Three months ago, it was 80 years since the beginning of the largest naval landing operation in the history of warfare, the famous "Overlord" operation, that is, the Allied naval and air landing on the German Atlantic wall in Normandy in World War II.
It was the long-awaited Allied invasion of Western Europe, which had been occupied by Nazi Germany for four years, i.e. the opening of the so-called Western Front and the Hitler's Germany in "pincers" whose large arms were the forces of the Western Allies on one side, that is, the forces of the Soviet Red Army on the other.
Almost 6 Americans, British, Canadians, Poles, Australians, South Africans, and New Zealanders took part in the actual naval landing operation on Normandy, which was called "Neptune" (D-Day) and was part of the wider "Overlord" plan on June 1944, 160.000. , Rhodesians and members of the armed forces of "Free France". They landed on the beaches in that French province and engaged in combat with around 50.000 members of the Wehrmacht defending them.
Disembarkation started at 6.30:80 am. The invasion zone was 24.000 kilometers long, on five sectors, beaches, called: Juta, Omaha, Sword, Džuno and Gold. The parachute landing of approximately 6.939 Allied troops preceded the amphibious landing of the invasion fleet, which consisted of ships from eight different countries - a total of 1.213 ships (4.126 warships, 1.600 transport ships and XNUMX support ships, including merchant ships). Among those vessels was an old Yugoslav ship with a name that is always very important for Montenegro and with a very specific task...
Namely, in addition to the construction and securing of bridgeheads on the enemy-controlled and well-defended coast, and the subsequent rapid penetration of landed allied units into the immediate rear of the coast and the creation of a wider operational base for further advancement into the interior of occupied France, for the success of this unprecedentedly large naval - landing operations of crucial importance was logistics, i.e. supplying the disembarked forces with equipment, weapons, ammunition, food and all other numerous necessary things. Since they could not count on the fact that they would quickly conquer one of the nearby large French seaports, i.e. that the retreating Germans would not deliberately destroy those port facilities, the Allied planners, since 1942, in the strictest secrecy, began to develop an extremely innovative project for that time, the so-called . portable temporary harbors called Mulberry Harbors. They would be formed in front of the unkempt beaches of Normandy, in just a few hours after the landing, from prefabricated concrete and steel sections that would be brought from Great Britain across the English Channel, even while the first battles of the landing forces with the defenders of the Atlantic Wall were going on.
This remarkably well-designed and executed engineering feat resulted in the installation of two Mulberry harbors in front of the Normandy beaches just days after the invasion. The formation of these artificial ports, for which more than 400 sections weighing almost 1,5 million tons were hauled across the English Channel, began already on June 8 and was completed in the next three to seven days, when the ports became operational and began to receive and transfer cargo which was brought from Britain by transport ships.
Two harbors were formed
Two ports were formed - "Mulberry A" in front of Omaha Beach intended for supplying American forces and "Mulberry B" (later named Port Winston after British Prime Minister Churchill) in front of Gold Beach, intended for primarily supplying British and other allied forces.
In order for these ports to function, it was necessary to come up with a quick and cheap system of building breakwaters that would protect them from the strongest waves of the Atlantic Ocean. Therefore, the Allied planners decided to build these breakwaters, called "Gooseberry", in the shallows in front of the "Mulberry" harbors, deliberately sinking old warships and merchant ships. In total, five such breakwaters were formed, consisting of a row of deliberately sunk ships - 62 of them altogether.
Among those ships was the old Yugoslav freighter "Njegoš", which was previously used by the British Ministry of War Transport. The steamship built way back in 1908, namely, was no longer usable for the transportation of war material, food and equipment, which "Njegoš" had been doing for the allies until then, so it was decided that it would be one of the ships that would deliberately lay down its life on the altar of success unprecedented large-scale landing operations, crucial for the quick end of the Second World War in Europe that the Allies hoped for.
"I was boarded on the ship "Njegoš" on a stormy winter day in January 1944. It was an old dilapidated tramper of about 4.000 GRT... It lay for months in one of Liverpool's docks. There were whispers, however, about some special mission for which he was assigned. This news was confirmed when a group of men came on board and began to drill holes through the watertight bulkheads and place dynamite along the ship's sides. Speculation reached a peak one day when the crew was taken aboard.
Instead of a regular daily work schedule, we were herded into a carefully guarded room where we were told in confidence that our ship would be participating in the invasion. The trip was supposed to be one-way since the ship had to be sunk to create an artificial harbor for the disembarkation of invasion units", writes one of the members of its then mixed crew, a British sailor, about the preparations for the last trip of "Njegoš" TG Davis. He published this story on the tenth anniversary of the sinking of the ship, in June 1954, in the magazine "World Digest".
"Njegoš" was built in 1908, under the name "Suruga", in the British shipyard A. McMillan & Son Ltd. in Dunbarton, Scotland. It was ordered by the British shipping company New York & Oriental SS Co Ltd from Liverpool. It was a cargo steamship of 4.393 gross tons, 114,4 meters long, 15,9 meters wide and with a draft of 5,34 meters. It was propelled by a 2.000 horsepower triple expansion steam engine built by the British factory Clyde Shipbuilding & Eng. Co. from Glasgow, with which the ship reached a maximum speed of only 11 knots. It changed several owners from Britain, the USA and Denmark before it was bought in 1926 by the company Jugoslavensko - amerikska plovidba ad from Split and named "Njegoš" after the famous Montenegrin bishop and poet. In 1928, a new company Jugoslavenski Lloyd ad Split was formed, which was formed by the merger of Atlantska plovidba Ivo Račić ad and Jugoslavensko-amerikanska plovidba ad - both from Split, and "Njegoš" became part of its fleet.
At the beginning of the Second World War, the ship sailed for the needs of the Allies, because "Njegoš" was leased by the British Ministry of War Transport from March 18, 1940. From June 1940, the ship was kept in the Senegalese port of Dakar by the power of the French puppet government in Vichy. A journalist and publicist from Split wrote about that difficult and challenging part of the career of the "Njegoš" for its crew in one of the chapters of his excellent book "Flowers of the Ocean", after the war Radovan Kovačević.
The last war contribution
In May 1944, "Njegoš" was again taken over by the British Ministry of War Transport, but it was noted that after almost four years of being forced to lie at the anchorage off the West African coast, the ship was in such bad condition that it could no longer be usefully used in regular navigation. Therefore, the aging Yugoslav steamship was determined to, together with 61 other similar old warships and merchant ships from Great Britain, the USA, Greece, Norway and other countries, make its last contribution to the war effort of the Allies and serve as protection against sea attacks on one of the Mulberry harbors.
"Njegoš" thus sailed across the English Channel in a convoy of various old ships that were supposed to be sunk off the French coast in Normandy.
"I took over the second watch at midnight. The big day was starting. In the silence that reigned, the noise of the machines seemed just hellish to me. Suddenly, a terrible noise was heard in front of us. My heart sank as I stared into the darkness. Blinding white blazes filled the horizon, and red glowing bullets seemed to come from all sides," describes a member of the "His" crew, TG Davis, of the tense moments when the old steamer, in the heat of battle burning all around, was slowly approaching a position nearby of the French town of Aromanš where it was supposed to be sunk. After they passed through a thick smoke screen that was laid on the sea by Allied warships so that the German gun batteries from the shore could not target the ships approaching the beaches, a British naval officer climbed onto the "Njegoš" from a small boat, who then he led the crew to the exact location where the steamer was to be sunk.
"What kind of picture did we see when we came out of the smoke screen. As far as the eye could see, there were invasion boats, loaded with troops, waiting for our arrival. The Germans built huge steel beams in concrete, just below the surface of the sea, and mines were mounted on top of these beams. A ship that would touch them would not only split the bottom but also fly into the air. Naval officer Planter he points to a distant rock. “That's your target, Captain, 400 feet from that rock. Chase the old guy as fast as you can," testified Davis about these tense moments.
"We were in position, the rock was rising high next to us. The order "to shelter" was given. We ran to the stern where the crew quarters were. About thirty Navy sailors were next to us, huddled in that narrow space. With a deafening thunder, our ship flew into the air. All the lights went out. Panic sets in. As he sank to his doom, "Njegoš" leaned to one side at high speed. The door jammed and we were trapped, like mice. There was cheering when we succeeded in breaking through the door, but the ship was so heeled that the door opened upwards instead of outwards, so that we crawled and slithered our way to the deck, and the ship tilted more and more dangerously. Someone shouted: "It's capsizing, jump into the sea!" At that very moment, the ship began to right as the water rose equally. He sat down on the bottom - only the upper deck, where all the crew huddled, remained free of water. The Navy crew abandoned the ship. Their task was just beginning while ours was completed.
They drowned them one after the other
We watched as the other ships from the convoy arrived and met the same fate. They sunk them one after the other, to form a breakwater for ongoing operations. The sky above us was blackened by planes - our planes that were rushing into battle. The war fleet on our outer side sailed at full steam, pounding the bridgehead on the shore with their great guns. I watched these scenes fascinated as the hull of our ship, on which we must have been sitting, shook from the explosions. There was no way out for us. We were on a sunken ship. If the invasion failed we would be lost, but the united power of the free world did not disappoint. The tragedy at Dunkirk in 1940 was avenged," British sailor Davis described the end of the old Yugoslav steamship in the whirlwind of the Normandy invasion.
So "Njegoš" was deliberately sunk on June 9, 1944 during operation "Overlord" - the allied landing in Normandy, for the purpose of building the Gooseberry breakwater no. 3 (Gooseberry breakwater No.3), as part of Mullberry B harbor (Port Winston). The old Yugoslav cargo ship was sunk by detonation of explosive charges placed at the bottom of its hull in the shallows in front of Gold beach, at position number 6, in a series of 15 ships that made up this breakwater.
How important and useful "Njegoš" was here is shown by the fact that the Mulberry B port managed to withstand the big storm that hit the coast of Normandy on June 19, 1944. Storm force 8 winds and waves did damage Port Winston, but unlike the Mulberry A harbor off Omaha Beach which was completely destroyed, they failed to destroy it. Therefore, this impressive structure continued to work, and over the next eight months (although it was designed to last only three months), over 2,5 million soldiers, 500.000 vehicles of various categories and more than four million tons of various goods necessary to supply the allied troops that were invading the interior of France.
Although some remains of the Mulberry A port are still visible today in the shallows off the coast of Normandy, this is not the case with the wreck of the Yugoslav steamship "Njegoš", because that ship was taken out of the sea after the war and cut into scrap metal.
Bonus video:
