Citizen-sailor documents Merchant Marine service at D-Day invasion
By HUDSON OLD
Journal publisher
In a culture where trappings signaled corporate standing, windows lining two walls of Lester E. Ellison's corner office on the 88th floor of the World Trade Center provided views of the Hudson River in one direction, the New York sky line in the other.
Years passed.
Now retired, he has more windows than ever, views of a spring-green field and woodlands at the edge of Mt. Vernon, a glass expanse of French doors and widows opening in another place to a courtyard pool, light streaming across Italian tile, afternoon sun pouring into a new office where the trappings have changed.
Mrs. Ellison - that's Jean - found the house on the Internet, Mr. Ellison said. He said she's a second generation, New York-born Italian who'd never lived closer to the earth than the 14th floor until she got lucky and met him.
He was born in Mt. Vernon. His father moved around East Texas, setting steam engines for cotton ginners and oil drillers, the industry people back then.
He learned about boilers and steam and the engines it drove in three years at sea. He sailed to China before it was communist, back when it was just another 6,000-year-old civilization.
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Over the years, his son has just about worn out the once glossy, soft-backed book of black and white photos, pictures from the Orient his father brought home from the navy. He keeps it in a drawer of the filing cabinets on either side of his new desk. Mostly, these days, his file cabinets are full of war records.
Above the desk hang pictures of ships Les Ellison has sailed, poster-size framings opening to scenes of oceans opening to the seven seas. There's a model of the tug he commanded long ago. He's 83 this year.
Like his father, his working life dealt with the energy driving the industry of his day - fission. Splitting atoms.
Having left the oil-patch town of Van for the Merchant Marine academy in New York, counting the years he'd been at sea, New York had been home for ten years by the time he thought he had enough stroke with Ibasco to suggest the company split its quality control division.
Ibasco guys are engineers. They design electrical generating plants. Mr. Ellison's idea back when was a new division dealing exclusively with quality control relating to nuclear energy. His idea floated like a lead balloon.
"There was a saying at Ibasco in those days," he said. "If you stepped on somebody's toes, they sent you to Texas."
Arriving with her husband in Houston in the early 1960's, Mrs. Ellison announced her intent to find work, perhaps in case Mr. Ellison had any ideas that could further irritate the powers that were.
He smiled, remembering the challenges of his wife's job search.
"The evening I learned that she was having difficulty finding a company with carpeting that suited her stands out," he said.
Ultimately finding a decor to her liking, Mrs. Ellison moved into a properly carpeted office as an executive assistant to NASA brass just as the space program was getting off the ground. Literally.
"She knew the people who launched the first astronauts into orbit," Mr. Ellison said. "She came home with wonderful stories about the astronauts. I keep telling her she needs to write a book."
Years passed. One day somebody in New York remembered Les Ellison's idea.
"Do it," the man said, "and bring with you anybody you want." Setting about recruiting, Mr. Ellison lured one volunteer. The new two-man nuclear quality control division moved to New York.
Before he quit, he got that swanky corner office. His division grew to 200 employees. The webs of work he watched over stretched from New York to the Netherlands, to the Mediterranean and the Orient.
He spent three years in China. He explored cities he'd seen in his father's pictures.
"I liked that," he said.
When he retired, the couple moved to Florida. In towns by the sea, he began hooking up with naval historians. He traveled. He began tracking ancestors back into the colonies. He went and explored the places they lived. He tracked his Leftwich line as they came west. In Mt. Vernon, a few blocks from the site of an old cotton gin where he figures his father built and set the boiler, he found Leftwich Street.
He liked that, too. As people with the means to live well anywhere, the Ellisons left Florida for Franklin County.
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Before he retired, he seldom mentioned his war stories. Nobody's made any movies about his outfit's assignment at Normandy, where in the late spring of 1944 the Allies launched the most massive naval landing in history, opening the final chapter of the European Theater of World War II.
But 50 years later, in the spring of 1994, animator Patrick M. Reynolds' Flashback series, "Merchant Marine at Normandy," appeared in a half dozen major dailies, including the Washington Post. Basing his series on interviews with Merchant Marine veterans, Mr. Reynolds produced an illustrated series of six installments, beginning his story with the 290,000 civilian Merchant Marine seafarers of the era; of that number, 114,145 received combat ribbons.
From among the 6,000 Merchant Marine civilian-manned merchant ships sailing for the War Shipping Administration or the Army Transportation Fleet during World War II, Mr. Reynolds' story, told in comic-strip panels, whittles down to nine tugs at Normandy.
Rich in naval history, the dramatic tides, swift currents and forbidding shores of this same coast had turned back the almighty Spanish Armada.
"The most difficult thing in an amphibious operation is not to establish the initial beach head," Mr. Ellison said. "That can almost always be done if sufficient force is employed." The trick is supplying provisions and munitions to sustain the invasion.
"Operation Mulberry," the job of Task Force 128, was unprecedented. To sustain the invasion, two artificial harbors about three miles long were to be built a mile off the French coast, one by the British, one by the Americans. They were to be networked with pontoon bridges, one stretching to the beach head.
Before dawn on the morning of the invasion, the convoy set sail from the Isle of Wight on the English Coast. There was a fleet of aging cargo ships, among them, the MS West Grama, the ship on which Mr. Ellison had first gone to sea as a cadet.
Twenty three of the ships moved into position off the coast where explosive charges in their hulls were detonated, scuttling the vessels and creating a three-mile outer perimeter.
For nearly two years, as many has 20,000 British workers had been employed in a secret project - construction of 48 concrete 6,000-ton floating caissons.
"Each was about the size of a six story building," Mr. Ellison said.
Tugs towed them some 90 miles across the channel. A half mile from Omaha Beach, valves aboard the caissons were opened, flooding them and sinking them into the sand.
"For the next few days as the tugs and the Navy Seabees atop the caissons lined up the breakwater, they came under constant fire by shore batteries and the Luftwaffe," Mr. Reynolds reported.
Army Commander A. Dayton Clark's task force did what hadn't been done before and hasn't been done since - working under fire they built a harbor capable of handling millions of tons of supplies and thousands of men.
And finished within a week of the invasion.
There are plenty of movies about the invasion.
If they ever made a movie about building a harbor under fire, in one scene, Mr. Ellison has a great character for script writers.
Joe was the most foul mouthed, irreverent, disrespectful sailor on board Mr. Ellison's tug. The night before putting to sea for the French coast, a clergyman came aboard to bless the crew.
"Joe stole the sacramental wine," Mr. Ellison said.
At nightfall of their second day at war, they'd secured their tug to a sunken ship and climbed aboard the abandoned vessel, taking shelter from the artillery that began at dark.
"It was quite a thing, the sound of those 88 millimeter shells hitting the superstructure," Mr. Ellison said. Making an account of the crew, and missing Joe, he went back to the tug.
He found his boatswain on hands and knees, a blanket pulled over his head as he cowered in the darkness.
"Get up!" howled the first mate, giving Joe a sound kick for emphasis as he ripped away the blanket to find Joe praying over his Rosary beads.
Though Mr. Ellison's war department ID labeled him a "noncombatant," entitled to the rights of a "lawful belligerent" if captured, it seemed that status could have been rightfully questioned the morning his tug was ordered to move a barge loaded with ammunition onto a beach not cleared of mines.
"In war, you do what's necessary," said Mr. Ellison, who made a good soldier, and within weeks of his arrival at Normandy, was made captain of his own tug.
"At the ripe old age of 22," he said.
All those years he didn't talk about the war, he had good reason. Generally, tales of Merchant Marines tied to army operations met with rolled eyes.
"I didn't tell the story because it's so little known as to be unbelievable," he said.
Mr. Reynolds' Flashback! series on the Merchant Marines gave the story credibility, in its cartoon panel way. Mr. Ellison wanted records.
More than 50 years later, even the head of the Navy's war archives was skeptical.
"I was only able to connect with him because we had a mutual friend, a lawyer in Nashville," Mr. Ellison said. He laughed. "I still remember his response when I told him my story of the Merchant Marines' part in the Normandy invasion - he said if what I was telling him was true, he'd find it."
In November, 1994, Bernard F. Cavalcante, Head, Navy Operational Archives Branch, responded. Now de-classified, the answer came in pages copied from the war diary of Task Force 128 Commander A. Dayton Clark, covering his assignment at Normandy from June through August, 1944.
While Merchant Mariners frequently provided shipping services during the war, in this case ten tugs, each with a crew of 11 men, were put under the direct command of the army.
In the pages of the commander's diary, a Merchant Marine from long ago found the listing of his tug as part of the task force under Commander Clark.
More than 6,000 civilian sailors were killed in action in World War II, most in the North Atlantic followed by the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean, where German subs patrolled. They lost 251 ships, Mr. Reynolds wrote.
As for Operation Mulberry, the Americans finished construction of the harbor a day ahead of schedule. Between June 14 and 18 more than 11,000 men, 2,000 vehicles and 40,000 tons of equipment and ammunition were brought ashore from Mulberry A.
On June 19, the strongest summer gale known in the English Channel for 40 years arose, lashing the harbor for two days, wrecking the harbor.
The storm was an incredible thing to see. At the height of the storm, and in some cases for its duration, the Merchant Marine tugs worked rescuing gunners from placements atop the sunken caissons. On the 21st, as the storm began to subside, crews went to work making repairs, reconstructing enough of the harbor to accommodate delivery of 10,000 tons of provisions on the 23rd and 14,500 tons on the 26th.
Time passed.
In Europe tending nuclear energy affairs, Mr. Ellison returned to Normandy. On a clear summer's morning, he found a grass airstrip, a plane and a French pilot with no English. Mr. Ellison spoke no French.
"When I got him to understand that I'd been there for the D-Day landing, he took me up - for more than an hour we flew low over the coast."
Below, he photographed what remained of the harbor, three of the concrete caissons, massive structures turned over time by current and tide to strange angles, geometric oddities in a tranquil sea.