D Day and DD Tanks

It wasn’t until I was middle aged that I realized I had an uncle that was on Omaha Beach on D Day. I knew I had an uncle that had been killed in the war but nobody ever talked about him. The reasons might have been long lasting grief or that they just didn’t know any details of his service. I happened to be home for a visit and at the some time I was reading Stephen Ambrose’s book on D Day. Someone mentioned that Uncle Philip had been in the 743rd Tank Battalion. Stephen Ambrose’s book had a diagram that showed the landing order of the assault units. The 743rd Tank Battalion was the lead unit, 10 minutes ahead of the 116th Regiment of the 29th Division, on the right hand side of Omaha Beach opposite Vierville sur Mer. The beach assigned to his company, Company B, was code named Dog Green.

As I started doing research, I was surprised to find that little was discussed in the popular literature about the 743rd Tank Battalion and their position in the assault on D Day. There was almost nothing about them in the exhibits in the World War II Museum in my own hometown of New Orleans. Yet they were a unique secret weapon that military planners relied upon very heavily for close infantry support. It seemed to me that more should be known about them.

The 743rd Tank Battalion was made up of modified Sherman tanks. The tanks were equipped with a double drive unit so that the engine could provide power to the tracks or to two propellers. The tank was also equipped with a canvass flotation shroud that was inflated using a small air compressor. Once erected, the canvass shroud would keep the tank afloat, barely. The idea was that the tanks would use their propellers to drive themselves on the beach. It was hoped that the tanks would look like innocuous rubber boats from the German perspective thereby giving them a big surprise when the tank was revealed. Their mission was to provide close in support to the infantry by engaging machine gun bunkers and other targets of opportunity.

There were two tank battalions on Omaha Beach that day: the 741st and the 743rd. Their orders were to launch from their LCT several miles out to sea and then proceed to the beach. The seas were still rough from the storm the day before. The 741st launched according to their orders and were quickly in a fight for survival against the sea. The tanks had about 1 foot of freeboard and the waves quickly overwhelmed the canvass shroud sending the 35 ton tanks to the bottom. This was observed by the LCT drivers carrying the 743rd. (How they learned of the situation of the 741st is not known. There may have been radio transmissions via tank radio alerting the 743rd to the problem.) The LCT driver made an on the spot decision to ignore orders and take the tanks all the way to the beach. His initiative may have saved many lives that day. (Recently declassified documents indicate that the decision to launch or not was up to the senior Army and Navy personnel on site)

My uncle survived D Day. Elements of his company went to Pont du Hoc to relieve the Rangers on June 9. I’m not sure, but I’d like to think he was part of that. Any letters he may have sent to the family regarding his experiences have been lost, if they ever existed. He was killed in Normandy on July 9 when his company was ambushed by tanks from the 2nd SS Panzer Division.

There is little documented about the independent tank battalions. There were approximately 37 of them in total including a couple of all black units. They were formed for the sole purpose of infantry support and were disbanded after the war. They were not stand alone units but were meant to be attached to infantry units as needed. Tank companies were split up and tanks were often out of contact with their company commander for weeks as they were shuttled between units. They could be fighting with different units on different days which gave them no time to develop coordination procedures with the unit they were fighting with. Ambrose discusses how unit cohesiveness was a key ingredient for building a soldier’s morale. Familiarity with the men you were fighting with gave the soldier a level of confidence as each man knew what the other would do. But Ambrose ignores how the combat vagabonds of the tank battalions coped with being separated from their command structure and shuttled between infantry units. They were dependent upon the kindness of the unit they were attached to for support. It must have been a lonely existence.

I have been to Normandy twice but could find no monument to either of the tank battalions that assaulted Omaha Beach that day, even though they were the first to land. There are almost no examples of DD tanks existing today even though it was considered to be an important secret weapon. (A couple of tanks from the 741st have been recovered and are on display at a museum in Port en Bessen, France. These still have the tubing for the inflation mechanism and pieces of the shroud on them.) And as I said earlier, the World War II Museum in New Orleans, our National WW II museum, has almost nothing about these unique units. Steel Victory: The Heroic Story of America's Independent Tank Battalions at War in Europe is a very good source of information regarding all the tank battalions. The View from the Turret: The 743rd Battalion During World War II is an excellent source for history about the 743rd. The 30th Division Association also has reprints of the unit history, Move Out, Verify.

The survivors of these units are passing from us quickly and a key piece of history will be lost with them. I hope this serves in some small way to keep their memory alive.