Neptune: The Allied Invasion of Europe and the D-Day Landings (41 page)

The German mines off the Normandy beaches were not as numerous as the Allies feared, mainly because Hitler had decreed that a full deployment of mines should be postponed until it was clear where the Allies were coming ashore. Still, the mines that were there proved particularly challenging because they relied on a variety of technologies. So-called Katie mines rested
on tripods that bent out of the way when contacted by minesweeping gear, then rocked back into place to detonate only when a ship passed overhead. German “oyster” mines rested on the bottom and detonated when they sensed a change in water pressure caused by a vessel that was at least 120 feet long passing overhead. The only effective Allied countermeasure for this type of mine was to tow a sled that mimicked the signature of a passing ship. But since the sled was towed astern, the minesweeper itself remained vulnerable, as was evident when the minesweeper USS
Osprey
was lost during the sweeping operations on June 5. Another problem was that some of the mines had “counters,” which meant that they would ignore the first one or two vessels that passed overhead and then detonate under the third. The Germans also deployed anti-sweeping devices that could cut the sweeping gear and temporarily put a minesweeper out of action until it could be repaired.
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All but thirty-two of the more than three hundred minesweepers assigned to the operation were Royal Navy vessels. Ramsay had appealed to Ernest King to increase the American contribution, but without success. Ramsay’s appeal did, however, result in the assignment of an American PT boat squadron to protect the minesweepers from E-boat attacks, though that decision had as much to do with the disastrous events during Exercise Tiger as with Ramsay’s request. As it happened, the PT boat squadron King sent was under the command of Lieutenant Commander John Bulkeley, who had been awarded the Medal of Honor two years before for his role in the Philippine campaign, including extracting Douglas MacArthur from Corregidor. Bulkeley’s squadron arrived in England only two days before the invasion, and Jimmy Hall told him to “get those minesweepers in and get those lines swept, then get out by 5:15 in the morning.”
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The minesweepers left port on the afternoon of June 5 and began sweeping at 8:00 p.m., while it was still daylight. They worked in flotillas of six, steaming en echelon to cover the desired channel width, while smaller vessels followed them to deploy red and green buoys on either side of the cleared channel. Charged to clear ten channels to the invasion beaches—two for each beach—they steamed in toward the coast for four hours, then turned around and swept back again on a parallel track. Once they had swept and marked the ten channels, they began sweeping the area off the
landing beaches where the big transports would anchor. They did not complete their work until only minutes before dawn on June 6, after more than sixteen hours of nonstop labor. Not every mine was detected, and mines remained “a constant source of worry,” but the role of the minesweepers was crucial. Captain Powell Rhea, who commanded the American battleship
Nevada
, declared in his official report that the minesweepers “deserve the lion’s share of the credit for the successful accomplishment of the mission.” In an unusual testimonial, he added: “They not only swept and buoyed a remarkably clear and geographically accurate channel through the German mine fields, but did so at night, unescorted, in severe cross currents, in mine-infested waters, and in the face of possible enemy attack.”
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While the minesweepers did their work, the invasion forces sortied from their several harbors. The LCTs carrying the men and equipment for the first wave left within minutes of Eisenhower’s preliminary “go” decision at 9:45 p.m. on June 4. The bigger troop transports, LSTs and LCI(L)s, joined the exodus the next morning. By midday on June 5, most of the vast Allied armada was at sea, and once again for thousands of men, the butterflies of uncertainty mixed with the adrenaline of anticipation.

British ships made up well over half of the invasion armada of more than six thousand vessels, and they offered a remarkable spectacle as they filed out of Southampton and Portsmouth. English ships had put to sea from those ancient ports for nine centuries, and the channels that led from them to the open sea were household names. Those leaving Southampton passed through the Solent, which separated the Isle of Wight from the mainland, and into a broad open roadstead known as Spithead for the long spit of sand that protected it from the Channel. This was the historic anchorage of the Royal Navy and the scene of formal reviews of the fleet by monarchs since Elizabeth I. Yet familiar as these roadsteads were to generations of British seamen since Drake and Frobisher, Spithead had never seen an armada like this one. To Vian, watching from his flagship, the cruiser
Scylla
, “the constant stream of landing craft and ships” coming down the Solent and into Spithead was “a heartening sight.”
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As Captain Stagg had promised, it was an “uncomfortable” crossing. Four-foot waves smacked into the blunt bows of the LCTs, and green water
washed over the thwarts and sluiced across their crowded decks. One LCT officer recalled that “the water would come in over the top front of the boat and flush out the back.” Occasionally when an LCT nosed into a trough in the waves, its stern would rise out of the water and, lacking any resistance, its propellers would spin out of control as the engines emitted a highpitched whine. Then the LCT pushed up into the next wave, the stern settled back into the sea, and the engine noise returned to normal. There was no place to escape the elements, and the embarked soldiers “huddled together in their trucks and kept as warm as possible.” Navy crewmen tried to keep them supplied with hot coffee, but even that proved difficult. Unlike the steak-and-eggs breakfasts served on some of the larger ships, men on the smaller LCTs got only more boxes of the despised K rations.
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It was even worse for the men on the rhino ferries. In order to make their way into the overcrowded harbors the night before, many of them had uncoupled from their tows, and they now proceeded to the rendezvous site on their own, “chugging along,” as Arthur Struble put it, at two or three knots, propelled by their twin outboard motors. A few of the rhinos had been designated as repair barges, and those had a Nissen hut in the middle of the deck that offered some refuge from the elements. On others, enterprising Seabees had cut a hatchway into one of the pontoons and set up Spartan quarters inside, though because the rhinos had only two feet of freeboard, the Channel’s four-foot swells washed over the flush deck and down through the contrived hatch, rendering those ersatz quarters unusable. There was nothing for it but to huddle together in the middle of the rafts and endure the discomfort. Kirk and Struble, moving swiftly past them in the commodious
Augusta
, noted that on some of the rhinos, the Seabees had built open fires on the deck to fight off the cold or to warm their rations. To Kirk, they were “just like Robinson Crusoe,” and they reminded Struble of Boy Scouts on a campout, though Bill O’Neill, passing by on an LCT, felt sorry for the men who were “leaning into the wind and spray” and “undoubtedly completely miserable.”
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After nightfall, a prerecorded message from Eisenhower was played on board all the invasion ships. The 1-MCs squawked to life, and the men heard the voice of the Supreme Allied Commander speaking in his flat, midwestern American accent: “Soldiers, Sailors, and Airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Forces! You are about to embark upon the Great Crusade, toward which we have striven for many months.” Ike acknowledged that “your task will not be an easy one,” though he also assured them that they would have “overwhelming superiority in weapons and munitions,” and that he had “full confidence in your courage, devotion to duty, and skill in battle.” He ended with: “Good Luck! And let us all beseech the blessing of Almighty God upon this great and noble undertaking.” On Moon’s flagship, that inspired hundreds of men on the open decks to begin singing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” The sound of it filtered down into the lower decks, where men lay on their cots or sat cross-legged on the deck. A junior officer on Moon’s staff recalled the lump in his throat as he sang: “As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free.”
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T
HE
C
ROSSING
, J
UNE
5–6, 1944

THE RENDEZVOUS SITE
for all five of the invasion forces was a few miles south of the Isle of Wight. Officially it was designated as Area Zebra, though virtually everyone called it “Piccadilly Circus” after the notoriously congested roundabout in the middle of London. It was an appropriate sobriquet. The thousands of ships of nearly every size and shape made up a city on the sea. The congestion was so great that it was difficult for some of the vessels to find their assigned flotillas, and inevitably there was some intermingling of ships from various commands. Lieutenant Dean Rockwell, who commanded the sixteen LCTs carrying the sixty-four duplex drive tanks for Omaha Beach, counted noses—or rather masts—and came up one short. Ensign F. S. White’s LCT-713 was missing. Like the proverbial good shepherd, Rockwell went off in search of it, and he found it maneuvering among the LCTs of Moon’s Force U. Rockwell came alongside the 713 and called out to White: had he noticed that while his vessel had a large white
O
painted on its conning tower, every other vessel in this area was marked with a
U
? White looked around and with dawning comprehension, though no apparent sense of irony, responded, “Oh.”
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By midnight on June 5, the Piccadilly Circus rendezvous in mid-Channel was far more congested than the original ever had been. The assembled armada included between four thousand and six thousand
vessels depending on whether one counted the minesweepers, patrol craft, tugs, rhino ferries, and other auxiliaries. Among them were 284 warships, a number that includes five battleships, two monitors, twenty-three cruisers, and more than a hundred destroyers and destroyer escorts, plus 142 smaller gunships. Adding armed patrol craft and PT boats to the list boosts the number of warships to nearly seven hundred. In addition to that, there were 311 LSTs, two hundred LCIs, eight hundred LCTs, nearly five hundred Mike boats (LCMs), and more than fifteen hundred of the small landing craft: Higgins boats and LCAs. Of all the memories that soldiers and sailors carried with them in the years afterward, the most pervasive was the one of “thousands and thousands of ships of all classes stretched from horizon to horizon.”
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Because the galley fires had to be put out at midnight, many of these ships served the last hot meal the men would have for some time. After that, all the ships went to general quarters and set Condition Zebra, which required dogging down the watertight hatches. Paint cans and other inflammable materials were thrown over the side; firefighting and damage-repair equipment was broken out. On the destroyers, men pulled the plugs from the muzzles of the 5-inch guns and stacked shells in the ammunition hoists from the magazines. On some ships, the captain gave a short speech over the 1-MC. Then the invasion groups began to sort themselves out and move ship by ship into the marked channels.

There were two swept channels to each beach—a fast channel for ships moving at twelve knots, mostly the big transports and destroyers, and a slow channel for those traveling at five knots, which included all the landing craft. Small sub chasers acted as guide ships for long lines of LCTs, all of them blacked out save for a single small blue light on the fantail to serve as a beacon for the ship behind it. To men on the guide ships out in front, the illuminated dan buoys—red on the right, green on the left—seemed “like a highway leading us to our own section of beach.” On Sub Chaser 1282, George Hackett looked astern to see hundreds of LCTs, one after another, in a line that stretched as far as he could see. One officer thought it looked like “a gigantic, twisting dragon.”
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