Sea Control - Sea Control 539 Normandy - The Sailors' Story and D-Day with Nick Hewitt

Episode Date: July 26, 2024

Links1. Normandy - The Sailors’ Story: A Naval History of D-Day and the Battle for France, by Nick Hewitt, Yale University Press, 2024.   

You're listening to Sea Control, hosted by the Center for International Maritime Security. Aloha, shipmates, and welcome back aboard Sea Control. Today, we are welcoming Nick Hewitt for the first time, and we're going to discuss his new book, Normandy, the Sailor's Story, the Naval History of D-Day, and the Battle for France. Nick, welcome. Could you tell the audience a little bit more about yourself, please? Yeah, of course. And hello. We're really, really good to be here. So I'm Nick here. I'm a naval historian. I studied at King's College, London, where I did a master's in war studies and specialised in naval history. And then I've been kind of working in the field for most of my career in museums.

So I was resident historian aboard HMS Belfast, the historic warship in London for some years. I was at the National Museum of the Royal Navy and the Imperial War Museum. and now I am a team manager for culture for Orkney Islands Council so responsible for the legacy of the naval base up here from the first and second world wars and really D-Day and the Normandy campaign has kind of been written through my career since I was on board HMS Belfast which was of course part of the bombardment force in Normandy. Well thank you for joining us as a reminder all opinions today are our own and not reflective of any institution which which we might be otherwise associated. Nick, what convinced you this was a story that needed to be told?

As you said, you've been basically working on this throughout your career. Years of frustration, really, Jared. So I started, I've had lots of extraordinary opportunities to explore the wider naval story of the Normandy campaign, beginning with HMS Belfast. And I wrote my first published work about HMS Belfast in Normandy, which then turned into a small book. And that was one story. That was the bombarding ships, the larger warships that provided gunfire support to the military. I then moved down to Portsmouth and I was briefly responsible for a beautiful restored motor gunboat down there, MGB 81, which was another part of the story because that was that was really kind of a flank guard for the Normandy landings, protecting the invasion area from German attack. Then I joined the National Museum of the Royal Navy.

I had an amazing opportunity to make a TV show called D-Day Sunken Secrets, which I think aired in the US as well, actually, which explored really the underwater legacy of the campaign, which again gave me such an extraordinary insight into the scale of it. And I also got to do a submarine dive with a combined operations pilotage party veteran called Jim Booth. So that was another part of the story. And then the National Museum of the Royal Navy amazingly let me head up their project to restore LCT 7074, which was the last surviving tank landing craft to take part in the D-Day landing. So I had all these kind of exposures to different dimensions of the naval battle. And over time, I started to think about it as a battle, as a forgotten campaign. And then the more of the secondary literature I read, especially more recent works, the more I realised that those sailors are just airbrushed out of the story, that they're there on D-Day as kind of taxi drivers ferrying the soldiers into action. And then every single narrative then rushes ashore inland with the soldiers.

And what you get then is the rest of the land campaign and you never hear about them again. And yet what they're doing is carrying out this incredibly complex, multifaceted operation. And I know your main interest is command and control. And that's such a big part of this story. And they're doing it for months. They're doing it for months before the landings and then they're doing it for months afterwards. So it's become a real passion of mine, actually. And this book is the kind of culminating point of that passion. So you refer to it as the Battle of the Seine Bay. And please correct me if I'm getting the pronunciation wrong. But in your opinion, when did that battle begin and why did you choose that time frame? So I started it with any of these things, you know, a campaign like this.

And I've made a number of comparisons in the book to the Battle of the Atlantic. And I think it's like that. It's a long campaign that has a number of kind of focal points in it. So it's always a little arbitrary when you start them and finish them. For me, I picked the spring of 1943. I've picked the Quebec conference and that moment really when the allies decide on Normandy that that final decision they've obviously whittled down a number of potential invasion areas they start with virtually the entire western European coast then it comes down to kind of is it going to be Normandy or the Pas-de-Calais

and then finally it's Normandy mainly because of the strength of the German defences in the Pas-de-Calais it's the short thing that the Germans are good and they know that and from that moment on i think a phenomenal amount of naval effort is directed towards preparing for the landing clearly but also securing the same bay in order to make it a safe operating environment so i i start the story with naval operations through the summer and the autumn of 43 and early 44 which even if the the sailors who are carrying out those operations may not realise, because obviously the invasion location is a big secret, the only real secrets you can keep

for something on that scale are where it's going to happen and when it's going to happen. The fact that it's going to happen is not a secret. The Germans are very aware of it. So sailors who are operating in the same bay and in the waters around it really try to enforce dominance over the German naval and air forces in the area. They don't know that they're preparing for the invasion,

Although if they're smart, and I do mention this in the book, if you know what you're looking at, if you're not stupid, you can work it out. But they are nevertheless carrying out enabling works for the landing. So I started then, I then move into looking at the incredible efforts to assemble the fleet. We tend to look with hindsight. Hindsight is a terrible problem with Normandy and especially the naval dimension. We look back on it and actually Admiral Ramsey, of whom I am a huge admirer, who is the British naval officer who's put in command of the Operation Neptune, which is the assault phase of the liberation of Europe. He, afterwards, he's very aware of this. And in July, he writes that my biggest fear is that everybody will think it was quite easy and plain sailing. And of course, that's what happened.

this extraordinary planning and execution and delivery makes it look with hindsight as if it was easy and strips all the peril out of it and that's compounded by kind of post-war writers who really have a have a strong incentive to strip the peril out of it you never want to make it look like the other guy did his job right so as a consequence that that kind of sense of it being a battle is lost really so i take it through the um and actually one of one of the main areas in in which we look back and think it might all have been easy is the assembly of shipping there's over 7 000 ships and vessels of all types used in the normally landings and they have to be begged borrowed and stolen from everywhere the mediterranean theater is stripped out the americans

are told quite firmly that operation amber dragoon which is this parallel invasion of southern france which is supposed to take place at the same time as D-Day, is not going to happen for a month because there just aren't enough ships. D-Day itself is delayed by a month to allow another month's worth of production of landing craft in Britain and the US because it's a knife edge. So I look at that, I look at the training and assembly of sailors, almost kind of, certainly in Britain, you know, every month or so

there's a kind of new intake of 18-year-olds going into the armed forces And a huge chunk of those are swept into the Navy and into combined operations, which is the Royal Navy's bit that delivers assault landings, because the appetite for sailors is absolutely voracious. And then I look also at the planning and the intelligence work and the deception work, again, which the Allied navies and sailors play an absolutely key role in. so as a precursor to this landing the allies are conducting a number of different operations in the mediterranean now what do they learn from their amphibious operations in the mediterranean and how did that inform their planning for d-day they learned so much from the mediterranean the mediterranean is the biggest classroom really um it's ever so interesting that perhaps sometimes there's some arguments over the value of those lessons let's let's give an example um

obviously famously we know about the the u.s armed forces faced at omaha beach to this day historians argue about whether um that was in part because everything that the u.s army and and the european theater is very much a u.s army theater the u.s navy is fully committed in the pacific and they're kind of the judia player in european waters um the u.s army learns all its techniques from the british because those assault landings that enabled i mentioned those mediterranean assault landings is british and the british go for um the priority is surprise and a short bombardment you know to not allow the enemy to reinforce the area the u.s navy has learned lessons in the pacific about bombarding for hours or even days in advance of the landing

but that's because they're attacking isolated islands that can't be reinforced so you know there's a short bombardment in Omaha, it doesn't go terribly well. And that's certainly one of the reasons why the opposition there is so intense. But other lessons are really powerful. So Operation Torch, for example, the Allied invasion of North Africa, although the opposition from the Vichy French is mostly quite light, there are places where it's very intense. They learn an awful lot about landing over open beaches in heavy surf. And they take away some very key lessons about about the importance of beach organisation and getting that infrastructure on the beach

to sort everything out as it comes ashore and then get it inland and out the way and off the beach as quickly as possible because torches chaos on the beaches. And it's just fortunate that there wasn't a kind of strong, coherent enemy force to launch a counter-attack because the logistic element is awful.

In Sicily, a great deal is learnt about, again, that kind of logistic element, but also they come under really violent sustained air attack in Sicily. Again, hindsight tells us that the Sicily landings were relatively easy. But Sicily and then later Salerno in Italy, huge air attack. And you can see when they go into Normandy, again, hindsight tells us that the Luftwaffe was a much diminished threat in Normandy. But actually at the time, simply the most visible illustration of this

is the flying of barrage balloons from almost every ship that goes across. They really think there's going to be a sustained German air attack like they've experienced in the Mediterranean and they prepare for it. They learn about gunfire, fire support. This really starts even earlier with the Dieppe landings in 1942, where the naval bombardment provided is really not adequate. There aren't enough ships and the guns aren't big enough. And although they are starting to experiment with improvised platforms, platforms so converted landing craft with guns on to provide close range fire support inland that the big lessons from dieppe are firstly those things are great but we need more of them

and they go on to develop bigger and better fire support craft and much more of them but also you need battleships and cruisers destroyers are not enough you need those very big guns and so you know that lesson is taken straight into d-day as is the lesson that you can't take a defended port from the sea. And that leads directly to the production of the famous Mulberry Harbours, the artificial harbours that are taken over. Dieppe is, the primary purpose of Dieppe is to see whether it's possible to take a port from the sea. Now, the Germans aren't stupid. They know any invading Allied force will need a port. And the strongest German defences are clustered around the ports. And the lesson from Dieppe is we can't do this. We need to find a better way.

How did the Allies prepare themselves in the sea area around the landing beaches? So it's an interesting question that maybe we can kick off by what they can't do, because what they can't do is anything too obvious because it will give away the location of the landing. And so, for example, there's an awful lot of covert survey work mainly carried out by the British. So the British run an organisation called the Combined Operations Pilotage Parties. what they're doing amongst other things is covert beach surveillance so they're putting small parties of sailors and royal engineers ashore and they are taking things like samples they're measuring beach gradients they're taking samples of the shingle or the sand to get a really definitive picture of what these surface areas are like before the landing takes place but obviously

what they can't do is only do that in normandy because if one of them's caught it's a dead giveaways so they're doing this all the way along the French coast and actually that's very fortunate because the only coppists actually to be intercepted and captured are captured in the Pas-de-Calais and one of them is actually brought in front of Rommel and there's a terrific story that's in his own memoir but also in Rommel's where he's you know he's interviewed by Rommel and who knows perfectly well what he's doing but fortunately it reinforces those German preconceptions that the landing is going to take place in the Pas-de-Calais. They are surveying minefields but what you can't do is sweep them because again the dead giveaway will be if you

start clearing minefields in the same bay so they're trying to get a picture of german coastal shipping they're trying to understand the beach defenses and again this goes on all the way along the coast of france because you can't be too focused so there's a fantastic combination of really innovative aerial reconnaissance actually the u.s air force pioneer pioneers this really low level oblique photography technique flying along the beach getting pictures of beach obstacles so that's combined with code breaking you know the famous famous enigma code breaking ultra intelligence and also you know humid so people on the ground french resistance photographing sketching simply writing down descriptions of the german coastal defense

what actually by 16 1944 is an extraordinarily comprehensive picture of the german beach defences. It's not always correct. It's not 100% correct because the other guy can always do something to surprise you. I think very famously at the Merville Battery in the British sector and at Wanderhoek in the US sector, the guns are not in the battery. At Wanderhoek, they've been removed and put further back. And at Merville Battery, they're just much, much smaller and older guns than the intelligence picture predicted. But generally, what the Allied sailors, soldiers and they were provided with on the 6th of June is an extraordinarily detailed picture. What did the Germans do to disrupt preparations, the landings,

and how did they continue the fight after the landings? So in advance of the landings, there's really very little that the Germans can do. They are very aware of the concentration of shipping on the south coast of England. And I think it's important, sitting up here in Orkney in the very north of Scotland, to remember that normally landings are vast. The shipping comes from everywhere to take part in it. So the bombardment forces for the US sector come from up here in Orkney,

sorry, for the British sector, and the bombardment forces for the US sector come from Northern Ireland in some cases. But the short-ranged landing craft are mostly leaving from the south coast of England, from ports and harbours and embarkation harbours stretching from kind of Devon for the US in the far west right through to Sussex for the British in the east.

So you can't hide that. But by this point, the German Air Force is not a strategic force at this point. Allied control of the air over Britain is so comprehensive, they can't really get near in any kind of strategically effective way. There are raids on the ports and harbours. There's what the British nicknamed the mini blitz that takes place in early 44. But these are pinpricks, really. Perhaps the most significant and really well-known element of interference is Exercise Tiger, which is obviously very, very familiar to audiences in the US. So this is the final invasion rehearsal for Force U, which is going to assault Utah area. Force U and Force S on the British side are late to the party. These beaches, really assault areas, are added after Montgomery and Eisenhower take over the command of the operation and push very forcefully, very quickly to have the invasion expanded. So Fort Hieu, everything is done differently.

And Fort Hieu gets its own final preparation exercise, mainly because on the other side, on the far shore, Utah area will be separated from the other beaches. It's up the side of the Cottontown Peninsula. There's a kind of marshy area and a river estuary between it and the other beaches. So it rehearses separately. It's a full assault exercise. So the landing craft go in and replicate the initial assault. And then you have a force of landing ships, tank landing ships,

so big, cushion-going, very large landing craft, basically, that are going in to replicate the follow-up waves. So that convoy sails at night with the aim of dropping its load on the following morning. And they are crossing Line Bay and heading into their assault area at Slapton Sands, which is a very well used training area in Devon. And German Schnellbooten, so these are fast motor torpedo boats, which the Allies nicknamed E-boats, penetrate what is a very flimsy defensive screen. they get into the convoy and they torpedo and sink two tank landing ships really badly damage a third and damage a fourth one as well over 700 us servicemen are killed many of them soldiers from a assault engineer battalion and that is a really significant disruption not only to the

training cycle but also to the landings itself we talked earlier about how precious every single hullies and those tank landing ships are particularly precious there's a famous quote from Churchill that I'm going to paraphrase because I can't remember exactly but it's it's something like that the fate of two great empires depended on some goddamn things called LSTs so you know they're really precious and to lose three of them out of service and two of them sunk is is significant as is the losses to the engineer special brigade and there are also intelligence fears about this because a number of officers are killed who are privy to the most important information of all which is when the invasion is going to take place and where

and there are some really grim significant efforts made to ensure that every single body is recovered to make sure that none of them have been taken prisoner and taken back by the Germans it should be stated the Germans don't know what they've done here they they have attacked what they think is a coastal convoy a routine coastal convoy it's not a deliberate effort to interfere with the landings but what it is is a very strong warning sign that actually nothing can be taken for granted and although german sea and air forces are by this point in the war on the back foot they're outnumbered and outgunned it's a classic example of asymmetric warfare and they only really You need to get lucky once to have a really significant impact.

So it genuinely unnerves, I think, the senior commanders that that was possible for that to happen. So the Germans do what they can. They know the invasion is coming. The other thing they do, and this particularly ramps up when General Rommel is appointed inspector general of beach defences in Normandy, they dramatically increased the number of obstacles that placed on the beaches so these are all sorts of nasty gadgets cruciform railway iron ramps to tip a landing craft up and flip it over all of these things are tipped with explosives old artillery shells the idea being to just try and do the maximum effort to make sure that the landings are disrupted before they even get ashore so the germans do what they can and and there's no question that by 6th of june 1944

when the invasion fleet sails um you know one day after the it was supposed to the um the same bay is a very dangerous place indeed and actually losses to landing craft on the invasion day are pretty significant and then the other important thing to remember is actually on the 6th of june itself the germans are caught on the back foot the day of landing is has been kept very very well the secret of that date and that famously Rommel is back in Germany for his wife's birthday giving his wife a pair of shoes and most of the senior military commanders in Normandy are basically doing a war game in Wren and they're not with their commands. The Germans are not ready for this and there's only on D-Day itself there's only really two significant incursions at sea

a flotilla of torpedo boats so these are kind of like small destroyers come out of Le Havre whiz through the smoke screen go oh my goodness that's a lot of ships fire a lot of torpedoes one of which sinks the norwegian destroyer savannah and then they flee for home under an enormous bombardment from the allied fleet and then at the other side in the u.s sector german torpedo boats e-boats again come out of cherbourg and kind of probe the defenses on the u.s side but don't get anywhere near the fleet and that's it for d-day but very soon afterwards the german navy gets out together as does the luftwaffe and so for weeks after the landings literally every night and i've looked at the files on this and i've listened to the veterans and

every night the luftwaffe is out so the night time is a great leveler they really it's not safe for them to operate in in daytime because of allied air superiority but at night the allies have very few fighters that are able to operate at night all those famous mustangs and thunderbolts and Spitfires are not able to operate at night time. So the Germans are out every night. They are carrying out tip and run bombing raids. They're carrying out torpedo attacks and they're constantly laying mines. So there's a phenomenal sweeping operation to clear the invasion area before the landings.

But every night they have to sweep again and again and again because the Germans top it up. And the other thing that comes out is E-boats, the German torpedo boats, the small warships. and they're operating out of the harbour and again every night they're probing the defences to the point that a couple of weeks after the landings Ramsey has to order a massive overwhelming strategic bombing raid on the harbour which flattens the port actually destroys a lot of those German small warships

but over time they reinforce the harbour and so it all starts all over again it is never a safe operating environment for the Allies and they have to be on watch all the time and there are very significant losses of ships not just to the enemy but also to weather which is a constant danger to sailors so about one in ten of those ships and vessels that we talked about at the beginning is not just either very significantly damaged or sunk but basically placed out of out of service during operations in the same bay and there are you know fairly

significant warships destroyers what cruiser british well polish cruiser called dragon is sunk and then later in july that the final threat that the germans bring into play is what they call their client camp for bando which is small battle units so human torpedoes explosive motorboats miniature submarines all mostly operate well all operating in the eastern the british sector being thrown at the invasion fleets and again strategically their impact is fairly limited But they do sink ships and they do damage ships. The attrition rate amongst their crews is appalling. But again, just coming back to that experience of the individual sailor or marine or coast guardman who is operating in the same bay, it surely felt like a battle to them.

It is never safe. It's exhausting. And there's always the risk that somebody is going to blow you up. What were the differences in the British and American approaches to command and control? How those differences affect preparation and execution of the landings? That's a really interesting question, because that's in terms of command, that's probably the most significant area of dispute, really, between the British and Americans. We should say from the outset, Operation Neptune is a British operation. Initially, the Royal Navy says it will do all of the maritime dimension. and the US Navy breathes this

eye of relief because they're so committed in the Pacific that actually finding ships and men to go over to the European theatre would be a real struggle. Then you get that key command change with Eisenhower and Montgomery and Eisenhower and Montgomery say that the invasion is

too small. It gets expanded by two assault areas, Utah and Sword. That requires a huge amount more shipping and at this point the British have to go, we i don't do this alone we haven't got enough ships so the u.s navy generously finds some and the forces of u.s destroyers there's a number of u.s battleships nevada texas come over u.s cruisers and the u.s takes more responsibility for the bombardment forces and getting the troops ashore

in the western sector where the u.s army is landing so you then have two task forces you You have the Eastern Task Force, which is the British sector, which is commanded by Admiral Sir Philip Vian. And then you have the U.S. Western Task Force, Admiral Alan Kirk. Now, U.S. Navy doctrine is very different to Royal Navy doctrine. The Royal Navy have always had a doctrine of more centralized control. It was really epically more flexible in the Second World War than it was in the First World War, which is a whole different conversation. But there's still a culture of more tight control. We have a Royal Navy officer, Admiral Ramsey, who's in command of the whole thing as Commander-in-Chief Allied Expeditionary Force.

And Ramsey, I think personally, but I'm happy to be challenged on this rightly, decides that the Seine Bay is a unique operating environment. You've got potentially 7,000 ships and craft milling around in the Seine Bay. and he decides that every single one at least for the invasion itself has to have its movements absolutely tightly controlled because if you have every single ship you know commander making his own decision in the same way you've got potentially chaos you've got potentially collisions you've got things in the wrong place you've got friendly fire you've got all sorts of potential for disaster so in the planning stage the naval orders for Neptune are absolutely vast and they really determine that every commanding officer from from a battleship down to um a tank landing craft like

the one i was involved with which had a crew of 12 and the commanding officer was a 19 year old sub-lieutenant um so uh i can't think what the u.s navy equivalent to some of them would be ensign probably you know very very junior officer indeed you know they all get their voluminous set of orders that tell them precisely when they're sailing who they're picking up when they're going to be there where they're going to drop them what they must do afterwards u.s navy doctrine has always emphasized individual initiative and decision making by the individual commander on the spot and u.s navy doctrine is essentially you give a general instruction to you know this is this is what we want you to achieve we want you to get these soldiers on this beach and then how

they do it is is up to the commanding officer on the spot and you can see immediately where that tension is going to come and the the americans do to their credit are aware that they are they are the kind of junior service in this particular operation um and they they do abide by this kind of tight control but alan kirk in particular is is very unhappy about it there's there's a fantastic interview that i found um that's available online actually and i can i just blanked on where it is but i will give you the details afterwards and he he talks at great length about just how frustrating he finds this, you know, what he calls micromanagement really.

I do think broadly that the British approach is probably right in this instance, but I also think possibly a bit more effort may have been made to explain to the Americans why it was going to be a challenge in this particular operation. And I think some of that is the kind of late expansion of the US Navy's commitment.

So maybe there just wasn't that time to do that. These are very busy people um operating under very great pressure and those those tensions when you when you read the memoirs and you listen to the interviews and yeah those tensions are there uh there are tensions between Ramsey and Kirk there are tensions between Ramsey and Vian actually um there are tensions between Vian and Kirk um actually the really interesting message from this I think is is not that there were tensions of course there were and even in our all our kind of mundane and very safe jobs that we do now, you know, we've all had deadlines that cause pressures and everybody gets a bit

snippy. Actually, what were the takeaways that they actually achieved the job? You know, they did an extraordinarily successful, hugely challenging thing that again, I will say again and again, only hindsight tells us it was easy. It wasn't easy, but those command tensions were definitely there. If you find the Kirk audio and send it to us here, we'll be sure to drop that into the show notes so folks can go back and listen to that interview themselves but that's all that we have time for today i'd like to thank my guest nick hewitt nick where can we find you online and what's your next project so you can find me mainly on twitter at nick hewitt for for kind of naval history stuff and um i am working on my next project i have a number of

ideas sculling around i'm talking to the wonderful folk at yale university press who published me for this um about um possibly operation torch is looking quite interesting to me um also um the very very difficult time that the royal navy in particular had in the eastern mediterranean in 1940 41 um focusing on the battle for crete also looking at that too but at the moment i'm just really enjoying normandy i've got a lot of kind of podcasts and interviews and things coming up around this and it's just a really great time to be to be working on this subject there's a lot of phenomenal literature come out and i'm really proud and excited to be part of it well thank you again for joining us to the listeners thanks for tuning in we'll see you next time

Thank you. Oh, no.