Neptune: The Allied Invasion of Europe and the D-Day Landings (25 page)

All too often, Americans found this tongue-in-cheek stereotype uncomfortably accurate. Bred to the notion that swift action and undeviating focus on the objective was the way to get things done, Americans found the British agonizingly indirect. When American Navy Captain James E. Arnold received orders as the naval officer in charge (NOIC) for one of the landing operations, he sought out his British counterpart to discuss how they could cooperate. He showed up at British headquarters and introduced himself: “I’m Captain Arnold, U.S. Navy, and I’m looking for NOIC, British forces. I wanted to discuss—” At that point he was interrupted: “Aye, sit down and have a spot of tea.” Such exchanges were not necessarily typical, but they were common enough to suggest that the cultural and professional gulf between the two nations affected planning and training for Neptune-Overlord.
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The origin of this Anglo-American gulf was not merely cultural—it was also experience-based. The vastly different roles that each country had played during the First World War colored all the exchanges between Brits and Yanks in the Second. In August 1943, Secretary of War Stimson wrote to Roosevelt, “The shadows of Passchendaele and Dunkerque still hang too heavily over the imagination of these [British] leaders. Though they have rendered lip service to the [cross-Channel] operation, their hearts are not in it.” That much was evident. As late as November 25, 1943, barely five months before the date set for the invasion of Europe, the British chief of staff argued, “We must not … regard
OVERLORD
on a fixed date as the pivot of our whole strategy on which all else turns.” The British, Stimson said, believed in “pinprick warfare” and were convinced that “Germany can be beaten by a series of attritions in northern Italy, in the eastern Mediterranean, in Greece, in the Balkans, in Rumania and other satellite countries and that the only fighting which needs to be done will be done by Russia.”
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He was not entirely wrong. And yet, in spite of the dissimilar experiences that informed their divergent approaches to war, and in spite of the cultural gulf between the gum-chewing, wisecracking Yanks and the temperamentally restrained, tea-drinking Brits, by the end of 1943 they were bound together by mutual need, and poised on the brink of history. It now seemed likely that the manpower resources for the invasion could be assembled in time to meet the agreed-upon deadline of May 1, 1944. To be sure, most of those men were inexperienced, many were insufficiently trained, and others were still en route, but they were well armed, well fed, and certainly eager enough. Two questions, however, remained unanswered: Could the Allies assemble the sealift capability needed to get them across the Channel and onto the Normandy beaches? And who would command the operation?

S
HIPPING
. from the very day of Pearl Harbor and even before, Allied strategic planning had been severely circumscribed by the scarcity of available shipping. As Brooke noted in January 1943, “The shortage of shipping was a stranglehold on all offensive operations.” It was not that the Allies had failed to see this coming. As early as 1936, the United States had begun subsidizing the construction of fifty new merchant ships a year under the Merchant Marine Act. Three years later, the government doubled the number of subsidized ships to one hundred, and doubled it again the next year. In January 1941, nearly a full year before Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt had declared an “unlimited national emergency” and used that to justify an even bigger shipbuilding program. Nevertheless, once the war began, the need to supply both Britain and Russia while simultaneously fighting a war in the Pacific revealed just how desperately short of shipping the Allies were. And it got worse. During 1942, German U-boats sank more than a thousand Allied ships in the North Atlantic. For a time it seemed possible that this U-boat onslaught might eliminate Allied sealift capability altogether.
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Defending the Atlantic convoys required hundreds of new destroyers, especially the new, smaller, destroyer escorts (DEs), plus dozens of small auxiliary aircraft carriers (CVEs). As Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox wrote in February 1943, it would be impossible to conduct any operations in Europe at all “unless escort vessels can be provided much more rapidly.” It seemed clear to him that building new escorts was the nation’s highest industrial priority. King agreed. Arguing that “one ship saved was worth two ships sunk,” he, too, wanted to put escort ship construction at the top of the nation’s priority list.
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On the other hand, it was equally critical to build more cargo ships. At the very least, the Allies had to replace the hundreds of ships already sunk by the Germans, and others being lost almost daily. The deputy administrator of the War Shipping Administration, Lewis W. Douglas, protested that making escorts the highest priority would jeopardize the program for building cargo ships and weaken the ability of the Allies to maintain the transatlantic convoys. After all, escorts would be useless if there was nothing for them to escort. Knox disagreed. “It does us little good,” he wrote, “to produce one hundred cargo ships a month if we do not produce enough escort vessels during that month to enable us to protect them when they go to sea.” In a kind of chicken-and-egg dilemma, the Allies had to decide whether it was more critical to build escorts to protect the convoys, or replace the cargo ships they were supposed to protect.
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And now there was a third imperative. All of the agreements solemnly accepted by the Combined Chiefs of Staff and the heads of government about invading occupied France on May 1, 1944, would be meaningless if the Allies could not produce the thousands of landing ships and landing craft needed to carry the invasion force to the beaches. Landing craft had constituted a bottleneck for the Torch landings, and again for the invasion of Sicily and Italy. The invasion of France would require far more. Without literally thousands of new landing craft, any talk of a cross-Channel operation was simply fatuous.
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There is an inextricable connection between strategic planning and logistical realities, and ship construction is especially determinative. Even more than in the production of tanks, trucks, or planes, shipbuilding requires
a particularly long gestation period that begins with the accumulation of raw materials and leads through steel mills, fabrication shops, machine shops, and assembly plants before eventually arriving in the building ways. It is a complex puzzle involving tens of thousands of interconnected parts. As a result, decisions made about construction priorities in 1943 decisively affected what was operationally possible in 1944. The American industrial colossus was impressive, but it was not infinite. If Neptune-Overlord was to become a reality—if those hundreds of thousands of soldiers crowding into southern England were to be lifted across the Channel and deposited onto the beaches of Normandy—the Allies had to produce the thousands of landing craft needed to carry them there.

Back in 1942, Roosevelt had created the War Production Board (WPB). In theory, at least, part of its job was to establish priority categories for all sorts of products, not just ships but also machine tools, cranes, valves, forgings, engine parts, and the hundreds of other industrial tools of war. The WPB set up a system in which the highest priority items received a rating of A-1. Inevitably, however, one or another command or interest group came forward to explain why a particular product needed to be elevated above the others, and soon there was an AA-1 category, and not long after that an AAA-1 category. By mid-1943 such ratings had become all but meaningless because so many items had been assigned the highest priority. At that point, the WPB created a new standard: an urgency rating. After confirmation of the decision for Neptune-Overlord in August 1943, only one American shipbuilding program carried an urgency rating: landing craft. The decision came late in the game, however, and the friction of war proved particularly powerful in slowing the production of desperately needed landing craft. In the end, the Allies simply ran out of time.
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THE TERM
“
LANDING CRAFT
” encompasses forty-six different types of vessels,
*
ranging from oceangoing transport and cargo ships that displaced
ten thousand tons or more down to the thirty-six-foot Higgins boats that carried the soldiers to the beach.
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The alphabet soup of acronyms for all these vessels can be confusing, even to experts, and for that reason, it is useful to lump them into three broad categories:

1. The most numerous, indeed nearly ubiquitous, type of landing craft was the small, flat-bottomed personnel carriers developed by Andrew Jackson Higgins at his shipyard in Louisiana (see
Chapter 4
). Popularly known as Higgins boats, they were initially designated as Landing Craft, Personnel (LCP) by the Navy. These displaced only six tons each and were carried aboard larger ships, suspended on davits that could lower them into the sea alongside the mother ship. Soldiers would then climb down chain or rope nets into the holds, which had no seats or benches, making some feel like they were inside a railroad boxcar with no roof. Each boat had a Navy crew of three whose job was to ferry their human cargo several miles to the beach. By the time of the Trident conference in May 1943, the United States had produced nearly four thousand of these craft. (See
Table 2
,
page 161
.) Many had gone to the Pacific, others had been employed in the Torch landing in North Africa, and still others were sent to the Mediterranean for the invasions of Sicily and Italy.

By May 1943, however, the LCP was no longer being manufactured, for it had been replaced by a slightly larger and more resilient variant that displaced eight tons and carried both soldiers and vehicles, including jeeps and light trucks, though not tanks. These were also produced by the Higgins Company and still called Higgins boats, though the Navy’s designation for them was Landing Craft, Vehicle and Personnel (LCVP). Like the earlier LCPs, they were carried aboard larger ships, and suspended on davits. They were an improvement over their slightly smaller predecessors in several ways. First, the draft forward was only twelve inches, which allowed them to land on beaches that had a very gradual slope (as at Normandy). They were also faster (12 mph) and had a longer range (one hundred miles) than the LCP, and they carried two .30 caliber machine guns aft. The first of them was built in November 1942, slightly too late for Torch, but over the next eighteen months American shipyards turned out an astonishing twelve
thousand of them, making them the most numerous of any vessel built during the war. They were the workhorses of the amphibious war, carrying soldiers and Marines to beaches from Sicily to Saipan.
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Another vessel in this general category was the somewhat larger Landing Craft, Mechanized (LCM), sometimes called a Mike boat since “Mike” was the phonetic code for the letter
M
. The 1944 Navy training manual called the LCM “a big and chunky older brother to the LCVP.” Of all-steel construction, each Mike boat displaced thirty tons and could carry a single Sherman tank, which is why they were sometimes called “tank lighters.” They had twin diesel engines, which made them quite maneuverable, though that also meant they required a particularly skilled coxswain. With a range of 130 miles, they could cross the Channel on their own, though they, too, had to be brought across the Atlantic as deck cargo on larger vessels, often several at once. By the time of the landings in Normandy, the United States had produced more than eight thousand of these small tank carriers.
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2. A second category of landing craft consisted of larger vessels that were capable of crossing the English Channel on their own to deliver tanks and infantry onto the assault beach. The larger of them was the Landing Craft, Infantry, or LCI, which the sailors affectionately called “Elsies.” The most common type was the LCI(L)—the second
L
standing for “large”—which were just over 158 feet long and displaced 230 tons. They could carry up to two hundred men each, though they were relatively fragile with little armor, and since they lacked bow doors, they could not carry vehicles of any kind. To disembark their human cargo, they pushed as far up onto the beach as they could and deployed twin ramps on either side of the bow.

The other vessel in this general category was the Landing Craft, Tank (LCT), which could carry four or five tanks or heavy trucks in its open cargo bay. In the course of the war, both Britain and the United States produced several versions of the LCT. By 1943, the United States was building the Mark VI, which at 119 feet was considerably shorter than an LCI but both sturdier and better armored, displacing 286 tons. The key feature of this type of landing craft was that upon beaching, it could open its bow doors, deploy a ramp onto the sand, and allow the trucks or tanks in its open well deck to drive out under their own power.