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It was a noble undertaking and it was very intelligent of General Bradley to think of
it the point was how to break the stalemate that is holding the American soldiers in the
Boucage area of Normandy where they are suffering very badly you can't you can't do your tactics
there we've gotta do something new he got the idea let us send two thousand bombers
over and give them the treat that we've been giving Berlin all the time let's bomb them
to hell and devastate them and then our troops can be freed and they we're freed ultimately
and that is when General Patton's third army entered entered the uh show well what we learned
there is the difficulty of communication the bombers were supposed to observe a line about
a mile wide and about uh maybe six miles long an oblong and in which they could bomb and
they'd been told the troops will be will vacate that area and they believed that but what
happened was that the bombs they dropped left smoke behind and the Americans mistook that
smoke for the smoke of their own smoke screen which they had worked out and they assumed
the bombers assumed that that was an empty space actually full of American soldiers and
they bombed it from these B-17s these immense bombs they bombed it for a long time and they
killed a great many American soldiers stupidly because nobody had thought you know when the
bombs go off that's gonna change the smoke line isn't it nobody thought of that and so
that is something was never reported and it wasn't reported also because it made possible
a breakthrough from the Omaha Beach head to get the war really going with tanks and to
uh you know free General Patton's third army to rampage all over France they were about
uh five hundred yards from Paris a couple of days later they went so fast well that
was one occasion when which would have to be called ironic because the hopes were so
high that that was going to be a workable solution to a difficult problem it did did
it not des when they corrected the mistake they just destroyed the Germans who were there
yeah yeah it did that it did that and made possible the the advance but it also destroyed
a great many American soldiers you know the thing that struck me Paul is the ultimate
irony was that the book says that to escape the American efforts to kill them uh some
of these Germans were driven so insane that they killed themselves instead that's true
yeah that saw that as the only way out but they had very different views about honor
then we had so that that is not really very surprising uh there was something else I wanted
to say about that I I've forgotten what it is but it doesn't yes in the book actually
the book is uh my book called The Boys Crusade yeah I advise sightseers and Normandy is a
great sightseers target I said don't waste your time looking for a monument about the
hundreds of American troops killed on that occasion because there is none and there probably
never will be because it's so shameful I mean we were just so stupid as to kill our own
soldiers well I learned later on that that happens much more often than we realize and
it always has to be covered up with public lies of one kind or another or implicit public
lies by just not mentioning it uh if you mention it people are going to catch on that war is
very dangerous indeed and look out you know you tell the uh the story about operation
Cobra that I think it was General McNair yeah who was responsible training the United States
he was behind the lines in a hole yeah they never found anything but a piece of his shirt
collar that's right because we thought we had withdrawn the troops entirely to safety
and he was he'd he was the director of training of the United States Army I think he was a
full General or a lieutenant General and he had found a nice uh dugout uh something to
be in and he thought he was perfectly safe well apparently a bomb hit right on top of
him and blew him all to hell fantastic This excerpt is brought to you by the Massachusetts
School of Law