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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
Force Mulberry,
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Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Force Mulberry - The Planning and Installation of the Artificial Harbor off U.S. Normandy Beaches in World War II (Hardcover)
This book is amazing!! Its about the Installation of the artificial harbor in Normandy during World War 2. My grandfather is mentioned many times in this wonderful accounting of the war.His name was LT> Comm. John Adam Bassett. who was also commissioned before his death a Captain in the Navy..It was such an old book written by Alfred Stanford I wasn't sure I could get another copy for my family . Amazon is amazing with their sights....
5.0 out of 5 stars
force mulberry,
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Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Force Mulberry - The Planning And Installation Of Artificial Harbor Off U.S. Normandy Beaches In World War II (Hardcover)
Force Mulberry is very special to me my grandfather Captain John Adam Bassett was mentioned many times he was in charge of sinking the cassions to build a breakwater on Oamaha Beach during World War Two. The original book was written in 1945 by Alfred Stanford
0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Temporary refuge,
By
This review is from: Force Mulberry - The Planning And Installation Of Artificial Harbor Off U.S. Normandy Beaches In World War II (Hardcover)
In war - or in any other complicated endeavor - things can go wrong in ridiculous ways. Such was the history of the American Mulberry, or artificial harbor, that almost failed and - on the for-want-of-a-nail principle - came within a whisker of ruining the 1944 invasion of France.
There are scant histories of the Mulberries, and apparently there never will be a full history, inasmuch as some of the documents were burned, according to Alfred Stanford, a U.S. Navy officer who was deputy commander of the American Mulberry built off Omaha and Utah beaches. His history, published in 1951, starts awkwardly but once it gets rolling turns into one of the better stories of out-of-the-way aspects of the big war, except Mulberry was only out-of-the-way in the sense of getting relatively little attention. It is mentioned in one or two pages in histories of the invasion. The detailed history is worth the telling and Stanford pulls few punches in doing it. "Force Mulberry" is also well worth reading by anyone interested in how small screwups spoil big adventures, and it would make an excellent text for the 21st century American military, which is building up a legendary record of screwups. The problem was simply stated. The Allies could not expect to capture a French port quickly, so they had to figure out a way to move vast quantities of men and munitions over open beaches, beaches that enjoy some of the worst weather in the world. The answer was to build two complete harbors in England and tow them to France. Although Mulberry had highest priority and sponsorship from the top political leaders, it seems not to have been well understood by the top level of military commanders. At one point, Capt. Dayton Clark, who commanded the American operation, was reporting to four admirals simultaneously. Stanford avers that Rear Adm. Allan Kirk, the Navy assault commander, showed no real interest in Mulberry until a couple of days before D-Day, when it was too late for high command to have any impact anyway. Stanford blames too much secrecy early on for part of the problems, and divided command throughout. These are not novel military failings and they have not stopped since 1944. However, some of the errors were almost comical. The flagships for the commanders of the two sections of American Mulberries, Clark and Stanford, were submarine chasers, whose ordinary job was escorting convoys. Some low level planner, not understanding that the SCs were serving as command vessels for the nonce, wrote into the operational orders a task for them to help escort a small section of the invasion force. Clark and Stanford, knowing that they would never be anywhere near those ships, ignored that. At some point further along in the planning, another low level operations officer (or perhaps the same one) issued codebooks to the Mulberry commanders as if they were part of the escort command. Clark and Stanford were halfway to France before they discovered that they had the wrong codes and could not communicate with anybody, or even learn whether the invasion was going forward or had been thrown back into the sea. Presumably Eisenhower never learned about this. As it turned out, the Mulberries worked very well. Better even than a regular port, because they were designed to operate modularly, very much like a modern container port. (They did not have containers, or course, but they did function much like ro-ro - roll-on, roll-off - logistical units.) "Here were piers and steel roadways ready to work with a simplicity and ease no harbor in the world could match," writes Stanford proudly. For two days, until a storm wrecked the nice roadways. The simplest part of the design - just some old ships sunk to block the swells and provide sheltered water for the light landing craft, survived the storm best. Two days were just enough to get the heavy artillery ashore, and the rest is history. As Wellington said after Waterloo was done, "It has been a damned nice thing -- the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life." "Force Mulberry" has next to nothing to say about the British Mulberry, and a full history would be a good thing to have, but Stanford's book is outstanding for what it does cover.
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