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An officer of the US Rangers stayed on the bridge of HMS Prince Baudouin, a Belgian cross-Channel steamer. He had posted two of his snipers, one on each side. Their task was to watch for floating mines as they approached the French coast. Around 04.00 hours, the captain announced over the tannoy, ‘Attention on deck! Attention on deck! British crews report to their assault boats.’ The Ranger officer decided that he preferred the British ‘Attention on deck!’ to the US Navy’s ‘Now hear this!’

Inevitably, such a huge fleet could not remain unseen for long. At 02.15 hours, the headquarters of the German 352nd Infanterie-Division, which was spread along the coast, had received a call from the Seekommandant Normandie in Cherbourg stating that enemy ships had been sighted seven miles north of Grandcamp. But the confusion caused by all the paratroop drops seems to have distracted attention away from the main threat to the coast. The dropping of the exploding parachute dummies had even led to a whole regiment from the 352nd Infanterie-Division being sent off on a wild-goose chase. It was not until 05.20 hours that the garrison on the Pointe du Hoc reported the presence of twenty-nine ships, of which four were large, perhaps cruisers.

Task Force O off Omaha, which they had sighted, in fact included the US battleships Texas and Nevada, as well as the monitor HMS Erebus, four cruisers and twelve destroyers.[5] Two of the cruisers, the Montcalm and the Georges Leygues, formed part of the Forces Navales Françaises Libres. Montcalm, the flagship of Contre-amiral Jaujard, flew the largest tricolore battle ensign that anyone had ever seen. The only British influence on the bridges of French cruisers came in the form of duffel coats and steaming mugs of cocoa as their officers tried to study the shore through binoculars. For French sailors, as for French airmen, the idea of bombarding their own country was deeply disturbing, but they did not shrink from their task.[6]

The Eastern Task Force off the three British and Canadian beaches, Sword, Juno and Gold, consisted of the battleships Ramillies and Warspite, the monitor HMS Roberts, twelve cruisers, including the Polish warship Dragon,[7] and thirty-seven destroyers for close support. When they opened fire, ‘the whole horizon appeared to be a solid mass of flames,’ wrote Generalleutnant Reichert of the 711th Infanterie-Division, watching from the coast.

The Western Task Force lost a destroyer, the USS Corry, to a mine, and the Eastern Task Force suffered a similar loss, but to a torpedo attack from a German E-boat. At 05.37 hours, while the smaller vessels headed towards their bombarding positions, the Norwegian destroyer Svenner was hit amidships. A small flotilla from Le Havre had approached under cover of the smokescreen laid by Allied aircraft to the east of the fleet to shield it from the Le Havre batteries. The Svenner broke in half, its bow and stern halves lifting out of the water, forming a V, then she sank rapidly. Five other torpedoes ran on, narrowly missing the Largs and the Slazak, both of which managed to take avoiding action just in time. Two warships raced to rescue the crew from the water. HMS Swift alone took on sixty-seven survivors, but thirty-three men had been killed in the explosion. Swift herself was sunk by a mine in the same waters eighteen days later.

The landing ships also moved in to their offshore positions. A US Navy lieutenant who commanded an LST (landing ship tank) headed for Gold beach with British troops slipped below for a moment to look at the radar plot. ‘The screen was literally filled all over with little pinpoints of light,’ he wrote, ‘ships everywhere 360 degrees from the centerpoint of where we were.’ When he returned, the senior British officer on board put a hand on his shoulder just before he addressed the ship’s company over the tannoy. ‘Most of my men,’ this colonel said, ‘have seen the worst of desert warfare and a good many of them were in France and evacuated through Dunkirk. So I’d advise you to go easy, go quick, and don’t get dramatic or emotional.’ The young American followed his lead and ‘made a very simple announcement’.

At 04.30 hours on the Prince Baudouin, the waiting soldiers heard the calclass="underline" ‘Rangers, man your boats!’ On other landing ships there was a good deal of chaos getting the men into the landing craft. Some infantrymen were so scared of the sea that they had inflated their life jackets on board ship and then could not get through the hatches. As they lined up on deck, an officer in the 1st Division noticed that one man was not wearing his steel helmet. ‘Get your damn helmet on,’ he told him. But the soldier had won so much in a high card game that his helmet was a third full. He had no choice. ‘The hell with it,’ he said, and emptied it like a bucket on the deck. Coins rolled all over the place. Many soldiers had their field dressings taped to their helmet; others attached a pack of cigarettes wrapped in cellophane.

Those with heavy equipment, such as radios and flame-throwers which weighed 100 pounds, had great difficulty descending the scramble nets into the landing craft. It was a dangerous process in any case, with the small craft rising and falling and bouncing against the side of the ship. Several men broke ankles or legs when they mistimed their jump or were caught between the rail and the ship’s side. It was easier for those lowered in landing craft from davits, but a battalion headquarters group of the 29th Infantry Division experienced an inauspicious start a little later when their assault craft was lowered from the British ship, HMS Empire Javelin. The davits jammed, leaving them for thirty minutes right under the ship’s heads. ‘During this half-hour,’ Major Dallas recorded, ‘the bowels of the ship’s company made the most of an opportunity which Englishmen have sought since 1776.’ Nobody inside the ship could hear their yells of protest. ‘We cursed, we cried and we laughed, but it kept coming. When we started for shore, we were all covered with shit.’

The US Rangers, whose principal task was to scale the cliffs at Pointe du Hoc to the west of Omaha beach, were less heavily burdened. Most were armed with little more than a Thompson sub-machine gun, a .45 automatic and a quarter-pound of TNT attached to their helmet. The ship’s captain bade them farewell over the public address system: ‘Good hunting, Rangers!’

One engineer about to land on Utah with the 4th Infantry Division later described in a letter the lowering of the assault boats as ‘the loneliest time’ of your life. ‘With a slap that jars everyone aboard, the craft hits the water. We chugged away and in a few seconds the large mother ship became just a darker blob in a world of darkness and then disappeared from view entirely.’

As the first flotillas of landing craft took up formation, two Ranger officers jumped on hearing a tremendous explosion. They looked around to see what had caused it. ‘That, sirs’, a British petty officer informed them pedantically, ‘is the battleship Texas, opening the barrage on the Normandy coast.’ The men on the landing craft felt the shock waves of the heavy shells from the battleships and cruisers firing over their heads. The other bombarding ships of the Western Task Force for the two American beaches of Utah and Omaha also opened up with their main armament. Unlike the Royal Navy, which fired their turrets in sequence, the American battleships Texas, Arkansas and Nevada fired broadsides with all their fourteen-inch guns at once. The sight made some observers think for a moment that the ship had blown up. Even at a distance, the concussion could be felt. ‘The big guns,’ noted Ludovic Kennedy, ‘make your chest feel that somebody had put their arms around you and given you a good squeeze.’ The passage of the heavy shells created a vacuum in their wake. ‘It was a strange sight,’ wrote a staff sergeant in the 1st Division, ‘to see the water rise up and follow the shells in and then drop back into the sea.’

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5

One of these ships, the anti-aircraft cruiser HMS Bellona, remained ready to protect the capital ships from air attack, but it never fired its guns during the day.

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6

The French destroyer La Combattante assisted in the bombardment of Ouistreham in support of the French commando detachment. Other French warships involved in Operation Neptune also included frigates guarding convoys, Aventure, Découverte, Escarmouche and Surprise, while the corvettes Aconit, Renoncule, Moselys and Estienne d’Orves were on anti-submarine duty. Other old French ships, including the battleship Courbet, were used to create the breakwaters for the Mulberry harbour.

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7

In addition to the cruiser ORP Dragon, the Polish destroyers ORP Krakowiak and Slazak took part in the beach support operation, while the destroyers ORP Blyskewica and Piorun were employed as part of the covering force.