SOME God Damn Things Called L.S.T.s.

 

I don't think they even saw each other. The German sailors were shooting at blips on a primitive radar screen, and at shadows in the dark. The British and Americans were just panicking, like chickens with a fox in their hen house. But in that confused melee on a moonless April night ten miles out in Lyme Bay off the southern English coast, Nazi Germany might have come within one torpedo of winning the Second World War. 

All they had to do was sink just one more of those lethargic targets waddling across their sights at ten knots, and the Allied invasion of France would have been delayed for months, perhaps forever. But how could they know that, when the vital importance of these fat clumsy ships came as a surprise even to the man who inspired their creation? A year earlier Winston Churchill had complained that “ the destinies of two great empires . . . seemed to be tied up in some god-dammed things called LST's”

The need for such a ship occurred to the British Prime Minister  in June of 1940 when 300, 000 British and French soldiers were rescued off the beaches of Dunkurque, France. The men were saved, but all their trucks and tanks and cannon had to be left behind. So, the need was simple - a vessel which could run up on a beach to directly load or disgorge heavy tanks and trucks. Of course in practice the thing was complicated. 

The ship would require a shallow draft to “beach” itself, but a deep draft to remain stable while crossing the open sea. While loading and unloading it had to remain level with its stern afloat and its bow on dry land and pointing “up” the beach. Naval Architect Rowland Baker was ordered to design this floating contradiction. Luckily, he knew enough about ships to be a genius.

Like all engineering problems, the most elegant solution was the source of the problem, in this case sea water – too little or too much. Impact with the land would require the strength of a double hull, while pumping sea water between the hulls would lower the draft, making the ship more stable in the open sea. Selectively pumping that water out of compartments between the hulls would allow the ship to come inshore, while balancing level. 

All it required was a bit of plumbing, which Baker ingeniously provided. Britain managed to convert three small oil tankers to the new design (above), but their ship yards were already stretched thin. So, in October of 1941 Baker was sent to Washington on a Lend -Lease shopping spree.

The U.S. Bureau of Ships did not like the design submitted by Baker, and they assigned John Niedermair to fix it. He made the ship bigger (330 feet long), which allowed it to carry 2,100 tons of equipment, and he added a winch system to the anchor chain to help drag the ship off the beach. He even made the bow doors wider. 

In early November of 1941, Britain immediately ordered 200 of the new Landing Ship Tanks. And then in December Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, and then Hitler, for some insane reason, declared war on America, as well. And suddenly the US Army and Marine Corps were  also demanding as many of these ships as possible. Two short months earlier no one had even  heard of an LST.. And that created a new problem.

The U.S. Navy went from 790 active ships in December of 1941, to  6,700 by August of 1945. There was no room in U.S. shipyards for the last minute orders for LST's for our own military, let alone the British. So the decision was to open “cornfield shipyards”, with companies like Chicago Bridge and Iron on the Sennica River in Illinois, Dravo in Pittsburgh and American Bridge in Ambridge, Pennsylvania, and the Missouri Valley Bridge and Iron works in Evansville, Indiana. - all on the Ohio River, and all now building LSTs.  The contracts for all this work, as on all war work, was done on a  "Cost Plus" basis. The Government would pay whatever it cost, plus a  profit margin. It took them six months to build the first ones, from keel to christening. That was incredibly fast for ship building, but not fast enough.

The original plan to invade France called for just three divisions in the first wave, and the only American division was to land on the beach code named Omaha. It was clear, that would not be a strong enough force to guarantee success, but with only 300 LST's  anticipated as arriving in Europe in time, they could not land more. In September of 1943 the head of the U.S. War Production Board, Donald Nelson, visited London and experienced Churchill's panic first hand.. Nelson cabled his staff that LST's were “most important single instrument of war”, and he added “the need for these ships has been grossly understated”

On 8 September, 1943 work began on LST number 507 at the Jefferson Boat and Machine Corporation in Jeffersonville, Indiana, on a bend in the Ohio River, just upstream from Evensville. Like all 117 of her sister ships built here – like the 1,000 of her sisters built in America -  the Jefferson Boat LST's were  assembled from 30,000 separate parts, and built in 3 sections, which were then welded together, mostly by women earning $1.20 and hour and working 9 hour shifts and a 54 hour work week. (Building an LST ) 

Ten weeks after beginning, LST number 507 was launched sideways into the Wabash River, and after fitting out with her deck guns, she sailed down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers to New Orleans, where she officially joined the U.S. Navy on 10 January, 1944 - 124 days from laying keel to joining a convoy. She was just one of 62 brand new LST's that reached England that winter.

This amazing influx of LST's allowed allied planners to add two divisions to the first wave, and a second American beach on Omaha's right, this one to be code named Utah.  But just inland from Utah beach, the Germans had flooded the land, leaving only two roads off the beach. 

That tactical problem could be solved, but the Americans needed someplace to practice, someplace with a tidal marsh just inland of a beach. 

And in December of 1943, three thousand British citizens were evacuated from the south coast of Devon in southwest England, around an area called Slapton Sands.

It was almost a duplicate of the topography of Utah Beach in Normandy. It was here,  in April of 1944, the allies staged Operation Tiger, a full scale live-fire practice of the landing  for Utah Beach.

At 7:30 in the morning of Thursday, 27 April, 1944, 30,000 men of the U.S. 4^th division were to rush ashore on Slapton Sands from, among other ships, 300 LST's.  But a glitch had thrown off the time table for the first wave. 

The gunnery ships were half an hour late, while most of the landing craft stayed on the original schedule. The gunnery officer on the cruiser HMS Hawkins, noted, “they had a white tape line beyond which the Americans should not cross until the live firing had finished. But...they were going straight through the white tape line and getting blown up.” 

About 300 men were killed or wounded. However, after that “glitch”, the rest of the first day's operations went smoothly, at least until after midnight, when the follow up units were preparing to practice their part of the invasion.

It was after one in the morning of Friday 28 April, 1944^, that eight LST's were plowing broad circles at ten knots in the calm, cold waters of Lyme bay, off Slapton Sands. These eight ships carried quartermasters, engineers, and even a graves registration unit, the house-keeping support without which an army cannot fight for very long. Their crews joked that the ship's initials actually stood for “Large Slow Target” or “Large Stationary Target”. This morning they were about to be proven correct. 

Bearing down on them were nine German Schnellbootes, (fast boats), each 120 feet long, each armed with four torpedoes and cannon and machine guns and capable of 42 knots – or four times the top speed of the LST's. All of the German boats carried radar. Only one of the LST's did.

According to the official U.S. naval history, issued in 1946, “LST 507, the first attacked, was hit by several torpedoes which failed to explode, then was set afire by a direct torpedo hit which did. Another struck five minutes later and also exploded. 

The enemy craft strafed the decks with machine guns, and fired on men who had jumped into the water. LST 507 began to settle into the waves.

About the same time, LST 531 was hit and set afire.

About 0210(am), LST 289 was hit by a torpedo which destroyed the crew's quarters, the rudder and the rear guns...” Amazingly, with its stern almost blown off, LST 289 was able to make it safely back to port. But after burning for two hours, LST 531 sank. Eventually a British destroyer arrived to pick up survivors, and was ordered to sink the wreckage of the pride of Jeffersonville, Indiana, LST 507. She had been in existence for six months, from birth to death. Her remains now lay 200 feet beneath Lyme bay, at 50°29′N, 2°52′W. 

The cost of that April night was 198 dead American sailors, and 551 dead American soldiers – 749 total, plus wounded. So tight was security surrounding the invasion that all survivors, the wounded and their doctors and nurses were sworn to secrecy, and many of the dead were buried in unmarked graves.

For the planners, the loss of three LST's meant that on D-Day, 6 June, 1944, there were no LST's in reserve. One more sinking would have meant a weakening of the invasion, and maybe the loss of Utah Beach. 

That was how close the German sailors came to stopping D-Day. They never knew it, of course. They never saw what kind of ships they were shooting at. On 6 June, 1944, the landings on Omaha Beach came perilously close to a disaster themselves. After losing 3,000 casualties, American troops were able to push barely 1 ½ miles inland. 

Meanwhile, on Utah, the beach added because of the rush the previous summer to produced LST's, 23,000 troops and 1,700 vehicles pushed almost 5 miles inland on the first day, at the cost of only 200 casualties.

As of 1 May,  1944, the full production of LSTs was assigned to the Pacific.  Looking back after the war, it was clear the invasion of Normandy was the product of total war -  in this case, the genius of a British design, improved by an American, implemented by the thousands of  American women who had never before had a job outside the home, and never dreamed they would build a sea going ship, who strained to build enough, to build that one ship more than was needed to give the allies a chance at victory. 

When you speak of war, any war, it is best to remember not only how many lives it costs, but also the unimagined demands it makes upon a nation. Because you can never know in advance, what God-damned thing will be vital the next time.

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IN FLANDERS FIELDS

 

I remind you that landscape is history, and as proof I offer the green “ponder lands” 30 miles south of the North Sea coast, and 10 miles north of Lilli, France. Politically this is Belgium, but morally it is a haunted landscape, described by a 21^st century writer as “...bleakness...dismal (where) winds howl across flat fields and whip through villages, wrapping around church steeples and belfries” 

To the English of a certain generation it would always be “Wipers”, a poor pronunciation of the French “Ypres” (Ipres).  

Here over four horrible years in the second decade of the 20^th century, hundreds of thousands of mostly young men from Germany and the British Empire endured the unendurable, day after miserable day engaged in static trench warfare and the clumsy, expensive and stupid attempts to break it.

So many are buried here in marked and unmarked graves that their bones make up no small portion of the soil. And many were buried alive.

A trench in the Great War meant survival, protection from artillery shells and machine gun fire. But here in the “le plat plays”, the 'flat country' in the local Flemish dialect, any digging or shelling uncovered a clinging, grasping yellowish brown clay, perpetually dripping with water. It coated everything it touched. It added pounds to boots, and subtracted warmth from soaked wool uniforms.

At the slightest shower, trenches and “dugouts” flooded. Those who existed here fought rats grown fat on the corpses that littered no-man's-land between the trenches, suffered from fungus inspired trench foot, trench mouth, and dysentery, cholera and typhus. The Germans had it marginally better, because they were ensconced on the 'high ground' of the Messines-Ypress Ridge, all of thirty feet above the worst of it. Unable to dig too deep, the Germans built concrete pill boxes above the ground. The British soldiers, without benefit of such amenities, endured not only the constant damp and the clay, but having German snipers and artillery observers overlooking their every move.

So it was the British who were were forced to explore the terrain below ground. Test drills discovered the yellow clay was waterlogged because about 70 feet further down was an impervious layer of hard brown clay, which trapped the ground water above it. But 30 dry feet below that was a soft blue clay, just damp enough to be perfect for tunneling. Early in 1915 recruiters went out to the mining districts of Britain, Canada and Australia, looking for volunteers.

One company of 600 miners signed up on a Thursday morning in Yorkshire, and were doing preliminary digging the following Wednesday afternoon in Flanders. In all, 33 companies were formed from three continents, but the procedures were the same at all 21 tunnels begun west and south of the Messines ridge. First, about a quarter- mile behind the front, a large steel conduit (above) was driven straight down for fifty feet. Using this as a shield against the oozing yellow muck, the miners then dug straight down to the blue clay. A gallery was then cleared at the bottom of the shaft and a winch lift installed to the surface. Then, divided into four to eight man teams, each company of royal engineers would begin to tunnel toward the German trenches.

The “Kicker” would lay on his back, supported at an angle by a heavy board or sand bags. Using his feet and legs, he would thrust a spade into the clay, slicing away about 9 inches with each push. A “Bagger” would shove the clumps into burlap sacks and pile them atop a rubber wheeled trolley, which a pair of “Tammers” would then push down rails toward the entrance.  Seventy bags were required for every foot of tunnel dug. At the gallery the bags would be winched to the surface, where every night regular army work teams removed the clay for careful disposal. German aircraft kept watch for dry clay on the surface, as this was proof of tunneling.

The trolley returned with pre-cut wooden bracing in 9 inch sections. To avoid the sounds hammering, the bracing was designed to be held in place by the tendency of the blue clay to swell on exposure to the air. Each crew worked a 6 to 12 hour shift at the face, with 8 hours off. The crews then rotated to operating and repairing the air and water pumps and the winches. Bunk rooms were carved off the tunnel shafts. Underground the miners were reasonably safe from all but the heaviest German shells, but the tension and claustrophobia insured that every four days the entire company had to be rotated behind the lines, one hour of Rest and Recovery for every sixteen hours spent in the tunnels.

The tunnels were dark, cold and often flooded with ice cold water. Over one six week period one mining company had 12 men killed by methane and carbon dioxide gas, with 28 sent to hospital and another 60 treated in the unit. Besides the constant threat of cave-ins, the exhausted men suffered all of the usual infections of trench warfare plus those caused by breathing stale air. A surface soldier, artilleryman Charles Brett, with the 47^th London Division, observed that “When the tunnellers emerged above ground they could easily be distinguished by their poor pallid faces. We who lived, or died,...daily subject to bombing, shelling or sniping, pitied them from the bottom of our hearts”

One tunnel was abandoned after it collapsed under a German counter-mine, and it was decided three others would not be used because of various problems. But after two years of digging, by May of 1917, over a million pounds of high explosives were packed into 17 tunnels – – about 40,000 pounds in each – directly under the German trenches atop the Messenes Ridge.

The pre-assault bombardment began on Tuesday, 8 May, 1917  and continued for two weeks. On Wednesday, 23 May, it became heavier, as the artillery was increased to 2,300 guns.  So heavy was the bombardment - 3.5 million shells a week - that German front line troops were rotated back for relief every other day. Almost 90% of the German artillery behind the Messnes Ridge was destroyed under this bombardment. 

The night before the grand assault, Eton educated General Herbert Plumer (above), told his staff, “Gentlemen, we may not make history tomorrow, but we shall certainly change the geography.”

At 2:50 in the morning, Thursday, 7  June, 1917  the British artillery barrage suddenly ceased. The silence that crashed over the trenches was deafening. German infantry clambered out of their dugouts and raced to their weapons. The British were in luck, as at this precise moment, the positions were being relieved, and the trenches were filled with twice as many defenders as usual. 

At 3:00 A.M. a white star shell exploded above the German positions, illuminating the stark landscape. And then at 3:10 A.M., in the words of one miner, “All hell broke loose”.

The 17 blasts were clearly heard a hundred miles away in London. The tunneler continued, “In the pale light it appeared as if the whole enemy line had begun to dance....

...then, one after another, huge tongues of flame shot hundreds of feet into the air, followed by dense columns of smoke, which flattened out at the top like gigantic mushrooms...The whole scene was majestic in its awfulness.” And it all happened over a period of just 30 seconds.

The largest mine, labeled as “Spanbroekmolen” and planted 88 feet below ground level, left a crater 40 feet deep and 280 feet in diameter. Before the eyes of Second Lieutenant J.W. Naylor, “The earth seemed to tear apart...The whole ground went up and came down again. It was like a huge mushroom.” 

And Private John Rea Laister wrote after the war, “Arms, legs, trees, bricks coming down all over the place....I thought, 'I wonder how many poor buggers, have gone up with that lot'.”

The artillery began an immediate walking barrage, with the advancing infantry right behind.

 By 10:00 that morning all the first day's objectives had been achieved. And for the first (and only) time in World War One, the defense suffered more causalities than the attackers. British casualties were 24,564, killed, wounded and missing.

They captured 7,354 German soldiers, with perhaps another 4-5,000 Germans missing and presumed dead in the blasts, and 23,000 wounded. The British front line advanced three miles and dug into their new positions, in front of yet another line of German trenches, a line which would not be breached until late in 1918. On the Western front in World War One, this “Bite and Hold” at Messenes Ridge was considered a major success.

For all the effort and sacrifice, there were no more large scale “Mining Campaigns” in World War One. No where else did the combination of soil and static positions combine to make it a viable option. And with time, the effort and sacrifice was largely forgotten...

...at least until Friday, 17 June,  1955.  That afternoon a thunderstorm passed over the old battlefield. And when a bolt of lightening struck a telephone pole placed directly above one of the three unused and abandoned mines, it set off the 38 year old explosives.  The resulting blast created a hole 60 feet deep and 120 feet wide (above). Windows in houses for miles around were shattered. Luckily, the only causality was a single cow.

That blast revived interest in the mining operations, and the last unexploded mine was finally located midway though the first decade of the 21^st century, beneath a placid farm with the name of La Basee Cour - The Base Court.  Sixty year old farmer Roger Mahieu, insisted he was not worried about the 22 tons of explosives buried 80 feet under his house. “It's been there all that time, why should it decide to blow up now?”

Except,  the same question is asked before most catastrophes, like World War One.

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