Prelude to Normandy

As we came down just south of the Isle of White, I came down out of the cloud to go back to Tangra, just a handful of miles, and all the South Hampton water which is between the Isle of White and Britain there was all full of landing craft and ships; surprising number of big ships, you know, merchant ships, destroyers, landing craft and they came out of the Solway Firth and headed south, due south. And anyway, saw and my number two, I forgot and we landed at Tangmere and they were, they said, “Everybody is confined to camp,” and they’re painting the airplanes, they’re painting white and black stripes on the wings. I think about three white and three black on each side, wide stripes, they took up oh about a third of the wing, I guess. And that was to identify, so that the navy and army wouldn’t fire at us so we could identify ourselves to them more readily. And so that night about, I think it was11 o’clock we were set for a briefing and the sort of sector commander came in and he had a map on the wall inside a great big tent, it was our mess tent. They had a map of England and Normandy, they had the beaches Sword, Juno, Gold and then Omaha and Utah, you know, three British Canadian beaches to the east and then the two American ones, Omaha and Utah, saw those names for the first time. As we came out of the tent we saw aircraft with navigation lights on over us, towing gliders, right over the top of Tangmere and “Boy, I guess this is it,” and well the weather was far from charming, anyway so that was the start of it.