On a cold, blustery Saturday this past March, I was fortunate to stand on the cliffs overlooking the beaches of Normandy, France, where nearly 60 years earlier, more than 300,000 men came ashore in the greatest amphibious assault the world has ever seen. Many did not make it off the beaches. Others only survived the first few days past the beachheads. The many cemeteries are impressive and depressing.
The battlefields of D-Day, the main Allied invasion of Europe during World War II, were of a magnitude I had not expected, although the descriptions of heroism were not. It is a somber place, one given to generation of sobering thoughts of the waste of war and lessons unlearned. That sticks with you for a while. And then you begin to consider the magnitude of the achievement leading up to and past June 6, 1944. As I pondered that, I was particularly struck by the ingenuity and technology required to get more than 300,000 men in more than 6,000 ships across more than 50 miles (80 km) of unfriendly water almost completely undetected. But that is only half the story. Keeping them there and supplying them to carry the battle forward in the initial days was a monumental task. The more I thought about it, the more it became a colossal marine engineering exercise, one carried out in an incredibly short time frame. And there, the relevance of Operation Overload - the code name for the invasion - to the development of our offshore industry became clear.
The invasion occurred between two major Channel ports in France, Cherbourg and LeHavre. Neither port was attacked, by design, leaving the Allied operation with the particularly high hurdle of having to land all supplies across a difficult beach initially under enemy fire. The first solution that fascinated me was fuel supply. The invasion planners first turned to the shallow-bottom oil tanker design in use in Lake Maricaibo, Venezuela. They were found to be in short supply and vulnerable. Lacking other means to deliver fuel to the beaches over shallow water plagued by extremely variable tides, the planners designed and built a temporary subsea pipeline. The 56-mile (90-km) fabric and rubber pipeline may have been the first reel-layed, flexible subsea line.
Normal bulk cargo - beans and bullets - had to be unloaded at the beach without a harbor to shelter the ships. So the Allies built two harbors off the beaches by sinking rows of ships in a curve extending from the beach and placing inside those a wall made from concrete. The blocks that formed the walls were constructed of reinforced concrete and divided into hollow internal segments. The blocks were towed from construction points in England and ballasted in place with seawater. Standing on one at the beach brought to mind immediately the concept of the gravity-based concrete platform so well used in the North Sea.
Other relevant technologies surfaced. The shaped charge extensively used in our industry had its beginnings prior to the invasion in occupied France. The first shaped charges consisted of explosives packed into concave objects such as hubcaps and headlight housings. These weapons, developed by the French Resistance, according to local lore, were set off against the sides of German tanks. The resultant, focused explosion was deadly to tanks.
The list of technologies born out of conflict that have served, and still serve, our industry could go on and on. Their existence does nothing to moderate the waste of war, but some solace can be taken in their contribution to the development of modern industry.

Comments