That Dwight D. Eisenhower became Supreme Commander of the Allied forces in Europe, orchestrating the largest amphibious invasion in history on June 6, 1944, was far from inevitable.

He came from the middle of nowhere — Abilene, Kansas — had never led men in battle, spent most of his career as a staff officer, and didn’t make general until he was in his fifties.

How, then, did he become the leader on whom the fate of the world would rest?

Today, we trace the making of Ike with Michel Paradis, author of The Light of Battle. We talk about how Eisenhower’s Midwestern upbringing shaped his character, and how his most important education happened outside the classroom. Michel shares how crucial mentors were in Ike’s development, and how Eisenhower made the most of those relationships. We discuss the books that were most formative in shaping his thinking, including what he got from Nietzsche. We also get into some of the practices Eisenhower used to lead effectively, including how he budgeted his time to maintain his morale while under the pressure of planning D-Day and what he did the evening before the invasion to deal with the stress.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• AoM Podcast #641: How Eisenhower Led — A Conversation with Ike’s Granddaughter
• AoM series on Eisenhower’s leadership
• AoM Podcast #996: Remembering D-Day 80 Years Later
• The Line Man’s Bible: A Football Textbook of Detailed Instruction by Ernest Graves.
• Sunday Firesides: You Never Know How Many Chapters Are Still to Come
• Fox Conner
• The Czar of Halfaday Creek by James B. Hendryx

Connect With Michel Paradis

• Michel on LinkedIn
• Michel’s faculty page

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Read theTranscript

Brett McKay: All right, Michelle Paradis, welcome to the show.

Michelle Paradis: Thanks so much for having me.

Brett McKay: So you got a book out called The Light of Battle, which is about D-Day. D-Day is one of the most studied and written about events in modern history. What do you think gets missed in the books on D-Day? And what were you hoping to bring to our understanding of D-Day with your book?

Michelle Paradis: No, that’s exactly right. There are so many great books about D-Day too that I definitely knew in starting this one that I couldn’t write just another book about D-Day. If only because like, you know, competing with people like Max Hastings is going to always be impossible. And so, you know, to me, I think the thing we missed, to answer your question about D-Day, the thing that fascinated me is not just the actual heroism of the men who hit the beaches, you know, on Omaha or on Juneau, but how much went into it. How much was behind them? We think about those 176,000 men who hit the beach in the first day, you know, obviously correctly. They are the literal heroes of that story. But, you know, depending on how you count it, about 2 million people made D-Day happen. And that kind of collective action, right, that working together for a common goal was essential to D-Day’s success. And that ultimately is what drew me, especially to Eisenhower. And obviously there’s no lack of historical celebration for Dwight Eisenhower, but I also think we almost take him for granted.

You know, there’s a book, a minute about people like, you know, about Churchill, about Patton, about D-Day itself, but there are actually very few serious studies of Eisenhower. The last, you know, significant biography, certainly covering his wartime experience, is at least about 10, 15 years old now. And I just thought that was amazing, right? I couldn’t understand that because here you are, you have this guy, he comes from the middle of the country, right, about as far away from anywhere as you could possibly get, which is Abilene, Kansas, and not only comes to the heights of military leadership in the Second World War, he commands the most complicated, and I would argue consequential military operation of that war, which is D-Day, and then goes on to be probably one of the preeminent figures of the 20th century, the first president we call the leader of the free world. And so many, I think, even admiring takes of Eisenhower sort of look at him as like this inevitable figure or a boring figure at worst, like the, you know, the 50s, the mayonnaise on white bread kind of thing. And to me, I just knew that there was something more going on there.

And so in thinking about D-Day and thinking about the heroism of the men on the beach on D-Day, I really wanted to just understand how they got there and how they got there in a way to succeed. And that took me to Dwight Eisenhower.

Brett McKay: And that’s what I loved about the book. You get into his personality or try to, because he is kind of an enigma. He’s kind of a Sphinx character in a lot of ways, just kind of this affable, smiling guy. And I think that’s why he gets overlooked. But you try to paint a picture of him that, no, there’s a lot going on with this guy. And that’s why he was so successful as a commander and later as a president of the United States. So let’s dig into Eisenhower and try to figure out how did this guy manage to carry off one of the biggest military invasions in the history of humanity? You mentioned he grew up in Abilene, Kansas. How do you think his Kansas upbringing prepared him for his role in World War II?

Michelle Paradis: Yeah, I mean, he’s such a fascinating figure, like as you say, because he’s known, certainly in his lifetime, particularly as president, as being, you know, everyone likes Ike. He is this smiling guy. He’s sort of almost seen as, again, bland or non-threatening. And yet he is probably, you know, responsible literally for the deaths of millions of Germans and one of the most, I think, cunning and in some ways ruthless military and political figures of the 20th century. But it’s all concealed around this very sort of bland, deceptively bland, I would say, packaging of smiling Ike. And a lot of that traces to his upbringing in Kansas. And there are a couple of things that I think shape him. You know, he’s born in 1890, which is sometimes celebrated as the year the West was closed, and he grows up in Abilene, which had been a, you know, a cow town from the Wild West, but by that point had become a fairly reserved, very religiously oriented community around the River Brethren. And his family, his father’s family, was a very prominent religious family, a farming family. But his own father was a, you know, a complicated guy.

He wasn’t a drinker, but he was definitely abusive. And even for the time, I would say, abusive. You know, late 1800s Kansas. And so Eisenhower grows up in this community in the middle of Kansas, which emphasizes a certain kind of, you know, humility. You know, if you talk to anyone from Kansas, the most important thing they’ll let you know is, well, Kansas is nothing to talk about. You know, we’re just humble people from the plains. And so that sense of Eisenhower of being, in a way, self-effacing is right out of Kansas, right? Everyone in Kansas recognizes that. But I think the other things he gets from growing up in his very unique circumstances is, one, a real burning desire to see the rest of the world. I don’t know that he travels more than about 100 miles or so before he ends up enrolling in West Point when he’s 19 years old. And as the middle child of a fairly low-income, large family, he just has this itch to want to see the absolute rest of the world. And that leads him to cultivate all sorts of mentors, both in Abilene and then really for the rest of his life.

It’s probably one of his greatest skills as a sort of a man in development is that he looks for people who seem to have figured something out that he wants to know. And he gloms onto them and tries to learn from them in a really intimate way. And in Kansas, one of his first mentors is the publisher of the local Democrat newspaper, the Dickinson News. And he just goes to this guy’s newspaper shop, hangs out there after school, typically with some friends. And this publisher sees in Eisenhower a curiosity, and Eisenhower wants to know what’s going on in the rest of the world. And so this guy starts just giving Eisenhower books to read. And one of Eisenhower’s favorite, or the one that makes the biggest imprint on him, is The Life of Hannibal. Now, when I said Eisenhower is the middle child of a very large, low-income family, that’s also a religiously pacifist family. His father and his mother were part of a movement called the Bible Students, which we now know as the Jehovah’s Witnesses, but were much more, how would we say, mystical movement at the turn of the 20th century.

And his religiously pacifist mother is not at all impressed when he brings home The Life of Hannibal, and in fact confiscates it from him and puts it away in her closet. And as Eisenhower sort of tells the story later, he would wait until she was out in the garden culling some of the crops, and he would sneak into her closet like he was looking for the Playboy and read The Life of Hannibal sort of in secret, and just became fascinated by, really in love with, a kind of military heroism, a kind of manly figure. And the thing he would always say about Hannibal in particular is that he knew from the time he was a young boy that Hannibal was one of the greatest generals in all of history because he was recounted as such, but only ever by his enemies. There are no extant tracts or histories by the Carthaginians of Hannibal’s exploits, only those written by the Romans. And to Eisenhower, the fact that someone could be so compelling as a figure, so powerful as a general, so brilliant, so heroic, as to go down in history that way when the only people writing about you are the enemies who fought you in battle, really impressed Eisenhower from a young age.

And so that upbringing in Kansas, that combination of, you know, it sounds cliche, but it’s true, small-town values, but combined with this real burning itch to get out of Kansas, to see the rest of the world, to be a part of the world, formed Eisenhower’s character at a young age in ways that you can see almost to the day he dies.

Brett McKay: So you mentioned West Point was his ticket out of Abilene. He went to West Point. How did West Point prepare him to be Supreme Allied Commander, you think?

Michelle Paradis: A couple of different ways. You know, Eisenhower went to West Point as his, you know, ironically enough, his way of rebelling against his parents and his ticket out of Abilene. And he gets there, and he’s really quite awkward. You know, he is a country boy, but he has a sense of this is where he wants to be. And this is where he’s, in a sense, always wanted to be since he was a boy. And so ends up doing two things in his career at West Point that end up, I think, shaping him and the sort of the Eisenhower we know forever. One is he has this deep concern about his background. He is not the son of a general. He is not part of the sort of burgeoning American aristocracy that is filling the ranks of his classmates. But that gray uniform they all wear at least covers up how sort of shabby and country his clothes are. But the way he talks, where he’s from, right? No one’s ever heard of Kansas, really. But people have heard of Abilene, that old west sort of history that Abilene carried as being the place where cowboys had shootouts in the town square. Eisenhower fully embraces as part of his personality.

And it’s where he begins to take on the nickname Ike as well, because Ike is this sort of typical name for a cowboy in the dime westerns that you’d get. You know, a cowboy who was out on the land all alone, who was his own man, who was always there to do the right thing, even if he was a little uncultured. And really leans into this identity of being sort of from the cowboy town, even though that is not at all consistent with how he actually grew up, but develops this kind of like cool, right? It’s funny to say Eisenhower was cool, but in West Point, he definitely develops this sense of cool and devil may care, big smile, you know, always ready for a good time that cultivates, I think, a very warm kind of friendship and respect between his classmates who go on to be his contemporaries in the army over the next 30 years. The other thing though, and this is, I think, underappreciated now, just given how different we think about sports, but he also was a star football player in his freshman and sophomore years, and not particularly skilled,

Right? He wasn’t a very, very fast runner, but he was a hardcore player, right? He would just throw himself into the opposing line. And so he was known as a bruiser and started, you know, having a lot of success and gaining quite a reputation for himself as a football player, but then blows out his knee. And at the time in West Point, if you had an injury like that, you could get kicked out, not of West Point, but kicked out of the army. And so Eisenhower is faced, you know, from a young age with the prospect of really not having a military career left just because of his knee injury. But the one thing he does, and the one thing the army sees in him is, you know, once he’s literally back on his feet, he can’t play football anymore, but he can coach it. And he becomes the assistant coach of the football team and demonstrates a kind of genius for the game, a genius for organizing men on the field that just as a practical matter, the army really appreciated back then because people used to play a lot of very competitive football. It was kind of the way softball leagues are maybe today.

But that in turn is what keeps him in the army. The army always wants a good football coach. And he basically spends the first 10 years almost of his career as like a star football coach in the army. But that also gives Eisenhower the first real lessons in leadership. And those lessons in leadership of leading a football team, coaching a football team end up, I think, shaping his understanding of what it means to lead in battle, to lead an army in ways that far surpass anything he actually learns in the classroom, either at West Point or the Command and General Staff School or anywhere else. It’s really at West Point and that opportunity to be a football coach that he learns to really be a leader.

Brett McKay: In this section about his role as army football coach and as a player for the team, you talk about this guy, Ernest Graves. He was an army football coach and he wrote this book, Ernest Graves wrote this book about coaching offensive and defensive alignment. And mixed in with it were these sort of just insights about leadership. And after I read about that in your book, I was like, I have to go buy this book. I’m gonna go find this Ernest Graves book. And I read it in just like one setting. It was really easy to read. But you’re right, there’s these leadership lessons that I think Eisenhower probably picked up from Graves on how to lead not only a football team, but an army, a military unit.

Michelle Paradis: Yeah, absolutely. And I’ll flash forward to, I think, one of the most, spoiler alert, but one of the most climactic moments in the D-Day story, and certainly in my telling of it, is when Eisenhower ultimately has to make the call based on some very unclear weather predictions about whether to launch this invasion. And launching this invasion is either going to be the grand success that it became, or it’s going to be a complete and utter disaster. There is literally a hurricane outside the doors as he’s making this decision. And when he finally does, the thing he says is, okay, let’s go. And that’s his famous sort of send-off speech for the D-Day invasion. And that exact quote is something Ernest Graves used to say and used to tell coaches to say right before the men were to go out onto the field. He’s like, well, okay, when it’s time to go, the coach needs to take control of the situation and say something like, okay, let’s go. And again, whether or not that was sort of in the back of Eisenhower’s head, whether or not it was just a coincidence, we’ll never really know. But yeah, that sense of, okay, it’s my job to lead this team. And the way to do it is the same way you would lead a football team, I think is totally correct. And this section about his role as army football coach and as a player for the team, you talk about this guy, Ernest Graves. He was an army football coach and he wrote this book, Ernest Graves wrote this book about coaching offensive and defensive alignment. And mixed in with it were these sort of just insights about leadership. And after I read about that in your book, I was like, I have to go buy this book. I’m gonna go find this Ernest Graves book. And I read it in just like one setting. It was really easy to read. But you’re right, there’s these leadership lessons that I think Eisenhower probably picked up from Graves on how to lead not only a football team, but an army, a military unit. Yeah, absolutely. And I’ll flash forward to, I think, one of the most, spoiler alert, but one of the most climactic moments in the D-Day story, and certainly in my telling of it, is when Eisenhower ultimately has to make the call based on some very unclear weather predictions about whether to launch this invasion. And launching this invasion is either going to be the grand success that it became, or it’s going to be a complete and utter disaster. There is literally a hurricane outside the doors as he’s making this decision. And when he finally does, the thing he says is, okay, let’s go. And that’s his famous sort of send-off speech for the D-Day invasion. And that exact quote is something Ernest Graves used to say and used to tell coaches to say right before the men were to go out onto the field. He’s like, well, okay, when it’s time to go, the coach needs to take control of the situation and say something like, okay, let’s go. And again, whether or not that was sort of in the back of Eisenhower’s head, whether or not it was just a coincidence, we’ll never really know.

But yeah, that sense of, okay, it’s my job to lead this team. And the way to do it is the same way you would lead a football team, I think is totally correct.

Brett McKay: So he graduates West Point in 1915. World War I is happening, but he doesn’t get sent off there. Instead, he gets kind of sent off to different training positions, and then he becomes sort of this staff officer. Not really on the battlegrounds. How did those staff positions prepare him for D-Day, you think?

Michelle Paradis: I think they prepared him uniquely well. And it gets to something I was saying a few minutes ago, is that one of Eisenhower’s, I think, most important leadership lessons is the importance of followership. And it’s the importance, particularly when you’re young, particularly when you’re coming up, to understand that your job is not to be the smartest person in the room. Your job is to figure out who the smartest person in the room is and make yourself as useful as possible to them. Because in doing that, not only are you going to be much more effective than kind of butting heads with the person who actually knows what they’re doing with your own ill-conceived ideas, but you’re going to learn a lot. If you keep a genuinely open mind and pay attention to what that person is doing and how they’re making decisions, you’re going to learn a ton from them that you can then use as you rise up the ranks. And so for Eisenhower, one of the ways I even thought about telling his story is by telling it through his mentors. And I could rattle them

Off, but the big ones certainly are people like Joe Howe, who was that newspaper publisher, Fox Connor, who he spends a long and very formative period with in Panama. But then people like General Moseley, who is probably one of the more suspect figures in history, but who has a big influence on Eisenhower. Same thing with General MacArthur, and then obviously General Marshall, and then I would even say Roosevelt and Churchill. As Eisenhower rises up the ranks, there’s always someone who’s the smartest person in the room, and he gets that. But he makes himself as useful as possible to fulfilling their vision. And in the course of doing that, learns their skills, learns how they either command an army, how they manage a team, or how they develop and use political power in ways to get things actually done, the way Roosevelt and Churchill did. And so it’s by having the humility, really, to be that staff officer, to be the one who helps the leader execute their plans, that Eisenhower really does grow into an incredibly formidable political figure in his own right.

Brett McKay: One thing I’ve taken away from Eisenhower’s experience as a staff officer is, yeah, that humility, and then also patience with your career. I know Eisenhower lamented when World War I was over. He’s like, is it? My military career is over. It’s not going anywhere. I’ve gone as far as I can go, and I missed it. I missed my chance. And he didn’t know he was about to embark on the biggest part of his military career. And it would happen in his 50s.

So I mean, I think that’s a great lesson there for a young guy, or even if you’re a guy in your 30s or your 40s, you think, man, I missed the boat. This is as good as it’s going to get. Maybe not. You could have a whole big, giant book of life ahead of you, like Eisenhower had, after his staff positions.

Michelle Paradis: Yeah, it’s definitely an encouraging story to anyone who’s still not yet in their mid-50s to see that Eisenhower starts World War II as a colonel, and within a matter of three years, he’s a five-star general. And again, one of the preeminent figures of the 20th century, too. And yeah, it wasn’t just after World War I. There are a lot of false dusts in Eisenhower’s career where he thinks he’s just finished. It’s all over. I’ve wasted my best years. This is the end. And each time, he’s proven wrong because there’s a new and often greater challenge just waiting just a little bit further down the line that he ends up having to take on.

Brett McKay: So you mentioned one of Eisenhower’s mentors during this staff officer period of his career was Fox Connor. This was when he was in Panama. This is one of my favorite sections of the book because you explore the education that Connor gave Eisenhower. This is where really Eisenhower got his education. He didn’t get it at West Point. It was when he was in Panama with this Fox Connor guy. So what did that tutelage look like under Connor? What did he tell Eisenhower? What did he assign Eisenhower to read? Tell us about it because I think it’s really interesting.

Michelle Paradis: Yeah, yeah. Fox Connor, he’s the son of a Confederate wounded veteran, has an army career, a quite distinguished army career in its own right. He’s probably the principal military planner of the American Expeditionary Force in World War I, where he comes to know George Patton, George Marshall. Fox Connor has a pretty amazing repertoire of connections that obviously matter a lot in Eisenhower’s life too. And Eisenhower gets stationed with him in Fort Gaillard, Panama, and this is a backwater in a backwater. I got to be honest with you. And one of the things that I never was able to fully pin down is why Fox Connor got marooned to command this podunk post in the middle of nowhere. It’s not obvious. But one of the things that is suggested though is that Fox Connor was not an easy person to get along with at all.

He had a Mississippian sort of rigidity to his personality. He was extremely serious. He inspired very little loyalty, let alone affection in subordinates who saw him as extremely high-handed and brusque. And Eisenhower, frankly, is no different, I think, when he arrives in Panama. Fox Connor basically makes him every day write out these very complicated orders of the day. What is everyone to do for today and how are they to do it? And there’s no point in this exercise, right? The army’s job in Camp Gaillard is basically to make sure the camp doesn’t fall into the Panama Canal. And that’s it. There’s nothing going on there.

He was first in his class, and it’s from then on that Eisenhower’s career just takes off.

Brett McKay: We’re going to take a quick break for your words from our sponsors. And now back to the show. You mentioned that one of the books Conor gave him was The Philosophy of Nietzsche, and you talk about the book. That book actually had a big impact, a lasting impact on Eisenhower. How did Nietzschean philosophy influence

Michelle Paradis: Eisenhower, you think? Oh, that was a real surprise to me, right? Almost the last person you think about when you’re thinking about Eisenhower is Friedrich Nietzsche. But sure enough, I was able to, again, one of the real difficult things as a research matter, but one of the most satisfying in trying to understand Eisenhower was just figuring out what books he read and then reading them. So what’s in his head and where can you see these ideas pop up later, if at all? And when I read the copy of Nietzsche that Fox Connor had, almost right away, I’m looking at almost verbatim things Eisenhower says later. And there are a couple of things that are going on in Nietzsche, or at least the Friedrich Nietzsche that Eisenhower reads, that are incredibly formative to Eisenhower. One is what we probably would just call basic stoicism. Going back to at least Marcus Aurelius, this idea of manhood being about seeing the world as it is in an unsentimental way and knowing that the truth is always going to matter much more than any ideology or idea or wish for how the world could be.

And that anytime you find yourself, as he often did and would, complaining about, oh, things aren’t turning out the way I hoped, knowing that, shut up, your feelings don’t matter. What matters is what is. And as soon as you can reconcile yourself to that, the better. And so that’s a big part of Eisenhower’s own philosophy, just being very objective and really quite hostile to ideology, which I think is one of Eisenhower’s most important and laudable traits, whether or not it’s Nazi fascism or communism or any of the other sort of, how would you sort of say it, sort of ideologies or theories of the day. Like he’s always worried and always thinking fundamentally about brass tacks. Okay, how does this really matter? What’s really going on? What’s really motivating people? Another big thing in Nietzsche that Eisenhower like fully embraces is the virtue of toughness and the manly virtues, so to speak, the willingness to fight for something bigger than yourself as a virtue in and of itself. And then the third thing I think that Eisenhower draws directly out of Nietzsche, actually quotes it several times without attributing it, but it’s right out of Nietzsche, is this idea that human beings all have a fundamental desire to be free.

And that when you motivate that, when you can appeal to that individual desire to be free, people are willing to do anything, to fight and to die for their own freedom. And indeed, one of the biggest quotes he often repeats that again is verbatim out of Nietzsche, is the idea that there is nothing more powerful than a motivated democracy. That democracy fundamentally is all about allowing free people to be free. And if you can harness that energy, that drive towards something greater than themselves, that individual desire to be free, to make their own choices, to pursue their own happiness, that you harness the most powerful force that human beings can muster.

Brett McKay: So Eisenhower graduates from the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College. He’s still confined to sort of administrative positions. He’s the aide to General Douglas MacArthur. He serves as the chief of staff of the 3rd Infantry Division. He holds various staff positions in Washington, D.C. He’s a colonel when World War II starts. He’s never led a battle. He doesn’t have that big personality like a MacArthur or Patton, but he still gets the job of Supreme Allied Commander in Europe over George Marshall, who is also in the running. And there’s a whole interesting story there. But from the time he takes that command, he’s got less than six months to plan Operation Overlord, D-Day. What kind of physical and emotional toll did the pressure in planning that invasion take on Eisenhower?

Michelle Paradis: Yeah, it’s an incredibly compressed time frame. The day by day is just stunning. And yeah, it has a huge toll. It has to. Eisenhower is basically sick the entire time, to varying degrees of severity. His cold basically comes and goes. He smokes like a chimney. He’s up to three packs a day by the time the D-Day invasion launches. I did the math on that. That’s about 11 to 12 hours of smoking per day. He begins to drink too much. He sleeps like three to four hours a day. And he really does bear the weight of it internally in ways that you, you know, it’s almost difficult to imagine anyone else being able to endure. You know, he’s lonely. He misses his family. He misses his son. There’s a moment when he, which I recount in the book, which is so poignant, when he’s asked to essentially give the commencement address at Britain’s equivalent of West Point and, you know, gives this very solemn speech about how the weight of the world is on these young men who are going to be literally his subordinates in a matter of weeks. And he writes this letter home that’s so meditative. It’s quite dark, where he says, you know, I just don’t understand this human need to destroy and how so many lives are put to waste and how we haven’t learned as a species to do better, to be kinder to each other.

And I think the poignancy of that moment came not just in the fact that he’s looking at these young men who he is confident he is sending to their deaths at some point or very well could, but they’re his son’s age. His son John is actually graduating from West Point, ironically enough, on June 6th, 1944. And, you know, as he’s bestowing awards and shaking their hands, like they look and act and are exactly like his own son. And that has to occur to him in terms of just like what is really putting what at risk? What are the costs? What are the dangers that these young men who are going to be crossing that beach, what are they confronting and why are they doing it? And he’s the one there sending them off, right? It’s his responsibility ultimately. He owns that. And the pressure is insane.

Brett McKay: So besides smoking and drinking a lot, another thing that helped Eisenhower deal with the pressure of the battlefront was spending time with what he called his official family. And this was like his tight inner circle of individuals he was close to. It included Case Summersby, his driver. There was his personal naval aide, Harry Butcher, his secretary, Mattie Panette. What role did Eisenhower’s official family play in kind of boosting up his morale during this period?

Michelle Paradis: Yeah, yeah, I don’t want to overstate. He’s not a drunk, to be clear. You know, he basically spends, no, but he spends his nights. Eisenhower’s very disciplined about organizing his time. It’s actually one of the more interesting and I think prescient leadership traits that he has is that he knows that a big part of his job is just making so many decisions day after day, high consequence, low consequence, just one after the other. And to do that effectively, to make the best decision he can, regardless of how it turns out, he has to keep himself healthy, both physically and mentally, as much as he possibly can. And so he’s very disciplined ultimately about budgeting out his time, right? This is an era before smartphones. And so when he goes home basically to the official family, he basically is disciplined from about 7 or 8 o’clock at night when he can about turning off the office and playing bridge and watching movies together and chatting and reciting poetry. It’s a really, I think, important opportunity he has to just be as human as possible under the circumstances. And this official family is both his literal

Aides, right? There are secretaries and drivers and things like that. But I think they’re just also the people that he can relax with. These are the people who are not gunning for him. They’re not trying to get anything from him. They’re not trying to use or manipulate him for their own ends. These are just the people he can trust day in and day out. And he knows he needs that retreat and he needs to take advantage of that retreat and not just constantly be working because otherwise he’ll collapse, he’ll burn out, and he won’t be able to make the hard decisions that he

Brett McKay: Has to make. I think it’s a great lesson for even if you’re not the Supreme Allied Commander, take your rest time seriously and make time for it. If Eisenhower could have done it during Overlord, you can do it when you’ve got your 9-5 job. Like, you’re okay.

Michelle Paradis: That’s right. Turn your phone off. Hang out with your kids. Have a meal without looking at your

Brett McKay: Phone. So you mentioned there’s a lot of internal struggles that Eisenhower had. He knew the impact his decisions were going to have. He was going to send lots of young men to their death. I mean, how did he do that and think about the human consequences while not letting it paralyze him? Because I think that’d be really hard. I mean, if I were in that position, I would think, oh my gosh, I can’t even make a decision. I would just freeze. What do you think Eisenhower did to overcome that while maintaining his humanity at the same time?

Michelle Paradis: I think actually the key thing was that he maintained his humanity. You know, we talked a bit about Nietzsche and this is sort of a Nietzschean idea or a stoic idea at least, but I think it also comes right out of Nietzsche, is that he never looked away from the consequences of his own decisions. Like he fully embraced them only as a corrective to make sure he was making the right decision. And being able to hold those things in his head at the same time I think was a key part, certainly of his ability to lead in crisis and some of the hard decisions he made. I’ll give you just one example of it that almost brings me to tears every time I think about it, is the night before D-Day launches, he goes around and sees off the 101st Airborne. And there’s probably the most famous picture of Eisenhower addressing these young men who were all painted up and getting ready to jump out of these planes over France. And he had been given an estimate just before that about half of these guys are gonna be lost. Half! And he’s sending thousands of these young men across the English Channel.

So he goes and he goes to see them off and there’s no fanfare, right? This is not a review. He literally just has Kay drive up as quietly as possible, gets out and just starts mingling between them and shaking their hands and talking to them. And again, there’s this very famous photograph where his hand is forward and he looks like he’s very sternly telling them some sort of great rallying cry to get them over the beaches. And with a little bit of tracking down, Ribna find the actual story behind that photo. And the guy he’s talking to, he’s talking to him about fishing because he would just go up to these guys and be like, what do you like to do? Where are you from? What was your job? What’s your hobbies? Anyone from Kansas? And this guy said he likes fishing. And Eisenhower is an adamant fisher himself, and a fly fisherman on top of that. And he’s like, so when you throw a rod, this is how I throw it. And he’s demonstrating the throwing of his rod, and the photographer just sort of happened to catch the moment in this way that has this very sort of commanding overtone to it.

But what’s really going on there is he’s just treating that young man like a human being, like his son, like himself. And when he goes around and meets these young men and shakes their hands, he forces himself to look each one of them in the eye when he does it. And think about that. Each hand he shakes, he knows that basically every other one is going to die, right? Every other one is some kid who is either his son’s age or younger, who’s just not going to go home again, who’s not going to see his own father again. And Eisenhower made himself do that, not only, I think, to be there for them and to let them know that he saw them and saw them not as soldiers to be sent across the border, but as young men who he cared about, who had their own lives and dreams and interests, but to remind himself of that too. And when he finishes, he just collapses into the back of his car and just said, well, no one can stop it now. And that’s how he ends June 5th, 1944. But I also think that’s how he does it, because he doesn’t numb himself to the costs of what he’s doing.

He understands it, he internalizes it, and owns it. And so that when he has a hard decision to make, such as sending them over there, knowing how many of them are unlikely to ever come home again, he’s able to do it because he’s weighed the costs, the benefits in a real way that he owns. It’s as much about responsibility and owning responsibility as it is just making the best decision you can.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I mean, the idea of owning responsibility. Eisenhower famously wrote two memos before D-Day happened, and one of them was, if it was a failure, it’s like, if this mission failed, I take full responsibility for it. But he didn’t have to publish that one, but he kept letting me know that. Yeah, the guy took responsibility. So okay, this is June 5th, he sent off the men personally. How did he spend the night before the invasion in the morning? What was he doing?

Michelle Paradis: Smoking. He basically, he stayed up the entire night, best as we could tell, smoking and reading Westerns. He was an adamant Western reader. He had his guilty pleasures, as we all do, and he was very emphatic that he got to enjoy them. And so really from about two in the morning when he gets back to base camp to about 7, 730, when he finally sort of gets up and meets the day, he’s just sitting on his bed, laying in bed, reading Westerns and smoking cigarettes and just waiting for the news to come in. Yeah,

Brett McKay: You talk about the Western you read about. Black John is the name of the story.

Michelle Paradis: Yeah, the Tsar of Half a Day Creek. Eisenhower really liked good shoot-em-up Westerns. Those were his favorite. Tsar of Half a Day Creek is not one of those. It has like a sort of more humorous vein to it, and there’s not a lot of shooting. But it really was apt. It really kind of met the moment very well because it’s all about this guy, the Tsar of Half a Day Creek. His name is Black John Smith, who is the kind of the doer in the small camping town in Alaska, or in Yukon country I think it is actually, where he’s always up to something, but he’s keeping everyone just everything in line. Everyone kind of thinks he’s this old hillbilly, but he actually is the guy who’s always got the plan and is one step ahead. So it was a very apt book for Eisenhower to be reading on

Brett McKay: D-Day. Another lesson there from Eisenhower, don’t feel bad about just indulging in a guilty pleasure when you’re going through a stressful period. He read Westerns. It’s okay if you want to, I don’t know, watch a crappy movie on Netflix. That’s okay, as long as it kind of just takes the edge off. That’s fine.

Michelle Paradis: No, that’s entirely true because one of the things that I found super interesting about Eisenhower, which you don’t see on the surface at all, but is very true, is that he thought a lot about how he thought. And he understood that if he was tired, if he was exhausted, if he was overwhelmed, that he was going to make bad decisions. And bad decisions didn’t mean that those decisions would not turn out the right way. He understood that there was always risk, just like any poker player would. But he wanted to make sure he was always making the best decision available to him based on the information available to him. And so doing things like making time for guilty pleasures, making time for friends, not beating up on yourself too much about your own vices. Everyone’s telling him he’s got to stop smoking, otherwise his cold will never get better. And he’s like, yeah, yeah, I get it. But he understands that he only had so much energy, only so much sort of self-discipline and focus that he can direct. And so prioritizing what you’re paying attention to, what you’re really investing your emotional and mental energy in, is honestly just as important as any one decision you

Make because your ability to make those decisions is going to be entirely contingent on how focused you are, how clear-minded you are, and your ability to just take everything in and decide. And so, yeah, just giving yourself your guilty pleasures and focusing on the things that matter and figuring out what matters is just as important as any one thing that you do.

Brett McKay: Yeah, that idea that Eisenhower thought about his thinking and he was kind of this master self-psychologist. Another thing that I remember reading about him that he did, he had an anger drawer. So Eisenhower, he had a temper, and he struggled with it his entire life. But he had this tactic whenever someone would piss him off and he wanted just to light him up. What he did instead is he wrote this letter out, exactly what he wanted to say, no filter. And then he just put it in his drawer. It cooled off and he’s like, okay, I got it out of my system. Now I can approach this with the cool head.

Michelle Paradis: Yeah, no, as you say, he was his own psychologist because there was no one else around he could trust for that role, really, other than maybe Kay Somersby or Harry Butcher. And yeah, so he would do those sorts of things. Or if he just was like feeling overwhelmed, just same thing. He was feeling overwhelmed and he was like, if he was having trouble focusing on any one thing, he would sit down and literally just write himself a memo of all the things he had to think about one after the other and putting down a couple of thoughts about each one just to, again, put it out on the page, get it out of his body and into something tangible so that he could focus on it more clearly. He’s just full of all of these very specific habits and techniques for making him a much better thinker and leader than he otherwise would have been.

Brett McKay: So something that Eisenhower is known for is his political ability. He was able to manage these big egos, Montgomery, Padden, Marshall, Churchill, DeGaulle. Did it deftly. I don’t think any other person could have done that. But the other thing that impressed me about Eisenhower was his grasp of public relations. He knew how to manage the media.

How would you describe his approach? I think this is underappreciated about

Michelle Paradis: Eisenhower. Oh, yeah. A hundred percent. I agree. I think it’s totally underappreciated. He got in a very sophisticated way that media had changed a lot and had changed politics a lot by the 1940s. And he understood that there were really two things that he needed to do to be an effective manager of his public persona, which in turn would give him a much freer hand in dealing with difficult political issues. And one was, you’ve got to be friends with the press. And he made sure that when he was playing bridge and smoking and drinking, that reporters were always with him just to kind of hang out, with a few exceptions, as guys. And having that kind of intimate friendship-level relationship with reporters enabled him to know what was going on, what they were going to print and publish before they did, and also gave him opportunities to, in what we would now call, shape the narrative before things hit the press. And that helped him on several occasions, not the least being with people like George Patton. But the other thing, though, and this was so – I mean, it’s part of who he is, but it’s so prescient that it demands to be remarked upon, is he also understood that as the media was becoming more intimate and celebrity-driven, where you had these personalities who were not just on the radio or in newspapers, but actually on film and could be seen, that there was a huge value in being seen as ordinary.

And I’m not saying he put that on. This is, in a way, who he is. These are his Kansas instincts coming out. But he leaned really hard into it in a way that was certainly designed to conceal the sophistication of his own thinking in most situations, where he understood that being kind of folksy and having this, like, oh, I just like going out fishing, and being very seen as not grasping for power in an environment where most politicians, to include Roosevelt, and Roosevelt being only sort of a marginal exception to this, were still seen as these very stern, statuesque figures, was its own kind of political power. It’s where we get the idea of I like Ike. The idea that a politician should not be only a leader but likable more or less draws directly from Eisenhower. And I know this, again, almost seems too obvious to say now, but it’s difficult to overstate how revolutionary it was for a general, like a major powerful general, to be known broadly in the public for smiling. A smiling general. There’s almost nothing more incongruous than that if you really think about it. And Eisenhower fully leaned into that and had a kind of folksy celebrity that obviously becomes his trademark.

And I think in the environment that he’s in particularly, with people like de Gaulle, with people like Churchill and Stalin and Roosevelt, is crucial to his ability to wield power because none of them understand that yet. None of them understand the importance of likability in the media as a kind of political power. And so everyone around Eisenhower just underestimates him all of the time as just being sort of like a smiling nice guy because they’re obviously very much still in the Marvel statue mold. And Eisenhower both, I think, understands that and uses that to such great effect that now it’s actually difficult to think about a politician who doesn’t smile all the time, right, where it’s not this sort of like happy, I’m a nice guy, I’m just like you, whether or not it’s George W. Bush on his ranch and Crawford clearing brush, or Donald Trump eating a Taco Bowl, or Barack Obama smiling big and throwing baskets, right? All of our politicians now, we want them to, quote unquote, to be just like us. And Eisenhower kind of sets that mold and sees that that’s where society is going way earlier than anybody else does.

Brett McKay: So after researching and writing about Eisenhower, what’s something that stuck with you the most about his life or his leadership?

Michelle Paradis: I think for me, in addition to giving hope to 40-year-olds everywhere that life is not yet over, I think the most both inspiring and cautionary aspects of Eisenhower’s life to me are that he really did come from nowhere to achieve the absolute greatest heights of political power in the 20th century. He, through a combination of, I think, intelligence, luck, and ruthlessness, pulled himself up to that height to great, I think, benefit to not only the United States but to the world. And so the both encouraging but cautionary things that I always think about when I think of Eisenhower is encouraging is that talent is everywhere. Talent can come from the middle of nowhere, from someone you’d never expect, where it wouldn’t even be recognized by most people until well into their 30s or 40s or even 50s. And the cautionary piece of that that I worry about sometimes is, do we still live in that America, right? Do we still live in a society where talent can rise? Because we have more people than ever. We have more opportunity for more people than ever as well, and fewer barriers based on old lines, whether that’s gender or race. But do we still have a society that allows the very best to rise?

And I don’t know the answer to that. I worry about that sometimes because all the opportunities Eisenhower had have become much more difficult and much stricter and much more tied up in tradition or bureaucracy or sort of other kinds of red tape that I worry we may not be getting the talent that we have at our disposal to have the kind of leaders that we possibly could have.

Brett McKay: Well, Michelle, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

Michelle Paradis: Yeah, the book is available anywhere fine books are sold, The Light of Battle. It makes a great gift in time for Father’s Day. I’ll plug that. And yeah, feel free to always reach out. I’m very easy to find. And so if you had any questions or ideas or thoughts about the book, good, bad or ugly, feel free to email me. I try to respond as quickly as I can.

Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Michelle Paradis, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Michelle Paradis: Thank you. It was a lot of fun.

Brett McKay: My guest today was Michelle Paradis. He’s the author of the book, The Light of Battle. It’s available on Amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can check out our show notes at aom.is slash supremecommander. We find links to resources. We delve deeper into this topic. Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmaleness.com where you can find our podcast archives. And make sure to check out our new newsletter. It’s called Dying Breed. You can sign up at dyingbreed.net. It’s a great way to support the show directly. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, it’s Brett McKay reminding you to listen to the podcast. Put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

12,000 aircraft. 7,000 ships. 13,000 paratroopers. 150,000 troops from a dozen countries. The Allied invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944 was the largest amphibian invasion in history. The epic scale of the operation is hard to grasp, as is its historic consequence. D-Day paved the way for the liberation of France and, ultimately, the end of the war. Victory came at a high cost: over 4,000 Allied troops lost their lives on D-Day itself, and tens of thousands more were killed in the battles that followed. 

80 years on, we’ve dug deep into the photo archives to bring a bit of D-Day’s sweep and significance back into our cultural memory. Below, you’ll find 25 amazing, rarely-seen photos from D-Day, along with their original captions. For more amazing photos of WWII as a whole, check out this post.

Four ‘stick’ commanders of 22nd Independent Parachute Company, British 6th Airborne Division, synchronising their watches in front of an Armstrong Whitworth Albemarle transport of No 38 Group, Royal Air Force, at about 11 pm on 5 June 1944, just prior to take off from RAF Harwell, Oxfordshire. This pathfinder unit parachuted into Normandy in advance of the rest of the division in order to mark out the landing zones, and these officers (left to right: Lieutenants Bobby de la Tour, Don Wells, John Vischer and Bob Midwood) were among the first Allied troops to land in France. 

British Airborne troops admire the graffiti chalked on the side of their Horsa glider as they prepare to fly out to Normandy as part of 6th Airborne Division’s second lift on the evening of 6 June 1944.

Members of an airborne unit make a final checkup of equipment before taking off from a British air base on the invasion of Fortress Europe. 

Set to be flown to spearhead the beginning of the battle for the liberation of Europe, men of an infantry paratroop regiment are shown inside a Douglas C-47 of the Ninth Air Force Troop Carrier Command, over France, June 6, 1944. 

Thumbs up from these British paratroops before they left England in a glider to reinforce Allied troops in France. Their slogan, to match their camouflaged faces, and names of their girls, adorn the side of the glider.

A few minutes before they embarked for the invasion of Europe, American assault troops kneel on a British pier, with their assault boats in background, and received benediction from Major Edward J. Waters, Catholic Army Chaplain from Oswego, New York. A few hours later these men were hitting the beaches of France in the first attack on Hitler’s fortress.

English Channel…Some are grim-faced, some are smiling, but all are eager in their own way to come to grips with the enemy. These American soldiers were photographed aboard a Navy LCI (landing craft, infantry) on their way to the invasion coast of France. They were anxious to do the job for which they had been trained for and for which they had been waiting. They made good, too.

Packed in assault craft completely ready to fight as soon as their feet touch land are these Canadian troops pictured when Allied armies, including Canadians, landed on the French Normandy coast to start the invasion of Hitler’s Europe.

One of the many B-26 Martin Marauders of the Ninth Air Force is shown over the coast of France during the early morning, giving cover to the landing craft shown on the sandy beaches below.

This Coast Guard landing barge burst into flames when it was hit by Nazi machine gun fire, and a soldier’s hand grenade exploded, but its crew steers it toward the beach despite the rising smoke and flame. Choppy waters in the Channel didn’t make the job any easier, either.

Canadian soldiers land on Courseulles beach in Normandy.

Christians Praying in St. Patrick’s Cathedral on D-Day .

Allied troops from the 8th Brigade, 3rd Infantry Division of the British Second Army come ashore on Queen Red Beach, Sword Beach area from Landing Craft Infantry (LCI). In the foreground are sappers of 84 Field Company Royal Engineers, part of No.5 Beach Group who are identified by the white bands around their helmets and behind them medical orderlies of 8th Field Ambulance, Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC), can be seen assisting wounded men on the shoreline. 

A German soldier lies dead outside a pillbox that he had defended on Utah Beach.

Paratroopers land on La Manche coast on June 6, 1944, after Allied forces stormed the Normandy beaches during D-Day. 

A crowd reading news of the D-Day invasion, on the “Zipper” news ticker at One Times Square, New York City, New York, USA, June 6, 1944.

American soldiers eat near a supply truck in France shortly after US troops landed on the beaches of Normandy.

D-Day — Coast Guard Ferries Reinforcements — Grim and determined, these American soldiers head towards the French coast as the American flag flies from the stern of their US Coast Guard landing barge as it speeds toward the invasion shore.

A wooden cross, a soldier’s helmet, and flowers mark the grave of an American soldier who was killed in battle during the invasion of Normandy, Carentan, France. A sign posted by French civilians reads ‘Mort pour la France’, or ‘Died for France.’ 

To learn more about D-Day, listen to this episode of the AoM podcast:

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

On D-Day, June 6, 1944, 160,000 troops participated in the invasion of Normandy. Today just a few thousand of these veterans are still alive, with the youngest in their late nineties. As their voices, and those of the million combatants and leaders who swept into motion across Europe 80 years ago, fall silent and pass from living history, Garrett Graff has captured and compiled them in a new book: When the Sea Came Alive: An Oral History of D-Day.

Drawing on his project of sifting through and synthesizing 5,000 oral histories, today Garrett takes us back to what was arguably the most consequential day in modern history and helps unpack the truly epic sweep of the operation, which was hard to fathom even then, and has become even more difficult to grasp with the passage of time. We talk about how unbelievably involved the planning process for D-Day was, stories you may never have heard before, a couple of the myths around D-Day, and the sacrificial heroism born of this event that continues to live on.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• AoM Podcast Episode #1: We Who Are Alive and Remain
• AoM Article: The 70th Anniversary of D-Day — Remembrances from the Brave Men Who Were There
• AoM Podcast #514: Remembering D-Day 75 Years Later
• The Bedford Boys: One American Town’s Ultimate D-Day Sacrifice by Alex Kershaw
• AoM Article: How Eisenhwoer Made the D-Day Decision
• The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11 by Garrett M. Graff

Connect With Garrett Graff

• Garrett’s website

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)

Listen to the episode on a separate page.

Download this episode.

Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice.

Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness podcast. On D-Day, June 6th, 1944, 160,000 troops participated in the invasion of Normandy. Today, just a few thousand of these veterans are still alive with the youngest in their late 90s. As their voices and those of the million combatants and leaders who swept into motion across Europe 80 years ago, fall silent and pass from living history, Garrett Graff has captured and compiled them in a new book, When the Sea Came Alive: An Oral history of D-Day. Drawing on his project of sifting through and synthesizing 5,000 oral histories, today, Garrett takes us back to what was arguably the most consequential day in modern history. It helps unpack the truly epic sweep of the operation, which was hard to fathom even then and has become even more difficult to grasp with the passage of time. We talk about how unbelievably involved the planning process for D-Day was, stories you may never have heard before, a couple that meets around D-Day and the sacrificial heroism born in this event that continues to live on. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/Normandy.

Garrett Graff, welcome to the show.

Garrett Graff: Thanks so much for having me.

Brett McKay: So it is the 80th anniversary of D-Day, the invasion of Normandy, where the Allied forces crossed the English Channel and started at a western front in World War II in Europe. And you got a new book out about that day, it’s called When the Sea Came Alive: An Oral History of D-Day. And this book is amazing. What I love about it is you create this narrative of what happened that day, not only that day, but leading up to D-Day. And all you use is quotes, that’s it. Just quotes from people who had firsthand experience with the invasion. What was the impetus behind creating this oral history of D-Day?

Garrett Graff: Yeah, so in 2019, I wrote a oral history of 9/11. It was called The Only Plane in the Sky. And 9/11 is I think arguably or not arguably, the most famous and consequential day of the 21st century. And in 2019, it was this very specific moment, which was, it was 18 years after 9/11, and you began to see that day shift from memory into history. The first American servicemen and women were coming out of basic training and deploying to Iraq and Afghanistan who were born after 9/11. You know, the first firefighters were coming into FDNY who were born after 9/11. And now as we approach the 80th anniversary of D-Day, it’s sort of the other bookend of that shift that this was a huge, titanic monumental day, arguably the most famous and consequential day of the 20th century.

And there were a million combatants that day in motion across Europe. And 80 years on, that number has dwindled to perhaps a few thousand. And we are seeing this day shift entirely from memory into history. And so what I wanted to do with this book was to take this moment when we have effectively every first person story that we will ever have of D-Day, of what that day was like, of what the people who participated in that day experienced and lived. And to try to tell really the most comprehensive version of that day that I could in the first person. And there’s a unique power, I think, that comes with oral history where, I think, and I’ve written plenty of narrative history as well, but I think often in narrative history and when you’re writing about an event like 9/11 or like D-Day, you write about it historically in a more organized and logical and neater way than anyone that day actually lived or experienced.

And oral history helps, I think, put you back in that moment knowing only what the participants knew at that time. And so you have these letters and these quotes and these reflections from people aboard the ships crossing the channel on the night of June 5th. They don’t know that they’re about to have this incredible, heroic, courageous day ahead of them. They, in fact, feel quite the opposite, which is they don’t feel particularly heroic or courageous about that which they are about to embark upon because for them it’s unknown and it’s terrifying.

Brett McKay: What was the process of putting this book together? Because it is 500 pages long, and as I said, there’s very little… You provide every now and then, some like historical context, give people some understanding what’s going on, what they’re about to read. How did you piece together all this material? Like where did you go for the material and then what was the process of creating the story?

Garrett Graff: Yeah. So it’s a mix of archival oral histories. There are some incredible projects and archives that have pulled together first person memories and oral histories of veterans at the National World War II Museum in New Orleans, at the Imperial War Museum in London, the American Veterans Project at the Library of Congress, as well as lots and lots of memoirs and letters from the battlefield, newspaper interviews, magazine pieces, official reports, etcetera, etcetera. And I think I ended up amassing about 5000 oral histories in pulling this together. The first draft of this book, believe it or not, was about 1.2 million words. That’s 3000 or 4000 pages. And then it was just a lot of whittling and carving and shaping to get it down to the story that’s included here, which ultimately features about 700 voices. I think the final number is 692 different participants.

Some names you know, FDR and Churchill and Eisenhower and Bernard Montgomery, and a lot of names that you don’t, American families back home, British civilians, French civilians, allied troops, sailors, soldiers, Marines, Coast Guard, and a lot from a lot of the rest of the countries that were part of that war effort. D-Day is as international a day of combat as we have probably ever experienced in history. And it was that Naval force off the shores of Normandy had more than a dozen nationalities represented including more than 600 Dutch sailors.

Brett McKay: So let’s get into D-Day. First all, why is D-Day called D-Day? I’m sure some people don’t even know that.

Garrett Graff: Yeah. What’s funny about it is D-Day is just a generic military term for the start of any operation. It’s a planning term in that when you’re doing a large complex operation, the planning for it starts long before a specific day or month or even location has been chosen. And so D-Day is a way to denote the start of an operation. And D-Day plus one is the day after the invasion, and D-Day minus one is the day before the invasion, so on and so forth to give the planners the chance to build these incredibly complex logistical timelines. But at a very technical level, there have been dozens or scores of D-Days. The first one was recorded in World War I, there’s actually a book that comes out in 1944 called D-Day written by the author John Gunther that’s about the invasion of Italy. And yet, here we are 80 years later, if you walk up to anyone on the street and say, D-Day, there is only one D-Day that we remember in history. And that’s June 6th, 1944.

Brett McKay: Yeah, because this is the most epic, most sweeping of all D-Days.

Garrett Graff: Not only that, I mean, it’s arguably the most sweeping and epic human endeavor that we’ve ever seen before and might ever see again. The scale of that invasion and the planning that went into it is just monumental in the sort of most monumental sense of that word.

Brett McKay: Yeah. How many people were involved? I mean, that was… And one of the biggest takeaways I got from this book, it was a reminder of how big D-Day was. Because then when you think about D-Day, you go, you just think about the invasion itself, and you only see maybe the soldiers running up and Saving Private Ryan, or maybe you see the Band of Brothers doing their thing. But it was huge, like, to give us an idea, like how many people were involved, how many ships, planes, etcetera?

Garrett Graff: It was the largest sea armada ever assembled in human history. Depending exactly on how you count it, it was around 5000 ships involved on D-Day itself, more than a million combatants on the move on the Allied side. On D-Day, about 160,000 troops in the first invasion wave coming ashore. 13,000 paratroopers carried aboard more than 2000 planes. And then the scale and scope of everything that was included in that, the Jeeps and tanks and gallons of drinking water and numbers of meals ready to eat, and the number of tanks and pints of blood and the whole sweep of that day is really incredible to calculate, especially when you think about basically getting every single one of those items to the place that it is supposed to be down to the minute that it is supposed to arrive, which was how closely calculated D-Day was, both in terms of loading people aboard ships, but then also the sense of what was arriving at the beach on D-Day itself.

Brett McKay: Were there any quotes that you came across that really stood out to you that captured just how big D-Day was?

Garrett Graff: Well, I think one of the things that, and you sort of mentioned this a little bit already, that there’s really no way to grasp how big D-Day actually was because this personal experience of D-Day was often so small. In the foreword to the book, there are sort of two quotes that stand out for me. Andy Rooney, who went on of course to be the famous CBS news correspondent. He says, “No one can tell the whole story of D-Day because no one knows it.” Each of the 60,000 men who waited ashore that day, he’s referring to the US beaches, know a little part of the story too well.

And Ernest Hemingway, who was aboard one of the landing craft that day, although he didn’t actually go ashore himself, he writes, you could write for a week and not give everyone credit for what that person did on a front of 1,135 yards. So I think that the dichotomy of that day is how much of that day was really lived at this incredible individual micro level even as the macro experience of that day was the most monumental in human history.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I’ve had several World War II historians on the podcast before and I remember, I think I asked this question to Alex Kershaw a while back ago in one interview, it was about D-Day, I believe, and I asked him like, “How do you keep finding these stories?” You know, because he will find these stories of just a single soldier, and it’s just this amazing epic story of this one guy. And he just said, “You don’t realize how big that thing was. We’ll never run out of stories to find.”

Garrett Graff: Yeah. Absolutely. And Alex Kershaw really, one of the things that he helped excavate and tell in a new thread that I follow in this book too, is the incredible story of Company A and Company B of the 116th Infantry Regiment, the 29th division at Omaha Beach, who were the first wave at one end of that beach. And they were mostly from this single town in Bedford, Virginia and they were devastated and wiped out in the way that has, I think, come to symbolize Omaha Beach and the killing field of Omaha Beach for so many Americans. Think about those first seven minutes of Saving Private Ryan and company A of the 116th storms ashore, the first wave at Omaha Beach. They leave the ship that morning with 230 members of their company, and just 18 will make it to the end of June 6th unscathed.

And for my purposes, that was actually a very hard portion of the book to tell, because there just weren’t enough people who survived the first wave ashore at Omaha Beach in order to tell about it later. And I struggled to pull together those couple of chapters at the start of the Omaha Beach section. But when I talk about doing oral history, my goal in reading and assessing and looking at the first person stories of an event like 9/11 or an event like D-Day, is you try to focus on what I call the ordinary and the extraordinary. And what I mean by that is you wanna sort of figure out what the ordinary experiences are. What is sort of the baseline experience that most people have on 9/11 or D-Day, so that you can include those and capture what the basic experience of that day was like.

On 9/11 it’s, what’s the ordinary experience of someone evacuating down the stairwells of the Twin Towers after the attack? What’s the ordinary experience of a firefighter responding to 9/11? And then you want the extraordinary, you want those incredible outlier stories that push people to the limit of human experience and capability. And what just stands out so much about writing about D-Day is how extraordinary the ordinary actually was. As you sort of imply in your question, you end up just reading one version after another, after another. These people that you have never heard of who of that day do things that would in any other circumstance stand as one of the most heroic things a human being could ever do. And yet that day is not even the most interesting story on that stretch of 1,135 yards of beach.

Brett McKay: So you break the book up into several sections. First section is about the preparation for D-Day, and this began an entire year before it actually happened, in 1943. And I really enjoyed this section because as I was reading that I was incredibly impressed with how thorough everyone was who was preparing this thing, how well thought out it was, the logistics of figuring out how to move so many people, how to make sure you have enough ships, how to coordinate everything. I was thinking, I don’t know if we could ever do something like that again. ‘Cause everything, you know, you even go to a fast food restaurant and things that just don’t work, but they’re somehow able to plan this great undertaking. Who were the main planners that you highlight in this section?

Garrett Graff: Yeah. This actually to me, was one of the more surprising efforts of writing and researching this book, was I started this book expecting, I’ll have a couple of chapters about the lead up and the planning, and then get right into D-Day itself. Yet so much of the story of D-Day actually turns out to be the work that went into preparing for D-Day. And in many ways, as terrible and high the cost was in human lives on D-Day itself, it was far lower than planners had anticipated or feared in part due to how good and thorough and specific and advanced the planning was in those months and years ahead of time.

And so about the first third of the book really ends up being both the planning and the training for D-Day itself. And there’s this wonderful figure, Lieutenant General Frederick Morgan, British General, who ends up the head of the operation to plan for D-Day. It’s this organization that ends up being called CASAC, the Chief of Staff to the Supreme Allied Commander, an organization that actually exists for almost a year before they get around to naming a Supreme allied commander himself, which of course is Dwight Eisenhower. And that they, Morgan is out there for months planning with this incredibly small staff that with time then grows into this giant machine building in invasion force and invasion plan more complex and larger than anything humans have ever attempted before.

Brett McKay: Is there a part of the planning phase that is sort of archetypical of just how complex preparing for the operation was?

Garrett Graff: Well, what I think is sort of funny about it is you realize how much of the planning ends up taking place in these video game terms you would call side quests. The sheer scale of projects that make up the individual components of D-Day. One of the challenges that the Allied planners are wrestling with is how to bring ashore after the invasion, all of the supplies and follow-on reinforcements that they’re going to need to bring. One of the most basic parts of an invasion is you need to have ports and harbors to bring the follow-on supplies by, but where the Allies choose to invade doesn’t have any natural harbors and ports, and so they end up building these things called mulberries, which are basically portable concrete harbors that they’re going to float across the channel with tug boats and toe, and then sink off the Normandy Coast to basically bring their own harbor with them.

And again, this is just the equivalent of one of the many side quests that people are working on leading up to D-Day, and those mulberries end up being two million tons of steel and concrete, more than 200 caissons constructed by tens of thousands of workers across the British Isles, some of them as big as five-story buildings, and then they also bring 70 old Navy ships that they are going to sink off the coast of these harbors to build artificial breakwaters. And this one operation alone is so big that it requires every tug boat in the British Isles as well as a whole bunch brought over from the United States itself, just for this one tiny piece of this giant operation.

Brett McKay: Yeah. Brigadier Walter, he said this about the mulberries. “It was probably the greatest wartime engineering feat of all time.” Of all time.

Garrett Graff: Of all time. Yes.

Brett McKay: And then Winston Churchill talked about, he says the whole project, talking about the mulberries, was majestic. Churchill calls D-Day, the whole preparation, majestic. He likes to use that word a lot.

Garrett Graff: He does, and he really gets… You could sort of see, he’s a Navy guy himself, he’s led Britain through this incredibly dark period that I try to tell in the first chapter of the book, as World War II opens and begins and the British and Allied forces are thrown out of Europe at Dunkirk. You see how excited he gets by the planning of Operation Overlord, a codename he actually selects and improves himself.

Brett McKay: Yeah, that was interesting. You talk about, there’s a quote from someone saying how he took a very personal interest in codenames.

Garrett Graff: Yes, he evidently loves codenames and ends up talking about them at great length and choosing them and changing them to sort of reflect his own beliefs in these operations, but one of my favorite scenes or anecdotes in the book is right up at the end of the run-up to the invasion as they’re getting ready, he asks, Winston Churchill asks for permission to accompany the landing aboard one of the British Navy vessels, and Eisenhower basically says, “Winston, I don’t think that’s a very good idea.” And then Churchill is like, “Well, if I just enlist as a Navy Aide aboard one of the ships, you can’t do anything about it.” And so he makes this plan to accompany the landing as just sort of run-of-the-mill Navy Aide aboard one of the British warships, and Eisenhower is pulling his hair out over this because he doesn’t wanna risk the Prime Minister in first wave of the D-Day landing.

And then the King of England actually gets wind of this, recognizes that it’s a problem and comes up with the only solution that he can think of to get Winston to back down, which is, he’s like, “Well, if Winston Churchill’s going, I’ll go too.” And tries to insist, not entirely seriously it seems, that he will accompany the landing invasion force as well, at which point Churchill is like, “Well, we can’t risk the King. So I won’t go, so the King won’t go.” And Eisenhower sort of ends up getting a good laugh over the whole thing and how astutely the King maneuvered Winston Churchill out of the invasion force.

Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. And what’s crazy too about the planning part and getting ready for D-Day, they kept this thing secret. The Germans had an idea that something was happening, but they didn’t know exactly what was gonna happen or when it was gonna happen. I was impressed by that. And the other thing I learned too from your book, and I didn’t realize this, is how much training went on for D-Day, ’cause you don’t really see… When you watch the movies about World War II, you’ll see the crew, a company at their boot camp in the United States, but you don’t see them training for the operations that they took part in. What was the training like in preparation for D-Day?

Garrett Graff: Yeah. This again, was part of what was so fascinating to me was understanding that actually more Allied troops were killed in the training for D-Day than on D-Day itself, that the Allies spent really the better part of a year ahead of D-Day running mock invasions of the British countryside, that they actually evacuate an entire seaside British county of civilians in order to set up a training facility that looks like the beaches the troops will storm in Normandy.

Brett McKay: Yeah. That was really interesting ’cause you get first-hand accounts of the residents there, and they just basically get this announcement saying, Hey, you gotta leave. You gotta sell your stuff and get out of here, and it’s not even for an invasion, it’s just so we can train.

Garrett Graff: Just to practice for the invasion and that for months, the US and British and Allied troops load up in landing craft and go out into the English Channel, and then turn around and storm back ashore in the British countryside as they train for this, and that there’s one particular exercise in the spring of ’44, that’s called Exercise Tiger, that was supposed to be the last large scale rehearsal for the troops heading to Utah Beach. And it is all of the force that is heading to Utah Beach, a raid-out on ships in the English Channel. And the night before the dawn invasion preparation, some German torpedo boats get through the security screen and sink a couple of landing craft and end up killing in that one night, upwards of 700 Allied servicemen, mostly Americans. And we actually don’t know the final number. It could be much higher than that even. And the Pentagon covers that up for decades. It’s not until really the 1980s that they admit that this incident happened at all, let alone that those units headed to Utah Beach suffered orders of multiple more casualties in Exercise Tiger than they did actually storming ashore at Utah Beach on June 6th, 1944.

Brett McKay: You have some quotes from some soldiers who were part of that, and how they had to keep it quiet. A story that stood out for me was from Corporal Eugene Carney. He says, “We were told to keep our mouths shut and taken to a camp where we were quarantined. When we went through the mess line, we weren’t even allowed to talk to the cooks. If, for example, we wanted two potatoes, we were told to hold up two fingers, if three, three fingers. We could have all we wanted, but could say nothing.” And then another sad one, this is from Private Veldon Downing, he said, “They told us to keep our mouths shut, and we did. After the war, the parents of one of the kids I served with who’d been lost, drove all the way out here from New York just to ask me what happened. I told them I couldn’t talk about it.”

Garrett Graff: Yeah, and it was this incredible secret for years and years and years. Secret in that moment, both because of the concerns about what it would do to undermine public confidence in the invasion, but also what it would do to the morale of the servicemen heading to the invasion itself in a couple of weeks. And one of the things that is really incredible to realize coming out of Exercise Tiger is the thing that had dogged Eisenhower and Morgan and all of the planners through that entire spring had been there just weren’t enough landing craft, they’re just weren’t enough landing ships, and they’d end up delaying the whole operation from May until June in order to get literally one more month’s worth of landing craft production in the United States over to Europe. And then in Exercise Tiger, they lose a couple more landing craft, and that is the last reserve that the entire Allied military has of landing craft, and they are down to the point where had they lost one or two more landing craft, it’s possible that they would have ended up having to scale back the D-Day invasion.

Brett McKay:And not only were soldiers getting very specific training, you talk about how the bombers were also getting trained. There was a ton of reconnaissance done in preparation for D-Day, and they had film, and so these bomber crews, they were watching this film over and over again of what their flight into Normandy would look like and they knew exactly where the pillboxes were, where they needed to drop their bombs, so they knew exactly where they needed to go, and something else that impressed me was the level of reconnaissance that happened during this planning process.

Garrett Graff: Yeah, down to the point where they had such thorough reconnaissance that if you were the coxswain of a landing craft, you got a photo of what your tiny stretch of beach should look like 1000 yards off the beach when you are coming into shore. It was incredibly detailed and advanced reconnaissance given the comparatively primitive photographic capabilities and technologies of that era.

Brett McKay: So, okay. At this point, we’re a couple of months away, we’re in the spring of ’44, they still hadn’t decided the exact day. They knew it was gonna be late May, June, based on where the moon was gonna be, tides, things like that, but they couldn’t pinpoint the exact date because they needed to look at the weather, and we’ll talk about the weather here in a bit. So you had, I think it was like two million people in England training, just getting ready for this invasion, not knowing when it was gonna happen. So morale becomes an issue, this always becomes an issue in the military when you have a bunch of guys not doing anything, kind of milling about. And so you talk about what Montgomery did, what Eisenhower did to boost morale, but you also recount this really harrowing story, it just made me, like I felt sad after I read it, of this chaplain who basically went to go give a pump-up speech to the guys, and it was basically the biggest downer.

He was just like, “Yeah, it’s gonna be tough. A lot of people are gonna die.” And then everyone was just feeling down and despondent, so this other guy had to come in and give a better speech. And the correspondent from Reuters talked about it, because he saw this chaplain give this really Debbie Downer speech. He says, “I went to the mess for lunch feeling very uncomfortable. As I was walking back to the tent, I was a few paces away when I heard a rifle crack. I saw the canvas move, went in and there was the padre,” talking about the chaplain, “he’d shot himself.”

Garrett Graff: Yeah, it was one of the British units, one of the commando units who sort of got this terrible, as you said, Debbie Downer speech from this padre and Lord Lovat, who’s the very colorful commander of the British commandos, ends up basically like pushing the guy off stage and jumping up to re-charge up his men, worried that they’re gonna have this crisis of confidence in themselves in those final hours. And he ends up basically saying to the padre, “Hey, you’re off the invasion, you can’t come with us anymore.” And the chaplain goes back to his tent and kills himself. And he’s so despondent about the damage that he’s caused to… The potential damage that he’s caused to the invasion, and they end up listing him formally as a battle casualty even though he dies in camp before they leave.

Brett McKay: Okay. So you have a section about the weather forecast, that played a big role. Originally, I think D-Day was supposed to be the 5th of June?

Garrett Graff: Exactly. Yeah.

Brett McKay: Yeah, and the weather was bad. And then Eisenhower, you just talked about the tension and the stress that Eisenhower had to go through to make this decision, ’cause it was on him. He was the only one who can make this decision, and you can tell that the burden was just so intense on him. But then he makes the go, and when he made that decision, everyone, he says everyone kind of lighted up. He says this, Dwight Eisenhower, “There was a definite brightening of faces as without further word, each went off to his respective post of duty to flash out to his command the messages that would set the whole host in motion,” and then Churchill said, “The die was irrevocably cast. Invasion would be launched June 6th.” So it started early in the morning, like right after midnight, with the paratroopers going in behind enemy lines. What was their mission, those initial paratroopers?

Garrett Graff: Yeah. The weather forecast turns this whole thing and almost upends the entire invasion. There are only three days in the start of June when the tides, the moon, all of the weather conditions that they need, overlap. And if they don’t go then, they will need to delay at least two weeks, if not a month. And the challenge is when you have an operation as big as D-Day, everyone is on board the ships and entire convoys have already put to sea even before they’re sure when exactly the D-Day invasion will be launched. And so Eisenhower is sitting there on June 3rd, June 4th, looking at these weather reports, knowing that D-Day is already in motion, there are a million people loading aboard the ships even that weekend, and if they can’t go on June 6th, they are actually gonna need to offload all of those million people and put them back into camps across England. And the security risk of that, these million people all now know their mission, they know where the invasion is gonna take place, and so for Eisenhower, it’s this incredibly high stakes, almost existential question about the Allied cause and whether the invasion can take place as he’s weighing the weather reports.

And then the weather just clears just a tiny, tiny bit enough to let them launch the invasion. And it begins, as you said that night with the paratroopers, the American paratroopers who were dropped behind the far western flank of Utah Beach, 82nd Airborne, 101st Airborne. 13,000 of those paratroopers dropping in to cure the Western flank and the approaches behind Utah Beach to make sure that the troops can actually get off Utah Beach once they get there. And then the British 6th Airborne is dropped along the eastern flank behind what we now call Sword Beach to secure the beach exits there and to seize the river crossings that would stop the German reinforcements from racing up behind the British and Canadian beaches.

And again, these are extraordinary stories that on any other day would be some of the wildest versions of military heroism recorded. In the 6th Airborne, they dropped three gliders of troops into this tiny field next to this one key bridge that’s later, now sort of known to history as Pegasus Bridge, they drop into this tiny field. I’ve stood there and you look at where these three gliders have all crashed just a couple of yards apart, and it’s impossible to imagine doing this in the dark, landing as close to the bridge as they did. And they storm out and seize Pegasus Bridge before the Germans have a chance to counter-attack or destroy the bridge, and then basically sort of set up to wait there till midday or early afternoon on the 6th when reinforcements will finally reach them from Sword Beach.

Brett McKay: So you have a section about the Naval part of this. They codenamed that Neptune, and this is the Naval component of D-Day. And again, epic. Majestic. And you have some great quotes from the Germans who were on the shores of Normandy and looking out into the ocean and just seeing just that giant armada. You have this one quote from a guy named Carl Wegner. This really stood out to me. He said, “Violently, my arm was shaken by Willie. I sat straight up and looked at him. His face was pale. I asked him what was wrong. He just pointed toward the sea. I looked out and saw ships as far as one could see. I’m not ashamed to say that I was never so scared of my life, but the sight was so impressive that no one could help but stare in amazement.” Yeah, it was just… I couldn’t imagine, again, we look in the past, we know what happened, but can you imagine if you’re some young 19-year-old German kid and you look out into the sea and it’s just thousands and thousands of these black dots that you know they’re gonna start pounding you with artillery.

Garrett Graff: Yeah, and it’s also… I think from the German perspective, you get a sense of the confusion and chaos that reigns that day, again, I think is normally lost in the way that we tell a narrative history, but that comes through so clearly in an oral history where even something as simple as like we know, and we talk about this history as these five features; Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno, and Sword. I talk about the British airborne dropping in to secure the eastern flank and the 82nd and 101st Airborne dropping in to secure the western flank. The Germans are waking up that morning. They don’t understand any of this. They don’t understand that there are five beaches. They don’t understand that it’s British troops on one side and American paratroopers on the other. They’re trying to figure out even whether this is the real invasion, because the allies have done this incredible job, basically misdirecting that the “real invasion” is going to come in mid-July in Calais, which is the place where the Germans most expected the invasion. And it’s the shortest part across the English Channel, it seems like it would be the easiest place to launch an invasion. And instead, they launch this invasion across the English Channel, where it’s 100 miles wide. And it is just this utter and complete shock to the Germans who spend the entire day trying to understand what they’re actually working on.

Brett McKay: The most harrowing part of D-Day, and the one that’s been captured in film by Saving Private Ryan was soldiers leaving landing craft in the ocean and charging the beaches of Normandy. Were there any first-hand accounts that sit out to you, that really captured the carnage and chaos of that amphibious invasion?

Garrett Graff: Yeah, we talked a little bit about the unit known as the Bedford Boys, that 116th infantry, Company A, Company B, storming ashore at Omaha Beach. But I think one of the things that I really tried to reframe a little bit in this telling of the book is I think we have this mythology in D-Day that Omaha Beach was this incredible killing ground, and everything else was a cake walk, especially the British and Canadian beaches. And that is technically true in a limited sense, if you are talking about people who die on the sand itself, but it’s not really reflective of the totality of the experience of D-Day, which is when you add in the casualties of the paratroopers and the fighting of the paratroopers behind Utah Beach, that sector is secured at great cost. When you talk about the British and Canadian beaches, there are individual units where they are absolutely devastated in their early waves of the invasion. 110 of the Queen’s Own Rifles fall as they march up the beaches in the British sector. And then the British and Canadian units get off the beach relatively quickly and then are engaged in very heavy fighting in an urban environment inland on D-Day itself. And that for the British and Canadian forces, in some ways, the afternoon of D-Day is where they see their most violent combat. Even as the Americans, once they get through their beach defenses at Utah and Omaha, their fighting is mostly done.

Brett McKay: There’s a really sad story at Juno. So this is the Canadian part of the invasion, and it’s the story of Corporal Fred Barnard. Could you read that one? I thought it was really poignant.

Garrett Graff: Yeah. “This is Corporal Fred Barnard, Company B, Queen’s Own Rifles, 8th Infantry Brigade, 3rd Canadian Division. My brother, Don, was on the boat with me. You could claim your brother to your regiment, get them to transfer him to your regiment, and I claimed him in 1944. And as we were going down the ramp, I yelled to my brother, “Don, give him hell.” And the next thing I know, I’m in the water maybe 4 feet deep. When I went up the beach, I passed one of the guys in my platoon, just a kid, about 19. He had been ripped right down, crying for his mother. The next thing I know, there was Don, lying on his back, a bullet right there in the heart. There was just a black hole in his uniform, right in the middle of his chest, no blood. It was as if he was asleep.”

I’m not surprised, I guess, that that quote stood out to you, but that really stuck with me when I was reading that. I’m grateful there was a Canadian journalist named Ted Barris, who went out and did the one definitive book on Juno and gathered up a lot of those memories and interviewed a lot of those veterans when they were still around and had very nicely shared his research and interview transcripts with me for this book. And I thought about that moment so much, like, “What must it have been like to go through the rest of your life, knowing that you had done this thing that you thought was great, you had gotten your brother to serve in the same unit as you did and gotten him into the same landing craft that you did on D-Day, and then for him to die?” And I don’t know what Fred Barnard ever felt about that, but you could just imagine the guilt or the second guessing or the responsibility that you would feel for a moment like that.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And it also just shows how random stuff was. There’s so many accounts where a guy would say, “I just ducked, and the bullet was by, then hit the guy behind me,” these guys that you could tell they just… They felt so helpless in a lot of cases. Of course, there were moments of gallantry and bravery, the Dick Winters types who went up and charged and did all that amazing stuff, but I just couldn’t imagine what it would have been like. One minute, you’re talking to your buddy, and the next minute, his head is blown off and you have to keep going.

Garrett Graff: You see in so many of the stories that day, the randomness of luck and chance. And as you said, that some of D-Day was skill, and some of it was courage and bravery and heroism, and a lot of it was just random fate and dumb luck and chance of who was on what patch of sand or in which hedgerow at which moment when a shell landed or a bullet went by. And there were so many people that day who, again, went through these extraordinary moments that were entirely ordinary for everyone around them.

Brett McKay: One of the goals you had with this book was to, I think, address this myth that is, I think, built up around D-Day, that it was this really tenuous thing that was always teetering on the edge of failure. But in the narrative that you were able to pull out of these accounts, you see that, yes, there were a lot of casualties. A lot of men lost their lives that day. But overall, it was a really a smashing success. It was probably one of the biggest military successes in world history.

Garrett Graff: Absolutely. And I think that is… To me, one of the things that really stands out is we have this sense that this was this incredible gamble. And at one level, it is, but the truth of the matter is every Allied amphibious invasion in World War II succeeds. And the reason for that is precisely because of what a gamble an amphibious invasion actually is.

And so for Operation Overlord, the Americans have invested so much. They have developed so many new technologies. They have developed so many new capabilities. They have trained so hard for so long. They’ve brought such scale and scope and size to this invasion that the Germans just don’t really have much of a chance on D-Day. Anywhere the Allies choose to land on D-Day, they are going to punch through. The question is, can they stay ashore once they’re there? And can they get to… Can they get enough follow-on supplies and reinforcements ashore faster than the Germans can get reinforcements up from inland in France and in Germany? And the tenuousness of the invasion actually is not D-Day itself, it’s the days after June 7th, June 10th, June 14th. And that when we talk about D-Day, D-Day is really just the start. It takes the Allies 77 days to complete the Normandy campaign and break out of the beach heads that they have built up and begin the march for Paris and Germany, and that D-Day feels, in so many ways, like the triumph. It is the day we storm ashore and pierce Fortress Europe. But for all of the troops who made it ashore that day and lived, some of their most poignant reflections are waking up the morning of June 7th and starting to fight all over again.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And I think one of the reasons why D-Day… Yes, it was a pivotal moment in… You say pivotal moment in human history. But it was a moment where there was so much carnage, but also you see bravery, you see courage, you see compassion of these soldiers trying to help each other out. And I’d like to end with this quote from Andy Rooney, if you don’t mind. It’s in the foreword. Can you read that?

Garrett Graff: “Andy Ronnie: If you think the world is selfish and rotten, go to the cemetery at Colville-sur-Mer overlooking Omaha Beach and see what one group of men did for another on D-Day, June 6th, 1944.”

Brett McKay: Well, Garrett, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book?

Garrett Graff: So you can get the book anywhere that you like purchasing books. The book is called When the Sea Came Alive. If you are a podcast listener, I would encourage you to pick up the audio book, which is a incredible marvel and masterpiece itself. It’s been read by dozens of actors, so every voice is different in the audio book, and you get the full sense of the accents of the British and Canadian and French and Germans who fought that day.

Brett McKay: Well, Garrett Graff, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Garrett Graff: Thanks so much for having me.

Brett McKay: My guest today was Garrett Graff. He’s the author of the book When the Sea Came Alive: An Oral History of D-Day. It’s available on amazon.com and book stores everywhere. You can find more information about his work at his website, garrettgraff.com. Also check out our show notes at aom.is/normandy, where you can find links to resources, we delve deeper into this topic.

Well, that wraps up another edition of the AoM podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com, where you can find our podcast archives. And while you’re there, sign up for our newsletter. You get a daily option and a weekly option. They’re both free. It’s the best way to stay on top of what’s going on at AoM. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate if you could take one minute to give us a review on Apple Podcast or Spotify. It helps out a lot. And if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think would get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, it’s Brett McKay, reminding you to not only listen to the AoM podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

General George S. Patton is known for his aggressive, action-oriented tactical brilliance.

His character was also marked by a lesser-known but equally fundamental mystic piety.

Those two qualities would come together in the lead up to and execution of Patton’s greatest achievement during WWII: the relief of Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge.

Alex Kershaw tells this story in his new book Patton’s Prayer: A True Story of Courage, Faith, and Victory in World War II. Today on the show, Alex shares how, when the Third Army’s advance into Germany was stalled by plane-grounding clouds and road-muddying rain, Patton commissioned a prayer for better weather that was distributed to a quarter million of his men, and how that prayer became even more urgent after the commencement of the Battle of the Bulge. We also talk about Patton’s qualities as a leader and a man, including his reading habits, how he combined a profane assertiveness with a pious faith and a belief in reincarnation, and what happened to him as the war came to a close.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• Alex’s previous appearances on the AoM Podcast:
  • #361: The Untold Story of WWII’s 45th Infantry Division
  • #514: Remembering D-Day 75 Years Later
  • #806: The Humble Heroics of Four of WWII’s Most Decorated Soldiers
  • #953: Duty, Honor, and the Unlikely Heroes Who Helped Win the Battle of the Bulge
• AoM Article: George S. Patton’s Rules on Being an Officer and a Gentleman
• AoM Article: The Libraries of Famous Men — George S. Patton
• AoM Article: The Maxims of General George S. Patton
• AoM Article: General Patton’s Strategy for Winning in War and Life — Keep Punching
• Chaplain James Hugh O’Neill
• Patton movie
• Patton’s opening speech
• The story and a look at Patton’s prayer cards

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• Alex on X

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Brett McKay: Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness podcast. General George Patton is known for is aggressive action oriented tactical brilliance. His character was also marked by a lesser known, but equally fundamental mystic piety. Those two qualities would come together in the lead up to an execution of Patton’s greatest achievement during World War II, the relief of Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge. Alex Kershaw tells a story in his new book, Patton’s Prayer. A True Story of Courage, faith, and Victory in World War II. Today on the show, Alex shares how, when the Third Army’s advance into Germany was stalled by playing grounding clouds and rode money in rain, Patton commissioned a prayer for better weather that was distributed to a quarter million of his men, and how that prayer became even more urgent after the commitment of the Battle of the Bulge. We also talk about Patton’s qualities as a leader and a man, including his reading habits, how he combined a profane assertiveness with a pious faith and a belief in reincarnation, and what happened to him as the war came to a close. After the show is over, check at our show notes at awim.is/patton. Alright, Alex Kershaw, welcome back to the show.

Alex Kershaw: Great to be with you.

Brett McKay:So we had you on at the end of last year to talk about one of your older books. That’s the Longest Winter, which recounts the story of an 18 Man US Platoon that faced the thrust of the entire German assault at the Battle of the Bulge. You got a new book out, and it’s about the Battle of the Bulge as well but this time it’s about General George Patton’s role in rebuffing the Nazi’s last ditch assault on the Allies, and it’s called Patton’s Prayer. And we’ll get to the title of the book here in a bit, because there was an actual prayer that Patton had composed for his troops. But before we do that, let’s talk about Patton, the man first. This guy, he was a larger than life character. He had ivory handle pistols that he carried around, the shiny helmet riding boots, had all these pithy quotes about driving and putting people’s heads in meat grinders and calling everybody Sons of bitches. What’s Patton’s background? What was his family background and how did it shape who he became as a man?

Alex Kershaw: Well, he had a very Patrician background, not from New England, but California. He was a California aristocrat in many ways, and went to VMI and then West Point and was a hell of a character. I mean, his formative years, I guess after West Point were spent alongside people like Eisenhower. And he was a cavalryman above all, actually competed in the 1912 Olympics for the one of the events he had created his own sword. And famously in 1918, he commanded the first ever American tank unit, and that was in France, took to combat with great relish. He was very brave, almost killed, wrote, I think it was on his birthday, toward the end of the war. He said that would be a shame for hostilities to end because he was enjoying it so much. He wanted a few more scraps. So this guy was a natural born warrior, very much larger than life, deeply religious, believed in reincarnation, thought that he’d fought in several wars before, that he was a man of destiny, and that something big was gonna happen in his life eventually, where he would be truly tested. And the point in my book is that that big thing did happen. It was called the Battle of the Bulge or rather World War II, but certainly during the Battle of the Bulge, he performed magnificently. He was an extraordinary force.

Brett McKay: Well, so you mentioned that he was deeply spiritual, and you also talk about how he was actually incredibly intellectual. I think oftentimes I think of Patton as this unthinking brute. He just had a blood lust, and that was it. But he was extremely well read and thoughtful, and as a kid he really struggled with reading in school. He probably had what we call today, and he probably had dyslexia, probably had ADHD. And it really frustrated him because as a boy, he had this driving ambition even then to be this consummate warrior in both body and mind. And so he became this voracious reader as a young man. He read the classics, he read lots of biographies of about past generals. And during World War II, he just, he kept his reading up. Like he had this extensive field library that he brought with him that had books like the Bible and a prayer book going to his spirituality. But then he had things like the complete set of Rudy Kipling’s poems. And something he read a lot was the Caesar’s Commentaries.

Alex Kershaw: Yeah. He never stopped studying military history. And I have a quote in the book where he explains to a journalist that as he was crossing Normandy, he was reading Julius Caesar. And he said, I followed in the path of Julius Caesar because the guy knew what he was doing, and why not just copy the greats? And so literally, there were quite a few times in World War II when Patton would trace the root of Julius Caesar a couple thousand years before and follow it. He very much had a sense of his place in history, and he relished the fact that he was fighting in North Africa, he was fighting in Sicily, that he was determined to become the first Ally General to reach Messina, which is at the far eastern end of Sicily. He wanted to beat Montgomery, the British General to that because he wanted his name in the history books.

And I’d say that throughout World War II, he had an eye on making his name and going down in history as much as he did on defeating the enemy. And believe me, he really was highly aggressive when it came to trying to defeat Nazism. But yeah, he, it’s a good point because, people, when you look, when you watch the famous movie about Patton, you just think he’s a screaming maniac. I think that that’s kind of the takeaway. Although the movie’s really pretty accurate, and I think George C. Scott does a fantastic job. I think it’s probably his best role. He turned down the Oscar. Actually, Scott complained at the time when the movie was being made that it wasn’t accurate enough. He read hugely about Patton, and he said that Patton wasn’t being rendered as a complex enough figure, as a figure who had deep emotions and was profoundly religious, and was a hugely complex man, as well as being an intellect.

So one of the things that really drew me to Patton was that he was an intellect. I don’t think there was anybody in the Allied Supreme Command, an army commander, certainly, who was as well-versed in military history as Patton. He read everything he could. He read the enemy’s works, too. He studied tank warfare because he read German theorists. So he was a polymath in many ways, a man of immense culture and really great education.

Brett McKay: Yeah, well, I know maybe something that separated him and Eisenhower. I know in Eisenhower, when he had time off, he would read, but it would be like a Louis L’Amour, like a Western…

Alex Kershaw: Yeah, he would read Western novels for relaxation, whereas Patton’s there reading Julius Caesar and the Greeks and medieval history. It’s funny ’cause if you look at the route of the Third Army ’cause he ended up commanding the Third Army, famously, and if you look at the route of the Third Army from Normandy all the way to the Czechoslovakian border, Czech border now, often he’s following in the footsteps of the Romans. And he loved that. He loved the fact that when his army crossed the Rhine, it was the first time for a very long time, for many centuries, that an invading force had crossed the Rhine. And he loved the idea that he was making that kind of history.

Brett McKay: Yeah, and he decided to mark the occasion by peeing in the Rhine.

Alex Kershaw: Yeah. Yeah. In the book, you’ll see several pictures about that period. And it’s still debatable whether the famous photograph of Patton peeing in the Rhine, whether that’s actually accurate or not. But I have no reason, I’ve come across no evidence to suggest that he didn’t urinate in the Rhine. And that would be a very fitting thing for Patton to do. Very Patton-esque.

Brett McKay: Yeah. So this is a guy, very intellectual. He saw himself on the same stage as Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great. He had an epic view of himself inside of history. You mentioned his spiritual life. We’ll talk about the reincarnation here in a bit but what was his spiritual life like? He was Anglican, correct?

Alex Kershaw: Yeah. And he was a practicing Anglican. He went to church regularly, attended services, prayed everyday, as far as I can make out. In his diaries, would write messages to his lord, you know. He was very devout, more so than any other American army commander, more so than any allied commander that I came across in World War II. He truly did believe that he was doing God’s work, and that he was gonna be protected by God, and that God was gonna answer his prayers. So he was pious and religious. The great contradiction, and I guess if I think this through, I don’t know whether it is a great contradiction, in fact because people say, here’s this guy that’s God-fearing, and yet he swears, blasphemes, and is the most notorious user of God damn and the rest of it in World War II. The opening speech that you see in that great movie, Patton, is actually not one speech, but it’s cobbled together from three or four speeches that Patton actually made. So although he didn’t do have that full-on amazing rant, as he did in the movie, George C. Scott’s speech is actually taken from several that Patton made.

And he did swear a lot. I mean, he swore famously, he turned the air blue. And the instances where I found him to be most vocal, I don’t think they’re anywhere near what he actually was like. This was a guy that could use swear words in a very inventive way. [laughter]

Brett McKay: Yeah.

Alex Kershaw: I would not have liked to be at the end of one of his tirades. Needless to say, there would have been a lot of effing and blinding, as us Brits say and I think it does make sense, if you think of Patton as sort of embodying this warrior archetype, like Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great. These guys had a bloodlust, they were aggressive and they fought, but they also, they were pious. They made their sacrifices before they went out to war.

Brett McKay: And just because you swear a lot, doesn’t mean that you’re not devout.

Alex Kershaw: Yeah. God forbid the people who swore would not be regular church attenders.

Brett McKay: Yeah, they probably need it the most, right?

Alex Kershaw: We wouldn’t have many people going to church.

Brett McKay: Yeah, exactly. Well, tell us about this reincarnation, because I’ve read that about it, and that he believed that he was reincarnated, that he actually saw great battles from history.

Alex Kershaw: Yeah, again, without referencing too much the movie, there’s those famous scenes when he’s in North Africa, where, and I think Sicily, where he’s wandering around and he looks at the ruins of previous battles, and he genuinely believed that he had had many lives, and in several of those lives, he’d been a warrior in time’s gone past. So yeah, he absolutely did believe in reincarnation. He’d been reincarnated several times already. I don’t know which life he was on, but it wasn’t number one, put it that way.

Brett McKay: And you also talk about, he thought he was a man of destiny. He really thought providence, God had saved him for this period to take part in this great enterprise. And I’ve seen connections between him and Winston Churchill. Winston Churchill talked the same way about himself. He’s like, I’m a man of destiny. I was born for this.

Alex Kershaw: Yeah. Well, I think I made the parallel in the book where I point out that Churchill said that he’d walked with destiny, beside destiny most of his life. And then at age 65, suddenly becomes prime minister in May, 1940, the most critical point in modern British history where Britain basically stood alone against a Nazi onslaught.

And Churchill believed that his whole life had prepared him for that ordeal, that trial, that moment. And Patton was similar. He wasn’t 65, but he was nearing 60. During the Battle of the Bulge, he was 59 years old. He’d just turned 59. So not far off Churchill, but he definitely felt that he’d been waiting much of his 20s, 30s, 40s, and into his 50s to really seize the moment, seize the day and become what he was destined to become, which was in my view, the most effective American combat commander of World War II.

Brett McKay: So Patton famously led the Third Army. What was the Third Army’s role in World War II prior to the Battle of the Bulge?

Alex Kershaw: Well, the third Army was activated at the beginning of August, 1944. So we were about to break out of Normandy. A lot of the really heavy bloody fighting had been done in Normandy. And the Third Army under Patton was brought into play and basically led the American breakout from Normandy and did so in extraordinary style and speed. The spearhead of the Third Army, was the Fourth armored division that was Patton’s favored division. Hell on wheels, and they cut a slash across France. That was extraordinary. They literally, there were stories about how tank commanders would call up Patton and ask where they should rest for the night to refuel, et cetera. And Patton said, “What the hell are you doing calling me? You’re wasting time even picking up a field phone. Just keep moving. Don’t stop.” And so the Third Army in the summer of 1944 took more prisoners and traveled further than any other mobile force in history in basically about six weeks, all the way from Brittany right to within a hundred miles of the German border. The only thing that stopped Patton was lack of fuel and to some extent the weather. But it was mainly the lack of fuel to supply his armored divisions. It was a very potent force. Patton had studied German strategy and tactics and the Blitzkrieg that had been so effective in 1940.

And he basically developed an American form of Blitzkrieg, a very Patton-esque version of it. Which basically meant that he equipped, manned and planned for his armored units to act as really effective modern day cavalry, you know, flanked by infant divisions, et cetera but his main preoccupation was speed and movement and taking the fight to the enemy and never allowing them, if possible, to have a break. You know, constant, constant pressure, just keep pushing, pushing, pushing. He several times, gave instructions which were basically don’t worry about what’s going on 10 miles to the east or the west. Just keep pushing your head and fight, just keep fighting. And it proved to be very effective until you get into the late fall of 1944 where the weather became atrocious. Fuel supplies were very difficult, it was very hard to come across extra fuel and there was a manpower problem. So yeah, he was a genius of Ahmed warfare.

Brett McKay: And so, Patton, the Third Army makes this slash into Europe, but then in the fall of ’44, they get stymied. The weather’s bad. There’s no manpower. They’re outta fuel. But yeah, the weather becomes a problem. As you get into November, December, and this is when the title of your book comes into play, Patton’s Prayer, Patton decided to… He says, we gotta pray. And he had this great quote talking about Patton’s idea about what role prayer played in warfare. And he says, you got a plan and then you gotta work really hard, but then you have to pray really hard as well. So he goes and finds this chaplain to say, I want you to write a prayer for us. So tell us about this chaplain who wrote Patton’s Prayer.

Alex Kershaw: That was a guy called O’Neill. He was the senior chaplain in the Third Army, and I believe there were more than 20 denominations within the Third Army, but he was the overall chief. And on the 8th of December, 1944, while Patton was headquartered in Nancy in France, O’Neill was at his desk one morning and he received a call, and it was Patton. O’Neill came from Chicago. He was, I think he was 52 years old at the time, and he’s a Roman Catholic priest. But he received this call from Patton saying, you know, come and see me. And when he went to see him, Patton said, look, I want you to write a prayer for me, which was, you know, came as a big surprise to O’Neill. And the prayer was basically for good weather. And I can read a little bit of it.

Brett McKay: Yeah.

Alex Kershaw: That it was printed onto over 250,000 prayer cards. So that basically every guy in the Third Army received one. And I think the last of these prayer cards, which, you know, it’s like a business card, I’ve actually got one, it fits into your wallet nicely. It would fit into any GIs combat pocket neatly. And the last of those prayers was distributed on the 14th of December, 1944. And that’s a hell of a lot of copies of a prayer and a hell of a lot of people to receive them. But anyway, on one side, there was a Christmas message that O’Neill wrote on behalf of Patton. And then the main prayer on the other side of the card read like this, “Almighty and most merciful Father, we humbly beseeched thee of thy great goodness to restrain these in moderate reigns with which we have had to contend. Grant us fair weather for battle, graciously hearken to us as soldiers who call upon thee that armed with thy power, we may advance from victory to victory and crush the oppression and wickedness of our enemies, and establish justice among men and nations.”

So that was the prayer. And Patton was very pleased with it. And in my book I go into quite some detail, but, O’Neill recorded the conversation he had with Patton in quite some detail, and I shamelessly used a lot of the dialogue from O’Neill’s memoirs for that meeting between the two of them on the 8th of December, 1944. So yeah, Patton made some good points though when he was talking to O’Neill. He asked O’Neill, how much praying was being done. And O’Neill said that it was pretty difficult to find places for people to pray as a congregation. And that in the middle of a war it was difficult to hold services, but basically not a lot of praying was going on. And Patton said, well, we need to change that. And Patton said, up to now in the Third Army, this is up until December of 1944, God has been very good to us.

We have never retreated, we have never suffered defeats. This is because a lot of people back home are praying for us. We were lucky in Africa, in Sicily, and in Italy, simply because people prayed. But we have to pray for ourselves too. And he, I love this about Patton, he added that a good soldier. Quote, “A good soldier is not made merely by making him think and work. There is something in every soldier that goes deeper than thinking or working. It’s his guts. It is something that he is built up in there. It is a world of truth and power that is higher than himself.” And Patton basically told O’Neill that everybody in the Third Army should be praying all the time. And if they didn’t pray sooner or later they’d crack up as he said, you know.

Go insane or go to pieces. And so O’Neill not only wrote a Christmas message from Patton, plus the famous Patton’s prayer for good weather and he also issued a directive in Patton’s name that actually went to unbelievably 486 chaplains in the Third Army, 32… I’m correcting myself now, 32 denominations and the officers of 20 divisions that were under Patton’s command. And the directive was really precise. Pray when driving, pray when fighting, pray alone, pray with others, pray by night and pray by day, pray for the cessation of immoderate rains for good weather for battle, pray for victory, pray for our army and pray for peace, lastly.

Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. So Patton, he has his prayer issued. He hands it out the same time Hitler’s planning his attack, right? This is like a last ditch effort. We talked about this in our last conversation, secret attack. No one knew it was coming. The Allies were caught completely off guard. How did Patton respond? Like what was his response when he found out that the Nazis had made this surprise attack?

Alex Kershaw: Well, you say that nobody knew that it was gonna happen, and that’s true to the extent that no one knew the extent of the German attack. No one knew that there were gonna be over 200,000 troops involved, and that this was Hitler’s last desperate gamble on the Western Front. But in fact, Patton did know that something was gonna happen because he had a superb intelligence staff. His entire staff were first class, but he had a head of intelligence called Oscar Koch, who he’d worked with since 1942. And he trusted him hugely. He didn’t ever make a major decision without consulting Koch. And Koch in late November and early December of 1944, had received a lot of intelligence, field intelligence, et cetera, interrogations of POWs, which suggested that the Germans were building up a significant force to the north of the Third Army near the Ardennes.

And so Patton, when he was told about this, he gave orders to make preparations in case there was a significant attack further north. And so when the attack finally came on the 16th of December, stunning and shocking, the Allied command and Patton himself was surprised by just how many men and how many tanks the Germans had been able to bring into play without anybody really realizing it. But when it happened, when the disaster unfolded, Patton was the only guy with a plan. In fact, he had three plans because he’d consulted with Koch and had asked his staff to draw up preparations in the likelihood of such a large scale movement of German forces. He had no idea that it was gonna be so vast, so big that the Germans would punch almost 70 miles through, past Allied lines. But he did have a plan in place, and it was that plan that the… One of those three operational plans that he adopted in the early days of the Battle of the Bulge. There was a famous meeting of Eisenhower, Bradley, Patton and other senior staff at Verdun, a fitting place given what had happened there in World War I on the 19th of December.

And Patton stole the show. He was the only guy in the meeting that actually was confident, that saw this as a real opportunity to finish off the Wehrmacht. And he had a plan. He was the only guy with a plan and said that he could pivot his Third Army in 48 hours and move that Third Army over a hundred miles to the north, to the Ardennes and then counter attack. And the reaction, particularly from one British senior official at the Verdun, was laughter. This guy’s joking, this guy really is a maniac. But… And Eisenhower himself said that he was somewhat surprised by Patton’s plan and said, well, don’t go off half-cocked. Take a little bit more time than that. But in fact, Patton did only really need 48 hours and did actually pivot his entire Third Army in just over two days, which is that act of changing the axis of advance of an entire army in such a short period of time and then moving over a hundred miles in terrible winter conditions was the greatest achievement of Patton’s illustrious military career. It was a phenomenal achievement.

Brett McKay: Yeah. Because he had a plan, even though he didn’t know exactly what was gonna happen, he had a plan, it allowed him to execute with speed. That was, again, it just allowed him…

Alex Kershaw: Yeah.

Brett McKay: To be fast, fast, fast, fast, fast.

Alex Kershaw: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Action was what was required. And he knew that the German forces were overextending themselves. They were vulnerable. But what it took was someone to act quickly and with immense aggression and to take the fight to the enemy. And the reason why the Battle of the Bulge is known as the Battle of the Bulge is not because of any Weight Watchers. It’s because the… If you looked at a map in, certainly on the 18th or 19th of December of 1944, it would show a big bulge in the Allied lines. And Patton, when he looked at that bulge, he saw opportunity that, well, if I can cut off the spearhead of the Wehrmacht, if I can attack, we can take great advantage of this. What others saw as a crisis, he saw as an opportunity. And I think that he not only saw as an opportunity to defeat the Wehrmacht decisively, but he saw it as a way to shorten the war.

That if we did the right things, threw enough men into this battle. If he was given the right kind of command, if he was allowed to make the decisions that he wanted to make, then this could be the last great battle of the war. It ended up being the last great battle on the Western Front anyway. But he thought that German collapse would soon follow. It actually took four months after the conclusion of the Battle of the Bulge in January, late January of 1945, it took until the 7th of May, 1945 for the Third Reich to finally collapse. But it was speeded up…

Brett McKay: Yeah.

Alex Kershaw: By defeat in the Battle of the Bulge.

Brett McKay: And you do such a great job in this part of the book, talking about, you know, that this drive that Patton was making with the Third Army. They’re trying to reach Bastogne, and you do a great job of showing the leadership style of Patton. He was one who led from the front. He actually talked about it. He said, it’s important for my men to see me at the front, and it’s also important that the enemy sees me at the front ’cause he understood the power of presence. He understood the power of having an image, and that it could inspire his own men, but also strike fear in the enemy. You recount this. There’s points where Germans talk about, “Oh my gosh, where’s Patton? Is Patton here?” They start freaking out when they hear that Patton’s on his way. And talking about this theatrical aspect of Patton’s leadership style, you do this great quote when he got asked about it in the press, and he started talking about it. He was very self-aware of it.

He said, you quote this, I like this a lot. He says, “You know, people ask why I swagger and swear, wear flashy uniforms, and sometimes two pistols. Well, I’m not sure whether some of it is any of my own damn fault, but however that may be, the press and others have built a picture of me. So now, no matter how tired or discouraged or even really ill I may be, if I don’t live up to that picture, my men are going to say the old man’s sick. The old son of a bitch has had it. Then their own confidence, their own morale will take a big drop.” So yeah, you could see it. There’s instances where he would help push a truck out of the snow. That was really important for the men to see that.

Alex Kershaw: Yeah, definitely. I mean, if you’re in the battle of your life and things are really, really tough, it’s nice to see the big boss lending a hand. One of the things that I love about Patton is the fact that he walked it as he talked it. I mean, he talked big, but he walked big, if you know what I mean.

Brett McKay: Yeah.

Alex Kershaw: And, you know, in contrast to someone like Bradley, who was the so-called GI’s general, you know, that was a myth propagated by Ernie Pyle, who wrote a bunch of columns about Bradley eulogizing him. You know, Bradley barely left his hotel in Luxembourg throughout the Battle of the Bulge, whereas Patton was out there almost every single day for sometimes all day in an open jeep, armored jeep, visiting division commanders, corps commanders, and being seen by countless of his men. And there were so many examples and so many instances of guys under his command actually spotting him as he passed by in a jeep. And he would stand up and shout out encouragement and swear and say that they had the Germans nuts in a grinder.

You know, et cetera, et cetera. You can only imagine. But the fact was that he was there, he was seen, and he was seen at the front pushing his Third Army towards victory. And I think that that says everything you need to know about Patton, that he was a man that was there and led from the front, was seen at the front, and knew how important it was to be regarded that way by his troops.

Brett McKay: Yeah.

Alex Kershaw: He was very strict. He was a disciplinarian.

Brett McKay: Oh, yeah. He was a big stickler for that sort of thing.

Alex Kershaw: Very, very loyal. I mean, everybody complained… Everybody complained in the Third Army that they only had to wear neckties, that their helmets had to be polished, whatever. It was that there seemed to be this sort of ridiculous level of neatness that Patton required. But that was part of a broader philosophy that Patton had, which was that he did demand discipline, that he wanted men to be extremely well trained, to do what they were told, to perform at a very high level. And that came through discipline.

Brett McKay: Yeah.

Alex Kershaw: You need great discipline in a great army. And they might have bitched and moaned about it, but after the war, when they looked back, they were all proud to have served under old blood and guts. They realized that that kind of order and discipline and pride of unit mattered, mattered a great deal.

Brett McKay: Did Patton’s prayer get answered, like the weather clear up eventually?

Alex Kershaw: Yeah, it did. And Patton certainly believed that it was answered. And other men in the Third Army believed that it had been answered. And the main answer came… The answer came on 22nd of December, when the weather started to change. And then in the morning of the 23rd, Patton awoke and looked out of his headquarters in Luxembourg up at the sky, and it was bright blue. So the cloud cover and fogs and mists that had shrouded the Wehrmacht and shrouded the battlefield since the beginning of the Battle of the Bulge, the 16th of December, that finally all went away. And the point was that with clear skies, the Allied Air Forces could go to town, and they had air superiority, massive air superiority, and could do a hell of a lot of damage. But they couldn’t do that with low cloud cover and mist and fog.

In fact, they’d been grounded until that point. But with clear skies on the 23rd of December, they just, boy did they, they pounded everything they could find between the Rhine and the Ardennes. They hit columns of German tanks, they strafed and pounded and bombed and shelled and… You name it, and did a hell of a lot of damage and made the critical difference in the Battle of the Bulge. So when Patton looked up at the clear blue skies, he absolutely believed that his prayer had been answered. And then soon after, he called for his chaplain, O’Neill, his head chaplain, O’Neill, and he gave him a medal.

He’s the only chaplain in World War II that we know of that received a medal for writing a prayer.

I think it was a bronze star.

Brett McKay: Yeah.

Alex Kershaw: So…

Brett McKay: It’s very Patton-esque.

Alex Kershaw: And Patton pinned it onto him himself. He wasn’t just handed it by some underling. It was Patton who pinned the medal on him himself.

Brett McKay: Alright, so they make it to Bastogne and this basically, this is kind of the Battle of the Bulge sort of winding down. It took a few more weeks for it to happen. What happened to the Third Army after that? What did they do?

Alex Kershaw: Well, you know, Bastogne was relieved on the 26th of December, but actually, in the first couple of weeks of January of 1945, there were much higher casualties suffered by the Third Army, annexed back by the 101st Airborne, then from the 16th of December through to the end of 1944. ‘Cause it’s one thing to stop a German counter attack and to relieve a besieged town. It’s quite another thing to push the Wehrmacht back to their starting point. And that took most of January of 1945, and it was a very bloody ordeal indeed, because the Germans fought very, very hard. They knew they had their backs to their homeland. Finally, the two key armies involved in the Battle of the Bulge met up at a place called Houffalize and the Americans pipped the Brits to Houffalize by just a matter of a few hours. And so that was the join up of the two main armies involved on the Allied side in the battle. And from there until the end of January, from Houffalize until the end of January, it was a slogging match to push the Germans back to where they’d started from on day one of the Battle of the Bulge.

They took a break for a while, and then by early February, the Third Army was on the move. Its progress was relatively slow through February, again because of the winter conditions and determined German counter attacks and stubbornness. But then finally by March, they’re starting to move, they’ve broken the back of the Wehrmacht on the Western Front, and they’re moving to towards the Rhine. The Allies crossed the Rhine first on the 7th of March, 1945 across the Ludendorff Bridge at Remagen. And then through the rest of March, the rest of the Allied armies crossed the Rhine from north to south. Patton crossed the Rhine on the 25th of March, and then Oppenheim, and famously urinated in the river and got to the other side to the Eastern Banks of the Rhine and fell to his knees and grabbed a bunch of dirt and shouted out. Thus William the Conqueror.

Basically, this is… We were talking earlier on about his understanding of military history and his love for those who had come before. So only Patton would’ve dropped to his knees on the other side of the Rhine and invoked William the Conqueror. So that takes you to April of 1945. Once we were across the Rhine, that was the last natural barrier between us and Berlin. You got Siegfried Line and then the Rhine, and then that’s it, basically. It’s that… There was still a lot of heavy fighting going on, but it was all over really for the Third Reich on the Western Front.

Brett McKay: And Patton became, he was a celebrity. He became a hero. Everyone loved Patton.

Alex Kershaw: Oh yeah. I mean, his name was in the headlines through much of the Battle of the Bulge. I mean, he became a superstar.

Brett McKay: Eventually. So Patton’s not fighting as much. There’s still some fighting going on, but he starts getting into trouble and eventually he gets in a lot of trouble, and he got relieved from his command of the Third Army. What caused that?

Alex Kershaw: He hated the Soviets. That was the main reason. And he spoke out about it unwisely and time and time again, just couldn’t keep his mouth shut and basically said that we should carry on fighting, and that rather than the Nazis, we should be fighting the Red Army. It’s not what people wanted to hear, certainly not what Eisenhower or any politicians wanted to hear it. That’s…

Brett McKay: When I read that, I thought he kind of has a point. He said that, we got [laughter] to probably fight these guys ’cause if we don’t, we’ll be fighting them in 20 years. And that’s exactly what happened.

Alex Kershaw: Yeah, it was called the Cold War. But that looming conflict was pretty hot even in 1945.

Brett McKay: Yeah.

Alex Kershaw: And that… If you ask somebody that lived throughout the Cold War or was in the part of Eastern Europe that was occupied by the Red Army, they certainly didn’t regard themselves as being liberated. And Patton insisted on trying to get to Prague and was stopped. He was told, no, you gotta stop. We’ve agreed that… Also, these are the lines that we’re gonna finish with at the end of the war. Stalin gets this, we occupy this, and that’s it. And Patton wanted to go as far as he could, as fast as he could. And the reason why was because he knew that he was a liberator, not a conqueror, that he wanted to set people free rather than enslave them, which is what he believed the Soviets would do and did do. So in terms of identifying the Soviets as the main enemy of democracy in Europe, he was dead right. But that was not the time to do it when we… You know, over 19 millions European civilians lay dead, and we’ve gone through a horrific global conflict. It was just not what people wanted to hear, and it’s not what his men wanted to hear either, to be honest. All they could think about in 1945 was going home and they didn’t wanna go… They didn’t wanna stay in Europe and fight against a formidable Red Army. That would’ve been a horrific bloodbath.

Brett McKay: Yeah. So yeah, Eisenhower, he was thinking about the Ally. He was thinking about relationships and trying to figure out how are we gonna organize this post-war thing.

Alex Kershaw: Yeah.

Brett McKay: He’s thinking bigger picture, and Patton’s comments weren’t helping that. And so yeah, he basically got sacked from his command.

Alex Kershaw: Yeah. He didn’t get sacked for comments about the Soviets, although those were very impolitic. And it’s surprising that he wasn’t disciplined severely. He got sacked eventually because Eisenhower ran out of patience. And the reason why he ran out of patience finally, was that in a press conference, Patton had been set up by a journalist, and Patton was pretty easy to set up. You just asked him a question about the Red Army, or you asked him a question that would set Patton off, and one of the questions was, it was seemingly benign, and it was basically about his role after the end of the war, which was that he was the governor of occupied Bavaria, and it was his responsibility to put that shattered part of Germany back together and make it run and organize things. It was an army of occupation that he was commanding, and he was asked a question about the treatment of Nazi officials.

And Patton basically pointed out that if you didn’t allow any Nazi official back into government, if you didn’t allow them to… Some of them to run the show, to make the electricity work, to organize various things, to run towns and cities, then who were you left with? ‘Cause pretty much anybody that had been in power of any kind since the rise of Hitler had been in the Nazi Party. You had to be in the Nazi Party to be a senior government official anywhere in Germany. That’s what it was all about. And so Patton basically said, well, the Nazis aren’t that different to the Republicans and the Democrats. It’s like if you belong to them, it’s not that much different to being in the Nazi Party. And of course, that comparison of the Republicans and Democrats to the Nazis just lit a bonfire. That was a step too far.

Even though when you really think about it, what Patton was saying was pretty true. And as we learned to our great dismay, but not a lot of people’s shock in some parts of the world, when we invaded Iraq, there was no plan for… Real plan for what we were gonna do once we’d invaded, just a lot of idealism. And when we got rid of Saddam Hussein’s forces and his senior command structure, et cetera, and all those who had obeyed Saddam Hussein, you were left with a vacuum. You didn’t have anybody to turn to to help you organize our occupation of Iraq. And Patton was basically saying the same thing, you know, you need to find people who can actually run the show. Otherwise, we’re going to have to do it all and we can’t do it all on our own.

Brett McKay: How did he respond to his getting removed from command?

Alex Kershaw: Well, you have to remember that Eisenhower’s patience had been tested since 1943 with the famous slapping incident. And there were several other occasions since then that had caused him a lot of irritation. He basically just wanted Patton to keep his goddamn mouth shut. And when they finally met, it was in September of 1945 in Europe, in Germany, and they had a real ding dong. I mean, the meeting went on for about two hours. Voices were raised. Eisenhower’s assistant and driver, a woman called Kay Summersby, wrote in a memoir that this was the most annoyed that she’d ever seen Eisenhower, that he’d aged like 10 years during this whole episode when he was having to basically fire a good friend. And that was what Patton was.

And he basically relieved Patton of command of the Third Army, which was a stunning blow to Patton. When Patton left the meeting, an observer said that he was white, maybe with shock, but certainly with disappointment. And he was given sort of a bogus role as head of the 15th Army, which was basically… Was gonna write the history of World War II as an historical unit. So that was a real comedown from, at the end of the war, Patton had almost 500,000 Americans under his command as Third Army commander. And then to suddenly find himself in charge of a bunch of guys who were gonna write the history of World War II was a real demotion. And it hit him hard.

He pretended that it didn’t in public anyway, but it left him somewhat embittered, deeply saddened and wondering about what the hell he was gonna do with the rest of his life ’cause his glory days were definitely over.

Brett McKay: Yeah.

Alex Kershaw: The problem for Patton was that even then, when the war ended in Europe on the 7th of May, 1945, he wanted to go to Japan. He was all for it. And in fact, he visited Washington, DC in June of 1945, and he was on a mission to try and get sent to Japan. At his last meeting with his Third Army staff, he said, I’ll see you in China. So he was all up for even more of a war. But MacArthur, who was the king of the Pacific Theater, he wouldn’t have Patton anywhere near him. I think he was threatened by Patton. He certainly didn’t want that size of ego anywhere near him.

And so Patton, there was no role found for Patton in the Pacific, even though Patton had actually asked President Truman, when he was at the White House in June of 1945, to send him there. It wasn’t gonna happen because MacArthur wouldn’t allow it, basically. And so it raises a question about what would have happened to Patton had he not died in a car accident in December 1945. So yeah, he was a man without a real role or purpose or, as he saw it, a future. And it hurt him a great deal. He’d spent his entire… Devoted his entire life to the US Army.

Brett McKay: Yeah, that car accident, it was a pretty banal death for Patton. I don’t think it was the death that he thought he’d have, like this glorious warrior death. So yeah, it’s the end of 1945. He’s about to leave Europe. He’s thinking about retiring from the Army. And he gets in this dumb car accident ’cause his limo driver was driving too fast. Everyone else was fine, but he ended up being paralyzed from the neck down. He had to spend, I think 12 days, in spinal traction in a hospital. But even during that time, he was a stoic soldier. The nurses said he was the ideal patient. But he said, yeah, this is a hell of a way to die. And he ended up dying from those injuries from that car accident. What’s interesting, though, is that Patton had a clear premonition of his death several months before.

So he went back to the United States for leave. And while he was there, right before he went back to Europe, he told his family, “This is our last goodbye.” And they were like, “What are you talking about? The war’s over. You’re not gonna die.” But he knew he was gonna die soon because he thought, he believed you had a certain amount of protection from providence or a certain amount of luck, and his had run out. But he did think he would be reincarnated again. So after writing this book, did you take any life lessons from Patton?

Alex Kershaw: Yeah, that’s a great question. The one thing that I came to realize by looking at Patton is that today he would be totally ostracized. He wouldn’t stand a chance in the modern US military. He was too outspoken. He wasn’t a team player in some ways. But if you look at human history, if you look in detail at human history, a lot of it is about conflict. Modern history is the history of war in many ways, one war after another. And we would be very naive to assume that we’re not going to stay that way as a basically conflictual species. And we need people like Patton. We’re always gonna need figures like Patton in the future. If we face great military tests, we’re gonna need aggressive, brilliant commanders who want to win and are prepared to do whatever they can to win. You don’t want to have your hands tied behind your back in a war if the stakes are everything.

And if national survival is on the line, you’re out to win. And from my point of view, men like Patton, we’ve always needed them and we will always need them in the future.

Brett McKay: Well, Alex, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

Alex Kershaw: You can go to all the usual online bookstores. And you can also go to my website, alexkershaw.com, and follow me on Twitter. Yeah, the book’s published on the 21st of May and hopefully people will enjoy it. I had a great time writing it ’cause I got to write about an incredibly fun, fascinating, colorful figure, which is Patton.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I had a great time reading it. It’s a great book.

Alex Kershaw: Oh, thank you.

Brett McKay: Well, Alex Kershaw, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Alex Kershaw: My pleasure, mate. Thanks a lot.

Brett McKay: My guest here is Alex Kershaw. He’s the author of the book, Patton’s Prayer. It’s available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about his work at his website, alexkershaw.com. Also, check out our show notes at aom.is/patton, where you can find links to resources where you can delve deeper into this topic.

Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM Podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com, where you can find our podcast archives, as well as thousands of articles that we’ve written over the years about pretty much anything you think of. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate it if you’d take one minute to give us a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It helps out a lot. If you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think would get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. And until next time, this is Brett McKay, reminding you to not only listen to the AOM Podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

The Battle of the Bulge commenced on the morning of December 16, 1944. The Allies were ill-prepared for this last, desperate offensive from the Germans, and the campaign might have succeeded if a few things hadn’t gotten in their way, including a single, green, 18-man platoon who refused to give up their ground to the Nazis.

Alex Kershaw shares the story of these men in his book, The Longest Winter, and with us today on the show. He first explains the background of the Battle of the Bulge and how an Intelligence and Reconnaissance unit that had never seen combat ended up in the thick of it. And he describes the platoon’s 20-year-old leader, Lyle Bouk, who was determined to carry out his orders and hold their position despite being massively outmanned and outgunned, and how his men fought until they were down to their last rounds. Alex then shares how what Bouk thought was a total failure — being captured as POWs after just a day of combat — turned out to have been an effort that significantly influenced the outcome of the Battle of the Bulge, and how an unlikely platoon of heroes who initially went unrecognized for their valor became the most decorated American platoon of WWII. You’ll find such an inspiring lesson in this show about living up to your duty and holding the line.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• Alex’s previous appearances on the AoM Podcast:
  • #361: The Untold Story of WWII’s 45th Infantry Division
  • #514: Remembering D-Day 75 Years Later
  • #806: The Humble Heroics of Four of WWII’s Most Decorated Soldiers
• The Bedord Boys by Alex Kershaw 
• The Bitter Woods: The Battle of the Bulge by John S.D. Eisenhower
• AoM Article: NUTS! Why Remembering Christmas 1944 Can Change Your Life
• Lyle Bouck

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)

Listen to the episode on a separate page.

Download this episode.

Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice.

Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness podcast. The Battle of the Bulge commenced on the morning of December 16th, 1944. The allies were ill-prepared for this last desperate offensive from the Germans, and the campaign might have succeeded, if a few things hadn’t gotten in their way, including a single green 18-man platoon, who refused to give up their ground to the Nazis. Alex Kershaw shares the story of these men in his book “The Longest Winter,” and with us today on the show. He first explains the background of the Battle of the Bulge, and how an intelligence and reconnaissance unit that had never seen combat ended up in the thick of it. And he describes the platoon’s 20-year-old leader, Lyle Bouck, who was determined to carry out his orders and hold the position despite being massively outmanned and outgunned and how his men fought until they were down to the last rounds.

Alex then shares how what Bouck thought was a total failure, being captured as POWs after just a day of combat, turned out to have been an effort that significantly influenced the outcome of the Battle of the Bulge. And how an unlikely platoon of heroes who initially went unrecognized for their valor, became the most decorated American platoon of World War II. You’ll find such an inspiring lesson in the show about living up to your duty and holding the line. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/battleofthebulge.

All right. Alex Kershaw, welcome back to the show.

Alex Kershaw: Hey, great to be with you.

Brett McKay: So, we’re coming up on the 80th Anniversary of The Battle of the Bulge, that’ll be next year, and you wrote a book two decades ago about the Battle of the Bulge. It’s called “The Longest Winter.” And what I love with your books that you do about World War II, is you always find a small story. You find an individual soldier, a unit that you can talk about the stories of these individual people in the broader context of this epic conflict that happened with World War II. And in this story, you follow an 18-man platoon from the US Army. They are facing the main thrust of the entire German assault at the Battle of the Bulge. How did you come across this story?

Alex Kershaw: Well, I’d written a book called “The Bedford Boys” that appeared in 2003 and did fairly well. That was about D-Day, focusing on a company that had been activated, first of all, as a National Guard unit from one small town in Virginia, Bedford. And anyway, my editor said to me, can you pick another small group of guys and thrust them into the middle of a very big battle in World War II? And the anniversary of the Battle of the Bulge is coming up, maybe you could find a unit that accomplished amazing things during the Battle of the Bulge? And I just put a phone call through to a friend of mine who worked at the Eisenhower Center in New Orleans, University of New Orleans. And I said, “I’m looking for a small group of guys, like, the size of a football team, maybe, ideally, and I’m looking at the Battle of the Bulge. Can you make any recommendations about any unit that I could look at?” And he’s like, immediately he said, “I&R Platoon, in the 99th Division, commanded by a 20-year-old called Lyle Bouck, and here’s his telephone number.” And I literally a few hours later called up, Lyle Bouck.

Alex Kershaw: This is over 20 years ago, now almost 20 years ago now. And he answered the phone. He was in St. Louis, and he answered the phone and I said, “Look, I really don’t wanna disturb you, but I’m really keen on writing about you and your platoon.” And he was okay with it. I was like, amazed that he was very polite and agreed to me writing about him and his platoon. But he had one condition, which was that, I had to write about every single member of the platoon that was there that day on the 16th of December 1944, first day of the German attack during the Battle of the Bulge. And to cut long story short, that platoon became the most decorated of World War II, most decorated US platoon, I should add. And I gave him my word. I said, “Yeah. Okay, I’ll do my very best to write about every guy in the platoon.” And of the 18 that served in the Battle of the Bulge, I think there were 11 still alive when I began my research, and I managed to interview all 11, amazingly. And not one of them is breathing today as I speak to you.

Brett McKay: I mean, I imagine that’s one of the hard things with your jobs, even you started writing about World War II right when a lot of these guys were… They were still alive, but those numbers have been dwindling every year.

Alex Kershaw: Yeah. I started interviewing seriously, World War II veterans in the late ’90s, and 16 million Americans served in uniform in World War II, and there are less than 120,000 alive today. So, you’d have to be 98, 99 to have served in World War II. I mean, some people lied about their age. I met a guy just a few days ago, who was actually 16 during the Battle of the Bulge. He’s a guy called Harry Miller, but he lied about his age. But you’d have to be 98, 99, and there aren’t many 98, 99 year olds around. [chuckle] But that’s the youngest you could be, you know? So, yeah, there are very few of the dozens and dozens of World War II veterans that I interviewed who are still with us, you know?

Brett McKay: So we’re gonna talk about the story. Lyle Bouck, he’s an amazing character, amazing person, and we’re gonna talk about his story and what he did with his unit at the Battle of the Bulge. But what’s interesting about your book, your book doesn’t start at the Battle of the Bulge, it actually starts in July of that same year of 1944 in the Wolf’s Layer, and this was Hitler’s Prussian Headquarters. Why start the story of the Battle of the Bulge here?

Alex Kershaw: Well, I wanted to start with a really dramatic scene, and that was the planting of a bomb by Count von Stauffenberg. It was what ended up being a failed assassination attempt of Hitler, one of many, but it really shook Hitler up. It wounded him badly. He was injured, almost killed by the blast. It was in a conference room that actually had open windows. So, if the windows had been closed and it hadn’t been… Things could have been otherwise, Hitler could have been easily killed. But anyway, after that, he started to think about how he might change the course of the war. And in the following months, couple of months after that July assassination attempt, he developed what became known as Wacht am Rhein, the code word for an attack through the Ardennes in December of 1944. So I wanted to start with this very dramatic moment when a Prussian aristocrat leaves a bomb in a suitcase and almost kills Hitler, and then examine how Hitler, after that near death event in desperation, developed a plan that he hoped would end the war on his terms in the West. That would change the outcome of World War II, so.

I also wanted to meet my platoon members before they shipped out from the US. So I switch from Hitler’s near death to Camp Maxey in Texas where the I&R Platoon were being trained under the leadership of Lyle Bouck, who was then just 20 years old. So that’s how I started. And then they get shipped out to the UK in, I believe the early fall of 1944, and then arrive in Belgium in November of 1944. And they were literally on the line for just a couple of weeks before the battle erupted. I mean, a totally green troops. Supposed to be an elite unit. An I&R unit is an intelligence and reconnaissance platoon. They’re not supposed to be engaged in heavy combat, quite the opposite.

They’re supposed to be the eyes and ears of a infantry regiment. You know, if they’re spotted and they end up in a firefight, that’s bad news, because they’re supposed to be patrolling secretly, unobserved behind enemy lines and feeding intelligence back to regimental headquarters. So, when they were attacked on the 16th of December, they were not a standard infantry unit, and it was only because they had great leadership and they brought in a couple of extra 50 cal machine guns and mounted them on jeeps that they had any real firepower. So yeah, that’s how I started with Hitler, and then following these guys to the front lines in the Ardennes.

Brett McKay: Okay. I see, yeah, put this in the [0:09:00.4] ____ context. Hitler at this point, the Nazis, their backs were against the wall. This is after D-Day…

Alex Kershaw: Yeah.

Brett McKay: The Allies were making progress in France, and then were heading to Germany. And as you… You talk about in the book this assassination attempt, it wounded him, it kinda shook him up, but it also in a weird way enlivened Hitler. He kind of started liking his own supply. He’s like, “I am awesome. Look, they didn’t kill me. I’m invincible.”

Alex Kershaw: Yeah. Yeah.

Brett McKay: “So maybe I can do this.” And he started looking at portraits of Frederick the Great, and…

Alex Kershaw: Yeah.

Brett McKay: Kind of talking with Frederick the great saying, “I can do what you did.” And that’s how he came with this final attack.

Alex Kershaw: Yeah. And basically, he hadn’t been killed and therefore he thought that Providence or God had saved him for greater things, and that fortune was on his side. So, yeah, that’s how he developed his, actually very daring and really quite audacious plan, what became known as his last great gamble, you know, in the West.

Brett McKay: So, yeah. Then after that, you switch over to Camp Maxey, to this unit, this platoon. You said they’re a reconnaissance platoon, and you talk about how the guys who were selected for this unit, they were handpicked. What were the characteristics that the leaders were looking for, for this I&R Platoon?

Alex Kershaw: Well, it’s interesting that you asked that question, because fair few of the guys had never expected to be in combat. They been in a special training program for college kids, what were called Whiz Kids, whether they were heading towards positions in intelligence units or some kind of duty that was not in a Foxhole on the front lines. But because of the manpower shortage in the fall of 1944, the ASTP program, as it was called, was canceled. And all these guys that were very smart, highly educated guys were sent into infantry units, and much to their dismay and disappointment. And so, several of the guys in Bouck’s Intelligence and Reconnaissance Platoon were very smart, highly educated and didn’t wanna be there, but hadn’t had much choice. So, they were a formidable bunch. They came from all over the United States. They came from different backgrounds. They were a diverse group, different ethnicities. They were truly an all American unit in that sense.

Brett McKay: Yeah. I mean, you had one Vernon Leopold, he was a German-Jewish refugee…

Alex Kershaw: Yep.

Brett McKay: Part of this unit. You had, I think, it’s Hernandez, a Mexican immigrant in there as well. Yeah, from all over.

Alex Kershaw: Yeah. There was a guy called Milosevic, who… For those who remember the Bosnian war, his distant relative was Milošević in recent times. So, he was a Serbian, the son of Serbian immigrants. So Hernandez, the guy you mentioned, he was… He had grown up in Texas. I actually managed to interview his widow in El Paso when I was researching the book. Guys from the Midwest, from cities, from rural America, couple of really good athletes. So it was a real mixed bunch, real… A really interesting range of Americans that Lyle Bouck was commanding. He was the second youngest in the platoon. There was a guy called Bill James, who was 19 years old, who was his runner. But imagine that, you’ve got 18 guys that you’re in command of, and you are the second youngest. So, you haven’t seen combat before and you look like a kid. I mean, Lyle Bouck looked very young. So, question is, why should any of these guys pay you any respect or carry out your orders when you’ve never been at war and you look like a boy?

Brett McKay: Right. And Bouck has an interesting background. I wanna talk about him, ’cause he’s a big part of the story.

Alex Kershaw: Yeah.

Brett McKay: So he was young, he was 20 years old, but he actually, like, he got involved in the military when he was 14, I think, with the National Guard?

Alex Kershaw: Yeah. He joined the National Guard when he was 14. I actually have… I think I have a photograph in the book or somewhere else, where I show a picture of him when he was just 14 in a whole group of other guys in the National Guard. So, he was very patriotic and it wasn’t just because he received some pay when he turned up for drills, etcetera. He was from the start, he wanted to serve his country. And by the time he got to Europe, to the Ardennes in the fall of 1944, he’d actually been wearing the uniforms for almost six years. So, it wasn’t like he just came out of high school and ended up as a lieutenant. He went through officer training school. He was seen as having great potential by his commanding officer, a guy called Major Kriz, and felt really proud that he’d been sort of singled out for leadership potential and given command of this I&R Platoon. It was a big deal to Lyle Bouck, he felt very honored by that.

Brett McKay: Did he show potential for… Like a capacity for leadership?

Alex Kershaw: Yeah, he did. Definitely. Yeah. I mean, you go through officer training school, they can work out pretty quickly whether you have what it takes to lead guys. Well, you never know though. I mean, this is the big issue, which is that, it doesn’t matter how well trained you are, when the bullets start whizzing by, only then do you know whether you’ve got it or you haven’t. And that’s something that every combat veteran will tell you, that it’s not until you actually get into combat that you realize who you are or what you can do, or whether your leaders are any good or not. That’s always a big question mark, you know? So you’ve got 18 guys into this young man’s command. None of them know either what will happen in combat, ’cause none of them have been in combat before either. So, lots of questions, you know? When people start to try to kill you, how do you react? And they all found out on the 16th of December.

Brett McKay: Okay. So, this unit, they get shipped to Europe. And when they were in Camp Maxey, they didn’t know where they were going yet. They were… I think you see this a lot in a lot of these World War II stories. These guys are at camp and then they get the order to load up in a train, and they’re on the train and they’re like, “All right, is this gonna go east or is this gonna go west?”

Alex Kershaw: Yeah.

Brett McKay: ‘Cause if it goes east, we’re gonna go to Europe. If it goes west, we’re getting shipped off to the Pacific Theater. And the same thing happened with these guys. They didn’t know until they got on the train and it started heading east.

Alex Kershaw: Yeah. And I would say that by that stage of the war, by the fall of 1944, most GIs would much rather go to Europe than the Pacific, because the Pacific was just a… It was a different kind of war. It was much darker, much more brutal. Japanese refusing to surrender. Just a really atrocious, barbaric series of islands. You have to hop from one to another. And I think most GIs thought that, if they were fighting against the Wehrmacht, if they’re fighting against even the SS Hitler’s most devout followers, that they stood a good chance of being taken prisoner, that they might not be beheaded. That if the worst came to the worst, and they did end up as POWs, that they could survive the war. Whereas, the idea of being taken prisoner by the Japanese in the Pacific was almost as horrific as fighting them.

Brett McKay: Okay. So they end up in Europe and they end up in Belgium in the Ardennes Forest. And this is late November, early December. Give us an idea, ’cause I think maybe people have seen Band of Brothers, the Battle of the Bulge scene. Like it was cold… What I mean… Give us an idea. What were the elements like in this area? What were they up against?

Alex Kershaw: Well. They were in kinda very hilly terrain in the Ardennes. Very thickly forested areas, and then some pasture. But it was the coldest winter in living memory. So, people always look at movies like, The Battle of the Bulge and Patton. And you see those beautiful couple of episodes from Band of Brothers. I think, they’re my favorite. And it does look extremely cold. In fact, it was colder than usual. So, people weren’t kidding when they said it was, literally people were freezing to death. In foxholes, unless you hugged your foxhole buddy to share their body warmth, or you took really serious precautions, you did stand a good chance of not waking up, of being frozen in your foxhole. So very cold. For the first few days of the Battle of the Bulge, the skies were overcast, it snowed in different areas. And then finally the sky’s cleared at the 23rd of December, after about a week. But the conditions were miserable. You were out there not getting hot food, subsisting on K-rations, having to spend every night in a foxhole. Maybe you had a blanket over you and if you were lucky to cover the foxhole and you wake up and it would be like stiff as wood in the morning, and you did that night after night after night.

And it was extremely exhausting. It was very, very, very harsh indeed. And you were constantly worried about getting trenched foot. It was mud slush. Just a very, very difficult fighting conditions. In fact, probably some of the most difficult of World War II. In the Pacific, there were horrendous conditions. But I think, the Battle of the Bulge, every veteran will tell you that the thing they remember most is, just how goddamn cold it was, you know?

Brett McKay: Yeah. And in addition to the harsh weather conditions, the troops were just… They were inadequately supplied and they were just generally unprepared in a lot of ways for a big attack.

Alex Kershaw: We were running out of men in the fall of 1944. So, because of the broad front strategy pursued by the allies, which meant that we had a frontline running from the Dutch border right through to Italy, was thinly manned. We didn’t have enough divisions to put on that very long front line, and the Ardennes was the most thinly manned part of that broad front. The divisions that were there were green, they hadn’t seen combat before, or they were being rested after the Battle of the Hürtgen Forest, which was a real meat grinder. So, thinly manned, not seen combat before, harsh conditions, and not expecting an attack. The position of the allies in late fall of 1944 was that they were gonna man this line and then gather new infantry regiments, material and other supplies, and then launch a spring attack into the heart of the Third Reich.

They had no idea, absolutely no idea, the average soldier that is, that the Germans were capable of launching such a massive surprise attack. And in fact, although intelligence suggested that some kind of attack could occur at the very highest levels of the allied command, the attack took them completely by surprise. I mean, it was stunning. It caused panic and chaos. Over 200,000 Germans suddenly attacking you in a place that you least expected, in really difficult terrain. They did not expect that at all, quite the opposite.

Brett McKay: How were they able to hide that? I mean, at this point, hadn’t we cracked the Enigma, and so, we were able to decipher codes and things like that?

Alex Kershaw: Very good point. And that goes to a broader issue, which is that we over relied on having broken the German codes and the Enigma information. We kind of got lazy. We thought we knew everything the Germans were up to. But before the Battle of the Bulge, Hitler had stated that there should be no radio communication, that orders should be written by hand, that those who knew about the plans for the battle were to keep it within a very tight circle. Anybody found relaying information about the forthcoming plans was to be executed. The way that the Germans actually gathered those 200,000 soldiers and over 500 tanks, over 1,000 artillery pieces, how they gathered them along the front line in the Ardennes is one of the great achievements of Hitler’s forces in World War II. It was miraculous almost. The Germans strafed Allied positions to cause distraction while tanks and other men moved to the front lines. They did so after dark, ’cause they could be spotted by Allied air forces during the day. They muffled the tank tracks. They had vehicles go over straw that had been laying on roads.

They made sure that the ammunition, in many cases, was carried to the front by hand, again, trying to avoid being spotted in vehicles. They even went so far as to ban soldiers from having fires with wood. They used charcoal instead, so that it wouldn’t create smoke, so that we couldn’t spot them. Everything was done in utmost secrecy and to avoid detection. So, yeah, they did a superb job of gathering those forces. In all three armies, well over 200,000 troops gathered, and when they attacked at 5:30, that was null hour, zero hour, 5:30 AM on the 16th of December, they took everybody by surprise. I should add to that, that there were intelligence reports coming back to the Allies that strongly suggested that some kind of attack was in the making. The I&R platoon itself, Lyle Bouck’s platoon, had detected strange noises and had reported back that something was going on. But at high levels, there was a really serious complacency. They just thought the Germans were incapable of launching this kind of scale of attack, that they were really a spent force in the West, and didn’t see it coming and didn’t expect it.

Brett McKay: Who was leading the attack on the German side?

Alex Kershaw: The overall commander was von Rundstedt. He was the overall German commander, and then you had various Wehrmacht divisions and then SS divisions. The main strike force, or rather the spearhead of the German attack, was to be entirely SS. So, SS stands for Schutzstaffel, that’s Hitler’s private army. They’re above the law. They are responsible for carrying out many of the atrocities of the Second World War committed by the Germans. They ran the concentration camps, and within the Waffen-SS, which is the army SS, if you like, they were the troops that Hitler trusted most toward the end of the war, especially after a Wehrmacht general, von Stauffenberg, had tried to kill him. So Hitler didn’t trust his Wehrmacht generals, the standard army officers and generals, didn’t trust them. And therefore, the main responsibility for success in Wacht am Rein, in the attack, in the Ardennes, that rested on the shoulders of SS officers and generals. And in particular, a guy called Joachim Peiper, who was in command of what was called Kampfgruppe Peiper, that was a task force, special task force that went ahead of an SS Panzer Army and was tasked with breaking through American lines and reaching the Meuse River within 48 hours.

So, really the success of the campaign, of the battle, rested just on one guy’s shoulders. And that was Lieutenant Colonel Joachim Peiper, who led that spearhead of SS troops that attacked on the 16th of December. He was told, you’ve got to get here by this time. Don’t mess around. Don’t take prisoners. If you get there, then we’ve got a chance. If you don’t, the war’s lost. So, huge responsibility for anybody to be carrying on their shoulders. And without jumping too far ahead, Joachim Peiper almost managed it. It was mission impossible, but he almost got there.

Brett McKay: We’re going to take a quick break for a word from our Sponsors. And now back to the show. Okay. So let’s talk about the Battle of the Bulge. So it started December 16th, 5:30 in the morning. How did it start? When did Bouck realize… ‘Cause again, Bouck is in the middle of this, like, he’s at the front line, him and his unit, they’re there, they had seen some German soldiers in the area, but they didn’t know there was a big attack coming. When did they realize, “Oh my gosh, this is a big giant attack?”

Alex Kershaw: Well, the barrage that preceded the attack that began at like, 5:30 was one of the biggest barrages of the Second World War. The Germans just shelled the hell out of all the American positions along, the front line would’ve been around about 50 miles long. The northern shoulder of what became the Battle of the Bulge was manned by the 99th Infantry Division, in the center you had the 106th Infantry Division, and then the 28th Infantry Division. And to the South you had other American forces that both of those shoulders on the north and the south, they performed pretty well, they withstood incredible pressure. But at the south, the center of the line folded pretty quickly.

So the first time that Bouck knew what was going on was when the skies lit up at 5:30 and he and his platoon all jumped into their foxholes and took shelter. It was a very, very powerful barrage and that was the same all along the line. So that the barrage was the first, it was the wake up call, the signal and then after that ended around about 8 o’clock in the morning, the front lines of the German attack, the advanced troops started to break through American positions. And it was around about that time in the morning that the I&R Platoon spotted their first Germans who were paratroopers that had been sent ahead of Joachim Peiper’s SS troops. The paratroopers were there to sort of, it was believed, mop up, very light American resistance, because the barrage would have done its work. The lines were thinly held, there was hope that there would be so much chaos and confusion and panic that there would be very insignificant American resistance. And that actually was in many cases, the… That happened to be true, but they didn’t count on Lyle Bouck’s platoon carrying out their orders, which were to hold their positions at all costs.

Brett McKay: And that’s what they did, they did… And again, they just had their…

Alex Kershaw: Yeah.

Brett McKay: Their rifles and they had that 150 caliber on a Jeep.

Alex Kershaw: Yeah, they actually had… I think they had two.

Brett McKay: Two, right.

Alex Kershaw: 250 calibers and then M1 rifles and Bouck could’ve had a carbine, which was the standard issue for an officer. So yeah, they manned positions above a small village called Lanzerath, which was right in the middle of the northern part of the shoulder. But more importantly, it was overlooking a road which the Germans had labeled Roll Barn B, that means Route B. And that was the route that Joachim Peiper was going to take to break through American lines and hit his objectives. So, they happened to be in the worst possible place at the worst possible time, just 18 of them in the platoon. And they were confronting a force of several hundred paratroopers, and then behind those paratroopers were Joachim Peiper’s SS troops and dozens and dozens of Tiger and Panther tanks.

Brett McKay: What’s really amazing about this story is that, under that kind of pressure, right? Being so outnumbered, so outgunned, Bouck and his men, they would’ve been really tempted to run, to retreat. But they didn’t. They stood their ground.

Alex Kershaw: Yeah. When he got the orders, he decided to carry out his orders, but there were several guys in the platoon that weren’t quite so happy about that, because they thought they didn’t stand a chance. They were up against this massive force and what difference did it make if they went down fighting and took a few dozen or whatever with them. Some of them thought, maybe it would be a better idea to pull back and regroup and form a better line of defense, why sacrifice their lives for really no good reason. They were massively outnumbered after all. But Lyle Bouck was a good officer and an order was an order and he told his men that, “We’re staying and no one’s gonna leave.” Later in the day, when they got into really serious combat, they were attacked actually four times by the Germans and held their positions. But later in the day, as the situation became increasingly hopeless, he did say, “If you wanna go, you can go, I’m staying, but if any of you guys wanna go, you can go and try and escape the German penetration and join other Americans and fight another day.” But none of the platoon actually did that, they all stayed put.

There were many cases in the first hours, the first couple of days in fact of the Battle of the Bulge, where the Americans did turn and run, that was understandable. They were petrified, they were up against a much greater force and they turned tail. And that may have been a lack of courage or it may have been very sensible, ’cause they wanted to carry on fighting and they thought by retreating they might stand a better chance of putting up a good fight. But that was not the case with the I&R Platoon, they stayed where they stood and they fought extremely well.

Brett McKay: Yeah, you wrote about Bouck, he returned to this place in 1969, and he… You said that he realized perhaps the one factor above all, their youth had explained why he and his men had stood and held. He said, older men, fathers, wiser, more cautious adults would surely have retreated as soon as the Germans appeared in such superior numbers. So, his youth probably played a role in that.

Alex Kershaw: Yeah. And I think he was… This is the first day of real combat, they’d been patrolling behind enemy lines, and had a few close shaves, but they actually hadn’t engaged with the enemy before. So this was the first true test and I think Lyle Bouck, wanted to prove himself, you know? He was young, everyone was watching him, looking at him thinking, “Well, what’s this guy got?” And he wanted to show that he had the right stuff, and he did. Yeah, they were attacked frontally. They were on a hillside near a tree line. Foxholes are still there. You can actually go. I was back there in May. I went to… I actually went to Lyle Bouck’s foxhole. So they were along the tree line, well placed, and they’d… Bouck had done his best to reinforce the positions.

He’d done what he could. And the paratroopers that attacked them were badly led, and they ran at them across an open field, open slope. It was a barbed wire fence that bisected the field. And as they were trying to climb over the fence, the 50 cals literally just mowed them down. I mean, some people say that, you know, there were 500 Germans that were killed or wounded. Some people say, it’s more like, three or four dozen. It doesn’t matter. What did happen was that four times the Germans attacked up this hillside near the village of Lanzerath. And these 18 guys in the I&R platoon repulsed them every time.

They were running out of ammunition by the time it was all over. It was sort of getting dark around about 4 o’clock in the afternoon. People forget just how long darkness lasted in that part of the world in December 1944. You almost have 16 hours of darkness. So, got light around about 8:00, 8:30 in the morning, got dark around 4:00, 4:30 in the afternoon. And by around 4 o’clock in the afternoon, many of the platoon were literally down to their last rounds. They’d been firing in firefight for most of the day. A couple of them were seriously wounded and… Miraculously only just a couple, but literally they… With a few more minutes, half an hour maybe, it would’ve been dark and they had nothing left to fight with. And so, it was at that point that Bouck said, “If you want to try and get away, now’s the time to do so, undercover darkness.” He still was gonna stay. And then finally the paratroopers got smart and realized that these full frontal assaults at this hillside were disastrous, and they decided to try and outflank the platoon’s positions.

And so, they came in from the flanks through woods and started to seize each of the foxholes. And the way they did that was that they fired at them, they threw grenades, and then when they got close enough, they would shout out in German, “Get out, get out” or “raus, raus,” is what they actually said. “Get out.” And they literally pulled several of the platoon members out of the foxholes by hand. And these guys didn’t give up easily, they in a couple of cases, they literally had fired their last rounds.

Brett McKay: And what role did this stand, that Bouck and his unit, that they made that day, what role did it play in the Battle of the Bulge for the allies?

Alex Kershaw: Well, with Bouck what happened was that he was beside Bill James, his runner in his foxhole, and suddenly the barrel of a machine pistol was thrust through a slit at the front of the… They created a really good well-defended command post and covered it with logs. And so, there was a slit about two or three feet wide by maybe six inches high. And suddenly the barrel of a German machine pistol came through and it was pointed right at Bouck and instinctively, I mean, he didn’t have time to think about it, instinctively he pushed it to the side and the German opened fire and fired, unfortunately, right into Bill James’ face. So unbelievably, Bill James wasn’t killed, but he took a lot of rounds in his face. Later on, I think he had to have over 20 plastic surgery operations to try and repair his face. Really badly disfigured and bleeding everywhere at the time. Bouck thought he was gonna die very quickly.

So, Bouck was pulled out with James. James is like, in and out of consciousness. Bouck doesn’t surrender quickly enough with his… Put his hands in the air, rather after he’s been pulled out of his hole and he’s shot in the leg. And then he has to try and prop up his buddy. But Bill James, who was a good friend of his too, and is marched down the hillside towards a cafe in Lanzerath. And he passes German corpses that they… The barbed wire fence is sort of piled high with dead or dying Germans, or bleeding Germans. And as he’s staggering down this hillside after dark with a German pointing a gun in his back, he hears this click and he thinks to himself, “Oh, the guy has shot me. I’m dead. This is what happens when you’re dead. I’m dead, but I’m still on this hillside.” [chuckle] But in fact, it was just the German messing with him, trying to scare him by pressing the trigger on his empty barrel. At least that’s what our theory is today.

So, to cut the long story short, none of the platoon were killed. There was a forward artillery observer that was attached to the platoon. There were three guys, I think, they were forward artillery observers that found themselves in the position that day. And a guy called Gacki was killed. So he was the only fatality. But none of the actual platoon were killed. A couple of them seriously wounded. Obviously, Bill James really had his face almost blown off. And they’re put in the cafe, Café Scholzen, which is… The building’s still there after dark. And Bouck is sitting there with his buddy bleeding out, his uniform soaked in his blood. And he is thinking to himself, “Okay, I’ve had one day in combat. It was a complete and utter disaster. I carried out my orders, but I’ve got two of my platoons shut up and we’re all gonna be prisoners of war. What a great achievement I did, [chuckle] less than 24 hours of my first day of real war. And I messed it up completely.”

And so, he was very… They were sent into POW camps. A very bad time to be sent into POW camps in the Third Reich, when there was very little food, and the Third Reich was collapsing, they weren’t treated particularly well, they lost a lot of weight. And all throughout that winter and the spring of… Winter 1945 and spring of 1945, Bouck was haunted by what had happened in Lanzerath. He felt like a complete failure. He felt like the one thing he’d wanted in his life since he was 14 was to serve as an Army officer and to win honor and maybe not glory, but to do his duty. And he felt like he completely failed and was very depressed. It’s depressing being a POW anyway, it wrecks your mental health, but he just, he felt like he’d really had achieved nothing and had failed miserably. And so, it was only many years after the war, in the ’60s, when Bill James, who did survive the war, even though his face had been almost blown off, he went into surgery in the Third Reich and was operated on without anesthetic, etcetera. And German doctors managed to save his life.

But in the ’60s, Bill James read a book by John Eisenhower, who was Allied Supreme Commander Dwight Eisenhower’s son. And John Eisenhower wrote a book called “The Bitter Woods,” which was about the Battle of the Bulge. I think it was published in 1965. And it was a really good in-depth study of what had happened during the Battle of the Bulge. And in it, he recounted the actions of the platoon, he interviewed Bill James and others that were in the vicinity. And Bill James read the book and he called up Lyle Bouck out of the blue. And he said, “You know what? I know that you’ve always felt that we shouldn’t talk about this, we shouldn’t revisit that terrible time. But in fact, what we did was amazing, because we actually held up the main strike force, the spearhead of the German attack during the Battle of the Bulge. And by holding our positions, carrying out the orders, doing our duty, even though it seemed insane and pointless at the time, we delayed Peiper’s strike force by maybe 24 hours. And that 24 hours, that was a very critical time that we threw the SS off their timetable.”

“And if you’ve only got 48 hours to get somewhere and you lose 24 hours, then you’ve got real problems.” And that’s exactly what happened. Peiper was delayed by the I&R Platoon, by other units too, but predominantly by the I&R Platoon’s actions that day. And that totally messed up the critical German schedule and made a big difference to the outcome Eisenhower argued and others would argue to the outcome of what happened on the first and second day of the Battle of the Bulge, which was the really important point of that battle. There were objectives that had to be reached. If they weren’t reached, the battle, yes, it would continue, but ultimately it would fail. It was all about getting somewhere quickly in the first 48 hours. And so, James said that we… What we did was amazing. We were in the wrong place at the wrong time, but boy, by carrying out our orders, we actually made a big, big difference to that vast battle. And it is the biggest battle ever fought by the US, fought by the US army in World War II, almost 800,000 Americans involved in some way. I think the Meuse-Argonne offensive in the First World War may have come close or historians can argue about which was the larger number of men involved, but it was certainly the most lethal battle for the US in World War II.

More Americans were killed in the Battle of the Bulge than any other single battle in World War II. I think some 19,000 lost their lives. It lasted from the 16th of December, through until officially the 16th of January. The bulge in the Allied lines was erased at Houffalize. So it’s a month long slugfest and very high casualties, 19,000 deaths, a very bloody difficult battle indeed. So yeah, they made a big difference. They made a really big difference to that last great battle on the Western Front in World War II.

Brett McKay: So you mentioned John Eisenhower wrote a history and he concluded that Bouck and his platoon, they played a big role in giving the Allies time to regroup…

Alex Kershaw: Yeah.

Brett McKay: From the surprise attack. But the thing is, these guys, they didn’t get any recognition, they didn’t receive awards immediately for their efforts on December 16th. Why is that? Why didn’t they get any awards?

Alex Kershaw: It was because the importance of their actions weren’t recognized until Eisenhower wrote his book that came out in ’65. And then, Bill James called up Bouck and said we did something quite extraordinary. It was very important and persuaded Bouck to try and get some kind of recognition for the platoon. That was a long, long process. It was a very difficult process to award medals after an action, long after an action, it’s very difficult. You have to pass legislation through Congress, you have to have affidavits, it has to be very, very well documented. To his credit, Lyle Bouck led that campaign, because he wanted his men to be recognized. He wasn’t in it for himself at all, but he wanted his men to be recognized. And I think that was a way of him coming to terms with that sense of failure that he’d felt. And a public recognition of what his men had actually done would have erased that sense of regret and failure.

And so in the late ’70s, the efforts to get the platoon recognized succeeded. The platoon were awarded medals. And when you add up all the bronze stars with valor, the silver stars, the DSCs, for the 18-man platoon, they actually became, for a single action, the most decorated US platoon in World War II. So, a long campaign, but ultimately successful, and Lyle Bouck was very proud. Most of the platoon was still alive when they received their awards in Washington, DC. And I think it was 1978, before the first game of the season, they appeared at Yankee Stadium on the mound, and Lyle Bouck threw out the first pitch. And their names appeared in lights at Yankee Stadium, then it was sort of Hollywood ending. These guys had done their duty, had suffered greatly, had survived the war as POWs, had come back, started families, worked really hard. And then, more than 30 years later, were finally recognized and had their names in lights and had this wonderful, absolutely a Hollywood ending to this very unlikely story.

Brett McKay: So as you took a deep dive into the lives of these men, did you get any life lessons from them?

Alex Kershaw: I think same kind of life lessons you get from talking to anybody that has been in combat, whether it’s World War II or not, that the route to contentment lies through service to others. So I think that they all felt incredibly… All of the World War II veterans I’ve ever interviewed, obviously were proud of their service. Did not boast about it, did not think they’d done anything particularly special. They did their duty, they served their country and were just lucky to come home, felt blessed that they did get to come home and have long lives. And I think they also felt very fortunate that they had got to survive, but they’d also been at a moment in world history when their actions had counted, and counted a great deal in terms of the platoon, that was absolutely the case. They were only in combat for maybe from 8 o’clock in the morning till 4:00 in the afternoon, but those 18 men, what they did in those hours really made a huge difference in terms of us being able to vote today, us being able to live in democracies in terms of defeating the Third Reich. But those were vital hours.

So, the life lessons I should have learned by now and I haven’t learned enough are the, helping other people, being unified, putting aside your differences, working for others, serving others. That’s where you get real contentment from. And I think the older you get, the more you realize that you gotta find some kind of cause in life that’s bigger than your own ego, bigger than yourself. And the best way to do that is to help other people, you know?

Brett McKay: Well, Alex, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about your work?

Alex Kershaw: At my website, www.alexkershaw.com, that’s the best place to go, or you can go on Amazon and buy my books, Alex Kershaw, plug it into the search engine. But yeah, just Google me.

Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Alex Kershaw, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Alex Kershaw: Oh, my pleasure. Thank you so much, yeah, again for having me on your wonderful… You got an amazing podcast there. Thank you very much.

Brett McKay: Thank you. My guest today was Alex Kershaw, he’s the author of the book, “The Longest Winter.” It’s available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about his work at his website, alexkershaw.com. Also, check at our show notes at aom.is/battleofthebulge, where you can find links to resources, where you can delve deeper into this topic.

Well, that wraps up another edition and another year of the AoM Podcast. Thank you all so much for listening to the show. We know there are thousands of podcasts that you can listen to out there, so it really means a lot that you choose to spend some time with us. Thank you for listening, thank you for your continued support. We really do appreciate it. Also, wanna take some time to thank some people who work behind the scenes here at the show. First, Kate McKay, she’s my wife and the producer and editor of the podcast. Kate works really hard to make sure that the final episode that you all listen to is the best it can be. And beyond producing the podcast, Kate’s also contributed a lot of great articles at artofmanliness.com. So thank you Kate, for all that you do for Art of Manliness.

 Also, I wanna thank Creative Audio Lab here in Tulsa, they’re are our sound engineers, they make sure the sound quality of our podcast are the best they can be. So thank you to Dylan and John for all that you do for the podcast. We’re taking a break for the rest of the year to celebrate the holidays with our family, we’ll be running some rerun episodes. From all of us here at Art of Manliness, Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, we’ll see you in 2024.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

If modern war is strange to contemplate in general, nothing feels quite so surreal as wrapping your head around World War II. The weight, stakes, and drama of it. The extent it transformed everyone’s lives, from the average joe to the well-known celebrity. The millions of people and tons of material involved. The sheer sweep of it. What a truly staggering thing: a world at war.

There’s a reason that modern books and movies perennially return to WWII for their plots. Nothing else inspires awe — that distinct mixture of both fear and wonder — in the same way. Reflecting on the war — which is ever worth doing — serves as a dizzying reminder of just what human beings are capable of: enormous death, depravity, and destruction on one hand, and great humanity and heroism on the other.

To bring an event that can seem far away and yet remains in the living memory of thousands of people back into focus, we dove deep, deep, deep into the photo archives from WWII. When the war is covered and remembered today, there are a few classic pictures that repeatedly reemerge. But, of course, tens of thousands of photographs were taken during the war, and we wanted to find and resurface some lesser-known snapshots from the Big One.

The photos’ original captions have been retained.

9/23/1943: Detroit, MI — Scene at Detroit’s Central Station as three post-Pearl Harbor dads say a fond farewell to their offspring as they leave for training at Fort Custer after induction.

Corporal James Gregory (left) holding a M1 Thompson submachine gun and T/5 (Technician fifth grade) Omer Taylor of Headquarters Company, 36th Armored Infantry Regiment, 9th Infantry Division of the United States First Army smoke cigarettes while taking cover from incoming enemy fire behind an M4 Sherman tank on 11th December 1944 in Geich near Duren in the North Rhine-Westphalia region of Germany. 

View of an American gun crew as they man a 75mm Pack Howitzer M1 (M1A1) emplacement for the defense of Torokina air field, Bougainville Island, Papua New Guinea, mid December 1943. 

An RAF Lancaster bomber over the German city of Hamburg during a bombing raid.

An alleged Soviet spy laughs at a Finnish soldier who is executing the spy in Rukajärvi, November 1942. 

Swinging from one bar to another on an overhead ladder is a muscle toughener to be reckoned with, and when these WAACS do the course in competition as part of their training, it is quite an obstacle. It is part of the intensive physical training regime at the WAAC training camp at Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia.

Coast Guardsmen on the deck of the U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Spencer watch the explosion of a depth charge which blasted a Nazi U-boat’s hope of breaking into the center of a large convoy. Sinking of U-175, April 17, 1943. 

7th June 1943: US film actor Clark Gable, who is serving as a gunnery instructor with the US Army Air Force ‘somewhere in England’, manning a weapon aboard an aircraft.

Bomb damage in Manchester.

American soldiers from the 503rd parachute ski battalion rest in sleeping bags on the snow after hiking and skiing over rough mountain terrain during training exercises.

Two bomber aircrew, Sergeant J. Dickinson from Canada and Sergeant F. Gilkes from Trinidad share a joke while waiting to board their aircraft for a raid on Hamburg. Britain, 1943.

11/12/43 — Darwin, Australia: Three p.m. is siesta time in Darwin, Australia, and flying Captain R.N. Skipper dreams up a date with a dream girl. Since their flight missions usually encompass a distance of 3,000 miles, personnel of B-24 squadrons in the Darwin area are only allowed four or five raids a month. Thus, in between times, they lead a hum-drum existence, and 3 p.m. is official nap time, although the heat usually makes it impossible to sleep.

An American tank goes forward with infantrymen following in its cover, searching for Japanese that infiltrated American lines the night before. Bougainville, Solomon Islands, March 1944.

Approximately three of the seven weeks training course of the U.S. Marine recruits at Parris Island are spent on the rifle range where the future leathernecks are trained in the use of weapons with which a Marine is normally armed. This is followed by a week of advanced instruction in combat work and practice with the bayonet. Here, recruits undergo calisthenics under arms.

Sharing a joke at the wartime dance hall, 1944.

The dead body of a GI who has not been picked up is on the beach. 7th June 1944. Vierville-sur-Mer (Omaha Beach, White Dog), Normandy, France. 

A French civilian woman pours a drink of cider for a British soldier with Bren gun in Lisieux, 1944.

Infantrymen of the U. S. First Army silently move through the snow-blanketed Krinkelter woods in Belgium on their way to contact the enemy during the current Nazi counteroffensive on the First Army front.

Two Navy dauntless dive bombers are poised to plunge through the thick cloud in left foreground. They carry thousand pound bombs to be dropped on Japanese installations on Wake Island.

Assault troops leave “alligator” as it hits the beach of Morotai Island. 

A YMCA mobile canteen serves soldiers next to an anti-aircraft battery. November 1940. 

Easter morning finds Technician Fifth Grade (T/5) William E. Thomas and Private First Class (PFC) Joseph Jackson preparing a special Easter egg basket for Hitler, March 1945. 

18th September 1944: A white phosphorous shell explodes as soldiers run across the street in Brest to plant explosives in enemy positions.

The British Army in Athens, Greece, October 1944. Sergeant R. Gregory and Driver A. Hardman on the Erectheum during a tour of the Acropolis.

A group of American soldiers has gathered around a piano and sings a song in the street Montéglise. 10th August 1944. The two GI’s on the right wear the insignia of the U.S. Army’s 2nd Armored Division, which has just arrived in Barenton, Normandy, France. 

8/23/1944: Leap to free France. Thousands of vari-colored parachutes, some holding equipment, some carrying men, fill the sky over Southern France between Nice and Marseilles after dropping from their C-47 carrier planes.

617 Squadron (Dambusters) at Scampton, Lincolnshire, 22 July 1943. The crew of Lancaster ED285/AJ-T sitting on the grass, posed under stormy clouds. 

Soldiers from the 331st Infantry Regiment, 83rd Infantry Division of the United States First Army run across a road to take cover from enemy fire in the bocage hedgerows near the village of Periers during the Normandy Campaign on 21st July 1944 near Periers in Normandy, France. 

CB’s of 50th Battalion sitting on sandbags in a Canvas, NCB, Chapel, bow their heads in prayer during candlelight Holy Communion service, at Tinian, Marianas Islands. December 24, 1944.

Assault troops crossing river, Rhineland Campaign, Germany, 1945.

American Marine Corps Private First Class Natalie Slack and American Marine Corps Corporal Dean L Stidham, both wearing so-called ‘peanut suits’, overalls named so for their tan color, on the deck of the troop transport taking them to Hawaii, location unspecified, in the South Pacific, circa 1943. 

Fourth Division Marines charging from their landing craft onto the beach in the battle at Iwo Jima, Iwo Jima, Japan, March 2, 1945. 

In London during World War II, on July 30, 1944, an English soldier rescues a little girl named Barbara James from the ruins of her home after a series of aerial bombings. 

Member of Cavalry Reconnaissance Squadron checks .30-caliber machine gun, Ardennes-Alsace Campaign, Battle of the Bulge, 1945.

German patrol exploring the Egyptian desert while blowing the ghibli. El Alamein, September 1942.

A British soldier in battledress kneeling in prayer at a Service of Intercession for France which took place at Westminster Cathedral, London, 14th June, 1940.

Soldiers of 2nd Battalion, 165th Infantry Regiment from the United States Army’s 27th Infantry Division landing at Yellow Beach on Butaritari Island against the incoming defensive fire from naval ground troops of the Imperial Japanese Navy’s 6th Special Naval Landing Force during the Battle of Makin Atoll on 20th November 1943 at Butaritari Island, Makin Atoll in the Gilbert Islands. 

Infantrymen advancing under enemy shell fire, Ardennes-Alsace Campaign, Battle of the Bulge, 1945.

Black members of a Marine division on Iwo Jima. 

1941: Red Army troops storming an apartment block amidst the ruins of war-torn Stalingrad.

Using an unexploded 16-inch naval shell for a resting place, Marine Pfc. Raymond Hubert shakes a three-day accumulation of sand from his boondocker. July 4, 1944.

USS LSM(R)-190 (MacKay) a United States Navy LSM(R)-188-class Landing Ship Medium (Rocket) fires a barrage of rockets in salvos on to the shores of Tokishi Shima in a prelanding bombardment during the Okinawa Campaign on 27th March 1945 at Tokishi Shima near Okinawa, Japan. USS LSM(R)-190 (MacKay) was attacked and sunk by 3 Japanese Kamikaze aircraft off Okinawa on 4th May 1945.

U.S. soldiers aboard Landing Craft, Vehicle, Personnel (LCVP), approaching Omaha Beach, Normandy, France.

Company F, 145th Infantry, 37th Infantry Division soldiers move past the General Post Office building on their way to assault the walled city of Intramuros, Feb. 23, 1945, in Manila, Philippines.

Vertical aerial photograph taken during a daylight attack on an oil storage depot at Bec d’Ambes situated in the Garonne estuary at the confluence of the Rivers Garonne and Dordogne, France. An Avro Lancaster of No. 514 Squadron RAF flies over the target area while dense clouds of smoke rise as bombs burst among the oil storage tanks, 4 August 1944. 

Scene of cheering crowd in the streets of Paris during the Liberation. Civilians waving at French tanks. 

Parisian women welcome soldiers of the allied troops, on August 25, 1944 in Paris, after the battle for the Liberation of Paris.

Circa 1945: GIs stand at the ruins of the great living room window of Hitler’s mountain retreat in Berchtesgaden, the so-called Berghof. 

A battle-weary soldier from George S. Patton’s Third Army sleeps on the luxurious bed where Hermann Goering once slept.

A boatload of soldiers aboard a liner arrives in New York City from the Pacific front, US, circa October 1945. 

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

When people think of the paratroopers of World War II, they tend to think of the European theater — the 101st Airborne Division and the Band of Brothers.

But paratroopers were also deployed in the Pacific, and here to unpack their lesser-known but equally epic and heroic story is James Fenelon, a former paratrooper himself and the author of Angels Against the Sun: A WWII Saga of Grunts, Grit, and Brotherhood. Today on the show, James tells us about the formation, leadership, and training of the 11th Airborne Division, the role they played in the campaigns of the Pacific — which included being dropped one by one out of a tiny plane described as a “lawnmower with wings” — how they built a reputation as one of the war’s most lethal units, and the division’s surprising connection to the creation of The Twilight Zone. At the end of our conversation, James shares what lessons we all can take away from the exploits and spirit of the 11th Airborne.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• AoM Podcast #1: We Who Are Alive and Remain
• AoM Article: Motivational Posters — Band of Brothers Edition
• Lieutenant General Joseph Swing
• Colonel Orin “Hard Rock” Haugen
• Medal of Honor citation for Private First Class Manuel Perez Jr.
• “Combat in Twilight: Rod Serling’s World War II”

Connect With James Fenelon

• James’ Website

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Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness Podcast. When people think of the paratroopers of World War II they tend to think of The European theatre, the 101st Airborne Division and the Band of Brothers. But paratroopers were also deployed in the Pacific and here to unpack their lesser-known but equally epic and heroic story is James Fenelon a former paratrooper himself and the author of Angels Against the Sun: A WWII Saga of Grunts Grit and Brotherhood. Today on the show James tells us about the formation leadership and training of the 11th Airborne Division the role they played in the campaigns of the Pacific which included being dropped one by one out of a tiny plane described as a “lawnmower with wings” how they built a reputation as one of the war’s most lethal units and the division’s surprising connection to the creation of The Twilight Zone. At the end of our conversation James shares what lessons we all can take away from the exploits and spirit of the 11th Airborne. After the show’s over check out our show notes at aom.is/pacificparatroopers.

James Fenelon welcome to the show.

James Fenelon: Thanks Brett I appreciate it. As a fan it’s a privilege to be here.

Brett McKay: Well you are a historian that has written two books about paratroopers during World War II. Your first book was Four Hours of Fury which is about the largest airborne operation in Europe that’s with the 17th Airborne Division. You got a new book out about paratroopers and that is called Angels Against the Sun which is about the 11th Airborne Division in the Pacific. What’s interesting about you as a historian of paratroopers you were a paratrooper yourself before you started writing about paratroopers. So tell us about your career as a paratrooper and at what point in your career did you start getting interested in the history of airborne operations?

James Fenelon: Yeah I think it’s actually a little bit flipped. I think it was my interest in history as a kid that kind of got me interested in enlisting in the service actually. My uncle was a paratrooper in Vietnam and his stories of his service and my own natural interest in history led me down that path and I enlisted in the Army right out of high school. I went to Jump School in 1988. I served for the vast majority of my time in what used to be called Long Range Surveillance units which are kind of like small reconnaissance teams or maybe LRRPs is another concept that kind of came out of the Vietnam era of the Long-Range Reconnaissance Patrols. And so that’s kind of what I did during my service small airborne operations six-man teams. That capability of course nowadays by and large has been replaced by drones. I still think they have some of those teams but not nearly as many as they used to. But it was during that time I got to go to jump master school and several other schools in the army and it was during a conversation with a sergeant I think I was a corporal at the time we were looking at a picture of some guys who had their picture taken right before their jump into Normandy and they were all standing outside of their plane all kitted up.

And the sergeant said to me he said “Wow the names change but the faces stay the same don’t they?” And that comment really stuck with me and that’s kind of what’s driven my mission if you will to document some of these stories is to tell their story and to have us all connect to the fact that these are all ordinary guys put in extraordinary circumstances.

Brett McKay: And how have you leveraged your first-hand experience into your history writing?

James Fenelon: Yeah I think one of the things that again struck me with that comment about the faces never changing looking at those pictures of those young men in their late teens or early 20s was… I think one of the things that makes the greatest generation great is that it’s not a magic formula per se. It’s that those guys in particular recognized that you can’t choose what happens to you but you can choose how you respond to it. And so I think I kind of leverage my service in and my writing as a way to kind of initially introduce readers to the normality of these guys in their late teens. Their future is uncertain. In most cases before they even get to the war zone their primary mission in life is to escape the mundaneness of Army life of service life. A lot of these guys have left home for the first time. They find themselves in the army. Every minute of their day is being directed by somebody else as to what to do and where to go and how to do it and all that kind of stuff and so I really kind of wanted to… I use my services as someone who was in that circumstance as a way to kind of bring the humanity out if you will and I know that may be overstating it but…

Brett McKay: No I think you did a good job with that. You’re able to really… The transition from your training life which was just boring and mundane to I’m suddenly thrown in the jungles and we’ll talk about that. It was jarring and you did a good job capturing that. So Angels Against the Sun it follows the 11th Airborne Division in their campaign in the Philippines and then eventually into Japan during World War II. And I think when most Americans think of airborne troops they typically think Band of Brothers and the European Theater and I think when most people think about the Pacific Theater. They think like amphibious landings. So what role did paratroopers play in the Pacific during the World War II?

James Fenelon: Yeah I think it’s a great question and it’s a great point of comparison. And I think we’ll use that familiarity of band of brothers as a kind of way to explore the topic because I think when we first talk about the Pacific and lean in to answer that question I think the first thing to understand is just the vast differences in the Pacific theater versus Europe and of course the Pacific is characterized by immense stretches of ocean between islands. The island-hopping campaign is of course this concept of starting basically in Australia and island-hopping our way closer to the home islands of Japan using those islands to build up logistical bases and airfields to then fuel and feed the campaign onto the next island. So that means a couple of things. First the Pacific Theater was dealing with this concept of scarcity. Resources are finite just like they are in any circumstance we never have enough of what we want and so you’re dealing with… How do you navigate that? And in the Pacific that meant of course scarcity in that supplies took a long time to get from point A to point B because they were always invariably traveling by ship sometimes those ships started as far away as San Francisco and so aircraft were limited and so that had an impact on the use of paratroopers and parachute operations in the Pacific theater.

And then you also had this idea that Europe had the priority at the time when the 11th arrived in the Pacific Theater it was still very much a Germany first strategy. And so that also had an impact on the scarcity of men and material. And so it’s interesting when we look at the European conflict and we compare airborne operations. Certainly the band of brothers… They jumped into Normandy and then later Holland and in these massive strategic use of airborne forces almost to lay either security on the flanks or seize bridges in advance as the armies advanced into Holland whereas in the Pacific what you see is a much more tactical use of parachute operations. And so I’m sure we’ll get into some of these more explicitly but you go from these massive division-sized jumps in Europe to in some cases down to individual guys jumping out of observation planes into the jungles in the Philippines and it’s really a great contrast to kind of understand the full range of capabilities of our airborne forces in World War II.

Brett McKay: Okay, so you wouldn’t have those scenes that you’d think Band of Brothers were just like hundreds or maybe thousands of parachutes falling down it be maybe just a few dozen in the Pacific?

James Fenelon: Yeah there were some regimental-sized drops in Lausanne in the Philippines and those were certainly larger but even then when one regiment jump you see the aircraft having to go back to the airfield multiple times to pick up the rest of the troops and bring them in so when you see a regimental jump in the Philippines and a regiment’s about 2000 guys the aircraft are going back to make multiple trips to pick them up and drop them so it’s taking three round trips essentially to drop 2000 guys where in Europe you see to your point it’s a one lift operation, thousands of chutes in the sky at the same time so it’s again that concept of scarcity and having to make do if you will.

Brett McKay: So when was the 11th Airborne Division created?

James Fenelon: Yeah so the 11th was created in February of 1943 at Camp Mackall, North Carolina. They were commanded by a guy named General Swing and by Airborne Division again using the kind of band of brothers example an Airborne Division was intended to be delivered into combat via glider and parachute so you had two types of units in an Airborne Division you had the glider troops which were guys that were assigned to these units so imagine if you will for a minute. You’re a kid coming out of the Great Depression you’ve never been in an airplane. You’re assigned to the element Airborne Division and a glider unit so your first ride in an aircraft is an engine-less glider you don’t get any additional hazardous duty pay like the parachute troops and you don’t get a parachute like Aircrew do right? So if you think of Aircrew and Bombers or fighters they all had the safety net if you will of a parachute whereas glider troops didn’t have any of that. And then the other units of course were the parachute units. And in the case of the 11th Airborne that was the 511th Parachute Infantry Regiment. These guys were all volunteers one of the more notable volunteers in that unit was Rod Serling the creator of The Twilight Zone television series of course that was after the war.

And these guys like Rod Serling were attracted to volunteer to the parachute troops because of the tough nature of their training in many cases Rod Serling wrote home to his parents after he volunteered that he thought going through the tough training would make him a better soldier and make him a better man and so he was looking forward to that challenge other guys were motivated because they liked the uniform and then of course they also all got paid $50 more a month for hazardous duty pay and that of course attracted a wide share of recruits as well.

Brett McKay: I came across all socio-economic there’s people from the country, rural, city, rich, poor, just it attracted a certain type of person. Of course there’s guys who wanted the money but a lot of guys they just liked the prestige and the toughness of it.

James Fenelon: That’s right I think it’s a great observation because of that wide appeal of that elite status if you will it did attract every walk of life you had some guys that were rodeo clowns all the way up to Harvard graduates who wanted to test themselves and join the ranks of these elite soldiers.

Brett McKay: So when it was initially formed in 1943 did they know they’re gonna be going to the Pacific or was it just like okay we’re gonna use you somewhere we’re just gonna get you prepared for wherever you’re gonna go.

James Fenelon: Yeah so the short answer to that question is no. They did not know that they were going to the Pacific. Of course one of the favorite topics of conversation when guys were sitting around with time on their hands was where are we gonna be deployed and there was raging rumors and debates on which direction they were gonna go but it wasn’t really until they were leaving Louisiana they did a series of training exercises at Camp Polk and it was when the train started veering left meaning they were going west towards the west coast that that was when it dawned on them that they were in fact headed to the Pacific Theater.

Brett McKay: So this was led by a guy named General Joseph Swing. Tell us about this guy. What was his military career like before he was put in charge of the 11th Airborne and what was his personality like?

James Fenelon: Yeah Swing was an interesting character. I really enjoyed learning a lot more about his military career and I would say that where we start to see his leadership style kind of emerge was not long after he graduated from West Point he graduated… He earned his commission rather as an artillery officer in 1915 not long after that he was assigned as a young lieutenant into the Punitive Expedition or Black Jack Pershing’s expedition into Mexico. And this was really the Army’s first experiment with mechanization. So this is right before World War I. The Army at that point was… You’re either moving on your feet or on the back of a horse and the expedition into Mexico was really the first time the army started integrating in things like vehicles cargo trucks to move troops they had some very rudimentary armored cars they were using motorcycles to deliver messages and for scouting they had a handful of biplanes that they were using and so what you see is this Swing is really exposed to this concept of modernization early in his career and probably the biggest impact that had on him was that there was no doctrine at this time so these guys are getting all this new equipment nobody really knows how to incorporate it into their scheme of maneuver or how they’re gonna actually conduct their campaign.

And what came along with that of course was a series of cautionary tales these things broke down or they didn’t arrange to have enough fuel for them in the field and so they were waiting on guys to bring gasoline forward and so all of these things were kind of witnessed by Swing and in my opinion and I think I’ve tried to make the point in the book you start to see later in World War II where he becomes very comfortable with for lack of a better word making things up as he goes along and I think that that flexibility of mindset was developed in this early part of his career and then from there of course he went on to serve in World War I with the First Infantry Division and then worked his way up the ranks until he became the commander of the 11th Airborne Division in early 1943.

Brett McKay: Another leader of the 11th Airborne that had a big impact on the division as a whole was this guy named Colonel Orin Haugen who was this guy and what was he like as a leader?

James Fenelon: Yeah Haugen was another interesting character he’s kind of what I call an OG parachute guy so he… As a captain in 1940 he was a company commander in the Army’s first organized unit of paratroopers the 501st Parachute Infantry Battalion. And he kind of came at things parachute operations and airborne from a very different perspective than Swing did so Swing… You can almost use the term kind of big army he viewed parachuting as simply a means to get to work a commute a unique commute to get to the battlefield whereas Haugen had come up through the ranks and like I said as a captain in this initial parachute unit where it was drilled into these guys that they were elite… At that point the parachute battalions were very similar to the early days of the range of battalion so they were elite infantry rating units that were intended to be used to jump behind the lines and blow up bridges and railroad lines and seize airfields and things like that.

So Haugen really leaned into this concept of self-reliance and again if we use the band of brothers as a comparison point their motto of, We stand alone together well Haugen in the 511th trained right there at Camp Toccoa and run Currahee just like the guys from Band of Brothers did and so Haugen really embraced this concept of self reliance and relying on the guy next to you and not being the weak link so to speak and he really led by example he led all of the runs of the unit up Mount Currahee. He would yell at them You are the best you are the best and encourage them to run faster but he was a very strict task master and so that his men’s nickname for him was hard rock and that was kind of in reference to his hard core way that he viewed their training he was extremely competitive he wanted to win and be the first at everything so he formed a regimental boxing team a regimental football team and was constantly relieving coaches and players to make sure that he got the best guys in there to win at whatever they were doing.

And he also… I think one of the important things about Haugen was that he recognized early on that the time for his leadership his officers to establish trust with his men was there during the training and that was the time to establish trust with the enlisted men if you waited till you got into combat to establish that trust it was too late and so he was really a hard taskmaster on his junior officers to get them to again lead by example put their men first and establish that trust.

Brett McKay: So you mentioned some of the training they did before they got shipped out I always love reading about the training of the paratroopers in World War II tell us more about their training. What was it like?

James Fenelon: Yeah So Jump School at Fort Benning at the time in World War II was four weeks long and so that was kind of the individual training or the individual skills to jump out of an airplane was done at Fort Benning four weeks long there was some ground training where they did… Going through mock aircraft doors and learning how to perform in the aircraft and then there was a tower week where they were learning how to do parachute landing falls.

And one of the things again that’s important to remember at this time is that the vast majority of these guys had never been in an airplane and so for most of the recruits at this point the first time they’re in an airplane is the same day that they’re going to jump out of it. And so the Army spent three weeks and in some cases four weeks getting these guys ready for that event through a series of the crawl walk run kind of strategy if you will of building them up over a period of weeks to then the final week being jump Week where they spend that week making five jumps culminating and then their graduation from that event where they earn their jump wings the Jump School today is very similar. The big difference is in World War II you spend a week learning how to pack your own parachute which is not something that they do anymore they now have a dedicated group of professionals fortunately whose job is to pack those parachutes because as you can imagine packing a parachute is a perishable skill and it’s something that you wanna be a expert in so they leave that to experts to do that and then units would get together and then start going through a series of unit exercises to where then they started to learn how to perform as squads and platoons and maneuver in those larger elements as a team.

Brett McKay: And so as you said, they didn’t learn, they are going to the Pacific till they were on the train and they started going west. When they got to San Francisco, or where they shipped… Did they get shipped out of San Francisco? I think it was San Francisco.

James Fenelon: Yes, that’s right.

Brett McKay: Shipped out of San Francisco. Where did they go initially to the Pacific?

James Fenelon: So their first destination was to New Guinea, just north of Australia. At that point, New Guinea had largely been secured. There were still some Japanese holdouts on the far side of the island, but the 11th Airborne did not see combat on New Guinea. They went into a training regimen there and took advantage of the fact that they were now in an environment in the terrain, very similar to what they would be fighting as they moved into the Pacific, and so again, you start to see here Swing and Haugen’s personalities really start to influence how the division would fight. They started going through a series of fairly elaborate live fire exercises, incorporating live ammunition, mortar fire, artillery fire, and we know that it was realistic training because, unfortunately, several guys were killed by friendly fire in those exercises. So it was very demanding. They also had the benefit of being trained by several Australian soldiers who had already been fighting the Japanese, so they incorporated those lessons learned, and it was really a time of development for the division as they started figuring out how to operate in this jungle environment.

Brett McKay: What year was this? Is this 1943 still, 1944?

James Fenelon: This is middle of 1944. So they had just arrived in May of 1944.

Brett McKay: And what was the state of the war in Pacific at this time?

James Fenelon: Yeah, so at this point, the allies were pushing their way across the Pacific, working their way, again, as in line with that island hopping campaign. New Guinea had largely been secured, so this was when MacArthur was in the process of fulfilling his famous I shall return promise that he made to the Philippine people, and the Americans invaded the Philippines in October of 1944. The 11th initially sat out the invasion, and it wasn’t until November of 1944, that the 11th Airborne landed on the island of Leyte, initially in an administrative capacity, so they were just kind of, if you can imagine following along that island-hopping campaign and landing on a secure beach after the invasion had already started, But pretty quickly into that campaign, MacArthur and his ground commander, a guy named Walter Kruger, had started realizing that they were suffering higher than expected casualties, and so the 11th was kind of then pushed up into the line to fill in as replacements and start moving into combat.

Brett McKay: So what was the objective on Leyte? Was it just to take back the island? Was that what it was?

James Fenelon: Leyte offered what they thought at the time was going to be access to a number of land-based air strips, which would put the allies in a great position to then use those airstrips to extend their air power to the other islands in the Philippines, specifically the main island of Luzon, as well as use them as bases to cut off Japanese sea lanes where they were bringing in the raw materials to still feed their war machine, if you will. Now, there was some assumptions that went into that initially, which failed to take into account the horrific torrential rains on Leyte. So these airfields that MacArthur and his staff had planned use turned out to be muddy quagmires at the time that they landed in October, so things didn’t quite work out that way initially. And the 11th Airborne was brought in and then pushed up into the central mountain range to cut off Japanese reinforcements that were working their way from the west side of the island over these mountains to try to come down into the valley where those airfields were located.

Brett McKay: So these guys were trained as paratroopers and gliders. Did they do any para trooping and gliding at Leyte?

James Fenelon: So yes, kind of. No gliding, but this is where we start to see Swing’s, flexibility, and improvisation is the way that I like to think of it. So as these guys started moving up into the mountains… This is basically like light infantry tactics at its finest. There’s no roads going up into the mountains, so there’s no jeeps can get up there, no trucks can get up there. All the supplies that are going up into the mountains are man-packed, and so if you think about it, these guys are going up like these little trails. You got a division going up into the mountains, and you’ve gotta keep them supplied with both food and ammunition as they’re engaging the Japanese. And so at some point, they get up to this plateau, and this is where Swing starts to utilize the unique airborne capability of his division.

Of course, aircraft being in short supply, as I mentioned earlier, what he did have access to was a handful of these small single-engine observation aircraft. One guy described them as a lawnmower with wings, so think as the smallest airplane you can imagine. They literally bring it ashore and then bolt the wings onto it, and so Swing tapped a platoon of his airborne engineer, so 30-some-odd guys of his combat engineering unit, and one by one, they climbed into the back of one of these aircraft and then jumped into the jungle with their shovels and demolition charges to expand and create a drop zone in the middle of the jungle. So these guys were literally climbing in, wrapping the static line of their parachute around the spars of the chair in the back seat of this airplane and parachuting in.

So those guys, 30 of them soon landed one at a time, they started chopping down trees, using demolitions, and expanding the footprint of that drop zone, so that Swing could then start dropping in supplies, additional men and material into that forward base, and using that as a way to then keep his men supplied. Surgeons jumped in there as well, parachuted in, which allowed the rest of the unit to then keep pushing forward up into the mountains.

Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for a word from our sponsors.

And now back to the show. And what was the fighting like at Leyte?

James Fenelon: Yeah, so I think when we think about the fighting on Leyte, I always like to begin with just the elements themselves, and so I mentioned it had been raining for a number of weeks on Leyte. So the first enemy that the troopers actually engaged was just the mud. They’re hacking up into these mountains, the mud in some cases is shin-deep, everything you own is wet, you’ve got disease, you’ve got the heat and humidity. So they hiked their way up and then that’s when as they’re in the mountains, that’s when they start to engage with Japanese patrols and as there up in these mountains, it’s really… The whole advantage in the way that the American army had geared itself around technology advantages and firepower advantage were really negated by the mountains because you couldn’t get any of that stuff up into the mountains.

You couldn’t get artillery pieces up into the mountains. You couldn’t get a lot of these larger radios. The mountains were covered in clouds, so air support was difficult. The maps were horrible, so nobody actually ever really knew where they were. These maps that they had were often hand-drawn and had villages mislabeled and entire ridge lines or mountain peaks were missing from them. That was kind of the conditions under which these guys moved up into the mountains, and then of course, on top of that, they had the enemy, the Japanese, which started almost kind of imagine this head-to-head collision up in the mountains as you had squads of the American paratroopers going forward, and in these very close combat conditions bumping into squads of Japanese who were heading in opposite direction.

Brett McKay: And the Japanese, they were just formidable opponents, and at this point, for the Japanese, they kind of understood… The generals and the leaders there, they understood that their backs were against the wall. So it was kind of turning into a fight to the death for these guys.

James Fenelon: Yeah, I think a fight to the death is a great way to describe it. At that point in the war, the Japanese leadership was really… Their strategy was to win just one massive campaign, right? The strategic concept kind of was like, “Well, if we can bring the Americans to their knees in just one battle, hit them with heavy, heavy casualties, maybe we can approach a treaty on equal terms” And of course, the Americans had already made their unconditional surrender kind of demand, but that was the idea of the Japanese, and so they were throwing in troops seeking a decisive victory, if you will. And one of the things…

One of the traits of the Japanese soldier was this concept of Yamato de Machi, and I hope I’m pronouncing that right, but it’s this idea of an unwavering belief in the righteousness of their cause, and these guys were kind of steeped in that ethos, if you will, that kind of involved equal parts Bushido Shinto religion, and of course, honor played an important component of that, but it was this idea of, “Well, if we’re brave enough and if we fight hard enough, our spirit can overcome technological advantages that the enemy has.” And it was interesting because up in the mountains of Leyte when those two elements came together, and at this point in the war, of course, all of the Americans understood that the Japanese were not gonna surrender. They understood from the news that had leaked out about the Bataan Death March that they could expect to be treated very poorly as prisoners themselves, and so it really devolved into this battle of attrition because neither side was willing to give up. The Americans weren’t gonna give up, they’re not gonna put themselves in the position to where they’re gonna be taken prisoner.

Japanese units were fighting to sometimes 96-97% of casualties, and so you really get this head-to-head, no-holds-barred combat up in the mountains of Leyte, and honestly, all the Pacific campaigns were very similar to that.

Brett McKay: You also talk about these reports from American soldiers that the Japanese at some points, they would just attack with a samurai sword and it was terrifying. Usually, they got gunned down, but it was terrifying to see some guy coming at you with just a sword.

James Fenelon: Absolutely, yeah, that’s one of those things that’s just really… It’s kind of hard to comprehend the terror of that when you’ve got guys, human wave attacks coming at you with swords over their heads. The Japanese bayonets were extremely long, so that’s intimidating, as well. There was one veteran I interviewed remembered, he shot a guy that was running towards them in a bonsai attack and all he was armed with was a fountain pen. He had a fountain pen raised up over his shoulder like a dagger. That’s how fanatical some of these attacks were.

Brett McKay: Alright, so they took Leyte. It took a month, and then you talk about after they finally to control the island, they had to do this mopping up, like, “Oh, let’s go mop up,” and basically that was to go find Japanese forces that were still there in hiding. But you talk about the mopping up was actually more dangerous than the actual assault. What made mopping up “More difficult or dangerous”?

James Fenelon: Yeah, I’m glad you put the mopping up in quotes, ’cause it’s one of those terms that is easy to overlook. I think what you had there was even a bigger level of desperation. When you’re dealing with these Japanese units that have been, in many cases, overrun or bypassed, so imagine a group of Japanese on a hill top where the Japanese have kind of, the Sun Tzu kind of way of just going around that hill top, isolated it, we’ll come back for it later type of thing. When you come back for it later, you’ve now got Japanese who are cut off, they’re viewing their mission now is to take as many Americans with them as possible, and so there’s just no real easy way to go about doing that. Again, at one point, Swing did utilize the unique capabilities of his division and dropped in four small artillery pieces, so they did have some heavier firepower at that time up in the mountains to kind of help them in these situations where they’re trying to winkle out these holdouts, but they’re in caves, they’re not gonna come out. You have to bring the mountain down around them, basically. I mean, Swing was very good about using flanking attacks, and he despised frontal assaults that some other army commanders were very comfortable with, but it was just very nasty, dirty work to go up there and try to get into these fortified positions and get these guys out of there.

Brett McKay: So what was the result of Leyte? So apart from, we took control the island, what were casualties like? And how did this… I mean, this is the 11th’s first… I mean, it was like baptism by fire. How did this affect them for the rest of the war.

James Fenelon: Yeah, so I think the Hard Rock Haugen’s unit came out of Leyte. It took them a month of tracking from one side to get to the other side of the island coming down out of the mountains on Christmas day, essentially, is when they started to emerge, on the far side of the island. They had a number of casualties, some of which they had left buried up in the mountains, so there was efforts to go get those guys. They had, I wanna say, right around 500 casualties from that fighting. They had just as many, if not more, guys that were suffering from disease up in those conditions, but Haugen did the math when they came out of the mountains, and he and his men were boasting of a 45 to one kill ratio of their time up in the mountain. And so again, this is where you start to see the real aggressive nature of Haugen and Swing both really always wanting to maintain contact with the enemy, always wanting to move forward, and so they kind of boasted of this kill ratio, if you will, as a way to set expectations for the unit, for the division, as to how they were gonna continue to lean into the fight.

Brett McKay: Did that give them a reputation amongst the Allies and the Japanese?

James Fenelon: Absolutely. One of the interesting things about the 11th Airborne Division is that I use the term punch above their weight. So both the 101st and the other Airborne divisions that were fielded during World War II were only 8500 men in the division, and so this made them, in most cases, a little bit more than half the size of a regular infantry division. So regular Infantry Division was anywhere between 14 and 15000 guys, and again, the 11th Airborne was 8500. So to kind of develop this reputation of doing so much damage with about half of what they had to a regular division, and the course that also included having far less artillery than a regular infantry division did, it really bolstered their reputation and you see them, particularly with General Eichelberger, one of MacArthur’s field commanders, really leaned on the 11th Airborne for their aggressive spirit.

Brett McKay: So what happened to the 11th after Leyte?

James Fenelon: So after Leyte, MacArthur had moved on and moved his invasion next to Luzon, which was the main island in the Philippines. Of course, the main prize of that campaign was to be Manilla, which was the capital city. Before the war, it was known as the Pearl of the Orient, and I think it’s important to kinda get a good idea of what that city was like. It had just under a million people living in it, so it was a massive urban area. Many of the boulevards along the bay there, the reason it was called Pearl of the Orient was these beautiful wide boulevards where people could stroll to watch the sunset. Many of the government buildings rivaled anything that you would see in Washington DC with these massive white marble columns. MacArthur had hoped that the Japanese were going to declare Manila an open city, meaning that they would withdraw their forces out of the city to avoid what would become massive bloodshed in an urban battle.

The Germans did that in Paris. They declared Paris an open city and left so that it wouldn’t turn into the blood bath that it could have. That didn’t happen unfortunately, in Manilla. And so as MacArthur campaign was slowing down, he had landed several divisions to the north, was pushing down towards Manilla, he decided to launch several other landings, if you will, south of Manila as a way to kind of divide Japanese forces. The 11th Airborne Division was assigned to one of these landings. General Swing really advocated for air dropping the division in total. So again, using gliders and aircraft to land them south of Manilla. Unfortunately, again, we see a lack of aircraft, so there just wasn’t enough aircraft at that point to be able to lift his division, and so they ended up going in kind of what he described as half a loaf, meaning that half a loaf went in amphibious-ly, meaning he landed his glider units along the shore, and then further inland, he air dropped Haugen and his men south of Manilla to where the two units then linked up on the ground, his glider units and the parachute units linked up and then started pushing their way north up into the city limits of Manilla.

Brett McKay: So how did the fighting differ in the city compared to the jungle? What were the unique challenges?

James Fenelon: The main thing was just the urban nature of it. So as the 11th was moving up, the Japanese had anticipated the Americans returning to the Philippines and that they would be attacking Manilla, so they had built a belt of defenses along the southern edge of the city. Their initial thought was that MacArthur was gonna attack from the south. He didn’t. He attacked from the north, but the 11th did attack from the south, so they ran into this belt line of defenses, which the Japanese had labeled the Genko line. Think about this as a series of pillboxes, machine gun nests, these are built out of brick, these are built out of bamboo tree trunks, they have taken aerial bombs and buried them in the ground as mines across the road.

They’ve overturned bulldozers and city buses across the roads to create blocking positions, and so it really just becomes this brick-by-brick concrete battle as the 11th start pushing their way up into the city. They’re swarming through the city, they’re finding Japanese holdouts in attics and in basements, behind them in areas they thought they’ve already cleared, they start to… The 11th and Swing start to really work with Filipino gorillas, who are really important in this battle for the 11th because of course, they know the terrain, they know the layout of the city, they know a lot about the Japanese defenses because, of course, they watch them being built, and so Swing really starts to leverage several battalions worth of Filipino gorillas in his scheme of battle.

Brett McKay: There were some pretty epic exploits by the individual members of the 11th airborne. I think at this point, there’s a guy named Manny Perez who… Basically, he won the Medal of honor for this, what he did. Can you talk about what he did at this point in the war?

James Fenelon: Yeah, so Perez was a member of Haugen’s parachute infantry regiment. He was 21 years old at the time of this attack. So they were working their way up through this Genko Line at this point. They had pushed their way north and were now kind of maneuvering east, if you will, trying to hook around some of these defenses. His unit had been engaged all morning in attacking several pillboxes. The counts vary, but the general consensus is they had taken out his squad and platoon had worked their way through 11 Japanese pillboxes. And the 12th one really had the squad pinned down. It was a dual twin-mounted machine gun that had a pretty good field of fire over some open terrain. The squad had gone to ground in front of this.

And as the story goes from lieutenant who was up front trying to figure out how they were going to attack this position, he looked over and all of a sudden, Perez and his nickname, his buddies called him Manny, was sprinting forward towards the gun position and they yelled for him to get down, he kept going. He threw himself down on the side of the gun position within hand grenade range. He threw a couple of hand grenades into the machine gun position. Right as they exploded, he’s jumping up and following them in, find several Japanese guys that have been wounded, he quickly shoots them.

Japanese soldier approaches him and attacks him with his bayonet on the end of his rifle. Perez ends up taking the rifle away from him, killing the guy with his own rifle, and then at one point beating three Japanese guys to death with that rifle, ends up breaking that rifle, grabbing another one. It’s really one of those stories that if you put it in a movie, it would be hard to believe, but at the end of it, Perez had taken the machine gun nest and his Medal of Honor citation cites that he had killed single-handedly, 23 of the enemy in that action. He was, to your point, awarded the Medal of Honor. That was interesting because several of his comrades that witnessed the event actually disputed the citation, wanting to amend it because by their count, during the entirety of that morning, Perez had actually taken out anywhere from 70 to 75 Japanese during the assault on all those other previous pillboxes. So he was quite a one-man machine. Sadly, even though he survived that event that he was awarded the Medal of Honor for it, it was awarded posthumously because he was killed later on in the campaign.

Brett McKay: So the 11th… They take Manila, the 11th with other divisions as well. What happened to the 11th after that?

James Fenelon: So one of the more interesting exploits of the 11th’s campaign while they were on Luzon was their liberation of the Los Banos prison camp. So when the Japanese had invaded the Philippines, they had taken prisoner several thousand civilians. So think of Americans, French, British, these were engineers who worked on the island, entrepreneurs who own businesses, clergy, on missions, things like that. And the Japanese had put them in a number of prison camps, some of which were in Manila proper. Los Banos was a couple of miles, maybe 20 miles outside of the city limits. It was a camp that held a little over 2,000 of these civilian prisoners. And MacArthur and his staff were worried that as the Japanese were being pushed across the island that rather than evacuate these prisoners or just simply release them, that they would execute the prisoners.

And so MacArthur put Swing in charge of figuring out how to rescue these guys. And this again is where you see Swing’s kind of flexible approach to his war fighting. The plan that his unit came up with was a kind of a multi-pronged attack that started with a ground assault by his reconnaissance scouts. They worked in conjunction with the Filipino guerrillas to sneak up to the outskirts of the camp. They timed their assault to be launched simultaneously as the Japanese were conducting their morning calisthenics. So the only armed Japanese were the guys that were around the perimeter of the camp. Everybody else was in there doing their morning exercises. Right as that happened, a company of guys parachuted in on the far side of the camp. So about 120 men parachuted in and they joined in the assault. While that was happening, the rest of that battalion came across the lake in amphibious tracked vehicles that then made their way into the camp, knocked down the gates of the camp with those tracked vehicles, and they loaded all of the prisoners onto those tracked vehicles to evacuate them.

It was a raid, meaning that they were just going in to rescue these guys and then get out. And so it was stunningly successful. None of the prisoners were killed in the crossfire. A couple of them were wounded, but nothing serious. Unfortunately, two of the guerrillas were killed in the firefight, but all of the American rescuers were evacuated unharmed as well.

Brett McKay: So this is about February 1945 when that prison liberation happened. And then the next couple of months, the 11th Airborne along with the other divisions there, they eventually secured the Philippines. Was it pretty easy after that point, if they got Manila, or was it hard fighting even then?

James Fenelon: It was pretty much hard fighting all the way across the island. Again, I think one of the things that’s interesting to note, I think, to just provide some additional context, the last Japanese soldier to surrender in the Philippines took place in 1974, and so that gives you kind of an idea as to the tenacity of these guys and their willingness to stay in the fight. And so, again, we use that term in quotes, “mopping up”. There was a lot of mopping up in Luzon. Swing kept pushing his division east across the island as an attempt to cut the island in half, if you will, as other units were both to the north and the south of them as they made that cut across. And it was similar combat, pushing through, sweeping past some of these more heavily defended areas, cutting them off so that they couldn’t get resupplied with food or reinforcements, and then coming back and dealing with them later.

At one point, Swing had a garrison of something like 300-some-odd Japanese kind of cornered on this mountain fortress that they had built, and they sent a guy up to try to get the Japanese to surrender, the Japanese shot at the guy who was bringing up the surrender terms. And so Swing was content just to sit back. And I think something like, they launched a thousand artillery shells a day at this place until they finally just reduced it to rubble. And that again was just kind of that battle of attrition that took place all across the Philippines.

Brett McKay: They finally took it towards the middle of 1945, and at this point, the military was getting ready for just an all-out invasion of Japan. What was the 11th Division’s role gonna be in that land invasion of Japan?

James Fenelon: Yeah, so everybody… All the troopers in the 11th were convinced that they were going to be dropped into the Japanese main island as part of MacArthur’s invasion. If you go look at the actual plans that were drawn up, the 11th Airborne was gonna be used in that invasion, but as far as I can find, they weren’t actually going to air drop them in. Again, maybe that was due to a lack of aircraft. The plans that I’ve seen indicate that they were gonna be landed amphibiously. But the guys at the time didn’t know that. The guys at the time all assumed that they would finally be used in one of these massive air drops that we’ve already compared Europe to. But of course, that didn’t happen. The United States dropped two atomic bombs, which then brought about the surrender, negotiations and ultimately, the end of the war.

Brett McKay: Did they occupy Japan? Did they play any role in that?

James Fenelon: Yeah, so this is where you finally start to see the small size of the 11th Airborne Division play into their favor. So they were the first troops to be air landed in Japan. They had flown from airfields in Manila initially to Okinawa, where they stayed for several weeks. And it’s kind of a misconception that the war ended immediately after the atomic bombs were dropped. There were several weeks there where there was internal debate going on in Japan about how to respond to the bombs, how to approach the surrender terms. Those were ironed out. And then several…

After the division had sat on Okinawa for several weeks, they then flew from Okinawa to a small airfield outside of Tokyo. They secured that. All of the guys from the 11th flew in fully armed, expecting a trap. One of the troopers commented that while the Japanese surrendered as hard as they fought. And so there weren’t any incidents once they landed fortunately. There was compliance with the surrender terms. And a couple of days after they got there, MacArthur landed at that airfield for the eventual signing of the surrender documents on the Missouri.

Brett McKay: When did these guys go home? Did they go home in 1945?

James Fenelon: Some of them did. It’s an interesting kind of return, if you will. So similar to what we saw in Europe, there was the point system of when these… You earn points for how long you’ve been in the service, if you were wounded, things like that. The 11th itself stayed in Japan for a number of years as an occupation force. So their initial mission, once they landed in Japan and secured that airfield was disarming the populace. So the Japanese had armed millions of civilians for this big fight that was anticipated to occur on the home islands. And so occupation troops were responsible for patrolling, conducting inspections and overseeing weapons turn in. And so the 11th kinda came home in drips and drabs and one’s and two’s as these guys would get on ships and make their way back to the States.

Brett McKay: What happened to some of these guys when they came home? Did they… Did a lot of these guys have a hard time processing what they went through?

James Fenelon: Yeah, of course, we know a lot more now about post-traumatic stress than we did back then. It was largely undiagnosed. Interestingly enough, I think one of the most vocal guys on that topic was Rod Serling who… He certainly didn’t call it post-traumatic stress, but he certainly knew what was going on. And he talked about himself and his friends who did come back and there was those that had been physically wounded, and then of course, those who had suffered mentally from their experience. And he talked pretty freely about that and some of the challenges he had and that’s really where he turned to writing. He found that as an outlet. Of course, now we know that writing and talking about it is a great way to kind of excise those demons, if you will, but that was kind of his way of going about it. And of course, I think if we look at the Twilight Zone, you can certainly see some of the themes in those episodes that he wrote of trying to kind of explore humanity and the perception of what the human experience entails.

Brett McKay: Yeah, you can see that definitely in the episodes, the themes like war is bad, that was a theme you see in Twilight Zone. Also, the Twilight Zone, there’s like an empathy for people dealing with mental illness that I don’t think you saw in other shows, but you saw that on the Twilight Zone.

James Fenelon: Yeah, absolutely. One of the most horrific events of the war took place right in front of Rod Serling ‘s eyes. When they were up in that forward base that I was talking about, they were dropping supplies into them and sometimes those supplies were just literally thrown out the side of the airplane. And one point in that campaign, they had gone five days without food because the clouds had socked in the mountain where they couldn’t get aircraft up there. So the clouds finally broke, the planes are flying over to push out these crates. One of Rod Serling ‘s best friends jumps up and is impromptu singing a song about food, getting a laugh out of everybody, when all of a sudden one of these crates falling out of the sky crushes his skull and kills him right in front of everybody who’s sitting there watching him in this moment of glee that he’s getting ready to get some food.

And again, I think… So you can imagine yourself sitting there as a 19, 20-year-old, and all of a sudden this moment your best friend’s head has caved in. And I think Rod spent a lot of his life trying to process those kinds of things through the exploration of his writing in his show.

Brett McKay: What lessons about life and being a man do you hope readers take away after reading about the 11th Airborne Division?

James Fenelon: It’s a great question. I think there’s so many interesting lessons to learn from both Swing and Haugen and the way that the unit comported themselves during the war. But I would say one of them was this concept of flexibility or imagination. It’s the idea of… When we see that in Swing’s comfortable take on how to not stick to doctrine or not stick to a plan when it wasn’t working, I think that’s something we could all benefit from, right? We gotta be comfortable and objective enough with ourselves and our approach to understand when we might have to pivot and attack something from a different direction to make it work. I think also the idea of initiative in the 11th Airborne, that meant always taking the initiative, always pushing forward, always keeping the enemy off-balance. Whereas I think in our daily life, always looking for opportunities to stay on the initiative, there’s always something that we can do to help ourselves, to help others, and that’s certainly within the spirit of that, always leaning into a scenario or a task. And then finally, I would say endurance is another big lesson that I certainly understood from learning more about these guys. And by endurance, I mean both physically and mentally.

I think one of the things that got them through some of that horrible jungle fighting was both their physical and their mental endurance, right? So staying in shape, staying in the game. And certainly, your podcast gives us lots of tools as far as mental and physical endurance.

Brett McKay: Well, James, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

James Fenelon: Yeah, so the book is available at all the usual suspects. You can order it online on Amazon or Barnes and Noble. If you wanna learn more about me and my work, you can go to jamesfenelon.com.

Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well James Fenelon thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

James Fenelon: Thank you, Brett.

Brett McKay: My guest today was James Fenelon. He’s the author of the book, Angels Against the Sun. It’s available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about his work at his website, jamesfenelon.com. Also check out our show notes at aom.is/pacificparatroopers where you can find links to resources. We delve deeper into this topic.

Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM Podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com where you can our podcast archives as well as thousands of articles that we’ve written over the years about pretty much anything you think of. And if you’d like to enjoy ad-free episodes of the AOM Podcast, you can do so at Stitcher Premium. Head over to stitcherpremium.com, sign up and use the code Manliness at checkout for a free month trial. Once you’re signed up, download the Stitcher app on Android or iOS and you can start enjoying ad-free episodes of the AOM Podcast. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate if you take one minute to give us a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, helps out a lot. And if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think would get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, it’s Brett McKay reminding you to not only listen to AOM Podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

When Daniel Zia Joseph decided to join the Army at the unusually late age of 32, he solicited advice from his buddies who had served in the military on how to succeed in the experience and become a good officer and leader. Today, he passes on these leadership lessons to us.

Dan is the author of Backpack to Rucksack: Insight Into Leadership and Resilience From Military Experts, and he first shares why he decided to join the Army at an older age and what he would tell other guys who keep thinking about doing the same thing. We talk about how he prepared himself to be a leader and how getting his masters in organizational psychology helped deepen his development. We then discuss the lessons his military mentors imparted to him, including why you should pursue attrition, the importance of command climate, using psychological jiu-jitsu, and the difference between garrison and field leadership.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• Dan’s video about joining the military after age 30
• AoM Podcast #875: Authority Is More Important Than Social Skills
• AoM Article: Are You a Strategist or an Operator?
• Once an Eagle by Anton Myrer

Connect With Dan Joseph

• Dan’s website — Combat Psych

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Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. When Daniel Zia Joseph decided to join the army at the unusually late age of 32, he solicited advice from his buddies who had served in the military on how to succeed in the experience and become a good officer and leader. Today, he passes on these leadership lessons to us. Dan is author of Backpack to Rucksack, insight into leadership and resilience from military experts. And he first shares why he decided to join the army at an older age and what he would tell other guys who keep thinking about doing the same thing. We talk about how he prepared himself to be a leader and how getting his masters in organizational psychology helped deepen his development. We then discuss the lessons his military mentors imparted to him, including why he should pursue attrition, the importance of command climate, using psychological Jiu-jitsu and the difference between garrison and field leadership. After the show is over check out our show notes at aom.is/militarymentors.

All right, Dan Joseph, welcome to the show.

Daniel Zia Joseph: Hey, glad to be here. Thanks for having me.

Brett McKay: So you got a new book out called Backpack to Rucksack, where you share insights on leadership and resilience that you learned in the military and in your work in organizational psychology. But before we talk about the book, let’s talk about your experience joining the Army because you did so at the age of 32, which is unusually late in life. A lot of guys aren’t joining the Army at age 32. So what’s the age limit for joining the Army? Were you pretty close to the the upper end?

Daniel Zia Joseph: Yes. So as a commissioned officer, I needed to commission by the age of 33. And I signed up at 32. So the recruiter definitely had my back against the wall saying you either sign the contract or you’re going to miss your window. So I jumped in. But yep, definitely pushed against that that age limit for the Army. Each branch has a different age limit. But I tell people to… I receive a lot of questions from people asking if they’re too old. And I tell them always ask a recruiter because those numbers do change depending on the needs of the government and military, what branches need.

Brett McKay: So let’s talk about your life before you joined and like then what led you to signing up at age 32. So what was going on before age 32? So you’re 18. That’s when most guys, when they’re thinking about joining the army, they join right at a high school or maybe in college. What were you doing? And then talk about what was going on right before you joined at age 32.

Daniel Zia Joseph: Yeah. So I have a pretty, pretty unique story, I guess, to myself. I worked in biotech for quite a while here in San Diego and a lot of genetic research companies out here. I’ve worked with companies that were genetically modifying specific organisms to create industry, new industry products, some wild stuff. And it led into a job involving machine learning algorithms and borderline AI back then a few years back, to basically enhance genetic codes to optimize genes and snip out disease markers from humans, from animals, a lot of really cool stuff happening. But I was essentially working initially in the laboratory and then I moved towards business development. And what really pushed me to join the military was when ISIS was actually attacking civilians and the populace in Iraq. My family is from there. My parents escaped barely with their lives back in the ’70s. And I had a lot of friends that I made here in San Diego who were on the SEAL teams, different branches who were deploying to go fight those guys.

And as I was over here, working in a world where we were literally using computer software to design genetic code and enhance the human species in a way that’s just absolutely mind blowing, My friends were in this primal fight in a war zone that they had nothing to do with. They were entering into that fight selflessly to go save people. And they came back with these stories that were just… They were literally fighting in the villages my parents grew up in. And I felt this deep desire to put on a uniform and contribute in any way possible. I just felt it was my duty because America saved my family. They gave us a place of refuge and that just really weighed heavy on me. So as I’m working on my company, I eventually started my own company and was making pretty good money, but then my friends would come back from these deployments telling me about some of the stuff they got into. And I just felt so compelled to let go of what I had here and to join the military, just to be able to tell myself before I’m on my death bed someday, like, hey, I did it.

Brett McKay: And you also talk about in the book during that time when you were working, you’re working hard, making good money. There’s also a hint of you felt kind of restless. There was drinking and you hang around the wrong kind of crowd and you just felt like you weren’t going anywhere either.

Daniel Zia Joseph: Yeah. So, especially if you’re the child of say immigrants and you grew up in the United States. So, I was born in the US my parents, like I said, they left Iraq in the ’70s. I was really trying to discover myself in a way here that… Yeah, it involved the wrong crowd, for sure. I got involved into what I thought was sort of popular behaviors, a lot of drinking, and then that quickly moved into a crowd that use drugs, partied pretty hard, play hard, work hard. And I got caught up in a lifestyle where it was just… It was driven sort of by how cool people thought you were based on this persona. And it felt… It was extremely superficial, very high quantity, low quality with the relationships. I made some good friends, but it definitely didn’t require discipline. It just required showing up, getting drunk and trying to have as much fun as possible. But when I started meeting friends in the military, I noticed a stark contrast between their behaviors, their level of discipline, their presence, their physicality, how they approached life. And I was drawn to their mindset. They were super sharp, super driven. And they definitely had goals far beyond what I was doing, which was just basically going from hangover to hangover. And these guys were getting after it, training all the time. And it was really inspiring to me.

Brett McKay: Okay, so you joined up at age 32. Did you face any challenges joining at that age?

Daniel Zia Joseph: Honestly, no, I didn’t. I have a lot of friends who were in the military at the time. And they their number one piece of advice to me was stay physically fit. Because regardless of age, when you show up, your body is… It’s your resume to the guys around you, especially as an officer. People want to be led by somebody who inspires them. And when you show up in good shape physically, and you can do the rucks, you can do the runs, pull ups, push ups, everything that they test you in, the guys are going to follow you, they’re going to want to be a part of your group. And age was never an issue for me. The biggest thing I was told was to never use my age as a way to talk down to anybody or be condescending. Basically, if people wanted to tap into whatever life wisdom I had, then I would allow them to ask for that. But I was definitely schooled on, Hey, just show up, keep your mouth shut, be present, and just stay physically driven. That’s going to motivate people.

Brett McKay: So what did you end up doing in the army?

Daniel Zia Joseph: I was a combat engineer. So I was a platoon leader for 19 months. It was a separate platoon is what we call it. And essentially, we would simulate combat exercises with minefields and wire obstacles, tank ditches, basically, simulating what World War III may look like.

Brett McKay: So like, what advice would you give to older guys who… They keep thinking about, should I join the military? What should I do? Am I too old? What advice you have for them? Would you just recommend to just go for it?

Daniel Zia Joseph: Yeah, I mean, I definitely tell people, if you’re thinking about it, at least start training for it. Because here’s the thing, even if you don’t make it into the military, the fact that you got up and trained yourself and started running and started doing the dieting and all of that, that’s required to just be at your top shape, it will progress you to becoming a better version of yourself. So I don’t see any downfall to pursuing that there’s a lot of people that reach out to me saying, Hey, I don’t know if I’m going to get cleared for some some medical things, or maybe some past criminal activity or whatever it is that happened in their life. And I say, don’t close the door on it, there might be a recruiter out there who’s going to find a waiver for whatever it is you’re dealing with. And don’t ever let age or any sort of negative self thought hold you back. Don’t limit yourself. And it’s amazing to see what people have. I mean, I’ve talked to guys who’ve lost over a 100 pounds just training for a military gig. That’s phenomenal.

Brett McKay: All right. So there’s the big thing. If you’re older, just stay in shape. Like if you’re fit, they’re going to take you. If you, even if you’re at that age limit.

Daniel Zia Joseph: Absolutely. Yeah. Fitness is like the number one thing because you just, you have to be able to pass those fitness tests. Yeah.

Brett McKay: I think what I heard is that it’s something like 70% of young people wouldn’t be able to qualify for military service.

Daniel Zia Joseph: I’ve heard that.

Brett McKay: A lot of that is because of obesity. That’s why they’re having recruiting problems. So how did joining the army change your life and what are you doing now?

Daniel Zia Joseph: Well, so I’m out now. I was in for three and a half years. I’m actually thinking about signing another contract. I have a MEPs appointment coming up to go in and get medically screened again. But being in the military really changed my life in ways that I never thought. I definitely was close to the troops. I loved being around them. It taught me a lot about leadership. It taught me a lot about how to relate to others in an organization that’s just constantly under high stress, high op tempo, just back to back training. It really left a mark on me that I didn’t expect. So I don’t know what to say. I could talk a lot about that.

Brett McKay: And also while you were in the military, you got your… That’s where the work in organizational psychology came in, correct?

Daniel Zia Joseph: Yeah. So the lockdowns impacted a lot of our training and during the downtime I thought to myself, what can I do to optimize? I didn’t want to just survive the lockdowns. I really wanted to thrive during the lockdown. So I thought, well, work out three times a day, don’t drink a drop of alcohol and get a master’s degree. And I lived by that. That was my day in and day out. And I wanted to come out of the lockdowns better than I ever was. And getting the masters was eye opening to me, because as I’m leading these soldiers, as I’m seeing the impact of mental health, as I’m talking to dudes that have been to war, the first and second waves in Fallujah and Iraq and dealing with all these issues. And, I’m working with them, I’m seeing the physiological response of what happens to them at work, based on what they experienced. Simultaneously, I’m writing these articles and doing my research for my master’s, it was just an amazing connection that I was realizing between the human brain, interpersonal relationships, organizational dynamics, and it definitely added a lot of depth to my understanding of what was going on.

Brett McKay: When you got out with your initial contract, did you go back to the corporate world or what was going on then?

Daniel Zia Joseph: So that was actually pretty recent, like a few months ago. So I’m currently working on another master’s degree and I can tell you that… I’m 36 now, And I can tell you that all the training I did in the military left… It put a fire in me. I’m in the best shape of my life right now, and I cannot sit still. I mean, I’m working out multiple workouts a day, still doing ruck runs, still staying physically active. And I thought that when I got out of the military, I would be totally okay with a much more sedentary life, back into an office environment. And that’s… Yeah, that’s definitely not what happened. It’s really shocking to me. So I’m currently doing some training with a group of guys that are working on some amazing pipelines in the military. They have some tough pipelines ahead of them, and I’m working side by side with them right now at the gym, doing some runs with them. And they’re motivating me a lot more than I thought I could ever be motivated. So that’s why I’m kind of looking into some additional contracts in the next few months, actually.

Brett McKay: Let’s talk about your book. So Backpack to Rucksack, what you did is leading up to you trying to figure out whether you’re gonna sign up with the Army. And also during that time when you were going through the process of training and whatnot, you got a lot of military friends and that you were talking to them, asking them for advice. Like, what do I need to know when I’m going through this process and becoming a commissioned officer? How do I handle this situation? And what you did in the book is you shared these insights you got from these various friends of yours in the military from all branches of the military. And then you combine that with your research that you’ve done in organizational psychology. And so each chapter highlights a different concept or topic. And in the first part of the book, the first chapter, you talk about this bit of advice you got from… I think it was a Green Beret friend of yours, about pursuing attrition in life, but also in the military world. What did he mean by that?

Daniel Zia Joseph: So his advice was to pursue pipelines in the military that people complained about. Pursue… Basically his philosophy is that any route you want to take in life that other people are afraid of or that they’re being just really critical or negative about it’s a filtration mechanism. It’ll stop the wrong people from pursuing it and it’ll filter for the stronger candidates. And he was just saying, make sure that… When you join the military, if you do want to find group of brothers around yourself that are just operating at a level that is far beyond your own perceived limitations, you need to go down some hard pads that remove the guys who just tap out early. And he said, next thing you know, you’ll be rubbing elbows with other people that are like-minded who sort of keep their mouth shut and just work really hard.

Brett McKay: And this is applicable outside the military too, in work, in your physical fitness. If you want to rub elbows with the best, just top-notch individuals, do the hard stuff ’cause that’s gonna filter out all the riff-raff.

Daniel Zia Joseph: Essentially, that was exactly how he approached life, yep.

Brett McKay: So let’s talk about another concept you learned from a friend of yours who’s a marine named Will, and he taught you the importance of command climate. What is command climate?

Daniel Zia Joseph: Essentially, it’s culture. It’s work culture. In the military, it’s really unique because the person at the top in whatever unit you’re looking at tends to… They set the temperature for the entire unit. So if you have someone who is super physical and super into fitness, you’ll see that everyone below them, all the subordinates suddenly begin to really invest in fitness. They suddenly become really gym oriented. But on the converse side of that, let’s say you have someone who is really negative and really, it’s an overused word, but if they say they’re toxic or have certain insecurities or they have a shame-based orientation towards their leadership style, you’ll see people below them begin to treat others the same way. And you can’t really change command climate in the military. You can’t walk into a unit and go up to somebody at that rank and say, hey, sir, hey, ma’am, I need you to conduct yourself differently, so we can all experience a whole different climate. What you get is what you get. And Will’s advice was you gotta make the most of it. If it’s bad, it’s gonna be bad, but you gotta just figure out how to handle it until that leader leaves and you get someone new. And if it’s good, then definitely count your blessings and just… You’re gonna have a blast in the job for sure. They’re gonna make the job awesome.

Brett McKay: Did you have any experiences of really bad command climate in the corporate world or the military?

Daniel Zia Joseph: I mean, definitely I’ve seen good and bad. I mean, as we all have, I’m sure, so definitely have seen the impact of it. And what’s astounding to me is the way in which it compounds the stress around us, because, I tell people attack problem sets, don’t attack people. If something sucks, if something needs to be enhanced or optimized or modified, whatever it is, the military and the corporate world, look at the problem set before you. You don’t have to make it personal. You don’t have to bring emotions into it and attack others and involve ego. So what I’ve seen good leaders do is when there is an issue that needs to be addressed, they are enablers of people. They enable subordinates. They enable everyone around them to find solutions. And if you fail, then okay, so be it, but pick yourself up and find the next solution that’ll work. Own it and make it great. Figure out a way to make the situation better. But what I’ve noticed toxic leaders will do is they will have a more fixed mindset as Carol Dweck talks about growth versus fixed mindset. They’ll sort of approach the situation as, hey, nothing’s gonna change. This is the way it is. Shut up and fall in line. I don’t care what your opinion is. I don’t care what data you have from your perspective.

I don’t see a viable solution and I don’t care that you think there is one. Just carry on, keep everything status quo how it is. And it’s stifling. And it’s not just on the job. We take it home with us. It follows us home, that stress, that level of… That feeling of not having a voice. It’s really repressive. And it feeds a lot into the personality of the leader. So again, if it’s a great leader, if there’s somebody who’s open-minded, you’ll feel that. There will be a sense of levity, even amidst highly stressful conversations or situations.

And one thing I will say, there was an EOD that talked to us about his experience in Iraq. There was a guy that got blown up, and there was a body on the ground. And I mean, definitely the dude was jacked up. And the medic started panicking. And the EOD ran up to him because in those situations, the medic takes control, right? Takes over. A lot of the guys who survived the blast, were looking at the medic starting to lose control. So this EOD ran up to him and grabbed him and said, look, man, I need you to take a breath, and I need you to focus. Do what you can to save this guy. If you can’t, fine. But do what you can, but everyone’s watching you right now. And what he was telling us as new officers, he said, look, your attitude is everything in the military because calm is contagious, just the same way that panic is contagious. So whatever type of leader you’re going to be, the men around you, the women around you are going to pick up on that. So be sure to lead and conduct yourself in a way that you want other people to pick up. Because good or bad, they will pick up on whatever vibe you’re putting out into the unit.

Brett McKay: Okay, so yeah, in order to be a leader that creates a good command climate, it’s just… It’s a lot of self work, right? It’s working to learn how to control your emotions, working on your own discipline, working on those social and people skills, those soft skills, it’s a full-time job. It’s not just something that happens, it’s something you have to be intentional about.

Daniel Zia Joseph: Absolutely, and I learned that in the corporate world. When I started my own business, I had a mentor, George. He was like a father figure to me. And I was struggling with some high-power executives that were… I was in some negotiations that were just absolutely intimidating to me. And George pulled me aside in sort of a coaching seminar that we had together, a discussion we had. And he let me know. He said, look, basically, the man that you are privately, it’s going to come out in the room when you negotiate. And he said, the other men you’re dealing with are sharks. I mean, if they smell blood in the water, you’re dead. They’re going to tear you to pieces in a negotiation. So he said, you got to work on yourself. You got to know who you are outside of the business world, outside of the office, who you are privately, when you put your head on the pillow at night, when you look in the mirror, who are you? Once you figure out who you are, and you have a grasp on that, and you ground yourself in that, you can then approach the negotiations with that level of confidence that is gonna allow you to have better leverage, and other people will not take advantage of you. Situations that suck won’t take advantage of you.

They won’t change you. You will bring light into that dark situation. And that was one of the most profound pieces of information I received because I realized that, if I don’t work on myself, the guys around me are gonna suffer. My ego issues, my insecurities, my personal private hangups are gonna come out at work in the way that I speak to others and the way that I treat others. And then all of a sudden they have to manage my emotions for me. And the job’s stressful enough, especially in the military. Training can be life and death. And if I’m bringing my own ego issues and the guys around me have to manage that, man, I’m doing them a disservice. So yeah, absolutely. I encourage every leader, pick up books, read, study yourself because you’re gonna benefit the organization, you’re gonna benefit your relationships, your marriages, your relationship with your kids. Everything will benefit when you grow yourself privately and personally.

Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. So in the military, you have to deal with all sorts of personalities, especially big personalities. Did you have any experience dealing with difficult people with big egos when you were in the military?

Daniel Zia Joseph: Yeah, I mean, the… It’s common to see people… And again, this happens in any organization, but when you see someone use their rank as a way of trying to stifle others, trying to sort of demand control… And psychology, they call that positional authority. You can have moral authority, you can have positional authority. Moral basically means when you walk in a room, regardless of rank, people, they trust you, they know that you know things, they see that confidence in you. Positional authority means, hey, do you know who I am? Do you know where I am on the hierarchy. Okay, cool. So fall in line, they rely on their rank. And yeah, I mean, I’ve seen that and I’ve had to manage that, absolutely.

Brett McKay: Did you have any military friends who gave you any advice on what to do with those big egos? People who were trying to use their positional authority to get things the way they wanted?

Daniel Zia Joseph: Yeah, absolutely. So one of the biggest pieces of advice on that was my buddy Brad, he’s an EOD commander now, but he was deployed in Afghanistan. And he told me about some situations where guys would try to pull rank, and he would let them know… I mean, and this would happen in the battlefield, as he’s dealing with an IED. And he had to tell people, some people who’re very high rank to shut up and sit down, because if they continue to distract him, there could be fallout that’ll kill everybody around them. So what he taught me was, when you know something is correct, there’s a way to present it to somebody who’s an authority with a respectful attitude, yet assertive. Assertion is really important when you know something is right. So it is important to stand by what you know. However, depending on what personality you’re dealing with, you got to manage it in a way that they will be receptive to it. And at that point, it’s really dependent on the person that you’re dealing with because sometimes direct is the best approach. Other times you got to stroke their ego a bit. You got to find a way to… I don’t want to say play the politics of it, ’cause that can get really dirty, but you got to find a way to get them to have an open mind.

And this is where… I mean, I could talk for days about this, but this is something we learn in Jiu-jitsu as well. We call it working the angles, basically. Jiu-jitsu is all about having the right angle. Approaching leadership dynamics, it’s the same way. Certain leaders, again, hit them head on. They’ll respect that, they’ll respond to it. Other leaders, you can’t do that, because once you do it, it’s fight mode, and the discussion’s completely derailed.

Brett McKay: Yeah, you gave some examples in the book of… I think when you were in basic training, you had some guys who were kind of big dogging, right? They just kind of… They kind of walked around like they were the stuff, right? They had the stuff and they were just annoying. And they would do these things where they kind of confront you and try to assert themselves over you in the dominance hierarchy. And you talked about how you’re really tempted to just… I’m gonna punch back or I’m gonna push back, I’m gonna get angry about it. But like you said, you did some like psychological Jiu-jitsu on these guys to, instead of them being enemies or a liability, they actually ended up being an asset. Like what did you do to turn those guys from… Like you weren’t best friends with them, but they became guys who you could collaborate with and get things done.

Daniel Zia Joseph: Yeah, I think in retrospect, maybe they were trying to size me up to see if I would stand up for myself. And in any case, I was very direct when I approached them. I maintained eye contact. I was very direct, but I also did it privately. I didn’t do it in a way… So they would… There’s a situation where I was being called out in front of the entire platoon. And this was in training, not my actual platoon, but back in the schoolhouse. And so what I decided to do is control my heart rate, control my breathing. It’s the same way like on the mats when I’m getting smashed by one of the black belts that I train with. I need to gain physiological control of my body, calm myself down. And then what I did is I directly approached one of these individuals and I let them know, hey, we’re going to have a conversation about this, but again, it’s not going to be emotional.

This is just gonna be man to man, we’re just gonna have a quick talk about this. And he quickly realized that I wasn’t there to start a fight, I was there to learn. I let him know that, I said, look, I know I’m new, I know you’ve been in the military for a while, I’m not here to be disrespectful. I’m not here to flex on anyone. I’m here to learn. So if you have something to teach me, I’m all ears. But I’m not gonna play this game of one-upmanship, that’s just not how I roll. And I learned that because of my high school friend, Tim, who introduced me to Jiu-jitsu. He told me that if you’re ever dealing with somebody who just absolutely wants to tear you to pieces on the mat and wants to smash your face into the mat, you need to tell them, I’m not here to fight. I’m here to learn. So if you’re here to fight, that’s not why I’m here. And it really has tremendously had an impact on the mats. So I started taking that principle into the military and it had the same impact. It was amazing.

Brett McKay: All right. So yeah, be direct, do it in private. You can be assertive, but not a jerk about it. I guess is the key. Let’s talk about the politics of military life. So you mentioned that that military can be political and by political, we mean that you do… The people who do and say things, whatever it takes to advance their career. Well, you talked about, you learned this from your military buddies that politics can get in the way of effectiveness. How so?

Daniel Zia Joseph: So, and again, this is highly applicable to the corporate world, to any organization. Some people will use their rank and authority to get their agenda done. Whatever their agenda is, usually I’d say to promote their own sort of resume, but they’ll do so at the expense of the well-being of those around them, not wanting to hear about inconvenient pieces of information about the organization, but that can quickly get dark. So what’s really important and the advice I received is listen to the people around you, give everybody a voice so you know what exactly needs to be improved to help others and any rank that… As you rank up, the higher rank you get, the more people you serve. It’s not the other way around, because a lot of people commonly think that with more rank and more authority, you have more power over more people. But if you look at it inversely, it really helps add a healthier context to the relationship. The more rank you have, the higher up you are, the more people you are actually serving as a leader.

And the way you serve those people is… And I get it, you can’t have a perfect solution that everybody’s happy with. But the more conversations you have, the more incremental improvements you can have throughout the organization by removing red tape wherever you can remove red tape, allowing people to get the schools that they want to get, to work towards the credentials, to pursue the education they need, to have time with their family, with their kids, if they need medical help, whatever it is, just allowing rank to be used to improve the unit and not to just demand sort of respect authoritatively.

Brett McKay: So take a servant leadership approach instead of thinking about, well, how can I advance the hierarchy and improve my own status and rank?

Daniel Zia Joseph: Right.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And for a book, I don’t know if you’ve read this book. It’s a great book that highlights the difference between a military leader who is very political and one who has that servant leadership approach. It’s a Once an Eagle. Have you read this book?

Daniel Zia Joseph: So that book is definitely the Bible to a lot of my friends. Yeah.

Brett McKay: Yeah. No, so this book is written in 1968. It follows these two officers from World War I through Vietnam. One guy is Sam Damon, career army officer, started off as a private, and then he rose up to general officer rank and he was honorable. Like he was all about his soldiers. He was like the epitome, like he was the guy. And then the other guy who was the more political officer was this guy named Courtney Massingale. No honor, had no concern for his troops. All he cared about was going up in the rank. And it’s a great book if you want. It’s a beast of a book, but a lot of great lessons on leadership, especially about that dichotomy between being a political leader and a servant leadership type leader.

Daniel Zia Joseph: Definitely. We’ve had a lot of talks about that book. Yep.

Brett McKay: So a lot of the advice in the book is about just how to stay calm, right? Even when things are going just crazy around you. What was some of the best advice you got from your military buddies on staying calm during chaos?

Daniel Zia Joseph: I mean, essentially, just have an awareness of your physiological response to kind of zero out your own emotional impact in a situation. Because oftentimes, when, let’s say, a mission set suddenly changes, so we have a movement. We’re trying to get the convoy from one location to another. And everybody’s been briefed on it. And then suddenly a wrench gets thrown in. Because we were simulating combat as realistically as possible. And there’s tempers flare. People get real mad real quick when it’s 125 degrees and you’re in your full kit. And we’re talking about some dangerous terrain, some night movements. Things can get real sketchy real fast. And as a leader especially, if I were to feed into that angst with that same level of anger and frustration as I’m trying to brief the change in the mission, I mean, it would be horrible. It would just turn into this cluster of egos and sparks would fly. People would just be yelling at each other and I never wanted to do that. So the advice I received was, hey, look, when things suck, you just gotta calm yourself down, find your center. Again, remove the emotionality out of it, the primal limbic response of the brain. Get back into your prefrontal cortex. And I’m talking psychology here, but essentially get into your higher mind and come in there with a sense of awareness and transparency.

Like, hey guys, this is gonna suck. I know it’s gonna suck, all right, but here’s the change. We’re gonna do it, but let’s just… Let’s get it done. We know what needs to be done. And having that open and honest, that truthful approach, it helps kind of quell the anxiety of those around you. Because then they realize, you’re not leaving things undiscussed. Everything can be talked about. And then, yeah, we just kind of get over it. Like, all right, cool. Yeah, you acknowledge it sucks. I acknowledge it sucks as well. All right, let’s do it. And let’s do it safely. And let’s do it in a manner that’s efficient. But when people come in and say, hey, something changed. You’re going to do it. Don’t talk back. Get into the vehicle. Do this. Do that. Whatever it is that needs to be changed. Oh, man, there’s going to be some resentment that builds quickly.

Brett McKay: So you have a chapter on knowing the difference between garrison and field leadership. What’s the difference between the two?

Daniel Zia Joseph: So yeah, my artillery officer buddy told me that, Jazz. So, okay, so in the field, you deal with… Like let’s say desert terrain or whatever. It could be in the woods, it could be… I don’t know, wherever you are. But you’re dealing with more kinetic factors of the job. You’re dealing with weapons systems, you’re dealing with, adverse weather conditions, rough terrain, and if you’re a leader who… So in garrison, it’s on base. That’s more of the office side. That’s more the paperwork and stuff like that. So let’s say you’re great at the paperwork. If you go out in the field and you suck, then you could lead your convoy off a cliff. Conversely, if you’re really good at the tactics in the field and you’re good at moving people around and getting things done out there, but you come back to the office life and you don’t know how to work a computer or write a memo, then your guys are going to suffer because you’re not able to put in the awards for them. You’re not able to get them to the schools that they need to get to or help them with anything else that’s related to their personal lives.

So my buddy was telling me you could be two of three things in the military. Good at two of three things. You could be either a good officer in the field, you could could be a good officer in garrison or a good person. You can’t be all three, you’re always just two of those three. But he said always default to being a good person. ‘Cause whether you suck in the field or you suck in garrison, your guys are gonna have your back. But if you’re not a good person, then it doesn’t matter that you’re good at the other two, ’cause everyone’s gonna suffer. So that’s kind of the short and sweet.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I think we wrote an article a while back ago about this difference between Garrison and Field, between Eisenhower and Patton. So Patton was probably… He was probably the better tactical officer. He loved being out in the field, being with the men and being in the muck and just being in the action. Eisenhower was more of a strategic officer, the Garrison. He was really good at people skills, negotiating, dealing with administrative things, things like that.

And because I think their personality suited those different things. And I think a lot of leaders, they get into trouble whenever they… They might be better as a field officer, but they get stuck in a garrison position or the opposite, like a garrison leader gets stuck in a field position. And I think the trick in leadership is finding out what you’re good at. And so this applies to the corporate world as well. You might be a guy who… Say you’re in sales or something. You’re really great being out in the field and talking to customers and dealing with other salesmen and encouraging them and motivating them. And maybe you get the promotion to manage a whole region, or maybe you’re at the office headquarters and you’re just miserable because it just doesn’t suit your personality. So I think that’s another trick of leadership is trying to figure out what you’re good at and leaning into that and not being tempted to go to something else because it might seem more prestigious or they might have more status.

Daniel Zia Joseph: Yeah, absolutely. And I would say the best way to handle that situation when things seem sort of out of sync with who you are is to rely on those around you. And again, being a leader is being an enabler. So enabling those people around you to compensate for those deficits, to use their strength to, as a team, build a better unit. So that’s huge. So if ego gets in the way and a leader says, no, I got this, I know the book on this, I know the solutions and I’ll fix it, I’ll figure it out. Everyone’s gonna stand around and just watch that leader fail. So it’s really important to just admit, hey guys, look, I’m great at this stuff, this stuff right here, I need your help. So let’s do it. And with that open honesty and that mindset, it really helps shift everything around for that unit.

Brett McKay: So Dan, we talked about some great concepts in your book. Is there anything that we missed that you’re really passionate about that you hope people will get out of it?

Daniel Zia Joseph: The biggest thing that’s on my mind is the suicides that happen with veterans and with active duty service members. Leaders can do so much to just approach the job with a sense of humanity, a sense of kindness, a sense of love for their troops that doesn’t stop their tactical abilities. It enhances it. And this isn’t something I’ve necessarily just come up with on my own. This is something people who’ve been to war have told me. They said the purest feeling was being in a war zone, where the number one concern is, did everyone make it back from that movement, from that patrol? Is everyone intact? Is everyone here? Are they present? Are they okay? These service members that I got to work with and these friends that I’ve just… I’m so pumped that I was able to learn from them. And they just… They told me to focus on the relationships, because when you do that, you give people the resources and the tools to handle all the struggles in life that come home with them, where they’re not around their buddies, they’re not connected with others necessarily, but they understand how to handle it. They see their value, they see their capacity to overcome and that resilience stays true. So I would say the biggest takeaway is if you’re a leader, please don’t be afraid to look into what we consider the softer side of human relationships.

Because counterintuitively, it will not stop you from being a savage tactically, to being able to crush whatever physical feat is before you. But I just see sort of this trepidation about approaching leadership that way, because people don’t wanna seem vulnerable and weak. And I understand that, but do the research. Look at the psychological implications of connecting with people in that deeper level because it will save lives.

Brett McKay: Well, Dan, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

Daniel Zia Joseph: I have a website, CombatPsych.com, they can go to. And the book is on Amazon, Backpack to Rucksack, insight into leadership and resilience for military experts. And they can just put my name on there, Dan Joseph.

Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Dan Joseph, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Daniel Zia Joseph: Thank you, appreciate it.

Brett McKay: My guest today was Dan Joseph. He’s the author of the book Backpack to Rucksack. It’s available on Amazon.com. You can find more information about his work at his website, CombatPsych.com. Also check out our show notes at aom.is/military mentors, where you find links to resources where we delve deeper into this topic.

Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Make sure to check out our website at ArtOfManliness.com where you can find our podcast archives, as well as thousands of articles that we’ve written over the years about pretty much anything you think of. And if you’d like to enjoy ad-free episodes of the AOM Podcast, you can do so on Stitcher Premium. Head over to stitcherpremium.com, sign up, use code Manliness to check out for a free month trial. Once you’re signed up, download the Stitcher app on Android iOS and you can start enjoying ad-free episodes of the AOM Podcast. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate it if you take one minute to give us a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It helps out a lot. And if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think will get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, this is Brett McKay, reminding you to not only listen to the AOM podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

Many a man has been impressed by the ingenuity of secret agent operations, and intrigued by the subterfuge, gadgets, and disguises required to pull them off. Much of what we think about when we think about spies got its start as part of the Office of Strategic Services, the American intelligence agency during World War II.

Here to unpack some of the history of the world of cloak and dagger operations is John Lisle, author of The Dirty Tricks Department: Stanley Lovell, the OSS, and the Masterminds of World War II Secret Warfare. Today on the show, Lisle explains why the OSS was created and the innovations its research and development section came up with to fight the Axis powers. We talk about the most successful weapons and devices this so-called “Dirty Tricks Department” developed, as well as its more off-the-wall ideas, which included releasing bat bombs and radioactive foxes in Japan. We discuss the department’s attempt to create a truth serum, its implementation of a disinformation campaign involving “The League of Lonely War Women,” and its promotion of a no-holds-barred hand-to-hand combat fighting system. We also talk about the influence of the OSS on the establishment of the CIA and controversial projects like MKUltra.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• William “Wild Bill” Donovan
• Office of Strategic Services
• William Fairbairn
• Time pencil
• “Aunt Jemima” explosive
• Limpet mine
• The bat bomb
• John’s article on Operation Fantasia’s radioactive foxes
• AoM Article: 15 Cool Spy Concealments
• AoM Podcast #225: The Real Life James Bond
• AoM Article: The History of Invisible Ink
• AoM Article: Why Men Love the Story of the Great Escape

Connect With John Lisle

• John on Twitter
• John’s website

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Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness podcast. Many a man has been impressed by the ingenuity of secret agent operations and intrigued by the subterfuge, gadgets, and disguises required to pull them off. Much of what we think about when we think about spies, got its start as a part of the Office of Strategic Services, the American intelligence agency during World War II. Here to unpack some of the history of the world of cloak-and-dagger operations is John Lisle, author of, “The Dirty Tricks Department : Stanley Lovell, the OSS, and the Masterminds of World War II Secret Warfare.” Today in the show, Lisle explains why the OSS was created and the innovation its research and development section came up with to fight the Axis powers. We talk about the most successful weapons and devices that the so-called, “dirty tricks department” developed, as well as it’s more off-the-wall ideas, which included releasing bat bombs and radioactive foxes in Japan. We discuss the department’s attempt to create truth serum, its implementation of a disinformation campaign involving the League of Lonely War Women, and its promotion of a no holds barred hand-to-hand combat fighting system. We also talk about the influence of the OSS on the establishment of the CIA, and controversial projects like MKUltra. After the show’s over, check out our shownotes at aom.is/dirtytricks.

Alright. John Lisle, welcome to the show.

John Lisle: Thank you very much. I’m so glad that you have me on here, I can’t wait to talk about this exciting book, these stories. I’m really excited.

Brett McKay: Yeah, so you got a new book, it’s called, “The Dirty Tricks Department”, which is about the Office of Strategic Services during World War II, and the individuals there that developed some really cool spy tech to help win the war. But your background is interesting, you’re a Historian of Science, and you also… You use that academic approach on the history of science to look at the intelligence community in the United States. How did you end up in this field? Was it just like you grew up watching James Bond movies and other spy shows and thought, “I wanna make a career researching and writing about the history of spy science”?

John Lisle: Well, I don’t think I consciously thought that when I was young. I do like spy stories and espionage. I think everyone’s kind of intrigued by that, and I certainly always have been. But I never consciously thought, “Oh, that’s what I wanna do.” I think when I got to grad school, I wrote my dissertation on a group of scientists during the cold war called, “The Science Attaches.” These were scientists who were attached to American embassies abroad. And as I was doing that research, I kind of discovered their connection to the intelligence community. And so that’s what took me from, this more history of science approach, into the intelligence community. And as I was looking at their connection to the intelligence community, I would come across the names of certain individuals who kept popping up with these really incredible stories. Stories of bat bombs, and painting foxes with radioactive paint, and secret weapons and all this stuff. And it all seemed to come back to just a couple of individuals, and I thought, “Oh my gosh, I need to find out more about these people ’cause they’re the center of all these crazy stories.”

Brett McKay: So in your book, “The Dirty Tricks Department,” you take readers through a history of the development of the OSS during World War II. This is basically the predecessor of the CIA, and clearly, the technology that they developed during this time to help the Allies win the war with espionage and cloak-and-dagger stuff. And one thing you point at the beginning of the book is that before World War II, the US really didn’t have a centralized intelligence agency for espionage. So how did the US do espionage before World War II? ‘Cause I imagine the US Military did engage in espionage, so how did they manage that?

John Lisle: Yeah, several of the military branches had their own intelligence divisions. You have the army military intelligence division, the Office of Naval Intelligence, domestically, you have something like the FBI. The Postmaster General, occasionally, would make arguments that he should be the center of this intelligence ’cause all information goes through him. So there were these kind of silos of intelligence before World War II, especially. This led to several problems, one of the problems is that there was a lot of bureaucratic infighting, because each of these intelligence divisions wanted appropriations and there’s not an infinite amount of appropriations to go around, and so they’re fighting for money. Another issue with this is that you occasionally get the duplication of research. If you have one division that’s working on a certain intelligence, it might be doing the same thing or collecting the same information as another division. Well, instead of duplicating that intelligence, that work, it might be useful to have a centralized intelligence organization that can collect and analyze all that intelligence, that way you’re not duplicating research or fighting for money, there’s some centralized place. That’s the impetus behind the OSS, the Office of Strategic Services, like you said, this centralized intelligence organization that’s created right around World War II.

Brett McKay: So Who came up with the idea of a centralized intelligence organization?

John Lisle: Well, one of the main people who spearheaded this idea is “Wild Bill” Donovan, William Donovan. He is a soldier, he won the Medal of Honor in World War I. He becomes a lawyer, he runs unsuccessfully for Governor of New York after Franklin Roosevelt. But he got sent by President Roosevelt, when Roosevelt becomes President, to Europe to see what’s going on in Europe, what’s the state of things in Europe during the 1930s, as tensions seemed to be on the rise. And Donovan comes back from… He went on several of those trips, and he realizes that the United States needs to stay abreast of all these developments that are happening, the tensions that, especially, seemed to be on the rise in Germany. And so he pleads to Roosevelt to please create some kind of central intelligence organization that will collect and analyze information to keep the President informed about what’s happening abroad so that the President can make the best decisions possible for the United States.

Brett McKay: And so, he got it going. But when it initially started, when the OSS initially started, it was looked down upon by those in Washington and the military. Why was that?

John Lisle: [chuckle] Yeah, for a few reasons. The joke about the OSS is that its nickname in the beginning was, “Oh, So Social”, because it recruited people from a lot of Ivy League schools, and so it was seen as a little aristocratic. And one of the reasons that that developed was because people who are hired into the OSS typically avoided being drafted into the military; if you were working with the OSS, you probably wouldn’t be drafted. So those were some of the knocks against the OSS. Another one was that military officials tended to dislike the OSS sometimes, especially because William Donovan, this man who was leading the OSS, was not into the strict hierarchy that you typically see in military organizations. He was more of a free-wheeling individual, flying by the seat of his pants. He would try anything if he thought it would work, and he wasn’t so much one for a strict structure of military discipline that typically you see in those other branches.

Brett McKay: And I imagine to the other military brass, they thought the OSS were encroaching on their turf. They’d go,”We already got our own intelligence stuff here. We don’t need you guys.”

John Lisle: Exactly, yes. Well, this is… So, one of the problems that the OSS is wanting to solve, is this idea of bureaucratic infighting, the idea being that, “We’ll collect and analyze all this information, and so we won’t have to fight over funds or anything.” What actually tends to happen is that now you just have one more horse in this race, now you just have one more organization that’s competing for the same funds. So instead of solving all of those issues that it hoped to, sometimes it contributed to them, ironically.

Brett McKay: So the OSS was developed, they were there to collect intelligence, analyze the intelligence, there’s department set up for that. But then Donovan thought, “You know what? We need a branch in the OSS that’s dedicated to destroying the enemy with subterfuge.” And so he thought, “You know what? I’m gonna start this thing where we research technology we can use to fight this clandestine war.” And he got this guy named Stanley Lovell, who is one of the main characters. Tell us about Stanley Lovell, and why did Donovan recruit him to become the Head Scientist at the research and development arm of the OSS?

John Lisle: Yes, Stanley Lovell is the main character of my book. Everything that I came across, all these interesting stories, all seem to have some connection to Stanley Lovell, so I really wanted to find more about him when I was doing research for this book. He is a Chemist from New England, he went to Cornell for school. One colleague described him with a quote that I think summarizes him pretty well, “A salty little Yankee inventor” that’s who Stanley Lovell was. He worked in the shoe and leather industry in New England for a while. During World War II, when the war broke out, he quit to go to Washington DC, and to try to aid the war effort in whatever way he could. He ended up signing on with a man named Vannevar Bush. Vannevar Bush was the main person who coordinated scientific research during World War II. Vannevar Bush was President Roosevelt’s unofficial science advisor. So Lovell, Stanley Lovell became an aide to Vannevar Bush. And Bush had some connections to the OSS, knew of the OSS, and ended up recommending that Lovell go over there and help Donovan, who was looking for a cunning chemist to join the ranks and help them create some of these devices and dirty tricks, I guess you could say, for the OSS.

Brett McKay: And what’s interesting about Lovell, his development as a character in your book, is that when he first started working with the OSS, he was reluctant to develop spy weapons. Why is that and how did that change throughout his career?

John Lisle: Yeah, he did have some moral reservations about doing this. This is the main arc of the book, seeing Lovell’s transformation over the course of the war. He felt an obligation to really do no harm; this is kind of a Hippocratic obligation that he felt. But at the same time, his country was in war, and this is a country, the United States, that had let a poor kid like him, whose mother had died when he was young, whose dad had died when he was young, who was basically raised by his sister, to overcome all these obstacles and be extremely successful. So he was very patriotic. So he had this conflict of, not wanting to do harm and using his scientific expertise for good, but at the same time, wanting to defend a country and help a country that had enabled a person like him to achieve so much. He eventually had a meeting with William Donovan, the head of the OSS, in which he laid out his moral reservations about doing this job, about creating these deadly weapons. He told Donovan that he didn’t know if he felt comfortable doing this, he didn’t think the American people would be happy with him doing this. And Donovan brushed him aside and said, “Well, you need to get over it. You’re being too naive. The American people will be thankful for anyone who can think of a way to defeat the Germans and the Japanese during this war.”

Brett McKay: And also, I think his inner conflict, it highlights, I think, the tension that people have about espionage. On the one hand, I think people think it’s cool that you’re using your… You’re like Odysseus, you’re using your wiles to defeat the enemy. But at the same time, you’re like. “Man, it’s kind of weeny. Something about it seems immoral, that you destroy people, but secretly.” And I think it’s a conflict that’s existed about espionage in war for a long time.

John Lisle: Yeah, and I think that gets to one of the conflict that Lovell has about some of his work when he’s developing biological and chemical warfares. This is traditionally seen as this unconventional type of warfare, a really negative aspect of warfare, something we should not do; use biological and chemical warfare. It’s somewhat less noble than traditional warfare. Lovell, over the course of the war, starts to change his mind about this, and he starts to think that maybe biological warfare is the ethical alternative to conventional warfare. “Instead of stabbing someone,” as he said, “with a bayonet and letting it get contaminated, and they develop some kind of infection and eventually die, well, what if you could spare a soldier, the wound. Maybe they’re gonna die from an infection anyway if you use biological warfare, but it doesn’t involve the barbarous stabbing them with a bayonet or something.” So he has this strange development where he goes from being reluctant to even help the OSS develop these weapons, to being someone who is encouraging the use of biological and chemical weapons during the war.

Brett McKay: The, “You’re killing them anyway, so why does it matter how you kill them?”

John Lisle: Yeah, well, that’s his idea and that’s his… Of course, there are objections to this, but Lovell’s idea was that, “Well, we want this war to end as soon as possible. If we want to stop as much suffering as we can, we should use everything available to us to stop that suffering. Yeah, it’s gonna be barbarous, it’s gonna be different than what we’re used to, but if that’s what ends the war, then let’s do it.”

Brett McKay: We’re gonna talk about some of these specific gadgets and technology the OSS developed during this time in World War II. But before you do that, I think you do a good job in the book of talking about the scientific process, how they came up with their ideas. So let’s talk about it, I think it’s really interesting. So what was the approach in the OSS, with Lovell’s department, on generating ideas, prototyping? Was it a move fast and break things? Was it more methodical? Describe that process for us.

John Lisle: The process within this dirty tricks department in this research and development branch was really kinda, “Throw things against the wall and we’ll see what sticks.” [chuckle] They’d summarize, I guess, with a popular phrase, “Ask for forgiveness, not for permission,” that was General Donovan’s MO in general. To do things, do what you can, see what sticks, and then see what works and continue doing that, and then discard the stuff that doesn’t. This can be good, especially in a war time, and in something like World War II, it was very helpful to not have all of that bureaucratic red tape around Lovell, where he could develop these weapons. So some context may be more permissible of these things than others. But yeah, it really was, “Let’s try out everything we can, and we’ll see what we come up with.”

Brett McKay: Well, there’s the lack of bureaucratic red tape around the OSS and Lovell. It was kind of interesting how you talk about, with some of this stuff, the President, Roosevelt, was told about some of the stuff they’re developing, but it was done in a way that he could have plausible deniability. So if it ever came up that the US ended up using chemical warfare, the President could go, “Well, I didn’t know about it.” But he did know about it.

John Lisle: Well, this is something that you see not just with the OSS, this is something throughout the intelligence community and the Executive branch, going throughout the Cold War, especially. There are different committees, the express purpose of them is to provide the President with some plausible deniability. When you’re talking about the intelligence community in general, there’s what I think of as a vicious cycle that sometimes plays out. The vicious cycle would be, secrecy, that’s inherent within the intelligence community. Secrecy enables plausible deniability. Plausible deniability enables risky behavior, risky behavior leads to embarrassment because it gets exposed. And then embarrassment leads to more secrecy. So it’s just this cycle that keeps going.

Brett McKay: Okay, start by some of the specific gadgets that Lovell and his department developed, and let’s talk about the weapons and the secret weapons they developed to kill people. So what were some of the ones that were the most successful that came out of this department?

John Lisle: Some of the longest lasting ones… Well, the longest lasting one is probably the silenced.22 pistol… Silent, flash-less. This was used after World War II, there are some reports of it even being used during the Vietnam War. So that was probably the longest lasting weapon that the R&D branch had a hand in developing. There are a lot of… Sometimes the simplest weapons are the most useful ones. Within the R&D branch, one of the most useful secret weapons they devised, was what’s called a time pencil. A time pencil is just a small device, it looks like a pencil, but it has some mechanism for delaying a detonation. So depending on the kind of wire that’s used, and acid might eat through the wire more fastly or more slowly. And then when the wire is completely eaten through, the time pencil might explode, which can set off a larger detonation, something like that. So those were used in conjunction with all kinds of explosives. One of the most common ones was what’s called a limpet. A limpet was an explosive charge that could be attached to the bottom of a ship. And the idea was that you would set your time pencil in your limpet, you would attach it to the ship, and then you would row away. And however long later, 30 minutes, an hour, the limpet would go off, it would blow a hole into the side of the ship and the ship would sink. So those are some of the most useful weapons that the R&D branch had a hand in developing.

One of the most famous ones is called “Aunt Jemima.” Aunt Jemima, is basically a pancake mix. This is something you could bake and eat, but it was a pancake mix that was laced with some high explosive. And so, although it was safe to consume, you could actually set a charge to it, and then you could blow it up. The reason for developing Aunt Jemima was that it would allow you to sneak this explosive into other territories pretty easily, because nobody’s gonna suspect that a pancake mix is serving as some kind of explosive.

Brett McKay: So a lot of these devices, made to kill, but also a lot of was made to sabotage, it sounds like.

John Lisle: Yes, sabotage is the name of the game, especially with the OSS. The military is handling the main fighting that’s going on during this war. The OSS, one of the main things that it’s doing, it’s helping to supply resistance forces in occupied Europe with these weapons to sabotage the German military. One big thing, especially, was to sabotage German trains, because then you can’t get supplies wherever it’s going. So one device that the R&D branch develops was called, “The Mole.” This was Stanley Lovell’s, it might have been his favorite device. The Mole was this device, that a saboteur would secretly place on the wheel well of a German train. And then The Mole was capable of determining whether it was light or dark. And so when the train entered a tunnel, The Mole would detonate, and it would, hopefully, ideally, cause the train to derail. And so not only would that ruin that train, it would also plug up the tunnel so no other trains could go through it. So a sabotage within the OSS, especially in conjunction with these resistance movements, was definitely the name of the game.

Brett McKay: Alright. So we talked about some of the more successful ideas. What were some of the zaniest ideas that this research and development department came up with?

John Lisle: [chuckle] Well, I mentioned that the R&D branch is just throwing things and seeing what sticks, and so you have a lot of stuff that doesn’t stick. [chuckle] One of the more interesting ones, probably one of the most famous things just because of how odd it is that came out of the OSS, and specifically, the R&D branch, is called The Bat Bomb. The Bat Bomb is the idea that bats will tend to roost in buildings. So if you release a bunch of bats, say, over Japan, they will naturally seek to roost in a bunch of Japanese buildings. And The Bat Bomb was the idea that, “What if we attach small, little, incendiary devices to bats, and then we release them over Japan. The bats will go and roost in these buildings, the incendiaries will explode, and they’ll cause a bunch of fires and it can burn a city down.” “Instead of having to drop bombs on Japan that might not hit buildings, we can almost guarantee with these bats, that they’re going to roost in places that the Japanese don’t want to be caught on fire.” So that’s the overall bat bomb idea, which was somewhat strange. [chuckle]

One of the other strange ideas in the book is called “Operation Fantasia.” Operation Fantasia was a psychological warfare scheme. The idea with this, it was targeting Japan, the idea with this is that within the Shinto religion, there are these portents of doom in the shape of a fox. And so this might signal that something bad is going to happen if this fox figure appears. The idea of Operation Fantasia was to make Japanese civilians think that they were seeing these portents of doom in the shape of foxes, and then maybe they would decide to lay down their arms, maybe they would quit fighting. The way that the OSS, specifically the R&D branch, tried to accomplish this, was by capturing live foxes and painting them with a radioactive paint. And this radioactive paint would glow in the dark, and so there would be these ghostly fox apparitions that you could release in Japan, that would supposedly make the Japanese scared of continuing to fight, and maybe that would resort in peace. That was, probably, the most outlandish [chuckle] idea that went anywhere within the OSS.

Brett McKay: Well, they tested it out. And I think Washington DC released these foxes in the park and there were people seeing it, and there were people freaking out. They’re like, “What is that? It’s a glowing dog, running around in the park.”

John Lisle: Yeah, they tested this in a few different ways. So one of the tests that they wanted to do was to see even if this radioactive paint would stick to a fox. Because the idea would be that you have to throw these foxes onto the coast of Japan, so you release them along the coast in the water and they would swim to shore. Well, if you did that, would the paint even stay on the foxes? Could foxes even swim? In order to determine this, the OSS had some people get some foxes, paint them, tow them out into the middle of the Chesapeake Bay, and throw them overboard just to see what would happen. It turns out the foxes did swim to shore, but by the time they had reached the shore, they had lost most of that paint that made them glow in the dark. And then, as you mentioned, in this other test of Operation Fantasia, there were several foxes that were released into Rock Creek Park, right by Washington DC. And there were newspaper reports afterwards that said that the people who observed these foxes had, what they called, “the screaming jeemies” they were really scared of these apparitions. And so the idea was that, “Well, if it scared Americans, surely it’s going to scare the Japanese even more.”

Brett McKay: But they never did actually move forward with the… Releasing the ghost foxes in Japan. The bat bomb, that never got put into practice either. A lot of these ideas you talk about, they were just brainstorming and experimenting. They were just… But they never actually used them in the war.

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And now back to the show. So mostly the technology they developed was for sabotage, but the OSS did think about assassination. And so they developed technology or weapons to assassinate targeted individuals in a way so that it didn’t look like an assassination. So tell us about some of this research and development here.

John Lisle: Yeah, within the R&D branch, there was one specific project called “Natural Causes,” and that’s kind of self-explanatory, “We wanna produce something that makes it look as if somebody had died by natural causes.” One of the methods of doing this was to create a capsule that was filled with some kind of sodium metal. And then if somebody eats, or if you slip this into their food somehow, and they would eat the sodium metal, it would cause them to die, but then the sodium metal would dissolve into salt. And so you wouldn’t really be able to trace what had happened to them. Other ways of potentially killing someone that the OSS was spit-balling with Natural Causes, was to artificially raise their body temperature for a prolonged period of time somehow… They don’t really lay out too clearly how they planned to do this, but this is just the idea that they had that could possibly work. Or, somehow injecting an air embolism into somebody’s vein and killing them that way. Those are a few ways that they plotted, or at least, attempted to think of ways to produce an assassination that looked like it could have been by any means.

Brett McKay: So they thought about it, they actually never implemented, put it into the practice?

John Lisle: Not these, not these. Not that I know of. Yeah, not with these. There are other methods of killing someone that were used, for instance, L pills. L pills are lethal pills, cyanide pills or, just generally suicide pills. These weren’t really given to other people, more so they were given to OSS agents themselves so that when they went abroad, if they got caught, they might take their L pill and kill themselves, basically, before they were captured or interrogated and could divulge any sensitive information.

Brett McKay: Did those ever get used?

John Lisle: Those did get used. Yeah, those did get used.

Brett McKay: Wow.

John Lisle: Not just by the United States, either. L pills were developed by several different countries. So they were used, not just by the US, but others as well. Yeah, William Donovan, when he’s… He’s traveling right after D-Day, he has an L pill on him and he almost uses it on one occasion. There are stories of OSS agents who used their L pill and it didn’t quite work as advertised, and they’re writhing on the ground for about 30 minutes. Ideally, it’s supposed to kill you within a minute or two, but sometimes they didn’t quite work as advertised.

Brett McKay: So in mid-century spy movies, truth serums are often used to get intelligence from enemy prisoners. Did the OSS develop any truth serums?

John Lisle: They tried. [chuckle] They certainly tried. One of the truth serums that they try to develop, or something that they try to use, is THC acetate, this is the main psychoactive ingredient in marijuana. This was experimented with pretty extensively during World War II within the OSS, to determine whether you can get someone to tell the truth. The idea with some of these drugs, is that maybe you can prevent a person’s part of the brain that invents lies, maybe you can prevent that part of the brain from operating. And if you can do that, well, they’re incapable of telling a lie so they have to tell the truth, that they’ll say anything. This didn’t really work out in practice. If you gave someone a supposed truth drug like THC acetate, or even alcohol is used. Alcohol has been known to get people to talk for a long time, you actually can get people to talk. The OSS did several experiments on its own personnel, but also on random people. It did experiments on some criminals, gangsters in New York, Augusto Del Gracio was one of them… And by giving them these drugs, these people actually did tend to talk more.

The problem, however, is that you can’t guarantee that what they’re saying is the truth. You can lower someone’s inhibitions, but how do you know what they’re saying is actually the truth? That’s the difficulty. It’s almost like torture. If you torture someone, they’re probably going to talk to you. They’re gonna say anything to make the pain stop. But that’s why it doesn’t quite work. If you are going to say anything to make the pain stop, then you can never trust what they say.

Brett McKay: Well, that was interesting. The guy… One of the guys who was heading up the Truth Serum work, experimenting with marijuana, he was actually… The guy who is… Am I right that he was actually in charge of the narcotics?

John Lisle: Yes.

Brett McKay: He enforced narcotics law, but when he worked at the OSS, he was actually giving gangsters narcotics.

John Lisle: Exactly. He was trying to clean the streets of drugs by day, and at the night, he was doling out drugs to people, surreptitiously, to see if they actually worked as truth drugs. I think the guy you’re referring to is George White. He is a narcotics officer for the Bureau of Narcotics. His job is to get drugs off the street. But Stanley Lovell, when he’s trying to figure out who he’s gonna test these truth drugs on, he has no connections to drugs, or he doesn’t know who he can try them out on. And so he basically hires George White to help him. So Lovell gives these drugs to George White, and then George White uses these drugs on his criminal informants to see if they will talk about incriminating stuff. If the informants do, well that means that maybe the drugs worked and he can report back to Stanley Lovell that this is a good truth drug.

Brett McKay: Isn’t that illegal?

John Lisle: Probably, yeah.

Brett McKay: So yeah, and that was the of the interesting thing with the OSS with some of the stuff they were developing. A lot of the stuff they would… They throw in an idea and someone would say, “Well, that’s illegal.” I think there was one instance where they were working on counterfeit documents, creating phoney money, and someone was like, “No, you can’t do that, that’s illegal.” And they’re like, “Well, we’re gonna do it anyways.” And they did it.

John Lisle: Yeah, this is one of the things I come back to at the end of the book, thinking about… In war time especially, war time seems to justify otherwise criminal things. People seem to be more forgiving of doing certain actions in war time than any other time, because it just comes back to the idea that when you’re under distress, it’s in your best interest to defend yourself, to do anything you can to get out of that distress. So war justifies these criminal acts, or seems to, it’s used as the justification for these criminal acts. This is going to lead to a lot of trouble after World War II, because some of these same things that we’re talking about, are going to continue into the CIA. And they’re not gonna have that same kind of justification, or at least, people aren’t gonna view it the same way, and it’s gonna lead to a lot of abuses of power.

Brett McKay: Yeah, we’ll talk about that. So any other mind control technology that the OSS tried to experiment with during World War II?

John Lisle: The main thing, I guess, would be the truth drugs. There’s something that ties into that, I guess, are these disinformation campaigns, trying to convince people of believing certain things that aren’t necessarily true. One of the most prominent disinformation campaigns, or at least, kind of the popular ones nowadays, that happened during World War II from the OSS is called “The Lonely League of War Women.” The idea is that the OSS would drop pamphlets over Germany or German troops, and these pamphlets would basically say, “There is a League of Lonely War Women in Germany, and they are going to sleep with any German soldier who is wearing a specific pin on their lapel.”

Now, on the face of it, this seems like, “Why would the OSS invent this idea that there are women who are wanting to sleep with the German soldiers? That doesn’t really make sense.” The idea though, is to make the German soldiers think, “Well, who are these War Women in Germany? Who are these women in Germany who are willing to sleep with all these soldiers?” And obviously the German soldiers might start to think to themselves, “Well, could it be my wife? Could it be my girlfriend who’s being recruited to join this League of Lonely War Women to sleep with all these soldiers?” And it might discourage the German soldiers because they’re gonna think of their girlfriends sleeping with someone else, and they’ll wanna go back home and not really fight. [chuckle] So that was one attempt to manipulate ideas in Germany at the time.

Brett McKay: So you mentioned, they did some counterfeiting. So forgeries were an important part of the OSS’ work. Why was that important in their espionage work?

John Lisle: One of the main things that the OSS does is send undercover agents abroad, to either gather information, or to train resistance groups that are operating in Europe. And so if you’re sending an undercover agent abroad, they better have a good cover story, they better have a good disguise. And papers are necessary, completely necessary, for that disguise. You’re gonna need a fake passport, you’re gonna need fake ration tickets, fake train tickets, fake money. All kind of… Not necessarily fake, but forgeries that look real. And so that’s why these forgery operations are really important. Again, the R&D branch sponsors one of these forgery operations called the Documents Division, and that’s its whole job, is to produce passports that look real, to produce money, to produce ration tickets. All kinds of things that these undercover agents are going to need when they go into Europe.

Brett McKay: This reminded me of The Great Escape, where they had a documents department to create all the… Give the papers to the escaping prisoners so that once they were in France or wherever, they could get to safety.

John Lisle: [chuckle] Yeah, it’s really, really impressive, the amount of detail that goes into producing these documents. In order to… It’s not just enough to give someone a fake document that looks real, at least on the surface, you have to make sure that the exact kind of paper is being used, the exact kind of ink is being used. There are reports of these forgers roughing up the edges of the paper with sand paper to make it look like it’s a little bit worn. There are cases of them throwing it on the floor of the office and walking over it to make it look worn. You have to get the specific stamps from the specific region, so you have to have an artist who can recreate specific stamps from wherever this document is supposedly coming from. If you’re taking pictures, you better make sure that you’re taking the picture in the same kind of style that the picture is supposed to be in. For German passports, you weren’t supposed to show one of your ears. And so if you didn’t know that, you might show someone on a passport, take a picture where they have both their ears in the photo. But then that would be an obvious forgery, because that’s not supposed to be there.

Brett McKay: Well, the other thing too, the agents, a lot of them got training on how to forge signatures or forge handwriting.

John Lisle: Yeah. This is one of my favorite parts of the book is talking about who these forgers are, and how they’re training people. In some circumstances, the OSS would hire criminals to help train people how to forge things, criminals who had forged US government money, because they had some good training. They were good at forging signatures and all kinds of things. One of these criminals is referred to as, “Jim the Penman.” He supposedly could look at someone’s name, pick out a suitable pen or quill, and recreate their signature up and down the page, and he would bet someone $5 that they couldn’t pick out their original one. And so he was hired, basically, to teach some of these agents how to do forgeries, how to study someone’s handwriting and the movements of the wrist in order to recreate exactly how they write.

Brett McKay: Did the OSS develop any Mission Impossible disguise technology?

John Lisle: Well, there are several different ways that the OSS disguised people. The best ones actually tend to be fairly simple. If you wanna disguise someone, you can put iodine on their teeth to make their teeth a little yellow. You might put some whitener on their temples to make them look a little older. You might put charcoal pencil in their wrinkles to make their wrinkles deeper and make them look older. Put some newspaper in their shoes to make them taller. Stuff their cheeks with cotton in order to change the shape of their face. But there are instances, really dramatic changes happening. There are a few people who undergo facial reconstruction surgery to change the shape of their chin in order so that they would not be recognized in somewhere that they otherwise might have been. And there are ways of altering your appearance to also help you on your undercover mission. Not just changing your physical appearance, but also changing the things that you carry with you.

So, for instance, the OSS, this R&D branch, developed all kinds of things with message chambers in them, like a pencil that had holes drilled into it where you could stuff a carefully rolled up paper, a belt that had a secret message chamber in there where you could stuff messages, shoes that had false bottoms where you could put things in. There are accounts of buttons that the OSS created, these buttons would screw on the opposite way that a typical screw thread goes, so that you could put something in the button, screw it on in the opposite way that you would typically do, and then if someone was suspicious of this button, they might try to unscrew it, but they probably would… By unscrewing it, they would actually screw it in because the threads were wound the opposite way. One of the most ingenious ways to deliver messages secretly was by melting lipstick. And then you would put a message in the lipstick, you would re-cast it, and then give it to some woman who would then take it somewhere, and it’s within the lipstick, so it’s really easily concealed.

Brett McKay: So besides developing spy gadgets, the OSS also developed innovative hand-to-hand combat styles. And they brought in a guy named William Fairbairn. So tell us about this guy and his Shanghai street-fighting style that he taught OSS agents.

John Lisle: Yeah, this is one of the most odd characters of the entire book, William Fairbairn. He was a former British Royal Marine. He had been stationed in Shanghai, deterring criminal gangs, monitoring red light districts, that kind of thing. And while he was in Shanghai… This is before World War II… He had been in a number of street fights and he had been beaten up by gangs and almost dead. And one time after he was beaten up by a gang, he woke up in a hospital and he started thinking to himself that he needs to develop the fighting skills in order to protect himself. So he starts taking Jujutsu classes, and he eventually devises his own system of fighting called gutter fighting. Gutter fighting is basically… There are no rules, that is gutter fighting. There are no rules. Gouge out somebody’s eyes, throw sand in their eyes, jab their chin, do anything that you can in order to, basically, incapacitate someone who’s trying to incapacitate you first. So he develops this before World War II. And then when the war breaks out, he’s hired by the OSS and he works with the British equivalent as well, to train these agents in how to fight.

And again, some of the most common techniques within gutter fighting would be like the chin jab; you thrust your hand into someone’s chin. He commonly refers to grabbing someone’s testicles… Just doing anything you can to incapacitate someone.

Brett McKay: Yeah, just like… It’s just cheap. [chuckle] It’s just…

John Lisle: Yeah, yeah, it’s very cheap.

Brett McKay: Yeah, very cheap fighting. And yeah, he drew a crowd. People liked to come watch demonstrations he’d put on, and he was kind of… He was a big draw, he’s a crowd pleaser.

John Lisle: He definitely was. And in fact, he was taken to see President Roosevelt before, and he demonstrated some of his fighting techniques. And people were really impressed by what he was doing. He would put on demonstrations for the OSS hierarchy, and he would ask some of his recruits, some of the really large recruits, to come at him and try to throw him off the stage. And before they knew what had hit them, basically, they had found themselves falling on the front rows of the audience and he was standing at the front of the stage, the star of the show. So yeah, he was definitely something else. [chuckle]

Brett McKay: So what was the track record of the OSS, the dirty tricks department? How big of a role did they play in the war effort?

John Lisle: Their biggest role, especially the R&D branch, is really helping these resistance forces, supplying them with things like The Mole, or other ways to sabotage trains. That’s probably the most effective thing that this R&D branch specifically did. As far as the OSS in general, it was really important that the United States had good intelligence from abroad. That’s probably the most important thing the OSS did, is gather intelligence and have analysts back home who could analyze that intelligence and figure out, “Where are German troops moving? Where are they stationed? How many people do they have?” So that’s probably the most important thing the OSS did. But as far as the R&D branch specifically, helping the resistance forces in Europe sabotage the German military, is probably its most important contribution to the war effort.

Brett McKay: And what happened to the OSS after the war ended?

John Lisle: Once the war ended, the OSS pretty much dissolved. It had been effective during the war, but after the war, there were a few reports that came out, specifically, one report, the Park Report. And it was written by someone who was affiliated with military intelligence, so there’s this kind of bureaucratic rivalry. And they just lambasted the OSS, saying that it didn’t do anything, it was ineffective. And so the OSS eventually gets… Basically dissolves after World War II. A few components of it do survive… Or did survive. The research and analysis branch which was analyzing intelligence that was coming in from abroad, that moved to the State Department. But otherwise, most of the OSS is pretty much liquidated.

Brett McKay: And then eventually, a couple of years later, the CIA formed. How did the ethos of the dirty tricks department carry over to the CIA?

John Lisle: Yeah, in a few ways. So a lot of the people who have been involved with the OSS eventually joined with the CIA, so a similar kind of culture develops there. The CIA is created in 1947 by the National Security Act, and the main head of the CIA, pretty quickly after that, is Allen Dulles. He’s gonna be the longest serving Director of Central Intelligence. He starts wondering what kind of branches he should create with the CIA, and he actually talks with Stanley Lovell, the head of this R&D branch. And he asks him, “Do you think I should create a branch within the CIA that does something similar to what your R&D branch did during World War II?” And Lovell says, “I think you should.” And so the CIA eventually develops a branch called the TSS, the Technical Services Staff. And it does a lot of similar things to what the R&D branch did during World War II. Another really important consequence or influence that the OSS has on the CIA, is that a lot of the people within the CIA get inspired by what happens within the OSS, and particularly, what was going on within that R&D branch.

John Lisle: So Lovell, Stanley Lovell, had been experimenting with truth drugs, and building gadgets, and thinking about assassinations, these same kind of ideas get taken up by specific people within the CIA.

Brett McKay: And then how did that play out in the CIA? And how did that eventually lead to some controversy?

John Lisle: Yeah, one of the main things this is going to lead to is that in 1953, the CIA creates a program to investigate mind control, “Is mind control possible? And if so, how might we achieve it?” This program is called MKUltra, a notorious program that the CIA has. The head of this program was a man named Sidney Gottlieb. Sidney Gottlieb, like Stanley Lovell, was a chemist. And he was the head of MKUltra, this mind control program. And when he first started this program, he was asking himself… He didn’t really know how to study mind control, he hadn’t been involved in this kind of thing before. And so he starts looking at historical records, trying to figure out what things he should do, what should he investigate. Well, he actually comes across the OSS files of the R&D branch, and in those files, he’s inspired to do a lot of things that the R&D branch had done. Except, this time, he’s not doing it during war time, he’s doing it during peace time. It’s Cold War, but peace time. And so Sidney Gottlieb is pretty directly inspired by Stanley Lovell to conduct a lot of these experiments that happen under MKUltra, especially, drug experiments, like truth drug experiments.

Brett McKay: And some of those experiments, they were basically giving LSD to people, right?

John Lisle: Yes, yeah. Well, okay, so here’s another connection. The OSS, remember when it’s conducting these drug experiments? Lovell had hired this narcotics officer named George White to conduct those THC experiments? Who does Sidney Gottlieb hire for MKUltra to slip LSD to people? George White. The same exact George White, the same person. So there’s a really direct connection between these two branches and programs.

Brett McKay: And again, that’s the point you make, is that the stuff that the CIA did during peace time, it was… People kinda looked to give a blind eye during war times, “Well, it’s war. We gotta do what we gotta do” In peace time, things change.

John Lisle: Yes, yes. This is one of the concluding things in the book. Sidney Gottlieb and MKUltra are doing things that are pretty similar to all the things that the R&D branch was up to during World War II.

Brett McKay: Well John, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

John Lisle: Thank you so much. Yeah, your questions were really well thought out. So I think that really contributed to a great conversation. If someone wants to know more, the best place probably to learn more about this, or to at least keep up with my work, is on Twitter. I’m on Twitter, @johnlisle, J-O-H-N, L-I-S-L-E. So I post occasionally, pictures from the archives. If I come across interesting documents, Twitter is mostly where I post interesting things like that. And, I guess, if anyone wants to, you can visit my website, johnlislehistorian.com. And that doesn’t have too much, but it’s just kind of the summary of some of the things that I’ve been interested in, the future work that I’m going to be doing. And, yeah, so those are probably the two best places.

Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, John Lisle, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

John Lisle: Yeah, thank you so much. This has been great.

Brett McKay: My guest here is John Lisle. He’s the author of the book, “The Dirty Tricks Department.” It’s available on amazon.com and book stores everywhere. You can find more information about his work at his website, johnlislehistorian.com. Also, check out our shownotes at aom.is/dirtytricks, where you’ll find links to resources where you can delve deeper into this topic.

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