now that we've made the airborne

dropped and are landing on the assault beaches, it's now to bring in some fire support. we weigh in the everyday always to have at large caliber fire support. give us a hand so our speaker uh next speaker as well prepared to speak to that topic. dr. craig symonds is professor of history at the united states naval academy, where he taught for 30 years to include four years as chairman of the history department. he also also served distinguished professorships, other institutions to include professor of strategy, interpretation of the royal naval college in dartmouth and the ernest j. king distinguished professor of maritime history at the u.s.

naval war college in newport, rhode island. a veteran of several of service in the us navy in the years 1971 through 74, dr. simon's subsequently obtained his doctoral degree in 1976 at the university of florida. over the years, he rarely came fame. as a distinguished historian specializing in the american civil war, maritime history and the history of the second world war. dr. simons is the author of such 17 books. many of which have been translated into as many six languages. my of all of his published titles today would exceed the length of his allotted time to speak. suffice it to say his subject matter expertise includes biographies of american civil war leaders and american civil war alices from a few of us in this room benefited greatly during our proper for the gettysburg relations battlefield exam.

so thank you, dr. simon is 28 book lincoln his admirals abraham lincoln the us navy in the civil won the prestigious lincoln prize his scholarship on us naval history of the second world war is also significant from the atlantic to the pacific oceans and back again. his book entitled neptune allied invasion of europe and the d-day landings, which provides insights into his talk here today, won the samuel l and samuel eliot morrison award for naval literature in year 2015. his most recent published two years ago takes us back to naval warfare the pacific with a biography of chester nimitz as with his long list of published published works, a list of craig's justly deserved awards is extensive, a few in honorable mention include the u.s. naval academy teacher of the year award in 1988 and researcher of

the year in 1998. the 2006 theodore and franklin d roosevelt prize for naval history. in 2014, the naval historical foundation presented him with the commodore dudley w award for lifetime achievement. this year, the pritzker military museum and library awarded him the pritzker for lifetime achievement military writing. ladies and gentlemen, dr. craig simons. thank you, tom. don't know if i can live up to that. thank you, everybody, for coming back lunch. i appreciate that on beautiful day out there to i want to thank the organizer of the conference, carol of course and tracy potts and of course the eisenhower family susan, who spent many years heading this organization. and i told david last night at

dinner that i was going to explain what it was we had in common. where are you, david? where are you sitting? there he is, way in the back. he knows is going to make a quick getaway here. if this is embarrassing he may not remember. he and i are graduates of the same institution, which is the u.s. navy officer candidate school. back in 1971. and the reason there's connection of sorts is it was being explain to us early on the various ports in which we were expected to participate and we were to make a choice. and among them and he read off water polo and then he said oh, no, water polo has been scrapped. the list of possible because there was an officer candidate recently who broke his finger playing water polo and i'm going to leave it to you to guess who that officer candidate might have been. so anyway, my my job today is to talk about the navy's role in the invasion, the normandy

beaches and, in particular, about one episode, which i used for the title, which is on the screen, and here's why susan inspired me this morning by saying, imagine what it would be like if. you had to conduct a complicated operation without any elected support or backup. so just live up to that expectation. none. my slides made it here today. so i'm. i'm going without a net and we'll see how that works out. but the quotation that i used for my title was the navy of saved the day or words to that effect comes from omar bradley who a pretty credible source. who was so grateful for the support that the u.s. navy in particular but royal navy ships as who pretty much did save the day at least i'm going to argue

that on omaha beach. before i do that, let me make a couple general observations that almost everybody, this audience and probably everybody in audience is very sensitive to. but i to to reiterate to them, to remind us all of the broader context of this. first of all, the invasion of nazi europe was an amphibious operation. it's an old aphorism in war that amphibious operations are most difficult to carry in war. it's often attributed to basil little heart, but i've actually found antecedents to that, in part because this was a joint operation as has been emphasized. my friend john susan mentioned it as well. it required a ground. the army, of course, a sea force. the navy and in this case an air coordinating three services in a

and complicated timetable is difficult. but in d-day, it was not only a joint operation. it was a combined operation involving countries. again emphasized earlier. britain the united states and canada france is often mentioned but also norway, poland, belgium, denmark, the netherlands, even australia and new zealand were represented in this operation. so we had air, land and sea forces of ten or so countries and a quick multiplication. my arithmetic as a history major will reveal this yields 30 sets of hierarchical command structures and one of the main reasons why very few people other than dwight could have carried this because eisenhower's great skill was his ability to bring people together

to and ameliorate difficulties. john showed us ike in that photograph, the paratroopers making a personal, looking them in the eye prior to their lifting off. but he did that kind of thing, not only at the the. oh and oh two or even the e one and e two level. he did it at. the political level he dealt with people, winston churchill and de gaulle. and for that matter, monty montgomery, george patton. so the ability to that, i think, is the great strength that eisenhower brought to this operation. now, today, in part to steven spielberg and tom hanks, when many americans think about d-day as i hope many of them will, and this 80th anniversary year, they may conjure up that bit of footage that opens saving ryan

where the craft are heading toward the beach in sea spray is flying past the thoughts and the ramp drops and out they go on to that horrible killing. i am personally grateful to tom hanks for his continuing interest in the second world war and to sustain the memory of those events. he not only is a great actor, he's a great supporter of the museum, new orleans, where he participates and also provides a of support for events such this. so good for him. but on the other hand, starting the story of d-day with the landing on omaha beach or any other beach, encourage moderate students to overlook what happened in the weeks, months and even years prior to that moment, including the assembling and training of the troops, the

movement, the equipment and the men across a contested ocean. from the western hemisphere to britain past the german. the construction training camps in britain. the assembly of equipment. the dozens of practice landings. all along the british coast. and, of course, the cross-channel movement itself and operate is so vast and so complex it stands virtually alone, not only the annals of the second world war, but in the annals of warfare itself for its size and complexity. and all that part up to the landing on the beach was a naval operation with its own codename operation neptune. in this the navy's role was not merely to facilitate the

movement of men and equipment across the channel army. soldiers like to explain that well the navy is really the bus driver. you know, they get us there, then we do the fighting. it is, of course, that but navies. and again, use the plural and honor of the several navies that were involved were central to the success of d-day in a wide variety of ways some of which i'll talk about today and argue rightly the most important of which took after the landings not only to supply the men, the food, the ammunition, the equipment a blood plasma to the men fighting on the beach but also to sustain there. here's another generalization you already know, but worth keeping in mind nonetheless. that is that the invasion of europe, not the result of a single rush forward by that 165,000 or 170,000.

whatever number we use. or in the 24,000 parrots, troops and glider troops who went in, that's the first wave. hollywood has encouraged us to believe that once that grant drops and they run out onto the beach and beat the enemy, they're done. but in fact, opposed amphibious assaults require a series of all day on d-day, 15 to 20 minutes apart, and then dozens more the next day and the day after that and the day after that. and in the case of the invasion, normandy, the landings went on for weeks and even months as has been mentioned already from the podium, about 176,000 allied troops went ashore on d-day. but a month and a half later, there were a million and a half of them.

that didn't just happen. ships also evac awaited the wounded and the prisoners sometimes in the same ship which caused interesting confrontations. they landed the trucks the jeeps and the other heavy equipment all the supporting necessary to enable an invading army to sustain itself. to build up to that million and a half men who made the healing march across central france and on to paris, eventually to berlin. so all of that is by way of arguing that the story of d-day is, of course, it's the story of the sacrifice. and of those who splashed ashore on omaha, utah and gold, juno and sword beaches on the 6th of june. but it was also a extra narrowly complex maritime in which some.

to 7000 allied ships, depending on how you count, maintain a supply chain of unprecedented. so in talking about the navy's role on the d-day invasion size of the armada is often the first thing everybody cites, while so many ships 6000. 7000. the personal memories of those participated in that invasion. who gathered together in that site of the isle of wight, which officially area zebra. but everybody called piccadilly circus was that you could see ships as far as the eye could see horizon to horizon. and of course, you hear story i could have walked across the english channel stepping from ship to ship not quite true, but the visual impact of that had legs. other popular themes of d-day and we've heard a few them today

is the clever disinfo campaign that the allies mounted to confuse the germans. operation fortitude which sought to convince the germans the landings would take place elsewhere in norway, calais, anywhere but normandy. and i think the reason that story has legs is. we love the idea of thinking about we outsmarted good stepping nazis. look how we fooled those silly germans into thinking we were going someplace else. and because of that psychology, i suspect that the impact of disinformation campaign has been somewhat exaggerate aided. it helped. it certainly hurt, but it does not explain by itself or even largely the allied successes in normandy. another aspect of this is the construction of the artificial

harbors known as the mulberries. i was pleased to hear john's response to a query from you about the that the mulberries play. these are the artificial harbors. two of them, one off gold beach near our marsh, other off omaha. and i think it's the same psychology those silly germans think we could come ashore in normandy because we wouldn't have a port to unload all the material all assets necessary to sustain million and a half soldiers on a defended beach. so we'll bring our own harbor with us. look how clever are it is kind of interesting story. and it is clever no doubt about it. the engineering is is absolutely astonishing and story of its origins is interesting too. they were sitting around discussing how we could be able to logistically sustain this huge, complex operation. and a british general named

hughes hallett, somebody said, well, we have to capture pork, but we can't capture a report there heavily. we can't get to cherbourg or le havre in time. and hughes holland said, well all i can say is that if we can't capture report, we'll have to take one with us and laughed, just like you did. just like that around the table. and then it got quiet and somebody said, well, why not. and of course we did. now, churchill, who loved gimmick weapons instinctively was a huge advocate of this. the facility at mulberry, a constructed off beach, and mulberry b of gold beach are often claimed to be one of the major reasons why the allies were able to be triumphant. even samuel eliot morris then argued that the artificial harbors were a key to allied success. now, far be it from me to samuel eliot morison, but i wonder if

this too isn't of that hindsight about cleverness. we can talk more about during the q&a if you're interested. in the end, of course, none of this would have mattered without the courage and determination of the soldiers themselves who stormed the beaches, dropped into the dark night, who glided down silently. so in that respect, focus and starting with the is not entirely misplaced. but there's another aspect of the navy's role in the operation and especially omaha beach that does sometimes get overlooked. and that is what i want to talk in particular today. it's the role played by about a dozen allied destroyers, ten cans in the popular lingo. i saw someone wearing the baseball hat, tin cans, sailors. where's destroyer? there is.

absolutely. tin cans, so-called because they are the smallest ocean going combatant. i mean there's battleships, cruisers, destroyers, a lot of of destroyers. wow. that sounds like a fearsome weapon. the origin of it is that they were designed to destroy tiny little torpedo boats. the french and italians were building. the royal navy said, well build a small ship that can take out torpedo boats and we'll call them torpedo boat destroyers. and then that was simply shortened to destroy piers. so despite the fearsome name, the nickname tin cans is often more appropriate thin skinned biggest gun that carries a five inch incher depth. charges on the stern torpedoes on the bow. but they played a critical at normandy in the lengthy and complex operational plan that was written for d-day.

the task assigned to the tin cans was to screen the invasion and fleet from possible interfere once by german u-boats. in fact, the u-boat threat, as we've heard, has pretty much been neutralized by the of 1944. indeed, the only axis naval challenge at all that they could post the invasion came from a handful of what the germans called chanel booting. i love speaking german. it makes me feel fierce. chanel vuitton fast boats literal translate. kind of equivalent to what we called p.t. boats patrol torpedo boats. small 80 foot carried torpedoes, their principal weapon and a machine gun topside topside. the chanel button did have an impact on the allied training regiment. before the landing, when they attacked a flotilla of lst, his officer, captain sands john

mentioned this in his address this morning morning. but on d-day, they they were ordered to charge out of lahav and attack that fleet. i'm trying to. imagine the expression on the of a chanel boot captain of this 80 foot boat with a crew of six being told go out and attack battleships and cruisers. only 6000 of them. so you should be okay. on the one hand, of course, it's what they might call a target rich environment. i can hardly miss. but on the other hand, it had to be at least a little bit intimidating. the junior officers who commanded these boats entrance and jeez left port, fired their torpedoes, turned around, went back into port. now, given the circumstances, they could avoid hitting something. one torpedo, in fact, did just miss the british battleship

warship. right. and another headed directly for the allied command ship with a rather clumsy name of largs. got name because large was the name of the in scotland owned by mountbatten. so it was the name given to the command ship and the allied naval commander bertram ramsay was on board. that could have been as should say, awkward. but as it happened, the officer, the deck on, the largo saw the track of the torpedo full ahead, and it missed by yards astern and instead hit a norwegian destroyer. the southerner only allied ship sunk on d-day by the germans navy. and that's because by 44 the allies had secured near mastery of the sea as well the air. and while the and e boats were meddlesome troublesome and you had to keep them in mind, they

posed no serious threat to the invasion. armada. the real crisis came, as we know on the beach, having had months to place and site their guns. germans on the high ground, particularly at omaha beach, that crescent shaped beach that john showed us. and thank you for showing that, john, because slides didn't get here or i'd show it to you too but the the landing came into that killing. and touch the surf under withering fire german guns. i like to cite this quotation because it's almost i can't get my head around completely. german machine guns fired at the rate of. 1500 rounds a minute. i think gun. that's not all of them. that's. 1500 rounds but that's 25 bullets per second. and the germans had 80 of these

around an arc around omaha beach which contemporary is describing it said it sounded like tearing a piece of paper in half. that's how fast the bullets left the muzzle. i won't make it do the math. it works out to 2200 bullets across omaha beach every. second, that's almost more bullets in the air than. air. the fire was so intense some the embarked troops balked at leaving the landing craft at, all as one landing craft dropped its rank ramp machine gun bullets killed the first four men right there in the front rank, getting ready to leave just outright killed them and smacked, clinging, clanging off the ramp on the wall and kicking up water and surf in front the boat and the soldiers just froze and navy coxswain at the stern stood and called out

plaintively. come on, fellas get out. i got to go get another load. and they did. the germans had artillery, of course, and it was pretty blowing up the landing boats and the larger lct is kind of an alphabet soup of amphibious craft involved or lct landing craft tank as opposed to the lsd landing ship tank and the l i's landing ship infant tree. and as they did, if they were successful on deposit ing their men and equipment ashore, they were blown up right there along the beach. and what that meant was that the beach front itself was crowded with smashed up and burning ships and vehicles. it looked like a maritime junkyard. and that meant the landing craft in the second wave. and the third wave. remember, every 20 minutes here

they come as they head toward that beach, there's no place to land they're going back and forth looking for an open piece of sand where they can go ashore. the landings at omaha beach began at 630 that morning, and by eight, the whole was in jeopardy. it was so bad general omar bradley watching from off shore, seriously considered calling it off. things were going a bit better on utah beach. and as thought was, well, get well, retreat back from omaha and for utah. but you can't re track men imposed on a b you'd have to just abandon them there. that's a hard call. it didn't happen, of course encouraged by navy commander off shore, rear admiral john lesley hall, bradley decided he would just continue to push men and

ashore as fast as he possibly could and hope that eventually momentum of that would allow them to secure the beach. one of the things that saved them literally saved the invasion. and here comes my central argument now was a handful of destroyers, most of them american. two of them were royal navy, british that came to the rescue almost like the cavalry riding to save the wagon train. then all the western. shipping of the stuff because i don't have pictures to prove it. as i mentioned in world war two, the primary function of destroyers was to act escorts for convoys back and forth across the north atlantic that brought the men and equipment to britain in the first place. their heaviest armament was a

five inch gun, kind of a pop gun. next to those 12 and 14 inch guns. the battleship were using five inch gun, a five inch shot waist, 50 pounds. that's not inconsiderable, but a 16 inch gun fires a shell, 3,000 pounds. now destroyers carry depth charges on the stern use against u-boats and. 20 and 40 millimeter anti-aircraft. and as i mentioned their assigned job was to screen outside the invasion fleet to prevent interference by u-boats. but by 8:00 in the morning on the sixth june, things had changed. we've got this beautiful detail plan. but you know what? we're going to have to scrap it or at least adjust it a lot of the destroyers skippers seeing was happening ashore already moving in closer to shore to see if they could provide close in gunfire support but at 830 it

became official when jimmy hall john leslie hall commanding the support group offshore ordered all the destroyers skippers to abandon their positions and close in on beach to provide gunfire for those troops trapped on omaha beach. most you already know the peculiarities of the tides and the geography of omaha beach. there's a one foot drop vertical line for every 50 feet horizontally, which means it's a very grab drill beach. if you've been there at low tide, you play soccer game there. i mean, it's almost flat as a table, but it also means that a low it's a long way from the surf to the high ground behind the beach whereas at high tide it's a relatively short distance. so the army tended to argue let's land at high tide so we

don't have that far to go. and the navy said, no, no, it has to be at low tide so we can take out the obstacles, the mines and all those impediments that rommel was stuck into the sand. and so they compromised. they did it. half tide, but a rising tide and becomes important because. you think about landing on omaha beach in a rising tide. if you're if you fall and you're wounded, you can't crawl as fast as that tide is coming up the beach. that is a terrifying environment battleships drew 38 feet. so they had to be more like two miles off the beach to fire those big 14 inch shells. but destroyers drew 13 feet. so they could go in much closer. so whole them to close the beach and in his own words, maintain

as heavy a volume of fire on beach targets as possible. admiral carlton bryant who was on the texas, was a bit more conversational about it. he got on the radio and yelled, get on the men, get on. they're raising hell with the men on the beach. and we can't have that. we must stop it. well, that's what he was in life magazine. so probably pretty close to that and to destroyer skippers responded with enthused as in fact almost too much enthusiasm. it's pretty self-evident that if destroyer or any other vessel grounds itself and shallow water off a beach that's dotted with artillery pieces, it's going to be hammered into bits at the leisure of the gunners. nevertheless, the destroyers bed shored some up 20 knots into. water that was so dangerously shallow and outside swept

channels. a sailor was them from a nearby lct horrified to see a destroyer, which he assumed must be out of control, careening toward the beach as fast as it could go at high speed. my god thought they're going to run aground right in front of the german artillery and at the last minute, the destroyer made a sharp turn back to its engines and with its starboard batteries blazed away every gun it had point blank at the defensive positions. another sailor on lusty, in his words, watched puffs of smoke and mounds, dirt flying everywhere on the hillside as the destroyer passed, swiftly by more than a dozen allied destroyers responded the call that morning, and nine of them

were from destroyer 18 destroyer squadron des ron. that's navy lingo. david knows because we both went to see desert on 18 commanded by us navy captain harry sanders and they spread out along omaha beach two of them, the satterlee and the thompson, along with the destroyer taliban, supported the army rangers, who were a sailing point to hawk west of omaha. i know you've all seen photos that that is just such an astonishing thing to see if you've not been go quickly because it's eroding fast. and if you to get a sense of how that looked at the and just try to understand the psychology of the men who made that climb. you should you should go to more the carmack and the mccook later joined by the harding took up positions near the center of omaha beach and five others led

by the the squadron flagship frankford. with sanders on board steamed the eastern end of the beach near. these were the beaches green and easy. the destroyers took up positions. 800 yards off the surf line. now, given that gradual slope of the beach, they were pretty shallow center. in his official report, there were times when we had less than one inch of water under our keel. they were so close they were being by rifle bullets. these dozen or so destroyers constitute, only a tiny fraction of. these supposedly 6 to 7000 ships that made up the allied armada. but they had a disproportionate impact on the outcome of that battle. at first, the destroyer captains

had lot of trouble knowing what to shoot. i mean, there's high ground. yes. okay. but where on that high? the heavy smoke over, the beach, plus actual german camouflage made almost impossible to figure out where the big german guns were or even small ones for that matter. some of the german guns had been designed so that they retract it into enclosed sides. it came out fire and then retracted. they were using smokeless powder so you couldn't look for smoke to find your target. in theory, they were to coordinate with the men on the shore. they would radio out, coordinates, the gunners would adjust and call fire. but in in rush ashore early morning virtually all of the radios became either destroyed waterlogged and communication was impossible. the ships couldn't talk to the men. the men couldn't talk to the ships. back to susan's board.

why didn't they just call them on their cell phone right. anyway, it was well into afternoon before any radio contact the two was established. well, what do you do in the. there was one immediate benefit to the arrive of the destroyers, and that is that many of the german gunners fearful of disclosing their position, stopped shooting. that by itself was reprieve of sorts to the men hunkered down on that shingle. the slide that john this morning of them behind shingle. i had that slide too but it's not here but anyway. near the center of omaha beach, near a little called lemuel a destroyer commander whose name is robert bier, a lieutenant commander who was captain of the gleaves class destroyer, carmack was scanning the bluffs looking for puffs of smoke or something

that would indicate where the enemy gun emplacement was. he couldn't see a thing, but he did notice this, that the few tanks that had gotten ashore in omaha and of course, omaha, where a lot of the supposedly a duplex drive tanks that swimming tanks, 27 of 32 went to the bottom, weren't there. but of the few tanks that did manage to get ashore, they all seemed to shooting at a particular place well. they must see something i can't so he orders up the gunners to hit that spot. and then he pumped in about the five inch guns can fire pretty rapidly. they can off six or seven salvos in a minute. so he just fired several volleys into that spot and then he noticed the tank shells were shooting. else it was like the tanks were a pointer here is where they are and then the the heavier guns on the destroyer off shore would

use that pointer to target the german gun emplacements and. it worked out keep in mind there's absolutely nothing in that five inch thick operational order for d-day to suggest this kind of cooperation. this is kind of thing the sailors and the soldiers worked out on the fly without communication they figured it out. it's a spontaneous partnership that i think says lot about the ability of american sailors and soldiers to adjust to circumstances, the ground or for that matter, on the sea sea. now, not far away from the karmic, another destroyer, the mccook commanded by lieutenant commander ralph ray mi. and he opened against what he assumed be german fortified positions, the cliff face. but they were so protected with 13 inches of concrete with that

rebar that he couldn't have an impact on them. so had an idea he fired below them into. the cliff face carving away chunks of rock until the supporting structure underneath gave and the whole artillery position came crashing down onto the. a mile or two. further east. commander james marshall. captain of the doyle, another destroyer maneuvered ship among the landing craft that were swarming off the fox sector. he could see his or his language. he could see men ashore dug in behind a hammock of sand along the beach and the boats of the third wave milling around off shore because they couldn't an open section of beach and a lookout. the doyle reported a machine gun emplacement on a steep hill at the west end of fox red beach.

so directed two salvos on the site, then shifted to a case made at the top of the hill, fired more salvos and was to report rather laconically, the target destroyed. absent spotters in the air, or for matter on land other destroyer skippers also improvised one sailor on an lct happened to be looking at a line of bluffs west of the when he noticed that the bushes moved just a little bit and have a second lighter shell exploded on the beach and he kept watching that spot and it happened again. so he called skipper over and he says, skipper, let's see, that's putting a little bit to the left. you see that spot right there? watch movement explosion. so the skipper got on the phone, called up. the nurse, which his words came in there, popped over sideways port side to the beach turned

loose eight rounds of five inch projectile into the suspected. there were no movements of brush so how was it that the german gun emplacements were so i mean, remember that allied planes we've seen the graphic came in and just saturate the area with bombs not so much effectively on omaha and then the navy came in in an abbreviated naval preliminary naval gunfire support fired 12 inch and 14 inch shells into or at omaha beach all that ordnance had the ground shake sand and dust up into the air just obscured the whole beach looked powerful. the tin cans had smaller, but their guns were precision aimed at specific targets. hit the beach beach master on omaha later claimed you could

see the trenches guns and men blowing up where they were hit. there was no doubt in his mind words the few navy destroyer we had say the invasion inside an artillery bunker on omaha beach, a german commander phoned headquarters to report the naval guns are smack up our strong points we running out of ammunition. we urgently need supplies. there was no answer because. the line had gone dead. so for more than an hour from before nine, maybe 845 until well past, when the destroyer gunfire off omaha beach was virtually nonstop, all constant firing, of course, depleted the ammunition of the destroyers there, their orders in that operation and command told them they were not to expend more than 50% of their available ammunition because you needed to

have a reserve just in case. but this was an emergency, so they ignored all that. and the destroyers and sanders squadron expended just about everything they had. the uss emmons fired. 767 rounds, the mccook hundred and 75 is out of a thousand, and the carmack 1127, although where the 127 came from, i'm not sure sure. this now says slide shows, but no, it doesn't. so i'm moving on. so shortly before noon, the ships finally establish contact with the fire control parties on the beach who called in gunfire request gunfire support requests to the destroyer beginning about 1130 noon and 1124 spotters ashore ask the frankfurt to target a concentration of german troops behind the beach. after the first shell, the

scattered, of course, shore spotting had limits to the u.s. laffey received a request for support. and when the gunnery officer asked for target coordinates, this is the answer he got in the radio transcription. we were lying on our stomachs a ditch under enemy fire can't furnish you a spot. laffey opened fire anyway, and after several the spotter radioed back whoever was shooting at us was stopped. so you must have done all right right. one of the most memorable examples, cal fire that morning occurred when army spotters near colleville-sur-mer reported that the germans were the steeple of the church to direct artillery into the beach. are there up in the steeple? i think you saw church steeple earlier. the emmons got the job of taking it down and after a few salvos it did a witness watching us

from the and saw that it hit the steeple right near its base like you just chopped it down with a giant ax a few miles the west of veer ville, samarra the harding accomplished a similar against the steeple of the church there the harding's first salvo clipped off the cross at the top. sounds pretty sacrilegious. the sacrament it about ten feet down from that and the third ten feet down from that the army guy said, boy, those navy guys are pretty good there, chopping it off a piece at a time. the cumulative effect of all this was pretty decisive for the first time since they had landed on that beach, the man lying face down behind that low of shingle and sand all along omaha beach were able to lift their heads and look about themselves for a off the beach as early as 1036.

lookouts on the frankford noted allied troops were beginning to advance. oh, i'm good, thanks. thank you. appreciate that. and an hour later at 1037, the german defender began to come out of their positions with their up. by the next day, the troops were moving off the beach. now, to be sure, much of this is the result of the incredible bravery and determination of the soldiers themselves, which must never be discounted. but the destroyers did play a critical role in this postwar. bradley wrote. and this is where i got the title for this talk. the navy saved our hides as the adjutant commander of the first infantry division, the red one said afterward, without that gunfire, we positively could not have crossed the beaches. thank you very much. i look forward to your

questions. now, do we have a microphone for this round or here it is. look at this. okay. so if you have a question, wait for the mic. time. you don't have a question. that's okay to. this one. yeah. sounds like you probably could, but they need to pick it up on the c-span. no, it wasn't me. i miss third row. oh, sorry. we're going to have somebody test you out. my grandfather landed with the seventh, ninth a few days after d-day, was wounded. a pillbox? sure. borg his wound wasn't bad enough to get evacuated off the beach for several days he got infected. he specifically told a story about they had to travel at night to england and that ships

were sunk around them and they had to pull men out of the water covered in oil. so were they hitting mines if the if there was no german navy? yeah or torpedo boats, what was causing these ships to be sunk? it is mostly mines. the germans had several very sophisticated mines and in fact so sophisticated that they didn't even them until they were pretty sure where the allies were going to come ashore. they had oyster that rusted on the bottom. and one of the reasons the minesweepers didn't pick up is that counters would the first three go by and then blow under the fourth one? and there were other magnetic anomaly detectors in so that you didn't have to it or contact it. you could just come and it would recognize the iron hull of a vessel. so the german mines were quite sophisticated and very effective. but your question raises a very important point. and that is to say that the last piece in particular, but the amphibious craft in general not only brought all those men and equipment to the shore and carried back prisoners and wounded that include apparently

your dad, grandfather, grandfather. they did this round the clock, not just at night. i mean, he happened to be at night. they pretty much did this in a round robin basis. when you look at the logbooks of those lost, it took, i think i'm going to make up the numbers here. i think it's 8 hours to get across the channel. it took 3 hours to deposit to reload, another 8 hours another to nonstop 52 times back and forth across that channel never stopped motors never shut down. so so that went on all the time. and if he was going back at night. it's because that was when they finally had room for that particular wounded soldier to get back the copter cherbourg critical remember that landing on utah beach was designed to cut across the attention peninsula and then head up and take cherbourg from the rear and that was a tough fight, but once they got cherbourg and cleared the harbor of the wreckage, the germans had sunk there. then they were able to use that

to to resupply and reinforce and evacuate the wounded. so thank for the question that you get. here is mike's comment comment. thank you. let's say three or four questions. oh, three or four questions. well, i thought i'd get them early when donuts had some sort a submarine fleet left. why didn't have the screening out there trying to find 6000 ships or more in the atlantic. well why didn't doenitz deploy his submarines more efficiently so that he could interfere with the invasion? he doesn't have that many left. the few that he have are all operating out of the bay of biscay and the ones who have the schnauzers which are the ones that could have made it maybe who shan't and into the bay of the seine to interfere with that fleet. they had them all bottled up. they just could not get out of the bay. escape. now, the other part is, as you know, the higgins boat drivers played a big role. one did earn the medal of honor and.

a lot of them were killed. yes. the higgins. for those who don't know a name, for andrew jackson higgins, who had a plant opposite new orleans at algiers on the mississippi river, who designed and invented and built these by the tens thousands. these are the you all see and these are the ones at the drop front ramp. they're very disposable, almost like tissues because you can get one use out of them, maybe two by the third time around their wreck. but they're driven by navy crews and, navy crew of three, a coxswain and two machine gunners. and that coxswain, unlike the guys down there in a, you know below the thought line waiting shore throwing up on their boots, the coxswain standing up at the back, driving that boat and not once, but twice. and then three times. and then four times. so i think navy connections are sometimes underappreciated for role that they played in the landing. thank you for that question. okay. any more from naturally as far

away as you can get in the far. also. i'll ask one halfway through. all right. that's good. how did they clean up the mess as the battle was going on? it's been a long junkyard along the beach. yeah. they towed off the junk ones and let them sink in the channel or towed off to the side to clear passengers across the beach. it didn't happen quickly. maybe by d-plus four, they were pretty well cleared, but it took it took a while they took them off. oh, he's got a book? wait a minute. wait, that's not fair. so thank for speaking. but so on. you were mentioning the importance of operation fortitude and the various aspects of the d-day landings that you feel may have been overemphasized in the historiography. do is there one aspect that you

would point to of the entire d-day campaign that you feel should be more emphasized than public history? that's a great question. if it's true, i think well, it is true that think whether whether what i think is true is another question that we have tended to give undue to the cleverness of our operation fortitude the mulberries or the funnies we built as little contraptions as rube machines that we're going to be able to do all these clever things. they had one called a flail tank that, had a big cylinder on the front with chains it. and the idea here was supposed to drive up in front of the troops and then the chains would flail the ground prematurely, the mines, so you could follow through. well, that didn't really the way it was advertised. the ddt tanks there were supposed to be able to swim ashore. how clever was that? right to the bottom. so i think there is a to say, let's figure out some clever way

to avoid having to do this by the courage and fortitude of the men who were going to do it. and that's i don't think that's under m-4 sized, maybe never emphasized enough. what it took to do that and continue to do it so i guess that's the one area. and then of course as i mentioned at the very outset, the importance, absolute crucial importance of general eisenhower to make all these disparate parts become part of the a-team air, land, sea bridge. americans, whether it's a boot or a trunk, whatever you're going to do, let's make this. we're the same team and there are lots of aspects of this to get overlooked for you can, learn about black soldiers in britain who southern americans don't want in their. but the british are perfectly willing to welcome. and eisenhower's got to solve

that problem, too. so eisenhower's temperament, his ability to bring all of these disparate parts together and make it work, that's key. one more. one more. if there is one more right there. run, run, run. so i did a research project a couple of years ago about where journalist martha gellhorn, who stowed away one of the hospital ships. yeah. and laid it on. easy read. and so i'm curious to know more about the hospital ships mentioned. if i recall correctly, they felt very exposed because of their markings. and so i'm curious to know what what were the policies for hospital ships and it maintained this gentleman's question in the middle over here some christian are more about that. yeah. no that's a great because what it what the broader it imposes

is how did the violence of war change what we thought as the humane protocols war things that you did by 1944 that you would not have considered in. 40 and hospital ships are one of those in the atlantic and more particularly in the pacific hospital ships were just i mean, you could put a big cross on that big white and think, well, we're okay. no you're not. and i think what that suggests is a lot about human nature, that that is possible for war to create its own momentum of violence of what's acceptable of what we can do. and maybe one of the reasons it's even worse the pacific than in the atlantic is, that the japanese in particular thought, anybody who was not of japanese descent or ancestry was was subhuman and of course, anybody who was allowed themselves to be taken prisoner deserve, whatever

he got, because he lost his honor. it was not quite as bad as that, the atlantic. but there was a feeling of that. there was a sensibility that our backs to the wall, the future of civilized nation depends on this. so anything goes. so martha gellhorn was absolutely right. they they were, i think, in a vulnerable spot. and you didn't know at any given moment it had the germans that capability, better capability of, attacking ships in the armada. i don't think they would have hesitated to hit the hospital ship, but a hypothetical because they didn't. so anyway thank you very much, everybody.