HANGZHOU: Huang Tingxin, the Chinese mainland's last veteran of the D-Day campaign to end the Nazi domination of Europe in 1944, has died at 91.

Huang, who died last Wednesday, was made a Chevalier of the National Order of the Legion of Honor in 2006, France's highest recognition of merit.

Upon receiving the medal, Huang said: "The honor goes to all the Chinese soldiers who fought there."

Huang's body was cremated and buried in a local cemetery on Sunday.

A graduate of the Qingdao Naval Academy in East China's Shandong province in 1942 at the age of 24, Huang and 23 other young naval officers went on to study and later fought in Britain.

After training at Royal Naval College in Greenwich, London, Huang was deployed as a deputy watch officer on United States-manufactured 10,000-ton escort carrier HMS Searcher, which carried up to 25 fighter aircraft, in March 1944. His duty was to make sure the ship maintained course and remained in formation.

Huang saw active duty when the vessel took part in the invasion of Normandy on D-Day, June 6, 1944. He also fought at a landing operation with the Allied forces at southern France's Toulon on Aug 15, 1944.

"My part on the ship was not much," Huang recalled in an interview with Xinhua in 2006. "Some other Chinese soldiers fought on the front line. One of my comrades showered thousands of artillery shells on the Nazi defenses."

Huang returned to China in 1948 and served in the PLA navy after the founding of the People's Republic of China. He left the navy 10 years later and taught at Zhejiang Sci-Tech University (ZSTU) until retirement.

"We are all impressed by his diligence and sense of responsibility in his work, be it teaching English or managing the foreign books," Jin Jingru, deputy secretary of the ZSTU Party committee, told Xinhua the day before Huang's death.

Huang kept a low-profile and seldom talked about his life in the navy. He started to dictate his war experiences to his son, Huang Shansong, only when he was confined to bed by Parkinson's disease.

"My father dictated what he saw in war-shattered Europe so as to remind us of the cruelty of war and the preciousness of our peaceful life," said Huang Shansong, holding the 60,000-word transcript, on Tuesday.

"His contribution to world peace might be trivial, but he played his part. In peacetime, he led a plain, but happy life and saw the development of our country.

"I think it's in the spirit of the Chinese people - willing to die for the greater good when occasion demands, while appreciating the plain peacefulness of everyday life," Huang Shansong said.

Mao Luqiong, a student at ZSTU, on Tuesday recalled the words of Huang, "I wish the word 'war' to be a historical term and remain so forever."

Xinhua

(China Daily 11/19/2009 page5)