Coasties Braved Withering German Fire to Put Troops Ashore on D-Day
Coast Guard Gunner's Mate Frank DeVita crawled over the bodies of the dead who lay in the blood and puke covering the deck of the Higgins boat on Omaha Beach to save the landing craft during the first wave of D-Day landings on June 6, 1944.
DeVita's main job as part of the landing craft's crew was to raise and lower the front ramp on orders of the coxswain, or boat driver, to allow more than 30 troops from the 1st Infantry Division, the "Big Red One," to storm ashore, but the German MG-42 machine guns took their toll.
In oral histories and in a Coast Guard interview, DeVita, of Brooklyn, New York, spoke of the numbing fear that the boat crews had to overcome on D-Day, the beginning of the Allied invasion of France that became a turning point in the war against Nazi Germany during World War II. Friday marks the 81st anniversary of the massive military operation.
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As soon as DeVita lowered the boat's ramp, "about 15 or 16 GIs died immediately" from the German fire, he said. "The first guy who got hit -- ripped his stomach open. Another guy two feet away was hit in the head, took his helmet off."
Now, the coxswain was screaming at him to get the ramp back up to allow the boat to back off the beach, but the ramp was stuck.
"I didn't know what to do. The ramp was in the front and I'm in the back. I can't see it from where I am because of the dead and wounded in front of me. I had to crawl over them to get to the ramp. And while I'm crawling, I'm crying. I'm saying to these kids, 'I'm sorry, please excuse me. I have no other alternative,'" DeVita said.
"When I got closer, I realized that two dead soldiers were on the ramp, holding it down. They never got off the boat. I tried lifting them up, but I couldn't. I weighed 125 pounds. Another guy came to help and, inch by inch, we pulled them into the boat," he said.
DeVita then tried to comfort one of the wounded. "He was crying 'help me, help me,' but I had nothing in my kit to help him." He started reciting the Lord's Prayer but never finished. "I knew he was gonna die," DeVita said. "I wanted him to know that he was not alone, and I reached down and touched his hand. And he died; he died."
His boat returned to the beach 14 more times to deliver troops and supplies after the initial landing in the first-wave assault. DeVita also noted that on trips to the attack transport USS Samuel Chase his boat had brought back a total of 308 bodies of U.S. troops who had been killed in action.
The role played by DeVita and the other Coast Guard personnel who crewed the Higgins boats was critical to the success of the D-Day landings in gaining a foothold in France to begin the liberation of Europe from the Nazis.
Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, the supreme Allied commander, often paid tribute to the Coasties and the Higgins boats by referring to Andrew Jackson Higgins, the New Orleans industrialist and designer of the Higgins boats, as "the man who won the war for us."
The expertise of the Higgins crews was such that many of the Coasties, including DeVita, were transferred to the Pacific after the Nazi surrender and participated in the landings on Iwo Jima and Okinawa.
Coast Guardsmen manned 99 warships and large landing vessels for Operation Neptune, the naval component of D-Day involving more than 6,900 ships and landing craft, including about 1,500 Higgins boats, according to a piece on the Coast Guard website titled "The U.S. Coast Guard at Normandy." A total of 18 Coast Guardsmen were killed and 38 were wounded in the course of the fighting on D-Day.
The flat-bottom Higgins boat itself was slightly more than 36 feet in length with a beam of just under 11 feet and was powered by a 225-horsepower Gray Marine 6-71 diesel engine at a maximum speed of 12 knots in calm seas. The sides and rear of the landing craft were made of plywood and offered little protection against enemy fire.
The vulnerability of the Higgins boats was not lost on Harold Schultze, who was the coxswain of a boat operating off the transport USS Bayfield on D-Day with the task of putting troops ashore on Utah Beach.
"The German fire was extremely heavy," Schultze told the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal in 2019. "As the driver, I would try to get to the beach and the bullets were hitting all around you, the ramp and everywhere. It was hard watching those young men drop off into the water. They had over 50-pound backpacks and were trying to hold their rifles over their heads all while being under heavy fire. Often, they couldn't get their footing, and many of them drowned before even getting to the beach. These were some of the bravest men I have ever seen."
The hardest part of his repeated trips to the beach on D-Day, Schultze said, was removing "the dog tags off of the dead soldiers floating in the water. That got to me. You eventually became numb to the sights and had to carry on, but you could never forget."
Related: What Ike Remembered When Returning to the Beaches of Normandy 20 Years After D-Day
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London's secret wartime tunnels set to draw tourists with spy museum and bar
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5 hours ago
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They were designed to shelter up to 8,000 people in a pair of parallel tunnels 16½ feet (5 meters) wide and 1,300 feet (400 meters) long. The tunnels were never used for that purpose; by the time they were finished in 1942 the worst of the Blitz was over, and Underground bosses had opened up subway stations as air raid shelters for Londoners. Instead, the tunnels became a government communications center and a base for the Special Operations Executive, a clandestine unit that sent agents — many of them women — on perilous sabotage missions in Nazi-occupied territory under orders from Prime Minister Winston Churchill to 'set Europe ablaze.' A naval officer named Ian Fleming was a liaison officer to the SOE, and the subterranean HQ may have provided inspiration for the world of secret agent 007 that he went on to create. 'This truly is the Q Branch of James Bond,' said Murray, referring to the thrillers' fictional MI6 quartermaster and gadget-maker. 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Secret wartime history It also will house Britain's Military Intelligence Museum, which is currently tucked away on a military base north of London with limited public access. Museum bosses have agreed to move a collection covering more than 300 years of history to the tunnels, bringing a much higher profile for a story they believe needs to be told. 'It's not targeted at people who already have an interest in military topics,' said the chair of the museum's board of trustees, who gave only his first name, Alistair, because of the museum's connection to Britain's armed forces. 'A heavy theme that will run through the new museum is that there are skills and tools that military intelligence has developed over years and centuries … and the fundamental one is, how do you tell truth from lies?' he said. 'That's a very big theme of now.' The museum also will flesh out the secret story of the Special Operations Executive. The museum's collection contains agent messages, supplies, weapons and sabotage equipment from the SOE's wartime adventures. 'Most of the people that worked in SOE never talked about it, either at the time or afterwards, and many of the records have disappeared,' Alistair said. 'So a lot is known about SOE, but we don't know everything, and the chances are we will never know everything.' A unique attraction For now, the tunnel entrance is through an unmarked door in an alley, and walking the cool, dim corridors brings the thrill of discovering a hidden corner of history. Within the thick steel and concrete walls are chunky old generators and telecoms equipment, a staff canteen with its kitchen still intact, and the bar, its 1960s orange and brown décor giving off retro 'Austin Powers' vibes Here and there are graffiti tags and a few items left by urban explorers who snuck in over the years, including a set of bowling pins with ball, and — incongruously — a bear costume. 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5 hours ago
- Associated Press
London's secret wartime tunnels are set to draw tourists with a spy museum and underground bar
LONDON (AP) — There is a history-rich part of London that few people have seen, where the city braced for the Blitz, James Bond's creator got inspiration and secret Cold War messages passed between Washington and Moscow. It's a network of tunnels 100 feet (30 meters) below the streets that was secret for decades — but could be the city's next big tourist destination. Local authorities have approved plans to fill the 90,000 square-foot (8,400 square-meter) site with an intelligence museum, an interactive World War II memorial and one of the world's deepest underground bars. 'It's an amazing space, an amazing city,' said Angus Murray, chief executive of The London Tunnels, as subway trains rattled overhead. 'And I think it tells a wonderful story.' A vast bomb shelter The tunnels lie directly below London Underground's Central Line in the city's Holborn area. Work to dig them began in secret in 1940, when Britain feared invasion by Nazi Germany. They were designed to shelter up to 8,000 people in a pair of parallel tunnels 16½ feet (5 meters) wide and 1,300 feet (400 meters) long. The tunnels were never used for that purpose; by the time they were finished in 1942 the worst of the Blitz was over, and Underground bosses had opened up subway stations as air raid shelters for Londoners. Instead, the tunnels became a government communications center and a base for the Special Operations Executive, a clandestine unit that sent agents — many of them women — on perilous sabotage missions in Nazi-occupied territory under orders from Prime Minister Winston Churchill to 'set Europe ablaze.' A naval officer named Ian Fleming was a liaison officer to the SOE, and the subterranean HQ may have provided inspiration for the world of secret agent 007 that he went on to create. 'This truly is the Q Branch of James Bond,' said Murray, referring to the thrillers' fictional MI6 quartermaster and gadget-maker. After the war, more tunnels were added to the complex and the site became a secure telephone exchange. From the mid-1950s it was a terminus of the first trans-Atlantic undersea telephone cable. After the Cuban Missile Crisis brought the world to the brink of nuclear war in 1962, a 'red telephone' hotline between the Pentagon and the Kremlin was established and ran through here. Up to 200 people worked underground, bound to secrecy but with the compensation of an onsite canteen and bar. For a time, the site also housed a bunker to be used by the government in the event of nuclear war. By the 1980s, technology had moved on and British Telecom moved out. The tunnels lay largely forgotten until BT sold them in 2023 to Murray's private equity-backed group. Plans include a memorial to the more than 40,000 civilians killed by German bombing in the war, cultural exhibitions and a nightspot that Murray boasts will be 'the deepest bar in the world in a city.' Secret wartime history It also will house Britain's Military Intelligence Museum, which is currently tucked away on a military base north of London with limited public access. Museum bosses have agreed to move a collection covering more than 300 years of history to the tunnels, bringing a much higher profile for a story they believe needs to be told. 'It's not targeted at people who already have an interest in military topics,' said the chair of the museum's board of trustees, who gave only his first name, Alistair, because of the museum's connection to Britain's armed forces. 'A heavy theme that will run through the new museum is that there are skills and tools that military intelligence has developed over years and centuries … and the fundamental one is, how do you tell truth from lies?' he said. 'That's a very big theme of now.' The museum also will flesh out the secret story of the Special Operations Executive. The museum's collection contains agent messages, supplies, weapons and sabotage equipment from the SOE's wartime adventures. 'Most of the people that worked in SOE never talked about it, either at the time or afterwards, and many of the records have disappeared,' Alistair said. 'So a lot is known about SOE, but we don't know everything, and the chances are we will never know everything.' A unique attraction For now, the tunnel entrance is through an unmarked door in an alley, and walking the cool, dim corridors brings the thrill of discovering a hidden corner of history. Within the thick steel and concrete walls are chunky old generators and telecoms equipment, a staff canteen with its kitchen still intact, and the bar, its 1960s orange and brown décor giving off retro 'Austin Powers' vibes Here and there are graffiti tags and a few items left by urban explorers who snuck in over the years, including a set of bowling pins with ball, and — incongruously — a bear costume. London Tunnels aims to open in 2028, and to attract up to 4.2 million tourists a year. That may sound ambitious, but Murray says the site's mix of 'history and heritage and novelty' makes it a unique draw. 'If you go home and say, 'I went to this really cool tunnel today,' then we're halfway there,' he said. 'If what's inside of it is even better, you're going to go 'Oh that's fantastic.''
