The Chase launched 15 assault waves and by 11 a.m. all of the 1st Division troops aboard had disembarked. LCTs maneuvered alongside and soon all of their equipment was on the way to the beaches as well. The LCVPs and LCMs returned with casualties who were cared for by the Chase's Public Health Service doctors. Some of the small boats became rescue vessels.
U.S.S. Samuel Chase
One Coast Guard LCVP skipper said, "We didn't think twice about going to help out a shipmate in distress. Ship spirit is at its best when the enemy is making it tough for us." He had pulled a landing craft to safety while carrying wounded soldiers back to the Chase. Such incidents were common along the shores of Normandy on D-Day. All in all, it was a successful morning for this Coast Guard-manned ship. But the day was not without loss. Six LCVPs did not return. One impaled itself on an obstacle before it made it to the beach. Four swamped in the heavy surf and one sank after taking a direct hit from a German 88, killing one Coast Guardsman outright. A total of 18 crewmen were missing.
Fortunately, many were alive and had made it to the beach where they huddled with the troops and waited for a chance to get back to their transport. One later reported that after he safely landed his troops a control vessel instructed him to begin offloading waiting LCIs. As he was headed back in with a fresh load of troops "We saw two British landing craft get direct hits by 88s. One of them blew up in a great gust of flame ... (as for us) I really dreaded the thought of facing those machine guns again ... but we beached the troops on dry land. Again they cut loose on us, but this time they hit home. Bullets sprayed into the stern of my boat as I was getting ready to back off. Then my engine conked out." Uninjured, he managed to hitch a ride back to the Chase later in the day.
The aftermath: debris litters the beaches of Normandy.
The matchbox-fleet patrol boats kept busy rescuing survivors along the entire Omaha beachhead and the experience of one of these diminutive wooden-hulled patrol craft typified the role of the cutters that day. The CGC-1 formed up with the Omaha assault force and arrived at its station at 6 a.m. It escorted a group of LCVPs to the beach. Two miles offshore a lookout spotted men from a sunken British LCA in the water and the CGC-1 went to their assistance.
The Coast Guardsmen had to jump overboard and tie lines to the freezing survivors because they were too cold to help themselves aboard. The cutter's crew succeeded in pulling 24 soldiers and four Royal Navy sailors from the Channel. They then sailed back to the transport area and transferred the survivors to the Chase. The CGC-1 then returned to the waters off Omaha. At 9:45 a.m. they recovered 19 survivors from the LCI(L)-91, 14 of whom were part of the LCI's Coast Guard crew and transferred these men to the Chase and once again returned to their station. They spent the better part of the day within 2,000 yards of the beach under enemy machine-gun, mortar and artillery fire. No crewman was injured and the crew returned to Britain unscathed. On the beaches, however, the day was not going well.
Omaha Beach secured. A panoramic view of the Omaha beachhead after it was secured, sometime around mid-June 1944, at low tide. The Coast Guard-manned LST-262 is the third beached LST from the right, one of 10 Coast Guard-manned LSTs that participated in the invasion of Normandy, France, in June, 1944.
Enemy fire was still intense and the naval gunfire support groups could not fire on targets because they were unable to contact the spotters on the beaches, most of whom had been killed or had their radio equipment damaged. British and American destroyers took the initiative and moved into point blank range and opened fire. Only a few hundred yards off the beaches they plastered the pillboxes, mobile 88s and machine-gun positions.
With their assistance the infantry slowly silenced the Germans, and through sheer force of will, manpower, and a few brave officers and men who rallied the troops, the Americans moved inland as the afternoon wore on. The momentum increased as obstacles were cleared and paths through them marked so that more landing craft could beach. The traffic jam cleared as Imlay sailed among the incoming craft, checked their manifests, ranked them according to their cargoes, and sent them in as time and space permitted.
German POW's prepare to spend the rest of the war in a prisoner-of-war camp, transported there courtesy of the U.S. Coast Guard.
The situation stabilized by 8 p.m. to the point that Fritzche turned command over to Imlay and returned to Great Britain. As the Allies had no ports in which to deliver supplies and reinforcements, the British, with the assistance of some Coast Guard officers, had devised a series of artificial harbors, some of which were named mulberries. These were set up around the American and British beaches. They were designed to handle 12,000 tons of supplies per day and would also allow LSTs to unload from them directly, well away from the beaches. Imlay was assigned as the port director for the Omaha mulberry which was soon handling as much traffic as most of the larger ports of the world. The Allies also devised a series of blockship breakwaters, named "gooseberries," to handle even more supplies necessary to supply the five divisions.
The Germans committed their panzer divisions too late to throw the Allies back into the sea as the Allied deceptions had convinced them that the Normandy landings were just a feint for the "real" invasion at Pas de Calais. Hitler ordered the powerful Fifteenth Army to stay there until well after the Allies secured their foothold at Normandy. Operation Neptune officially ended on June 29 with the liberation of Cherbourg. The Allies' breakout from the Normandy beachhead occurred seven weeks after D-Day, and Lieutenant General George S. Patton Jr.'s newly constituted Third Army raced for Paris. The liberation of Europe was at hand. The Allied forces had pooled their resources and accomplished what many believed could not be done. They successfully invaded Hitler's Fortress Europe and sealed the fate of the Third Reich.
The landing craft coxswain was the symbol and fiber of the amphibious force. Exposed to enemy fire as he steered his craft to shore, the lives of thirty-six infantrymen in his small LCVP were his responsibility. If he failed in his mission of landing these troops, the strategy of admirals went for naught; the bombardment of a naval force alone could never gain a foothold on the hostile and contested shore. Prairie boy or city lad, the coxswain became a paragon of courageous determination and seamanship
The Coast Guard's role during that invasion has often been overlooked. Nevertheless the service deserves more than a nod of appreciation from those who now enjoy the fruits of the Allied victory. Coast Guardsmen manned 99 warships and large landing vessels for Operation Neptune and dozens of smaller landing craft. The Coast Guard lost more vessels that day than on any single day during its history, mute testimony to the ferocity of the German defenders and the bravery of the crews who took the infantry right to the enemy's doorstep. Eighteen Coast Guardsmen paid the ultimate price that day as well, while 38 more were seriously wounded. There were more casualties to come that summer from mines, torpedoes and attacks by the Luftwaffe as the ships sailed the English Channel carrying supplies and reinforcements and returning with prisoners of war and wounded GIs.
Carrying out the Coast Guard's time-honored task of saving lives, albeit under enemy fire on a shoreline thousands of miles from home, the cutters of Rescue Flotilla One saved more than 400 men on D-Day alone and by the time the unit was decommissioned in December, 1944, they had saved 1,438 souls. As at North Africa, Sicily, Italy and throughout the Pacific, the Coast Guard was instrumental to the invasion's success. An admirable record for the United States' oldest continuous sea-going service.
Additional Sources:
www.navsource.org
www.history.navy.mi
6juin.omaha.free.fr
