PT 305

The PT 305 is afloat near Lakefront Airport (KNEW). She has been named "USS Sudden Jerk". This was the name given to her by her plank owner crew after she had a jolt during a docking maneuver. She is available for deck tours and for rides if you are a recent lottery winner. This is the only operational combat veteran PT boat. She is credited with sinking 2 German lighter barges in the Mediterranean. The deck tour lasts 45 minutes and gives a detailed description of her operation and weapons systems.

About 20% of her is original. She was rebuilt over a period 10 years to her original design specs and construction techniques. She survived because the Navy brought European Theater PT boats back to the US in preparation for sending them to the Pacific. After the war she was a tour boat and an oyster dragger.

The wheel is an original wheel. Andrew Higgins, who built these boats, gave it to a friend from his surplus stock after the war and he displayed it on his mantle for years. As soon as he died, his wife, who hated it, donated it to the museum

Points for anyone who can identify this instrument.

It was tight quarters for her crew of 11.

Torpedo launch was roll off, not from a launcher. Deck rails are a modern safety requirement and not part of the original kit.

Les Fleurs de la Memoire

This Memorial Day it seems appropriate to tell you about an organization in France that honors those who rest in the American Cemetery in Normandy. French citizens volunteer to put flowers on the grave of an adopted soldier. They commit to do this at least once per year and they hand down that obligation to their descendants. You can read about the organization here.

D Day Visitor

Travel route was to Houston to connect with Lufthansa. Then to Frankfurt and then to Paris. I'm not sure if its the Lufthansa or the 100 business class passengers in the A380 but the service seems have become less than I remember. Even so. the trip was smooth. The only aggravation was the security inspection at Frankfurt when making the connection there. It was the closest thing I've had to a strip search with my clothes on. All manual - no scanners.

While waiting for baggage in Paris, I noticed an elderly gentleman. I asked him if he was over for the 70th anniversary. He brightened up and told me the capsule version of  his WW II service. He was a medic in the 2nd Division and landed on Omaha on the third day. He was in the Battle for St. Lo. He went on to Brest. He was on the northern flank during the Battle of the Bulge. He crossed the Rhine and went into Czechoslovakia. I wish I had more time to talk as he seemed eager to tell his story. June 6th is almost here and these guys are almost all gone. God bless them.

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.

Visiting Omaha

We started the day with a visit to Bayeux. The first problem is that parking spaces are at a premium. I used the parking lot shark technique – follow someone who appears to be heading for their car and snatch their spot as they drive off. We finally found something resembling a parking space and took off on foot to find the tapestry.

They are proud of their little piece of cloth and would have you spend several hours reading descriptive material and watching films before seeing the real deal. We skipped all that and went right to tapestry. The free audio guides are adequate to describe the scenes on the tapestry.

Lunch was at a little outside cafe. I think my wife has finally gotten used to the French and their dogs. They take their dogs everywhere and it is not unusual to see them in a restaurant. A large black lab lay at her feet for the whole meal and she didn’t blink.

After the tapestry, we headed for the coast and the invasion beaches. We went to Port-en-Bessen and along the way happened upon a museum filled with D Day artifacts salvaged from the sea. In the parking lot were two examples of Double Drive Sherman tanks. These were secret amphibious tanks with propeller drives described previously. They were supported by an inflatable canvas “hull” and were supposed to propel themselves ashore unaided. These had to be some of the tanks lost by the 741st Tank Battalion. All but two of their 16 tanks were swamped trying to swim to the beach. These had lost their canvass “hulls” but remnants of the inflatable support struts were still attached along with the inflating mechanism and tubing. Their gun barrels were locked in the high elevation they had to have to clear the canvas skirt that kept them afloat. Uncle Phillip was in the 743rd Tank Battalion. When the LST driver carrying his tanks realized what was happening to the 741st, he elected ignore his orders and take his tanks all the way to the beach, an action that probably had a major impact on the outcome of the day.

When you approach the beaches from land it is not obvious that there is a beach. The land slopes gently up to an almost vertical bluff, and from the coast road, you can’t see what’s on the other side. We took the coast road that paralleled the beach until we got to Colleville. There we took a road down to the beach. This was probably the same route that most of the troops used to get off the beach on D Day. It was one of the major routes up the bluffs which were impassable to vehicles except in a few draws. And the Germans had these pretty well defended.

We parked on Omaha Beach in the shadow of the monument to the 1st Division. My wife is surprised to see the beach being used for recreation. Families were picnicking, flying kites and enjoying the day. I think she found it a little surreal. You tend to forget that this place, with all its history, is still a beach. But from this vantage point you get a better idea of what the soldiers faced. At low tide, they had to cross 300 yards of open beach. When they reached the high tide line, the beach ended in a strip of cobble stones and a shallow ledge about 2 feet high. Beyond that is another 100 yards of open ground leading to a bluff over 100 feet high. And the whole thing is strung with barbed wire, mines and covered with intersecting machine gun fire.

From here we headed back up the bluff for the American Cemetery at St. Laurent-sur-Mere. It’s late August and the lines of traffic are long. It seems for every car leaving, there are five wanting to get in. We arrive just after a heavy rain. I am astonished at the number of Europeans who are making the pilgrimage to the cemetery. Certainly they must have better things to do than to sit in traffic waiting to visit a cemetery with 10,000 graves, but then maybe we Americans underestimate the appreciation Europe still has for their liberation from the Nazis. I saw a similar appreciation in the South Korea. I hope the Iraqis will feel the same in 50 years.

The American Cemetery is another item on my list of things to see before you die.

From the cemetery we drove to Vierville-sur-Mer. This is far end of Omaha Beach. This is the beach area where my uncle came ashore. It was one of the main exits from the beach but the Germans had built a large concrete wall blocking the road. There were also gun emplacements where 88 mm guns could shoot the length of Omaha Beach. This is where the boys of Bedford, Virginia landed - just behind the tanks of the 743rd. Today the old gun emplacement serves as a memorial to the National Guard. This is the view the German gunners had. Try to imagine crossing that beach at low tide under fire form this gun.

The next stop was Pont-du-Hoc where Rangers climbed the cliffs only to find that the guns they were supposed to attack had been moved further inland. They found the guns and destroyed them anyway and then dug in until help arrived. It was two days before some tanks of the 743rd were able to get over to relieve the Rangers. I like to think Uncle Philip’s tank was one of them.

Pont-du-Hoc has been left much as it was in June 1944, bomb craters and all.

Pont-du-Hoc has seen several improvements since I was here a year ago. A new parking lot, landscaping and observation platforms had been built for the 60th anniversary. And again I saw European tourists flocking here with children in tow. Like kids everywhere, they enjoy climbing in and around the old gun emplacements.

Since I didn’t want to overload my wife with D-Day stuff, we ended the war tour and went back to La Ducrie. Dinner that night was in a small bistro in the city of St. Lo. We were reminded of the friendliness of the French again when the family at the table next to ours offered translation help with the menu and then we spent some time giving their young boys some practice In English.