60 Years Ago Today

At sea.

Off the French coast a little before 9:00 P.M. a dozen small ships appeared. They moved quietly along the horizon, so close that their crews could clearly see the houses of Normandy. The ships went unnoticed. They finished their job and then moved back. They were British mine sweepers - the vanguard of the mightiest fleet ever assembled.

For now back in the Channel, plowing through the choppy gray waters, a phalanx of ships bore down on Hitler's Europe - the might and fury of the free world unleashed at last. They came, rank after relentless rank, ten lanes wide, twenty miles across, five thousand ships of every description. There were fast new attack transports, slow rust-scarred freighters, small ocean liners, Channel steamers, hospital ships, weather-beaten tankers, coasters and swarms of fussing tugs. There were endless columns of shallow-draft landing ships - great wallowing vessels, some of them almost 350 feet long. Many of these and the other heavier transports carried smaller landing craft for the actual beach assault - more than fifteen hundred of them. Ahead of the convoys were processions of mine sweepers, Coast Guard cutters, buoy-layers and motor launches. Barrage balloons flew above the ships. Squadrons of fighter planes weaved below the clouds. And surrounding this fantastic cavalcade of ships packed with men, guns, tanks, motor vehicles and supplies, and excluding small naval vessels, was a formidable array of 702 warships.

There was the heavy cruiser U.S.S. Augusta, Rear Admiral Kirk's flagship, leading the American task force - twenty-one convoys bound for Omaha and Utah beaches. Just four months before Pearl Harbor the queenly Augusta had carried President Roosevelt to a quiet Newfoundland bay for the first of many historic meetings with Winston Churchill. Nearby, steaming majestically with all their battle flags flying, were the battleships: H.M.S. Nelson, Ramillies and Warspite, and U.S.S. Texas, Arkansas and the proud Nevada which the Japanese had sunk and written off at Pearl Harbor.

Leading the thirty-eight British and Canadian convoys bound for Sword, Juno and Gold beaches was the cruiser H.M.S. Scylla, the flagship of Rear Admiral Sir Philip Vian, the man who tracked down the German battleship Bismarck. And close by was one of Britain's most famous light cruisers - H.M.S. Ajax, one of a trio which had hounded the pride of Hitler's fleet, the Graf Spee, to her doom in Montevideo harbor after the battle of the River Plate in December 1939. There were other famous cruisers - the U.S.S. Tuscaloosa and Quincy, H.M.S. Enterprise and Black Prince, France's Georges Leygues - twenty-two in all.

Along the edges of the convoys sailed a variety of ships: graceful sloops, chunky corvettes, slim gunboats like the Dutch Soemba, antisubmarine patrol craft, fast PT boats, and everywhere sleek destroyers. Besides the scores of American and British destroyers, there were Canada's Qu'Appelle, Saskatchewan and Ristigouche, Norway's Svenner, and even a contribution from the Polish forces, the Poiron.

Slowly, ponderously this great armada moved across the Channel. It followed a minute-by-minute traffic pattern of a kind never attempted before. Ships poured out of British ports and, moving down the coasts in two-convoy lanes, converged on the assembly area south of the Isle of Wight. There they sorted themselves out and each took a carefully predetermined position with the force heading for the particular beach to which it had been assigned. Out of the assembly area, which was promptly nicknamed "Piccadilly Circus," the convoys headed for France along five buoy-marked lanes. And as they approached Normandy these five paths split up into ten channels, two for each beach - one for fast traffic, the other for slow. Up front, just behind the spearhead of mine sweepers, battleships and cruisers, were the command ships, the attack transports bristling with radar and radio antennae. These floating command posts would be the nerve centers for the invasion.

Everywhere there were ships. To the men aboard, this historic armada is still remembered as "the most impressive, unforgettable" sight they had ever seen.

On land.

As the last twilight turned to darkness, the last men got on board their planes. Eisenhower was out on the runway, calling out "Good luck!" He noticed a short private, in Eisenhower's words "more equipment than soldier," who snapped him a salute. Eisenhower returned it. Then the private turned to the east and called out, "Look out, Hitler. Here we come!"

The pilots started their engines. A giant cacophony of sound engulfed the airfield as each C-47 in its turn lurched into line on the taxi strip. At the head of the runway, the pilots locked the brakes and ran up the engines until they screamed. Then, at ten-second intervals, they released the brakes and started down the runway, slowly at first, gathering speed, so overloaded that they barely made it into the sky.

When the last plane roared off, Eisenhower turned to his driver, Kay Summersby. She saw tears in his eyes. He began to walk slowly toward his car. "Well," he said quietly, "it's on."

Before going to bed, Admiral Ramsay made a final entry in his handwritten diary: "Monday, June 5, 1944. Thus has been the vital & crucial decision to stage the great enterprise which, I hope, be the immediate means of bringing about the downfall of Germany's fighting power & Nazi oppression & an early cessation of hostilities.

"I am not under delusions as to the risks involved in this most difficult of all operations. . . . Success will be in the balance. We must trust in our invisible assets to tip the balance in our favor.

"We shall require all the help that God can give us & I cannot believe that this will not be forthcoming."

Tired as he must have been, Ramsay caught the spirit and soul of the great undertaking perfectly, especially in his hope for what the results would be for occupied Europe and the world, his recognition that the enterprise was fraught with peril, and his confidence that God was blessing this cause.

'At sea' from The Longest Day by Cornelius Ryan. 'On land' from D-Day June 6, 1944 by Stephen E. Ambrose.