Neptune: The Allied Invasion of Europe and the D-Day Landings (32 page)

That was certainly not the case with the officer assigned to command the Western (American) Task Force, Rear Admiral Alan G. Kirk. As with Vian, Ramsay also enjoyed a friendly relationship with Kirk, one that had begun two years before when Kirk had been the American naval attaché during Ramsay’s command tenure at Dover. They, too, had been regular golf partners, and knew each other as “Alan” and “Bertie.” Like Vian, Kirk had played an active role in the landings in Sicily, after which, at the request of Admiral King, he had flown out to the Pacific to discuss amphibious operations with members of Chester Nimitz’s staff. In the fall of 1943, however, he was back in England and assigned to Ramsay’s staff. Upon his return, Kirk called Ramsay up and invited him to have lunch. Ramsay’s cool refusal suggested to Kirk that he had made a gaffe. Since their golfing days, Ramsay had gained two more stars and was now vastly Kirk’s superior. To make amends, Kirk hurried over to Ramsay’s headquarters to report to him formally and officially.
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Just as Vian had assumed that he would be Ramsay’s deputy, Kirk’s initial assumption was that he would be Ramsay’s chief of staff. But with Ramsay’s command now split, Kirk was the logical person to take over the Western (American) Task Force. For Kirk, this was great news, for, like Vian, he much preferred a fighting billet to administrative duties. Some weeks before, he had reported to the British First Sea Lord, Admiral Andrew Cunningham, whom he had known for years, and Cunningham had teased him by saying that as Ramsay’s chief of staff, he was likely to miss out on most of the action. During the invasion, Cunningham told him, “you’ll be with Admiral Ramsay in a big bomb shelter down the south coast of England.”

“Oh no,” Kirk replied. “I don’t expect to be there at all. I expect to be on my flagship off the coast of Normandy.”

His riposte was as much bravado and bantering as genuine expectation, but as it happened, he was correct. His appointment to command the Western Task Force meant that he would be an active, indeed central, player in the invasion.
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Unlike Vian, Kirk settled into the management of his diverse and farflung naval command with ease and authority—perhaps with a bit too much authority, in Ramsay’s opinion. As disappointed as Ramsay was with Vian’s hesitancy to grasp the reins of command, he soon became alarmed at Kirk’s tendency to overstep his bounds. Mostly this was a product of the very different leadership protocols in the Royal Navy and the United States Navy. As Kirk put it, “Our system of command was to tell the fellow what you wanted him to do and why you wanted him to do it,” and then to leave it up to the on-scene commander to “decide for himself
how
he’s going to do it.” Ramsay, however, did not want his subordinates running off willy-nilly to do their own thing, especially during the decisive campaign of the war. Kirk noted disapprovingly that “all the planning was done in Norfolk House by Admiral Ramsay and his staff in the minutest detail.” Written orders arrived from London in thick packets, and if any change needed to be made, it all had to be referred back up the chain of command to be reconsidered. If the change was approved, another thick folder of orders was sure to follow.
*
Kirk and his staff instinctively rebelled at these circumstances, and occasionally they complained about it. When they did, Ramsay was unmoved. Kirk noted that whenever his staff suggested that “we could do it better this way or that way,” the result was a “tough little comment” from headquarters putting them in their place.
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Despite this tension, Ramsay sought to pay lip service, at least, to the idea of a fully integrated naval command. From the very start, one of Eisenhower’s guiding principles had been the complete integration of Anglo-American forces. It was in deference to that command guidance that Ramsay wrote to Kirk early in their relationship: “The operations we are planning together call for a degree of cooperation between our Navies which had hitherto never even been contemplated.” The idea, Ramsay
wrote, was to create the kind of partnership in which it would possible to conclude that “there existed not two Navies but one nation.” In that spirit, each of Ramsay’s task force commanders was in charge of all the ships, of whatever nationality (including French, Dutch, and Norwegian), within their respective area.
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All this left Admiral Harold Stark somewhat out in the cold. The former U.S. chief of naval operations knew that he had been packed off to England in the first place to make room for Ernie King to assume a dual role as both CNO and COMINCH, and also because the incubus of Pearl Harbor still hung about him like an aura. Then, too, Roosevelt may have decided that Stark was simply not tough enough to be wartime CNO. Officially, at least, Stark was Commander in Chief, U.S. Naval Forces, Europe, and recently he had been endowed with another title: Commander, Twelfth Fleet. Those titles meant little, however, since Ramsay and his task force commanders absorbed literally every ship and landing craft they could get their hands on. As a result, the Twelfth Fleet existed mainly as an abstraction, and it became Stark’s main job to ensure that Ramsay had the tools and the manpower he needed to be successful. In that mission, Stark got invaluable support from Navy Captain (later Rear Admiral) Howard A. Flanigan, a 1910 Naval Academy graduate and World War I veteran who had been recalled to active service after the United States entered the war. He proved an imaginative and resourceful administrator, who demonstrated an uncanny ability to fulfill (if perhaps illicitly) even the most exotic matériel requests.
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QUITE APART FROM THESE COMPLICATIONS OF COMMAND
, the issue that continued to dominate Allied planning was whether there would be enough ships available to execute the crossing at all. The problem of insufficient sealift had been partially resolved with the decisions to postpone the Normandy landing until June—it was now officially scheduled for June 5—and to postpone Anvil until the late summer. It also helped that April and May were the most robust months yet for LST construction: American shipyards turned out fifty of them in April, and an astonishing eighty-two in May. Still unresolved, however, was the shortage of warships to escort the landing vessels across the Channel and provide gunfire
support for the landing. As early as January 21, Ramsay had provided Eisenhower with specifics about the naval implications of a five-division assault, and Ike had included those estimates in his request to the JCS. Though the Joint Chiefs had agreed to postpone the assault and to accelerate LST production, they had not responded to the request for more combatant ships.
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A factor complicating Eisenhower’s request was that King and the U.S. Navy were in the midst of choreographing a major offensive in the Pacific that was scheduled to take place only a few days after the D-Day landings. A massive American strike force of seven aircraft carriers, eight light carriers, and seven fast battleships, plus scores of cruisers and destroyers as well as transports and landing ships—more than seven hundred ships altogether—was scheduled to strike Saipan in the Marianas on June 15. The Allies’ ability to launch two major seaborne offensives on opposite sides of the globe less than two weeks apart was testimony to the remarkable productivity of American industry, but it was also evidence that the Germany-first strategy had been all but abandoned.

One reason King and the Americans felt they could undertake the Saipan offensive was that according to the original agreement set down at Quebec and confirmed at Cairo, the escort and combat vessels for Neptune would be provided primarily by the Royal Navy “with some augmentation from the United States.” Alas, with the expansion from three to five divisions on five different beaches, and the creation of separate British and American task forces, the warship requirements for Neptune now exceeded the Royal Navy’s resources. The First Sea Lord, Admiral Cunningham, was able to add only the cruiser
Sheffield
, which had a bent propeller shaft, and the battleship
Nelson
, which was scheduled to go into the yards at Philadelphia in May for modernization. In March, Ramsay sat down with his staff to work out the numbers. After studying the escort and bombardment schedules, he concluded that he needed a minimum of one additional battleship, seven more cruisers, and fourteen destroyers. That raised his total warship requirement to six battleships, twenty-five cruisers, and no fewer than fifty-six destroyers. He acknowledged that this was “a huge force,” and that “the R.N. can’t possibly meet this bill.” Regardless of earlier agreements, he
knew the additional ships would have to come from the United States Navy, which in his view was “meet, right and proper.”
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Eisenhower backed him up. Indeed, if anything he raised the ante. “If the decision is made to send U.S. naval vessels,” he wrote to Marshall, “three or four battleships” would be better than “a corresponding number of cruisers.” Ike found the thought of those big 14-inch shells smashing into German pillboxes and artillery positions “very comforting.” Eisenhower’s request triggered a visit from King’s deputy chief of staff, Rear Admiral Charles M. Cooke Jr., called “Savvy” Cooke since his Naval Academy days in tribute to his academic brilliance. Cooke met first with Kirk and his subordinates, including Rear Admiral John Lesslie Hall Jr., who at this point served as Kirk’s deputy and was in charge of training. Kirk had a reputation for straight talk, but it was Hall who was blunt to the point of insubordination. He told Cooke he did not understand “how in the world” King could deny adequate gunfire support to so important an operation as Neptune. It was “ridiculous,” Hall asserted, to send squadron after squadron of destroyers across the Atlantic on convoy duty and not keep even one of them in British waters for “the most important landing in the history of the United States.” Cooke was taken aback, and told Hall, “You have no right to talk that way.” Hall was not intimidated. “Who in God’s world has a better right to talk that way than I have?” he asked truculently. In the end, Hall suffered no consequences for his outburst, and King eventually ordered three older battleships, two more cruisers, and twenty more destroyers from the U.S. Navy to join the Neptune force, bringing the total number of U.S. destroyers to thirty-four.
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At the same time, however, King also sent Rear Admiral Bernhard Bieri to England with orders to join Ramsay’s staff. Apparently King’s view was that if Ramsay was going to have some U.S. Navy ships, he was also going to have a U.S. Navy man on his staff. Ramsay bristled at that, since he assumed, correctly, that he alone had the authority to appoint the members of his staff. Even Eisenhower thought it presumptive, if not in fact offensive. Beetle Smith told Bieri that if Ramsay wanted to send him home, he was within his rights. Instead, Ramsay accepted Bieri, though he also made sure that he understood he worked for ANCXF and not for King. Ramsay put Bieri to work on a committee doing postwar planning.
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There were other shortages besides shipping. On April 17, Stark sent King a long cable arguing that “despite every effort to spread all available personnel in Ukay [U.K.] just as far as they will go,” he was concerned about “important deficits” that threatened the viability of the cross-Channel movement. Among the deficiencies: there were not enough officers for the LCTs, not enough medical personnel to treat the expected casualties, too few intelligence officers and communications personnel, and not enough tugs. Most of these problems were relatively minor and fixable, but they could not be ignored.
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While Ramsay, Stark, and King sparred over available warships and shortfalls in other areas, the training never stopped, especially amphibious training. A hundred years before, the French military theorist Antoine-Henri Jomini had declared that amphibious operations were “among the most difficult in war,” an adage that had become a mantra in the military academies and war colleges of Western nations. Certainly the Allies had seen ample evidence of Jomini’s cautionary dictum, from Dieppe to Torch to Tarawa. With so much riding on the outcome of this particular amphibious operation, it was essential that the soldiers of Montgomery’s 21st Army Group and the sailors of Ramsay’s naval command develop a clear and practiced protocol in the few weeks left before they crossed the Channel. Training—training that was as realistic as it was possible to make it—was the next hurdle.

D
URING
1943, most of the training received by those million and a half soldiers spread out in a hundred or more camps all across southern England had consisted primarily of lengthy route marches. Due mainly to the shortage of landing ships and landing craft, few of them had ever participated in an amphibious landing or even been on board an amphibious ship. One Army officer at the American training base at Appledore on Devon’s north coast did the best he could with what he had. He had logs laid out on the practice beach in the shape of a Higgins boat and ordered his men to huddle together inside the rectangular outline. Then, on his signal, they ran out the landward end to take positions farther up the beach. While perhaps better than nothing at all, it was hardly an effective substitute for an actual landing.