D-DAY: The Great Assault 60th ANNIVERSARY

Sea Classics, Jun 2004 by Burton, Earl

The transports began unloading troops into small boats, some 13 miles offshore. In R/Adm. Hall's sectors, ranged in line from east to west at 600-yard internals, were his flagship, USS Ancon, an amphibious veteran of Africa, Sicily and Salerno; Samuel Chase, the British transports Empire Anvil and Henrico, the USS Charles Carroll and Thomas Jefferson. Then seven more British troopships. Astern of these was USS Ocean Wave, a new type of craft, a Landing Ship Dock. On both sides of this double line, and astern of it, were rendezvous areas for the LCT and LCI convoys.

Rear Admiral Moon's task force was somewhat smaller; his transports were USS Bay field, his flagship Barnett, Dickman and the British Empire Gauntlet. Behind these ships were ranged five LSTs with rhino barges, and around the whole, as around Adm. Hall's big ships, were the rendezvous areas of the LCTs and LCIs.

Task Force O was designed to carry the main push of the American assault, spearheaded by troops of the 1st and 29th Divisions. Theirs was to be a tough row to hoe. The intelligence section of R/Adm. Hall's Operation Order described the terrain with brutal clarity:

"In the Omaha Beach Area the coast is a flat land rising gradually from 100-ft in height on the right to 200-ft on the left. On the right a plateau reaches the sea in a bold chalk cliff. On the left the cliff is topped by a rugged 200-ft bluff. The shore between is a beach approximately 7500-yds in length backed by a shelf of an average 100-yards width. Immediately behind this shelf, a bluff rises to the plateau presenting a steep, grassy or bushcovered slope. There are four valley exits. Through this bluff. Behind this embankment, the flatland, or shelf, should have sufficient grass cover to support vehicular movement. The bluff behind this shelf will probably restrict such movement, and channel it into the four valley exits.

"Since the Beach Area is dominated by bluff there is little effective cover, and much of what there is the enemy is progressively clearing."

To defend this formidable piece of terrain the Germans had wrought with their usual thoroughness. Machine-gun emplacements were dug in the face of the cliffs, pillboxes dominated every inch of the four narrow beach exits, mortars and 88s were zeroed in on each square foot of beach. Very few guns pointed seaward, and consequently very few of them were good targets from seaward. (There was a battery of 105s on Pointe de Hoe, which commanded the Transport Area of Task Force O, yet Task Force O assembled in that Transport Area and the 105s never woke up until too late.)

The geography of Utah Beach differed radically from Omaha. It was not dominated by bluffs; instead, back of the beach there was about a mile of low dunes and then swamp. There were casemated big guns, strong points, pillboxes and machinegun nests in profusion, of course, but reconnaissance had showed the intelligence officers where most of them were, and they were simply marked down as fat targets.

Of course, there was high ground to the westward running out to Pointe de Barfleur, and guns there could fire down the beach if they weren't put out of action. And the Cotentin Peninsula was supposed to hold some of the huge German railroad guns which could dominate the Transport Area and duel on even terms with a battleship. But generally it was assumed that Utah Beach would be the easier to assault. It turned out to have its own kind of deadly defense.