A good friend of mine was a 6'6" Italian guy from the Bronx when WWII broke out. He enlisted in the Navy at age 17, became a Ranger. As such he was involved in the amphibious landings, and he said all of them until going hysterically blind when wounded for the third time on D-Day. He said of the 2,000 member battalion, 60 survived the war. (An interesting guy, at one point 40 guys were dropped of a sub for a raid into France, Tom was the only one to make it back to the boat.)

He said that after the first landing the big guys, of which he was one, always muscled themselves closer to the ramps of the boats in order to be the first off. He told me that there was a lot of action as the boats headed to the beach, the new guys trying to get back, the experienced ones moving forward. The reasoning was that the longer a boat was in one place the more likely a machine gun would be to find it and get the people coming off.

An interesting bit of trivia. Don't know if it's true, and it's certainly counter-intuitive.

Arf