Neptune: The Allied Invasion of Europe and the D-Day Landings (53 page)

As chaotic and frenzied as it seemed, the delivery of men, vehicles, and supplies over the beach became increasingly efficient after June 10. The pre-invasion goal of 8,000 tons per day on Omaha Beach was reached and surpassed on June 12 when some 8,529 tons came ashore. By June 15, the backlog of unloaded ships had been cleared, and Hall noted with some pride that “all previous records for stores landed on the Force O beaches was broken on each successive day.” In the five-day period from June 12 to June 16, the Allies landed a total of 75,383 men, 10,926 vehicles, and 66,571 tons of supplies on Omaha Beach. That was roughly the equivalent of a fully equipped infantry division every day—and there were five Allied beaches where this was happening. If the Allies could maintain that pace, it would overmatch anything the Germans could do.
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Bringing men and supplies in over the beach remained precarious, however. Nightly raids from the Luftwaffe and occasional sorties by E-boats
from Cherbourg were never severe enough to imperil the invasion, though accidents, enemy mines, and weather did cause occasional interruptions. At seven in the morning of June 7, the USS
Susan B. Anthony
(APA-72), formerly the passenger liner
Santa Clara
and known as the “Susie Bee,” loaded with more than twenty-three hundred men of the Fourth Infantry Division, hit a mine, very likely one of the pressure-sensitive oyster mines that had been dropped overnight by a German bomber. All power went out, and the big ship began to settle. Without power, damage control was impossible. Once it was clear that the ship could not be saved, her captain, Commander T. L. Gray, sent out a signal to all vessels: “Come alongside, we need help.” Assuming he wanted help with unloading, a nearby LCT responded: “Sorry, we have other orders,” to which Gray replied: “We are sinking.” That brought every ship in the area to her aid, including the British frigate
Narbrough
. The crew of the “Susie Bee” threw the boarding nets over the side, and the soldiers climbed down into the sea, where rescuing vessels picked them up. Not a single soldier or sailor was lost, but the incident underscored the Allied assumption that it was essential to capture a major seaport early in the campaign so that offloading could be more reliable and efficient. To accomplish that, the men of “Lightning Joe” Collins’s VII Corps were already fighting their way northward from Utah Beach to target the seaport city of Cherbourg. Until Cherbourg fell, however, the Allies had a backup plan.
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THE SAME DAY
the “Susie Bee” went down, men on Omaha Beach who looked seaward witnessed a curious sight, described by one as “several large barges, loaded with long, steel pylons and huge, odd forms made of concrete, and two rusty, old freighters being pulled and pushed toward the land by tugs.” The freighters were the first of the so-called corncobs—the derelict blockships that would be sunk to form breakwaters—and the “odd forms made of concrete” were the giant Phoenix units, each of them as big as a city office building. Here were the first elements of Project Mulberry, the artificial harbors to be constructed off Omaha Beach near St. Laurent-sur-Mer and off Gold Beach near Arromanche.
²⁵

The very existence of this program was nearly as great a secret as the invasion itself. Yet the Phoenix caissons were so enormous that complete concealment was impossible. In May, the men who were to make up the crews of the Phoenix units were startled to hear Lord Haw Haw
*
announce on Nazi Germany’s propaganda radio station, “We know exactly what you intend to do with these concrete units. You intend to sink them off our coast in the assault.” Then Haw Haw promised that the German navy would be happy to do that for them: sinking them well before they ever made it to the coast.
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Not everyone in the Allied high command was enthusiastic about the Mulberry project. One of the officers who helped supervise it wrote later that “Force Mulberry was an unwanted orphan.” Ramsay, Kirk, Hall, and many of the other operational commanders were openly dubious, even scornful, about whether it could be done at all, and even if it could, whether it would be worth the effort. The candid-to-a-fault Hall told Admiral Cunningham, “One storm will wash them all away.” Still, the skeptics knew better than to get in the way of a project supported by Churchill, and they were happy to leave the management of it to others while they focused on more conventional issues. This lack of institutional enthusiasm made obtaining materials for the project an uphill struggle. Because of that, for the men who ran the Mulberry program, the postponement of the invasion from May to June was critical.
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Then, as D-Day approached, it became evident that the British simply did not have the towing capacity needed to move all the various parts of the Mulberry project across the Channel. Somewhat grudgingly, the Americans agreed to contribute 25 tugs out of the 132 that were required, though when they arrived, 11 of them proved to be relatively small yard tugs that lacked the horsepower to move the giant Phoenix caissons through the water. Yet somehow, in spite of skepticism from the admirals, a scarcity of resources, an almost impossible schedule, and an insufficiency of tugs, the
work got done, the components got to sea, and on the day after the landings, the first elements of this vast project appeared off Omaha and Gold Beaches.
²⁸

All five of the invasion beaches were to be protected by the artificial breakwaters called gooseberries, but two of them—Omaha and Gold—were to host complete artificial harbors composed of several elements. First, some two thousand yards off the coast, the Allies would position so-called bombardons: enormous floating steel pontoons, each of them more than two hundred feet long, that were strung together end to end, like a Brobdingnagian pool float. Then, another thousand yards closer to the beach, the tugs would maneuver the giant Phoenix units into place and sink them in a long row. Inside the protection of these concrete structures, several steel pier heads, known as Lobnitz piers for their designer, Henry Pearson Lobnitz, would be connected to the beach by “whales,” which were long, floating roadways. These causeways required more than thirteen thousand steel pontoons that would be anchored to the sea floor by more than two thousand special anchors called kites. The roadway sections would float on the surface and rise and fall with the tide. In theory, at least, once all these elements were in place, fully loaded ships could maneuver into the sheltered harbor created by the Phoenix units, nose up to the Lobnitz piers at either high or low tide, quickly disgorge their tanks, trucks, or cargo onto the floating roadway, and then immediately back off again for another trip. The whole project was a marvel of imagination and engineering—if it worked.

The first elements to be put in place were the corncobs that made up the gooseberry breakwaters. Off Omaha Beach, the gooseberry was anchored at its western end by the former Royal Navy dreadnaught HMS
Centurion
, which was wrestled into place by the tugs early on the afternoon of June 7. The Germans immediately opened fire on this battleship, which in their view had been foolish enough to come within artillery range. When the pre-positioned charges on the
Centurion
were detonated and the big ship settled to the bottom, the Germans thought they had sunk her. That night, Goebbels himself announced this triumph of German coastal defense forces on the radio.
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T
HE
P
LAN FOR THE
M
ULBERRY
H
ARBOR OFF
O
MAHA
B
EACH

Two more of the corncob blockships were pushed into place and sunk astern of the
Centurion
that same afternoon. The German gunners continued their barrage, and the civilian crews of the derelict ships began to wonder if they had made a bad bargain, even though they were being paid what was all too accurately called “danger money” for the job. At all five of the invasion beaches, the old freighters were pushed and pulled into place by the tugs, the explosive charges were detonated, and the ships settled more or less into position. At Utah Beach, the corncobs were placed a mile farther south than the plan indicated, to comport with the revised landing site. The plan for all five beaches called for the ships to be sunk bow to stern in a straight, unbroken line, but this proved difficult to do in the insistent current and swiftly running tide, and several gaps between the ships made the result an imperfect breakwater. Even so, it resulted in a dramatic reduction in the volatility of the sea. Combined with the decision to allow the LSTs to dry out on the beaches, the placement of the gooseberries contributed to a continued acceleration of the supply effort. The gooseberries off both of the American beaches were completed by June 12, and on June 14 more than 27,000 men, nearly 2,000 vehicles, and another 7,752 tons of supplies came ashore on Omaha Beach in a single day.
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Even before the gooseberries were completed, the giant concrete Phoenix units were being towed into place off Vierville on Omaha Beach and Arromanche near Gold Beach. Huge and balky as they were, and with the tide and current so assertive, the tugs struggled to nudge the Phoenix units into the proper place and keep them there while the men on board them opened the sea cocks and the units settled to the bottom. Even with four ocean tugs pushing all at once, the Phoenix units were difficult to hold in place against the current. Occasionally one would drift away on its own no matter what the tugs did. As with the corncobs, the eventual alignment of the Phoenix units only superficially resembled the straight lines drawn on the planning maps.
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Then the Lobnitz pier heads had to be set in position inside the protected anchorage. These were big, complex structures, two hundred feet long, sixty feet wide, and ten feet high, with giant metal posts called “spuds,” sixty feet long, sticking up at each corner. To at least one observer, they
resembled “a huge water bug with its four retracted spud legs sticking up like giant feelers into the sky.” Once the pier head was in position, the “spuds” were lowered to the seabed to become its legs, and the steel platform on the Lobnitz pier hung suspended from steel cables attached to the top of the spuds. Unlike the “whale” roadway, it did not float. Rather, diesel engines raised or lowered the pier with the tide, and a permanent crew of fifteen managed the “maze of complicated diesel electric hoisting gear.”
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To transport the tanks, trucks, and other equipment from the pier heads to the shore nearly a mile away, the Allies constructed a floating steel roadway—the “whale”—composed of hundreds of eighty-foot-long prefabricated sections. To keep the whales stable, the Americans anchored every other section to the ocean floor. The more careful British anchored every section of their whale roadways. The Americans thought that, as usual, the British were being overly careful, though as it happened, the British would have the last laugh. For now, however, it allowed the Americans to complete the Mulberry off Omaha Beach three days ahead of schedule.

At 4:43 p.m. on June 16, the entire Mulberry workforce at Omaha Beach paused to watch as LST-342 eased up to the end of the middle Lobnitz pier. The ship dropped its ramp onto the metal platform, and one by one, seventy-eight vehicles rolled out of the LST onto the pier and then drove along the whale to the beach at a steady fifteen miles an hour, emptying the ship in a mere thirty-eight minutes. Soldiers and sailors cheered lustily, and the exhausted managers of the Mulberry project congratulated one another on a remarkable engineering triumph. Over the next thirty-six hours, ten more LSTs unloaded at the Lobnitz pier, and the average unloading time per ship was only sixty-four minutes. The visionary champions of the Mulberry project had been vindicated. Or so it seemed.

Though each LST unloaded quickly—much more quickly than they could over the beach, especially if they were drying out—each Lobnitz pier head could accommodate only two LSTs at a time, whereas the beach could, theoretically at least, host dozens of them. It was a trade-off between the swift unloading of a few ships and the slow unloading of many ships. It was not immediately clear which would prove more efficient. After the Mulberry was opened for business on June 16, the daily tonnage of cargo
delivered to Omaha Beach increased slightly, from 8,500 tons to 8,700 tons, but at the same time, the landing of personnel actually dropped from an average of 17,843 per day (June 13 to 16) to only 11,686 per day (June 17 to 19). (See
Table 3
,
page 328
.) Either way, the flood of men, vehicles, and supplies into Normandy was remarkable. In the two weeks after D-Day, the Allies landed a total of 618,855 men, 93,986 vehicles, and 245,133 tons of supplies over the five Normandy beaches, even though most of the unloading at Sword Beach had to be halted due to continuing German artillery fire. Only a small percentage of the total came in via the Mulberries, and given that, it was not yet evident that the great effort put into the Mulberry project was yielding a significant return. To validate the wisdom of the project, the next several days would be crucial.
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