, 21:13For NEPTUNE/OVERLORD, all four US "veteran" divisions (1st, 9th, 2nd Armored, and 82nd Airborne) had combat experience as divisions. I wonder if Gammel failed to rise to the occasion too? His next move was in a senior staff role. Poor performance cost McNaughton his job.
He seemed to be on track until Ex Spartan. Gammel spend much of WW1 as a staff officer, but was in command and staff roles in WW2.
Brook was fighting the war - and keeping a cjeck on WSC while Nye ran the Army. The British Army has never created a Great General Staff in the Prussian style, but it needs really really good staff officers in key roles. This may have marked them down as "staff" rather than "command".
#AIRBRIDGE TOKEN PROFESSIONAL#
He and Nye were both very bright chaps with Nye's law degree a professional qualification beyond those normal for soldiers. Nye, as a mustang (or whatever the British equivalent is) might very well have been just the individual to work with the Americans, for example. Kind of like Archibald Nye as significant as both men's careers were, one wonders if they would have been better in operational commands than some of those who did receive them. If not, then expecting the Allies to manage to do so with an understrength mixed motorized brigade and (perhaps) a battalion or so of airborne infantry seems questionable.Īlexander and Montgomery had other responsibilities at the time, however I've always wondered about James Gammel, who appears to have been well-regarded by all of his superiors (from Auchinleck to Montgomery to Wilson to Alexander), served as chief of staff to SACMED under Wilson and Alexander, and yet never got an operational command outside of the UK. Which raises the question of whether Esteva, with 12,000 French and colonial troops, could have held the airfields and ports against what was, at best, an airlift of (initially) a few thousand light infantry from Sicily. given the unliklihood of getting to Tunis in strength and absent Esteva fighting it out to prevent an Axis entry into Tunis and Bizerte with his own resources, seems unlikely there was much chance of getting into the northern Tunisian ports before the Axis did. The French garrison commander of Tunis was willing to fight and was still close enough to the city to worry the Axis.įair all in all. A pity such a air borne operation was beyond them.
It seems the First Army staff and commander had something to learn about combat operations as well. There was also the expectation the two battalions Allied paratroops would have seized the Tunis airfield by 12 November. Note that the Brits expected to cover the operations east of Algiers with a couple groups of Spitfires, but a failure to deliver fuel to the Djidjelli airfield grounded them. Would seizing Bone been worth the loss of a dozen cargo and warships? Only if it means Bizerte or Tunis is in Allied hands a week or two later & not the Axis. The Brit concerns about Axis air attacks on a amphib fleet reading Bone 9 November seem more justified than the US fears of the Spaniards. When the Brit advanced guards reached Bone a flotilla of transports followed & saw themselves and the port repeatedly bombed. On 11 & 12 November while hovering over the landing at Bougie, 220 km west of Bone, the Allies lost three transports, a cruiser, and had the Monitor Roberts damaged. They weren't in the mood to lose another carrier & a dozen other ships while hovering over a landing operation at Bone. Four months earlier the Brits had carriers put out of action and a flotilla of cruisers, as well as a half dozen cargo ships sunk in Op PEDESTAL. If the conops had been a US corps (ideally, Patton's amphibious corps headquarters, reinforced) in Morocco, and a British corps (Crocker? Allfrey?, also reinforced) in eastern Algeria, with a floating reserve and heavy escort for Tunisia ready and at sea, seems like the end result could well have been better than the reality. The US element of the SHINGLE assault force was the 3rd, so yes for DRAGOON, 3rd, 36th, and 45th were all experienced, as well as some elements of the 1st ATF (depending on how one categorizes the 1st SSF, which went in by sea).įor NEPTUNE/OVERLORD, all four US "veteran" divisions (1st, 9th, 2nd Armored, and 82nd Airborne) had combat experience as divisions. Also have to consider the elements of the 82nd that were committed. In the invasion of Italy, at Anzio and in the south of France all the US divisions initially landed by sea had previous combat experience.įor HUSKY, are you counting 2nd Armored, 1st, 3rd, and the 82nd, or just the first three? Some of the 82nd went in by air, some by sea, of course.įor AVALANCHE, I'd say yes for the 45th, but no for the 36th. In Sicily, the US landed three divisions with previous combat experience and one without. I was just looking at the US forces used in the initial landings in the Mediterranean from July 1943.
0 kommentar(er)
