Neptune: The Allied Invasion of Europe and the D-Day Landings (39 page)

During the lengthy loading process, senior officers occasionally dropped by one or another of the embarkation sites to ensure that things were progressing satisfactorily. Both Eisenhower and Ramsay visited Portsmouth to chat with the soldiers and sailors and offer encouragement. Even King George showed up. Robert Evans was busy loading jeeps and other equipment onto LCT-271 when a black Rolls-Royce pulled up on the hard and King George VI stepped out wearing the uniform of a five-star admiral in the Royal Navy. Evans knew the proper protocol was for him to come to attention and salute, but instead he, and everyone else in the immediate area, started cheering and waving. The king took it all in good spirit and waved back. At another site, the king strode toward the ramp of a ship that was being loaded, only to be confronted by a young American quartermaster, clipboard in hand, who had been told not to let anyone on board without first checking his identity and recording his name. That led to this curious exchange:

The quartermaster dutifully recorded on his clipboard that the ship had been visited by Admiral George Windsor.
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Churchill, too, could not resist inserting himself into the frenzy of preparations. He was a regular visitor to Southwick House, where Eisenhower, Ramsay, and others felt obliged to provide him with updated briefings, and the prime minister also visited several of the embarkation sites. More problematically, he announced to Ramsay his plan to cross the Channel himself on the British cruiser HMS
Belfast
so that he could be present when Allied guns opened on the French coast. When Eisenhower expressed his opposition to this idea, Churchill overrode him. Churchill conceded that Eisenhower had command authority over the invasion force, but he insisted that the American general did not have the right “to regulate the complement of the British ships in the Royal Navy.” Ike backed down, but Churchill still had King George to contend with. At first the king was enthusiastic about the idea and suggested that he, too, should board the
Belfast
and take part in the invasion. Soon enough, however, he appreciated how reckless it was to create a situation where a chance bomb or shell could produce an inestimable psychological victory for the Axis. He told Churchill that neither of them should go. Churchill was a dutiful and even enthusiastic monarchist, but he rebelled at being told that he could not go to sea, even by the king. He was, after all (as Roosevelt often called him in their correspondence), a “former naval person.” When George VI reminded Churchill that the prime minister required the king’s permission to leave the country, Churchill replied that being on a king’s ship was technically not “out of the country.” George VI saw that the key to resolving this impasse was not an authoritarian declaration but an appeal to Churchill’s sense of duty. On June 2, even as the invasion fleet prepared to depart, he demonstrated his sensitivity and political skill in a letter to his prime minister:

Churchill stayed behind.

AS THE MOMENT OF DEPARTURE NEARED
, many men in the invasion armada, sensing the imminence of action, took the opportunity to write a last letter home professing their love to their families, asserting their willingness to die if necessary, and asking to be remembered. Some wrote their parents, others their wives. In this, there was little difference between the ranks. Ensign Edwin Gale assured his father that he was proud to be “one of the chosen thousands who are going to strike the blow that is going to win the war.” Admiral Don Moon wrote his wife that he would do his best to “carry the country’s banner high and apply all power to the enemy’s defeat.” Both pledged their “devotion and love” to their families.
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The time of departure varied from port to port, and even from ship to ship, with the more distant and slower vessels leaving first. Indeed, some elements of the Allied armada were already at sea well before the amphibious ships began to load their cargoes. The first to leave port were the “corncobs”—the derelict ships that would be sunk off the target beaches to form the “gooseberry” breakwater. They had left the small port of Oban, in northern Scotland, under tow on May 31. Traveling at only three to four knots, it would take them ten days to get to Normandy, by which time, presumably, the beaches would be secured. The next to depart were a pair of four-man midget submarines, the X-20 and the X-23, which left Portsmouth under tow on June 2 to take up positions off the British beaches, where they would act as beacons and guides for the invaders.

Of the actual landing forces, Moon’s Force U was the first to sortie. The LCTs in the Dart River began unmooring from their nests and heading out into the lower anchorage off Dartmouth Castle at noon on June 3. By the afternoon, it was evident to even a casual observer that they were all getting under way. Edwin Gale, on LCT-853, found it “quite a moving spectacle,” not the least because the townspeople of Dartmouth, aware of what was happening, gathered in large numbers along the riverbank, where they stood silently waving goodbye. Cliff Underwood, skipper of the 853, turned to Gale and said, “Edwin, you know we may not do anything as worthwhile as this again in our lives. But it is a fine thing to be here.” Gale was moved by Underwood’s words, though it did not stop him from wondering, as their vessel passed out through the submarine net and into the open Channel, if “we might not ever come back again.”
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June days are long in the northern latitudes, and the sun did not set that night until after ten o’clock. Throughout the long afternoon and into the evening, hundreds of Allied ships exited from Plymouth, Salcombe, and Brixham, as well as from Dartmouth. They moved into the Channel and formed up into twelve separate convoys, which then turned south by southeast, with the English coast off their port side. They crossed Lyme Bay, where three LSTs had come to grief during Exercise Tiger in April, and headed for a position south of the Isle of Wight designated as Area Zebra, where they would rendezvous with the four other invasion forces due to sortie the next morning. Providentially, there were no German air reconnaissance missions during these crucial hours. Very likely this was due to the unsettled weather, though at least one senior U.S. officer found it “simply incredible.”
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The weather remained a concern, for as soon as Moon’s vessels left their several harbors, they were hit with four-to-six-foot seas, strong winds, and intermittent rain. The smaller ships suffered the most. That included the several fifty-six-foot-long landing craft control ships, intended primarily for use as navigational aids to mark the eventual line of departure. An officer on one of these (the LCC-60) recalled that the sea was “abusively choppy and disagreeable.” It was particularly nasty on the open bridge, where the “bitter winds and raw salt spray” challenged the enthusiasm of
officers and crew alike. These conditions also affected the Seabees on the rhino ferries being towed by the LSTs. The wind and current tended to slew the rhino barges off to one side, so they proceeded crab-like, acting like a kind of sea anchor for the ships towing them. The big hemp towlines would lie slack on the water, then jerk taut, sometimes knocking the Seabees off their feet. It also put a great strain on the towlines and made it difficult for the towing ships to maintain their position in the formation. Soon the careful structure of the convoys began to unravel. Moreover, since the rhinos were essentially flat metal barges, they offered no protection at all from the waves that sloshed across their decks or the cold winds that whipped around them. The Seabees had to stamp their feet to keep their lower legs from going numb.
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That same night, three hundred miles to the north, the gunfire support ships for the invasion left Belfast, in Northern Ireland, and the Firth of Clyde, in Scotland. Even after the sun eventually set, there was a full moon whose light struggled to pierce the heavy cloud cover. According to U.S. Navy Rear Admiral Carleton F. Bryant, who commanded the Omaha Beach bombardment group, the result was “a kind of half twilight” that struck him as “eerie.” Bryant led a mixed command of two American battleships (
Texas
and
Arkansas
) plus two British and two French cruisers. Another American, Rear Admiral Morton Deyo, commanded the bombardment group for Utah Beach, which consisted of the battleship
Nevada
(a Pearl Harbor survivor) and three heavy cruisers. The bombardment groups for Gold, Juno, and Sword Beaches were made up entirely of Royal Navy warships, including the battleships
Warspite
and
Ramillies
, and all these ships headed south through the Irish Sea on a course to clear Land’s End before dawn on June 4. The captain of a Royal Navy destroyer operating in the Irish Sea looked out over the starboard quarter of his ship that night to see the fighting tops of several battleships and heavy cruisers coming up over the horizon. He identified most of the British ships, which were followed by others with the distinctive higher freeboard of American warships.
Here are the lions of the great armada
, he thought,
and the flags of two nations bent together
. The very sight of them erased any doubt he had about the success of the forthcoming operation.
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By midnight on June 3, several of the tightly scheduled elements of the complex invasion plan had been set in motion, but there was one aspect of the plan that could not be scripted.

THE SHIPS OF MOON’S FORCE U
were still emerging from their several harbors at 9:30 p.m. on June 3, when Eisenhower and his principal deputies met at Southwick House near Portsmouth to hear the latest weather forecast from Group Captain James M. Stagg, the Royal Air Force officer who was Ike’s chief meteorologist. The day before, Stagg had reported that the forecast for June 5 was “full of menace,” and that the weather was likely to turn worse before it got better. Ike had decided to wait a day before deciding what, if anything, to do about it. Now, twenty-four hours later, Stagg’s updated forecast was even more dire. A low-pressure area was moving in, and the weather stations in Northern Ireland were reporting large waves and winds of thirty miles per hour. Eisenhower asked his trio of commanders what they thought. Ramsay, who had spent the day visiting the hards in Portsmouth, replied that he believed the initial assault force would be able to get ashore but that the worsening weather would make it difficult, perhaps even impossible, to provide follow-up support. Leigh-Mallory was similarly cautious, suggesting that even if his planes could fly, the pilots would not be able to see well enough to be sure of their targets. Only Montgomery announced himself ready to go, a statement that provoked a few sidelong glances from others in the room who wondered if this was just Monty being Monty. The decision, of course, was Eisenhower’s. To send the invasion force into the teeth of a bad storm could prove disastrous, but a postponement might prove almost as bad. A delay risked losing the element of surprise and would utterly disrupt the intricate invasion timetable, with potentially catastrophic results. There seemed to be no good option. Eisenhower announced that the circumstances seemed to require a twenty-four-hour postponement but that he would wait until four-fifteen the next morning to hear one more weather report before making a final decision. In the meantime, the original schedule would be maintained, and Moon’s Force U continued on its southeasterly course, battling the elements.
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