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Across the Channel and Over the Beach
I couldn't tell you how long it took to get to shore - it seemed like forever. But at long
last, the front end opened by letting down the ramp, and here was the beach, some three hundred
yards away. I had been told that it might not be possible to come in close enough to land us dry-
shod - that was the reason for waterproofing the vehicles but it looked like half the English
Channel still in front of us. The first vehicle rolled carefully down the steep ramp and splashed
out of sight. Shortly we saw it again, chugging manfully up to the beach. Then the next and the
next, and after while it was our turn. The ramp looked awfully steep, the water tremendously
deep. Joe B. Davis put the jeep in low range, low gear, and eased her in. The water covered the
hood and lapped around my short ribs. I looked back at Sgt Johnson with some envy. He was still
mostly above water level. The engine sputtered, chugged twice, sputtered again, and died. The
waterproofing had failed.
"God damn it!" I screamed. "I thought you had this son-of-a-bitch waterproofed!"
"I thought so too, sir."
I jumped out-for some reason the water was even icier outside - and called to Sgt Johnson
to get out and help push. Hopeless. Our feet sank ten inches into the sandy bottom, and so did the
jeep's tires. The LCT yawed, moving the ramp so that we were on longer blocking it, and more
vehicles came off and passed us. Can you imagine pushing a car stuck in the mud through four
feet of water? We tried for five minutes, and I saw it was no use, so I started to tell Joe B. to wait
with the jeep until it could be rescued and then come find me. I was about to start out on foot
with Sgt Johnson, but just then a caterpillar tractor floundered out toward us and told us to hitch
onto it. The tractor pulled us and another unfortunate out and across the beach and up a roadway
onto a bluff where there was a place we could pull off the road and work on the jeep. And there -
wonder of wonders - I found Jake Jacobs and Major Hughes. I fell on their necks and kissed
them. Davis opened the hood of the jeep and started scraping off waterproofing compound by the
handful and fooling with the carburetor. It was dusk by now and I was wet and worn, but I was
with someone I knew and someone that knew the score.
When my jeep would run again, we started out, following Major Hughes. Before dark I
just got a few faint impression - signs everywhere, "Roads cleared of mines to hedges," M.P.s at
almost every crossroad, the first view of the now famous Normandy hedgerows, an occasional
village, usually badly shelled. In one doorway here were two figures - a gaunt Norman woman
and a boy of about ten who puffed avidly on a cigarette. Both looked at us listlessly as we went
by.
I went a lot of places that night - to the field where Major Hughes had decided to
assemble the battery as it came in, to the 359th Infantry CP, to the fields just out of the village of
Neuville au Plain (just north of Ste. Mere Eglise) where B and A Batteries were already in
position firing, and to the 4th Division Artillery CP. Part of the time I was with Hughes and
Jacobs, later with Col Costain.
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