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ARMADA: The D-Day Landing Fleet Marks the Largest
Invasion in History
by Chris Alper
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As dawn broke over the English Channel on the morning of June 6, 1944, German
coast artillery troops along a 30-mile stretch of the Normandy Coast saw an
apparition that could have been custom-designed as their worst nightmare. The
grey light gradually revealed a horizon filled with ships, rolling towards them
in black waves: minesweepers, warships, transports and merchantmen. One German
officer purportedly said, in disbelief, "It's impossible ... there can't be
that many ships in the world."
Nevertheless, there were. The story of how almost 900 warships; from the U.S,
British, Canadian, Free French, Polish, Norwegian, Dutch, and Greek navies; and
almost 4,100 other craft ranging in size from ocean liners to fishing boats;
came to be in the Channel supporting the final push into Hitler’s Fortress
Europe, is in fact illustrative of how the Allies won the war. Beyond the
strategy of staff officers and the bravery of individuals, it is the story of
the awakening of the American industrial giant that still bestrides the world
today.
Armadas of the Past
In the 16th century, the original Armada made its way from Spain to anchor off
Calais, from there to push on in its attempt to invade England. That Grand
Armada of King Philip numbered 197 ships, 163 of them merchantmen carrying
troops. Against them sailed 60 English ships, hardly a fleet to darken the
horizon.
At Dunkirk, between May 28 and June 4, 1940, Admiral Ramsey's fleet of Little
Ships, numbering 150 Royal Navy vessels and 650 commercial and privately owned
boats, under heavy fire and with inconceivable courage, returned repeatedly to
rescue no less than 338,000 British and French troops. Those figures give an
idea of the size of fleet that could be mustered in Channel waters by the Royal
Navy on emergency notice in 1940.
Even Naval battles of the early Second World War pale in comparison the number
of vessels deployed on the morning of D-Day. In 1941, Midway, the largest early
battle of the Pacific War, saw 26 U.S. ships fight 125 Japanese vessels.
Things, it seemed, had changed in three years.
The U-Boat War Forces a Rapid Buildup
In fact, it was the Battle of the Atlantic that bore heavily on the ability to
create a D-Day Armada. It was in response to the early success of the U-Boats
against British shipping in 1940-41, and later against the US in 1942-43, that
the pressure to build merchant ships and warships as quickly as humanly
possible came to rest on the shoulders of the United States.
Britain, its industry devastated by bombing losses, needed to concentrate its
shipyards’ efforts on repairing damages to existing vessels. So it was that
Henry Kaiser, the American industrialist, and other maritime heavyweights put
their engineers to the test of creating a system that could churn out warships
and merchant ships at a rate faster than the U-Boats could sink them. In 1940,
the US had so few merchant ships they could not reasonably assist Britain in
running the Nazi blockade. By 1944, working night and day and using
prefabricated sections; a shipyard could turn out a cargo ship in 17 days.
Wartime America produced nearly 12,000 war and cargo ships and 65,000 landing
craft.
Undersea and Air Superiority
And what of the vaunted U-Boats, and the Luftwaffe? Should they not have made a
shooting gallery of such a mass of targets? By 1944, advances in radar and air
cover effectively prevented the U-Boats from even nearing the fleet, and along
with an exhausted and demoralized German Navy submarine officer corps, removed
any threat the U-Boats may have posed. A suicidal order to engage the enemy at
any cost sent by the increasingly fanatical Admiral Donitz; once the U-Boat
Arm’s charismatic leader, later Grand Admiral, and briefly, following Hitler’s
suicide, leader of the Third Reich; was ignored by skippers unwilling to
sacrifice their crews on a mission that could not possibly damage the enemy.
The once-feared Luftwaffe was also a non-factor. With the bulk of the Luftwaffe
kept close to Germany to fend off continuous day and night bombing by the US
Air Force and the RAF, the German air commander in France had only 820
effective fighters and bombers to put up against an air armada of 6,029 Allied
planes. The Allies also had such a powerful support system behind the lines
that over the period of June 6-7, they made possible more than 10,000 sorties
against the Germans forces opposing the invasion. This imbalance effectively
nullified the German air capability as an obstacle to the Armada.
Instant Harbors and the Final Analysis
The final evidence of the industrial might of the Allies was the Mulberry
Harbors, (so named because the mulberry plant grows rapidly.) Allied planners
knew that Cherbourg Harbor, (50 miles away and the nearest deep-water harbor on
the coastline), might not be available in time to continue the required pace
for the troop buildup. Thus, they drafted a plan to build breakwaters by towing
150 prefabricated concrete shells; each 200 feet long, by 60 feet wide, by 60
feet high; across the Channel, designed to be filled and sunk off the landing
beaches. Built within weeks by American military and English crews in a
round-the-clock effort, the blocks formed, when towed across the channel and
put in place, a breakwater a mile long: 30 feet above sea level at low tide,
and still 10 feet above sea level at high tide. Seven Liberty ships at a time
could dock at a Mulberry, unloading their cargo into landing craft, and keeping
the flow of men and materiel on schedule.
Against this power, Germany had only a battered industrial infrastructure, a
war on the Eastern Front that had already turned for the worse, and a German
High Command increasingly wary of its Fuhrer’s capability for grand strategy.
Despite the might of the Armada, things could have turned against the Allies on
the morning of D-Day, but that topic has been exhaustively documented
elsewhere. All the same, were it not for the scale of the assault launched
against France, and the industrial capability that allowed it to be built so
quickly, there would have been no chance at all of breaching Fortress Europe,
and the world as we know it today could have been vastly different.
RELATED LINKS:
The Spanish Armada
http://www.elizabethi.org/armada/
The National D-Day Museum: New Orleans http://www.ddaymuseum.org/history/dday_history_ddayjune6.html
D-Day Overview: Summary of Land Sea and Air Forces
http://www.strategypage.com/articles/default.asp?target=dday.htm&reader=long
Phoenixes,
Mulberries, Whales, Lobnitzes, Corncobs and Role of Tugs at Normandy Harbor on
D-Day June 6, 1944 http://www.usmm.org/normandy.html
Copyright © 2004 by Chris Alper.
Please send comments to Chris Alper at: chris@alperleroux.net.
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