Neptune: The Allied Invasion of Europe and the D-Day Landings (26 page)

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While both the LCI and the LCT could cross the English Channel on their own, neither had been designed for a transatlantic voyage. Many of the LCIs did it anyway, but most of the LCTs came to England as deck cargo. In some cases they arrived in sections and were welded together in British shipyards, though the general practice was for them to be carried piggyback on the deck of a larger ship. When the paired ships arrived in England, the host ship would transfer water in her ballast tanks to create a deliberate list to one side, and the 286-ton LCT would slide sideways down greased wooden beams to land alongside with a spectacular splash.
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3. The third type of amphibious vessel was both the largest and by far the most important. It was also the ship that became the industrial and logistical bottleneck for the Allies, not only for the Normandy invasion, but worldwide. This was the Landing Ship, Tank (LST). Described by one authority as “a large, empty, self-propelled box,” it was an oceangoing ship that displaced 1,625 tons when empty and could carry twenty Sherman tanks, thirty heavy trucks, or twenty-one hundred tons of cargo in its cavernous hold, plus as many as forty light trucks or jeeps lashed to its upper deck. It also had bunk space for up to 350 soldiers. Because of its flat bottom, which gave it a draft of only a foot and a half forward when empty and four to seven feet when fully loaded, it could steam right up onto a beach despite its great size and discharge its cargo through massive bow doors. The British had pioneered this kind of large-capacity tank carrier with the “Winstons” and “Winettes” used at Dieppe, and because of that the American-built LSTs were sometimes referred to as the LST-2. Very quickly, however, the American version eclipsed its British prototype and was soon universally known simply as the LST.
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A case can be made that LSTs were the most important ships of the Second World War, yet few loved or admired them. To begin with, they were very poor sailors. With their blunt bow (to accommodate the big doors) and flat bottom (to ensure shallow draft), they were, as one sailor put it, “shaped like a bathtub,” and they wallowed badly even in calm seas. In any kind of mild chop they would smack down heavily on each successive wave with a teeth-rattling thump. As one veteran recalled: “Some ships go over the
waves; some of them go through the waves; some go under the waves; but an LST just clubs them to death.” In an active sea, the LSTs also tended to “shimmy and vibrate,” and the torque exerted on the lengthy hull as it slipped precariously down a quartering wave was so powerful that observers on the bridge could see the hull actually twist. If the ship was loaded with a full cargo of jeeps and light trucks on its weather deck, the vehicles would rise and fall rhythmically as if driving in unison over a hilly countryside. On rare occasions, the movement of the ship’s hull became so violent it could rip open the welds that held the ship together, opening a seam, as one sailor put it, like a run in a woman’s stocking.
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Given these sailing characteristics, seasickness was endemic, and the LSTs were uncomfortable in other ways, too. To conserve space for the barn-like hold, the crew’s quarters were squeezed into a small space aft under the fantail and consisted of hinged bunks stacked three high. The ship’s head was directly behind these bunks, and one veteran recalled that the LSTs “stank of diesel oil, backed-up toilets, and vomit.” The LSTs did not even have names. Instead, like the smaller LCIs and LCTs, the ungainly and unloved LSTs were distinguished only by their hull number, such as LST-235 or LST-393.
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It was almost as if the Navy bureaucracy was ashamed of these ugly ducklings and sought to deny them the distinction of a christening. Finally, the LSTs were slow, seldom able to exceed ten knots, and crewmembers joked that “LST” actually stood for “Large Slow Target.” For all that, they were absolutely essential to any large-scale amphibious operation, and vital for success at Normandy.
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Before the war was over, the United States would build more than a thousand LSTs, but by May 1943, when the conferees at Trident approved the plan for an invasion of Europe one year hence, only 241 of them had been completed. Moreover, all but a handful of them were in the Pacific or the Mediterranean. The COSSAC plan for the cross-Channel invasion called for a concentration of 230 LSTs in southern England by early 1944 in
order to execute Neptune-Overlord on May 1. Instead, a variety of factors conspired to hinder both their production and concentration, and very soon it became evident that a shortage of LSTs was the Achilles’ heel of the entire Allied invasion effort. Indeed, the history of the LST construction program offers singular insight into both the friction of war and the confluence of strategy and logistics.

BORROWING HEAVILY ON BRITISH PLANS
, naval architect John Niedermair, who ran the Preliminary Design Branch at the U.S. Navy’s Bureau of Ships (BuShips), drew up the blueprints for an American LST early in 1942, and the first keel was laid in June of that year. One curious but valuable aspect of Niedermair’s design was that the LSTs were equipped with ballast tanks which, when filled, would prevent them from bobbing like a cork when unladen, but which could be pumped out when carrying a full load so that the draft remained relatively stable.

Though LSTs were full-sized, oceangoing ships with a length of 327 feet 9 inches and a 50-foot beam, the majority of American LSTs were built inland, mostly along the Ohio River, at cities from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to Evansville, Indiana. They were constructed on building ways parallel to the river and were launched sideways, an event that generated an impressive wave that slapped up onto the opposite riverbank. The first LST hit the water in Pittsburgh in October 1942, only weeks before the Torch landings. Manned by a skeleton crew and placed in the charge of a river pilot, it made its way fifteen hundred miles down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers on a nine-day journey to New Orleans. The Navy men on board followed the civilians around to learn how the ship worked. Many remembered that journey as “a great adventure,” since for most of them it was the first time they had been under way on board a ship. The LSTs were formally commissioned in the town of Algiers, Louisiana, across the river from New Orleans. There, the boat davits were installed and they were equipped with Higgins boats—initially two or three to a side. Then, proudly bearing a commissioning pennant, they steamed out the mouth of the great river and into the Gulf of Mexico. Some lingered for a week or two near Panama City for a series
of beaching exercises; others rounded Key West and headed up the Atlantic coast to the Navy’s Amphibious Training Base at Little Creek, Virginia, where the Commander Amphibious Forces supplied new officers and the rest of the crew.
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For the most part, the crews on the LSTs were as fresh and untested as the ships themselves. The complement for an LST was nine officers and 110 sailors, a larger number than on a comparably sized cargo ship because of the need to man the guns when at general quarters. Save for the commanding officer, usually a Navy lieutenant in his twenties, most of the officers were ninety-day wonders who had come straight from civilian life and endured thirteen weeks of midshipman training at one of several designated colleges before being sent directly to a ship. As one graduate of the program recalled, “we learned close order drill, plane identification and signal flag recognition. That was about it.” As for the crew, a handful of petty officers brought critical experience; most of the rest were teenagers straight from boot camp. One officer recalled that on his ship, “the ages of our crew ranged from 17 to 22. Not one of them had ever seen the ocean.”
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Manning the smaller LCIs and LCTs was even more problematic. They often boasted only a single commissioned officer, and like the department heads on the LSTs, they were often complete novices. When Ensign Philip Goulding reported on board the LCI(L) 506, the commanding officer, a lieutenant, junior grade, asked him: “Goulding, do you know anything?”

“No, sir,” Goulding replied earnestly. “I just got out of midshipman’s school. I don’t know anything at all.”

To Goulding’s astonishment, the lieutenant slapped his hand down on the wardroom table and exclaimed: “Thank God for that. Nobody on this ship knows anything and I was afraid those idiots were going to send me someone to spoil it. Siddown and have a cup of coffee.”
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The training in Chesapeake Bay seldom lasted more than a few weeks. The officers and crew on the big LSTs learned how to run the engines, operate the bow doors, and maneuver the ship while under way. They worked on emergency procedures, tactical maneuvering, precision anchoring, mooring alongside, and underway refueling. As on all Navy ships, officers sought to keep the crew physically fit, though this occasionally proved
problematic, and even humorous. While the large open deck of an LST provided lots of room for calisthenics, the constant rolling of the ship made it something of an adventure. As the sailors lined up and began doing jumping jacks, the rolling ship moved beneath them so that after each jump, they landed a few inches away from where they had started. As the ship slowly rolled to starboard, the files of jumping men “moved slowly across the deck to the port rail, and then, as the ship righted itself, they bounded slowly back to starboard.” Watching this from the bridge, one officer wondered if “in a prolonged roll, the crew would dance right over the side.”
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Combat training consisted of learning how to shoot the 3-inch gun on the stern and the 20 mm anti-aircraft guns, or later the 40 mm Bofors gun. Often there was only one day to practice firing those guns, aiming at a target sleeve towed at the end of a long tether by a Navy airplane whose pilot was almost certainly very nervous. Beaching exercises were especially nerve-racking. It was frightening to steam directly toward the shore. It was so counterintuitive that during the first attempt, men on board instinctively grabbed on to whatever they could, anticipating a jarring collision, if not worse. Then, too, if the LST grounded on the beach at anything other than a fairly precise 90-degree angle, it was likely to slew off to one side, an effect called broaching, which meant it would end up sideways on the beach and probably require a tow to get off again.
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Once an LST successfully pushed itself up onto a beach, its massive bow doors opened like a cupboard, a twenty-three-foot bow ramp was lowered, and the tanks, trucks, and jeeps inside its hold drove off onto the sand under their own power. Huge fans ventilated the cargo hold so that the exhaust from all those gasoline engines firing up at once did not asphyxiate the crew. After the hold was emptied, the vehicles on the upper deck could be unloaded. In early models of the LST, an elevator on the foredeck lowered them one by one down to the cargo hold. That proved time-consuming, however, and beginning with LST-491, laid down in July 1943, a ramp replaced the elevator so that the vehicles on the weather deck could simply drive down the ramp and out the bow doors.
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After unloading, the LSTs needed to retract from the beach. To do that, each was equipped with a special anchor at the stern that was attached to a
steel cable wound around a massive winch. As the LST steamed in toward the beach, crew members dropped the anchor well offshore and paid out the cable as necessary. It was important to pick the right moment to execute that maneuver, for if the crew dropped the anchor too soon, the cable would run right off the spool and disappear into the sea. After disgorging its cargo, a gasoline-powered motor engaged the winch, the anchor dug into the bottom, and the LST hauled itself off the beach stern first, assisted by its own engines. The sequence of orders was: “Up ramp. Close bow doors. Haul around on the stern anchor. All engines back one third.”
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It was helpful if the LSTs landed on a rising tide at or near the high-tide mark. If they attempted to discharge their cargo at low tide, the last vehicles to drive off might be swamped by the rising tide; if they unloaded during a falling tide, by the time the last vehicle debarked, the ship could find itself thoroughly aground, high and dry like a beached whale, a circumstance known as “drying out.” When that happened, there was no choice but to wait for the next high tide to retract.