LST 459 moved away from the quay, sailed slowly to the center of the river in Plymouth harbor, and tied up to another LST. “We were side by side with so many crafts,” Eastridge said, “that a man could have jumped from one deck to another for a half mile or more. Toward the sea, we could see destroyers and larger ships at anchor. The harbor was just jammed with boats.”⁸

Altogether there were 2,727 ships, ranging from battleships to transports and landing craft that would cross on their own bottoms. They came from twelve nations—the United States, Great Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, France, Belgium, Norway, Poland, Greece, and Holland. They were divided into the Western Naval Task Force (931 ships, headed for Omaha and Utah) and the Eastern Naval Task Force (1,796 ships, headed for Gold, Juno, and Sword). On the decks of the LSTs were the Higgins boats and other craft too small to cross the Channel on their own. There were 2,606 of them. Thus the total armada amounted to 5,333 ships and craft of all types, more vessels—as Admiral Morison pointed out—“than there were in all the world when Elizabeth I was Queen of England.”⁹

The first to move out were the minesweepers. Their job was to sweep up along the English coast in case the Luftwaffe and E-boats had dropped mines in the area, then proceed to clear five channels for the separate assault forces (O, U, G, J, and S), marking them with lighted dan buoys spaced at one-mile intervals along the 400-meter-wide channels, and finally clear the area in which the transports would anchor off the beaches. There were 245 vessels involved in this mammoth sweeping job; they began their work on the night of May 31–June 1.

On June 3, the gunfire support and bombardment ships of the Western Naval Task Force set sail from Belfast headed south through the Irish Sea. They included the battleships Nevada, veteran of the Pearl Harbor attack, Texas, the oldest in the U.S. fleet, and Arkansas, along with seven cruisers and twenty-one destroyers. They would lead the way. After they had rounded Lands End and passed the Isle of Wight, the LSTs, LCTs, LCMs, and the transports would follow. They were to get under way in the predawn hours of June 4, rendezvous, and form up in convoys.

AS THE TROOPS filed onto their transports and landing craft, they were handed an order of the day from General Eisenhower. It began, “Soldiers, Sailors and Airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Force:

“You are about to embark upon the Great Crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you. The hope and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you. . . .