Season 064 Part 18. End the War in 44 – Only Human – Bradley 3 – I don't care if we get Brest tomorrow or ten days later.

It was Omar Bradley who, during the campaign by Patton’s Third Army in Brittany who said to Troy Middleton, the commander of the VIII Corp who was fretting over Patton’s orders to take Brest as quickly as possible:

Some people are more concerned with the headlines and the news they'll make than the soundness of their tactics. I don't care if we get Brest tomorrow or ten days later. If we cut the peninsula, we'll get it anyhow. But we can't risk a loose hinge.

This indicated a fundamental difference between the way of war conducted by Bradley and Patton, the commander of the Third Army who had been foisted on an unhappy Bradley.

Montgomery, who had been the first to realise that the ports in Brittany no longer mattered in the war being fought against Germany after the collapse of its army after Cobra, didn’t issue an order to Bradley not to send Patton’s entire Army into Brittany to take the ports, but he did make it clear that he thought a single Corp could do the job, and with doubts that even that would be needed. So how did Bradley handle the whole Brittany thing?

Tag words: Omar Bradley; Patton’s Third Army; Troy Middleton; Brest; Brittany; Montgomery; Operation Cobra; Russell Weigley; Eisenhower’s Lieutenants; German Army; Overlord; Normandy; General John Shirley Wood; Tiger Jack; American Rommel; Quiberon Bay; Chateaubriant; Carlo d’Este; A Genius for War;