June 6: A walk across a beach in Normandy

American Digest ^ | 6 June 2021 | Vanderleun

[Rummyfan]

Today your job is straightforward. First, you must load 40 to 50 pounds on your back. Then you need to climb down a net of rope that is banging on the steel side of a ship and jump into a steel rectangle bobbing on the surface of the ocean below you. Others are already inside the steel boat shouting and urging you to hurry up.

Once in the boat, you stand with dozens of others as the boat is driven towards distant beaches and cliffs through a hot hailstorm of bullets and explosions. Boats moving nearby are, from time to time, hit with a high explosive shell and disintegrate in a red rain of bullets and body parts. Then there’s the smell of men near you fouling themselves as the fear bites into their necks and they hunch lower into the boat. That smell mingles with the smell of cordite and seaweed.

In front of you, over the steel helmets of other men, you can see the flat surface of the bow’s landing ramp still held in place against the sea. Soon you are within range of the machine guns that line the cliffs above the beach ahead. The metallic death sound of their bullets clangs and whines off the front of the ramp.

Then the coxswain shouts and the klaxon sounds. Then you feel the keel of the LVCP grind against the rocks and sand of Normandy as the large shells from the boats in the armada behind you whuffle and moan overhead. Then the explosions all around and above you increase in intensity and then the bullets from the machine guns in the cliffs ahead and above rattle and hum along the steel plates of the boat and the men crouch lower. Then somehow you all strain forward as, at last, the ramp drops down and you see the beach. Then the men surge forward and you step with them. Then you are out in the chill waters of the channel wading in towards sand already doused with death, past bodies bobbing in the surf staining the waters crimson. Then you are on the beach.

[Eric in the Ozarks]

One of my favorites...

[mad_as_he$$]

Good piece. One nit. "The landing craft, vehicle, personnel (LCVP) or Higgins boat was a landing craft used extensively in amphibious landings in World War II. Typically constructed from plywood, this shallow-draft, barge-like boat could ferry a roughly platoon-sized complement of 36 men to shore at 9 knots (17 km/h). Men generally entered the boat by climbing down a cargo net hung from the side of their troop transport; they exited by charging down the boat's lowered bow ramp."

From wiki.

I added emphasis.

A family friend got wounded from flying pieces of plywood.

[The Truth Will Make You Free]

It wasn’t “broad daylight”, but daybreak in the middle of an intense storm. It was a complete plan. For example, paratroopers dropped in early to take out coastal defenses. Deception to convince Germans landing would be elsewhere. When the landing began, they thought it was a decoy. The storm was God’s help. German weather boats had been sunk and their station in Newfoundland stopped working. They couldn’t see the break in the storm, but the Allies could. Consequently many German commanders were off with mistresses, family, or elsewhere. Hitler had given orders not to move tanks without his command and also had given orders on June 5 not to awaken him for any reason. Some soldiers were conscripts from occupied territories who readily surrendered. Victory was by no means certain. Eisenhower has pre-written 2 announcements: one for success, one for failure.