The US Army LT-5, the last remaining tug of its size that took part in the D-Day invasion of Normandy 75 years ago, sits just outside of Oswego’s Maritime Museum at the foot of West First Street. Photo: Randy Pellis
by Randy Pellis
OSWEGO — Great and powerful nations memorialize their military histories, for those struggles, that courage, and those sacrifices must never be forgotten.
But we do so according to the occasion. We celebrate the Fourth of July. We remember on Memorial Day. And we commemorate D-Day.
Nothing short of our landing on the moon compares to the enormity and complexity of the D-Day invasion of Normandy 75 years ago.
Indeed, it could be said that it was D-Day’s success that engendered that great American post-war confidence, that gave us presidents who lived that war, culminating in John F. Kennedy, the young war hero, who understood our history, who saw what we could do as a nation, and who rose to inspire a generation that had lived through that war with him to do the great and hard things again. D-Day taught us that, and it was a janitor who taught it to us again.
JFK first visited NASA in 1962. Upon noticing a janitor carrying a broom, the president, there to rally Americans to the moon mission, left his tour, walked over to the janitor and said, “Hi. I’m Jack Kennedy. What are you doing?”
“Well, Mr. President,” the janitor replied, “I’m helping put a man on the moon.”
The importance of every single aspect of the D-Day invasion was as important to its success as that janitor’s contribution was to putting Neil Armstrong on the moon, no matter how some might see that contribution as smaller than that of others.
Each contribution was crucial.
It was each contribution that made success possible.
And so it was Thursday (June 6) that Oswego’s Maritime Museum commemorated the crucial contribution of an often-overlooked participant in the greatest amphibious military invasion in history, their tugboat, the US Army LT-5. It’s the last tugboat of its size still in existence that took part in the D-Day invasion.
The sheer magnitude of the invasion’s logistics is staggering. You don’t just drop off 156,000 men into waist-high water under blistering machine gun fire and watch them stroll up the beach.
Defenses had to be built, ammunition, food, and gasoline had to be stored, and perhaps most amazingly, an entire system of synthetic harbors, roads, and bridges had to be constructed in secret and established prior to and during the invasion.
Twenty thousand round-the-clock workers in British shipyards built 150 hollow concrete structures, each 200 feet long by 60 feet wide by 60 feet high, that were laid end to end to form two giant breakwalls, one for the beach the British were to invade, the other for the American. These were towed across 90 miles of the English Channel in 8 or 9 round trips by tugs larger than the LT-5 but were held in place by the smaller tugs as valves were opened to flood the interiors of these hollow concrete “Phoenixes,” as they were called, securing them to the channel’s floor.
When completed, each of these walls, called Mulberries, was about one mile long, and stood about 30 feet above sea level at low tide, 10 feet above sea level at high tide.
Seven Liberty ships at a time could tie up at a Mulberry to unload their cargo into landing craft.
As the Mulberries were being built, 89 ships, which had been damaged beyond repair, made it to Normandy under their own power, crewed by volunteer mariners. Each was held in position by four small tugs while explosives blew their bottoms out, sinking them between the Mulberries and the shore to create what was called a Gooseberry or blockship, meant to calm the waters inside the harbor and eliminate the surf and breakers on the beach, all done under fire from the beach and German planes.
A 1,400-foot-long pier was constructed from seven 200-foot-long by 60-foot-wide steel tables sitting on four steel legs each and adjusted to water level enabling cargo ships to unload supplies directly into trucks.
And finally, steel pontoon bridges, towed from England on barges, connected the pier to the shore.
Meanwhile, Oswego’s LT-5, along with 5 other similar tugs, beached 12 barges loaded with ammunition near the American invasion site as ordered by American General Omar Bradley.
What was originally considered a backup operation was completed on D-Day plus one, June 7, 1944. But with the advent of a major mid-June storm that destroyed the main American harbor at Omaha Beach, those supplies became crucial and vital to the success of the mission.
As US Navy Vice Admiral Alan Kirk later wrote, “We loaded them (the barges) with what the Army called units of fire – so many rounds of small arms and so many rounds of machine gun ammunition, ammunition for antitank guns and antiaircraft guns, and 105s, bazookas, 155s, and so on. Each barge was loaded with some of each kind of ammunition. The whole thing was what they called ‘combat loaded’ for each type of gun. We towed those right over on D+1 and stranded them high up on the beaches, out of the way of the regular landing spots. So this reserve ammunition was available and, by God, when the great storm came in mid-June, it saved our bacon. A very well-conceived idea of Bradley’s and very well executed.”
Military historian Charles Dana Gibson named that mission “one of the top four most-significant events in US military maritime logistics.”
“That’s no small accomplishment,” Maritime Museum curator Michael Pittavino remarked in telling the story of “the most unlikely of heroes, the National Historic Landmark, World War II tugboat LT-5” to the 50 people gathered in the main room of the Maritime Museum Thursday.
Originally one of 210 such tugs, all crewed by civilian Merchant Marines, the LT-5, with its crew of eight, crossed the Atlantic in two weeks, leaving Charleston harbor on February 3, 1944.
Following the LT-5’s successful beaching of reserve ammunition, the LT-5 was attacked on June 9, 1944, D-Day plus three, while moored to a sunken ship. She fought back and brought down a German plane. Her vessel stack bears the kill mark of that day: a swastika-labeled plane in white paint.
For the remainder of June 1944, the LT-5 crossed the English Channel again and again carrying all manner of supplies back to the artificial harbors off Normandy Beach.
In 1989, the Oswego Port Authority acquired the LT-5, which had been put up for sale by the government. What the Port Authority paid for the tug, if anything, is unknown.
Twenty-five years ago, here for the LT-5’s 50th anniversary D-Day commemoration, historian Gibson said: “The reality is that this tug – ex US Army Transport LT-5 played a highly significant and unique role in maintaining our 1944 presence in France – a presence which at one point in time was in serious jeopardy….She is the last of but six LT tugs which provided a service which by its exact nature allowed victory at Normandy – a service which may well have saved the American army once ashore from virtual defeat.”
A number of officials including Executive Director of the Maritime Museum Mercedes Niess, Christine Gray, president of the museum, Dan Ferens of the Oswego Veterans Council, and Oswego Mayor Billy Barlow spoke to the assembled crowd.
But perhaps the most touching speech of the day was given by Amy Tressider, chair of Oswego’s Port Authority, who put D-Day and all things military into a very personal perspective.
As the mother of a son in the Navy, Tressider said, “I try to speak about being that without becoming too emotional. But, a lot of people lost their family members that day. And when you’re a military mom you fear war, you fear phone calls, you fear not getting phone calls.”
Her son is a veteran of three deployments to Afghanistan.
“And believe me,” she said, “when your child, and to me he’s my child regardless of his duties, when they’re in a situation like that, it’s hard to think about anything else really. So to me, the LT-5, it’s wonderful that we have it here, because it’s a symbol, a symbol of the sacrifice, a symbol of the sacrifice of the men and women who go out every day to do their job not knowing where that job may take them. They don’t know when an interaction may occur. And they’re always ready for that. So I want to thank them, honor the memory of those who lost their lives and those who served and those who serve now, because that’s what it’s really about. That tug out there is a symbol of that sacrifice. I don’t know if the rest of us can really ever understand that there are men and women who are willing to just go forward for us. It’s for us. They don’t do it for the money. They don’t do it for the honors that they receive. They do it for us – a difficult job and difficult for the people they leave behind. So I just wanted to say thank you for that, and thank you Mercedes for having us all today and for remembering that.”
The H. Lee White Maritime Museum, at the foot of West First Street, will be open free of charge Saturday and Sunday, June 8 and 9 from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
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