The Dead and Those About to Die: D-Day: The Big Red One at Omaha Beach by McManus John C
Author:McManus, John C. [McManus, John C.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2014-04-29T06:00:00+00:00
Aboard the Ancon, General Huebner was like a caged lion. Surrounded by his staff in a command room, he was desperate for information. Aside from the terse radio messages from Wyman, he was getting most of his other news by eavesdropping on the spotty radio communications of V Corps, the First Army, or the naval task force. “A Division Commander exercises his command functions through the training, deployment and the launching of his troops for combat,” Huebner later opined. “I had no control . . . didn’t expect any control” of the situation on the beach. Though Huebner intellectually understood the reality of his limited impact on the battle at this stage, it was nonetheless difficult for him to truly accept. He was the type of commander whose instinct was to size up a situation for himself, with his own eyes, probably in the thick of the action. He had always led that way, but it was impossible to do so on this day. The Ancon was too far offshore. During multiple forays to the deck, neither the general nor his binocular-wielding staff officers could see well enough through the smoke, haze, and sea mist to glean any sense of what was really going on ashore. The sea winds carried with them the fleeting sounds of shooting, but again, this revealed nothing of the brutal realities on the beach. As a converted passenger liner displacing more than 14,000 tons, Ancon was an ideal amphibious command ship. Both Huebner and his immediate superior, Major General Leonard Gerow, had placed their respective headquarters on the ship.
As Huebner paced helplessly in his command post, he took stock of what he did know. “I had not had very many good reports,” he said. “Most of these reports were rather fragmentary in character but they informed me that the fighting was heavy and we were still confined to the beach itself.” That was pretty much the extent of what he knew. He had no sense of the struggle for the draws or the heavy casualties experienced by the initial waves, nor any inkling of the decimation of the Gap Assault Teams; instead he had only a strong sense that something was not right. If not for Wyman, he would have been almost completely in the dark about the 1st Division side of the beach.
Huebner’s chief of staff, Colonel Stanhope Mason, was equally frustrated. His job was to oversee every aspect of the division headquarters and act as a trusted counsel for Huebner. Mason knew that the mother’s milk of any decent headquarters was accurate information. A general with no knowledge of a battle situation was obviously in a poor position to make decisions. As chief of staff, Mason knew that communications were the key to the problem, and yet they were practically nonexistent between the division headquarters and the units on the beach. In Mason’s opinion, this troubling state of affairs was made worse by Colonel Ben Talley, the commander of a special information team for General Gerow.
Download
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.
The Radium Girls by Kate Moore(11650)
100 Deadly Skills by Clint Emerson(4711)
The Templars by Dan Jones(4563)
Rise and Kill First by Ronen Bergman(4558)
The Doomsday Machine by Daniel Ellsberg(4262)
The Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang(4032)
Killing England by Bill O'Reilly(3901)
Hitler in Los Angeles by Steven J. Ross(3810)
Stalin by Stephen Kotkin(3733)
12 Strong by Doug Stanton(3426)
Hitler's Monsters by Eric Kurlander(3179)
Blood and Sand by Alex Von Tunzelmann(3068)
Darkest Hour by Anthony McCarten(3020)
The Code Book by Simon Singh(2883)
The Art of War Visualized by Jessica Hagy(2847)
Hitler's Flying Saucers: A Guide to German Flying Discs of the Second World War by Stevens Henry(2634)
Babylon's Ark by Lawrence Anthony(2447)
The Second World Wars by Victor Davis Hanson(2429)
Tobruk by Peter Fitzsimons(2384)
