The 'Coal-Era' American Battleship That Fought Hitler's Atlantic Wall From Two Miles Off Omaha Beach

June sixth, nineteen forty-four. Five fifty-two in the morning. Omaha Beach, Normandy. A thirty-one-year-old American battleship lies at anchor about four thousand yards off the sand, a little over two miles, close enough to see the bluffs without binoculars. She was laid down in nineteen ten. She was built to burn coal. She carries twelve guns of a caliber the United States Navy stopped designing into battleships before the First World War was over. Her fire control system has been assembled from second-hand parts taken off a newer battleship. She is the oldest battleship in the American fleet.

At five fifty-two, USS Arkansas opens fire. It is the first time in thirty-one years of service that her main battery has fired at a real enemy.

Within hours, the Americans landing below her will take two thousand four hundred casualties on this single stretch of beach, the worst of any Allied landing that day. The men who survive the morning will be pinned under German fire from concrete strongpoints dug into the bluffs, and for much of that morning they will not be able to move. And the ship covering them, from a range most battleship captains would have considered reckless, is the one the Navy had kept in service mostly because a treaty allowed it.

So how did a coal-era dreadnought, too slow for the fleet and too old for the Pacific, end up anchored barely two miles off Hitler's Atlantic Wall? To understand why the Navy sent a thirty-one-year-old ship in to point-blank range, you have to go back to a design that was already a compromise on the day it was approved.

In nineteen oh nine, Congress authorized two new battleships, Wyoming and Arkansas. They were the fourth American dreadnought design, and they were only an incremental improvement on the Florida class before them. The Secretary of the Navy had asked for fourteen-inch guns. The Bureau of Ordnance argued that at the ranges battles were then expected to be fought, eight thousand to eighty-five hundred yards, a twelve-inch gun could already penetrate any armor afloat. Fourteen inches was unnecessary, it said. The Navy took the smaller gun and put more of them in the ship.

The result was twelve twelve-inch fifty-caliber Mark seven guns in six twin turrets, every one of them on the centerline. Two turrets sat forward in a superfiring pair. Four sat aft, in two more superfiring pairs. Each gun fired an eight hundred seventy pound shell at two thousand nine hundred feet per second. At fifteen degrees of elevation, the maximum the turrets allowed, the gun reached about twenty thousand yards. Its barrel was good for two hundred rounds before it needed relining. Along her sides, in casemates, she carried twenty-one five-inch fifty-one caliber guns firing fifty pound shells.

Arkansas was laid down at the New York Shipbuilding Corporation in Camden, New Jersey, on January twenty-fifth, nineteen ten. She was launched on January fourteenth, nineteen eleven, and commissioned on September seventeenth, nineteen twelve. Twelve coal-fired boilers and twenty-eight thousand shaft horsepower gave her twenty and a half knots by design and a little over twenty-one on trials. In nineteen twelve, that was the speed of the battle line. Thirty years later, it meant she could not keep station with any modern task force.

She and Wyoming were the last American battleships ever built with twelve-inch guns. Every American battleship that followed carried fourteen-inch guns or bigger. By the time Arkansas was a year old, she was already the smaller-gunned end of the battle line.

She went to war in nineteen eighteen, joining the American battleships serving with the British Grand Fleet in the North Sea. She never fired at a German ship. On November twenty-first, nineteen eighteen, she was part of the combined fleet of three hundred seventy British, American and French warships that met the German High Seas Fleet at sea and escorted it into internment at Scapa Flow.

Then the Navy began deciding what to keep. In nineteen twenty-five, Arkansas went into the Philadelphia Navy Yard for modernization. Her twelve coal-fired boilers came out. In went four White-Forster oil-fired boilers that had been built for battleships cancelled under the Washington Naval Treaty, trunked into a single funnel. Anti-torpedo bulges widened her beam to one hundred six feet. Three and a half inches of armor were added to her second deck against plunging fire. Her top speed did not change. She was still a twenty-knot ship in a navy that was starting to think about thirty-knot ones.

In nineteen thirty, the London Naval Treaty decided her sister's fate. Wyoming was demilitarized, stripped of half her main battery, her belt armor and her bulges, and turned into a training ship. Arkansas was allowed to keep her guns. For most of the next decade, she carried midshipmen from the Naval Academy on summer cruises to Europe and the Caribbean.

When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on December seventh, nineteen forty-one, Arkansas was at anchor in Casco Bay, Maine. She was twenty-nine years old. The Pacific war was going to be fought by carriers and by the fast battleships that could keep up with them. Arkansas could do neither.

So the Navy used her for the jobs that did not need speed. In the spring of nineteen forty-two, at Norfolk, her secondary battery was cut from sixteen five-inch guns to six. Thirty-six forty-millimeter Bofors guns and twenty-six twenty-millimeter Oerlikons went on in their place. Then she spent two years escorting convoys: troopships to Scotland, supply convoys to Casablanca for the North African campaign, more convoys to Northern Ireland. Escort duty. Training duty. The work given to a ship nobody expected to fight.

And her fire control told the same story. The Navy had not spent money on a new system for her. Arkansas went to war with a fire control installation assembled from second-hand pieces and parts taken from the battleship Tennessee. Her gyro-compasses were hand-me-downs from the heavy cruiser Tuscaloosa, and they were always troublesome. Under rapid maneuvering they failed entirely. To shoot while underway, Arkansas had to hold a steady course and fire slowly.

On paper, then, the ship that went to Normandy was thirty-one years old, twenty knots at best, armed with the smallest main guns of any American battleship, and aimed by equipment other ships had already discarded. Those were the facts the Navy knew about her. The facts that mattered at Omaha were different.

The first was distance. Omaha Beach is a curve of sand about five miles long, closed in by bluffs roughly one hundred feet high. The Germans had built their defenses into those bluffs and into the five small valleys, the draws, that led off the beach. Concrete gun positions, machine gun nests and mortar pits were sited to fire along the length of the sand, not out to sea, which made many of them hard to see from offshore and harder to hit. A battleship twenty thousand yards out could hit a point on a map. A battleship four thousand yards out could see the bluffs, the draws and the smoke of the guns firing from them.

The second was the gun itself. Twenty thousand yards of range had been a limitation in a fleet battle. Off Omaha, where the targets were a few thousand yards inland of a ship anchored two miles off the beach, range did not matter at all. What mattered was a heavy shell, a flat trajectory at short range, and enough barrels to keep firing for days. Arkansas had twelve.

The third was that her age made her expendable. The Navy's new battleships were in the Pacific, and nobody was going to risk one in mined shallow water within range of German coastal guns. Arkansas was exactly the ship the Navy could afford to send in close.

The Allies had also solved her worst weakness before she left port. A ship firing at targets she cannot see needs someone who can see them. On April eighteenth, nineteen forty-four, Arkansas sailed for Northern Ireland to train for shore bombardment. Her own floatplane pilots were temporarily assigned to squadron V O S seven, flying Spitfires out of the Royal Naval Air Station at Lee-on-Solent, so that fast fighters could spot her fall of shot over defended ground. She was also given shore fire control parties, teams that landed with the troops and passed targets back to the ship by radio.

She was assigned to Fire Support Group Two with the battleship Texas, off Omaha. On June third, she left her moorings.

The morning of June sixth began with the Germans firing first. At about five thirty, the batteries near Port-en-Bessin, on the eastern edge of the Omaha sector, opened fire on the destroyer Emmons. The Free French cruiser Georges Leygues returned fire, and Arkansas joined her.

At five fifty-two, Arkansas fired her main battery at an enemy for the first time in her career. Her target was Les Moulins, one of the draws that led off the beach. The Germans had turned two small settlements of seaside holiday villas, Hamel-au-Prêtre and Les Moulins, into strongpoints covering the sand. Arkansas put several broadsides into Les Moulins before the first wave landed.

It was not enough. Nothing that morning was. The air bombardment had fallen too far inland. Rockets and naval shells had hit the bluffs, but most of the concrete positions survived, and when the landing craft came in at six thirty, the German defenders were still at their guns. Landing craft missed their assigned sectors. Engineers trying to clear the beach obstacles were cut down among them. Later waves bunched up in the few cleared lanes. Along much of Omaha, the survivors lay against the shingle bank at the top of the beach and could not go farther.

The warships offshore had a problem of their own. Many of the shore fire control parties that were supposed to call their fire had been killed, wounded or scattered, or had lost their radios in the surf. For long stretches of the morning, the big ships could see the beach and could not tell which positions were still firing on it.

So they fired on what they could see. The destroyers went closest, some of them to within a thousand yards of the beach, scraping bottom, firing their five-inch guns directly at German positions they could see shooting at the troops. Behind them, the two battleships worked on the heavier targets.

One of those targets was the battery at Longues-sur-Mer, four one-hundred-fifty-millimeter naval guns in concrete casemates on the cliffs between Omaha and Gold Beach. British cruisers had engaged it at dawn. After the Germans made repairs, the battery opened fire again, this time toward Omaha. The French cruisers Georges Leygues and Montcalm and the thirty-one-year-old Arkansas returned fire. They knocked out one casemate and damaged two more. The battery's last working gun fired intermittently through the afternoon and evening, with little effect on the landings.

The rest of the day went the same way. Arkansas, anchored close, fired her twelve-inch and five-inch guns wherever a spotter aircraft, a surviving shore party or her own lookouts could point her. By late morning, small groups of infantry had begun climbing the bluffs between the German strongpoints, and the destroyers and battleships fired ahead of them. By the end of June sixth, thirty-four thousand American troops were ashore at Omaha. The German three hundred fifty-second Infantry Division, which had held the bluffs, had lost ten percent of its strength, about one thousand two hundred men, and had no reserves coming.

Arkansas did not leave. She stayed off Omaha, firing on German positions as the beachhead pushed inland, until June thirteenth. Then she moved west to support the troops fighting around Grandcamp. For a week, the oldest battleship in the Navy worked as heavy artillery for an army that had not yet landed its own.

Omaha proved that the old dreadnought could hold a gun line for a week and keep hitting fortifications. But the strongpoints above Omaha had been sited mostly to fire along the beach, not out to sea. Two weeks later, at Cherbourg, Arkansas would face a battery built to fight ships.

The Allies needed a deep-water port, and the nearest was Cherbourg, at the northern tip of the Cotentin Peninsula. On June twenty-fifth, while the American seventh Corps attacked the city from the landward side, a naval task force was sent to bombard it from the sea. It was divided into two groups. The first, under Rear Admiral Morton Deyo, included the battleship Nevada. The second, under Rear Admiral Carleton Bryant, flying his flag in Texas, was Texas and Arkansas, with five destroyers.

Group Two's assignment was Battery Hamburg, near Fermanville, about six miles east of Cherbourg. It held four two-hundred-forty-millimeter guns, well separated, with steel shields and reinforced concrete casemates, manned by naval gunners and ringed by six eighty-eight-millimeter guns and more anti-aircraft positions. The battery could reach forty thousand yards. That was double the range of Arkansas's guns. To hit Hamburg at all, she would have to close to where Hamburg could hit her first.

The currents off Normandy slowed the battleships behind their minesweepers. Arkansas reached her shore fire control party by radio, closed the range to eighteen thousand yards, and at twelve oh eight, she opened fire. She was the first ship in her group to fire on the battery.

This was where her second-hand fire control became a danger. Her gyro-compasses failed whenever she maneuvered hard, so she could only shoot by holding a steady course and firing slowly. A ship doing that inside the range of a heavier battery is giving the enemy an easy target.

Her first salvos did no damage. As Group Two steamed into Hamburg's arc of fire, the German guns opened up. Every minesweeper was bracketed. The destroyer Barton was holed by a ricochet from another battery that failed to explode in her aft diesel room. The destroyer Laffey took a dud in her port bow. The destroyer O'Brien was hit on her bridge. Texas was straddled again and again, at intervals of twenty to thirty seconds, and was hit on the bridge that afternoon.

At thirteen thirty-five, Texas knocked out one of Battery Hamburg's big guns. She and Arkansas kept firing on Hamburg and on a battery nearby through the afternoon. When the two battleships strayed back into the arc of fire, Hamburg's three remaining guns concentrated on Texas, and a German one-hundred-five-millimeter battery found Arkansas. German shells fell around both battleships. One photograph from that afternoon shows a heavy German shell landing in the water between them. Arkansas was straddled several times. She was not hit.

The ships maneuvered, the destroyers laid smoke, and Group Two turned for Portland at fifteen oh one. Cherbourg fell to the Americans the next day. The German commander in the west, Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, later described Allied naval gunfire in Normandy as constantly available artillery, skillfully directed by air and ground spotters, with a high rapid-fire capacity at range.

The record Arkansas left in France is not a record of spectacular single hits. It is a record of presence. On June sixth she was one of the first American ships to fire, from a little over two miles off the worst beach of the invasion, on strongpoints that were killing the men below her. With the French cruisers, she helped knock out part of the battery at Longues. She stayed on the gun line for a week while the beachhead was built. At Cherbourg she closed to within range of a battery that could outrange her by double and came out undamaged.

And then the Navy kept using her. She sailed for the Mediterranean on July fourth, and on August fifteenth, nineteen forty-four, she was back on a gun line for Operation Dragoon, the invasion of southern France. In nineteen forty-five she went to the Pacific. At six in the morning on February sixteenth, she opened fire on Japanese positions on the west coast of Iwo Jima. At Okinawa, she supported the troops ashore for forty-six days. Kamikazes attacked her repeatedly. None struck her. She earned four battle stars in the war.

Then she went to Bikini Atoll as a target ship for the atomic tests of Operation Crossroads. On July first, nineteen forty-six, she survived the first test, an air burst, with heavy damage to her upper works. On July twenty-fifth, the second test was an underwater burst. Arkansas was among the ships closest to it, and she capsized and sank. She had been in commission for almost thirty-four years.

The judgment of nineteen forty-one had been correct in every way it was stated. Arkansas was too slow for a carrier task force. Her guns were the smallest in the American battle line. Her fire control was made of spares. Against a modern battleship at twenty thousand yards, she would have lost.

But nobody asked her to fight a modern battleship. They asked her to sit off a beach, a little over two miles from German guns in concrete, and keep firing until the infantry was off the sand. For that job, a slow ship did not need speed. A short-ranged gun did not need range. And an old ship that nobody needed for anything else was the ship the Navy could afford to put where the danger was. The critics had measured Arkansas against the battle she was never going to fight. At Omaha, she was measured against the one she was sent to.

At five fifty-two on the morning of June sixth, nineteen forty-four, a coal-era dreadnought fired her guns in anger for the first time in thirty-one years. She kept firing for most of the next year.