Neptune: The Allied Invasion of Europe and the D-Day Landings (15 page)

Important as they were, the Higgins boats were not a complete solution to the problem of assaulting a defended beach. As the battle for France had demonstrated, World War II was a mechanized war where tanks were an important component—arguably the key component—in any ground campaign. And as the debacle at Dieppe had shown, getting tanks onto a beach from ships offshore was particularly challenging. There were a limited number of LCMs (Mike boats), and in any case shuttling back and forth to carry one or two tanks ashore at a time simply would not do. Some way had to be found to land many tanks—scores of them, even hundreds of them—all at once. Eventually this would be resolved by what was perhaps the most important vessel of the war: the Landing Ship, Tank (LST). In the fall of 1942, however, there was no such vessel in the U.S. Navy. And so, once again, the Allies had to improvise. The Americans addressed the issue by purchasing the
Seatrain New Jersey
, a commercial ship that had been built to carry a hundred fully loaded railroad cars between New York and Havana—in effect, a kind of early container ship. Purchased only days before the Torch invasion armada left Norfolk, she was rechristened USS
Lakehurst
(APM-1) and loaded with 250 Sherman tanks. That was certainly enough armor to make an impact on the battlefield; the problem was that the
Lakehurst
’s V-shaped hull meant that she drew more than twenty-three feet of water when fully loaded, and could not discharge her cargo over a beach. None of those 250 tanks could come ashore until the Allies seized a working seaport.
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The British addressed the problem differently. They had been thinking about the difficulty of unloading tanks across a defended beach much longer than the Americans—since Dunkirk, in fact—and they had tried it at Dieppe, though with less than resounding success. As a result, they had
developed an early prototype of a tank landing ship. Like so much else, the impetus for this vessel came from the fertile mind of Winston Churchill. Early on, he advocated a ship that could carry sixty heavy tanks and steam right up onto the beach to unload them through massive bow doors that opened like a giant cupboard. Unable to build such vessels from the keel up due to the scarcity of both steel and building ways, the British converted a handful of existing flat-bottomed oil tankers originally designed to operate in the shallow waters of Venezuela’s Lake Maracaibo. As with the American reliance on the
Seatrain New Jersey
, it was not a perfect solution. While these ships drew only four feet of water at the bow, they drew fifteen feet at the stern, and as a result, on any beach with a gradual incline, the ship’s stern was likely to touch bottom while the bow was still some twenty or thirty feet from the shore. That required extending a very long and rather precarious bow ramp to the beach. By the time of Torch, the British had one large version of such a ship (called a “Winston”), and three smaller versions (called “Winettes”).
*
The Winettes could carry up to twenty of the American-made Grant tanks, but their long bow ramps took thirteen minutes to deploy, which was not ideal when under fire.
^†

In addition to the transports and the landing ships, each of the invasion forces also required a warship escort, not only to ensure safe arrival at the beach but also to provide naval gunfire support against targets ashore. By agreement, the U.S. Navy would escort the American invasion force across the Atlantic from Norfolk to Morocco, and the Royal Navy would do the same for the invasion groups from Scotland to Algiers and Oran. The
American warship contingent included the brand-new battleship USS
Massachusetts
(BB-59) plus the much older
New York
(BB-34) and
Texas
(BB-35) as well as seven cruisers and no fewer than thirty-eight destroyers. More destroyers would have been preferable, but in the late summer of 1942, destroyers were in demand everywhere: the Battle of the Atlantic against German U-boats was at full tide, and that very week in the Pacific, U.S. Navy destroyers engaged in a series of fierce surface engagements in the Solomon Islands. In this, as in all things, the Allies would make do with what there was. The British warships committed to Torch, dubbed “Force H” and “Force X,” included the
Duke of York
(the battleship that had carried Churchill to the Arcadia conference), the
Nelson
, two battlecruisers (ships with armament similar to a battleship but more lightly armored), three cruisers, and seventeen destroyers, one of them Dutch. To assemble this force, the Royal Navy had to draw from the Home Fleet, reduce the Atlantic escorts, and temporarily suspend the convoys to Russia.
¹⁵

Eisenhower’s job was to bring all the elements together—the troopships, the transports, the aircraft carriers, the landing craft, and the warships, both British and American, plus the tanks, trucks, and jeeps, and the thousands of tons of supplies, plus more than a hundred thousand men—in a complex maritime quadrille. Keeping track of all the various pieces of this giant puzzle was all but overwhelming. Eisenhower bemoaned the fact that “there is no way in many instances of knowing exactly what we have here. Many supplies are still unclassified and are not yet unloaded at depots. Time for unloading, sorting, cataloging, and for subsequent boxing, crating, marking, and loading simply does not exist.” Nevertheless, the unforgiving timetable dictated that the operation begin before the winter storms arrived, and so work continued around the clock.
¹⁶

In early November, Eisenhower boarded a B-17 “Flying Fortress” and flew from England to Gibraltar where he set up headquarters in a small, dank chamber carved out of the rock itself.
*
He had set all the pieces in motion; now it was a matter of what he described as an “interminable, almost
unendurable wait” to see whether they fit together. The wait was especially nerve-racking because the ships en route to the invasion beaches all operated under radio silence. He may have been in command, but he had no idea what was happening, and he felt utterly helpless. “We cannot find out anything!” he scrawled in his diary in frustration.
¹⁷

ON OCTOBER 23, 1942, A LONG COLUMN
of ships that included twenty-eight transports packed with 33,843 American soldiers began filing slowly out of Hampton Roads, Virginia, and into Chesapeake Bay to begin a four-thousand-mile journey to the coast of Africa. That same day in Egypt, forces of the British Eighth Army attacked the German Afrika Corps at El Alamein. The British pounded the outnumbered Germans for ten days, eventually winning a signal victory—indeed, the first major British victory of the war against a German army. It was a promising omen.

While the British assailed the Germans at El Alamein, the American convoy steamed eastward across the Atlantic. Destroyers scouted ahead, with watch standers scouring the sea for the telltale “feather” of an enemy periscope. Navy patrol planes circled overhead; two silver blimps drifted lazily nearby. On board the task force flagship, the heavy cruiser USS
Augusta
(CA-31), were both Major General George Patton, who commanded the embarked troops, and Rear Admiral H. Kent Hewitt, who commanded the armada itself, officially designated Task Force 34. The contrast between the two men was jarring. Patton was impeccably attired, with every badge and button in place; Hewitt’s uniform often looked like he had slept in it. Patton was a former Olympic athlete who presented himself with an assertive, almost challenging military bearing; Hewitt had a perceptible double chin and an easy relaxed manner. Patton was flamboyant, profane, and quick-triggered; Hewitt was understated, low-key, and deliberate. Despite his appearance, Hewitt was bright and competent and every bit a professional. Patton wasn’t so sure. When, prior to sailing, Hewitt suggested that there were still a number of problems they had to work out, Patton threw a tantrum and accused Hewitt of being defeatist. Concerned by Patton’s reaction, Hewitt went to King, who talked to Marshall, and Patton eventually climbed down enough to allow a working relationship, though
he never quite accepted Hewitt as a true warrior, writing home to his wife that “poor old Kent” was “such an old lady.”
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Three days out, the convoy from Norfolk rendezvoused with the warships of the covering force that had steamed south from Casco Bay in Maine, and soon afterward it joined up with the carrier force steaming up from Bermuda. The transports and cargo vessels formed up into nine columns with the ships following one another at thousand-yard intervals. Cruisers and destroyers scouted out to both sides; the oilers for refueling trailed behind. After them came USS
Ranger
, the four smaller carriers, and their escorts. Altogether, the formation covered some six hundred square miles of ocean.
¹⁹

The troopships were tightly packed. Upon boarding, each soldier had been handed a canvas cot with a metal frame that he hung on the bulkhead, where there were slots for them in tiers of four. In many cases the men were not billeted with their company mates since in order to keep track of who had embarked, the men had filed aboard in alphabetical order rather than by unit. That meant that officers were unsure of where their men were, or even what ship they were on. Officers tried to track down the men of their command using the short-range talk-between-ships (TBS) radio, but the Navy soon put a stop to it because the airwaves were being so clogged with messages it sounded, in the words of one Navy officer, like “a Chinese laundry at New Years.” Unsurprisingly, many of the GIs suffered horribly from seasickness. Crowded as the ships were, the men could not all be allowed on deck at one time, and most of them spent the two-week crossing below decks as the ships rolled in the Atlantic swells while the convoy executed a zigzag course to discourage submarine attacks. The conditions were hardly improved by the miasma of odors that resulted not only from thousands of unwashed soldiers living and sleeping together in a confined space but also—and especially—by the lingering stench of
mal de mer
that could never quite be eliminated.
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One day before the Americans left Norfolk, forty-six British cargo ships escorted by eighteen warships left the Firth of Clyde in Scotland bound for Oran on the north coast of Algeria. A day behind them came thirty-nine more transport ships carrying the men for the Eastern Assault Force bound for Algiers. The British and American soldiers on board these ships had a somewhat shorter journey than those in Task Force 34, and some of the Americans found the experience rather novel, even enjoyable. They were especially pleased to be included in the British tradition of “splicing the main brace” each day, when a ration of rum was served out to all hands. They were less enchanted by the other British tradition of afternoon tea, and they were positively repelled by the food, which consisted almost exclusively of boiled mutton.
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O
PERATION
TORCH, N
OVEMBER
8–11, 1942

Altogether, the Allies committed more than six hundred ships to Operation Torch. Keeping this massive movement secret was a major concern, not only to achieve surprise on the beach but to avoid German U-boats en route. Consequently, the convoys from both Norfolk and Britain took deceptive routes to give the impression that they might be bound elsewhere, such as the Azores or South Africa. Even after the convoys from England passed through the Strait of Gibraltar and into the Mediterranean, they continued eastward, as if headed for the besieged island of Malta, before they abruptly turned south for the African coast. The mission was kept secret from the French as well, and as a result, no one knew how the French would react when the Allied troops came ashore. Would the British and Americans be greeted as liberators or invaders? There had been some discussion about sharing plans with the French in the hope of working out an arrangement in advance, though to do so risked compromising the whole operation. In the end, the decision was made to keep everything secret until the last moment.