Radio Honolulu.' Finally, a very British voice from HMS Indefatigable (a hysterical name for a ship) said, 'I say there, we have it direct from Radio Tokyo. The Nips are ready to call it quits, provided the Emperor can keep his white horse.' A veddy British summary of conditions! Looking back, I realize that it was all a long time ago and no one is the same as they were then. But we're not the people we would have been without Alabama. She put her mark on us and weand our lives sincewere changed for the better. We may have wanted off but she was our ship! And is still! In the 'I' division, we always knew two things for sure: (1) The 'Mighty A' was the best ship in the Pacific or anywhere else; (2) The 'I' Division was the best division on her. Modest we weren't; cocky we were. But we did the job and did it superbly. It was my pleasure and privilege to be associated with the men of '\' and all who made her 'The Mighty A.' Gentlemen, I salute you! Francis Earl Burton Earl Burton served in the Navy as a radar man first class. Earl served in the Pacific for two years. He was on the second wave at the Battle of Tarawa in the Central Pacific Gilbert Islands. He was ill with dengue fever and was always proud of serving his country. Laurence J. Burton Laurence J. Burton was in the U.S. Naval Air Corps and attained the rank of seaman first class. He attended flight school and gunnery school In 1944, because of the high ratio of women to men, he initiated the 'Polygamist Prance' with Dean Hurst. A male student could take as many females to the dance as he would like. After the war, he served at student body president at Weber College. Don Averett Buswell D-DAY ACTION - The description of the mined destroyer in the book The Longest Day by Cornelius Ryan was just as I had seen it. Someone from my vantage point had to have reported this to the book's author. The 5th of June 1944 was the chosen day for D-Day; but because of the bad weather, it was postponed. We had our troops on board from the 4th of June waiting. As far as we knew, this could be just another practice landing. During the night of the 4th, we were advised to proceed to Bournemouth Harbor and anchor for the night. There were hundreds of ships in the area. Not until we left the harbor on the evening of the 5th did we begin to think that this might be the real thing. We cruised through the night in the channel with the weather still rather bad. Our instructions were to head for France in the early morning. There seemed to be thousands of ships all around us. It was cloudy and the ocean was rough. We could hear planes overhead and then the bombardment started. As we approached our designated area on the beach, the battleships and cruisers were pounding the beach with shells going directly over our heads. It is hard to believe, but the beach seemed to bounce as the shells hit and exploded. No way could there be anything remaining alive on that beach. Our job was to establish a new beachhead in the Utah beach area. Our troops consisted of a Kansas National Guard group trained in communications, with the job of establishing a beachhead for communicating to and guarding of subsequent landings. It was a wild scene as we approached the beach. The German pill boxes were still intact with a clear view of the beach. Sherman tanks would appear at the crest 142 of the hill overlooking the beach. They would fire and then back off out-of-sight. Their 88mm cannons were very accurate. Infantry Combat Vehicles (ICVs) carrying about forty men were hit by the shells. The gradient of the beach was very shallow. It meant that we would hit ground 200 feet or more from the beach proper. We had to drop our anchor at the right moment so that we could be pulled off the beach after we had unloaded our troops. On our first run, the anchor was dropped too soon, and we had to back off and try again. This time we made it and were set to unload the men. The wind and current from our port side was such that the captain had to continue to adjust our speed to keep us from broaching sidewise off the beach. My job was to supervise the unloading with my position on the ship's bow. The ramp was moved forward and down into the water. The men were ready to run down the ramp into the water to get to the beach (my problem at this time will be told a little later). The rope or line had been placed and ready for the soldiers to hold onto as they left the ramp. This line was necessary because the water could be from two to ten feet deep. The deeper areas were due to the bombing and shelling that had taken place earlier. The men were heavily laden with full packs, ammunition, guns, and parts of machine guns. One man might have the barrel and another, the tripod to hold it. The ammunition boxes were heavy. The first man to leave the ship was the commanding officer. As I watched, he never even dropped to one knee all the way to the protecting seawall. The men holding to the line would sometimes drop out-of-sight as they hit one of those deep bombshell holes. Most of them came up, but many did not. The soldiers were happy to get off the ship knowing we were sitting ducks because of shells from the beach area. They hit the beach and fell down prone on the sand. This was very dangerous for them. I guess the bravest man I ever saw in action was their commanding officer. As I said earlier, he never dropped to his knees, but kept moving to the seawall. He would stop and blow his whistle and give his arm signal to keep moving. I feel he saved many men by his personal courage and encouragement. Ordinarily (in practice) we could unload our troops and be off the beach in about twenty minutes, but it took us about one hour and twenty minutes to get the job done on D-Day. The gradient of the beach and the bad Weather made for special problems, not to mention our mistakes in handling the operation. One of the delays occurred when two men with a balloon and coil of wire would not leave the ship. A small boat had come along side to pick them up because of the heavy equipment they had to take ashore. Their responsibility was to handle the barrage balloon to protect the soldiers from strafing attacks. The two soldiers would not get in the boat when they saw what was happening on the beach. This was the only time I took my 45 pistol out of my holster in a threatening way. I told them either get off the ship or suffer the consequences. They complied. I have often wondered if I really could have pulled the trigger on those men. I'm happy at least that they thought I might do it. Our ship was the only one of our group of five that was not damaged in some way. As we left the beach, the remaining four ships headed back to England. We were ordered to stay on the beach to pick up survivors and act as a messenger ship because we could maneuver in shallow water and therefore get around easily. Our next few days were spent on the beach as instructed. We spotted bodies for the small boats to pick up and also took men aboard such as paratroopers that had found their way back to the beach. During these days thousands of troops were put on the beach along with tanks and other vehicles. The beach head had been established and our troops were moving slowly inland. A few years later, I visited our beach area and was given the red carpet treatment by the personnel at the museum there. I could not believe that those reinforced concrete pill boxes were still intact. From my observation of the bombing and shelling on D-Day, I was surprised that any structure could endure the pounding. It was an emotional experience sitting on the beach that day recalling the D-Day experience. 'SCHWARTZY' - One of my favorite stories concerning the Normandy landing is what I refer to as the 'Schwarzback story.' Just before we left the dock at Virginia Capes, a new sailor came aboard. His name was Robert Schwarzback, a striker signalman. He was the kind of man that would cap every story he heard. That does not go over well with other people, having their best story beaten. He was a morale problem so I had him on my watch. At times, he would send me semaphore messages from the bow of the ship while I was on the Con. These messages were always questions that had an automatic answer of, 'No, no, no!' After this went on for a while, I simply wouldn't attempt to read the message, but just give him the 'negative' sign. Captain Corideo eventually called me in to read a secret memo concerning the landing. One request was to have a buoy, an anchor, and a long line ready for use on the beach landing. He pointed out that the volunteer would probably not get back to the ship, and that he would be very vulnerable to artillery fire. The picture 143