Assignment to Hell by Timothy M. Gay

Author:Timothy M. Gay [Gay, Timothy M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781101585382
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2012-05-01T04:00:00+00:00

AS THE WINTER OF ’44 turned to spring, Omar Bradley (“Brad”) and Dwight Eisenhower (“Ike”) were contending with far weightier U.S.-Anglo relations. The cross-Channel invasion plan they’d inherited from an Allied team led by British general Frederick Morgan was well thought out in terms of location and timing, but woefully inadequate in what Ike called “wallop.”36 Eisenhower, the Supreme Commander, and Bradley, the commander of U.S. ground forces, effectively doubled the size of the initial seaborne assault force (from three divisions to five), demanded much heavier and broader naval gunfire and strategic bombing support, and insisted on the aggressive use of airborne troops.

After leaving the U.S.’s Italy operation in the unsteady hands of Lieutenant General Mark Clark, Ike and Brad met nearly every day in the Norfolk House on the east side of St. James’s Square.37 Ike and Brad had witnessed in Sicily the hazards of paratroop operations. The more they studied maps of Normandy and assessed intelligence reports of the Wehrmacht’s deployment in northern France, however, the more convinced they became that it was imperative to land airborne divisions behind the beachheads. Without troopers from the U.S. 82nd and 101st and the British Sixth harassing enemy troops and seizing key arteries, it would be nearly impossible for the seaborne infantry to push inland, Bradley and Eisenhower believed. Allied paratroopers had to be in position to disrupt enemy counterattacks; without them, Panzer units and the other outfits the German field marshal Gerd von Rundstedt was holding in reserve would have an unbroken line to vulnerable beachheads.

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