Looking for Tanks Sunk on D-Day

“D-Day: Beneath the Waves,” which airs tonight on the Discovery Channel, explores one of the lingering mysteries of June 6, 1944, as a way to reexamine those early-morning hours of bravery and death.

The mystery centers on a “secret” weapon devised by the Allies: 30-ton Sherman tanks equipped with propellers and disguised with canvas so they could swim ashore from boats and then provide covering fire for troops assaulting Hitler’s heavily fortified Atlantic Wall.

At Utah and Sword beaches, the strategy worked beautifully.

But 27 of 29 tanks launched 6,000 yards from Omaha Beach sank almost immediately, leaving troops trapped in the rolling surf and barb-wired beach and vulnerable to withering machine-gun fire from German soldiers on the bluffs above.

Underwater archeologist and former U.S. Army tank driver Brett Phaneuf was determined to find an answer to the failure of the 741st tank battalion. He searched the sea bottom with a camera-equipped, remote-operated vehicle to find the sunken Shermans and also combed through British and American war records.

There’s nothing quite like a tank, Phaneuf explains: “It’s like testosterone cast in steel.”

The mystery may be a slight one, and Phaneuf’s conclusion hardly surprising, but the success of “Beneath the Waves” lies elsewhere: in vivid re-creations that rival those of “Saving Private Ryan,” interviews with American, British and German veterans, and an overview of the longest day that buffs and novices alike will find instructive.

A former German infantryman tells of manning one of the machine gun nests and looking through the fog in disbelief to see that “the whole horizon was full of ships.”

As “Beneath the Waves” notes, there were other foul-ups that morning: aerial bombardment that missed its target, paratroopers who were dropped miles from their rallying points. With 6,000 ships, 175,000 troops and a daring, complex plan of attack, miscues were to be expected.

Still, the soldiers of the 741st felt a particular sense of failure, which remains largely undiminished by decades.

“We all had a sense of shame that we didn’t do what we were sent out there to do,” says one veteran. “I’m sure we could have saved a lot of men,” says another.

“Beneath the Waves” makes a strong case that the 741st had no reason for shame and that the GIs struggled bravely against unforeseen circumstances that doomed their mission from the start.

There are no plans to raise the tanks. They remain at the bottom of the English Channel, the narrator says, “unique monuments to men and women who gave their lives to that great crusade.”

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“D-Day: Beneath the Waves” airs at 9 tonight on the Discovery Channel.