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Two hundred and thirty one thousand men and ten thousand women served with the United States Coast
Guard during the second world war, one thousand nine hundred and eighteen of them would die in
that service. The Coast Guard took its first casualty the day after Pearl Harbor when the
Coast Guard manned transport Leonard Wood was bombed by the Japanese Navy in Singapore, and
while the Coast Guard served many roles throughout the war they never forgot their central role of
search and rescue. Fifteen hundred survivors of torpedo attacks were rescued by Coast Guard
cutters boats and planes off the coast of America during the war, a thousand more were rescued by
Coast Guardsmen who are performing their duty as convoy escort, but about fourteen hundred more
were saved by Coast Guardsmen in a little-known flotilla that played a notable role in the largest
amphibious invasion in history. The story of Rescue Flotilla One, the Matchbox Fleet,
is a story that deserves to be remembered. After the Axis powers invaded the Soviet
Union in Operation Barbarossa in June of 1941, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin started pressing
for the Western Allies to open a second front in Western Europe. That would require the largest
amphibious assault in world history, and it would take time to gather the strength to make such an
attack. Two invasion plans for 1942, code-named Operation Roundup and Operation Sledgehammer,
were both deemed impractical and unlikely to succeed, and the disastrous Operation Rudder,
better known as the Raid of Dieppe, demonstrated the high cost and impractically of trying to take
a well defended port. The Allies instead opted to invade what they perceived to be a more vulnerable
French North Africa in 1942. Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt met in Washington DC in May
of 1943 and agreed that the invasion of Western Europe would occur in a year's time, the leaders
discussed the initial plans for that invasion when they met again in Quebec City in Canada in
August of that year. While they briefly considered an invasion through Norway, tentatively called
Operation Jupiter, they settled on an invasion of France calling the plan Operation Overlord.
Operation Overlord was the code-name for the overall Allied plan to establish a large-scale
lodgement on the continent of Europe, invading German occupied Western Europe and establishing
a second front would distract Hitler's armies, who were fighting the Soviets in the east,
and offer a path for the liberation of Paris and the invasion of Germany itself. It was a massive
operation eventually including 39 divisions and more than a million troops. Overlord was a
multi-faceted plan that included major operations like Operation Point-Blank, a portion of the ally
bomber offensive intended to set the stage for the invasion, and Operation Bodyguard,
the complex deception plan designed to mislead the German High Command as that the timing in
place of the invasion, but by far the most complex and challenging part of the plan was code-named
Operation Neptune the Allied landings on the beaches of Normandy France that today is better
known as D-Day. The scope of Operation Neptune was staggering, nearly 7,000 vessels were involved,
by comparison the great Spanish Armada of 1588 included a hundred and thirty ships. Only some
850 ships have been used in the invasion of North Africa the year before. 160,000 Allied troops were
landed by sea and parachute along those fifty miles of Coast land On June 6, and they were
supported by one hundred ninety five thousand sailors manning the massive invasion fleet,
and Winston Churchill realized that some of those men were gonna wind up in the water.
Purportedly some weeks before the invasion he lamented to President Roosevelt that the
invasion fleet had no rescue flotilla, but with all of the resources already committed how could
they put together such a flotilla in such a short period of time. FDR responded, “We already have
such a group, the United States Coast Guard”. The Coast Guard already had a significant role
in Operation Neptune, showing their skill at small boat handling by operating many of the
landing craft that ferried the landing force under fire to the beaches, but of course the Coast Guard
had traditionally played the role of rescuing people at sea. Vice Admiral Russell R Waesche, the
Commandant of the Coast Guard, suggested that the coastal patrol boats being used for anti-submarine
service along the U.S. East Coast were the best fit for the proposed flotilla. Sixty, eighty three
foot cutters, or what was called the Matchbox Fleet, were selected and transported piggyback
on freighters to the UK where they were formed into Rescue Flotilla One based at Poole England
and modified for service as rescue craft. The 83 foot Cutter had been designed in 1940, contracted
to the wheeler shipyard in Brooklyn New York, the first order of 40 cutters entered service
in 1941 and by the end of 1944 a total of 230 were produced for the Coast Guard. They were designed
for coastal convoy escort, anti-submarine duty and search and rescue. The 83 foot 2 inch long
vessels were wooden hulled, and their two screws were powered by two inline eight-cylinder Stirling
Viking 2 gasoline engines, each of which produced 600 horsepower along a top speed of 20 knots.
They were commonly called matchboxes because of the dangerous combination of gasoline and wood.
They had a displacement of 76 tons, a beam of 16 foot 2 inches, and a draft of 5 foot 4 inches. In
normal World War 2 configuration, they mounted a 20 millimeter gun aft and depth charge racks,
although the racks were removed for the role in operation Neptune, the normal crew complement
was 13. The 60 cutters of Rescue Flotilla One had their Coast Guard call-signs removed and for the
sake of communication simplicity were renamed CGC 1 through 60. Thirty were assigned to the
American sector, Omaha Utah beaches, and thirty to the British sector, Gold, Juno and Sword beaches,
although the Coast Guard operated several vessels on D-Day, Rescue Flotilla One represented
nearly two-thirds of those. Their job was straightforward, as flotilla veteran Jack Hamlin
explained, “Be nothing but just be a lifeguard” he said “we were not there to destroy anybody,
to kill anybody, we were there to just do rescue operations and that's what we did”.
At pool, the crews had received special training including extensive first-aid training,
it would prove critical on June 6th. Their task was dangerous; they were accompanying
the assault boats and would have to brave enemy fire and obstacles many times on the rusty runs,
the seas were rough and the tiny boats had to maneuver around the larger craft. CGC 16,
nicknamed the Homing Pigeon, got to work early, picking up survivors from a landing
craft disabled by the choppy seas in the assembly area before the landing even began. As the crew
neared Omaha Beach they rushed to the rescue of the crew of an anti-aircraft ship which had been
destroyed by German fire. No sooner had they pulled those survivors on board when a German
shell destroyed a nearby patrol boat. Rushing to their rescue the tiny Cutter, intended to
carry no more than 20 wounded, was crammed with ninety rescued men. They returned them to the
hospital ship and went back to the beach. One of the CGC 16s crew climbed aboard a burning
transport loaded with the ammunition to rescue a sailor whose legs had been severed by a shell,
he rescued the man and the crash sank in less than two minutes later. Many of the men were
seriously injured and the first aid was left up to CGC 16s cook, who applied tourniquets
and administered morphine from the ship's medical locker. By the end of the day, the crew of CGC 16
had pulled 126 men from the English Channel, the largest number saved by any of the Coast
Guard Matchbox Fleet that day. For their heroism, the crew of CGC 16 were awarded the Bronze Star.
CGC 1 came upon a sunken British landing craft two miles offshore, they pulled 24 soldiers and
four Royal Navy sailors on the channel, the Coast Guardsman had to jump overboard and tie lines to
the freezing survivors because they were too cold to help themselves aboard. Later CGC 1 rescued 19
survivors from another second landing craft, 14 of whom were fellow Coast Guardsmen. CGC
34 rescued another 32 British soldiers and seamen in the British sector, the process could be slow,
many of the men being rescued were injured and the soldiers were weighted down with heavy packs,
it took time and all the crew strength to carefully lift them on board while under
fire. The boats had to carry survivors back to hospital ships 10 miles off shore in the
choppy waters, loaded with casualties; the cutters could barely make 15 knots,
and the cutters saw their share of fire that day. CGC 29 was in the British sector when a marauding
German torpedo boat attacked a group of landing craft, other escorts chased the torpedo boat as
the crew of the cutter saved 14 men from the craft that had been torpedoed. A group of 4
cutters were nearly fired upon by the British who had mistaken them for German torpedo boats.
CGC 53 came under fire from a shore battery as they pulled men from a swamped landing craft,
the battleship HMS Rodney opened fire silencing the German guns. The crew of CGC 35 received
the British Distinguished Service Cross for steering their wooden cutter through a sea
of burning petrol to rescue the crew of a landing craft that had been blown up by a direct hit, and
yet they did their jobs. By the end of the day, the Matchbox Fleet had saved over 400 soldiers
and sailors along the Normandy beachhead, despite often being in the line of fire with many of the
cutters taking damage, Rescue Flotilla One did not lose a single boat, nor a single Coast Guardsman.
The Coast Guard played a vital role in Operation Neptune, operating many naval ships, from large
landing craft to the small Higgins boats that were dropping the soldiers at the shore. Four landing
craft ships operated by the Coast Guard were sunk in Operation Neptune and several other Coast Guard
vessels were damaged; it was the largest loss of Coast Guard vessels in the history of the service,
fifteen Coast Guardsmen died in the Normandy landings. Coast Guard commander Quinton R Walsh,
both helped to design the Mulberry Harbors that transformed the Normandy beaches into
giant ports and also played a central role in capturing the French port of Cherbourg
and returning it to service. He received the U.S. Distinguished Service Cross.
Rescue Flotilla One continued to be in service off the coast of France until the unit was
finally disbanded in February of 1945. Some of the cutters have been in the assault zones more
than 89 days and it made the round trip between the Normandy beaches and Great Britain more than
30 times. In their period of operation they were credited with rescuing 1437 people. They
were continuing the Coast Guard's long tradition of saving lives albeit on a beach, under fire,
thousands of miles from home but that is the nature of the men and women who serve in the
United States oldest continuing seagoing service whose motto is, Semper Paratus, always ready.
I'm the History Guy. I hope you enjoyed this edition of my series of short snippets of
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