GUEST OPINION: Soldier loses life onboard seagoing tank on D-Day

By JIM WATKINS, guest columnist

Twenty-four-year-old Jesse Thurl Campbell, of rural Spearsville, was due in France June 5, but stormy weather in the English Channel necessitated a change in plans.

For Supreme Allied Cmdr. Gen. Eisenhower, a man whose adult life was filled with important decisions none was more important than the one he now had to make.

The weather forecast for June 6 was not markedly better than that of June 5, but hundreds of thousands of Allied troops, sailors and airmen awaited his orders. Eisenhower knew that the tides would not favor an invasion again for nearly two weeks, long enough for the Germans to possibly learn of the Allies’ plan.

Eisenhower gave the order and set in motion the largest amphibious invasion in world history; an armada of over 4,000 warships, nearly 10,000 aircraft and some 160,000 invasion troops.

Campbell would be part of this historical confrontation. June 6, 1944 would be D-Day for Operation Overlord — the Allied invasion of Normandy on the coast of France. The coast had five designated zones, or “beaches,” with the code names Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno and Sword in which the Allied forces would attack Hitler’s heavily fortified Atlantic Wall. Omaha Beach would turn out to be the most formidable. This was Campbell’s destination.

According to an article in The Democrat the large Campbell family was well-known in the northern part of Brown County. Among other occupations and activities Campbell’s father Alexander was a highly respected citizen of the county having served as county assessor and as a commissioner.

Watkins

Jesse’s mother died when he was just 13. Alexander would remarry adding her daughter and two sons to the family. Four sons — Wesley, Kenneth, Curtis and Orville — in addition to Jesse would all see service in the Army.

Jesse was inducted in January of 1942. After basic training he was assigned to the recently formed 741st Tank Battalion. With his battalion he crisscrossed the country moving from one training camp to another developing the basic maneuvering and gunnery skills necessary for tank warfare.

At Camp Bradford, Virginia the 741st would undergo special training that would be vital to their most important mission. They would work on amphibious training. This training included loading and unloading their tanks aboard Navy craft and practicing assault landings. There would be further training exercises when they traveled to England.

The men of the 741st arrived in England in August of 1943. Waiting for them were their Sherman tanks. But these were different.

Designated the Duplex Drive Sherman, or simply the “DD tank,” they were also called the “Swimming Tank.”

The seagoing DD was a 33-ton Sherman tank equipped with rear-mounted propellers and powered by the same engine that moved it overland. Its watertight body was fitted with a canvas flotation collar that could be raised on steel arms to cover the upper part of the tank. The inflated collar displaced enough water to float the tank. The turret would be above the water line with the rest of the tank submerged.

The coming months in England would be spent training for their vital mission of assaulting the Normandy beaches. That plan involved being first ashore, dropping their collars and firing to destroy the German concrete gun emplacements, the pillboxes. This would hopefully pave the way for the infantry’s advancing to set up a foothold by the end of the first day of battle.

In the months leading up to D-Day Jesse was a frequent letter writer.

“I like it here just fine,” he wrote his father.

“The country is sure pretty here and the people are swell. I can get all I need here. Tell everyone there hello for me and I’ll write soon. Take care of yourself and write often.” Jesse was able to hook up with his brother Curtis in the spring of 1944. Curtis likewise would be involved in the D-Day invasion.

The weather on the June 6 was better than June 5, but not appreciably. There was less rain, but the seas were just as rough, or rougher, than the day before. And that was one aspect that had not been adequately dealt with in the training regimen. The waves were too high.

Each LCT (Landing Craft Tank) ship would carry four Sherman tanks to within two miles of the beach before launching. The 6-foot waves gave the LCT’s a lot of trouble and some of them launched their Shermans three miles out instead of two. The Shermans had never trained in anything more than 1-foot waves!

On Sword and Utah beaches the majority of the DD tanks successfully swam to shore. On Omaha Beach, 27 of the 29 tanks sank at sea. Jesse was aboard one of the 27.

A. J. Liebling, a writer for The New Yorker, was in a landing craft that day.

Around noon, five drenched and shivering rescued soldiers were transferred to their boat. They were in fact tank soldiers like Jesse. Their craft had been swamped by a wave and their tank immediately sank. They were able to get to the raft that was part of their equipment before going down with the tank.

“The sergeant in command was a fellow from Cleveland. He was especially happy about being saved because he liked his wife. He would keep repeating ‘Gee, to think it’s my second anniversary! I guess it’s my lucky day!’ But when he heard about what we thought had happened to the men we put ashore, he grew gloomy. The tanks had been headed for that beach and should have helped knock out the German pillboxes. ‘If we hadn’t got swamped maybe those other guys wouldn’t have been killed.’ He had a soldier’s heart,” Liebling wrote.

Unlike those “lucky” soldiers rescued by Liebling’s landing craft Jesse was not. Jesse’s body washed ashore July 26, 1944 — 142 miles up the coast from Omaha Beach at Dieppe. Jesse Campbell had arrived in France.

The cover of “The Fallen” by Jim Watkins that memorializes Brown County soldiers who never returned home from World War II. “Every fatality of war is a tragic story. The enormity of it nationwide taxes all comprehension, but when narrowed down to a little rural area of middle America one is more able to appreciate the terrible sacrifices made during that time,” Watkins said.

Of the many difficult jobs in the military one of the most heartrending is conducted by the U.S. Army Quartermaster Graves Registration Service. Working with reverence and respect to preserve the dignity of those who sacrificed their lives they labor to correctly identify those many fallen souls. It was through the laundry markings on Jesse’s clothing as well as his estimated height and hair color that Graves Registration was able to identify him.

Jessie Higgins, writing for the Evansville Courier and Press in June of 2016 on that year’s anniversary of D-Day, recounted from the Campbell family history as related by Tammy Cravens, Curtis’ daughter, of the events of that perilous day.

Tammy said her dad survived having been on a landing craft that broke down and never made it that day to Normandy. Her family eventually came to possess a collection of Jesse’s items from overseas that included his wallet, some French money, ID cards and pictures.

Jesse T. Campbell is buried or memorialized at Plot C Row 8 in Ardennes American Cemetery in Neupre, Belgium. This is an American Battle Monuments Commission location.

Jim Watkins is a Brown County Historical Society member who wrote “The Fallen,” a memorial document about young men from Brown County who never returned home from World War II. Watkins was a public school teacher for 42 years and has always been interested in learning about WWII. He can be reached at [email protected].