One of the claims made is that it was Ike himself who
selected PdH at target #1. And thus he wanted the mess covered up as it was embarrassing. I doubt this, as I think Ike had a lot more
on his plate that to deal with minutia like this. This is what he had an enormous
staff for. His Intel guys would come to him and say "here's our plan based
upon our best estimate" and he'd OK it. So I don’t buy that, but figure any errors
were made way down on the food chain and it just floated up to the people who
needed to approve it.
As to PdH not being a worthy target, I disagree. One of the
author's claims is that the Yanks didn’t know the guns were not there. No, not
correct. There is ample evidence that the maps given out to the Rangers and
others for D-day clearly marked PDH as having the guns removed. In fact, this
is why Major Lytle got bent out of shape on 5 June. He knew there were no guns,
and he knew they were going get a lot of guys killed for no real reason. So Rudder
relived him, and went ashore to run things himself. Now I have to admit that my
own personal feelings are that Rudder made a major error here. I was not there
when Lytle was relived, although some Rangers told me what they had heard.
Maybe he needed to be, maybe not. But there is a thing in the Army called chain
of command. If Lytle was shot in the first minute, there was someone else ready
to take over. Rudder did not need to go.
Although he had made a lot of noise previously about wanting to . So to me, in
my opinion with what I know, and understanding full well that there may be
evidence that has not come forward, I think Rudder screwed the pooch here.
I think he wanted to go ashore in the invasion, and when
Lytle got upset/drunk/loud or whatever, he saw it as his moment of glory and
stepped into the fray. What this did, was leave the Rangers without a support
system off shore to watch out for them. Thus there were issues with naval
gunfire support, and resupply. In my
opinion he should have stayed offshore, and done his job as coordinator, then
landed when the situation was clear, which would have allowed him to bring in supplies,
evacuate wounded and all those things that the Rangers had issues with.
I think the author is also wrong when he says the PdH
landing was useless. Yes, there were no
guns there, but there was a key observation point with nice rangefinders linked
into the local batteries via buried land lines. The view from this position is
pretty good both ways, and if those observers were able to send targeting
information to the German batteries it would have been very beneficial for
them. The second value of taking PdH is that it is close to the road connecting
the two beaches. I'm not sure if this
was a critical position to take, but the Rangers did cut the road, and it
proved to be important that they did. And of course they also denied that
ground to any German batteries that might have moved up. The guns the Rangers destroyed behind PdH
could easily have been moved up, and tied in to the observation post. He's got a very interesting reason they
weren't, which I think may well be true. But That one I will let you go buy the
book and read for yourselves.
As an odd note on the Rangers at PdH. A short while after
Spearheading D-day was publishing, I got an odd phone call. It was from a fellow
in the southwest that had been a Ranger in the 70/80's. He told me he had hung
out with WW2 rangers a lot at their reunions and had always asked them about
their operations. Everything he said that I had any knowledge on made perfect
sense to me, so my bullshit detector did not go off. He said he had to call me and let me know I
had gotten closest to the truth of anyone. Especially with the relief of Lytle.
And he was really impressed I had picked up on that and figured out who it
was. We had a long talk, and he was going
to send me some documents, then vanished into the aether. Oh well. One thing he said that always made
me wonder was that he had more than one eye witness to the Rangers being
destroyed at Cisterna, and that they had actually been doing well with their
night infiltration, until a jeep from a neighboring unit that had gotten lost
can up with their head lights on. That's when the Germans were tipped off. I
have no idea if this is true or not, but as I said, the guy really did seem to
know what he was talking about. I always
wondered if anyone else had heard that story.
And no, I never heard from him again.
So, when I have a minute I am going to post part 3, in which
I talk more about the book than what's in it.
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