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"THE COLOR OF BLOOD"

By Greg Edwards & Mark Morrison
The Roanoke Times
June 4, 1994

The front end sank first. Stevens, in the back, was trapped for a while by other men pushing back against him. As the boat sank, Stevens could see its propeller still turning.

"I was about as scared as I ever was. I was not much of a swimmer."

Like others on the boat, Stevens wore an inflatable life preserver that fit around his body and under his armpits like a small inner tube. The assault jacket he?d been issued had been tailored to fit better. Now, the jacket, its pockets loaded with ammunition and supplies, was weighing him down; because of the tailoring and the life preserver, he couldn't get it off.

He struggled to keep his head above the rough sea. "I drank more water than I ever drank in my life." Stevens grabbed hold of a bangalore torpedo, an explosive used to blast holes in barbed wire and pillboxes, that was floating by.

One man drowned when his life jacket either failed or was struck by a bullet. The lieutenant leading the boat section swam to the beach, without telling anybody he was going.

Fighting for over an hour to stay afloat, Stevens was exhausted. When another boat loaded with rockets came by at 8 a.m. and rescued him and others, Clyde Powers, another Bedford soldier, pushed Stevens into the boat because he lacked the strength to climb a ladder himself.

Stevens was taken to a troop ship where he found several others from sunken landing craft. They were all taken back to England to be re-equipped.

.....

Willard Norfleet's threat paid off.

The frightened sailor, with Norfleet's gun to his head, took the boat in and Norfleet and his platoon landed in chin-deep water. The beach stretched out for 300 yards beyond the water to the base of the bluffs.

One man was killed when he jumped from the boat and the ramp, bouncing wildly in the breaking surf, struck him in the head. Norfleet and his group saw a man from another outfit up on the beach get shot. He called desperately for help.

A medic ran to his aid. He was shot.

At the water's edge, Norfleet ducked behind a snad pile. He thought to himself: "If hell's like this, I sure don't want to go there." And he prayed: "I said Lord, if you'll just get me back home, I'll accept you and live for you."

The men from his platoon scattered.

"It was everyone for himself then."

Behind the sand pile, he looked down the beach to a soldier knee-deep in the surf who had dropped his rifle and was reaching to retrieve it. Suddenly, he fell over and folded limply into the water.

It was the only color image Norfleet would remember from D-Day. Everything else would be in black-and-white.

"You could see the color of blood just mixing in the water."

Norfleet charged across the 300 yards of open sand. Eventually, he joined up with others from his platoon at the base of the bluffs, where they couldn't be targeted by the snipers above them.

They were joined by stragglers from other companies. The pieced together a machine gun and radioed a Navy destroyer to knock out a pillbox. Slowly, as the day dragged on, they fought their way up the bluffs.

As night fell, there was a lull in the fighting. At the top of the bluffs, Norfleet bedded down in a shallow foxhole, so weary that he was able to sleep even with the Germans camped "as close as across the street."

He fell asleep listening to the sound of their pots and pans rattling through the dark. more