Then came an alert.  The real boat ride was due.  The trip across was to be in
LST's.  On the third of July, the outfit hit the marshalling area near
Dorchester, Dorset, and celebrated Independence Day fittingly by preparing
for another liberation.  Three LST's took them aboard the fifth and on the 
sixth they were on Omaha Beach.

By the tenth of July, the battalion had started its first job.  They were working
for First Army and the job was to connect First Army, First Army Rear and 
VIII and VII Corps.  Communications were in but the line was continually 
being shot out by artillery fire near Carentan.  This line had to run across 
swamps flooded by the Germans, the Carentan Canal and a river.  It was 
only after the job had been satisfactorily completed that the Engineers pro-
nounced those swampy fields free of mines.

The open wire across the Carentan Canal was replaced by submarine 
cable to allow clearance for water traffic and then the cable replaced by a 
high span of open wire.  There was work around St Come-du-Mont and 
Chef-du-Pont.  Some open wire and some spiral four.  And some of the 
spiral four looped out in the first hasty days of the invasion had to be recovered.

And the enemy was never far away. In pushing open wire as far as they could
go, five linesman were injured, one seriously. This happened the 23rd of July,
as the open wire was heading for Marigny. And then also near Marigny, on the
26th, a survey party captured the battalion's first prisoners. 


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