The Far Shore

by Edward Ellsberg

  Then there were those underwater obstacles. To take care of them, D-day was changed to present them to us all exposed at H-hour, and our demolition groups now were busily engaged in full dress rehearsals on British sands in destroying replicas.

  Still left was the most glaring question of all, and to soldiers the most important—how to get our men in on the beaches and then off the beaches and inland without having all of them slaughtered by that mass of firepower Rommel had waiting them on the cliffs. This, a matter literally of life or death to every man in the assaulting forces, naturally enough got the most attention. No slips here were permissible, or irretrievable disaster, exactly as promised us by Dr. Goebbels, would overwhelm the invasion.

  Air power mainly was to take care of this. We had complete control of the air—Hermann Goering’s Luftwaffe had long since been knocked out of the skies over Western Europe—we were free in the air over Normandy to do as we pleased. What pleased Eisenhower and his staff in this instance was to use this unopposed air power to blot out completely in a holocaust of heavy bombs all the gun positions, casemated or not, and all the elaborate defenses on the cliffs and on the sands on the preparation of which Rommel had bestowed such loving care. But this air bombardment, any more than one on Pointe du Hoe, could not be staged before D-day without disclosing our intended point of attack.

  To take care of this item, then, our Eighth Air Force was to fly over Omaha Beach just after dawn on D-day with an air armada of 330 B-24’s, our heaviest bombers. For this, purposely a daylight attack to obliterate the enemy just before our troops landed, the bombers were to smack the defenders from H-30 minutes to H-5 minutes, with a drop of 650 tons of bombs. These were all to be 100 pound fragmentation bombs with instantaneous fuses, to avoid undue cratering of the beach itself. After that deluge of 13,000 bombs had landed on Rommel’s defenses overlooking Omaha, our airmen felt there wouldn’t be any defenses there worth talking about any more. As some airmen put it, all the infantry would have to do after that would be to wade ashore, their major problem thereafter being not to fall into any waterfilled bomb craters in the sands and drown there.

  However, just in case the bombing pattern itself should have holes in it and some Nazi gun positions thereby escape their share of bombs and remain still in action after that blanketing of the area from the air, the Navy was briefed to take a hand. Commencing as the dawn broke and somewhat before the air bombardment opened, and lasting until almost the very last minute before the first line of landing craft dropped their ramps, the battleships Texas and Arkansas from 18,000 yards out, were to lay down 600 rounds of 14-inch and 12-inch shells on the crests of the cliffs. Simultaneously, three cruisers from somewhat closer in were to lay 950 rounds of 6-inch and 8-inch shells on the same defenses, and eight destroyers, from only 1800 yards off the beach, practically point-blank range for their guns, were to plaster it with 2000 rounds more of 5-inch shells.

  All this naval firing would in general be aimed simply at the probable locations of the Nazi batteries as shown on the maps, clustered about the four draws going up from the beach, with the hope that some of the shells would hit a vital spot, and with the definite intention of keeping all the German guns silent under that massive barrage of naval shells during the fleet approach and the run-in of the first wave of landing craft. It was assumed that all German guns still left in action would be anxious to keep that fact undisclosed (and thereby not subject themselves to the chance even of specially aimed counter-battery fire from the sea) until the landing forces were practically at the water’s edge. From that moment on, random fire on the cliffs was no longer tolerable. With no local observers to call the shots for the ships, we had to lift our naval gunfire off the beaches to avoid shelling our own men. At that unfortunate moment when our naval fire had to be lifted, it was expected the remaining Nazi guns (if any) would all come promptly into action against the troops before them, just being unloaded into the surf.

  The main German gun positions were well camouflaged and indistinguishable from the cliffs themselves as targets from the sea; additionally, the heavier guns were intended only for lateral fire along the beach, and were, as said before, shielded from view from the water by lateral concrete walls extended well beyond their muzzles. But the German gun set-up, ingenious though it was in concealment, still had its Achilles’ heel—the muzzle flashes from the guns, and to some degree thereafter the muzzles of the guns themselves, were visible from the sky overhead. To exploit this weakness and hurriedly to finish off any guns remaining in action when H-hour arrived and our men began wading ashore, forty Piper Cubs, each flown by a British naval pilot and each carrying as observer an American naval gunnery officer from some one of the ships in our bombarding flotilla were provided.

  These tiny planes, highly maneuverable, could take off from little fields on the Near Shore closest to Normandy. They were to take the air just long enough before H-hour to cross the Channel and come in low over our landing craft as they made their approach to the beach, and then circle about continuously over the German gun positions on the crests of the cliffs. The moment any German gun exposed itself by opening fire along the beach, the nearest naval observer was to spot the flashes from above, mark the position of the muzzle with respect to the cliff front, and bring down on that point the fire of the particular turret on the warship at sea for which he was acting by radio as fire control officer. With the fire of our heavy naval guns controlled and corrected by a spotter in the air right over the target, it would be a miracle if within a few salvos that target wasn’t completely blown to bits.

  Finally, to help along in destroying any defending Nazi troops manning open trenches and machine-gun nests that had survived the air bombardment and the initial naval barrage and to catch those defenders just as they were coming out of foxholes and dugouts to man their weapons, came next a rocket attack to be launched in force just before our first wave touched down. Nine specially fitted landing barges, LCT (R)’s, equipped for rocket launching, were to come in just behind the leading landing craft, take station on a line 3000 yards off the beach, and when the first wave was only 300 yards from the waterline, let go all together with a barrage of 9000 high explosive rockets to drench the entire beach area—sands and cliffs alike—with a deluge of bursting rockets such as had never before been seen.

  You could tally it all up—after 13,000 bombs, 3550 heavy naval shells, and 9000 high explosive rockets had detonated in a period of less than forty minutes just before H-hour on the Omaha Beach—a total of 25,550 explosions, one explosion approximately for every three square yards of beach area, it did not seem probable many Nazis would survive till H-hour itself in any condition seriously to interfere with the landing of our first wave.

  Still there might possibly be some, and close-up artillery support for the men in the first wave, who would be armed only with small arms, mortars, and bazookas, was highly desirable right on the beachhead. Should any of the Nazi heavier casemated guns still survive and open up on our first wave, until the Navy and its aircraft observers could spot them and blast them to pieces, some Army artillery right on the beach itself would help a lot in bolstering the morale of those first in. Close up on the beach, so our artillerymen could see along the beach itself as well as could their enemies, such guns would have a line of sight inside the lateral concrete walls shielding the Nazi guns from observation from the sea. They could fire in reply right into the Nazi gun embrasures and at least keep those guns hotly engaged in an artillery duel while our men landed, if indeed they didn’t succeed themselves by overwhelming firepower in knocking out the enemy before the Navy did.

  So as the next to final measure of protection to the assault forces, that close-in artillery support was abundantly provided. Sixty-four General Sherman tanks were specially fitted out with propellers and flotation cells of pleated canvas to make them amphibious—they could then run on land or water. These dual-drive monsters went by the name of “DD’s”—dual-drives. They were to be put ove
rboard by their mother LCT’s in the invading fleet roughly 6000 yards offshore about forty minutes before H-hour. Then they were to swim in on their own power just ahead of the first wave, take station at the water’s edge evenly spaced all along the beach from one end of it to the other, and if any enemy gun from the heights above opened up on our men as the naval barrage was lifted off the beach, all such tanks as could see inside its concrete screen were instantly to take it under fire. With sixty-four Sherman tanks all ready for action right on the beach edge for artillery support as the first wave landed, it looked as if even should every Nazi gun on the heights overhead have come through unscathed from the previous terrific assaults on them with bombs, with naval guns, and with rockets, those sixty-four tank guns could still swiftly smother the fire of the lot of them.

  Finally, just to play it safe, should it turn out that those 64 DD tanks with their 75 mm. guns got fouled up in the beach obstacles and never got in to the water’s edge to give the infantry that essential close-up artillery support, a second string to the close-up artillery bow was provided.

  After extensive experiments off British beaches to prove the feasibility of the operation, a large flotilla of Dukw’s was used to make amphibious artillerymen of the Field Artillery. Three batteries of 105 mm. field guns, belonging to the 111th Field Artillery Battalion, were installed in Dukw’s, one gun to each Dukw. Similarly made seagoing were the howitzers of several Cannon Companies, and the anti-tank guns of various anti-tank platoons. With all these Dukws each bearing a respectable calibered field gun, the Dukw flotilla became a very formidable navy of itself. It was intended to put overboard these Dukws from their carriers about 10,000 yards out, have them swim in behind the landing craft carrying the first assault wave, firing on the beachhead as they went. Finally, while the troops of the first wave were wading shoreward through the exposed obstacles on their way in to the shingle above the high-water mark, these Dukws would stop just to seaward of the obstacles so as to take no chances of becoming entangled, and from there would pour in a hot fire from their 105’s, their anti-tank guns, and their howitzers, to smother any fire from the cliffs, whether our DD tanks got in to the beach themselves to provide that covering fire or whether they never did.

  So if the bombs didn’t do it; if the Navy pre-H-hour barrage failed; if the Navy spotter controlled fire at H-hour was ineffective; if the rockets didn’t completely wash out the defense; if the DD tanks all got fouled up and sunk in the mined obstacles, then the field artillerymen, firing afloat from those close-in Dukw’s would still give the G.I.’s struggling ashore the smothering fire needed to protect them from the machine guns and the Nazi 88’s on the cliffs behind the beach as they went in. Six independent means of knocking out the Nazi guns were provided; they couldn’t possibly all fail.

  That then was the view of the beach as seen from opposite sides of it. The defenses Rommel had installed were impassable—so he felt. Our assault preparations to pass those defenses were irresistible—so we thought.

  CHAPTER 17

  My impression of how rightly to envision the invasion underwent a radical change under my new freedom to spend my time listening at night to Dr. Goebbels presenting one point of view respecting D-day, and during the daylight hours to listening to the opposing point of view as seen by airmen preparing to blow the cliffs on the Far Shore into the sea; as seen by Rangers preparing to scale Pointe du Hoe; as seen by some Navy men practicing demolition tactics on the beach obstacles and by still others detailed as fire control spotters weighing the possibilities of squeezing two naval officers, one British and one American, into a Piper Cub built to carry one man only as its pilot and their increased chances thereafter in the overloaded Cub of being shot down over the Far Shore by the enemy; and finally as seen by Army men involved in every phase of the assault from swimming DD tanks ashore for close-in artillery support to wading themselves with the first wave of troops into the surf and through the obstacles. Listening to all these swiftly cut down the size of the invasion to the scale of single comprehensible human beings and their very human feelings as they faced what faced them on D-day.

  No longer did the invasion seem to me just one grandiose project in which everything, men as impersonally as materials, was lumped together by the millions into the single vast mass of the Overlord Plan on which I had spent so much time at Grosvenor Square. The invasion began now to dissolve into the individual dangers starkly confronting a million different individuals.

  All about me, jammed into the invasion staging area on the Channel centered on Southampton water, were the men involved in all these undertakings. They were waterproofing their equipment, testing their explosives, trying their guns. But above all they were studying—studying maps, studying air reconnaissance photographs, and finally, studying snapshots taken all through the period between World War I and World War II by tourists on the Normandy beaches before Vierville, les Moulins, St. Laurent, and Colleville—incongruous photographs, most of them, showing in the foreground on the sands Mrs. Joe Doakes in her latest daring French bathing costume, which was the only reason originally the snapshot was taken by Joe himself during the 1930’s to lift the eyebrows of the folks back home.

  But that picture chanced to show in addition something Joe himself had not the slightest interest in when he pressed the button to take that picture—as a background behind Mrs. Joe, stood a good view of some section of the bluffs overlooking the beach. In short, Joe, all unknowingly, had provided a picture of the identical section of the bluffs which was to be the very particular task of the platoon officer, with that snapshot now in his hands, to get his men on to the crest of—pronto.

  So under a powerful magnifying glass that snapshot was being carefully studied for what it showed on the bluffs behind in the way of curves and contours (not Mrs. Joe’s; nobody on the Near Shore gave a damn about her or the cut of her bathing suit any more). For on the ability of the men of that platoon to know and to utilize to the full every curve and every contour in that bluff as cover from gunfire laterally or from above as they scaled it, might very well depend whether any of them would ever reach the crest alive.

  However, I swiftly discovered I wasn’t going to be left wholly free to wander about the staging areas and talk with the men struggling with the diverse bits of what had all to be fitted together to make a go of the invasion.

  The reason was simple. There I was, the only American naval officer around Selsey Bill with four stripes. Captain Clark, the only other four-striper connected with Mulberry (who actually commanded the operation) could no longer, now that the agonizing problem of the Phoenix lifting was taken off his soul, find time to come again to Selsey Bill. Other pressing problems, in particular the one of getting enough ocean-going tugs to tow his Phoenixs to Normandy once they were afloat, and that other one of finessing somehow from some command enough competent officers to handle them once they were on the Far Shore, had become his new bête noire in place of the nightmare I had the good fortune to help solve for him.

  Captain Dayton Clark was still in a tough spot. It was, unfortunately for him, a fact that while those few top echelon naval planners in London involved in developing Overlord fully realized the overriding importance of Mulberry, most of the naval officers commanding afloat never did. To them, their jobs in getting the invasion armies safely across to Normandy and successfully ashore there constituted the whole task. The need for Mulberry to counter Rommel’s Panzers later, once the troops were ashore, was to them wholly nebulous—something out of their field and their concern. Winning the land battles, once they had successfully got the troops ashore, was the Army’s problem, not theirs.

  Anyway, Mulberry, vital though it might be to ultimate success, was required only after the success of the initial assault. Consequently every naval commander involved in the initial assault was naturally enough wholly submerged in seeing that first things were put first—the needs of Mulberry, if any so far as he was concerned, could wait for attention till later
. But wherever Mulberry fitted into the first stage operation of anyone, it then got too much attention, unfortunately, for Captain Clark’s equilibrium.

  For Operation Mulberry touched so many different parts of the Overlord Plan that Captain Clark found himself simultaneously subordinated to five different naval seniors—to Rear Admirals Kirk, Hall, Moon, and Wilkes of our Navy and to Rear-Admiral Tennant of the Royal Navy—each commanding different parts of Overlord. Each one of these five seniors had his own particular task to carry through; each ran his own rehearsals, planning conferences, and inspections. And each insisted Captain Clark be personally present with him whenever and wherever he inspected, rehearsed, and conferred, to be sure that Mulberry was properly phased in with his individual part of the show, which was as far as his interest in it went.

  Captain Clark did his damnedest to comply. An officer more dedicated to the success of the invasion didn’t exist anywhere in it. Between scurrying back and forth attending everybody’s training exercises of every kind at half a dozen Channel ports from Plymouth east to Portsmouth, he had hardly time for sleep any more, let alone for going further east than Portsmouth, beyond which, thank God, he had no seniors demanding his presence. So he made no more visits to Selsey Bill. There, at last, matters seemed now under control; Selsey Bill, tacitly at least, he left to me. I had to be there anyway, and he didn’t. So he stayed away.

  The results were natural enough. I was right there on the spot, so every Mulberry problem at Selsey Bill was brought to me for decision. It was not possible to brush off the officers at Selsey Bill, all but one very much junior in rank to me, when they laid their Mulberry problems in my lap. I was obviously Senior Officer Present at Selsey Bill—I had been ordered there by Admiral Stark, I had four stripes, it was naturally up to me to untangle the knots and to make the decisions. Had I attempted to say that I wasn’t assigned to Selsey Bill for that and that none of those matters were my affair—take them up with Captain Clark, then probably somewhere on the road far to the westward and quite unreachable, or with Commander Stanford in not so distant but for them practically as inaccessible Portsmouth—not one of those troubled juniors, all new to the Navy, would have believed me. To them, I should have become simply another superannuated fuddy-duddy resurrected from the old Navy, willing enough to take an active assignment and draw full pay for it, but even more willing to let his juniors flounder while he shirked his plain duty.