Posted on 06/06/2015 10:07:55 AM PDT by PROCON
Few narrative historians have been able to capture the essence of war quite like Stephen Ambrose. The Eisenhower biographer published several books on the war later in his life, including Citizen Soldiers, Band of Brothers, and perhaps the best one volume treatment of the Normandy invasion, D-Day: June 6, 1944.
One theme running through all of those books was the sheer ordinariness of the American GI and how, when confronted by the greatest challenges of their lives, outperformed, outfought, and outsmarted the seemingly invincible Nazi war machine.
From a blurb advertising D-Day:
They wanted to be throwing baseballs, not hand grenades, shooting .22s at rabbits, not M-1s at other men. But when the test came, when freedom had to be fought for or abandoned, they fought. They were soldiers of democracy. They were the men of D-Day. When Hitler declared war on the United States, he bet that the young men brought up in the Hitler Youth would outfight the youngsters brought up in the Boy Scouts.,p>
Hitler lost, largely because “the Boy Scouts had been taught to figure their way out of their own problems,” writes Ambrose. Americans were trained to use their own initiative and not blindly follow orders, like the Germans. This proved decisive on Omaha Beach, as nothing went as planned, and the first and second waves of the landings were being slaughtered. And then, one by one — mostly NCO’s — began to realize that staying put was death andthey began a slow, painful climb up the bluffs. There was no mass charge, but rather small groups of two and three soldiers taking it upon themselves to get the job done.
Ambrose points out that never could have happened in the German army.
In an interview on Brian Lamb’s C-Span show Booknotes, Ambrose expanded on this theme:
LAMB: Why was it a great day?
AMBROSE: You know, you can’t exaggerate it. You can’t overstate it. It was the pivot point of the 20th century. It was the day on which the decision was made as to who was going to rule in this world in the second half of the 20th century. Is it going to be Nazism, is it going to be communism, or are the democracies going to prevail? If we would have failed on Omaha Beach and on the other beaches on the 6th of June in 1944, the struggle for Europe would have been a struggle between Hitler and Stalin, and we would have been out of it. If Stalin had won, the Iron Curtain would have been on the English Channel. If Hitler had won, I don’t think he would have been able to take Britain, at least not in the immediate future, but he would have gone all the way to the Urals. Hitler’s plan was to turn the problem of conquering America over to the next generation, utilizing the resources that he intended to have as a part of the greater German Reich as a result of victory. It really did turn on getting ashore and penetrating that Atlantic Wall. Now, once that Atlantic Wall was penetrated and we had a beachhead and you could begin to move from England into the continent, this tremendous outpouring of America’s factories that we had managed to get over to England by winning the battle of the Atlantic in 1943, if you penetrated the Atlantic Wall then it was no longer a question of who was going to win. It was when is the end going to come. Germany could not possibly prevail against — but if Rommel stopped them cold on the beaches — this was an all-or-nothing operation. Eisenhower, when he took command in January of 1944, said, “This operation is being planned as a success. There are no contingency plans.” Had they stopped him — and they came very close to stopping him — we would not have been able to mount another operation in 1944. This was Hitler’s great chance to win the war — stop them in June of 1944 on the Atlantic coast, then he can move 11 panzer divisions to the east. Eleven panzer divisions might well have swung the balance on the eastern front, or they might have had another effect. They might have led Stalin to conclude, “Those blankety-blank capitalists. They’re up to their old tricks. They’re going to fight till the last Red Army soldier. To hell with that. I’m going to cut a deal with my friend Adolph again, just like we did in 1939. We’ll divide Eastern Europe between us.” That wouldn’t have lasted. Sooner or later they would have clashed, but the democracies wouldn’t have been in on it anymore.
I’m surprised that D-Day is trending on Twitter given the ignorance of the past couple of generations about the significance of June 6. But those of us old enough to remember when commemorating D-Day was a big deal, should take the responsibility for passing on the feelings that all of America experienced that day, summed up in Eisenhower’s D-Day address to the troops, and FDR’s heartfelt prayer.
That's such hogwash. The German soldiers spanned the full spectrum of martial effectiveness, just like the Americans. It's just that the winners/survivors write history.
WTF are you talking about?
Thanks for the kind words about my father..he recently had to move into a nursing home because of mobility issues, but his mind remains very sharp; it’s a blessing to have a parent enjoy the long, full life that he has enjoyed.
You are spot-on in your observations about the Germans; they have always produced some of the finest armored vehicles in the world, a trend that continued through the Leopard II MBT. But the German Army of World War II was not prepared for a war of attrition and logistics. The combat value of a Panther or even a Tiger was greatly reduced when a mechanical breakdown or moderate combat damage could take them out of the fight for good.
By comparison, some of the most heavily-damaged Shermans were repaired and sent back to the front. My Dad told me one of the first jobs in restoring a damaged M4 was cleaning up the crew compartment and giving it a new coat of paint. The bodies of dead or wounded crew members were usually gone by the time my father (and other retriever crews) arrived on the scene, but there was often a lot of dried blood and other body parts left inside. So, the crew compartment had to be hosed out and given a fresh coat of white paint, which also covered the smell from Shermans that had burned.
Sad, isn’t it? That America, the world leader in the automotive industry at the time, could only produce a tank that for the few pluses it did have overall was not a very good armored vehicle in the final analysis.
The Sherman M-4 tank was called the 'Ronson lighter' because would light up every time it was hit.
Actually, the fire danger was overstated; the biggest reason some Shermans caught fire was that most were powered by gas engines. Gas ignites much more easily than diesel, but most tanks during WWII (on all sides) utilized gasoline engines.
Many of the Sherman fires were caused by ammunition that ignited and exploded in the crew compartment. The early models had a poorly-designed system for storing ammo. Later variants put ammunition into a more protected location and surrounded by a “water bath, reducing the possibility of explosion and fire.
In 1940, the year German Panzers rolled across the low countries and France, the entire tank development budget for the U.S. Army was only $90,000. Given that level of parsimony, it’s amazing we were able to develop the Sherman. Don’t forget, our “first” medium tank of the war, the Grant, had a side-mounted main gun, because we didn’t have the capability to mount a larger gun in a revolving turret.
I learned to shoot in the scouts, taught by men who all had CIBs. i was taught to swim by a navy frogman who did pre invasion demo in the pacific.
They were serious men who knew their sh!t.
Today’s boy scouts are led by women.
Your steaming insight.
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