A little CB History for Scotty

[Seabee74]

.....And others to enjoy. I wrote this for a class and I think I wow'ed everyone in the classroom.


"Operation Overlord was the code name for the invasion of northwest Europe during WWII by Allied forces. The operation began with the landings at Normandy on June 6, 1944 (commonly known as D-Day). This is known as the largest amphibious assaults ever conducted. Nearly 160,000 troops crossed the English Chanel landing more than 3 million troops by the end of August.
To have participated in Operation Overlord must have taken tremendous fortitude and no doubt drove ordinary men to do the extrordinary.
Men waded ashore facing whistling bullets...., every few seconds hearing a round smack into the Joe's body next to them with total randomness. The Germans had a bullet with every American troops name on it. If you were lucky, yours didn't find you....... and you continued on, wading through blood and floating bodies.
But to have been a Navy frogman or Seabee, the FIRST to touch beach the morning of June 6, 1944, that’s the stuff legends are made of.
Sir Winston Churchill said it best,
"Never in the field of human conflict, has so much, been owed by so many, to so few!"
To the men who would land later in the day, these Sailors were owed much.

Dennis Shryock was a member of the Illinois Reserve Militia. He joined the Navy days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and signed on to become a Seabee.
Shortly after, the Navy created an unconventional warfighting unit at Fort Pierce, Fla. One of the specialties needed was demolition, which Shryock took on.
A forerunner to the Navy special operations force known as the Underwater Demolition Teams or UDT's, Naval Combat Demolition Units cleared the way for the initial invasion force on that historic day. These Units were heavily comprised of Seabees and divers.
"There was stuff blowing up all over the place. The Germans were cutting into us, too," Dennis Shryock said of the landings on Utah. He said the ocean water around him "looked like pure blood. That was sickening..... but we couldn’t stop doing our job."

Working with U.S. Army Engineers, their crucial task was to destroy the steel and concrete barriers that the Germans had built in the water and on the beaches to forestall any amphibious landings.
When dawn betrayed their presence, they came under murderous German fire. Whole teams were wiped out when shells prematurely detonated their explosives.
Heedless of the danger, the survivors continued to work until all their explosive charges were planted. As a result of their heroic actions, the charges went off on schedule and huge holes were blown in the enemy's defenses.
"I don’t know why," Shryock said, "but I didn’t think anybody would shoot me."
Men were falling all around Shryock as he moved from obstacle to obstacle, lacing each with 60 pounds of explosives. At times he was so close he could hear German soldiers talking and even saw one of their remote-controlled mini-tanks packed with explosives roving across the sand. The only injury he sustained was a chipped tooth from a piece of shrapnel.

In all, 34 demolition units were deployed to England for the invasion. Working off of maps of the coastline supplied by the French Resistance, Shryock’s unit arrived off shore at least an hour before the 6 a.m. invasion.
Demolition teams suffered six dead and 11 injured on Utah, according to Navy statistics. Thirty-one died and 60 were injured on Omaha.
The arduous assignment of the combat demolition units was only
the beginning of the Seabees' work on Normandy's beaches. After the invasion fleet had arrived off the coast the approximately 10,000 Seabees of Naval Construction Regiment 25 began manhandling their pontoon causeways onto the beach.
It was over these causeways that the infantry charged ashore. Under constant German fire, directed at slowing or stopping the landings, the Seabees succeeded in placing large numbers of these pontoon causeways. Allied troops and tanks subsequently swept ashore in ever greater numbers and pushed the German defenders inland.
The Seabees landed hundreds of thousands of tons of war material daily. In addition to these massive amounts of supplies, by July 4, only 28 days after D-day, they had helped land more than a million Allied fighting men.
Following D-day the surging Allied forces were halted when they came to the Rhine River.
Many times during the Second World War the Seabees had been called upon to do odd jobs of an urgent nature, but this particular odd job was of special significance. The U.S. Army, concerned about the Rhine River's swift and tricky currents, called upon the Seabees to operate many of the landing craft that were to be used in breaking Germany's Rhine River barrier. Thus creating the need for Amphibious Construction Battalions and for Seabees to specialize in bridge building to this day.
In all, the Seabees operated more than 300 craft which shuttled thousands of troops into the heart of Germany. One Seabee crew even had the honor of ferrying Prime Minister Winston Churchill across the Rhine on an inspection tour.
The naval component of the operation was also comprised of 1,213 allied warships. Their main task was to provide shore bombardment firepower for the troops going ashore and to guard the transports, logistical support, to conduct minesweeping and antisubmarine patrols on the flanks of the invasion corridor and the demolition of landing site obstacles.
Allied forces also provided 4,126 amphibious craft, including a variety of specialized landing craft, such as LSTs, LCIs, and LCTs.
More than 3,500 of these landing craft were actually used during the Normandy invasion and would provide the crucial troop-carrying capacity to land the thousands of men, vehicles, and artillery along the 50-mile wide target area.
The words of Gen. George S. Patton spoke on June 5th 1944 say it best and were perhaps the most inspirational and encouraging words ever laid upon the ears of his audience ......
"Sure, we want to go home. We want this war over with. The quickest way to get it over with is to go get the bastards who started it. The quicker they are whipped, the quicker we can go home. The shortest way home is through Berlin and Tokyo. And when we get to Berlin, I am personally going to shoot that paper hanging son-of-a-bitch Hitler. Just like I'd shoot a snake!"

[Rimjob]

Thank you!

[TRUE GRIT]

Good read, I have heard alot about the Seabees in the pacific theater but did not know much of there operations in Europe.

[Seabeescotty]

Thank you John, it was a good read. I knew we were involved in Europe, though to a lesser degree, than the Pacific. It's nice to know we did our part, in the greatest beach landing, in history. Seabees also built the runway for the Berlin airlift.