The whole thing started at the Quebec conference, where Roosevelt and Churchill planned the invasion of Europe with their Joint Chiefs of Staff.
The ground forces were sure they could seize an invasion beachhead on the continent of Europe. But holding it was another matter.
The landing would be followed by a race between ourselves and the Germans in concentrating men and weapons at the invasion point. Our supplies would have to be carried by sea and landed on the beaches. Amphibious craft and rhino ferries (steel pontoons, powered by huge outboard motors) could pour a certain amount of material on to the beaches. But bad weather or even a stiff offshore breeze might break the precious life line.
So the Army made one condition for the invasion: they must have some kind of port, as insurance against bad weather.
They went further. They made a timetable of just what they wanted, and when:
D plus 2. Shelter for half a mile of coastline and 1,000 tons of small craft.
D plus 7. Shelters behind which coasters could unload onto ferry craft, regardless of weather.
D plus 14. Sheltered water for 17 coasters plus 7 pierheads, plus one motor transport pier for
LST’s to send their vehicles directly ashore.
Plan, as soon as possible, a harbor for large ships to discharge their cargoes into lighters.
Now there were, of course, plenty of ports in Western Europe which could fill the bill— but intelligence reports showed that the Germans recognized their importance as much as we did. Each port suitable for an invasion base had been fortified, so that it would take weeks or even months to capture it—weeks during which bad weather might at any time bring our offensive to a standstill. We needed a port for a prolonged invasion; we needed a prolonged invasion to seize a port.
It was to break this iron circle of frustration that Mulberry A and Mulberry B were born. The military leaders turned the problem over to the engineers and technical experts. They produced a plan which sounded deceptively simple: if you must have a port and cannot capture one, then make one— build a port on the beachhead.
Easier said than done. But the experts— adjourning to the heat of a Washington June —went on to consider scores of suggested ways to carry out the plan. In the end they combined four of them into an over-all plan for the construction of two artificial harbors—code named “Mulberry”: one each in the American and British sectors of the beachhead.
For the small craft shelter, which had to go in right on the heels of the actual landing, they took an old idea and turned it inside out. Sunken ships had been used in the past to block ports: now it was proposed to use them to build one. Ships could go across under their own power: a line of them sunk end to end along the 15-foot line would form an excellent shelter close inshore. The ship shelters were given the code name of “Gooseberry.”
For the larger harbor the experts took a half forgotten idea and tremendously expanded it. Sunken ships couldn’t be used: the water where the breakwater had to go in would be so deep that they would be covered at high tide. So the engineers proposed a portable breakwater made up of sections, which could be floated over and then sunk in place. These sections were to be huge, hollow concrete caissons, in assorted sizes, the largest being 60 feet high and weighing many tons, as much as many an ocean freighter. According to the code, one of these units was a “Phoenix.”
In order that the lighters might unload and the LST’s discharge their vehicles directly to the shore, piers—once more, portable—were needed. Fortunately a design for these was ready. The British War Office had developed a floating steel pier similar to a pontoon bridge in principle, known as the Loebnitz pier. This pier had a steel scow for a head, resting on an ingenious arrangement of steel stilts at the four corners, so that it could rise and fall with the tide while remaining firmly fixed in place. These could be lifted while the head was being towed, giving the scow a vague resemblance to a Mississippi River steamer. “Whales” was the code name for the pier units.
For the outermost breakwater the experts turned to a young Scots physicist in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, Lieutenant Commander Robert Arthur Lockner. Lockner had been working for sometime on the problem of a floating breakwater, and his latest development was accepted for Mulberry. It consisted of a series of floating steel units moored end to end in two long lines. Each unit was cruciform in cross section, and 200 feet in length, three of the arms being filled with water while the air-filled fourth kept it afloat. These curious objects—their code name was “Bombardon”—were possessed of great inertia. When a wave came along they lifted so slowly that much of the energy of the swell was reflected instead of being transmitted to the waters beyond. Tests showed that this cut wave levels very considerably.
Of the two artificial ports, the American harbor was to be primarily for the direct discharge of motor vehicles from LST’s, over the piers, to the shore: the British port would be especially adapted for the unloading of coasters. They were to handle ten to twelve thousand tons of supplies a day and many hundred vehicles.
The twin ports would be very similar in appearance—a line of sunken ships close inshore, forming one end of the harbor, then a connected line of caissons forming a breakwater for the piers. Outside of all of this stood rows of floating breakwaters, making a roadstead for the ocean freighters.
In addition there would be three more small craft shelters, formed by sunken ships, beyond the main harbors.
Preliminary construction of the units would be carried out by the British alone, but each country would be responsible for transporting its Mulberry to the other side and assembling it there.
Designing the harbors was one thing; getting them built was another matter. British heavy industry was already overloaded. Steel and concrete were as scarce as hen’s teeth—and the caissons alone required over 30,000 long tons of steel and more than 500,000 long tons of concrete. Man power was equally scarce—and it took some 22,000 men to build the caissons alone.
The result was constant struggle—struggle for priorities for labor and raw materials, to get dry docks, to carry out tests of the designs which had to be checked even as the building got under way. There never was enough time for anything—time for construction, time for testing, time for training. The necessary division of the job among four distinct agencies—the British Ministry of Supply, War Office and Admiralty, and the United States Navy—further slowed things up. The whole construction program, exclusive of the planning period, had to be carried out in only five months. In this time units had to be built for 10 miles of piers, 23 pierheads, 93 Bombardons, and more than 100 Phoenixes, while 80-odd block ships had to be prepared for sinking.
No small order—and not made easier by the fact that it had to be carried out under the very nose of the Luftwaffe. The thousands of men who worked on the program further complicated the security problem. Many of them were Irishmen, who returned periodically to the Free State where there was a German legation.
Since it was impossible to keep them from talking, they were given something quite misleading to talk about—a “cover” story, convincing but highly inaccurate, for each unit. The men aboard the block ships, for example, were told that these were to be “port repair ships,” designed to fill holes in damaged breakwaters which might be found in captured ports.
Despite all handicaps the work went on, and by late winter the first units were delivered to the men who were to handle them in the invasion. Over-all control of the project was in the hands of the Royal Navy, but a special American Task Group, later to become Task Force 128, had been set up under U.S. naval command to take over Mulberry A. Seabees of the 108th Naval Construction Battalion were given the job of riding the units across the Channel and putting them into place on the Norman coast.
The tug problem was given to a naval reservist who, in civil life, had been the head of a large New York towing company. He soon found himself trying to divide up the limited supply of tugs among a host of clamoring claimants, each convinced that his need was the greatest. More tugs were sent for posthaste from the United States and all the available tugs for the entire invasion— civilian, salvage, handling tugs, Army tugs, and Navy tugs, British, Allied, and American tugs, were put in a pool under him.
All spring the men trained in sinking and floating the caissons, linking up the pier units, anchoring the pierheads, handling the towing lines, maneuvering the tugs. More units of every type came dribbling in. By June 6, D-day, they were ready to go.
As it started out, TF 128 was probably the strangest Task Force ever to fly the American flag. Not one of its three divisions resembled the conventional idea of a task force as a glamorous group of swift cruisers and hard-hitting carriers. The flagship was a tiny submarine chaser. The biggest unit which set out from The Solent, on the South Coast of England, was a lumber vessel from the Baltic trade—her heavy lifting gear fore and aft gave her a number of ribald nicknames. There were some old side-wheelers with tender memories of picknicking excursionists along the English coasts. There were boom layers—or net tenders according to U. S. Navy usage—with their strange snout-like bows. And there were tugs.
The block ship division which sailed from Poole, to the westward, was no fancier. The ships had been taken from the dregs of the North Atlantic shipping pool, old freighters, battered by years of overwork, many of them carrying gaping wounds left by bomb, torpedo, or mine. But they had no ordinary cargo and their crews of merchant volunteers knew it. Below decks there was only sand ballast—and high explosives, carefully planted where they would blow out the bottom at the touch of a button on the bridge. Nevertheless the old veterans had plenty of protection as they limped out to the Channel and headed for France at a furious 5 knots. Planes and escort craft showed how highly they were valued.
Strangest of all, of course, were the Phoenix and Whale units. These had been gathered in shallow waters in The Solent and along the coast to the eastward. The piers had been set up on the shore and the Phoenixes sunk in place until they were needed. Now, after pumping vessels emptied them out, they looked like the biggest Noah’s Arks in history. Their ends—there was no way to tell the bow from the stern—were square and barge-like. As their crews clambered onto the 3-foot ledges which were their decks, their box-like superstructures towered into the air 40 feet above. The men climbed hand over hand up the iron ladders which clung to the sides, to the narrow wooden platforms which ran across the open tops. “Phoenix” was the official name—but the riding crews, who were to spend a day and a hah at sea, living in concrete caves built into one end, called them a lot of things as they pried open their cold K rations!
At that, the Phoenix crews were better off than their fellow Seabees aboard the Whales. Their quarters were tents pitched on an open pier span a few feet above the water. The spans were towed across in units of six, and looked like nothing so much as a chain of little country bridges putting out to sea. The men aboard the Whale heads were more fortunate. Their quarters in the depths of the scow-like vessels were narrow and cramped, but they were at least warm and dry.
The first units—handling tugs, net tenders, boom vessels, survey launches, and so forth—arrived off the Normandy beachhead early on the morning of June 7, D plus one.
The area offshore was a fantastic sight. Sprawled as far as the eye could see, all the way to the horizon, were the ships of the invasion fleet—ships of every size and description, tankers, freighters, transports, landing craft, destroyers, cruisers, battleships. It was as if all the everyday shipping in New York Harbor, plus half the Navy, were gathered off the French coast. Landing craft were going into the few cleared areas on the beach. Transports were discharging men over the side onto barges and small craft. Supply ships had dropped anchor ready to discharge their cargo. And moving in and out were the fighting ships of the support force, their shells roaring overhead at unseen targets inland.
Mulberry A was to go in off “Omaha” Beach, near the village of Vierville. There was little advance information about this area. The coasts were little frequented by seamen and the most recent charts were based on surveys made in the nineteenth century. Aerial surveys and raiding parties had added to this dubious store of information, but even so, D-day found TF 128 depending on an on-the-spot survey for final selection of installation points.
Royal Navy survey parties and American Seabee surveyors in LCT’s were therefore the first to go in. They had to check previous estimates of water depths, some of which proved wrong, and mark with buoys the lines for the ships, Phoenixes, and piers.
The main elements of the Task Force began to gather for the job during the afternoon of the 7th.
Meanwhile, during those few days when the landing of soldiers and their equipment was all-important, Navy salvage forces on Omaha pulled several heavy guns out of the water, located and hauled up on the beach scores of drowned-out jeeps, trucks, and ambulances, and even salvaged two Piper Cub planes which the Army needed badly for gun spotting. Frequently its men waded out shoulder-deep in order to swing a line aboard an LCI, so that soldiers wading ashore with heavy equipment should have something to guide them through the surf.
Although this work of salvaging Army vehicles continued throughout the summer —when some of the tanks or trucks hauled ashore had been in the water so long as to have barnacled—it was only during the critical first few days that it was given top priority.
The primary function of the Port Director was not salvage, however, but the vital one of lighterage. Much cargo arrived from England in LST’s and LCT’s, and they could unload directly on the beach, of course. But Liberty Ships and other merchantmen had to lie in the open roadstead and discharge their cargoes onto LCT’s, and LCM’s, and rhino ferries. These last were a development of the famous Seabee pontoon causeway which had done good yeoman service in every invasion since Sicily. The rhinos were, in effect, self-propelled causeways, great rafts of pontoons, powered by huge outboard motors.
One of the great sights of the beaches in operation preceding the building of the Mulberries was the spectacle of one of these rhinos, piled high with freight, moving in to shore. On the topmost pinnacle of the cargo stood the officer in charge, guiding his strange craft by hand signals to the two coxswains standing at the wheels of their outboard motors quite unable to see where they were going. Each barge had a tent pitched in the back—they could hardly be said to have a bow and a stern—and from it there was usually a column of smoke rising as the Seabees, who seemed at it continuously, cooked themselves a meal or brewed up a pot of coffee.
Little coasters—British, Dutch, Norwegian—carried most of the ammunition, and they were unloaded into DUKW’s driven, for the most part, by men of Negro port battalions. These men, along with the small boat crews, almost forgot the meaning of the word “rest.’’ They worked from a little before sunrise to a little after sunset, and in those latitudes in June the sun rises early and sets late.
The first ships for the first Gooseberry arrived at noon, June 7, coming in to the beachhead with their regular civilian crews. They were under the over-all command of veteran New York dockmasters, who had the task of sinking them in position. The lieutenant in charge had devoted his life to putting ships in the right place at the right time; to him, this was just one more job, even though the toughest.
He and his men soon found out how tough it was, as they put down the first three ships that afternoon. The tide was a bitter enemy. Throughout the area it ran parallel to the shore; eastward with the flood and westward with the ebb, and it ran from 3 to 5 knots. To hold a heavy ship or caisson against this force and at the same time drop it on the bottom exactly in line with two bobbing buoys called for the highest seamanship. They learned this when the James Irkbell, the Raelaliade, and the Galveston were taken into the line marked by the buoys and maneuvered into places with the help of handling tugs. The tide fought stubbornly to keep them out of position, but at last the crews went tumbling over the side after their gear, the firing button was pressed, a cloud of black smoke billowed out of each vessel amidships, and she settled into place.
These ships were to be used for more than a breakwater. They lacked fresh water, but their cabins were a good deal more comfortable than the foxholes ashore, and it was planned to use them as quarters for Seabees.
It was a fine spring evening when they were taken in on D plus one to their new quarters aboard the sunken 555. Smoke from somewhere inland and the occasional boom of land mines, exploded by engineers clearing the roads, were the only signs of war. But as the men scrambled onto the deck of the 555, the gray bursts of smoke from the land mines were replaced by fountains of water, first along the edge of the beach, then walking out across the water toward the sunken ships! For the first time a preliminary whistle could be heard before the explosion.
The men halfway aboard the 555 scrambled back on the LCH—an LCI fitted out with extra communications equipment to serve as a headquarters vessel—which had brought them in, A shell landed 50 feet off the bow, and a shower of fragments sprayed the ship. Lines were quickly cast off, and the LCH moved seaward with more haste than dignity. Behind her German shells bracketed the 555. Then there was a hit in the stern. A destroyer came dashing in and opened fire at the shore. As she did so, a handling tug next to the line of block ships was hit and scurried off with a white plume from a smashed steam line trailing out behind.
The destroyer found the range, and the shelling suddenly stopped. Ten men had been wounded. Beautiful evening or not, this was a battlefront.
The first Phoenixes arrived that same evening of D plus one, eight hours ahead of schedule; the next day saw them put down. The riding-crews—dirty, tired, and be- whiskered from their long trip—were taken off and put aboard the towing tug for good food, showers, and sleep on the trip back to the United Kingdom for another unit. Meanwhile the sinking-crew took over.
If the ships proved tricky, the Phoenixes were more so. They had, of course, no power of their own, their box shape made them far crankier in a tide than a ship, while in any breeze their huge superstructures acted like a sail. Most of the tugs were put on the down- tide side with one or two on the other flank to help guide the unwieldy unit into place. The whole operation was directed by hand signals. When the Phoenix was lined up with the buoys, the tugs would struggle to hold her in place, the signal to sink would be given, the men stationed at the valves would turn the great wheels, and far below in the depths huge spurts of water could be seen pouring into her flat bottom. It was not easy to put her down on even keel. There had to be a constant adjustment of valves as the Phoenix would begin to list. But 25 or 30 minutes later the big caisson would be on the bottom.
The men soon lost all track of time as days ran one into another. Everyone knew that the fighting men ashore must have more and more supplies—and that Mulberry A was needed to get the stuff to them. It was a race against the German ability to concentrate forces for a counterattack. The men worked from the first light of dawn until far into the gray twilight, which lasted nearly until midnight. There was the unchanging backdrop of the shore—and the endless lines of men in khaki who poured ashore. Each night there was an air raid, and from the harbor great fountains of red tracer fire would climb up into the sky toward invisible targets. An occasional bomb would split open the seams of an unlucky landing craft. Sometimes night raiders dropped mines. H.M.S. Minster, a tender, thus was sunk off the Utah beach—with the loss of 70-odd men, trapped below at dinner.
But the harbor grew steadily after the freighters came in for the Gooseberry; the grim old British battleship Centurion followed them into line, her crew bidding her farewell with some ceremony. All ships of the first Gooseberry had been put down by D plus 4—June Id—while the other American Gooseberry, a shelter off the other U. S. beach, was completed a day later, despite heavy fire from German batteries.
On the eighth the first floating breakwaters had arrived and the work of mooring them offshore began. On the ninth the first Whale spans showed up. The pierheads soon followed. There was a delay while the shoreline was cleared of mines, then the Seabeesbuilt ramps of earth faced with rubble and surfaced with netting to connect the piers with the road which ran along behind the sea wall, and soon the piers began to grow out from the shore, as small Army motor tugs towed the units into place. The piers had to be built out about 3,000 feet to reach water deep enough for LST’s at low tide.
Late on Saturday, June 17—D plus 11— the piers were sufficiently far along for the first LST to come nuzzling in to unload. Four pierheads had been formed into two T’s, so that, if necessary, four LST’s could come alongside at once. An overhead ramp on the body of the T’s further speeded things up by enabling an LST to unload over the side at the same time that the cargo in the hold was pouring through the bow gates.
The 18th was fair and sunny. Although the pier system was still only partially finished— only two of the three roadways and four of the heads were installed—the Mulberry was in constant use. LST after LST came in, unloaded her cargo of men and vehicles and started back to England at once for another. The average unloading time ran something under an hour—a 1200 per cent saving over the twelve hours required to unload an LST on the beach, where the landing ship had to go onto the sands at high tide, discharge her cargo when the water went out, and then wait for the next high tide before she could push off. Sunday evening saw the Mulberry waiting for new customers. Everybody felt good. The worst was over. Now it was just a matter of finishing her up.
But further work had to be postponed. The morning of D plus 13—June 19— dawned gray and cold, with rain squalls whipping in before a rising northeaster. The forecasts called for the best weather since D-day—so no one worried particularly. Further reassurance was to be found in the Channel Pilot, the seaman’s Bible for these tricky coastal waters. There, in a table giving the probable number of days of storm to be expected each month in the Mulberry Area, opposite the months of June stood a round, comforting 0.
But it was soon evident that forecasts and Channel Pilot both were wrong. The wind was pushing the swells down the Channel at an ever quickening pace and spray began to smash high over the line of caissons. It was the worst time of the month for a storm. Two days later the new moon was to bring the spring tides, and already high water was well above the normal level.
In reality, things were far worse than they looked. The heaviest storm in eighty years was roaring down on the invasion fleet: a storm which was to wreak havoc among the landing craft, stop the flow of supplies ashore, jeopardize the whole invasion—and leave the American Mulberry a shattered wreck. Ironically enough, the artillery of Heaven was to succeed where the artillery of Hitler had failed dismally.
For the moment, it looked as though there would be merely a temporary interruption of work. As a precautionary measure, it was decided to evacuate the Army anti-aircraft crews, who had ridden the Phoenixes across the Channel and who were still living on them in corrugated iron shelters beneath the platforms of their Bofor guns. They got off all right, although some of the rescue craft were all but smashed against the caissons, whose 3-foot ledges made approach perilous even in good weather. A few hours later, swells swept across the open tops of the Phoenixes and only the guns could be seen sticking out of the surf like lonely spindles marking hidden reefs.
Anxiety grew by 12-hour cycles. Each six hours of rising tide was six hours of worry. The wind pushed the tide some 10 feet above normal, buried the caissons, hammered at the deckhouses of the sunken ships and rocked the pierheads. Then the flood would pass, and everyone would feel a little better as they waited for the next tide, hoping by then the wind would drop.
For three long days and three long nights everyone hoped—until there was nothing left to hope for.
Darkness on the 19th brought evidence of real trouble ahead. A Phoenix broke her back, sagging at the ends where sea and tide had scoured out the sand from beneath her. At the same time, in the comparatively sheltered area behind the breakwater, pier spans and floats, which had been anchored near the roadway, broke loose to become drifting menaces to ships and piers alike. They bashed into pontoons repeatedly, and the mooring lines on the piers soon were torn away.
Tugs chugged frantically from one end of the harbor to the other, rounding up drifting units, answering appeals from small landing craft which were beginning to drag ashore all along the line. Concrete connecting floats broke loose and ran around like floating juggernauts. In desperation, the lieutenant in charge of the pier installation, a veteran of the merchant service, put men aboard the floats to hack holes in them and sink them, so they could do no more harm. His little motor tugs corralled drifting span lengths, towed them free and moored them, a most formidable job now that broken pontoons had dropped half the spans under water.
Anchor and lines were at a premium. At midnight, a bearded Seabee Chief went over the side of a 60-foot Army fisherman into a frail mooring skiff whose anchor was fitted so that it could only be released through the bottom. His job was to cut it loose. The skiff heaved sickeningly, water surged through the anchor well, the Chief hacked away for two and a half hours before the anchor fell away. Then he crawled back over the side, more dead then alive.
By now some of the spans lacked mooring of any sort. Somehow, the tugs got lines on them. Somehow, they managed to hold them, biting into the gale. It was nearly dawn when, exhausted, all hands who could be spared turned in. They were up again at 6:00 a.m.
The sun was out, but the wind had risen, and ugly, lead-colored seas raced stronger than ever down the Channel. The beach was piled with landing craft—their ground tackle was too light for this kind of weather —and during the night four landing ships had smashed into the eastern pier.
The tide went out, and men from the windrowed landing craft checked hulls for damage. At one spot, soldiers in masks were digging where a body lay beneath the sands. A few feet away, three shipwrecked men sat down to a beach picnic. The little packages which come in K-rations were spread daintily on a battered tarpaulin which served as a cloth. Cans of pork and egg yolks were warming over a driftwood fire.
But the tide returned across the flats—and the wind blew on. Each span of the piers would heave up on the crest of the surf, twist to the right, slump over to the left, and drop crazily into the trough, weaving and snaking so that the roadway was impossible for even a jeep, and it took an acrobat to walk ashore. Fountains surged up through the spans. More and more derelicts rode in the surf and pounded at the roadways. A landing ramp drifted against the eastern spans with deadly force, working its apron under a pontoon so that it banged up and down on solid cement instead of yielding water. Pierheads began to pull apart. At the same time the cables by which the heads were hung on the supporting spuds started to snap as the scows lifted and fell with the racing swells.
The Gooseberries, those abused freighters, were catching it, too. Their main decks were now awash and the seas were tearing at their superstructures. The Seabees were taken off as the swells raced through the cabins where they had been quartered, washing away most of their personal gear. During the night the wretched Centurion, which had gone through Jutland unscathed, broke her back just as the caissons had broken theirs. The sands had scoured out from her uneasy bed.
The Phoenixes were taking the worst pounding of all. Several already had collapsed. At low water their shattered ruins were cliffs crumbling into the surf. .
Chaos compounded during the night of June 20-21. Radio channels, jammed with appeals for help, told the story of ships drifting helplessly, of collisions, of founderings, and of craft abandoned. LCH 414, Mulberry A’s small headquarters ship, banged ominously at her pierhead, and all night long men stood by to check the strain on her great towing hawsers. An LCT came scudding around the end of the pier, out of control, barely missed the LCH 414, smashed into another LCT moored near by and knocked her off her moorings, the two drifting helplessly off into the night, headed for the beach. Shortly after 1:00 A.M., a coaster loaded with ammunition bumped into the eastern pier, her whistle crying piteously for help. A searchlight broke the blackout to pick her out—a dim shape in rain and spray like a Hollywood version of disaster by night. A handling tug bustled to the rescue. The coaster’s frightened crew was ready to jump, leaving ship and deadly cargo to blunder on to catastrophe. Leaning from the pilot-house of the tug, a Coast Guard lieutenant cursed and argued the men into staying aboard. A line was passed, the tug snaked her out and finally tied her to a Liberty Ship offshore.
Morning of the third day found sea and wind still unabated. Planks, personal gear, smashed small craft, empty gasoline cans— debris of all sorts, littered the water. Once or twice a body bobbed by in an orange life preserver. The mass of landing craft crammed against the pier had multiplied. During the morning, the easternmost of the two pierheads parallel to the shore lifted from the bottom and drifted off, its giant spuds fractured like twigs. One pier already was severed from its head. Now the drifting head smashed in behind its mate and snapped the spans which had linked it with the shore.
The day was a repetition of the two before —seas racing endlessly, winds of 40 knots and much more in gusts, tides far above normal, splattering rain squalls alternating with lightening of the overcast to give a momentary illusion of better weather. By four in the afternoon, the last Phoenix at the western end of the front wall had half crumbled away. The 414 banged worse than ever against her pierhead, threatening to smash in her sides or dislodge the pier. Overwhelmed by discouragement and defeat by the elements, the men stared gloomily into the storm, fingering the inflation valves of their life belts, wondering if they would end up swimming for the beach.
By mid-evening, the LCH was battering the pier so heavily that she was ordered to sea. Several Task Force staff officers boarded the pierhead to spend the night there. The rest remained aboard the LCH.
Morning at last brought a break in the weather. It was bright and sunny. Although the seas were still running high, the wind had dropped. Men spread out soaked clothing to dry, checked over lines, overhauled guns. Others just sat around soaking up the warm sunshine while a cracked tenor from the Deep South plucked at a guitar and sang “Pistol-packin’ Mama.” The storm was over, but too late. Mulberry A was dead.
Only the line of sunken ships, battered but still in line, could still be used. They remained as a shelter for small craft: whatever could be salvaged from the remainder was sent off to Mulberry B. For this harbor, 10 miles along the coast to the eastward, had largely survived the storm. Its more sheltered position, under the lee of Cap de la Heve, was partly responsible for its good fortune; so was an offshore reef which took much of the brunt of the storm. In the days ahead Mulberry B proved invaluable in supplying the eastern end of the beachhead. In fact, for a few weeks, it enjoyed the distinction of being the busiest port in all Europe.
* From Battle Report: The Battle of the Atlantic. Copyright 1945 by Walter Karig, and reprinted by permission of Farrar and Rinehart, Inc., publisher.