The men descending to their Higgins boats on those scramble nets provide one of the most enduring images of D-Day. Like the paratroopers who had dropped into France during the night, the infantry and combat engineers were grossly overloaded with weapons, ammunition, and rations. Their impregnated clothing and heavy boots added to their cumbersome, awkward feeling. It was dark and the Channel swells raised and lowered the little landing craft by ten feet and more.

As the coxswains brought them alongside, officers on deck instructed their men to time their jumps off the nets into the boats—jump as the landing craft reached the top of a swell so as to shorten the distance. Many failed: there were more than two dozen broken legs in the first hour alone. A few got caught between the ship and the landing craft: at least three men were squashed to death, others badly injured.

Seaman Ronald Seaborne, a naval telegraphist going into Gold as a forward observer, was carrying his haversack, a radio, a telescopic aerial, a revolver, and an assortment of pouches. Everything was on his back, which made him top-heavy, except the aerial, which he carried in one hand, leaving only one hand free to scramble down the net. “For me, that scramble was the most difficult part of the entire Normandy operation. But for a lucky wave which almost washed the craft back onto the boat deck of the LST, and thus reduced the distance of my inevitable fall to a small one, I doubt very much whether I would have made the transit.”¹² Overall, considering the difficulties, the loading went well.

On the Higgins boats, assault platoons of thirty men and two officers, carrying bangalore torpedoes, mortars, BARs, rifles, and other weapons, jammed together. They had to stand; there was insufficient room for anyone to sit. The tops of the gunwales were just about at eye level. When the boats were loaded, the coxswains pulled away from the mother ship and began to circle. The circles grew ever larger.

The boats bobbed up and down—and almost immediately most of the Spam, or eggs and rum, consumed earlier ended up on the decks, which made the decks exceedingly slippery. On Seaman Seaborne’s LCM, a Royal Marine brigadier “sat majestically on the seat of a jeep, whilst the rest of us huddled miserably between the jeep and the sides of the craft trying to avoid the vast quantity of cold sea spray coming over the gunwales.” Men began throwing up; the wind flung the vomit back on the jeep and the brigadier. “He shouted to all on board that anyone feeling sick was to go to the other side of the craft and within seconds the portside was full of green-faced men.”

As the LCM circled, the wind came in off the port, throwing another wave of vomit on the brigadier and his jeep. “Fortunately, the brigadier then succumbed to the motion and was past caring about the dreadful state he and his jeep got into.”¹³