Here is a brief excerpt from a classic article written by A. J. Liebling for The New York Times (June 23, 1944). To read the complete article, check out others, and obtain subscription information, please click here.

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Three days after the first Allied landing in France, I was in the wardroom of an LCIL (Landing Craft, Infantry, Large) that was bobbing in the lee of the French cruiser Montcalm off the Normandy coast. The word “large” in landing-craft designation is purely relative; the wardroom of the one I was on is seven by seven feet and contains two officers’ bunks and a table with four places at it. She carries a complement of four officers, but since one of them must always be on watch there is room for a guest at the wardroom table, which is how I fitted in. The Montcalm was loosing salvos, each of which rocked our ship; she was firing at a German pocket of resistance a couple of miles from the shoreline. The suave voice of a B.B.C. announcer came over the wardroom radio: “Next in our series of impressions from the front will be a recording of an artillery barrage.” The French ship loosed off again, drowning out the recording. It was this same announcer, I think—I’m not sure, because all B.B.C. announcers sound alike—who said, a little while later, “We are now in a position to say the landings came off with surprising ease. The Air Force and the big guns of the Navy smashed coastal defenses, and the Army occupied them.” Lieutenant Henry Rigg, United States Coast Guard Reserve, the skipper of our landing craft, looked at Long, her engineering officer, and they both began to laugh. Kavanaugh, the ship’s communications officer, said, “Now what do you think of that?” I called briefly upon God. Aboard the LCIL, D Day hadn’t seemed like that to us. There is nothing like a broadcasting studio in London to give a chap perspective.

Iwent aboard our LCIL on Thursday evening, June 1st. The little ship was one of a long double file that lay along the dock in a certain British port. She was fast to the dock, with another LCIL lashed to her on the other side. An LCIL is a hundred and fifty-five feet long and about three hundred deadweight tons. A destroyer is a big ship indeed by comparison; even an LST (Landing Ship, Tanks) looms over an LCIL like a monster. The LCIL has a flat bottom and draws only five feet of water, so she can go right up on a beach. Her hull is a box for carrying men; she can sleep two hundred soldiers belowdecks or can carry five hundred on a short ferrying trip, when men stand both below and topside. An LCIL has a stern anchor which she drops just before she goes aground and two forward ramps which she runs out as she touches bottom. As troops go down the ramps, the ship naturally lightens, and she rises a few inches in the water; she then winches herself off by the stern anchor, in much the same way a monkey pulls himself back on a limb by his tail. Troop space is about all there is to an LCIL, except for a compact engine room and a few indispensable sundries like navigation instruments and anti-aircraft guns. LCILs are the smallest ocean-crossing landing craft, and all those now in the European theatre arrived under their own power. The crews probably would have found it more comfortable sailing on the Santa María. Most LCILs are operated by the Navy, but several score of them have Coast Guard crews. Ours was one of the latter. The name “Coast Guard” has always reminded me of little cutters plying out to ocean liners from the barge office at the Battery in New York, and the association gave me a definite pleasure. Before boarding the landing craft, I had been briefed, along with twenty other correspondents, on the flagship of Rear Admiral John L. Hall, Jr., who commanded the task force of which our craft formed a minute part, so I knew where we were going and approximately when. Since that morning I had been sealed off from the civilian world, in the marshalling area, and when I went aboard our landing craft I knew that I would not be permitted even to set foot on the dock except in the company of a commissioned officer.

It was warm and the air felt soporific when I arrived. The scene somehow reminded me more of the Sheepshead Bay channel, with its fishing boats, than of the jumping-off place for an invasion. A young naval officer who had brought me ashore from the flagship took me over the landing craft’s gangplank and introduced me to Lieutenant Rigg. Rigg, familiarly known as Bunny, was a big man, thirty-three years old, with clear, light-blue eyes and a fleshy, good-tempered face. He was a yacht broker in civilian life and often wrote articles about boats. Rigg welcomed me aboard as if we were going for a cruise to Block Island, and invited me into the wardroom to have a cup of coffee. There was standing room only, because Rigg’s three junior officers and a Navy commander were already drinking coffee at the table. The junior officers—Long, Kavanaugh, and Williams—were all lieutenants (j.g.). Long, a small, jolly man with an upturned nose, was a Coast Guard regular with twenty years’ service, mostly as a chief petty officer. He came from Baltimore. Kavanaugh, tall and straight-featured, was from Crary, North Dakota, and Williams, a very polite, blond boy, came from White Deer, Texas. Kavanaugh and Williams were both in their extremely early twenties. The three-striper, a handsome, slender man with prematurely white hair and black eyebrows, was introduced to me by Rigg as the C.O. of a naval beach battalion which would go in to organize boat traffic on a stretch of beach as soon as the first waves of Infantry had taken it over. He was going to travel to the invasion coast aboard our landing craft, and since he disliked life ashore in the marshalling area, he had come aboard ship early. The commander, who had a drawl hard to match north of Georgia, was in fact a Washingtonian. He was an Annapolis man, he soon told me, but had left the Navy for several years to practice law in the District of Columbia and then returned to it for the war. His battalion was divided for the crossing among six LCILs, which would go in in pairs on adjacent beaches, so naturally he had much more detailed dope on the coming operation than normally would come to, say, the skipper of a landing craft, and this was to make conversations in the tiny wardroom more interesting than they otherwise would have been.

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Here’s a direct link to the complete article.

And here’s a Wiki mini-bio:

Abbott Joseph Liebling (October 18, 1904 – December 28, 1963) was an American journalist who was closely associated with The New Yorker from 1935 until his death. His New York Times obituary called him “a critic of the daily press, a chronicler of the prize ring, an epicure and a biographer of such diverse personages as Gov. Earl Long of Louisiana and Col. John R. Stingo.”^[1] He was known for dubbing Chicago the “Second City” and for the aphorism “Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.”^[2][3] Liebling’s boxing book The Sweet Science was named the greatest sports book of all time by Sports Illustrated.^[4] Liebling was a connoisseur of French cuisine, a subject he wrote about in Between Meals: An Appetite For Paris. Pete Hamill, editor of a Library of America anthology of Liebling’s writings, said “He was a gourmand of words, in addition to food… he retained his taste for ‘low’ culture too: boxers and corner men, conmen and cigar store owners, political hacks and hack operators.