ARROMANCHES, France — Port Winston was the port the British brought with them on D-Day.

It was set up off Gold Beach when the Allies found they could not capture any established port on the French coast.

John Luck, a retired major, and Ronald Cowan, a retired colonel, formerly of the 969th Port Floating Co Engineers are two of the men who made Port Winston possible.

Port Winston was part of Project Mulberry — two artificial harbors the Allies brought with them to help supply the war machine that broke through and destroyed Nazi defenses in the West. The harbor at Arromanches was dubbed Port Winston in honor of the British prime minister's support of the harbor construction idea.

Standing in the Arromanches museum, the two men reminisced about the difficulties of building and transporting the harbors. Those were hard times in Britain with shortages of all kinds and air raids.

"First of all we had to settle for workers who nobody else wanted. That gave us a bunch of villains and other castoffs from all over the country. And there were more than 20,000 men involved in this project." Luck said.

"Anyway, we never thought we would finish the project with the workers we got," he said. "Surprisingly, after the men were told what they were doing, they buckled down and got the job done."

Luck said everybody involved with the project had almost no experience in building a portable port.

He recalled an American Seabee who was dancing with a British woman. The woman asked what his insignia meant; the Seabee said, "Total confusion."

Luck left England on D-Day with the first section of Port Winston, which consisted of five bridges being towed by a tugboat doing four knots. They arrived off the Calvados Coast nine days after D-Day.

"I think there was some shooting, but it couldn't have been much because I don't remember it," Luck said.

The toughest test for Port Winston, also known as a Mulberry, was a fierce storm June 18.

"If it weren't for Luck and the American John Hemmings, who commanded the 334th Harbor Crafts Co, we would have really been in a fix," Cowan said. "Those large floating pontoons sank within half an hour when a hole was broken into them. They had to be fixed and maneuvered back into place."

Cowan and Luck said the British were lucky because they were able to save their port. The American Mulberry at Omaha Beach was destroyed.

"We were partly protected by the Calvados reef, and we anchored all our positions. The Americans were more exposed to the sea and the storm, and they did not anchor each position," Cowan said.

Both men agreed that, without the American tugboat, the job never could have been done. They praised Americans Hemmings and Sgt. Max Hartdegen. Hemmings recently died. Hartdegen lives in Los Angeles.

In the museum here, with its models and explanations of Port Winston, hangs a photograph of Cowan and Luck, with Cowan in the rear, and Luck, directing operations through a megaphone from a bridge.

Cowan is an old soldier who visited this coast before.

"I was chased by the Germans from Metz all the way to Cherbourg, when they broke through the line at Sedan," he said. "In Cherbourg, I and 20 others managed to escape in a fishing boat from the end of a mole (a seawall) to England. So the Mulberry was my second time to this coast."

On Wednesday, Cowan and Luck were scheduled to show Britain's Queen Elizabeth through the museum.