DR. YALE KRAMER: THE NAVY’S HEROIC ROLE IN NORMANDY
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/the-navys-heroic-role-at-normandy
It is not widely recognized that the U.S. Navy played a vital part in the struggle to avert catastrophe on Omaha Beach on June 6, 1944.
Of course the Navy had been assigned many important missions besides the 47-minute pre-invasion bombardment that day: getting the tanks and artillery to the beach early to give the first assault waves plenty of cover; clearing paths through the minefields so the landing crafts could get through; getting the infantry to their assigned beaches at the right times; providing beach masters to control beach traffic;providing signalmen to direct fire from the battleships and cruisers a mile out in the anchorage; as well as countless other tasks only experienced seamen can do well.
Unfortunately, the navy had no better luck in accomplishing these goals on Omaha Beach than the Army Air Forces and the Army had in accomplishing their planned operations. But in the end the Navy came through just as the Army did that morning on Omaha. And they did so not by carrying out orders from the top, but by the initiative and courage of individual skippers and their men at the critical moment.
The situation was this. By mid-morning small groups of soldiers had begun making headway up the cliffs and had succeeded in taking out some strategic gun-emplacements. Slowly, at various points along the beach, the movement forward had begun. But there were still many places where the men were hopelessly pinned down and demoralized by heavy machine-gun and mortar fire. No artillery had reached the beach, few tanks had arrived in working order and there were no working radios to help direct fire from the larger ships. It was at this time that the skippers of several destroyers-“tin cans”-seeing the catastrophic predicament of the men on the beach, decided to seize the moment.
The first to do this was Lt. Commander Ralph Ramey, the captain of the USS McCook. He sailed into the western sector-the section that had been assigned to the inexperienced 29th Division and that had been hit very hard in the first landings-to within several hundred yards of the beach and began firing with his five-inch guns at whatever he could see. His salvos were effective in destroying dug-in cliff positions, two artillery positions, and some pill-boxes. When other destroyer captains saw this they joined the McCook, guiding themselves by fathometer to within inches of becoming grounded-sitting ducks-and thus exposing their ships and men to heavy, directed artillery fire from behind the beach. Even from four or five hundred yards it was still difficult to spot well-camouflaged gun emplacements but determined gunners found ways to do so. Another destroyer that played an important role at this time was the USS Frankford. Its gunnery officer, Lt. Owen Keeler, writes: “A tank sitting at the water’s edge with a broken track fired at something on the hill. We immediately followed up with a five-inch salvo. The tank gunner flipped open his hatch, looked around at us, waved, dropped back in the tank, and fired at another target. For the next few minutes he was our fire-control party.”
In addition to the McCook and the Frankford there were the USS Carmick and the USS Satterlee that deserve special mention for the initiative and courage they showed at Omaha, and probably others as well. More than destroying German positions to a significant degree, the close presence of these ships gave immeasurable moral support to the isolated men on the beach. These feelings could not have been expressed better than by James Knight, an Army engineer who landed at H-hour and who wrote a letter to the crew of the Frankford forty-five years after D-Day. “… at about 10:00 or 10:30 a destroyer loomed out of the sea…headed straight towards me…my first thought was that she had struck a mine…and was damaged badly enough that she was being beached. But suddenly she swerved to the right with all her guns blazing away.” Over the years Knight tried to find out the name of the destroyer without success until 1989. In his letter he wrote: “…nearly every living person on Omaha was pinned down from the time he reached the dune line until after you made your ‘cruise.’ Not long after you swung out to sea, there was movement on the beach, which eventually enabled the infantry to advance up the slope onto the flat beyond.”
Our thanks to the skippers and crews of that “tin can” navy, seventy years ago. God bless ‘em wherever they may be.
Dr. Yale Kramer, a former faculty memberand graduate of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, psychoanalyst and former Clinical Professor at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School of the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, is the author of Talking Back to Liberal Power. His articles have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, American Spectator and The Public Interest.
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