Neptune: The Allied Invasion of Europe and the D-Day Landings (51 page)

The news from the other beaches was better. Utah Beach was well in hand, with the men of Collins’s VII Corps already moving inland for an eventual link-up with the airborne troops. West of Omaha Beach, the British—and alongside them the Canadians—were established ashore and already attracting the attention of several furious German counterattacks. Off Sword Beach, the Germans mounted their only naval counterattack of the day when German torpedo boats out of Le Havre stumbled into the invasion force. Awestruck by the spectacle, and no doubt assuming that it would be all but impossible to miss in such a target-rich environment, the E-boats had fired off their torpedoes in the general direction of the Allied fleet and then fled. One torpedo passed between the
Warspite
and
Ramillies
, and another headed directly toward Ramsay’s headquarters ship,
Largs
. The officer of the deck on the
Largs
ordered full astern, and the torpedo passed across its bow, missing by only a matter of feet. The Norwegian destroyer
Svenner
was less fortunate. A torpedo struck her boiler room, and the ensuing explosion lifted her out of the water, breaking her in half. Like the
Corry
, she sank within minutes. That, however, proved to be the only Allied loss of the day to enemy surface action.
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THE SUN FINALLY SET AT
10:06. Even then, a bright, full moon cast a silver glow over the beaches, offering good visibility through thinning clouds,
though it also bled the color out of the landscape, turning everything into shades of black and white. The detritus on Omaha Beach offered mute testimony to an apparent catastrophe. Despite the ongoing work of the combat engineers, the beachfront remained littered with scores of wrecked landing craft, tanks, trucks, and jeeps. Though a dozen lanes had been cleared through the obstructions, many of those obstacles remained in place—obscene black sculptures scarring the silvered sheen of the beach.

Yet thanks to the sheer will of the officers and men who had fought the battle, and in part at least to the close-in fire support of a handful of destroyers, by nightfall on June 6 the Allies had landed 132,450 American, British, and Canadian soldiers on French soil.
*
To the east, British Tommies advanced gingerly from Sword Beach toward Caen; to the west, American GIs moved inland from Utah Beach toward the village of Sainte-Mère-Eglise; and on Omaha, the men were at last off the beach and in possession of the high ground, including the villages of Vierville, St. Laurent, and Colleville. In the end, it was less the detailed invasion plan, labored over for so many months, that provided the margin of success than it was the desperate ferocity of the men themselves. If the plan had failed, the men had triumphed; if they had not quite established a foothold, they had at least secured a toehold. The question now was whether they could maintain the buildup of men, vehicles, and supplies needed to keep that toehold and to expand it.

T
HE OFFICIAL OBJECTIVE
of Operation Neptune was “to secure a lodgment on the Continent from which further offensive operations can be developed.” By midnight on June 6, it might have been argued that this objective had been achieved. But as Frederick Morgan had noted back in 1943 when he was still COSSAC: “The surprise assault … would no doubt win the first round.” The far more important question, the one that would ultimately decide the campaign, was whether the Allies could bring in reinforcements and equipment over the assault beaches faster than the Germans could direct their mobile divisions there—as Morgan put it in a rough paraphrase of Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest, “who could get the mostest men there fustest.”
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In that race, the D-Day landings were only the first lap. The Allied soldiers who had seized the beaches had to be fed and supplied with ammunition. Then thousands more men—tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands—had to be brought ashore in a never-ending stream to support and expand the beachhead, and those men, too, had to be fed and supplied.
The tanks, trucks, jeeps, and artillery pieces that had been lost during the assault had to be replaced, and thousands more had to come ashore to provide mobility and firepower to the invading army. And all of this had to be accomplished swiftly so that the Allied force in Normandy would be strong enough to withstand the German counteroffensive when it came, as it inevitably would. Not to be forgotten were the displaced French civilians of Normandy cowering in their basements or driven from their homes altogether; they, too, had to be fed and supplied. Fulfilling all these essential needs constituted a logistical challenge of the greatest magnitude. As Eisenhower had put it in a letter to Marshall in February, “From D day to D plus 60 this thing is going to absorb everything the United Nations can possibly pour into it.”
²

IT GOT OFF TO A POOR START
, especially on Omaha Beach. In spite of all that had gone wrong, the Allies had managed to land an impressive number of men and vehicles on D-Day, but the delivery of stores and supplies fell far short of the pre-invasion goal. According to the original schedule, the first loads of military cargo were supposed to start coming ashore by H plus three hours, that is, at about 9:30 a.m. That schedule was exploded almost at once, for at 9:30 on the morning of D-Day, virtually nothing at all was moving on Omaha Beach. Consequently, instead of the 2,400 tons of supplies that were supposed to be landed that day, the actual total was only about 100 tons. Moreover, the buildup over the ensuing several days also fell significantly short of the official targets. The goal was 8,000 tons per day, but during the first four days of the invasion, the Allies landed a
total
of only 4,581 tons on Omaha Beach. One reason for this was the obvious reality that, as Hall put it rather laconically, “obstacles still impeded access to the beach,” and because of that, ships of the follow-up supply convoys from England had to loiter offshore waiting to be unloaded. Not until the evening of June 9 was the beachfront sufficiently cleared of obstacles and wreckage to allow unrestricted use of the waterfront. As a result, the movement of supplies across the beach fell so far behind schedule that even Hall’s famous equanimity was tested. “The general progress of unloading,” he wrote, was “far too slow.”
³

A second factor that affected the offloading process was that the Army commanders who were fighting the Germans inland sent back urgent—and sometimes frantic—requests for particular items, especially ammunition. In an effort to respond to those requests, beach officers had to first figure out which ships contained the needed supplies and then resequence the landing schedule to give them priority. Ships that were in position and ready to offload were ordered to stand off while others containing the needed items were brought in, and this, too, caused delays. Hall complained that this slowed down delivery, but Army commanders insisted that “unloading must be done according to priorities.” Hall appealed to Bradley, and on June 10 he got permission from Bradley’s chief of staff, Major General William Benjamin Kean, to unload all ships “as fast as possible regardless of priorities.” As Ramsay put it, “Empty the ships and [the] priorities will take care of themselves.” After that, the pace of unloading picked up significantly, though periodic demands to prioritize certain kinds of supplies caused occasional difficulties.
⁴

A third factor that impeded the offloading schedule during those first few days was Ramsay’s decision that on Omaha Beach at least, the big and valuable LSTs were not to go ashore to discharge their cargoes until the beaches were no longer within range of enemy artillery. Two LSTs had attempted to land on D-Day and had been badly battered—the 133 was stranded on the beach, and the 309 had to back away and offload into smaller craft. Though Ramsay did authorize sending the LSTs onto the British beaches, and even onto Utah Beach, as early as June 7, he insisted that this should not be done on Omaha Beach “except in an emergency.” As serious as things were, Hall could not in good conscience label a slowdown in offloading an “emergency,” and so for the first several days almost everything headed for Omaha Beach initially had to be unloaded into smaller craft offshore. This was already standard procedure for the transports and Liberty ships, and including the LSTs in this protocol put an additional strain on the small craft and consumed both time and manpower.
⁵

While the LCTs and Higgins boats carried the soldiers, the work of transporting the vehicles and heavy cargo fell mainly on the big, flat, barge-like rhino ferries, which had six times the capacity of an LCT, and ten times
that of a Higgins boat. Most of the rhinos and their Seabee crews had come across the Channel under tow, and when they arrived off the invasion beaches, they first had to cast loose and motor around to the bow of the LST to load up. Some found that difficult to do—the violent sea state had so strained the towing shackles that many of them had bent. On one rhino ferry, the Seabees labored for more than an hour, “cursing, sweating, and scrambling,” trying to unshackle the disfigured couplings. All that time, the skipper of the LST stood at the stern of his ship, megaphone in hand, yelling at them to get on with it.
⁶

After the rhinos liberated themselves, they then had to maneuver around to the bow of the LSTs, and that, too, proved difficult. The rhino barges were particularly unwieldy, and the heavy sea state made the approach hazardous as well as difficult. Some of the steel cables used to connect the two vessels snapped “like kite cord,” as one sailor put it. In at least one case, a Seabee jumped into the chill water to retrieve the loose end of a parted chain. Once the rhino was finally in place, the LST lowered its ramp, and the tanks and fully loaded trucks drove out of the ship’s tank deck onto the rhino’s flat, exposed surface. As they did so, the rhino settled deeper and deeper in the water until sometimes there was only a few inches of free-board. Water “began to wash over the stern,” as one Seabee recalled, and soon everyone on the rhino was “wet from the knees down.”
⁷

Once divorced from the LSTs, the rhinos then made their painstaking way the ten or eleven miles to the beach. Occasionally a tug might be assigned to assist them, but the cumbersome rhinos were so ungainly that the tugs were overmatched. As one Seabee put it, “It was like the tail trying to wag the dog.” After the rhinos got to within a mile or two of the beach, the beach masters often ordered them to wait their turn before going ashore. When they finally got the go-ahead signal, they had to contend with the eastward-flowing current, which kept trying to push them to the left. As one Seabee put it, “We kept sliding down the beach with the current.” All in all, it was a difficult and sometimes precarious process that contributed to the disappointing totals of tonnage delivered ashore.
⁸

One of the biggest Allied logistical concerns during those first several days was ammunition. As the historian Russell Weigley has noted, a salient
characteristic of the “American way of war” is the application of overwhelming firepower. The British viewed this with a mixture of amusement and disapproval. To them, the American profligacy with ordnance only underscored their indifferent military skills. Here was one more aspect of the cultural differences between the Anglo-American partners. Having been forced all their lives to make do with limited resources, the British shook their collective heads at the American tendency to “use a sledgehammer to crack nuts,” as one British officer put it. To the Americans, the application of overwhelming firepower was simply the most effective and efficient way to defeat the enemy while minimizing their own casualties. That view, however, also meant that the American front-line troops had to be supplied with prodigious quantities of bullets and artillery shells. To do this, the initial plan was for ammunition ships to provide afloat stowage offshore while the small amphibious DUKWs ferried ammunition to the beach. They seemed especially appropriate for such a mission because after motoring ashore with their supply of ordnance, they could then simply keep going and drive inland to wherever the ammunition was needed.
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