At 4:33 a.m. on June 6, 1944, under overcast skies just before dawn broke over Omaha Beach, a 36-foot steel boat was lowered from an American battleship into the dark waters of the Atlantic. Inside this boat—in Naval terms, a Landing Craft, Support (Small) boat; in relative terms, a bathtub—hunkered a commanding officer and six sailors. One of those sailors was a first-generation American teenager from St. Louis named Lorenzo Pietro Berra, or Lawrence Peter Berra, or, better still, to you, me and posterity, Yogi Berra.
The essential job of the LCS was to run interference for the waves of troops that would, across all of Normandy’s shores, account for the largest amphibious invasion in the history of the world.