BEAUFORT - The young men piloting Andrew Higgins' craft onto the beachheads of World War II had to fight adrenaline and fear while precisely executing one of the most unnatural acts a sailor can be assigned: intentionally grounding a boat, then somehow pulling it off the beach.

Earl W. Norwood, 82, who teaches history at Carteret Community College in Morehead City, piloted a Higgins boat in the third row of landing craft during the Normandy invasion in 1944. In his hands were the wheel and the lives of 36 soldiers and three other sailors as he steered around mines and headed for the beach. The roar of guns and explosions was like standing beside a freight train.

He was 18.

Norwood ran aground at full throttle, sliding the boat as far onto the sand as he could for the soldiers, he said. Then he gave the lone order of the whole maneuver: "Drop the ramp!" The crews were so well trained that the rest was done without speaking. Which was a good thing: He's still not sure how the man on the ramp's winch heard the order over the deafening din.

After the first row of four soldiers dashed down the ramp, a German artillery shell tore through the hull and exploded, instantly killing two men in the second wave and wounding the other two. The rest didn't hesitate, Norwood said, clambering over the bodies toward the beach.

In perhaps 90 seconds, the soldiers were gone. As a crewman cranked the ramp up as fast as he could, Norwood backed off the beach at full throttle. He had to hold the rudder perfectly straight or the boat would turn sideways and roll over in the surf, as many did that day.

Once in deep water, he spun the boat and headed to sea, the hole from the artillery shell leaking with every big wave on the five-mile trip to his ship. There, Norwood was given another Higgins boat. Its coxswain had been wounded by a round that passed through the thin steel ramp and entered his eye.

A front seat for a hellish battle

The battle was so hellish that Norwood lost track of the trips to the beach; he thinks he made four. Sometimes the incoming fire was so intense that commanders on the beach ordered him to leave after loading only two or three wounded. Still, his crew brought 16 to 18 wounded men to a hospital ship.

The worst part, Norwood said, was waiting while medics loaded the wounded. Under intense fire, he had to calmly feather the throttle to hold the boat straight so the surf wouldn't twist it out of the groove it had dug coming in.

By his second trip, the GIs he was ferrying to the beach had seen the wounded returning.

"There was no more standing up, trying to look over the sides and see what was going on," he said. "They were all hunkered as low as they could get."

Later, he and his crew volunteered for another terrible job: cruising along the beach to pull floating bodies out of the water. After three days, they grew so distressed that they asked a senior noncommissioned officer whether they could stop. He reminded them that every dead GI they found was one more family that would know what happened. The crew returned to the somber hunt for two more days, until a storm blew the rest of the bodies offshore, Norwood said.

"I still have nightmares about that," he said. "Not bad ones now, I guess, more like dreams."

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