On the morning of Tuesday 6 June, 1944, the forty-four year old Ernest Hemingway was hanging onto the wheelhouse rail of his LCVP (Landing Craft, Vehicle and Personnel) feeling dreadfully hungover, a state of affairs that did nothing to help relieve the excruciating pain in his head due to a car accident in London just a few days before. The hospital doctor, after applying fifty-seven stitches, had told Hemingway that he should rest for several weeks. But Hemingway, famous and influential writer, big game hunter, would be bullfighter, infamous drinker and deep-sea fisherman, was not a resting kind of guy, and certainly not a war correspondent who was going to miss the biggest military invasion known to man.

So there he was vomiting over the side of the LCVP, taking pain killers washed down with slugs of brandy from a silver hip flask. The pain simply got worse.

” Okay, Doc,” he said to himself, ” pain killers and booze don’t mix.”

Two months earlier Hemingway had been sailing his boat, ‘Pilar’, in the warmer waters off the Gulf of Mexico looking for German U-boats as part of deal he’d done with the FBI, who’d paid him $500 a month, which could buy a lot of booze for him and his motley crew. And Hemingway’s bunch of irregulars did spot a U-boat on one occasion, managing to get the information back to the mainland, which resulted in the capture of a submarine, although it may not have been the same submarine.

Although, after the war, Hemingway made the best of those U-boat hunting days in his posthumous novel, Islands in the Stream, he did know he was pretty much wasting his time, and should be in Europe reporting  the war, as his then wife, the distinguished journalist Martha Gellhorn, was about to do.

So, after a telephone call his old employer, Collier’s Weekly, he was employed by the magazine as their chief war correspondent, with the instruction he get to Europe and onto the beaches. Within days Hemingway was on a scheduled flying boat to Britain, and a few weeks later on the New Orleans built LCVP.

Hemingway liked the tough young commander of the LCVP, US Navy Lieutenant Robert Anderson, no doubt because he reminded Hemingway of himself when he was young and driving a Red Cross ambulance in Italy during World War I. And Anderson liked Hemingway too, and not just because he admired the man’s writing, but because he gave Anderson some added expertise in military and sailing matters, and because the older man showed absolutely no sign of fear. Hemingway was a good man to have on board at dangerous times like these.

As the light of the morning increased, and Hemingway trained his field-glasses on Omaha Beach, the old First World War One US Navy battleships, ‘Texas’, ‘Arkansas’ and the ‘Nevada’ opened fire with an assortment of high explosive shells and rockets on the German positions concreted into the bluffs behind the beach. Surely nothing could survive, thought Hemingway, under that sort of bombardment, but when the order came for the landing craft to advance deadly German 88 artillery fire came screaming in, with two shells exploding very close to the side of Anderson’s boat. But Anderson kept his craft heading in as straight a line as he could, until the fire became so intense he shouted to his Coxswain, Frank Currier:

” Frank, get her round and outta here before we’re all dead meat!”

Frank lurched the craft to starboard and, with the 225hp engine roaring and shaking at full-throttle headed  back along the craft’s own wake.

Anderson now put his hand on Currier’s shoulder and looked at Hemingway.

” Frank, now turn her back round for another go,” shouted Anderson.

The LCVP turned quickly in the increasingly choppy waters.

” Okay, Bob,” shouted Hemingway, ” see that church over there, and the wooded inlet to our left, head between the two.”

Anderson looked through his glasses and nodded.

” Okay Frank,” shouted Anderson, ” head straight for that gap between the church and the inlet.”

” Yes, sir,” shouted Currier, who then gave the engine full throttle once more and took the LCVP in fast under heavy German artillery and machine gun fire.

The LCVP hit the beach at speed with the ramp crashing down immediately. Officers and NCOs started barking orders as murderous MG38 and MG42 machine gun fire ripped into the GIs scrambling to get ashore. Most didn’t make it.

Hemingway couldn’t believe his eyes. Omaha Beach was a bloody shambles, with hundreds, perhaps thousands of dead and dying everywhere. There was no cover for the GIs. Where were the bomb craters that were meant to give some sort of cover? Young Americans were being slaughtered before Hemingway’s eyes, he couldn’t do anything except look and remember. For the first time in his life he felt utterly helpless. All he could do now was help get some wounded back on board as the LCVP reversed rapidly away from the beach, its ramp closing slowly like the bloodied mouth of a huge whale.

Later that day, on yet another run to the beach, Hemingway could see GIs climbing the bluffs.

‘ They were not firing’, he wrote later, ‘ just slowly, laboriously…going the other way from home.’