7 The War in Europe: English Channel
In England, as May 1944 turned into June, it didn’t take a genius to know that something big was afoot. Military traffic choked the roads leading to the Channel seacoast and the coastal villages. Troops were in battle dress, officers were grim faced, all hands hustled about on the thousands of mysterious errands that presage an offensive. Everybody knew it was the Big Landing—the assault on Fortress Europe—but where?
Motor Torpedo Boat Squadron Two, under Lieut. Commander John Bulkeley (with only three boats this was the smallest squadron ever organized), had helped to make the decision where to land. Assigned to the Office of Strategic Services—America’s cloak-and-dagger outfit for all kinds of secret business—Squadron Two had run a ferry service between England and the enemy-occupied continent to deliver secret agents, saboteurs, spies, resistance officers, and couriers for the governments in exile.
The sailors of Squadron Two carried out their orders, of course, but on some of their errands they could mutter the old Navy adage: “I may have to take it, but I don’t have to like it.”
For example, the night they were sent across the Channel to land on the Normandy shore, there to scoop up several bucketfuls of sand. The crews grumbled about taking their fragile craft under the guns of Hitler’s mighty Western Wall just to fill the First Sea Lord’s sandbox.
They did not find out, until long after that night, why they were sent to play with shovels and buckets on the Normandy beach. A scientist who claimed to know the beaches well—beaches that had already been picked for the Normandy landings—said that they were made of spongy peat covered with a thin layer of sand, and that Allied trucks and tanks would bog down helplessly on the soft strand, once they left the hard decks of the landing craft.
The samples brought back by the PT sailors proved that the scientist didn’t know sand from shinola about Normandy beach conditions, and the operation went ahead as planned.
On June 6, 1944, the first waves of American and British troops landed on Omaha and Utah beaches and began the long slugging match with Marshal Erwin Rommel’s Nazis to twist Normandy out of German hands.
During the landings proper, PTs were used as anti-E-boat screens, but made their biggest contribution by dousing flare floats dropped by German aircraft to guide their night bombers.
At the beginning the assigned duties of the PTs were not heavy, but there is always work for a fleet of small, handy armed boats in a big amphibious operation.
On June 8th, for instance, as the destroyer Glennon jockeyed about off the Saint Marcouf Islands, north of Utah Beach, getting ready to bombard a shore battery, she struck a mine astern. One minesweeper took the damaged destroyer under tow, and another went ahead to sweep a clear escape channel. Just before 9 A.M., the destroyer-escort Rich closed the ships, and the skipper asked if he could help. The captain of the Glennon answered: “Negative; clear area cautiously, live mines.”
Too late. A heavy explosion stopped the Rich dead in the water. A second explosion tore away fifty feet of the stern. A third mine exploded forward. The destroyer-escort was a shambles, its keel broken and folded in a V. The superstructure was festooned with a grisly drapery of bodies and parts of bodies.
PTs rallied around the Rich to take survivors from the deck or from the mine-filled waters around the shattered vessel. Crewmen on the 508 saw a sailor bobbing by in the sea, and the bowman picked up a heaving line to throw to his rescue. The man in the water calmly refused assistance.
“Never mind the line,” he said, “I have no arms to catch it.”
The PT skipper, Lieut. Calvin R. Whorton, dove into the icy Channel waters, but the armless sailor had gone to the bottom.
The Rich followed him in fifteen minutes, with 79 of the crew. Seventy-three survivors were wounded.
The Glennon itself went aground, and two days later a German shore battery put two salvos aboard. The destroyer rolled over and sank.
American soldiers ashore pushed rapidly northwestward along the coast of the Cherbourg Peninsula, to capture the port of Cherbourg, sorely needed as a terminal to replace the temporary harbor behind a jury-rig breakwater of sunken ships at the landing beaches. The Nazi garrison at Cherbourg put up a last-ditch stand, however, and on June 27th, forts on the outer breakwater and a few coastal batteries still held out.
The Navy sent a curiously composed task force to reduce the forts. With the destroyer Shubrick, the Navy sent six PTs to deal with the holdout Germans. It is hard to understand what PTs were expected to accomplish against heavy guns behind concrete casemates. Perhaps the reputation of the PT commander had overpowered the judgment of the Navy brass, for it was none other than Lieut. Commander John Bulkeley, hero of the MacArthur rescue run and the New Guinea blockade, come to try his mettle in European waters.
Leaving four PTs with the destroyer as a screen, Bulkeley, in 510, with 521 in company, cruised by the forts and sprayed them with machine guns at 150-yard range. The stubborn Nazis poured out a stream of 88-mm. shells and hit 521 hard enough to stop her dead for five minutes while a motor machinist mate made frantic repairs. Lieut. Commander Bulkeley ran rings around the stalled craft, laying a doughnut of smoke around her for a screen.
The Shubrick herself was taking near misses from shore batteries, so the skipper recalled the PTs and departed the scene. The two “bombardment” PTs followed suit, having accomplished little except to exercise the crew. Fortunately no American sailors were hurt in this most inappropriate use of PT capabilities.
Even after the Allies had taken the whole Normandy coast, the Germans clung to the offshore Channel Islands of Jersey, Alderney, Guernsey, and Sark. On Jersey, they maintained a base for small craft which made annoying nightly sorties.
To seal off the Jersey base, the Navy ordered PT Squadrons Thirty and Thirty-four to patrol nightly from Cherbourg to the Channel Islands in the company of a destroyer escort for backstop firepower and for radar scouting.
NETHERLANDS BELGIUM FRANCE PT 509 SUNK BY MINESWEEPER PTs 510 and 521 “BOMBARD” FORTS RICH SUNK BY MINES
On the night between August 8th and 9th, the Maloy and five PTs were patrolling west of Jersey. The weather was good all night, but shortly before dawn a thick fog settled over the sea. At 5:30 A.M. the radar watch on the Maloy picked up six German minesweepers.
Lieut. H. J. Sherertz, as the officer in tactical command of the PT patrol, was riding Maloy to use its superior radar. He dispatched three PTs from the northern end of the scouting line to attack the Germans. The skipper of PT 500, one of the north scout group, was Lieut. Douglas Kennedy, now editor of True magazine. Blinded by the peasouper, the PTs fired torpedoes by radar, but missed.
Thirty minutes later, Lieut. Sherertz vectored the southern pair of torpedo boats to the attack. The 508 and 509 approached the firing line through the fog at almost 50 knots. Lieut. Harry M. Crist, a veteran of many PT battles in Pacific waters and skipper of 509, risked one fish by radar aim from 500 yards. Lieut. Whorton (the officer who had tried in vain to save the armless sailor of the Rich) couldn’t fire, because his radar conked out at the critical moment, so the PTs circled and Lieut. Crist conned the 508 by radio. The boats fired but missed.
As they came about to circle again, Whorton reported that he heard heavy firing break out between the other PT and a minesweeper, but he couldn’t shoot because his buddies were between him and the Germans. Whorton lost the 509 in the swirling fog, and when he came around again, everybody had disappeared. He searched almost an hour and returned to the Maloy on orders of Lieut. Sherertz, because his burned-out radar made his search ineffective.
The 503 and the 507 took up the search for their missing comrades. At 8 A.M. they picked up a radar target in the St. Helier roadstead at Jersey, and closed to 200 yards. The fog lifted briefly and unveiled a minesweeper dead ahead and on a collision course. The 503 fired a torpedo, and both boats raked the enemy’s decks, but suffered hard punishment themselves from the enemy’s return fire. Before the boats escaped from the enemy waters, two PT sailors were killed and four wounded on 503, and one wounded on 507.
The next day a search plane found the body of a sailor from the 509, and ten days later a bullet-riddled section of the hull was found floating in the Channel. It was not until after the war that the fate of the 509 was learned from the sole survivor, a liberated prisoner of war named John L. Page, RdM3c. Here is his story:
“After firing one torpedo by radar, the 509 circled and came in for a gunnery run. I was in the charthouse on the radar. Lieut. (jg) John K. Pavlis was at the wheel. I remember we were moving fast and got pretty close before receiving return fire. When it came it was heavy and accurate.
“One shell burst in the charthouse, knocking me out. When I came to, I was trying to beat out flames with my hands. I was wounded and the boat was on fire, but I pulled the detonator switch to destroy the radar and then crawled on deck.
“The bow of our boat was hung up on the side of a 180-foot minesweeper. From the deck of the enemy sweeper, Germans were pouring in small-arms fire and grenades. Everything aft of the cockpit was burning. I struggled forward through the bullets and bursting grenades to the bow—I have no idea how long that journey took—and the Germans tossed me a line. I had just enough strength to take it and they hauled me aboard.”
The Germans stretched Page out on the deck and attacked the PT’s carcass with crowbars, frantically trying to pry themselves loose from its clutches. Just as the PT broke loose, it exploded with a tremendous roar.
“I couldn’t see it,” says Page, “but I felt the heat and the blast.”
Free of the PT, the minesweeper ran for the shelter of home base at St. Helier. The Germans carried Page back to the crew’s quarters to tend his wounds. He had a broken right arm and leg, thirty-seven bullet and shrapnel holes in his body, and a large-caliber slug in his lungs. While they were working on him they were carrying in their own dead and wounded.
“I managed to count the dead. There were fifteen of them and a good number of wounded. It’s difficult to estimate how many, because they kept milling around. I guess I conked out for a while. The first thing I remember is a first-aid man putting a pack on my back and arm. Then I could hear the noise of the ship docking.
“After they removed their dead and wounded, they took me ashore at St. Helier. They laid me out on the dock for quite a while, and a couple of civilians—I found out later they were Gestapo agents—tried to question me, but they saw I was badly shot up, so they didn’t try to question me further.”
Page was taken to a former English hospital at St. Helier, where skillful German surgeons performed many operations—he couldn’t remember how many—to remove dozens of bullets and fragments from every part of his body. The final operation was on December 27, 1944.
While he was in the hospital, the bodies of three of his shipmates washed ashore on Jersey. The British Red Cross took over the bodies and buried them with military honors.
Page was regularly annoyed by Gestapo men, but he said: “I found that being very correct and stressing the fact that my government didn’t permit me to answer was very effective. They tried a few times and finally let me alone.”
Page was liberated on May 8, 1945.
The Channel Island battles were vicious and inconclusive, in a sense, but the German gadflies stayed more and more in port—became more and more timid when they did patrol. Nightly sweeps of the PT-destroyer escort teams bottled up the German boats and cleared the Channel waters for the heavy traffic serving the voracious appetite of the armies on the continent.