer on D-Day, ferrying troops across the Channel. He said: “We were between Belfast and the shore and she was engaging the coastal batteries, firing broadsides so all the guns on the side facing the shore were firing together. We were too close for comfort. My ears were battered. It was so bad that I was completely deafened and my ears were bleeding. “I have suffered ever since, we didn’t have ear defenders in those days. D-Day was not an experience I would recommend. We were taking men ashore, transferring them to landing craft and soon the bodies were coming back. “They were put on a ship alongside us that we nicknamed the Coffin Ship. Poor blighters. That will remain with me for the rest of my life. Today is not about us. It’s about the men who never came back. We got away with it. We were lucky.”

Veteran Ted also served on Belfast when it was sent on what Winston Churchill called “the worst journey in the world”, escorting Arctic convoys which ferried tanks, fuel and planes to Stalin’s Soviet Union. In winter the cold was so intense that flesh and metal could freeze together in an instant and the mountainous seas could rip off a gun turret roof. Ted fought in the Battle of North Cape off Norway in December 1943 and played his part in sinking the Scharnhorst. He said: “I was on Arctic convoys for two years and it was hell on earth. I was on torpedoes where we attacked the Scharnhorst. She was ablaze and we got the signal to go in and finish her off. So I fired three torpedoes and it sank her.”

Then and Now: D-Day landings 72 years on Mon, June 6, 2016 Then & Now compilation to commemorate the 72nd anniversary of the landings. A series of archive pictures taken during the 1944 invasion with direct comparisons of them as they appear today. While the landscape has changed, the memory of the momentous event lives on. Play slideshow Reuters 1 of 14 U.S. Army reinforcements march up a hill past a German bunker overlooking Omaha Beach after the D-Day landings near Colleville sur Mer, France, June 18, 1944