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Freeman had been spending a lot of time with his own artillery officers, Paul O’Dowd, the forward observer for the Fifteenth Field Artillery Battalion, noticed. He was always checking in, asking what they were hearing, and there was a good reason for that, because when all the other forms of communications were breaking down, the artillery generally had the best communications left. The artillery had to have good communications; if they didn’t, they risked killing their own troops. So they had their own spotter planes, and their reports from the field were very good, or at least very good on the scale of communications that existed by then. They knew from the start that the road south was only for the dead and dying. O’Dowd, who had been studying Freeman, knew immediately what he was up to, and decided that he was a damn smart officer. Other division officers tended to categorize the artillery as a unit to which you gave orders, not one you listened to. Because of what he was hearing, Freeman decided relatively early in the day to go out on the Anju road, the route Shrimp Milburn had offered to Keiser.
The Coldest Winter
David Halberstam
Ass Power is the ability to sit your butt down in the chair and get to work, and the willpower and commitment to keep your butt in the chair to get things done.
The Practice of Practice
Jonathan Harnum
The fear of another war had infected Whitehall and the Quai d’Orsay. Certainly Roosevelt’s Washington was not without its defeatists; in the last fiscal year the Army’s plans for new equipment had been limited to 1,870 more Garand rifles. Perhaps the generals were only being realistic; they would have had a difficult time getting much more on the Hill. But Roosevelt saw an alternative. The most resolute hard-core isolationist, believing only in Fortress America, conceded the need for a strong Navy. Therefore the President rode down Pennsylvania Avenue on January 28, 1938, and asked for a billion-dollar “two-ocean” Navy. He got it, in the Vinson Naval Act. At the same time he sent Hopkins to the Pacific Coast for a survey; he wanted to know how quickly aircraft factories could convert to the production of warplanes. As Hopkins later noted, the President felt certain that war was coming to America “and he believed that air power would win it.” His statement in 1938 that the United States needed 8,000 planes distressed almost everyone, including generals and admirals. An exception was Air Corps General Arnold. Briefing the commander in chief, Arnold had estimated that Germany then had 8,000 bombers and fighters. America had 1,650 pilots, a few hundred obsolete planes, and thirteen B-17s on order, to be delivered at the end of 1938. The general added pointedly that the lead time for modern weapons was very long. Roosevelt gave him the green light for expansion. Without that sanction, Arnold declared after the war, the sky over Normandy could not have been cleared of the Luftwaffe in 1944, and D-Day could not have been scheduled for June 6.
The Glory and the Dream
William Manchester
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