Today makes the 75th anniversary of D-Day, perhaps the most epic undertaking of the greatest conflagration ever to engulf the world, and one that is now passing from living memory.
It’s hard for people to grasp just what a massive logistical undertaking D-Day was:
The buildup to D-Day was undertaken by Operation Bolero, a logistical effort of unprecedented magnitude. Sailing on now-secure sea routes, the U.S. Navy and merchant marine took 1,200,000 troops to Britain, where hundreds of camps and bases were established and supplied with everything from chewing gum to bombers. Britain’s existing infrastructure was inadequate to support the massive effort, so a thousand locomotives and twenty thousand freight cars were shipped from the United States, plus material for hundreds of miles of additional rail lines. Transatlantic shipments increased to the point that some 1,900,000 tons of supplies reached Britain in May 1944 alone, showing the scale of D-Day logistics.
In command of the U.S. Army’s Service of Supply was Lt. Gen. John C. H. Lee, an engineer officer of long experience. In the two years between 1942 and 1944, Eisenhower said that Lee turned the United Kingdom into ‘‘one gigantic air base, workshop, storage depot, and mobilization camp.’’
The manpower required to meet the needs for D-Day logistics was enormous. Less than one-fourth of the Allied troops in France were in combat units, and only about 20 percent served as infantrymen. A four- or five-to-one ‘‘tail to tooth’’ ratio was not unusual in other theaters of war, either. In mechanized warfare, fuel and oil were essential to success, and Allied logisticians solved the problem of adequate petroleum supply. They designed and built the Pipeline under the Ocean (PLUTO) to pump the lifeblood of tanks, trucks, and all other motor vehicles directly to Normandy. Other innovative projects involved prefabricated piers called Mulberries and block ships. The latter were twenty-eight merchant vessels intentionally sunk to provide breakwaters for artificial piers. Most were old, worn-out vessels dating from as early as 1919, though a few were 1943 Liberty ships. In all, 326 cargo ships were involved in D-Day, including two hundred American vessels.
Indeed, the sheer number of ships involved was staggering:
They set sail in 6,939 vessels — an impressive armada for a single naval operation.
They had 4,126 boats and barges, landing ships and landing craft in military terms, participating in the assault phase entitled “Operation Neptune” in 47 convoys.
The operation notably included:
7 battleships 20 cruisers 221 destroyers, frigates and corvettes 495 patrol boats 287 minesweepers 58 submarine chasers 2 submarines Meanwhile, 864 boats were used for purely logistical reasons, serving as floating hospitals or transportation for food and ammunition.
Artificial “Mulberry harbors” had to be developed, manufactured, deployed and used until French ports could be seized and German damage repaired. Over 60 ships were scuttled to provide the “gooseberry” breakwaters to shield the beaches so the mulberries could be constructed and operated. The built two, one at Gold beach, the other at Omaha, though the one at Omaha was promptly wrecked on June 19 by the worst storm to hit the Normandy coast in 40 years. They used the mulberry at Gold for another ten months. “In that time this harbour landed 2.5 million men, 500,000 vehicles and 4 million tons of goods.” Though American forces also transported a great deal of material directly to the beaches using LSTs (Landing Ship, Tank).
Here’s Ronald Reagan’s speech to mark the 40th anniversary of D-Day:
The logistics of any war/battle are incredible, but the build up to D-Day and the support after turns it up to “11.”