Neptune: The Allied Invasion of Europe and the D-Day Landings (54 page)

THE STORM THAT ARRIVED
on June 19 caught almost everyone by surprise. Indeed, after the inclement weather on June 5 that had forced the initial postponement of the invasion, the weather in the Channel had been relatively benign, and all predictions were that it would remain that way. On June 18, the official weather report for the next day was: “Cloudy to partly cloudy. Visibility fair, 4–6 miles. Wind NE, velocity gentle—8–13 knots.” Even as that forecast was distributed to the fleet, however, the wind was gusting in excess of twenty knots. On June 19, a southward-moving cold front from Ireland collided with a depression moving north from the Mediterranean to produce a summer gale of historic ferocity. The barometer dropped to 29.92 inches, and the wind increased to thirty knots. By ten o’clock that night, waves were crashing over the top of the Phoenix units, and the British gun crews in the anti-aircraft batteries atop each of the units had to be evacuated. When the Mike boats arrived to do that, the British soldiers were “hanging onto the gun for dear life.” Even inside the breakwater, the seas were so rough that the Mike boats rose and fell as much as fifteen feet, soaring up to the top of the Phoenix units at the crest of a wave, then suddenly swooping down again. In one Mike boat, the men took off their kapok life jackets and threw them into the open deck space to create a cushion for the soldiers to land on, and then encouraged the men on the Phoenix to jump. Of the five men in one gun crew who did so, two were severely injured.
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Meanwhile, the floating metal roadways from the Lobnitz piers to the beach began to heave wildly, undulating, as one put it, “like writhing pythons.” The Seabees worked furiously to secure them, holding on with one hand to avoid being swept into the sea while they sought to double up the lines on both the Lobnitz pier and the floating roadway with eight-inch hawsers. The whales off Arromanche were less vulnerable, partly because they were more protected by the coastal geography, but also because of the British decision to anchor both ends of every section.
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Allied shipping also suffered from the wrath of the storm, and the smaller vessels were particularly at risk. The bigger ships put out heavy anchors to both port and starboard, but the LCTs, Higgins boats, and Mike boats carried only a single anchor, and they were not equipped with spring lines that could ease the strain. As these smaller vessels were buffeted by seven-foot seas and thirty-knot winds, their anchor lines stretched “taut as bowstrings,” and inevitably some of those lines snapped and sent the vessels careening helplessly before the wind. Many were driven ashore and broached sideways on the sand, where they were pounded by the heavy surf. One witness claimed they were “piled six deep against the shore.” On some vessels, the skippers deliberately ran their boats up onto the beach, concluding that it was better to go aground than to go under.
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The storm lasted all night, and the next day even the big ships began to drag their anchors as a powerful north-by-northeast wind pushed them shoreward. Many got up steam and headed out to gain sea room off what was now a lee shore. Even so, that afternoon a salvage barge and five British LCTs whose anchor lines gave way crashed violently into the whale off Omaha Beach. Their steel hulls punctured the pontoons that kept the roadway afloat, and several sections of the whale were wrecked; other sections simply disappeared.

On the morning of June 20, there were glimpses of blue skies through the gray clouds, and many hoped that the worst had passed. Instead, the storm worked its way up to a full-blown gale—the worst June storm in the English Channel in forty years. Those LCTs that had gotten under way to avoid being blown ashore now began to run low on fuel, and they sought a safe place to tie up. With so many vessels seeking shelter, such places were hard to find.
The big ships were already virtually surrounded by smaller vessels tied up alongside, and there was no more room. Often when an LCT or a Mike boat sought to tie up, it was warned off, first with shouts, then with threats, and in a few cases with gunfire. When one British LCT requested permission to tie up to a large American ship that was already surrounded by scores of small Higgins boats all tied together, the American officer of the deck, Ensign Clifford Sinnett, shouted back that there was no room. The British LCT skipper was desperate, however, and after a moment of silence, he announced: “We’re coming in to tie up.” This time Sinnett responded more emphatically, announcing “in no uncertain terms that he was
not
going to come in and tie up,” and using some sailor’s language for emphasis. The British officer replied: “I don’t know who you are, sir, but you are no gentleman.”
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By now, “the whole Baie de la Seine was a mass of dirty yellow-gray water streaked and flecked with white foam and cresting seas.” The cables securing the Lobnitz piers to the bottom began to snap, and though the legs, or spuds, remained intact and in place, the whole structure swayed dramatically with the huge swells, some of them a hundred feet long. Fearing that the strain would be too much, the crew released the clutch holding the platform in place so that it could ride up and down with the swells. That eased the strain on the platform, but it multiplied the discomfort level for the men on the pier heads, who had to hold on with both hands as the platform rose and fell dramatically and unpredictably. Worse yet, the two-hundred-foot-long bombardons a thousand yards out to sea broke loose from their anchors and hurtled down on the artificial harbor like so many battering rams. They smashed into the Mulberry with such velocity that some of the Phoenix units actually broke in half. Before it was over, twenty of the thirty-one Phoenix units off Omaha Beach were wrecked. By now, a total of seventeen ships had collided with the floating metal roadway, turning it into “a tangled heaving mass.”
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The winds finally began to abate on the evening of June 22, and on the morning of the twenty-third it was possible to assess the damage. Kirk was appalled. “Landing craft were piled up on the beach,” he recalled later, and “the shoreline was just a shambles.” Kirk’s chief of staff, Arthur Struble, estimated that there were between twenty-two hundred and twenty-four hundred vessels
wrecked on the beach, though many of them had grounded there on purpose and would later be salvaged. The actual total of destroyed vessels came to about three hundred, which was bad enough. That morning there were only twelve LCTs and one rhino ferry in operating condition off Omaha Beach.
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The damage to the artificial harbors was harder to assess. Though a few of the corncobs had been shifted out of place, the gooseberries remained mostly intact. The barrier of Phoenix units, the key element of the Mulberry harbors, had suffered serious damage, and off Omaha Beach, at least, the whale roadways were all but destroyed. Some of those who had worked on the Mulberry program from the beginning thought it could all be repaired. But Commodore William A. Sullivan, the U.S. Navy’s supervisor of salvage, decided otherwise. He recommended to Eisenhower that the Mulberry off Omaha Beach should be shut down and that salvageable elements of it should be towed over to effect repairs on Mulberry B, off Arromanche, which had fared much better. Eisenhower agreed. The gooseberries would be repaired and even reinforced, but the complicated Lobnitz piers and whale roadways off Omaha Beach were abandoned.
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At the time, no one knew what impact this would have on Allied plans; whether without the artificial harbors it would even be possible to maintain the buildup of men and equipment needed to sustain the invasion. There were a few rays of hope. Bradley’s idea of beaching ammunition ships ashore proved a godsend, for they had been largely unaffected by the storm. Bradley worried nonetheless, and on June 22, as the storm abated, he urged Kirk to land more ammunition barges on the beach. Though at one point the stockpile of ammunition ashore got down to only three days’ supply, the delivery of both men and supplies to the beach never stopped entirely. The daily totals dropped from 8,700 tons before the storm to only 676 tons on June 21, when the storm was at its height. But then the numbers rose to 1,077 tons the next day and to 4,595 on June 23. On the twenty-fourth, they actually topped 10,000 tons for the first time—more than when the Mulberry was in full operation. On that one day, 22,630 men, 3,513 vehicles, and 10,974 tons of supplies landed on Omaha Beach, all of it over the beach, and mostly by the LSTs. Moreover, the LSTs were able to sustain these levels over the next several weeks. That confirmed what should have been evident in the five days before the Mulberry opened for business: that while the Mulberry project was unquestionably a testament to Anglo-American, and especially British, imagination, creativity, and determination, it was not, after all, essential to the maintenance of the Allied invasion.
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Table 3 Unloading of Men and Supplies on Omaha Beach, June 6–26, 1944

Source: Hall to Wilkes, July 9, 1944, John Lesslie Hall Papers, box 1, Swem Library, W&M.

THE SHIPS BRINGING MEN AND SUPPLIES
to the invasion beaches did not return to England empty. Back in January, Ramsay had suggested that because the LSTs were so scarce and valuable, they should not be used to
evacuate casualties because that was likely to slow their turnaround time and thereby risk the rapid and continuous delivery of reinforcements and supplies. That may have been a ploy to demonstrate how important it was to increase LST availability, because for the actual invasion a number of LSTs were specially staffed with Navy doctors and pharmacist’s mates to take care of casualties. A few ships even had ersatz operating rooms. Vessels so equipped performed a kind of shuttle service, carrying troops and vehicles in one direction and wounded men in the other.
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There were so many wounded men on Omaha Beach that first day that relatively few could be evacuated at all. Far too many had to survive one or even two cold nights lying on the sand. As the soldiers fought their way inland and the threat of German artillery was reduced, the Allies established aid stations on the beaches. For the first several days, these were little more than foxholes with sandbag walls and a canvas roof, but at least the Navy pharmacist’s mates who manned them had bandages and (critically) morphine. Many of the wounded were assisted down to the aid stations by their buddies. Others arrived in specially configured ambulance trucks, modified from the nearly ubiquitous two-and-a-half-ton Dodge trucks. Still others were carried down from the bluffs in Stokes stretchers, a kind of wire basket in a metal frame. Occasionally a wounded soldier staggered in on his own.
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Many of them were wounded psychically as well as physically. Posttraumatic stress disorder had not yet acquired its current designation, and the commonly used term was “battle fatigue.” Whatever name it bore, its victims were unmistakable. Pharmacist’s Mate Bill Milne, off LST-491, treated one wounded American airborne soldier who had somehow made it down to the aid station unassisted. He had parachuted out over enemy territory in the middle of the night, endured conditions that only he knew for certain, and though he had been shot through the leg, he had nevertheless walked all the way to Omaha Beach. By the time he arrived at the aid station, he was a grisly apparition, and Milne saw at once that he was in shock. “He had his .45 in one hand, and a combat knife in the other,” Milne recalled. “I remember specifically that we could not get his pistol or knife away from him until we had given him morphine.” Survivors of sinkings
reacted similarly. One man who was pulled from the water onto a rhino ferry seemed not to know where he was or what was happening. Someone put a coat in his hands, but he stood there dripping, apparently confused by what he was supposed to do with it. After a minute or two, someone put it around his shoulders. The man never moved.
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