Mulberry was a code name used for either of two artificial harbours designed and constructed by the British in World War II to facilitate the unloading of supply ships off the coast of Normandy, France, immediately following the invasion of Europe on D-Day, June 6, 1944. One harbour, known as
Mulberry A, was constructed off Saint-Laurent at Omaha Beach in the American sector, and the other, Mulberry B, was built off Arromanches at Gold Beach in the British sector. Each harbour, when fully operational, had the capacity to move 7,000 tons of vehicles and supplies per day from ship to shore.
Each Mulberry harbour consisted of roughly 6 miles (10 km) of flexible steel roadways (code-named Whales) that floated on steel or concrete pontoons (called Beetles). The roadways terminated at great pierheads, called Spuds, that were jacked up and down on legs that rested on the seafloor.
These structures were to be sheltered from the sea by lines of massive sunken caissons (called Phoenixes), lines of scuttled ships (called Gooseberries), and a line of floating breakwaters (called Bombardons). It was estimated that construction of the caissons alone required 330,000 cubic yards of concrete,
31,000 tons of steel, and 1.5 million yards of steel shuttering.
One of the floating Mulberry roadways being put to good use at Omaha Beach in Normandy, France.
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The Mulberry harbours were conceived after the failed amphibious raid on the French port of Dieppe in August 1942.
The German defense of the coast of western Europe was built on formidable defenses around ports and port facilities.
Because of the strength of these defenses, the Allies had to consider other means to push large quantities of provisions across the beaches in the early stages of an invasion. The
British solution to the problem was to bring their own port with them. This solution had the support of Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who in May 1943 wrote the following note:
Piers for use on beaches: They must float up and down with the tide. The anchor problem must be mastered.… Let me have the best solution worked out. Don’t argue the matter. The
difficulties will argue for themselves.
With Churchill’s support, the artificial harbours received immediate attention, resources, time, and energy.
The various parts of the Mulberries were fabricated in secrecy in Britain and floated into position immediately after D-Day. Within 12 days of the landing (D-Day plus 12), both harbours were operational. They were intended to provide the
primary means for the movement of goods from ship to shore until the port at Cherbourg was captured and opened.
However, on June 19 a violent storm began, and by June 22 the American harbour was destroyed. (Parts of the wreckage were used to repair the British harbour.) The Americans had to return to the old way of doing things: bringing landing ships in to shore, grounding them, off-loading the ships, and then
refloating them on the next high tide. The British Mulberry supported the Allied armies for 10 months. Two and a half million men, a half million vehicles, and four million tons of supplies landed in Europe through the artificial harbour at Arromanches. Remains of the structure can be seen to this day near the Musée du Débarquement.
LOGISTICS IN THE NUCLEAR AGE
The dropping of the first atomic bombs in August 1945 seemed to inaugurate a new era in warfare, demanding radical changes in
logistic systems and techniques. The bombs did, in truth, give birth to a new line of weaponry of unprecedented destructive power. Within a decade they were followed by the thermonuclear weapon, an even greater leap in destructive force. Development of intercontinental ballistic missiles and nuclear-powered, missile-firing submarines a few years later extended the potential range of destruction to targets anywhere on the globe. The following decades saw dramatic
developments in the offensive capabilities of nuclear weapons and also, for the first time, in defenses against them. But the world moved into the late 20th century without any of the new nuclear weaponry having been used in anger. Most warfare, moreover, was limited in scale and made little use of advanced technology. It produced only nine highly mobilized war economies: the two Koreas (1950–53), Israel (1956, 1967, 1973), North Vietnam (1965–75), Biafra (1967–
70), Iran and Iraq (1980–88)—all except Israel preindustrial Third World countries.
The first major conflict in this period, the war in Korea (1950–53), seemed in many ways an extension of the positional campaigns in World War II. It was fought largely with World War II weapons, in some cases improved versions, and with stocks of munitions left over from that conflict. United Nations forces had an excellent base in nearby Japan, whose factories made a major contribution by
rebuilding U.S. World War II material. UN air superiority kept both Japan and Pusan, South Korea’s major port of entry, free from
communist air attack. UN forces thus were able to funnel through Pusan supply tonnages comparable to those handled by the largest ports in World War II and to concentrate depots and other
installations in the Pusan area to a degree that would have been suicidal without air superiority. The communist supply system,
although technically primitive, functioned well under UN air attack, moving troops and supplies by night, organizing local labour, and exploiting the Chinese soldier’s famous ability to fight well under
extreme privation.
By World War II standards, the Korean War was a limited conflict (except for the two Korean belligerents, on whose soil it was fought).
It involved only a partial, or “creeping,” economic mobilization in the United States and a modest mobilization of reserves. Yet this was no small war. Over three years about 37.2 million measurement tons of cargo were poured into the South Korean ports, more than three- fourths of the amount shipped to U.S. Army forces in all the Pacific theatres in World War II. Combined UN forces reached a peak
strength of almost one million men; communist forces were considerably larger.
NEW TECHNOLOGY
Advances in the technology of supply and movement after 1945 were not commensurate with those in weaponry. On land, internal-
combustion vehicles and railroads, with increasing use of diesel fuel in both, remained the basic instruments of large-scale troop and
freight movement despite their growing vulnerability to attack. In the most modern systems, substantial amounts of motor transport were capable of crossing shallow water obstacles. In areas not yet
penetrated by rail or metaled roads—areas where much of the warfare of the period occurred—surface movement necessarily reverted to the ancient modes of human and animal porterage,
sometimes usefully supplemented by the bicycle. Some exotic types of vehicles capable of negotiating rough and soft terrain off the roads
were designed and tested—the “hovercraft,” or aircushion vehicle, for instance. But none of these innovations came into general use. The most promising developments in overland movement were helicopters and vertical-takeoff-and-landing aircraft, along with techniques of rapid airfield construction, which enabled streamlined airmobile forces and their logistic tails to overleap terrain obstacles and greatly reduced their dependence on roads, airfields, and forward bases.
Helicopters also permitted the establishment and maintenance of isolated artillery fire bases in enemy territory.
In air movement there was a spectacular growth in the range and payload capacity of transport aircraft. The pistonengine transports of World War II vintage that carried out the Berlin airlift of 1948–49 had a capacity of about four tons and a maximum range of 1,500 miles (2,400 km). The U.S. C-141 jet transport, which went into service in 1965, had a 45-ton capacity and a range of 3,000 miles (4,800 km); it could take an average payload of 24 tons from the U.S.
West Coast to South Vietnam in 43 hours and evacuate wounded back to the East Coast (10,000 miles, or 16,000 km) in less than a day. By 1970 these capabilities were dwarfed by the new “global logistics” C- 5A, with payloads up to 130 tons and ranges up to 5,500 miles (8,800 km). It is estimated that 10 C-5As could have handled the entire
Berlin airlift, which employed more than 140 of the then-available aircraft. C-5As played a vital role in the U.S. airlift to Israel during the Arab-Israeli War of October 1973. Very large cargo helicopters were also developed, notably in the Soviet Union, as were new
techniques for packaging and air-dropping cargo.
In this period, movement by sea was the only branch of logistics that tapped the huge potential of nuclear propulsion. Its principal application, however, was in submarines, which did not develop a significant logistic function. (Development of nuclear-powered aircraft proved abortive.) The Soviet Union produced a
nuclearpowered icebreaker in 1957, and the United States launched the first nuclear-powered merchant ship in 1959. But high initial and operating costs and (in the West) vested mercantile interests barred extensive construction of nuclear merchant ships. Except for
supertankers built after the Suez crisis in 1956, and again during the energy crisis of the 1970s, seaborne cargo movement still depended on ships not radically different from those used in World War II. The chief technical improvement in sea lift, embodied in a few special- purpose vessels, was the “roll-on-roll-off” feature, first used in World War II landing craft, which permitted loading and discharge of
vehicles without hoisting. Containerization, the stowage of irregularly shaped freight in sealed, reusable containers of uniform size and
shape, became widespread in commercial ship operations and significantly affected ship design.
This period saw further development, from World War II models, of large vessels capable of discharging landing craft and vehicles offshore or over a beach as well as transporting troops, cargo, and helicopters in amphibious operations. For follow-up operations, improved attack cargo ships were built, such as the British landing-
ship logistic, with accommodations for landing craft, helicopters, vehicles and tanks, landing ramps, and heavy-cargo-handling equipment. More revolutionary additions to the technology of
amphibious logistics were the American landing vehicle hydrofoil and the BARC, both amphibians with pneumatic-tired wheels for overland movement and, in the latter case, capacity for 100 tons of cargo.
Hydrofoil craft, which skimmed at high speeds above the water on submerged inclined planes, developed a varied family of types by 1970.
The revolution in electronic communication after World War II also had a profound impact on logistic administration. In advanced logistic systems the combination of advanced electronic
communication with the high-speed electronic computer almost wholly replaced the elaborate processes of message transmission, record search, and record keeping formerly involved in supply
administration, making the response of supply to demand automatic and virtually instantaneous.
STRATEGIC MOBILITY
Because the leading military powers did not directly fight each other during the decades after World War II, none of them had to deal with the classic logistic problem of deploying and supporting forces over sea lines of communication exposed to enemy attack. The Soviet
Union was able in 1962 to establish a missile base in Cuba manned by some 25,000 troops without interference by the United States until its
offensive purpose was detected. Similarly, the large deployments of U.S. forces to Korea, Southeast Asia, and elsewhere, as well as the 8,000-mile (12,800-km) movement of a British expeditionary force to the Falkland Islands in 1982, encountered no opposition.
Yet the problem of strategic mobility was of major concern after 1945 to the handful of nations with far-flung interests and the
capacity to project military power far beyond their borders. In the tightly controlled power politics of the period, each of these countries needed the capability to bring military force quickly to bear to
protect its interests in local emergencies at remote points—as Great Britain and France did at Suez, Egypt, in 1956, the United States in Lebanon in 1958 and in the Taiwan Straits in 1959, Great Britain in Kuwait in 1961 and in the Falkland Islands in 1982, and France in Chad on several occasions in the 1980s. The most effective
instruments for such interventions were small, powerful, mobile task forces brought in by air or sea as well as forward-deployed aircraft- carrier and amphibious forces. The United States developed strong and versatile intervention capabilities, with major fleets deployed in the far Pacific and the Mediterranean; a worldwide network of bases and alliances; large ground and air forces in Europe, Korea, and Southeast Asia; and, in the 1960s, a mobile strategic reserve of several divisions with longrange sea-lift and airlift capabilities. The Soviet Union, Great Britain, and France had more limited capabilities, although the Soviet Union began in the late 1960s to deploy strong naval and air forces into the eastern Mediterranean and also
maintained a naval presence in the Indian Ocean. After the U.S.
withdrawal from Vietnam in 1973, the Soviet navy extended its power into the South China Sea.