The Far Shore
Rear Admiral Edward Ellsberg
“You can almost always force an invasion, but you can’t always make it stick.” (General Omar Bradley to the war correspondents on the eve of D-day in Normandy)
TO
CAPTAIN DAYTON CLARK
and
THE MEN OF THE NAVY HE LED
in
FORCE MULBERRY
They made it “stick.”
CHAPTER 1
“To Selsey Bill—”
So said the orders.
Selsey Bill? To an American, an odd name for any spot. Till I’d been given those orders, I’d never heard of the place.
Now I was looking at Selsey Bill. In English parlance, it was a “bill.” To me, in everyday American, it was just a promontory, protruding not too importantly into the English Channel just east of the Isle of Wight. Selsey Bill turned out to be both a sandy cape and a most unpretentious seashore village straddling a long, wide beach. Its thin line of frowzy summer cottages, stretched out along the Channel sand, was reminiscent of the flimsy shelters of a generation ago fringing our own New Jersey coast. This collection of shacks was evidently the summertime haven of some hundreds of middle class English families fleeing to sand and sea from sweltering London streets.
Selsey Bill was most unimpressive. Unlike not so distant Brighton, no shore hotels caught the eye. Nor did it give any indication of being a seaport, large or small. Selsey had no harbor, it had no piers, it had no warehouses. It had absolutely nothing of importance to friend or enemy in a war—except that wide stretch of endless beach fronting the English Channel. For, only a hundred miles from that beach, due south across the water, lay Normandy—and less than a hundred miles north of it over defenseless open country lay London.
That wide, flat beach—Selsey Bill had something there. But what? Asset or danger spot to the British whose beach it was, now that there was a war?
Four years before, when France fell, it had been spotted instantly as a glaring danger point by the British, stripped of their arms at Dunkirk, naked now before their enemies. Across that inviting beach, every Englishman at no great strain to his imagination envisioned hordes of steel-helmeted Nazis leaping ashore from landing barges to trample beneath their hobnailed boots what few defenders Britain might muster on the sands. And then without pause moving north to overwhelm both him and nearby London.
Faced with that prospect, the English had hastily evacuated all cottagers from Selsey Bill, in desperation had sowed the broad sands with buried land mines, festooned the beach before the front doors of the emptied cottages with endless snarls of concertina barbed wire.
So in 1940, except for a few sentries peering anxiously out to sea each morning as the dawn broke, Selsey Bill became a deserted village. Before me there, in 1944, still remained much of the tangled wire. Even some of the warning signs, faced to be read only from the land side, screaming to any unwary Englishman approaching the beach:
“KEEP OFF THE SANDS! MINES!”
But that was all over. Four heartrending years of war had wrought some changes. Now it was the spring of 1944. The wide flat beach at Selsey Bill, by an ironic reversal in the whims of Mars, had in British eyes been metamorphosed from a danger spot to an invaluable asset. From Britain’s vulnerable Achilles’ heel to Britannia’s strong right arm.
For from that selfsame beach at Selsey Bill, seemingly made to order for just such a purpose, reprisal was about to start. From its sands, an irresistible lance to strike down the enemy on the Far Shore was at last about to be launched!
Or, was it about to be?
There was little doubt in the minds of the planners (both British and American) round about Grosvenor Square in London that the allied lance was actually irresistible, as planned. But there seemed to be (in one American mind, at least) some gnawing doubt as to whether the launching of it was likely to come off. So in the face of fervid British pooh-poohing of any basis at all for the existence even of such a silly question, I had been ordered by the American high command to Selsey Bill to see what actually was the situation.
As a result, there was I, gazing for the first time out over the Channel towards Hitler’s boasted impregnable Atlantic Wall, invisible to me below the distant southern horizon. Immediately before me lay Selsey Bill and its simple village, easily encompassed at a glance—the string of unpretentious cottages, the rusted remnants of the barbed wire, the faded warning signs, the wide sands beneath which here and there still lurked, like deadly cobras set to strike should one step on them, such of their own mines as had escaped even the most intensive efforts of the British to find and remove.
Altogether, it was no very striking seashore scene.
But, just offshore—?
I stared offshore in open-mouthed astonishment. Nothing I had heard from anyone round about Grosvenor Square or read there concerning invasion planning had prepared me for what now hit me in the eyes, just offshore.
What was this fantasy, sprawled over five square miles at least of what should be the rippling open sea? That conglomeration of tall black towers reaching skyward from beneath the Channel waters? That massive jumble of half submerged block-long windowless concrete warehouses—a hundred of them, perhaps even more—far and near protruding in no recognizable pattern, helter-skelter, from the waves? Those ponderous steel arches, evidently disjointed sections of highway bridges, beginning nowhere, ending nowhere, mysteriously swimming on the surface of the sea, somehow afloat in spite of gravity, interspersed crazily amongst the even crazier disarray of those semi-submerged concrete buildings? A city, perhaps, insanely shuffled about and then sunk by some overwhelming catastrophe?
To my dazed eyes, I might be looking on a grander scale at nothing more or less than lower Pittsburgh, half buried from sight beneath the waters in full flood of the overflowing Monongahela and Alleghany, joining to form the still more overflooded Ohio. There before me could be Pittsburgh’s tall blast furnaces, dead now, their fires drowned out; her warehouses, with the waters rising nearly to their roofs; her deserted bridges flooded to their floors—everything half hidden in the rising waters, half still showing above the rivers—mile on square mile of flooded city. Some such vast industrial metropolis as that, overwhelmed by the sea, lay there off Selsey Bill, so any casual observer would swear.
What it really was, of course, I knew.
In Admiral Stark’s American naval headquarters in Grosvenor Square, studying the thick volume embodying every facet of the Overlord Plan, I had been thoroughly saturated in its purpose. Still, even so, the first sight of the reality in all its immensity stunned the mind—mine, anyway. There it rested like a titanic unsolved jigsaw puzzle, scrambled beyond any recognition of its true design. Half-engulfed in the Channel waters, it lay in a multitude of pieces, the instrument unenvisioned by the enemy (so we hoped), which was to sustain to success an invasion which the enemy High Command knew could not possibly be successfully sustained. Provided only, that as planned, we got it from Selsey Bill to the Far Shore close on the heels of the first wave of our invaders.
Close on the heels of the first wave—
Therein lay now the doubt I had been sent to investigate. On that point, the skeptical captain in our Navy in whose hands had been put responsibility for its placement and operation, once it was transported to the Far Shore, had himself no doubt whatever. His belief, vehemently expressed to whomever in authority he could buttonhole long enough to pour it out, was that it wasn’t going to be delivered to him on the Far Shore on D-day close on the heels of our first wave. In fact, he doubted that, with the plan as laid out, it would ever be started off the bottom at Selsey Bill, let alone be delivered to him in Normandy, while he and any others in the invading force still w
ere alive to care—they would all, for want of it, long since have been slaughtered in counterattack by the waiting Nazis on the Far Shore before it arrived to sustain them in their assault!
Viewing for the first time what lay before me, sunk off Selsey Bill, I began to sympathize with our agonized naval skeptic. To lift that sunken city hurriedly from off the bottom and get it underway from Selsey Bill for Normandy was a salvage job such as might have appalled even that half-god Hercules, had he been a seaman and a salvage man.
CHAPTER 2
Looking at wrecks sunk wholesale was no longer any novelty to me. In the Red Sea, where I had been flung immediately we were shoved into World War II, I had counted wrecks around about Massawa by the dozens—three harbors full of sabotaged German and Italian ships, forty perhaps, and little enough to work with on them. Still, lifting the more important hulks one at a time had kept ahead of our war needs in that Middle Eastern area—we salvagers had made out there with the means at hand.
Next for me had come our North African invasion. Transferred at once to the Mediterranean as Eisenhower’s Principal Salvage Officer, I found sizing up wrecks by the harborful becoming commonplace. From Casablanca in Morocco through Oran in Algeria to Bône on the Tunisian border, what harbors in North Africa were not strewn initially with wrecks from our naval gunfire and French sabotage were soon in no better case, with the victims of Nazi bombs and torpedoes littering those harbor bottoms. And to complete that dismal picture, other terribly blasted ships, victims at sea of U-boat or aircraft attack, which somehow we had managed to keep afloat till towed in, cluttered many a badly needed wharf.
Still, whether in the Red Sea or in North Africa, there had been no absolute deadline in salvage work. With more bombs still exploding about you, you lifted wrecks or cleared harbor entrances and piers as rapidly as your ingenuity, your little salvage force, and your own endurance allowed. While you wore your heart out on the wrecks, the war about you still went on—a little the better while your heart stood up, a little the worse when it began to fail and willy-nilly you slowed down, or dropped dead.
But at Selsey Bill, it was different. Here, confronting everyone as starkly as the enemy-manned cliffs on the Far Shore, there was a deadline—D-day. Here, with the lives of a million men inexorably intertwined with what happened on D-day, that day stood as deadline. The lifting from the sea floor of that vast mass of sunken equipment off Selsey Bill for overwhelming military reasons must not start till immediately before D-day. And when D-day dawned, for even more overwhelming military reasons, most of that helter-skelter submerged city must be afloat again, moving immediately in the wake of the assaulting forces to be resunk, in proper arrangement this time, on the beaches of Normandy—or the invasion must fail.
Would all this then, as planned, be moving on D-day—or would it not?
On the British side of every discussion concerning that subject, from Cabinet Minister in London down to Brigadier in command at Selsey Bill, the answer to any such absurd question was, “Assuredly. Beyond all doubt. My dear fellow, the Royal Engineers have it in charge.”
And if any shadow of skepticism still persisted in an untutored American, he was informed that the history of the Royal Engineers ran unbroken back through many centuries to the days at least of Charles the First. That, of course, settled it.
On the American side, one lone naval officer, wholly unawed even by that many centuries, replied flatly, “No!”
Somehow, perhaps because he was a naval and not an army officer, to him the Royal Engineers, however ancient and royal they might be, were no more immune to failure than any other military organization. And having carefully looked over how the Royal Engineers proposed to carry through the lifting task which must be done before he had anything with which to work on the Far Shore, he was certain of their failure. But he had no reputation in the field of engineering, even less in that of salvage to back up his belief. Initially, his doubts went unheeded.
Still, more and more emphatically as D-day grew closer, he persisted in voicing his dissent each time he came up from the Channel to the London headquarters in Grosvenor Square of Admiral Harold Stark, Commander, U. S. Naval Forces in Europe.
But he had only four stripes—he was just a captain. His doubts, at first not really taken too seriously even on the American side, were nevertheless, to set his mind at rest, finally transmitted from Admiral Stark’s headquarters to the British in nearby Whitehall, where lay responsibility for that part of the operation. All doubts got short shrift there from both British Army and Navy. The British Major General in charge of the Royal Engineers felt that he and his engineer subordinates, down to that Brigadier he had placed at Selsey Bill to see it through, had the situation properly in hand. The Admiral of the Fleet serving as First Sea Lord, already with troubles enough afloat, felt it impolitic for the Royal Navy to intrude itself on the problems of the Royal Engineers so far even as to express any opinion on a subject in their hands. So the British Cabinet Minister, at the head of the hierarchy under whose wing the project came, replied officially to Stark that he had absolute faith in the Royal Engineers—there was consequently no question needing inquiry. Stark, confronted with the situation that all the know-how there was available in Britain was reported unanimously of one mind, accepted the decision.
Our distressed captain continued to get nowhere. Who was he, a lone seagoing skipper and a very junior one at that, to have his unsupported judgment override that of the responsible British Cabinet Minister, controvert the technical judgment and confidence in its own abilities of all the Royal Engineers, backed by centuries of tradition, or refute the acquiescence, though tacit, of the high command of His Majesty’s Royal Navy? And to top off his sad situation, with all hands in the foreign services opposed to him, covered with an acreage of gold lace so vast that to it his own puny four gold stripes were but picayune threads?
Still, like Cassandra sensing irretrievable disaster, he continued to protest, though now his protests went without hearers. As D-day grew nearer, more and more convinced that in the hands of the Royal Engineers the one ace on which the Allies must rely for victory was never going to get to the Normandy Beachhead in time to be played, his agonized protests became almost hysterical. But no longer in Grosvenor Square could he buttonhole even one senior long enough to get another hearing for his oft-told tale.
CHAPTER 3
The year before, in 1943, in the Mediterranean, with one American lieutenant and some British soldiers picked up on an Algerian beach to help, I had boarded the abandoned hulk of a torpedoed and sinking British cruiser. She was already stern awash and badly heeled down, threatening each instant to capsize and take us with her to the bottom. In a three days’ battle round the clock with the sea for that waterlogged warship, we had saved her and towed her to the port of Bougie.
But that cruiser, H.M.S. Pozarica, had been one wreck too many for me. I came ashore from her to be thrust into the military hospital at Algiers by the first Army surgeon who got his eyes on me at headquarters. From there, a few days later, with “in view of the possibility of complete cardiac failure” entered in my Navy medical record by the Army specialists, I had hurriedly been flown home from the African war zone to become just another patient in the huge Navy hospital at Bethesda, immediately outside Washington.
Bethesda, with no bombs exploding nightly over it, was more restful than Algiers. Two months on its rolls, part of the time by the grace of an understanding Navy medic as an outpatient allowed to go home, and my heart was considered relaxed enough to go on beating for awhile. Bethesda released me then as a patient, reported me fit for some kind of duty, not too strenuous. After some difficulty in finding a berth for a sub-par relic of the war in Africa, Admiral King, naval C-in-C, had me sent to help supervise inspection of warcraft building for the Navy at some thirty shipyards, big and small, round about New York.
But a little less than a year on inspection of ships under construction was all I could stand. I felt I still
could do more toward helping win the war were I again with ships on the front lines. Early spring of 1944 saw me once more in Washington facing Admiral Ernest King, Chief of Naval Operations, Commander-in-Chief, U. S. Fleet, under whom I had served years before as Salvage Officer on two sunken submarines when King was a Captain and I a Lieutenant Commander.
Having lived with Ernest King for months on deck a salvage ship so small no one aboard her, out of his bunk, was ever wholly clear of another’s sight, I thought I knew King well enough to ask a favor of him. And certainly he’d had equal opportunity to know me quite as well.
The things King wanted done, would swiftly come to pass. All I wanted now of him was that he see I got sent back to the war zone—I’d had enough in wartime of doing my fighting on the home front.
Busy though Admiral King was in running a two ocean war, on the basis of auld lang syne, effective at least on King’s aide, I was admitted to King’s office.
King, the nearest thing in human form to a completely impersonal machine that the Navy has ever had on its roster, long, lean, severe, listened silently to my request. He had last seen me the year before in Algiers, hardly two weeks before that episode on H.M.S. Pozarica which finally had ended my salvage command in the Mediterranean and sent me home, a hospital case.
King heard me through, inspected me quizzically, commented at last,
“So, Ellsberg, you think you have come back to battery, do you?”
This unexpected ordnance simile set me back on my heels. Here I was, unflatteringly being discussed as a worn out gun, which its overworked recoil cylinders have only with difficulty managed to return once more to firing position. Still, I answered unargumentatively (and truthfully, I believe),
“Yes, sir. I think I have.”
King knew salvage. He also knew salvage officers, of whom the Navy had but few of any experience, but was badly in need of many. If the one before him felt able again to keep on his own two feet, King was evidently not going to quibble over whether he might perhaps be mistaken. After all, there was still a war on, not yet won. He quit eyeing me, scanned for a moment the thin air over my head, considering, I soon discovered, that immense map in the war plans room encompassing the entire world, then asked me,
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