D-Day - Naval Activity

Naval Activity

Operation Neptune, as the naval part of the D-Day invasion was known, was a primarily Royal Navy affair, both in planning and execution. This is widely considered ‘a never surpassed masterpiece of planning’. In overall command was Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay RN, who as Flag Officer Dover had controlled the evacuation of over 300,000 soldiers from Dunkirk four years earlier. He had also been responsible for the naval planning of the invasion of North Africa in 1942 and one of the two fleets carrying troops for the invasion of Sicily the following year.

The invasion fleet was drawn from eight different navies, comprising 6,939 vessels: 1,213 warships, 4,126 transport vessels (landing ships and landing craft), and 736 ancillary craft and 864 merchant vessels. Out of the 2,468 major landing vessels in the two task forces deployed on 6 June 1944 only 346 were American. Of the 23 cruisers covering the landings 17 were British. In fact of the 16 warships covering the American Western beaches (Utah and Omaha) 50% were British and Allied ships. There were 195,700 naval personnel involved; 112,824 (58%) of them were British; 52,889 (30%) were from the US and 4,988 from Allied countries.

The Allied Naval Expeditionary Force was divided into two Naval Task Forces: Western (Rear-Admiral Alan G Kirk USN) and Eastern (Rear-Admiral Sir Philip Vian RN – another veteran of the Italian landings).

The warships provided cover for the transports against any enemy surface warships, submarines or aerial attack, and supported the landings with shore bombardment. These ships included the Allied Task Force "O". A small part of the naval operation was Operation Gambit, when British midget submarines supplied navigation beacons to guide landing craft.