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Show On Every Beachhead, It's the Coast Guard That Puts 'Em Ashore Coast guardsmen landed the marines ma-rines at Tulagi. They were under fire at Guadalcanal. They were in there again at Tarawa. They manned landing Barges stcrning the beaches of Cape Gloucester and Bougainville, Kwajalein and Eniwe-tok Eniwe-tok in the Marsha'ls, Hollandia and Wakde and Biak in the .invasion of Dutch New Gumta. More recently, when navy task forces moved against Saipan in the Marianas, coast guardsmen operat ed assault transports and tank landing land-ing ships, and coxswains and gun crews were at their posts in the LCVPs that swarmed to the Saipan beaches. On the other side of the world, coast guardsmen landed 'em in North Africa, on Sicily and at bloody Salerno. On D-Day when the Liberation Lib-eration Armada swept across the English channel to breach Hitler's vaunted Festung Europe in Wor-mandy, Wor-mandy, coast guar-lvper, were un der the terrific Nazi fire that made a literal hell of the beach. Coast guard crews operated transports, LSTs, LCIs and landing barges in those heavily mined waters. A flotilla flotil-la of coast guard 83-fopters dubbed "match boxes" boldly and tirelessly tire-lessly poked amidst wreckage and mines to save the lives of more than 800 American and Allied soldiers and sailors in the first 24 hours of invasion inva-sion under heavy shell-fire from German Ger-man si , ire implacements. |