For Dana Simmons, walking in her father’s military footsteps more than 70 years later proved a deeply moving experience.

Lieutenant Donald Wight Giddings was stationed in Bermuda between 1943 and 1944 to train soldiers bound for the Second World War battlefields how to fire artillery guns.

He was transferred to Guantánamo Bay before the end of the war, and although he never spoke about his wartime experiences, he often recounted stories to his family of Bermuda’s beauty and body surfing on South Shore.

This week, his daughter, now 73, travelled to the island to see the locations where her father worked, lived and spent his spare time.

She also came to Bermuda to donate rare photographs of the old Anti-Aircraft Training Centre, which previously occupied the Grand Atlantic site in Warwick.

“It’s actually been very emotional,” Mrs Simmons said. “I was a baby when my father came to Bermuda to serve so I knew very little about the place.

“But he always talked about how beautiful it was here and how friendly the people were.

“I remember him telling us about how he went body surfing and cut up his chest on the coral.

“It’s my first time in Bermuda and to see where he worked and lived all that time ago has been an amazing experience.”

Mrs Simmons, together with her husband Derek, had planned their trip to Bermuda when they came across a few black and white aerial photographs of the former artillery command.

The couple, who live in North Carolina, were joined by friends Caroline and Austin Chapman for their trip to Bermuda.

Yesterday, they met up with National Museum chief executive Edward Harris, who gave the quartet a tour of the old training centre, Southlands, where Lieutenant Giddings stayed, and Southlands beach, where he swam and surfed in his free time.

“Being here really means everything to me,” Mrs Simmons said. “My father brought my mother here in the 1970s and she absolutely loved it too.

“It was her favourite place in the world and I am so happy to be able to follow in their foot steps coming to Bermuda.

“For me to be able to share these images with the rest of Bermuda is the least we can do.”

Dr Harris added: “The National Museum is delighted to receive the aerial picture of the Southlands Anti-Aircraft Training Centre from Dana Simmons in memory of her father, Donald Wight Giddings.

“It is particularly relevant to our expanding collections of Second World War material of the American forces, who were in Bermuda from 1941 and throughout the Cold War, sadly leaving in 1995.”