Operation Neptune

by Kenneth Edwards

  “We opened fire and at first it was a target shoot, for the enemy seemed to be completely upset by being met on his own doorstep, and from the direction of his tracer he seemed at first to think that he was being attacked by low-flying aircraft. By previous arrangement Qu’Appelle went for the leading German ship, and ‘A’ gun scored a couple of hits before any of his tracer even came in our direction. I saw his 88 mm gun go up in the air and over the side early on.

  “Then the enemy realised that we weren’t Wellingtons or Mosquitoes and started pointing his guns at us. Very soon tracer was lighting up the bridge and things got pretty lively. I couldn’t see what the U-boats did, but it transpired that they turned outwards, and the far one was not seen or heard from again.

  “When I guessed that Restigouche was clear I turned 180 degrees to port and went back to finish them off. I could see two stopped and burning and I thought at least one had sunk, but it is very hard to tell under these conditions.

  “When I was coming back I suddenly found someone shooting very accurately at me from dead ahead—I found out later that it was the port U-boat, which had turned to the southward. I had just told ‘A’ gun that if they didn’t get a hit very soon we would get hit ourselves, when we were. A 40 mm shell passed through the port side of the bridge and burst inside. The Radio-Telephone operator next to me caught most of it—he died four days later—and a look-out and I collected most of the rest. I didn’t fall down because I was hanging on to the voice pipe, but I wasn’t very comfortable.

  “We passed fairly close to the U-boat, and Skeena hit him once or twice with Oerlikon, but unfortunately not with 4.7-inch. I turned away to starboard and sent for the First Lieutenant to take over the command. By that time we had 145 holes in the ship, though fortunately very few on the waterline, but the steering was playing up, so, after ‘X’ gun had registered four hits on the only trawler we could see that wasn’t burning, I laid off, telling HMCS Skeena to take over the command of the group.

  “After that I took less and less interest in the proceedings. The doctor had a busy night for we had several casualties, including an arm off at one of the Oerlikons. Although when I put my hand down to my thigh after being hit my finger went right into the bone, we did not realise that my leg was broken until I got to hospital at Plymouth next morning.”

  HMS Thornborough was a Captain class frigate (K 574) built in the USA where it was launched 13 November 1943. It was returned to the USA in 1947 and scrapped.

  The first week in July also saw a sudden great increase in the enemy activity with surface craft off the eastern flank of the Assault Area, but the close blockade of Le Havre maintained by our light coastal forces and the activities of our patrols were too much for them and their sallies led to their repulse, usually with loss and heavy damage.

  Actions took place almost every night during this period, but perhaps the nights of 6 and 7 July stand out as full of incident and at the same time typical.

  One of the most skilful of our light coastal force commanders was Lieutenant-Commander D. G. Bradford, DSC, RNR. At about 1 a.m. on Friday, 7 July, his patrol intercepted an enemy force off Cap de la Hève. The enemy was greatly superior to our patrol, for it consisted of two M-class minesweepers, one vessel of the corvette type, and seven or eight E-boats or R-boats. Moreover, the enemy was close under the guns of the German shore batteries. Nevertheless, Lieutenant-Commander Bradford attacked and pressed the attack home despite heavy opposition both from the German ships and from the shore batteries. The German corvette-type ship blew up and one of the E or R-boats was seen to sink and another was blazing before the British patrol withdrew, still under heavy fire from coastal batteries. Only one of our craft sustained minor damage and we had one man slightly wounded.

  In the early hours of the following morning a light coastal force patrol commanded by Lieutenant J. Collins, RNVR, found a group of E-boats off Cap d’Antifer. There was a brisk engagement in which our boats certainly inflicted damage, and then the E-boats made off towards their base at Le Havre. Before they were able to reach the shelter of that port, however, they were engaged by the “Captain” class frigate Thornborough and there is no doubt that some of the E-boats received serious damage before they reached their base.

  Shortly after this Lieutenant-Commander Bradford’s patrol, which was operating with the “Hunt” class destroyers Cattistock and La Combattante (of the Fighting French Navy) encountered another group of E-boats. The enemy at once made at high speed for the shelter of Le Havre, but they did not get away. They left one of their number blazing fiercely. Then, as they neared Le Havre, two German ‘M’-class minesweepers appeared on the scene. It is probable that these two ships had been ordered out to support the smaller German craft, but mistook the fleeing E-boats for British light coastal craft about to raid Le Havre. Anyway, the German minesweepers hotly engaged the German E-boats, so our forces discreetly withdrew in order to avoid clearing up the misunderstanding and left them to it!

  So the war against the German surface units went on night after night, with the Allied forces asserting an ever increasing superiority and inflicting upon the enemy a scale of loss and damage which progressively curtailed his ability to offer any large-scale threat to the build-up of the strength of the invasion armies of the Allies. There is little doubt that the continuous discomfiture of the E-boats and the losses incurred by them led the enemy to divert a great part of his war-effort to the launching of so-called “secret weapons” against the eastern Assault Area.

  The first flying bomb had been sighted in the area on 16 June, but these weapons achieved nothing and it was remarkable how many of them were seen flying towards German-occupied territory, having either had gyroscope failures, or possibly due to faulty discharge from hastily improvised ramps.

  Eight days later, on 24 June, the first German composite aircraft put in an appearance in the eastern Assault Area. This was a Junkers 88 laden with explosive with a Messerschmitt fighter on top of it. When in position to attack, the fighter could release the explosive-laden bomber and, in theory, direct it on to its target by wireless control. In practice, however, these weapons proved to be failures, and expensive ones, for they were easy to shoot down.

  These air weapons were never used on any considerable scale against our invasion forces, and it was not until July, by which time our close blockade of Cherbourg and of Le Havre and our operations off the Dutch coast had seriously depleted the German resources in surface vessels, that the Germans produced their maritime “secret weapons”—the explosive motor boat and the one-man torpedo.

  Up to the end of August our light coastal forces had brought the enemy to action on twenty-eight different occasions off the flanks of the Assault Area alone, and on every occasion the loss and damage inflicted upon the Germans was out of all proportion to that suffered by our forces. It was a sustained effort consisting of close blockade and inshore patrolling which called for a very high degree both of skill and of endurance.

  This was appreciated at the Admiralty, for the Board of Admiralty made the following signal to all units:

  “Their Lordships are particularly impressed with the recent fine work carried out by the Coastal Forces craft off the coasts of France and the Low Countries, and congratulate not only the crews themselves but also those concerned with the direction and administration of the craft. Their efforts have contributed largely to the success of the operations in France.”

  A Life Magazine photograph of tracer fire, early June 1944. The night sky was not a dark and tranquil place in the bay of the Seine off Normandy.

  CHAPTER XI

  DETAILS THAT COUNT

  Keeping the convoy system working—Communications—Meals and mails—Casualty notification—Further build-up—Operation Pluto.

  After the capture of Cherbourg and Le Havre, when there appeared to be little further danger of enemy attack on our cross-Channel shipping route to Normandy, it was strongly urged in many quarters that the convoy system o
n this route should be abolished and that ships should sail independently as they were loaded. It was argued that this would save voyage-time and therefore shipping, since the speed of a convoy is necessarily that of the slowest vessel in the convoy and the first ship to complete loading or unloading has to wait for the others of the convoy. This argument is perfectly sound, but Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay stood out against any abandonment of the convoy system on the cross-Channel route.

  His reasons were two. In the first place he considered it absolutely essential that the organisation on the far shore should know exactly when ships could be expected and the nature of their cargoes, and that the organisation on the British shore should know when empty ships were leaving Normandy, so that arrangements could be made for their berthing and rapid loading for the next voyage. His second reason, which was a development of the first, was that it was absolutely essential to keep signal traffic down to proportions which could be handled with expedition and without error. As it was, his headquarters signal staff handled more than a million signals in three months, and on some days the signal traffic had reached the 3,000 mark. If independent sailing had taken the place of convoys the signal traffic concerning the sailing and arriving, and loading and unloading of the ships would be multiplied by the average number of ships in convoy—which was sixteen. No communication staff could hope to handle such a volume of signal traffic without danger of delay and mistakes which might well disorganise the whole of the build-up control organisation (BUCO).

  Communications had been, from early in the planning stage of “Operation Neptune,” a matter which had called for most careful organisation.

  Two or three decades earlier a signal officer of the Royal Navy had written:

  “Of what avail the loaded tube

  The turret or the shell

  If flags or W/T default

  The Fleet will go to Hell.”

  (W/T is, of course, the abbreviation for Wireless Telegraphy.) Communications are far more difficult and far more essential in a combined operation in which all three arms of two great nations, together with other Allied forces, are assaulting a fortress continent with nothing less than the future of the world at stake.

  The importance of rapid and, above all, reliable communications had been stressed throughout. This was as well, for the signal traffic assumed gigantic proportions. In the GOLD sector alone Commodore Douglas-Pennant’s headquarters ship, HMS Bulolo, handled 3,219 signals on D-day and 42,298 signals between D-day and D plus 20. Commodore Oliver, who had charge of JUNO area and had HMS Hilary as his headquarters ship, had for some time before D-day instituted a special form of training for all those responsible for communications. This was conducted over the internal broadcasting system of the ship and was called “Uncle Taylor’s Hour”—“Uncle Taylor” being Lieutenant-Commander Taylor, Commodore Oliver’s signal officer. “Uncle Taylor’s Hour” was designed to make all concerned “radio-conscious” and inspired with the determination to get signals through with the minimum of delay and the maximum of accuracy. Commodore Oliver paid high tribute in his official report to his signal officer’s somewhat unorthodox system of training all those concerned with communications, saying that it had imbued one and all with the spirit that “somehow the message must get through, even if you have to swim with it.”

  The build-up of the strength of our armies in Normandy was not solely a matter of organisation designed to make the utmost possible use of every craft; of material considerations such as artificial harbours; and of defeating both the enemy and the weather. Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay had early realised that the essence of the problem lay in hard work in face of difficulties and under conditions of danger and discomfort. For this reason considerable attention had been paid during the planning stage to the provision of such amenities as would be possible to the officers and men working on and off the beaches. The men in the ships would have accommodation and messes and canteens at their disposal if and when they had time to make use of them. Not so the beach parties and the men in the minor landing craft. Self-heating cans of soup and other food would provide a hot meal in emergency, but sufficient supplies of these could not be carried in all the small craft or be landed with the beach parties. It was necessary, however, to produce some means of providing these men with hot meals, for a hot meal is essential to a man who has been wet through for many hours and who has to work on long past the normal exhaustion point and has nothing but a hollow in the sand to sleep in when he can at last snatch a short rest.

  Realisation of this truth led to the organisation of what might be termed the “build-up behind the build-up,” in so far as it was concerned with building up, both physically and in morale, the men upon whose tireless work the build-up of the strength of the armies so largely depended. To this end there were produced the floating galleys, called LBK’s (Landing Barge, Kitchen) which were capable of providing hot meals for upwards of 500 men at short notice. Of all the curious craft which made up the invasion fleet these were among the most odd, and if the Germans ever saw them they may well have wondered whether we had produced some new type of “secret weapon.” The LBK was like nothing so much as a large house-boat with the windows boarded up and with its roof a veritable forest of galley funnels. They were clumsy and unsightly, but they proved of incalculable value.

  Other amenities were also organised. All depot ships were fitted with canteens, and there were in the British Assault Area two special canteen boats which plied to and fro twenty-four hours a day. It was only in the SWORD area after it had been closed to shipping that the Eastern Flank Support Squadron found itself cut off from this service. Free newspapers were also provided, although it is difficult to see how anybody ever had time to read them. There was also a special organisation for providing new clothing and kits to survivors of sunken craft without the usual delay imposed by “red tape.”

  The amenities were by no means confined to the British Assault Area. In the American Assault Area special arrangements were made to provide floating mobile “Post Exchanges”—the American equivalent of a canteen known to all American soldiers and sailors as “PX,” and where they can get anything from cigarettes and toothpaste to fountain pens and camera films.

  There never has been, and probably never will be, an organisation which is perfect. In recent naval history stress has frequently been laid by naval officers upon the importance to morale of ensuring rapid and regular delivery of mails. In “Neptune” every effort had been made during the planning stage to ensure that officers and men engaged in the operation should get their letters from home rapidly and regularly. This was the more important because all concerned knew that London and the southern counties were under constant attack by German “V” weapons. Yet in the reports rendered by commanding officers one finds repeated complaints that the mails were irregular and unduly slow in delivery to the ships and squadrons. To arrange for the delivery of mails to a great floating and constantly moving population under conditions in which the addresses were necessarily kept secret until the last moment and in which the enemy’s actions necessarily play a part, is a matter of supreme difficulty. These difficulties should, however, have been overcome to a greater degree than they were.

  Another aspect of naval organisation in “Operation Neptune” which was of very great importance to morale was the reporting of casualties and the notification of next-of-kin. This, happily, worked well. A special organisation was set up during the preparatory period to deal with this problem. The big raid on Dieppe two years before had demonstrated that the ordinary method of reporting casualties and notifying their next-of-kin falls far short of requirements in a great amphibious operation in which men are apt to join up with different units at a moment’s notice and without the formality of being officially drafted or appointed. If, for instance, a certain LCT is sunk and only three or four of her crew are reported as survivors one cannot, in an operation like “Neptune,” conclude that the remainder must be listed as “missing.” It is mo
re than likely that some of them have reached the shore, and, finding that an LCA or a beach party are short-handed due to casualties, have joined up with them. To notify the next-of-kin of every man who had in this way temporarily “disappeared” from his proper station or ship that he was listed as “missing” would have led to untold misery and anxiety. In the light of experience gained at Dieppe a special casualty reporting system and centre, with an immense card index organisation, was set up for “Neptune.” The extent to which this saved needless anxiety and sorrow may be judged from the fact that of the first 1,500 reports of officers and men being “missing” during “Neptune” rather more than 1,200 were found to be erroneous. In June this special casualty reporting centre was hit and badly damaged by a flying bomb and much of its card index organisation was destroyed. Nevertheless, it continued to function with success until 5 August. By that time the danger of erroneous reports had passed and casualty reporting reverted to the normal Admiralty procedure.

  Day after day and week after week the hard slogging work of the build-up went on, and by D plus 28 (4 July) a million men of the Allied Armies of Liberation had been landed in France. With these men had been landed 183,500 vehicles and 650,000 tons of stores, which is roughly equivalent to one vehicle and rather more than three tons of stores for every five men landed. It was a stupendous achievement in the face of great difficulties and a period of bad weather which virtually reduced those twenty-eight days to less than twenty-five. It must be admitted, however, that since the great gale the “build-up” in the British area had been a matter of maintaining rather than reinforcing the troops ashore and trying to make up some of the lost time imposed by the gale. The same applied for a time in the American area, but the capture of Cherbourg on D plus 20 had made an important difference. To begin with, the port could not be used to any great extent, but very soon it was handling a sufficient volume of traffic to enable the strength of the American armies to be considerably augmented. It should be remembered in conjunction with the military history of the invasion that, while an ever-increasing proportion of the American build-up was handled by the great port of Cherbourg and its enormous protected harbour from the last week in June, every man and vehicle and every ton of stores for the British build-up was landed over the beaches, through the Arromanches “Mulberry” harbour and the two little ports of Corseulles and Port-en-Bessin.