Neptune: The Allied Invasion of Europe and the D-Day Landings (43 page)

The problem was how to communicate that decision to the other vessels in his flotilla. Rockwell doubted that flag signals were sufficient. Nor could he use flashing lights, which would alert the enemy, and of course the Allies were operating under radio silence. But with the eastern sky already beginning to lighten in anticipation of dawn and the coast now visible to the naked eye, Rockwell decided to break the rules.
What the hell
, he thought.
By now the Germans know what is about to happen
. Rather than use the ship’s long-range radio, however, he employed the shorter-range radio in one of the tanks, calling the other LCTs in his flotilla to order them
not
to launch.
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Not all the LCT skippers got the word. The eight vessels that were under Rockwell’s immediate supervision did, but the other eight, carrying the thirty-two tanks of Companies B and C of the 741st Tank Battalion under Army Captain James G. Thornton, did not. On those vessels, there was uncertainty and confusion as the young and mostly inexperienced Army and Navy officers grappled with the distinction between duty and judgment. According to protocol, until the men and equipment were ashore, operational authority and responsibility belonged to the senior naval officer on board. But in this case those naval officers were ensigns in their early twenties, and quite naturally they felt some diffidence in making such a decision on behalf of the tank men. The Army officers were young, too, and they were eager to go—after all, they had spent months in rigorous training for just this moment. On LCT-600, Ensign Henry Sullivan discussed the circumstances with Second Lieutenant Patrick J. O’Shaughnessy. Even though they agreed “it was a little too rough to launch,” O’Shaughnessy was cognizant of the historic immensity of the moment. Driven by a powerful sense of duty, he told Sullivan that he wanted go anyway, and Sullivan deferred to him. At 5:35 a.m. O’Shaughnessy drove the first DD tank off the bow ramp.
²⁴

As the second tank prepared to follow, a near miss from a German artillery shell caused LCT-600 to rock violently. The tanks jostled against one another, and the motion tore a hole in the canvas shroud of the second tank in line. That may have been providential, for with its shroud compromised, it could not be launched at all, nor could the two tanks behind it. Like Rockwell, Sullivan concluded that he had to take the other three tanks all the way to the beach. As for O’Shaughnessy’s tank, it swam about a hundred yards under its own power, then disappeared from sight. Worse was to come. Without the fortunate accident of a torn shroud, all seven of the other LCTs in the group launched their DD tanks as prescribed in the op order. Captain Thornton went first. Then, one after another, twenty-seven more DD tanks rolled off the ramps and into the tossing sea. As on the 600, one of the tanks on board LCT-537 had a tear in its canvas shroud, but the tank driver, Staff Sergeant John R. Sertell, insisted that the tank’s bilge pump could manage the leak. Ensign Robert J. McKee declined to overrule him, and all four tanks went into the water. Sertell’s tank sank almost immediately. The other three struggled forward through the severe chop for a few hundred yards before they, too, went down. In the end, of the twenty-nine tanks launched off Omaha Beach that morning, only two made it to dry land. It was horrifying to watch. “They just went down to the bottom like rocks,” a crewman on one of the LCTs recalled. “Some men were able to jump out in time, but not all.” The rest, trapped inside a thirty-four-ton tank, went to the bottom with it. The LCTs and other nearby vessels hastened to pull bodies from the water, both living and dead. Joe Esclavon was one of those so engaged, and as he worked, he recognized the bodies of some of those he had trained with at Slapton Sands. He was deeply affected by the sight of them stacked “like cordwood” on the deck. Recalling it forty years later, he paused in the midst of his description and muttered: “They were real nice people on those tanks.”
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The survival rates of the DD tanks varied from beach to beach. Off Utah Beach, U.S. Navy Lieutenant (j.g.) John B. Richer, commanding one of the tiny patrol craft whose job it was to mark the landing zones, saw that the sea conditions made launching the DD tanks from six thousand yards impossible. On his own, he moved his patrol craft to within two thousand yards
of the beach to establish a new departure line. There the LCTs were not only closer to shore but also in the lee of the protruding headland of Cape Barfleur. One of them, LCT-597, was hit by a German artillery shell and sank with all four tanks still on board, but twenty-seven of the remaining twenty-eight DD tanks made it safely to shore.
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Some fifty miles to the east, off Sword Beach, the British LCT skippers closed to fifteen hundred yards, less than a mile, before launching their swimming tanks. Consequently, of the forty DD tanks there, thirty-four of them launched successfully, and thirty-one made it ashore, where, according to Vian, they did “sterling work.” At Gold Beach, the LCTs brought their tanks to within a half mile of the shore before launching, though eight were lost anyway. At the Canadian Juno Beach, many of the DD tanks could not be launched at all, but of those that were, twenty-one of twenty-nine made it ashore. Though the tanks that survived the journey did good work, the disaster off Omaha Beach meant that the soldiers there had relatively little tank support.
²⁷

Almost as disastrous was the fate of the DUKWs. The Allies had more than twenty-five hundred of these little wheeled amphibians, which were entrusted with carrying some of the Army’s artillery pieces to the beach. They, too, were launched from well offshore, and though they had performed flawlessly during the exercises at Slapton Sands, some of them now suffered a fate similar to the DD tanks, shipping water until they lost buoyancy. Though their crews were rescued, twenty-six field pieces were lost. One crewmember, hauled up onto a rhino ferry after his DUKW sank beneath him, was thoroughly disgusted. After practicing for most of three years “to be in the spearhead of the invasion,” he said, “when the time comes, the God Damn boat sinks from under us.”
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WHILE THE HIGGINS BOATS
chugged shoreward and the LCTs sought with decidedly mixed results to launch the DD tanks, the Allies unleashed a carefully coordinated air and sea bombardment of the target beaches. This consisted of three phases: a massive air assault by thousands of heavy and medium bombers from England, a naval barrage by the battleships and cruisers, and a last-minute rocket attack by specially equipped LCTs. The idea was that the application of so much ordnance in so short a time frame
would, at the very least, utterly demoralize the defenders, if not actually stun them into submission.

Though Allied bombers had been busy over Europe for months, they had focused relatively little attention on the Normandy beaches in order to avoid tipping their hand. Instead, in accordance with Eisenhower’s “transportation strategy,” they had targeted the railroad network in northern France to make it difficult for the Germans to rush reinforcements to the threatened spot. Churchill had worried that this approach would result in heavy civilian casualties, but Ike had insisted on it, writing Churchill that “casualties to civilian personnel are inherent in any plan for the full use of Air power to prepare for the assault.” In the end, this transportation strategy proved remarkably effective, though of course it also meant that the preparation of the landing beaches themselves was limited to a relatively short bombardment in the brief half hour of twilight just before the landings. Moreover, because senior Army officers worried that dropping 500- and 1,000-pound bombs on the beach would create craters that could impede Allied tanks, the ordnance packages on many of the Allied bombers consisted of 100-pound antipersonnel bombs. These would make no craters on the beach, but neither would they seriously damage even modest concrete fortifications.
²⁹

More than two thousand bombers took off from half a dozen airfields in East Anglia late on the evening of June 5. As the planes circled to gain altitude, darkness closed in around them and made assembling into formations a dangerous undertaking. Just as the Allied ships in the invasion force maintained their positions during the Channel crossing by watching the blue light on the fantail of the ship in front of them, so, too, did the pilots hold their position in the formations by watching the blue lights on the wingtips of the other planes.
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After assembling over the English Midlands, the bombers flew south in several enormous formations. While they did so, the battleships and cruisers of the bombardment groups took their assigned positions off the coast. According to the operation order, the ships were to open fire at 5:50 a.m., just minutes before official dawn at 5:58. On the American beaches, they were to maintain a steady and concentrated fire against designated targets
for exactly half an hour, then lift fire in time for the men and the tanks to storm ashore at 6:30 amid the dust and smoke. Due to the later landings on the British and Canadian beaches, the bombarding ships there would have an extra hour to soften the defenses.

Without doubt, a longer pre-invasion naval bombardment would have been more effective. The Americans had learned from operations in the Pacific, at Tarawa and elsewhere, that extended bombardments, often lasting several days, were needed to knock out hardened defensive positions. But in the Pacific, the Americans were attacking islands where the defenders could not expect any reinforcements. Army leaders argued that a lengthy bombardment of the Normandy coast would alert the Germans and provide them time to dispatch reinforcements to the threatened area. In the end, the Neptune planners decided that surprise was crucial, and so they opted for a short but concentrated pre-invasion blitz that they hoped would knock the defenders back on their heels while the invaders came ashore. Rear Admiral Morton Deyo, who commanded the bombardment group off Utah Beach, recalled, “We hoped that by sending our crashing salvos into the midst of all the known enemy positions, we could sufficiently terrorize their none-too-patriotic crews enough to distract and drive them from their posts.” It proved a vain hope.
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Deyo directed his ships into position off Utah Beach between St. Martin de Varreville and St. Vaast-la Hougue at 5:00 a.m. There they were only eleven thousand yards (just over six miles) off the beach, and silhouetted as they were against a rising sun, they made an irresistible target. At 5:05 a.m., the 170 mm (6.7-inch) German guns in the battery at St. Vaast-la Hougue opened fire, the first enemy shots of the day. The Germans directed most of their fire at the still-active minesweepers and at the Royal Navy cruiser
Black Prince
, which was closest, though shell splashes also erupted around the American cruisers
Quincy
and
Tuscaloosa
, the latter of which Deyo was using as his flagship.
*

T
HE
B
OMBARDMENT
, 6:00
A.M.
, J
UNE
6, 1944

Though Deyo’s orders were to open fire at 5:50, his gunners were getting antsy. “Shells splashed all around us,” a boatswain’s mate on the
Quincy
remembered, “and shrapnel skittered across the deck.” One near miss opened a hole in the skin of the
Quincy
and flooded a storage compartment filled with Oh Henry! candy bars. The captains of the various Allied ships asked permission to reply, but Deyo turned them down; he wanted to wait for the air spotters to arrive so that the first salvos had maximum effect. But as German marksmanship improved, Deyo changed his mind. At 5:36 he gave the order to “commence counter-battery bombardment.”
³²

In an unpublished postwar memoir, Deyo offered a vivid description of the process of loading and firing the 8-inch guns on a heavy cruiser. First came “the shrill ascending song of the ammunition car speeding upward from the magazine.” That was followed by “a metallic thump” as the shells dropped into the loading trays. A pneumatic rammer shoved the rounds into place, and soon afterward the three turrets, each with three 8-inch guns, pivoted out to port to face the target. All nine barrels rose gracefully in response to the calculated target data. Two quick buzzes signaled “stand by,” then one buzz, then, as Deyo put it: “Flash! Jar! Lurch!” and twenty-four hundred pounds of high explosives were sent screaming toward the beach.
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