The Germans built a four-gun battery on the cliff just west of Port-en-Bessin. Big fortifications, big guns - 155mm. Beautifully camouflaged with nets and dirt embankments, they could not be seen from the air.

The farmer on whose land they were built was furious because he could not graze his cattle or grow crops on the field. He paced off the distances between the bunkers, from the bunkers to the observation post on the very edge of the cliff, from the cliff to the bunkers, and so on. He had a blind son, eight or nine years old. Like many blind people, the boy had a fabulous memory. Because he was blind, the Germans paid little attention to him.

One day in early 1944, the boy hitched a ride to Bayeux. There he managed to get in touch with Andre Heintz, an eighteen year old in the Resistance. The boy gave Heintz his information; Heintz sent it on to England via his little homemade radio transmitter (hidden in a Campbell Soup can; today on display in the Battle of Normandy Museum in Caen); thus the British navy, on D-Day, had the exact coordinates of the bunkers.

"Everything is wrecked, Herr Leutnant! The stores are on fire. Everything's wrecked!"

Shaking his head, he added, "We've got to surrender, Herr Leutnant."

"Have you gone out of your mind, man?" the twenty-three-year-old Jahnke replied. "If we had always surrendered in Russia in this kind of situation the Russians would have been here long ago."

He called out a command, "All troops fall in for entrenching!" Just as they were getting into the work, here came another wave of Marauders. The men huddled in the sand. Jahnke sent a man on a bicycle to report to battalion HQ, but he was killed by a bomb.

All along the bluff, German soldiers watched the landing craft approach, their fingers on the triggers of machine guns, rifles, artillery fuses, or holding mortar rounds. In bunker 62, Frerking was at the telephone, giving the range to gunners a couple of kilometers inland: "Target Dora, all guns, range four-eight-five-zero, basic direction 20 plus, impact fuse."

Frankford fired away from shoal water 800 meters off the beach. Gunnery Officer Keeler recalled: "A tank sitting at the water's edge with a broken track fired at something on the hill. We immediately followed up with a 5-inch salvo. The tank gunner flipped open his hatch, looked around at us, waved, dropped back in the tank, and fired at another target. For the next few minutes he was our fire-control party. Our range-finder optics could examine the spots where his shells hit."

A bit later McCook had the perhaps unique experience of forcing German troops to surrender. As "Rebel" Ramey was firing at a cliff position, German soldiers appeared waving a white flag and attempting to signal the ship by semaphore and flashing light. For nearly an hour Ramey's semaphore man tried to establish communications, he using broken German, and they using poor English.

When Ramey tired of the game and signaled that he was resuming fire, a prompt answer came back - "Ceize fire!" Ramey had his man signal to the Germans that they should come down the bluff and surrender themselves. They understood and did, coming down single file with hands up to turn themselves over the GIs on the beach.