Neptune: The Allied Invasion of Europe and the D-Day Landings (42 page)

Most of the skippers focused on the blue light of the vessel in front of them rather than the red and green dan buoys. That was an imperfect
navigating system since the high waves often obscured the blue lights. At one point, the executive officer of an LCT turned to the skipper to ask if the green buoys were supposed to be on the right side or the left side! To their horror they saw that their entire line of LCTs was outside the lane.

In another case, a line of landing craft passed directly across the bow of some transport ships, and last-second “radical course changes were necessary to avoid them.” Inevitably, some ships broke down: more than a few had engine trouble, others leaked and began taking on water, still others had fuel problems. LCT-852 reported that its ramp “fell off,” offering no further explanation. All of these ships had to return to port.
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For most of the men, however, the three-hour crossing was routine. “The hours crept slowly by,” one recalled, and men passed the time in different ways. On LST-315, a large poker game began soon after midnight and lasted throughout the crossing. Chaplains on some of the larger ships hosted brief religious services. On one British destroyer, men stood “bare headed and drenched with spray …, holding on to anything they could find which would steady them against the violent movements of the ship,” as the chaplain recited the traditional Royal Navy prayer, written by Lord Nelson on the eve of the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805: “May the Great God whom I worship grant to my Country and to the benefit of Europe in general a great and glorious victory. Amen.” On other ships, men kept to themselves, thinking of family, sweethearts, and friends. To many the silence seemed “terrible,” and at least one man thought, “The ripple of the bow wave sounded like Niagara Falls in the tense silence.”
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So far there had been no reaction from the enemy, or any indication that the Germans even knew what was about to descend on them. At about 1:00 a.m., most of those on board the ships of Force O and Force U who were topside could hear, even if they could not see, hundreds of airplanes passing overhead. They were C-47 transport planes towing gliders filled with men of the 82nd and 101st Airborne divisions who would land behind the American beaches that night. Other planes carried the paratroopers of the British 6th Airborne Division toward their drop zone behind Sword Beach near Caen. As the Allied ships approached the French coast, the navigators were astonished to see that the 236-foot gray stone lighthouse on Cape
Barfleur was still operating, its powerful beam of light blinking as usual, almost as if the Germans disdained the whole idea of a sea assault. The big troop transports dropped anchor at their designated positions eighteen thousand yards (just over ten miles) off the coast at about 2:30 a.m., well ahead of the slower and more numerous LCTs and LCIs, and they had barely dropped anchor when they began to lower their Higgins boats alongside. Kirk, Hall, and Moon all agreed that, packed as they were with American soldiers, the transports were far too valuable and vulnerable to risk taking them within range of the German shore batteries, and for the soldiers that meant a long and dizzying ride to the assault beaches in the tiny Higgins boats. At 3:00 a.m., the 1-MC loudspeakers on the transports squawked to life: “Now hear this. Stand by all troops.”
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Ashore on the high ground behind what the Allies called Omaha Beach, near Colleville-sur-Mer, German Lance Corporal Hein Severloh was anticipating his breakfast of bread, cheese, and butter when he paused to look out over the sea. With the morning haze lifting, several dark objects slowly came into focus, hundreds of them—thousands! “Holy smoke!” he said aloud. “Here they are.”
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DUE TO THE TIDE DIFFERENTIAL
and the curious geography of the Normandy coastline, the Americans would land sixty to eighty minutes ahead of the British and Canadians. There had been a lot of discussion about this. The Normandy beach gradients were very gradual—on much of the shoreline there is only about a foot of vertical rise in fifty feet of horizontal beach. Combined with tides of eighteen to twenty-four feet, that meant that the width of the beach changed dramatically from high tide to low tide. The generals had argued for making the attack at high tide, when the killing zone of the beach was relatively narrow, but the admirals wanted to attack at low tide so that the beach obstructions, most of them wired with mines, would be exposed. That would allow the landing craft to avoid them en route to the beach and would give the Navy Combat Demolition Units an opportunity to neutralize at least some of them before the second and third waves came ashore. In the end, the compromise decision was to attack two hours after low tide, which on June 6 was 6:30 a.m. That would give the
demolition teams a brief window to attack the obstructions, and the swiftly rising tide would narrow the width of the beach as subsequent waves of infantry came ashore.
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A problem with this solution was that at two hours after low tide, the sand bars off Sword Beach near Caen did not provide sufficient deep water to allow the British LCTs to pass over them; not for another hour would there be enough water to provide clearance. Thus while H-Hour was 6:30 on the American beaches, it was 7:25 on Sword Beach. The asymmetry of the landings concerned Eisenhower, who would have preferred to strike all five beaches at once, but in the end he bowed to the tyranny of the coastal geography.

Nervous but confident, the soldiers on the American transports lugged their oversized packs and their nine-and-a-half-pound Garand M1 rifles onto the weather deck and lined up to board the Higgins boats. On a few ships, the soldiers climbed into landing craft that were suspended at the rail and were lowered along with the boats; on most, however, the Higgins boats were lowered empty save for their three-man Navy crews, and the soldiers climbed down into them on the scramble nets. Each soldier had to remember to hold the vertical supports on the nets rather than the horizontal ropes so that the man coming down after him did not step on his hands. Then, near the bottom of the net, he had to time his last-second jump into the Higgins boat carefully since the boats were rising and falling dramatically with the Channel swells. Some mistimed their jump and suffered lacerations and the occasional broken leg. The injured were brought back on board bearing the dubious distinction of being the first to be wounded during the invasion. As soon as the boats filled up with their designated complement, the Navy coxswains cast off and motored away to join boats from other transports that were circling in a holding pattern nearby. This process took about an hour; on the
Thomas Jefferson
(APA-30), for example, it took exactly sixty-six minutes.
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Not all the soldiers disembarked at once. Even with twenty or more Higgins boats per ship, the big transports could land only about five hundred men at a time—roughly a third of their onboard total. The rest would have to wait until the boats returned several hours later to carry them ashore in a
subsequent wave. The invasion of occupied France was not to be accomplished in a single dash shoreward, but in a series of waves ten to fifteen minutes apart all day long, and indeed over the next several weeks. For more than nineteen hours, from before dawn until after ten that night, the coxswains in their Higgins boats and LCAs and the ensigns in their LCTs shuttled back and forth from the transports and the LSTs to the beach carrying troops and equipment ashore. For them, as much as for the soldiers they carried, June 6 was truly the longest day.
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Once inside the Higgins boats, the soldiers could see nothing. The high sides of the boat were above their heads and, heavily burdened as they were, they stood uncomfortably and precariously side by side, jostling up against one another as the boat lurched shoreward through the severe chop. Sea spray smacked them in the face and drizzled down into their clothing. Some who had avoided seasickness during the Channel crossing succumbed to it now, and the smell of
mal de mer
on the deck and on their boot tops added to the general discomfort of all. To many, the circling seemed endless. Then, just after 4:00 a.m., with the sky turning from full dark to dove gray, the landing craft were taken in charge by a small patrol boat or an escorting destroyer and led shoreward at a leisurely five knots. At that rate, the journey would take another two and a half hours, and they would arrive at their target beaches precisely at H-Hour. By then, however, many of the soldiers were so worn out from the journey and from seasickness that their battle-worthiness was questionable. As one Higgins boat approached the beach, a soldier hoisted himself out over the thwarts to vomit into the roiling sea, provoking his sergeant to order him, “Get your head down. You’ll be killed.” The soldier didn’t move, answering, “I’m dying anyway.”
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FROM THE START
, the planners had wrestled with the question of how to get at least some of the tanks ashore with the first wave of infantry so that the attackers would have armored support. Sending in the scarce LSTs with the first wave would subject them to unacceptable risk. Not until the enemy’s big coastal guns had been neutralized could the LSTs run up onto the beach and spew out their massive cargoes of tanks and trucks. For the initial assault, therefore, the Allies relied on a few score specialized LCTs.
One version was an armored variant, designated LCT(A). These vessels were to go ashore with the infantry, ground themselves on the beach, and unload their Sherman tanks, including some equipped with bulldozer blades so they could help clear the beach obstacles. Another group of LCTs carried the experimental duplex drive tanks that would be launched from offshore and swim into the beach under their own power. Since the DD tanks were considerably slower than the Higgins boats, they would launch early, around 3:00 a.m., to give them time to motor to the beach at a painstaking two or three knots.

The problem, of course, was the weather. The inflatable canvas shrouds on the DD tanks had only about nine inches of freeboard when deployed, and it seemed unlikely that they could survive very long in the four-foot waves. The Neptune orders specified that “if state of sea is such as to prevent their being launched … land them with the first wave.” The responsibility of judging the “state of sea” lay with the commanding officers of the LCT flotillas. Thus the first life-and-death decisions off the Normandy beaches on June 6 fell to a handful of ensigns and lieutenants.
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Off Omaha Beach, that responsibility belonged to Navy Lieutenant Dean Rockwell. A tall, dark, and robust individual with an oversized personality, Rockwell was a former athlete at Eastern Michigan University and a sometime professional wrestler. He had been teaching high school in Michigan and coaching the school’s football team when he heard about Pearl Harbor and immediately enlisted in the Navy. Now, on D-Day, he was in charge of LCT Flotilla 12, consisting of sixteen vessels, each commanded by an ensign, and each carrying four DD tanks, half of them from the 741st Tank Battalion and half from the 743rd.
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In the predawn darkness, Rockwell led his sixteen LCTs in a long single file past the looming shadows of the big transports, battleships, and cruisers off Omaha Beach to take up their assigned positions six thousand yards (a little over three miles) off the beach. At the designated line of departure, Rockwell deployed his flotilla into two groups of eight in a line abreast facing Omaha Beach. It was just past 3:00 a.m., and the soldiers in the Higgins boats had not yet begun their slow journey toward the beach. Nevertheless, according to the plan, this was the moment for Rockwell’s LCTs to open their bow doors,
drop their ramps, and send the amphibious DD tanks on their way. It was evident to Rockwell, however, that doing so in such a violent sea would be tantamount to murder. He talked it over with Army Captain Ned Elder, the senior Army officer on board, and between them they decided “it would be insane” to launch the DD tanks into that volatile sea. Rockwell concluded that it was his duty to carry the tanks all the way to the beach.
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