Neptune: The Allied Invasion of Europe and the D-Day Landings (44 page)

Among the early Allied targets were the German radar stations: big metal dishes, twenty feet across, called “Giant Würzburgs,” that could scan out to sea some forty-three miles and direct the fire of artillery ashore. Even before the bombardment began, ships in the Allied fleet had intercepted electronic emissions as the Giant Würzburgs sought to obtain targeting coordinates for the German gunners. Until the radar sites could be destroyed by gunfire, the Americans used onboard transmitters that sent out bursts of electrical energy designed to jam and deflect the radar beams. While employing this technology, the electronics technicians on
Tuscaloosa
were much relieved to see the enemy radar sweep past them and then “wander off.”
³⁴

The
Nevada
added her big guns to the assault at 5:47. Giant black and red fireballs roiled from the muzzles of her 14-inch guns, the big ship lurched sideways, and fifteen thousand pounds of high-explosive shells flew in a single ten-gun salvo toward the German batteries behind Utah Beach. The
concussion created by the firing of those big guns was so powerful that one sailor on board thought it would pull his clothes off; several suffered nosebleeds. Men on LCTs miles away felt their ship’s hull move beneath them. It was particularly daunting for the soldiers in the Higgins boats already headed shoreward since the shells passed directly over their heads, sounding like a freight train that was about to run them down. Many instinctively ducked. The shells could not be seen as they streaked toward the targets, but the air friction they created generated a small red light that allowed witnesses to follow the line of shot through the predawn twilight.
³⁵

The biggest naval guns off Utah Beach belonged to a curious vessel officially dubbed a “monitor.” It was HMS
Erebus
, essentially a fat-bodied light cruiser with an oversized turret on its foredeck that boasted two 15-inch guns. Those guns fired shells weighing 1,920 pounds each and had a range of nearly twenty miles. Early in the bombardment, the
Erebus
targeted the German batteries on the Iles Saint-Marcouf, the small islands off the coast above Utah Beach south of St. Vaast-la Hougue. There, the German guns were encased in bunkers with concrete walls thirteen feet thick. Nevertheless, the big guns on the
Erebus
silenced them before they could be used to enfilade the landing beaches.

Off Omaha Beach, RADM Carleton Bryant commanded the bombardment ships of Force O, led by the battleships
Texas
and
Arkansas
. Both were older vessels, laid down in 1910–11; indeed, the
Arkansas
was the oldest American battleship still in service. She was so old, there were no showers or toilets on board—the men washed from buckets, and the toilet facilities consisted of a metal trough with salt water flowing through it. Both ships had been built using rivets instead of welds, and occasionally when they fired a full salvo, a rivet or two would pop loose. Despite their age, however, they were superb gun platforms, and they fired their big shells at a low, almost flat trajectory into the high ground behind Omaha Beach. Ensign Donald Irwin was driving LCT-614 toward Omaha Beach when his ears were assailed by “the most ear-splitting, deafening, horrendous sound I have ever heard” as the big shells passed overhead. He looked back at the
Texas
, her guns still wreathed in smoke, and from his vantage point it looked as if those big 14-inch guns “were pointed right at us.” To Ensign Victor
Hicken, commanding LCT(A) 2227, the
Texas
’s guns sounded “like a giant door slamming,” and another recalled that the very air vibrated with the sound and set everyone on board trembling.
³⁶

The American battleships off Omaha Beach were supported by two French cruisers,
Montcalm
and
Georges Leygues
, as well as the British heavy cruiser
Glasgow
and the light cruiser
Bellona
. It is easy to imagine the mixed emotions of the sailors on the French warships as they opened fire on French soil. The skipper of the
Montcalm
, Captain E. J. H. L. Deprez, mused that “it is a monstrous thing to have to fire on our homeland.” From his ship, he flew a giant French tricolor flag, sixty by one hundred feet in size, that could be seen from the shore.
³⁷

The greatest firepower in the Allied armada was off Sword Beach. There, two British battleships each carried a battery of eight 15-inch guns. These were the
Warspite
, known as the “grand old lady” of the Royal Navy, and
Ramillies
, named for the 1706 battle during the War of the Spanish Succession that had been won by Churchill’s ancestor, John Churchill, the first Duke of Marlborough. This group also included HMS
Roberts
, another so-called monitor with two more 15-inch guns. That gave the Allies a total of eighteen 15-inch guns at Sword Beach, and from those guns the British could fire nearly thirty-five thousand pounds of high explosives in a single salvo. To that was added the firepower of five cruisers and fifteen destroyers. And because the Sword Beach landings would not take place until later that morning, these ships had an extra hour to prepare the beach. The heavy guns, the sheer number of them, and the extended time on target all had an impact. The commander of Force S, British Rear Admiral Arthur George Talbot, believed that “the enemy was obviously stunned by the sheer weight of [gunfire] support we were meting out.”
³⁸

There were no Allied battleships off Gold or Juno Beaches, though there were half a dozen cruisers and two dozen destroyers. The cruisers off Juno Beach included HMS
Belfast
, which, if King George had not intervened, would have included the prime minister among the ship’s company. As it happened, the
Belfast
escaped harm during the operation, and Churchill afterward made a point of saying, in effect, “See, it would have been all right.”
³⁹

There had been plenty of discussion about the best way to direct the naval gunfire. The Army preferred to rely on shore-based fire control parties (SFCPs), while the Navy wanted to use air spotters. In the end, the Allies did both, which proved invaluable when the fire control parties on shore were decimated by the unexpectedly heavy enemy fire on Omaha Beach, and in any case, shore spotting could not begin until the troops landed. Air spotting was best conducted by slow, two-seater aircraft that could linger over a target. Since the Normandy beaches were blanketed with anti-aircraft batteries, that was not realistic on June 6. As Deyo put it, “Slow seaplanes such as we normally used would not long survive over that country.” Instead, the Allies used British Spitfires, which, over the American beaches, were piloted by U.S. Navy volunteers. The Spitfires worked in pairs, with one pilot reporting the fall of the shot, while the other scanned the skies for potential Luftwaffe interference, though given Allied mastery of the air, such a precaution was probably unnecessary. The Germans did, however, put up an impressive amount of anti-air ground fire. An observer on the
Texas
thought that the German tracer fire looked like someone “taking a garden hose and wiggling it back and forth.” The fire came up from several sites at once, so it “kind of crocheted the AA fire” across the sky.
⁴⁰

The long flight from airfields in Britain meant that the Spitfires could remain over the beach for only about forty minutes, but when one pair had to depart, another pair arrived to take its place. At any given moment, there were at least six spotter planes aloft for each beach: two overhead, two returning, and two en route. Spotting remained problematic, however, because the high speed of the fighter planes made them imperfect for the task, and because the clouds of smoke and dust generated by the fall of thousands of rounds of high-explosive shells made for poor visibility. Then, too, Allied radio communications were disappointing. Deyo’s flagship,
Tuscaloosa
, established contact with its spotter plane at 5:38 but lost it ten minutes later and did not regain contact for over half an hour.
⁴¹

The Allies sought to make up for imperfect spotting with sheer volume. In the half hour dedicated to the naval gunfire off Utah Beach, the
Nevada
alone fired 337 rounds of 14-inch shells and 2,693 rounds of 5-inch shells. The gun barrels grew so hot they had to be hosed down with seawater.
⁴²

More than sixty destroyers added thousands more rounds of 4-inch and 5-inch ammunition to the bombardment. Initially, the newer and larger American
Gleaves
-class destroyers were assigned to the bombardment mission, while the lighter British destroyers and American destroyer escorts carried out screening duties to fend off German E-boats. The main reason for this was that the
Gleaves
-class destroyers had radar fire control that allowed them to target German gun emplacements by map coordinates even through heavy smoke. As one destroyerman put it, “The Brits had to be able to see their targets, while the Americans could deliver blind fire.”
⁴³

Then, in the midst of the naval bombardment, more than two thousand Allied bombers converged on the five beaches. Their impact was significantly weakened, however, by the weather conditions. Though the storm that had delayed the invasion was moderating, the cloud layer above the beach remained thick enough that the pilots and bombardiers were unable to see their targets. Consequently, they had to bomb by radar from above the clouds. With so many planes operating in so small a space, each group was assigned a very specific flight path. The pilots of the 450 high-flying B-24 Liberator bombers assigned to Omaha Beach had the most difficult mission, for their flight path was almost due south, directly over the invading fleet, and they would strike Omaha Beach perpendicularly. Unable to see their targets, and desperate to avoid dropping their bombs on the Allied landing craft already heading for the beach, the pilots waited an extra five to twenty seconds before releasing their ordnance. The B-24s dropped more than thirteen thousand bombs, but due to the conditions and their determination to avoid friendly casualties, all of them fell uselessly into the French countryside behind Omaha Beach. While the spectacular pyrotechnics boosted the morale of the men in the approaching landing craft, who cheered the explosions ashore, the historian Joseph Balkoski has noted that “not a single bomb fell anywhere near Omaha Beach.”
⁴⁴

Bombing on the other beaches was more successful. The B-26 Marauders assigned to Utah Beach flew lower than the B-24s, so pilot visibility was better. Even more important, however, their flight path took them along the length of Utah Beach, so bombs that fell either long or short still had a good chance of hitting a target. The 276 Marauders dropped nearly five thousand
bombs, most of them weighing 250 pounds each, though a few carried giant 2,000-pound “blockbuster” bombs, which, even if they did not hit a specific target, left both attackers and defenders momentarily stunned. Utah Beach was completely obscured by the resulting smoke, dust, and debris. In addition, Allied destroyers just off the beach generated more smoke to screen the approaching Higgins boats from German artillery ashore. The consequence was that neither the gunners on the Allied warships nor the coxswains driving the Higgins boats could see much of anything through the thick pall of smoke.
⁴⁵

Once the Allied planes departed, the naval gunfire resumed, though the smoke and dust were now so thick that gunners were reduced to firing blindly. Allied destroyers close to shore sought to pick out targets of opportunity, but there were so many ships off the coast they literally got in one another’s way. Lieutenant Commander G. J. Marshall, on the destroyer USS
Doyle
(DD-494), spent much of his time “avoiding collision” amidst the wind and currents of the crowded seafront, though his ship still managed to fire 364 rounds of 5-inch ammunition.
⁴⁶

The third element of the Allied effort to soften the beaches relied on a novel and somewhat experimental weapon: rocket-firing LCTs. Designated as LCT(R)s, these vessels carried two layers of rocket launchers that entirely filled their well decks. The launching racks were loaded with 1,080 three-foot-long rockets. Since the rockets weighed sixty pounds each, an LCT(R) could hurl nearly 65,000 pounds of ordnance toward the enemy in about ninety seconds, and there were thirty-six of them dedicated to the bombardment mission, eight of them off Omaha Beach. The problem was that the rockets could be aimed only by pointing the vessel itself in the general direction of the target, and the range could be adjusted only by changing the angle of the racks. Once the commanding officer made the best estimate he could of the target and distance, the crew headed below and the CO retreated into an armored bolt-hole. When he triggered the launch, the rockets fired off automatically in a programmed sequence without any further human involvement. There was no disputing the visual impact of it. A crewman recalled that “the ship seemed to explode” as hundreds of rockets whooshed off the racks in a virtual stream of fire, leaving
trails of black smoke as they streaked through the sky. Smoke rose up all around the ship “like a dense fog,” and small fires broke out on board. In the aftermath of the launch, “everyone was cursing and screaming and fighting the flames.” Impressive as it was, however, most of the rockets off Omaha Beach fell short, hissing harmlessly into the sea. Those that reached the beach did some damage to the barbed wire and the obstructions, but not as much as might have been guessed from the pyrotechnic display. At least none of them struck a Higgins boat.
⁴⁷

All of this meant that for just over an hour between 5:37 and 6:40 a.m., thousands of bombs, shells, and rockets filled the air over the two American beaches on the Normandy coast. It was stunning, indeed all but overwhelming, to the senses. The men in the Higgins boats, now within minutes of landing, crouched down and covered their ears, glad that their enemies and not they were on the receiving end of such awesome firepower. Alas, all that sound and fury disguised the fact that on Omaha Beach at least, the bombs fell too long, the rockets fell too short, and the naval gunfire was too brief. Ashore, the Germans crouched down in their bombproof shelters, many with concrete walls five feet thick, and they too covered their ears, but none of the Allied ordnance penetrated their bunkers and pillboxes.