Andrew Roberts - The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War

hey thank you hello everybody right so he start the video if we are serious about the future of a free society we need to be serious about reading there is a wonderful throwaway moment in the movie Animal House that I've always loved there's a shot of students walking across the campus of Faber College and they pass a statue of the founder Emil Faber and they're on the pedestal inscribed in marble is the slogan knowledge is good it is an in arguable but useless insight and I think it's very close to the way most Americans feel about reading reading is good there is as of yet no larger group of Americans that are opposed to reading but we have a kind of vague faith and that this is probably a positive social activity based largely on the fact that people who read well do better in school and might get a better job I regret to say that even though I am a writer I probably shared that vague sentiment that reading is good when I came to the National Endowment for the Arts nearly six years ago I knew that literature was important I knew that information was important but I never understood the deep personal and civic transformation that happens in an individual when they become a regular reader let me explain how I came to this belief about four years ago we were doing the study called reading at risk which analyzed the reading behavior of Americans in relationship to everything else they do in their lives and what we discovered surprised us now I wasn't surprised that people who read went to the theater more or went to museums more but when we started comparing the data we discovered some things that no one expected when you read it has a transformative impact both on your individual life and on your community life who would have thought for example that readers did volunteer in charity work at three to four times the level of non readers there was something going on that we didn't understand now we tend to think of reading as a passive activity you know you sit down you read a book it almost seems like a way of escaping from the pressures of our daily life what we learned was something radically different reading is an active engaged enterprise that requires the use of focused linear attention the development of your imagination and the use of your memory this over time develops a depth of interior life in the individual it gives them a heightened sense of their own destiny of their own individuality and then and this is the most surprising part because you understand yourself better you begin to recognize that other people have lives as rich and complex as your own that they too have an interior life that is partially hidden from you this fundamentally changes the way we look at ourselves versus other people and how we live in society what this led us to was the conclusion that reading is a basic Civic activity that a healthy democracy which requires the engaged and informed participation of individuals is also a political system which requires readers people who in a sense take their own lives more seriously and take the lives of the communities in which they live more series I don't think Americans are dumber than they were 25 years ago but our culture is the media is one of the ways in which we see the world outside of ourselves but what does the American media show us today almost no coverage of arts or serious ideas instead they are focused overwhelmingly on trying to sell us things I have a recurring nightmare I am in Rome I am walking into the Sistine Chapel I look up at the ceiling and I see Michelangelo's supremely beautiful fresco of the creation of man in which God reaches out his hand to give humanity the gift of life and then I look in Adams hand and see a can of Diet Pepsi I worry that we're living in a culture which is increasingly dumbed down and increasingly passive I'm sitting in my office in Washington DC right now and you can hear outside the window the horns of a protest going on on Pennsylvania Avenue I'm not quite sure what is going on but I like it democracy requires engaged and informed citizens and the best way I know of creating and sustaining those citizens is through reading reading is not escapism it is an invitation to activism and now please welcome to the stage festival founder James cobbler library director David Bryant library and Rancho Mirage mayor Dana Hobart everyone here is sometimes very important but we have a few distinguished guests that read gravitas job festival I'm gonna ask him if they would mind standing first of all that was Dana joy who is just been named California poet laureate he is going to be speaking with Lord Dobbs Lord Dobbs would you stand up and lady Dobbs they're just given come in from England the creative house of cards he'll be speaking tomorrow night can you hear me and he and Dana will be discussing the dumbing down of American and British society not to be missed all right to to our guests of honor I want to first welcome an author soon to be a new book but our senator our beloved Senator Barbara Boxer and her husband Stuart would you please stand Thank You Barbara Barbara's new book the art of tough is available on amazon.com I just ordered my first five she's agreed to be a keynote speaker for 2017 so please order her books we need to get those sales going all right I also want to welcome Dean Harrington from USC deep we use wave say hello thank you and I'm really honored very special friends of Helene to mine is governor Gray Davis as wife Sharron Davis please stand we also have former Secretary of the Commerce and our best US trade ambassador Mickey Kantor and his beautiful wife Heidi Schulman welcome I had to point out a late arrival but we all are so excited for Saturday night why Lee Child just came in from London Lee Child will be speaking Saturday night and I want to welcome a really a local legend Kaye Ballard her is just about her 90th birthday I want to say this festival would not have been possible without the Godfather and that's Geoff Cowan and I want Jeff and I his wife Eileen Adams to stand up jeff is speaking tomorrow morning at 9:00 a.m. please please be there and we have one more this is really I I just we love them former state treasurer of California sister of our governor daughter of a governor Kathleen Brown and her husband van Gordon saara former president of CBS News CBS Sports and Fox Television News so I'm very proud about City Council and I want that I think we lived living in 92 to 700 is a joy and a blessing and I want to thank our City Council I asked them to stand and our city manager Randy buddy please stand being knowledged for your support the writers festival and now I want to introduce really the partner of this the Godfather Brian David Head Librarian Thank You Jamie and as librarians we keep a low profile but not here not now we are ecstatic not quite as ecstatic as Jamie but very close no one is as ecstatic as Jamie we are with the 1,000 smartest people in the Coachella Valley our readers we are in year three of the largest most successful best organized and most respected writers event centered in a public library in the United States of America Thank You Jamie cobbler or a founder Thank You Rancho Mirage City Council thank you to our more than 100 angels thank you to Geoff Cowan and sunnylands thank you to the library foundation thank you to the library staff Thank You city staff and our volunteers and thank you most of all to our readers you will enjoy three great Rancho Mirage library venues at the 2016 festival you will find all three rooms equipped with t-coil technology that's for audio clarity each program will feature important ideas from an international roster of today's best writers this year you will have 48 author talks and panel discussions in two days at the library you will enjoy six author talks in three nights here at the Helene Galen auditorium Helene Galen would you please stand up helene is a treasure we love you helene the Rancho Mirage Writers Festival is the celebration of books writers and you our readers all of this in our beautiful resort city in El Nino well he is sleeping in the Pacific Ocean but he even likes our festival as our weather today shows now it is my privilege to introduce our favorite reader the great mayor of Rancho Mirage Dana Hobart yay thank you David El Nino is not sleeping with the power vested in me I gave it directions not to be here during the festival one of the perks that comes with being mayor it's my pleasure to welcome you to the third annual Rancho Mirage writers festival and truly if a festival could be considered international this one could be we have over ten writers from all around the world and that we are expanding all the time the one reason that we're doing so well has to be because a founder Jaime cobbler Jamie is clearly a visionary I have no doubt that he envisioned what we're seeing that some of us are surprised by it that this could be put together in such a brief period of time and the first year was a success the second year was a success this as well not only a visionary but he has boundless energy never seen anybody I mean a guy who carries around a whistle wherever he goes very unique but he gets things done if attacked he has an energy level of nobody I have ever seen I would like to say also that we could not be doing this having this great affair at a public library without the support more than support the strong encouragement of our library staff David and Susan cook his associate she is the assistant director and the whole library staff the idea of having a festival a book festival in a library as David mentioned is I don't know if it's unique or not but it doesn't happen much I don't think and to have it in what many think and those of us who live in Rancho Mirage believe that we're having it probably in the best library best small city library in the entire nation wikipedia says that the written word began about 3200 BC in Mesopotamia and if that occurred in January of that year I'm not talking about hieroglyphics I'm talking about the written word conveying ideas if that began in January of that year we are now celebrating the 5200 and 16th anniversary of the written word and we are doing it literally and I do not think this is hyperbolic to say we are doing it literally with some of the finest writers in the history of man one essential ingredient that we have in this festival is that the people who attend can speak with all of these authors they can meet with am asked questions about your writing style their writing style should I dump my project that I've been working on for 18 years and you know I'm on page 37 so I'd give it up and I ask the questions and I I certainly have a question like all of you do my question happen to be directed toward Lee Child I would like to know yes or no finally I'm tired of staying in suspense is Jack Reacher ever going to buy a car or a watch I mean what is this at any rate it is such a pleasure to welcome you to what I know will be an event that you will remember for many years to come because of the people you've seen in the people you will see so it's my role as mayor to declare that the third annual Rancho Mirage writers festival is now open so are we ready for the show so last spring Charles Krauthammer visited the desert and Helene and I had dinner with Charles Krauthammer and I said to him at dinner before he spoke I said what are you reading he said I just finished Napoleon eyes Oh Andrew Roberts I said he's coming to speak at our writers festival he said it's the best biography but Jamie read his book on World War two he said I didn't want it to end so ladies and gentlemen straight from London we have the famed British historian whose book became number two on the London Times bestsellers book on World War two and tomorrow at 11 o'clock he's speaking on Napoleon which is you know one the LA Book Festival Award for best biography and Harvey Weinstein his company has just optioned it for a major TV series so later we please join me in giving a warm welcome to Andrew Roberts ladies and gentlemen it's a great honor to be invited to address you at this keynote speech and thank you very much indeed Jamie for those kind words it's perfectly true that my book got to number two on the bestseller list beaten only by a book about Michael Jackson I think it's wonderful that that Jamie should have spent an entire year working on this festival although not it turns out quite enough time to get a pair of trousers that matches his pinstripe jacket area these things happen in the in the 25 years that I have been writing and researching and thinking about the Third Reich which my wife points out to me constantly is actually twice as long as the existence of the Third Reich it has become more and more apparent to me that the reason that the Nazis lost was because they were Nazis Adolf Hitler came to power because he was a Nazi he set up and started the second world war because he was a Nazi but he also lost that war because he was a Nazi on the 22nd of June 1941 he unleashed Operation Barbarossa the largest invasion in the history of mankind over 3 million men in 160 divisions attacked Russia in a surprise attack it was extraordinary that it was a surprise attack Stalin had been given 990 warnings no fewer than 90 warnings including by the British and the Americans and yet the only person that he ever trusted a man who trusted nobody the only person he ever trusted Stalin was a Dolf Hitler the most untrustworthy person in the 20th century and the initial attack was unbelievably successful over three and a half million Russian soldiers captured in the first couple of weeks for something like 40% little over 40% of the Red Army Air Force was destroyed on the ground didn't even have a chance to take off its commander Lieutenant General Ivan carpets committed suicide that afternoon which in Stalin's Russia was a sensible career move and for me the most central statistic of the second world war is that for every five Germans killed in combat by which I don't mean bombed from the air civilians bombed from the air in Germany but killed on the battlefield soldiers killed on a battlefield for every five of them four died on the Eastern Front and so it was absolutely essential that that that that front should hold and ultimately through the battles of Moscow and Stalingrad and Kursk and finally Berlin should be successful and yet the reason that Hitler started this attack was entirely political it wasn't it was ideological it was a Nazi ideology the ideology of course of the laban drowned the sense of the living space that the master race his his ubermensch his superhuman master race was going to carve out from the Slavic untermensch the subhumans that he despised so much because of his vicious and hateful and resentful Nazi ideology the second reason of course was his loathing of the Jews over 50% of European Jews lived in the Soviet Union in 1941 and so he was going to be able to annihilate them and also of course he was going to get to what Joseph Goebbels his propaganda ministry minister called a final reckoning with the Bolsheviks against whom he had been fighting on the street corners of Berlin for so long in various other German cities and of course it didn't go the way he planned at all as I mentioned four-fifths of the Germans who died died there and one of the reasons was the absolutely sorry here always display the product was the horrific cold the - got down to minus 40 degrees and yet include the includes windchill factor and yet Adolf Hitler and had not done the basic thing that one would have assumed that he would have done especially of course as Napoleon had invaded 112 years later and come to grief in Russia and which was to ensure that all his soldiers had proper winter clothing and the reason for this is his belief in the in the ubermensch in the in the idea that his through Nazi ideology that German soldiers were inherently superior to everybody else and he was we get this very much from a quotation from the 12th of August 1942 where he was staying he was at the he spent most of the war over 300 sorry over 60% of the war at the wolf hunt sir the Wolf's Lair out in eastern Poland now what was Eastern Prussia I do recommend anybody who's who's anywhere near there to go there says it's a extraordinarily sinister place you can go and see the place that the 20th of July bomb went off and and it was there that he was talking to him 'la and he said this about showing quite how little he appreciated the danger that the cold was going to ultimately play on his on his soldiers he said this reminiscing about the cold winters having to change into long trousers was always a misery to me even with the temperature of 10 below zero I used to go about in lederhosen the feeling of freedom they give you is wonderful abandoning my shorts was one of the biggest sacrifices I had to make anything up to five degrees below zero I didn't even notice quite a number of young people of today already wear shorts all the year round it's just a question of habit in the future I shall have an SS Highland Brigade in later hosen anyway of course nearly needless to say once the temperature got down tonight and minus 40 it was truly horrific gurbles had to put out two demands that the women of Germany gave their mink coats to be sent off for the soldiers to wear on the Eastern Front and the Italian journalist Curzio mal aparte was sitting in the Euro Pesce cafe in Warsaw which is still there actually funny enough to this day when the German wounded came off the railway station and and came through into Warsaw and he wrote this suddenly I was struck with horror and realized that they had no eyelids I had already seen soldiers with lidless eyes on the platform of the Minsk station a few days previously on my way from Smolensk the ghastly cold of that winter had the strangest consequences thousands and thousands of soldiers had lost their limbs thousands and thousands had their ears their noses their fingers and their sexual organs ripped off by the frost many had lost their hair many had lost their eyelids singed by the cold the eyelid drops off like a piece of dead skin and their future was only lunacy the next disaster to overtake him within six months of the last of this last entirely self-induced disaster was his decision to go to war against you against the Americans the 11th of December 1941 he declared war against America and the reason he did this was also down to Nazi ideology astonishingly he had he actually knew about the extraordinary productive power of the United States he wrote a second book as well as mine Kampf which a lot of people forget it was published with a rather unimaginative title of Hitler's second book and in it he writes about the the Ford Motor Company and the way in which time and motion studies were worked in America and the extraordinary kepada capacity of the United States and yet in December 1941 he declared war against this country which is uninvaded and which he had certainly no no prospects or plans for invading and he believed that in his own words and in also the words of Ribbentrop none of the Nazis by the way had ever been to America apart from Ribbentrop who in the 1920s had come to had come to New York in order to sell champagne somewhat unsuccessfully as well and but he believed therefore and everybody else believed that he was the the absolute you know world expert on America amongst the Nazis and he said that's because there were so many Jews and so many blacks in the senior reaches of American politics he clearly hadn't seen the actual the actual personnel of the Roosevelt administration and therefore the Americans were not going to be able to fight and Hitler himself told told Molotov when Molotov visited Berlin in 1914 he told him that the first time that if the American if Germany went to war with America the first time that America would be able to actually fight and put men in the European theater would be in the year nineteen seventy needless say in fact of course the United States landed a quarter of a million men with Operation Torch in November 1942 who then in the July of 1943 moved over into Sicily and September 1943 across from to the mainland of of Italy and then marched all the way up taking Rome on the 5th of June 1944 the day before the great cross-channel attack so he could not have been more wrong about that too and he also extraordinarily again putting his racial precepts first decided that there were he was not going to didn't need to go to war of course with with America because he had no treaty obligations with Japan at all but he then after he had gone to war on the side of Japan did nothing about it he they didn't even exchange anti-tank information between the two countries and this too was because although at the time in 1937 of the anti Comintern pact various German scientists took Japanese skulls out of the ethnographic Museum in Berlin and and and took calipers and worked out from this entirely for propaganda motives as you can imagine but in fact the Japanese were an Aryan people he he he didn't believe it himself and he didn't actually try to coordinate with the Japanese so effectively there were two entirely separate wars that were going on at the same time he also put politics ahead in his choice of generals we know pretty much every word that was said in the Fuhrer conferences from December 1942 all the way through to just a few days before his death in April 1945 because he had the stenographers who had nothing to do after he closed down the Reichstag instead take down every word that he and everybody else said in the Fuhrer conferences and so therefore we know that he listened it's not true that the Fuhrer didn't listen he listened sometimes for up to an hour when men like Erich von Manstein and in Rommel and GERD von wound stared and Heinz Guderian men who had worked and been in the General Staff who'd had senior positions in the First World War when Hitler himself had only been a corporal the these men who understood anew about ground strategy would be listened to by the Fuhrer and then at the end of about an hour or so Hitler would do exactly what he originally said he was going to do at the beginning of the meeting and so after the bomb plot after the 20th of July bomb part in 1944 when his generals attempted to kill him what he did was to trust those generals who were fanatical Nazis men like Rendell ik and Myrna and Krebs rather than the people who were the best generals of the day another classic error of putting his his politics and the and the best interests of the Nazi Party before the best interest of the ver market and and the country and then of course you come on to the whole question of the Holocaust between 1939 and 1944 the number of Germans working in war production factories fell from 39 million to 29 million a drop of 26 percent and yet at the same time that he desperately needed people he was indulging in the ultimate nazi dream of trying to make europe you dan fry he was killing six million of his most intelligent hard-working and well-educated people it made absolutely no sense in terms of the war and of course one of the things it did was to and before the war was as soon as he came to power in 1933 and then onwards lose the exact people who ultimately were to create the war winning weapon of the nuclear bomb between 1900 and 1930 to the Germans won in the in that period just before Hitler came to power the Germans won 13 Nobel prizes in physics and chemistry as against America's 5 from the period 1950 tonight to the year 2000 with all of the great brain drain that that happened from from Germany and and other occupied countries to America when Germany also won 13 the Americans won 67 when our he had when I interviewed the military second Winston Churchill's military secretary for my first book a quarter of a century ago now we had a very fine lunch and he said to me at the end of it you know I often think why it was that we won the war and I keep coming to the conclusion that our German scientists were cleverer than their German scientists so what did you have on the other side well the answer was a total contrast and she's worth it's worth looking at what was happening with Stalin at the time although of course he was just he was a he was a totalitarian dictator just as bad as as Hitler in many ways he learnt on the first day of Operation Barbarossa he had something like a nervous breakdown he went back to his dacha he assumed that he was going to be arrested in fact by the Politburo when they came to to visit him but what he was able to do was to was to allow his best generals men like Rocco zovsky and Jacques oov and Connie EV and others all the ones that he hadn't wound up actually shooting in the late 1930s and to exercise far more influence and power and decision-making capacity than Hitler was allowing his generals it was a he was effectively fighting Stalin a a western-style war and what I mean by western-style war is the way in which the combined Chiefs of Staff the American Joint Chiefs and the British Chiefs of Staff managed to have a system between them where they would have Rao's of course they would when there's a marvelous quote from a historian called Ronald Lewin who says that there's no law in warfare by which men can die in battle but that staff officers could not be vexed and and these staff officers were vexed you would have situation where the chief of the Imperial General Staff the man in charge of the British Chiefs of Staff Sir Alan later later Lord Allen Brook would would be sitting in front of Winston Churchill breaking pencils in half saying no I disagree with you prime minister must be very off-putting to have a flinty Ulsterman breaking pencil in in your face and and of course you also had the situation in the American Chiefs of Staff where where General George C Marshall the u.s. army chief of staff would bang his hand on the table in order to try to stop Admiral Ernest King the head of the US Navy from being even more Anglophone beak and rhubarb ative the knee was under normal circumstances and there was one point where at where general WeDo Meyer said that he wanted during a meeting to lean over and sock Allen Brook in the jaw in the words of his own diary but the point of these are of these great these great conferences and you will know the names of them Tehran and Casablanca and Yalta and the rest of them where these 10 conferences where they all came together was that the debates and the arguments between the people there were conducted in of course not open because they had to be secret but in the in the in the Democratic fashion nobody was scared nobody was worried for their for their lives or even their jobs they said what they believed and they stuck to their beliefs and of course there was an enormous amount of horse trading that went on but it was the Democratic way of making war sometimes the situation could get so toughened and and hard-fought that the room was was was emptied sometimes he would have 60 or 70 people in the room and Brooke on one side and Marshall on the American side would agree that all of the Vice Chiefs and the assistant Chiefs and everybody else had to leave so that the six key figures were able to have it out and this actually happened in the San Jose at the Chateau Frontenac in Quebec the sextons conference in 1943 the room is actually exactly the same now as it was at the time of the conference and at the year and so all of the Vice Admirals and vice generals and so on went out into the next door room and at the end of the meeting two enormous blocks of ice were brought in and lord mountbatten the idea was that they were going to is a completely mad idea when one thinks about it now but nonetheless it's it was a it was a scheme was to lassoo an iceberg up in the up in the arctic and bring it down tube use as an aircraft carrier a sort of unsinkable aircraft carrier off the Norman coast in 1944 ad endure and in order to prove the the capacities of something called pykrete which was a mixture of wood pulp and ice that they were going to cover this this iceberg in Lord Mountbatten took out his his revolver and first fired into the block of normal ice which completely disintegrated proving that all the love suffer had to do is to get one bomb on the iceberg and the whole thing would be a complete disaster and then he fired at the pykrete the block of ice made of pykrete and in the room in the in the words of Alan Brooks diary the bullets buzzed around the room like an angry bee quite what Mountbatten could have been thinking of trying to demonstrate the Ricochet capacity of bichri's to a roomful of Chiefs of Staff is is anyone's guess but nonetheless one of the young officers who'd had to leave the room a little bit earlier said oh my god they're shooting at each other now one of the ways in which in which Churchill in particular was able to calm these these conferences and when they got particularly aggressive and tough he was able to to make everybody come down a notch was through the fabulous use of course of his sense of humor and there's application in the November of 1943 when they were trying to get turkey into the war not a very successful policy owing to the fact that Turkey actually only declared war against Nazi Germany in March 1945 but nonetheless remember that it's November and the argument was whether or not they try to coerce the Turks or whether or not they should appease and suck up to the Turks and be as nice as possible try to get them into the war in that way and and the debate had gone on and we've been pretty aggressive and tough and at at one point Winston Churchill made in my view the fabulous Jake tell Turkey that Christmas is coming and so when you contrast as one mast the the kind of war leadership that one got from Winston Churchill who was perfectly willing to and we're about to play a clip Aaron is going to play a clip fairly soon of of a speech of Winston Churchill's in which he does the exact opposite of Hitler Hitler and Goebbels tried to pretend that there was no such thing as the bombing of Berlin at the beginning when it became clear that there was they ignored it and Hitler in fact never visited a bomb site he never had himself photographed anywhere near any any bomb victims and he actually had little curtains installed in his mercedes-benz so that he wouldn't have to see anybody as he was driving to and from places in in Berlin and that they wouldn't be able to see him I does so so that was one way of dealing with it the other way was to do what Winston Churchill did which was to level with the British people to tell them how bad it was not to try to hide the the horrors and the and the things that were going to be necessary the blood toil tears and sweat they were going to be necessary in order to win that war I'm just going to play you a little clip of his great we shall fight them on the beaches speech of the 4th of June 1940 the final paragraph of which is very short it's only about the last paragraph was only about 160 words and all of them very interestingly for his for the tricks of his trade the sort of technique of his speaking all of them are in Old English they are words that come from the anglo-saxon dictionary except for two and all of the others are so Aaron take it away so I have myself full confidence that you've ordered our duty if nothing is neglected and if the best arrangements are made as they are being made we heard prove ourselves once more able to defend our Island home the ride out the storm of war and to outlive the Menace of tyranny if necessary videos if necessary alone at any rate that is what we're going to try to do government every matter them that is a will of Parliament in the nation the British Empire the French Republic linked together in their code and indeed will defend to the death penaity soil aiding each other like good comrades to the adverse to their strength we shall go on to the end we shall fight in France to fight on the Seas and oceans we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air we shall defend our island whatever the cost may be we shall fight on the beaches to fight on the landing grounds we shall fight in the fields and in the streets we shall fight in the Hills we shall never surrender and if because I do not for a moment believe this island or a large part of it but subjugated and starving in our Empire beyond the seas armed and guarded by the body freak would carry on the struggle until in God's good time the new world was all its power like steps passed to the rescue and a liberation never ever fails to send a tingle down the spine that moment and that paragraph where he goes on he starts right to the end and then we shall never surrender as I say those are all of them all of them words that can be found in Old English except for the word surrender which comes from the French the major battles between the British and the the Americans in the creation of grand strategy were of course the timing of the cross-channel attack the which turned into Operation Overlord on the 6th of June 1944 and up until the Trident conference of May 1943 FDR had supported Churchill and Alan Brooke against his own chief of staff u.s. army chief of staff George Marshall and over the timing of that the British hadn't wanted to re to go back onto the continent of from which of course we'd been ignominiously flung off at Dunkirk in June 1940 until they were absolutely certain that that wasn't going to happen again that German counter-attack was not going to be successful again when I went up to university I was taught by my historian Dom's never to ever write the word inevitable because nothing in history is inevitable except for German counter-attack and when one looks at the history of German counter-attack in the Second World War one that one could understand why these men who had of course fought in the front in the trenches Allen Brooke and and Winston Churchill I didn't want to re-enter the continent any quicker than they did but at the Trident conference FDR changed his mind he supported Marshall and therefore they came up with the date of the first of May 1944 to to have Operation Overlord and by that it had to be put back of course because of questions to do with landing craft but nonetheless it ultimately took place only about five weeks after that and that was the point really the absolutely right time to attack not least because the the Russians by that stage were crushing the the vert marked in the East in operation Bagration for example the Russians managed to kill or capture kill wound or capture five hundred and ten thousand Germans so it was absolutely essential that we got back onto the continent as soon as possible and and the timing was was was really superb by that stage the Battle of the Atlantic had been won in in the July and August of 1943 the Germans had added an extra rotor to the Enigma machine plunging all of the shark code into the naval code into gobbledygook until December 1943 when they were able to break back in and therefore sends the send the forces to the right places to intercept the u-boat Wolfpack's the on the actual day of d-day such was the air superiority over the beaches of Dunkirk that while the Luftwaffe were able to fly 318 sorties the Allies threw flew no fewer than 13,000 168 an extraordinary difference the Allies had bombed had dropped 18,000 400 tons of bombs on Normandy in in April 1944 alone and they had the mulberry harbors were that weren't ready in 1943 and the pipeline under the ocean Pluto which was to bring millions of of gallons of gasoline over as well so the timing by June 1944 was absolutely perfect and so extraordinarily the the person who of course had the power by then was FDR in the calendar year 1944 when Britain was able to build 28,000 warplane and the Germans and Russians were able to produce 40,000 warplanes each the united states produced ninety eight thousand war planes almost as much the whole of the rest of the world put together and so of course FDR was able to to choose the the timing and the date and as it turned out also of course the commander in chief for the attack and and it was a fabulously successful one just to conclude another thing that that strikes me when i when i read these books and and work in these papers and go to these archives which as i say i've been doing now for a quarter of a century is there was one area that constantly comes back to me and that is the way in which these great leaders alan brook george marshall winston churchill FDR these are the these are the people who decided where to attack when to attack under what circumstances with kyta with the forces you know men like Patton and Montgomery and Eisenhower and Bradley and so on are very important figures of course on the battlefield but they were only able to use the forces given to them by the four masters and commanders back back home and what they did was something truly extraordinary I think in that they all worried desperately desperately these are men who had pressures that I know we have very distinguished people here here in the audience tonight but I don't think any of them would for a moment claim that they are have the kind of pressures on them where day-in day-out the fates of tens of thousands of men lives and deaths of tens of thousands of men are on their decision hang on their decision and it was something that despite the doubts they have and the doubts they expressed to their diaries and the doubts they expressed and on occasion to their wives Winston Churchill said the night before d-day that he feared he told Clementine Churchill that he feared that there would be thousands of Allied dead in the in the surf of the Normandy beaches and yet when it came to the press and it came to Parliament and Congress when it came to the public when it came to their own staffs they showed nothing other than complete certainty in ultimate victory and that ladies and gentlemen strikes me as the very quintessence of leadership thank you very much

Channel: Rancho Mirage Library & Observatory

Views: 12,536

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Keywords: Rancho Mirage Writers Festival, 2016, Rancho Mirage Public Library

Id: P24sdLM43PQ

Length: 51min 56sec (3116 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 07 2016