Operation Neptune 1944: D-Day’s Seaborne Armada

By Ken Ford and Howard Gerrard

The naval plan behind the Normandy landings that aided the success of the Allied invasion of France.

The story of Operation Neptune was, of course, more than just a tale of planning, building and logistics. It had action a-plenty and the emotive tales of bravery, ingenuity and determination by the crews of the ships involved brought credit to the naval traditions of the Allied nations.

Battleships, cruisers and destroyers bombarded enemy positions; midget submarines pointed the way to the beaches; minesweepers worked secretly by night to clear lanes; landing craft of all sizes braved enemy fire and mines to deposit their loads on the beaches and naval beach parties endured shellfire and machine guns to bring order to the beaches. Royal Navy commandos and US naval engineers dealt with beach obstacles against rising tides in the face of withering enemy fire. Losses during Neptune and the days after the assault were quite heavy.

In this detailed, illustrated account, Ken Ford unpacks the operation that had more casualties amongst its vessels than any other naval enterprise in World War II.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Feb 20, 2014
• ISBN: 9781472802736

Ken Ford

Ken Ford was born in Hampshire in 1943. He trained as an engineer and spent almost thirty years in the telecommunications industry. He now spends his time as an author and a bookseller specialising in military history. He has written a number of books on various Second World War subjects. Ken now lives in Southampton.

Book preview

ORIGINS OF THE BATTLE

When the British Expeditionary Force was expelled from France in June 1940, thoughts immediately turned to a time when Britain could return to the Continent to pursue its fight with Germany to a positive conclusion. This intention sounded simple, but the idea of landing a large army on a hostile continent was, however, such a complicated operation of war that it had been successfully attempted only a few times in history, and never against an enemy that was as powerful and skilful as the German Army.

Britain’s Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, knew that the country had neither the means nor the manpower to undertake amphibious landings on a large scale, nor would it have for several years to come. All the nation could do in the meantime was to undertake operations around the periphery of the war zone, engaging the enemy at sea and in the air, and fighting him in the only theatre possible, North Africa. Closer to home Churchill urged the raising of a type of guerrilla force – the commandos – who could sweep across the English Channel and harass the enemy by lightning attacks on his coastline. These raids began as no more than ‘hit and run’ attacks, which caused little more than chaos and consternation, but grew into major assaults on specific strategic targets of some significance. In the whole scope of the conflict they were essentially sideshows, but they boosted morale at home and taught many lessons to those planning the crucial invasion of Nazi-dominated Europe.

The liberty cargo ship SS Jeremiah O’Brien, which took part in the great supply chain that stretched across the English Channel during Operation Neptune. She was one of the 2,710 US-built, mass-produced vessels that helped win the war. The ship is now preserved as a visitor attraction in San Francisco harbour. (Carol M. Highsmith/Library of Congress)

The first great plan for the proposed invasion was titled Operation Roundup and was developed in late 1941. In the early summer of that year Hitler had invaded Russia and had switched the bulk of his forces eastwards, leaving France and the Low Countries lightly held. Roundup was a plan to exploit any possible disintegration of Nazi power in Europe as a result of aerial bombardment, internal resistance and an overextended eastern front. In essence it would be an invasion to ‘round up’ any German resistance once the Nazi regime had begun to crumble. Its intentions were blinded by a large dose of wishful thinking, for Britain did not have enough of the specialized vessels to carry out any meaningful landings, nor did it have the forces available to exploit any such invasion. Nonetheless, flawed as it was, when the USA entered the war in December 1941 it was still the only plan on the table. Joint work continued on Roundup, but without a great deal of enthusiasm.

The alliance between Britain and the USA, combined with President Roosevelt’s decision to undertake the defeat of Germany as its main priority, gave new impetus to the question of cross-Channel landings. American strategy called for an invasion to be launched as soon as possible to exploit Germany’s failure to defeat Russia. Flushed with the enthusiasm of its entry into the war, the United States wanted an invasion in 1942, or at least in 1943, seeing it as the only possible way to conduct a decisive stroke against Germany. Such an operation would open up a second front, which, together with the efforts being made by the Russians, would engage and tie down Nazi forces both in the east and in the west. Britain, primarily Churchill, felt a different strategy should be adopted that realistically reflected the forces available.

A relic of the invasion: this British LCA was left on Utah Beach for many years after the war and was still there in the late 1970s. The craft was most likely used for later ferrying operations. It has since disappeared. (TS Collection)

Britain did not have an army large enough to undertake the ground war that would of necessity follow an invasion. Nor, it has to be said, did the USA. In 1939 the US Army numbered just 190,000 men. By the time it declared war on Germany two years later it had only just begun to grow and it took until the end of 1942 before it could number 1,600,000 men in 36 active divisions. In contrast Germany had mustered 112 divisions in September 1939 and, by December 1942, had 270 active divisions. When Germany invaded Russia in June 1941 its army consisted of 3,767,000 men, whilst that of the Soviet Union contained approximately 5,500,000 men.

The size of these forces was quite staggering when one considers that Britain only managed to deploy 35 active divisions in the whole of the war. What these numbers show is that there was no way that Britain could effectively undertake an invasion of Europe without great help from the United States. Even then, the American Army in Europe would have to expand considerably from its 1941 size before it could take part, but that did not prevent the Americans from pushing for the invasion to be launched just as soon as it could.

In the years between the end of 1941 and 1944 America wished to concentrate its strength for a cross-channel assault. Britain, again Churchill in particular, wanted to follow a different strategy, choosing to deploy its strength around the edges of Nazi Europe. Churchill had a great fear of amphibious operations conditioned by the memory of the failed Gallipoli landings in World War I, a disaster for which he carried some blame. Britain’s leader thought that Allied strategy might be better suited by avoiding German forces and continuing the struggle in North Africa and through the ‘softer’ countries around the Mediterranean. He convinced the Americans to make landings in Morocco and Algeria to join with British Eighth Army to evict Axis forces from Africa. This was eventually achieved through the Operation Torch landings and subsequent actions in Tunisia. These Anglo-American landings against an undefended coastline were virtually unopposed. Fighting was sporadic and soon over, but some lessons were learned regarding the logistical requirements of staging an invasion.

The cigar-smoking Prime Minister of Great Britain, Winston Churchill, joins with his Chief of the Imperial General Staff, General Sir Alan Brooke, during a June 1944 visit to the D-Day beaches. (NMRN)

Churchill continued to press his Mediterranean strategy, and further amphibious landings were made against Sicily, southern Italy and at Anzio. All were against thinly secured coastlines with sparse enemy defences. The only amphibious attack against a strongly defended beach held by determined German troops was the raid on the French port of Dieppe in the summer of 1942. The troops, mostly Canadian, were held on the beaches and slaughtered in great numbers, with only half of the force making its way safely back to England. Landing against French colonials and Italians on wide-open beaches bore no relationship to the grim task of an assault against concrete fortifications manned by well-trained and motivated German troops.

Whilst Churchill pushed his ‘soft underbelly’ idea of whittling away the enemy at the edges of his sphere of influence, Roosevelt and Stalin applied pressure for a cross-channel invasion to take priority. Both parties needed the ‘Second Front’ immediately; the Americans to deploy the growing numbers of divisions being produced in the United States and the Russians to help relieve pressure on their forces. Churchill, however, still held a strong hand, for the invasion could only be launched from England and would need the vast resources of the Royal Navy to make it happen. His intransigence infuriated the other two leaders. Roosevelt decided to call Churchill’s bluff by suggesting that if no invasion took place in 1944 he would switch the bulk of his forces to the Pacific and make the defeat of Japan his first priority. Churchill therefore had the choice of remaining a leading player in the Allied pact or watching from the sidelines as the USA and the USSR carved up the post-war world.

Many of England’s small south coast ports were used to embark troops for the invasion. Here US troops destined for Omaha Beach are loaded onto an LCVP alongside the famous Weymouth Pavilion, a favourite haunt of holidaymakers in peacetime. (NARA/TS Collection)

The modern light cruiser HMS Glasgow was built just before the war and commissioned in 1937. She is seen here bombarding German positions in support of American troops in Normandy as part of Bombardment Force C. (NMRN)

At the Quebec conference in August 1943 Churchill conceded that the invasion should take place in the spring of 1944 and that it would receive the highest priority of the Anglo-American alliance. He did not, however, abandon his Mediterranean ideas. He tried again at the Tehran conference at the end of 1943 to get the invasion postponed until the autumn of 1944 to afford time for further operations on the enemy’s soft underbelly. Roosevelt and Stalin ignored his arguments and agreed that the invasion of north-west Europe would proceed as originally suggested. The operation was given the codeword Overlord and was set to take place on 1 May 1944.

Churchill’s reluctance to push for the cross-channel landings was not just a personal eccentricity; his views were widely felt by many British and American leaders. Nazi propaganda had achieved a belief