now it's time to bring some fire support. we inlw the infantry always love to have a large caliber fire support to give us a hand. so, our speaker, the next speaker as s well prepared to te topic where he talked for 30 years to includeou four years in the history department and he also served distinguished professorships at other institutions to include professor of strategy at the naval college in dartmouth england and the earnest professor of maritime history at the u.s. naval war college in newport rhode island. in the years 1971 through 74, doctor simons subsequently obtained his doctoral degree at

the university of florida. over the years he came to fame as a distinguished historian, specializing the american civil war, maritime history and naval history of the second world war. doctor simons is the author of 17 books many of which have been translated into as many as six languages by reading all of the published titles today would receive the length of his allotted time to speak. suffice it to say, the subject matter expertise includes biography of civil war leaders in american civil analysis from a few of us in the room with the battlefield guide and exam. so thank you, doctor simons. the 2008 book lincoln and his admirals, abraham lincoln, the u.s. navy and civil war won their prestigious lincoln prize. the scholarship on u.s. naval

history and the second world war is also significant from the atlantic to the pacific oceans and back again. the book entitled the d-day landings won the morrison award for naval literature in 2015. if you include the teacher of the year award in 1988 and the researchers in 1998. the 2006 roosevelt prize for naval history. in 2014 the naval historical foundation presented him with a

w knox award for lifetime achievementie. this past year the pritzker military museum awarded him the prize for the lifetime achievement in military writing. ladies and gentlemen, doctor greg simons. [applause] thank you, tom. thank you, everybody, for coming back from lunch. a beautiful day out there. i want to thank the organizer of the conference, carol of course and tracy and of course the eisenhower family. susan spent so many years heading this organization. i told david last night that i was going to explain what it was that we had in common. there he is in the back, going to make a quick getaway.

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 a connection of sorts it was being explained to us early on the various sports we were expected to participate and among them he said water polo has been scrapped from the lists 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 job today is to talk about the navy's role and invasion of the normandy beaches, and in particular about one episode which i used for the title which is not on the screen and here's why. susan inspired me by saying

imagine what it would be likeonf you had to conduct a complicated operation without any electronic support or backup. so listen to live up to the expectation none of my slides made it here today. sot , i'm going without a net ad we will see how that works out. but the quotation i used for the title comes from omar bradley who is a pretty credible source who was so grateful for the support that the u.s. navy in particular but the navy ships as well did save the day at least i'm going to argue that on omaha beach. before i do that, let me make a couple of general observations almost everybody in the audience and probably everybody in the audience is very sensitive to, but i wanted to remind us all of

the broad context. first, the invasion of the nazi occupied europe was an amphibious operation. it's and old amphibious operations that are the most difficult to carry out in war. in part because this is a joint operation as has been emphasized, susan mentioned this as well it required a ground force. the army of course. the c force, the navy and in this case and air force. coordinating three services in a tight timetable is difficult,ic but it wasn't only a joint operation, it was a combined operation involving several countries again as emphasized earlierbr, 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 have air land and sea forces of ten or so countries and a quick multiplication, even my arithmetic as a history major will reveal this yields 30 sets of the command structures and that is one of the main reasons why very few people other than dwight eisenhower could have carried this off, because eisenhower's great skill with his ability to bring people together to coordinate and ameliorate difficulties. john showed us that paragraph making a personal connection looking them in the eye prior to

lifting off that he did that kind of thing not only at zero one and zero two, he did it at the politicalth level. the ability to do that is the greatest strength of eisenhower brought to this operation. now, today thanks in part to steven spielberg and tom hanks, when many americans think about d-day as i hope many of them will in this 80th anniversary year, they may conjure up that bit of footage that opens up saving private ryan where they are heading towards the beach and the sea spray is flying past and it drops and out they go.

i'm personally grateful for his continuing interest in the second world war. he not only is a great actor but a great supporter of the museum in new orleans where he participates and also provides a lot of support for the events such as this. so, good for him. but on the other hand, the story of d-day with a landing on omaha beach or any beach encourages the 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 of the equipment and the men across a contested ocean from the western hemisphere to britain past the german u-boat's. the construction of training

camps in britain, the assembly of their equipment, the dozens of practice landings all along the britishis coast and of coure the cross channel movement itself and an operation so vast and complex it stands virtually not only along the second world war but in the warfare itself for its size and complexity and up to the landing on the beach was a naval operation with its own code name, operation neptune. this, the navy's role wasn't merely to facilitate the movement of men and equipment across the channel army soldiers like to explain while the navy is the bus driver they get us there and then we do the fighting. it is of course that but navies

and of course i will use the plural were central to the success in a wide variety of wayst some of which i will talk about today and arguably the most important of which took place after the landings not only to supply the men, food, ammunition, equipment to the men fighting on the beach, but also to sustain them there. there's another generalizationor you already know that is worth keeping in mind nonetheless and thatnv is the invasion of europe was not the result by whatever number we use or the 24,000 paratroops and glider troops. that's the first wave. hollywood has encouraged us to believe that once that granting

drops and they run onto the beach and they beat the enemy, that it's done. but in fact, the assaults require a series of landings. all day long 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 of 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 .hem that didn't just happen. they also evacuated the wounded and the prisoners sometimes in the same ship that causes interesting confrontations.

they landed the trucks and jeeps and other heavy equipment all the supporting material necessary to enable and invading army to sustain itself, to build up to that 1.5 million men who made the march across central france onto paris and berlin. so all of that is by way of arguing that the story of d-day is of course the story of the sacrifice and the heroism of those who splashed ashore on omaha, utah and on the sixth of june, but it was also an extraordinarily complex maritime drill in which some six to 7,000 allied ships depending on how you count maintained a supply chain of unprecedented size. so, in talking about the navy's

role from the d-day invasion is often the first thing everybody sites. so many. 6,000, 7,000 that the personal memories of those who participated in the invasion who gathered together in that site which was officially the area everybody called the piccadilly circus that you could see f them as far as the eye could see horizon to horizon and of course you hear stories i could have walked across the english channel but the visual impact of that has legs. other popular themes of the day and we've heard them today, the clever disinformation campaign that the allies amounted to to confuse the german operation fortitude which sought to convince the landings would take place elsewhere.

anywhere but normandy. andor i think the reason that story has legs as we love the idea of thinking about the way out outsmarted of those. look how we fooled those silly germans into thinking we were going someplace else. and because of that psychology i suspected the impact of the disinformation campaign has been somewhat exaggerated. it helped. it certainly didn't hurt but it doesn't explain by itself or even largely the allied successes in normandy. another aspect of this is the construction of the artificial harbors. i was pleased to hear john's response about the role they played. these are the artificial harbors one-off gold beach and the other off omaha and i think it is the

same psychology. those silly germans didn't think we couldrm come ashore in germay because we wouldn't have a port to unload all the material assets necessary to sustain 1.5 million soldiers on a defended beach so we will bring our own harbor with us. look how clever we are. it is kind of an interesting story and it is clever, no doubt about it the engineering is absolutely astonishingin. and the story of the origins is interesting. they were sitting around discussing how we could possibly be able to logistically sustain this huge complex operation and a british general somebody said we have to capture a port but we can't their heavily defended we can't get there in time.

and everybody laughed and then i got quiet and somebody said why not. and of course we did. now, churchill who loved the weapons instinctively was a huge advocate of this. the facility constructed on omaha beach are often a claim to be one of the majors reasons why the allies were able to be triumphant. even samuel morrison argued that the artificial harbors for the were the key to the allied success. far be it from me to contradict morrison, but i wonder if this isn't part of that hindsight about cleverness. we can talk more about this in the queuing day if you are 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 and dropped into the dark night and glided down silently. so in that respect the focus is starting with the landing and is not entirely misplaced. but there's another aspect of the navy's role in the d-day operation and especially in omaha beach that does sometimes get overlooked and that is what i want to talk about in particular today. it's the role played by about a dozen allied destroyers, tin cans and the popular lingo i saw someone wearing a baseball hat, tin can sailors. where's my destroyer men, there he is. so called because they are the smallest combat and. that is battleships, cruisers, destroyers. that sounds like a fearsomee

weapon. the origin of it is that they were designed to destroy tiny torpedo i boats which the french and italians were building so the royal navy said we will build a small ship that can take outll the bugs and call them torpedo boats destroyers and then that was simply shortened to destroyers so despite thin skinned, biggest gun they carry is a 5-inch, death charges on the sternum, torpedoes on the bow. they played a critical role at normandy. in the lengthy and complex operational plan that was written for d-day, the task assigned was to screen the invasion from the possible interference by the german u-boats. in fact the threat as we heard

has pretty much been neutralized and indeed the only access naval challenge at all came from a handful of what the germans called [inaudible] fast boats a little translation, kind of the equivalent to what we called controlled torpedo boats, small 80-foot of the a principal weapon and the machine gun tops. it did have an impact on the allied training regimen before the landing when they attacked a flotilla. john mentioned this in his address this morning. but on the day they were ordered to charge out and attack that flee.

i'm trying to imagine the expression on the face of the captain of this 80-foot boat with a crew of six being told there's only 6,000 of them so you should be okay. on the one hand of course is what they might call a target rich environment, can hardly mess. on the other hand it had to be at leastst a little bit intimidating. the junior officers that commanded left port, fired off their torpedoes, turned around and went right back into port. now again the circumstances they could hardly avoid getting something. one in fact did just miss it another headed directly for the allied command ship. it was the name of the estate in scotland so it was the name

given and the allied naval command was on board. that could have been as we should say awkward but as it happened, they saw the track of the torpedo went full head and was missed by yards and instead hit a norwegian destroyer. that is because they had secured near absolute mastery of the sea as well as the air and while the boatsou were metal some, troublesome you had to keepd, tm 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 citedd their guns the germans on

the high ground particularly at omaha beach that crescent-shaped beach john showed us and thank you forth showing that because my slide didn't getsese here or i would w it to you. the landing boats came into the killing zone and touched under withering fir. german machine guns i like to cite this quotation because it is almost i can't get my head around it completely. german machine guns fired at the rate of 1500 rounds a minute. that's 25 per second. they had 80 of these arranged in thear ark around omaha beach. they said it sounded like tearing a piece of paper inho half, that is how fast the

bullets left the muzzle. i won't make you do the math. it works out to 2,200 bullets across omaha beach every second. that's almost more in the air than air. it was so intense some of the troops balked at leaving the landing craft at all. there was one that dropped and killed the first floor right there in the rank just outright killed them and smacked cleaning and climbing off the ramp and the wall of kicking up water and surf and the soldiers just froze and the navy stood up and called out come on, fellas, get out i've got to go get another load. and they did. they had artillery and was pretty busy blowing up the

landing boats and the larger kind of an alphabet soup of the amphibious crowds involved and the ship infantry even if they were successful depositing, they were blown up right there along the beach and what that meant was the beachfront itself was crowded and 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. there's no place to land. they are going back and forth looking for an open piece of sand where they can go ashore. the landings at omahama beach

began at 6:30 that morning and byby eight, the whole operation was in jeopardy. it was so bad, general bradley watching from offshore considered calling it off. betterwere going a bit and his thought was we will retract from omaha and headed for utah but you can't retract men already imposed you would have to just abandon them there. that is a hard call. it didn't happen of course. encouraged by the navy command, he decided he would continue to push men and equipment ashore as fast as he could and hope that eventually the momentum would allow them to secure the beach. one of the things that saved

them and the invasion and here comes my central argument now was a handful of destroyers most of them american but two of them were navy, british. they came to the rescue almost like the calvary writing to save the training in an old western. skipping some of this stuff because i don't have pictures to prove it. i mentioned in world war ii the primary function was to act as escorts for those convoys back in the north atlantic that brought the men and equipment to britain in the first place. the heaviest armament was a 5-inch gun kind of a popgun next to those. thehi battleships were using th. 5-inch shot weighs 50 pounds. that's not inconsiderable the b

16-inch gun fires a shell with 3,000 pounds. destroyers also d carried chargs on the stern for the use u agait the boats and smaller 2240 and it was to scream outside the invasion i fleet to prevent interference by the u-boats but by 8:00 in the morning on the sixth of june, things had changed. we've got this beautiful detailed plan that of course we are going to have to scrap or at least adjust it. a lot of them seeing what was happening ashore already began moving in closer to see if they could provide close in gunfire support but at 8:30 it became official. john wesley hall commanding the support group offshore ordered all thean destroyer skippers to abandon their positions and close in on the beach to provide

gunfire support for those trapped on omaha beach. .. ... >> on low tide, it's allonge way from the surf to the high ground on the beach. high tide is a relatively short distance. army t tended to argue and risig

tide and fall and you're wounded, you can't crawl as fast as that tide is coming up the beach.at that's tafanely terrifying environment. hall ordered them to close the beach and in his own words maintain a heavy volume of fire on beach targets as possible. he got on the radio and yelled get on them, men. get on them! they're raising hell with the

men on the beach and we can't have that. that's how it was quoted in life mag seen so probably pretty close to that . destroyers and skippers respond with enthusiasm and probably too much. self-evidence evident if a destroyer grounds itself in shallow water off a beach that's daunted with artillery pieces, it'll be hammered into bits. no knots into waters that was dangerously shallow and into channels and watching from nearby lgct and nearby destroyer and assume must be out of control careening towards the

beach as fast as it can go at high speed and thought my god they're going to run aground in front of german artillery. at the lost minute, the destroyer made a sharp turn, backed it is engines and with the star bard batteries blazed with every gun it had point-blank at the defensive positions. more than a dozen allied destroyers responded to the call that morning and commanded we u.s. s army captain harry sandea

and spread out along omaha beach and two of them, the sutterly and thompson supported the army rangers who s were sailing point duhoc west of omaha and you've all seen photos of that and astonishing thing to see and not going there and you should go and the ma cook later joined by harding took up positions for the center and going for omaha beach and five other fox green and easy reds.

the destroyers took up positions 800 yards given the gradual slope of the beach and they were pretty shallow water and going for them and one inch of water under the heels and they were so close and they were being hit. hit a lot of trouble not knowing what to shoot at. yes, there's high ground but where? the heavy smoke over the beach and plus excellent german cam flosh and made it all by

possible to figure out where the fertilizer man guns were and small ones for that matter. camouflage using smokeless powder and couldn't look for smoke the ships couldn't talk to the men and the men couldn't talk to the ships. why not call her on her cell phone?

that was a reprieve and showing them behind the shingle and i had that slide too and it's not here but anyway. near the center ovomaha beach and a lieutenant commander who was captain of the class destroyer carmic going for this and it would indicate where the enemy gun placement was and couldn't see a thing. he did notice this, that the few tanks that had gotten a show at omaha and it's where a lot of the supposedly duplex dry tanks

and 27 of 32 went to the bottom and not there and of the few tanks that managed to get ashore, they all seem to be shooting at particular place. he orders up the gunners to hit that spot. nothing in the 5-inch click operational order for d-day suggesting this kind of cooperation and this is the kind

ofe thing, the sailors and the soldiers worked out on the fly without communication. they figured it out. it's a spontaneous partnership and says a lot about the ability of american sailors and soldiers to adjust to circumstances on the ground or for that matter on the sea. he opened fire what he assumed might beif german fortified positions in the cliff base and they were so well protected with 13 inches of concrete reinforced with that rebar, that he couldn't fire into the cliff phase carving away chunks of rock till the supporting

structure underneath and the whole artillery position crashed down onto the beach. swapping off the fox green sector and he could see the language and see men ashore dug in behind the sand along the beach and boats of third wave and fired two more salvos and reporting target destroyed.

absent spotters in the air or on land and they happened to be looking at line of bluffs west of the beach. when he noticed that the bushes moved just a little bit. and half a second later a shell exploded on the beach. he kept launching that spot and it happened again so he called the skipper over and said, skipper, little bit to the -- see that spot. watch this. movement. explosion. so the skipper got on the phone and called up the nearest destroyer, his words, came barreling in there and popped over side ways and port side to the beach and turned loose eight rounds of 5-inch projectiles into the position and no more movements of brush.

all thatan made the ground shake sand and dust up in the air and obscured the whole beach and looked powerful. tin can had smaller guns but theres were aimed at precision targets and hitting the beach.

the few navy destroyers we had saved the invasion.

shortly before noon, the ships contacted on the beach and gunfire requests on the request to the destroyer getting about 11:30 or noon. at 11:24, spotters try to target a concentration of german troops behind the beach.

if you have a question, wait for the mic. if you don't, that's okay too. evacuating off the beach a few days player tell ago story to travel at night about england and ships were sunk around them and one of the reason the mind

sweepers didn't keep it there and it's going to blow up under the fourth one. other magnetic anomaly detecters built in and going to come here and recognize that scar reigns leading back prisoners and wounded including a dad and grandfather and they did this right on the clock and not just a night but he happened to be a night and they are full-timely

had room for that particular t soldier to get back and captor was critical and clearing the harbor of the wreckage the germans sunk there and able to use that to resupply and reinforcein and evacuate the wounded. thank you for the question. mike's coming.

>> thank you. three or four questions. i thought i'd get in early with doughnuts and the screening with six thousand ships on the atlantic wall. >> deploying the submarines more efficiently and interfering with the invasion.n. he doesn't have that many left and few are operating out of the bay of biskay and one with the new york l are the ones that could have -- snorkel and made it around the shot into the bay of hussain to interfere with that and they had them all bottled up and could not get out of the bay of biskay. >> oh part is the higgins boatig driver played a big role and metal of honor. >> higgins boat named for andrew jackson higgins that had a plant opposite of new orleanss and algeria and mississippi river who designed and inventing and built these by the tens of thousands and these are what

you've all seen and these are the drop front ramp and i like the guys down there and going to shore uphe on their boots and that's standing up at the back driving the boat and not once but twice and then three times and then four times.

>> it didn't happen quickly. it took awhile to take off.

undue cleverness to the operation and mulberries or funnies we've b built and contractions of root goldberg machines and one called up a flail tank and had a big cylinder on the front with chains on it and the idea here was supposed to drive up in front of the chains and flailing the ground prematurely detonate the minds and file it through. that didn't work the way it was advertised and tanks that were supposed to be able to swim ashorere and how clever was tha? zoom. right to the bottom.

all the parts to be part of a team, air, land, sea, britts, canadians ander americans and a truck or whatever you do, let's make this on the same team and they're allowed to have aspects of this getting overlooked. getting parts together for them to work. that's key.

>> great question and the other question imposes on how did the violence of war change what we thought of as humane protocols of war and going for the 44 and that you'd not have considered in 1940.

and hospital ships are one of those. ine atlantic and going for the pacific and hospitals were targets and put a big red cross on that big white ship and think we're okay. no, you're not. anybody allowing themselves to be taken prisoner deserved whatever he got and he lost his honor and it's not quite as bad as that in the atlantic but there was a a feeling of that ad there's a sense of our backs are to the wall and anything goes so a month ago it was absolutely

right and they were, i think, in a vulnerable spot, and you know at any given moment, it had the germans with the capability, better capability of attacking ships in the armada. i don't think they would have hesitated to hit the hospital ship but we'll never know because they didn't. anyways, thank you very much, everybody. when i first started n

this weekend, i came up with this theme, the information war. one of the attendees i was chatting me about spies and espionage and that kind of thing. and my ears perked up and i thought that would be an interesting topic. so i broaden that a