Mervyn Kersh is proud of his country, and of the role he played in helping to defeat the Nazis in the Second World War.

But the soon-to-be 101-year-old Jewish D-Day veteran, who also witnessed the horrors of the newly-liberated Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945, is not proud of what he sees as the current state of the nation.

Speaking to the Daily Mail from his comfortable home in north London, Mervyn is despondent about modern Britain and the myriad crises it faces.

He goes as far as saying that victory over Adolf Hitler was a ‘waste of time’, adding that the country has gone ‘right downhill.’

The veteran, who was awarded France‘s prestigious Legion d’Honneur in 2015 and has also been lauded by former prime minister Boris Johnson for his efforts reaching out to young people, now lives alone after the death of his wife Betty in 2018.

Incredibly, her twin sister Esta married Mervyn’s brother Cyril. The two couples were inseparable for decades, before Cyril’s passing in 2014.

Mervyn is speaking out just weeks after fellow veteran Alec Penstone, 100, stunned the presenters of ITV show Good Morning Britain when he said the sacrifice of the lost men of his generation ‘wasn’t worth’ it.

He added to stunned presenters Adil Ray and Kate Garraway: ‘What we fought for was our freedom, but now it’s a darn sight worse than when I fought for it.’

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Mervyn Kersh is proud of his country, and of the role he played in helping to defeat the Nazis in the Second World War. Pictured: Mr Kersh at his home in north London

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Mervyn and his late wife Betty on their wedding day in 1949. Betty passed away in 2018

Just days later, in a wide-ranging interview with the Daily Mail, Mr Penstone added that Britain has ‘gone to rack and ruin’.

It is a view that Mervyn has sympathy with.

‘I think it [the war] was a waste of time, because the benefits we got from it, the wartime camaraderie and everyone, almost everybody, mucked in [with] whatever they could do,’ he says.

‘Whatever [way] they could help somebody else they did. That wasn’t just in the army. You don’t get that now, no.’

Mervyn adds: ‘This country has gone right downhill.

‘I know the population is changing. Some are leaving, and then others are coming who have no understanding or knowledge of what this country was like, not only just its history, but it’s morals.’

Mervyn – who insists he has ‘no objection’ to genuine refugees fleeing for their lives – goes on to highlight the ongoing crisis of migrants crossing the Channel to get to Britain from France.

So far this year, nearly 40,000 people have made the journey, and Labour’s attempts to stem the illegal arrivals, as well as curb the use of hotels for asylum seekers, are not proving to be a deterrent.

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Mervyn and Betty in France in 2017. The couple were together for nearly 70 years, until Betty’s passing in 2018

Mervyn believes that successive governments have let the country down.

‘You see this fairly new government saying they’re going to do this, they’re going to do that.

‘And then they look at reality and say they can’t.’

Asked how today’s leaders compare with the likes of Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher, Mervyn adds: ‘They led. They didn’t just try to keep the job to the next day, next session, a bit of sparring with the opposition, and then come and have a drink job.

‘They were leaders. They believed what they were trying to put over.

‘Churchill particularly, because he started warning people what was coming before the war began.’

More money should be being spent on Britain’s defences, Mervyn believes.

‘All our wealth should go on defence if that’s the only thing that we can afford,’ he says.

‘But defence must come first.’

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Mervyn and his wife Betty (left) with his brother Cyril and his other half Esta. Betty and Esta were twin sisters

Born in Brixton, south London, on December 20, 1924 to parents Matilda and David, Mervyn was the youngest of three.

Just weeks away from turning 15 when the war began, Mervyn was old enough to end up having to fight, but too young to have established his path in life when he signed up in 1943.

Then aged 18, Mervyn wanted to follow his older brother into the Royal Air Force (his sister Lilian was a nurse), but was, he says, ‘poked in the stomach’ and told: ‘The Army wants you.’

Mervyn had hoped to be able to join the Royal Engineers so he could continue indulging his pre-war hobby of drawing maps.

Instead, he was sent into the Ordnance Corps, the body tasked with supplying weapons, vehicles and other equipment to troops.

After weeks of training in Scotland, he was ready to follow the main D-Day invasion force into Normandy.

Mervyn was sent to France on June 9, three days after the historic main landings.

He was, he says, ‘very pleased’ to get to play a role in the invasion of Nazi-occupied France.

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Mervyn and his brother Cyril in Egypt, where they both served after the Allied victory over Nazi Germany and Japan

‘I was very enthusiastic not just get into action, but to get the world finished and the Germans defeated.’

After landing on Gold Beach, Mervyn’s unit based themselves in a requisitioned chateau set in extensive grounds.

There was still a fierce battle to win against the retreating German forces. Paris was would not be liberated until late August 1944.

Mervyn spent several weeks in France before moving into Belgium, Holland and then Germany as Adolf Hitler’s regime collapsed in the face of the Allied onslaught.

By May 1945, Mervyn was in the German town of Celle, where he had expected to be picked up by an anti-gas unit and taken to the newly-seized, ruined Berlin.

But his ride never arrived, and so Mervyn decided to walk to the nearby Bergen-Belsen camp, which had been liberated just days earlier by British troops.

Soldiers had discovered 60,000 barely alive Jewish victims of the Holocaust, many of them suffering from typhus, dysentery and tuberculosis.

Everywhere were the skeletal remains of those who had already perished.

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Mervyn Kersh in Egypt in 1946. He served there after the war had come to an end

BBC broadcaster Richard Dimbleby would describe to Britons in his famous radio broadcast how he had found himself ‘in the world of a nightmare’ when he entered the camp.

Although he was not allowed inside the camp due to the disease threat, Mervyn spoke to former inmates who were well enough to stand up and walk around.

And, not knowing about the threat posed by giving too much or the wrong kind of food to the severely malnourished, he handed out his chocolate rations.

For the two weeks he was in Celle, Mervyn walked to Belsen ‘every day’, he says.

‘I didn’t think of taking any food, but I did take chocolate. Every soldier was issued a bar of chocolate a week, and 50 cigarettes in an oval shaped tin.

‘I didn’t smoke, so I used to change my cigarettes for more chocolate, so I had two bars of chocolate in my pocket that I had hadn’t yet eaten.

As two weeks went by, I went around collecting more and more, and I was taking a whole load of chocolate [bars] and giving them out.’

He added: ‘I spoke to whoever could speak English, or French to find out what had happened to them. Not a very happy state.

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Mervyn Kersh in Brighton during his time in the Army

‘They were all trying to get to Israel. Every single one, except one man. They were all Jewish obviously.’

Now, with the war in Europe having ended and the full extent of the horror of the Nazi regime exposed, there was no need for Mervyn to go to Berlin.

‘It was very satisfying to know that I had done what I could to end it, and that it had now ended,’ he says.

The young soldier, still only 20, instead initially returned to Britain, where he was told he was to be sent to Japan as part of a planned Allied invasion force.

The Japanese were, despite overwhelming odds, still refusing to surrender.

Only the devastating use of the first atomic bombs – dropped by the US on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 – forced the Japanese capitulation.

So, instead of going to the Far East, Mervyn was sent to Egypt. It was an eventful six months in the Middle East.

Mervyn met his brother there and, after getting seriously ill, lost so much weight that his mother did not recognise him when he returned home.

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The guests at Mervyn and Betty’s wedding in 1949

After being ‘demobbed’ in late 1946, Mervyn set about trying – and struggling – to find work.

The war had upturned his life.

‘The war service made things very difficult to start with,’ he says.

‘I was born at the wrong moment. My brother was older. He was already an apprentice, as were others in his age group.

‘They came back to the various trades that they’d learned, or apprenticeships they were still in and they carried on where they had left off.

‘I wasn’t in anything so there was nowhere to step back into.’

He adds: ‘Originally I was going to go on, take Matric [graduate from college], and then carry on studying from there,’ he says.

‘Perhaps go to university, which was a rarity in those days. It just didn’t come about.

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Mervyn Kersh at his comfortable home in north London. He is proudly wearing his war medals

‘Teaching is what I had in mind.’

Then, at a New Year’s Eve party ahead of 1949, Mervyn met the love of his life.

Then aged 24, he had only been invited to the shindig because he answered the phone when the host – a family friend – called wanting to speak to his brother.

‘Perhaps begrudgingly, she said would you like to come to the party,’ Mervyn says. ‘I thought, I’ve got nothing better to do.’

So he went along with his brother. Fortunately for him, Betty was among the guests.

‘I stuck to her the evening and she got stuck with me,’ Mervyn says.

‘She left me a phone number. About two months later, I decided I would phone her and see if she was doing anything.’

Incredibly, Mervyn discovered that Betty worked in the same building as him on Oxford Street.

‘I phoned, she answers,’ she continues. ‘I said, “Remember me?” She said, “I thought you hadn’t remembered me!”. I said, “Can you get out for a coffee?”

‘She didn’t let me go again.’

Not long after their second meeting, Mervyn asked Betty to join him and Cyril at a dance they were both going to.

She asked if she could bring her sister. Mervyn says of his brother: ‘His answer was, “don’t think she’s going to dump her with me all evening.”

As it turned out, Cyril was so enamoured by Esta that it was he who spoke to her all evening.

They too quickly became an item, and marriage for both couples followed in October 1949.

‘We were together all the time. We went on holidays together,’ Mervyn says.

The respective couples lived near each other too. They were neighbours in both nearby Southgate and then Cockfosters.

Whilst Cyril died in 2015 aged 94, Esta only passed away last year. Her home, which is visible from Mervyn’s living room window, was recently sold.

Asked about the strength of his marriage, Mervyn says: ‘We had arguments.

‘Obviously two distinct people have distinct outlooks on things. We had quarrels but the quarrels never lasted.’

He adds, mischievously: ‘I ignored what she was saying and she ignored what I was saying.’

The couple had children Lynn, Hilary and David in 1953, 1955 and 1961 respectively.

Mervyn, who supported his family with jobs in the clothing and printing trades before he turned to journalism, is now both a grandfather and great-grandfather.

He has three grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.

Asked how he feels about today’s younger generations, Mervyn says they are ‘certainly’ less disciplined than people of his age.

‘Now you get kids of four, five, and six, who are opinionated, opining on different subjects that they can’t possibly know anything about.

‘They are only repeating what they’ve heard from somebody or other. They don’t think for themselves.’

Mervyn tries to get across the gravity of what was fought for in the war through talks he gives in schools about his experience.

‘Usually the first question the boys ask is, “did you kill anyone?”

‘I always give the same answer, [which is] “I’m thinking about it now”,’ he jokes.