Lt. Nance of Company A
116th Infantry Regiment
" I was with Company B, which arrived 19 minutes after Company A. I was the first one to go out. It was a divisional order that the officer be the first man to leave the boat. When he touched the sand, our barber had taken us exactly where we were to be led. He was in a steel compartment and when he pulled the lock, the ramp didn't come down. I told her "go down there," he shot it several times, and she fell. I pushed her and then I took two steps on that ramp, and I jumped into the water. The water went up to my chest, a wave raised the water up to my neck, I walked and I went to the beach that was about 15 to 20 yards away. My boat was the ship of the company headquarters. It was company B, but we were from company A in it.
When I got up after jumping, I looked around me, all around me, there was no soul. No one. Where was everybody? Where was Company A? I didn't know what happened to the company until the sea came up. I turned around, and I saw the bodies in the water, they clashed with each other, there were so many. There was no one in sight. I turned around, and I didn't see anyone, nobody behind me.
The people who had come to land with me, were somewhere behind, disappeared, and then later I started moving forward. A little later, some of them found themselves around me. In front of me, there was one of my couriers, on the left there was my radio, Clifton and he called me, he told me he had been hit, I looked at him, he seemed to be fine. I asked him, "Can you move?" and I was injured three times, before I could reach the mark left by the high tide.
Four men from the 29th reconnaissance were behind one of these steel things and I yelled at them to disperse, and I had just told them that a mortar shell fell, killing three of these men, and injuring the other.
I saw Lieutenant Winkler of Company B, he was on my right, he was broke like hay by a fake. Winkler was killed.
Of our six assault boats composing our section, mine was the seventh, we lost number 5 at sea. Then, Captain Bellegin's number 2, there were 32 men on board, only one person survived. It exploded with all the demolition equipment on board.
So we lost boats number 5 and number 2 on the six ships of company A."
Lieutenant Elisha (Ray) Nance, 29th Infantry Division, 116th Infantry Regiment, Company A (Oral History - Eisenhower Center)