TASK FORCE HOGAN

World War II story of a tank unit battling to victory, from the Normandy beaches across France, Belgium, and Germany.

Hogan, a fourth-generation soldier, chronicles the story of his father, Lt. Col. Sam Hogan, who was only 28 when he led his battalion onto the beach on July 10, 1944, a month after D-Day, and immediately joined the fight. “A West Pointer, he was firm in personality and convictions; but to armchair generals and colonels pressuring him to move his people forward from the safety of a command post ten kilometers behind him, he could be irreverent and understatedly sarcastic.” Following this assessment of his courageous father, the author combines official sources with family correspondence, journals, and interviews with surviving members of the task force to deliver an admiring account of 10 months of brutal combat. This is a docudrama with invented dialogue and the characters’ inner thoughts, but the author has done his homework, delivering a capable nuts-and-bolts, often gruesome description of small-unit action that undoubtedly resembles what actually occurred. Readers will learn the smell, sound, operation, and defects of a Sherman tank; the makeup, command structure, and tactics of an American armored division; and personal stories of scores of men under and above Sam Hogan. The author also delivers plenty of vivid descriptions of the enemy, whose soldiers were (in the author’s eyes) elite and fanatic, with better weapons and vastly superior tanks. (Unmentioned are the facts that the enemy’s men and tanks were vastly outnumbered, and their experienced commanders were regularly overruled by Hitler, with disastrous results.) What readers will not get is the big picture, as the author rarely steps back to describe the overall campaign. Readers searching for an overview should consult Stephen Ambrose or Max Hastings.

An adequate account of ground-level fireworks in the war’s final year.