good morning ladies and gentlemen thank you all for turning out again I hope that extra hour of sleep was worthwhile either for sleep or for a later night last night uh a couple of housekeeping notes before we begin this morning's program uh we're going to Anchor around 1:30 uh and from the anchoring we're going to take Tenders in uh the military will all be on basically a ferry it's a huge tender uh we need the military folks to assemble here at 1:15 originally it was going to be 100 p.m. but we don't need to hold you down here for a full 15 extra minutes so 115 back here the cultural folks that are going to be going off on St Peter Port tour uh please meet in the main bar just right on the fifth floor down here at 145 so 115 and 145 couple of reminders you need to bring your boarding card the little leather with your silver card in there um I would recommend you bring your map guide that was delivered two nights ago I believe in your uh in your room this will give you an idea of what gurny is and where you are on gurny so that the guides can reference it during the touring uh the temperature is going to be about a pretty constant 56 overcast a slight wind not much of a chance for rain but those red jackets would be very helpful if it does rain or if it is windy um sunscreen hat all the usual um and I think that's it so 115 for the military here in the show Lounge 145 for the cultural right over there in the main bar thank [Music] you well ready for another great day and uh everybody geared up and ready to go locked and loaded so uh Rick Atkinson's here with us again today to uh uh tell us about the buildup for the opening of the second front and the long awaited uh cross Channel attack and uh he's going to talk about Allied planning and the planner uh who worked on what is now known and has been known ever since as Operation Overlord uh large D-Day invasion that we talked about some already uh the last few days his latest book in his Trilogy guns at last Light uh although regrettably not available for sale here on the ship along with any of the other books everybody's asking me about but you can go online and order them from our store and they'll be home when you get there so uh but it's a great great book uh I encourage all of you to read it if you have not so he's going to shed some more light uh on guns at last Light Rick come on up here join me in welcoming and I hope that one doesn't fall because it's black it does I go dry thanks Nick all right thank you Nick thank you Jeremy and thanks to all of you I've really enjoyed your company individually and collectively over the last few days and look forward to chatting a lot more over the remaining week that we've got uh something I should have confessed probably on the first night after we boarded I don't know about Rob and Don uh but when I start going like this as I'm speaking that means I don't know what I'm talking about so let's imagine that it's 70 years ago in fact 70 years 2 weeks and 3 days it's May 15th 1944 at St Paul's School on Hammer Smith Road in London where Dwight Eisenhower Winston Churchill Omar Bradley George Patton King George V 6 and several dozen of the most senior British and American commanders have gathered to review for a last time the plan known as Overlord it's the plan for the invasion of France which at that point is scheduled for June 5th three weeks later and they gather in an auditorium at St Paul's School it's not quite as elegant as this one the generals and Admirals are seated on hard wooden benches normally reserved for school boys they're labeled rows B through J and because German bombs have broken all 700 windows at St Paul's School even though it's the middle of May it's cold as a meat locker in the auditorium the auditorium is called the model room and the generals and Admirals are bundled up in their overcoats and on the cockpit at the base of this Auditorium is a huge plaster of Parish relief map 6 in to the mile and it shows that section of the French Coast Where the River s spills into the Atlantic in Normandy and as they discuss the plan and what is going to happen on the day of the invasion there's a British Brigadier and he's wearing no skid socks and he's shuffling around with a pointer as they discuss different Geographic locations the beaches for example Utah Omaha gold Juno sword and towns that no one in America has ever heard of before St low can cherborg and over on the very edge of the map Paris and as they talk about this the Brigadier points to these different places places they talk about their problems the biggest problem that they have initially is getting across what in the official Army history is called an ugly piece of water called the English Channel this is the most complex undertaking in the history of warfare and the channel is only 21 Mi wide at its narrowest point but for nearly a thousand years invaded armies going one way or another have found more grief than glory in trying to get across the channel and one British planner suggested that the only solution was tow over the assault beaches already assaulted the US war department thinking through how do we assault beaches when we know that they're going to be lots of Germans waiting if we come conventionally by sea and if we come by air by glider or parachute in Airborne operations we also know that's going to be very hazardous because there going to be lots of Germans waiting on those Landing zones and Drop Zones what are the Alternatives so somebody comes up with a bright idea let's dig a tunnel under the English Channel and there was a study done and the officers who did the study reported back to the war department yes sir we can do this it'll take 15,000 miners a year to ex excavate 55,000 tons of spoil but we can do this the one thing they could never figure out was what happened when that first minor popped his head out of the hole in Normandy and the entire German 7th Army was waiting for him so they went back to thinking more conventionally as they had to there were so many issues that they were trying to think through and anticipate they had their own acronym pinwe problems of the invasion of Northwest Europe so for example among the pinwe issues there was anxiety that the Germans would fly over England and drop rats infected with Bubonic plague and there were bounties offered on rat carcasses in Britain to test for plague there was anxiety that the Germans would fly over London and drop what were called radioactive agents and there were Guyer counters hidden around London to test for radioactivity the Allies had stocked 160,000 tons of chemical Munitions in Britain and in the Mediterranean lest the war in Normandy turn chemical as of course it had in World War I and there were two target lists I found them at the national archives in College Park Maryland both of them signed by Eisenhower two target lists for chemical attack by the Allies if the Germans use chemicals first the first list list listed Target sites that were based on caring about French civilian casualties the second target list not so much and we would have hit with mustard gas and fos Gene and other chemical munition virtually every Road intersection in Normandy it didn't come to that the guy who's responsible for all of this is somebody you've perhaps heard of Dwight David Eisenhower in the late spring of 1944 he's 53 years old he's smoking four packs of cigarettes a day his blood pressure is 176 over 110 he's sub stantially hypertensive he's got persistent headaches he's got ringing in one ear he's a very robust man but he's under tremendous stress he's a fourstar general at the time of Normandy and he's in the process of ascending from Lieutenant Colonel to five-star general in 42 months it's an average of six months between promotions President Roosevelt has selected elected him as his Supreme Commander and commander of the Allied expeditionary Force because he is as the President says I alluded to this a couple days ago a natural leader with exceptional political instincts he had a knack for getting along with the British notwithstanding the anglophobia that ran through the American General officer ranks I alluded to that also and he's also been chosen because he has exceptional organizational gifts he's extremely articulate he speaks and writes with great Precision unlike our notion of him as president where we think of him as kind of a George Bush Forerunner troubled with syn syntax in fact he's very very precise Churchill who knows something about articulation at one point says to a British general I'm not sure I trust a general who's that glib and as I mentioned he describes himself as chairman of the board that's the metaphor he uses he sees it in corporate terms chairman of the largest Marshall Enterprise in the Western World well by the late spring of 1944 American soldiers by the tens of thousands are pouring into Britain every week since January the number of GIS in Britain has doubled to 1.5 million it's a country the size of Oregon of the US Army's 89 divisions a division has about 15,000 soldiers 20 of them can now be found in Britain and there's 38 more that are either in rot or have been earmarked for the European theater they come through Liverpool through swans SE Cardiff Belfast Newport but most of them come through Glasgow and the Jason grck more than 100,000 in April alone and they're arriving in some cases 15,000 at a time aboard the two queens the Queen Mary and the Queen Elizabeth these ships can carry 15,000 soldiers it's not as comfortable as this Silver Cloud but the Queens are very fast and they can outrun German OTS they can outrun German Torpedoes and this is the reason the Queens are used to transport eventually hundreds of thousands of soldiers from America to Britain and the continent well we can see them can't we down the gang planks they tromp their names are checked from a clipboard each Soldier is wearing his helmet his field jacket and a large Celluloid button colorcoded by the section of the ship to which he has been confined during the passage troops carry four blankets a piece to save cargo space deluded officers can be seen lugging folding chairs pillowcases tennis rackets a brass band and Highland Pipers greet them on the docks Scottish school children are there on the docks giving the V sign V for victory as they're arriving combat pilots who had fulfilled their mission quotas and are waiting on the docks to board the ship to go home are yelling out at them go back before it's too late or what's your wife's telephone number each arriving unit is listed in a master log called the iron book and another man manest called the forecast of destination shows where every company would bivwak an infantry company maybe 170 men it's Company by company and where they're going to bivwak around the British aisles and then they fall in for a breast and they march across the dock to nearby troop trains and they're going to be hauled to 12200 camps and several hundred airfields across across Britain one over overeducated Lieutenant wrote to his mother this country constantly reminds one of Thomas Hardy but nowhere in Tess of the Derber vills do you find 400,000 prefabricated Huts 279,000 tents all erected to accommodate this Yankee horde and they supplement 112 ,000 buildings borrowed from the British 20 million square fet of storage warehouse space GIS call this new world that they're entering spam land the prevailing odor however is not span it's burning feces from US Army School of hygiene Coal Fired incinerators despite improving Logistics and we're getting better at it as the war goes on conf fusion and error abound the American Juggernaut included millions of tons of materal and most of it is carried across the Atlantic in cargo ships that arrive days if not months after these troops arrive on the fast queens and other fast troop carriers so truck drivers are separated from their trucks drummers are separated from their drums chap are separated from their chalices in May 1944 the British Ministry of Transport which is trying to coordinate all of this allocates 120 births shipping births for US Army troop ships but 158 arrived so negotiations got as far up as whiteall and the White House over what to do with these 38 orphan vessels and despite efforts to accommodate them half the cargo from these 38 ships is just dumped on the ground outside various ports it includes 5,000 tons of peanuts 50,000 portable radios and it's subsequently all lost to exposure to the weather this is quite common GIS claim yes the Army is cutting red tape lengthwise well the loading of vessels Bound for the far Shore that's what they call Normandy the far Shore the troops don't know where they're going very few know where they're going but they know they're going somewhere they know it's somewhere across the water and they call it generically the farshore so the loading of invasion vessels had begun on May 4th 194 44 and as the month wore away it really intensified 7,000 kinds of combat Necessities are going to be needed on the beaches in the first four hours that's from surgical scissors to Bazooka rockets and then thousands of tons are going to be needed in the subsequent days responsibility for embarcation fell to three military bureaucracies with acronyms evocative of the Marx Brothers moveco Turco and embarco Merchant Marine captains were sequestered in a London basement near sri's department store and there they prepared loading plans using the blueprints of deck and cargo spaces spread on huge tables and wooden blocks scaled to every Jeep Howitzer and shipping container are pushed around like chest pieces on These Blueprints to ensure that they fit and in the camps soldiers lay out fullsize deck replicas on the ground and they practice Wheeling trucks and guns in and out a great deal had been learned from from earlier invasions in North Africa Sicily salero anzio and of course the Pacific a vast flotilla of amphibious vessels had been designed and and built by the thousands in the previous two years Nick last night talked about the Higgins boat no less critical was a much larger vessel the LST Landing ship tank it had clamshell bow doors and a bow ramp it could carry 20 Sherman tanks and a lot of other stuff and it could put them right on the beach more than a thousand lsts were built during the war shipping is the narrow bottleneck through which all critical decision making strategic decision making must pass during World War II and nowhere is it more critical than for Normandy The Invasion has been delayed a month from early May to early June in order to allow more lsts to show up and other kinds of landing craft in 22 British ports stors slung pallets and cargo Nets into the holds and onto decks as this loading goes on radios from Pennsylvania Greece from Texas rifles from Massachusetts for Overlord the US Army had accumulated in Britain 300,000 Vehicles 1,800 train locomotives 20,000 rail cars 2.6 million Small Arms 2700 artillery pieces 300,000 telephone poles and 7 million tons of gasoline oil and other petroleum products Sha Supreme headquarters Allied expeditionary Force Eisenhower's headquarters sha had calculated daily combat consumption from fuel to bullets to chewing gum at 41.294104 [Music] him 60 million K rations it's enough to feed the invasion Force for a month have been bundled into 500 ton Bales and huge Army rail cars known as as War flats are used to take tanks and bulldozers to the ports mountains of ammunition are stacked on car fairies that had been requisition from Boston New York and Baltimore armed guards from 10 cartography depos escorted 3,000 tons of maps for D-Day alone they're the first of 210 million maps that will be distributed in Europe during the war most of them are printed in five color also into the holds as this loading goes on in May 1944 280,000 hydrographic charts so you can read read the bottom of the ocean if you're a coast Guardsman or navy Skipper and they're Town plats for the likes of cherborg and ST Low many of the 1 million aerial photos reconnaissance photos of German defenses that had been snapped by reconnaissance planes along the beaches they also go into the holds the US first Army it's the largest Tactical Unit for the American is going to land on June 6 commanded by Omar Bradley the US first Army battle plan for Overlord contains more words than Gone With the Wind I can hear Professor Miller somewhere in the peanut gallery saying yeah but not more than the Liberation trilogy the first Infantry Division alone and we'll run into them a lot they're going to land on Omaha Beach field order number 35 which is their plan has 15 annexes and 18 appendices including a reminder to drive on the right side of the road again we we can see it can't we this day after night after day war material cascading onto the war and the keys radio crystals by the thousands carrier pigeons by the hundreds each American General is authorized to take with him 100 silver stars and 300 purple hearts better known to soldiers as the German Marksmanship medal they're also carrying 10,000 hainon packs these are canvas bags that have been sewn by sailmakers in Lofts across England and they've been stuffed with plastic explosive to blow up the beach defenses and we'll talk a lot more about that when we get to the beaches a company that had been contracted to deliver 10,000 crosses was late on its contract they missed their deadline and instead Graves registration units would improvise with wooden grave markers cotton mattress covers which were to be used as shrouds had been purchased on the basis of one for every 375 manh hours in France that formula proved way too optimistic and in July with supplies of cotton mattress covers dwindling quarter Masters would be forced to order another 50,000 these are used to wrap the Dead fourth four Hospital ships made ready the reporter Martha ghorn who was there described them as snowy white with many bright red crosses painted on the hull and painted flat on the boat deck each LST would carry at least two Physicians and 20 Navy Corman to evacuate casualties from France and operating rooms had been installed called on the open tank decks one officer described them as a cold dirty trap which they were all told Overlord would muster 8,000 doctors 600,000 doses of penicillin 50 tons of sulfur and 800,000 pints of plasma by the way the plasma was meticulously segregated by white and black donors on Tuesday May 23rd 1944 a great migration of assault troops swept from their preliminary camps toward the English Seaside and into a dozen marshalling areas Americans on the Southwest coast of England the Brits and the Canadians in the South and this is where the final staging begins and March rates as they're going to these marshalling areas had been calculated so that each Convoy was to travel 25 mi in 2 hours Vehicles 60 yards apart with a 10-minute halt before every even hour on the hour and Military policemen they're wearing brassard that are specially treated to detect poison gas in case the Germans gas the marshalling areas are waving traffic through the intersections and thatched roof Villages all across Southern England mothers holding their children aoft from the curb to watch the Army's pass and on tanks and trucks the men have chalked the names of sweethearts left behind so nearly every vehicle has as one Captain puts it a patron girl Saint or perhaps a patron girl Sinner by late in the week the marshalling camps were sealed centuries were ordered to shoot to kill any deserters and GIS wearing captured German uniforms and captured enemy weapons wander through the bivwak so troops grew familiar with the enemy's appearance they would know what the Germans look like fantastic rumors swirled through these final encampments that British Commando is in a raid very similar to the failed raid on St no had in fact captured cherborg this is not true that Berlin intended to for peace this is not true that a particular unit would be sacrificed in a diversion area attack this was not true that the German verok possessed either a death beam capable of incinerating many acres at a time or they had a vast refrigerating apparatus that could create big icebergs in the English Channel this was true this was not true a column in the military newspaper Stars and Stripes advis soldiers don't be surprised if a Frenchman steps up to you and kisses you that doesn't mean he's queer it just means he's emotional security remained Paramount cha strategic uh uh Supreme headquarters Allied expeditionary Force had concluded that the The Invasion had little chance of it of success if the enemy received even 48 Hours advanced notice that the invasion was coming and scha to use Eisenhower's words who any time longer than 48 hours spell certain defeat the British government in early April had imposed a ban that kept the usual 600,000 visitors from approaching Coastal stretches along the North Sea the Bristol Channel and the English Channel 2,000 Army Counter Intelligence agents sniffed around for leaks sensors fluent in 22 languages including Ukrainian and Slovak scrutinized soldiers letters cutting out indiscretions with xacto knives until May 25th when all outgoing mail was stopped completely for 10 days and then camouflage inspectors roamed around Southern England to ensure that The Invasion assembly remained invisible to possible German surveillance planes thousands of tons of Of Cinders and sludge oil were used to darken New Road Cuts so they wouldn't betray troop concentrations to any planes overhead and garnished Nets were used to cover tents and Huts the British alone used a million square yards of net and even medical stretchers and surgical hampers were slathered with what was called toned down P paint it's either standard camouflage color 1A which is dark brown or standard camouflage color 15 which is olive drab deception complemented the camouflage the greatest prevarication of the war originally known as appendic Y and eventually given the code name fortitude tried to induce the enemy to make faulty strategic dispositions of their troops that was the order issued by the combined Chiefs of Staff in London and Washington try to make the enemy move to the wrong place and there were 1,500 Allied deceivers who were using phony radio traffic to suggest that a fictional army with eight divisions was gathering in Scotland to attack Norway in cahoots with the Soviets followed then by a larger invasion in mid July of the podal it's 150 miles Northeast of the actual Invasion beaches in Normandy thepay is the obvious place it's the closest point between France and England more than 200 Big Bobs these are 8 ton decoy landing craft fashioned from canvas and oil drums were conspicuously uh deployed beginning on May 20th around the t's Estuary which would be the natural channel for an invasion heading to the POA dummy radio transmitters now broadcast the radio hubub coded messages you can't necessarily understand the message if you're the Germans but you can understand that there's an enormous amount of radio traffic going on and these dummy transmitters are kicking out the simulated radio traffic of a spectral 150,000 men us first Army group notionally poised to pounce on the wrong Coast in the wrong m mon it doesn't exist it's ostensibly commanded by George Patton the British genius for duplicity some of us talked about this yesterday enhanced this series of ruses by passing information through more than a dozen German agents in England all discovered all arrested and all flipped by British Counter Intelligence Officers officers and the network of British double agents with code names like Garbo and tricycle some of you are familiar particularly with Garbo embellished this deception and there were more than 500 deceitful radio messages radio reports that were sent from London to enemy spy Masters in Madrid and Lisbon for eventual relay to Berlin the fortitude reception had by the end of May created a German hallucination enemy analysts now detected 79 Allied divisions staging in Britain there were only 52 by late May Allied intelligence including Ultra which is the British ability to intercept and decipher most coded German radio traffic intelligence had discovered no evidence that the enemy has accurately assessed the area in which our main assault is to be made this is the final report given to Eisenhower he breathed a big sigh of relief and lit another cigarette in a final pre-invasion fraud Lieutenant Clifton James of the royal Army payor after spending time studying the many ticks of General Bernard Montgomery whom he strikingly resembled flew to jalter on May 26 and then to alers he was fitted with a Black Beret and he strutted around in public for several days in hopes that Berlin would conclude that no attack across the channel was imminent if Monty was swanning around in the Mediterranean well as May slid into June these Invasion preparations grew feverish every vehicle to be shoved onto the French Coast required waterproofing to a depth of 54 in so and they use a gooey compound of Grease lime and asbest fibers and a vertical tunnel a funnel rather from the exhaust pipe sticks up it's like a ren tail sticking up in the back to prevent water from drowning the engine a single Sherman tank took 300 man hours to waterproof it took the fiveman crew a week to waterproof their tank sha on May 29th also had ordered that 11,000 Allied airplanes to be used in The Invasion display three broad white stripes on each Wing Underside and top side as recognition symbols there had been terrible fratricide in Sicily and they're trying to avoid this so a frantic search Begins the end of May for 100,000 gallons of white wash and 20,000 brushes required the mobilization of the British paint industry and some air Crews slathered on these white stripes with push brooms soldiers were issued seasickness pills vomit bags and life belts these are incidentals that bring the average rifleman's combat load to 68.4 LBS that's far beyond the 43 lbs that has been recommended for assault troops they're heavily weighted down paratroops are carrying far more than that and this will be an issue that we'll find when we're on the beaches a company Commander staging and Dorset with the 116th infantry which is bound Omaha Beach reported that his men were as he put it loping and braying about the camp under their packs saying that as long as they were loaded like jackasses they may as well sound like them on June 2nd 70 years ago today the men dawned what were called skunk suits their stiff mous uniforms impregnated against poison gas we wore them going into a rock in April in uh uh March of 2003 Brigadier General theer Roosevelt Jr who's somebody I need no prompting to talk about and we will talk about him a lot more he's with the fourth infantry division he wrote to his wife whose name happened to be the same as the wife of his distant cousin Franklin Ted Roosevelt's wife's name was also ellanor so he writes to ellanor on May 30th we're ready now as ready as we'll ever be the Blackbird says to his brother if this be the last song ye shall sing sing well for you may not sing another each Soldier placed his personal effects into a quartermaster box that was 12 in Long 8 in wide and 4 in deep for storage at a Depot in Liverpool it was like shedding an old skin or a previous life and troops Bound for France would fill 500 rail boox cars with these effects every week for the rest of the summer well let's look at them one last time before we open it up to your questions one last time as we send them off with your Indulgence here's my description of the beginning of the invasion and as we here in Portsmouth tomorrow Operation Overlord has been delayed 24 Hours by a nasty storm that crops up in the English Channel but then Eisenhower finally gives the launch order for The Invasion across the fleet the war cry sounded up anchor in the murky fretful Dawn from every English Harbor and estuary spilled the great affluent of Liberation from salom and pool Dartmouth and Waymouth entangled wakes from the temps past the black deep and whalebone marshes all converging on the White Cap Channel nearly 200,000 seamen and Merchant Mariners crewing 59 convoys carrying 130,000 soldiers 2,000 tanks and 12,000 Vehicles ships heave through the gray waves Cutters Corvettes frigs Freighters fairies trollers tankers subchasers ships for channel marking for cable laying for smoke making ships for refrigerating Towing victualing from the Irish sea the bombardment squadrons rounded lands and in Cornwall pugnacious column cols of Cruisers battleships destroyers even dreadnots given a second life like the USS Nevada raised and remade after Pearl Harbor and the ancient monitor HMS arabus built to Shell German fortifications in World War I with two 15-inch guns of dubious accuracy and from her MK flew the signal the signal Nelson had given England expects every man to do his duty in The Heavy Cruiser USS Tuscaloosa replied we are full of Ginger by midm morning the heavy Skies lightened and the wind ebbed recoloring the sea from peor to Sapphire a luminous rainbow said to be tropical in its colors arked above the wet green English fields and dapp Sun lit the CL chalk Cliffs of Kent like white curtains a naval officer on the USS Quincy wrote War I think would tend to increase one's eye for beauty just as it should tend to make peace more endurable Sailors broke out their battle ense stripped each bridge to fighting trim and converted mess tables into operating theaters in watertight compartments Bel low deck crewman aboard the resurrected Nevada stowed dress blues China glassware library books tablecloths office files brooms mirrors Brigadier General Roosevelt again wrote his wife elanar from the USS Barnett we are starting on the great Venture of this war the men are C Ed below or lounging on Deck very few have seen action Roosevelt son of the 26 president who at 56 would be the senior officer on Utah beach in both age and rank in the first wave he had seen enough in France during the last war and in The Landings in Africa and on Sicily during this one to have premonitions and he wrote to his wife we've had a grand life and I hope there'll be more should it chance that there's not at least we can say that in our years together we've packed enough for 10 ordinary lives we've known Joy sorrow Triumph and disaster all that goes to fill the pattern of human existence our feet were placed in a large room and we did not bury our talent in a napkin the light faded and was gone deep into the English Channel 59 darkened convoys went to Battle Stations as they pushed past parallel rows of dim navigation boys red to starboard white to Port like Street lamps to France small crafts struggled in the wind and Lop a landing craft log recorded waves washed over deck stove went out nothing to eat explosives wet could not be dried out short Seas snaap tow ropes flooded engine rooms and slopped through troop compartments some helmsmen held their wheels 30° off true to keep course several heaving vessels blinkered a one-word message seasick seasick seasick downtown 10 channels swept clean of mindes they plunged two designated for each of the five forces streaming toward five beaches Utah Omaha gold Juno sword wakes braided and rebr the Amber orb of a full moon Rose through a thinning overcast off the port bow and the Sea sang as swells slipped along every Hull Bound for a better world Hallelujah sang the sea hallelujah hallelujah thank you very much thank you if you have questions please raise your hand there's one down here Jeremy I can see here you go sir what I'd like to know is that uh I've always heard of a story called the man that never was it was aoy to fake the Germans using the body of a Dead Soldier dressed up as a messenger was that part of fortitude or was it part of the Italian invasion that is part of husky the invasion of Sicily uh some who were on bus 6 yesterday heard me talk about this because it involved a submarine the sarif which had had many uh adventures during the war and just in brief because that is uh a mission that was launched to deceive the Germans about where the invasion after North Africa was going to come Sicily was the obvious place it's only 100 miles from Tunisia it's a big aircraft carrying the Mediterranean it's the next easy step towards southern Europe and so the Brits again with this talent for deception concocted a scheme in which they took a dead man and only relatively recently have we learned who he was it turned out he was a homeless man in London who had killed himself by drinking rat poison and it turns out that rat poison the physiological signs of rat poison are very similar to Drowning foaming and the lungs look similar and so on they found this guy they'd been looking for a suitable candidate for a while they dressed him in the uniform of a marine major they handcuffed to his wrist a briefcase full of phony documents and the document suggested that he was carrying important mail from London to British headquarters in jalter indicating that the next Invasion after North Africa and this is happening in the spring of 1943 will not be Sicily but in fact will be the British pelp the Greek ppenis Southern Greece the serif took this dead man carried him by submarine from Britain off the coast of southern Spain dumped him overboard in his uniform with his briefcase dumped a life raft that had been Sha shed with shattered ores to make it look as though he was the victim of a plane crash plane traveling from Britain to jalter and they knew very well that the tides would carry him into the Spanish coast and they knew very well that the Spanish would then turn the material over to the Germans worked beautifully Spanish fishermen found the body called Spanish authorities they gave the body back to the British Consulate in Spain but not before they had picked the lock of the briefcase copied the documents and passed the documents along to the Germans in Madrid and then to Berlin the Germans are looking at this saying H could it be Southern Greece it wasn't a decisive operation at all but it did further confuse the Germans about where the next step would come I'm amazed that the Germans did not see all the preparation how did we get lucky beyond the Nets and things that you described Rick how did they miss the buildup in Southern England u i get Cala and the possibility of that but with so much material and so many people seems to me they missed a big one and I and I and curious as to why or how well they know there's a buildup going on and they know that there are hundreds of thousands of American soldiers as well as Brits and Canadians and Norwegians or poles that are gathering they're not completely blind but they're mostly blind for one thing they have zero aerial reconnaissance capability air domination has become so thorough on behalf of the Allies that the Germans cannot fly flights over England Scotland Northern Ireland to see what's going on there are almost no flights that come over in the spring of 1944 uh it's worth your life if you're a German pilot to venture over the channel because we have such an impenetrable air cover that's been built so that's one factor uh another factor is they have almost no Naval reconnaissance uh Rob mentioned the other day they don't really have a Navy other than those uots and so they've not been able to get out and at least look from the deck of a ship to see what's happening in Southern England um so they know that something's coming it's not that they don't expect an invasion but we're talking 3,000 mies of Coastline from Norway down to the French Spanish border and if you're trying to defend everywhere you're defending nowhere now they're not trying to defend everywhere but they're putting their chips on certain things and there's a big argument going on within the the German High command over how best to counter The Invasion when it comes I'm sure robt we talk more about that um but all in all they are blind they're deaf and they're pretty dumb um and they just don't know where or when it's coming and that is the essence of the deception that we are trying to fo on them we don't pretend that we're not coming but if you don't know where the punch is coming or when the punch is coming you're largely defenseless and they're as we'll see they're not entirely defenseless cuz they're going to they're very Stout defenses along places like Normandy but the ability to position the forces particularly the armored forces that can react to something like an invasion when it's most vulnerable which is in the first hours and days of the invasion um they're they're a bit at Sea Rick when was the um uh Dem mining of the uh English Channel undertaking undertaken and how was that done without uh Discovery well uh we'll talk more about it for sure when we get to uh Normandy it's the largest mining operation Dem mining operation in the history of warfare there more than 300 uh uh mine sweepers that are sent out now the Germans have mined the English Channel don't worry I think we've got most most of them and they have mined the Bay of the sen as well as other obvious potential Invasion places and so the mining operation is set up to avoid precisely what you suggest could happen that they suddenly detect 300 mine sweepers wandering around the mining was done very quickly basically starting just a couple of days before D-Day and they swept channels they didn't sweep the entire English Channel they didn't sweep the entire Bay of the sen although eventually they did but initially they sweeping channels going from the Gathering areas and you'll see maps in those books that were set out from the assembly areas where the ships are coming together off the southern coast of England for the most part and a channel that heads toward France in the Bay of the and then as the the The Invasion force is gathering those Min sweepers and they have marked the Channel with with the lighted boys that you can see again the Germans don't have the ability to do reconnaissance they cannot see these things and we have lots of planes making sure that they aren sending air reconnaissance and they're they uh uh don't have the ability to send uh Naval forces out and then so as the channel that's leading from England toward France is completed then a very complex sophisticated mind sweeping operation begins really on the eve of the invasion in the Bay of the sen and you're sweeping the areas where the big warships are going to be steaming because they're going to be firing Inland and you're sweeping all the way into the beach areas trying to ensure that there are no mines left it doesn't it's not complete and as we will see there are ships that hit mines and there are men quite a few men who are killed but all in all you have to say it's a prodigious and successful operation uh General Rosell is buried in the American cemetery in a very prominent grave uh he died of a heart attack several days later and uh it's very interesting it's nice to see his grave there it's very prominent thank you thank you sir yeah that's all the prompting I need to talk about TED Roosevelt he is the son of the 26th president and he uh has he spends his entire life 56 years trying to live up to a father whose face is carved on Mount Rushmore and he does pretty well um he's a runty little guy he uh um got this deep fog horn voice um he's been in World War I substantially wounded fighting with the first division in France he's been gassed and uh and shot um he goes to Harvard his father's convinced nothing will come of him because he doesn't seem to have much ambition uh his first job is working in a carpet Factory in Connecticut I think for $7 a week between the wars he becomes the chairman of American Express the governor general of Puerto Rico the governor of the Philippines he helps found the American Legion or the veteran of for Foreign Wars I can't remember which one he's a prolific author he's a great hunter if you go to the uh Natural History Museum in Chicago you will see that many of the trophies there are from theore Roosevelt Jr um and as war is approaching in 1940 he petitions to go back in he's in his 50s at this point and um he walks with a cane he is made a colonel he eventually becomes a brigadier general he becomes the assistant division commander of the first Infantry Vision the big red one and he is in the first wave that lands in Algeria on November 8th 1942 and he wins a distinguished service cross for his heroics at U Elgar pretty fierce battle in southern Tunisia he is uh in the initial waves that land at Sicily at Jaya he's instrumental in helping to repel the German Counterattack in Sicily against the first Division and then toward the end of the Sicilian campaign the first Infantry Division Commander his boss Terry delamesa Allen is relieved of command and Roosevelt is relieved with him Omar Bradley doesn't really like Allen and if he's going to throw Allen over the side he's going to throw his sidekick Roosevelt over the side part of this is because the first division has become between particularly between the campaigns in Africa and Sicily kind of an armed mob and they're breaking into wine stores and Tunisia and so on and and Bradley who's kind of a tea toling Prim sodbuster just really has it in for the first division it breaks Roosevelt's heart I mean he cries and cries about this it's is I mean it really he thinks it's going to be the end of the war he gets Eleanor to whom he's writing many wonderful letters his letters are in the Library of Congress he gets Elanor to petition George Marshall repeatedly and she is really persistent to give him a second chance and Marshall finally relents to get her off his neck he allows Rosevelt to come back in as a brigadier general assigned to the fourth division he lands as we'll see in the first wave at Utah Beach he recognizes and we'll talk more about it that they are off by a mile that currents have pushed them aside and he gets them going from where they land and you're absolutely right it's a month later in mid July of uh of 1944 he had his son Quenton is in the first Division and he comes over to visit the old man they're near Sherborn evening together talking reminiscing talking about the family gossiping talking about the war talking about this talking about that Quenton leaves about 10:30 to go back to his Division and Ted Roosevelt has a massive heart attack and and dies H he never knows that he has been nominated for and will receive postumus now the Medal of Honor for his heroics on Utah Beach um and yes his grave which will be in the cemetery where we are is is is very very moving up to your left Rick yes what about this vague notion that I have uh of these uh I don't know whether paper mâché decoy planes that are put at Cala and uh this notion that RL was much smarter than Hitler and he didn't bite for that Decoy but Hitler did and uh I'd like for you to elaborate on that if you could yeah I talked about some of the decoys that they're using uh they're not papier-mâché they're they're made out of oil drums and they're pretty elaborate pretty sophisticated the landing craft decoys weigh 8 tons a piece and their decoy tanks and their decoy planes and all of that it's it's largely for not because the Germans don't have the aerial capacity to send reconnaissant Flights over to take pictures of these things so there's really no evidence that the German High command whether it's raml or anybody else has been told hey look look at these Big Bobs these landing craft that are in the time T's Estuary um there is a very large argument going on within the German High command and Rob will talk about it U surely at at greater uh length and I will and more coherently but essentially the Germans are having a debate over what to do and how to defend against this invasion they know is coming and raml who has faced Allied air power in Spades in North Africa and seen some of it in Italy and has been as of January 1944 assigned by Hitler he's the most mag magnetic German general certainly in the Western Front to take charge of the army group that happens to have its uh in its sector Normandy and he really throws himself into the job in Earnest and he's planting mines and putting all kinds of obstacles out and um he believes that because of Allied air superiority that it will be very difficult to move the Panzer reinforcements this is the heart of the the German counterattacking Force any distance because Allied planes will be on them instantly and make life hell others including runed who is rl's boss he's the theater commander in the west uh believe that you cannot put your limited armored uh uh reinforcements too close to any one beach because what happens if you pick the wrong Beach it'll be even harder to move them laterally along the beaches as you need to so they argue that a better solution is to have a kind of a central repository not far from Paris and that's where the uh the the the bulk of the German armor reinforcements these mechanized mobile reinforcements will be well Hitler listens to these arguments and they thrash it out pretty thoroughly through the spring of 194 before and Hitler kind of C cuts the baby in half um he gives raml some of the force to place where he wants uh uh he has the rest of it basically in a Central Area uh but he keeps personal control over a good portion of it so nobody's happy nobody's convinced that they've found the solution to it but that's the way it is as of June 6 194 before um I don't think you can say that raml was necessarily smarter than uh Rad or Hitler about this he is quite right that moving any distance against this terrifying onslaught of 11,000 planes overhead is hell and when those divisions begin to move and we'll talk a lot more about it um they are they are against a a very stiff force in the Allied planes that are attacking them relentlessly as they move toward the invasion beaches so I'll you know we'll talk about it more and Rob will uh give you greater detail on the German thinking about this up to your right Rick we'll get back to you sir Rick um in the pre-invasion training wasn't there a disaster at slapped in Sands that perhaps you could talk about yeah there was a disaster at slap clapped in Sands uh and perhaps we'll hear more about it at Portsmouth tomorrow but in general uh what happens is this um there are rehearsals going on before Normandy and there's a series of uh exercises and the exercises are designed to get all of the players accustomed to working together that includes Coast Guardsmen uh Navy officers swabs uh soldiers getting them accustomed to getting on to landing craft uh getting them accustomed to being at Sea uh getting them accustomed to uh listening to orders of when to get into the the Higgins boats to go ashore um one of the exercises takes place on the southern coast of England in a remote area that the British have very generously vacated for us uh as a training area called slapped in Sands uh uh and it's in April now I said that the Germans had no substantial uh Naval force it didn't mean they had no Naval Force um they still had submarines U but they also had a kind of Patrol boat Mo these small fast boats that they were sending out into the channel periodically the exercise that slapped in Sands was to take a unit in a convoy and to steam around a bit to simulate uh going to Normandy the soldiers didn't know that the the topography at slapt and S is quite similar to some of the beaches particularly Utah Beach uh in Normandy uh and what happened was that there was a uh a miscommunication really a fatal miscommunication over security for this Convoy the Brits were supposed to provide most of the security with the Royal Navy and uh by chance uh three I believe it was a German Patrol boats heavily armed managed to get through the security screen and attack the Convoy and torpedoed several lsts there had been a Hope by a lot of soldiers that the LST had a shallow enough draft that Torpedoes would go under the hull of the ship no and uh there were hundreds of American soldiers particularly some Sailors who died now and it was terrible it was awful Eisenhower felt awful not least for the loss of the lsts he is counting personally lsts it is the critical thing that he needs and to have lsts go to the bottom at slapped in Sands breaks his heart almost as much as the loss of these soldiers there are bodies washing ashore on the southern coast of England for days and weeks and one of the things that causes the most anxiety and these bodies are being hauled Inland and they're it's just a terrible few days one of the things that causes the greatest anxiety is that among the missing are I can't remember it's a dozen or so officers who are bigoted bigot is the compartmented code word that means you are permitted to have security clearance to know where and when the invasion is going to take place it's the really the highest clearance for those in the know about Overlord and there are a dozen guys who are bigoted who are missing and there's concern that perhaps they've been captured uh where are they and there is great concern as you can imagine that the somebody could Spill the Beans oh yeah there's a big Invasion coming by the way it's in Normandy and it's set for June 5th well they eventually recover all the bodies of the bigoted officers and uh that's one less anxiety in that long pinwe list for Eisenhower to worry about I'll be right down to you you sir he's coming thank you Nick uh thank you uh question about the eth Air Force how did the Eighth Air Force integrate into the preparation for Overlord yeah let me step all over Don by answering that at Great length um and I am going to let Don answer that because he he is the expert on the eth Air Force and he can answer that much more coherently than I can but obviously um there are a lot of moving Parts uh Naval Air ground and um the eth air force uh has a number of duties and responsibilities um they have been flying strategic missions Don talked about it yesterday at some length and the argument has going back and forth on what should be their contribution to the invasion now there are some in the eight therefore we want to just keep hitting those strategic targets that are far from The Invasion beaches and not surprisingly there are those responsible for putting those troops onto the beaches who want every bit of Firepower they can get devoted to that task their argument in essence is look if we fail on June six as it turns out then it doesn't matter what you're doing in dropping more bombs on Hamburg or or Dortmund or wherever um this is something that Eisenhower has to reconcile and so their contribution will be substantial but uh ultimately not particularly successful in hitting tactical targets now they are they have been asked and it's not just the eth Air Force it's basically all the heavy forces to hit areas right along the beaches just before the invasion comes Don will tell you what happens they don't really hit what they're supposed to hit partly because of bad weather partly because of anxiety about bombing friendly troops uh and partly just because of the fog of War so they are a a player when it comes to the invasion um but as we will see and we will talk about this a lot more when we get there they have not softened up the landing areas uh as robustly as had been hoped I'll get to you as quickly as I can sir thank you uh Rick if you could briefly speak on U what value if any there was that was developed by Frederick Morgan and kasac before sha got on board did they have to scrap everything kasac came up with or yeah what a great question I'm glad you brought him up uh because I gave him short shrift um as they've been thinking about invading the continent really since early 1942 um the first big and most important strategic decision that has been made at the highest level by Churchill and Roosevelt is Germany first the presumption is that if you defeat the strongest of the Axis powers the Lesser Powers meaning Italy and Japan will fall from the tree like rotten fruit this is sensible it's even wise it's correct uh so the intent is to take the war to the Germans before the others now for all kinds of reasons it doesn't play out quite that way partly the Navy and the Marine Corps all six Marine divisions are in the Pacific and they have a lot to do out there and they're they're really pressing their War but Germany first is the premise by the way see General Boomer here Eisenhower pleaded to get Marines in the European theater he really wanted uh Marine units he got none um so they've been thinking about how to get onto the occupied continent of Europe since early 1942 a after uh there is a general agreement that there will be an invasion and that it will ultimately occur in the spring of 1944 um a structure is set up to begin planning it and it's given the the acronym KAC Chief of Staff to the Supreme Allied Commander well there is no Supreme Allied Commander yet he's the chief of staff to nobody because Eisenhower isn't going to be appointed to the job until late in 1943 but in the meantime there is a staff set up to begin working some of these very problems we've been talking about and the chief of staff is a British general named uh Frederick Morgan Morgan is told the rough parameters and it's Morgan and his staff incidentally who choose Normandy early they kind of put their finger on a map and they say here are the reasons why this should be the place and not there or there or there uh Morgan is given certain parameters okay you got X number of Divisions likely you got why number of lsts likely uh come up with a plan Morgan proposes a landing on three beaches and um it's essentially the plan that ultimately is enacted as part of Overlord but when the big shots from the Mediterranean incidentally they call themselves The Mediterranean ites because they've all been through the war together and it includes Eisenhower Montgomery Patton Bradley it's a very long list they are really fused together by this med metr anean experience if you're not a Mediterranean I and Morgan is not you're kind of on the outs you're not with the In Crowd it's a problem as we will see later in the war but they come back Eisenhower has been appointed Supreme Commander Montgomery has been appointed essentially the ground Commander for Overlord and they're looking at the plan at the map and they say it's too small it's insufficient instead of three beaches on on a 25m front we want five beaches on a 50m front that's one of the main reasons it's delayed from May till June because as you expand to those two other beaches and everyone finally agrees yeah okay we got it it's got to be bigger got to be five beaches uh we like a lot of the rest of the plan we're going to incorporate in a lot of the thinking about everything from mind sweeping to deception Morgan's guys have been working on that he is a big contributor to the success of Overlord uh but when you expand substantially this plan it requires you to have more of everything so you've added Utah Beach that means not only do you need the fourth infantry division to get that beach you need the lsts and the rest of the naval Force to transport those troops and all of the support that's required for that the same thing on the other end if you're going to add sword Beach on the flip side of the invasion be so uh you know Morgan he's not he's no dummy if they had said okay we've got enough stuff for you to create five beaches he would have created Five beaches he offers a plan with three beaches because he is told that is the limit of the resources available great well uh thank you all for the rich questions Rick thank you very much for wonderful presentation again um it is thank [Applause] you please enjoy your next hour and a half and for those of you on the uh military tour please come back here at 1:15 in the show lounge and at 1:45 for the cultural tour in the main bar thank you
