Should the enemy in spite of this major disaster try such a thing again, they would be more ready the second time.
Their enemy did try it again, and this time, with more shells falling about, once again they must have scored some fortunate hits, for once again, with hatches flying skyward from an internal explosion, down went their second victim!
And a third time, except by then being well alerted, substantial artillery fire was bracketing their target, as under the eyes of the Nazi observers, jubilant at the remarkable results they were getting from their guns inland, it too went to the bottom!
To the startled G.I.’s in the support force watching all this from the packed transports offshore, waiting themselves somehow to be unloaded, there was nothing in what they saw to cause any jubilation whatever. Unaware of what actually was happening (for Operation Mulberry had always been Top Secret) all they could understand was what was plainly going on under their very eyes. There, one by one, moving out of the transport area in which they lay, were big ships just like their own, loaded, so far as they knew, with G.I.’s as was also theirs, heading inshore to unload. And there, before a single G.I. could be seen getting off, under enemy fire the ship was sunk!
To G.I.’s who before D-day had heard plenty over “Invasion Calling!” as to the white crosses waiting them on the Far Shore, and among whom the wildest stories (unfortunately, most of them true) were already circulating as to what had happened on the beaches, to the first waves, what now was visibly going on inshore put morale into the sub-cellar. Was their own troopship the next in line for a similar fate?
And shortly came the pay-off. A huge battleship, British apparently, three times the size of any troopship thereabouts, steamed from the transport area, headed inshore, far closer than any big ship ever before had gone. To the astonished Nazi artillery observers on the bluffs, to the unstrung G.I.’s watching her from offshore, the black muzzles of her menacing 13.5-inch turret guns trained ahead as she steered in meant only one thing—she was going in with her main battery ready to blast those obnoxious inland guns off the face of the earth.
Here was a target worthwhile, though against such heavily armored battleship turrets and protective decks, mobile artillery could not expect to accomplish much. Still every battery the 352nd Division had, directed by those shore observers, concentrated on her.
On came that dreadnaught, disregarding the shells bursting all about, evidently holding her own fire till she had a position that suited her. When close in to the three hulks already protruding from the sea only half a mile offshore, she swung slowly to starboard, obviously to present her whole port broadside to the shore, ready to let go a crashing salvo from all the guns she had.
An even better target for them now, the Nazi batteries inland, firing furiously, bracketed her from bow to stern as she swung parallel to the beach. And then to the horror of the G.I.’s watching and to the delirious joy of the Nazi observers, before she could fire a single broadside, a series of internal explosions shook the ship and down went the Centurion!
I listened that night at Selsey Bill to “Invasion Calling.” Goebbels had been in a tough spot on D-day evening—with forebodings of diaster on the beachheads pouring in, except for his regular feature, “Lili Marlene,” he had dealt only in vague generalities. But by evening of D + 1 he had pulled himself and his propaganda machinery together and was in his usual form. Now, aside from gory prophecies of what should happen to us as soon as Rommel and his Panzers hit our forces behind the beachheads, “Invasion Calling!” had hot news of amazing Nazi successes in the battle still going on for the beaches. German artillery had sunk a number of Allied transports foolishly hazarding themselves trying to discharge close in to the Normandy shore. And to top off all, a British dreadnaught of the Iron Duke class, steaming in to strafe the beaches, had also been sunk by the devastating fire of those Nazi gunners! And more! The loss of life on that battleship had been terrific! So swiftly had she gone down, that out of over a thousand men and officers comprising her crew, not more than seventy had been observed able to get on deck to abandon ship! The Allies had suffered a major disaster that insured their swift defeat!
So, Dr. Goebbels? I couldn’t keep from smiling as I listened. That harmless old dummy, the Centurion, to the very last still pulling the enemy’s leg as she had in the Mediterranean, had now done her final bit for her country. She had gone down in a blaze of enemy publicity such as even the actual performance of her real 13.5-inch guns against the German High Seas Fleet at Jutland twenty-eight years before had never centered on her. Quite a finish for an innocuous old hulk.
Tremendous loss of life, eh? My thoughts ran back to the interview I’d had just the week before in Portsmouth with the Centurion’s new skipper—that Commander in the Royal Navy who was seeking to place her at my service. Hadn’t he told me then that his entire crew to steam the Centurion across the Channel on her last voyage had been reduced to seventy? He had. And the excited Nazis now were telling the world that only some seventy men out of her entire crew were seen escaping the sinking Centurion!
I chuckled. That Royal Navy three-striper had done an excellent job—even by Goebbels’ own account, in spite of all the fire Nazi artillery had laid on his ship, while he was sinking her for our Gooseberry breakwater, he’d got his whole crew safely off and away from there. A good show.
CHAPTER 29
On the wide beach at Selsey Bill on D + 1, I stood figuratively chewing my nails as I watched another flight of Phoenixs, all afloat, get slowly underway astern the towing tugs and head out for the Far Shore.
I had had a trying week. Seven days before, checking the arrangements aboard one of the Mulberry auxiliaries, I had slipped off a vertical steel ladder inside a cargo hatch, shot feet first down into the hold, landed with a terrific impact on one heel only on the steel inner bottom.
At the hospital in Netley on nearby Southampton water, which our naval surgeons had taken over from the British in anticipation of the huge number of naval casualties expected on the crossing, I was lugged in, expecting at the very least a fractured foot.
X-rays showed no breaks, only massive bruises. On crutches then, with a foam rubber pad under that heel to ease the pain, I went back immediately to the Channel.
After two days the crutches were discarded in favor of a couple of canes, and on those, with D-day now announced as only a few days off, I resumed my unofficial task of doing whatever seemed to need any doing to get the men, the materials, and the helter-skelter mass of Mulberry units moored off Selsey Bill ready to go. A great deal needed doing. A couple of canes are a handicap to normal ease of movement on crowded decks; still, it was the canes or nothing, so with them I hobbled about the ships offshore.
I made out fairly well, till two days before D-day, when in trying to leap from the gunwale of one vessel to the gunwale of another tied alongside, I didn’t quite make the gap and landed in the Channel between the two ships. Fortunately, some sailors on one of those vessels, noting my sudden eclipse, rushed to the rail and flung me a line as I floundered far below in the narrow gap between those two ponderous steel hulls. At the end of this line, I was dragged up that sheer-sided canyon before the wash of the seas brought those two ships into contact again and thoroughly squashed me between them. I noted as a by-product of that unintended immersion, that the waters of the Channel weren’t very cold. Presumably the G.I.’s who might in a few nights also involuntarily find themselves overboard in it would at least not be so numbed by frigid waters that they couldn’t swim.
Since I’d lost my canes anyway in that mishap and now had reason enough also to feel they were more of a hindrance than a help in getting around afloat, I didn’t replace them. From then on, I simply hobbled about mainly on one foot.
And that was my situation when on the storm-whipped afternoon of June 5, we failed to receive a second notice of any postponement and knew the party was on.
For those going from Selsey Bill, the time had come to shove off. So
berly the Seabees and the soldiers forming the AA gun crews looked down from the first lot of Phoenixs, all afloat now, tugging heavily at their temporary moorings. And in that ramshackle cottage facing the beach, Lieut. Fred Barton, for the first time, began to buckle on all his battle equipment. Barton was big anyway—but when at last he was encased in all of it and finally slipped on his helmet, he looked to me as huge as Ajax armored and ready for battle before the walls of Troy—and beneath his helmet, his face looked quite as grim. Silently we shook hands and he departed. Very soon, Barton and his little tugs were only tiny atoms lost in the vast mass of ships fighting the rough seas in the Channel on their way to the Far Shore.
D-day dawned, still in a storm—not so bad a storm any longer, but nevertheless nothing for small craft to be about in. For me, still hobbling around Selsey Bill, my major obligation was keeping an eye on the flotation of the batch of Phoenixs already prepared for final lifting on D-day.
MacKenzie’s numerous salvage crews by now had their teeth well into the task—up came the Phoenixs—no troubles. MacKenzie himself wasn’t even around; probably he had shoved off with the British for their beaches off Bayeux. At any rate, for the moment there was neither any need for or any likelihood of any consultations at Selsey Bill about lifting Phoenixs.
So I commandeered a jeep and headed for Portsmouth. There I would be closer to London and to Grosvenor Square should Flanigan by any chance, now that the battle had begun, change my orders and relieve me of my present assignment. And frankly also, I should be closer to both SHAEF in Portsmouth and Allied Naval Headquarters at Southwick House, with far better opportunity in that area to keep in touch with what was happening on the Far Shore than in isolated Selsey Bill.
But as the hours dragged along on that sixth of June, all I learned around Portsmouth was that the first optimistic report from the flyers just returning from the pre-H-hour bombardment of the Omaha Beach just couldn’t be so. Their report was that never had our heavy bombers delivered such a tremendous blow—so thoroughly, in spite of the overcast, had they plastered the beach beneath with fragmentation bombs that there could not possibly be a vestige left of barbed wire, mines, trenches or of Nazi defenders—the G.I.’s would simply have an unopposed walk ashore to take over the beachhead.
But from the lack of any reports from Bradley as the morning drew on, it was swiftly evident at SHAEF that the G.I.’s weren’t simply having a walk ashore. And when more hours still had gone by with no word of any progress at all from Bradley, and what scraps of information coming in from other sources, mainly naval, indicated that due to heavy weather offshore, everything on the Omaha Beach had gone wrong, the strain at Eisenhower’s headquarters became unbearable.
Here was a general’s headquarters beautifully set up with the nest array of radio communications ever seen in its numerous circuits to receive reports on progress and to direct the moves needed—army, navy, air—on a far flung battleline in France. Yet Eisenhower with all his up-to-the-minute gadgets was less in control of the battle there than Caesar had been two millennia before, when with nothing for a communications system but some leather-lunged Roman behind a horn, he also had fought in Gaul. Eisenhower could clearly sense impending disaster, but he could find out nothing that might guide him in a move to fend it off. It was about at that time I ran into one of his naval staff just outside, who informed me that the gloom inside SHAEF was then “so thick you could cut it with a knife.”
Apparently then, there was nothing to keep in touch with in Portsmouth. Dismayed, I went back to Selsey Bill. There, at least, watching Phoenixs rising from the bottom of the sea, I could take my imagination off what might be happening to turn into disaster in the melee on the Omaha Beach that exquisitely devised assault on it set forth in the Overlord Plan. That, in the calm of Grosvenor Square where I had studied it, had seemed so absolutely foolproof. Had the Nazis after all, sprung on us one of Dr. Goebbels’ oft-hinted at irresistible secret weapons? Or had the storm done it?
D + 1 came and went, with no further real information at Selsey Bill except what might be deduced from the failure of any order to come through suspending the lifting and dispatch of any more Phoenixs.
But not till Dr. Goebbels with his “Invasion Calling!” program came to my rescue that night was I really relieved. Listening to Goebbels’ excited accounts of Nazi successes in those sinkings off Omaha, nailed down by details of the glorious artillery engagement in which they had sunk the Centurion, I knew at last we were getting along reasonably well off Omaha, no matter what had occurred initially. Unless we had a fairly firm grip on the beach, Clark couldn’t possibly already be engaged in setting down his Gooseberry breakwater.
D + 2 came. Another batch of Phoenixs was coming up, ready for dispatch that afternoon when the ocean-going tugs got back from Normandy. And still no word in the way of any orders for me from Grosvenor Square.
Alone now in that summer cottage facing the Selsey sands, I made up my mind and began heaving my few belongings into a kit bag. That cottage, so far as I was concerned, could now revert to the state of an archeological artifact in which Barton had found it. And the girls next door could get over their hysteria—no more bombs were likely ever to come down on Selsey Bill. As for myself, I was departing for the Far Shore.
It was obvious to me there was nothing I could do any longer on the Near Shore—the Royal Navy had the Phoenix-lifting situation there well in hand. But on the Far Shore, in setting up those Artificial Harbors, there might well be a great deal I could do to help. And so far as I could see from my orders—oral ones anyway—directing me to stay on the Channel as a consultant on the Phoenixs, after all, the Channel had two shores. Neither one had definitely been specified as my station, and I might be needed just as badly for consultation on the Far Shore concerning problems involving Phoenixs, now that there were many there already and more going, as on the Near Shore. I would chance it—my interpretation of my orders was as logical as might be anyone else’s to the contrary.
I crossed the Channel for the invasion of Normandy aboard a 6000 ton block of concrete at the end of a long tow-line, moving at all of three knots astern a laboring tug. The crossing took over thirty hours—no very swift passage. We—that is, the squadron of some ten similar chunks of concrete—had the protection of no convoy of our own; we were much too slow for any convoy to stay with us. But by keeping in the main stream of invasion traffic bound for France, we had the benefit of the occasional presence in our vicinity of destroyers passing us accompanying faster groups, mainly troop carriers.
Still, especially during the night passage, there was always the chance an E-boat might phase itself into the traffic lane, astern of one group of destroyers, ahead of the next, and take a shot at a Phoenix—it could hardly miss. We on a Phoenix had no more chance of taking evasive action to dodge a torpedo coming our way than had the Houses of Parliament in ducking a bomb. One Phoenix had already been so sunk the night before by an E-boat. And one of the larger Navy tugs had come in with nothing on the end of its towline, to report that it believed its Phoenix had struck a mine, in spite of being in the swept channel—anyway, a terrific explosion had sent it down. And in a third case, while the tow itself, this time one of the Whale sections, was still found afloat, its towing tug had been sunk. After that the E-boat had evidently finished off the Seabees on the tow by machine gunning them; there were no men aboard the Whale bridging, but there were plenty of bloodstains.
The net effect of all this on the thirty men, half Seabees and half soldiers, forming the crew of my Phoenix, was first to see our AA guns constantly manned for action. And secondly I noted that every man aboard, including myself, elected to sleep in the open on the topside, picking out the soft side of a hard plank on the wooden platform serving as a deck there, as far above the water as he could get, and incidentally, with his Mae West cuddled closely alongside him. The beautifully constructed compartment below inside the concrete hull, fitted out as quarters with bunks, mattresses, a
nd all the comforts of home, got the cold shoulder on that passage from all of us. Should our Phoenix be either torpedoed or mined, it did not seem possible for a man in those quarters below to get out and up the long vertical ladders into the clear above before the Phoenix submerged. And apparently, no one cared to try.
However, we were lucky. Late next day we arrived intact off Omaha, where I debarked while the ST tugs took over the Phoenix to get it into position for sinking in the already impressive line of sunken Phoenixs off Omaha.
As we came in, from the high elevation of the gun platform of my slow-going Phoenix, I had plenty of time for a careful look all about through my binoculars. The most obvious thing, of course, especially to one coming in by sea, was the vast mass of ships lying offshore all busily unloading. And next to that, the water covered with landing craft of all kinds, going in toward the beach loaded with troops and stores, coming back many of them, with their flat decks dotted with litters—the wounded on stretchers—grim notice the battle front was hardly off the beach yet, and so far as enemy artillery bursts were concerned, not even that far back. If any confirmation were needed of this, there was my old ship, the Texas (in which thirty years before I had served on what was both her first commission and mine also) firing her 14-inch guns with great deliberation, apparently smashing away as directed by radio at some invisible target inland thwarting the advance of our troops.
Right ahead loomed those high cliffs, the distinguishing mark of Omaha, looking down over a beach so strewn with wreckage and debris of the assault that ever clearing it seemed more of an impossibility than any of the labors of antiquity set to stymie Hercules. Smashed tanks, wrecked landing craft, tangles of barbed wire, uprooted obstacles, battered trucks, littered the beach from end to end. Amongst them struggled the combat engineers, with bulldozers and tractor cranes trying to bring about some means of giving traffic a better chance to move inland and away from the unutterable chaos of the sands.
The Far Shore Page 28