“Operation COBRA and the Breakout at Normandy,”

By Rick Atkinson; Pulitzer Prize Winning Author

Six weeks after the Allied invasion of Normandy, Operation OVERLORD showed distressing signs of stalemate. More than a million American, British, and Canadian troops had come ashore in France by mid-July 1944, but they remained wedged within a narrow bridgehead roughly fifty miles wide and twenty miles deep. Both German defenders and Allied attackers had suffered more than 100,000 casualties; it was small comfort to the Allies that the enemy wounded included Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, commander of Army Group B, who was critically injured in a strafing ambush on July 17. Fighting was intense, grim, and unspeakably violent, with daily advances often limited to a few yards. The great war correspondent Ernie Pyle told his wife, ”Sometimes I get so obsessed with the tragedy and horror of seeing dead men that I can hardly stand it. But I guess there is nothing to do but keep going? As a New Zealand officer serving as an observer with the British Second Army wrote.” realize that the enemy morale is lower but ours frightens me.?

Morale hardly improved when British efforts to expand the bridgehead south of Caen gained little ground in Operation GOODWOOD, an attack led on July 18 by three armored divisions which together lost more than 400 tanks. A trooper in the Fife and Forfar Yeomanry reported: “In front, brew-up after brew-up, some tank crews are on fire and rolling about on the ground trying to put out the flames in their clothes.? Beyond gaining a few dozen square miles, GOODWOOD did succeed in further fixing German attention on the eastern half of the Allied bridgehead, allowing the Americans in the west to position themselves for the blow that would finally break the deadlock, transforming a war of attrition into a war of movement.

That decisive blow, known as COBRA, was largely planned by the U.S. First Army commander. Lieutenant General Omar N. Bradley flew from France to England to plead for a massive assault by heavy and medium bombers to blow a hole in the German line for ground troops to exploit. Aca,!A”I want it to be the biggest thing in the world? Bradley said, with bomb craters every sixteen feet at his chosen point of attack, a few miles west of St. LAfA’. Originally intended to follow on the heels of GOODWOOD, COBRA was delayed several days by the wretched weather that plagued Normandy in the summer of 1944. Thick clouds also led to the abrupt cancellation of sorties launched from England on July 24, but not before the first waves had dropped their payloads, including several dozen bombs that fell behind American lines, killing or wounding about 150 U.S. soldiers.

Bradley was furious, not least because the bombers had attacked not parallel to the road marking the Army’s line of departure as he had insisted, but rather perpendicular to that road in tactics which the pilots considered technically necessary but which Bradley believed increased the chance of fratricide. Despite charging that Army Air Forces had simply lied about the attack plan, Bradley concluded that he had no choice but authorize another, full-throated attempt a day later, on July 25.”Queer feeling!”sitting, waiting,!”waiting for God knows what? an armored officer told his diary.

Some 1,500 B-17s and B-24s dropped more than 3,000 tons of bombs when COBRA resumed shortly before noon on July 25, with almost another 1,000 tons of bombs and napalm dropped by medium bombers and napalm in one of World War II’s most devastating air attacks. Again, many bombs fell short, killing 111 American soldier,!”including Lt. Gen. Lesley J. McNair, commander of Army Ground Forces who had imprudently joined front-line troops as an observer!”and wounding nearly 500 others. 

“The most sustained horrible thing I have ever gone through” wrote Ernie Pyle, who was caught in the errant drop. Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Allied supreme commander, had crossed the English Channel to Normandy for the day, only to return to his headquarters in England that evening, dejected and uncertain about COBRAA success, but determined never to use heavy bombers in support of ground troops again. “I gave them a green light this time? Eisenhower told Bradley. “But I promise you.

In fact, the bombing had unhinged German defenses almost precisely as planned. “The bomb carpets rolled toward us, most of them passing only a few yards away? reported Gen. Fritz Bayerlein, commander of the badly mauled Panzer Lehr Division, who described, “a pall of dust, with fountains of earth spewing high in the air? In addition to killing perhaps a thousand German soldiers and demolishing numerous command posts, the bombardment overturned tanks, demolished enemy communications, and terrified those who survived the onslaught only to face several attacking U.S. Army infantry divisions. Late on the afternoon of July 25, the VII Corps commander, Maj. Gen. J. Lawton Collins, shrewdly decided to send his armor exploitation force into the breach. The next day, the German Seventh Army reported seven ruptures in the line from east to west. By the night of July 27, the 30th Infantry Division, which had suffered most of the fratricidal casualties earlier in the week, reported, “This thing has busted wide open.? Bradley wrote Eisenhower the following day, “Things on our front really look good.? 

Things got even better. More than 100,000 combat troops poured south through a gap not five miles wide, soon turning the German left flank and capturing several key bridges near Avranches, the gateway from Normandy to Brittany. At noon on August 1, the U.S. Third Army was committed to the fight under Lt. Gen. George S. Patton, and the stalemate anxieties of mid-July would soon vanish in a hell-for-leather pursuit of a beaten enemy across France.

Author says Soldiers can learn from World War II

By NICK DUKE

Three-time Pulitzer Prize winner, military historian and author Rick Atkinson visited Marshall Auditorium 2013 to speak as part of the Combat Leader Speaker Program.

Atkinson has written six books, including his latest work, The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945. The book is the final installment of Atkinson’s “Liberation Trilogy,” a narrative history of the U.S. military’s role in the liberation of Europe in World War II.

Atkinson spent the last 15 years working on the trilogy, an endeavor he said he took on in large part because of his fascination with the effect combat has on Soldiers.

“The great stress of combat really reveals character, whether you’re talking about the Civil War or last week,” Atkinson said. “That’s what intrigues me.”

As part of promotional efforts for his book, Atkinson frequently stops at military installations to speak to Soldiers.

He said that there are lessons Soldiers can learn from researching World War II, especially from a leadership perspective.

“There are elements of combat leadership that are eternal,” he said. “Whether you go back 2,000 years to look at what made a successful combat leader in ancient times or whether you’re looking at today in Afghanistan or a couple of years ago in Iraq, the things that you see are people who are physically fit, people who are adaptable and … are not ruffled when things don’t go according to plan because they never do in combat. 

“I think that if you look at successful combat leaders from World War II or Korea or Vietnam or any of our other wars, including the Gulf War or Grenada and the more recent wars, what you see is Soldiers who can think through what they are doing. There’s an element of reacting to it, but being able to maintain a calm center when everything around you is chaos and being able to resist the forces of stress and being able to make an effective, rational decision is what makes an effective combat leader.”

While some may say that modern technology has made combat vastly different from World War II, Atkinson disagrees.

“I think combat Soldiers are combat Soldiers, whether you’re talking about 2013 in Afghanistan or 1944 in the Battle of the Bulge or the Civil War or the American Revolution,” he said. 

“Aspects of leadership, physical fitness, taking care of each other, the leaders taking care of their Soldiers — all of those things derive directly from combat experience in World War II. The successful combat leaders do it well and those who are not successful don’t do it as well. I think that the lessons are pretty direct and pretty intimate, and I think that a Soldier today should feel a very direct connection to those Soldiers of 70 years ago.”

Atkinson, who worked as a Washington Post journalist for 25 years, also offered advice to Soldiers on how to deal with members of the media during conflicts.

“There are several rules,” he said. “Don’t lie. Stay in your lane. Don’t talk about what you don’t understand or aren’t authorized to talk about. Be direct. Bad news never improves with age. Don’t think that a reporter you’re talking to is not going to find out the seedier side of some controversy because they probably will and you don’t want to find yourself having fibbed about it or trying to cover it up.

“Rely on your public affair officers and public affairs NCOs. They are responsible in part for acting as a liaison in that relationship … The reporter is not there to carry water for you. The reporter is not there to help you do your job, but a reporter is there to understand what your job is. I think you can take that to the bank and it could make for a unique relationship.”

Atkinson’s father was an Army officer, something that he said helped to foster his interest in military history. 

“(Military history) is part and parcel of who we are, where we came from and where we’re going,” he said. “For Americans to recognize the importance of military history is vital to understanding how we got here in 2013. It’s all part of this giant tapestry that we call the American story. That’s what I’m keen on telling.”

“The Guns at Last Light” follows the American military from the days leading up to D-Day all the way through the end of the war in Europe. 

Atkinson said the war grabbed his interest at an early age, and seems to hold an eternal appeal for many Americans.

“The war was so enormous and so terrible — 60 million dead,” he said. “Nothing like it before and nothing like it, I hope, that we will ever see again. That has a magnetic appeal to people. It was an existential war. It was about our very existence and the things we hold dearest. That has a relentless attraction for people.”