Joseph S. Jones Utah Beach - former Gunner's Mate 1/c on LCI #5

LCI Flotilla Two (32 ships) left Torquay England early June 6 or June 5 with troops and barrage balloons and proceeded to Utah Beach. Each ship carried about 125 fully armed infantrymen in heavy seas.

Just after daybreak, we reached a marked (by bouys) supposedly swept lane to head for the beaches. An LCT (#777) cut across our starboard bow and was several hundred feet ahead when it struck a mine. The bow went straight up spilling 6-bys trucks and personnel into the channel. It sank in a few minutes. We picked up a sailor with his life jacket on but unconscious or dead and our corpsman worked on him over an hour while the ship was bucking in heavy sea but to no avail. We transferred the body to a troop ship later.
Word came to us that the higher-ups decided that the gradual sloped beaches would cause the troops to have to wade too far to get to dry land.

A group of LCVP's came along side and took our troops off and took them in. German shore guns walked out to us in several places when we first tried but air cover kept them inoperative in most cases. We never had to look up when a plane flew over. The German Airforce was finished except for a few that came at night.

We had to tie up to a Liberty ship after loosing bow and stern anchors. At night on D-7, the line we used to tie to the Liberty broke and we started engines and not knowing the line had broke at the Liberty and the line came under our ship and fouled the screws shutting down the engines. We drifted to shore going between the steel obstacles and finally going high and dry at low tide. Fortunately the shore batteries had been destroyed.
The next morning the crew put ladders over the side and took hack saws and cut the lines off the shafts. An anchor was borrowed from a LCT and attacked to the stern anchor cable which was attached to a motorized winch. An Army bulldozer took the anchor out as far as it could and buried it. At high tide, we pulled ourselves off.

After that we were used for hauling troops and supplies from various points on the Normandy beaches and finally we took a load of walking wounded to England on June 22-23.
We experience several of V-1 weapons before leaving England and was amazed to watch the British Spitfires fly alongside the "buzz bombs" using their wing tips to turn the weapons away from their courses towards London. That's about it.

Thanks for the opportunity.
Sincerely, Joseph S. Jones, former Gunner's Mate 1/c on LCI #5     (05 Mai 1999)