Untold War Stories@UntoldWarFacts · Aug 22, 2026

They were 83 feet long, made of wood, and had almost no protection at all. Their job on D-Day was to sit off the…

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Summary

During D-Day, the U.S. Coast Guard's "Matchbox Fleet" of sixty 83-foot wooden cutters rescued nearly 500 men from the water off the beaches of Normandy, with one cutter alone saving 126 by mid-morning. Despite being lightly armed and unarmored, these small wooden vessels stayed close to shore under heavy fire while other ships moved toward the beaches, with fifteen Coast Guard personnel killed in the operation.

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#1
They were 83 feet long, made of wood, and had almost no protection at all. Their job on D-Day was to sit off the beaches under fire and drag drowning men out of the sea. Sixty of them saved nearly 500 lives in a single day. This is the story of the Coast Guard's rescue flotilla..🧵1/4
#2
🧵 2/4 A few weeks before the invasion, Roosevelt identified a problem that still needed an answer. Thousands of ships and landing craft were going to cross the Channel and put 156,000 men onto a defended coast. Landing craft would be sunk. Ships would burn. Men would go into the water in their hundreds. Who was going to get them out? He suggested the operation needed a dedicated rescue force. The job went to the Coast Guard, because pulling people out of the sea was the one thing they had been doing since long before the war. They were given sixty 83-foot cutters. Wooden hulls, gasoline engines, lightly armed and completely unarmoured. Boats built for patrolling a coastline rather than crossing a battlefield. Wooden boats powered by gasoline, going into a fight. The crews called themselves the Matchbox Fleet.
#3
🧵 3/4 Thirty went to the American beaches at Utah and Omaha. Thirty went to the British and Canadian beaches at Gold, Juno and Sword. They crossed with the armada and then followed the first wave in. Everything else in the Channel that morning was moving toward the beaches with a job to do there. The cutters were supposed to stay back near the transports. Within a short time they were working close inshore instead, because that was where the men in the water were, and that meant sitting inside the range of German artillery and mortars while burning landing craft went down around them. Men went over the side of the cutters to reach swimmers who could not get to them. Others were hauled out of the wreckage of craft that had been hit on the run in. One cutter, nicknamed the Homing Pigeon, had pulled 90 men out by half past nine in the morning. By the end of the day it had 126, more than any other boat in the flotilla.
#4
🧵 4/4 By the end of 6 June, the Matchbox Fleet had rescued close to 500 men. During the flotilla's service off Normandy, the total eventually reached 1,438. It was stood down that December. Fifteen Coast Guardsmen were killed off those beaches on D-Day. The National Coast Guard Museum lists every one of them by name. They were not the only Coast Guard on that coast either. Coast Guardsmen crewed transports and drove landing craft onto the sand, and one of them, a photographer named Robert Sargent, took a picture from a Coast Guard landing craft as the ramp went down at Omaha. Into the Jaws of Death. It is one of the most reproduced photographs of the entire war, and almost nobody knows who took it. There is something worth sitting with in all of this. On the most violent morning of the war in the west, with every other vessel in the Channel driving toward the shore to fight, sixty little wooden boats went out into the water and stayed there for one reason. So that men who would otherwise have drowned got to go home. This was the story of the Matchbox Fleet. I post a story like this every single day. Most people never see them. Follow so you don't miss the next one.