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E.J. Cowley. My Full Story of the
D. Day Landing.

We loaded men of the 7th Armoured Division
on the 2nd of june 1944 at Horwich. at first
we thought this was just an excersice, until I
spoke to a sargent and he said, that they had only
been back in England a week, and they had no leave,
but had been transported with there [crossed out][illegible][end crossed out] tanks to
Horwich so I put 2 and 2 together and siad to him
I lay odds that this is the real thing, and when
all shore leave was stopped we knew, and on June the
4th the ships company was mustered, and we was told
were we was going. D day should have been on June
the 5th but owing to the weather was postponed
for 24 hrs and only then if the weather was favourable
so there we were tied to a bouy in wild river
waiting for the balloon to go up. At2 am 6th
off June we recieved orders start main engines,
bouy wires were slipped and we were under way.
we sailed along the coast for awhile, and the
sight is one I shall never forget, the whole channel
seemed to be filled with ships and the sky
with planes. We aproached the French coast around
5 am, and slowly steamed towards our landing point
but about 2 miles off we stopped engines and stayed
put for nearly 2 1/2 hrs, the reason for this the
frogmen had not cleared all the mines from
the Landing strip and this held up the landing
when eventuly we did land, we were beached in
6 ft of water, so the 11 tanks had to go