I have sat down with men who came ashore at Normandy June 6, 1994. It has been an honor. Here are two of the articles I have written.

Bob Harding

Around ten in the morning.
June sixth.
1944.
Omaha Beach. Normandy.

Bob Harding, age 19, of the 5th Engineer Brigade, 56th Engineers, stepped out of a LCI – Landing Craft, Infantry – and took his place in the second wave of soldiers to land in France on what historian Cornelius Ryan would call “The Longest Day.”

Fifty-eight years later Bob Harding sits in his Avilla home and remembers it wasn’t really a surprise that they were on this boat that had left Plymouth, England while the sky was still dark to cross the Channel.

Just five months earlier– between Christmas and New Year’s Day – they had disembarked from another ship, the Queen Elizabeth, in Glasgow, Scotland. They were then sent to England where they “practiced blowing things up.”

Scuttlebutt had it that there was something up. Harding says, “Oh, yeah, we had one guy that every time we’d be getting ready to do something, he say there was a rumor that we were going to really do SOMETHING. Then he would add that it was just a rumor.”

Harding smiles and says, “When we got on the boat there in Plymouth, the fellow said, ‘I think they’re carrying this rumor too far’” That was the last piece of humor in Bob Harding’s story for quite awhile.

He talks about General Eisenhower’s message that was read to all troops involved in the invasion: “In that speech I think it said there will be no turning back. When the last guy hit the water, I saw why there would be no turning back because they raised the ramps on that ship and they were gone. So you had one way to go. 90 pound pack and trying to keep rifle dry.
“Toward a mound . . .”

The mound was a pile of sand that they men called a dike and on top of it were guns. Continue reading D-Day Articles: Bob Harding, Gene Cogan →