Neptune: The Allied Invasion of Europe and the D-Day Landings (55 page)

After triage at the aid station, the wounded were loaded onto LCTs or Mike boats, or in a few cases into DUKWs, for the trip out to a waiting LST. It proved possible to lay twenty wounded men, end to end and side by side, on the open cargo deck of a Mike boat. The boats then retracted from the beach and ferried the wounded out to empty LSTs, where cranes hoisted those who were not ambulatory on board in their Stokes stretchers. Carried down into the tank deck, either they were placed on racks arrayed along the bulkhead or their stretchers were chained down to the deck using the same tie-downs that had secured the tanks during the passage from England. Navy pharmacist’s mates and others cut away their damp and filthy clothing, often clotted with dried blood, and covered them with fresh blankets.

For the most serious cases, several of the LSTs had makeshift operating rooms at the far end of the tank deck below the galley. There, Navy doctors performed hundreds of operations, many of them involving amputations. Afterward, the removed limb was affixed to a piece of iron and dropped over the side. Despite the conditions and the circumstances, the doctors did remarkable work. A pharmacist’s mate on board one LST remembered that the doctors “worked for hours … removing shrapnel, patching bullet wounds, and trying to calm down some men that were completely out of their minds.”
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Not every ship had a doctor. Off Sword Beach, a leaking DUKW filled with several badly wounded British soldiers had to go to four different ships before it found one that had a doctor on board. Five minutes after the last man was taken off the DUKW, it sank alongside. As a result of the doctor shortage, pharmacist’s mates often found themselves not only setting splints and administering plasma transfusions but also performing operations, even when the task was well beyond their training. On Moon’s command ship
Bayfield
, Pharmacist’s Mate Second Class Vince del Guidice was in charge of head wounds. When he removed the helmet from one U.S.
Army Ranger, he saw that a shell fragment had cut off the crown of the man’s skull, so his brains were spilling out. Instinctively, he tried to push them back into place, but the wound was mortal and the soldier soon died.
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In addition to wounded Allied soldiers, the returning LSTs also carried prisoners of war. Many of these prisoners turned out not to be Germans at all, but rather men—boys, really—from one or more of Hitler’s conquered eastern European nations: Poles, Lithuanians, and Russian-speaking Georgians. More than once, a prisoner was startled when an American of Polish extraction spoke to him in his native language. By the third day of the campaign, these men were surrendering in large numbers, and the beach masters had difficulty accommodating all of them. When a platoon of GIs marched more than two hundred prisoners down to Omaha Beach, a Navy lieutenant asked them, “What in hell am I supposed to do with them?” The American soldiers essentially shrugged—they had fulfilled their assignment to deliver them to the beach, and they prepared to return to the front. The Navy lieutenant assigned four sailors with old carbines to guard the two hundred men, but he need not have worried, for they were “meek as lambs,” though one of the men assigned to guard them, Navy Signalman Second Class Bill DeFrates, was haunted for years afterward by “the blank stare in the eyes of a defeated soldier.”
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Most of the prisoners were embarked in LSTs dedicated to that purpose. In such cases, the men were simply herded into the tank deck until no more would fit. Vernon Paul on LST-983 estimated that there “must have been a thousand of them” packed “like sardines” into the tank deck of his ship. They were fed K rations, and probably were happy to get them. Most of the prisoners were utterly submissive, lining up when and where they were told, and obeying orders without murmur. There were exceptions, however. On one occasion, when a Navy officer ordered a group of prisoners to embark onto an LCT by walking out through the surf, a German officer objected that his men would get their feet wet. The American in charge was utterly unsympathetic. We got our feet wet when we came ashore, he told the German; you can get your feet wet going the other way.
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Occasionally German prisoners and wounded American soldiers shared passage on the same ship, and that sometimes proved awkward. Some of the wounded Americans objected to sharing passage with enemy soldiers, even wounded enemy soldiers. On one LST, Pharmacist’s Mate Ralph Crenshaw noticed that when he provided medical treatment to a wounded German, the Americans nearby muttered aloud that he should let the man die. Sensitive to the mood on board, when a boat came alongside with another load of prisoners, Crenshaw refused to let them board. The American officer in the boat objected, insisting that he had orders. But Crenshaw told him he would not be responsible for their safety if the officer persisted in putting them on the ship.
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The one group that neither the Allies nor the prisoners wanted anything to do with was the SS troops. That, apparently, was just fine with the SS troops. An American sailor on LST-371 noted that the SS soldiers “were all well dressed, with very good uniforms.” When they were herded into the tank deck of an LST, they “immediately set up an area separate from the other German troops,” even posting a guard detail to keep others away from their little corner of the ship. One observer believed that the SS soldiers showed as much disdain for the other Germans as they did for the Allies.
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Like the ships that carried the wounded back to England, those LSTs assigned to carry prisoners operated a kind of shuttle service, as these terse entries from one crewmember’s journal testify:

TWO WEEKS AFTER THE INITIAL LANDINGS
, Ramsay, Kirk, and the other Neptune commanders could be generally satisfied. The crossing had been virtually bloodless, and the landings, while confused and costly, had been ultimately successful. The U.S. Navy and Coast Guard had played the central role in getting the troops ashore on the American beaches, and the
Royal Navy had performed flawlessly off the British and Canadian beaches. The ships had sustained the soldiers with naval gunfire support and maintained a robust line of supply even in the face of bad weather and furious opposition. Despite the loss of the Mulberry harbor at Omaha Beach, the supplies continued to pour in, meeting and even exceeding expectations. The Allies had lost one major troop carrier (the “Susie Bee”) and several destroyers as well as hundreds of small landing craft, but the losses had been less than projected. Only one task now remained for the men and the ships of Operation Neptune: seizing a major seaport.

F
ROM THE BEGINNING
, Allied planners had assumed that even after obtaining a foothold on the beach, sustaining the kind of massive buildup needed to conquer a continent required seizing a major port on the French coast. The Neptune operational plan called for the deployment ashore of eighteen fully equipped divisions during the first two weeks, and almost no one believed it would be possible to do that over an open beach. Even if that proved feasible, surely it would be impossible to maintain such a pace during the long period the Allies needed to build their force up to a million men or more without a working seaport. The Allies made effective use of the small Norman ports of Courseulles-sur-Mer on Juno Beach and Port-en-Bessin on Gold Beach, but they were both small harbors incapable of handling deep draft ships. For that, the Allies needed to seize a major seaport. The selection of Normandy as the Allied objective necessarily meant that the harbor in question had to be Cherbourg, the city at the tip of the Cotentin Peninsula. Consequently, one of the first Allied goals once the beaches were secure was for the VII Corps of “Lightning Joe” Collins,
including both the 4th Infantry Division and the scattered and much-bloodied 82nd Airborne, to push northward up the east coast of the peninsula to seize Cherbourg in a swift coup de main.
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It didn’t happen. Cherbourg remained in German hands for three weeks after D-Day, and when the Allies finally did seize it on June 27, its value as a seaport had been all but eliminated thanks to the Nazi penchant for smashing and wrecking anything they could not possess. The campaign for Cherbourg was the capstone of Operation Neptune, and though it was eventually successful, in the end it did not allow the Allies to shift the logistical focus of the invasion from the Normandy beaches to a functioning seaport. Instead, in this, as in so many aspects of the invasion, the key to Allied success was the ability of the participants to adjust, adapt, and get on with it.

EISENHOWER VISITED THE BEACHHEAD
on June 8. Accompanied by Ramsay and Montgomery, he crossed the Channel on the British minelayer
Apollo
and surveyed all five of the landing beaches. He was concerned by the slow progress of Montgomery’s forces toward Caen, where the Germans were focusing their counterattacks, and he also worried about the situation on Omaha Beach. He met with Bradley, who by now had established his headquarters ashore, and expressed his unease that the American enclaves on Utah and Omaha Beach were still separated from each other. Four regiments had already begun an advance northward along the coast toward Cherbourg, but Eisenhower decided that it was more important to unify and stabilize the beachhead before continuing that drive, and Bradley concurred. It is possible to imagine them in Bradley’s headquarters bending over a map as Eisenhower pointed out the revised objectives. First he wanted to eliminate the pocket of German resistance near Sainte-Mère-Eglise, which would unify the 4th Division with elements of the 82nd Airborne, and then he wanted Bradley to seize the city of Carentan, on the Taute River. That would unify Omaha and Utah Beaches and make both beaches more secure. Only then would it be possible to turn north toward Cherbourg.
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Navy warships provided gunfire support for both of these efforts, firing their big guns ten or fifteen miles inland in response to requests from fire
control parties ashore. The cruiser
Quincy
sent her 8-inch shells smashing into bridges over the Douve River above Carentan, and the other heavy gunships fired their shells against enemy troop concentrations, tank parks, artillery positions, and even a railroad train parked on a siding. The Army’s advance toward Carentan and Isigny allowed Kirk to consider opening those cites as possible seaports, though because of the narrow channels that connected them to the sea, they could be used only by small coasters and barges. For oceangoing ships, the seizure of Cherbourg remained critical.
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The going was tough in the
bocage
country with its thick hedgerows and numerous waterways, but by June 14 the Allies had secured Carentan and established a continuous front from Quineville, north of Utah Beach, to Ouistreham, on the Orne River east of Sword Beach. By then, however, it was a full week after the initial landings, and the opportunity for a quick thrust up the peninsula to Cherbourg had passed. Instead, it now seemed more important to cut off the Cotentin Peninsula at its base in order to isolate the city and prevent the Germans from sending reinforcements there. Collins assigned the task to the veteran 9th Infantry Division, which began a westward drive on June 15 in company with elements of the 82nd Airborne. Advance units reached St.-Saveur-le-Vicomte on the sixteenth and pushed on rapidly overnight, and a tank company attached to the 9th Division reached Barneville-sur-Mer, overlooking the sea, before dawn on the seventeenth. Now that they had cut off the peninsula, it was time to turn north for Cherbourg.

Collins reorganized his command so that the newly designated VIII Corps under Major General Troy Middleton faced southward to ensure the isolation of the peninsula, while three divisions of his own VII Corps (the 9th, 79th, and 4th) turned north on parallel fronts to close in on Cherbourg. As his nickname suggested, Lightning Joe Collins was an aggressive commander, “independent, vigorous, heady, capable, and full of vinegar,” according to one fellow officer. He had served on Guadalcanal in the Pacific War, where he became known for his highly personal, hands-on command style. Now he was often to be found in the front lines as his three divisions headed northward. The advance began on June 19, the same day the storm struck the ships off the Normandy beaches.
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