Dare All Dangers chronicles the 741st Tank Battalion during World War II. The book stands as more than a narrative history of the battalion, though it recounts the grim facts and figures. It is the story of men in mortal danger, a testament to their ability to maintain a sense of their humanity while enduring combat and all its shuddering horrors.
The 741st waged a grueling war that began on D-Day when twenty-seven of its amphibious tanks sank, and hapless crewmen perished in the frigid water. Other tanks from the battalion successfully landed that day. Their crews battled on Omaha beach before carrying the fight into Normandy and the green hell of hedgerow country.
After a hard-won victory in France, the battalion paraded through Paris, motoring down the Champs-Élysées, greeted by waving, screaming crowds. The euphoria of a liberated people enveloped the tankers, but the war and its agonies pulled them back.
The 741st plunged into combat along Germany’s Westwall and fell into a muddy, grinding stalemate that dragged on through the autumn. The impasse finally ended with the Battle of the Bulge when an SS Panzer Division slammed into the battalion. The defending GIs prevailed during the bitter, wintertime struggle.
Afterward, the battalion swept across Germany, tangling with Tiger tanks and deadly Flak guns as the Third Reich died in a firestorm of its own making. The war ended for the 741st in Czechoslovakia on V-E Day, where the surviving tank crewmen found themselves mobbed by another exuberant, liberated population.
Fifty years after the war, the book’s author, Bill Warnock, commenced work on a narrative about the valiant crewmen and their exploits. The project began by gathering memoirs, battle maps, wartime letters, and official records. Clues also lay in US Army motion-picture film, still photographs, and aerial-reconnaissance imagery. The author hiked the former battlegrounds to familiarize himself with the terrain, architecture, and local cultures. He also conducted nearly 100 interviews with 741st veterans during the 1990s, interviews unobtainable today since the “Greatest Generation” has mostly passed on. The interviews add color and dimension to the story, something impossible to derive from the dry, laconic reports found in official records.
Every person interviewed is now deceased, but their stories live on in this book. Its pages bring alive the savvy and raw courage it took to survive and achieve victory. Its words capture the sounds, images, and explicit details of armored warfare. As one veteran said, “God never made any finer men than good soldiers.” The 741st proved it, time and again.
Bill Warnock is an award-winning author and military historian. He wrote The Dead of Winter (Penguin USA, 2005), a book chronicling efforts by him and his colleagues to recover missing US soldiers killed during the Battle of the Bulge. Those efforts continue to this very day, and he conducts public-speaking events on the subject. Mr. Warnock also writes articles for WWII History magazine and received a 2010 Distinguished Writing Award from the Army Historical Foundation. In all his work, he is passionate about preserving history, unlocking its secrets, and getting the details right.
