Invasion cuts job of Atlantic Fleet
Adm. Ingersoll: Supply task now is to keep ‘expenditures replaced’
Washington – (June 6)
All the American men and material needed for the invasion of Europe had been convoyed to the United Kingdom by the Atlantic Fleet, and now the fleet’s greatly reduced job will be to keep the “expenditures replaced,” Adm. Royal E. Ingersoll, Atlantic Fleet commander, declared here today.
Adm. Ingersoll, who attended a press conference with James Forrestal, Secretary of the Navy, and Adm. Ernest J. King, Commander-in-Chief of the fleet, also said that Atlantic Fleet warships, from “battleships down,” and Navy aircraft based in the United Kingdom were aiding the invasion.
U.S. battleships, he declared, were presumably bombarding German concrete shore defenses as they did in the Marshalls invasion, where at Kwajalein the Pacific war craft moved within 1,200 yards of the shore.
Adm. Ingersoll is regarded in the Navy as one of the unsung heroes of the war, for it was his Atlantic Fleet that escorted the troops and munitions to Great Britain and the Mediterranean and also won the Battle of the Atlantic against submarines. Adm. King introduced the publicity-shy Adm. Ingersoll as “a great sea officer and a great commander.”
Adm. Ingersoll emphasized that the men and material needed for the invasion were in place, and that the Atlantic Fleet’s job should now be easier while taking care of invasion needs from this point on.
Furthermore, he declared, although there have been reports that the U-boat packs would return to the Atlantic when the invasion started to prey on communication lines from America to England, this threat “is not yet in evidence.”
Adm. Ingersoll said that since Jan. 1, 1942, the Atlantic Fleet has escorted more than 7,000 across the Atlantic “and only lost ten,” and none of these was a troopship. There were other ship losses in the Atlantic, he added, but those occurred among ships not escorted by the fleet.
The admiral said the Germans “gave us some bad knocks in the beginning,” but despite this, the men and munitions got through.
The pre-invasion battle with the U-boats was a battle of wits and scientific developments, in which the Nazis sometimes were ahead of us, and we fortunately were usually ahead of them, he said.
Nazi planes still remain a threat, Adm. Ingersoll reported. In the Mediterranean within the last two to three weeks, a convoy of more than 100 ships was attacked by 40 German aircraft, he revealed. The convoy fought off the raiders by itself, shooting down 18-20 of them and not losing a ship.
Adm. Ingersoll said that as of last Saturday, the Atlantic had 1,511 ships assigned to it for duty or training.
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