“What else could I do? You engage, you fight, you win. That is the reputation of our Navy, then and in the future.”
—Commander John Bulkeley, U.S. Navy
One of the essential preliminaries to Dragoon was the seizure by Sitka Force of the two small offshore Îles d’Hyères, Le Levant and Port-Cros, situated on the southern side of the landing zones, and the silencing of the 164mm batteries thought to be positioned on Le Levant. The guns posed a considerable threat to the main divisional landings. In the interwar years, the island of Port-Cros had been the haunt of literary luminaries André Malraux, André Gide, and Paul Valéry. (Today some 90 percent of Le Levant is now given over to a French weapons testing establishment and the remainder has a thriving tourist industry, much of it devoted to nudism.) Both islands are rocky and pine-covered, with sandy beaches on the landward side and fifty-foot cliffs on the seaward shore. The decision was taken to attack from the seaward side of the islands as it was anticipated that the Germans had discounted the possibility of an assault from this quarter.
The mission was entrusted to Rear Admiral Lyal A. Davidson’s Task Force 86 and its associated Special Forces formations. The task of Sitka Force, consisting of the First Special Service Force (FSSF) commanded by Colonel Edwin A. Walker, and the Naval Task Unit 86.3, was the elimination of the threat to the Alpha assault area posed by the German guns and the opening of the approach to the Rade (Roads) d’Hyères, which was to be used by warships supporting the westward drive on Toulon. The men of the FSSF, all hardened veterans, had spent several days preparing for the mission at Propriano Bay in Corsica, where there was “little to do but swim and fish.” The “Black Devils,” as they were known, were unfazed by their new assignment, and many of them relaxed by sleeping or jitterbugging to the dance band music played over the loudspeaker systems.
The man in operational charge of the Sitka operation was Rear Admiral T. E. Chandler, flying his flag in Prince Henry, a converted Canadian vessel similar to a US destroyer transport, plus the Royal Navy landing ship HMS Prince Baudouin, five more destroyer transports, and gunfire support vessels. Just before midnight on August 14, Chandler’s squadron anchored five miles off the islands, and shortly afterward the first of Sitka Force’s boats were in the water. Low-profile LCAs (Landing Craft, Assault) towed the rubber boats of First Special Service Force to within 1,000 yards of Le Levant and Port-Cros before casting them off. Ahead of the first wave were scouts paddling in one-man kayaks or lying prone on surfboards to check the target beaches and guide the first wave in with hooded lights. It was, to the very hour, the first anniversary of the Allied occupation of Kiska, in the Aleutians, in which FSSF had played a part. True to their first commander, Robert Frederick, the men of FSSF were as contrarian as ever. Before they clambered down into their boats on the debarkation netting hung on the side of the destroyer transport USS Tattnall, every man was handed two fragmentation grenades by sailors on the orders of the Tattnall’s captain. The Black Devils took a dim view of carrying the extra weight onto the shore and, after obediently accepting them, quickly found convenient ways of discarding the unwanted grenades on their downward journey.
The 2nd and 3rd Regiments, FSSF, some 1,300 men, landed without opposition on the southeastern side of Le Levant. Having scaled the cliffs, the 2nd Regiment struck southwest while the men of the 3rd Regiment battled through head-high maquis overgrowth, forging north to deal with the 164mm battery at Pointe Titan on the northeastern tip of the island only to discover, to their great disappointment, that the guns were cleverly constructed dummies. Shortly afterward, they came under fire from German mortars and machine guns concealed in a complex of caves on the other side of the narrow tip of the island. Colonel Walker ordered his men to move on the enemy position, which was held by men from a static unit of 242nd Infantry Division, while gunfire support came from the British destroyer HMS Lookout. In the late evening the German garrison surrendered, having inflicted about seventy-five killed and wounded casualties on Walker’s force, all of whom were evacuated to the Prince Henry, along with 110 men from the Le Levant garrison and 57 badly burned German sailors from a torpedoed German auxiliary destroyer.
In the small hours of August 15, the U.S. Navy was in a sharp naval action off Le Levant. Patrolling off the island, the destroyer Somers* picked up on her search radar a contact of two ships at about 16,000 yards. They were challenged but the ships did not identify themselves. When, at 0440, one of them did not respond to a searchlight challenge, the Somers, having closed to 4,750 yards, opened fire, fatally damaging one of the ships and pursuing the other until it stopped dead in the water at 0520. At dawn the Somers’s captain, Commander W. C. Hughes, identified the first ship as a former Italian corvette Escabart (UJ6081) and the second as another former Italian ship Camoscio (SG21), which sank an hour later. Hughes sent a boarding party across before she went down, and rescued a total of ninety-nine men from both ships. Homer Bigart, a war correspondent embedded with the Black Devils on Le Levant, witnessed the Somers’s engagement with the corvette: “We were just getting into the underbrush when the sky suddenly went red and we turned to see a ship convulsed in a violent explosion four miles up the coast. We thought at first one of ours had struck a mine, but it later developed that the ship was a German corvette that had left Toulon a few hours earlier on a nightly coastal patrol. She was carrying several tons of gasoline and machine gun bullets and the cargo was afire before the corvette could lash back at her tormentors. The skipper was killed but more than forty members of her crew, some horribly burned, were picked up and brought to our ship.”
To the west, on Port-Cros, the plans of FSSF’s 1st Regiment were about to unravel. Here the garrison had retreated to a château in the island’s northwest corner and two stone forts dating from the Napoleonic era, the most formidable of which was the Fort de l’Eminence, the garrison’s headquarters, which boasted a roof protected by gravel and earth twenty feet thick and was ringed by machine gun nests. All three positions beat off infantry assaults, obliging the shore fire control party to call for gunfire support, which arrived at about 0900 from the 8-inch main batteries of the heavy cruiser Augusta. By mid-afternoon, the Augusta had fired ninety-two unavailing rounds that failed to persuade the Germans to throw in the towel. According to an eyewitness, “The rounds bounced off the heavy forts like tennis balls.” A sustained rocket and bomb attack on August 17 by RAF Typhoon fighter-bombers was no more successful. Eventually, one of the forts was infiltrated and forced to surrender, but the others held out.
Much of this was witnessed by Secretary of the Navy Forrestal, who had come aboard the Augusta on August 15 accompanied by Admiral Davidson. After he expressed a desire to take a closer look at the action, Forrestal was taken ashore in a landing craft and coolly watched the fight for Port-Cros from under the shade of a tree. German resistance was finally broken when, on August 17, the Royal Navy battleship Ramillies, supported by the Augusta, was brought up to batter the fortresses with twelve rounds from her 15-inch guns. Shortly before 1400 on August 17 the Germans, seeing that further resistance was futile, surrendered. In the fight for Port-Cros FSSF had five men killed and ten wounded, while the German losses were ten killed and 105 captured. The British destroyer Dido sent the elderly battleship a saucy signal, “Many a good tune can be played on an old fiddle!”
In the small hours of August 15, a number of dedicated deception exercises had been launched on both flanks of the assault area. The first aimed to suggest an airborne landing at Baie de la Ciotat between Toulon and Marseille, as C-47s dropped three hundred life-size dummy parachutists festooned with demolition charges near La Ciotat. The deception achieved some initial traction but was swiftly discounted by Army Group G. The dummy parachute drop was followed by an operation conducted by the Special Operations Force’s Western Diversionary Unit. Eleven air-sea rescue craft, two motor launches (MLs), eight patrol torpedo boats (PTs), and the destroyer USS Endicott† raced into the Baie de la Ciotat, deploying radar reflecting balloons and loudspeakers to create the impression of a larger force, the effect being enhanced by aircraft dropping chaff. On the Endicott’s bridge was Commander John Bulkeley, who had won a Medal of Honor captaining the PT boat that had extracted General MacArthur, his staff, and his family from the Philippines in March 1942. On the eastern flank of the assault area, the prewar movie star Douglas Fairbanks, now a lieutenant commander in the U.S. Naval Reserve and, appropriately for the man who played Rupert of Hentzau in The Prisoner of Zenda, an expert in the art of military deception, led a small force of PT boats and other craft making a feint toward Genoa and a demonstration off Cannes. These ships were part of the Eastern Diversionary Force, Task Unit 80.4.2, also known as Rosie Force, which was commanded by Fairbanks. The elderly British Insect-class gunboats HMS Scarab and HMS Aphis, also elements of Rosie Force, shelled German positions near Antibes, aiming to plant the seeds of doubt in German minds as to the precise location of the anticipated landings. These measures undoubtedly caused some confusion in the minds of German commanders in the South of France, but as Army Group G had few mobile reserves it possessed only a limited ability to respond to threats real or imagined.
Bulkeley was involved in a second deception operation off La Ciotat on August 17 when seventeen PT boats, and the Scarab and the Aphis, followed by the Endicott, sank a German merchant steamer in the harbor. The warships then bombarded the town before spotting two German ships, the former Italian Gabbiano-class corvette Antilope (UJ6082), whose sister ship the Escabart had been sunk off Port-Cros on August 15 by the Somers, and a former Egyptian armed yacht Nimet Allah (UJ6081). The German boats were engaged by Scarab and Aphis which forced them to withdraw. The Endicott, which could deploy only a single 5-inch gun during the action, then opened fire from within 1,500 yards. In a duel lasting nearly an hour both German vessels were sunk while the Endicott’s side was torn open by a shell that failed to explode. When later asked why he had chosen to take on a fight with two vessels that at the time outgunned him, Bulkeley replied, “What else could I do? You engage, you fight, you win. That is the reputation of our Navy, then and in the future.”
The first assaults on mainland France were the task of Romeo Force, consisting of the French Commandos d’Afrique, who were to land at Cap Nègre, a thickly forested promontory jutting into the Mediterranean on the western end of the assault area five miles from the town of Le Lavandou. The vessels carrying them broke off from Task Force 86 at 2155 and launched the commandos shoreward at approximately 2230. However, the operation was complicated by some fussy planning. Sixty commandos were to land on a rocky beach at the bottom of a 350-foot cliff at the southeastern corner of Cap Nègre while a single scout was to go ashore to mark landing sites for the main body of commandos at Rayol Beach, two miles to the east. Two small parties would follow at 0050 to secure rocky points on both sides of the Rayol landing area before the main force went in at 0100.
Then the weather made its presence known. A gentle westerly current nudged the leading landing craft off course while the haze that was later to hamper the parachute landings of First Airborne Task Force made it impossible for coxswains of the landing craft to positively identify landmarks as they drifted westward, landing their troops, and those in the landing craft that followed, about a mile from their objective. The commandos came ashore at Cap Nègre under heavy fire, while the jeeps and heavy equipment intended for Rayol Beach were delivered to another beach, Canadel, which lacked suitable exits; the equipment was reloaded and taken off, again under fire. Nevertheless, the commandos who had landed at Cap Nègre overran artillery positions, cleared pillboxes, and bunkers, and set up a roadblock at the base of the promontory before beating off a German counterattack launched toward midmorning on the 15th. The men who had landed at Rayol cleared the beach, with gunfire support from the cruisers Dido and Augusta, and established a second blocking position on the coast road, which was shortly to be reinforced by men of the U.S. 3rd Division advancing from their landings in the Baie de Cavalaire. The Commandos d’Afrique lost eleven men in the operation, with some fifty wounded while killing three hundred Germans and taking one thousand prisoner. A third group of commandos advanced a little over three miles inland toward the small town of La Môle, nestling in thick forests in the heart of the Maures Massif. By midday La Môle had been cleared of scattered German opposition and an artillery battery had been established on high ground at the edge of the town.
On the eastern flank of the of the assault area, on the western edge of the Golfe de la Napoule, lay the coastal town of Théoule-sur-Mer, boasting the vivid red stone of the Esterel Massif and the target of sixty-seven marines of the French Naval Assault Group, who landed as part of the Rosie operation at 0140 from rubber assault craft at Deux Frères Pointe, a mile south of the little port. The marines had advanced only a few hundred yards inland when they walked into a freshly laid and extensive minefield, taking casualties and alerting the Germans, who took them prisoner at daylight.‡ Although it had not set up a blocking point along the coastal road, the Rosie operation, combined with the successful Romeo landings to the west, drew German attention away from the main assault beaches, where the principal blow was about to fall.