Tag Archives: Rick Atkinson

Footnote 30 — Rick Atkinson, The Guns at Last Light

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Footnote 30  —  Rick Atkinson, The Guns At Last Light: War in Western Europe, 1944-1945 (The Liberation Trilogy, Volume 3).  New York: Henry Holt and Co.. 2013, pp. 23-24 (Kindle Edition Locations 573-609).

The “stuff” of war: Excerpts from Rick Atkinson’s Liberation Trilogy:

“The loading of invasion vessels bound for the Far Shore had begun on May 4 and intensified as the month wore away. Seven thousand kinds of combat necessities had to reach the Norman beaches in the first four hours, from surgical scissors to bazooka rockets, followed by tens of thousands of tons in the days following. Responsibility for embarkation fell to three military bureaucracies with acronyms evocative of the Marx Brothers: MOVCO, TURCO, and EMBARCO. Merchant marine captains sequestered in a London basement near Selfridges department store prepared loading plans with the blueprints of deck and cargo spaces spread on huge tables; wooden blocks scaled to every jeep, howitzer, and shipping container were pushed around like chess pieces to ensure a fit. Soldiers in their camps laid out full-sized deck replicas on the ground and practiced wheeling trucks and guns in and out.

“In twenty-two British ports, stevedores slung pallets and cargo nets into holds and onto decks, loading radios from Pennsylvania, grease from Texas, rifles from Massachusetts. For OVERLORD, the U.S. Army had accumulated 301,000 vehicles, 1,800 train locomotives, 20,000 rail cars, 2.6 million small arms, 2,700 artillery pieces, 300,000 telephone poles, and 7 million tons of gasoline, oil, and lubricants. SHAEF had calculated daily combat consumption, from fuel to bullets to chewing gum, at 41.298 pounds per soldier. Sixty million K rations, enough to feed the invaders for a month, were packed in 500-ton bales. Huge U.S. Army railcars known as war flats hauled tanks and bulldozers to the docks, while mountains of ammunition were stacked on car ferries requisitioned from Boston, New York, and Baltimore. The photographer Robert Capa, who would land with the second wave at Omaha Beach, watched as the “giant toys ” were hoisted aboard…

“Armed guards from ten cartography depots escorted 3,000 tons of maps for D-Day alone, the first of 210 million maps that would be distributed in Europe, most of them printed in five colors. Also into the holds went 280,000 hydrographic charts; town plats for the likes of Cherbourg and St.-Lô; many of the one million aerial photos of German defenses, snapped from reconnaissance planes flying at twenty-five feet; and watercolors depicting the view that landing-craft coxswains would have of their beaches. Copies of a French atlas pinpointed monuments and cultural treasures, with an attached order from Eisenhower calling for “restraint and discipline” in wreaking havoc.

“The U.S. First Army battle plan for OVERLORD contained more words than Gone with the Wind. For the 1st Infantry Division alone, Field Order No. 35 had fifteen annexes and eighteen appendices, including a reminder to “drive on right side of road.” Thick sheaves of code words began with the Pink List, valid from H-hour to two A.M. on D + 1, when the Blue List would succeed it. Should the Blue List be compromised, the White List would be used, but only if the word “swallow” was broadcast on the radio. A soldier could only sigh.

“Day after night after day, war matériel cascaded onto the wharves and quays, a catalogue Homeric in magnitude and variety: radio crystals by the thousands, carrier pigeons by the hundreds, one hundred Silver Stars and three hundred Purple Hearts—dubbed “the German marksmanship medal”— for each major general to award as warranted, and ten thousand “Hagensen packs,” canvas bags sewn by sailmakers in lofts across England and stuffed with plastic explosive. A company contracted to deliver ten thousand metal crosses had missed its deadline; instead, Graves Registration units would improvise with wooden markers. Cotton mattress covers used as shrouds had been purchased on the basis of one for every 375 man-days in France, a formula that proved far too optimistic. In July, with supplies dwindling, quartermasters would be forced to ship another fifty thousand.

“Four hospital ships made ready, “snowy white … with many bright new red crosses painted on the hull and painted flat on the boat deck,” the reporter Martha Gellhorn noted. Each LST also would carry at least two physicians and twenty Navy corpsmen to evacuate casualties, with operating rooms built on the open tank decks— a “cold, dirty trap,” in one officer’s estimation— and steam tables used to heat twenty-gallon sterilization cans. All told, OVERLORD would muster 8,000 doctors, 600,000 doses of penicillin, fifty tons of sulfa, and 800,000 pints of plasma meticulously segregated by black and white donors. Sixteen hundred pallets weighing half a ton each and designed to be dragged across the beaches were packed with enough medical supplies to last a fortnight.

 

Footnote 21 – Father’s Day Note on Rick Atkinson’s Liberation Trilogy III

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Footnote 21 – Father’s Day Note

On this Father’s Day of 2013, I am thinking of course of my father, James H. Wolfgang, now nearing his 91st birthday.  His only trip to Europe occurred at age 21 – via Omaha Beach.  His unit, the 654th Engineering Battalion, was responsible for producing the millions of maps with which Steven Ambrose, fifteen years ago, opened his book Citizen Soldiers.

Today I began reading the most recent version of the war in the European theatre, Rick Atkinson’s third volume of his Liberation Trilogy. A testament to the engineers who translated hard-won intelligence-gathering information into usable maps and models, Atkinson’s Prologue includes an account of the mammoth plaster-cast model of the beaches of Normandy, constructed under armed guard by the 654th Engineering Battalion in a small village in the Cotswalds during the spring of 1944, and then transported to London.  The massive model is featured in the orientation film at the D-Day Museum in the old Higgins Boat factory in New Orleans.  Here part of Atkinson’s Prologue:

“Nowhere were the uniforms more impressive on Monday morning, May 15, than along Hammersmith Row in west London.  Here the greatest Anglo-American military conclave of World War II gathered the 1,720th day of the war to rehearse the death blow intended to destroy Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich.  Admirals, generals, field marshals, logisticians, and staff wizards by the score climbed from their limousines and marched … into the Model room … [formerly an auditorium] at St. Paul’s School … Top secret charts and maps now lined the Model Room …Behind [Eisenhower] in the cockpit of the Model Room lay an immense plaster relief map of the Normandy coast where the River Seine spilled into the Atlantic.  Thirty feet wide and set on a tilted platform…[it] depicted, in bright colors and a scale six inches to the mile, the rivers, villages, beaches and uplands of what would become the world’s most famous battlefield.”

Early in his life, my father was a part of that vast enterprise by the millions of “the greatest generation” who played various roles, in ending oppressively tyrannical regimes across the globe, remaking the world (for good – or ill – in varying circumstances), and indirectly allowing the gospel to be heard in many new places around the globe.  Returning home to marry his high school sweetheart, he raised his family to obey God, honor their country, and be of service to others.  From his Bible class on Romans I (and others) first learned the foundational gospel truths anchored in the concept of “justification by faith,” and through him I developed my earliest love for hymns by observing him develop his abilities in leading hymns for public worship, thus enabling other Christians to worship God in song. And that is merely the beginning of the “short list” of important things he taught and modeled.

Happy Father’s Day, Dad – and thanks for all those things you did, in war and peace – and still do! I love you!

Footnote 21 – Father’s Day Note Rick Atkinson, The Guns At Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945 (New York Henry Holt and Company, 2013), Kindle edition, Locations 157, 172, 223.

Footnote 5 – An Army At Dawn

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Footnote 5 – Rick Atkinson, An Army At Dawn: The War in North Africa, 1942-43 (New York: Henry Holt, 2001), pp. 33-34, 40-41, 413-415.

Perhaps it is appropriate to consider the battles waged across 1,000 miles of North African coastline 70 years ago in early 1943. Though the “timeline” is segmented by identifiable battles such as Kasserine Pass (28 February 1943) and el Guettar (23 March 1943), the genesis of the conflict occurred months before.  Perhaps modern Americans can only imagine how much went into the conflict, even in terms of sheer material goods, as described by Pulitzer Prize-winner Rick Atkinson:

“Dawn on October 24 revealed a forest of masts and fighting tops across Hampton Roads, where the greatest war fleet ever to sail from American waters made ready…..Young men, fated to survive and become old men dying abed half a century hence, would forever remember this hour, when an army at dawn made for the open sea in a cause none could yet comprehend.”

In addition to 33,843 soldiers, the holds of this flotilla carried “tanks and cannons, rubber boats and outboard motors, ammunition and machine guns, magnifying glasses and stepladders, alarm clocks and bicycles.  Into the holds went: tractors, cement, asphalt, and more than a million gallons of gasoline, mostly in five-gallon tins.  Into the holds went: thousands of miles of wire, well-digging machinery, railroad cars, 750,000 bottles of insect repellant, and 7,000 tons of coal in burlap bags.  Into the holds went: black basketball shoes, 3,000 vehicles, loudspeakers, 16,000 feet of cotton rope, and $100,000 in gold coins, entrusted to George Patton personally.  And into the holds went: a platoon of carrier pigeons, six flyswatters and and sixty rolls of flypaper for each 1,000 soldiers, plus five pounds of rat poison per company.

“A special crate, requisitioned in a frantic message to the War Department, held a thousand Purple Hearts… Phrase books with pronunciation keys, to be distributed at sea, perfectly captured Allied ambivalence, giving the French for both, ‘I am your friend’ and ‘I will shoot you if you resist.’  A propaganda radio station, cobbled together with a transmitter salvaged in Jersey City and a generator from a South Carolina cotton mill, was secretly installed in the U.S.S. Texas … Quartermasters had rounded up 10 million salt tablets and 67,000 American flag armbands, with 138,000 safety pins to secure them to uniform sleeves….Using a Michelin commercial road guide to Morocco, a government printing plant outside Washington had spent weeks reproducing sixty tons of maps, which were manhandled into the holds along with sealed bundles of Baedeckers, old issues of National Geographic, French tourist guidebooks, and volume ‘M’ of various encyclopedias….”

All this in addition to 72,000 troops and half a million tons of cargo previously shipped to England for the “shorter” sea journey to North Africa…. “In late January, Eisenhower had pleaded with Washington for more trucks.  Less than three weeks later, a special convoy of twenty ships sailed from Norfolk, New York, and Baltimore with 5,000 two-and-a-half-ton trucks, 2,000 cargo trailers, 400 dump trucks, 80 fighter planes, and, for ballast, 12,000 tons of coal, 16,000 tons of flour, 9,000 tons of sugar, 1,000 tons of soap, and 4,000 submachine guns, all of which arrived in Africa on March 6 ….”

“’The battle,’ Rommel famously observed, ‘is fought and decided by the quartermasters before the shooting begins.’  The shooting had begun months before in northwest Africa, but now the quartermasters truly came into their own.  The prodigies of American industrial muscle and organizational acumen began to tell.  In Oran, engineers built an assembly plant near the port and taught local workers in English, French, and Spanish how to put together a jeep from a box of parts in nine minutes. That plant turned out more than 20,000 vehicles.  Another factory nearby assembled 1,200 railcars, which were among 4,500 cars and 250 locomotives ultimately added to North African rolling stock.”

“In Africa, total supply requirements amounted to thirteen tons per soldier each month. …From late February to late March, 130 ships sailed from the United States for Africa with 84,000 soldiers, 24,000 vehicles, and a million tons of cargo….The Americans’ genius ‘lay in creating resources rather than using them economically,’ a British study observed astutely….’The American Army does not solve its problems,’ one general noted, ’it overwhelms them.‘   There was prodigal ineconomy – of time, of motion, of stuff – but beyond the extravagance lay a brisk ability to get the job done.  After Kasserine, American aviation engineers built five new airfields around Sbeitla – in seventy-two hours.  More than one hundred fields would be built during the Tunisian campaign.  The enemy would not be ‘solved’ in Tunisia.  He would be overwhelmed.”

And, above and beyond the material cost, at the expense  of more than 70,000 Allied casualties, “a continent has been redeemed,” to use Churchill’s memorable phrase.