Neptune: The Allied Invasion of Europe and the D-Day Landings (14 page)

A second issue was where the troops would land. French North Africa stretched for a thousand miles from the Atlantic Ocean to the Tunisian desert. The British wanted to secure a foothold as far inside the Mediterranean as possible. That way, they could move quickly into Tunisia and trap the German Afrika Korps between the invasion force and the British
Eighth Army in Egypt. American planners, dubious about sending forces through the Strait of Gibraltar and into the cul-de-sac of the Mediterranean, wanted the landings to take place outside the Mediterranean, on the Atlantic coast of French Morocco. Roosevelt himself personally insisted that “one of our landings must be on the Atlantic.” The British found such concerns incomprehensible. They had been passing through the Strait of Gibraltar with impunity for more than two hundred years, and to them it was as friendly and familiar as the English Channel. In the end, these issues were resolved by compromise. The Allies would make three landings: an all-American effort on the Atlantic coast near Casablanca, and two Anglo-American landings on the Mediterranean coast at Oran and Algiers. These negotiations, however, played havoc with the timetable. Eisenhower did not get the green light until the first week of September, and only then could he begin to assemble the various pieces—the troops, the ships, and the supplies—that would make up the invasion groups.
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In the meantime, on August 19, the British launched a raid against the French Channel coast at Dieppe, about halfway between the Pas de Calais and Normandy. As he had made clear at Arcadia, Churchill’s long-term strategic vision included periodic assaults against the periphery of Nazioccupied Europe to test German defenses, give hope to the resistance, and perhaps draw the Luftwaffe into a battle of attrition. He had made Mountbatten the commander of combined operations precisely to oversee such raids, and the British had already carried out successful forays against Le Havre and St. Nazaire. The attack on Dieppe, however, was a disaster from the start. German defenses proved more than adequate, inflicting an appalling 60 percent casualty rate on the five thousand Canadians and one thousand British commandos who took part. Even the air battle went the way of the Germans: the Luftwaffe lost only 46 planes, while the Allies lost 106. If the operation had any silver lining at all, it was in providing important lessons about amphibious operations, including the difficulty of getting heavy tanks ashore from landing ships. Of the fifty-eight big 40-ton “Churchill” tanks embarked for the raid, fewer than half got to the beach at all, and fewer than half of those got as far as the seawall. Though the British sought to put the best face on it and kept the extent of the disaster a secret, the
Dieppe raid fell short of being a full-blown catastrophe only because of the limited numbers involved. The lesson was not lost on Eisenhower, who wrote his naval aide Harry Butcher on September 2 that in planning Torch, “we are undertaking something of a quite desperate nature.”
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TO MANAGE OPERATION TORCH
, Eisenhower moved his headquarters from No. 20 Grosvenor Square in London’s Mayfair district to the larger Norfolk House on St. James’s Square, a block off Pall Mall. Once the home of the Dukes of Norfolk, the original building had been razed just before the war to accommodate a rather charmless red brick office building. There, Eisenhower and his team of staff officers kept long hours dealing with the infinite number of details associated with mounting an invasion of Africa, now only two months away. Haste bred anxiety in the barely controlled chaos that characterized the daily schedule at Norfolk House. Ike’s deputy Mark Clark (who preferred to use his middle name, Wayne) found that keeping track of all the various aspects of the global operation was all but impossible. Goods and equipment that had been ordered and shipped somehow disappeared. The U-boats were responsible for some of that, of course, but much of it was administrative confusion. Whatever the cause, the shortfalls had to be made up somehow, and staff officers scrambled to find replacements or substitutes. Their frustration led to frayed tempers and sharp words. Through it all, whatever he might feel personally, Eisenhower remained outwardly calm and confident. When Clark came to him frantic about yet another seemingly insoluble crisis, Eisenhower’s most characteristic comment was, “Now just keep your shirt on, Wayne.”
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Eisenhower also had to keep Churchill happy. The prime minister liked to be in the middle of things, and he insisted that both Eisenhower and Clark attend weekly luncheons and occasional late-night meetings at 10 Downing Street. The P.M. also hosted the Americans for weekends at Chequers. Churchill considered these meetings a great success. To Eisenhower they were one more time-consuming distraction from the work he had to do. In spite of that, he was unfailingly courteous, always complimented Churchill on the Irish stew that was often served, and managed to
convince the prime minister that he was as delighted by these conferences as his host.
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The biggest problem confronting the planners at Norfolk House was the old one of shipping. There were not enough troopships for the invasion force, not enough cargo ships to carry the supplies, not enough escorts for protection, and, most of all, not enough landing craft to get the men, their supplies, and their vehicles from the transports to the beach. As Clark put it, “There was a continual crisis over shipping space and frequent changes in plans had to be made to overcome what was always a shortage of vessels.” The prewar emphasis on building combatants had severely restricted the construction of auxiliaries, and losses in the Battle of the Atlantic made the problem worse. In consequence, the invasion armadas for all three beaches were improvised flotillas of whatever the Allies could lay their hands on. Prewar cruise ships became troopships, cargo vessels metamorphosed into attack transports, and even ferryboats from the Glasgow-Belfast run were called into service. To use the American idiom, the invasion fleets were jury-rigged, or as the British would say, lash-ups.
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Another problem was air cover. The landing beaches in Algeria could be protected, at least in part, by planes operating from the recently enlarged single airstrip at British Gibraltar, but the American landings in Morocco would depend entirely on carrier-borne aircraft, and most of the full-sized American aircraft carriers were in the Pacific. Indeed, only three days after the American invasion flotilla left Norfolk for Africa on October 23, U.S. carriers in the Pacific fought the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands, which cost the Americans the USS
Hornet
(CV-8). The only carrier in the Atlantic was the much smaller USS
Ranger
(CV-4). To supplement her, the Americans relied on four small carriers that had been converted from oilers, each of them capable of carrying thirty planes.
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These ships did excellent service, though their hasty conversion demonstrated again the ersatz character of the invasion force.

By far the most daunting obstacle for the invaders was the dearth of landing craft. Getting armed men, each of them carrying fifty or sixty pounds of weapons and equipment, from the troopships to the beaches, along with their supplies and especially their vehicles, was the most difficult aspect of any amphibious operation. The U.S. Marines had pioneered amphibious tactics during the 1930s and had conducted a number of practice landings during the annual fleet exercises at Culebra in Puerto Rico. But due to the parsimonious budgets of those years, they improvised “landing craft” from ships’ boats. That would not suffice for the kind of large-scale amphibious assaults needed to effect Torch. For that, the Allies needed specially designed vessels that were small enough to be carried aboard the troopships during the ocean crossing, yet large enough to carry a score or more soldiers and their equipment several miles to the beach. They needed to be of sufficiently shallow draft to get close to the beach—or even onto the beach—but also commodious enough to carry the jeeps, trucks, and tanks needed to sustain a landing force in a battle ashore. Though the Navy Department had experimented with early designs for a “tank lighter” in the 1930s, the vessel that proved most useful in this role was something called the Higgins boat.
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IN THE 1930S, A TEAM OF DESIGNERS
working for boatbuilding entrepreneur Andrew Jackson Higgins had developed what was initially called a “Eureka boat” for trappers and oil explorers in the shallow swamps of the Louisiana delta. The U.S. Marines became interested in the Eureka boat for military purposes, and in the fall of 1940 Higgins obtained a contract with the Navy to build 335 of them. The boats that made up this first generation of landing craft were flat-bottomed plywood vessels thirty-six feet long with a spoon-shaped bow that allowed them to push up onto a shallow beach. They were initially powered by a gasoline engine, though diesel engines eventually proved more practical. Higgins was a charismatic and tenacious businessman who was occasionally frustrated in his prewar dealings with the Navy bureaucracy. Furious when the Navy reneged on a handshake deal for 131 tank carriers in favor of an inferior in-house design, Higgins publicly characterized the Naval Academy as a place where officers learned “fancy dancing, football, fencing, boxing—things like that,” but, he insisted,
“there are no officers … who know a goddam thing about small boat design.” Navy leaders, in turn, considered him “an arrogant know it all.”
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Pearl Harbor swept away most of the bureaucratic impediments, but it did not change the Navy’s low priority for landing-craft production. In January 1942 the construction of carriers, destroyers, and even battleships seemed more urgent than building landing craft, which were initially listed eighth in the Navy’s shipbuilding precedence. Two months later they were lowered to tenth. Nevertheless, by the summer of 1942, the Navy had authorized construction of nearly two thousand of them. Many of those were still in the construction pipeline as the deadline for Torch approached, and most would eventually be sent to the Pacific. Consequently, there were only a few hundred landing craft available for the landings in North Africa.

What made the Higgins boats so valuable was their peculiar design. Because of their flat bottom, spoonbill bow, and shallow draft (only twenty-six inches forward), they could run right up onto the beach. In newer versions, the bow was squared off and hinged at the bottom so that it could be dropped onto the sand to allow the men to rush out onto the beach dryshod. Each boat could carry thirty-six soldiers plus a Navy crew of three, and the addition of the bow ramp meant that they could also carry jeeps and trucks, though at thirty-six feet long and just over ten feet wide, they could carry only one truck or two jeeps at a time. To improve on that, Higgins designed and built a fifty-foot model that was made of steel and equipped with a stronger ramp so that it could carry a thirty-four-ton Sherman tank. Characteristically, the Navy endowed each of these vessels with a slightly different acronym: the initial Higgins boat was a Landing Craft Personnel (LCP), and the ramped version was an LCP(R), later redesignated as a Landing Craft, Vehicle and Personnel (LCVP). The bigger, steel Higgins boats for carrying tanks ashore were designated as Landing Craft Mechanized (LCM), often called a “Mike boat.”
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Higgins even assumed responsibility for training the coxswains who would operate these ungainly craft. Upon completing the course, they received a certificate from the “Higgins Eureka Motor Boat Operators School of New Orleans, U.S.A.” At the school, they learned the distinctive characteristics of these unique craft. For example, the natural instinct of a boat
operator heading for a beach at full speed was to throttle back as he approached the shore. To do so, however, meant that the vessel might ground on an offshore sandbar while still some distance from the beach. The coxswains had to be trained to keep the throttle wide open as they approached the shore in order to run the boat over any sandbars and up onto the beach as far as possible. Even while the men or vehicles were being discharged, the engine was held at full throttle to hold the boat in place.
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