D-Day Supply Mulberry A and B

As a ex-engineer I am interested in the back story of D-Day, the engineering requirements and solutions really were extraordinary. This is a small piece that I put together for my Facebook page, French Wargames Holidays @l’hotel de Hercé.

DDay plus 1, while the foothold was expanding in France, the supply planning swung into full action, 132 tugs departed england on the evening of the 6th of June with the parts for the two mulberry harbours.

Mulberry A team, the US construction seebees had a hard time at Omaha, still under fire and the port location was full of obstacles that required explosives to remove.

Mulberry B team, British No 1 construction and repair group started to work quickly at Arromanches.
The first task was to survey the location of the caissons and pier heads, then mark them with buoys.

The first components to arrive were the blocking ships, scuttled in overlapping patterns to avoid wave penetration and excessive scouring.

The LST pier heads and Whale roadways were in place by the 9th and heavy vehicles started using them on the 14th.

The harbours arrived off the coast and by the 13th, Gooseberry 1 at Utah was unloading ships, followed by Gooseberry 3 at Arromanches, 4 at Courselle (Juno) and 5 at Ouistreham (Sword).

The bombardons strings were in place by the 17th.

The Phoenix departed England on the 10th and by the 18th 75 were in place, one was damaged by a tug during a night collision.

Ten days after the landings the harbour was almost complete. Then on the 19th a great storm hit Normandy and lasted for three days, Mulberry A at Omaha was completely wrecked and abandoned except for some pier heads and whale roadways. I watched a documentry some time agao and it seems that at Mulberry A, quite a number of instructions by the construction team particularly the overlapping of the blocking ships and the anchor points for the Phoenix units was ignored or missed.

Mulberry B 10 months after D-Day, and over 2.5 million men, 500,000 vehicles, and 4 million tons of supplies were landed before it was fully decommissioned.

cheers

Matt

DDay event at Sainte Mère Église and Carentan 2019

We visited Carentan and Sainte Mère Église for DDay this year with our Canadian guests, along with several thousand other international visitors. As we live directly south of  Caen, we thought we would approach from the St Lo direction to enter, it was a very good choice as we reached camp Arizona easily parking within 300m of the event.
The para drop occurred at 11:30 first with a fly past of the C-47, who then circled and lined up for the drop, it was a great spectacle to see and bought back memories of my service with the 2 troop, 2/3 Royal Australian  Engineers attached to 3rd Royal Australian Infantry paratroop regiment.
We then visited camp Arizona, a US camp which predominantly was made up of trucks and jeeps, some great civilian vehicles also.
We then had lunch and back in the car travelled the back roads to Sainte Mère Église, again scoring a car park within 100m of the famous church. The place was alive and bustling with current servicemen, re enactors and visiting tourists. After walking around the square and taking a few photographs we headed off to camp Geronimo. A fantastic collection of American vehicles including some rare beasts, as an ex engineer I was most interested in the bridging equipment. It was fantastic to see a lot of passionate young French renactors, plus a few oldies.
On Friday  off to Pegasus and Gold beach for our British part of the tour, we are skipping the actual 6th because of all the official road blockages and politicians making speeches.

To book a battlefield tour or to visit our l'hotel B&B with us follow the link to L'Hotel de Hercé 

Cheers
Matt