“That was great,” Perrett replied. “Do it again.” The crew member did, and the infantrymen broke into laughter. “It just took the tension right away,” Perrett said.²⁰

Sgt. John Beck of the 87th Mortar Battalion had taken seasickness pills. They did not work; he threw up anyway. But they had an unintended effect—he fell asleep while going in.

“The explosion of shells awakened me as we approached the coast,” he remembered. “My best friend, Sgt. Bob Myers from New Castle, Pa., took a number of those pills and it drove him out of his mind. He didn’t become coherent until the next day. He made the invasion of Normandy and doesn’t remember one thing about it!”²¹

(Who decided to hand out those pills is one of the mysteries of D-Day. They were also given to the airborne troopers, many of whom complained later that the only effect they had was to make them drowsy. They had not been used in any of the practice runs, many of which had been in water as rough as on June 6.)

As the flat-bottomed, square-bowed landing craft slammed into the waves, one anonymous green-faced GI summed up the feelings of all his buddies: “That s.o.b. Higgins—he hasn’t got nothing to be proud of, inventing this boat!”²²

COL. RUSSELL “RED” REEDER was CO of the 12th Infantry, scheduled to land at 1030. For the first four hours of the invasion, therefore, he was watching from an LCI six kilometers out, not seeing much because of the smoke and haze. “The hands on my watch would not move,” he wrote. “The time from six thirty until we landed at ten thirty was the longest four hours I ever spent.” The 12th was supposed to land north of the 8th, but the coxswains followed the orders from Roosevelt to bring the follow-up waves in behind the 8th Regiment, which put the 12th two kilometers south of where it expected to be.

“It don’t matter,” Colonel Reeder declared when he discovered the error. “We know where to go!”

Reeder led his men through a hole in the seawall to the top of the dune, where he saw Roosevelt.

“Red, the causeways leading inland are all clogged up,” Roosevelt yelled. “Look at it! A procession of jeeps and not a wheel turning.” To Reeder, “Roosevelt looked tired and the cane he leaned on heightened the impression.”²³