ABOARD THE QE2. June 5: What were you doing on D-Day? Aboard the great liner ' bound for Normandy with nearly 1.000 US and Canadian veterans, some old friends from English towns that hosted them and assorted media and show biz celebrities* the question rang out more often than bells chiming the ship's watches, reports AP.

And with Spitfires. Hurricanes and P-47s lumbering in a nostalgic salute through the gloom of rain clouds over the Channel off Southampton, the answers — sad and funny and sometimes shockingly stark — echoed the unforgettable excitement, of that longest remembered day.

Bob Hope, -between rehearsals for the big D-Day anniversary show to be performed on deck under the QE2's funnel, recalled that 50 years ago he was broadcasting live the last Pepsodent radio show of the season from California's Van Nuys Air Force Base before an audience of P-38 pilots, who would soon be joining some of the- veterans aboard as replacements for buddies shot down in flames.

The sqrtpt was loaded with Jokes about Shicklgrubber. Army food. Air Corps brass and the shortage of girls. An announcer kept Interrupting with bulletins about the Normandy Invasion and then came Gen Dwight Elsenhower's historic D-Day message.

Dame Vera Lynn.. the "sweetheart of the forces." whom biimpish BBC brass once tried to silence because they thought her sentimental songs of loneliness like "Bluebirds Over the White Cliffs of Dover" might lower the morale of fighting men. knew 'the invasion was on.

She w^s on the last leg home from entertaining British troops in the Far East and India when her seaplane out of Gibraltar skirted the edge of the great invasion armada stretching across the Channel. She whispered a prayer for "her boys," the RAF crews who

still stand at attention when she promises "We'll Meet Again."

Walter Cronkite was a young wire service reporter who, late on the eve of D-Day. had resigned himself to spending another day in a Fleet Street office "writing the main roundup story." Then Capt. Hal Ley-shon, an Air Corps press of fleer. and "an occasional carousing buddy." came knocking at the door of his London digs.

He offered a chance to go along on a "highly dangerous" secret mission with the 8th Air Force. This ha* got to be D-Day," Cronkite concluded as off they went in the middle of the night to Molesworth air base. The mission was to go in at low level on a B-17 Flying Fortress and bomb behind the Normandy beaches.

"How could I resist? Why. he even promised if I got back at all I’d be in the office before the official D-Day announcement was made." Cronkite recalled over a cup of coffee.

Capt Robin Wdodall. master of the QE2. was a 10-year-old schoolboy in the blitz-battered north of London on his way to school when he saw the planes go over with the white invasion stripes painted on their underwings. some pulling glid-er< "I was a great plane spot- ter as were all kids then, but 1 didn't know it was D-Day." he recalled in his sea cabin just prior to setting dff from Southampton.

Andy Rooney was a correspondent for the US Army newspaper Stars and Stripes aboard a co&stal steamer that left Bristol several days before the invasion. "We knew something was going on because of all the ships out there, but didn’t know it was D-Day," the veteran CBS correspondent recalled over breakfast in the QE2's Udo lounge. On D-Day plus four. Sgt Rooney climbed’ down a cargo net Into a landing craft and upon disembark ing "immediately headed for Cherbourg, because that's where the story was by then." He remembers that his news paper on June 6 headlined .the liberation of Rome

Irving Ostov, from Daytona Beach, also flew D-Day missions in Leaky Lane, his P-47 "On the first mission we were supposed to protect the Navy ships blasting away at the beaches, but they didn’t seem to like that idea and started firing at u*. So we got the hell out of there quick."

John Ambrose, from Braintree, Essex, England, came on board the liner at Southampton with a British group called BUTNA: "Buddies of The Ninth Airforce."