Neptune: The Allied Invasion of Europe and the D-Day Landings (28 page)

FOR THE NORMANDY LANDINGS
, the COSSAC plan called for 250 LCI(L) personnel carriers, 900 LCTs, 480 Mike boats, more than 1,000 Higgins boats, and 230 LSTs. The construction of all of these except LSTs proceeded apace. Smaller landing craft, such as the Higgins boats, did not require building ways and could be contracted out to independent boatyards and metal fabricating firms, some of them hundreds of miles from deep water. In the last six months of 1943, even as the construction of LSTs lagged, more than five thousand Higgins boats were delivered to the fleet.

One event that did affect the production schedule of these smaller boats, as well as the LSTs, occurred almost exactly halfway around the world on November 20, 1943. On that date, five thousand U.S. Marines assaulted the tiny island of Betio in Tarawa Atoll, the first step in what would become known as the Central Pacific Drive, a campaign that would lead from Kwajalein to Saipan, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa. At Tarawa, however, the Higgins boats got hung up on the offshore coral reefs despite their shallow draft. That compelled many of the Marines to wade more than a quarter mile to
the beach, suffering horrible casualties in the process. As a result, the Marines requested a dramatic increase in the number of tracked amphibious vessels (LVTs or “amphtracks”) that could crawl over such reefs. The November schedule had initially called for 2,055 of these, but as a result of the lessons learned at Tarawa, the December schedule included more than 4,000 of them, virtually doubling the requirement. It was one more obligation crowded onto an already congested construction schedule.
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Finally, assembling a sufficient number of LSTs for Neptune-Overlord was not simply a matter of production; it was also a question of distribution. Besides those sent to the Pacific, there were 104 LSTs still in the Mediterranean in late 1943. Since Allied soldiers were already ashore on the Italian boot, the need for landing craft in that theater had diminished significantly, and Morgan’s plan called for fifty-six of those LSTs to return to England in January 1944 to prepare for the cross-Channel operation. As the campaign in Italy dragged on, however, Churchill conceived of an end run around the German defensive line in Italy by conducting an amphibious landing at Anzio. Though Eisenhower was less enthusiastic about this maneuver than most of his subordinates, he agreed that it was desirable in order to avoid “a series of slow and costly frontal attacks.” Of course, to conduct that operation meant keeping a number of landing craft, and especially the essential LSTs, in the Mediterranean. “I do not wish to interfere with the preparations for
OVERLORD
,” Eisenhower wrote to the Combined Chiefs, “but I have felt it my duty to lay before you my requirements.”
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Churchill argued that the departure of the LSTs for England could be delayed several months without any serious consequences because the ships and crews in question were already veterans of multiple operations and would not need additional training after they arrived in the United Kingdom. Of course, that argument overlooked the fact that while the ships’ crews might be experienced, the troops they would carry were not, so it would be helpful, arguably even essential, to have the LSTs in England for training several months before they set out across the Channel. Nevertheless, on October 29, orders went out to suspend “all shipments of landing craft to U.K. from Mediterranean area.” In the end, the fifty-six LSTs participated in the landings at Anzio (dubbed Operation Shingle) on
January 22, 1944. (See map,
page 116
.) It was another fist hurled into the Mediterranean tar baby, for the troops at Anzio became trapped in a coastal cul-de-sac and the campaign bogged down again. Churchill acknowledged his disappointment in a particularly vivid sentence: “I had hoped that we were hurling a wild cat on to the shore, but all we got was a stranded whale.” Stranded or not, the forces in the Anzio bridgehead had to be supplied, and much of their supplies had to be carried on LSTs, a fact that kept those ships, like the men they supplied, imprisoned in the Mediterranean.
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Scrambling to close the gap between the shrinking availability and the increasing need, the Combined Chiefs took steps to ensure that none of the LSTs were being “wasted” conducting ancillary missions. Because they had a commodious hold and the ability to discharge cargo anywhere without a pier, jetty, or heavy-lift cranes, theater commanders found LSTs useful for all sorts of logistic work. A few of them, especially in the Pacific, even used them as “afloat storage” for ammunition and supplies. Aware of this, King ordered all commanders to “rigidly restrict use of landing craft to first amphibious assault operations,” adding an unusual note: “This is mandatory.” Similarly, Churchill wrote to Brooke to ask about LSTs being “absorbed in purely supply work to the prevention of their amphibious duties.” The prime minister was annoyed that “such valuable forces [were] being so completely wasted.”
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Meanwhile, back in the United States, despite an “urgency” priority and twenty-four-hour-a-day work schedules, the production of new LSTs remained modest, even disappointing. Roosevelt authorized the new director of war mobilization, James (Jimmy) Byrnes, to make landing craft the single highest construction priority, over Army trucks, Navy ships, and even Russian assistance. By the end of 1943, the United States had built a total of 398 LSTs, but over half of them were in the Pacific and more than a hundred were still in the Mediterranean. That left fewer than a hundred for an operation that Morgan estimated would require 230. By the spring of 1944, the situation was becoming serious. Secretary of the Navy Knox tried to put the best face on it he could in a letter to Betty Stark in London. He asserted that “we are right up to schedule—in fact, ahead of schedule—for landing craft of all types
except LSTs
, and we might be short five or six of
these on the date required. We have cut out entirely the building of Destroyer Escorts, and are concentrating those yards on landing craft production.”
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Was it too late? To be sure, LSTs were at last making their way across the Atlantic, albeit slowly, and many of them also carried a fully loaded LCT strapped to the deck as cargo. To the men on board, this was a decidedly mixed blessing. It allowed the executive officer on the LST to integrate the crew of the LCT into the watch bill for the crossing, which meant that watch standers did not have to serve “watch-and-watch”—four hours on and four hours off, around the clock. On the other hand, the added weight topside made the LSTs even more liable to heavy rolling than usual. It was hard to say whether the extra help on watch compensated for the rough ride. As one put it, “You have never ridden a ship until you have ridden an LST in the North Atlantic in the month of February.” Another sailor described the experience with particular vividness: “One minute the ship was carried to the crest of a wave, at which time one could look down into the valley of water below, and the next minute the ship would sink down to the bottom of the trough and then one would look at a wall of water, towering almost vertically above the ship on all sides.” It was difficult—even dangerous—just to sit on the toilet since the swift rise and fall of the hull often sent the occupant crashing into the overhead and then plunging down back onto the toilet seat.
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Despite Knox’s attempt to reassure Stark, it was soon evident that the Allies would be short several dozen LSTs on the projected date for D-Day, and that many of the LSTs that did arrive would be in no condition for a major effort for weeks if not months afterward. That meant either going ahead with inadequate shipping or postponing the invasion. Churchill may not have been entirely disappointed by the prospect of a delay, for he had already suggested a postponement until June; nonetheless, he found it absurd, as he wrote to Marshall, that “the destinies of two great empires … seemed to be tied up in some god-dammed things called LSTs.”
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ONE ISSUE THAT WAS FINALLY RESOLVED
that winter was the appointment of a commanding general. At Quebec in August, Morgan had been granted a third star and endowed with de facto command of the
cross-Channel attack “pending the appointment of the Supreme Commander.” As D-Day neared, Morgan’s temporary status became increasingly awkward, and the need to make a permanent appointment more urgent. When he had conceded to Roosevelt the authority to make that appointment, Churchill had assumed that Roosevelt would name George C. Marshall to the post, and at the time, that was exactly what the president planned to do. FDR believed that Marshall had more than paid his dues with the JCS and CCS and that he deserved an opportunity to become, as the president put it, “the Pershing of the Second World War” by commanding the great invasion. Even Morgan urged Roosevelt to name Marshall to command, and to do it soon, telling him during an October visit to America that even though the invasion was still six months away, some matters had to be put in motion immediately in order to ensure readiness on D-Day. Roosevelt listened but did not commit himself.
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Nevertheless, the assumption on both sides of the Atlantic was that Marshall would soon be named to command the cross-Channel invasion and that Eisenhower would return from the Mediterranean to assume the job of chief of staff so that a British officer could take command in the Mediterranean. Marshall even began to put his household effects into storage in preparation for an imminent move to Europe. Secretary of War Stimson did no more than reflect the general consensus when he wrote to Roosevelt that making Marshall the supreme commander was obvious. Making an analogy with the Civil War, Stimson noted that while “Mr. Lincoln had to fumble through a process of trial and error with dreadful losses until he was able to discover the right choice,” no such casting about was needed on this occasion. “General Marshall already has a towering eminence of reputation as a tried soldier and as a broad-minded and skillful administrator.”
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But that was exactly the problem. Marshall was such a “skilful administrator” that it was not clear that Eisenhower or anyone else could replace him. Who would run the war while Marshall was running the invasion? The fact that Eisenhower had been Marshall’s acolyte and would now become his theoretical superior as chief of staff added another layer of awkwardness. Though Roosevelt had all but promised Marshall the command (as Churchill had done to Brooke before snatching it back), as September
turned to October, and October to November, the president made no formal announcement about it.

One reason for his hesitation was the pushback he was getting from the other members of the Joint Chiefs. Both Ernie King and Hap Arnold insisted that Marshall could not be spared from his current job. Secretly they may have believed that no one else could manage the mercurial president and give him not only the kind of direct and honest advice he expected and deserved but also the subtle guidance and direction that, in their opinion, he needed. They also suggested that appointing Marshall to command Overlord would be a demotion from being chief of staff. As Arnold wrote General Thomas T. Handy, the assistant chief of staff for operations, sending Marshall to Europe to command Overlord would make him “just another Theater Commander.” Roosevelt might have resisted these objections from the JCS, but soon Marshall’s pending appointment became a political issue as well. Rumors that Marshall would be relieved from his post and sent to Europe found their way into the press. Republican newspapers, ever suspicious of nefarious plotting by the New Dealers, portrayed it as a scheme to get the forthright and honest Marshall out of the way.
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Marshall himself maintained a professional silence about the whole issue, but he did have concerns about how wide the supreme commander’s authority would reach. He believed that whoever commanded Overlord should also have strategic control of Mediterranean operations. An advocate of unified command since Arcadia, Marshall was convinced that it was essential that one man “should exercise command over the Allied force commanders in the Mediterranean, in northwest Europe, and of the strategic air forces.” That was anathema to Churchill, not only because it would put the entire European war in the hands of an American but also because the prime minister continued to harbor hopes of extending Mediterranean operations into the Balkans and the Greek Islands, something that was unthinkable if an American was in charge. As far as the British were concerned, Overlord would be an independent and completely separate command, and a British officer would have his own independent command in the Mediterranean. Such a narrowing of the authority of the supreme commander made it somewhat less “supreme,” and was one more factor for Roosevelt to consider.
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