When we got aboard the boats to go over
to England, to France rather for D-day
an officer come down and said,
“I need three volunteers, you, you and you!”
So there was me and two of my friends
that he took over to the platoon sergeant.
Now I didn't know what it was because
nobody was wearing any shoulder flashes
to indicate what regiment you were or
anything and immediately we started
getting off of the boat onto the landing
craft to go onto the beach.
Getting into the landing craft itself was a
rough thing because I forget what you call
them now but they were made of
something like a net, it was made out of rope.
You crawled down this net to get into the
landing craft and, of course,
as you're crawling down one wave takes
the ship down here and the landing craft
goes up here, it was kind of a rough deal.
One man got crushed right between the
ship and the landing craft as we were
trying to get in. And, of course,
we had never had, myself and my other
two fellows, hadn't had this experience
of scrambling down this net yet –
the other guys did so it was kind
of rough getting down there.
I got down about two rungs on the ladder
and the landing craft came up and
I just let go and jumped.
The other two people had seen me do it,
they did the same thing so we didn't
bother crawling down, we jumped.