The Far Shore

by Edward Ellsberg

  Few though these cases were, they caused the most trouble. All, of course, were sent back to Commander Collier, who handled them finally as well as was humanly possible—he managed to brace up most enough to go back on their jobs. But the whole situation left me shaken. I couldn’t help sympathizing with those scared kids, particularly while being forced to turn thumbs down on their elders pleading to go in their places.

  Meanwhile, all about me on Selsey Bill the pace was accelerating. Out on the water, MacKenzie’s men were readying their growing fleet of salvage scows and their tugs, testing their salvage pumps, practicing on the waiting Phoenixs. MacKenzie himself wasn’t around much—apparently to him the most important part of his task was rooting out of every British harbor what he could find there in the way of salvage gear and men. The assistants he sent to Selsey Bill as salvage masters (none above the rank of lieutenant, which in the Royal Navy appeared to be about tops for salvage men) seemed seasoned enough as salvors—no more than MacKenzie himself did they ask or want any advice of me or of anyone.

  So I gave none, except on one occasion when in the practice lifting of a Phoenix the British salvage officer in charge allowed it to take so heavy a list that to me it seemed possible he might capsize his semi-flooded hulk. I pointed out to that man the need for more attention to the stability calculations involved in waterlogged wrecks, which the Phoenixs were during the lifting operation, lest actually he capsize one. But the only result was that next day I got a message, relayed to me without comment by Commodore Flanigan, that the Royal Navy was complaining I was giving orders to their men; would I kindly desist?

  Eagerly I pointed out to Flanigan that the best way to cure the complaint was to take me out of Selsey Bill, but Flanigan couldn’t see that. I must remain as ordered as consultant. To my outraged explanation that I had certainly given no orders, only offered a helpful suggestion to a junior salvage officer, his only comment was that with MacKenzie’s juniors, it would be prudent to restrict my conversations to remarks on the weather; with MacKenzie himself, I might go farther should MacKenzie invite it, which was most unlikely. So cursing the luck which put me in the position of a bird dog with birds all about, but forbidden absolutely to do any pointing, I stayed on.

  However, since my orders didn’t restrict me to Selsey Bill but only to the Channel, I attempted to reduce the chances of more friction with MacKenzie’s salvage forces by going a little further afield than before.

  The result was that, going somewhat west of Portsmouth for the first time, I got a close view of another component of Operation Mulberry, of which I’d read, but to which I’d paid little attention. These were the Bombardons.

  Bombardons, it seemed, were the answer to the problem of attempting to enlarge the protected harbor area off the Normandy beaches far beyond what could be enclosed by the Phoenix breakwaters. Regardless of how little attention others, especially in the naval combat arm, might give to the problem, the Army’s logistic experts struggling with the millions of tons of equipment they had to get unloaded on the Far Shore, were ravenous for the utmost in protected ship discharge space.

  So to provide that in the area outside the Phoenix breakwater line, endless experiments in how best to break up wave action in deep water had been carried out. The experimenters had come up with the idea, of all things, of a floating breakwater, anchored well out beyond the Phoenixs in water so deep a regular breakwater could never be planted there.

  The Bombardons made up that floating breakwater. They were lengthy steel structures, floating about two-thirds submerged, cruciform in shape, suggested by a British engineer named Lochner. To each side of a long and thin rectangular vertical steel hull, a horizontal steel fin about nine feet wide was welded, sticking out from the hull below its water-line. These Bombardons were two hundred feet long each. Between their deep central hulls, protruding partly above water, and their flat side fins immersed horizontally in it, they exerted an appreciable quieting effect on waves. About twenty-four of those objects, chained together end to end to make a floating breakwater nearly a mile long, were to be moored well offshore outside the Phoenix line, there to break the waves. Inside the line of steel Bombardons and outside the line of concrete Phoenixs would be a substantial semi-protected area in which it was figured Liberty ships could anchor and discharge into Dukw’s alongside under practically all probable conditions of the seas in summer.

  At Portland, which was the assembly point for the Bombardons, I looked them over with both awe and a little skepticism. The awe came from any seaman’s fear of having to handle such unwieldy and dangerous looking objects, both in the tow across the Channel, and in the securing of them in place on the Far Shore. Just a little inattention or hard luck on the part of the tugs handling them, and those wicked steel fins, completely out of sight, could slice open a ship’s hull like a can opener. Commander Ligon Ard, an old shipmate of mine of Naval Academy days, had the unlovely job of handling them; I didn’t envy him it.

  The skepticism came from whether their value in quieting waves could ever offset the loss to other military uses, even in Operation Mulberry itself, of all the steel it took to make those Bombardons. For every other project in England, where steel had become more precious than ducal diadems, had been bled of steel to get enough to build those highly hypothetical breakwaters. What hurt me most was that many of the vital pontoons to carry the Whale bridging ashore from our Lobnitz pierheads had been made of concrete, eggshell thin, instead of steel, so the steel plate saved could go into these Bombardons. And hourly now we were having continuous headaches with those concrete eggshells floating our Whales at Selsey Bill and Portsmouth—you hardly dared look hard at them lest they crack and leak. Keeping them pumped dry and afloat was a full time salvage operation in itself. And all to save the steel that should have gone into them for these unpromising Bombardons!

  Finally, to add insult to that injury of such dubious use of what little steel there was, it was obvious now where all the spare mooring gear and cables in Britain had gone, that might have obviated much, if not all, of that nightmare of sinking Phoenixs at Selsey Bill instead of mooring them. There it all was at Portland, every spare anchor and cable in the United Kingdom, assigned to the job of serving as the moorings on the coasts of Normandy of that string of Bombardons!

  The Bombardons would have to do a magnificent breakwater job on the Far Shore to compensate for all the troubles they had so far caused. I swore at the sight of them.

  Returning via Portsmouth, I ran into another aspect of the voracious appetite of the Army top staff for harbor space. Regardless of how it might seem to naval combat officers, there was no doubt about it but that in the minds of the Army staff, nothing was so imperative in avoiding disaster on the Far Shore as provision for a rapid build-up of supplies.

  Now it so happened that it had become swiftly apparent that Britain’s ability to produce Phoenixs by D-day was substantially short of what the Mulberry plan had originally contemplated. Since a reduction of protected harbor space was not to be thought of, and an attempt to squeeze more Phoenixs out of the dismally creaking British economy was even more fruitless than trying to squeeze more juice out of an orange already run down by a steam roller, some other answer had to be provided.

  It was a vivid commentary on the desperate need for harbor space, that the answer was provided at the expense of that hitherto sacrosanct cornerstone of British existence—merchant shipping. Both in World War I and so far in World War II, in the face of savage U-boat sinkings, the need for ships had outweighed all else in British eyes. Now, however, ships themselves were to be sacrificed as substitutes for the Phoenixs which Britain couldn’t produce in time. The oldest ships, of course, worn-out ships, ships with rickety machinery and with boilers approaching the danger point; but nevertheless ships that still could steam, and might in less pressing circumstances have kept on carrying cargo to the United Kingdom.

  So under Lieutenant George Hoague, Jr., Captain Clark had set up a spec
ial group to handle and sink these vessels to form auxiliary breakwaters on Omaha and Utah Beaches, designated by the code name of Gooseberries. Twenty-three merchant ships were ballasted, fitted and wired with explosive charges, and gathered in the northern Scotch port of Oban, ready to sail so as to be off the Far Shore immediately behind the assault forces on D-day, then and there to be sunk as the first breakwater. Since their depth of hull was substantially less than that of the sixty foot high Phoenixs, they would have to be sunk in shallower water; still their breakwater would form adequate harbor space for coasting steamers and landing craft of all kinds, though not for ocean-going ships.

  With this part of Operation Mulberry, I had had no contacts—the ships and their crews were all being assembled and made ready for scuttling far from Channel waters. But as I came into Commander Stanford’s Portsmouth office on this occasion, I made contact with it. Stanford introduced me to a commander in the Royal Navy who, he said, was looking for me.

  I looked at him inquiringly. He looked familiar—had we met before, I asked?

  It seemed we had, in the Mediterranean. Did I remember the Centurion?

  The Centurion? I remembered her all right. Immediately my memory went back to Port Said, in the summer of 1942. There Captain Damant, Royal Navy, Principal Salvage Officer for the Suez Canal which the Nazis were then desperately trying to block with mines and bombs, and which Damant was just as desperately striving to keep cleared of wrecks and open to traffic, had just finished telling me the straits the Royal Navy was in, in the Eastern Mediterranean. It seemed they were trying there to hold off the entire Italian Navy, dreadnaughts and all, with only four light cruisers—they hadn’t a single battleship of their own left in the Mediterranean. Of the three they’d had, U-335 had sunk the Barham at sea, and some Italian frogmen, getting through the net defenses of Alexandria harbor, had put the other two, the Queen Elizabeth and the Valiant, out of action for a year at least with limpet mines with which the frogmen had blasted vast holes in those battleship bottoms.

  And hardly had Captain Damant finished telling me that, as we strolled along the quay at the entrance to the Canal, that I happened to look to seaward. There, not a quarter of a mile off the quay, was moored a British dreadnaught, bristling with 13.5-inch guns—as formidable a battleship as one might ever see.

  “What’s that then?” I queried. “I thought you’d just said, Captain, you hadn’t a battleship in the Med.”

  Damant didn’t even look to seaward to check what I was indicating.

  “That?” he answered. “Oh, that’s not a battleship; that’s a dummy. That’s the Centurion.”

  I looked again. I knew a battleship when I saw one—I’d spent over thirty years looking at them, and this one was hardly two ship lengths away from me. At such short range I could hardly be fooled by any dummy, made up to look at a distance like a battleship. Before me was a full-sized battleship without doubt—tripod masts, heavy guns, armored turrets. I recognized her; she was the Centurion, of the Iron Duke class; she’d fought at Jutland, in World War I.

  “Quit trying to fool me, Captain,” I objected. “I know a battleship when I see one.”

  “That’s what our Italian friends think, too,” replied Damant. “We’re pulling their leg, just the way we’re pulling yours. Good job, isn’t she?” And Damant went on to explain the Centurion was a dummy, though once she had been a battleship. Years ago, she had had all her real guns and turrets taken off and had been reduced to service as a target ship. But when in World War II, every battleship in the Med. had been sunk or put out of action, the Admiralty had hastily fitted out the old Centurion with wooden guns and wooden turrets, mounted some real anti-aircraft guns on her topsides, and sent her to the Med. to fool the Italians into thinking Britain really had a dreadnaught there. And against the Italians, she’d done a fine job of it too; cruising in the Med. she’d kept four Italian superdreadnaughts holed up, afraid to go to sea lest they should meet her.

  Yes, I remembered the Centurion, all right. But all that was in 1942. What had that to do with me in 1944?

  I soon learned. To my surprise, the Centurion was now at my service. My service? Yes, at my service. Before me was her new skipper, ordered, so he understood, by the Admiralty to pay his respects to me and get whatever orders I had to give him with regard to Operation Mulberry.

  The Centurion in Operation Mulberry? I looked at him in amazement. What good was a dummy battleship, however excellent a dummy she might be, to Operation Mulberry? We weren’t engaged in running any hoaxes on anybody; we had no need of the Centurion to pull any Nazi legs, no matter how successful in leg pulling she’d been with the Italians. There must be some mistake.

  No, there was no mistake. He and his ship, the Centurion, had been attached to Operation Mulberry. As I was Senior Officer Present, he was reporting to me for orders. As he understood it, the Centurion, no longer needed anywhere as a dummy now that we had knocked Italy out of the war and controlled the Mediterranean completely, had been ordered home and the Admiralty had concluded she and her wooden guns could best serve the Allies, from here on out, as a Gooseberry—she was at the last minute being turned over to Operation Mulberry to be scuttled by her own crew as the key vessel in our line of old hulks to be sunk off the Omaha Beach. He, formerly her Executive Officer, had taken over the command from the Royal Navy captain under whom she had masqueraded in the Med. as a battleship in full commission. Now with her normal crew of a thousand men reduced to the seventy men only whom he needed to steam her on her last voyage across the Channel, he was to take her there, and then blow her bottom out at whatever spot off the Omaha Beach suited me best. What directions did I have to give him to carry through those orders?

  I had to explain I wasn’t running Operation Mulberry, no matter what surface appearances to the contrary might indicate. Commander Stanford, Deputy Commander, Mulberry, would put him in touch with the officer in Operation Mulberry actually detailed in charge of the Gooseberries who would be glad to brief him in his new part. So he was to scuttle the Centurion, eh? Queer end for a battleship. But it wasn’t a bad idea—in death, she would still keep on helping win the war; so huge a vessel, three times the size of any other ship we had, would make a wonderful anchor for the western end of our Gooseberry breakwater. And her anti-aircraft battery, even after she was scuttled, would be a powerful addition to the air defenses of Omaha Beach. I wished him luck; I’d see him again, I hoped, off Omaha.

  I shoved off for Selsey Bill, shaking my head incredulously over the lengths the higher command was willing to go to get the maximum amount possible of sheltered waters for the artificial harbor off the Omaha Beach. First, twenty-three still usable freighters. Now this venerable old battleship, even though her fangs had long since been pulled.

  And that brought to an end the month of May. What might June have to offer?

  CHAPTER 18

  June 1 brought Captain Clark to Mulberry Headquarters in Portsmouth with the news that the date chosen for D-day had been released at last. It was to be June 5.

  At Selsey Bill, alerted immediately, the news spread fast. The frantic pace that Barton had set in getting stores and ammunition loaded became even more frantic. To add to Barton’s problems, he found to his consternation that his Seabees were loading everything portable in southern England that they could get their hands on, from tractor cranes to bulldozers, aboard the Lobnitz pierheads—such items might come in handy on the Far Shore. Barton had no objections to that—they might well all be handy—but it presented him with a terrific additional stowage problem in lashing down for sea.

  Meanwhile, with D-day a concrete fact at last, the atmosphere at Selsey Bill became more tense than ever. Every threat of secret weapons waiting to obliterate us on the Far Shore got a fresh going over from those most vitally concerned in them. What might these mysterious weapons be? Who knew? One, always hinted at by the Nazis, was that we should be met and incinerated in seas of oil, set afire once our landing craft were so
near in on the Far Shore they could no longer turn and flee.

  Could there be anything in that? It was nothing the average G.I., who knew little of the sea and less of oil and its flammable possibilities, could brush from his thoughts—what most G.I.’s knew only too well was that in World War I, the Germans, stymied on the Western Front, had suddenly unmasked their flamenwerfer, flame-throwers, on the unsuspecting Allies, with horrible effect. Might they not now repeat on a vaster scale and set the whole surface of the sea on fire to defeat the invasion? And if they did, how could we counter that? The G.I., looking about him, could see no signs of anything being provided for him to counter with. That might mean we felt such a weapon was impossible, and needed no counters. Still, that quieted nobody’s fears—we might be wrong; also, most likely, nothing was being provided because no counter was possible. Nobody faces with equanimity the prospect of being suddenly trapped and roasted to death in a sea of roaring flame, as promised. And the Nazis were quite capable of doing such a thing, if they could. Could they?

  Hardly less frightening was the prospect of being met with poison gas. Along with their flamenwerfers, the Germans had in World War I unmasked poison gas also on the Allies, with more horrible effects even than they had achieved with flame. Poison gas, unlike flame, was however now barred from warfare by international convention. Still, who was so naive as to believe that Hitler would pay any attention to international conventions, should it please him once again to treat them as just scraps of paper? No G.I., anyway. And there was real evidence that poison gas, at least, was likely to be used on him. Every G.I. was being given a gas mask, clothes specially treated to be resistant to gas, various ointments to plaster his anatomy should some of the liquid poisons (the worst of all) splash his skin. Encumbered with that gas mask, loaded down with that clothing and his ointments, no G.I. was in any position to laugh off the poison gas probability—and next to the innate horror with which anyone looks on being made a living torch, comes his horror of poison.