Chester “Chet” B. Hansen: General Omar Bradley's Aide, Diarist (...and Personal Scout on D-Day)

Before dawn on June 6, 1944, as the cruiser USS Augusta headed toward the coast of Normandy, Army Major Chester "Chet" B. Hansen was up and at the side of General Omar Bradley.

Hansen was a journalist by training and an aide to Bradley. As he typically would do, Hansen made notes in his diary:

“Like others in the Army party, Bradley was up at 3:30. He is on the bridge, a familiar figure in his ODs with Moberly infantry boots and OD shirt, combat jacket, steel helmet. He smiles lightly as though it is good to be nearer the coast of France and get the invasion under way.”

Hanson had been assigned to Bradley when he was conducting training in Louisiana and followed him as he rose through the ranks, accompanying him in the North Africa campaign and the invasion of Sicily, and as he led American ground forces on D-Day as commander of the First Army.

When the landing on Omaha Beach ran into heavy German resistance, Hansen, then a 27 years old, went ashore twice with others to report on the situation.

When faced with an extreme shortage of information, LTG Omar Bradley dispatched Hansen, along with a?gunnery officer, to cruise along the shore and report what they could see.

They returned at the end of an hour with alarming news. Along Fox, in the Big Red One’s sector, few channels had been opened through the obstacles, causing craft to divert to Easy Red, where more gaps had been blown, but this in turn was leading to congestion as the tide crept in.?

At noon, V Corps was forced to admit,?“Situation critical at all four exits.”?The time lag between achievement and reporting was abysmally slow. By 9:00am, approximately 500 men had landed safely in every sector of the beach, negotiated their way through minefields, climbed the bluffs and in small groups were moving inland. By midday, that figure had climbed to around 5000, with much of the 18th and 115th Infantry Regiments ashore and forging onwards.?

However V Corps was not in a position to confirm these first flickers of success until 1:09pm, when they informed Bradley,?“Troops formerly pinned down on Easy Red, Easy Green, Fox Red, advancing up heights behind beaches.”?

Any lessons we might be able to learn from this account would likely relate to the kind of information famine that afflicts decision making in times of chaos. Because in wartime, the usual solution is to go see for yourself.

Bradley recorded those moments in his 1951 memoir?A Soldier’s Story, although many of the words were actually Hansen’s, who acted as his ghost writer.

Some of the diary entries report battles and scenes of carnage, but most record the mundane details of important lives during extraordinary times.

One entry recounts how General Dwight D. Eisenhower sent Bradley an ice-making machine because Eisenhower was tired of warm whiskey. Another reveals that Bradley was in his “West Point dressing robe” when he learned that the war in Europe was over. Later, he wrote, officers drank cognac in celebration and watched the “starry skies.”

Diaries by World War II soldiers were rare because keeping one was forbidden, for fear that it might fall into enemy hands.

Rick Atkinson, author of the three-volume history of the role of the U.S. military in the liberation of Europe in World War II, said, “Chet Hansen’s war diary is surely among the most unusual documents ever written from within the headquarters of a major combat commander. For more than six decades it has put historians inside that command post, and, in some measure, inside the head of his boss, Lt. Gen. Omar N. Bradley. Hansen had a ringside seat and he made the most of it, with a sure eye for the telling detail and the ironic voice of a thoroughly modern observer of the greatest event of the 20th Century.”

“He was a meticulous note-taker and a keen observer,” Atkinson said of Hansen. “For someone trying to understand the nuances of the war and how personalities interacted or didn’t interact, he is invaluable.”

Hansen remained as an aide to Bradley after the war, following him — the last of the nation’s five-star generals — as Bradley served as Secretary of the Veterans Administration, Army Chief of Staff in 1948 and the first Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1949. During that time, Hansen recorded hundreds of hours of interviews with Bradley.

A colonel when he retired from the Air Force (he had done an inter-service transfer from the Army to the Air Force in 1951, prior to his assignment in the CIA with General Beetle Smith-- the new DCI) in 1956, Hansen joined IBM as a communications executive in 1958, retiring in 1986.

Hansen died on October 17, 2012 at the age of 95. He's buried in Arlington National Cemetery in a grave he shares with his wife. He died on her birthday.

In his typically understated way, Omar Bradley considered Chet Hansen not just an aide, but "an associate and friend" who provided "devoted and invaluable assistance".?