In the early months of World War II, the U.S. Navy created a series of highly compressed officer training programs for basic midshipman indoctrination and officer candidate training. The freshly minted ensigns were quickly rushed out to join the many hundreds of new ships that were being churned out by American shipyards. Many became instantaneous commanding officers with three months or less of preparation and virtually no sea time. Old salts derisively called them “Ninety-Day Wonders.” By June 1944, more than two-thirds of naval officers on active duty were reservists. There were at least a quarter million of them by the end of the war. They commanded the great majority of the U.S. ships and support vessels in Operation Neptune, and many of their junior officers came straight to the fleet with only a few weeks at the midshipman schools.

Howard W. Rhodes, Jr.’s path to Utah took him through 60-day midshipman indoctrination at Cornell University, and 60-day basic officer training school at Princeton University, followed by a brief “crash course” at the Sub-Chaser School in Miami. In March 1944 he took command of US LCF 18, one of the Royal Navy gunfire support ships recommissioned into the U.S. Navy for the Normandy assault as landing craft flak. The primary mission of the 195-ft. LCFs was to provide close anti-air and gunfire support for beach landings. They participated in Exercise Tiger at Slapton Sands and sortied with a flotilla of other gunfire support craft from Salcombe on the South Devon coast on the afternoon of June 3. The nearly 100 vessels in the convoy spent nearly 70 hours at sea fighting the heavy southwesterly gale that swept through the English Channel and caused Eisenhower to delay D-Day 24 hours. Shortly after dawn on June 6, the LCFs led the first wave of infantry landing craft into Utah Beach with ships and boats exploding all around them by underwater mines.

There is a popular misconception that Utah Beach was a “walk in the park” in contrast with the carnage on neighboring Omaha. While it is true that the U.S. Army 4th Division only about 200 casualties in the initial landings due to the light enemy resistance at the beachfront, the figures cited in most D-Day histories neglect to include the 2,500-plus casualties suffered by the two divisions of paratroopers who dropped behind the beach front during the night. And they also do not include the scores of ships and support craft of Force (U) that were sunk by enemy mines in the waters off UTAH Beach. Ninety-Day Wonders commanded and staffed nearly all of these, and most of the enlisted sailors were likewise straight out of basic training.

While many hundreds—if not thousands—of histories, biographies and memoirs have been published on Operation Neptune and Overlord almost none of them focus on the important role of the Ninety-Day Wonder USNR officers or the “reverse lend-lease” program under which nearly 100 Royal Navy ships were recommissioned into the U.S. Navy for Operation Neptune.