In the pre-dawn darkness of the morning of 5 June, the day before D-Day, Eisenhower held another brief meeting of his weather forecasters and confirmed the decision of the previous evening. Among the first to know was his naval aide.
Captain H.C. Butcher, aide to Eisenhower
Diary, Shaef Advance (near Portsmouth), Monday, 5 June 1944
D-Day is now almost irrevocably set for tomorrow morning, about 6.40, the time varying with tides at different beaches, the idea being to strike before high tide submerges obstacles which have to be cleared away …
The actual decision was confirmed and made final this morning at 4.15 after all the weather dope had been assembled. During yesterday the weather looked as if we might have to postpone for at least two days, until Thursday, with possibility of two weeks. Pockets of ‘lows’ existed all the way from western Canada across the United States and the Atlantic, and were coming our way. What was needed was a benevolent ‘high’ to counteract or divert at least one of the parading lows. During the night, that actually occurred. During the day, Force U, the US task force which started from Falmouth at the western end of the Channel at 6 a.m. Sunday, had become scattered, owing to the galelike wind sweeping southern England and the Channel. But Admiral Kirk had heard some encouraging news that the scattering was not as bad as feared. It was enough improved by the early-morning session to warrant the gamble, which only Ike could take, and he did, but with the chance of decent weather in his favour for possibly only two days. After that we hope to be ashore, and while weather will still be vitally important, we will have gotten over the historic hump.
Throughout the morning the invasion ‘On’ signal was flashed and passed to embarkation camps and the cramped, rain-lashed ships. The postponement had frayed everybody’s nerves, and for most the invasion order was a relief, an end to the waiting. From sealed envelopes and packages were pulled maps and orders. Now, for the first time, the men and junior officers were fully informed about their exact landing place and the job that would be expected of them. At least one British soldier rushed to his diary breathlessly to record the news.
Corporal G.E. Hughes, 1st Battalion, Royal Hampshire Regiment
Diary, 5 June
D-Day tomorrow. Everybody quite excited. We land at Arromanches near Bayeux.
For one British Marine waiting ashore the news was delivered with a fearsome religious accompaniment.
Marine Stanley Blacker, RM
Our commanding officer said, ‘This is it chaps’, and we were ordered to kneel in the road in three ranks. Then the local vicar appeared like magic, prayed and said ‘Please God give them courage to face the enemy.’ There was no saliva in my mouth. I thought I was sailing to my death.
Marine Blacker was to go to France in one of the smallest invasion craft, an LCM only 50 feet in length and completely open to the elements. Aside from its small crew it carried one lorry and four soldiers. Elsewhere, for the last but umpteenth time equipment was checked, and the men made ready. In the aft wardroom of USS Carroll, the deputy commander of the US 29th Division gathered his advanced headquarters staff for some final words of advice.
Brigadier-General Norman ‘Dutch’ Cota, US 29th Infantry Division, aged 51
This is different from any other exercise that you’ve had so far. The little discrepancies that we tried to correct on Slapton Sands are going to be magnified and are going to give way to incidents that you at first may view as chaotic. The air and naval bombardments are reassuring. But you’re going to find confusion. The landing craft aren’t going in on schedule, and people are going to be landed in the wrong place. Some won’t be landed at all. The enemy will try, and will have some success, in preventing our gaining ‘lodgement’. But we must improvise, carry on, not lose our heads.
Throughout the Allied invasion forces senior officers gave similar ‘pep talks’, but Cota’s words would have a particular resonance because the 29th Division was bound for Omaha beach, the bloodiest of the Allied landings. In mid-afternoon the last of the seaborne forces, including the commandos of Lord Lovat’s 1st Special Service Brigade, were given their orders and driven from their marshalling points close to the ports. Awaiting them was the Allied armada, a sight which many still rank as the most ‘tremendous’ of their lives.
W. Emlyn ‘Taffy’ Jones, 1st Special Service Brigade
We sped away in trucks – destination ‘Rising Sun’ Warsash, where our landing craft were waiting. Cries of ‘Good luck’ and ladies blowing kisses. They knowing full well what was about to happen. The scene that greeted us when we arrived was fantastic; lines upon lines of craft of various sizes and overhead a ceiling of literally hundreds of barrage balloons, so awe-inspiring. Well, this was the last of terra firma and before boarding our landing craft, for some unknown reason, I kissed the ground – perhaps a comical gesture to ease the tension.
Captain Keith Douglas, Nottinghamshire Yeomanry
Actors waiting in the wings of Europe
we already watch the lights on the stage
and listen to the colossal overture begin.
For us entering at the height of the din
it will be hard to hear our thoughts, hard to gauge
how much our conduct owes to fear or fury.
Everyone, I suppose, will use these minutes
to look back, to hear music and recall
what we were doing and saying that year
during our last few months as people, near
the sucking mouth of the day that swallowed us all
into the stomach of a war. Now we are in it
and no more people, just little pieces of food
swirling in an uncomfortable digestive journey,
what we said and did then has a slightly
fairytale quality. There is an excitement
in seeing our ghosts wandering …
Douglas was killed in action D-Day +3.
In the late afternoon, in weather which was windy but with dashes of sun, the first of the 5,000 Allied ships weighed anchor and began leaving their south-coast ports, doing so amid cheers and the sound of bagpipes (if they were British) and swing music (if they were American; the Andrews Sisters’ ‘The Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy of Company B’ was much played that day). Outside port, the ships made for the assembly point off the Isle of Wight, dividing there into huge convoys, miles wide, bound for five beaches in Normandy.
W. Emlyn ‘Taffy’ Jones, 1st Special Service Brigade
There was a stiffish breeze but a clear night. Sailing down the Solent through an array of ships and craft that were at anchor was tremendously impressive. As we passed by the crews stood on deck and gave us a remarkable send-off with their cheering and waving, it made one feel so proud, and above all this glorious noise we could hear the pipes, the bagpipes of Bill Millin, our commando piper.
Lieutenant H.T. Bone, 2nd East Yorkshire Regiment
The Bar was closed and everyone got themselves ready for action stations. On both sides of the ship could be seen other slower convoys moving out past the Boom, one after another, all so familiar to us, yet this time just a little more exciting. There were shouts from the local people we worked with, a wail of bagpipes, multi-coloured signal flags, new paint and our divisional sign on every vessel. It was a memorable sight. Later that night just before we sailed I collected from everybody all their written orders and all other secret bumf and descended with them into the bowels of the ship where I burned them in the boiler, ascending afterwards in a lather of sweat.
Able Seaman J.H. Cooling, RN, aboard HMS Scorpion
Overhead went a great escort of fighters to protect us from attack and a very comforting and impressive sight it was too, but what was still more impressive was that as far as the eye could see were hundreds and hundreds of ships of all shapes and sizes, and you knew that beyond the horizon were more and still more.
Sergeant Richard W. Herklotz, 110th Field Artillery, US 29th Infantry Division
There were so many vessels, so many ships, that there was nowhere on the horizon that you could look and not see some type of vessel. Everywhere in the air there were barrage balloons on cables from each ship. It seemed that they filled the sky.
Captain Eric Bush, Naval Assault Group Commander with 8 Brigade, 3rd British Division
We sailed during the afternoon of June 5th and as the Isle of Wight fell away behind us I saw from Goathland’s bridge a sight never to be forgotten. Thousands and thousands of ships of all classes stretched from horizon to horizon, and all were heading in the same direction.
Although the weather had improved, it was still unkind, with strong tides and headwinds. Many soldiers, and some sailors, too, were extremely seasick, despite an issue of pills, and there were moments when we feared that some of our craft would never make it. Admiral Talbot flew the signal: ‘Good luck, drive on’, and, by God, we did.
Towards evening we mustered aft in our destroyer, and as she tossed and turned in the waves we bowed our heads as the Chaplain gave a blessing. The scene was very moving – soldiers and sailors at prayer together on the eve of battle. Bareheaded and drenched with spray, they stood holding on to anything they could find which would steady them against the violent motions of the ship.
‘Preserve us’, we prayed, ‘from the dangers of the sea and from the violence of the enemy, that we may return in safety to enjoy the blessings of the land with the fruits of our labours.’ Then, in keeping with naval tradition, our padre ended his service with this extract from Nelson’s prayer, which so exactly fitted the occasion. ‘May the Great God whom I worship grant to my Country and to the benefit of Europe in general a great and glorious victory. Amen.’ We then returned to our posts refreshed and made our final preparations for the morning.
At sunset, night guns’ crews were closed up, night lookouts placed and every precaution taken against surprise attack. But the enemy never came, thank God, as most of our craft were very vulnerable and their crews had quite enough to do trying to keep station without having to fight a battle at the same time.
Every ship was now completely darkened, except for a tiny blue light low down aft for the next ship astern to see and follow. It was sometimes difficult to spot this light because of the waves, but it didn’t matter, for ships and craft were frequently lit up by the phosphorescence in bow wave and stern wash, as they thumped into the heavy seas …
Alan Melville, RAF war correspondent
We weighed anchor just after half-past six. The great mass of ships slipped very quietly away. At sea, they formed up in their own convoys and forged steadily out to sea, bearing almost due south. The minesweepers went ahead of us and cleared narrow lanes in the minefields right up to the beaches – a magnificent job superbly carried out. The armada thinned and ships which had been lying almost alongside our own sheered away to port and starboard to keep to their own courses. I went up on the boat-deck and stayed there all night, with a disc ready on my recording gear in case we ran into any excitement. The navigating officer told me with a gloomy satisfaction that the number of our convoy was thirteen. ‘They don’t usually do that,’ he said. ‘They usually miss out thirteen. I don’t like it.’ He showed me the charts of our crossing: where we would be at each hour, what ships would be lying near us, at what points we would alter course. Everything happened exactly as it had been set down on paper. When we reached the minefields, the lanes through them were marked. At eleven, when we were due to find the battle-wagons of His Majesty’s Navy on our port bow, there they were … Ramillies, Warspite, Frobisher, Mauritius, Dragon, Arethusa. It never got really dark that night; you were always able to make out grey shadows and have a guess at what type of craft they were. And it was certainly one of the quietest nights I have ever experienced: the last quiet night I was to enjoy for many weeks. I recorded nothing; there was nothing to record. The mightiest invasion armada of all time was crossing the Channel to smash an entrance into Europe, and we might have been enjoying a day trip to Margate.
About nine o’clock the captain had asked me to read the farewell messages from Admiral Ramsay, Admiral Talbot and from General Eisenhower over the ship’s broadcast system. I put them over as well as I could, but all the time I felt – quite wrongly, I know – that they were somehow unreal and out of touch with the actual situation. They were big pronouncements by big men, but it was our own little convoy with its own escort and its own load of troops that mattered most at that moment. We were well out to sea by then and rolling quite a bit. The one padre on board held a service on the quarter-deck; the rhino (a sort of mobile raft with an outboard motor attached) which we were towing ploughed through the swell thirty yards behind us. The men, in their lifebelts and steel helmets, crowded round the padre and we sang the same old hymns … ‘Abide with me’ and ‘O God our Help in Ages Past’. The padre had hoisted himself on to a packing case near the galley doorway and twice, when we took an extra heavy roll, he had to be steadied by the men round him to stop him taking a header in the middle of his prayers.
As the armada made its way slowly across the Channel, the men aboard the transports and landing ships were in muted, reflective mood.
Trooper Peter Davies, 1st East Riding Yeomanry
We were told to get our heads down, and to sleep. I don’t think many did, I certainly didn’t and the lads who were seasick certainly didn’t. We talked about everything to pass the time – everything bar the thing we were going to do.
W. Emlyn ‘Taffy’ Jones, 1st Special Service Brigade
It took us a little while in the cramped conditions to settle down, sorting out our equipment, rucksacks, wireless sets, mortars, etc. and the smell of nauseous fumes of diesel and the time we would have to spend on board wouldn’t make this trip very comfortable … Sleep was out of the question. Everyone to their own thoughts. A little joking and singing but with a certain apprehension of what tomorrow would bring. What would be their thoughts at home – our families, wives and children, when they switched on the radio tomorrow morning? Hope they don’t worry too much.
Alfred Leonard, Merchant Navy, aged 16
You were very aware that what was about to happen was going to be important. The atmosphere was full of that. I think the older men felt more fearful, but being young you don’t look at the fear side ofit so much, you just thought it’s a big thing you’re being part of.
Sombreness was not universal. On some ships there was something approaching a party spirit.
Frederick Wright, RN
Diary, 5 June
We have aboard our lovely fast steamship a lovely body of men, all in fine physical condition – Canadians – all in grand spirits, and all psychologically minded, for they all know what they are going to France for. Tonight I shall be playing dice with them, for that is their famous pastime.
Wright and his Canadian friends played dice until four the next morning. Even the wave of seasickness which swept over the armada as it hit mid-Channel did nothing to spoil the game. The troops and sailors on the small boats had a particularly rough and nauseous passage.
George Collard, 1st RM Armoured Support Regiment
The LCIs wallowed in the rough sea – the added armour to their sides, and the weight of the tanks, made them very low in the water. We slung hammocks where we could, sometimes between the tanks. Many were seasick, including the sailors. Most of the Marines had never served afloat, but I had experience of Northern Patrols on HMS Diomede and knew that hard-tack army biscuits taken in large amounts would act like concrete in the stomach and you never became seasick. No seasick tablets were given the Marine as was given to other troops – a point of pride I suppose.
William Seymour, RN
We had been postponed a day, but the sea did not seem much better to me on the day we sailed. The waves were coming over the side of the ship. Some of the tanks on the landing craft had broken their chains and were moving about in the very rough seas. A few had to turn back. But on we went, rocking from side to side.
I wasn’t scared. If you’re being seasick you feel like you’re dying anyway.
G.G. Townsend, Combined Operations
Nearer and nearer we crept towards the enemy-held coastline as, in the eerie silence, anxious eyes scanned the agitated water for drifting mines and hostile German E-boats while the rest of us hurriedly removed the caps and inserted the fuses in the thousand rockets which lay patiently in their well-greased ramps, awaiting the electric charge which would send them soaring on their flight of destruction. There was a heart-stopping moment when the lookout on the f0’c’sle spotted something and, after a slight change in course, a large dark object floated past the port side, but we were never sure what it was, for this was no time for investigation, and so we plodded on.
Long before the armada reached this stage of its journey, back in the dying afternoon of the fifth, the parachutists and glider troops who would be the first Allied invaders to land in Normandy, and who were charged with seizing the left and right flanks of the invasion area, had paraded at their camps in the Midlands and the south of England prior to emplaning.
Chester Wilmot, BBC war correspondent, attached to 6th Airborne Division
On the evening of 5 June 1944, as the last glow of twilight was fading from the western sky, six R.A.F. Albermarles were drawn up on the runway of Harwell airfield. Gathered around them, drinking tea and smoking cigarettes, were 60 men of the 22nd Independent Parachute Company, pathfinders who were to guide the 6th British Airborne Division to its landfall behind the Atlantic Wall near Caen. Their faces and equipment were smeared with brown, black and green paint, and over their uniforms they wore camouflaged jumping smocks. Every man was a walking arsenal. They had crammed so much ammunition into their pockets and pouches, so many weapons into their webbing, that they had found it difficult to hitch on their parachute harnesses. Grenades were festooned about them; they had fighting knives in their gaiters and clips of cartridges in the linings of their steel helmets. No man was carrying less than 85 lb; some more than a hundred, and in addition each had strapped to his leg a 60 lb kitbag containing lights and radar-beacons with which to mark the dropping and landing-zones for the rest of the division.
These men were the torchbearers of liberation. Like all paratroops they were volunteers, and they had been specially picked and trained for this responsible task, but otherwise there was little to distinguish them from the rest of Montgomery’s force. Beside the leading aircraft were the ten men who were due to land first, at the point of the invasion spearhead, a Berkshire hod-carrier and a toolmaker from Kent, a bricklayer from Edinburgh, a Worcestershire kennelman and a lorry driver from Dumfries, two ‘regulars’, a deserter from the ‘army’ of the Irish Free State and a refugee from Austria, led by a young lieutenant, who, when was began, had been in the chorus of a West End musical comedy. Three of them had been at Dunkirk, one had fought in Africa, but the rest were going into battle for the first time. These pathfinders were the vanguard of the force that had the most vital role in the Neptune plan – that of seizing and holding the left flank of the bridgehead – the open flank, against which the main weight of German counter-attack was likely to fall as the Panzer divisions moved in from their garrison areas southeast and east of Caen. If 6th Airborne were to rail, the whole bridgehead might be rolled up from this wing before the seaborne divisions could become firmly established.
The nearest of these divisions, 3rd British, was to land on Sword beach just west of the Orne. This river and the canal which runs paralled to it from the sea to Caen, eight miles inland, provided a naturally strong flank position. Montgomery wanted not merely to secure the line of these water obstacles but to hold east of them a base from which to expand the Allied bridgehead south-east beyond Caen into open ground where Rommel’s panzer divisions might be profitably engaged. The seizure of this base was the responsibility entrusted to the commander of 6th Airborne, Major-General Richard Gale. Tall, spare and ramrod-straight, with ruddy face, bristling moustache and bushy eyebrows, Gale looked a ‘Poona colonel’ every inch, but this first impression was misleading. When he spoke, the power of his blunt but lucid words revealed a man who could both devise a plan of daring originality and imbue his men with the confidence and courage to carry it out …
At ten to eleven the aircrews went aboard. The pathfinders drained their tea-mugs, adjusted their harnesses, stubbed out their cigarettes and clambered aboard. The door slammed behind them. The engines spoke up. A signal flashed from the control tender and the six Albermarles roared down the runway in quick succession, lifted, circled above the sleeping, unsuspecting countryside, their red and green navigation lights twinkled like fireflies. Soon after 11.30 the swarm of lights moved in formation over our heads and faded into the southern distance.
The Times war correspondent, attached to 6th Airborne Division
I watched the unit go to war at dusk on D–1 (the day before D-Day), parading with everybody from its brigadier downwards in blackened faces and wearing the camouflage smocks and rimless steel helmets of the airborne forces.
Each of the black-faced men appeared nearly as broad and thick as he was tall by reason of the colossal amount of equipment which the parachutist carried with him.
The brigadier and the lieutenant-colonel made brief speeches. ‘We are history,’ said the latter; there were three cheers, a short prayer and in the gathering of darkness they drove off to the aerodrome with the men in the first lorry singing, incredible as it seems, the notes of the Horst Wessel Song at the top of their voices.
At Welford aerodrome the men of the American 101st ‘Screaming Eagles’ Airborne Division were reviewed by Eisenhower himself, gaunt-faced, burdened with worry but still able to turn on his famous popular touch. Passing along the line of men, he asked one man:
‘What is your job, soldier?’
‘Ammunition bearer, sir.’
‘Where is your home?’
‘Pennsylvania, sir.’
‘Did you get those shoulders working in a coal mine?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Good luck to you tonight, soldier.’
The parachutists of the US 101st and 82nd Airborne Divisions had enormous quantities of equipment stashed around their bodies to carry into battle. One US parachutist listed his load:
Donald Burgett, US 101st Airborne Division
My personal equipment consisted of: one suit of ODs, worn under my jump suit – this was an order for everyone – helmet, boots, gloves, main chute, reserve chute, Mae West, rifle, .45 automatic pistol, trench knife, jump knife, hunting knife, machete, one cartridge belt, two bandoliers, two cans of machine-gun ammo totalling 676 rounds of .30 ammo, 66 rounds of .45 ammo, one Hawkins mine capable of blowing the track off of a tank, four blocks of TNT, one entrenching tool with two blasting caps taped on the outside of the steel part, three first-aid kits, two morphine needles, one gas-mask, a canteen of water, three days’ supply of K rations, two days’ supply of D rations (hard tropical chocolate bars), six fragmentation grenades, one Gammon grenade, one orange smoke and one red smoke grenade, one orange panel, one blanket, one raincoat, one change of socks and underwear, two cartons of cigarettes and a few other odds and ends.
Unsurprisingly, Burgett could hardly walk and had to be helped into the plane by Air Corps personnel. On the flight over, Burgett and his comrades knelt on the floor and rested the weight of the gear and parachutes on the seat behind. The British paratroopers were only slightly less encumbered.
James Byrom, 6th Airborne Division
Fantastically upholstered, our pockets bulging with drugs and bandages, with maps and money and escaping gadgets, we stuffed ourselves into our jumping jackets and waddled, staggering under the weight of stretcher-bundles and kit-bags, to the lorries waiting to take us to the airfield. And there formidably arrayed on the tarmac runway was a line of camouflaged Dakotas, stretching away into a yellow sunset streaked with bars of black cloud. We had already met the crew of our aircraft, and they had assured us that the flight would be ‘a piece of cake’ – a little flak over the French coast, but really nothing to worry about. Now I thought they looked less confident, their Air Force charm a little strained.
Conscious of themselves as an elite, these airborne troops’ morale was especially high (although veterans of most units report morale as ‘good’ in the twenty-four hours before D-Day). To be young and at war was even exciting. And the fear which came was mostly the fear of letting others down.
Corporal Ted Morris, 225 Para Field Ambulance, 6th Airborne Division
Before midnight on the fifth we went to the airport for parachute inspection, before the take-off. There was a big lance-corporal with us, Taff Rowlands, a Welshman. He was a lad for a bit of fun and he kept kicking our parachutes and saying, ‘That bloody thing won’t open.’ That was the mood. You were young, you lapped it up.
Captain Philip Burkinshaw, 12th Yorkshire Parachute Battalion
Shortly before 11.30 p.m., the converted Stirling bomber of 38 Group which was to transport us to Normandy roared down the runway at RAF Keevil … and as the wheels of the heavily laden plane ceased to roll and became silent and I knew we were airborne, my mind was awhirl with mixed emotions and, I must confess, some fears, particularly the fear of being afraid. Would we be dropped on or near to the dropping zone, or perhaps due to change in the weather or wind speed, or a fault in navigation, well behind enemy lines; would I find the rendezvous; how would I shape up in front of my platoon in the stark reality and unaccustomed horrors of battle, and would I command and guide them as they deserved. The moment of reckoning was inexorably approaching for me, as it was for thousands of others in the air, on land and on sea.
As fleet after fleet of planes passed over the south coast of England, people left dance floors, pubs and beds to watch. Among those watching the first waves of British parachutists depart was Major-General Richard Gale, Commander of the British 6th Airborne Division, and about to emplane himself for France.
Major-General Richard Gale, 6th Airborne Division
That night the moon shone. The sky was clear as one by one the great aircraft, boosting up their engines, roared down the runways. Next to go were the two parachute brigades and the engineers accompanying them. Then our turn came. My glider number was 70. I was accompanied by my ADC, Tom Haughton, David Baird my GSO 2, my personal escort, my signaller and my driver, and Rifleman Grey, Tom’s batman. In the glider also were my jeep with wireless set and two motor cycles. There were twelve of us in all. Before us lay an hour and a half’s flight. We were to land just north of Ranville in the area captured by Nigel Poett and his brigade. We hoped that the sappers would have cleared away sufficient of the stakes to give us a reasonably safe landing zone.
During the few days I had been on the station I had got to know the station commander and his staff very well. I remember I had once said that I liked treacle very much indeed. It was a thoughtful, friendly and very charming gesture, therefore, when Group Captain Surplice handed me a tin of treacle to take to France just as I was emplaning.
In the glider we all wore Mae Wests, and taking our places we all fastened ourselves in and waited for the jerk as the tug took the strain on the tow-rope. Soon it came and we could feel ourselves hurtling down the smooth tarmac. Then we were airborne and once again we heard the familiar whistle as the air rushed by and we glided higher and higher into the dark night.
At the same time as Gale’s glider was being towed through the night, across the sky to the west General Matt Ridgway of the US 82nd Airborne Division sat with his ‘stick’ (a planeload of parachutists) aboard a C-47 transport.
General Matt B. Ridgway, US 82nd Airborne Division
We flew in a V of Vs, like a gigantic spearhead without a shaft. England was on double daylight saving time, and it was still full light, but eastward, over the Channel, the skies were darkening. Two hours later night had fallen, and below us we could see glints of yellow flame from the German anti- aircraft guns on the Channel Islands. We watched them curiously and without fear, as a high-flying duck may watch a hunter, knowing that we were too high and far away for their fire to reach us. In the plane the men sat quietly, deep in their own thoughts. They joked a little and broke, now and then, into ribald laughter. Nervousness and tension, and the cold that blasted through the open door, had its effect upon us all. Now and then a paratrooper would rise, lumber heavily to the little bathroom in the tail of the plane, find he could not push through the narrow doorway in his bulky gear, and come back, mumbling his profane opinion of the designers of the C-47 airplane. Soon the crew chief passed a bucket around, but this did not entirely solve our problem. A man strapped and buckled into full combat gear finds it extremely difficult to reach certain essential portions of his anatomy, and his efforts are not made easier by the fact that his comrades are watching him, jeering derisively and offering gratuitous advice.
Wing to wing, the big planes snuggled close in their tight formation, we crossed to the coast of France. I was sitting straight across the aisle from the doorless exit. Even at fifteen hundred feet I could tell the Channel was rough, for we passed over a small patrol craft – one of the check points for our navigators – and the light it displayed for us was bobbing like a cork in a millrace. No lights showed on the land, but in the pale glow of a rising moon, I could clearly see each farm and field below. And I remember thinking how peaceful the land looked, each house and hedgerow, path and little stream bathed in the silver of the moonlight.
It was now midnight. Within minutes the first parachutists would be jumping out over Normandy.