Hobart Bartshire

Bill Strutton is a extraordinary writer, schooled in the British tradition; to read a great example, delve into "Island of Terrible Friends". "The Secret Invaders" is a bit less compelling, yet the story shines a stark and revealing ugliness to the US Army's invasion planning for D-Day. We have heard the landing craft heading for Omaha Beach missed their intended target and instead the soldiers were confronted with a wickedly different beachfront, machine-guns scything their ranks. Bill Strutton tells the short history of the British commando/scouts who reconned the waters before landings in the Dodecanese and Sicily, charting shoals and sand-bars and on shore strong-points, and then deploying path-finders to guide the landing crafts that morning. Yet the US Army chose to dismiss such an effort, scoffing at this expertise, with a result that the British landed at their Normandy beaches relatively unscathed, and the US Army took significant losses.