Neptune: The Allied Invasion of Europe and the D-Day Landings (36 page)

Several hours after Skahill and the LSTs left Plymouth, at about 10:00 p.m., nine small German warships sortied from Cherbourg. Called E-boats by the Allies, the German designation for these craft was
Schnellboote
(S-boat) or “fast boat”—a particularly apt designation. With their 7,500-horsepower Daimler-Benz engines, they could make up to forty knots. Built of wood on a light metal alloy frame with a thin sheath of mahogany, they were about a hundred feet long (about twenty feet longer than an American PT boat) and armed with 40 mm guns, though their principal weapon was the four torpedoes they carried amidships that had a range of seven to eight thousand yards—about four miles. The E-boats operated almost exclusively at night and were painted either gray or in a mottled camouflage pattern, which made them very hard to see. Their sortie from Cherbourg on the night of April 27 was noted by British radar technicians ashore, but in the dual communication system, no word of it got to Skahill or to the captain of the
Azalea
, Commander George C. Geddes, RNVR, until after midnight. The news did, however, concern Admiral Leatham, who realized belatedly that convoy T-4 was at sea with only a single escort. At 1:37 a.m. he dispatched the destroyer HMS
Saladin
, a sister ship of the damaged
Scimitar
, as a relief escort.
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Like the German E-boats, the LSTs of convoy T-4 were running blacked out. They were approaching Lyme Bay at a few minutes past 1:00 in the morning on April 28 when crewmen and the embarked soldiers on LST-507 heard what one described as “a scraping and dragging noise” under the ship. In hindsight it is evident that this was a German torpedo passing just under the shallow-draft LST. Lieutenant J. S. Swarts, skipper of the 507, sounded general quarters, though most of the sailors who dutifully headed for their combat stations assumed, quite naturally, that this was simply part
of the exercise. Only minutes later, bright green tracer rounds from the E-boats lit up the darkness. Even then, most of the men on board the 507 and the other ships in the convoy assumed this was another, quite realistic part of the drill.
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All doubt evaporated at 2:07 a.m. when the first torpedo exploded. It struck the 507 amidships in the auxiliary engine room, knocking out both the ship’s electricity and its communications and starting several fires. The dozens of vehicles on the tank deck had all been topped off with gasoline, and as the fires reached them, they burst into flame one by one. The 507 also began taking on water. Because of their large open tank deck, LSTs had no transverse bulkheads or watertight compartments that could be used to limit the flooding. The only thing that could be done was to close off as many hatches as possible in the hope of controlling the inundation of water. Meanwhile, the fires produced “a dull roar,” as one sailor recalled, “punctuated by the crackling and sputtering of small arms ammunition” cooking off. Lieutenant (j.g.) Gene Eckstam, the ship’s doctor, looked into the tank deck to see “a huge, roaring blast furnace … Trucks were burning; gasoline was burning; and small-arms ammunition was exploding.” He could hear the screams of men being consumed by the flames, but he knew there was nothing he could do for them; smoke inhalation would soon overcome any who were still alive. “So I closed the hatches into the tank deck and dogged them tightly shut.”
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Crowded as the ship was, with nearly five hundred soldiers on board as well as more than a hundred crewmen, the men got in one another’s way as they reacted to the crisis. They found that the metal pins holding the life rafts to the bulkheads had rusted in place and couldn’t be pried loose. Crewmen tried to lower the Higgins boats alongside, but the LST was listing so badly the hydraulic gear jammed. A soldier used his rifle to shoot the cable holding one of them, and it finally dropped into the water. Men panicked and began jumping over the side. Soon the sea around the 507 was filled with struggling men, some who could swim and many who could not.
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Eleven minutes after the 507 was struck, a torpedo hit LST-531, and less than a minute later it was hit again. The result was “a gigantic orange ball” of
flame, and the 531 began to sink almost at once. Sailors and soldiers simply leaped over the side into the chill water, trusting to their life vests. The water was so cold it drove the breath from their bodies. Moreover, the life vests that had been issued to the soldiers proved worse than useless. Unlike the kapok vests that were standard in the Navy, the soldiers had been issued something that resembled a bicycle inner tube that wrapped around their chests. Most wore them at their waist so they didn’t interfere with their packs. As a result, when men triggered the CO
₂
cartridges and inflated them, the vests tipped them over onto their heads. Those who could clung to one of the small two-man rafts, which soon became overcrowded. One raft had more than twenty men clinging to it and to each other in concentric circles. As the frigid cold overcame them and they lost consciousness, they let go and drifted away into the dark.
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Then LST-289 was hit. The skipper, Lieutenant Henry A. Mettler, saw the torpedo coming and ordered, “Right full rudder.” The maneuver may have saved the ship, because the torpedo struck the ship’s stern rather than its broadside. It blew off the after section of the 289, containing the crew’s quarters and the galley, while the rest of the ship remained afloat; this time, the fact that LSTs were shaped like a bathtub proved an advantage. By now both the 507 and 531 were gone. The 507 had broken in half, with the bow and stern sections rising up to form what one sailor described as “a fiery jackknife” before it went under. The 531, hit by two torpedoes, had gone down in only six minutes. Gunners on the remaining LSTs fired at the swift, dark shadows in the night as red (American) and green (German) tracer bullets filled the air. German tracers had a delayed illumination, so it was difficult to determine their point of origin, and in the confusion and poor visibility, many of the American shells struck other LSTs.
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Commander Geddes, in the
Azalea
, heard the explosions from his position a mile ahead of the convoy and circled back at flank speed. He was reluctant to fire a star shell that would illuminate the scene, for he knew that it would also expose the LSTs. He did not even know from which direction the attacks had come or whether the attacker was a U-boat or an E-boat. For his part, Commander Skahill in LST-515 ordered the remaining ships of the convoy to head toward shore. This was the correct and well-established
protocol when a convoy came under attack. But the order did not sit well with the captain of Skahill’s flagship, Lieutenant John Doyle.
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Doyle was much younger than Skahill and was what was called a “mustang”—that is, a prior enlisted sailor. Thickset, bluff, hearty, and shortnecked, he was a bulldog to Skahill’s aging greyhound. Doyle objected vociferously to Skahill’s decision to turn shoreward while two, and perhaps three, of his ships were sinking. Doyle wanted to go back and pick up the survivors. Skahill knew not only that this was a violation of standing orders but also that trying to pick up survivors more often than not resulted in yet another ship being sunk. Doyle didn’t care. In an act of near mutiny, he got on the 1-MC loudspeaker and explained the situation to the men on board. Their shipmates and fellow soldiers were dying out there, he announced. Who wanted to go back to get them? A rousing cheer went up, and Skahill capitulated. The 515 returned to the scene.
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It was too late. With the sun coming up, the E-boats had retreated, but it had been more than two hours since the first men had gone into the frigid water. Even most of those who could swim or who had found something to cling to had lost functionality in their limbs. The
Saladin
arrived to help, and men on Doyle’s 515 and on the
Saladin
began retrieving those who were left alive. Most of the bodies in the water, however, were not moving. After rescuing the few survivors, the 515 and the
Saladin
began retrieving the lifeless forms from the water with the intent, no doubt, of giving them a proper burial. Then orders arrived from shore to leave them where they were. There were complaints about that, too, but this time the orders held, and the ships left the scene. Hours later, crewmen on LCT-271 passing through the area en route to Portland Harbor noted that the sea around them was filled with hundreds of small floating objects. “As we got closer,” a sailor recalled, “we noted that they were American GI’s.” Crewmen used a boat hook to pull one of the bodies alongside. It was a U.S. Army soldier, “in a sort of sitting position with all his clothes on … His eyes were wide open and staring.” He looked, a sailor recalled, like he had known he was going to die. After reporting the discovery, they, too, got orders to leave the bodies where they were, and LCT-271 continued on to Portland, though it had to zigzag “to keep from running over the bodies.”
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The final death toll from Exercise Tiger was 198 sailors and 441 soldiers killed, which was more, as it happened, than died during the actual landings on Utah Beach five weeks later.
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But no one was to know about the slaughter that had occurred in Lyme Bay. The news, after all, would be a crushing blow to morale and cast a pall over the other major rehearsal scheduled to take place only five days later. Indeed, if news of the disaster became public, it might even undermine support for the D-Day landings themselves. Certainly the Germans would take increased confidence from knowing how badly the Allies had been hurt. So the decision was made at the very top—very likely by Eisenhower himself—that the incident would remain a secret. When Skahill, Doyle, and LST-515 arrived in Portland late on the afternoon of April 28, they saw that every U.S. Navy ship in the harbor flew its flag at half staff. Naturally, they assumed that this was in honor of the hundreds of men who had died in the Channel that morning. It was not. By coincidence, Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox had died that same day, and the flags had been lowered in his honor. In an effort to keep news of the debacle in Lyme Bay from spreading, the survivors were placed in hospitals. Officially they were under observation, but to some it felt like incarceration, and the entire incident remained largely unknown until well after the war was over.

Terrible as the death toll was, Eisenhower and Ramsay were almost as concerned about the loss of those three LSTs.
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The Allied operational margin of safety in terms of LSTs was so narrow that the loss of three of them threatened the viability of Neptune itself. Stark wired King that three replacement LSTs must be sent from America at once. King advised Stark that the only way replacements could get there in time was to bring them from the Mediterranean, but Admiral Cunningham, who commanded in the Med, said he had no LSTs to spare. King promised that he would send
three replacements to the Med in June. Once again, the Allies were forced to shift naval assets around from theater to theater like a slide puzzle.
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PUTTING A LID ON THE CATASTROPHE
did not mean there were no repercussions. Ernest King ordered eight more destroyers from the U.S. Navy to join Ramsay’s command, adding, “Experience against E boats desirable.” Kirk did not think that was sufficient. He wanted to use the battleship
Nevada
and her big 14-inch guns to blast the E-boat pens in Cherbourg. Ramsay was cool to the idea, partly because it might alert the Germans that something was up, but also because it deviated from the carefully structured Neptune operational plan. To Kirk, this was simply another example of British unwillingness to depart from the script. Kirk was annoyed that his previous attempt to obtain operational control over the waters around Cherbourg had been rejected, and angry that the cumbersome command structure in Plymouth had resulted in the convoy having an inadequate escort. In an official letter to Ramsay, he expressed himself rather strongly on both issues. Ramsay took umbrage at Kirk’s tone and thought Kirk had “quite lost his sense of proportion.” He concluded that Kirk “is not a big enough man to hold the position he does.” For his part, Kirk attributed Ramsay’s attitude to the British tendency to view all operations as “a set piece” in which “no initiative was possible.” The relationship got testy on May 7 when Ramsay met with the command teams of both of his naval task forces. After meeting with Vian and his force commanders in the morning, Ramsay met with Kirk, Hall, and Moon in the afternoon. There, Kirk again brought up the question of attacking the German E-boat sanctuary in Cherbourg. Ramsay thought Kirk was being “stupid,” and admitted that “I somewhat lost my patience with him.” Ramsay’s final verdict on Kirk was that he was “a poor fish.” They had come a long way from being “Alan” and “Bertie.”
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Still Kirk wouldn’t let it go. Getting no satisfaction from Ramsay, he ensured that his concerns found their way through back channels to Eisenhower’s chief of staff, Beetle Smith. That irritated Ramsay even more, and he briefly considered an official reprimand of Kirk for violating the chain of command. At a meeting with both Eisenhower and Ramsay on May 8, Kirk
again argued the importance of “blasting the German E-boats out of their nests.” Eisenhower asked Ramsay what he thought about the idea, and Ramsay explained why he thought a naval attack on Cherbourg was unnecessary and perhaps even harmful. Then, to Ramsay’s horror, Ike turned back to Kirk to ask what he thought of Ramsay’s argument. To Ramsay, that was outrageous. In his view, it didn’t matter what Kirk thought. Ramsay was the naval C in C, and Kirk was his subordinate. He was appalled that Eisenhower acted as if their views had equal merit. Ramsay kept quiet at the time, but he was furious. “It was a bad meeting,” he wrote in his diary, “& made me cross.”
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