For example, the night they were sent across the Channel to land on the Normandy shore, there to scoop up several bucketfuls of sand. The crews grumbled about taking their fragile craft under the guns of Hitler’s mighty Western Wall just to fill the First Sea Lord’s sandbox. They did not find out, until long after that night, why they were sent to play with shovels and buckets on the Normandy beach. A scientist who claimed to know the beaches well—beaches that had already been picked for the Normandy landings—said that they were made of spongy peat covered with a thin layer of sand, and that Allied trucks and tanks would bog down helplessly on the soft strand, once they left the hard decks of the landing craft. The samples brought back by the PT sailors proved that the scientist didn’t know sand from shinola about Normandy beach conditions, and the operation went ahead as planned. On June 6, 1944, the first waves of American and British troops landed on Omaha and Utah beaches and began the long slugging match with Marshal Erwin Rommel’s Nazis to twist Normandy out of German hands. During the landings proper, PTs were used as anti-E-boat screens, but made their biggest contribution by dousing flare floats dropped by German aircraft to guide their night bombers. At the beginning the assigned duties of the PTs were not heavy, but there is always work for a fleet of small, handy armed boats in a big amphibious operation. On June 8th, for instance, as the destroyer _Glennon_ jockeyed about off the Saint Marcouf Islands, north of Utah Beach, getting ready to bombard a shore battery, she struck a mine astern. One minesweeper took the damaged destroyer under tow, and another went ahead to sweep a clear escape channel. Just before 9 A.M., the destroyer-escort _Rich_ closed the ships, and the skipper asked if he could help. The captain of the _Glennon_ answered: “Negative; clear area cautiously, live mines.” Too late. A heavy explosion stopped the _Rich_ dead in the water. A second explosion tore away fifty feet of the stern. A third mine exploded forward. The destroyer-escort was a shambles, its keel broken and folded in a V. The superstructure was festooned with a grisly drapery of bodies and parts of bodies. PTs rallied around the _Rich_ to take survivors from the deck or from the mine-filled waters around the shattered vessel. Crewmen on the 508 saw a sailor bobbing by in the sea, and the bowman picked up a heaving line to throw to his rescue. The man in the water calmly refused assistance. “Never mind the line,” he said, “I have no arms to catch it.” The PT skipper, Lieut. Calvin R. Whorton, dove into the icy Channel waters, but the armless sailor had gone to the bottom. The _Rich_ followed him in fifteen minutes, with 79 of the crew. Seventy-three survivors were wounded. The _Glennon_ itself went aground, and two days later a German shore battery put two salvos aboard. The destroyer rolled over and sank.