All in all, this worked out really well. There was no uncontrolled crashing down of a cut tree. The roots put up a fight all the way to the ground, never once falling faster than the winch pulled it. Even increasing the resistance at the end when we tried to up root the whole thing - pulling the truck across the ground.
The 40,000 lb winch on the M916(A1) is definately a two man job without a secondary and smaller "pull out winch". There is no free spool though there is the engine idle increase and the twin speed hyd motor.
7/8" cable has quite the memory, to the point that I have a wedged shaped block of wood to jam between the last wrap off of the spool and the hyd tank, when I want to go set up kit etc., without the free cable birds nesting on the drum, untill I can get the end tensioned.
As you can see from some of the 'screen shots' I videoed this exercise, but haven't yet worked how to edit all the packages.