Early on the morning of June 6, 1944, Phil Fitts, a 24-year-old private first class with C Company, 741st Tank Battalion, climbed aboard the duplex drive (DD) tank that was to take him and four other soldiers to Omaha Beach. Their mission was paramount: help secure the beachhead in advance of the thousands of infantrymen who were to land just a few minutes after them.
 
Fitts and his crewmembers had practiced the landing for months, learning how to launch the amphibious Sherman into the water and navigate it toward a specific point on shore. But the actual mission differed greatly from its many rehearsals. The waters off Normandy roiled with nausea-inducing, 6-foot swells—conditions far worse than the tank crews had experienced in training. Nonetheless, the order to launch was given, so Fitts, an assistant tank driver, and his fellow soldiers piloted their unwieldy vehicle off the bow of the tank landing craft and into the frigid waters of the English Channel about 6,000 yards from shore.

The tank, held afloat by an air-filled canvas curtain, struggled toward the well-fortified beach for about 15 minutes until a large wave suddenly crashed over the top and filled the engine with water, bringing it to a sputtering stop. “That’s it, fellas—let’s go,” said Fitts’ commander. “We can’t stay on this thing, because it’s going down.”

As the crew deployed a small inflatable raft in the water, Fitts jumped into the tank to retrieve a tommy gun on the off chance they reached the shore. Moments later, the tank literally sank from beneath him. “Luckily, it didn’t pull me down, and I was able to swim over to the raft,” says Fitts, who now lives in Danville, Va. The men eventually were picked up and transferred to a hospital ship, which took them to England. They returned to Normandy a few days later with a new tank.

An ocean graveyard

Three American tank battalions had swimming DD Shermans on D-Day—the 70th at Utah Beach and the 741st and 743rd at Omaha Beach. However, few of the amphibious tanks actually made it to shore that morning. High seas swamped most of those launched, forcing their crews to abandon ship just as Fitts did. Five DD tank personnel are known to have died at sea, pulled to the bottom of the English Channel by their sinking tanks or killed by hypothermia as they floated in the cold water. Many others involved in the invasion died when their ships were struck by mines or artillery.

Today, the rusted hulks of more than two dozen DD tanks can be found scattered across the ocean graveyard off Normandy—a vast expanse that also contains destroyers, destroyer escorts, mine sweepers, ocean tugs, transports, and various types of landing craft and landing barges lost during the largest amphibious assault in military history. Shortly after the war, some of the wrecks were removed by order of the French government because the unexploded ordnance posed a hazard to local fishing communities and safe navigation, but most of these wrecks still lie where they sank, slowly melding into the underwater landscape.

In 2000, the Naval Historical Center (NHC) in Washington, D.C., in partnership with the Institute of Nautical Archeology (INA) at Texas A&M University, received a unique opportunity to survey and map U.S. Navy ships and other craft lost during Operation Neptune, the naval portion of Overlord. Reluctant to pursue such an endeavor sooner because of the cost, the Navy found itself unable to say no when INA Director George Robb offered free use of his surveying boat and crew.

“We have management responsibilities for the Navy’s historic wrecks, and Normandy was the biggest battle the Navy was ever involved in,” explains Barbara Voulgaris, assistant branch head for Underwater Archeology at NHC. “We thought it would be a good project to use remote sensing and other technology to see what was there and what was happening with the wrecks.”

“We learned what we need to consider when surveying a submerged battlefield and what technologies and methodologies work best to produce reliable and cost-effective results,” said contract archeologist Steve Schmidt, who spent three summers in France working on the project. “At Normandy, the results provided not just an inventory of sunken craft, but data on the state of preservation and environmental surroundings—important data for the Navy to effectively manage its submerged cultural resources.”

INA Research Associate Brett Phaneuf, a student of nautical archeology, also was interested in seeing what remained of the ships and other craft lost during Operation Neptune.

“We at the INA wanted to focus more on the amphibious tanks, which were of great interest to me because I’m a former tank driver,” Phaneuf says. “I’m happy to say that we were able to locate all of the lost amphibious armor from the 741st Tank Battalion.”

"We were in trouble”

On the morning of D-Day, Bill Merkert, a private first class with B Company, 741st Tank Battalion, was too busy to be afraid. The water was extremely choppy and the tank’s crew struggled to keep their DD Sherman afloat as it launched from the bow of LCT 600.

As Merkert’s tank entered the water, a sudden wave caused the LCT to lurch violently, knocking the three tanks behind Merkert’s into each other and tearing their inflatable canvas screens. Now unfit to launch, the tanks would have to be ferried to shore.

Meanwhile, Merkert’s tank was having difficulties of its own. “There were huge swells that morning,” recalls Merkert, who now lives in Amboy, Ind. “One moment we could see the beach, the next it was a wall of water. We weren’t in the ocean 10 minutes when we had a problem with one of the struts that held the canopy on the right side. I knew then that we were in trouble.”

With their tank on the verge of sinking, the crew launched two rubber rafts; only one of them inflated, and then only partially. Still, a partially inflated raft was better than nothing, and three of the five crewmembers, including Merkert, quickly climbed aboard. Moments later, the tank disappeared beneath the waves. The remaining two crewmembers were pulled down with it but managed to make it back to the surface. One was thrown a life ring from a nearby LCT, but strong currents carried away the other.

Miraculously, the entire crew eventually was rescued. The men returned to Normandy a few days later with a new tank and joined the Allied push inland. “In our company, we lost a total of 11 tanks at sea,” Merkert notes. “Only two of our tanks made it ashore under their own power. C Company lost all 16 of its tanks at sea. A lot of men died on Omaha Beach that morning because we weren’t able to provide covering firepower.”

State-of-the-art mapping

The Normandy Survey Project mapped the ocean floor off Banc du Cardonnet, Utah Beach, and Omaha Beach—a total of 9.63 square miles. Because the tract was so large, the NHC turned to state-of-the-art technology to ensure its findings were as thorough and precise as possible.
 

“We relied primarily on two remote sensing systems—a marine magnetometer, which senses the iron content of objects, and a side-scan sonar, which creates a ‘rolling video’ picture of the ocean floor based upon soundings,” explains Schmidt. “We integrated those two systems with a global positioning system, which corrected for local variances using a satellite correction system. When we saw something that looked like a shipwreck or some other kind of target, we made a log of it, or what we call a target manual.”

In 2002, the last year of the project, the University of New Hampshire Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping and Joint Hydrographic Center and corporate sponsors Fugro and RESON collaborated with the NHC to use the high-resolution RESON SeaBat multibeam sonar, which produced remarkable three-dimensional images of the channel floor. The multibeam work was supported, in part, by a grant from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Office of Ocean Exploration.

“The multibeam sonar system uses a fan-shaped swath to cover the sea floor, but the output data is in the form of depths rather than images—hence the 3-D effect,” notes Schmidt. “Instead of continuously recording the strength of the return echo, the multibeam measures the time it takes for each acoustic signal to travel from the transmitter to the object and back. Because multibeam sonars traditionally are hull-mounted rather than towed, the position of sea floor features can be very accurately calculated.”

At the end of each day, the crew reviewed the sonar data a second time, just in case they missed anything. “We used the target manual to place the objects we found within the real world, basically on a map with very specific coordinates,” Schmidt says. “Later, we used that data to try to determine what each object was.”

To get a closer look at specific vessels during the 2001 and 2002 seasons, the NHC relied on a Deep Ocean Engineering Phantom III remotely operated vehicle (ROV), piloted by Dana Lynn, a mechanical engineer at the Naval Surface Warfare Center, Carderock Division. “Dana did a remarkable job of piloting the ROV around the numerous fouling and entanglement hazards found on some of the wreck sites,” notes Schmidt. “He even managed to pilot the ROV into some interior compartments and cargo holds.”

Similar in design to the device used by Robert Ballard to study the Titanic, the ROV carried a digital still camera and a video camera. In addition, its forward-looking sonar unit came in handy during periods of poor visibility, such as when huge algae blooms in 2001 restricted the underwater view to just a few feet.

“We learned that if we hovered the ROV above a wreck site and tilted its nose down, we could drift over the site and get a nice sonar image,” Schmidt says. “Even when we couldn’t get video or still images, we were able to get some very detailed sonar data through this technique.”

The NHC came away with much more than a map of sunken vessels. The state of the ships’ preservation also was revealing. “When we look at a site, we’re very interested in how intact it is,” Schmidt says. “Have there been any impacts such as salvage work or sport diving? People dragging anchors across? Is there a lot of erosion around the site that’s exposing it to corrosive elements, or is there a buildup of sediment that’s helping to protect it?”

One might assume that the sinking of dozens of ships, landing craft, and other materiel would wreak havoc on Normandy’s undersea environment. However, after six decades the impact appears to be minimal. “From what we could tell, some of the sites—especially the deep-water sites—seem to be creating a decent habitat for area marine life,” says Schmidt. “We saw a lot of fish schooling around and a lot of marine growth on the exposed sections. Basically, the wrecks have become artificial reefs.”
The NHC had hoped to identify the naval wrecks as they were located and mapped, but the task proved extremely difficult. In many cases, identifying marks had been scrubbed away by years of exposure to the ocean elements. Missing or incomplete Navy action reports added to the confusion.

“There is a lack of action reports with a lot of these vessels, so we don’t know a lot about them or where they were lost,” says Schmidt. “While we would like to say this is such-and-such LCT or lst, it may not be possible, especially in areas where there may be four or five of the same type of craft within fairly close proximity. We’re doing the best we can.”

Locating and mapping naval losses is just one part of the ongoing Normandy project. Equally important is the preservation of the undersea graveyard. It’s a tough job made even more difficult by the fact that the U.S. Navy does not have a consistent presence in the region and must rely on the French government to police and protect its wrecks, some of which have been looted by recreational divers and unauthorized salvage operations.

The value of the Normandy Survey Project has proved to be multilayered, say those involved. It has helped archeologists evaluate the latest in undersea technology, aided in the preservation of our naval history, and honored those servicemen who gave their lives bringing an end to the war in Europe.
“These wrecks represent one of the most historically significant events of the 20th century, and our ties with that event are slowly disappearing,” says Schmidt. “The veterans of D-Day are aging, and pretty soon we won’t be able to conduct oral histories to gather information about these wrecks and their missions. This has become a race against time.”

“The wrecks represent the will of the people to defeat tyranny,” adds Phaneuf. “That’s what it comes down to. These ships are the material representation of that force of will to liberate France and to end the tyranny of the Nazi regime. They are the physical manifestation of the lives lost and the sacrifice that was made for freedom.”

For Voulgaris, seeing the twisted remains of sunken vessels in the multibeam sonar put D-Day into perspective. “The contrast between looking at the beach, which was so peaceful and quiet, and then looking at the monitors and seeing the wrecks down there—it was hard to believe what had happened,” she says. “And then when you see the American cemetery, it’s difficult to imagine that so much carnage had occurred there, and not that long ago.”

The fieldwork may be done, but the Normandy project is far from finished. Still pending is a thorough search of Navy historical archives for official action reports and other information, as well as the collection of oral histories from D-Day veterans. Voulgaris hopes to turn the resulting material into an educational package, perhaps on CD-ROM, that will bring D-Day to life for today’s young people.

Charles Wehrle hopes the world never forgets the history-changing events of June 6, 1944, or the thousands of men who lost their lives that memorable day. As a photographer with the U.S. Coast Guard, Wehrle watched the Normandy invasion from the deck of LCI 87, an infantry landing craft. It was pure chaos, he says, and mistakes were made that cost many American lives. But the invasion was necessary for the Allies to win the war.

“If we had been driven off that beach and back into the sea, we wouldn’t have been back for quite a while,” says Wehrle from his home in Elkton, Md. “Who knows how the war would have turned out? That’s why I believe it’s important that D-Day be remembered and celebrated. We paid a heavy price, but it brought about an end to the war in Europe.”