The Duplex Drive Tanks of Omaha Beach (c) Embarkation Errors

British Duplex Drive Sherman Tanks with their screens inflated, embarked on a Landing Craft, Tank.

In the previous installment I detailed the vague and inadequate instructions contained in the various planning documents regarding the launching of the Duplex Drive (DD) tanks, as well as some of the after-the-fact claims participants made regarding verbal directives on the matter.  Hidden in the planning process, however, was another layer of errors which would also influence events on D-Day.  These errors resulted from the disconnects between certain preparations which had to be made early in the process, and the formal planning documents which were published later and contained details that partly nullified those preparations.  Although seemingly minor in some respects, at least one of these disconnects would have unexpected impacts on D-Day.

Tardy Task Organization

Previously I touched on the manner in which the DD/LCTs were ‘task organized’ to meet the requirements of the plan.  ‘Task organization’ is simply the manner in which units are grouped together to accomplish a mission, with elements added or removed as the nature of the mission dictates.  In the American sectors there eventually would be three task organized DD/LCT divisions.  Two of these divisions were slated for Omaha Beach, with Assault Groups O-1 (CTG 124.3) and O-2 (CTG 124.4) each having one division.  The third division was slated for Utah Beach.  Each division needed to carry two companies of DD tanks (32 tanks).  With an LCT limited to carrying four DD tanks, this established a requirement for eight LCTs in each division.  (The third and last tank company from each battalion was scheduled to land minutes later, but these tanks were equipped with deep wading kits and not DD kits.  Therefore, they are omitted from this discussion, but will be the focus of a separate blog.)

The normal organizational structure of an LCT division, however, included only six craft.  Hence the need to task-organize the LCT divisions by adding two LCTs to each division.  The Navy based its task organization on an existing division of LCTs for each battalion.  These divisions came from two groups within LCT Flotilla 12.  That flotilla was commanded by LCDR Leide, who we met in the previous installment.  Figure 1 illustrates the task organization for the entire DD/LCT effort.  Divisions 69 and 70 constituted Group 35, which was commanded by Lt.(jg) Rockwell.  Note that Rockwell’s two divisions were assigned to different beaches, and it isn’t clear why this was done. From a strictly span-of-control perspective, it would make more sense if they had both been allotted to Omaha Beach.  There may have been good reasons for this allocation, but from a perspective more than eight decades later, it simply seems to be one of the odd little quirks in the planning process. 

To the 18 LCTs from Divisions 69, 70 and 71, six more LCTs were allotted.  One of these also came from Flotilla 12.  The remaining five, however, came from three different flotillas, and no two of which were even from the same group.  Mixing in individual craft in this manner did nothing to help unit cohesion, but circumstances often demand this kind of assignment.  So, again, although there are a couple of points that appear odd from a perspective 80 years later, there is nothing fundamentally wrong with the task organization as depicted.  Under the pressures of NEPTUNE planning, this kind of task organization was not uncommon.

But there was a real problem hidden in Figure 1.  In the division allotted to Assault Group O-1, either Rockwell or Leide had placed an ‘outsider’ in charge.  Lt.(jg) J. E. Barry and his LCT-537 were normally assigned to Flotilla 19 but had been attached to the division allotted to Assault Group O-1 as one of the two additional craft.  Again, this kind of cross-attachment is not unusual.  What is unusual is the fact that Barry was placed in command of that division. 

Figure 1.  The final task organization for the DD/LCT units on D-Day.  Barry was originally located in LCT-537 as indicated by the flag, but was switched to LCT-539 at the last minute.  Note that various plans, orders and sources show different division, group and even flotilla numbers for these sets of craft.  For simplicity of reference, I have selected the version as shown.

By placing Barry in command, they necessarily subordinated the normal commander of Division 71 to him, which could pose a host of problems.  We have no idea why Rockwell or Leide made this decision.  Was it because of a perceived technical or leadership shortcoming in the Division 71 leader?  Or was it simply a rigorous adherence to the naval and military god of seniority? 

Ideally, the training and standard operating procedures were virtually identical among the LCT flotillas in the European Theater, so a mixing of craft and commanders should not be too harmful.  Ideally.  The reality was somewhat different.  By inserting an outsider into the chain of command between a division of LCTs from Flotilla 12 on one hand, and the leaders of Flotilla 12 on the other hand, they were simply asking for trouble.  At best, the outsider Barry would serve as an imperfect filter between the vision and orders of Leide and the LCTs Leide had trained.  It was nothing less than a self-inflicted weaking of the chain of command.  Leide had organized Flotilla 12 over that past half year, placing his stamp on it, and Rockwell had done the same with his Group 35.  It is only to be expected that both men would cast a critical eye on an outsider who was suddenly taking control of one of their babies:  Flotilla 12’s Division 71.

This awkwardness could have at least been mitigated by Leide of Rockwell.  They could have placed the leader of Divisions 71 (a Lt.(jg) Scrivner) in charge of the second section, leaving him the face-saving responsibility of leading four of his six LCTs.  They did not do this.  An ensign (ENS Donal K. MacKenzie) was placed in charge of the second section, and Scrivner was left to command only his own craft within Barry’s section of the division.  This was one of the oddest decisions within the DD/LCT project and it raises many questions.  But lacking information on why this decision was made, we are not in a position to judge whether it was wise or not.  And whatever personal friction may have resulted within Division 71, it does not appear to have played a negative role in the events of D-Day, as LCT-603 (Scrivner’s) would end up as the tail-end-Charlie of Barry’s eight LCTs and therefore was not in a position to affect anything.  On the other hand, using Scrivner in a more responsible role may have helped prevent the later errors.  There is no way of knowing. 

In theory, much of this should have been smoothed over in the weeks of training leading up to D-Day.   Major Duncan (executive officer of the 743rd Tank Battalion, and commandant of the DD tank training school) noted that training began on 15 March 1944.  But initially only four DD tanks were available, with the remaining tanks (more than a hundred) trickling in as they arrived by ship.  How much training the LCTs had gotten in is an open question, especially given the distractions of late arrivals, overhauls and shipyard modifications experienced by the LCTs.  By 1 April, two weeks after the planned start of the DD training school, only ten of the twenty-four LCTs were expected to have the ramp extension kits mounted (necessary for safely launching DD tanks), and by that same date, only a total of five DD tanks had been delivered to the three battalions undergoing training.[1]   So, there is some question how complete and comprehensive the training was by the time it ended on 30 April.  Nevertheless, figures Rockwell provided for training indicate that the average LCT had launched its load of four DD tanks 12 times,[2] although that number undoubtedly varied widely between individual craft.  In fact, one craft (LCT-600) wouldn’t even be available to start training until by May 6. 

More importantly, those figures speak only to the crew proficiency at launching the tanks.  It serves as no indication of the tactical cohesion and proficiency of the individual divisions when operating as a team.  One would hope that training had welded the disparate crews together, but that was likely only partly the case.  It is important to note that the task organization depicted in Figure 1 was only locked-in during the last half of May, whereas the training at Torcross was largely completed by the end of April.  In fact, with the assault group orders not being issued until the last week of May, it is questionable whether any of the DD tank training at Torcross was performed with the LCTs organized into their D-Day task organizations.  Which raises the question whether Barry was able to exercise his role as division commander in any meaningful way at any time during training.  Perhaps he did, but there are no records that indicate this. 

Recall RADM Hall’s comment in his Operation NEPTUNE report regarding the state of training leading up to D-Day.  Referring to Exercise FABIUS, the 3-6 May final D-Day rehearsal. He stated:

“Unfortunately, due to the late arrival of the landing craft in the Theater, plus the necessity of alterations and repairs to put those already present in the best possible condition for the assault, only between sixty and seventy percent of the landing craft which eventually took part in the assault under Force “O” took part in this exercise.”[3]

In summary, the DD/LCT force may have been eager and willing, but it was far from a well-honed naval force.  The LCTs were fresh off the construction ways and were manned by crews equally raw and partly trained.  By the time they arrived in theater, took possession of and reassembled their craft, and guided them through the local shipyard modifications and shakedown cruises, there was little time for division- or group-level maneuver training.  And inserting an outsider into the middle of the chain of command at that late date could only pose a problem for one unlucky division.

Of course, there was little chance this one point alone could result in a debacle.  But debacles invariably are the result of a cascading series of minor errors and flukes of fate.

An indication of the confusion over DD/LCT planning was contained in in the Western Naval Task Force (RADM Kirk) Operation Plan No. 2-44 (dated 21 April 1944).  This document was published five weeks after the start of the DD tank school, and just 9 days before the school’s formal course ended.  Most of the LCTs which would be used on D-Day had been at least partially trained by then. 

The problem was, Kirk’s order allocated only one DD/LCT division to Omaha Beach, and that was Division 69.  This was one of Rockwell’s two divisions, and it would be the one he personally led on D-Day.   Slated for Utah Beach were Rockwell’s second division (Division 70) and Division 71 (which was supposed to be the core of Barry’s division at Omaha).  The allocation therefore was just the opposite of the tactical requirement:  Omaha had one division when it required two, and Utah had two when it required one.  This undoubtedly was the reason behind Rockwell’s rather pointed comment in his 30 April report on training.

“3.  I should like to make the following recommendations:

“(a)  It is imperative that no one of the above listed LCTs be left out of the plans for DD tanks on D-Day.  The assault should have the use of the maximum amount of personnel with the maximum training.”[4]

From this it appears Rockwell feared that as WNTF sorted out the LCT assignment matter, they would simply tell him to use another division already slated for Omaha—even if it had missed out in training—rather than switch divisions between the beaches.  It was a well-founded fear, but fortunately it proved groundless.  The LCTs that had been selected for the DD tank mission had been fitted with special ramp extensions, so the LCTs used in training had to be used on D-Day.  And this in turn would require reallocation of LCTs.  There were three changes issued to Kirk’s WNTF order that would affect the task organization.  As of Change 1 (dated 4 May) the six craft of Division 17 that would constitute the core of Barry’s division were still listed under the Utah forces, with the remaining 18 LCTs listed correctly.  That date coincided with Exercise FABIUS, the final rehearsal for Omaha Beach, and with Division 71 still allotted to Utah Beach, they must have missed that exercise.  Nor did they participate in the Exercise TIGER, the final rehearsal for Utah Beach; Rockwell’s report indicates only 32 DD tanks were used in that exercise, which would have been Division 70, the one division the DD/LCTs actually intended for that beach.  Again, was Barry ever afforded the opportunity to lead his composite division in any realistic training?

Speaking the Language

Change 2 to Kirk’s WNTF order was issued on 10 May, and while a page survives that states the task organization was revised, the pages with those changes did not.   Fortunately Change 3 (published on 22 May) did survive and shows Division 71[5] was moved to Omaha Beach at least by that date.  As the only surviving copies of the Utah Beach landing tables show they were revised on 10 May, those tables could not reflect these changes to Kirk’s latest task organization.  This obscure fact has caused confusion for historians ever since.  

This switch of LCT divisions was the best opportunity to solve Rockwell’s span-of-control challenge.  The planners could have moved Rockwell’s Division 70 from Utah to Omaha, so that both of his divisions were on the same beach.  Unfortunately, Division 70 had already been incorporated into the Utah Landings Tables and Diagrams as bringing in the DD tanks of the 70th Tank Battalion, and had already rehearsed that role in Exercise TIGER.  Division 71, on the other hand, had been slotted to land artillery at Utah almost four hours after H-Hour, a task that took no special training or equipment.  The planners probably thought it was best to take the division that wasn’t already planned to carry DD tanks at Utah and move them to the beach where their special skills were needed.

The irony is that if Barry could not be trusted to act on his own, as implied by Rockwell’s and Leide’s later reports, then Utah would have been the best place for his division, because both the Assault Force commander and the Landing Force commander at Utah would be personally involved in the launch or land decision, and the deputy Assault Group commander would maintain direct control over that division until it beached.  In that environment, Barry would not have been given enough slack in his leash to get in trouble, as Rockwell and Leide suggested was the problem on D-Day.  Again, a minor glitch in planning—corrected by means of a curious half-measure—would contribute to the D-Day fiasco.  

Interestingly, the 22 May changes to Kirk’s task organization were correctly included in Hall’s order for Omaha (CTF 124 Operation Order No. BB-44) which was actually dated two days previously, on 20 May.  Clearly there had been some good staff coordination between the two headquarters.  Hall’s order also included some necessary and key details which would, unfortunately, be the source of further confusion in the DD/LCT saga.  Annex D of his order was the Attack Landing Plan, and it included a series of LCT Assignment Tables.  These tables specified the loads for each LCT, the craft’s designated landing beach sector and the craft’s relative landing position within the division.  It even designated the order of movement within the division and where the leader’s LCT would be.  These table are an excellent example of the detailed planning necessary for an assault landing to succeed.

The problem came because they were in part ignored.

An Error in Divisions

As D-Day approached, Rockwell and the DD tank company commanders were able to get a jump on the embarkation effort.  Most of the assault shipping would sail to the embarkation ports where they would load the troops and equipment they would carry to the far shore.  But on 25 March, just as the DD training was getting underway, MG Heubner (CG, 1st Infantry Division) provided an endorsement to a memo from COL MacLaughlin regarding that DD training.[6]  Part of that endorsement was a recommendation that the DD tanks be loaded on the LCTs and moved to the concentration areas by water rather than road convoys.  The LCTs were based at Dartmouth, which was close to the DD tank base at Torcross, so this recommendation made sense.  Heubner only controlled the tanks of the 741st and 743rd Tank Battalions, but he recommended the same procedure be used for the tanks of the 70th Tank Battalion, which were also training at Torcross and which were slated for Utah Beach.  And this recommendation was approved.  After Exercise FABIUS, the last D-Day rehearsal, the DD tanks were provided time on a firing range to boresight and check fire their main guns.  When that was completed, they were ready to embark on the LCTs when the alert order was issued. 

The Landing Tables of the 4th Division (revised 10 May) did correctly reflect the DD tanks of Companies A and B, 70th Tank Battalion, embarking at Torcross, and the wading tanks of Company C with the tank dozers, embarking at Dartmouth.[7]  For some reason, the Landing tables for the 1st Division did not reflect this change, and directed all the tanks of the 741st and 743rd Tank Battalions be embarked at Portland.  That was all too typical of the many relatively small errors in such a large and complex operation.  Nevertheless, all three battalions loaded their tracks as Heubner suggested:  the DD tanks loaded at Torcross and the wading tanks and tank dozers loaded at Dartmouth. 

On 25 June, the LCTs and DD tanks destined for Omaha Beach sailed for Portland.[8]  The problem was, the embarkation at Torcross had gone wrong.

For some unknown reason, Rockwell’s LCT division for Omaha Assault Group O-2 saw the two companies of the 743rd Tank battalion loaded on the incorrect LCT sections.  As loaded, Co. B would land on Dog White instead of Dog Green, with Co. C landing on Dog Green instead of Dog White.  The 1st Infantry Division’s Landing Tables had been published on 15 May and the Final Ship Assignment Lists were published on 16 May.  Both of these reflected the correct load assignments for each LCT.  So why didn’t Rockwell and Leide follow those orders?  It was most likely due to the fact that only 10 copies of those documents were included in the distribution to Hall’s headquarters, and the information in those would not be widely disseminated until Hall issued his own order.  That order included LCT Assignment Tables[9] which also correctly specified the loading and LCTs for Companies A and B.   It was published on 20 May, just five days before the LCTs and DD tanks sailed from Torcross to their departure ports.  The distribution list for Hall’s order included one copy for every LCT, so in theory, Rockwell and Leide should have seen the LCT Assignment Tables before embarking the tanks.  But that theory had a flaw.  Hall’s order was over 250 pages long and included vast segments that were completely irrelevant to the skipper of an LCT.  The communications annex alone was 100 pages long, and only a few paragraphs of it pertained to a craft commander.  The poor ensigns and lieutenants (junior grade)—who had absolutely no training or experience to prepare them for this aspect of a major operation—were swamped with irrelevant masses of information and had to sift through the chaff to find a grain or two of wheat.  Hall himself later acknowledged this was an error. 

“The Assault Force Commander’s order was distributed to all unit, craft and ship commanders, down to and including L.C.T.s.  In light of the experience gained, it is doubted whether such a wide distribution was either necessary or advisable.  In large part, the commanding officers of the smaller craft such as L.C.T.s and the units such as L.C.M and L.C.P.(L) Flotillas had neither the time nor the opportunity to digest the entire order.”[10]

Hall was undoubtedly correct in this.  He went on to recommend that in the future it be left to the assault group commanders (O-1, O-2, etc.) to disseminate only the necessary information in their orders, and not to burden junior officers with the entire amphibious force order.  This was a lesson Hall must have learned in his North African and Mediterranean operations, and it is curious he committed such an error for NEPTUNE.

Had Rockwell and/or Leide received copies of those Assignment Tables—buried in the mass of Hall’s order—and missed them, or perhaps misread them?  Or had Assault Group O-2 temporarily withheld distribution of Hall’s order until CAPT Bailey could issue it in conjunction with his own order (published 27 May, two days after the DD/LCTs sailed for Portland), which would have meant Rockwell and Leide had to act on faulty, unofficial information for embarkation?  Either explanation seems plausible, and there is no indication which might be the case.

The faulty embarkation was just one more glitch in a hurried, last-minute project, which was itself just a small part of an equally hurried major planning effort.  But at least the error could be fixed.  The four LCTs in each section were interchanged in the landing assignments tables and in the order of movement, thus getting the embarked tanks to the correct beaches.  This was effected by Change 1 to Hall’s operations order (dated 30 May).

The incident was significant enough that RADM Hall mentioned it in his NEPTUNE report, while at the same time minimizing its impact.

“A few mistakes were made, but these were detected in ample time to correct them; in one instance two companies of DD tanks were loaded on the wrong L.C.T.s, necessitating a change in the L.C.T. Assignment Table of the Operation Order.”[11]

Although indicative of the confusion that continued as D-Day loomed, this change likely had minimal impact.  True, eight LCT OiCs needed to study different beach panoramas so they could identify by sight their intended landing sites, and it would change their convoy and approach formations, but as we’ll see, it seems not to have affected the events of D-Day.

Nevertheless, the last reason a lieutenant (junior grade) or lieutenant commander would want to come to their rear admiral’s attention was because they made an error which only he could fix.  Hall was not fond of the DD tank concept to begin with, and the two naval leaders of that effort had just made a rather significant error that needed Hall’s intervention to fix, and this just five days before the planned sortie date.  This episode must have made an unfavorable impression on Hall, and it is fair to wonder how this may have influenced the defensive tone in their post-D-Day reports as Rockwell and Leide tried to explain the D-Day debacle.

Beyond this, the embarkation confusion was perhaps a clue that not all was well within the DD/LCT project.  Given the key role of this first wave and Hall’s general misgivings about the DD program, an astute commander might have tasked his chief of staff or a plans officer to take a closer look at its status.  But given the sheer scope of Hall’s command and the last-minute character of much of the preparations, that sort of keen observation might be too much to expect. 

Or would it?  An insight into the adequacy of Hall’s planning can be gained from Admiral Ramsay, the Allied Naval Commander in Chief.  He visited Hall on 10 March, shortly before Exercise FOX—even before the creation of Moon’s Force Utah—and was not impressed. 

“He has not formed his Force O in groups as are Forces J & S & and he himself has been doing all the planning which should have been done by his group comdrs.  I asked him why this was & he hedged a bit but gave the excuse that he had not the commanders & staff necessary.  The answer of course is that he should have insisted on getting them.”[12] 

Ramsay’s observation was made a bit more than two months before Hall published his operations order, so we would like to hope that in that period much had been done to rectify the faults in Hall’s staff organization and planning.  Yet there are indications Hall never completely overcame this slow start.  Turning again to Hall’s report on Operation NEPTUNE, it is clear his priority was to keep his staff as small as possible due to limited space on the flagship and that inevitably must have impacted the quality of his planning as well as supervision of preparations.[13]  In that light, Hall’s lack of awareness concerning the confused planning for the DD/LCT project might not be excusable after all.

Formation Error

The next planning error would have more serious implications.  It’s also the more complex issue to describe, involving sailing formations and the approach to the beach.  As a result. I’ll go into some detail on the mechanics of the problem.

The standard method for landing craft when approaching a beach employed a column formation, with the section’s leader in the first ship.  Normally the senior Army officer would be in the same craft as the Navy section leader to ensure unity of effort.  As the column neared the beach, the formation would change to bring all craft into a shallow Vee formation with the lead craft at the point of the wedge.  This was done by each succeeding craft veering to left or right, based on their order in the column; even numbers would veer to the left, odd to the right.  This method ensured that the leader remained in the center of the formation, making it easier for the other craft to guide on the leader for the final run into the beach. It also had the advantage of landing the senior Army leader more or less in the center of his unit, easing his command and control tasks when he landed.   The shallow Vee formation ensured the craft would touch down at different moments, hopefully avoiding all the craft being hit by a single artillery salvo.  If the unit was a division of craft consisting of two sections, the process would be much the same, with the second section deploying to the left of the first section.

Figure 2. An extract from Assault Group O-1's Approach Schedule showing the landing formation of the first LCVPs on Easy Red Beach Sector.

Figure 2 illustrates this.  It is a diagram from the Approach Schedule of the Assault Group O-1 (CTG 124.3) operations order showing the final formation of a wave consisting of a division of LCVPs.[14]  The A and B sections have each moved from a column formation into shallow Vee formations in the vicinity of the line of departure.  Each LCVP is labelled with two designations.  The bottom number shows the landing table serial number and the relative position of each craft as it hits the beach, starting with the lowest number on the right with higher numbers to the left.  The top designation determines the crafts’ position in column movement before assuming the shallow Vee.  The A or B designated which section, and the last two letters designate the beach sector, in this case Easy Red.  The center numbers, 31-36, indicate the order within the section’s column.  Note in each Vee the leader’s craft designation ends in 1 (i.e., 31 in this case), The designations ending in odd numbers (33 and 35) are echeloned to the right, and the designations ending in even numbers (32, 34 and 36) are echeloned to the left.  By convention, the division leader is at the head of the righthand Vee, as indicated by the small flag symbol.  So the disposition of craft in this extract shows that initial plans called for the conventional approach formation of a column deploying into its final landing formation.  

Figure 3.  This detail from the Assault Group O-1 Landing Diagram depicts the intended positions of Barry's LCTs when they were to launch their tanks.  (Note: The boxes labelled with 'S's above the diamonds are small craft which were to lead each group of four DD tanks to the beach and provide last moment suppressive fires.)

Early planning for the DD/LCTs within Assault Group O-1 anticipated this same conventional scheme of maneuver for the DD/LCTs, as demonstrated by Figure 3, which is a detail from the Landing Diagram (Annex E) of that assault group’s operation order.[15]  It depicts the DD tanks (the diamond shapes) as they were intended to land on the indicated beaches.  Below each group of four diamonds are two LCT numbers.  The first number indicates the craft serial number, as used in the landing tables.  They were numbered sequentially, lowest to the right (55) and highest to the left (62).  The second LCT number (highlighted in red) is the actual hull number of the LCT carrying those four tanks.  Note that Barry’s division of eight LCTs has been broken into two four-craft sections.  The only difference between this and Figure 2 is that Barry’s two sections would launch with a gap of several hundred yards between them.  Barry’s own craft (LCT-537, second from the right in the line abreast formation) is exactly where the division leader should be positioned and this distribution of landing craft indicates that at the time this annex was developed, a normal approach formation was anticipated.  And it further proves that some coordination had been made between the CTG 124.3 staff and Rockwell, as the staff knew which craft (LCT-537) would be the division leader’s, and correctly placed it in the formation.

Figure 4.  The standard LCT approach formation deploying into line abreast, as Lt.(jg) Barry's division would have used on D-Day.

Figure 4 is a depiction of the standard sailing dispositions through the boat lanes for Barry’s division to launch their DD tanks as required.  This placed both the Army and Navy leaders in the same two craft.  It also placed the Navy leaders at the head of their division (Barry) and section (MacKenzie), as well as placing them as close to the center of their formation when launching.  It was an excellent scheme of maneuver for the purposes of command and control.  [Note:  As the LCTs were not supposed to actually land, there was no need to remain in the shallow Vee, and they would simply assume a line abreast formation for launching.]

As excellent as that may have been, it was about to be thrown overboard.  When the two assault groups finally published their operations orders, they did so after Rockwell had sailed with his already-embarked DD tanks on 25 May.  Assault Group O-1’s order wasn’t published until 29 May and O-2’s order on 25 May, and they contained a change to the approach plan.  Rather than leaving the Transport Area and sailing down the boat lanes to deploy as shown in Figure 4, the orders instead directed Barry’s and Rockwell’s division to proceed down a swept channel at the west boundary of each of their respective boat lanes.  In Barry’s case he was to follow the channel from Point BA to Point BB.  (See Figure 5)  The LCT division would remain in column until they reached the 6000 yard line, then turn left in column and proceed until the LCTs were opposite the intended beach sectors, turn to the starboard (right into line abreast) and prepare to launch their tanks.  That was a significant change.

Figure 5.  The Omaha Assault Area Diagram showing the anticipated approach to the beach (blue) and the final approach route (red) for Barry’s division as directed by the Assault Groups’ orders.

What was the reason for adopting this changed routing?  It isn’t clear.  In the Assault Group O-1 order, all landing craft were instructed to ‘be prepared’ to follow channel BA-BG, but otherwise plan on moving directly down the boat lanes.  Only the DD tanks and DUKWs were specifically ordered to use channel BA-BG.  The boat lanes were supposed to have been swept clear by H-3 hours, so it appears offshore mines were not the concern.  The only other consideration that seems to make sense would be the inexperience of the DD/LCT crews and leadership.  Elsewhere I have addressed how new and untrained these LCTs and crews were. 

Nor was their leadership much better.  Rockwell, whose only previous experience was in an LCT training command, had been appointed commander of Group 35, Flotilla 12, in late November 1943, which was just 15 months after receiving a commission.  That flotilla was just forming, with its LCTs still coming off the builders’ ways.  At this point his task was to get the new craft shipped overseas.  He reached the UK in mid-February himself, not yet having any experience as an LCT group commander.  Three weeks later he was sent to Dartmouth to lead the LCT component of the DD tank effort.  Rockwell did have the advantage of being in the Navy for almost two years at that point (he was commissioned from the ranks), but his time with LCTs was almost exclusively in Chesapeake Bay, and he had no training to prepare himself for the command of the 12 LCTs in his group.  And once he did link up with his LCTs, he was quickly sent off on the detached training mission with the DD tanks, heading a composite LCT unit, fully half of which were not from his organic group.  He didn’t even have a chance to learn group leadership and command skills at the feet of a flotilla commander. 

To put it mildly, Hall would be entrusting the critical first wave of 64 tanks to very inexperienced craft, crews and leaders.  And this is a likely explanation for the revised movement formation.  Given the very green crews, the follow-the-leader formation for the approach to the launching positions would place the least demands on the raw crews.

But there was a complication.  If the LCTs retained their planned column formation, then they would arrive offshore in a completely mixed up order, as depicted in Figure 6.  Not only would the two tank companies be landing on the wrong beach sectors, but the positions within the companies would be completely changed.  That was clearly unacceptable.

Figure 6.  Diagram showing the effect of the new approach formation as compared to the specified launching positions.

Something had to change, and the easiest solution seemed to be to change the order of LCTs within the sailing formation.  Neither of the assault groups’ operation orders specified the LCT formations during the Channel crossing or how they arrived in the Transport Area, so altering these formations would not require another embarrassing change to an already published order.  In the revised formation, the LCT scheduled for the easternmost launching position would lead, followed by the remaining LCTs in the order of their launching positions.  (Figure 7)  This solved the problem; now the LCTs would arrive in the correct positions, with their embarked tanks also correctly positioned.

Figure 7.  Diagram showing the revised sailing formation bringing the LCTs into the correct positions.

But one problem remained with this formation.  Instead of leading his division, Barry would be relegated to seventh position in a column of eight.  This was clearly not the position for the division leader.  Rockwell’s solution to this new problem was to order an exchange of OiCs.  He directed Barry to take over LCT 549, which was the new lead craft, and directed its OiC, Ens McKee, to take over Barry’s LCT 537.  Apparently, Rockwell was slow in realizing this problem, or at least slow in devising a solution, as Barry didn’t not board LCT-549 until the day of the final sortie, 5 June.  Had the aborted 4 June sortie not been turned back by weather, the planned 5 June landings would have been conducted with Barry at the rear of his own formation.  This last-second act of expediency would have serious consequences.  In a stroke, Rockwell had broken apart the links between the Army and Navy leaders in that division.  (Figure 8)  Neither of the Army company commanders was collocated with his Navy counterpart.  Given that the various orders had imposed strict radio silence, and given that the order for Assault Group O-1 (under whom Barry operated) specified that the launch or land decision was supposed to be made jointly by the senior Army and Navy officers, then Barry would be facing serious obstacles.

Figure 8.  Diagram depicting the positions of key Navy and Army leaders resulting from the formation and LCT OiC changes.

Although the above discussion focuses on the effects within Barry’s division, similar formation changes were required within Rockwell’s division.  Rockwell, however, had one advantage for his division.  As the commander of Group 35, he was not the OiC of any individual craft.  He could position himself on any of his LCTs without displacing its OiC.  So, when he shifted his flag to LCT-535 (easternmost LCT and therefore the new division lead craft), it caused minimal impact within his division’s chain of command.  Nevertheless, it did physically separate him from CPT Elder, the man with whom he was supposed to consult.  So, the “unanimity of effort” Leide and Rockwell would later emphasize, was in fact disrupted by their own hands (though in response to external changes) before the operation began.

The embarkation for the Omaha DD/LCTs ended up being something of a mini-debacle which foreshadowed the D-Day events.  Both divisions encountered problems resulting from poor coordination.  One problem was fixed by the Task Force commander’s intervention.  The second was addressed through a series of expedient decisions with a far less satisfactory result.  Where does the fault for all of this lie?  There is no definite smoking gun, and it may be that Rockwell’s DD/LCT project was simply the unlucky victim of too hurried planning, conducted by too many layered commands, with too little adequate coordination.  We have seen indications of some direct coordination between either Rockwell or Leide and the two assault groups (notably the placement of command LCTs in the landing diagrams).  But something went wrong in that process.  The change in approach formations was common to both assault groups (but not as a result of Hall’s order), and it is difficult to believe Leide would not have gotten wind of it before embarkation at Torcross.  Rockwell probably can be excused for this failure simply because he was physically separated more so than Leide.  Were Rockwell and Leide to blame for the confusion and chaos?  Were they instead victims of Hall’s chaotic planning effort, one which apparently had not adequately improved since Ramsay’s observations in March?  Or was it a mixture of both?

Where Rockwell and Leide undisputably do come in for criticism, however, is how they covered up these failings after the D-Day debacle.  Neither officer mentioned either of the embarkation problems despite the fact that one of these problems would directly lead to the lack of coordinated command in Barry’s division on 6 June.  It was the exact kind of mitigating factor that their duty required them to report.  Their failure to make any mention of those details would appear to indicate they were covering up relevant facts that could call their own leadership into question.  

Rockwell was later to comment that in Barry, he had chosen the wrong man.  In reality, it seems Barry was in large part set up for failure by Rockwell’s orders and inadequate planning.  Rockwell in essence pled guilty to the lesser offense of selecting a poor subordinate—thereby making Barry the scapegoat—in order to deflect charges involving his own role in the events. 

In the next installment, we’ll take a deep dive into the actual events of D-Day.

Acknowledgements.
While researching this Omaha Beach Series, I have come in contact with several excellent researchers, and as good researchers do, we shared our finds. In the case of this DD Tank series, I owe a tremendous debt to Patrick Ungashick whom I stumbled upon while we were both delving into the subject. Patrick had managed to dig up a trove of Lt. Dean Rockwell’s personal papers which Rockwell had provided to Steven Ambrose. Any serious study of the DD tanks question must include these Rockwell papers, and I would have been lost without them. My sincere gratitude to him. Patrick has a book coming out this June which uses WWII case studies as a teaching vehicle for management decision making. One of those case studies focuses on, of course, the DD tanks at Omaha Beach. Patrick and I take somewhat different approaches to our analyses, and our conclusions are somewhat different, but I wholeheartedly recommend his upcoming book: A Day for Leadership; Business Insights for Today’s Executives and Teams from the D-Day Battle, or one of his other fine books. Thanks, Patrick!



[1] Memorandum from Commander, 3rd Armored Group, to Commander, 1st Infantry Division, subj: DD Tank Training, dtd 25 March 1944.  [RG407 Entry 427D - Neptune - DD Tank Training - Barges - File 659]  Armored groups, such as the 3rd, provided administrative and some logistical support for the independent tank battalions, but did control their tactical operations.  These battalions were normally attached to an infantry division for combat operations.

[2] Memorandum from DD LCT Unit Commander [LT.(jg) Rockwell] to Commander, ELEVENTH Amphibious Force [RADM Hall], subj: DD LCT Operations, Evaluation of Results of, dtd 30 April.  [RG407 Entry 427D - Neptune - DD Tank Training - Barges - File 659]  MAJ Duncan’s report of the same date included similar data.

[3] Report by Commander Assault Force “O”, included in The Report by The Allied Naval Commander-in-Chief Expeditionary Force on Operation “NEPTUNE”.  (Part V.—Comments and Recommendations; 4. Preparation and Training; (A) Comments, pg 622). 

[4] Opcit, Rockwell.

[5] LCTs 598-603; the additional two LCTs were already slotted for Omaha Beach.

[6] See footnote 1.

[7] The wading tanks of Company C, 70th Tank Battalion and the dozer tanks would land in a separate wave, directly on the beach, in support of the engineer beach gap clearance mission.  The organization at Omaha was different in that the DD tanks were in Companies B and C, and the wading tanks were in Company A of each battalion.

[8] Force O Commander in his NEPTUNE Report, pg. 5.

[9] Annex D, pg. 17 of CTF 124 Operation Order No. BB-44.

[10] Report by Commander Assault Force “O”, included in The Report by The Allied Naval Commander-in-Chief Expeditionary Force on Operation “NEPTUNE”.  (Part V.—Comments and Recommendations; 2. Plans, Planning and orders; (A) Comments, pg 618). 

[11] Report by Commander Assault Force “O”, included in The Report by The Allied Naval Commander-in-Chief Expeditionary Force on Operation “NEPTUNE”.  (Part V.—Comments and Recommendations; 13. Combat Loading; (A) Comments, pg 633).  The handwritten changes to the LCT Assignment Tables are visible in the NARA copies of this order.

[12] Ramsay, Bertram, (1994), The Year of D-Day, The 1944 Diary of Sir Bertram Ramsay, The University of Hull Press, pg. 41.

[13] Opcit. Part V.—Comments and Recommendations; 3. Staff Organization; (A) Comments, pp 618-619.

[14] Commander, Transport Division 1, Operation Order 3-44, dtd 29 May 1944, pg. C-8 of Appendix Three to Annex C (Approach Schedule).  Note that COMTRANS DIV 1 was designated the commander of Assault Group O-1 under Hall’s order, and as such carried the designation CTG 124.3 under the Force O task force organization.

[15] Ibid, Annex E.

The Duplex Drive Tanks of Omaha Beach (b) Confusion of Command

Rear Admiral John L. Hall, USN.

Commander, Assault Force “O”

(USN 80-G-302404, via NARA)

Historical discussions of the loss of the DD tanks generally have been framed as a comparison of the decisions made by two sets of very junior officers; one set chose badly, the other chose wisely.  That’s very convenient framing for some parties as it distracts attention from the root causes of the debacle.  You see, the decisions of those junior officers were merely the precipitants for what immediately followed.  What has been excluded by that framing were the precedents. That is to say, the questionable decisions and actions of the chain of command in the preceding weeks which placed some of those junior officers in a difficult and ambiguous situation for which they were unprepared, and which set the stage for the loss of so many tanks.  Let’s see if we can provide a more complete perspective.

Command at Omaha - A Small Matter of Attitude

Rear Admiral (RADM) John L. Hall, Jr., had spent most of his early career serving in battleships, cruisers and destroyers, eventually rising to command the battleship USS Arkansas (BB-33).  The advent of war found Hall on the staff of the Commander, Battleships Atlantic, which duty was soon followed by a brief stint on the staff of the Chief of Naval Operations.  In the summer of 1942, Hall had a crushing disappointment.  He was to be sent out with the Operation TORCH naval forces (the North Africa landings, 9 November 1942), initially serving as chief of staff to then-RADM Hewitt, who commanded the Western Naval Task Force that would land Patton’s troops.  Following the landings, Hall was slated to command the West African Sea Frontier and the Naval Operating Base at Casablanca.  It was not the combat career for which he had spent a lifetime preparing.

From there, Hall’s career became wedded to the amphibious forces, and he soon became commander of the Amphibious Force Northwest Africa (later the Eighth Amphibious Force).  As such he was responsible for all US naval amphibious forces in the Mediterranean Theater of Operations and their bases.  It was principally an administrative and training command. whose mission was to prepare the amphibious elements for operations. When amphibious landings took place, Hall’s position made him the logical man to command an amphibious assault force, and during Operation HUSKY (the invasion of Sicily, 9 July 1943) Hall commanded the amphibious assault force that landed US troops at Gela (one of the two US amphibious assault forces in the invasion).  He then commanded the amphibious task force that landed the American corps at Salerno (Operation AVALANCHE).  By the time he was summoned to the UK in the fall of 1943, Hall had a solid foundation in amphibious landings.  It was a somewhat deceptive foundation, however, as none of the three landings he had taken part in was opposed by strong German-manned defenses at the water’s edge, or extensive beach obstacles.  As a result, he would perhaps underestimate some aspects of the Omaha Beach landings and be slow to appreciate the dangers.[1]

When Hall arrived in the UK, he was placed in command of the newly created Eleventh Amphibious Force, which was responsible for all US naval amphibious forces and bases operating from the UK.  It was a lateral transfer, and not to his liking.  His immediate superior was RADM Allan Kirk (Commander of NEPTUNE’s Western Naval Task Force), whose amphibious experience had been limited to a single landing (Operation HUSKY), where he had been a peer to Hall, commanding the second US amphibious assault force for that invasion.  Hall thought Kirk was “too much flash, not enough substance”, and believed he was more experienced and therefore should have had Kirk’s job.  But Kirk was not the only man Hall held in low esteem.  He similarly thought little of Admiral Bertram Ramsay (the Allied Naval Commander-in-Chief) and General Eisenhower, the Supreme Allied Commander.  In short, he thought little of all three men above him in the operational chain of command, which was less than an ideal situation. Hall’s attitude must have been further soured when the size of NEPTUNE was increased to five beaches and RADM Donald Moon was chosen to command the amphibious task force for the Utah Beach landings.  Not only did Hall’s D-Day force get reduced by that decision, but Moon had absolutely no previous amphibious experience.[2]

The organizational structure of Rear Admiral Hall’s Assault Force “O” for the Omaha Beach landings. The LCTs carrying the Duplex Drive tanks were divided between CTG 124.3 (Assault Group O-1) and CTG 124.4 (Assault Group O-2).

This slightly sour attitude arguably would combine with three other factors to influence Hall’s decisions during the leadup to NEPTUNE.  First, as touched on above, in his previous amphibious experiences the beaches had not been nearly as heavily defended as they would be in Normandy, which led him to underestimate the difficulties the initial infantry waves would face.  This was evidenced in his opinion that landing tanks in the early waves of an assault was unnecessary, a rather poor piece of judgement to which he clung even in the wake of the Omaha landings. [See three paragraphs below.]

Second, Omaha Beach would be Hall’s third outing as an amphibious assault force commander, a role which doctrinally placed him in command of the Army forces for the first days of the landings until the Army was “firmly established ashore.”  It was a very temporary arrangement which, nevertheless, could lead some amphibious commanders to believe they understood ground combat better than the soldiers.  In Hall’s case, this tendency was influenced by recent experience. As Hall approached his third landing, he could look back on the lack of amphibious experience of some of his Army landing force commanders, both past and present.  Only Patton (who Hall landed in HUSKY) had previous experience in an amphibious landing (TORCH).  The Salerno landings saw the inexperienced Lieutenant General Mark Clark as the commander of the Army landing force, and Clark’s conduct of that operation was far from satisfactory.  For the Omaha landings, Hall would have the veteran 1st Division (which had been in the amphibious assaults for TORCH and was landed by Hall in HUSKY), but neither the division’s new commander nor the V Corps commander for NEPTUNE (under whom the 1st Division would operate) had any previous amphibious experience.  As a result, there was an undertone in Hall’s planning that indicated he thought he knew better than the Army when it came to the soldiering side of the business.  And in some amphibious respects he probably did, but it would turn out that his greater experience would lead him somewhat astray in the unique operating environment of Normandy. 

And third, although very aware of the inadequate bombardment assets available, he took a very dim view of the makeshift—yet vital—efforts to compensate for that shortage, and perhaps failed to do all he could have to help those efforts succeed.  Which brings us back to the Duplex Drive tanks.

In February 1944, Hall and Lieutenant General (LTG) Omar Bradley (commander of the First US Army) had observed a demonstration of the DD concept using British Valentine tanks.  Bradley was enthused.  Recognizing the need for substantial tank support in the initial waves to compensate for the lack of bombardment assets, Bradley was faced with the problem of how to get them ashore.  The Navy was initially unprepared to support this, and the best they could do was obtain a limited number of British LCTs, to which some additional armor was added, in the hopes that they had a reasonable chance of surviving the task of landing tanks in the first wave. As an added effort. wooden platforms were then built at the front of these LCTs to permit the two lead tanks to fire over the ramp during the final approach to the beach so they could provide additional last-minute suppressive fires.  It was a limited and hurried effort, producing only enough LCT(A)s to bring in two tank companies on Omaha Beach (and one company on Utah).  That was four companies fewer than Bradley needed for Omaha, and even then, these up-armored LCTs barely arrived in time for the operation.  If the Navy was not willing to use unarmored LCTs to bring in the remaining four tank companies, the DD tank concept appeared to be the next best solution.  Hall, by contrast, viewed them as impractical ‘gimmicks.’  He was at least partially correct; DD tanks did prove practical only under restricted conditions.  His error was in not recognizing that bad circumstances sometimes require the least bad options—which, frankly, is what the DD tanks were.  As Hall noted in his after action report:

“The Force Commander [Hall, talking of himself in the third person] acquiesced reluctantly in both the decision to employ tanks and artillery firing from landing craft, and to land tanks in the first wave.  He ultimately agreed because he realized the necessity for more firepower at this stage of the assault than could be supplied by the Naval craft then available.  He was then, and still is, doubtful of the efficacy of DD tanks and tanks firing from LCT(A)s landing in the first wave on strongly defended beaches.” [3]

His disdain for the concept almost certainly father the disjointed and vague planning for the employment of the DD tanks, and led to inadequate commander supervision on D-Day.

Delegation or Dereliction?

At four of the five invasion beaches, the decision to launch the DD tanks was made by the amphibious force commander for that particular beach, or it was delegated to one of his senior subordinates. They used their judgement as to how far out to launch or whether to launch at all.[4]  There was only one beach where the amphibious force commander refused to make that decision or delegate it to a senior subordinate, and that was Omaha Beach. Hall, who viewed the DD tanks as impractical gimmicks, ended up fobbing the decision off on very junior officers with woefully unclear guidance.

The origin of what would become the heart of the problem lay in report from then-Lieutenant (Junior Grade) Dean Rockwell[5] (US Navy) and Major William Duncan (US Army).  Duncan was the Executive Officer of the 743rd Tank Battalion but had been temporarily detailed to be the school commandant for training the Army DD tank crews and for preparing the newly arrived DD tanks.  Rockwell, commanding the newly created LCT Group 35 (part of LCT Flotilla 12), was charged with supporting the school’s training while also training LCT crews for their role in launching DD tanks.  Their reports, both signed on 30 April 1944, were clearly written in concert and differed only in minor details.  Both reports stated that the decision to launch the DD tanks should be the responsibility of a suitable Army officer.  Neither report mentioned any role for the Navy in such a decision.  To quote Duncan’s recommendation:

“(b)  That an Army officer who has worked with DD’s and knows the sea conditions which are favorable to DD’s give the decision as to whether the DD’s will be launched or carried directly to the beach by the LCT.”[6]

Presumably, MAJ Duncan felt that those risking their lives in the DD tanks would be the men best equipped to decide what risk the sea posed.  And that logic is attractive.  But it is doubtful that an Army officer who has undergone just one or two weeks of training (which was all the tank company commanders had), half of which did not include open water launching, would be qualified as to what differentiated Force 3 from Force 4 conditions just by sight (Force 3 being the recommended upper limit for safe launches).  Moreover, he would be completely unqualified to judge the nature and strength of crosscurrents off the beach, which consideration, as it turns out, was as important a factor in the loss of the DD tanks as were the waves and winds.  Clearly these are factors the naval officers would be far more able to judge, and Duncan was in error suggesting the Navy be relieved of the responsibility. Duncan was also in error recommending the decision be solely left to a junior Army officer, as it would turn out, the most senior Army officer afloat with the DD tanks would be a captain.  

Rockwell’s report included much the same recommendation, but it also revealed the Navy’s reluctance to shoulder any responsibility in the matter.

“Inasmuch as the Army is desirous of launching, if at all possible and feasible, the DD tanks on D-Day, an Army officer who is thoroughly cognizant of the limitations and peculiarities of said tanks should make the decision, in case of rough sea, whether or not that tanks shall be launched or taken directly to the beach.” [7]

To crudely paraphrase, ‘it’s the Army’s pet idea and I don’t want anything to do with that decision.’ As we’ll see, he later changed his tune when trying to explain away the results of 6 June.

The issue of who would make the ‘launch or land’ decision eventually reached LTG Bradley.  Bradley’s position on the matter differed from that of Duncan and Rockwell.  Bradley recognized that the ultimate decision on delivering the DD tanks was fundamentally a Navy obligation, though necessarily with the advice of an Army counterpart.  Although the DD tanks were something of a doctrinal odd duck, it was solely the Navy’s unchallenged responsibility to get the Army ashore, and by extension in the case of the DD tanks, to decide whether launching or landing was the more effective option given the conditions on D-Day. As a result, on 17 May Bradley sent a letter on the subject to RADM Kirk, Commander of the Western Naval Task Force. Kirk’s two subordinate task forces were responsible for the Omaha and Utah operations, thus he was RADM Hall’s immediate superior.  Quoting from that letter:

“Although the control of DD tanks in the final analysis remains the responsibility of the Corps Commander concerned, it is appreciated that the decision to beach the LCTs is a responsibility of the Naval Task Force Commander and must be the result of close collaboration with the Corps Commander.”[8]

In other words, while the Army had a big stake in the decision and should have input, ultimately it was a Navy responsibility to make the ‘launch or land’ decision.  To facilitate knowledgeable Army input to that decision, two days before Bradley sent his letter, V Corps (the Omaha Landing Force) had directed Colonel McLaughlin be assigned to the command ship USS Ancon “as he will be the specialist to advise CG Force O in regard to launching DD tanks.”[9]  COL McLaughlin was the commander of the 3rd Armored Group, the parent headquarters of the two tank battalions which furnished the DD companies for Omaha Beach, and he had been closely involved monitoring Duncan’s school.  He, being the “knowledgeable officer”, was therefore positioned to advise the V Corps Commander, who in turn would advise the amphibious task force commander in his decision—the latter man being RADM Hall for Omaha Beach.

Bradley’s letter went on to address an additional, related issue that seems to have arisen.  His closing sentence to that letter read:

“It is believed that to delegate that authority for either of the above decisions to Commanders of craft would result in uncoordinated and piecemeal attacks.”

We don’t know exactly what sparked this concern or who might have wanted to delegate the ‘launch or land’ decision to craft commanders.  A literal reading of both Rockwell’s and Duncan’s reports recommended the decision fall to an Army officer “who had worked with DDs” (Duncan’s words, though Rockwell used similar language) which would have precluded any Navy participation in this decision.  Only one Navy order had been issued by the date of Bradley’s letter, and that was Kirk’s Operation Plan No. 2-44 (for the Western Naval Task Force (WNTF)), dated 21 April1944, and it made no mention of an option to land DD tanks directly on the beach, much less did it identify who would make that decision.[10]  How this concern may have reached Bradley isn’t clear (I suspect it came from COL McLaughlin), but he clearly saw the folly in such an idea.  Almost all of the designated LCT officers-in-charge (OICs) were of the lowest naval officer rank—ensign (officer grade O-1)—recently commissioned and with little leadership experience and even less sea experience.  To entrust to these men a decision involving the fate of two thirds of the initial armor support would be irresponsible.  But to be clear, Bradley was not just casting aspersions on junior naval officers.  The phrase “uncoordinated and piecemeal” would have equally applied if the decision were to be entrusted to junior Army officers, as the senior tank commanders aboard on D-Day (company commanders of grade O-3) were just one grade higher than the two most senior LCT commanders.  This was a decision that demanded older, wiser and more experienced officers than would be found aboard those LCTs on D-Day.

In summary, Bradley insisted on two points: 1) It was a naval responsibility, with due consideration given to Army advice; and 2) It should be made at the amphibious task force command level; delegating that decision to a junior naval officer in Wave 1 would be a mistake.  He would be proven absolutely correct.

The Best Laid Plans . . .

There is no record of RADM Kirk’s reply to Bradley’s letter, but we can make an inference from what Kirk did next.  On 22 May—five days after Bradley’s letter—Kirk’s headquarters issued “Change Number Three 3 to Naval Commander, Western Task Force Operation Plan No. 2-44.”  It stated in part:

“Assault Force Commanders may break radio silence after H minus 120 [0430 hours] for communication in connection with launching DD tanks.”

To be clear, the senior Army officer was termed the Landing Force Commander; the term ‘Assault Force Commanders’ referred to the senior Navy officers—Hall (Omaha) and Moon (Utah).  So, in that change, Kirk was clearly authorizing Hall and Moon to use radios to contact the LCTs (or the LCT flotilla commanders) to inform them of the results of the ‘launch or land’ decisions.  And they could make this decision as early as 0430 hours.  It would seem Bradley’s wisdom was endorsed by Kirk.

But just the opposite policy eventually took root in Hall’s assault force, and it came about in a vague way.  When Hall issued his Operation Order No. BB-44 on 20 May[11] (two days before Kirk’s clarifying order on radio silence regarding DD tanks), it contained these specific instructions to the commanders of Assault Groups O-1 and O-2 (paragraphs 3(c) and 3(d) of the base order): 

“Weather permitting, launch DD tanks about six thousand yards offshore and land them at about H minus ten minutes.  If state of sea is such as to prevent their being launched and proceeding to the beach under their own power, land them with the first wave.”   

The Attack Landing Plan for the LCTs (Annex D to Hall’s operations order) contained similar language:

“LCT’s carrying DD tanks launch DD tanks about 6,000 yards from beach in time for them to land at H-10, if state of sea permits swimming. Otherwise LCTs land with LCT(A)s in first wave.”

The good news, therefore, is that Hall’s order did address the possibility of needing to make a launch or land decision. His boss’ original order (RADM Kirk’s order for the WNTF) did not even do that.  This represented a softening of the Navy’s position; they’d bring the DD tanks all the way into the beach in unarmored LCTs, but only if the sea state made it necessary. In the individual instructions to both the Assault Group O-1 and O-2 commanders (the only two assault groups that included the DD/LCTs), Hall’s order used that identical language, thereby effectively delegating the launch or land decision to those two men. Notably, he offered no guidance on whether Army input would be sought or accepted.  While this delegation appears to be clear, an oddity of the naval command structure then came into play. 

The two men designated as the commanders of those two assault groups were also commanders of their respective Transport Divisions. CAPT Fritzsche, as the commander of Transport Division 1 (including the USS Chase, USS Henrico and HMS Empire Anvil) also served as the Assault Group O-1 commander. Similarly, CAPT Bailey, commanding Transport Division 3 (including the USS Carroll, USS Jefferson and HMS Empire Javelin) also served as the Assault Group O-2. And those two men had absolutely no experience with DD tanks.  Furthermore, they were scheduled to be in the area for only about 12 hours before their transports sailed to the UK, at which time their deputies would take over command of the assault groups.  So their stake in the goings-on among LCT skippers was as shallow as it was brief. It was bad enough that Hall didn’t want to make the launch or land decision himself; his delegation of this responsibility to the assault group was just another indication of his careless attitude to the matter.

The common sense alternative would have been to delegate that authority to the two deputy Assault Group Commanders. These deputies were in command of the awkwardly named “Non-Transport Based Assault Ships and Craft” task element within their assault groups, and would be actively working out in the boat lanes during the landings, overseeing movement of craft to and from the beach. Critically, the DD/LCTs were in the task element directly commanded by the Deputy Assault Group commander. Between the craft directly under their commands (the LSTs, LCIs, LCTs and Rhino ferries) and the other craft whose movements they controlled during the landings, they were responsible for 98% of the craft in each assault group. In addition, as they would be located in the boat lanes and would operate far closer inshore than the Assault Group commanders (whose ships would be anchored 13 miles offshore), they would be in a much better position to judge sea conditions for launching. This alternative also would have largely paralleled the policy at the British beaches. 

Perhaps Hall assumed that the two Assault Group commanders would naturally delegate this decision further down to their deputies? If so, he was wrong. 

Further, Hall’s order was critically vague on the key point of what would be an unsafe sea state.  While both Rockwell and Duncan had stated that Force 3 was the maximum sea state for launching, Hall’s order did not include this key decision criterion for his subordinate commanders.  Duncan, as the executive officer of his battalion, would not be aboard the DD/LCTs on D-Day. In this planning vacuum, it appears the only man who would both be present on D-Day in a position to influence things and who was aware of the Force 3 cut-off criterion would be Rockwell. Was it likely that this detail had been informally passed among LCT and tank company commanders? Yes, it seems probable it was; but the failure to record it in the orders created yet another possible point of confusion and error. Instead of a firm, specified decision criterion, the decision would be left to word of mouth and the very uncertain ‘best military judgement’ of very junior officers

Hall’s order followed Bradley’s letter by just 3 days and was published before Kirk issued the change to his order. So Hall’s order could not be expected to reflect any agreement Bradley and Kirk had reached.  Nevertheless, Hall’s original order did contain this provision (Annex H, Communications Plan):

“8. (a) Radio silence is to be maintained by all units of the assault force from the time of sailing up to H-Hour, except for:

“(1) Enemy reports providing the enemy has been clearly identified.

“(2) After “H” minus 120 minutes as ordered by the Force Commander for specific purposes.”

Those were the only two exceptions, and his order did not elaborate on what ‘specific purposes’ the Force Commander might have in mind. So clearly Hall did anticipate being granted authority to break radio silence at H-120 (advance knowledge perhaps coming through staff channels or discussions between Kirk and Hall), but his order did not link that exception to the DD tank decision, which was the specific exception which would appear in Kirk’s change to his WNTF order two days later. Although Kirk’s exception was not published before Hall’s order, when it finally was issued, Hall did nothing to implement it. On 30 May 1944, Hall issued 20 pages of changes to his original Force “O" order (BB-44), but these made no further mention of the radio silence policy, much less link it to the launching of DD tanks. Having delegated the responsibility for the launch or land decision, he failed to delegate the necessary authority to break radio silence to disseminate the decision. And that posed a problem, as any decision on the DD tanks would require radio consultations between the decision makers and radio transmission to the necessary craft and units at about H-90.

The unfortunate reality is that as of 30 May, the date Hall issued the change to his order, he had left the DD tank matter in something of a state of limbo. His lack of concern is perhaps illustrated by his own order. Annex L, Reports Required, listed three pages of items that had to be reported to CTF 124 (Hall) as the operation unfolded. It did not include a requirement to inform Hall whether the DD tanks would be launched or landed.

Apparently, it wasn’t a matter important enough to merit his attention.

Composition of the initial two Assault Groups landing on Omaha Beach. (The Assault Group involved in the landings of the Ranger Task Force is omitted here as they were outside the scope of the DD tank operations.)

Planning, One Level Down

Minor clarity would come from the next level of planning, but in general, the confusion spread a bit further. The commanders of Assault Groups O-1 and O-2 issued their own orders late in May (29 May for Assault Group O-1 and 27 May for Assault Group O-2). 

The order for Assault Group O-1 did not directly address the DD/LCTs.[12] The paragraph listing specified tasks for the Non-Transport Based Assault Ships and Craft (CTU 124.3.3) omitted any reference to DD/LCTs. In Annex C, Approach Schedule, the DD/LCTs were listed as the first wave, however no landing time was listed. Worse, the Approach Diagrams (Appendix 3 to Annex C) also omitted any reference to DD/LCTs. All other references to the DD/LCTs were contained in sections which—strangely—provided instructions to other entities. The most substantive comment regarding DD/LCTs was in Annex F, LCS(S) Employment. The Landing Craft, Support (Small) were 36 foot long craft, and one of their tasks was to lead in the DD tanks to the beach after they were launched. Paragraph 5 of that Annex stated:

“If the state of the sea is such as to prevent DD tanks from being launched and proceeding to the beach under their own power, LCT(DD)s will land them with the first wave.**”

This wording was virtually identical to the general provision in Hall’s order. The two asterisks directed the reader to this footnote:

“** The matter will be decided by the Senior Naval Officer in charge of LCTs (DD), and the Senior Army Officer in charge of DDs.” 

The footnote’s indirect comment was the only mention of who would make the launch or land decision for Group O-1. There were no other directions to the DD/LCT division leader or the Army tank officer regarding their role in this or even citing a decision criterion. The result of this informational footnote is that this order kicked the responsibility down from the Assault Group commander (a Navy captain, O-6 grade) all the way down to a Navy Lt.(j.g.) (O-2 grade) and roped an Army Captain (O-3 grade) into the mix. The Deputy Assault Group commander was cut out of the decision. Needless to say, an informational footnote in an annex dealing with altogether different craft was a totally inadequate way to delegate authority regarding LCTs. There should have been a separate annex, or at least a paragraph in the base order directly addressing the tasks of the DD/LCT unit, and it should have provided instructions, guidance, and—most importantly—specifically delegated the authority. In fact, the absence in this order of any specified tasks, or virtually any consideration, for the DD/LCT element could lead one to wonder if these LCTs were actually operating under orders from another authority. It is only the fact that the DD/LCTs were included in the task organization for the ‘Non-Transport Based Assault Ships and Craft’ element that indicates they even belonged to Assault Group O-1. Furthermore, the small matter of what would happen if the senior Navy and Army officers disagree was politely ignored.  The result of this order was a complete reversal of Bradley’s position.

The operation order for Assault Group O-2 started off better, with paragraph 3 (7) of the base order (rather than buried in an annex) directly addressing the launch or land decision with the by now familiar: [13]

“If state of sea is such that DDT’s cannot be launched, land them from LCT’s with HOW Hour wave.”

But the base order made no reference to who should make this decision or state the decision criterion in concrete terms. The Annex C, Approach Plan, did, however, correctly include the DD/LCTs, noting the DD tanks would ‘unload’ 6,000 yards offshore at H-55. As with the O-1 order, the Assault Group O-2’s Annex F, LCS(S) Employment, included this provision:

“3. If weather conditions do not permit the launching of DDT’s proceed ahead of LCT carrying assigned DDT’s from the Line of Departure to the beach, to land with the FIRST wave.”

But in this order, there was no footnote to identify exactly who would make that decision. In fact, it simply was not addressed anywhere in the order. As a result, the O-2 order was even less satisfactory than the O-1 order.

As far as formal planning was concerned, the operations orders of the two assault groups did little to clarify roles and responsibilities. All that can be said to their credit was that both did address the possibility that they might have to bring the DD tanks all the way onto the beach, but since Hall’s order had already raised that contingency, the assault group’s orders added nothing positive in that regard. At least the O-1 order did indirectly mention who would make the launch or land decision for that group, pinning the rose on the senior Navy DD/LCT officer and the senior Army company commander. But even that was of little help, as those LCTs would be led by Lt.(j.g.) Barry, who informally fell under Rockwell, and who, it would turn out, had his own ideas on who should make such a decision.

The logical assumption is that when the O-1 order mentioned the senior Army and Navy officers, it referred to the senior men in just Assault Group O-1, and their decision would only govern the eight DD/LCTs of O-1. It was, obviously, an order that only governed O-1. From that footnote in the O-1 order, many have assumed that a similar decision process was in effect within Assault Group O-2 — but it must be stressed that the O-2 order neither stated nor implied this. Therefore, such an assumption is not warranted, however tempting it may be. We must look to other sources to try to clarify this.

Further, there is another possible interpretation.  The “the Senior Naval Officer in charge of LCTs (DD), and the Senior Army Officer in charge of DDs” might have referred to the senior officers in the entire Omaha Beach DD/LCT operation. That is, one senior Army officer and one senior Navy officer making one decision for both assault groups.  Rockwell had been the senior LCT officer concerned with the DDs since the inception of training and styled himself the “DD LCT Unit Commander” in his 30 April report on training.  Even though he was assigned to Assault Group O-2 for the invasion, he continued to exercise authority over all the LCTs in both groups, going so far as to designate the division/wave leader for the DD/LCTs of O-1. In fact, he even directed a last-minute switch in the officers commanding two LCTs in Assault Group O-1.  It was Rockwell who had the most experience in the LCT/DD combination, and it was Rockwell who the Navy looked to as the expert on the subject.   Indeed, three of the Officers in Charge of LCTs in Group O-1 addressed their reports to Rockwell as “DD LCT Commander”, “Commander, DD LCTs” or “Commander, DD LCT Group”—even though Rockwell was in Group O-2.  Given that Rockwell’s authority—both formal and informal—extended beyond his mere role within Assault Group O-2, the order was written vaguely enough to plausibly imply he would be the one to make the Navy’s half of the decision for both assault groups.  Having acknowledged that possible interpretation, we will set it aside and proceed with the original interpretation.

The four orders discussed above constitute the sum total of written guidance on the employment of DD tanks and the LCTs that carried them at Omaha. In summary, a vague concept incompletely articulated at the higher levels, became a bit more specific yet at the same time more disjointed and uncoordinated by the time it was articulated in the orders of the two assault groups. Worse, what little that was specified could be interpreted in more than one way. Shoddiness in orders such as this seldom goes unpunished by the gods of war.

The Unwritten Agreements No One Could Agree on Later

Nor would the gods of war pass up this opportunity. They set the god of Chaos on the job, and the god of Chaos convened a meeting to address what the orders failed to do. A warning is in order here. Nothing about this meeting was documented at the time, and that includes the results and decisions it produced. We have three subsequent reports that reference this meeting, and none are consistent. Each report was penned in the aftermath of the D-Day debacle and all were obviously crafted to cast author’s role in the best light. Unfortunately, whatever did happen in that meeting lies at the heart of the DD tank question, and since the actual events of the meeting remain lost in a fog of uncertainty, it limits our ability to draw supportable conclusions.

This meeting supposedly took place while the DD/LCTs were still in Portland Harbor (located in Weymouth Bay), which puts it sometime after 25 May (when the DD/LCTs sailed from Torcross) and before 4 June (the original sortie date). The first mention of this meeting was a paragraph in Rockwell’s 14 July 1944 report addressed to the Commander in Chief, United States Fleet, subject: Launching of “DD” Tanks on D-Day, N. France Operation.[14] In it he stated:

“Before leaving Portland, the question had been raised by this command as to the course to pursue in the event of a sea too rough for a launching. Despite the insistence of this command that a decision be made by one senior Army officer for both battalions, the question of launching was finally left to the senior officer of each battalion, in this case Captain Thornton of the 741st and Captain Elder of the 743rd. This decision was agreed upon by Lt. Colonels Skaggs and Upham, commanding the 741st and 743rd, respectively.”

Much as been inferred from this passage, most of which isn’t justified, so it needs careful examination. At it’s core, this version was an attempt to nullify, or at least alter without authorization, the footnote included in the Assault Group O-1 order. As Rockwell fell under Assault Group 0-2, he certainly had no authority to do that, whatever the merits of his proposal.

Although this passage was later cited as an effort to achieve ‘unanimity of effort’, the fact is that his proposition only discussed how the Army would make the launch or land decision, and included no role for the Navy. In reading that passage, many have inferred that the proposal must have included a counterpart, that is, a single decision-maker for the Navy. But there was no mention of this, and as we’ll soon see, there was evidence this meeting relieved the Navy of any role in the decision. And that outcome, perhaps not so coincidentally, was exactly what Rockwell advocated in his 30 April report on training: that the decision should be strictly an Army responsibility. In this interpretation, the Portland meeting was merely a backdoor gambit to impose his preferred assignment of responsibilities, despite what the orders may have had to say. And this was a second dimension of his effort to nullify the Assault Group O-1 order that it was to be a joint decision by the senior Army and Navy DD/LCT officers of that group.

The above point is usually missed based on Rockwell’s next paragraph which was crafted to make it appear he was a partner in the decision within his own group:

“At 0505 this command contacted Captain Elder via tank radio and we were in perfect accord that the LCTs carrying tanks of the 743rd Battalion would not launch, but put the tanks directly on the designated beaches.”

We will deconstruct that particular sentence in a later installment, so for now I’ll merely note that Rockwell’s report was apparently designed to throw Barry under the bus. That may sound like a very harsh judgement. After all, Rockwell would become a hero for his actions on D-Day, earning a Navy Cross for the decision he made that morning. And as a consequence of his D-Day actions, he was elevated to interim command of then-forming LCT Flotilla 42 in early to mid 1945. And that was an impressive accomplishment. In October 1943 he was merely a newly commissioned ensign, assigned as the OIC of a single LCT. But in the next 18 months he would be put in command of a group of 12 LCTs, and then in command of an LCT flotilla of (nominally) 36 LCTs. [Information on LCT Flotilla 42 is sparse, but according to Rockwell—who is the source of this detail—the flotilla was at Pearl Harbor preparing to sail to the western Pacific when the war ended.] As his meteoric rise was primarily founded on the reports filed after D-Day, it is only fair to examine those reports carefully. And that examination raises serious questions, the first of which was his treatment of Barry.

Recall how the DD/LCTs were organized. The DD/LCT formations for Assault Groups O-1 and O-2 were each based on a division of 6 LCTs from Flotilla 12. In O-1, it was Division 71, LCT Group 36, Flotilla 12. To round the formation out to the needed 8 craft, two LCTs were added: LCT 537 (Div 109, Gp 36, Flot 19) and LCT 549 (Div 111, Gp 35, Flot 19). In O-2, the formation was based on Division 69, Group 35, Flotilla 12. It was rounded out by LCT 535 (Div 68, Gp 34, Flot 12) and LCT 713 (Div 151, Gp 76, Flot 26). So 13 of the 16 DD/LCTs were from the same flotilla as Rockwell. And one oddity stood out in the O-1 force. Although it contained all the LCTs of Div 71, that division’s commander did not lead the O-1 DD/LCT force. Barry, the outsider from Flotilla 19, was put in charge over all of Division 71’s craft, not to mention over their normal leader, Lt.(j.g.) Scrivner. As the outsider, Barry was in a delicate position at best. At worst, he would perhaps stand as a convenient scapegoat—assuming someone might need one. And in that context, it is hard not to view with suspicion the fact that although Barry was still part of Rockwell’s DD/LCT organization on D-Day (though not in his operational chain of command), Rockwell didn’t even bother to obtain Barry’s report before submitting his own. He obtained several reports from Barry’s subordinate OICs before submitting his report, but did not wait for Barry’s. And that’s an important fact, as Barry’s handwritten report (dated 22 July) is the clearest description of result from the Portland meeting as to who would make the launch or land decision. And he directly contradicted Rockwell. Barry stated:

“The senior army officer was the person to decide or not. This was established at the meeting.” [15]

To be sure, Barry was not happy about the launching, but this was not because of who made the decision. While he did think the seas were too high, he was mainly upset his LCTs began launching at the command of the embarked Army unit leaders, and that he was bypassed in issuing those orders. Nevertheless he followed suit. The key fact here is that Barry’s statement corroborates the interpretation made earlier that Rockwell was not just attempting to have one decision-maker for the Army, but to place the sole decision responsibility on the Army. And while he failed in the former, he succeeded in removing the Navy from the process. Exactly as he advocated on 30 April.

Not a single Army person present recorded that meeting or left a record of its decision. The closest we have is a reference in the 17 July Action Report of the 741st Tank Battalion, and we can infer something from it. The 741st was the tank battalion landed by Assault Group O-1 and was aboard Barry’s LCTs. The Action Report stated:

“Capt. Thornton succeeded in contacting Capt. Young by radio and the two commanders discussed the advisability of launching the DD tanks, the sea being extremely rough, much rougher than the tanks had ever operated in during their preparatory training. Both commanders agreed that the advantages to be gained by the launching of the tanks justified the risk of launching the tanks in the heavy sea. Accordingly, orders were issued for the launching of the tanks at approximately H-50.” [16]

Although this paragraph does not mention the meeting in Portland, it described the decision process and responsibilities exactly in a manner that matches Barry’s report. These two sources in turn directly support the earlier interpretation of Rockwell’s report that he was attempting to shift the responsibility completely to the Army.

But none of Rockwell’s chain of command would ever see Barry’s report. In fact, neither Barry’s nor the reports of the other LCT officers-in-charge were official action reports, and none were submitted through chain of command to the Commander in Chief, United States Fleet, as required. Instead, they were kept in Rockwell’s personal papers for five decades. So there was nothing in the record to contradict Rockwell’s vague description of the meeting’s results. To further illustrate the seemingly self-serving and deceptive nature of Rockwell’s actions, we need look no further than the second-to-last paragraph of that report:

“It might be observed at this time that the action reports of all the officers-in-charge of “DD” LCTs in Force O-1 submitted to this command state that they were amazed when the order came to launch.”

This was blatantly false on two accounts. First, we only know that he had four of the eight reports by the time he wrote that. Two reports were undated and two were dated after he submitted his own report. Second, and more importantly, not a single report indicated amazement. Four reports noted that the sea was rough or too rough to launch, two reports indicated the sea had calmed and was not a problem, and two reports didn’t think the sea state was significant enough to even mention. Again, no indications of ‘amazement’. At all. Rockwell seems to have misrepresented the facts to make the case look more damning for those who would read his report. And by retaining these OIC reports in his personal files, his superiors would be unaware of the deceit.

LCDR William Leide was normally the commander of LCT Flotilla 12, and on D-Day commanded the LCTs of Assault Group O-2. In both roles, he was Rockwell’s immediate superior, and he was supposedly present at the meeting in Portland. Leide actually submitted two reports that touched on the DD tank issue. On 29 June he submitted his “Action Report, LCT O-2.” In this report he described Rockwell’s role in this manner:

“2. Lieutenant D. L Rockwell, USNR, in charge of the LCTs carrying the “DD” tanks, was aboard the LCT 535 and with Ensign A. J. Pellegrini, the Officer-in-Charge, made an important decision. The weather was too rough to permit launching, so the tanks were put on the beach, touchdown being made at H-1 minute.” [17]

Interestingly, this report did not mention the meeting in Portland Harbor, and contradicted both Rockwell’s and Barry’s versions. It actually gave all the credit for the decision to Rockwell and Pellegrini, a claim even Rockwell was not bold enough to make. And it was this not wholly accurate claim that would later lead to Rockwell’s Navy Cross as the Navy was looking for something positive to offset the debacle. And by shunning any mention of the Army role in the decision, Leide wrote CPT Elder out of the official version of events, ensuring his own subordinate, Rockwell, would receive all the credit. By the time Leide submitted this version of the events, CPT Elder, CPT Ehmke and LTC Upham would all be killed in combat (the latter two killed on D-Day). So there no one to contest Leide’s inaccuracies.

So at this point, we have three completely different perspectives. Over in Assault Group O-1, Barry said it was solely the Army’s responsibility, which the sparse Army comments corroborate. In Rockwell’s report, he said he initiated the call that resulted in a joint Army-Navy decision. And in Leide’s version, it was solely the Navy’s—that is to say Rockwell’s—decision. Beyond that, Leide’s statement put the initial spin on the story, indicating the decision was solely a Navy responsibility, which was the exact opposite of Barry’s account. With Barry’s version blocked from getting into the record at the time, and the Army participants dead, it resulted in a highly questionable version of events entering the record.

Leide’s second comment on the DD tank matter came as a 20 July endorsement to Rockwell’s report—and again, Leide signed his endorsement two days before Barry’s report was even submitted. This again makes it appear as if there was a conscious and coordinated effort to condemn Barry without letting him be heard. In his endorsement, Leide was now moved to make a stinging indictment of the DD tank program, a position he did not go on the record with before the D-Day debacle. He wrote:

“The notorious deficiencies of “DD” tanks in heavy seas were common knowledge. Meetings were held with all the officers-in-charge of “DD” tanks in Force “O”. It was unanimously agreed that any seas running, the tanks should be brought into the beach. Lieutenant Rockwell, who was Officer-in-Charge for all the training of the LCTs in this program, was specifically instructed that the “DD” tanks of “O-2” were to be brought into the beach. No doubt existed in his mind nor those of the officers-in-charge of what would take place in the event of rough weather. This report clearly shows that an attempt was made by Lieutenant Rockwell to obtain unanimity of action even though he was to lead only the LCTs of O-2 for the assault. It is our opinion that not only a senior army officer, but a senior naval officer should make the decision on launching based on weather conditions.” [18]

This is an exceptionally poorly written paragraph and it it difficult to understand his points. To begin with, in this context “officers-in-charge” is a Navy term for the officer responsible for a smaller craft—such as LCTs—which do not rate a commanding officer. But the full term he used was “the officers-in-charge of “DD” tanks”, which would seem to mean the Army tank officers, as the Navy OICs were in charge of LCTs, not the DD tanks. So the confusion began with the second sentence. His next two sentences hammer the point home that Rockwell and the other OICs (from which we might assume the OICs were indeed the Navy officers, but did they include the DD/LCT OICs of O-1?) knew exactly what to do in a bad sea state, a claim obviously intended to imply Barry used bad judgement, without actually naming Barry. But that is not the relevant point. The crux of the matter was who was supposed to make the decision, which was not specified in the O-2 order that governed Leide, Rockwell and Elder. And Leide pointedly did not mention what the meeting had to say about that. The fourth sentence endorses Rockwell’s attempt to obtain “unanimity of action” but fails to note he only sought that between the Army units, and made no reference at all to any Navy role in the decision, and certainly did not propose a corresponding unanimity of action among the Navy units. And his final sentence is again confusing. As written, it seems to be protesting that the decision had been made solely by the Army officers, and that a Navy officer should have been involved in the decision, apparently criticizing the O-1 decision without actually mentioning them. It is also a bit of disingenuous post-debacle whitewashing. If Leide felt that strongly about it being a joint decision, he should have gotten it written into the orders for his assault group, and the instructions he hammered into the OICs should have mentioned exactly that process. But he plainly did not do the first, and his stern instructions to the OICs mentioned nothing about obtaining a joint decision.

Looking past the confused rhetoric, Leide’s reports made just two points. 1) Success at O-2 was solely due to Rockwell’s judgement, which indirectly reflected credit on Leide as Rockwell’s boss and the man who wisely chose Rockwell for the job and instructed him. And 2) it sought to shift responsibility away from himself for the errors over in O-1 by presenting the case that he was smart enough to properly warn the OICs (to include Barry), but he was disobeyed (by Barry). Whether you take his comments at face value or see them as self-serving statements, it misses the key point. Nowhere did Leide (or Rockwell, for that matter) clearly state what the agreed upon decision mechanism would be. And that is what caused the train to jump the tracks. While Leide’s last sentence—after the debacle—said it was his opinion the decision should have been a joint one, absolutely nothing in his (or, again, Rockwell’s) report indicate they clearly gave such instructions to anyone.

So the reports of Rockwell and Leide confuse rather than clarify. The result—whether intended or accidental—of this muddled discussion was to hang Barry out to dry. Rockwell was portrayed as following his instruction and landing the tanks; Barry was supposedly clear on those instructions, but failed to carry them out. Although it was supposedly “unanimously agreed” and “No doubt existed in his mind nor those of the officers-in-charge,” yet somehow both Barry and the two Army company commanders in O-1 had a completely different view of how it was to play out.

So what really did happen in the Portland meeting? Frankly, we’ll never know. But the results of it are painfully clear. Based on the O-1 order, Barry and Thornton had clear directions to make a joint decision. But after the Portland meeting, they had been convinced to disobey that order and replace it with a unilateral Army decision, which—not so coincidentally—was the exact policy Duncan and Rockwell recommended five weeks earlier. Surely Barry and Thornton didn’t dream up this change themselves, which means they were following the outcome of the Portland meeting, at least as they understood was the result of Rockwell’s wranglings. And since Rockwell and Leide made a point of highlighting their advocacy in that meeting(s), the logical conclusion is that they were primarily responsible for spawning the confusion that would cause the trainwreck. Whatever did happen in that meeting destroyed the single element of the DD/LCT plans that was reasonably clear (the footnote in the O-1 plan), resulting in the worst possible outcome. And the fact that none of the reports from O-1 made it into Rockwell’s and Leide’s reports, or any official record, is significant if not actually damning.

I’ve taken pains to carefully parse the various documents pertaining to the DD/LCT orders and instructions, and I’ve done this for two reasons. First, in the wake of a debacle, it is an all too common human impulse for people to try to make it clear that they had no responsibility for what happened, and if only they had been listened to, the tragedy would have been avoided. And just as frequently, those who rush to establish their innocence in this manner are the ones who actually did share culpability. So the comments of Rockwell and Leide require very close examination to determine exactly what they did say, what they left out, and what can be verified from other sources. Rockwell’s and Leide’s reports do not come off well in such an examination due to their vague and conflicting perspectives, as well as the key points they omit. Barry’s simple and direct statement, backed by the 741st Tank Battalion’s after action report’s comments, appears much more believable.

The second reason for this parsing goes to the human need to project order on a confusing situation. The planning for the DD/LCTs was vague and disjointed, and this was further confused by the equally vague and contradictory comments by Rockwell and Leide. So a partial fact applying to one unit is naturally seized by analysts and extrapolated to apply to throughout the units involved, when in fact there is no basis for that. Or the analyst seeking to make sense of ill-worded statements might interpret them to corroborate each other, because that would seemingly establish consistency and order where in fact there was none. My objective has been to avoid assumptions which cannot be clearly supported by a close examination of what was said, what was accurate and what was left unsaid. I think this approach provides a better perspective, as it avoids the trap of becoming prisoner to one’s own assumptions, hastily made at the outset of analysis. While I do offer my conclusions, the primary goal is to provide the reader all the pertinent information for his or her own conclusions.

Lax Command, Doubtful Control, and No Communications

The final aspect of this comedy of errors was one Rockwell and Leide pointedly ignored in their reports. That was communications. Although all the LCTs had been equipped with radios when they arrived in the UK, the naval orders imposed radio silence, so how would Rockwell take part in any decision or pass orders to his LCTs? While Hall’s order did note he could grant exceptions, Rockwell made it clear he was not authorized to use his radios before the first landing, which was a point he stressed in his oral history. So Rockwell was obviously not the beneficiary of Hall’s exceptions. Similarly, the Army had also imposed radio silence. Annex 15, Signal Communications Plan, of the 1st Infantry Division order [19] stated:

“3.x.(2) Silence may be broken in the assault phase as follows: . . .

“(b) By leading Army assault units on contact with the enemy.”

Normally, the senior Army and Navy officers in a wave would be located in the same craft, so coordination between the two would merely be a matter of face to face discussion. But another disconnect in planning had resulted in none of these leaders being in collocated in either Assault Group O-1 or O-2 (an error we’ll cover in detail in another installment). So all the wrangling over who would decide what for which element was rather pointless without a means to communicate. Although Rockwell in his report said he contacted Elder by tank radio, which indeed happened, that decision to break radio silence was taken under the pressure of the imminent landing, whereas breaking radio silence contrary to orders was not likely to be a planning assumption during the Portland meeting.

This simple matter of communications, and the fact that the key Army and Navy commanders were not collocated, puts the lie to the post-operation inventions contained in Rockwell’s and Leide’s reports. In fact, the mere idea that one officer could decide for both battalions and convey that decision to the tankers, in the absence of radio communications, was preposterous considering the distance there would be between the LCTs of the two assault groups. And it would be equally preposterous to assume one Navy counterpart would be able to make a corresponding decision and confer with his Army counterpart under those same circumstances.

As noted earlier, the Army neither commented on nor even acknowledged such a meeting at Portland. Their silence on the topic at least had the benefit of not trotting out rather transparent self-serving excuses. But to be clear, the Army’s skirts were not clean in this process. The operations order for the 741st Tank Battalion (Field Order #1, 21 May 1944) did not address the launch or land question at all. Neither, as far as I can tell, did the order for the 743rd Tank Battalion. Nor did the operations orders for the 3rd Armored Group, the 1st Infantry Division or the Vth Corps. And in this vacuum of guidance, the Army battalion commanders may have been at a loss for guidance when they were confronted by Rockwell’s proposal at the Portland meeting. Regardless, they bear a large part of the responsibility for accepting the sole decision-making role without Navy input.

For those unfamiliar with operational planning, subordinate units are very often authorized to directly deal with each other to coordinate aspects that require cooperation or interaction (the well known ‘direct liaison authorized’, or DIRLAUTH). If fact this kind of direct coordination is usually necessary in any order. But the nature of this supposed meeting at Portland certainly fell well outside that category. For one thing, its object was not merely coordination, rather it appears to have been a conspiring to induce personnel assigned to Assault Group O-1 to disobey provisions of the Assault Group O-1 order. More importantly, there was no consensus on anything that resulted from the meeting, and nothing recorded during it. At best, this was a shoddy example of staff work.

By degrees, RADM Hall’s planning and orders process had resulted in the almost the exact situation Bradley had said was unacceptable: the decision to launch or land had been successively delegated to the lowest level. Not only that, but a close examination of the actual events will show that the decision was left to the Army, a point the later Navy reports would seek to cloud. Certainly, Bradley and the Army chain of command were partly at fault, leaving the matter too much in the Navy’s unwilling hands and not advocating strongly enough for its own interests. But in the final analysis, the largest share of the blame must rest on the shoulders of RADM Hall for his unwillingness to be appropriately involved with the DD ‘gimmicks’ and for his failure to ensure the orders he and his subordinates issued were clear, consistent and properly supervised during execution. He was, after all, the only one of the five assault force commanders who lost control of of his DD tanks on D-Day.

A Shore Too Far

One last point needs to be made regarding the various orders before we move on.  In their 30 April reports, both Rockwell and Duncan recommended that the DD tanks be launched no more than 4,000 yards offshore.  That caution was initially seconded by the chain of command.

During Exercise Tiger, the pre-invasion rehearsal for Utah, MG Collins (commanding the VII Corps) was concerned enough to want to see for himself how the DD tanks handled:

“To check their operation during one of our Slapton Sands exercises I put off in a small boat from our command ship Bayfield with our G-3 and went forward with the line of LCTs (landing craft, tank) carrying the DDs of the 70th Tank Battalion, attached to the 4th Division. Good-sized waves were pitching the LCTs about as we approached the shore and lowered the gangplanks to put off the DDs. From close alongside I watched the tanks drive off the ends of the gangplanks, their canvas collars barely avoiding gulps of water as they plunged overboard. Once the DDs settled down they rode very well. But I decided that I would insist that the Navy take the LCTs with our DDs as close to shore as possible on D day before dumping them off, a provision that proved both a lifesaver and a DD saver on D day.”[20]

Bradley, too, was concerned about their seaworthiness; although the seas were acceptable when the DD tanks were launched during Exercise Tiger, by the end of the day, the waves were disturbingly white-capped.[21] 

When Exercise Fabius I (the rehearsal for the Omaha landings) took place during the first week of May, the DD tanks of both the 741st and 743rd Tank Battalions were launched just 3,000 yards off the beach at Slapton Sands.  (Their role in the exercise was limited, as they did not leave the water’s edge, and soon moved off to their base in the adjacent village of Torcross.[22]) 

So, it would appear all due caution would be heeded in launching the DD tanks.  It is surprising, then, that the Navy—which doubted the seaworthiness of DD tanks—elected to launch them from much farther away.  Kirk’s WNTF order specified the DD tanks would be launched 6,000 yards offshore, which was actually 2,000 yards farther offshore than the line of departure.[23]  Hall’s order also specified 6,000 yards.  The British beaches proposed even farther out, with instructions for Sword and Gold Beaches that DD tanks be launched at 7,000 yards.[24]  It isn’t clear what drove these Assault Force Commanders to extend the launching distances.  As far as can be told, Ramsay’s order did not mention the topic at all. Of course on D-Day, the relevant British officers used their own judgement whether to adhere to the 7,000 yard guidance.

In a later installment we’ll briefly review the success or failure of the DD tanks on the other beaches to see what impact these extended launching distances may have had.  For now it suffices to note that Hall, who was a skeptic on the viability of DD tanks, acquiesced in the decision to launch at twice the distance used during the Fabius I rehearsal, and at a distance 50% greater than Rockwell and Duncan recommended as the upper limit.  For a man who doubted the practicality of the ‘gimmick’, his indifference to the project seems to have done more to harm than help their chances.

Acknowledgements.
While researching this Omaha Beach Series, I have come in contact with several excellent researchers, and as good researchers do, we shared our finds. In the case of this DD Tank series, I owe a tremendous debt to Patrick Ungashick whom I stumbled upon while we were both delving into the subject. Patrick had managed to dig up a trove of Lt. Dean Rockwell’s personal papers which Rockwell had provided to Steven Ambrose. Any serious study of the DD tanks question must include these Rockwell papers, and I would have been lost without them. My sincere gratitude to him. Patrick has a book coming out this June which uses WWII case studies as a teaching vehicle for management decision making. One of those case studies focuses on, of course, the DD tanks at Omaha Beach. Patrick and I take somewhat different approaches to our analyses, and our conclusions are somewhat different, but I wholeheartedly recommend his upcoming book: A Day for Leadership; Business Insights for Today’s Executives and Teams from the D-Day Battle, or one of his other fine books. Thanks, Patrick!

FOOTNOTES

[1] For a discussion of Hall’s career up to his assignment to the European Theater of Operations, see Susan Godson’s Viking of Assault, Admiral John Lesslie Hall, Jr., and Amphibious Warfare.  University Press of America, Washington, DC, 1982

[2] For a discussion of Hall’s attitude to his superiors, see Christopher Yung’s Gators of Neptune; Naval Amphibious Planning for the Normandy Invasion.  Naval Institute Press, Annapolis, MD, 2006.  For his opinion of Kirk, Eisenhower and Ramay, see pp13-14.  For his opinion regarding a separate command for Utah beach, see pg. 86-87.  In turn, Ramsay’s opinion of Hall was little better, pg 87.

[3] Hall’s second endorsement (dtd 22 Sept 1944) to Commander, Group 35’s memorandum, subj: Launching “DD” Tanks on D-Day, NEPTUNE Operation, dtd 14 July 1944.

[4] Yung, pp 180-182.

[5] Rockwell was promoted at some date between this 30 April report and his subsequent 14 July report on the landings.

[6] Memorandum For:  Commander, ELEVENTH Amphibious Force.  Subj:  Results of Training, Tests and Tactical Operations of DD Tanks at Slapton Sands, Devon, England, during the period 15 March – 30 April 1944, dated 30 April 1944, para 8(b).  RG407, Entry 427d, NARA.

[7] Letter to:  Commander ELEVENTH Amphibious Force, Subj:  DD LCT Operations, Evaluation and Results of, dated 30 April 1944, para 3(e). RG407, Entry 427d, NARA.

[8] Headquarters, First U. S. Army letter to Naval Commander, Western Task Force, subj: Launching of DD Tanks, dtd 17 March 1944. This letter reference an earlier letter on the same subject which was dated 24 April 1944. [RG407, Entry 427d, NARA] In this context the “Navy Task Force Commander” refers to RADM Hall and RADM Moon (at Utah Beach), who were the counterparts to the two Army Corps Commanders.

[9] Headquarters, V Corps Staff Routing Slip, Subject: DD Tank Training ‘O’ Operations, dtd. 15 May 1944, note 2, from G-3.  RG402, Entry 427D, NARA.

[10] Kirk’s WNTF Operation Plan No. 2-44 was issued on 21 April 1944. Apparently the lack of guidance in that order regarding DD tanks rang an alarm within the First U.S. Army. Three days later, Bradley sent a letter to Kirk with the subject “Launching of DD Tanks”. Although that letter is not available, we know it was sent because it was referenced in Bradley’s 17 May 1944 letter of the same subject. Because that 24 April letter is missing, Bradley’s specific concerns at that earlier date are not known. But it indicates concern with the general matter as early as a week before Duncan and Rockwell sent in their reports on training.

Commander Task Group 125.5, subj:  Action Report, Operation Order BB 3-44 of Assault Force “U”, Western Naval Task Force, Allied Naval expeditionary Force, dtd 12 July 1944.  In the event, the decision at Utah was changed by the deputy assault group commander to compensate for the late arrival of the LCTs carrying the DD tanks.

[11] Eleventh Amphibious Force (TASK FORCE ONE TWO FOUR) Operation Order No. BB-44, dtd 20 May 1944. [RG38, Entry A1-352, Box 197, NARA]

[12] ComTransDiv 1, Operation Order 3-44, dtd 29 May 1944. [RG38, Entry A1-352, Box 318, NARA] Several titles were typically used for naval units, and they can be confusing to the uninitiated.  Transportation Division 1 was a unit of attack transport ships, and for this operation became the headquarters around which Assault Group O-1 was formed, and that assault group’s designation within the task force structure was TF 124.3.  Similarly, Hall’s ELEVENTH Amphibious Force was the headquarters around which Assault Force Omaha was built, and it had the task force designation TF 122. 

[13] ComTransDiv 3, Operation Order N0. 4-44, dtd 27 May 1944. [RG38, Entry A1-352, Box 318, NARA]

[14] Commander, Group 35 memorandum, subj: Launching “DD” Tanks on D-Day, NEPTUNE Operation, dtd 14 July 1944. As with most US Navy reports, it originally read NEPTUNE Operation, but NEPTUNE was redacted and replaced by a hand written “N. France”, apparently to maintain secrecy of the NEPTUNE code word.

[15] This is a handwritten two page document subj: Action Report “DD” Tanks, dtd 22 July 1944 and addressed to Lt. Rockwell. It was included in Rockwell’s personal files which he provided to Steven Ambrose, and which Patrick Ungashick obtained and was kind enough to share with me. This document and the rest of the LCT OICs’ reports can be found in the Robert Rowe collection at Carlisle Barracks.

[16] Headquarters, 741st Tank Battalion memorandum to the Adjutant General, U. S. Army, subj: Action Against Enemy/After Action Report, dtd 19 [illegible, believed to be’ July’) 1944. Available online from the Combined Arms Research Library, Fort Leavenworth, KS. https://cgsc.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p4013coll8/id/3512/

[17] Commander, LCT-6 Flotillas 12 and 26, memorandum to Commander in Chief, United States Fleet, subj: Action Report, LCT “O-2,” dtd 29 June 1944.

[18] Leide’s first endorsement endorsement (dtd 20 July 1944) to Commander, Group 35’s memorandum, subj: Launching “DD” Tanks on D-Day, NEPTUNE Operation, dtd 14 July 1944.

[19] Headquarters, 1st U. S. Infantry Division, Field Order No. 35, Force “O”, w/changes, dtd 16 April 1944. Available at the First Division Museum at Cantigny digital archives. https://firstdivisionmuseum.nmtvault.com/jsp/PsImageViewer.jsp?doc_id=5d51b39f-52d3-4177-b65e-30b812011812%2Fiwfd0000%2F20141124%2F00000201

[20] Collins, J. L,. (1979) Lightning Joe: An Autobiography. Plunkett Lake Press. Kindle Edition, pg. 257.

[21] Bradley, O., (1999) A Soldier’s Story.  Penguin Random House, pg. 270.

[22] Jones, C., (1946) The Administrative and Logistical History of the ETO, Part VI, NEPTUNE: Training, Mounting, The Artificial Ports,” Historical Division, United States Army Forces, European Theater, Pg 269.

[23] WNTF Operation Plan No. 2-44, Appendix 2 to Annex G, dtd 21 April 1944

[24] Instructions for Juno DD tanks were contained in Joint Operating Instructions No. 32, Conduct of DD Tanks, which is missing from the archives.

The Duplex Drive Tanks of Omaha Beach (a) Limited Means and Makeshift Solutions

In the introductory post to this Omaha Beach Series, I stated that Operation OVERLORD’s planning had begun as an under-resourced concept, an error later exacerbated by the necessary — but belated — expansion of the size of the landing force from three to five divisions.  The available resources had been inadequate for the three division concept as it was planned, and the expansion of the assault force would strain shipping almost to the breaking point.  Indeed, the frantic efforts to find the necessary additional resources had a trickle-down impact throughout planning for Operation NEPTUNE[1] and in many cases at least partially hobbled the attacking forces.

It only seems appropriate that this, the first of these deep-dive explorations, should focus on the first wave to land on Omaha Beach.  This wave would include the sixteen Landing Craft, Tanks (LCTs) that were to carry in 64 duplex-drive tanks (DD tanks).  For those unfamiliar with such equipment, LCTs were flat bottomed barges, sometimes called tank lighters, designed to land vehicles and personnel on a beach.  There were several models, but the LCT(6) version — the type used in this first wave — was about 120 feel long, was crewed by one officer and eleven sailors. It could carry as many as four M4 Sherman tanks, was slow (8 knots when empty) and handled open seas rather poorly.  Yet the LCT was absolutely essential for a successful amphibious landing.  The DD tanks were a modification of standard M4 Sherman tanks that gave them limited ‘swimming’ capability for use in assault landings.  Essentially, the tanks were fitted with canvas screens or curtains which would create something like a bathtub configuration that would displace enough water to make the tanks float.  For propulsion the tanks were fitted with two propellers in addition to their tracks, hence the term duplex drive.  It was a fragile system and fit only for relatively calm seas. As it would turn out, such would not be the case with the seas off Omaha Beach on 6 June 1944. 

The plan was that the tanks would be launched from LCTs about 6000 yards offshore and swim into the beach, landing at five minutes prior to H-Hour (H-5 minutes).  Two companies of DD tanks (a total of 32 tanks) would land on the eastern half of Omaha beach to support the 16th Regimental Combat Team (16th RCT).  Their eight LCTs belonged to Assault Group O-1.  Eight LCTs belonging to Assault Group O-2 would bring in two more companies with an additional 32 tanks on the western half of Omaha Beach to support the 116th RCT’s landings.

The two groups of LCTs – and their DD tanks – fared much differently.   Twenty-nine DD tanks of O-1 were launched between 6,000 and 2500 yards from the beach; 27 sank and only two successfully swam ashore.  Three others were delivered directly to the beach.  In the O-2 group, the decision was made to bring the DD-tanks all the way into the beach and not have them swim in.  The loss of so many DD tanks of the O-1 group was something of a disaster.  Although no formal inquiry was conducted, soon enough explanations were put forward and scapegoats identified.  The crux of the matter focused on two points: the state of the seas, and exactly who made the decisions to launch.  The explanations were pretty much a one-sided affair as the key Army officers involved were soon killed in action or their units were rather more consumed with surviving in the ongoing high-intensity combat, than squabbling about past failures.  The Navy, on the other hand, left a complete record of its view of how events transpired, and that one-sided perspective has dominated the historical narrative. 

It is the challenge of this discussion to examine the plans, the decisions and dispositions which led to the fate of the DD tanks on Omaha Beach, and attempt to arrive at perhaps a more balanced perspective.  But first, it is necessary to understand the LCTs involved and their crews.

The Landing Craft Problem

It’s a truism that big navies love big ships and largely ignore small ships.  That isn’t as shortsighted as it may first seem.  Big ships cost a lot, have long construction times and require major dockyard facilities.  So, it isn’t unreasonable that big ships dominate peacetime construction programs.  Smaller ships cost less, can be built much more quickly and in smaller shipyards, so naturally in times of peace there is a tendency to defer their construction, reasoning that they can be quickly built when needed, or . . . their roles filled by rapid conversion of civilian hulls.

And so it was that the US approached December 1941 with a fairly good doctrinal foundation for amphibious warfare,[2] but a nearly bare cupboard of necessary assault ships and craft.  The swelling pre-war naval construction programs in 1939-41 virtually ignored the smaller classes of ships, especially the specialized landing ships and craft.  In fact, several of the designs that would prove essential to victory originated in Britain, where they had been forced to come to grips with the challenges of amphibious warfare before the US had even entered the war.  The US Navy really only began to fully face up to the problem as plans were being formulated for the invasion of North Africa (Operation TORCH).  The shortfall of assault craft was so severe that the President had to direct a crash ‘tiger team’ effort to rush construction of enough craft to support the landings.  And that effort ended up disrupting almost every major ship construction program to one degree or another.  The ‘reasonable’ pre-war focus on major ship construction no longer seemed so reasonable.

This crash program did succeed in producing enough craft to make TORCH possible, but the new level of sustained production was mostly swallowed up by continuing operations in the Pacific and the Mediterranean. There was only a relatively small amount left over to accumulate a modest reserve in the UK to support an eventual invasion of the continent.  But then another long-standing crisis demanded attention. 

At the start of 1943, the continuing success of the German U-boat campaign made it clear this threat had to be defeated if the Allies were to win the war.  At the Casablanca Conference in January 1943, the Combined Chiefs of Staff declared, “The defeat of the U-boat must remain a first charge on the resources of the United Nations,” which then drove priorities on construction.[3]  Accordingly, the President refocused the “tiger team” on production of destroyer escorts.  The priority assigned to assault shipping and craft was so low that they were not even mentioned in his production plan for 1943.  Despite three major conferences which directed concentration of assets in the UK for the invasion of the Continent, assault hulls simultaneously remained a critical shortage and a low priority for construction.  Even when the US Navy finally agreed to increase LCT production in the Fall of 1943, it was felt the additional craft could not reach the UK in time for the invasion, so NEPTUNE would have to make do with the already scheduled rate of allocations.

And that directly led to the shortfall of hundreds of LCTs and other craft that Lieutenant General Frederick Morgan faced (as discussed in the preceding installment).  One hundred and fifty-six LCTs would eventually be needed for the Omaha Beach landings, but as of 1 September 1943, not one of them was at hand.  Ninety-three of these LCTs hadn’t even been built, and in many cases their crews had not yet even been inducted into the Navy or Coast Guard.  A further 27 would be obtained in a circuitous manner.  They originally had been delivered to the Royal Navy through the Lend-lease Program.  Although hard-used and in poor materiel condition, the decision was made to refit them for various specialized roles and then ‘reverse Lend-lease’ them back to the US Navy, to be manned by green crews.  The transfer would occur none too soon.

The only veteran LCTs would be the 36 craft from Flotilla 18, which had been put in service between August and November 1942 and had served in the Mediterranean.  The problem with this flotilla was that they originally had been allocated to Operation ANVIL, the plan to invade the south of France simultaneously with the Normandy landings.  It was not until late March 1944 that Eisenhower finally had to admit the two invasions could not be supported and cancelled ANVIL.[4]  LCT Flotilla 18, and other assault vessels, were moved to the UK where they were able to participate in the final round of invasion rehearsals.

What of the LCTs allotted to the DD tank landings?  These would all be new construction with equally new crews.   The following chart lists the LCTs and the date they were accepted from the shipyards.

This is a somewhat bizarre allocation of craft.  Considering this would be the very first wave of the landings — carrying in the 64 DD tanks upon which the infantry and engineers would rely so heavily for fire support — not a single veteran craft or crew would be assigned to the task.[5]  The naval commander for Force O (the amphibious force conducting the landings at Omaha Beach) was Rear Admiral (RADM) John R. Hall, Jr.  As we’ll discuss in later installments, placing the newest craft with greenest crews in the lead waves for the most critical roles was something of a theme in Hall’s planning for NEPTUNE.  The two tank battalions embarked in these LCTs were at least two years in service and well trained.  Placing their fate in the hands of greenest LCT crews was a gamble.[6]

The good news about the selection of these LCTs was that they all came from just two flotillas — excepting just two from a third flotilla — which should have aided cohesion.  The bad news was that the flotillas were just as new as their craft and crews, so there was little in the way of organizational cohesion to fall back on.  The matter of command effectiveness was complicated by the fact that the leader of the ill-fated LCTs of the O-1 group was from Flotilla 19, while six of the eight LCTs in his group were from Flotilla 26.  This did little for continuity of command and would be further complicated when he was directed to switch to another craft in his group late in the game.

When considering the dates these LCT were accepted by the Navy from the yards, it would be easy to conclude that the majority of the crews would have six months or more to gain experience with their craft and in operating within their flotillas before D-Day.  But that is misleading. 

The dates listed above are when the LCTs were accepted from the builders’ construction yards.  They then had to be shipped or sailed to the port of departure for the UK.  Some LCTs would move as completed craft on the decks of the larger Landing Ships, Tanks (LSTs); these could be partially outfitted in the US before being hoisted aboard their LST.  But the number of LSTs allocated for Europe was limited, so most of the LCTs could not be assembled when loaded on typical cargo ships.  That wasn’t a major problem. LCTs were constructed in three sections specifically for ease of movement on Liberty ships; they could then be bolted back together once they arrived overseas.  And this is how most of the new construction LCTs arrived in the UK.  The new craft would arrive at a departure port in the US, be broken back down into three sections and loaded as deck cargo on a Liberty ship. This consumed a bit more time, but economized on shipping, which, with the continuing U-Boat losses, was the primary constraint. The wait for available shipping and the period in convoy across the Atlantic consumed more time.  Once arriving in the UK, the LCTs had to be reassembled, which was done either in a British shipyard, or by a newly assigned crew.  The crews had been trained in the Chesapeake Bay, shipped separately overseas and often only first saw their new craft on arrival in the UK. 

After assembly came outfitting and a brief shakedown cruise, if they were lucky.  From there it was back to the yards to correct any materiel deficiencies, and then mandatory time in a shipyard to make six important modifications required for operations in the ETO.  These included everything from longitudinal stiffening of the hull, modifications of the ramp and addition of radios.[7]  Assuming all this went as planned, the crews took over and sailed for whichever port was home to their new flotilla.  In many cases, this trip was their first experience on the open ocean.  To give you an idea of how green the crews were, one craft left the Thames estuary and mistakenly crossed the English Channel and sailed into German-occupied Boulogne, where they were promptly captured.[8]

All of the foregoing consumed months, leaving little time for the new crews and craft to absorb their new duties and the skills needed for working within their flotillas.  Speaking of the final full scale rehearsal for the Omaha Landings (Exercise FABIUS I, 3-6 May 1944) RADM Hall noted in his report:

“Unfortunately, due to the late arrival of the landing craft in the Theater, plus the necessity of alterations and repairs to put those already present in the best possible condition for the assault, only between sixty and seventy percent of the landing craft which eventually took part in the assault under Force “O” took part in this exercise.”[9]    

As we’ll see, the 16 DD LCTs destined for Omaha Beach had a little luck in that regard.

The DD Tank School

As with so much of the D-Day preparations, the DD tank effort was a last minute, rushed affair.  Because there were no DD versions of the M4 Sherman in the UK, limited training was conducted from the middle of January to the middle of February 1944 on the British DD version of the Valentine tank. Major (MAJ) William Duncan, executive officer of the 743rd Tank Battalion, had attended that training with a few men from his unit and was selected to establish a DD tank training school.  The school would train two tank companies from each of three tank battalions.  The 741st and 743rd Tank Battalions were tagged for Omaha Beach, and the 70th Tank Battalion for Utah Beach.  Meanwhile, the Navy’s Lieutenant (Junior Grade) (Lt.(jg)) Dean Rockwell, commander of Group 35 of Flotilla 12, was charged with providing the landing craft to support MAJ Duncan’s training, as well as training the LCTs for their role in the invasion. The school was set up at Torcross, adjacent to the Slapton Sands training area, with the LCTs based out of the nearby city of Dartmouth.

COL Severne MacLaughlin, (commander of the 3rd Armored Group, to which the 741st and 743rd Tank Battalions belonged) provided an outline for training in a 27 February memo, which initially focused only on his two battalions.  The tank companies would arrive without tanks; their DD tanks would be issued at the school as they arrived from the States.  MacLaughlin hoped the training could be conducted from 20 March to 4 April assuming the tanks had arrived by then.  The training would last five days for each of his two battalions.  However, the first 15 DD tanks were not scheduled to arrive until about 15 March, and ten of them were to go to the British.  After arrival, the tanks required several modifications (to include “modifications accomplished to struts to avoid sinking vehicles”!), so the initial five tanks might be available for the start of training on 20 March, with the next shipment of 24 DD tanks due to arrive from the states by the start of April.[10]  

[Images by Dr. Dan Saranga via The-Blueprints.com]

Launching DD tanks was a delicate and tricky operation, with far more ways it could go wrong than right.  The canvas flotation screens could be easily snagged and ripped by fixtures in the LCT during loading.  And to avoid damaging the tanks’ propellers, the LCT had to be backing at 1,600 rpm while the tanks actually drove off the ramp.  When the tanks left the ramp, they initially dropped down into the water until the screens provided enough buoyancy to halt the downward travel and lift them them in the water to the point of stability.  The problem was, at the point the tanks left the ramp, they were only partially immersed, and the initial downward plunge from that height was so deep that the sea could overflow the canvas screens, resulting in a sinking tank.  In an attempt to fix this, special ramp extensions were hurriedly developed that would support the tanks until they were deeper into the water, so the initial plunge would not be so bad.  These modifications delayed how soon the selected LCTs could be available to support training. 

Film clip of a DD Tank launching from an LCT and sinking.

As a result of these delays for both Army and Navy equipment, initial training would get off to a slow start, necessitating a longer training plan.

By the end of April, formal training had concluded and on 1 May, Duncan and Rockwell submitted reports to their respective superiors.  The reports were obviously tightly coordinated and the two officers were in agreement on all significant points.  Rockwell reported he had trained 23 of the 24 LCTs required to land all three battalions’ DD tanks, and urged they be dedicated to the mission for the invasion.  He also claimed 1,087 tank launchings from LCTs with only two tanks lost and no personnel casualties.  Duncan’s report noted that 250 DD tanks had been received and prepared, with 100 used in training.  His training results included over 1,200 launches from LCTs, 500 launches from land and 800 hours of water navigation.  He also reported six cases of carbon monoxide poisoning (nonfatal), three tanks lost and three killed.[11]

Of the several comments and recommendations the two made in common, three would turn out to be significant: 1) the DD tanks should be launched no more than 4000 yards from the beach; 2) the decision to launch should be made by the senior Army officer, and 3) the DD tanks be limited to a Force 3 wind and sea.

There is some conflict in the records whether DD tanks were employed in either of the two major rehearsals for Utah and Omaha Beach, due to the security concerns over these top secret tanks.  In fact, on 25 March, MG Heubner (commanding the 1st Infantry Division) recommended that the DD tanks not be waterborne for the upcoming rehearsal and instead should operate from their training site at Torcross.[12]  On the other hand, Rockwell’s report specifically mentioned 31 DD tanks launching as part of Exercise TIGER (the Utah Beach rehearsal).  It is believed the 1st Division’s DD tanks did participate in Exercise FABIUS I (the Omaha Beach rehearsal) but I have not located a source to verify that.

After formal school ended, the DD tanks continued training of one sort or another in preparation of the invasion, including sight alignment and check firing of their new guns.  Rockwell continued training LCTs, including the last of his 24 primary craft (LCT 713).  In addition, he trained several backup LCTs.  As the plans worked out, all of the initial 23 LCTs he trained (and the late arriving 713) were kept together for the D-Day mission.

The entire effort was a last minute and hurried affair, beset by late arriving tanks, a crash training schedule and green Navy crews.  But the men who had been made responsible for getting it done had performed their best to make it work.  The question was, would that best be good enough?

But Why Bother With DD Tanks?

Given the late and chaotic nature of the DD effort, it is fair to ask, why was it even necessary?  And to answer that, we need to address the not so minor issue of bombardment. 

Unlike some Pacific islands, where naval bombardment could stretch for days without fear that the isolated defenders could be reinforced, in Normandy every minute after discovery of the invasion fleet could be used to rush enemy reserves to the threatened beaches.  Hence, landings on the Continent needed to be scheduled to touch down as soon after dawn as other considerations would permit.   For D-Day, those other considerations included preparatory air bombardment, naval bombardment and the tide.  This allowed only about 40 minutes for preparatory air and naval bombardment, ceasing at about H-Hour when naval firing would shift to inland targets.  That wasn’t much time.  In theory, if your allotted bombardment time was short, you should compensate by increasing the number of barrels firing.  But Neptune was working on a shoestring here, too.  Between Utah and Omaha Beaches, only 3 old battle ships, 1 monitor, 8 cruisers and 20 destroyers were allotted.[13]  By comparison, the invasion of Saipan was scheduled just one week later.  Its bombardment force included seven new fast battleships, seven old battleships, 11 cruisers and 23 destroyers firing over multiple days.  Having gained momentum in what would prove to be a long series of amphibious assaults in the Pacific, the US wasn’t especially keen to divert ships and lose that momentum just for the sake of a 40 minute bombardment in what might well be the last amphibious assault in the ETO.

So, the Western Naval Task Force was faced with too brief a bombardment window and far too few barrels.  Several measures were taken to try to fill this gap.  A number of LCTs was converted to carry 1,064 rockets of five-inch diameter, and nine of these craft were allotted to Omaha Beach.  It was intended they would fire their rockets just before the first wave landed. In addition, 24 small Landing Craft, Support (Small) (LCS(S)) were each equipped with 24 rockets, which they would fire as they escorted the first waves into the beach.  And additional LCTs would be loaded with Army self-propelled howitzers, which would provide artillery support afloat.  These were good efforts to fill the bombardment gap, but these craft were not stable platforms, and they lacked sophisticated gunnery controls that might ensure accuracy. 

That then left the option of fire support ashore.  Having tanks ashore early is always a good idea, as any infantryman can tell you.  In the case of the Omaha landings, this need was greater due to the limited sea-based bombardment.  Normally, one battalion of tanks would support a division (of three regiments), but for Omaha Beach there would be a tank battalion supporting each assault regiment.  The trick was, how to get them ashore.  There were only enough up-armored LCTs (termed LCT(A)s) to land one company from each battalion directly on the beach (along with one tank dozer in each LCT(A)), and even these were pressed into the fire support role.  Elevated platforms were built at the front of these craft to enable the forward two tanks to fire over the bow ramp during the ride into the beach.  As early as December 1943, the Army was casting about for more makeshift solutions, even considering light tanks for the first wave.  But these were only armed with 37mm guns, which were deemed inadequate. A month later, the DD tank concept was being seriously considered (which spurred MAJ Duncan’s attendance at the training that month).  Not only would DD tanks avoid having to run unarmored LCTs into the beach in the first wave, but it was hoped the unexpected sight of them crawling out of the sea would have a demoralizing effect on the defenders.

And so it was that the late and hurried DD tank effort was yet another result of launching NEPTUNE on resources that were barely adequate.  No one was entirely happy with this hodge-podge approach.  As RADM Hall put it:

“The Force Commander [talking of himself in the third person] acquiesced reluctantly in both the decision to employ tanks and artillery firing from landing craft, and to land tanks in the first wave.  He ultimately agreed because he realized the necessity for more firepower at this stage of the assault than could be supplied by the Naval craft then available.  He was then, and still is, doubtful of the efficacy of DD tanks and tanks firing from LCT(A)s landing in the first wave on strongly defended beaches.” [14] 

In light of these constraints, the Allied naval commands took pains to point out that the effects of the bombardment were likely to be limited.  Although the bombardment was expected to have a “neutralizing” effect, they wanted it clearly understood that in this case, “neutralizing” meant a stunning effect, not a destructive one.  The Army had similarly cautioned that the “drenching fire” mission of its wave 1 and 2 tanks was intended to stun and suppress, not necessarily destroy.  Perhaps the cumulative effect might be greater when combined with the attack by the heavy bombers of the US Army Air Force, but no one at the higher levels harbored any delusion about the expected results.  Unfortunately, many of the assault troops would later report they had been incorrectly assured the German defenses would be destroyed.   

As the shortcomings in planning and early errors in execution began to pile up, success of the landings in turn hung more heavily on the success of the DD tanks.

FOOTNOTES

[1] A note about codewords.  OVERLORD and NEPTUNE were closely interrelated and often used interchangeably.  OVERLORD was the umbrella plan for the assault on the continent and defeat of Germany.  NEPTUNE was the codename for the plan for the amphibious assault on the Atlantic coast of France.  In this installment, the focus of discussion centers on the amphibious landings, and therefore examines the NEPTUNE plans.

[2] At least theoretically.  It would take several actual landings by Army and Marine divisions to hone the theoretical doctrine into a practical system.

[3] Memorandum by the Combined Chiefs of Staff, “Conduct of the War in 1943”, 19 January 1943.

[4] Renamed Operation DRAGOON and rescheduled, these landings took place on 15 August, using some of the assault shipping that had been employed in NEPTUNE.

[5] The 16 LCTs carrying in the wading tanks and tanks dozer scheduled to land just minutes later were in even worse condition.  Originally given to the UK under the Lend Lease program, these LCT had been modified with additional armor and returned to the US for various fire support roles.  All of these were delivered to US units during the first half of 1944, necessitating the formation of scratch crews which had either minimal or no training on the craft.

[6] Hall was an experienced amphibious commander, having commanded an assault force in the Sicily invasion (Operation HUSKY), and before that had been Admiral Hewitt’s chief of staff for the North African landings (Operation TORCH).  He had been the Eighth Amphibious Force commander in the Mediterranean before he was transferred to become the Eleventh Amphibious Force Commander in the UK.  As COM Eleventh PhibForce, he was selected to lead the Omaha landings.  

[7] Six major modifications had to be performed on the LCTs for the DD tanks.  In additional, all LCT engines had to be overhauled in preparation for the assault.  See Report of Commander, Amphibious bases, UK, titled “A History of the United Stated Amphibious Bases in the United Kingdom”.  Dated 1 November 1944.  Pg. 61.

[8] This anecdote was recorded by Charles Lilly, Jr. in his account of his war service.  He was the Officer in Charge of LCT 637 on D-Day.  Although LCT 637 was delivered to the Navy on 19 January 1944, it did not join its flotilla until the end of April, missing the major rehearsals, and had just 3 weeks to work up before embarking cargo for the invasion.  Fortunately, the 637 was not one of those supporting the DD tanks.

[9] COM 11th PHIBFOR (Hall).  Report of Ops Period 6/4-29/44-Assault on Vierville-Colleville Sector, Coast of Normandy, France.  Dated 27 July 1944.  Pg. 88.

[10] Commander 3rd Armored Group (MacLaughlin). Memo, subj: DD Tank Training, dtd 25 March 1944.

[11] The difference in losses resulted from one non-training accident when an impromptu demonstration was put on for a visitor. The tank swamped.

[12] Commanding General, 1st Infantry Division (Heubner). 1st Endorsement, dtd 25 March 1944, to Commander, 3rd Armored Group memo, subj:  DD Tank Training

[13] The monitor (the HMS Erebus) was a flat bottomed ship boasting just a single turret with two 15 inch guns (same as found on some battleships).  It was specifically designed for shore bombardment.  The total of destroyers includes three British Hunt class escort destroyers.

[14]  Op cit, Hall, pg 101.

Planning for Operation OVERLORD; When Objectives Exceed Resources

Insignia of the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force

It was late September 1943, and British Lieutenant General Frederick E. Morgan was not entirely a happy man.  As a result of the Casablanca Conference (14-24 January 1943, codenamed SYMBOL),[1] the western Allies had affirmed their commitment to “an invasion in force” on the Continent in 1944,[2] and as a tangible example of that commitment had directed the creation of a planning staff to prepare for that invasion.  As the commander of that future invasion had not yet been selected, in the interim the staff would be headed by the position called the Chief of Staff to the Supreme Allied Commander (designate).  General Morgan was tapped for that job, and both he and his staff would be referred to by the acronym COSSAC.  As there was not yet a Supreme Allied Commander (nor would there be one for about nine months), Morgan was at something of a loss for clear guidance from above.

His charter was broad:  to plan for “A full scale assault against the Continent in 1944, as early as possible.”[3]  Beyond that, the combined US and British Chiefs of Staff had little to offer.  Initially he had not been given any idea what forces would be available for the landings, except that when it came to naval forces, he could only count on such shipping as would be available in the United Kingdom at the time the invasion would be launched – and as seen above, that date was another item left unspecified.  Morgan was also hampered in that his new position was merely as a planning and coordination element, one that had no command or executive authority.  Still, at least it was a start.

Morgan and his new staff – which only began forming in mid-March and did not hold its first meeting until 17 April - did have the advantage of a wealth of intelligence, several studies and a few plans developed earlier by various commands for various contingencies, all of which were related to some degree with landings on the Continent.  COSSAC also benefitted from the lessons of the failed Dieppe Raid.  Drawing from those sources and COSSAC’s own analyses, Morgan was able to eliminate the Dutch and Belgian coasts and focus on the French Coast.  Of course, the selection of a landing area was necessarily influenced by the size of the force in the initial assault wave as well as the size of the immediate follow-on forces, and the size of both of those were limited by the assault shipping that would be available.  And, again, both the size of these forces and amount of assault shipping to carry them were constraints which the Combined Chiefs of Staff had neglected to specify. 

Lieutenant General Sir Frederick E. Morgan

Lacking guidance on the forces available for the landings, Morgan’s plan assumed an assault force of four divisions followed by an immediate reinforcement of six more divisions.  These figures had been used in the most recent planning effort— Operation SKYSCRAPER—before COSSAC assumed responsibility for the planning.[4]  But of course they were only an educated guess as there were many variables that could not be anticipated, not the least of which was future enemy strength and dispositions many months in the future.  While the British Combined Commanders had previously rejected SKYSCRAPER’s four-plus-six division force level, COSSAC’s analysis considered it reasonable given the variables and unknowns, and since no better estimates were available, COSSAC incorporated the four-plus-six force level as one of its own planning assumptions.

Morgan’s outline plan was fairly reasonable, given the limitations under which he worked, though there were some weaknesses.  A major problem was, and would remain, the availability of assault shipping.  In May COSSAC’s chief naval planner conducted a study that concluded there was enough sealift for four divisions in the assault, but only enough to permit simultaneously embarkation for one follow-on division—instead of six—to land the second day.  

Until that point, there had been just one significant amphibious assault in the Mediterranean Theater, with another soon to begin.  Both of these operations targeted areas that were geographically isolated to a greater or lesser degree from the enemy’s sources of reinforcements and supplies.  French possessions in North Africa were separated from France by the Mediterranean Sea, and Sicily was separated from Italy by the Straits of Messina - both of which were subject to interdiction.  More importantly both of those invasions faced defenders whose willingness to fight was questionable.  In North Africa, there were no German forces defending the invasion beaches, and it was hoped the Vichy forces that were there would join the Allies (after some regrettable initial fighting they did).  And in Sicily the bulk of the defenders would be poorly-equipped, low-quality Italian units with inadequate supplies and even lower motivation.  Despite those strategic advantages, the Allies allotted more divisions to the assault for each of those two operations than what appeared to be supportable for the long awaited and much heralded Second Front invasion on the Continent.  The well-developed rail network in western Europe could theoretically simultaneously support the movement of seven German reinforcing divisions, which, given the shortage of Allied shipping, would decisively outpace efforts for the Allies to reinforce and expand a continental beachhead.  

The idea of assaulting the Atlantic Wall - where there were far more German forces close at hand, and much greater ability to reinforce the defenses - with less strength in the assault than previously used in much more favorable conditions, did not appear to be a sound strategic decision.  But such were the constraints under which Morgan had to labor.

[The shortage of assault shipping and craft was tied to production priorities, which in turn were dictated by decisions on the matter of the Alliance’s grand strategy.  Although those decisions would seem very shortsighted to those involved in OVERLORD planning, they were the results of trying to harmonize and rationalize many competing demands and often nearly irreconcilable national positions.  It is remarkable that so little in the way of disconnects between strategy and materiel resulted.  I will defer the discussion of the background concerning the shortage of assault shipping and craft to a later post.]

If that was not bad enough, worse was to come.  At the Third Washington Conference (12-15 May 1943, codenamed TRIDENT), the US Joint Chiefs of Staff anticipated that by 1 April 1944 there would be 36 divisions available to support the invasion.[5]  But, again, shipping was the limiting factor.   The British presented the shipping bill for the invasion of the Continent: 8,500 ships and craft were needed to simultaneously lift ten divisions (four in the assault and six immediate follow-on).  In the subsequent tension-charged discussions, the figure was “talked down” to 4,000 ships and craft.  In addition, the debate was reopened concerning the rationale for four divisions in the assault.  This discussion, however, was not focused on augmenting this assault force, but to revise downward the proposed force.  As a result, the Combined Chiefs of Staff limited Morgan’s planning to that which could be supported by the 4,504 ships and craft assumed then to be available for the invasion.[6]  This, the Combined Chiefs believed, would enable a simultaneous sealift of five divisions (three in the assault and two for immediate follow-on) with two more divisions following using the D-Day shipping upon its return.   To partially compensate, the Combined Chiefs authorized the use of two airborne divisions, though at the time of their decision, there was not sufficient airlift for even one division. Twenty more divisions would be available to feed into the bridgehead in the ensuing months, but none of these were made available for the initial invasion.[7]

As a rough indication of the relative commitment to this invasion of the continent, the conference allocated 10% fewer major assault ships (APA, AP, LSI and LSH) to the operation than they allocated to the upcoming invasion of Sicily (45 vs 50).  The strategic priority the Combined Chiefs had given the operation clearly was not matched by the necessary priority on resources.

The conference agreed on a proposed date of 1 May 1944 and settled on the codename OVERLORD.[8]  Morgan received the TRIDENT directives in May 1943 and set to developing an outline plan using the latest guidance. 

This map was produced by COSSAC to depict the factors that were considered in selecting suitable landing beaches. Their analysis settled on three beaches in the CAEN Sector for the three-plus-two division assault plan. With the expansion to a five division plan, a beach just inside the COTENTIN Sector was added; this would be area of the UTAH landings.

Being an outline plan, it did not attempt to determine the details of troop dispositions and maneuvers, though it did attempt to allocate major formations to major objectives and forecast some sequence in which critical objectives would be secured.  Morgan set his planners to work on refining the proposed landing sites and finally settled on three:  Courseulles-sur-Mer in the east (entry point for operations aimed at Caen); Vierville-sur-Mer/ Colleville-sur-Mer to the west; and Arromanches-les-Bains in the center.  Given his limited assault force, he had to abandon the idea of a landing west of the Vire estuary (the eventual Utah Beach area).

The shipping problem continued to hamstring planning.  The inclusion of essential non-divisional assets (corps- or army-level armor, antitank, antiaircraft units, etc.) took away lift from that allocated for the assault and follow-on divisions, thereby slowing the reinforcing schedule.  In addition, many of the smaller craft, which the Combined Chiefs had included in their analysis, were not capable of crossing the Channel so their capacity figures could not be used in deployment lift calculations.  Also, essential minor operations to seize bridges or coastal defense batteries reduced airlift for the main airborne landings; he concluded he had sufficient aircraft only to lift 2/3 of a single airborne division at once. 

The late-August 1943 Quebec conference would hold surprises – both good and bad - for COSSAC.[9]  The latest version of the outline OVERLORD plan was presented to the conference and approved, although COSSAC’s predicted rates of advances after D-Day were deemed too optimistic (and events would prove they were!).  Nevertheless, the Combined Chiefs directed him to continue planning and accepted his preconditions for success, which required efforts to attrit the Luftwaffe and tie down or divert German Wehrmacht forces.  Realizing the assault force might be too weak, Churchill suggested it be increased by 25% and include a landing west of the Vire estuary, which Morgan had originally wanted but could not do with the forces allocated. General Marshall (Chief of Staff of the US Army) agreed that strengthening the assault would be a sound move.[10]  As good as that appeared, there were two drawbacks.  First, that suggestion was not put into writing as a directive.  Second, no additional shipping was made available, so any increase in the size of the invasion was rather illusory.  While Morgan considered the prospects for success were good (on the assumption German air and ground forces were whittled down in advance), he advocated an increase of at least 10% of shipping just to ensure the three-plus-two division concept could be on the beach by daylight D+2.[11] 

The Combined Chiefs’ appetite for the operation was growing, but they still would not fully face up to the bill.  Various plans and studies were suggested to comb out craft from other activities and increase production, but most of these were futile or had marginal impact, and it was felt no increase of production would reach the UK until April 1944.  As his draft plan stood, its success depended on transferring substantial shipping from the Mediterranean, something that was far from guaranteed.  Still, Morgan now had the latitude to explore the concept of a larger invasion, which would permit identification of the problems that would entail, and perhaps lead to steps necessary for solutions.

On the downside, one of COSSAC’s requests had come back to haunt them.  They had requested a feint against southern France, timed to coincide with the OVERLORD landings in an effort to tie down German divisions.  The Combined Chiefs endorsed the idea and directed GEN Eisenhower [12] to draw up plans.  When he submitted his plans in November, however, it was for an actual landing, seizure of key ports and offensive follow-on operations to the north.  While there were sound strategic reasons for this operation (codenamed ANVIL), as far as COSSAC was concerned, it was just one more demand on the very same limited pool of assault shipping on which they depended to drawing from in the Mediterranean.  Thus it was that Eisenhower, the commander in the Mediterranean, would be for a time the worst obstacle for Eisenhower the Supreme Commander in the UK.   In fact, ANVIL would have crippled the chances of success for the Normandy landings had not Eisenhower received permission to cancel ANVIL, which he did just a bit more than two months before OVERLORD. 

The concerns raised by Churchill and Marshall would soon be validated by real events.  On 9 September 1943, Operation AVALANCHE struck the beaches of Salerno, Italy.  Despite an initial landing of the better parts of four divisions and strong attachments, swift German counterattacks came so close to splitting the beachhead that at one point evacuation of half of it was considered.  And this despite the fact that the Germans had the rugged terrain working against their armored thrusts.  In light of this, the three-plus-two division force slated for OVERLORD could hardly be considered adequate to ensure success.  And yet neither greater force allocations nor shipping assets were devoted to OVERLORD.  

With Sicily serving as a cautionary example, Morgan used his apparent authority to study the options for expanding the invasion.  He decided that efforts should not be bent towards adding another assault division, rather to provide the assets necessary to overcome the shortfall in shipping for the two follow-on divisions in the initial three-division assault alternative.  The problem of LCTs perhaps best illustrates the general scale of shortfalls facing COSSAC.  The TRIDENT conference had allotted 653 LCTs for the invasion, a figure COSSAC considered a dangerous minimum.  Almost immediately those began to melt away.  By the end of September about a quarter of those LCTs had been diverted.  Forty-four had been committed to anti-submarine net defense operations at Scapa Flow and many others were due to be converted to conduct fire support missions [13] – a task the Combined Chiefs had failed to anticipate and for which no new construction was authorized.  While the latter group of LCTs were still part of OVERLORD planning, their decks could not be counted on for lift purposes.

On 30 September 1943, Morgan stated that there would be a deficit of 251 LCTs merely to fully embark the two follow-on divisions so that they could be landed on D+1 to support the three-division assault concept.  To support the lift requirements of a four-division alternative, there would be a deficit of 389 LCTs.  “In addition, for a four-division assault there would be a shortage of more than 150 support craft using LCT or equivalent hulls.” 

And that’s where I will leave this introductory review, as it amply illustrates the minimalist planning assumptions and inadequate resource allocations that would dominate preparations for the eventual 6 June landings.  Among the allied leaders there was the growing realization that not enough had been done to ensure success, but little would be done to find solutions for the next few months.  The result of this would be that perhaps the dominant theme of OVERLORD preparations would be the continuing last-minute attempts to obtain critical ships, equipment and units, and slap them into the operation in the nick of time.  This problem would be vastly complicated with the arrival of Eisenhower and Montgomery from the Mediterranean, in January 1944.  The two commanders were of the same mind: the operation was too weak and on too narrow a front.  Therefore, the initial assault would be increased to five seaborne divisions and three airborne divisions, and would target five invasion beaches (to include one west of the Vire estuary to facilitate operations against Cherbourg).  Strategically it was a sound decision; the weakness of the three-plus-two force option would have had much too low a chance for success.  At the same time, however, this decision had seen the shortfall in shipping go from ‘critical deficiency’ to ‘near impossibility’.

It's true that many amphibious assault operations had successfully been planned and executed in far shorter windows than the five months Eisenhower had left to him (5 January to 6 June- including the delay from the planned 1 May target date).  But in most cases, the choices of objectives were limited in scope to what the available resources in theater could support.  But OVERLORD was different.  To gain and secure a lodgment on the Continent in the face of strong German formations, a minimum level of forces and resources would be necessary.  Allied strategists had committed to the operation, but failed to pony up the necessary ante.  The deficit, especially in assault shipping and craft, simply could not be magically produced and delivered to the theater in time. 

Any casual student of OVERLORD is probably aware of the shortfall of adequate assault shipping and craft, as well as the herculean strides that largely overcame those shortfalls (although too often at the last minute and with inadequate means).  What is not commonly appreciated are the more subtle and less recognized impacts of this slap-dash, in-the-nick-of-time effort.  Too often crews or units arrived very late to the party, inadequately trained for their tasks, and in some cases only semi-trained on their own craft.  Too often they were committed to some of the most critical and most dangerous roles in the invasion.  As if that weren’t bad enough, German initiatives (such as the sudden crash construction of beach obstacles) required additional, equally last-minute, responses from Allied commanders, again resulting in inadequately trained units committed to new and critical tasks.

The following series of posts will examine several cases where combat operations during OVERLORD were adversely affected by these last-minute efforts to redeem the shortfalls of planning.  The tactical failures or near-failures that occurred on D-Day as a result of the inadequate planning and resources allocations have generally been glossed over and even completely ignored by many, so they have faded from history.  In that regard, this series will place many of the events on Omaha Beach in their more complete context.  The intent is not to affix blame on individuals (though that will probably happen in selected cases), rather to highlight the complexities of combined and joint planning, and explore the unintended consequences of flaws in that planning.

One final note of caution.  We should never lose sight of the fact that despite everything, the invasion was a success.  They pulled it off.  But in so doing, a far greater burden – undiubtedly too great - was placed on the shoulders of the young Tommies and G.I. Joes who approached the beaches on 6 June, often ill-prepared for the ordeal ahead of them.  That they measured up and succeeded despite all will forever be a testament to their courage and character.

FURTHER READING

• History of COSSAC (Chief of Staff to Supreme Allied Commander), 1943 - 1944. Prepared by The Historical Sub-Section, Office of Secretary, General Staff, Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force. May 1944

• Cross Channel Attack, by Gordan Harrison, 1950

FOOTNOTES

[1] The meeting included U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and their principal military advisors.  Joseph Stalin was invited but did not attend due to ongoing military operations.

[2] Cross Channel Attack, pg.44.  Much of this post is a summary of portions of Cross Channel Attack’s history of the planning leading up to 6 June 1944, with my summary focusing more tightly on the assault shipping and landing craft problem.

[3] He was also charged with two other responsibilities which have been omitted here as they don’t bear on the current theme.  The first was a large deception effort to tie down German forces in the west (Operation COCKADE) and the second to quickly move forces to the continent in the case of a sudden German collapse Operation RANKIN.

[4] This outline plan was codenamed SKYSCRAPER and was produced in early 1943.  It was developed by a planning cell working under the directions of the British Combined Commanders, and thus represented a solely British perspective on the issue (the Combined Commanders were essentially the British body equivalent to the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, with the notable exception that the British Combined Chiefs predated the creation of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff).

[5] See “The Trident Conference, May 1943: Papers and Minutes of Meetings”, CCS 215.  CCS 215 also predicted 32 German division in France and the low countries, which could be reinforced to a total of 60 divisions.

[6] The British were to supply 3,257 of these, or 72% of the total.

[7] See “The Trident Conference, May 1943: Papers and Minutes of Meetings”, CCS 242/615. 

[8] OVERLORD was the codename for the invasion of western Europe and the subsequent campaign to defeat Germany, while NEPTUNE was the codename for the amphibious landings in Normandy.  Much of the discussion surrounding assault shipping and craft merges into the realm of what would later become NEPTUNE planning, but for simplicity’s sake, I will use only OVERLORD for the purposes of this article.

[9] Codenamed QUADRANT, held in that city 17-24 August 1943.

[10] See “Quadrant Conference, August 1943; Papers and Minutes of Meetings”, pg. 397.

[11] See “Quadrant Conference, August 1943; Papers and Minutes of Meetings”, C.C.S. 304.

[12] At this point, Eisenhower was the commander of the Mediterranean Theater.  He would not take command of OVERLORD until January 1944.

[13] Such as those carrying hundreds of rockets to lay a barrage on the beaches just before the first waves would land (Landing Craft, Tank (Rocket) – LCT(R)).  There was also a need to use LCTs as platforms for anti-aircraft guns (Landing Craft, Flak - LCF) and direct-fire medium caliber guns (Landing Craft, Gun – LCG).

Omaha Beach in Focus - Series Introduction

Picture taken by Chief Photographer’s Mate Robert Sargent, of the USS Samuel Chase. Image shows Company A, 16th Infantry, 1st Infantry Division landing on Easy Red Beach Sector, Omaha Beach at 7:40 AM on 6 June 1944.

Over the next months I will be posting here a series of articles which will take a close look at selected aspects of the NEPTUNE landings on Omaha Beach on D-Day, 6 June 1944.  I would like to open by claiming that this series includes ‘never-before-seen’ material or ‘newly-found material that had been lost’, or other such spectacular claims which seem to be de rigueur for popular military histories.   While such claims might be true in one or two instances throughout this series, the fact is that surviving historical documentation has been poured over in such depth and such frequency that the documents are wearing thin from repeated handling, and there are very few new revelations to be ‘discovered’.

If that’s the case, then why bother with this series at all?  I suggest there are a couple good reasons.

First is the matter of perspective.  If you want to engage in a nearly futile pursuit, try to find a modern military historian with firsthand military experience.  There are some, but they are too few and too far between.  The generations of historians who had any military service, much less during WWII, have sadly passed away.  In their wake has arisen a field of military historians who rely instead on whatever expertise an advanced degree in history can bestow.  While such a degree, complemented with sound common sense, has turned out many fine works by many fine authors, it also imposes strict limitations on their depth of understanding and analysis in detail.  They have no firsthand idea of how small units operate, especially in combat conditions.  They often have only a surface-deep understanding of tactics and doctrine.  Few have had any experience in leading, managing and commanding large bodies of men and complex organizations.  Few have been trained at the general staff college level, so they lack understanding of how staffs operate or the subtleties of planning.  Even fewer have been trained at the war college level, so they have no firm appreciation of either the Operational Art, or Strategy.  In fact, it’s depressing to see so many of them use the words tactics and strategy interchangeably.

The result of this lack of professional training (in the military sense) limits these academic historians to a 32-bit understanding of a 256-bit subject matter.  And their products often reflect those limits. 

I hope I bring a different perspective to this series.  I was a professional Army officer, entering the service at 17, graduating from the Military Academy at West Point and then serving 22 years as an Infantry officer, complete with the Ranger tab, Master Parachutist Badge and Combat Infantryman’s Badge.  I’ve even had planning experience, ranging from platoon level on the one hand to theater army  level at the other extreme.  So, I hope to provide a somewhat better perspective than many.  Beyond that, a short tour as an inspector general taught me not to focus merely on what happened during an incident, but to look deeper into the causative factors that may have brought about the end result.  And the fact is, the seeds sown by the preconditions before the battle far too often are responsible for the poisoned fruit reaped in combat.  I am not a professional historian and have never claimed to be.  Nevertheless, my perspective may be worthwhile.

The second reason I have for writing this series is historical accuracy.  Despite the amazingly diligent work of hobbyist and professional researchers—and a number of excellent authors—popular knowledge of the landings increasingly has been distorted or falsified by sketchy 5-minute YouTube videos as well as some authors who seek to create spectacular stories at the expense of the facts.  Of course, there are also the Hollywood productions which place entertainment impact over historical reality.  Then there is the ‘regimental history’ version of events which seeks to record the glory and great accomplishments of a particular unit, with just the barest nod to factual accuracy.  I ran into this in several units to which I was assigned over the years.  ‘Regimental history’ may be understandable in its intended role of inculcating martial culture, but it should never be confused with legitimate history.  And finally, popular histories seldom delve deeply into technical military details, so they tend to deliver either a superficially shallow story, or, again, seize on one small aspect and exaggerate its importance to absurd degrees. 

All of these factors have resulted in some fairly incomplete, if not generally distorted views of military history in general, and Omaha Beach in particular.  For instance, the jumbled and scattered landings of the first few waves on Omaha Beach are usually quickly attributed to the unexpectedly strong eastward current and smoke that obscured landmarks . . . and no further thought is given to the matter.  But that ignores a number of decisions during the planning and rehearsal phases that laid the groundwork for failure once the current and smoke were encountered.  Official action reports tend to lay blame at the feet of uncontrollable influences rather than staff and command decisions that set the preconditions for failure.  And so it is that I believe several points merit a deeper analysis.  From an organizational and planning perspective, one would do well to study how and why these decisions were made.

And now for a caveat.  Although the Second Front (the Allied landings in northwest Europe) had long been a point of discussion, and been a subject of studies and limited planning, the actual preparations were very much a hurried and not totally coordinated affair.  Largely this was due to the rather late expansion of the size of the invasion.  It was a critical decision—and absolutely necessary—but it placed significant additional demands on forces and materiel, especially when it came to naval shipping.  The fact that all of these challenges were met in a relatively short time stands as a testament to the exceptional ability of those involved.  It is inevitable, however,  that under the pressures of time, the vast scope of the planning effort, a host of unknowns and an altogether too active enemy commander, that oversights, mistakes and errors in judgement would occur.  The intent with this series is not to find culprits or lay blame (well, with one or two unavoidable exceptions).  Rather it is to identify how decisions conspired to affect some of the more notable events.

I hope you find these articles informative, and perhaps even enjoyable.

CRH

Destroyers’ Inshore Support at Omaha beach - Motion Picture Evidence

Several months ago, I was asked to do some research for a documentary film project on an Army combat cameraman who landed on Omaha Beach on D-Day, 6 June 1944.  As with most of these requests, it ended up involving many, many hours reviewing the scattered film clips and photos that have survived.  Although the invasion was a momentous event, the vast bulk of the visual record consists of some pretty routine, even boring material.  I was trying to track the progress of a specific landing craft, tank (LCT) and identify the time it beached.  Normally, a quick look at an image is enough to let you know that it isn’t relevant and you move on to the next hundred or so images.  So, as I was reviewing a particular film clip shot by an Army motion picture cameraman aboard the LCT, I quickly dismissed the clip; it had been taken too early in the day and the LCT was much too far offshore.  As I was about to fast-forward, something caught my attention.  The clip showed a mass of landing craft milling offshore, part of the backlog that was created when crowded conditions on the narrow beach caused beachmasters to halt further landings of vehicles and equipment. 

But there amid the traffic jam of landing craft was something else altogether.  It was a warship, a destroyer, to be exact.  It was like an elephant that had been overlooked because I was focused on the herd of mice surrounding it.  What stood out was the location of the destroyer.  Destroyers were supposed to operate in the fire support lanes, which looped toward the beach, turning away some five thousand yards or more from the shore.  But in this film clip, the destroyer was much farther inshore.  It was obviously well forward of the line of departure and closer in than any of the landing craft. 

As far as I can tell, that clip represents the only motion picture evidence of one of the most critical, if not decisive actions on D-Day:  the movement of Destroyer Squadron 18 close inshore to pound German defenses.

“Thank God for the U.S. Navy”

If you have read anything about the D-Day landings at Omaha Beach on 6 June 1944, then you are aware of the critical role played by a few Navy destroyers.  With the assaulting regiments largely pinned down at the shingle embankment, no exits yet opened and later waves of men and vehicles piling up at the waterline, things looked very bad from offshore.  That viewpoint may have been a bit misleading, as limited progress was actually being made in the gaps between German strongpoints, but those advances were not apparent from offshore and there is little doubt the landings were in trouble.

Ironically, there was substantial firepower at hand to help the troops struggling to seize the beachhead, but that firepower had been largely silent since the pre-H-Hour bombardment had ended.  Task Force 124.9, the Omaha Beach naval bombardment force, was lying several thousand yards off the beach.  It included two old US battleships, three light cruisers (two Free French and one Royal Navy), nine US Gleaves-class destroyers. and three British Hunt class destroyers.[1]  The US destroyers, which are the focus of this article, constituted Destroyer Squadron 18 (DESRON 18), and included USS Frankford, DD 497; USS Carmick, DD 493; USS Doyle, DD 494; USS Emmons, DD 457 (replacing the damaged USS Endicott); USS McCook, DD 496; USS Baldwin, DD 624; USS Harding, DD 625; USS Satterlee, DD 626; and USS Thompson, DD 627.

Figure 1. The USS McCook, DD 496, showing the configuration of the nine Gleaves-class destroyers of DESRON 18 on D-Day. (NAVSOURCE)

The battleships and cruisers had been primarily engaged with coastal artillery batteries and other targets behind the landing beaches.  Most of the naval gunfire placed on the immediate beach defenses during the pre-H-Hour bombardment had come from the nine US destroyers (employing their four 5-inch guns and in some cases their 40mm antiaircraft guns in the direct fire mode) and the three British escort destroyers (mounting four 4-inch guns).  At 6:25 AM, the destroyers had been ordered to cease fire as the first waves were about to land.

After that, the destroyers had only conducted direct fire missions on the few enemy ‘targets of opportunity’ they could positively identify.  The Satterlee, and later the Harding and Thompson, were able to make contact with the Rangers’ shore fire control party (SFCP) and provided gunfire support that first suppressed defenders so the Rangers could climb to the top of the cliffs at Pointe du Hoc, and then aided the Rangers in repelling German counterattacks.  Beyond the far eastern end of Omaha Beach, Baldwin, Doyle, Emmons and Harding periodically engaged German shore batteries in the vicinity of Port-en-Bessin that just wouldn’t stay dead.  Beyond these few engagements, the destroyers’ guns had mostly been idle.  This was not due to a lack of will or capability, rather a lack of targets, or more precisely, a lack of spotters ashore.  Each ship had been tasked to support fire requests from one or two SFCP attached to infantry battalions coming ashore.  But the ships had been largely unsuccessful in establishing communications with their SFCP teams.  Between casualties in the SFCP teams and waterlogged radios, communications generally failed and the destroyers were mostly blind.  From time to time, they might spot a target of opportunity and engage it, or, taking a clue from the shell bursts of the surviving tanks, bring their guns to bear on the same targets.  But by and large the destroyers had been frustratingly idle, unable to do much to help with the crisis ashore for fear of hitting friendly troops, whose locations were difficult to identify through the smoke and haze from their positions in the fire support lanes. 

Until about 8:30 AM the Frankford, with the DESRON 18’s commander aboard (Captain Sanders), had been overseeing the establishment of the anti-submarine screen north of the Transport Area (which was 23,000 yards offshore).  She then departed and headed inshore where the rest of the squadron was operating, and, according to the ship’s action report, closed within 1200 yards of the beach.  Seeing the situation on the beach, at about 9 AM, Captain Sanders, ordered his destroyers to close into the beach as far as possible to provide fire support.  According to Samuel Eliot Morison, by 8:00 AM some of the destroyers had already moved closer to shore, but now the entire squadron closed in.

Figure 2. This illustration shows the organization of the various naval control measures off Omaha Beach. Note the fire support areas. The destroyers generally operated from within these lanes. (Morison)

To put this in perspective, the fire support lanes in which these destroyers operated, were 5000 to 7000 yards from the beaches at their nearest points.  Twelve hundred yards would put the ship at point blank range as far as their 5 inch guns were concerned.  It also placed the destroyers in dangerously shallow water.  The draft of these ships ranged from a bit more than 13 feet to a bit less than 18 feet (when fully loaded).  McCook, for example, closed to the 3 fathom line (18 feet depth), based on charts whose hydrographical data was none too precise.

When Captain Sanders ordered his ships that close in, he was taking a big risk of grounding and the possible loss of one or more of his ships.  And the danger wasn’t just from running aground.  If one of the destroyers steamed over a sunken LCT or even one of the sunken duplex drive tanks in that shallow water, the result could very well have been a holed hull.  On the other hand, the reward was potentially great.  At those close ranges, ships had far better observation to locate targets on the beach and could better key off the targets the tanks were engaging.  Just as importantly, at those ranges, they could precisely place fire on identified targets, reducing the risk of danger to friendly troops ashore.  CPT Sanders’ decision was bold, but not entirely rash. He had conducted close in fire support in the Mediterranean, so he had experience on his side. His was a classic example of a calculated risk.  And he led by example; his ship reported closing to 800 yards from the beach. Fortunately, while some of his ships scraped bottom, none ran hard aground.

Captain Sanders’ orders were soon given unambiguous endorsement. At 9:50 Am, Admiral Bryant, commanding the bombardment group, exhorted all the ships in his group: “Get on them, men! Get on them! They are raising hell with the men on the beach, and we can’t have any more of that! We must stop it!”

And it worked.  In light of the recent Army loss to Navy in their annual football game, I am not inclined to say much nice about my nautical compatriots.  Nevertheless, justice demands I make this one concession: The Navy may well have saved the day at Omaha Beach.  Certainly, Generals Bradley (commanding the First US Army) and Gerow (commanding the VII Corps and the Army troops landing at Omaha Beach) thought so.  As did several thousand men ashore. [2]  With the destroyers finally able to spot and engage specific German emplacements at absurdly close ranges, enemy defensive fires rapidly lessened and the troops ashore were able to make faster progress off the beach. [3]

Despite the gallant, and arguably decisive, actions of DESRON 18, it was only able to contribute a small fraction of its firepower to the fight. According to Morrison, “Commander W. J. Marshall in Satterlee reported that, owing to want of information, only about 20 per cent of the destroyers’ fire support capabilities were were used.”

I won’t attempt here to relate the fire missions these destroyers executed during this phase of the landings.  Those have been told many times before, and such details are not the focus of this article.  Our focus here is on the visual record of these events.  But I’ll close this section with an excerpt of a letter from Colonel Mason (chief of staff for the 1st Infantry Division) to Rear Admiral Hall (commander of the Navy forces off Omaha Beach):  “I am now firmly convinced that our supporting naval fire got us in; that without that gunfire we positively could not have crossed those beaches.”

(For those interested in a summary of this action, I suggest Destroyers at Normandy, Naval Gunfire Support at Omaha Beach, by William B. Kirkland Jr., or Morison’s  History of United States Naval Operations in World War II, Volume XI, The Invasion of France and Germany.)

Visual Evidence

Until I stumbled on this film, the only images that I had seen of these destroyers in action close inshore at Omaha Beach were still images.  The most well-known were drawings, The Battle for Fox Green Beach and Target of Opportunity, both by Dwight Shepler, a combat artist aboard the Emmons that day.  And I can only recall a single still photo (Figure 3 below). But motion picture film of the destroyers in action?  Not so much.

Figure 3. A destroyer off Dog White beach sector. This photo has been associated with the fire mission conducted by the USS Harding to demolish the bell tower of the church in Vierville in the belief the Germans were using it as an observation post. The request supposedly had been passed from an Army colonel to the captain of LCT 538 who passed it on to the Harding. After approval from higher, at 2:13 PM the Harding expended 40 rounds, destroying the tower and causing friendly casualties. The area was already in the hands of the Rangers and no Germans were in the tower. This is an excellent example of how confusing combat can be, and especially when using naval gunfire to support troops ashore. A similar incident occurred at the opposite end of Omaha Beach when naval shelling of Colleville, which was already occupied by Company C, 16th RCT. Numerous friendly casualties resulted.

Although the Harding appears to be close inshore in this photo this is a bit deceptive, as the relative sizes of the Harding and of the burning Landing Craft, Infantry (LCI) and beached LCT indicate. (Omaha Beach - Vierville)

As I mentioned at the beginning of this article, I did finally stumble on some film of this event while browsing through the excellent holdings on the Critical Past website.  It was clip # 65675051420, titled “United States soldiers loaded in Landing Crafts as they move towards Fox Green Beachhead in Normandy, France on D-Day”, and was just 1 minute and 6 seconds long – including the Critical Past introductory splash screen.  It’s not the best quality film.  Taken from a bobbing LCT, it can be a bit difficult to identify and track specific details, a condition not helped by the camera panning past key parts of the action.  Further, it is grainy footage and the exposure is not the best. 

Figure 4. This image comes from a frame of motion picture film taken aboard an LCT by Technical Sergeant (TSGT) Val Pope, a US Army combat cameraman belonging to the 165th Signal Photo Company. Outlined in blue is the distinctive shape of a Gleaves-class destroyer. It’s impossible to tell from this image how close to shore it is, but it is well inshore of the landing craft seen gathered here, which are seaward of the Line of Departure (4000 yards from the shore). Outlined in red is the distinctive black smoke column of high-explosive shell detonations. (Critical Past)

During this clip, a destroyer can be seen in four separate sequences.  The first sequence runs from the 00:04 second to 00:12 second time mark.  As Figure 4 illustrates, the scene shows the backlog of various landing craft in a holding pattern off Omaha Beach.  Between this log jam and the beach is a lone destroyer; from what little can be seen, it doesn’t appear there are any landing craft shoreward of the ship, but that isn’t certain.  From its shape it is a Gleaves-class destroyer, exactly as we would expect.  Its bow is pointing to the right (west), facing into the direction of the current and this is exactly how the destroyers maneuvered.  For example, the Doyle’s action report included this entry: “Maneuvering ship to stay in position against current which is running west at 2.8 knots. Flood tide."

In the background you can clearly see the bluffs behind the beach.  There are several streams of low lying white smoke, usually a sign of grass fires.  Ignited by the pre-H-Hour bombardment, they proved to be a persistent problem on D-Day, obscuring key navigational landmarks for the first waves.  Atop the bluffs on the left side of the frame is a darker smoke column, more in keeping with the results of high explosive (HE) shell detonations.  The area of the presumed HE explosions are a good distance laterally down the beach from the destroyer, so these impacts are probably the product of a different destroyer.

Figure 5. Taken from a frame just 2 seconds after Figure 4, the camera has panned to the right. The destroyer (again in blue) is now in the left side of the frame. The film coincidentally catches a salvo of naval shells impacting at the far left of the frame before the camera quickly pans away. Note this is not the same area as the black smoke seen in Figure 4. (Critical Past)

At time mark 00:10 of this same sequence, a cluster of HE shells detonates at the top of the bluffs farther to the right.  Because the camera has panned to the right, this new set of explosions is again in the left half of the camera’s frame, but the impact location is several hundred yards to the right (west) of the first HE smoke column.  Again, you can’t see any indication that the destroyer pictured fired this salvo, it is nonetheless the only film I’ve seen that shows both a destroyer and a destroyer’s shellfire during this critical phase of the battle.

The gap in the bluffs visible at the 00:10 mark appears to the entrance to the Colleville Draw (Exit E-3 in the invasion plan).  This would place these ships off the Fox Red beach sector.  The HE detonations seen at that time mark appear to be well to the east of WN60 and the F-1 exit [4], and probably are hitting the bluffs just north of le Grand Hameau and Sainte Honorine.

For the next 7 seconds, the camera is angled to the right (west) and shows little of interest to us.

Figure 6. A closer view of the destroyer in action. In the background is the same stretch of bluffs, showing signs of recent shellfire. Some time has passed since the sequence in Figure 5 was filmed, as indicated by the changed smoke patterns. (Critical Past)

At time mark 00:19, the camera is again focused on the destroyer, which is in the right half of the camera’s frame, and briefly obscured by the passing LCT-626[5].  The contour of the bluffs and the pattern of the grass fire and HE smoke columns proves this is the same scene as in the first sequence.  The destroyer is still pointed to the west.  The camera’s point of view appears much closer inshore; whether that is due to the camera’s LCT moving closer or a telephoto lens isn’t clear.  There are no new detonations visible, but both HE smoke columns continue to expand.  Nor is there a sign that the destroyer pictured has fired a salvo during the 11 seconds of this sequence.  

At the 00:31 mark there is a new scene showing the smoke rising from recent HE explosions on the bluff.  At the very end of this sequence (00:38 mark) at the right of the frame, you can see the two white vertical shapes which are the distinctive funnels of a destroyer.  The sequence ends there. [Note: the film cells available as still images through Critical Past were generated one per second of film. The image of the destroyer’s two funnels discussed in this paragraph fall between the two nearest cells, so it wasn’t possible to include an illustrative photo here. The funnels are briefly visible in the clip.]

The next sequence begins at the 00:40 mark, with another large HE smoke cloud billowing up at the top of the bluffs.  In this case, LCT-623 is in the foreground[6], but no destroyer is visible.

Figure 7. In this image taken from the film’s 55 second mark, a destroyer - perhaps the same one in previous sequences - is moving out to sea and is in the vicinity of the Line of Departure (which was 4000 yards from the beach) or beyond. The second and third gun turrets (mounts 52 and 53 in US Navy terminology) are still trained fore and aft respectively, while the front and rear turrets (mounts 51 and 54) are trained to starboard, and may still be in the process of a fire mission. (Critical Past)

The next sequence begins at the 00:51 mark and shows a destroyer at much closer range.  Even at this distance it is not possible to identify which ship it is.  The nine Gleaves-class destroyers here had nearly identical configurations[7] and the hull number isn’t visible.  Note the point of origin for the black smoke is on the slopes of the bluff, not the top. The volume black smoke indicates a heavy volume of naval fire has been concentrated on the target.  

Also note that in every sequence discussed—save one—all we see are the HE smoke clouds, not the actual explosions as the shells impacted.  There’s a reason for this.  The motion picture cameras used 100 foot reels of film, and there were practical limits on how many rolls could be carried.  The cameraman who filmed this sequence belonged to Detachment P of the Army’s 165th Signal Photo Company, and he was going ashore that day.  Whatever load of film he carried on D-Day would have to last him a few days, until a resupply chain was established. So he had to carefully conserve his film, and not waste it on useless scenes.  With this in mind, we can easily understand why this clip consists of so many short sequences: get the shot, stop filming and look for another interesting scene.

With film being a critical item, our cameraman could not afford to film long sequences in the hope that a destroyer would fire before his roll was exhausted.  The solution was to try to stay ready and focused on the likely action, and start the camera after the boom of the guns signaled the action had commenced.  So it was a case of reactive filming.  Not a very good technique, but considering the circumstance, it was about the best possible.

Recall I said only one sequence actually showed shells detonating.  That was the first sequence, and I believe it was purely accidental.  The sequence began by showing a growing HE smoke cloud – typical of the reactive method of filming that was required.  The camera then panned to the right, briefly seeking some other subject before the sequence cut off.  The shell bursts we do see apparently were captured accidentally, and the fact that the camera quickly panned past the explosions and shuts off indicates to me the cameraman didn’t even know he captured that historic image.

This motion picture clip may not be the most earth-shattering discovery in military history, or even D-Day lore. But it is quite a nice bit of documentation that captures a significant event on D-Day. Choppy, short - almost disjointed - sequences, grainy and with poor exposure. Nevertheless, it is a small and meaningful piece of history, captured as it happened, under difficult conditions. I hope you find it as interesting as I have.

If you are aware of any other motion picture footage of destroyers operating close inshore off Omaha Beach, please be sure to leave a note - and a link! - in the comments section.

Chuck Herrick

FOOTNOTES

[1] The following account omits discussion of the British Hunt class destroyers, Tanatside, Talybont and Melbreak.  Termed ‘escort destroyers’ by the Royal Navy, they were smaller and less heavily armed than fleet destroyers, as befitted their design role as convoy escort ships.  During the morning of 6 June, they participated in the pre-H-Hour bombardment, but then were detached from the gunfire support mission and moved to the outer screening station to join other ships in the anti-submarine screen, as the plan called for.  As a result, they did not figure in the actions that are the focus of this article.  As always, no slight is intended to our gallant British allies, as these ship did credible jobs in all tasks assigned to them.

[2] Of course, the Navy was also responsible for several factors which plagued the landings, so perhaps the credit and debit columns rather balanced out in the end.  I hope to address some of the problems with the naval planning and execution in future posts.

[3] I should note that in at least one instance during this period, a large ship in the bombardment group aided the destroyers battering the German beach defenses.  Morison reported that, “Between 12:23 and 12:30 PM the old battleship USS Arkansas put six 14-inch shells into the German strongpoints at the Vierville exit.”

[4] WN60 was the German strongpoint on the eastern bluffs of the Colleville draw; the F-1 draw snaked up just below the position.  WN stands for the German word Wiederstandnest, literally, resistance nest.

[5] Scheduled to land at H+300 (11:30 AM) in wave 21 for Fox Green beach sector.

[6] Scheduled to land at H+130 (8:40 AM) in wave 17 for Easy Red beach sector.

[7] Eight of DESRON 18’s destroyers had a square-faced bridge, and only the Emmons had the standard rounded-face bridge.  Unfortunately the front face of the bridge in this sequence isn’t visible.