Set to Sail!

And we set sail in the afternoon . . . set sail in the afternoon. At about evening, six, seven o’clock, the storm came up . . . fierce storm. The waves, the winds were blowing. Hard to do anything, and the swell of the ship, and anyhow, they said, “We can’t turn back now. We gotta keep going.” So, we kept going until that night, and just about dusk, they stopped the operations. You could almost see the coastline of France, of Calais. And the Germans used to have a V2 rocket, or a buzz bomb, what they would call a buzz bomb. They would light . . . and they would come across there. It was like a bomb with a mechanized motor, and they’d, they’d have gas coming from the tail. But as long as that gas is coming from the tail, when it’s going over you. But once it stopped, it, it dropped and exploded. Well, he started that that evening, and he continued all night. It’s a good job he didn’t know we were in that channel ‘cause he would have wiped them ships out of that channel, the whole thing. In the meantime, the whole armada of the navy was heading toward the shores and nobody knew what was going to go out. And they said, “No, everything is cancelled.” So, we stayed that night. And the next morning at 5:30, well, before 5:30, the orders came aboard the ship that “Set everything, set sail, go.” And the ships, that, the minesweeper had to go first and clear all the mines that the Germans . . . they had plenty there. They had an awful lot of them there, and we cleaned that all up. And you come back there. The idea was so that the other landing craft, the assault boats and the ships that were coming in, would be able to go in the, the beachhead without getting too much trouble.