Operation Neptune E-Book

David Wragg

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 454

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

Long-awaited, the Normandy landings were the largest amphibious operation in history. Success was achieved by the advent of specialised landing craft, heavy naval firepower and the creation of two artificial harbours and an underwater pipeline. Operation Neptune: The Prelude to D-Day tells the story of this incredible feat using eyewitness accounts of the landings and the breaching of Hitler's famed 'Atlantic Wall'. David Wragg explores the earlier Allied and Axis experiences with amphibious operations and the planning for Neptune and Overlord. He reveals the naval support needed once the armies were ashore and before continental ports could be captured and cleared of mines, with operations such as minesweeping off the Normandy coast, which led to one of the worst 'friendly fire' incidents of the war. This is the must-read book to understand what made D-Day possible.

Leseprobe

First published 2014

This paperback edition published 2022

The History Press

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© David Wragg, 2014, 2022

The right of David Wragg to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 0 7509 5481 5

Typesetting and origination by The History Press

Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ Books Limited, Padstow, Cornwall.

eBook converted by Geethik Technologies

Contents

Preface

Glossary

Introduction: Assault from the Sea

1 Looking for a Second Front

2 Planning and Preparation

3 The War Within – Battling Leaders

4 Sowing False Leads

5 Debacle at Dieppe

6 Disasters on Exercises

7 Invention – The Key to Success

8 Under the Noses of the Germans

9 Southwick House – The Nerve Centre

10 Confusing the Enemy

11 The Germans Prepare

12 The Naval Action

13 The Assault – The British Sector

14 The Assault – The American Sector

15 The Battle for the Channel Ports

16 Walcheren

17 What Could Have Happened

Appendix I – Before and After Overlord: The Sequence of Events in 1944

Appendix II – British, Canadian and ‘Free’ Warships in Operation Neptune

Appendix III – American Warships in Operation Neptune

Appendix IV – Allied Order of Battle

Appendix V – German Order of Battle

Bibliography

Preface

This is the BBC Home Service – and here is a special bulletin read by John Snagge. D-Day has come. Early this morning the Allies began the assault on the north-western face of Hitler’s European fortress.

The very term ‘D-Day’ has a ring to it, even seventy years and more after the Allied invasion of France. Sometimes referred to as either the ‘Normandy landings’ or ‘Operation Overlord’, it is still known popularly as ‘D-Day’, even though there have been many D-days elsewhere, designating the launch of many operations.

It is impossible, however, to overstate the importance of the Allied invasion of France on 6 June 1944. It was not the end of the Second World War, not even of the Second World War in Europe, and those who thought that Germany would be forced to surrender by Christmas were soon proved wrong. There was much hard fighting ahead, but the balance of power had changed completely and could not be reversed. Germany, which had seemed unstoppable in 1940 with the Allied defeat in the Battle of France, the humiliation of the withdrawal from Dunkirk, all following on from the fall of Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands and Belgium, was now facing a combined British, American and Canadian assault aimed directly at the heart of its strength.

One of the big developments of the Second World War was that assault was no longer over the ground, and even when landings were involved, they were not entirely from the sea. Airborne assault had already proved itself in the invasion of the Netherlands in May 1940. At Crete, where the Germans landed 17,530 men despite heavy losses amongst paratroops and air-landed troops, it was the airborne assault that saved them as the Royal Navy retained control of the seas, despite the losses suffered to Axis air power. Yet Crete was a close-run thing for the Germans, facing British, Commonwealth and Greek forces evacuated from the mainland totalling 35,000 men. What swung the balance in favour of the Germans was that the British and Greek forces had left behind their artillery and anti-aircraft weapons back in Greece, as well as their vehicles and their radios, so they lacked communications, transport and anything other than light weapons.

Operation Overlord was not simply going to be the biggest amphibious assault ever; it was also going to be the biggest airborne assault ever. It was going to have the largest fleet ever providing covering fire and mine clearance, as well as protection on its flanks from attacks by U-boats and E-boats. The latter had already enjoyed their first blood when by chance they happened on an American amphibious exercise and attacked and sank many landing craft.

Leaving nothing to chance in training the troops, a major exercise, ‘Operation Tiger’, was scheduled to run from 22 April to 30 April 1944, with 30,000 troops, who would be exposed to the use of live munitions so that they got used not simply to landing on a beach, but to the sounds and smells of warfare. The exercise was not without incident, with a case of friendly fire on 27 April, but the following day nine German E-boats evaded British patrols and found a convoy of eight landing ships, LSTs, in Lyme Bay. The ships were sailing in a straight line, which made attack easier, and had just one corvette as an escort. In the ensuing battle, two of the LSTs were sunk and one was badly damaged before the attackers withdrew unscathed, leaving 946 men dead and another 200 wounded.

To allow room for such a massive invasion force, the landings had been divided into five landing zones or beaches, each with its own code-name, with US forces taking Omaha and Utah beaches to the west of the British and Canadian forces landing on Gold, Juno and Sword beaches. To many, choosing Normandy for the invasion rather than the Pas-de-Calais, much closer to the English coast, might seem perverse, but short as the channel crossing might have been, it would have been too short of space and congested, with the ships providing easy targets, while the beaches of Normandy offered easier landing grounds.

Originally planned for 5 June 1944, Operation Overlord was delayed by a full twenty-four hours because of the weather. A severe storm had blown up, fortunately detected in time by the meteorologists advising the operation’s commanders, who took the decision to order the delay. It is doubtful if their thoughtfulness was appreciated by those taking part in the landings as, while the storm may have blown over, the sea took much longer to calm down. For those who feel the first touches of mal de mer as soon as their feet touch the deck of a ship, the poor seaworthiness of flat-bottomed landing craft was something from beyond their worst nightmares. These creatures rolled and pitched, water slopped over the sides and onto the decks, and the helmets of those unfortunates aboard saw more use as receptacles for vomit than as protection from shrapnel and bullets.

True, the Germans had already lost North Africa, then Sicily, and were hard-pressed to stop the Allies advancing through Italy, Rome having fallen just two days earlier, on 4 June. Yet, there was the barrier of the Alps and much of northern Italy from just south of Florence in which to hold the Allies. Advancing through Austria meant facing many natural obstacles, and a population that included many supporters of the Nazis. Between France and Germany, the natural obstacles were much less severe and France had a border with Germany. Despite this, it was not to be a clear road through to Germany: even breaking out of Normandy was to prove more difficult than the Allies had first thought.

D-Day was a cataclysmic event: the turning point in the war. It put the Germans under pressure. The code-name ‘Operation Overlord’ was well chosen. This, at last, was the ‘Second Front’ that the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin had been demanding almost since the German invasion of the Soviet Union under the banner of ‘Operation Barbarossa’.

The assault was conducted by both air and sea, and the maritime element was so important that it required its own operation and its own code-name, ‘Operation Neptune’.

Neptune was the biggest maritime invasion in history. It required almost 7,000 ships to land more than 130,000 men on D-Day alone, the overwhelming majority of those engaged in the invasion, with another 23,000 either parachuted in or landed by gliders. They were part of a massive armada of almost 7,000 ships of all types and all sizes. Most were British, American or Canadian, but there were others manned by the ‘Free’ forces of France, Poland, the Netherlands and Norway.

Yet, despite the weather, not everyone was suffering. Many were in high spirits, especially aboard the warships. Lord Lovat commanded the 1st Special Service Brigade, and, as always, he was accompanied by his piper, the Cameron Highlander Bill Millin, who stood in the bows of the brigade’s landing ship in battledress blouse and kilt and played ‘The Road to the Isles’. Two Hunt-class destroyers played ‘A-hunting We Will Go’ over their tannoys, prompting Free French destroyers to play the ‘Marseillaise’ while French matelots danced with excitement and waved at the other ships, thrilled at returning home after four years. Aboard other warships, crews were cheering.

Dice and poker games flourished aboard the American landing ships, the men choosing to gamble using the special Allied occupation currency that had been issued, much to the disgust of the Free French leader, General Charles de Gaulle. This was a show of bravado, as one soldier remarked: ‘All are tense and all are pretending to be casual.’1

Sea power played its part in the invasion, not simply to land troops and tanks on the beaches, or provide covering gunfire, important though that was. First, the Allied navies had to survey the beaches; then clear the mines, right under the noses of the German gun emplacements and immediately before the landing craft and landing ships approached; then guide the assault craft to the shore; and bombard enemy positions so that the invaders had the best possible chance of reaching their initial objectives. The task of the Allied navies did not end with the invasion, as the armies ashore had to be kept supplied and reinforced, so protection from a German naval counter-attack was important. Fuel pipelines, code-named ‘Pluto’, had to be laid. Two ‘Mulberry’ harbours had to be towed across the English Channel in sections and assembled, each the size of the important port of Dover, for centuries England’s main Channel port for those travelling between the British Isles and the Continent.

Overlord itself, of course, had everything. There was deception on the part of the invaders and delusion on the part of the defenders from the very top, Hitler believing that the Allies would return to Europe via Norway. Hitler was not alone in thinking that the Allied assault would come elsewhere. Given the size of the invasion and the resources devoted to it, it seems incredible that the German generals on the ground thought that it was simply a feint, and that the main thrust would come later through the Pas-de-Calais.

It was not, of course, solely a naval operation. Massive air power was deployed to bomb German defences and cut supply lines that could be used by German reinforcements; to provide fighter cover over the invasion fleet, the landing zones and the landing grounds for the paratroops and air-landed glider-borne troops, and tanks air-landed using the mighty Hamilcar gliders; and, of course, air power was needed in the first place to carry those same paratroops and glider-borne troops. Yet, having said that, not quite everything was deployed, for while the Allied navies provided heavy bombardment to cover the landings, the aircraft carrier, that most important of the Second World War’s naval vessels, was absent. Unlike the landings in North Africa, on the mainland of Italy, the south of France and in the Pacific, there was no need for carriers as shore bases were available in the south of England, many of them within 80 miles of the Normandy beaches. In any case, there would have been no room for aircraft carriers to charge around at maximum speed, heading into the wind to launch their aircraft and then recover them as they returned from their sorties.

Planning was beset by competing egos, and by different national priorities. The Soviet leader, Joseph Stalin, whose brutal regime had left his armed services purged of the commanders who could have countered the German invasion of 1941, and who had refused to heed warnings, had pressed his newfound Allies to start a second front almost from the start of the German invasion, ignoring their efforts in the air over Germany, and in the North Atlantic, and even on the Arctic convoys to Murmansk and Archangel, where the weather was as great an enemy as the German Luftwaffe and the Kriegsmarine’s U-boats. Even the Allied invasions of North Africa, Sicily, and mainland Italy had not impressed Stalin.

The Americans had wanted an invasion in 1943, but this was too soon for Britain’s wartime leader, Winston Churchill, whose reluctance and hesitation was born partly from a greater appreciation of the difficulties not just in the invasion but once ashore. Unfortunately, as already mentioned, it was also due in part to the mistaken and impractical belief that invading Italy would provide a path to Germany.

OFFSHORE

The afternoon of 5 June had seen a much more visible Allied naval presence. The fleet of minesweeping flotillas began sweeping from the assembly point, named ‘Piccadilly Circus’, along the ten channels leading to the Normandy beaches. The 7th US Minesweeping Squadron’s USS Osprey struck a mine on its way to the US beaches and sank.

Catching a mine was an occupational hazard of minesweeping, but the German offshore barrage of moored mines running down almost the middle of the English Channel was either badly laid, or laid in patches, or had been much reduced by weather and unfortunate vessels detonating some of the mines. As the channels were swept, more than eighty lighted danbuoys were dropped to provide a clear and safe course for the assault forces. All this was happening as the minesweepers had to adjust their courses and their sweeps as the wind and tide changed. Rear-Admiral Alan Kirk, USN, commanding the US Western Task Force, reported that, ‘The minesweepers were the keystone of the arch, and their task was one of unprecedented complexity.’2

In one sense, the minesweepers were very lucky. By 1940, many of them could clearly see the coast of France, with three hours of summer daylight remaining. They continued their course towards the French coast, expecting at any minute to be engaged by the German coastal batteries, but unable to take evasive action because of the need to remain in the channels being swept. Yet the guns remained silent, even when the 14th Flotilla was so close to the shore, by 2145, that the houses inland from the beach could be clearly seen by the naked eye. It was not for another two hours that any activity could be seen from the Atlantic Wall, and then the target was not the minesweepers but an Allied aerial attack on the fortifications.

The failure of the German gunners to fire at the approaching minesweepers remains one of the great mysteries of the Normandy landings. Some believe that the minesweepers were mistaken for German destroyers – for the RAF made the same mistake a very short time after D-Day.

IN THE AIR

For D-Day, both air-landed troops in gliders and paratroops were being used, and not for the first time by the Allies, as this combination had been used in the landings on Sicily, which were also affected by bad weather. Undaunted, Brigadier James Hill, commanding officer of the 3rd Parachute Brigade, assembled his officers and senior NCOs on the evening of 5 June: ‘Gentlemen, in spite of your excellent training and orders, do not be daunted if chaos reigns. It undoubtedly will.’3

Meanwhile, the RAF was mounting ‘Operation Taxable’, which involved tricking the enemy into believing an invasion force was approaching Cap d’Antifer, north of Le Havre, which was also mined, while motor launches towed reflector balloons intended to create an image of large ships on enemy radar. A similar operation was mounted around Boulogne with Short Stirling bombers dropping window.

At 2300 on 5 June, across southern England people ran into the streets in towns and villages attracted by the roar of hundreds of aircraft engines, to see a vast fleet of aircraft silhouetted against the patchy clouds. More than 1,200 aircraft were in the air carrying the British 6th Airborne Division and the American 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions. The British were headed east of the River Orne so that they could secure the Eighth Army’s left flank and safeguard the bridges. The Americans were heading for the Cotentin Peninsula, their main priority being the causeways across the flooded areas behind Utah Beach.

The troops were flown inland, flying over the heavy coastal defences to land before dawn some miles inside enemy-held territory. Many of these were paratroopers, but others were to be air-landed in gliders detached from their towing aircraft or tugs at around 5,000ft. The objective of using airborne troops was to seize vital points such as bridges, to deny these to the Germans either as they tried to send reinforcements, or in retreat, and to ensure that they would be available for the Allied troops, who were expected, somewhat optimistically, to be soon advancing from the coast.

The gliders were towed by a variety of aircraft, but for the British paratroops the most common towing aircraft was the Short Stirling. Originally created as the first of the British force of heavy bombers, it was soon outclassed by the Avro Lancaster and Handley Page Halifax. Someone in the Shorts design office had made the mistake of giving this large aircraft a mid-wing, dividing the bomb bay into two, rather than the high-wing that enabled its rivals to have a single long bomb bay, so when 8,000lb ‘double cookie’ bombs became available to the Royal Air Force, the Stirling could not carry them. Reputedly the easiest to fly of the British heavy bombers, it was soon relegated to other duties, of which towing gliders was one.

Being towed into action in this way was probably the most comfortable way of reaching Normandy, or perhaps the least uncomfortable. It was not without its hazards, however, although these were probably not apparent to the troops sitting facing each other across the narrow fuselages. The men of the Glider Pilot Regiment, the most short-lived of any British Army formation, were all too well aware of the responsibilities thrust upon them. Once released from their towing aircraft, they were committed to making a landing, with no chance of a go-round for a second attempt, landing on a spot that they had never seen before and which was often not suitable for aircraft, and, of course, all of this was to be achieved in the dark!

Most members of the regiment were sergeants or staff sergeants, and typical of these was Staff Sergeant Roy Howard, whose dilemma was one faced by many others that day. ‘My objective was a small corner of a particularly tiny field of rough pasture close to the Orne Bridge,’ he recalled later:

If I overshot, I would crush us all against a 14-ft high embankment – if I undershot I would destroy my seven tons of powerless aircraft and its human cargo on a belt of 50-ft high trees. There was simply no room for error. The significance of the two bridges to be attacked by a coup de main force was emphasised to us. With the 6th Airborne Division landing to the east of the river, and the whole invasion coming ashore to the west of the canal, it was vital that these troops should be able to cross the two bridges over the Orne and the canal. These two bridges were the only ones where you could do this between Caen and the sea. So it was absolutely vital that we had the maximum surprise element, and the only way to do this was for us to carry out our operation before the rest of the invasion started. So we were going to sneak in just after midnight, and some six-and-a-half hours before the seaborne invasion came ashore.

Someone had made a most marvellous sand-table, a perfect model of what was on the ground in Normandy – even down to the last tree and ditch. The chap who’d made it had put some wires above the area, and slid a cine camera down those wires, filming all the way, and therefore had simulated what a glider pilot would see on his approach. It was incredibly clever, and impressed us all very much. So we were very confident. Each Horsa glider with its 88-ft wingspan was going to carry 28 troops, a mixture of Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, plus two or three Engineers – we were also going to carry an assault boat, and numerous other bits of equipment, because it was thought that the bridges might be blown before we got there. We got out onto the airfield about 9.30pm on the 5th June. I think everyone knew on the airfield what was happening except one of the ground staff from the Air Force, who came up to me and said, ‘Are you bringing this one back tonight, Staff?’ I said, ‘No, I don’t think so.’ He walked away looking dazed.

We’d met the Ox and Bucks lads a few days before and they were a very good bunch. However, on the night they arrived all blacked up, loaded with arms and ammunition, they looked a right bunch of cut-throats. We loaded up, drank a cup of tea, chatted and about twenty to eleven, when it was nearly dark – we had double summertime in those days – we mounted up and when somebody fired the green flare, the engines started and one by one we got under way.4

‘Twenty-eight troops was a heavy load, not least because they were all fully equipped. We were literally staggering under the weight of the stuff we were carrying,’ recalls William Gray, a private with the 2nd Battalion Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry:

I personally carried four fully loaded Bren-gun magazines plus two bandoliers of .303 ammunition. I had six Mills 36 grenades, two 77 phosphorus smoke grenades, two Norwegian-type egg-shaped stun grenades that just made a bang when you threw them. We carried a twenty-four hour ration pack that consisted of cubes of tea, soup, oatmeal, toilet paper, sweets, matches and some fuel for our little Tommy cookers.5

This part of the invasion force assembled at RAF Tarrant Rushton, an airfield in Dorset some 3 miles east of Blandford Forum. It had only opened in October 1943, and was used specifically for glider towing. The make-up of the air-landed force was dictated by the role they had to play once in France.

‘It was a coup de main operation,’ explained Major John Howard, commander of D Company:

Glider-borne to capture two bridges in Normandy and to land soon after midnight … For this operation I was given two extra platoons and 30 Royal Engineers, so that was 150 infantry, 30 Royal Engineers – a force of 180. We landed in six gliders, each glider containing one platoon of around 25 infantry and five Royal Engineers. Three gliders went for a bridge over the River Orne and three gliders for a bridge over the Caen Canal, now known as Pegasus Bridge. This bridge was much more important; it was much more heavily defended – it was a waterway used for commercial purposes up to the port of Caen. Most of the defences of the two bridges were around this bridge. That is one reason why I went in No.1 glider. We were so thrilled to have this special job – the spearhead of the invasion as it has often been described – that we wanted to get the job done and done successfully, and that seemed to overcome all fear.6

His optimism was shared by a junior officer, Lieutenant ‘Tod’ Sweeney, and again it was a case of feeling that a great honour had been bestowed on him:

At eleven o’clock, we took off from Tarrant Rushton to spearhead the invasion into Europe. It was rather like being picked to play for your country at Lords. The exhilaration buoyed us up and kept us going. We were all scared stiff, of course, but we’d been waiting and waiting for this stage from 1940 onwards, and none of us had even been in action before.7

Not surprisingly, many were in fact nervous, or even scared. Hardly any of them would have flown before the war, and while they had been given training in glider landing, it was over friendly soil, and often in daylight. Everyone was issued with a brown paper bag in case of airsickness. ‘Suddenly we became airborne,’ said Sergeant Henry Clark, who was also in the 2nd Ox and Bucks’ D Company:

We could barely see, it was quite dark, there were a few cigarettes going, and there was obviously a tenseness and nervousness because there wasn’t the usual idle chatter – nobody was singing and there was almost silence in the glider, but within ten minutes, the usual round of conversation started, people began to sing, the tenseness evaporated and it became just another glider flight.8

They flew over the English Channel at around 6,000ft. While the sea had still to abate after the storm of the day before, many recall that the flight was relatively comfortable and one officer recalled that no one in his glider was airsick. The Ox and Bucks’ Horsa gliders were towed by Handley Page Halifax bombers – aircraft that normally bore a substantial part of each night’s bombing of enemy territory although at first they had suffered from a relatively high accident rate. Flying east of the massive invasion fleet, they crossed the coast near the resort of Cabourg, where there was a gap in the German flak defences.

Released at 5,000ft, the gliders dived, their occupants able to hear the rush of the air over the wings and around the fuselage now that the noise of the towing aircraft’s engines was receding into the distance, before levelling off at around 1,000ft.

‘It was a hazy moonlit night,’ Major John Howard later recalled. ‘At 1,000 feet we opened the glider’s doors. The most amazing sight was those wonderful Normandy horses and cattle. They were grazing very quietly, as if nothing was happening, although a lot of bombers were going overhead.’9

Within minutes they were on the ground. It was just six minutes after midnight on 6 June. The British had returned to France after four years. The Americans and Canadians were arriving for the first time. Now it was time for the bridges to be taken and secured.

Notes

1. US National Archives.

2. Imperial War Museum Sound Archive.

3. Imperial War Museum Sound Archive.

4. Imperial War Museum Sound Archive.

5. Imperial War Museum Sound Archive.

6. Imperial War Museum Sound Archive.

7. Imperial War Museum Sound Archive.

8. Imperial War Museum Sound Archive.

9. Imperial War Museum Sound Archive.

Glossary

AA

Anti-aircraft

AB

Able seaman

AFC

Air Force Cross

ASH

Air-to-surface vessel radar (US-built)

ASV

Air-to-surface vessel radar (British-built)

Capt

Captain

CAP

Combat Air Patrol

CB

Commander of the Order of the Bath

CCS

Combined Chiefs of Staff

Cdr

Commander

CCGS

Chief of the Canadian General Staff

CID

Committee of Imperial Defence

C-in-C

Commander-in-Chief

CMG

Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George

CO

Commanding Officer

Conning tower

the raised superstructure of a submarine that allows a better view for navigational purposes

COPP

Combined Operations Pilotage Parties

COS

(British) Chiefs of Staff

CPO

Chief Petty Officer

CVO

Commander of the Royal Victorian Order

DFC

Distinguished Flying Cross

DSO

Distinguished Service Order

DSC

Distinguished Service Cross

Dt

detachment

DUKW

open topped amphibious vehicle

E-boat

German MTBs or MGBs

Fin

alternative name, mainly US, for the conning tower on a submarine

Flt

Flight

FUSAG

First United States Army Group

HMS

His Majesty’s Ship

HMAS

His Majesty’s Australian Ship

HMCS

His Majesty’s Canadian Ship

HMNZS

His Majesty’s New Zealand Ship

JCS

(American) Joint Chiefs of Staff

KCB

Knight Commander of the Bath

LCA

Landing Craft Artillery

LCI

Landing Craft Infantry

LCN

Landing Craft Navigation

LCT

Landing Craft Tank

LPD

Landing Platform Dock

LST

Landing Ship, Tank

Lt

Lieutenant

Lt-Cdr

Lieutenant-Commander

Lt-Gen

Lieutenant-General

Maj-General

Major-General

MBE

Member of the British Empire

MGB

Motor Gunboat

MTB

Motor Torpedo Boat

MV

Motor Vessel

OBE

Officer of the British Empire

OSS

(American) Office of Strategic Services

PO

Petty Officer

PR

Photo-Reconnaissance

RAF

Royal Air Force

RCAF

Royal Canadian Air Force

RCAN

Royal Canadian Navy

RCNVR

Royal Canadian Navy Volunteer Reserve

RM

Royal Marines

RN

Royal Navy

RNethN

Royal Netherlands Navy

RNR

Royal Naval Reserve

RNVR

Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve

RP

rocket projectile

SANF(V)

South African Naval Force (Volunteer), equivalent of RNVR

SAAF

South African Air Force

SHAEF

Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force

SOE

(British) Special Operations Executive

U-boat

German submarine

USN

United States Navy

USS

United States Ship

VC

Victoria Cross

Introduction: Assault from the Sea

There is nothing new about amphibious warfare. It was brought to an advanced stage of sophistication during the Second World War, but many lessons had to be learnt during the war years. The Japanese have generally been regarded as the earliest exponents but, in Europe, it dates from before the Battle of Marathon in 490 BC.

There are also records that suggest much earlier attempts at invasion from the sea using what might be described as ‘light forces’, that is without cavalry, especially by the ‘Sea Peoples’, originally Phoenicians, who migrated from the Levant in substantial numbers around the shores of the Mediterranean Sea, colonising Cyprus and Malta. Amidst these rare attempts at amphibious assault, there were many more migrations and Doric Sparta and Ionian Athens established colonies or trading posts around the Eastern Mediterranean. Eventually these movements resulted in rivalry leading to war.

In 490 BC, during the Second Persian Campaign, came what is generally regarded as the first amphibious assault, at least in the West, because the Persians’ ships were specially constructed to carry horses and cavalry, the troops being carried direct to Attica, the region to the west of Athens, pausing only to take Rhodes and Naxos on their way. These forces landed near Marathon, only to find their way blocked by the Greeks. Rather than attack, the Persians re-embarked, putting their cavalry aboard first, a mistake as the Greeks then attacked the Persian force in strength. Later, in the Third Persian Campaign, a novel feature was the construction of two bridges across a chain of boats to keep open the route across the Hellespont.

Clearly, even before the Romans, amphibious assault was not unknown and, indeed, there was a degree of sophistication in the ability to land cavalry or to improvise bridges using boats. Records of the numbers involved are few, but when the Athenian trading post at Segesta in Sicily called for assistance, when threatened by Syracuse, which was an ally of Corinth at the time (415–413 BC), the Athenians sent 134 triremes with 25,000 men in their ships’ companies, and 6,400 soldiers.

The Greeks and the Phoenicians were the great sea-faring powers of the ancient world, even to the extent that the Persians had to depend on conscripted Phoenician sailors and ships to make progress across the Eastern Mediterranean. Early Rome was not a sea power and it was not until later that Republican Rome began to appreciate the value of ruling the waves, and started to confront the growing power of Carthage in the Punic Wars. The catalyst for this was the need to secure Sicily as part of the Roman Empire. Initially the battles for Sicily were on land, but the need for a fleet soon became obvious and the Romans chose a stranded Punic quinquereme, or pentere, as the model for the ships of the fleet. An innovation was the boarding ramp, known as the corvus, meaning raven, so that enemy ships could be seized by boarding parties of soldiers. Despite their inexperience in sea warfare, the new fleet enabled the Romans to seize Corsica in 259 BC and then Malta in 257 BC.

Victory required the Romans to seize Carthage itself, and this was to prove another early example of amphibious assault. A fleet of 330 ships was assembled, including troop transports, and engaged the Carthaginians in the naval battle of Ecnomus in 256 BC, where, despite superior Carthaginian tactics, the Romans won having lost just twenty-four ships to the Carthaginians’ loss of ninety, of which thirty were sunk by ramming while the boarding ramps enabled the capture of the other sixty.

With the steady demise of Roman might after AD 400, there was a power vacuum in the Mediterranean until the rise of Islam. By the time of the death of Muhammed in 632, the whole of the Arabian Peninsula had become the core of Islam and what followed was a period of expansion that eventually reached as far west as what is now Spain and Portugal, although in the eastern Mediterranean, the successor to the Eastern Roman Empire, Byzantium, held on as a centre of Christian power and many of the Slavic nations also remained unconquered. Throughout the next 900 years, naval warfare remained largely unchanged from that practised by Rome and Carthage, although a primitive flame-thrower known as ‘Greek Fire’ was invented by a Syrian in Byzantine service, projecting an inextinguishable cocktail of flaming saltpetre, pitch, sulphur and oil onto enemy ships.

Little progress in naval warfare or amphibious assault was made by the Vikings, whose raids and eventual settlement found limited opposition, although they did suffer defeat at the Battle of Stamford Bridge in Yorkshire in 1066.

The Norman invasion of England that culminated in the Battle of Hastings in the same year showed little improvement over earlier practice. The Norman success was due in part to superior tactics, but also to the fact that the defending army led by King Harold had been force marched south from their victory over the Vikings at Stamford Bridge, and were almost certainly less able to fight well than their adversaries.

TOWARDS THE MODERN ERA

The advent of the cannon added a new dimension to warfare at sea as much as on land. Nevertheless, the capture of an enemy ship remained as much part of naval warfare as sinking it. Even at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805, the British commander, Vice Admiral the Viscount Nelson died from wounds inflicted by a French sniper rather than from cannon fire.

During this period, the threat of a French invasion of England was real. There were few innovations, but a print from the period shows massive Montgolfières, or hot air balloons, each carrying up to 3,000 French troops, horses and cannon, across the English Channel. This startling prophecy of what would have been an airborne assault with air-landed forces remained a dream. The technology of the early balloons was simply not up to what was required and, in any case, the unpredictability of the wind over the Channel would have made the operation hazardous. Nevertheless, the concept of an assault using air power could fairly be said to have dated from this time.

Perhaps more of a foretaste of what was to come in the twentieth century came with the Walcheren expedition of August 1809, when the Royal Navy landed what was for the time the considerable force of 40,000 men on the island of Walcheren, using 520 transports escorted by forty-two ships of the line (predecessor of the battleship), twenty-five frigates and sixty smaller vessels under the overall command of Rear-Admiral Strachan. The Dutch port of Vlissingen was captured, but an assault on Antwerp failed and the troops suffered heavy losses before being re-embarked.

There was innovation of a kind in 1830, when the French invaded Algeria with a hundred warships including the first French paddle steamer, and 350 transports landed 38,000 men. This must have been a successful expedition, at least for the French, as the country became a French colony in 1847.

Often at this time, heavy bombardment by ships of the line was used to force the enemy to surrender, a good example being Vice Admiral Stopford’s capture of Saint-Jean-d’Acre during the Turko–Egyptian War, after his combined fleet of twenty ships, including three Austrian and Turkish warships, shelled the strong fortress for several hours.

During the Crimean War (1853–56), there were no amphibious assaults as such, but an expeditionary force of around 60,000 men was transported by sea from Varna in Bulgaria to Eupatoria in Ukraine.

Neither the American Civil War (1861–65) nor the Franco–Prussian War (1870–71) involved amphibious assault. As with the Turko–Egyptian War, the Sino–French War (1883–85) saw the use of bombardment rather than amphibious assault to force the Chinese to concede Indo-China to the French. A French squadron brought hostilities to an end with the capture of Mekong.

More amphibious action came with the Sino–Japanese War (1894–95) over the control of Korea. Following a rebellion in Seoul, the Japanese demanded a Chinese withdrawal, but the Chinese reaction was to send a troop convoy with reinforcements. Without a declaration of war, the Japanese attacked the convoy, sinking a transport and damaging a cruiser. War was officially declared on 1 August, during which both countries had to depend on convoys to reinforce and supply their forces in Korea. The landings that mattered most in the war were conducted by the Japanese, landing near Port Arthur in October 1894, and then in January 1895 on the Shantung Peninsula, on either side of the important port and base of Weihaiwei, to which the Chinese fleet had withdrawn earlier, and which was subsequently besieged. When peace was finally negotiated, the Great Powers, which included the UK and the US, forced Japan to return Port Arthur to China.

The Spanish–American War of 1898 saw bombardment used again instead of amphibious warfare. Russian expansion into the eastern parts of Asia and Japanese ambitions for territorial expansion onto the mainland led to the Russo–Japanese War of 1904–05. The conflict was fought largely ashore, with a short naval action on 9 February at Port Arthur, which Russia leased from China, as the Japanese brought troop transports to Inchon, the port for Seoul in Korea before war was declared, but was also famous for two major naval battles, the Battle of the Yellow Sea on 10 August 1904, and on 27–28 May 1905, the Battle of Tsushima. In both cases, the Russians lost heavily, and the latter engagement was decisive. The war ended formally with the Treaty of Portsmouth (New Hampshire, US) in September, with the Japanese receiving Port Arthur.

Amphibious activity by Ottoman forces was prevented during the First Balkan War (1912–13) by Greek control of the Aegean.

THE FIRST WORLD WAR

The First World War is best remembered in Europe for the protracted offensives and bloody battles on the Western Front, although the Germans and the Russians also had the Eastern Front. However, it was far from being a wholly European War. There were battles on land, on the lakes and offshore in East Africa, and on land and on the rivers in Mesopotamia, present-day Iraq. There were engagements at sea in the Pacific, in the Battle of Coronel, and in the South Atlantic, in the Battle of the Falkland Islands. Another popular memory of the war is what has been variously known as Gallipoli and the Dardanelles, for the war on land and at sea, respectively. This was at the outset a major amphibious operation.

Few now realise that there was a plan for an even more audacious amphibious operation, which would have meant nothing less than the seaborne invasion of Germany herself, with landings on the Baltic coast of Pomerania, the closest point to the capital, just 80 miles from Berlin. Both this aborted plan and the Gallipoli landings had one thing in common: they were attempts to break the stalemate on the Western Front, which saw little substantial movement until mid-1918, and to bring an early end to the war that at first many had thought would be ‘all over by Christmas’.

The Baltic operation was the brainchild of the First Sea Lord, Admiral of the Fleet Lord Fisher. Fisher was a brilliant strategist and organiser. He had held the post of First Sea Lord at the Admiralty twice, being brought out of retirement by the new First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill. On his first appointment to the post in 1904, Fisher had revolutionised naval warfare by commissioning the first ‘all big gun’ battleship, HMS Dreadnought, which rendered all other battleships obsolete. He also warned the naval officers of his day that in future war at sea would be fought in the air above it and beneath the waves, although he actually meant by the airship and the torpedo fired from a surface vessel rather than the aeroplane and the submarine that were to come.

Fisher was almost what today would be termed a ‘technocrat’. No engineer, he nevertheless embraced the new technology of his day with enthusiasm. Dreadnought could not have been built with piston engines, but the new steam turbines meant that weight was redistributed across the ship, allowing a heavier armament and heavier armour, especially on deck above the engine room, accommodation and magazines.

Fisher’s love of technology came to the fore in the plans to invade Germany. He had predicted the date of war breaking out when he realised that the Germans were widening the Kiel Canal so that the largest ships could have a sheltered passage between the Baltic and the North Sea. He knew that the passage of the Norwegian Skagerrak and Swedish Kattegat straits was difficult and shallow, and that the completion of the Kiel Canal improvements would be the earliest date that Germany could start a war.

The idea of invading Germany was first broached in 1909, having occurred to Fisher when he accompanied King Edward VII on a visit to the Tsar a year earlier. Fisher believed that the invasion would pull a million German troops away from the front, although this was more likely to be the Eastern Front. He also expected that many of the troops for the invasion would be Russian.

There were two fundamental flaws to the plan. The first was that the naval power would have to be provided by the Royal Navy, and it would be difficult to get it into the Baltic in sufficient strength in wartime. The second was insurmountable, and concerned the fighting cohesiveness of Russian troops as the country gradually descended into anarchy and eventual revolution.

Churchill was aware of the plan even before he invited Fisher to return as First Sea Lord. He pressed the government to support it and even raised the idea with the Russians. His contribution to the operation was that the island of Borkum, off the North Sea coast of Germany and west of Emden, should be seized first to provide a base for operations on the mainland. Instead of easing the operation, this would have had precisely the opposite effect as Borkum is not well placed for the Skagerrak, and it would have alerted the Germans to the Anglo–Russian plan. It was unlikely that the Germans would allow the Kiel Canal to be used, and instead of Pomerania, the invasion would have to start with the seizure of Schleswig-Holstein, much further from Berlin. This also meant that Russian troops were unlikely to be available. Despite these drawbacks, David Lloyd George, then Chancellor of the Exchequer but later Prime Minister, supported the plan.

It was necessary to build special shallow draught vessels to enter the Baltic. In all, 612 ships of all kinds were needed, and despite other pressing demands for men, materials and shipbuilding capacity, work had already started on these before the end of 1914. At a time when the country desperately needed men for the frontline, Fisher persuaded Lord Kitchener, Minister for War, to stop recruiting men from the shipyards. Fisher dictated the specifications of the warships, which were to be led by three ‘light battlecruisers’, an oxymoron, with the first two, HMS Courageous and HMS Glorious to have four 15in guns in two turrets, while the third, HMS Furious, was to have two 18in guns. These were heavy armaments for ships of just 22,700 tons and a shallow draught, and would have made them dangerously top-heavy. To the wits of the Fleet, these three ships were known as ‘Helpless’, ‘Hopeless’ and ‘Useless’; Courageous was also known as ‘Outrageous’ and Glorious as ‘Uproarious’! All three were eventually converted to aircraft carriers, the first being Furious, which was to launch the first carrier air strike in 1918.

Nevertheless, the idea of attacking behind the fronts gained other adherents, but Turkey was seen as a safer option. Thus the idea of a Baltic operation was dropped in favour of landings in Gallipoli or forcing the Dardanelles.

Behind this decision was the belief that the Turks would surrender when faced with a substantial assault. This was wrong, as events subsequently proved, while Turkish military might was stiffened by the presence of senior German commanders. The Royal Navy had been successful in penetrating the Bosporus and the Sea of Marmara with their submarines, but with heavy coastal artillery batteries on either side of the Dardanelles (known to the Ancient Greeks as the Hellespont), surface units would have much greater difficulty. The other problem was that the operation required the best that the army and navy could offer, but the senior commanders of both services were sceptical about the invasion and neither wanted to lose their best ships or men. Russian involvement was not sought, but instead this became an Anglo–French operation bolstered by substantial numbers of Australian and New Zealand troops. Greek offers of help were spurned.

On 18 March 1915, after bombarding the forts on Gallipoli into silence, a combined force of British and French battleships entered the Dardanelles. It was a disaster from the start. The French pre-dreadnought Bouvet struck a mine and exploded, as did the British pre-dreadnoughts Irresistible and Ocean; more fortunate was the British battlecruiser Inflexible, which also struck a mine but was able to limp back to Malta. The attempt to neutralise Gallipoli and the Dardanelles using naval power alone was abandoned.

The fact that so many of the ships deployed were pre-dreadnoughts showed just how little faith the Admiralty had in the campaign. The Admiralty was not alone in this view. The head of the British Army, Sir John French, thought that it was no more than a ‘sideshow’. The choice of commander for the ground forces also showed how little hope was vested in the venture. At 62 years of age, General Sir Ian Hamilton was close to retirement, stationed in the UK, and left behind because many senior officers, including French, disliked him. ‘My knowledge of the Dardanelles was nil,’ he later confessed. ‘Of the Turk nil, of the strength of my own forces, next to nil.’ Unfortunately, the War Office was unable to improve his knowledge as the available reference material was a good ten years out of date and the maps were even worse, designed for tourists and inaccurate. When the troops were landed, they were to find that, instead of gently sloping gradients, they were faced with rugged terrain with deep ravines cut by many watercourses. Despite the reservations of Sir John French, driving the operation was the Secretary of State for War, Field Marshal Herbert Kitchener. By contrast, the latter was wildly optimistic. ‘Supposing one submarine pops up opposite the town of Gallipoli and waves a Union Jack three times,’ Kitchener assured Hamilton. ‘The whole Turkish garrison on the peninsula will take to their heels and make a beeline for Bulair [the town at the neck of the peninsula].’1

No one explained to Hamilton that even the sinking of a major Turkish warship by a British submarine had failed to bring about Turkish surrender.

The one voice of reason and sound ideas was Hamilton’s Chief-of-Staff, Major-General Walter Braithwaite, a man who nevertheless lacked diplomacy and was often abrasive. When the two officers met Kitchener to discuss the operation for the first time, Braithwaite proposed that the invasion force should have better air power than the enemy, and aired the possibility of having a squadron of the latest aircraft manned by experienced pilots and observers. Kitchener turned on him, his face red with fury, and barked, ‘Not one!’

It was not just air power that was lacking: the expeditionary force also lacked adequate artillery or any hand grenades at all. They did have motor vehicles and armoured cars, but both would be unsuitable on the inhospitable terrain. Mules and stores had to be found in Egypt. The port of Mudros, on the Greek island of Lemnos (the recovery of which was a Turkish war aim), was turned into a harbour to provide a forward base. Jetties and pontoons also had to be assembled. While the effort did not compare with the Mulberry harbour assembled for the Normandy landings, neither did the resources made available, nor the commitment of those in the UK, France or even amongst the British forces in Egypt. Throughout the campaign, those endeavouring to achieve success were to struggle against the odds. General Sir John Maxwell, C-in-C Egypt, another of Hamilton’s enemies, only provided support grudgingly when ordered to do so by Kitchener.

Hamilton’s own team cannot be completely absolved from any blame at this early stage. The specialists were left behind in Egypt rather than serving as part of Hamilton’s headquarters, and those left so far behind included the Quartermaster-General, the Director of Medical Services and the Adjutant-General. It was not until later in the campaign, when it had become bogged down, that an efficient supply operation was created on Lemnos with an experienced general officer in command.

One innovation was the use of floating piers for the landings, designed by an enterprising army officer. Unfortunately, these were supposed to be delivered to the beaches by the Royal Navy, but the job was subcontracted to merchant shipping, and seven were abandoned in the Mediterranean, the one that reached Mudros being abandoned there.

Hamilton assembled 75,000 men, many of them Australians and New Zealanders, who were to prove to be amongst his best troops.

No fewer than five different landing sites were available. One of these was actually in Anatolia, near Besika Bay, and not only offered easy terrain, but had few natural defensive positions for the enemy. Another spot with easy terrain was on the Gulf of Saros, where Gallipoli joined the mainland of Thrace, just 3½ miles wide: this would cut off the whole of Gallipoli, but would mean being under attack from both sides. Gaba Tepe was the next best choice on the peninsula itself, where it was just 6 miles wide and the terrain was relatively easy, with a low valley, which could be protected if high ground on either side was also taken, giving a good defensive position. Cape Helles at the tip of the peninsula was at least within easy range of the guns of the fleet, and meant that fighting would take place on one front. Suvla Bay offered a good beach, with heights nearby which were manageable. There was a large salt lake behind it, which was dry in summer.

Commanding the defences was the German General von Sanders, who only needed eight days to get his forces into position; the Allies gave him four weeks, with the result that he had a force of 84,000 men in six divisions against just 14,000 at the time of the Royal Navy’s initial hit and run gunnery raids. The extra time was put to good use, improving communications through repairing and improving the road network. Convinced that the British attack would come in the Gulf of Saros, von Sanders made his headquarters at the neck of the peninsula.

The real flaw had been to allow the Royal Navy to carry out a heavy bombardment, alerting the Turks and their German allies to the possibility of an invasion long before the army was ready to invade. Such a heavy bombardment was needed immediately before the invasion.

On the morning of 25 April 1915, 1,500 men of the Australian 1st Division disembarked from the battleships into small boats, which were towed by small steam pinnaces towards the beach. First light came at 0405, and the pinnaces cast off their tows at 0425, leaving the boats to be rowed to the shore by sailors. It was at this moment that the first fire came from the defenders; initially badly aimed, it became increasingly accurate as the light improved and the boats closed on the coast, but most of the first wave reached the beaches safely.

At Cape Helles, just 1,000 Turkish troops watched the landings by the 29th Division. Many of the men did not encounter opposition, and while two groups did, at one of them, ‘X’ Beach, it only occurred once they were safely ashore and had advanced half a mile inland, leaving the beach safe for the main body to follow.

Another innovation was the use of an old merchant ship, the River Clyde, with doors cut in the sides of the hull so that a large number of troops could land quickly, running across a bridge of lighters. The lighters were towed into place by a tug, but almost immediately began to break away in the strong currents, and were only held together by the prompt action of a commander and an able seaman who dived into the water and held the lashings secure. As the first of 2,000 men of the Munster Fusiliers and the Hampshire Regiment ran through the doors, they were cut down by a well-planned and well-aimed burst of Turkish fire. About half of the men were caught on the pontoon bridge, half remaining inside the ship, whose machine guns mounted in the bows were used to stop the Turks from advancing onto the beaches.