RONALD REAGAN'S FINEST MOMENT: THE BOYS OF POINTE DU HOC: JUNE 6, 1944: 3/8: Dog Company: The Boys of Pointe du Hoc — the Rangers Who Landed at D-Day and Fought Across Europe,by Patrick K. O’Donnell, with John Pruden as narrator. Blackstone Audio, Inc.
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.6 • 2.7K Ratings
🗓️ 26 May 2025
⏱️ 11 minutes
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Summary
https://www.amazon.com/Dog-Company-Patrick-K-O-Donnell-audiobook/dp/B00A2ATV1W/ref=tmm_aud_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=
It is said that the right man in the right place at the right time can mean the difference between victory and defeat. This is the dramatic story of 68 soldiers in the US Army's Second Ranger Battalion, Company D — "Dog Company" — who made that difference, time and again. From D-day, when German guns atop Pointe du Hoc threatened the Allied landings and the men of Dog Company scaled the sheer 90-foot cliffs to destroy them; to the slopes of Hill 400, in Germany’s Hürtgen Forest, where the Rangers launched a desperate bayonet charge across an open field; to a "quiet" section of the Ardennes, where Dog Company suddenly found itself on the tip of the spear at the Battle of the Bulge; the men of Dog Company made the difference.
1944 POINTE DU HOC
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is CBSI in the world. I'm John Batts with Patrick O'Donnell. His book, Dog Company, |
| 0:07.9 | The Boys of Puanta do Ock, the Rangers who accomplished D-Day's toughest mission, led the way across Europe. |
| 0:13.7 | It is 6 of June, sometime around between 7, 20 and 8 o'clock in the morning. |
| 0:20.3 | The landing craft are all coming into Omaha and Utah at this point. |
| 0:25.5 | Also, there's the British and Canadian and French forces landing further to the west. |
| 0:31.8 | However, all of that is vulnerable to those German guns at the top, and they must be destroyed. The assault is led by |
| 0:40.5 | assault team A, dog easy and fox. They've been training for this and they have a machine that is |
| 0:48.9 | new to assault forces anywhere. I don't know that they needed it before. |
| 0:56.0 | It's a grapnel hook fired by a rocket. |
| 1:01.8 | Patrick, my memory of your detail is that it was to be launched from the landing craft. |
| 1:04.5 | Is that correct or did they carry them to the shoreline? |
| 1:08.1 | Most of them were launched from the landing craft. |
| 1:13.7 | And it was a rocket propelled grabmnel, as you mentioned, which shot the rope up. |
| 1:17.5 | But this was a tenuous situation. |
| 1:22.8 | Most of these ropes were literally wet from the seawater on the land as they were coming into landing craft because from the top of the cliff, the Germans were, you know, using mortar rounds |
| 1:29.9 | and hand grenades, Tadomaster hand grenades, and things were, there was a lot of chaos in the landing |
| 1:36.0 | area, and it was very rough and tumultuous. So these men, they fire the grapnels and they start |
| 1:42.4 | to climb up the cliffs. |
| 1:58.4 | And part of the cliff faced is the shore bombardment as well as the bombardment for the bombers had collapsed part of the cliff, which made it difficult, but also in some cases a little bit easier to climb. |
| 2:06.4 | But they still had to go up this cliff against machine gun fire from MG42s, |
| 2:14.9 | which could fire a astounding rate of almost 1,500 rounds per minute when they were fully operational. |
| 2:20.5 | And the Germans were feeding belt after belt into their machine guns. |
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