I think that first light came at about five am, and it slowly revealed the beach to us. Nothing was changed there; the sand was studded with large numbers of steel obstacles, and these were very prominent as the tide was out. The sky was overcast and the offshore wind was quite strong. As time passed, with my binoculars, as I scanned the horizon, I began to see many shapes materialise. The sea was slightly foggy out there, but I could still see first a handful of shapes, then more, and finally an absolute wall of these grey outlines stretching almost across the whole horizon.
This reminds me of my favorite scenes from the motion picture THE LONGEST DAY. As a German officer looked out with his binoculars over the Channel from his bunker, the fog lifted to reveal thousand of Allied ships.
