The Far Shore

By Edward Ellsberg

June 6, 1944, D-Day: Allied forces took the beaches at Normandy—and the naval engineering genius of Edward Ellsberg would play a crucial part.

Before World War II, Edward Ellsberg had already established himself as a true innovator and master naval engineer, revolutionizing the salvage and rescue of sunken vessels like no one before. Then, having served his country for over a decade, he retired to private life.
 
But his work was not finished. Within hours of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the aging and physically ill Ellsberg was on a train to Washington, DC, to offer his services once again. And they would be needed for the greatest military invasion in human history.
 
In The Far Shore, Rear Admiral Ellsberg describes in detail the meticulous preparation and efforts behind the Normandy Invasion—efforts that would keep the flow of men and materials streaming onto the beaches and into the heart of Europe. From dealing with the extremes of engineering possibilities to wrestling with the knowledge that countless lives would depend on the success of his intricate planning, Ellsberg would work himself into exhaustion to do his part. His achievements would eventually earn him the Distinguished Service Medal and lead to his appointment as an Officer of the Order of the British Empire.
 
Vividly described by a man who saw firsthand the horrors of war and the cost of victory, The Far Shore takes readers through the brutal surf, onto the bloody beaches, and into the mind of one of World War II’s little-known heroes.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Release date: Jun 24, 2014
• ISBN: 9781480493629

Edward Ellsberg

 Edward Ellsberg (1891–1983) graduated first in his class from the United States Naval Academy in 1914. After he did a stint aboard the USS Texas, the navy sent Ellsberg to Massachusetts Institute of Technology for postgraduate training in naval architecture. In 1925, he played a key role in the salvage of the sunken submarine USS S-51 and became the first naval officer to qualify as a deep-sea diver. Ellsberg later received the Distinguished Service Medal for his innovations and hard work.

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

To Selsey Bill—

So said the orders.

Selsey Bill? To an American, an odd name for any spot. Till I’d been given those orders, I’d never heard of the place.

Now I was looking at Selsey Bill. In English parlance, it was a bill. To me, in everyday American, it was just a promontory, protruding not too importantly into the English Channel just east of the Isle of Wight. Selsey Bill turned out to be both a sandy cape and a most unpretentious seashore village straddling a long, wide beach. Its thin line of frowzy summer cottages, stretched out along the Channel sand, was reminiscent of the flimsy shelters of a generation ago fringing our own New Jersey coast. This collection of shacks was evidently the summertime haven of some hundreds of middle class English families fleeing to sand and sea from sweltering London streets.

Selsey Bill was most unimpressive. Unlike not so distant Brighton, no shore hotels caught the eye. Nor did it give any indication of being a seaport, large or small. Selsey had no harbor, it had no piers, it had no warehouses. It had absolutely nothing of importance to friend or enemy in a war—except that wide stretch of endless beach fronting the English Channel. For, only a hundred miles from that beach, due south across the water, lay Normandy—and less than a hundred miles north of it over defenseless open country lay London.

That wide, flat beach—Selsey Bill had something there. But what? Asset or danger spot to the British whose beach it was, now that there was a war?

Four years before, when France fell, it had been spotted instantly as a glaring danger point by the British, stripped of their arms at Dunkirk, naked now before their enemies. Across that inviting beach, every Englishman at no great strain to his imagination envisioned hordes of steel-helmeted Nazis leaping ashore from landing barges to trample beneath their hobnailed boots what few defenders Britain might muster on the sands. And then without pause moving north to overwhelm both him and nearby London.

Faced with that prospect, the English had hastily evacuated all cottagers from Selsey Bill, in desperation had sowed the broad sands with buried land mines, festooned the beach before the front doors of the emptied cottages with endless snarls of concertina barbed wire.

So in 1940, except for a few sentries peering anxiously out to sea each morning as the dawn broke, Selsey Bill became a deserted village. Before me there, in 1944, still remained much of the tangled wire. Even some of the warning signs, faced to be read only from the land side, screaming to any unwary Englishman approaching the beach:

KEEP OFF THE SANDS! MINES!

But that was all over. Four heartrending years of war had wrought some changes. Now it was the spring of 1944. The wide flat beach at Selsey Bill, by an ironic reversal in the whims of Mars, had in British eyes been metamorphosed from a danger spot to an invaluable asset. From Britain’s vulnerable Achilles’ heel to Britannia’s strong right arm.

For from that selfsame beach at Selsey Bill, seemingly made to order for just such a purpose, reprisal was about to start. From its sands, an irresistible lance to strike down the enemy on the Far Shore was at last about to be launched!

Or, was it about to be?

There was little doubt in the minds of the planners (both British and American) round about Grosvenor Square in London that the allied lance was actually irresistible, as planned. But there seemed to be (in one American mind, at least) some gnawing doubt as to whether the launching of it was likely to come off. So in the face of fervid British pooh-poohing of any basis at all for the existence even of such a silly question, I had been ordered by the American high command to Selsey Bill to see what actually was the situation.

As a result, there was I, gazing for the first time out over the Channel towards Hitler’s boasted impregnable Atlantic Wall, invisible to me below the distant southern horizon. Immediately before me lay Selsey Bill and its simple village, easily encompassed at a glance—the string of unpretentious cottages, the rusted remnants of the barbed wire, the faded warning signs, the wide sands beneath which here and there still lurked, like deadly cobras set to strike should one step on them, such of their own mines as had escaped even the most intensive efforts of the British to find and remove.

Altogether, it was no very striking seashore scene.

But, just offshore—?

I stared offshore in open-mouthed astonishment. Nothing I had heard from anyone round about Grosvenor Square or read there concerning invasion planning had prepared me for what now hit me in the eyes, just offshore.

What was this fantasy, sprawled over five square miles at least of what should be the rippling open sea? That conglomeration of tall black towers reaching skyward from beneath the Channel waters? That massive jumble of half submerged block-long windowless concrete warehouses—a hundred of them, perhaps even more—far and near protruding in no recognizable pattern, helter-skelter, from the waves? Those ponderous steel arches, evidently disjointed sections of highway bridges, beginning nowhere, ending nowhere, mysteriously swimming on the surface of the sea, somehow afloat in spite of gravity, interspersed crazily amongst the even crazier disarray of those semi-submerged concrete buildings? A city, perhaps, insanely shuffled about and then sunk by some overwhelming catastrophe?

To my dazed eyes, I might be looking on a grander scale at nothing more or less than lower Pittsburgh, half buried from sight beneath the waters in full flood of the overflowing Monongahela and Alleghany, joining to form the still more overflooded Ohio. There before me could be Pittsburgh’s tall blast furnaces, dead now, their fires drowned out; her warehouses, with the waters rising nearly to their roofs; her deserted bridges flooded to their floors—everything half hidden in the rising waters, half still showing above the rivers—mile on square mile of flooded city. Some such vast industrial metropolis as that, overwhelmed by the sea, lay there off Selsey Bill, so any casual observer would swear.

What it really was, of course, I knew.

In Admiral Stark’s American naval headquarters in Grosvenor Square, studying the thick volume embodying every facet of the Overlord Plan, I had been thoroughly saturated in its purpose. Still, even so, the first sight of the reality in all its immensity stunned the mind—mine, anyway. There it rested like a titanic unsolved jigsaw puzzle, scrambled beyond any recognition of its true design. Half-engulfed in the Channel waters, it lay in a multitude of pieces, the instrument unenvisioned by the enemy (so we hoped), which was to sustain to success an invasion which the enemy High Command knew could not possibly be successfully sustained. Provided only, that as planned, we got it from Selsey Bill to the Far Shore close on the heels of the first wave of our invaders.

Close on the heels of the first wave—

Therein lay now the doubt I had been sent to investigate. On that point, the skeptical captain in our Navy in whose hands had been put responsibility for its placement and operation, once it was transported to the Far Shore, had himself no doubt whatever. His belief, vehemently expressed to whomever in authority he could buttonhole long enough to pour it out, was that it wasn’t going to be delivered to him on the Far Shore on D-day close on the heels of our first wave. In fact, he doubted that, with the plan as laid out, it would ever be started off the bottom at Selsey Bill, let alone be delivered to him in Normandy, while he and any others in the invading force still were alive to care—they would all, for want of it, long since have been slaughtered in counterattack by the waiting Nazis on the Far Shore before it arrived to sustain them in their assault!

Viewing for the first time what lay before me, sunk off Selsey Bill, I began to sympathize with our agonized naval skeptic. To lift that sunken city hurriedly from off the bottom and get it underway from Selsey Bill for Normandy was a salvage job such as might have appalled even that half-god Hercules, had he been a seaman and a salvage man.

CHAPTER 2

Looking at wrecks sunk wholesale was no longer any novelty to me. In the Red Sea, where I had been flung immediately we were shoved into World War II, I had counted wrecks around about Massawa by the dozens—three harbors full of sabotaged German and Italian ships, forty perhaps, and little enough to work with on them. Still, lifting the more important hulks one at a time had kept ahead of our war needs in that Middle Eastern area—we salvagers had made out there with the means at hand.

Next for me had come our North African invasion. Transferred at once to the Mediterranean as Eisenhower’s Principal Salvage Officer, I found sizing up wrecks by the harborful becoming commonplace. From Casablanca in Morocco through Oran in Algeria to Bône on the Tunisian border, what harbors in North Africa were not strewn initially with wrecks from our naval gunfire and French sabotage were soon in no better case, with the victims of Nazi bombs and torpedoes littering those harbor bottoms. And to complete that dismal picture, other terribly blasted ships, victims at sea of U-boat or aircraft attack, which somehow we had managed to keep afloat till towed in, cluttered many a badly needed wharf.

Still, whether in the Red Sea or in North Africa, there had been no absolute deadline in salvage work. With more bombs still exploding about you, you lifted wrecks or cleared harbor entrances and piers as rapidly as your ingenuity, your little salvage force, and your own endurance allowed. While you wore your heart out on the wrecks, the war about you still went on—a little the better while your heart stood up, a little the worse when it began to fail and willy-nilly you slowed down, or dropped dead.

But at Selsey Bill, it was different. Here, confronting everyone as starkly as the enemy-manned cliffs on the Far Shore, there was a deadline—D-day. Here, with the lives of a million men inexorably intertwined with what happened on D-day, that day stood as deadline. The lifting from the sea floor of that vast mass of sunken equipment off Selsey Bill for overwhelming military reasons must not start till immediately before D-day. And when D-day dawned, for even more overwhelming military reasons, most of that helter-skelter submerged city must be afloat again, moving immediately in the wake of the assaulting forces to be resunk, in proper arrangement this time, on the beaches of Normandy—or the invasion must fail.

Would all this then, as planned, be moving on D-day—or would it not?

On the British side of every discussion concerning that subject, from Cabinet Minister in London down to Brigadier in command at Selsey Bill, the answer to any such absurd question was, Assuredly. Beyond all doubt. My dear fellow, the Royal Engineers have it in charge.

And if any shadow of skepticism still persisted in an untutored American, he was informed that the history of the Royal Engineers ran unbroken back through many centuries to the days at least of Charles the First. That, of course, settled it.

On the American side, one lone naval officer, wholly unawed even by that many centuries, replied flatly, No!

Somehow, perhaps because he was a naval and not an army officer, to him the Royal Engineers, however ancient and royal they might be, were no more immune to failure than any other military organization. And having carefully looked over how the Royal Engineers proposed to carry through the lifting task which must be done before he had anything with which to work on the Far Shore, he was certain of their failure. But he had no reputation in the field of engineering, even less in that of salvage to back up his belief. Initially, his doubts went unheeded.

Still, more and more emphatically as D-day grew closer, he persisted in voicing his dissent each time he came up from the Channel to the London headquarters in Grosvenor Square of Admiral Harold Stark, Commander, U. S. Naval Forces in Europe.

But he had only four stripes—he was just a captain. His doubts, at first not really taken too seriously even on the American side, were nevertheless, to set his mind at rest, finally transmitted from Admiral Stark’s headquarters to the British in nearby Whitehall, where lay responsibility for that part of the operation. All doubts got short shrift there from both British Army and Navy. The British Major General in charge of the Royal Engineers felt that he and his engineer subordinates, down to that Brigadier he had placed at Selsey Bill to see it through, had the situation properly in hand. The Admiral of the Fleet serving as First Sea Lord, already with troubles enough afloat, felt it impolitic for the Royal Navy to intrude itself on the problems of the Royal Engineers so far even as to express any opinion on a subject in their hands. So the British Cabinet Minister, at the head of the hierarchy under whose wing the project came, replied officially to Stark that he had absolute faith in the Royal Engineers—there was consequently no question needing inquiry. Stark, confronted with the situation that all the know-how there was available in Britain was reported unanimously of one mind, accepted the decision.

Our distressed captain continued to get nowhere. Who was he, a lone seagoing skipper and a very junior one at that, to have his unsupported judgment override that of the responsible British Cabinet Minister, controvert the technical judgment and confidence in its own abilities of all the Royal Engineers, backed by centuries of tradition, or refute the acquiescence, though tacit, of the high command of His Majesty’s Royal Navy? And to top off his sad situation, with all hands in the foreign services opposed to him, covered with an acreage of gold lace so vast that to it his own puny four gold stripes were but picayune threads?

Still, like Cassandra sensing irretrievable disaster, he continued to protest, though now his protests went without hearers. As D-day grew nearer, more and more convinced that in the hands of the Royal Engineers the one ace on which the Allies must rely for victory was never going to get to the Normandy Beachhead in time to be played, his agonized protests became almost hysterical. But no longer in Grosvenor Square could he buttonhole even one senior long enough to get another hearing for his oft-told tale.

CHAPTER 3

The year before, in 1943, in the Mediterranean, with one American lieutenant and some British soldiers picked up on an Algerian beach to help, I had boarded the abandoned hulk of a torpedoed and sinking British cruiser. She was already stern awash and badly heeled down, threatening each instant to capsize and take us with her to the bottom. In a three days’ battle round the clock with the sea for that waterlogged warship, we had saved her and towed her to the port of Bougie.

But that cruiser, H.M.S. Pozarica, had been one wreck too many for me. I came ashore from her to be thrust into the military hospital at Algiers by the first Army surgeon who got his eyes on me at headquarters. From there, a few days later, with in view of the possibility of complete cardiac failure entered in my Navy medical record by the Army specialists, I had hurriedly been flown home from the African war zone to become just another patient in the huge Navy hospital at Bethesda, immediately outside Washington.

Bethesda, with no bombs exploding nightly over it, was more restful than Algiers. Two months on its rolls, part of the time by the grace of an understanding Navy medic as an outpatient allowed to go home, and my heart was considered relaxed enough to go on beating for awhile. Bethesda released me then as a patient, reported me fit for some kind of duty, not too strenuous. After some difficulty in finding a berth for a sub-par relic of the war in Africa, Admiral King, naval C-in-C, had me sent to help supervise inspection of warcraft building for the Navy at some thirty shipyards, big and small, round about New York.

But a little less than a year on inspection of ships under construction was all I could stand. I felt I still could do more toward helping win the war were I again with ships on the front lines. Early spring of 1944 saw me once more in Washington facing Admiral Ernest King, Chief of Naval Operations, Commander-in-Chief, U. S. Fleet, under whom I had served years before as Salvage Officer on two sunken submarines when King was a Captain and I a Lieutenant Commander.

Having lived with Ernest King for months on deck a salvage ship so small no one aboard her, out of his bunk, was ever wholly clear of another’s sight, I thought I knew King well enough to ask a favor of him. And certainly he’d had equal opportunity to know me quite as well.

The things King wanted done, would swiftly come to pass. All I wanted now of him was that he see I got sent back to the war zone—I’d had enough in wartime of doing my fighting on the home front.

Busy though Admiral King was in running a two ocean war, on the basis of auld lang syne, effective at least on King’s aide, I was admitted to King’s office.

King, the nearest thing in human form to a completely impersonal machine that the Navy has ever had on its roster, long, lean, severe, listened silently to my request. He had last seen me the year before in Algiers, hardly two weeks before that episode on H.M.S. Pozarica which finally had ended my salvage command in the Mediterranean and sent me home, a hospital case.

King heard me through, inspected me quizzically, commented at last,

So, Ellsberg, you think you have come back to battery, do you?

This unexpected ordnance simile set me back on my heels. Here I was, unflatteringly being discussed as a worn out gun, which its overworked recoil cylinders have only with difficulty managed to return once more to firing position. Still, I answered unargumentatively (and truthfully, I believe),

Yes, sir. I think I have.

King knew salvage. He also knew salvage officers, of whom the Navy had but few of any experience, but was badly in need of many. If the one before him felt able again to keep on his own two feet, King was evidently not going to quibble over whether he might perhaps be mistaken. After all, there was still a war on, not yet won. He quit eyeing me, scanned for a moment the thin air over my head, considering, I soon discovered, that immense map in the war plans room encompassing the entire world, then asked me,

Where would you like to go? The coming invasion of Europe will give you quicker action, but the Pacific war has longer term possibilities.

Here, certainly was a businesslike enough appraisal of the differing opportunities offered by the war scene; quite unimpassioned, too. Seeing I was being offered a choice, I hastily thought it over. I was not too certain I could last long enough to take decent advantage of the Pacific’s longer term possibilities—the quicker action in the European theater had obvious attractions in my case.

I’ll take Europe, sir, I answered quickly.

Done. I’ll cable Stark I’m flying you over. You’ll get action enough with him. Good luck, Ellsberg.

That was how I came to join the staff at 20 Grosvenor Square in London, of four-starred Admiral Harold Stark, Commander, U. S. Naval Forces in Europe.

My first war assignment from Stark was nothing to set anyone’s pulses to beating madly with excitement—it was prosaically enough nothing more nor less than reading a book.

It was a massive book I was given—one glance showed it would take quite a while to read—it was at least as thick as the Manhattan telephone directory and certainly weighed as much. But unlike the Manhattan telephone directory of which the number of copies in circulation must reach toward two million, of this book there were probably not a dozen copies in existence—it was rarer than Shakespeare’s First Folio.

The reading of that book, never taken by anyone from Stark’s Naval Headquarters, was a ritual. First, a Navy Chief Yeoman with no other apparent duties than keeper of The Book, operated the combination of the safe in which it lay. The safe was opened, The Book carefully extracted by its guardian, the safe again closed and locked. Then came a short procession, composed only of the Chief Yeoman bearing The Book and of me following, to a small room down the corridor. We both entered, to complete the ritual. The door was closed behind us. The Book was laid on the solitary table there, its number (seven, as I recall) checked carefully by its keeper, a receipt for it bearing that number placed before me. In my turn, I checked the number on The Book with that on the receipt, signed it, sat down in the single chair before the table to read. The keeper took the receipt each time, reminded me I had better lock myself in, and hurriedly departed, no doubt with a considerable weight off his mind. For some hours, till I should call him to surrender that volume and get back my receipt, that priceless Book was my responsibility, no longer his.

Each day at noon when I went out to lunch, late each afternoon, when dizzy from reading I had to quit and retire to my billet, the ritual was reversed. My receipt was returned, The Book locked again in the safe, to be guarded through the night hours by marine sentries. Never did that Book leave Stark’s offices in Grosvenor Square.

For that Top Secret Book was Stark’s copy of the Overlord Plan, most carefully guarded of all military documents. It took me over a week to read it. Long before I finished, I could see the need for the extreme security measures surrounding The Book. There, first set out in over-all terms, then in exact detail, was the strategic plan involved in the Normandy Invasion, from months before D-day till months afterward when the beaches had been left far behind and the war had become one of movement deep into France, aimed at the Rhine. There were set out the forces to be used and the parts to be played by every unit, British and American, on land, at sea, in air, in carrying through the plan. And lastly there they were—what was unique to this invasion and most secret of all—the strange devices which were to make possible the impossible—the unbelievable assortment of mechanical contrivances on a vast scale designed to overcome or to nullify each and every condition which Hitler’s General Staff knew made a successful invasion impossible.

The reading of The Book left me dazed. I was given no instructions regarding it—just to read it—all of it. My instructions would come after. So I read it all, absorbed all of it I could, from the over-all strategy on a grand scale on which the campaign in France was to be based, through the tactical stratagems intended to delude the enemy on D-day as to the exact point of attack, down finally to the futuristic devices provided to make possible the breaching of the Atlantic Wall—devices alongside which, both in conception and immensity, the gigantic Wooden Horse which crafty Ulysses devised to breach the walls of Troy was but an infant’s tiny plaything.

Daily I read till higher strategy oozed from my ears, strange engineering concepts stunned my mind, life itself became only a nightmare in which all men on land, in air, over or under the sea, seemed to be gripped in a fantastic vortex, inexorably being sucked like bits of cosmic dust into a mad whirl spiralling about a solitary dazzling sun—

D-day!

Everything in The Book, in life itself now, revolved about D-day. This was to happen so many days before D-day, that, so many days after—on D minus 30 days, for instance, this was to come to pass; that, on the other hand, not till D plus 42 days had come. Here was a new calendar to govern the lives of all about me, in which time was reckoned, not from the birth of Christ, but as being such and such a time before or after THE DAY on which the Allies set foot at dawn on the coasts of Normandy. My life now, sleeping and waking, revolved, like that of everyone else around me, about D-day.

It was, perhaps, sometime in the beginning of the week of my reading of The Book, that first I met Captain Dayton Clark. He had just come north once more to London from the Channel, to pick up immediately from someone at 20 Grosvenor Square the interesting bit of news that since his last visit there something new had been added to Stark’s naval staff—the man who had been General Eisenhower’s Principal Salvage Officer in the North African Invasion, a fairly senior captain.

In Clark’s despairing eyes, here at last was a heaven-sent opportunity—someone attached to Grosvenor Square who would understand his problem. He waylaid me in the corridor as I came out for my lunchtime break from the locking up of The Book, still in a half-daze from the reading of it.

Captain Ellsberg?

I had to stop, since my path was blocked. I looked up (I’m not so tall myself). Before me was a gaunt naval figure with four stripes, a deeply seamed face framing a pair of intense eyes that gripped me instantly as might have those of the Ancient Mariner, and stopped me just as effectively in my tracks—a tall, lean figure whose very leanness made him look taller perhaps than actually he was.

Already in a half -trance, I was soon completely in one before I finished listening to the tale of agony poured out by this tortured seaman who had as heavy a weight crushing his soul as Coleridge’s unfortunate after he’d shot the albatross—except that this mariner apparently had no such sin to blame for the evil future that he faced. Before me, I swiftly heard, stood Captain Dayton Clark of our Navy, eight years junior to me, assigned to command Operation Mulberry. He was facing disaster over his Phoenixs, the key to the Mulberry Operation.

That finished me off as an involuntary listener. I hadn’t got that far yet in my reading of The Book. I hadn’t the foggiest notion then of where Operation Mulberry came in, in the Overlord Plan, let alone of what a Phoenix was. What this Captain Clark was so bitterly bemoaning was wholly beyond me.

In spite of those piercing eyes, I managed to come to enough to seek escape. I must be excused from further listening. Unlike Coleridge’s unwilling listener, I could plead no wedding I must attend, but I was hungry, and I stated bluntly I had a hasty lunch to get so I might return to my sole job—the reading of The Book. Come see me in about a week, Captain—perhaps then I’ll understand what so distresses you. Until then—goodby. I brusquely broke away.

Mulling how unfortunate it was any such wrought-up character had managed somehow to wangle a command assignment in an invasion requiring of all hands the most imperturbable reaction to difficulties, I ate my lunch. Soon I was back once more at my reading, trusting never again to have the ill luck of running into that Captain Clark. A few days back on the beach, with his men, away from the tense atmosphere at London headquarters, would, I hoped, restore him to a state of mind more suitable to his rank and responsibilities and keep him from bothering me further. Meanwhile, there was my reading to make me quickly forget him.

By the early part of the following week, I had read The Book through completely and had a fair over-all grasp of what the vast Overlord Plan encompassed. Now I was rereading more carefully that section which had to do with the strange mechanisms which were to make Overlord possible. Somewhere among all these mechanistic fantasies, all wound up with seaports, existent and nonexistent, I know my own assignment must come. These, not the complicated strategy set out for guidance of the army commanders, now got my absorbed interest.

Among these, Operation Mulberry swiftly became to me a most concrete reality. It came first in the structure on which victory was to rise. Operation Mulberry was literally the new-found key to success in invasion. It was to make possible what the wholly impersonal German General Staff had long since concluded was an obvious impossibility; an unpalatable conclusion that the British, after their bloody repulse on the beaches at Dieppe two years before, had wholeheartedly been forced to concur in as correct; a conclusion with which every American strategist, however skeptical, who had studied the question since 1941, was also ultimately, but most reluctantly, forced to agree.

The German General Staff, a body governed in its military thinking solely by logic, had early figured the problem out to its one logical conclusion—cold logic showed a successful invasion to be impossible. Their advice to Hitler consequently had been,

Hold the ports and we hold everything.

And thus ran their reasoning (which no one, whether on the German side or on ours, could refute):

A large, mechanized army, such as von Rundstedt and Rommel had, covering the Atlantic Coast from Denmark to Spain, could be defeated (if at all) only by a larger, better mechanized army—an invading army of a million men, at least, formidably equipped.

Conceded that the Allies might, with their superior sea power, somehow land somewhere on the open European coast the larger army needed, they still could not land the heavy tanks, the big guns, the mechanized equipment and continuously disembark the immense quantity of supplies required to make that army an effective fighting force, without the wharfs, the harbor cranes, and the huge protected harbors necessary in all kinds of weather to handle ashore heavy equipment and supplies in such vast quantity.

Unlike the situation in World War I, when every French port was open to supply Pershing’s army, now every harbor in continental Europe from Norway through to Spain was in German hands, defended by large German garrisons and formidable concrete-casemented heavy coastal artillery emplacements.

Against those unsinkable heavy coastal batteries, the superior Allied navies could never hope to stage, from the seas, a successful bombardment to capture any one of these harbors. The Allied naval commanders knew better than to attempt that. It was freely conceded by both sides that these harbors could be taken only by massive, long-drawn-out siege assault from the land side.

However, siege assaults on the harbors from the land side could be undertaken by invaders only after defeating Rommel’s field armies.

But without the heavy mechanized equipment and supplies which could only be landed through harbors the Allies didn’t have, Rommel’s forces could not be defeated in the field, to allow after Rommel’s defeat an assault from the shore side to take the harbors needed to land the equipment necessary to defeat Rommel—and so on, round and round, ad infinitum.

The only possible conclusion? An invasion, yes, if the Allies are so mad as to be willing to offer up a million ill-equipped men to be massacred by Field Marshal Rommel’s mechanized forces. But a successful invasion? Obviously an impossibility!

To that conclusion, the German General Staff, the British War Office, the American strategists, including Eisenhower’s Chief of Staff, General Walter Bedell Smith, ultimately all subscribed without dissent. How could any one of them, bound in his thinking by the laws of reason, possibly dissent? He could not. Who can question irrefutable logic?

But the British are a most illogical and stubborn race. Had they been more logical and less stubborn, they would swiftly have surrendered to Hitler after the Fall of France, and the question later of how successfully to stage an invasion impossible of success would never have risen to plague them. But running true to British doggedness even in the face of inevitable defeat, they neither accepted defeat after Dunkirk nor the impossibility of landing once again in Europe, even after their disastrous attempt at Dieppe. Doggedly the British planners continued to butt their heads against the stone wall of that impossibility. They continued to get nothing for their efforts except more headaches.

Then with Pearl Harbor, American strategists came to London, full of enthusiasm, to take over from the stupid British, to show them how an invasion of Europe should and, before the end of 1942, would be staged successfully.

Our own strategists, with their noses up against the hard realities of the problem, got no further through that impossibility than had the British. Soon it was being agreed by our planners both in Washington and in England, that if there were to be an invasion of any nature at all in 1942, it had better take place in North Africa. There we would face no German army whatever in our landings, and there the highly essential but ill-defended French African ports would fall swiftly into our hands before the nearest Germans, whether with Rommel in distant Libya before El Alamein or with Kesselring in Italy, could do anything to interfere with us.

That face-saving solution provided an invasion in 1942 for those shrieking for some immediate Allied action to pacify Stalin and save the Russians. But it failed to help any on staging the vital European invasion. That dilemma remained—the British planners, unvexed now by the Americans, continued doggedly as before to try to solve the unsolvable. The American strategists found their hands temporarily, at least, full of new problems in North Africa, but problems somewhat more susceptible to solution of some sort—Darlan for one, Rommel and his Afrika Korps for another.

Meanwhile, the phlegmatic, the unimaginative, the even (in the minds of some American worshippers at the shrine of a Yankee monopoly on ingenuity) stupid British, finally solved the riddle.

A jest, a joke too ridiculous even to be taken seriously, was the entering wedge. The scene, the messroom in Norfolk House, headquarters of Lieut. General Sir Frederick Morgan, Chief of the British Planning Staff. The occasion, a group of British officers of all services, mulling over after dinner in late June of 1943 for the ten-thousandth time that bête noire of the invasion—the ports in France

Reviews for The Far Shore

[Richard kaczmarek · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

" A picture is worth a thousand words. " The book is
devoid of pictures/diagrams/maps, etc. which would
have given the reader a much better view of what
the book discusses.

Yes, the author did describe, in a limited manner, the
characteristics and purposes of the PhoenixES, floating
piers, ships to be sunk as part of the barrier protecting
the two artificial harbors, etc. He also mentioned that,
due to steel shortages, some of the "equipments"
could not bear the loads put on them.

Too much of the book is centered on the approach
of the fighting forces to the beaches, the establishment
of a beachhead and the continued fighting days later.
All of this has been covered by others.

I noticed that the author had a very high opinion of
himself which was balanced with a bit of condescention
toward others. He was a salvage expert and was
detailed as a consultant to Operation Mulberry. He
had nothing to do with the overall invasion plan,
the design and construction of any of its
"components" and how they were to be employed.