“A French farmyard is more like brick than it is like dirt. For centuries animals have been pounding it down. The sun has been baking it. There was just no way that I could dig a hole to protect myself. The enlisted men had their entrenching tools and a couple of them offered to dig me a hole but I said, ‘No. You go take care of yourselves. Dig your own holes and after you are safe and secure then you can give me your shovel and I will dig me a hole.’

“It was cold as the darkness came on us. I mean really cold. There was a haystack in the farmyard.” Raaen decided to lie down in it. “I’m just a city boy. I learned a little bit about haystacks in French barnyards that night because it wasn’t a haystack, it was a manure pile. I hardly had lain down in the warmth of that manure pile when I was covered with every kind of bug you could think of. I came out of that thing slapping and swinging and pinching, doing all I could to rid me of all those vermin and biting bugs.

“I went to the farmhouse. Inside an old French woman was putting fagots on a fire. It was a very tiny fire.” Lieutenant Van Riper, a platoon leader in Raaen’s company, was there. “Van Riper and I spent the rest of the night warming our hands over that little tiny fire of fagots alongside that little old French woman. It was sort of an ignominious ending to a rather exciting day.”³

Pvt. Harry Parley, 116th Regiment, 29th Division, said in his oral history that “the last hours of June 6 are quite vivid in my memory. As darkness came, we found ourselves in a hedgerow-enclosed field. Dirty, hungry, and dog tired, with no idea as to where we were, we decided to dig in for the night. We could hear the far off sound of artillery and see the path of tracer fire arcing in the distance.

“As we spread out around the field, I found myself paired off with my sergeant. We started to dig a foxhole, but the ground was rock hard and we were both totally exhausted by the time the hole was about three inches deep. Finally, standing there in the dark, aware that it was useless to continue, my sergeant said, ‘Fuck it, Parley. Let’s just get down and get some rest.’ And so, D-Day came to an end with both of us sitting back to back in the shallow trench throughout the night.”⁴

AT PEGASUS BRIDGE, the Ox and Bucks handed over to the Warwickshire Regiment. John Howard led his men through the dark toward Ranville. Jack Bailey found it hard to leave. “You see,” he explained, “we had been there a full day and night. We rather felt that this was our bit of territory.”⁵

LT. JOHN REVILLE of F Company, 5th Ranger Battalion, was on top of the bluff at Omaha. As the light faded, he called his runner, Pvt. Rex Low, pointed out to the 6,000 vessels in the Channel, and said, “Rex, take a look at this. You’ll never see a sight like this again in your life.”⁶

Pvt. Robert Zafft, a twenty-year-old infantryman in the 115th Regiment, 29th Division, Omaha Beach, put his feelings and experience this way: “I made it up the hill, I made it all the way to where the Germans had stopped us for the night, and I guess I made it up the hill of manhood.”⁷

Pvt. Felix Branham was a member of K Company, 116th Infantry, the regiment that took the heaviest casualties of all the Allied regiments on D-Day. “I have gone through lots of tragedies since D-Day,” he concluded his oral history. “But to me, D-Day will live with me till the day I die, and I’ll take it to heaven with me. It was the longest, most miserable, horrible day that I or anyone else ever went through.