Neptune: The Allied Invasion of Europe and the D-Day Landings (34 page)

THE COMMAND TEAM
in charge of training included not only Ramsay, Vian, and Kirk but also two U.S. Navy rear admirals, John Wilkes and John “Jimmy” Lesslie Hall Jr. Wilkes’s job was largely administrative, since he was responsible for the landing craft themselves as well as the practice facilities and the enormous supply depot at Exeter. In this capacity, he bore the delightful acronym of COMLANDCRAB. While Wilkes supervised the craft themselves, Hall’s job was to schedule and organize the exercises, which he did from an office in the British Naval Academy at Dartmouth. Hall’s job soon underwent a dramatic change, however. The expansion of the initial landing force to five divisions not only led to the division of Ramsay’s command into Eastern and Western Task Forces under Vian and Kirk, it also caused those task forces to be subdivided into task groups, one
for each beach. Three of them were under Vian’s supervision: Force S for Sword Beach, Force J for Juno Beach, and Force G for Gold Beach. The other two, under Kirk’s command, were Force U for Utah Beach and Force O for Omaha Beach. And each of them got a separate commander.

The men selected to command the two American task groups were very different from each other. Jimmy Hall gave up his training command to take over Force O, which would carry Leonard Gerow’s V Corps to Omaha Beach. Like most career officers, Hall was happy to trade an administrative post for an active afloat command. His singular characteristic, both as a personality and as an officer, was a hearty self-confidence. On his Naval Academy yearbook page, Hall’s classmates described him as “a big, blonde, good-natured Virginian” with a “deep bass voice” who was “a friend to everyone.” Like Eisenhower, he was older than most of his classmates because prior to attending the Naval Academy, he had spent three years at William and Mary College, where his father was an English professor famous in academic circles for his translation of
Beowulf
. A standout athlete at William and Mary, Hall had starred in football, basketball, and baseball. This was before the NCAA had rules limiting the eligibility of athletes, and Hall played all three of those sports for four more years at Navy, later recalling, “My last year at the Academy, I played every second of the Army football game, every second of every basketball game, and every inning of every baseball game.”
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Upon his graduation in 1913, he was awarded the sword presented to the academy’s best all-around athlete. His size, his age, and his athletic prowess all contributed to an ebullient self-confidence.
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Though Hall spent most of his naval career as a battleship-destroyer man, he had as much or more experience in amphibious operations as anyone in the theater. He had been Hewitt’s chief of staff during the Torch landings and had organized the U.S. Amphibious Force for the invasions of
both Sicily and Italy. When he arrived in England, he impressed Ramsay as “a fine type of seaman, bluff and obstinate, & a fine leader.” That bluff obstinacy occasionally got him into trouble, such as when he told Savvy Cooke that “it was ridiculous” for King and the JCS to refuse to supply the cross-Channel force with the warships that were needed. He occasionally saw fit to lecture Army generals as well. After assuming his new job as Force O commander and studying the numbers carefully, he went personally to Montgomery’s headquarters to explain to him that the shipping crisis might well mean a reduction in the size of the initial cross-Channel lift. When he got there, Montgomery was absent, off on yet another speaking trip, so Hall explained the situation to Monty’s chief of staff, Brigadier General Francis “Freddy” Guingand. Guingand heard him out and then replied, “General Montgomery would not accept a reduction of that nature.” Hall made it clear that he wasn’t there to get Montgomery’s approval, and that it was not a matter of what Montgomery would “accept.” It was a matter of what was possible. “General, apparently you misunderstand the job I’ve been assigned,” Hall told Guingand. “I’m down here to tell you how you would do it if you had to accept.” It is probably just as well that Montgomery was not there.
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The other American naval command was Force U, for Utah Beach. That job might have gone to Wilkes, and in fact, Kirk wrote to King to “strongly recommend” Wilkes for the post because of his experience in Sicily and his “general familiarity with the plan.” King had other ideas. Wilkes remained ashore as the administrator of landing craft, and the command of Force U went instead to Rear Admiral Don P. Moon, who had served as King’s operational plans officer and had been slotted to command a naval task force for Anvil. Now that Anvil was postponed, King sent Moon to England to command Force U. Ramsay expressed satisfaction with Moon when he arrived in March, noting in his diary that Moon was “a fine type of U.S. officer. Efficient & alert. He should do well.” Moon, however, was very different from Hall. If bluff self-confidence was Hall’s principal characteristic, Moon’s was a ferocious work ethic, the product of a fierce determination “to always do one’s best.” Even as a midshipman, what Moon’s classmates remembered most about him was his “infinite capacity for hard work.” Instead of the easy
dominance that had characterized Hall’s participation in sports, Moon earned a spot on the academy fencing team only by “dogged persistence,” which allowed him to become “a very tolerable
sabreur
.” Less flatteringly, Moon’s classmates also described him as “persistent and conservative, without the curse of imagination, or disturbing outburst of animal spirits.” In the language of the academy, he was a grind.
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Moon’s work ethic was an inherent characteristic, but it was very likely exacerbated by both experience and circumstance. Back in July 1942, Moon had commanded the escort for convoy PQ-17, bound for Russia around the North Cape. It had progressed as far as the Barents Sea, north of Norway, when the British Admiralty, having misread a code intercept, concluded that a large German surface force was in the area and ordered the convoy to scatter. That was a dreadful mistake, for it made the ships easy pickings for the U-boats and aircraft, and in the end, twenty-three of the thirty-seven merchant ships in the convoy were lost. It was hardly Moon’s fault, but the memory of it may have contributed to his determination to ensure that he did not overlook any detail. Then, too, his subsequent assignment in Washington, working directly for the demanding and punctilious Ernest King, could make anyone detail oriented.

Another factor contributing to Moon’s regimen of hard work was his late appointment to the command of Force U. Having initially been sent to the Mediterranean, he arrived in England only in March. Whereas both Kirk and Hall had six months or more in the theater, Moon had less than three months to prepare for the invasion. Among other things, that meant that he never had a chance to compile a compatible staff, which contributed to his tendency to try to do too much himself. Thus as a result of character, experience, and circumstance, Moon became obsessed with work in the spring of 1944. He worked until well past midnight nearly every day, then was up and back at it again at four the next morning. Hall told him that “he was trying to do too much himself” and that “he would have to delegate more authority,” but Moon continued to burn the candle at both ends.
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Even the Army officers who worked with Moon noted his obsessive attention to detail. Collins, the commander of the VII Corps, became concerned about Moon’s tendency “to do too much himself instead of giving
responsibilities to his staff.” He tried to get Moon interested in a walk or a game of tennis, but Moon always begged off, pleading that he was too busy. Collins’s repeated invitations, however, may have been the impetus for Moon’s order one day that everyone on the staff should go out and play a baseball game, though he himself did not play.
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Both Hall and Moon accelerated the training exercises for their commands. In addition to the innumerable small exercises, there were also several major rehearsals, most of them endowed with the name of some water-loving and presumably amphibious creature. Hall’s Force O participated in three large-scale rehearsals in January code-named Duck I, II, and III. They were followed by Exercise Fox, and then a series of smaller operations called Muskrat, Otter, and Mink. Gerow, the V Corps commander, was not happy with the early exercises. He thought the embarkation had taken too long, the supplies had been late in coming ashore, the troops had carried too much gear, and the men seemed confused about what to do. He wondered aloud whether in an actual landing any of them would have gotten off the beach alive.
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Hoping for a better show, Ramsay, Kirk, and Gerow all boarded Hall’s command ship, USS
Ancon
, on March 10 to observe Exercise Fox. It was a “nice sunny morning,” and all went according to plan. The two cruisers and eight destroyers shelled the beach at Slapton Sands, further blasting the already ruined Royal Sands Hotel, which had been designated as the enemy headquarters. Then hundreds of landing craft carried the men and equipment of the 1st Infantry Division ashore. The rhino ferries were particularly effective in transferring tanks and trucks from the LSTs to the beach. There was still some confusion in Army-Navy communications, but the only serious difficulty was that a few of the tanks had trouble crossing the pebbly beach and bogged down. Despite that, Ramsay was pleased. Even before the exercise, he had confided to his diary that he had begun to “view the future with more confidence as regards the purely naval aspects.” Significantly, perhaps, no one expressed an opinion about how the exercise might have turned out if it had not been a “nice sunny morning.”
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Ramsay was also pleased with the outcome of Exercise Beaver two weeks later, in which Moon’s Force U, in its first full-scale exercise, carried elements of Collins’s VII Corps from Plymouth, Dartmouth, and Brixham to
Slapton Sands. The beach assault took place on time and according to plan. The Special Engineer Brigades cleared paths through the obstacles with their bulldozers, tractors, and motorized road graders; the assault units secured the beachhead and made a rapid advance inland; and the Navy managed to keep the troops supplied, bringing some eighteen hundred tons of supplies and ammunition ashore by nightfall.
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WHILE THE PRACTICE LANDINGS CONTINUED
, others sought creative and innovative ways to enhance Allied chances in the great invasion. The most ambitious of these was a proposal to construct one or more artificial harbors off the landing beaches. The origins of this project dated back to the summer of 1943 when the COSSAC planners were discussing the seizure of Cherbourg. They had drawn up a schedule to get the first wave of Allied forces ashore, but it was evident that without the use of Cherbourg’s port facilities, it would be difficult to expand the initial foothold. What if Cherbourg did not fall in accordance with the Allied schedule? In the midst of that discussion, British Commodore John Hughes-Hallet said, apparently in jest, “Well, all I can say is, if we can’t capture a port we must take one with us.” There was general laughter around the table, until someone said: Well, why not?
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The initial idea was to sink some old ships off the landing beaches to serve as a breakwater in case of unsettled weather. From the beginning, this was both a British idea and a British program. At the Quebec conference, advocates of the scheme set up a demonstration in a hotel bathroom. Admirals and generals crowded into the loo to watch as Mountbatten’s science advisor, Professor J. D. Bernal, placed some small paper boats in one end of a partially filled bathtub. An officer then swirled the water around in the other end with a back brush. That caused the paper boats to bounce around, and they soon swamped and sank. After replacing them with new paper boats, Bernal then placed a barrier in the tub. (In one version of the story it was a life vest, in another a loofah.) Again the officer vigorously swirled up the water, but this time the barrier absorbed the wavelets, and the paper boats were undisturbed. It was hardly a scientific experiment, but it carried the day, and the plan to erect an artificial breakwater off the landing beaches became part of the Neptune-Overlord plan that was adopted at Quebec.
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