Imagine standing in one of those LSTs in the first wave. I hope I would have had the guts to do it.
As the Admiral said in The Bridges of Toko-Ri where do we find such men?
Posted on 06/06/2021 8:08:06 PM PDT by Rummyfan
Today your job is straightforward. First, you must load 40 to 50 pounds on your back. Then you need to climb down a net of rope that is banging on the steel side of a ship and jump into a steel rectangle bobbing on the surface of the ocean below you. Others are already inside the steel boat shouting and urging you to hurry up.
Once in the boat, you stand with dozens of others as the boat is driven towards distant beaches and cliffs through a hot hailstorm of bullets and explosions. Boats moving nearby are, from time to time, hit with a high explosive shell and disintegrate in a red rain of bullets and body parts. Then there’s the smell of men near you fouling themselves as the fear bites into their necks and they hunch lower into the boat. That smell mingles with the smell of cordite and seaweed.
In front of you, over the steel helmets of other men, you can see the flat surface of the bow’s landing ramp still held in place against the sea. Soon you are within range of the machine guns that line the cliffs above the beach ahead. The metallic death sound of their bullets clangs and whines off the front of the ramp.
Then the coxswain shouts and the klaxon sounds. Then you feel the keel of the LVCP grind against the rocks and sand of Normandy as the large shells from the boats in the armada behind you whuffle and moan overhead. Then the explosions all around and above you increase in intensity and then the bullets from the machine guns in the cliffs ahead and above rattle and hum along the steel plates of the boat and the men crouch lower. Then somehow you all strain forward as, at last, the ramp drops down and you see the beach. Then the men surge forward and you step with them. Then you are out in the chill waters of the channel wading in towards sand already doused with death, past bodies bobbing in the surf staining the waters crimson. Then you are on the beach.
Imagine standing in one of those LSTs in the first wave. I hope I would have had the guts to do it.
As the Admiral said in The Bridges of Toko-Ri where do we find such men?
It was a much different time. Sure those men were scared, but back then, what would have been even worse was to be considered to be a coward.
“I took the image on the link at low tide in Normady in 2006. This is literally at the edge of the water looking back to the bluffs where the American cemetery is. Look how damn far that is… it took a good 20 minutes to walk down from the cemetery to the water’s edge. I cannot imagine having gone the other way wet, seasick, with a 60-pound ruck on my back, a rifle that weighed a friggin ton unloaded, and with bullets and mortar shells raining down on me.
A very good read.
Thanks.
The writer is unaware that the LCVP was made primarily of plywood.
There were certainly no LST’s in the first wave and I’m fairly sure none on June 6 at all.
LCVP?
Landing Craft Vehicle & Personnel
I visited an old couple from church that lived in a nursing home. The woman was very chatty and the husband not so much. I said something about his navy tattoo and that he must have been in WWII to try to bring him into the conversation.
Wife kept talking: “Yep - Harry drove a Higgins boat in World War II”. I replied - “Oh - a landing craft!”
Harry’s first words in the conversation were “Not too many people know that.”
Wife: “Harry drove one on D-Day!”
I got up from my seat and walked over and shook his hand again and said what an honor it was to be with him. (I could barely keep my eyes from welling up thinking what he must have been through and the honor I felt.) I could see he didn’t want any more conversation about it so I asked about the pictures of the kids on the wall.
Harry perked up talking about their kids, the company he started after the war, etc.
Running in dry sand is a bitch without a load. With 50+ pounds, it would exhaust you in twenty steps.
For the same reason the LST’s did not land with the first waves.
The LCVP’s were plywood except for a steel ramp in front. By the time I was in Vietnam, the plywood had been replaced with fiberglass.
Just reading a current post, floating across my screen. I love your post.
“GRATITUDE” is a rare thing in the human race.
Thanks for that detail about the plywood landing craft. My dad would have been on one of those, I guess. He was a navy ensign heading a demolition unit, getting off the boat first and going to blow up mines and obstacles on the beach so the troops could come ashore. After his unit did their clearance job, he rescued men who were foundering in the surf. He was awarded a Navy Cross.
I never understood the logic of this way of fighting , storming the beach in broad daylight with enemy having the high ground. It was either incompetence or simply no care for human life of your own .
I’m just relieved that Biden didn’t show up and make a tearful speech recalling his ascent of Pointe du Hoc on D Day.
How else could it have been done? They didn’t have much in the way of night vision equipment in those days?
Actually, it can, and even is. However, the men that can are being mustered out as 'insurrectionists' by the whimps that can't.
How should it have been done?
Day light storming of a beach carrying up to 80 pounds while wet and running in sand with the enemy on the high ground? I could think of a couple other ways that a bit more stealth.
Please answer the question.
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