COLLEGE STATION -- On a cliff overlooking Omaha Beach in Normandy, France lie the remains of more than 9,000 Americans killed when the Allies invaded France on D-Day, June 6, 1944. In a corner of this cemetery, a semicircular wall lists the names of 1,557 soldiers whose remains were never found and who are listed as Missing In Action.
While family members may never learn the fates of their missing relatives, these soldiers likely died in the naval action, called Operation Neptune, that ferried troops and equipment across the English Channel to the Normandy beaches.
Fifty-six years after the invasion, Project Neptune 2K is attempting to find out what happened to these soldiers by surveying and identifying the underwater wreckage lying off the coast of the Utah and Omaha beaches, where the Americans went ashore.
Project leader Brett Phaneuf said that while the battle sites on land have been studied extensively, no has ever tried to find what artifacts lie in the waters off of the beaches.
"We need to study the battlefields, including the underwater portion, to get a handle on what happened," said Phaneuf, who works for the Institute of Nautical Archaeology at Texas A&M University. "We don't know exactly how many ships were there. We're not sure how many people were lost on the ships or in the water."
This summer Phaneuf, project co-director Steve Schmidt of the Naval Historical Center and other researchers spent six weeks using magnetometers, which measure magnetic fields, and side-scanning sonar to profile the seafloor in waters ranging from 5 to 30 meters deep. Phaneuf said they covered only one-quarter the area they plan to cover in coming years.
Even with this being only the first year of the project, he said they have already found six to eight Sherman tanks and more than two dozen wrecks lying off the Normandy coast. Phaneuf said he believes some of these wrecks are those of landing craft-tanks (LCTs) and a Higgins Boat, which ferried troops and tanks from larger offshore ships to the beaches.
He also said the team may have found several of the amphibious British Double Duty Tanks. Many of these tanks, which were rigged to float, proved failures and sank as soon as they were released from ships, taking their crews down with them, he said.
"A lot of these men are in the tanks and landing ships that never made it to shore," he said. "Certainly, these sites are every bit as hallowed as the grounds of the American cemetery (in Normandy)."
By identifying the wrecks, he said, researchers might be able to provide some closure to the relatives of those people who served on those ships and are still listed as MIA.
Phaneuf said he also hopes the information he learns will be used by American and French officials to devise ways to police and protect these historical sites, which have become popular dive sites and are subject to looting.
"We can't make recommendations about protecting resources that we don't know about, so we're surveying to see whatís there, how much is really left and what kind of condition it is in," he said.
Phaneuf said he doubts any of the wrecks would be brought up or put in a museum because of the cost of preserving them. Also, he said, these wrecks are gravesites, and they are fine where they are. They just need to be protected, he said.
"There's not a statute of limitations on the respect and debts owed to those who paid the ultimate price," he said.
Next summer, Phaneuf and his team will return to France to continue looking for wrecks from the Normandy invasion. His work is sponsored by the Texas Sea Grant College Program and is a joint project between the Institute of Nautical Archaeology and the underwater archaeology branch of the Institute of Nautical Archaeology.
Images available at http://ina.tamu.edu/neptune.htm.