Valor Friday

Captain Quentin Walsh, USCG

Recently, the keel for a guided missile destroyer was laid down. This future US Navy ship is being named USS Quentin Walsh. DDG-132 is named not for a US Navy hero, but rather a Coastie. Though admittedly, the US Coast Guard was under the Navy Department at the time of his particular noteworthy heroics, as it happened during World War II. His actions were part of the larger Invasion of Normandy, aka D-Day, the 81st Anniversary of which is happening this very day.

Walsh’s story begins humbly enough. Born in 1910 in Providence, Rhode Island, he attended the US Coast Guard Academy, graduating in 1933. As a young officer he served on Coast Guard cutters intercepting rum runners along the American Atlantic coast. In the late 1930s he spent a year observing a modern whaling ship operation, traveling the world with them. He produced a three volume report on whaling, which was used by the Commerce Department (under which the USCG operated) in their policy to oppose commercial whaling.

By the time of the Second World War, Walsh was a lieutenant commander in rank, and assigned to administrative duties. He was sent to England, and there he became a bigot. BIGOT is an acronym that’s been said to mean “British Invasion of German Occupied Territory.” The actual origin of the phrase is less clear, but it’s thought to actually be a codeword wherein “to gib” as in “to Gibraltar” is reversed. Gibraltar, the tiny British port on the southern tip of neutral Spain, was the stopping point for high value mission planners as they flew to the North Africa campaign. This avoided the heavily U-Boat patrolled ocean routes taken by the less well connected troops.

In any case, the “Bigot list” carried the names of those men and women cleared at the highest levels to work on the most critical of strategic war plans. After the Invasion of North Africa came the Invasion of Sicily, then Italy, southern France, and then Normandy. It was on the latter, Operation Overlord, that Walsh was a bigot.

Walsh’s task was to plan the invasion, capture, and holding of the French port at Cherbourg. Cherbourg was a deep water port, which is something the Allies would need if they hoped to achieve more than a mere toehold on the continent. Capturing the port in-tact was going to be critical to continued success after the initial landing (what became known as D-Day). Walsh devised a plan in which a small unit of specially trained naval commandos would take the port and access the damages. He volunteered to lead the operation himself.

Other plans around the Normandy operation that Walsh had a role in planning were Mulberry, Gooseberries, Pluto, and a special Raskin Plan “C”. Mulberry was the well-known giant floating pier system the Allies installed on the shores of Normandy to bring men and materiel in. Gooseberries were the lesser-known ships intentionally sunk just off shore to provide an artificial breakwater to make going ashore easier for the landing craft. Pluto was a massive welded pipeline laid across England and then the Channel to pump fuel from Liverpool to France to support the war machine.

Raskin Plan C is a virtually unheard of plan, but probably one of many such contingency plans made, that would be followed should the German troops in France surrender to the arriving Allies. Walsh wrote in his memoirs that “Few officer read the plan or were aware it existed,” and that “I have never met anyone who ever heard of it.” Since the German troops in France didn’t surrender, this particular plan never again saw the light of day.

The bulk of the planning for D-Day was completed by the end of January 1944. This left Walsh free to train with the men he would be leading at Cherbourg. He arrived in Scotland in April to do so. He hand picked 52 men of the US Army to join his operation. They all came from a group of 300 volunteers. He requested 10 officers and men of the 28th Infantry Division to be assigned to train he and his team on reconnaissance operations.

Walsh and his men would train six days a week from 0600-2200 hours. His personal philosophy was “The tougher the training would make it easier to solve future situations.”

As their fateful day in June started to approach, Walsh reported in to General Lawton Collins, VII Corps commander, and ordered to arrive on Utah Beach on D+4, as Collins planned to take Cherbourg on D+20 (instead of the original D+6). Owing to the extreme secrecy of the mission, Walsh was ordered not to carry written orders nor operational plans, not to keep a diary, and not to have a camera.

Carried across the Channel by Liberty Ship, Walsh landed on D+3, 9 June 1944, at Utah Beach. While the beachhead had been secured and tens of thousands of Allied troops were pouring into France, the Germans were putting up a good fight. Walsh arrived on Utah Beach under frequent German artillery shelling. The men had donned wax impregnated uniforms, in preparation for enemy gas attacks. The uniforms, while protective against chemical weapons, had the downside of being heavy and not breathing well. Walsh said, “It was like walking around in a steam bath all day when the weather was warm but in an ice pack at night or when the weather was cloudy and cold, which it was most of the time.” They’d be stuck in these terrible uniforms until after their coming action at Cherbourg.

After coming ashore, Walsh and his men were strafed by German Luftwaffe aircraft. The bombardment resulted in six men being injured, four badly enough that they were sent back to England, and they hadn’t even really started fighting yet. Walsh’s team were eventually moved to near Cherbourg with the 79th Infantry Division. Walsh and his men crossed the heavily fortified Fort Du Roule to gain entry to the port of Cherbourg from the east.

Inside the port, Walsh and his recce troops engaged in constant street fighting with the retreating Germans. That first day saw them battle for roughly 13 hours, starting at 0600, until they reached the waterfront, where Walsh was able to make his first reports on the condition of the port.

Fighting through Cherbourg from house to house, the Germans would be rendering the port inoperable until the Americans could pacify the entire area. In furtherance of this goal, Walsh led a group of 16 of his men in an assault on the final German redoubt at the port city’s arsenal. With Thompson sub-machine guns, bazookas, and hand grenades, they fought their way past enemy snipers to blow open the armored doors of the arsenal. Inside they captured 400 enemy troops.

Walsh and one of his officers then approached the German command post at Fort Du Homet. Arriving under a white flag of truce, Walsh bluffed his way into getting the German general’s surrender. They captured more than 350 Wehrmacht men and liberated 52 American paratroopers that the Germans had earlier captured.

Once the enemy had been dealt with, Walsh took on the task of turning Cherbourg into an operating port once more. This required interrogating the enemy troops and civilian dock workers to map out the mine fields, relaying that information by small boat to the waiting fleet, and deciding which of the French locals could be trusted to help with this ordeal until he was relieved a few days later.

For his actions at Cherbourg, Walsh was awarded the Navy Cross. Normally, naval line officers do not receive valor awards for actions ashore. When they do, they haven’t been leading ground combat, and this might be one of the only time a Coast Guard officer received a valor decoration for leading Army troops in that ground combat.

For the rest of July, Walsh helped run the Cherbourg port. When his commanding officer Navy Captain Norman Ives (who had received the Navy Cross as a peacetime decoration as an early submarine commander) was leading a reconnaissance party and was killed in action on the Brittany Peninsula, Walsh took over. He reassembled his commando team, and augmented them with another 350 men. Walsh and his men reconnoitered Brest and LeHavre.

Walsh suffered from a lung condition, which he’d contracted while training in England. His combat service had forced it to flare up again in July, but he battled that as well as the Nazis for a few months. By mid-September, when he was once again relieved by the arrival of a higher ranking naval officer, it was insurmountable. He was returned to the states in October 1944. He was subsequently medically retired. His retirement was short lived, as he was called back to active duty during the Korean War. He served at Coast Guard Headquarters in D.C., rose to the rank of captain, and retired again in 1960.

After the service, Walsh settled in rural Denton, Maryland. He taught high school science for a few years before becoming a probation and parole officer. He retired from the State of Maryland in 1975. He was known in the Denton area for advocating for the preservation of the town’s historic district.

Walsh passed away in 2000 at the age of 90. In his memoirs, Walsh took note that his original commando team had suffered 25% casualties, seeing three killed in action and ten wounded among their 53 men. That’s actually not a bad loss rate, given that he describes Normandy as “a blood bath” and the fighting for Cherbourg as “a slaughter house.”

Walsh some interactions with the French when he was in Normandy. One I think is particularly humorous. Before his action at Cherbourg, he returned to his bivouac one night to some angry French farmers. They were upset some American paratroopers had slaughter a few of their sheep. The Frenchmen had some German horses with them. When Walsh pointed to the German brands on the horses (which were military equipment after all), and advised the French that those equines were now the property of the United States, the farmers decided that if Walsh could forget about the horses, they’d forget about the sheep.

Category: Coast Guard, Historical, Navy, Navy Cross, Valor, We Remember, WWII