November 20, 2025 • 19 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, in this continuation of Ambrose’s work on June 6, 1944, the battle comes into view through the voices of the men who survived it. He follows their push off the beaches, their losses, and their small gains, and how those efforts turned the invasion into a foothold that could not be pushed back. Ambrose also highlights the Army’s “soldier suggestion box,” an unusual program that invited frontline troops to offer ideas for improving equipment and tactics, and how those insights shaped the fight for Normandy.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:11):
This is Lee Habib, and this is our American Stories.
Stephen Ambrose was one of America's leading biographers and historians.
At the core of Ambrose's phenomenal success is his simple
but straightforward belief that history is biography and that history
is about people. Ambrose passed in two thousand and two,
(00:32):
but his epic storytelling accounts can now be heard here
at Our American Stories thanks to those who run his estate.
Here's Ambrose with the D Day Invasion Part two.
Speaker 2 (00:45):
Let's take a listen. The battle over the next couple
of weeks took on a form that brought great anguish
to Eisenhower and posed great dangers for the alliance. This
was because General Montgomery had, in the pre overlord planning,
said that the way this battle is going to go
(01:06):
is as follows. We're going in on the left, that
is the closest to the city of con and thus
to the city of Paris. The role of the Americans
in this operation would be to protect the right flank
of the British forces advancing on Paris. But the Americans
felt that he was being penny wise and pound foolish,
(01:27):
that he was saving a few lives now by not attacking,
it was going to mean more British lives would be
lost later on. We had the initiative, we had the advantage.
We should have driven on was Patent's attitude, Bradley's attitude.
Colins Eisenhower's and many of the senior British officers at
Shay felt the same way well. With Montgomery held up
in front of Cohn, it now fell on the Americans
(01:50):
to the right under General Bradley, the US First Army,
the fourth Infantry, the twenty ninth Infantry, the first Infantry Division,
and the two airborne divisions eighty second, one hundred and
first to effect a breakout from the Normandy Peninsula. This
was about as bad a country as there is in
the world for fighting an offensive action or turning that around.
(02:13):
It was just ideal for the defense. This was because
the Norman countryside is filled with very small fields, many
of them smaller than football fields, very few of them
much bigger. These fields were surrounded by hedges. I don't
think of a little hedge in England or a little
hedge in front of the house on main Street in
(02:34):
the Middle West of the United States. These hedges or
hedge rows were a thousand years and more old. They
consisted of piles of earth as much as six feet
and even more in height, the couple of meters very
broad at the base two three meters, with trees and
shrubs planted on top of them that had been there
(02:56):
for centuries and whose roots had made these mounds, and
to almost a cement kind of barrier. There was one
entry into these fields, and one only that the farmer kept.
It had a gate there, and that's he moved his
cattle in and closed the gate, and the hedgerows were
perfectly satisfactory his fences. Now for the attackers in this
(03:20):
kind of a situation, it was just a nightmare. Gi
In the very first days, gis would come to the gate,
to the opening and rush into the field. Well, the
Germans had prepared for this. They had their machine guns
at the fire d from the gate on each corner
with a crisscross fire through the field. They had mortarmen
(03:40):
behind who had zeroed in on the field, and they
had eighty eight's back further to the rear that had
also sighted into the field. And they would wait until
a bunch of gis, maybe even a platoon in strength,
got into that field. And then they would call out
the fire order and just cut him down. How do
you make primes in a situation like this? And these
(04:01):
German troops may not have been the best that ever
fought for eight off himper, but boy, they sure had
good positions to fight from, and they were awfully good
on the defensive. And also these fields would be strewn
with land mines. Well. One technique that was used was
to drive a tank right into the gate, stop it there,
and turn that seventy five millimeter barrel onto the two
(04:24):
corners and fire white phosphorus shells which put the fear
of God into everyone into the corners to take care
of the machine guns, and then drive the trank around
in the field. And those would be anti personnel mines
out there that the tank could safely explode without injuring
itself and take the field that way. But the Germans
(04:44):
caught onto that quick and often would hit that tank
when it got into the They had field communications mainly
under buried underground telephone lines so that they couldn't be
picked up by the eyes, and they'd get on the
phone at the fire in the hedrow and say the
tank is just coming into the opening. Right now. They'd
have an eighty eight a mile or two back who
zeroed in on that point, and they'd blast it and
(05:05):
blast the tank away. The tanks when they tried to
come in from the sides of the gate right as
through the hedgerow itself would hit that hedgerow, and then
they'd go up in the air, climbing the hedgerow, so
that at their apex they would have their underbellies exposed
to Germans with handheld anti tank rockets on the far side.
And of course the underbelly of a tank has no
(05:27):
armor on it, so you could blow it up with
one well placed shot. The solution to this problem of
fighting in the hedgerow country on the offensive came from
enlisted men. And this was a characteristic of the US
Army in the Second World War that I would want
to dwell on for a second. In the US Army,
(05:50):
every officer from second lieutenant on up had a suggestion box,
either literally or figuratively, outside his door. They didn't do
it that way in the German and the suggestion box
worked time and time and time again. As American kids, privates, corporals,
(06:10):
sergeants would figure out the solution to a tactical problem
and suggest it to their immediate superior, who would pass
it on up the chine of command and tell the
end It got to Bradley himself, and he would okay
or veto the idea. There were lots of them in Normandy.
Many of them worked. The most famous wise to take
(06:31):
those steel rails that had formed the beach defenses at
Utah and Omaha. They were only six feet long and
weld them on to the front of a tank with
two prongs, so that the tank could drive into that
hedgerow and those steel rails would penetrate and that would
keep the tank from going belly up, and the tank
(06:51):
then had enough engine power to drive on through that hedgerow,
and then he could start using his seventy five millimeter cannon.
The tank captain could to hit those German machine gun
positions with the white phosphorus and open up other entryways
into the hedgerows. With this ingenious device, and as I say,
quite a few others, the Americans started to make progress
(07:13):
in Normandy. It was still slow and expensive because every
field had to be fought for, couldn't bypass any of them. Still,
some progress was made almost every day Nevertheless, the mood
in the Allied world was becoming more and more pessimistic
as June gave way to July, and July then began
(07:34):
to approach its end, and Mani still hadn't taken con
and on the right flank, Bradley's troops were only inching
their way forward at a cost reminiscent of the battles
of the First World War. And people thought of the
First World War and were afraid, afraid of a stalemate
that the Germans would keep the Allies bottled up in
(07:55):
Normandy right on through to the coming of fall and
even on into winter, which, along with all the other
bad things that would result from such a situation, the
loss of morale, the loss of life, the loss of equipment.
Stalin would undoubtedly have thought, you're not serious about this attack.
The so called Second Front, he would have said, is
doing us no good at all. Beyond all those things,
(08:17):
a stalemate imposed in Normandy lasting into the winner would
have given her more time to develop his secret weapon,
more time to perfect the diesel submarine, something on which
the Germans had stolen a march on the US and
British Navy, give him time to complete the V one,
the pilotless aircraft radio controlled that could carry bonds. More importantly,
(08:38):
give Werner von Braun and his team more time to
develop the medium range rockets the so called V two
V stood for vengeance weapons, more time to develop the
jet aircraft, where Germany was two years and even more
ahead of the Allies of development.
Speaker 1 (09:00):
And you've been listening to the late great Stephen Ambrose
tell one heck of a story about the D Day invasion.
By the way, there's a part one. Go to Ouramerican
Stories dot com or put in Stephen Ambrose and you'll
see not just the first part of D Day the story,
but so many countless other terrific stories told by Ambrose,
(09:20):
not just about World War Two, but so many other things,
like the trans Continental Railroad and my favorite Undaunted Courage
about the Lewis and Clark expedition.
Speaker 2 (09:31):
And what a story we were hearing.
Speaker 1 (09:33):
Now we have to remember with history that nobody knew
then what was going to happen next. Would our troops
be pinned down in Normandy Well, Eisenhower didn't know, Marshall
didn't know, the men didn't know. And that's why we
love to tell these stories. Bring you back into the
story itself as it was happening. When we come back,
(09:53):
more of the story of D Day here on our
American story, and we continue with our American stories and
with the story of the D Day invasion brought to
(10:15):
us by Stephen Ambrose. Let's pick up where we last
left off.
Speaker 2 (10:21):
Desperate measures were called for. Eisner put great pressure on
Mani to attack. You've got to attack. Mani finally said,
give me all the air forces and I will attack.
Eisner gave him every plane that flew in England and
put him to work in Operation Goodwood toward the end
of July and bombing a stripped one mile by eight
miles in front of Manni's army outside of Khan. This
(10:42):
huge bombardment was followed by an attack that many called
off after the first hour because his losses were too heavy. Again,
the argument Moni saying, I'm holding the German armor in
my front, the Americans saying, we put everything we had
under this attack, and you gained one mile. One mile
was gained after the biggest air bombardment the world has
(11:03):
ever seen, and the anger at Montgomery boiled and boiled.
There were demands on the part of American officers and
some British officers that Eisenhower sacked Montgomery. Send them home,
let him go be the governor of Malta. Put him
in the House of Lords, get rid of them. Get
somebody that will make this British army fight. Eisenhower always
resisted such pressure. He recognized something that those who were
(11:25):
making the recommendation did not. That Money was a national hero,
that the British press had built him up after the
victory at l Alamine into a general whose stature was
the equal to that of Wellington. That to fire Money
in the middle of this battle after the success of
D Day would be unacceptable to the British government and
to the British people. Money had to stay. Instead of
(11:45):
putting pressure on Money, much less firing money, Eisenhower began
putting the pressure on Bradley. Bradley then said, well, we're
almost to the edge of the Hedgerow country. We're almost
out into open wheat fields, places where we can use
our tanks can come into play, where the trucks that
we've brought over all the way from Detroit can become
a part of the action. We're almost there. Give me
(12:08):
an air bombardment to open up a path in the
German defenses and I'll break through. Well, they'd been down
that path once but decided not with Bradley, let's try
it again, So towards the end of the campaign, Operation
Cobra was laid on July twenty eighth. Another huge bombardment
by B seventeen's B twenty four is B twenty fives,
(12:31):
with the fighter bombers getting in and the fighters coming
down to strait right in front of the American lines.
This time, Eisenhower ordered the air commanders to keep that
bombardment right on the noses of our front line troops
so that once it lifts, they can move into an
area that has just been devastated, and any German still
alive is suffering from concussion so badly that he won't
(12:51):
be able to fight. Well, they laid it on close.
They laid it on so close that we took a
lot of casualties, including a four star general General McNair,
who was there to observe This is the last time
I used big bombers in a tactical situation like that.
Taking casualties from your own planes as a terrible thing.
War is awful anyway, but when it's your own guy's
killing you, it really just is the very bottom. But
(13:14):
it worked, It did blast that hole in the German lines.
General Collins was able to break through and take the
town of Saint lo And now is the time to
bring George Patten in on the game. Patten had been eager,
as you might imagine, eager doesn't even begin to describe it,
to get into this battle. Now. At the beginning of August,
(13:34):
he brought his third army over and Patten began to
swing down into France, with the possibility now of going
all the way straight through to Paris without opposition. Now
Hitler saw an opportunity. The Americans had a whole army
out in the open. Germans didn't have the airpower to
do anything about that, but they sure had a lot
(13:56):
more tanks than I had been able to bring a forward. Yet.
Now Hitler directly did a he thought a brilliant counterstroke
to attack the Americans along the line leading toward Marteine,
to break through with tanks at Marteine to get to
the coast, and to cut Patent off completely from his
supply line. This would reverse the situation the third army
(14:18):
would be forced to surrender. Out of gasoline, out of ammunition,
out of food, out of medicine, it would have no
choice but to surrender. The Germans could re establish their
line in Normandy and impose that stalemate that Hitler counted
on to provide him with time to bring the new
weapons into play. Now, the German generals weren't happy with
this plan, brilliant as it looked on paper. Rammel, incidentally,
(14:39):
by now was no longer in the battle. Ramel had
been injured when his car had been shot up by
a spitfire when it was traveling to his headquarters, and
it had crashed, and he had cracked his skull and
had a bad concussion and gone home to recuperate. Hitler's
relations with his generals by this time were in dis
(15:00):
to say the very least of it, because on the
twentieth of July of nineteen forty four, the German conspirators
against Hitler had gone into action. Von Stauffenberg had set
off a bomb in Hitler's headquarters designed to eliminate Hitler
so that the German generals could take over the German government,
and then what they hoped would happen, would be that
(15:21):
the Allies would embrace them, that they could have peace
on their western front, and that they could then turn
all of their forces to the east to stop the
Red tide that was coming in through Poland. They even hoped,
in their wildest fantasies that the Americans and British would
join them, and that you would have the spectacle of
the German, American, British and French army lining up to
(15:44):
stop the advance of the Red Army into Central Europe.
I say fantasy, and it really was, But you think
about it, that's basically what NATO is. That's what ultimately happened.
It wasn't possible with Hitler's Nazis. The German generals thought, hoped, prayed, dreamed,
speculated that it might be possible with the Germany run
(16:04):
by the General staff. There was no way that was
gonna happen. None of the Allied leaders were prepared to
make peace with the German General staff. There was going
to have to be a revolution in Germany first, with
not only Hitler overthrown, but militarism discarded, and a new
democratic Germany could then emerge with whom we could do
business and eventually obviously we did, as they became the
(16:26):
most important European members of the North Atlantic Treaty organization,
and nobody was ready for that in July of nineteen
forty four. But in any event, the plot against Hitler failed.
Came that close. It's one of the great what ifs
of all world history. And it's the damnedest story because
Stauffenberg had his bomb and his briefcase and he had
(16:46):
set it down on the side of the table leg
with Hitler right next to it. Standing at this briefing table.
They were all looking at maps, and Staufenberg then had
excused himself to go out and make a telephone call. Look,
there's why I gotta go make a call back to
the headquarters. As he left, the officer standing on this
side knocked over his briefcase accidentally with his foot, picked
(17:07):
it up and set it down again on the side
away from Hitler, with the big heavy wooden leg between
the bomb and Hitler, so that when the bomb went off.
Although Hitler suffered some injuries, he lost hearing in one
of his ears, his arm was pretty badly hit He
suffered a bitter in the way of internal injuries. He
survived and of course he carried out vengeance against the conspiratories,
(17:30):
which really included almost all the high ranking officers in
the German army. Although some of them managed a duck
and dodge. Ramld didn't. Hitler had deep suspicions about Ronald's
involvement in the conspiracy. Actually, although Romel was informed about
it and was prepared to take advantage of it, he
had advised against it. Romeld took the position that we
(17:50):
ought to arrest Hitler and put him on trial, we
shouldn't kill him. If we kill him, were going to
make him into a martyr, and Germany you'll have another
stab in the back legend, which was pretty good political
thinking on the one side. But on the other side,
the idea that in a totalitarian state run by people
as ruthless and as shrewd and as determined as the Nazis,
(18:13):
that these politically naive generals could get away with arresting
Hitler and putting them on trial. That was nonsense. That
was never gonna en.
Speaker 1 (18:21):
And a terrific job on the production, editing and storytelling
by our own Greg Hangler, and a special thanks to
the Ambrose Estate for allowing us to share this audio
with you, And by the way, go to Amazon or
wherever you get your books, pick up Band of Brothers,
pick up Undaunted Courage, pick up well, just about anything
Ambrose ever wrote. And by the way, what a story
(18:43):
he tells. There are two things that were of particular interest. First,
that suggestion box or ourgis would put in ideas. And
unlike most top down countries, our country he won'ts governed
from the bottom up. And these good ideas would filter
all the way up to a General Marshall, who would
then implement some of them. And of course we hear
(19:04):
about that fear of getting pinned down in July, and
incomes Patton's Army, his third army in July, not just
to save the day, but to move us forward to Berlin.
Like no other general in our ranks could have the
story of D Day. Here on our American stories
This is Lee Habib, and this is our American Stories.
Stephen Ambrose was one of America's leading biographers and historians.
At the core of Ambrose's phenomenal success is his simple
but straightforward belief that history is biography and that history
is about people. Ambrose passed in two thousand and two,
(00:32):
but his epic storytelling accounts can now be heard here
at Our American Stories thanks to those who run his estate.
Here's Ambrose with the D Day Invasion Part two.
Speaker 2 (00:45):
Let's take a listen. The battle over the next couple
of weeks took on a form that brought great anguish
to Eisenhower and posed great dangers for the alliance. This
was because General Montgomery had, in the pre overlord planning,
said that the way this battle is going to go
(01:06):
is as follows. We're going in on the left, that
is the closest to the city of con and thus
to the city of Paris. The role of the Americans
in this operation would be to protect the right flank
of the British forces advancing on Paris. But the Americans
felt that he was being penny wise and pound foolish,
(01:27):
that he was saving a few lives now by not attacking,
it was going to mean more British lives would be
lost later on. We had the initiative, we had the advantage.
We should have driven on was Patent's attitude, Bradley's attitude.
Colins Eisenhower's and many of the senior British officers at
Shay felt the same way well. With Montgomery held up
in front of Cohn, it now fell on the Americans
(01:50):
to the right under General Bradley, the US First Army,
the fourth Infantry, the twenty ninth Infantry, the first Infantry Division,
and the two airborne divisions eighty second, one hundred and
first to effect a breakout from the Normandy Peninsula. This
was about as bad a country as there is in
the world for fighting an offensive action or turning that around.
(02:13):
It was just ideal for the defense. This was because
the Norman countryside is filled with very small fields, many
of them smaller than football fields, very few of them
much bigger. These fields were surrounded by hedges. I don't
think of a little hedge in England or a little
hedge in front of the house on main Street in
(02:34):
the Middle West of the United States. These hedges or
hedge rows were a thousand years and more old. They
consisted of piles of earth as much as six feet
and even more in height, the couple of meters very
broad at the base two three meters, with trees and
shrubs planted on top of them that had been there
(02:56):
for centuries and whose roots had made these mounds, and
to almost a cement kind of barrier. There was one
entry into these fields, and one only that the farmer kept.
It had a gate there, and that's he moved his
cattle in and closed the gate, and the hedgerows were
perfectly satisfactory his fences. Now for the attackers in this
(03:20):
kind of a situation, it was just a nightmare. Gi
In the very first days, gis would come to the gate,
to the opening and rush into the field. Well, the
Germans had prepared for this. They had their machine guns
at the fire d from the gate on each corner
with a crisscross fire through the field. They had mortarmen
(03:40):
behind who had zeroed in on the field, and they
had eighty eight's back further to the rear that had
also sighted into the field. And they would wait until
a bunch of gis, maybe even a platoon in strength,
got into that field. And then they would call out
the fire order and just cut him down. How do
you make primes in a situation like this? And these
(04:01):
German troops may not have been the best that ever
fought for eight off himper, but boy, they sure had
good positions to fight from, and they were awfully good
on the defensive. And also these fields would be strewn
with land mines. Well. One technique that was used was
to drive a tank right into the gate, stop it there,
and turn that seventy five millimeter barrel onto the two
(04:24):
corners and fire white phosphorus shells which put the fear
of God into everyone into the corners to take care
of the machine guns, and then drive the trank around
in the field. And those would be anti personnel mines
out there that the tank could safely explode without injuring
itself and take the field that way. But the Germans
(04:44):
caught onto that quick and often would hit that tank
when it got into the They had field communications mainly
under buried underground telephone lines so that they couldn't be
picked up by the eyes, and they'd get on the
phone at the fire in the hedrow and say the
tank is just coming into the opening. Right now. They'd
have an eighty eight a mile or two back who
zeroed in on that point, and they'd blast it and
(05:05):
blast the tank away. The tanks when they tried to
come in from the sides of the gate right as
through the hedgerow itself would hit that hedgerow, and then
they'd go up in the air, climbing the hedgerow, so
that at their apex they would have their underbellies exposed
to Germans with handheld anti tank rockets on the far side.
And of course the underbelly of a tank has no
(05:27):
armor on it, so you could blow it up with
one well placed shot. The solution to this problem of
fighting in the hedgerow country on the offensive came from
enlisted men. And this was a characteristic of the US
Army in the Second World War that I would want
to dwell on for a second. In the US Army,
(05:50):
every officer from second lieutenant on up had a suggestion box,
either literally or figuratively, outside his door. They didn't do
it that way in the German and the suggestion box
worked time and time and time again. As American kids, privates, corporals,
(06:10):
sergeants would figure out the solution to a tactical problem
and suggest it to their immediate superior, who would pass
it on up the chine of command and tell the
end It got to Bradley himself, and he would okay
or veto the idea. There were lots of them in Normandy.
Many of them worked. The most famous wise to take
(06:31):
those steel rails that had formed the beach defenses at
Utah and Omaha. They were only six feet long and
weld them on to the front of a tank with
two prongs, so that the tank could drive into that
hedgerow and those steel rails would penetrate and that would
keep the tank from going belly up, and the tank
(06:51):
then had enough engine power to drive on through that hedgerow,
and then he could start using his seventy five millimeter cannon.
The tank captain could to hit those German machine gun
positions with the white phosphorus and open up other entryways
into the hedgerows. With this ingenious device, and as I say,
quite a few others, the Americans started to make progress
(07:13):
in Normandy. It was still slow and expensive because every
field had to be fought for, couldn't bypass any of them. Still,
some progress was made almost every day Nevertheless, the mood
in the Allied world was becoming more and more pessimistic
as June gave way to July, and July then began
(07:34):
to approach its end, and Mani still hadn't taken con
and on the right flank, Bradley's troops were only inching
their way forward at a cost reminiscent of the battles
of the First World War. And people thought of the
First World War and were afraid, afraid of a stalemate
that the Germans would keep the Allies bottled up in
(07:55):
Normandy right on through to the coming of fall and
even on into winter, which, along with all the other
bad things that would result from such a situation, the
loss of morale, the loss of life, the loss of equipment.
Stalin would undoubtedly have thought, you're not serious about this attack.
The so called Second Front, he would have said, is
doing us no good at all. Beyond all those things,
(08:17):
a stalemate imposed in Normandy lasting into the winner would
have given her more time to develop his secret weapon,
more time to perfect the diesel submarine, something on which
the Germans had stolen a march on the US and
British Navy, give him time to complete the V one,
the pilotless aircraft radio controlled that could carry bonds. More importantly,
(08:38):
give Werner von Braun and his team more time to
develop the medium range rockets the so called V two
V stood for vengeance weapons, more time to develop the
jet aircraft, where Germany was two years and even more
ahead of the Allies of development.
Speaker 1 (09:00):
And you've been listening to the late great Stephen Ambrose
tell one heck of a story about the D Day invasion.
By the way, there's a part one. Go to Ouramerican
Stories dot com or put in Stephen Ambrose and you'll
see not just the first part of D Day the story,
but so many countless other terrific stories told by Ambrose,
(09:20):
not just about World War Two, but so many other things,
like the trans Continental Railroad and my favorite Undaunted Courage
about the Lewis and Clark expedition.
Speaker 2 (09:31):
And what a story we were hearing.
Speaker 1 (09:33):
Now we have to remember with history that nobody knew
then what was going to happen next. Would our troops
be pinned down in Normandy Well, Eisenhower didn't know, Marshall
didn't know, the men didn't know. And that's why we
love to tell these stories. Bring you back into the
story itself as it was happening. When we come back,
(09:53):
more of the story of D Day here on our
American story, and we continue with our American stories and
with the story of the D Day invasion brought to
(10:15):
us by Stephen Ambrose. Let's pick up where we last
left off.
Speaker 2 (10:21):
Desperate measures were called for. Eisner put great pressure on
Mani to attack. You've got to attack. Mani finally said,
give me all the air forces and I will attack.
Eisner gave him every plane that flew in England and
put him to work in Operation Goodwood toward the end
of July and bombing a stripped one mile by eight
miles in front of Manni's army outside of Khan. This
(10:42):
huge bombardment was followed by an attack that many called
off after the first hour because his losses were too heavy. Again,
the argument Moni saying, I'm holding the German armor in
my front, the Americans saying, we put everything we had
under this attack, and you gained one mile. One mile
was gained after the biggest air bombardment the world has
(11:03):
ever seen, and the anger at Montgomery boiled and boiled.
There were demands on the part of American officers and
some British officers that Eisenhower sacked Montgomery. Send them home,
let him go be the governor of Malta. Put him
in the House of Lords, get rid of them. Get
somebody that will make this British army fight. Eisenhower always
resisted such pressure. He recognized something that those who were
(11:25):
making the recommendation did not. That Money was a national hero,
that the British press had built him up after the
victory at l Alamine into a general whose stature was
the equal to that of Wellington. That to fire Money
in the middle of this battle after the success of
D Day would be unacceptable to the British government and
to the British people. Money had to stay. Instead of
(11:45):
putting pressure on Money, much less firing money, Eisenhower began
putting the pressure on Bradley. Bradley then said, well, we're
almost to the edge of the Hedgerow country. We're almost
out into open wheat fields, places where we can use
our tanks can come into play, where the trucks that
we've brought over all the way from Detroit can become
a part of the action. We're almost there. Give me
(12:08):
an air bombardment to open up a path in the
German defenses and I'll break through. Well, they'd been down
that path once but decided not with Bradley, let's try
it again, So towards the end of the campaign, Operation
Cobra was laid on July twenty eighth. Another huge bombardment
by B seventeen's B twenty four is B twenty fives,
(12:31):
with the fighter bombers getting in and the fighters coming
down to strait right in front of the American lines.
This time, Eisenhower ordered the air commanders to keep that
bombardment right on the noses of our front line troops
so that once it lifts, they can move into an
area that has just been devastated, and any German still
alive is suffering from concussion so badly that he won't
(12:51):
be able to fight. Well, they laid it on close.
They laid it on so close that we took a
lot of casualties, including a four star general General McNair,
who was there to observe This is the last time
I used big bombers in a tactical situation like that.
Taking casualties from your own planes as a terrible thing.
War is awful anyway, but when it's your own guy's
killing you, it really just is the very bottom. But
(13:14):
it worked, It did blast that hole in the German lines.
General Collins was able to break through and take the
town of Saint lo And now is the time to
bring George Patten in on the game. Patten had been eager,
as you might imagine, eager doesn't even begin to describe it,
to get into this battle. Now. At the beginning of August,
(13:34):
he brought his third army over and Patten began to
swing down into France, with the possibility now of going
all the way straight through to Paris without opposition. Now
Hitler saw an opportunity. The Americans had a whole army
out in the open. Germans didn't have the airpower to
do anything about that, but they sure had a lot
(13:56):
more tanks than I had been able to bring a forward. Yet.
Now Hitler directly did a he thought a brilliant counterstroke
to attack the Americans along the line leading toward Marteine,
to break through with tanks at Marteine to get to
the coast, and to cut Patent off completely from his
supply line. This would reverse the situation the third army
(14:18):
would be forced to surrender. Out of gasoline, out of ammunition,
out of food, out of medicine, it would have no
choice but to surrender. The Germans could re establish their
line in Normandy and impose that stalemate that Hitler counted
on to provide him with time to bring the new
weapons into play. Now, the German generals weren't happy with
this plan, brilliant as it looked on paper. Rammel, incidentally,
(14:39):
by now was no longer in the battle. Ramel had
been injured when his car had been shot up by
a spitfire when it was traveling to his headquarters, and
it had crashed, and he had cracked his skull and
had a bad concussion and gone home to recuperate. Hitler's
relations with his generals by this time were in dis
(15:00):
to say the very least of it, because on the
twentieth of July of nineteen forty four, the German conspirators
against Hitler had gone into action. Von Stauffenberg had set
off a bomb in Hitler's headquarters designed to eliminate Hitler
so that the German generals could take over the German government,
and then what they hoped would happen, would be that
(15:21):
the Allies would embrace them, that they could have peace
on their western front, and that they could then turn
all of their forces to the east to stop the
Red tide that was coming in through Poland. They even hoped,
in their wildest fantasies that the Americans and British would
join them, and that you would have the spectacle of
the German, American, British and French army lining up to
(15:44):
stop the advance of the Red Army into Central Europe.
I say fantasy, and it really was, But you think
about it, that's basically what NATO is. That's what ultimately happened.
It wasn't possible with Hitler's Nazis. The German generals thought, hoped, prayed, dreamed,
speculated that it might be possible with the Germany run
(16:04):
by the General staff. There was no way that was
gonna happen. None of the Allied leaders were prepared to
make peace with the German General staff. There was going
to have to be a revolution in Germany first, with
not only Hitler overthrown, but militarism discarded, and a new
democratic Germany could then emerge with whom we could do
business and eventually obviously we did, as they became the
(16:26):
most important European members of the North Atlantic Treaty organization,
and nobody was ready for that in July of nineteen
forty four. But in any event, the plot against Hitler failed.
Came that close. It's one of the great what ifs
of all world history. And it's the damnedest story because
Stauffenberg had his bomb and his briefcase and he had
(16:46):
set it down on the side of the table leg
with Hitler right next to it. Standing at this briefing table.
They were all looking at maps, and Staufenberg then had
excused himself to go out and make a telephone call. Look,
there's why I gotta go make a call back to
the headquarters. As he left, the officer standing on this
side knocked over his briefcase accidentally with his foot, picked
(17:07):
it up and set it down again on the side
away from Hitler, with the big heavy wooden leg between
the bomb and Hitler, so that when the bomb went off.
Although Hitler suffered some injuries, he lost hearing in one
of his ears, his arm was pretty badly hit He
suffered a bitter in the way of internal injuries. He
survived and of course he carried out vengeance against the conspiratories,
(17:30):
which really included almost all the high ranking officers in
the German army. Although some of them managed a duck
and dodge. Ramld didn't. Hitler had deep suspicions about Ronald's
involvement in the conspiracy. Actually, although Romel was informed about
it and was prepared to take advantage of it, he
had advised against it. Romeld took the position that we
(17:50):
ought to arrest Hitler and put him on trial, we
shouldn't kill him. If we kill him, were going to
make him into a martyr, and Germany you'll have another
stab in the back legend, which was pretty good political
thinking on the one side. But on the other side,
the idea that in a totalitarian state run by people
as ruthless and as shrewd and as determined as the Nazis,
(18:13):
that these politically naive generals could get away with arresting
Hitler and putting them on trial. That was nonsense. That
was never gonna en.
Speaker 1 (18:21):
And a terrific job on the production, editing and storytelling
by our own Greg Hangler, and a special thanks to
the Ambrose Estate for allowing us to share this audio
with you, And by the way, go to Amazon or
wherever you get your books, pick up Band of Brothers,
pick up Undaunted Courage, pick up well, just about anything
Ambrose ever wrote. And by the way, what a story
(18:43):
he tells. There are two things that were of particular interest. First,
that suggestion box or ourgis would put in ideas. And
unlike most top down countries, our country he won'ts governed
from the bottom up. And these good ideas would filter
all the way up to a General Marshall, who would
then implement some of them. And of course we hear
(19:04):
about that fear of getting pinned down in July, and
incomes Patton's Army, his third army in July, not just
to save the day, but to move us forward to Berlin.
Like no other general in our ranks could have the
story of D Day. Here on our American stories
Host
Lee Habeeb
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