Former President of A&M revolver

2,943 Views | 12 Replies | Last: 4 yr ago by 45-70Ag
Hogtown
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This is probably in the wrong place, but I figured I would put it in the most popular forum. Currently in the Atlanta airport reading the June issue of American Rifleman. On page 36 they have a half page article on Col. James Earl Rudder's revolver. He was the commanding officer of 2nd Ranger Battalion and carried a Model 17 .45 ACP on D Day, the Battle of the Bulge and throughout the war. He returned home to Texas and after retirement from the Army as a Major General became the President of A&M. He was living on campus and his house burned down, but his revolver survived. Anyway, nice article and very timely with the upcoming D-Day anniversary. Someone who knows how to scan and post should put it on this site.
chevy con queso
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I'm afraid all I found was an article about the guns used, but not on Rudder's specifically. Might be waiting to put that one up on the website.

ETA: https://www.americanrifleman.org/articles/2019/5/17/the-men-and-guns-of-pointe-du-hoc/ Cool article anyway.
TAMU74
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My grandfather carried one in France in WW1. He was a major in the Army. I have it today.
trueaggie2782
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Received this in an email blog this morning:

Quote:

Pointe du Hoc, France Seventy-five years ago Thursday, a battalion of elite U.S. Army Rangers scaled the 100-foot promontory here overlooking Omaha Beach, with nothing more than ropes and rickety ladders. As enemy gunfire and grenades rained down, picking them off as they climbed, the Rangers managed to secure the strategic high ground and silence a small battery of long-range German guns that had been moved inland.

The battle for Pointe du Hoc became of one the most heroic moments of the D-Day invasion. It was lionized by the legendary Hollywood film "The Longest Day" and by President Ronald Reagan, who stood on this hallowed ground to deliver one of his most famous speeches, extolling the bravery of the "Boys of Pointe du Hoc" on the 40th anniversary of the largest amphibious assault in the world's history.

But a little more than three miles down the windswept Normandy coastline, an archaeological dig on a vast swath of farmland is starting to tell another story about what took place that day. A World War II artifact collector and historian accidentally stumbled upon a massive German artillery installation that was buried after the invasion. His discovery, along with a trove of declassified U.S. and British military documents, threatens to alter the narrative of Pointe du Hoc and its importance as a military objective during the D-Day invasion.

Only now are historians beginning to reckon with the implications. Depending on which is talking, the discovery of what is known as "Maisy Battery" either calls into question the wisdom of the entire Pointe du Hoc operation or is simply one more footnote in a war full of footnotes.

One thing is certain: The mythology of Pointe du Hoc is firmly established. Those who challenge the story do so at their own peril.

"Historians always shatter the idol, but let me tell you, when they do, they get a lot of pushback and angry emails in the middle of the night," said Rob Citino, the senior historian at the National World War II Museum in New Orleans who has written 10 books about the war and only recently learned about Maisy Battery. "Pointe du Hoc is such sacred ground, it's like bringing someone to Gettysburg and saying, 'Actually, there was a much bigger battle fought just a few miles away.' "

The artifact collector and historian, Gary Sterne, 55, has received nothing but pushback since he found a map at a military flea market 15 years ago that led him to the discovery of Maisy Battery, a complex that covers 144 acres one mile inland between Omaha and Utah beaches the prime objectives of the U.S. invasion forces. He has published a two-volume, 1,160-page encyclopedia full of photographs, military documents and interviews with Army Rangers who climbed the cliffs of Pointe du Hoc.

Gary Sterne at Maisy Battery in 2006. The questions he raises about Pointe du Hoc have come under attack by some historians.

His startling conclusion: The assault was unnecessary, the commander of the U.S. Army Ranger unit failed to follow orders, putting his men directly in harm's way, and U.S. military leaders should have targeted Maisy and its battery of heavy artillery guns instead of Pointe du Hoc, which the Germans had largely abandoned by the time of the Normandy invasion.

The entrance to a German bunker at the Maisy Battery, which was discovered by Gary Sterne in 2004.

"I have nothing but respect for the Rangers and what they did at Pointe du Hoc," Sterne said in a recent interview from his home in England. "It was truly heroic. But the facts are the facts."

'A lightbulb moment'

Sterne has been collecting military memorabilia since he was child growing up near Manchester, England. It became a full-time pursuit after he purchased a home in Normandy. In 2004, he traveled to Louisville to attend one of the largest military flea markets in the world.

Beneath one of the 5,000 tables set up there, Sterne spotted a cardboard box. Inside was the complete uniform of a U.S. Army soldier who had fought in WWII. Sterne bought it for $180. Inside one of the pockets was a map of Normandy. The map was marked with hand-drawn circles, each with an "X" in the middle, and the words: "Areas of High Resistance."

Sterne was confused. He knew the precise locations of those areas.

"I thought, 'There's nothing there. It's just fields,'" Sterne recalled.

Back in Normandy, Sterne drove to the fields and started to walk through the tall grass. He came across a clearing and a large slab of concrete. At first he thought he had found the foundation of a building destroyed long ago. As he stepped off the slab, he tripped over a small chimney protruding from the concrete.

He was standing on the roof of a building, not the floor.

"I thought, hang on a minute," Sterne said. "It was a lightbulb moment."

Sterne and his brother grabbed some shovels and began to dig. They unearthed a perfectly preserved, bombproof German ammunition bunker. He and his son, Dan, have been digging ever since, uncovering bunkers and barracks and large concrete gun placements. They discovered a field hospital, a command and control center, evidence that an SS squad was embedded at the battery and the skeleton of a German soldier. All of it was buried by Allied forces after the invasion and Maisy was lost to history.

For nearly two years, Sterne kept his discovery a secret as he purchased dozens of tracts of land from their owners, quietly piecing together vast sections of Maisy for a World War II museum. When he went public with his findings in 2006 and opened the site to the public a year later, he said the backlash was ferocious. Other historians labeled him an opportunist, a fabulist, a "Mad Englishman."

Sterne returned fire. He argued that Maisy, not Pointe du Hoc, should have been a primary target on D-Day. The guns at Maisy, he noted, were still firing three days after the invasion and capable of striking positions on Utah Beach, about five miles away. What he said next amounted to heresy in the military world.

Based on previously secret intelligence and field reports he obtained from military archives in the United States and Britain, Sterne said the 2nd Ranger Battalion commander of the Pointe du Hoc mission, Lt. Col James E. Rudder, knew that the Germans had removed their guns from Pointe du Hoc as the D-Day invasion neared. When Rudder and his men reached the top of Pointe du Hoc on June 6, 1944, the guns were gone, some of them replaced with long wooden telephone poles resembling artillery cannons. The real guns had been moved inland. The Rangers found five guns that had been moved from Pointe du Hoc that morning and disabled them with thermite grenades.

Sterne went further. He said Rudder jeopardized the lives of his men by disobeying orders. The declassified orders show that the 2nd Ranger Battalion was tasked with attacking Pointe du Hoc, moving inland and knocking out the German artillery batteries at Grandcamp and Maisy. The orders, issued March 26, 1944, directed Rudder's Rangers to "capture enemy batteries at GRANDCAMP and MAISY" after taking Pointe du Hoc.

Instead, Rudder attacked Pointe du Hoc, despite the reports documenting that the guns were being moved, and he remained in the area without advancing to Maisy. He later said he was ordered to hold the Grandcamp-Vierville Highway to prevent a German counterattack. But Sterne said he could find no orders in the thousands of records he has reviewed directing Rudder to remain at Pointe du Hoc and hold that highway. Of the Rangers who served under Rudder during the invasion, 77 were killed, 152 were wounded and 38 were listed as missing in action.

Rudder, who died in 1970, went on to become a war hero, receiving the Distinguished Service Cross, and was later appointed president of Texas A&M University. One of the Rangers who said he fought under Rudder, Lt. George G. Klein, went on to become a world-famous narrator of the Pointe du Hoc story.

Klein frequently lectured about the assault, telling audiences that he was wounded by a German bayonet and had to be evacuated. During the 73rd anniversary of the invasion, Klein traveled to Normandy, where he was feted as "one of the great celebrities of the battle." He signed autographs. He posed for pictures. He planted trees in Normandy villages.

But there was a problem: Klein never fought at Pointe du Hoc.

Sterne said Klein visited Maisy during one summer and told Sterne that "you have your history all wrong." Sterne had written a book by then called "Cover Up at Omaha Beach." It was a based on interviews Sterne had conducted with Rangers who fought at Pointe du Hoc.

Sterne said he asked Klein about the role he played that day. Klein told him he had destroyed a gun pit at Pointe du Hoc. But records show that the gun pit had been destroyed months earlier. Klein said he was a lieutenant in F Company of the 2nd Ranger Battalion. But F Company already had a full complement of lieutenants. Klein could not recall details of the battle. The Rangers Sterne had interviewed could never forget. Klein said he returned to his original artillery unit after he was wounded.

Sterne and other historians found the papers documenting the activities of that artillery unit during D-Day. Klein and his unit were in Ireland on June 6, 1944.

Klein eventually admitted that he had fabricated his military past and the tales he told about the attack. The story was picked up by news outlets around the world.

Klein, like Maisy, faded into history. Now 98 and living in Illinois, he did not return calls for comment.

'The fog of war'

Each year, nearly 1 million tourists descend upon Normandy, many of them from the United States. Tour guides escort them to Omaha and Utah beaches, the American Cemetery and historic military sites, such as the town of Sainte-Mere-Eglise.

The piece de resistance of any tour is Pointe du Hoc.

Adrian Ridley-Jones, 63, a top-rated battlefield guide in Normandy, has recently added a new site to his tour: Maisy Battery.

The former signal officer in the British Army said he has come to appreciate the significance of the Maisy discovery and the documents Sterne has obtained. It has become increasingly clear to him that as D-Day approached, the need to take Pointe du Hoc diminished. The guns were gone, the Germans were changing their positions, and the Pointe du Hoc mission would be perilous. He wonders why Rudder didn't alert his commanders that the guns were being removed from Pointe du Hoc and urge them to make Maisy and Grandcamp the primary targets instead. Rudder never told his men that the guns had been removed, either.

"As archaeological evidence becomes clearer, history gets rewritten," Ridley-Jones said. "Problems come as you do this. You upset preconceived ideas and entrenched positions. Instead of people looking at this dispassionately, it becomes a political hot potato."

Ridley-Jones is careful to note the bravery of the Rangers at Pointe du Hoc.

"If it wasn't for the Americans, we wouldn't have won the war," he said. "It was indeed a symbiotic relationship and I am in no way denigrating them. "

World War II historians note that the Germans built numerous batteries along the coast as part of Hitler's Atlantic Wall. Even though there were reports that the guns at Pointe du Hoc were being moved, the promontory remained a strategic position, occupying the high ground above Omaha Beach, where the Americans suffered their heaviest losses of the landing. A plan the size of the D-Day invasion, code-named "Operation Overlord," is not easily changed.

"The fog of war was never foggier than on the morning of June 6, 1944," said Rick Atkinson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author who has written a three-volume history of World War II. "What is the overall impact on Operation Overlord and the specific events on the morning of June 6, 1944? Pretty minimal. There were a lot of moving parts, some of them were moving, and some of them were moving sideways. Did it cause substantial degradation of the operation? I don't think so."

Citino, the senior historian at the World War II museum in New Orleans, has been lecturing about Pointe du Hoc for 35 years. It's a story that captures the imagination of everyone who hears it.

"What you have at Maisy is little harder to explain," Citino said. "It's interesting and it's wonderful to see the outlines of a military base, but you can't take a little kid there and say, 'Look, Johnny, the Rangers scaled those cliffs with nothing but rope.' "

Citino acknowledged that Maisy was an important installation for the Germans during D-Day, and U.S. military commanders might have considered placing it higher on their list of targets. The discovery, he said, is starting to change the narrative of what happened 75 years ago.

But changing history takes time.

"We are learning all the time and that's the best thing about the Maisy Battery story," Citino said. "Just below the surface, there are any number of buried stories that will tantalize us just as much as the Maisy Battery story. It clearly played a role in D-Day and I never heard about it until five years ago. And I've been studying this all my life."


https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/one-of-d-day-s-most-famous-heroic-assaults-may-have-been-unnecessary/ar-AACi2Lq?ocid=se
JABQ04
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AG
https://texags.com/forums/49/topics/3039016

Some good comments if you want read
trueaggie2782
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Thanks for that. I don't frequent the history board and when I posted that, I think the thread was on the football board.
JABQ04
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No problem. Wasn't trying to be snarky or anything. You should visit the board more often. Tons of smart posters here.
trueaggie2782
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JABQ04 said:

No problem. Wasn't trying to be snarky or anything. You should visit the board more often. Tons of smart posters here.


You're cool. I didn't take it as a snarky comment.
agsalaska
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TAMU74 said:

My grandfather carried one in France in WW1. He was a major in the Army. I have it today.
I have my grandfathers as well.

He actually bought it in 1919 from the PX(we think) when he was discharged. It is a 1918 manufactured Colt. He loaded it at some point, put it in his closet, and it stayed there until he died in 1949 when my mom was a little kid.. We found it in 1987 after my grandmother died. It is in 99% condition and in a presentation case hanging on a wall.

Interesting enough, my wife has her grandfathers New Army made in 1923 that was, as I understand it, made by much of the same tooling. He was a Texas Sheriff and carried it until he retired in the early fifties. It has ivory grips and is buried deep in a safe.

Needless to say those would be the last two that we would part with. Third would be my S&W 44 mag I carried in Alaska.

All three big, powerful revolvers.
The trouble with quotes on the internet is that you never know if they are genuine. -- Abraham Lincoln.
UTExan
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Interesting that Rudder would choose a revolver chambered in .45 ACP instead of the 1911 auto pistol if I remember reading that article correctly.
agsalaska
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UTExan said:

Interesting that Rudder would choose a revolver chambered in .45 ACP instead of the 1911 auto pistol if I remember reading that article correctly.


Under those circumstances I would much rather have a revolver over a 1911, especially one made in the 20s and 30s.
The trouble with quotes on the internet is that you never know if they are genuine. -- Abraham Lincoln.
JR69
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UTExan said:

Interesting that Rudder would choose a revolver chambered in .45 ACP instead of the 1911 auto pistol if I remember reading that article correctly.
In those days - heck even today - many people prefer revolvers. I suspect his choice of .45 ACP might have something to do with the availability of ammunition.
agsalaska
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JR69 said:

UTExan said:

Interesting that Rudder would choose a revolver chambered in .45 ACP instead of the 1911 auto pistol if I remember reading that article correctly.
In those days - heck even today - many people prefer revolvers. I suspect his choice of .45 ACP might have something to do with the availability of ammunition.
Considering the extremely wet, muddy conditions they knew they were facing and the fact that the WW2 era 1911s were not always as reliable as todays 1911, I can certainly understand wanting a revolver. And since the 1917 was chambered in the same cartridge as the 1911, ammo was readily available.

If you told me I would have to first soak my handgun in sea water, then cover it in sand, then mud, then use it, I would choose a 1917 every time. Probably even today over the 1911.
The trouble with quotes on the internet is that you never know if they are genuine. -- Abraham Lincoln.
45-70Ag
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Even in Vietnam, my grandfather was issued a revolver. He wasn't issued the weapon for protection but rather to kill himself if he were to be captured.

He said there's no way he could have done that.
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