With the 60th anniversary of D-Day tomorrow, many veterans will visit memorials, such as the new World War II Memorial in our nation's capital, as they would a shrine. Or they will go back to the Normandy beaches they struggled across six decades ago.

		Gene Jannuzi is retired CEO of Moltrup Steel in Beaver Falls and a former Post-Gazette reporter. During World War II he was commanding officer of an LCI(L) in the invasions of Sicily, Salerno, Normandy and Southern France.

I will not visit the etched marble memorials and I will not go back to the beaches of Normandy, where I was 60 years ago. Memorials are reminders, and I don't need reminding. My bitter memories of those beaches are etched forever on the marble of my mind. I visit them constantly, day after day, wherever I may be, so I don't need to go back to France to visit them.

Memories, wrote Evelyn Waugh in "Brideshead Revisited," are "the memorials and pledges of the vital hours of a lifetime."

Among my memories of that English springtime before June 6, 1944, one of the strongest is my recall of the strain of the long wait for the assault on the Nazi-held Normandy beaches of France. We had arrived in Falmouth in Cornwall on the southwest coast of England in February. We were LCI(L) Flotilla 11--36 ships of Landing Craft Infantry (Large).

D-Day at Normandy has been called, in novel and film, "The Longest Day." The stretch of days from February to June 6, 1944, I call "the longest wait." We knew from the beginning why we were in England. As yet we didn't know when or where the cross-channel invasion of France would take place.

I have a rather fond memory of Cornwall, warmed by the meandering Gulf Stream. Camellias bloomed in February that year. Daily in that springtime we trained for what was to come, sortieing from Falmouth harbor, landing troops on beaches, keeping the ships in shape, waiting.

My ship was LCI(L) 530, the flotilla flagship. We carried flotilla Commander A.L. Warburton, and his staff of six. By stages we moved eastward to other ports in Cornwall and Devonshire. By May we were in Dartmouth, moored to buoys in the upper reaches of the tidewater Dart River. A road from our mooring place led up a hill to Agatha Christie's lovely home -- Greenway House -- which became our flotilla headquarters.

There we waited. In late May, in the quiet, bucolic setting of the dead end of the Dart River, I was in my cabin studying the operations orders for Operation Overlord. The orders had been delivered to me, as commanding officer of my ship, in three large canvas sacks. At last I knew the "when" and the "where." And now the ships were "sealed." That meant that no one could leave the vicinity. Commanding officers, if they wished, could walk uphill from the dock to Agatha Christie's house.

Now we waited for the signal to execute the operations orders. Overlord was the overall air-sea-land plan for the invasion of France. Operation Neptune was the Navy part of Overlord. The assault would cover a 60-mile front in the Bay of the Seine. By now I had a special assignment. Commander Warburton had been designated assault wave commander of the Western Task Force. My ship had been fitted out with the latest technology: radar, and special navigation and communications gear. LCI(L) 530 was detached from duty as flotilla flagship. Because the enormous communications gear, all tubes and cabinets, took up so much space below decks, we would take aboard only two dozen troops of Gen. "Lightning Joe" Collins' VII Corps. As part of our assignment we would land them on Utah Beach on D-Day, which was scheduled for June 5.

My first assignment: Sortie LCI(L) 530 from Dartmouth, carrying the assault wave commander and the VII Corps personnel, to rendezvous at Dart Buoy, four miles in the channel off Dartmouth, with Force U, the Gunfire Support Convoy, coming up from Plymouth, at H-hour minus 17 hours on D-Day minus one. That would be at 1230 hours Double British Summer Time, 17 hours before the invasion.

During that part of the wait, the days passed swiftly. The troops boarded the ship on June 2. We held gas mask drills and church services -- Catholic, Protestant and Jewish. The troops passed their waiting time playing poker on a blanket on deck with scrip currency they had been issued for use on the far shore. We called it "scrip poker."

Now the wait was for a signal from Supreme Headquarters. It was to come by messenger. If we were to land on June 5, as scheduled, we would receive by hand on the night of June 3 the message, ON WEST ONE, meaning OPERATION NEPTUNE WEST, GO. If the message read TWO, it was no-go. We waited for the messenger.

Near midnight on June 3, the sailor on watch brought an envelope to my cabin. Inside was the message, ON WEST TWO. Supreme Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower had made his agonizing decision to postpone because of the weather.

So there was another day of waiting, of uncertainty, more time to write letters, more time to memorize courses and speeds to the beach. On June 4, the weather cleared. Near midnight again came the envelope. This time it was ON WEST ONE.

Just after noon on June 5, LCI(L) 530 was under way, alone, one small ship among 6,000 ships and craft, carrying a few men among millions in the gigantic effort of Overlord. At Dart Buoy we waited for the gunfire support convoy. All eyes westward, we were excited by the appearance on the horizon of the barrage balloons of Force U, swimming over the sea like a school of friendly fish. Then the ships to which they were moored gradually took shape.

Heading the convoy was the Bayfield, an attack transport and flagship of Force U. She was headquarters for Adm. Don P. Moon, task force commander, and for Gen. Collins. Other ships in the convoy were the ancient battleship Nevada, the U.S. cruisers Quincy and Tuscaloosa and the British cruiser Black Prince; two other transports, four destroyers, two sub-chasers, a PT Boat and my LCI(L).

The immediate objective of Force U was Utah Beach, near St. Mere Eglise on the Cotentin Peninsula. To the east, Force 0 would assault Omaha Beach at Vierville Sur Mer with the V Corps. Still farther east, Force B, carrying forces of the British Second Army, would hit Gold, Juno and Sword beaches near Caen.

All afternoon on June 5, Force U sailed eastward along the Channel coast. Off Portland Bill at dusk, the convoy turned southeast, and in darkness south, down a swept channel marked by dimly lit buoys, toward the Normandy coast of France.

Shortly after a black midnight, the convoy arrived in the transport area, the staging point for the amphibious assault on the beaches, 12 miles southwest. Speaking into the voice tube, I gave the order to the wheelhouse below to stop engines. The battleship, cruisers and destroyers deployed to positions from which they would deliver their fire on the far shore.

As we waited, I sensed my smallness and loneliness among the immense forces that at last had been unleashed. I saw the glow of bombs bursting silently on the enemy shore, watched a giant orgasm of anti-aircraft fire that hosed and spewed and flowered in a merry hell of light and color. I heard and saw in the light of the anti-aircraft fire the C47s flying low-towing gliders toward the beach. They returned without the gliders.

At H-hour minus two hours, the commander came up to the conn and told me to get under way slowly down the swept channel to Point Zebra, a ship standing just off Utah Beach. As my ship moved, the aerial bombardment and the anti-aircraft fire ended. I heard and smelled the gunfire of the Navy ships. Dawn diluted the night.

As we neared Point Zebra, my eyes were on the beach. German .88s sent up geysers of water and sand at the shoreline. I stopped engines and waited for a signal from the control vessel. It was the last wait. From the vessel came a one-word semaphore message: PROCEED.

I looked at the commander and he nodded. I got my ship under way and headed toward the beach.

"All engines ahead full," I said into the voice tube. "Steady as you go."