The Build Up by Martin Bowman

Author:Martin Bowman
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781783468850
Publisher: Pen and Sword
Published: 2013-08-18T16:00:00+00:00

‘Little did I know that I would take a wild ride into history in a Higgins Landing Craft, an LCVP. My crew and I picked up the landing barge at Little Creek, Virginia. There were no numbers, no nothing on it. The only thing that was stamped on the barge was a ‘No Smoking’ sign. Ed Meadows, my bowman was from up in the mountains of eastern Kentucky. John Lofton my Sternman was from somewhere about a hundred miles east of Houston, Texas and my Motor Machinist Mate was a boy by the name of Harry Anton. He had learned diesel motors well. He was very, very adept. I was the coxswain. At that time I was a Seaman First Class and everybody called me Larry. And I was very proud to be a part of this group. My crew and I then took off for destinations unknown. We were given a compass reading and told, ‘Now way out there in the Atlantic on the horizon, you will see a ship and it’s a quite sizable ship and it has big booms on it and derricks an davits and everything and you just go out there and you’ll find it. It’s got a great big ‘33’ on the bow. And when you find that ship, that’s your ship. They’ll hoist you aboard and cradle your barge and then you will be assigned. So, that’s what we did and we went aboard the Bayfield.

‘After a few days aboard ship we were assigned to different boat divisions. There were three boat divisions and I was assigned to the first boat division. Then they told us to paint our number on our barge. Well my number ended up as PA 33-3. So we painted our barge and we painted it inside and out. We got a great big stencil that they had made for us I think in the carpenter’s shop aboard ship and they brought it to us and with the paint brushes and the stencil and we put the numbers on our LCVP.

‘We went on shake down cruises and on manoeuvres and we got to be pretty good at running this little boat and taking on troops. Then we were told that we were going to be in this big convoy, so we went back to New York and I swear I believed it was Pier 13. We picked up troops and then we embarked for Britain. We landed in Scotland arriving on the 22nd February 1944. At Weymouth, Falmouth and Plymouth we did a lot of manoeuvres. We went through several nights of bombings. It seemed to me that it was sometime around midnight on 5 June, like the rest of the guys, I couldn’t sleep, so I ended up in the galley and so my crew came on up and we all were sitting around drinking coffee and they were telling us that the weather was pretty foul and they didn’t know what they were going to do. We

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