"NOBODY SLEPT THAT NIGHT"
By Greg Edwards & Mark Morrison
The Roanoke Times
June 4, 1994
By June 3, Roy Stevens and the rest of the troops scheduled to take part in the initial landings had boarded the ships that would take them across the Channel.
"It was a solemn thing," Stevens remembers of the wait aboard the British troop ship Empire Javelin, which would carry the entire 1st battalion of the 116th Infantry and the 2nd Ranger Battalion to France. "We sat around and talked about what we would do when we got back home."
Stevens had broken his right ankle playing football and had returned to Company A only two weeks earlier. He killed the time as the ship sat in the port of Southhampton sharpening his bayonet and knives or going to the ship's canteen where he bought cookies. Stevens didn't care too much for the food on the ship: the British ate too much fish.
Earl Parker, another Bedford soldier, showed Stevens and others pictures of the daughter he had never seen, born four weeks after he shipped out. Parker told them he wouldn't mind dying if he could only see his daughter.
A boy who was an acrobat entertained others by walking up and down the ship's stairs on his hands.
There was no swearing or cussing like you see in war movies, Stevens said. "People were serious about this thing. We knew somebody was going to die and it wasn't going to be long."
A Catholic priest told the men they should prepare themselves for what awaited them. "I imagine everybody did," Stevens said. "If anybody believed in an Almighty, they did that night."
The night of June 5, as the ship pulled out of the harbor, Stevens lay in his bunk trying to sleep and wondering if he would survive. "Nobody slept that night, nobody."
.....
For Willard Norfleet, his final days before the invasion were spent in a camp in England with about 3,500 other soldiers. Barbed wire lined the fences and guards were at the gate with orders not to let anyone out.
Here, Norfleet was given his D-Day mission.
He was 26, from Roanoke, and the sharpest dresser in his outfit. He even pressed his shoelaces. They called him Lover, and on Omaha Beach his job was to lead his platoon of men onto shore and up a crude roadway to the bluffs above the beach.
At the camp, they ate well for a change: steak and lemon meringue pie.
The men joked about it. They were being fattened up for the kill.
A last meal for the condemned. more...
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