The Combined Planning of the invasion on the altered basis—that is with a five-divisional instead of a three-divisional front for the initial assault—was begun on 4 January 1944, although the concurrence of all the authorities concerned had not by that time been obtained to the change of plan. It was, in fact, not until 7 February that the concurrence of the United States to the greater assault was received, but it was essential that the Combined Planning should be rushed ahead, even without approval, if delays were to be avoided.
Even when official sanction had been obtained for the assault on the wider front there was considerable uncertainty regarding the availability of all the additional ships and craft which would be required to convey to France the two extra divisions and their equipment and their immediate “build-up,” and it was not until 20 March that sufficient vessels were allocated to provide for all the additional sea transport. In the interval the planning had to proceed on the basis that the shipping requirements must be kept down to the very minimum and that it would somehow be found possible to meet this minimum.
From the time of the increase in the scope of the assault, however, the naval planning and preparations had to contend with realisation that there were shortages in many things that would be needed, and with continual uncertainty of whether or not certain requirements would be met. There was a shortage of ships and of landing craft. There was a great shortage of tugs. There was a shortage of berthing facilities in our ports. There was a shortage of ammunition and other lighters. Nobody could say exactly to what extent these shortages could be made good by the beginning of June, but everybody on both sides of the Atlantic was striving to see that they were made good, as far as it was humanly possible to do so in the time available. Postponement of the invasion after the June period, in which tides and other factors made the landings possible could not be contemplated, for any such postponement would have to be for at least a month—which would leave insufficient time for the subsequent military operations to be carried out before the winter set in.
Throughout those difficult months Admiral Ramsay kept always before him his goal—the greatest offensive objective that any admiral has ever had. In the opening sentence of his orders for “Operation Neptune” Admiral Ramsay succinctly expressed this as follows:
“The object of the Naval Commander-in-Chief is the safe and timely arrival of the assault forces at their beaches, the cover of their landings, and subsequently the support and maintenance and the rapid build-up of our forces ashore.”
The object remained unaltered by the change of plan to embrace the greater assault on the wider front, but this added enormously to the responsibility and the difficulties of the Naval Commander-in-Chief. Admiral Ramsay was never unsure of the ability to carry out the plan for the more extensive assault, but he experienced considerable anxiety on account of uncertainty whether the ships and other things which he required would be made available to him.
As has been said, the Admiralty had asked him to make big reductions in the list of naval forces which he had said he would require. This list of naval requirements had been prepared on a minimum basis for the original plan of assaulting on a three-divisional front. How right Admiral Ramsay had been when he had declined to accept any reduction, and explained that he believed that the naval commitment would increase rather than decrease! The extent to which the naval commitments had been increased made it necessary for Admiral Ramsay continually to make more and greater demands upon the Admiralty; but these were met by the Admiralty in an ever more co-operative spirit as they appreciated to an increasing degree the immensity of the task with which Admiral Ramsay was faced. The following paragraph from one of the official documents, produced after the scope of the invasion plan had been extended in accordance with General Montgomery’s wishes, is eloquent of the gigantic nature of the invasion task. This paragraph ran:
“Object:—To carry out an operation from the United Kingdom to secure a lodgement on the Continent from which further offensive operations can be developed. This lodgement area must contain sufficient port facilities to maintain a force of 26-30 divisions and to enable this force to be augmented by follow-up formations at the rate of from 3-5 divisions a month.”
It staggers the imagination. An assault on a five-divisional front with an immediate follow-up of two divisions was to be built up into a force of between 26 and 30 divisions in a very short time, and even then there was to be superimposed upon the enormous task of keeping this great army fully supplied an additional “build-up” of military strength ashore at a rate of, on the average, one new division every week. Never before had an organisation concerned with the overseas passage of troops been faced with a problem of like magnitude—and in this case the problem went far beyond the mere transport of troops and material. It involved assault landings on the most strongly defended coast in the world; it involved defeat of any and every attempt by the enemy to interfere with our plans; it involved not only the capture and reconditioning of ports, but the construction of artificial ports and their conveyance and placing in the positions off a hostile coast best suited to our requirements.
The purely naval needs in order to guarantee the safe passage of the assault troops, their support by naval gunfire in the early stages of the invasion, and the uninterrupted flow of supplies and of the “build-up,” were enormously increased. Admiral Ramsay continued to believe that the United States Navy would in the end be represented by strong forces, but there had not at that time been any amendment of the decision taken at the Anglo-American Cairo Conference—which immediately followed the Churchill-Roosevelt-Stalin meeting at Teheran at which the main lines of the invasion in the West were agreed. The Cairo agreement had been to the effect that the whole of the naval commitments of the invasion should be discharged by the Royal Navy, with the assistance of the Dominions and our European Allies.
The result was that the British Admiralty had at this time to consider Admiral Ramsay’s requirements as a charge solely upon their resources, and in relation to the worldwide commitments for which they already held the responsibility. The Admiralty were as helpful and as co-operative as they could be under the circumstances, but it was beyond the bounds of possibility for them to guarantee in advance that the ever-increasing naval requirements for the invasion would be met.
As the world knows, Admiral Ramsay’s faith in American naval participation proved well-founded, and this at last dissipated the anxiety and uncertainty and lifted from the Admiralty a load which, with the best will in the world, they doubted their ability to carry. The scale of American naval participation was small by comparison with the part played by the Royal Navy, but it was none the less important for that. True inter-Allied co-operation does not lie in insistence upon equal shares of responsibility or risk in all theatres of war, but in the willingness and ability of one ally to make good the shortages felt by the other in mounting an operation for the common good.
To illustrate the immense increase in the naval commitments for the invasion which occurred after Admiral Ramsay had presented the preliminary list of his naval requirements to the Admiralty in December, 1943, it is of interest to list the number of warships which actually took part in the invasion of Normandy. They were:
6 Battleships.
2 Monitors (15-inch gun bombardment ships).
22 Cruisers.
119 Destroyers (including 26 escort destroyers).
113 Sloops, frigates and corvettes.
80 Patrol craft, anti-submarine trawlers and gunboats.
360 Motor launches, motor torpedo boats, motor gunboats, and American “P.T.” boats.
This was a total of 702 warships, excluding minesweepers, as opposed to the initial requirement of 467 warships in these categories. Nor will it escape notice that the number of ships capable of convoy escort duties, which had been the subject of an Admiralty request that the initial requirements should be reduced by nearly half, accounts for the greater part of the increase.
The mi
nesweeping requirements were also much greater. Before the change of plan Admiral Ramsay had said that he would require twelve flotillas of minesweepers—yet no less than twenty-five flotillas of minesweepers of all types took part in the invasion.
CHAPTER III
PRODUCTION LINE FOR INVASION
Landing craft production—Alteration of ships and coasters—Port facilities and “hards”—Idea and production of the “Mulberry” artificial harbours—The ferry service—the “Gooseberry” shelter harbours.
Although it was at the time apparent to few, there was something about England before the invasion of Normandy which suggested Shakespeare in modern dress. The whole giant structure of industrialism keyed to a mighty war effort was the dominant motif, but there was also a dispersion of industry among those who never saw lathe or forge and who laboured in or near their homes for the common aim. Once more there was such preoccupation with sea power as most deeply to affect the daily lives of men and women far removed from blue water. Tradesmen of all sorts and grades of skill were, of course, the first to have their labours called to production of the needs of a sea power which must be capable of carrying great armies across the seas, to defeat upon the continent of Europe the greatest military power of the modern world. But this by no means applied only to those skilled in the shipbuilding trade or in the many crafts which are normally allied to shipbuilding. Men who had made cranes and bridges and roof trusses found themselves making parts of landing craft and of ships. Men and women who had never dreamt of having anything to do with the construction of ships found themselves lending a hand with this work in the most unlikely places. Vessels were built in urban streets and under the greenwood tree.
It was perhaps in the host of improvised shipyards that one sensed more than elsewhere the tremendous drive of a nation straining nerve and sinew to satisfy the demand for vessels with which to make an end of Germany tyranny.
The cry was for more landing craft and yet more landing craft. It was heard in the established shipyards, but there it could not be fully answered because of the pressure of more orthodox shipbuilding and ship repairing, to which had been added a long list of urgent alterations to existing ships to make them better fitted for their invasion duties. It was heard in thousands of inland workshops and garages. In these, men and machines which had been for long devoted to constructional engineering and motor repair diverted their labours to produce parts and sections for prefabricated landing craft.
Most astounding of all, it was heard in the waterside glades of the New Forest and in hundreds of little streets running down to the banks of rivers and canals all over the country. To these came the devil of urgency, which with truly devilish ingenuity converted them into shipyards. In the roadways were laid improvised slipways. Gantries were swung across between the windows of opposite houses. Lorries brought strange-shaped structures of steel plate. The sound of pneumatic riveters took the place of the shouts of children at play, and the children stood goggle-eyed at the brilliance of the welding arcs which so far outshone the neon cinema lights which many had never seen.
These street dockyards became part of the life of the streets which they occupied. There were, of course, the regular workers, doing their shifts as they would have done on any other organised industrial labour, but there was also a tremendous amount of casual labour. Men and women on their way home or on their way to work or to shop stopped and lent willing hands. A community spirit was built into the landing craft put together in these streets and launched into river or canal, and Water Street was for ever trying to outdo Canal Street. The methods were ultra-modern; the scene was ugly twentieth century; but there was something intimately Elizabethan in the spirit. Had it not been so, D-day could hardly have marked so great a turning point in the history of freedom. As it was, it may well be that centuries to come will find that the essence of the success of that great day was the product of struggle between slave labour and labour “directed” in emergency but basically free.
Yet the work being done on the production of landing craft, great and widespread as it was, amounted only to a tithe of the tasks being undertaken for the maritime side of the invasion. Only an astronomer could visualise the number of man-hours and women-hours of work which went to the building of successful invasion.
The shipyards proper were crammed with work, and even the stringent blackout regulations took second place to an urgency which made small fry of “priorities” and kept the shifts working day and night.
The breaching of Hitler’s “Atlantic Wall”—Todt-armoured by four years of German ingenuity provided with almost limitless slave labour—was not a project lightly to be undertaken. It was in no sense an operation to which the war-time “standardised” shipping such as the “Liberty Ships” and the “Victory Ships” could be diverted from their ocean-going work with confidence that they would prove as useful off the beaches as in the Atlantic. Utterly different conditions would obtain during invasion, and if this were not to be built upon dangerous makeshift, the ships had to be altered to meet the requirements of their altered service. They had to be fitted to carry combinations of cargoes and of cargo and passengers such as had not been thought of in their design and construction. They had to be fitted to meet a scale of air attack undreamt of on the great trade routes of the open ocean. Arrangements and alterations had to be made to enable them to discharge their cargoes quickly and efficiently off open beaches and in improvised shelter harbours instead of in the long-established and efficient ports to which they were accustomed.
It had been recognised that in the early stages of the invasion, until something in the nature of port facilities had been either captured or devised on the French coast, the merchant ships upon which the greatest burden would fall would be the small coasting vessels. Apart from the specially designed landing ships and craft, the first stages of the invasion would be predominantly a coaster’s job.
Being small, the coasters would be less vulnerable than big ocean-going ships, and they could be handled with greater freedom. The main reason for using coasters, however, lay in the fact that they were almost flat-bottomed and fairly light when unladen, although very strong for their size. The problem of the rapid landing of large quantities of stores and equipment on open beaches could only be solved by running the ships themselves ashore. Where a big ship would be likely to break her back on the falling tide and would, at the least, require tugs to haul her off the beach on the next high water, the coasters would be quite safe and independent. They could run themselves ashore on the beaches at or near high water, laying out a stern anchor as they did so. They would “dry out” completely at low water and be able to land their cargoes directly on to the beaches without the use of lighters or other craft. When high and dry they would remain upright and be immune to the strains which would probably damage a bigger ship in similar circumstances. And when the tide rose sufficiently for them to be once more water-borne they could “kedge” themselves off the beach without assistance, by the simple process of heaving in on the hawser attached to the anchor laid out astern.
Most of the coasters chosen, however, had to undergo a certain amount of structural alteration to fit them for their duties. Here was yet more work for the shipyards, and it was work which was complicated by the fact that it could not in any way be standardised. There is no less standardised fleet of vessels in the world than the coasters which ply round the British coasts, and every coaster had to be treated in a way peculiar to itself.
The most frequent alteration required to be made to the coasters was the fitting of stouter derricks to enable them to unload their heavy cargoes on to beaches where there would be no facilities whatever. The fitting of stouter derricks in many cases entailed the fitting of stronger masts or the strengthening of the mast-step and the heel fittings of the derricks. Many of the coasters had also to be fitted for the carriage of specialised and dangerous cargoes such as cased petrol and ammunition.
To these commitments of the shi
pyards there was added yet another. Ships and craft had to be fitted as water-boats, tenders, hospital carriers, and a great number of “dumb” and power-driven lighters and barges and tugs produced. Even floating kitchens had to be provided.
The vast amount of fitting-out work required imposed a tremendous strain on the shipyards of this country, and the work had to be finished in very quick time at the last moment, for it was essential that no ships should be withdrawn from their normal service until it was absolutely necessary. This was in order to avoid dislocation of the country’s distributive organisation or any premature reduction in the imports of food and essential war materials.
Not only was it essential that the deep-sea merchant ships should continue to transport to this country large numbers of American troops and the vast amount of war material to be accumulated for the invasion, but it was essential that the coaster fleet should continue until the last possible moment to play its part in the transport system of the country and build up stocks of various commodities in various places. In no case was this more important than in building up stocks of coal at the riverside power stations and other plants upon which so much of the war potential depended.
Operation Neptune Page 6