Landing.

Now the story starts to get interesting. I must say that a lot of this is totally new to me. Up till now I basically thought that Operation Torch consisted of, General Clark tries to talk the French into not fighting, blah, blah, the Americans game ashore, blah, blah, USS Massachusetts pretty much sinks the French fleet by herself, blah, blah, the French put up token resistance then give up, blah, blah, we get our butts kicked at Kaiserine pass, blah, blah, we meet up with the British and the campaign is over. I didn't know anything about any of the commando style raids that preceded the landings, nor just how heavy their casualties were.

Anybody have any specivic thoughts on this chapter?

Hi Rodger -- seems we have a discussion group of two ??

Just finished Chapter 2. He writes smoothly & is easy to read, but I am tiring of the extraneous chit-chat & adjectives/adverbs -- weathermen jotting their "cabalistic symbols" ???.

There is no OOB and that does not help anyone see the big picture. The maps leave gaps in that they show battalions->regiment symbols but stop there. I'm not sure it ever mentions which division some of these folks are from. BTW, the naval OOB, would also be nice (yeah I know it is an army tale) just to learn something.

The part where "Boy Captain" Moore of the 168th lands on the wrong beach then somehow ends up in Lanbiridi -- the text doesn't say how, the maps don't show the route.

It is a "good read", but it isn't my brand of history.

Still plugging on,
John

No idea where my last attempt to reply went.....

I'll be finishing 'Ivan's War' this week and playing catch-up over the weekend

With any luck I will be up to speed for the next chapter...

Sorry guys, but I've fallen WAY behind in my re-reading of this one, and it has been a while since I've read the beast, I don't really feel comfortable in making a viable comment, know what I mean? I AM making a genuine effort to catch up though, just too many irons in the fire...
Gunny

John, I can see what you mean. I'm not sure if I like it or not. It does seem "extraneous" but it can also liven it the narrative up a bit. Maps are lacking, and so it the OOB, that's certainly true. I wondered myself about the way the units were numbered. I thought there should have had three numbers, company, regiment, and division. I suppose this can be excused because there were so few divisions. Between the text and the maps you can pretty much figure out who goes where. My main issue with the author is still that he seems to go out of his way to show how badly prepared for war the US military was. I'm not disputing that it wasn't prepared, but I think he is going out of his way to show it. At lunch I'll go out and review this chapter more to see if I can show some instances where I think he is overboard.

Rodger:
On the symbology -- there are battalion symbols, sometimes regiment symbols, but so far no division symbols, etc. The battalion symbols usually (correctly) show the parent regiment, but the regimental symbols do not show the parent division. Which would be OK if a simple OOB had been given in the nearby text. Discerning OOB from a map is near impossible due to attachments.detachments, etc ...

Actually, I like Chapter 3 better -- the details of dealing with the French are a hoot ....

I don't have a problem of his view/opinion on US readiness -- it's fact -- and we haven't even got to Fredenhall .... I think it would have been better for him to spend a whole section of the book up front discussing the US Army, Regulars, Guard, and Reserve in the 20's - 30's from the point of doctrine, training, manning, education, etc. Not all of that is bad, particularly the Regulars & education, but one has to understand how useless the Guard structure was, how unsuitable and unprepared the majority of the Guard personnel were, especially at the officer level & the more senior the worse. We were still curing that ill two years later ... Political appointments, good ol' boy networks,

None of the above is meant to start a war with the NG. It is a fact of that time which doesn't represent the very different fact of today. The NG of today is a lot different than it was in WW2 and a lot different, as is the Army itself, than 10-20-30 years ago ...

As I stated earlier, I am reading thru to see how he handles the "what did we learn" aftermath but I think that by missing the front-end as I noted above, he will have a hard time showing change ...

John

Hope you guys dont' mind, but I'm having a great time "lurking" on this thread. I've had "An Army at Dawn" on my reading list for some time and haven't been able to get to it.

Following the discussion so far has been an enjoyable way to get some of the highlights!!!

Tom

Not at all Tom, feel free to "lurk" and join in at any time if you have any comments or questions.

JRATZ, and anybody else reading along, let me try to clarify my views about the author. I think I have a bias concerning his being a "staff writer and senior editor for the Washington Post for twenty years." I'm NOT the "it's all the fault of the liberal media" kind of guy but I do think that newspaper people can have a tendancy to put a "spin" on a story in order to make it more interesting and readable. I have no doubt that the US army and navy was unprepared for war when they invaded North Africa. Atkinson has more than shown this and he can show it as often as he likes. I wish he were a bit more fair about it is all. Here are two examples.

In the section, "In the night all cats are grey", pg 70 in my edition, the paragraph that begins "To command RESERVIST,..." is this passage. "After commanding a destroyer flotilla on convoy duty, he headed a training school for intelligence agents in Hertford: his students included KimPhilby and Guy Burgess, who would would be notorious soon enough as British traitors."

Ok, that's fine but what does that have to do with RESERVIST? That makes an interesting sidebar but it almost sounds like Atkinson is saying, "See, the commanders were so bad they couldn't even spot a future traitor they were training."

Later in the same section, pg 72, paragraph beginning, "The overloaded cutters..." is this passage. "The overloaded cutters wallowed so badly during the short trip across the Mediterranean that soup sloshed from the mess bowls." The cutters may in fact have been overloaded, I really don't know. I don't think it's that unusual though for 250 foot boats, depending on the sea conditions, to have soup "sloshed from the mess bowls." It seems to me that Atkinson saw this mentioned, and took it as just one more example of how the Allies were scrapping the bottom of the barrel when they were forced to use such boats in their assault.

I think there are plenty of examples like this in the chapters ahead.

Rodger,

First, I have to admit that I have read the Washington Post pretty much daily for almost 15 years, not that I'm liberal, but it is the best information from our nation's capitol ... enough said ...

Atkinson does military reporting and should have some background/knowledge .... I treat his work far different than I treat some of the liberal college types with their thinly disguised anti-war/military/etc polyemics & agendas ...

I think you and I are reading the same passages with different perspectives. I see the ones you cited, not as intentional negatives against the services, but him cluttering up the text with extraneous color & chit-chat & fluff - he does waste a lot of time telling us everything he knows whether it is relevant or not ... See my previous comments about this ...

Break to hit the latrine & get another Guinness ... (perfectly illustrating cause &effect) ...

You know, the more I think about it, you are right -- a certain negativeness does sneak in -- it's almost a "tone" or "underlying current" ... In many regards, it is as if he were a broadcast media reporter -- never mention the thousand guys who didn't screw up, just the one that did ....

John

Yes, thank you, that's exactly what I've been trying to put into words, without results. It's also not so much he overlooks the 1000 guys who did good, in order to concentrate on the 1 who screwed up, but rather, I think, that he looks for every single example of somebody screwing up, when really only a half as many would make his point just as well.

Now, on to things that Atkinson certainly does well in getting across. I don't know about anybody else but I had never heard of Operations RESERVIST, VILLAIN, and TERMINAL. I was very surprised to hear about how disasterous they, for the most part, were. I would think that if the number of men had been larger, they may have gone down in history along with Market/Garden.

One thing that is made clear in this chapter, and even more in the next chapter, is that, say what you will about the French, they could and did fight bravely. This is particularly true of the French navy. The tragedy of it is in this case they were fighting the wrong people.

One final point. One thing the is clear is the difficulty the Allies had in knowing if the if the French would fight or not. This really seemed a no win situation. If they attacked all out they risked allienating the French even more. If they didn't go into the fight expecting the French to fight back, as they seemed to have done in many cases, they are asking for disaster, which they got.

Rodger, we're getting ahead of ourselves here but you made an excellent point that I didn't want to loose. The US "way of war" is attrition, hi-diddle-diddle-right-up-the-middle. The situation with the French placed us a position of "clear ambiguity" for maybe one of the first times in our military history.

And Atkinson makes a very good point in Chap 3 when he discusses the action around St Cloud, where a US Reg Cdr is going to walk a barage through the town & Terry Allen overrules him & orders a bypass -- as Atkinson says "[Allen] had calibrated political and battlefield variables to make the first singular tactical decision by an American general in the liberation of Europe."

John