Neptune: The Allied Invasion of Europe and the D-Day Landings (35 page)

Over the ensuing months, however, this relatively modest proposal took on a life of its own and morphed into a far more ambitious program. Spurred on by Churchill, who was ever an enthusiast of innovative approaches to war, it grew to include one or more artificial harbors with special offloading piers and causeways into the beach. Eisenhower had already suggested that because tanks might bog down in the shingle of the invasion beaches, it would be desirable to construct a causeway from the low-tide mark to the top of the beach. Now British planners went beyond that to propose the construction of causeways from pier heads well offshore all the way into the beach itself.
²⁴

The overall project was given the name Mulberry. The breakwater was called a “gooseberry,” which was to be made up of derelict vessels dubbed “corncobs.” Like some lab experiment gone horribly awry, the program eventually grew out of all proportion to the original idea. The 149 Phoenix caissons needed to construct artificial harbors alone consumed more than half a million cubic yards of concrete, thirty thousand tons of iron reinforcement bars, fifteen million feet of steel tubing, and fifty miles of steel wire.
²⁵

These enormous demands drew upon already scarce matériel and labor resources and occupied shipways and building yards needed to maintain and repair the landing craft and warships. Even if all the pieces of the Mulberry program could be assembled in time—which was by no means certain—there were not enough tugs to move them all into place. Instead of cooling enthusiasm for the project, however, these discoveries triggered a frenzied effort to find more resources. Stark warned King that unless many more tugs could be made available, the project could not be completed in time to meet the perceived need.
²⁶

In the cultural legacy of the eventual Allied victory, the artificial harbors off the Normandy beaches have come to symbolize the ultimate triumph of Anglo-American ingenuity and resourcefulness. Yet many of the operational commanders both at the time and afterward were markedly restrained in their enthusiasm. After inspecting a site where the gigantic Phoenix caissons were being fabricated, Ramsay decided they were “even more formidable & abortion like than I anticipated.” He thought it would be “the devil” to tow them into place, and wondered if they would make
much of a difference in the end. Right up to D-Day itself, he referred openly to “those damned Mulberries.” Even Hughes-Hallet, whose offhand remark had set it all in motion, came to see the Mulberry project as an example of “wasteful and ridiculous excess.”
²⁷

Besides the artificial harbors, another Allied initiative was dubbed Pluto, which stood for “pipeline under the ocean” and was designed to meet the Allied army’s voracious appetite for fuel. The jeeps, trucks, and tanks carried to the beach by the thousands of landing craft would require enormous amounts of gasoline and diesel fuel to keep going during the land campaign. Carrying that fuel across the Channel in a virtually infinite number of jerrycans (initial estimates were for 26.3 million of them) seemed both daunting and a bit absurd, but until Cherbourg was taken, there was no port where tankers could offload. It was Arthur Harley, chief of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, who suggested that the solution was to run a flexible four-inch hose encased in a dozen reinforced layers across the bottom of the Channel from Britain to France. By the eve of D-Day it was in position and ready to deploy.
²⁸

There were other, less ambitious innovations, many of which sprang from the mind of a British major general named Percy Hobart, the erst-while commander of the British 79th Armored Division, and coincidentally Montgomery’s brother-in-law. Hobart, who sported owlish glasses and a brush mustache, developed a whole series of unconventional weapons that collectively came to be known as “Hobart’s Funnies.” Many of them were contraptions added to either a Sherman or Churchill tank to give it special capabilities. One, called an AVRE (for Assault Vehicle, Royal Engineers) mounted an oversize short-barreled gun capable of firing a huge 40-pound shell for blasting German pillboxes. Another, called a “flail tank,” carried a fantastical rotating cylinder of chains that pummeled the ground to its front to detonate mines in its path. Still another fired self-propelled Bangalore torpedoes, and one, appropriately nicknamed “Bobbin,” boasted a giant spool of matting that unfurled as it advanced so that it could traverse boggy ground. There was even one with no turret at all whose function was to act as a movable ramp so that tanks behind it could drive over the top of it to scale walls and other impediments. To one American officer, it seemed
that nearly every vehicle “had some kind of Rube Goldberg contraption hooked up to it.” The Americans were intrigued by some of these innovations but on the whole preferred to rely on more conventional weaponry applied with overwhelming force. There was one device, however, that the Americans found interesting enough to adopt in large numbers. It was called the duplex drive tank.
²⁹

Conceived by an Austrian immigrant to Britain, Nicholas Straussler, the duplex drive (or DD) tank was supposed to solve the problem of getting armor ashore with the first wave of infantry. To do that, thirty-four-ton Sherman M4 tanks were equipped with giant waterproof canvas shrouds, like water wings, that wrapped all the way around the tank, virtually obscuring it. When deployed, the shroud was so high that the tank driver, standing on a platform behind the turret, could not see over the rim without a periscope. When inflated, the shroud contained enough air to keep the tank afloat, or, more accurately, to keep it from sinking, since the tank itself was suspended below the waterline with only about nine inches of canvas showing above the water. The tank’s engine was connected to drive shafts that turned twin propellers astern. In theory at least, a tank so equipped could drive off the ramp of an LCT several miles offshore—beyond the range of German artillery—and swim to the beach on its own without attracting the heavy gunfire that would be directed at an amphibious ship. Essentially an amphibious stealth weapon, the DD tanks would crawl up onto the beach “like a big bug coming out of the water,” as one sailor put it. Once ashore, the shroud collapsed and the tank resumed its terrestrial character. Eisenhower and Bradley witnessed a demonstration of some duplex drive tanks in February, and they were sufficiently impressed to include them in the planning for D-Day. Soon enough, the DD tanks became part of the regular landing exercises.
³⁰

Their performance was mixed. They worked satisfactorily as long as the seas were relatively calm, but they were slow and cumbersome, and steering by periscope was problematic. At one rehearsal, attended not only by Montgomery, Ramsay, and Leigh-Mallory but also by King George himself, the DD tanks arrived both twenty minutes late and in the wrong place. On other occasions a DD’s propellers broke down and an LCT had to be
dispatched to tow it in. The tanks were so heavy, however, that even with all three of the LCT’s 225-horsepower engines running flat out, they could hardly be moved. “We just had to wrestle with it and keep pulling,” an LCT skipper recalled, and eventually he got it close enough to the beach that a bulldozer could tow it onto dry land. Sometimes they couldn’t be saved. During Exercise Fox, two of them swamped and went to the bottom. Long after the war was over, one of them was salvaged, and it remains on Slapton Sands today as a memorial.
³¹

Superficially similar but in fact quite different from the DD tanks were the DUKWs, which were essentially amphibious trucks used to carry cargo, especially ammunition, to the beach.
*
While the DD tanks were land vehicles with water wings, the DUKWs (which everyone called “ducks”) were essentially boats with wheels, and therefore far more reliable as vessels and also more nimble ashore. Built by General Motors and powered by Chevrolet engines, they weighed six and a half tons each and could make five and a half knots afloat and fifty miles per hour ashore. They had been used successfully during the landings on Sicily and in Italy and were therefore less of a gimmick than most of Hobart’s “Funnies.” Even so, with only about a foot of freeboard when fully loaded, they, too, could take on water in rough seas and lose their marginal buoyancy.
³²

IN LATE APRIL
, Don Moon and “Lightning Joe” Collins prepared to conduct “Exercise Tiger,” the last full scale rehearsal of Force U before the invasion. The plan was for Moon’s amphibians to put the bulk of Collins’s VII Corps ashore at Slapton Sands, from which it would advance to “capture” the town of Oakhampton, twenty-five miles inland. In order to duplicate as closely as possible the actual Utah Beach landings, now only five weeks away, the beach was prepared with two lines of steel tetrahedrons and barbed wire; even live mines were put in place.
³³

Moon’s force involved a mix of American landing craft and Royal Navy warships. Such an arrangement was no longer novel or even noteworthy, though there were some awkward aspects to it. One was that in the Royal Navy, the flag officers serving as Commander in Chief, Plymouth and Commander in Chief, Portsmouth had full authority over all vessels, of any nationality, when they were in port. Only when the ships cleared the harbor did command authority shift to the task force commanders. In addition, Kirk was concerned that his zone of authority did not extend to the French city of Cherbourg at the end of the Cotentin Peninsula, which remained the responsibility of the C in C Plymouth. That worried him, because it was from Cherbourg that any German surface units would sortie to assail his right flank. Some weeks before, Kirk had sent his chief of staff, Rear Admiral Arthur Struble, to ask Ramsay to change that. Struble may have picked a bad day, for there was a palpable sense of annoyance in Ramsay’s reaction. Ramsay listened to Kirk’s request to change the command boundaries, then blurted out: “You Yanks want everything. No, I won’t do it. They’re going to stay where they are.” And they did. These arrangements created a certain ambiguity about the Allied naval command structure and a potential for confusion—even, as it proved, catastrophe.
³⁴

Almost all of Moon’s Force U took part in Exercise Tiger. That included twenty-one LSTs, twenty-eight LCI(L)s, and sixty-five LCTs, plus nearly a hundred smaller vessels and the usual escort of warships. Moon and Collins watched the exercise from Moon’s flagship, the attack transport
Bayfield
. Other interested viewers watched from shore. That audience included much of the top brass at both SHAEF and ANCXF. Even Eisenhower attended, bringing Tedder, Leigh-Mallory, and Omar Bradley with him from London on a special train called “Bayonet.” Kirk sent Moon a short note to let him know that Eisenhower was coming, and like all naval messages, it contained what was called padding at the beginning and the end of the message to confuse enemy code breakers. Such padding consisted of nonsense phrases picked at random by the radioman from a thick book. Ominously, the padding that was added to the end of Kirk’s message was: “No luck.”
³⁵

As the various elements of Force U gathered off Slapton Sands early on the morning of April 27, Moon learned that at least one LCT flotilla was behind schedule. Careful as always, he decided to postpone the landing by an hour to ensure that all the pieces of the invasion force were in place. But Moon made that call at 6:25 for a landing that was scheduled to begin at 6:30. In a complex exercise with army, naval, and air elements, that invited confusion. Some of the Higgins boats began heading for the beach in accordance with the original schedule when the British heavy cruiser
Hawkins
opened fire on the beach. Shells fell among the landing craft and caused a number of friendly-fire casualties. It was quickly straightened out and the forces eventually got ashore, but it was not an especially good showing. And it was about to get much worse.
³⁶

The second-wave assault force for Exercise Tiger, scheduled to land the next day, consisted of eight fully loaded LSTs collectively dubbed convoy T-4. The commodore of the convoy was U.S. Navy Commander Bernard Skahill, from New York City, a prim, neat man with a thin neck that protruded stalk-like from his crisp uniform collar. At forty-six, Skahill was a Naval Academy grad from the class of 1921, and to the young officers and men of the amphibious force, he seemed positively ancient. The Royal Navy escort for the convoy consisted of one small Flower-class corvette, the
Azalea
, which at just over two hundred feet in length was even smaller than an American destroyer escort, plus the larger but much older destroyer
Scimitar
. The
Azalea
would lead, and the
Scimitar
would screen the convoy’s right flank, which was the likely avenue of approach for any German naval force seeking to interfere with the exercise.

In the jostling of ships inside Plymouth Harbor just prior to departure, the
Scimitar
was struck by an American landing craft in a collision that gouged a two-foot hole in her starboard side some twenty feet back from the bow. Such collisions were not altogether unusual in a crowded harbor, and the damage was not significant, but the C in C Plymouth, Rear Admiral Sir Ralph Leatham, nevertheless ordered the
Scimitar
into the yards for repair. Neither Leatham nor the captain of the
Scimitar
, however, notified Commander Skahill, who, after all, was not in the Royal Navy chain of command. Skahill saw the
Scimitar
going in the wrong direction as it headed for
the repair yard, but he assumed it was part of the complicated maneuvering necessary to get all the ships out of port and into formation. As a result, convoy T-4 went to sea that evening with only a single escort, the tiny
Azalea
, and no flank guard. After joining up off Berry Head, the eight LSTs headed out into the Channel. The idea was for them to spend as much time at sea as it would take to cross the Channel to Normandy, thus emulating the experience of an actual assault.
³⁷