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 >> dr. craig simons is professor of the naval academy and going toou include four years and he's served distinguished professorship and going for the strategy of the britania college

the american civil war leaders and american civil war going with us in this room benefited greatly during that corporation and and it's going to work with lincoln and admirals and abraham lincoln and civil war and prestigious lincoln prize.

most recent work two months ago and naval warfare in the specific and admiral chester and this is the unjustly deserved a large extensive line and a few 1998 and 2006 theodore and frankly d. roosevelt prize and 2014 historical foundation presented him with acommodore dudley knox award for lifestyle achievement and library h awardd him with the pulitzer prize.

welcome. organizer and carol of course and laying back and going to get a quick get away and this is embarrassing.

in particular i use for the title not on the screen and here's why.

during this time and going for this day and going to argue that and on the omaha beach and before i do that, amphibious

operation during this time and going to carry out in war and attributed to the basil little heart and going to have joint operation and emphasized as well forces of ten or so countries

and quick multiplication and revealing the sets of hierarchy called and command structures and that's one one of the main reasons that few people other than dwight d. eisenhower could haveus carried this off and coud have the great skill and ability to bring people together.oh going back in 2001 or 2002 and e1 or e2 level and did it at political level and many

americans think about d day and hope many of them will and # nonillion anniversary will and conjure up that bit of footage at that point and where the landing california crafter heading towards the beach and flying past the forts andwould

he bees, months, and years prior to that moment and assembling and training for the troops and the movement of the equipment and man across a contested ocean from the western hemisphere and going past the german u boats and training camps in britain and going so complex and

virtually along not only the second world war and annals of warfare itself and size and complexity the fighting and it is of course that and navy and again i'll use the plural in honor of the several navies involved were central to the success of d-day and in a wide variety of ways.

went on for weeks and months of what has beenn mentioned already from this podium and about 176,000 allied a month and a half later there were so many of them. that didn't just happen. chipss evacuated the wounded.

it's the story of the sacrifice and harrowing of those that splashed asore on omaha, utah, and gold juneau and beaches on the sixth of june. wow, so many ships.

6,000, 7,000 and personal memories of those that participate and the aisle of white, which was areas and everybodyyb called pick dilly circus was that you could see ships as far as eye could see horizon, horizon and of course you hear story and i could have walked across the english channel and not quite true but the visual impact of that

thinking about unsmarting those and going from t some place and that psychology and i suspected the impact of the disinformation campaign and has been somewhat exaggerated the response to a quarry fromm you about the role that the mulberries played and going for the homage in the area and we coulder come ashore in normandy and we wouldn't have a port to unload.

logistically staying in a huge complex operation and a british general and going to vote and all i can say is if we can capture a report and having to take one with us. of course we get to churchill

and weapons instinctively and going to get to this and facility andwho stormed the beaches and dropped into the dark night and going down silently and in that respect,

starting with the handling is not entirely misplaced but there's another aspect of the navy's role inin the d-day operation. taxpayers role play of about a dozen destroyers and going to see someone trying to destroy tiny little torpedo boats and

task assigned to the tin can was screen the invasion fleet from possible interference by german u boats.

they attacked a flotilla in thea sand and john mentioned this and in his address this morning and but on ---day, they were attacking that fleet. going for them to attack those

battleships. might call a target-rich environment and going for this and one torpedo just missed the battleship and another one headed directly for the allied commandship and put a rather clumsy name of largs and got that going for scott land. going for the name of the ship and ramsey was on board. that could have been as we should say awkward but near

absolute for the mastery of the sea as well as the air. the real crisis came on the beach and having months placed to incite guns and germans on the omaha beach and shaped beach andthat's 25 bullets per

second. the bullets left the muzzle some

of the troops balked at leaving the landing craft at all. it was when the dropping them and machine gun bullets killed the first four men in the front rank getting ready to leave and smack off the wall and kicking up water and surf in front of gogoing for the amphibious crimes on the landing craft and

infantry and as they did, even if they were successful in depositing their men and equipment and going up there along the beach. that men the landing craft in the second wave and the third wave remember, every ten minutes here they come and head toward that beach, there's no place to land. they're going back and forth looking at open view of the sand and they can go ashore. the whole operation was in jeopardy and omar bradley watching from offshore and

consider things going a bit better on utah beach and will retract from omaha and going for utah. it didn't happen. encouraged by navy commander and going for john leslie hall and they'll push men and equipment ashore as fast as he possibly could and hoping before the momentum going to allow them to literally save the invasion and they came to the r rescue almost like the cavalry writing to save

the wagon train. it pictures to prove it. escorts for the convoys back and forth across the north atlantic and going for britain and heaviest is a 5-inch gun next to 1 and 4-inch guns and battleships we're using and it was going 3,000 pounds and the story was also a depth charges on the stern for use against u-boat asks one of the items smaller for 20 and 40-millimeter

aircraft gun and began moving in closer to shore to provide close in gunfire support and at 8:30, it became official. that's when jimmy hall and shorthanding the support group offshore and ordered all the destroyer skippers to abandoned their positions and close in on the beach to provide gunfire support for the troops planned and trapped on omaha beach.

going for the omaha beach, there's a one footdrop vertically for every a 50 feet horizontally, which means it's a very gradual beach. there at low tide, you could play soccer. at low tide, it's a long way from the surfs to the high ground and relatively short and army arguing and playing in high tide so there's not that far to go. navy said, no, no, no. has to be low tide to take the obstacles and minds and all those impediments that ramos stuck into the sand. they compromised. they did it half tide. ....

they had to be like 2 miles off the beach. destroyers went 13 feet so they could go and much closer so they ordered them to close the beach and the volume of fire as much as possible. a bit more conversational about it. we must stop it.

and responding with enthusiasm two months, it's prettyy self evident the ground themselves off artillery pieces. gunners. nevertheless, the destroyers bed shored some up 20 knots into. water that was so dangerously shallow and outside swept ice and she went to sleep between 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. if you enjoyed american history tv senate using the qr code on the screen to receive weekly highlights of upcoming programs. sign up for the newsletter today and watch american history tv every weekend or anytime online at c-span.org/history. ♪♪ >> c-span now is a free mobile app featuring your unfiltered view of what's happening in washington, live and on-demand. keep up with the days because defense was live streams and or proceedings and hearings from u.s. congress.

a variety of podcasts. c-span now is available at the apple store and google play. scan to download free today or visit c-span.org/c-span now. c-span now, your front row to washington anytime, anywhere. ♪♪ >> the house will be in order. >> c-span celebrates 45 years of covering congress like no other. your primary source capitol hill providing coverage for the government. c-span, 45 years and