A fortnight after the landings, this costly effort was brought to naught by an idea of simple genius. The man who wrote those words was Albert Spear. He wrote them in 1969 in a memoir composed in the years just after his release from Spandow prison where he had served 20 years for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
He wrote them about the Atlantic Wall, the chain of concrete fortifications that he himself, as Minister of Armaments and head of the TOT organization, had presided over from February 1942 until the Western Allies came ashore at Normandy. The wall ran from northern Norway to the Spanish frontier, some 5,200 km of coastline scattered with concrete.
Spear’s own count of what it had cost him was 13 million cubic meters of concrete and 1 and a half million tons of steel. Two years of labor by close to 300,000 men, most of them not German. 3.7 billion rife’s marks in the money of the day, which one historian at the National WW2 Museum has converted to over $200 billion in present terms.
5% of Germany’s entire annual steel production pulled out of the war effort and poured into the western coast of Europe. Modern historians counting the yubot pens and the VW weapons sites that the TOT organization built alongside the wall proper raise the concrete figure to closer to 17 million cub m.
Either way, the count is staggering and the point is the same. Germany spent the equivalent of a separate war on the Atlantic wall and Spear himself looking back from the cell where he had had a quarter century to think about it said the whole thing had been brought to naugh in two weeks by a single idea to understand what spear meant you have to understand the doctrine that built the wall the doctrine that the wall was built to enforce and the one assumption that Hitler runstead RML and the German naval staff all shared in common. It is the
assumption that gave the allies their opening. The doctrine begins with Fura directive number 40 signed by Adolf Hitler on March 23, 1942. In its opening lines, Hitler warned his commanders that the coasts of Europe were now exposed to the danger of enemy landings and that the enemy’s choice of time and place would not be based solely on strategic considerations, political motives, alliance pressures, reverses elsewhere.
All of these might force the western powers to land somewhere they would not otherwise choose. The directive established a command structure for coastal defense. But the operative provision was simpler than the pros. The ports must be held. Sherburgg, Laav, Buloin, Calala, Dunkirk, the Channel Islands, the ports above all.
Hitler’s logic was sound given the assumption underneath it. No invasion fleet, no army of the size the allies would need to commit could be sustained by landing supplies across an open beach, ammunition, fuel, food, vehicles, medical supplies, replacements. The arithmetic of supplying a million-man army required a working port.
The ports must therefore be made into fortresses. The rest of the coastline could be held by thinner forces, by static divisions filled with Polish and Ukrainian conscripts and walking wounded, by everything that could not be sent to Russia. The wall was not really a wall. It was a series of port fortresses connected by a propaganda line.
That propaganda line is worth pausing on. The German illustrated magazines and news reels through 1943 and into 1944 ran constant pictures of Feston Europa. Fortress Europe concrete bunkers along sheer Norwegian cliffs. Heavy guns silhouetted against the channel sky. Centuries in helmets staring out across gray water. Most of the photographs were taken at the same place near Bologone where the heavy batteries were real and where the lines were genuinely thick.
The rest of the coast was thinner in places much thinner. If you grew up with a father, an uncle or a grandfather who came back from Normandy, this is one of the stories that explains why he came back at all. A like helps the next person find it. Then back to the story. The men who built it were largely not Germans. The tote organization had been founded by Fritz Tot, the engineer who had built the autoban system and the Sief freed line before the war.
Tot was killed in an unexplained plane crash on February 8, 1942, shortly after leaving a conference with Hitler at the Rastenberg headquarters. Spear succeeded him as Minister of Armaments and as head of the TOT organization the same day. At peak in 1944, the Tot organization had roughly 286,000 workmen along the Atlantic Wall.
About 10% of them were Germans, mostly supervisors and skilled trades. The rest were Vichi conscripted Frenchmen of whom the Vichi regime drafted roughly 600,000 over the relevant period alongside forced laborers from occupied territories, prisoners of war, and concentration camp inmates. Thousands of them died on the work.
The concrete and steel of the Atlantic wall is in part a record of who built it under what conditions, and that record is not separable from the bunkers themselves. Hitler also decreed that 1 12th of the entire concrete and steel ration for the Atlantic wall would go to the Channel Islands. The Channel Islands were British territory captured in 1940 and they contributed nothing to the defense of France.
They were fortified because they were British. The propaganda value of pictures showing German troops in concrete bunkers on British soil was worth, in Hitler’s view, one 12th of the entire Western defense. By 1944, the Channel Islands had a concentration of fortifications denser than the Normandy beaches that would actually be attacked.
What got built along the rest of the coast was, by German engineering standards, impressive. There were over 600 standardized bunker types, all designed under the Regalbo system. Internal room dimensions in multiples of 10 cm, room heights of 2 m or 2.2 2 m. Steel armored doors of 30 mm plate set into right angle entries to defeat blast.
Armored air intakes. More than 200 standardized armor parts that could be ordered from a catalog. The smallest bunkers required more than 100 cub m of concrete each. There were named batteries that the Allied invasion planners learned to fear. Battery Linderman near Sangat with 406 mm crop naval guns in massive casemates visible from the English coast on a clear day.
Battery tot in the pazd deala the largest battery in France with a 70 ft crook railway gun named Leopold that could throw a 562 lb shell 40 mi. Czech hedgehogs welded out of three crossed I-beams on the beaches. Belgian gates of heavy steel set below the high water line to rip the bottoms out of landing craft.
Tow pits, small concrete observation and machine gun positions named for the desert war. And there was RML’s asparagus, RML sparle. Slanted wooden poles set into likely glider and parachute fields with mines or shells wired to the tops. The poles were RML’s idea, ordered after he inspected the wall and found the beach defenses sparse and the inland approaches naked.
This was the wall the Allies saw on their reconnaissance photographs. This was the wall the German people saw in their news reels. Neither version was quite the wall that was actually there. In November 1943, Hitler issued Furer directive number 51, warning of consequences of staggering proportions if the Western Allies established a bridge head.
He sent field marshal Irwin RML West to inspect the wall and to organize its defense. RML arrived at Lake Garder in northern Italy on roughly November 10, 1943, where he met the man assigned to be his naval adviser, Vice Admiral Friedrich Rouge. Together, they began inspecting the Atlantic Wall from the Danish coast down through the Netherlands, Belgium, and France to the Spanish frontier.
What RML found shocked him. We have it on the testimony of Rouge himself, written in 1946 in a manuscript for the US Army’s foreign military studies program and published more publicly in June 1954 in the United States Naval Institute proceedings. The German papers and the news reels, Rouge wrote, were full of reports and pictures of the Atlantic War, and the new arrivals from Germany were somewhat surprised when they could not find this wall.
There were four heavy batteries near Bologone where the channel narrowed and where operation sea lion had been planned three years before. There the divisions held narrow sectors. There was reserve depth. The photographers had photographed Buloin. Move west away from Buloinne and the sectors grew wider. Move further west into Normandy and one weak division of seven battalions held a front of 30 mi with no reserves behind it. That is the wall RML found.
Seven battalions holding 30 m. A front line stretched so thin that even RML, the most aggressive defensive thinker in the Vermacht, could see at a glance that it would not hold. Field Marshal Ger von Runstead, the senior soldier in the West, was even blunter. After the war, he sat for an interrogation with Major Milton Schulman, an intelligence officer of the First Canadian Army, who was collecting the German commander’s own assessments for the Canadian Army Historical Section.
Schulman published the results in 1947 in a book called Defeat in the West. Runett’s verdict on the wall is one of the most uncompromising things any Field Marshall has ever said about his own side’s grand strategic project. As for the Atlantic Wall itself, Runstet told Schulman, it had to be seen to be believed. It had no depth and little surface.
It was sheer humbug at best. Runet said, it might prove an obstacle for 24 hours at any one point. But one day’s intensive assault by a determined force was all that was needed to break any part of this line. Once through the so-called wall, the rest of these fortifications and fortresses facing the sea were of no use at all against an attack from behind.
Runstead added a detail worth holding on to. He said that he had received the furer’s instructions for the defense of the fortresses, and that the wording had said, “Defend to the last drop of blood.” He had personally changed the words to defend to the last bullet before sending the order forward. Even that mitigation, he said, was not enough.
We subsequently lost over 120,000 men in these concrete posts when we withdrew from France. I always considered this to be a tragic waste of useful manpower. 120,000 men stranded inside concrete that pointed in the wrong direction. The wall had been built to repel an invasion from the sea, and the men inside it died because the Allies came ashore and then attacked the bunkers from behind.
The concrete was thick enough to stop a battleship’s main gun. It could do nothing about a man with a satchel charge coming at it from the landwood side. And after June 1944, that was the direction the satchel charges came from. RML reached the same verdict on the wall as Runstead, though he reached it in a different way.
Runet was an old Prussian aristocrat with the cold professionalism of 50 years in uniform. Raml was a Suabian school teacher’s son who had built his career on aggression and intuition. Where Ronet was scornful, RML was furious. The wall, RML wrote privately to one of his confidants, in language preserved through the editorial work of BH Liddell Hart in the 1953 volume known as the RML papers, was a figment of Hitler’s cloud cuckoo land, an enormous bluff, more for the German people than for the enemy.
The phrase he used in German was Vulcan Cukshime, cloud cuckoo land. It is a phrase Aristophanes used in the birds more than 2,000 years before to describe a city the birds build in the air. RML chose his word carefully. RML’s response to what he had seen was the doctrine he is best remembered for.
On April 22, 1944, 6 weeks before the invasion, he stood on a stretch of Normandy beach with his agitant, Captain Helmouth Lang, and laid out the only defense he believed had any chance of working. The war will be won or lost on the beaches. RML told Lang, “We will have only one chance to stop the enemy, and that is while he is in the water struggling to get ashore.
Reserves will never get up to the point of attack, and it is foolish even to consider them. The main line of resistance will be here. Everything we have must be on the coast.” Believe me, Lang, the first 24 hours of the invasion will be decisive. Fritz Bioline who commanded the Panzer division in Normandy and who edited parts of the RML papers after the war paraphrased the same view in different language.
RML believed Baline wrote that victory could no longer be gained by mobile warfare. Not merely because of British and American air superiority, but also because the German armament’s industry was no longer capable of keeping pace with the Western Allies in the production of tanks, guns, anti-tank guns, and vehicles. Raml, who had been the master of mobile armored warfare in the desert, no longer believed mobile warfare could save Germany in the West.
Stop them on the beach in the first 24 hours, or the war was lost. This was the man Hitler had sent to defend the wall. He believed the wall was a fraud. He believed mobile war was finished. He believed the beach was the only chance. After the invasion, when Hitler heard from Spear about Raml’s mounting pessimism, Hitler told Spear something Spear recorded in his memoir.
RML has lost his nerve. Hitler said he has become a pessimist. In these times, only optimists can achieve anything. Spear himself had walked the wall with Raml in the spring of 1944. He records it in his memoir. He had seen the same things RML had seen. The thin lines, the sectors of seven battalions over 30 mi, the bunkers facing the sea with nothing behind them.
He had also seen the steel and the concrete that he himself had signed for on requisition forms back in Berlin going into a defense the field marshal walking next to him already believed could not work. The verdict Spear would write 25 years later in Spandow was in part the verdict of a man who had walked the wall before it was tested and known even then what he was looking at.
So you have by the spring of 1944 the two most senior soldiers in the west agreeing privately that the wall is humbug that it is bluff that it is a propaganda construction sold to the German people as a fortress when it is in fact a screen. And yet they both agreed equally strongly on the same assumption Hitler held.
The allies would come for a port. Raml said so explicitly in his December 31, 1943 report to Hitler written after his first inspection tour. He stated that the enemy’s main concern would be to get the quickest possible possession of a port or ports capable of handling large ships. He predicted the assault would come in the Pazda Calala where the channel was narrowest, where the air cover from southern England was best and where the ports of Bologn and Calala were biggest.
The whole German staff agreed. Okay. The supreme command was sure of Calala. The marine preferred the Shelder or the sane bite because the waters between were thick with German ground mines. Runstet thought the Som RL by April had revised to the sane bite. Every one of these guesses assumed the allies would land near a working port.
He was wrong. Not about the doctrine, about where the doctrine would meet its answer. And here is the answer. In 1917, when Winston Churchill was Minister of Munitions, and the First World War was in its fourth year, he wrote a memorandum proposing that the Royal Navy build artificial harbors off the German islands of Borham and Silt for a contemplated operation in the North Sea.
The proposal went nowhere. The memo was filed. 25 years later on May 30, 1942, with Britain alone in the west and a cross channel invasion still a distant prospect, Churchill sent a minute to Lord Louie Mountbatton, the chief of combined operations. The minute was four sentences long. Peers for use on beaches.
They must float up and down with the tide. The anchor problem must be mastered. Let me have the best solution worked out. Don’t argue the matter. The difficulties will argue for themselves. 3 months later, on August 19, 1942, a force of about 6,000 men, most of them Canadian, raided the French port of DEP. The official Canadian history records that 3,623 of the 6,086 men who reached shore were killed, wounded, or captured, almost 60%.
The Canadians alone lost 3,367 of roughly 5,000 engaged. DEP is sometimes spoken of as a failure in search of a lesson. It found one. To the Germans, DEP confirmed that no Allied force could seize a defended port by frontal assault. Hitler’s portfixation doctrine was vindicated. The wall could continue to be built around the ports. To the Allies, Deppp taught the opposite lesson.
The army would not be taking a port by frontal assault. The army would have to bring its own. The engineering competition began. Three concepts went to trial at Galastston on Wigtown Bay on the Scottish coast in the late summer of 1943. Hugh Iris Hughes, the civil engineer who had built parts of Wembley Stadium and the Hyde Park Corner underpass, designed the hippo pier with concrete quesons sunk in place and the crocodile bridge spans.
Ronald Hamilton of the Department of Miscellaneous Weapons Development designed the Swiss roll, a floating roadway of waterproofed canvas stiffened with slats. Lieutenant Colonel William Everall and Major Alan Beckett working in the war offices transportation 5 department designed a tortionally flexible floating bridge linked to a peer head with four legs that rested on the seabed lowered and raised with the tide.
The peer head design was derived from a lobnit dredger. A storm at Galastston decided the matter. Hughes’s hippos were undermined. The crocodile spans failed. Hamilton’s Swiss roll washed away. Beckett’s whale roadway, the one designed to flex with the swell rather than resist it, came through undamaged. Brigadier Sir Bruce White, the director of ports and inland water transport at the war office, took charge of the engineering.
Professor John Bernal of Cambridge, known to his colleagues as the sage, helped co-manage manufacturer. Brigadier Reginald Gwithther of the Royal Engineers, later appointed commander of the Order of the British Empire for the work, would supervise assembly on the Normandy coast. You should know who was building this thing because it is one of the engineering miracles of the war.
At peak, 20,000 men were employed on the concrete quesons alone, 10,500 laborers, 1,000 scaffolders, 5,000 carpenters, 770 steel fixes. Across the full project, including the steel and the bridging components, and the dewatering of London’s East India Dock and South Dock to use them as construction basins, the workforce ran into the tens of thousands more.
The war office issued more than 130,000 prints of working drawings dealing with the quesons. Construction sites included London, Middlesborough, Gaul, Southampton, Tilbury, Plymouth, and 23 slipway units at Stokes Bay, Stone Point, and Langston Harbors. 19 British civil engineering firms shared the contracts. 545,000 cub yds of reinforced concrete.
66,000 tons of reinforcing steel, 9,000 standards of timber, 440,000 square yards of plywood, 97 mi of steel wire rope. What they were building was two complete pre-fabricated artificial harbors. Each harbor had several layers. On the outside, 24 crucifform steel breakwaters called bombardens, each 200 f feet long, anchored in a onemile arc to break the worst of the swell.
Inside the bombardens, a line of 213 reinforced concrete units called Phoenix quesons sunk to form a continuous breakwater. The largest of the Phoenix Quesons measured 60 m long, 20 m wide, 18 m high. That is a building, a six-story building made of concrete displacing over 6,000 tons towed across the English Channel.
Inside the breakwater, 61 obsolete ships called gooseburies or corn cobs were scuttled to make sheltered anchorages. Among them was the old British battleship HMS Centurion launched in 1911 and the French battleship Corb and the Dutch cruiser HNLMS Sumatra and a long roster of Liberty ships and steamers no longer needed for active duty.
The retired ships were sunk in line. Their rusting superructures showed above the water line like a ghost fleet. The masts and funnels rising from the salt water as if at anchor in a graveyard. Inside the breakwater they made, the spud peer heads stood on their four legs on the seabed, decks floating up and down with the 23- ft Normandy tide.
From the peer heads, the whale roadways ran in floating spans on concrete pontoons called beetles, 10 mi of bridging in total, designed by Beckett to flex with the swell. Beckett also designed the kite anchors that secured the bombardons. The kite anchors had such high holding power that few of them could be recovered after the war.
They are still there off the Normandy coast, buried in the seabed where they were planted in June 1944. When Franklin Roosevelt heard the concept described, he turned to Francis Perkins, his secretary of labor, and said something his secretary of labor preserved on page 383 of her 1946 memoir, The Roosevelt I Knew.
You know, Roosevelt told her that was Churchill’s idea. He has a hundred a day, and about four of them are good. This was one of the four. There is a story about the demonstration of the concept to Admiral Sir Dudley Pound, the first sea lord on the Queen Mary during the 1943 voyage to the Quebec conference. Lieutenant Commander DA Grant ran a bathtub demonstration.
Pound sat on a toilet seat watching. Grant used a back brush to generate waves in the bath. Paper ships placed in the open water were sunk. Paper ships placed inside an inflated May West life preserver which represented the Malbury breakwater survived. This is the kind of moment historians struggle to take seriously and yet it happened and the first sea lord was convinced.
Eisenhower himself recalled the first time he had heard the idea. Mount Batton had raised it at a conference in the spring of 1942. If ports are not available, Mount Batton had said we may have to construct them in pieces and tow them in. Hoots and Jeers greeted his suggestion. Two years later, Eisenhower wrote it was to become reality. Two harbors.
The British harbor at Aramanches would be designated Malbury B and would serve the British and Canadian beaches at Gold Juno and Sword. The American harbor of St. Laurent and Vavville would be designated Malbury A and would serve Omaha. Both would be towed in pieces across the channel and assembled in place. Malbury A would be commanded by Captain Augustus Dayton Clark of the United States Navy, Naval Academy, class of 1922, designated commander, task force 128.
The construction work on the American side would be done by the US Navy Civil Engineer Corps with CBS and the US Army Transportation Corps. Malbury B would be commanded by Lieutenant Colonel GCB Shadic of the British 20 port group, Royal Engineers. Captain Clark sailed for Normandy aboard a submarine chaser. SC1329 built in 1943 by Sims Brothers of Dorchester, Massachusetts.
Riding with the American Malbury Force was Captain Edward Ellberg, US Navy, the most celebrated marine salvage expert in the American Naval Establishment. Ellberg had volunteered to help solve the engineering problem of refloating the Phoenix Quesons in the right place at the right tide. He had ridden a Phoenix queson across the channel personally on a 60 m concrete box behind a tug in the top of the central channel.
The components began crossing on the afternoon of June 6th, 1944. 400 Malbury units in aggregate, 1 and a half million tons of towed material pulled by tugboats at roughly four knots. Some of the Phoenix quesons had Bofer’s 40mm anti-aircraft towers mounted on top with British gunners crewing them through the slow crossing.
Imagine the picture. A great gray procession of concrete buildings undertoe in line breast moving across the channel chop at the pace of a fast walk. The tugs ahead of them. The bombardens and beetles and whales spans in their own slower columns behind. The entire English Channel filled with the floating components of two complete ports.
From the air, once the Mulberies were assembled, the view was stranger still. A great oval breakwater of concrete quesons and scuttled merchant ships enclosing roughly two square miles of sheltered water. The bombardens riding the swell in their outer ark. The peer heads standing on their four legs in the middle of the artificial harbor. The whale roadways flexing on their beetles between the peer heads and the beach.
Dukws cutting wakes across the sheltered water. And on the beach itself, the columns of trucks and tanks moving inland. Two complete deep water ports sitting on a stretch of coast where 5 weeks earlier there had been only sand and the dunes behind it. The German aerial reconnaissance, when it managed to get a plane over Normandy through the Allied fighter cover, photographed all of this.
By then, the photographs no longer needed interpreting. What were the Germans seeing before all of this assembled? This is the lynch pin of the story, and we have the answer, in the words of Vice Admiral Rouge himself. The last air photographs made before the invasion, Rouge wrote, were from May 25. We got some good pictures of towed malbury components but failed to recognize their full significance.
They were labeled as probable landing peers. Probable landing peers. Read those three words again. The Germans had photographed the Malbury components under tow off the southern English coast in late May 1944. The Luftwaffer interpreters had looked at the photographs. They had captioned them. They had noted that the objects appeared to be some form of landing equipment.
They had then filed the photographs and moved on. Nobody on the German side connected those photographs to a complete pre-fabricated harbor system that would render the seizure of a major port unnecessary. The doctrine had so completely captured the German imagination that even when the components were photographed in plain sight, they were classified within the existing assumption they were landing peers.
The Germans knew the Allies might use landing peers as a stop gap, the way armies always improvise. The idea that the peers were a substitute for a port, not a supplement to one, did not enter German thinking. Rouge listed the requests RML had been making during the spring of 1944. RML applied for the opening of V1 fire on the assembly areas in southern England.
He applied for air attacks on Southampton and Portsmouth. He applied for the laying of oyster mines in the channels leading to sea from these ports. He applied for the movement of two armored divisions and the flack core to Normandy. Not a single one of the requests, Rouge wrote, was granted. The man who knew the wall best, who had stood on the beaches at low tide and seen how thin the German line was, asked for the only measures that might have disrupted the Allied logistics buildup and was told no every time.
The components crossed. The first Phoenix Queson was sunk at Aromanes at dawn on June 8, 1944. By June 15, 115 more had been sunk in a 5mile arc between Tracy Surr and Asells. By June 18, two peers and four peer heads were working. Ships were unloading at the peer heads and trucks were rolling down the whale roadways and onto the beach without ever touching salt water.
The Malbury was working. Malbury B was working as designed. Malbury A at Omaha was working too, though the American assembly had been less attentive to detail. The Royal Navy’s high holding power kite anchors, which Beckett had designed and which the Royal Engineers had used on Malbury B, had been emitted from the American bombards.
The Americans used hemp rope instead. If your father, your grandfather, your uncle, or your brother served, his name belongs in the comments. his branch, his unit, his theater. Many of you grew up hearing his stories. Many of you grew up around his silence. Either way, his name belongs here. These records matter, and the men in them are slipping out of living memory faster than any of us would like.
On June 19, 1944, a storm came up out of the northeast. Royal Engineer Major Ronald Cowan, who was at Aramanches, described it later as such as had not been seen in the channel for 80 years, second only to the storm that smashed the Spanish Armada in 1588. The storm blew force 6 to force 8 for 3 days. Modern meteorological hindcast modeling published by Professor Alistister Adcock of Oxford University using European Center data has found that a storm of this severity in summer would only be expected once in roughly 40 years. That
is the kind of storm it was. A statistical freak that arrived in the worst possible week for the Allied logistical effort. Malbury A was destroyed. 21 of the 28 Phoenix quesongs in the American harbor were broken up entirely. The bombard secured with hemp rope rather than the kite anchors used by the British broke their moorings and became free floating concrete and steel missiles, tumbling through the harbor and possibly doing more damage to the rest of the structure than the storm itself. By June 22, when the wind
dropped, the American harbor was unusable. The British harbor at Aromanes, sheltered slightly by the natural calvedos shaw, secured with kite anchors, more attentively assembled, came through battered but functional. This was the moment when the entire Allied logistical effort could have collapsed. 3 weeks into the lodgement, Sherburgg not yet taken the American beach without its harbor. The channel still rough.
The standard German operational answer to this kind of crisis would have been a counterattack. while the supply system was disrupted and the German command in the west had been planning exactly that though it would be diverted by the relentless Allied air power and the slowness of the German armored reserves to reach Normandy.
Here is what happened instead. The American commanders did not rebuild Malbury A. They surveyed the damage, made the engineering judgment that it could not be put back together in time to matter and cannibalized the surviving components. The intact pieces of Malbury A, including six Phoenix quesons and a number of whale spans, were transferred to aromanches to reinforce Malbury B.
The decision to abandon the American harbor entirely is one of the underappreciated logistical pivots of the war. It carries an American signature, and it bet the campaign on a piece of equipment the Americans had built in enormous quantity and never planned to use this way. The decision was made possible by the landing ship tank.
The LST could deliberately beach itself at low tide, drop its bow ramp on the sand, discharge its cargo of trucks and tanks and ammunition directly across the wet sand to waiting drivers, and reflat itself at the next high tide to go back to England for another load. The ship was an Anglo-American design, and the United States had built it in extraordinary numbers by the spring of 1944.
Hundreds of LSTs began doing exactly this off Omaha and Utah through July, August, and September of 1944. They beached at low tide. They unloaded in the dry. They refloated. They went back. The cycle was the artificial harbor. The DUKW, the American amphibious truck, made the rest of the system work.
Six wheels on land, a single propeller in the water. The DUKW could swim from a transport ship to the beach and then drive up the sand without transferring its load. Boxes of rations, drums of fuel, ammunition crates loaded onto the truck on the English coast, came off the truck in a field behind Omaha without ever being touched in between.
Captain Ellburg, who had ridden a Phoenix Queson across the channel and who had been brought across to solve harbor engineering problems, instead spent the days after the storm unsnarling wrecked landing craft so the LSTs and DUKWS could continue to land cargo at Omaha. Captain Clark, who had commanded the American harbor, was reassigned as chief of staff to Rear Admiral John Wils, the commander of ports and bases in France.
The harbor he had been sent to operate no longer existed. The job he was given instead was to make sure the lack of a harbor did not matter. Look at the tonnage figures. By 30 days after D-Day, Malbury B at Aromanes was offloading 6,750 tons of supplies per day. The American beach at Omaha with no artificial harbor was offloading 1,200 tons.
By 60 days, Malbury B was still at 6,750. Omaha alone was at 10,000. Utah, the other American beach with no harbor of any kind, was at 6,000. The combined American open beach figure of 16,000 tons per day, exceeded the British harbors throughput by a factor of more than 2:1. The United States Center for Military History’s verdict on this was direct.
The tremendous tonnage capacities subsequently developed at both Utah and Omaha were without doubt one of the most significant and gratifying features of the entire Overlord operation. What is striking looking at the numbers is that the destruction of Malbury A did not break the campaign. It demonstrated something the Allies had not known they could do.
The Malbury concept had been built on the assumption that you could not sustain a million-man army across an open beach. The destruction of Malbury A proved you could. Malbury B at Aromanes would continue to operate from June 1944 to March 1945. 10 months. It had been designed for three.
Across those 10 months, it landed close to 2 1/2 million men, 4 million tons of supplies, and half a million vehicles. Church Hill visiting the harbor on July 23, 1944, called it a miraculous port that had played and would continue to play a most important part in the liberation of Europe. And Sherborg, the port the Germans had assumed the Allies would have to take.
Sherburgg fell on June 27, 1944, 3 weeks into the American attack on the Cotentin Peninsula. The German garrison commander, General Lieutenant Carl Wilhelm von Schlleban, had used those three weeks well from his point of view. His engineers carried out what may be the most thorough port denial sabotage in modern military history.
Cranes demolished, quaz cratered, warehouses burned, the channel mined with shipwreck and demolition charges. The inner harbor turned into a graveyard of half-sk hulls. The first freight was not discharged at Sherborg until July 16, 1944, almost 3 weeks after the city had fallen and 6 weeks after the invasion had begun.
By September, the American engineers had Sherburgg moving more than 17,000 tons a day. But for the six most critical weeks of the lodgement, the port the Germans had assumed the Allies needed had been deliberately taken out of the equation by the Germans themselves, and it had not mattered. The Allied campaign in Normandy in those six weeks had landed the men and the trucks and the ammunition and the fuel for a million-man army across an open beach and across one British artificial harbor.
And the army had broken out at St. Low and was racing for Paris while the Sherborg sabotage crews were still being rounded up. This is the operational reality behind Spear’s verdict. The wall had been built to force the Allies to fight for a port. The Malbury had been designed to make the port unnecessary. When the storm destroyed Malbury A, and the American beach proved you could sustain a campaign without any artificial harbor at all, the wall’s central premise collapsed entirely.
A note here on what Spear was actually praising, because the historical record matters more than the dramatic shape of the story. The Malbury concept was British in origin. Churchill in 1917. Churchill on May 30, 1942. Beckett, Bernal, Bruce White, Iris Hughes, all British. The labor was British and Irish and the construction sites were British docks.
Malbury A was operated by the United States Navy, and Malbury A was the one that failed in the storm. The American share of the achievement Spear is praising was operational, not conceptual. The United States built the LSTs and the DUKWS and the Liberty ships in the quantities that made the open beach sustainment work. The American Civil Engineer Corps and CBS built Malbury A.
The American Command, when Malbury A was destroyed, made the decision to land the rest of the war across the sand at Omaha and Utah, and the engineering equipment in the American supply pipeline let them do it. What spear is praising in the German of his memoir is a genial einfall, a stroke of ingenious thought and aninding, an invention. Neither word is national.
He is praising the entire Anglo-American doctrine of beach sustainment and the operational decision after June 19 that turned a British engineering concept into a strategic fact. In the years after the war, the German commanders sat for their interrogations and wrote their memoirs and tried to make sense of what had happened.
Ronet to Schulman in 1945 and 46, calling the wall sheer humbug, Raml in private to his confidence before the bomb plot and the forced suicide that ended his life on October 14, 1944, calling it cloud cuckoo land. Rouge in 1954 in the United States Naval Institute proceedings describing the probable landing peers and the requests RML had made that were never granted.
Spear in 1969 calling the entire 2-year effort brought to n there is a darker spear voice in Spandow prison alone in his cell Spear wrote diaries that were eventually published in 1975 and translated as Spandow the secret diaries. The voice in those diaries is harsher than the voice of the memoir. In the memoir, the Malbury is a stroke of simple genius, and the wall is a tribute to Allied ingenuity.
In the Spandow diary on the same subject, Spear wrote one sentence. All this expenditure of effort was sheer waste. That is the verdict. The postwar Spear could write only in private. 300,000 workers, 13 million cub m of concrete, 1 and a half million tons of steel, 3.7 billion rice marks, 120,000 German soldiers lost inside the concrete posts that Runstead had told Hitler were tactically useless.
All of it sheer waste. The architectural historian Joseph Reichquit, writing many years later for a Royal Geographic Society exhibition catalog called the Atlantic Wall a lasting token of a mighty miscalculation. The miscalculation was not the engineering. The engineering was, if anything, too good.
The German bunkers at Point Duh Hawk and along the Calala coast are still there. They survived 80 years of weather and saltwater, and they will survive another 80. The miscalculation was the doctrine. Hitler, Runstet, Raml, and thes marine all believed the same thing about how an invasion fleet had to be supplied.
And they all built their plans on the assumption that the allies believed it too. They were right that the allies believed it. The allies believed it so completely that they spent the equivalent of a small national budget building two artificial harbors in case the assumption turned out to be true.
Where the Germans got it wrong was in assuming that the Allies, faced with the wall and its port fortresses, would have no other answer. The Allies built two ports, towed them across the channel, and when one of them was destroyed in a once in 40 years summer storm, the men on the American beach simply landed their cargo on the sand and kept the war moving.
The wall designed to channel the invasion toward the fortified ports channeled it instead toward the one stretch of coast where the engineers and the seaman had decided in advance that the port did not matter. The Phoenix quesons are still there. Several of them sit half submerged off Aramanches where they have sat for 82 years now weathering.
Two more sit in Portland Harbor in Dorset where they were left after the war. Their listing entry in the Historic England register notes that each one weighs 7,113.8 tons. They are visited by tourists and by the children and grandchildren of the men who built them and the men who landed under their protection. They are slowly dissolving in the salt water that they were not designed to last in.
The kite anchors are still there too on the seabed off Normandy where Beckett’s design held against the storm that broke the bombardon. A full-size replica stands at the Beckett Memorial at Aromanes. The original anchors will be there long after the replica is gone, holding their grip in the sand, attached to nothing.
If you stayed with this story to the end, a like helps the next person find it. If you want more like this, subscribe. Major Alan Beckett of the British War Office, the Royal Engineer who designed the Whale Roadway and the kite anchors that held Malbury B together through the storm, was honored after the war for his work and continued in civil engineering for the rest of his career.
His anchors held for eight decades and are still holding now. Captain Augustus Dayton Clark, United States Navy, Naval Academy, class of 1922, who commanded Malbury A at Omaha and rode the storm out at the head of Task Force 128, was reassigned afterward as chief of staff to the commander of ports and bases in France, continued to serve through the end of the war, and lived until 1990.
Captain Edward Ellberg, the American naval salvage expert who rode a Phoenix queson across the channel and who spent the poststorm days unsnarling Omaha, survived the war. Vice Admiral Friedrich Rouge, the German naval adviser who wrote the most precise account we have of how the Malbury photographs were filed as probable landing peers, served the Federal Republic of Germany after the war and wrote his memoirs. He died in 1985.
Albert Spear, who had built the wall and then in his memoir written that it had been brought to naught by an idea of simple genius was released from Spandow on October 1, 1966. He died of a stroke in London on September 1, 1981, the 42nd anniversary of the German invasion of Poland.
300,000 laborers on the wall, most of them forced. 13 million cubic meters of concrete. One and a half million tons of steel. 120,000 German soldiers lost inside the concrete after the lodgement had been won. The American LSTs and DUKWs and CBS and engineers and sailors who proved you could sustain an invasion across an open beach.
The British engineers who designed a harbor that could be towed. the wall that pointed in the wrong direction. Their names belong in the record.
