D-Day + 10, June 16, " With a roar the first vehicle emerged ... and turned into the roadway. With but a brief grin for a moment at the crowd the driver sent his vehicle down the steel tracks toward shore. "The dream of Mulberry actually worked. The theoretical scheme on paper had finally been translated into actual units of steel that fitted together and now were operational .... "
COURTESY OF US NA VAL INSTITUTE
D-Day + 12, June 18, Lt. Comdr. Everrett Morris, USNR , Port Director, Mulberry A, from aboard blockship Centurion:
"It is going to blow like stink if you ask me." D-Day + 14, June 20, "The huge seas, well over one hundred foot long, were now sweeping across the decks and superstructures of the blockships." D-Day + 15, June 21, "The problem of saving Mulberry seemed hopeless. During the night more LCTs had piled into the bridging .. . plus barges, LCVPs and small craft, in a tangled, heaving mass working against the structure. At one point the bridging had completely twisted under the strain till it stood on edge." COU RTESY OF US NA VA L INSTITUTE
way began. It would be ten days before the Mulberry harbor began to function at Omaha Beach , but the Gooseberry breakwaters were an immediate success. They smoothed out the surf on the beach , formed a protective lee and convenient homeport for hundreds of small craft, and established anti-aircraft batteries to defend the main landing site. On June 11, two more American ships were added to Gooseberry I. As the troops began to move inland and take out the German artillery emplacements, life on the blockships became less hectic, but the challenges faced by their now purely mjlitary crews were not over yet. On June 19, the English Channel unleashed a Force 6 half-gale SEA HISTORY 69, SPRING 1994
which ravaged Mulberry A and rendered some of the Gooseberry ships uninhabitable . When the storm subsided on June 23, Rear Admiral Alan Kirk and Captain Dayton Clarke, the Navy commander of Mulberry A, decided to abandon the floating pierheads altogether and use whatever could be salvaged from them to repair Mulberry B in the British sector. The Whale piers had been severely damaged,and the unanticipated success achieved by running land ing ships and small coasters right up on the beach made them less important than originally planned . The Gooseberries, however, had been an unqualified success and it was decided to reconstitute and even expand them. A
total of ten additional American freighters were sunk at Gooseberry I and II during July and August. By this time , Cherbourg was in Allied hands and, as more ports were captured , the importance of the Beach landing sites diminished . Omaha Beach went from being the busiest port in Western Europe to a forgotten backwater. Twenty-seven American freighters were slowly pounded to pieces by the next winter's storms and today nearly all trace of them is gone. But these ships and their sailors had surely earned a place in history!
Dr. James E. Valle is chairman of the Department of History and Political Science at Delaware State College. 19