D-Day Tribute, Anecdotally

Sixty-six years ago:

. . . 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.

In his bunker overlooking Omaha beach, German Major Werner Pluskat was cold, tired and exasperated.

Pluskat could not rid himself of his gnawing uneasiness. Once more he swung his artillery glasses over to the left, picked up the dark mass of the Cherbourg peninsula and began a slow sweep of the horizon. The same low banks of mist came into view, the same patches of shimmering moonlight, the same restless, white-flecked sea. Nothing was changed. Everything seemed peaceful. […]

Wearily, he swung the glasses over to the left again. Slowly, he tracked across the horizon. He reached the dead center of the bay. The glasses stopped moving. Pluskat tensed, stared hard.

Through the scattering, thinning mist the horizon was magically filling with ships -- ships of every size and description, ships that casually maneuvered back and forth as though they had been there for hours. There appeared to be thousands of them. It was a ghostly armada that somehow had appeared from nowhere.

Pluskat stared in frozen disbelief, speechless, moved as he had never been before in his life. At that moment the world of the good soldier Pluskat began falling apart. He says in those first few moments he knew, calmly and surely, that "this was the end for Germany." (credit: The Longest Day, Cornelius Ryan)

American Cemetery Normandy

God Bless the USA!