D-Day Duty
Heroes Remember
It was choppy, yeah. It was pretty, pretty blustery and again, a
lot of, a lot of the guys were sea sick. And we had been
training the different troops and when it came time to go in and
load, our destination was the Omaha Beach. We had I think about
thirty landing craft, four of us and three American landing
craft headed, took on US infantry and headed for Omaha.
Interviewer: What do you remember about the American troops
that were loaded aboard your ship?
They were pretty, pretty concerned. Some of them were you know,
they were green. One guy I talked to, he had only been in the
army about eleven months, and here he was going into combat and,
you know. So there's a certain amount of fear, just like there
was in Salerno, a lot of those young guys were,
they were afraid. Yeah.
Interviewer: What do you remember about the crossing?
Well the crossing was choppy, uneventful. I remember feeling the
shells whistling over my head when I was getting ready to drop
the kedge. But, we never, our ship was not hit. No, no.
Interviewer: You were below decks at...
No, I was on the kedge at that time.
Interviewer: OK.
On the stern. Like the kedge anchor was on the stern right of
mid ships. And you dropped the kedge and you waited and then of
course there was somebody else had taking my place in the engine
room, and then on the coast in they hit the beach. And when
you're ready, when all the troops are off, presumably you pull
your kedge in and it pulls you off. But when we had taken all
our troops off, pulled the kedge in, the kedge came in but we
didn't come off. We sat there all night. Yeah.
There's a German mortar I picked up in Omaha there.
Interviewer: You were effectively grounded, off Omaha beach.
All night. Till the next, early next morning
when the tide came full, yeah.
Interviewer: What do you remember about
what was going on around the ?
Well it was kind of scary because the, the fighting was just,
they had established a beach head by the time we got in, but the
fighting was going on up the hill, you know we could hear all
the guns and, and there we are, sitting, a sitting duck.
Expecting that we're going to get a couple of mortar shells or
something come over and hit us. So, most of us said well let's
get off, you know, if you're going to get hit, get up on the
beach. So, we got off the ship when she was beached and walked
up the hill. We said we'd go up and see how close we could get
to the troops and we got into one of the pillboxes and the
remains of a couple of people there. And we brought a case of
German mortars back to ship and we had our gunner
disarm them and I brought one home. Yeah.
Interviewer: As a souvenir.
Yeah, as a souvenir.
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