Hi, I'm the History Guy. I love history and if
you love history too this is the channel for you. 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 forgotten history, about ten minutes long,
and if you did enjoy please go ahead and click that thumbs up button which is there
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