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.”