The Long Blue Line: “Into the Jaws of Death”—SM2 John Roberts and LCI-93 at Omaha Beach
BM1 William A. Bleyer, United States Coast Guard
[Editor’s note: This article was inspired by a story written by PAC Matthew R. Schofield for Coast Guard Magazine in 2010.]
“We were sitting ducks and the Germans clearly had us in their sights.“
Steward’s Mate 2nd Class John Noble Roberts, U.S. Coast Guard Reserve
The most iconic photograph from D-Day is titled “Into the Jaws of Death,” which was shot by Coast Guard combat photographer, Chief Petty Officer Robert Sargent, from a landing craft approaching the beaches of Normandy. The picture’s name is horrifically apt as the morning of June 6, 1944, found Steward’s Mate 2nd Class John Noble Roberts and the crew of USS LCI(L)-93 (a.k.a. LCI-93) running into that hotly-contested piece of French shoreline.
John Roberts was born in Natchitoches Parish, Louisiana, on November 1, 1924. He was the oldest of 15 children whose parents were cotton farmers. He was working as a clerk at a grocery store and a waiter at the Silver Moon Night Club in Alexandria, Louisiana, when he was drafted into the Coast Guard.
Roberts attended Coast Guard basic training at Curtis Bay, Maryland, from June to July 1943, and then headed to St. Augustine, Florida, for Steward’s Mate training. In January 1944, he embarked a troop transport destined for the European Theater. On January 27th, he disembarked in England and was assigned to Coast Guard-manned LCI-91. He later transferred to Coast Guard-manned LCI-93 under the command of Lt.j.g. Budd Bornhoft.
LCI-93 was a new kind of amphibious assault ship, one of many such vessels crewed by Coast Guardsmen in World War II. Commonly called “Elsie Items” after the first two letters and the letter “I” in the phonetic alphabet, LCIs were unusual-looking ships—only 158-foot long with a square conning tower jutting up from the after portion of the vessel. Essentially, they were small troop transports that could land troops on hostile beaches.
LCI-93 had seen action in the Allied invasions of the North Africa, Sicily, and Italy. Now, with Roberts on board, LCI-93 would sail with the joint U.S. Navy-Coast Guard Flotilla 10 for Operation Neptune, the naval operation supporting Operation Overlord–the Allied assault on Nazi-occupied France.
As an African American, Roberts had experienced discrimination throughout his life. And, even though the United States military would not fully desegregate until 1948, cracks in its segregationist policies appeared during World War II. The Coast Guard led the way in having integrated crews on its ships and Roberts got along well with his shipmates.
LCI-93 made its first D-Day run to shore at 9:45 a.m. with Roberts manning his battle station as an emergency messenger. Roberts’s combat role would be vital to shipboard communications if the LCI’s sound-powered phone system failed. When LCI-319 approached Easy Red beach, heavy German artillery and machine gun fire covered it with dead and wounded. The landing vessel ground over beach obstacles and the crew dropped ramps on either side of the bow sending into the fray 200 soldiers from the 1st Infantry Division (a.k.a. “Big Red One”). One soldier was caught shirking in the crew’s quarters and Roberts escorted him up to the bridge to face Lt.j.g. Bornhoft. Soon after, LCI-93 recovered wounded soldiers, backed off the beach, and steamed to the Coast Guard-manned transport USS Samuel B. Chase to embark more troops.
John Noble Roberts and Coast Guard Captain Roger Laferriere in May 2010 during a ceremony awarding Roberts the French Légion d’Honneur medal.
Long read !
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