The Forgotten Heroes of D-Day

Today is the 82^nd anniversary of the D-Day landings.  Whilst I note that Normandy is hosting a whole host of events today to celebrate the achievement, celebrations in this country seem rather muted.  Accordingly, I wish to pay tribute to a gallant group of men of whom few have heard, the Landing Craft Obstacle Clearance Units or LCOCU, known as the Lock-yews.

Long before D-Day itself, the planners recognised that Hitler’s formidable Atlantic Wall defences extended beyond the shore and into the sea.  Beneath the waves at High Water had been constructed several steel frameworks up to ten feet in height.  Known as ‘hedgehogs’, the spines of these obstacles were littered with explosives so that any landing craft running over them would be destroyed.  It fell to the Royal Navy planning staff for Operation Neptune to neutralise these obstacles or else the landings would fail, even before the soldiers reached the shore.  Moreover, the beaches of potential landing sites in France were littered with tank traps and mines, including the infamous butterfly-shaped Teller mines.  Many of these were made from bakelite and wood, and so could not be detected by metal detectors.  The solution to the problem was to train a group of 120 extremely brave ‘human minesweepers’!

The men started their specialist training in January 1944, first at the Submarine Training School and then in Appledore, Devon.  They were formed into ten units, six of which comprised Royal Marines and four of naval frogmen.  On D-Day at H-Hour, ie the very beginning of the assault, the units deployed from landing craft and inflatable boats towards the Juno, Sword and Gold beaches.  Wearing their rubber diving suits with ‘rebreather’ tanks to avoid giving away tell-tale bubbles, they swam hell-for-leather towards the beaches.  Above them the Allies and German were exchanging heavy shell-fire.  Systematically, they began by dismantling the explosive booby-traps on the underwater obstacles.  Then they had to destroy the steel frames themselves to prevent them ripping out the keels of the following landing craft.  As they reached the shore line, they came under fire from snipers, machine guns and mortar fire.  They struggled in the heavy surf, but succeeded in creating a gap for the first batches of landing craft.  As the soldiers leapt ashore, they began to overpower the enemy machine gun and mortar posts and the frogmen were able to widen the safe corridor for the landing craft.  In all, the Lock-yews destroyed thousands of obstacles, but that didn’t mean the beaches were safe.

The following day, Naval Parties of Rendering Mines Safe (RMS) specialists were landed to deal with not just the deadly Teller mines, but thousands of unexploded shells from both sides of the fight.  The men then had to move swiftly onto the task of clearing the French ports in preparation for the ships of the invasion force.  I recount the exploits of the RMS teams in my Death to Touch’WW2 series of three books, the third of which covering D-Day should be published by the end of 2026.  Whilst I feel I have highlighted the courage of the RMS units, I think the tremendous feats of the Lock-yews have been overlooked.  Without them and their US equivalents, D-Day would have been a fiasco.