Neptune: The Allied Invasion of Europe and the D-Day Landings (33 page)

Equally important was the training needed by the Navy and Coast Guard officers and men on the thousands of vessels that would carry these soldiers to the beaches. Those LSTs transferred from the Mediterranean after Anvil was postponed did have experienced crews, but on their arrival in England,
those ships were augmented by hundreds of new recruits, most of them right out of boot camp. And the only seagoing experience of the men on the newest LSTs arriving from America was their journey across the Atlantic. They were, as one officer put it, “green as corn.”
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As for the smaller LCTs, as Betty Stark had pointed out to King, they had only one commissioned officer each, most of them young ensigns with just a few months’ service. Indeed, they did not even have the experience of having crossed the Atlantic under way, since their ships had been carried as deck cargo on the larger LSTs. Given that, it seemed desirable to Stark to add a second officer to each vessel. It was not clear how adding one more brand-new and inexperienced ensign to each LCT would significantly improve its efficiency, but it seemed a good idea at the time. To fill that perceived need, the officer training program back in the States was cut short. College graduates who had been enrolled in the Navy’s V-7 officer training program for only a few weeks suddenly got orders to pack their sea bags and report to New York for embarkation.
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Arriving in Glasgow, they took trains south to one or another Channel port. Ninety-two of them were dispatched to Dartmouth, where they encountered the rather awesome spectacle of nearly a hundred LCTs lined up hull to hull across the Dart River. The ninety-two new arrivals became instant executive officers, virtually all of them serving under a captain who was in many cases only a few months their senior. It was rumored among the new execs that one of the LCT skippers, an ensign named Clifford Underwood, was actually thirty years old and married!
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The British, too, worried about having enough junior officers to command the hundreds of smaller amphibious ships. To address that need, they opened a special naval cadet school at Lochaiort in Scotland where the officer candidates focused almost entirely on amphibious issues. They did not even get training in deep-sea navigation. Some veteran Royal Navy officers muttered that the graduates should not have commissions at all if they could not handle a ship on the high seas, though in the end most acknowledged that it was, as one put it, “a matter of necessity rather than choice.
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British and American LCTs were grouped into flotillas of a dozen vessels each, and the flotilla commanders were young, too, most of them
lieutenants in their mid- to late twenties. Their first task was to ensure that the LCTs were operationally ready. In addition to such cosmetic things as providing a fresh coat of paint, they had to ensure that engines and the guns actually worked. Once the vessels were certified as functional, the flotilla commanders began taking them out into the Channel, where the new skippers (and their even newer execs) learned how to respond to flag and light signals so they could maintain their positions in a formation and turn simultaneously from a column ahead into a line abreast. They maneuvered first in groups of eight to twelve, then twenty to thirty, and finally more than a hundred. They learned how to land their craft on a beach and successfully retract. And they conducted endless man-overboard drills, fire drills, and first-aid drills.
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Beginning early in 1944, British and American landing craft began to conduct small-scale rehearsals of amphibious landings with their army counterparts. In Channel ports from Fowey in Cornwall to Salcombe in Devon and Poole in Dorset, American LCT skippers worked closely with the elements of the 1st and 29th U.S. Infantry divisions that made up part of Major General Leonard Gerow’s V Corps and the 4th division that was part of J. Lawton Collins’s VII Corps. Farther east, up the England Channel, Royal Navy LCTs conducted exercises from the Solent to the Thames estuary with units of Dempsey’s British Second Army, which included the Canadian Third Division.

For the Americans, the center of much of this activity was the Amphibious Training School at Slapton Sands, only a few miles west of Dartmouth. In at least one respect, Slapton Sands was a misnomer, for there was no sand there at all. Like the American target beaches across the Channel (now renamed Omaha and Utah), the beach at Slapton was composed of shingle: billions of small wave-polished black and gray pebbles. The site had other physical characteristics that were similar to Omaha Beach and especially Utah Beach. Not only did the rolling countryside of South Devon resemble the
bocage
country of Normandy, but behind the beach at Slapton Sands was a brackish marshy inlet called Slapton Ley. Since there was a similar body of marshland behind Utah Beach, the landings at Slapton would allow the would-be invaders to rehearse bridging this obstacle.
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Beginning in the midwinter chill of January 1944, the practice landings at Slapton Sands and elsewhere continued through February and March and into April as the days gradually lengthened and the Channel waters became slightly less frigid. Most of the smaller exercises did not involve the big LSTs, and the smaller LCTs did much of the work. A crew member on LCT-276 recalled the exercises fondly: “We sailed into Devon and Cornwall County seaside cities and towns where [the soldiers] were stationed. Both of the counties were renowned for their beauty, fine hotels, and quaint pubs. In between the practices, there was enough time to be able to enjoy them.” Ninety miles to the north on the Bristol Channel, the official “Boat Operational Schedule” for the Appledore Training Center showed similar activity, and still more exercises took place even farther north in the Firth of Clyde in Scotland, though uncertain weather and chilly seas often wreaked havoc with the schedule. In all of these exercises, the soldiers and sailors learned the protocols of each other’s service, and soon enough the practice sessions became routine, or as routine as inherently dangerous amphibious landings could be. “We loaded and unloaded various troops and equipment time after time,” one sailor recalled. “We were never sure if each practice might be the real thing.”
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The Allied planners who organized these training sessions gradually raised the stakes. The exercises became larger and more realistic until they began to approximate the feel of a live-fire assault. The planners sowed mines in the waters leading to the beach so that the minesweepers could sweep them up, and they designated targets onshore as enemy bunkers or gun emplacements so that the destroyers could practice taking them out with naval gunfire. One gunner recalled being assigned the window on the upper left side of a specific house as his target. In many of the exercises, the first troops ashore belonged to the Special Engineer Brigades, whose job it would be to disarm or destroy the mines. The infantry came next, splashing ashore through the frigid Channel surf and charging inland to set up a defensive perimeter. LCTs and the smaller Mike boats brought ashore the trucks, tanks, and jeeps needed to exploit the landing. With live ammunition passing over their heads from the destroyers offshore, and mines exploding both offshore and on the beach, it looked and felt a lot like real war.
Dangerous as it was, Allied officers were convinced that occasional casualties were the price of readiness, and that it would save lives in the end.
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ALTHOUGH THE LSTS
had been specifically designed to run up onto the sand and discharge their cargoes directly onto the beach, that was not advisable or even possible during the initial assault phase, when enemy artillery dominated the landing site. German guns ashore might smash up so many of the scarce LSTs that it would become impossible for the Allies to sustain the flow of essential reinforcements and equipment. Only after the big guns were captured or suppressed would it be safe to bring the LSTs ashore. Until then, smaller vessels such as the LCTs would have to shuttle the men and equipment from the LSTs to the beach.

That was no simple matter. Since the LSTs remained stationary, the young skippers of the LCTs had to maneuver into position. The anchored LST would have its bow doors open and its ramp partially deployed, hovering ten or a dozen feet above the sea, and the LCT skipper had to maneuver underneath that heavy ramp while his own vessel was heaving and rolling with the Channel swells. Once the LCT was positioned perpendicularly across the bow of the LST, the ramp was lowered until it rested on the thwart of the smaller vessel. With the ramp in place and secured, vehicles could then be driven under their own power from the tank deck of the LST across what was now a narrow metal bridge into the exposed deck of the LCT. The weight of each truck or tank not only caused the LCT to settle lower in the water, it also acted to push it away from the LST and put a tremendous strain on the lines holding the ships together.
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Sometimes LCTs took on loads further offshore from the even larger Attack Transports (APA), and this, too, was no picnic. The big transports had three mooring zones alongside where an LCT could tie up, and as the LCT approached, a coordinator on the transport assigned it a specific zone. To maneuver into place, the LCT skipper used a speaking tube to give helm orders to the quartermaster in the chart house one level below him while simultaneously giving orders to the engine room. Mooring at the bow or the stern of an APA was difficult enough, but mooring amidships was a nightmare, especially if there were already other LCTs moored ahead and
astern. Often, an LCT commander would try to “crab” his vessel into the narrow space by coming alongside fairly fast (to ensure that the rudders would take hold), then backing down on all three screws at once while holding the helm hard over, hoping to slide into place. If he misjudged the moment, it could result in a collision, sometimes with significant damage. Another approach was to make what the LCT skippers called a “Chinese landing,” which meant coming alongside stern first and backing into the space. It was much like parallel-parking a car—if the car was 120 feet long, weighed 286 tons, and had no brakes.
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Even when the LCT was safely moored alongside, the danger was not past. Since the LCT was coming to collect a cargo, it was empty and “tossed up and down like a cork,” as one skipper put it. The mooring lines had to be loose enough to accommodate this movement but tight enough to keep the LCT alongside. Fenders were thrown over the side to minimize damage as the two vessels thumped violently together. Then the real work began: cranes on the big transport ship would lower the jeeps, trucks, and other cargo over the side of the transport down into the empty LCT. With the LCT rising and plunging, choosing the right moment to unshackle a two-and-a-half-ton truck was a touchy and even dangerous task. Eventually the cargo shift would be complete, and the LCT could unmoor and head for the beach.
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An alternative to using LCTs to do this was to employ what was called a “rhino ferry,” which was essentially a self-propelled raft made up of giant pontoons constructed out of sheet metal. A rhino ferry could hardly be called a vessel, for it had no hold, no cabin, and no working parts at all other than two outboard motors that allowed it to move independently at about two or three knots. They were manned by men of the Construction Battalion, called CBs or Seabees. Despite their minimalist design, the rhino ferries proved so effective in rehearsals that on D-Day many of the LSTs towed a rhino ferry behind them during the Channel crossing.
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The worker bees of the landing exercises were the little Higgins boats (American) and LCAs (British). They were used not only to carry troops and light vehicles (mostly jeeps) to the shore but also for a wide variety of mundane tasks: carrying messages from ship to ship during periods of
radio silence, ferrying officers between ship and shore, conducting rescue work, picking up supplies, and making mail runs. They were essentially the jeeps of the naval war.

Though the German air Blitz of English cities had ended, occasional bombing raids punctuated the Allied training schedule and added another level of wartime realism. Often the German planes came over at night, and the gunners on the hundreds of Allied ships opened fire, sending thousands of rounds of red tracer fire into the dark sky. On mornings after such raids, many of the ships in the harbor found their decks littered with shell fragments, most of it spent ordnance that had fallen back to earth. During these raids, the Germans frequently dropped mines in the harbor, which kept Allied minesweepers busy. Minesweeping was a noisy activity, as explosions took place all across the harbor. The concussions were so great that men on ships half a mile away could feel them in their feet. Even so, the sweepers occasionally missed one or two. Watching from the deck of his LST one day, Donald W. Nutley observed a Higgins boat making a mail run across Plymouth Harbor when it hit a mine and exploded. The coxswain was hurled off the boat like so much wreckage. Nutley watched as the man flew “high into the air, end over end, and landed flat out on the deck of an LCT with a loud thud.” Naturally, he assumed the man had been killed. Then, “all of a sudden, he got up, staggered around like a drunk,” and walked away.
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