Saving the World: Michel Paradis Reconstructs Dwight Eisenhower's Greatest Triumph

Speaker 1:

From the library of the New York Stock Exchange at the corner of Wall and Broad Streets in New York City you're Inside the ICE House. Our podcast from Intercontinental Exchange on markets, leadership, and vision, and global business, the dream drivers that have made the NYSE an indispensable institution of global growth for over 225 years. Each week we feature stories of those who hatch plans, create jobs, and harness the engine of capitalism. Right here, right now at the NYSE and at ICE's exchanges and clearing houses around the world. And now welcome Inside the ICE House. Here's your host, Josh King of Intercontinental Exchange.

Josh King:

This is an episode about bookends. The bookends of World War II were essentially December 7, 1941, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor demarked by President Franklin Roosevelt's Day of Infamy speech in the House Chamber, and May 8, 1945 VE Day. Also, August 15, 1945, V-J Day when President Harry Truman announced that Japan surrendered unconditionally on the deck of the battleship USS Missouri anchored in Tokyo Bay. Within those bookends are hinges of history, turning points that opened a pivotal new chapter in that conflict. One was April 18, 1942 when Lieutenant Colonel Jimmy Doolittle launched 16 B-25 Mitchell bombers from the deck of the USS Hornet to begin the counter-attack on the Empire of Japan by audaciously attempting to bomb Tokyo. The other June 6, 1945, D-Day, when 156,000 soldiers and 196,500 sailors comprised in our moderate across the English Channel and land on the beaches of Normandy, France beginning the liberation of Europe.

Now, we've had a lot of remembrances of D-Day recently at the New York Stock Exchange. On May 8, the 79th anniversary of VE Day, I was thrilled to welcome John Monsky to the NYSE's Board Room for a Whiskey Wednesday presentation of The Eyes of the World, a show that he took to Boston's Symphony Hall a couple of weeks later, which told the story of the 11 months between D-Day and VE Day through the eyes of three witnesses to the events, the legendary photographer Robert Capa, the Vogue cover model turned correspondent Lee Miller, and papa himself, the old man of the sea, Ernest Hemingway, who was on assignment from Collier's and running up a big expense account. Backed up by the Boston Pops orchestra and four Broadway stars singing songs of the era, here is part of John Monsky's framing of the invasion to come.

Speaker 2:

Tomorrow belongs.

Speaker 3:

Tomorrow belongs to me.

Speaker 4:

June 6, 1944 D-Day. An American landing craft makes its way toward the beaches of Normandy, France. The commanding officer appears over the bow, he's trying to get his bearings. He's wet and he's cold. And on the shore, the German army waits for him locked and loaded with artillery, and machine gun nests, and a beach full of mines.

Josh King:

If you've read The Longest Day or seen Saving Private Ryan or Band of Brothers, you know the story from there. Amid heavy casualties American, British, Canadian, free French, and other allied forces fought their way ashore through the hedgerows and onto the liberation of Paris and eventually the fall of Berlin. Like Jimmy Doolittle boots dropping a bare-bones plan to send B-25s over Tokyo and land his planes in China, a very different plan unfolded for D-Day under the direction of the Supreme Allied Commander Dwight David Eisenhower. The result of extraordinary logistical and political coordination among allied generals and their bosses, FDR, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin. The fruit of Ike's labor, Operation Overlord, effectively brought an end to the war and cemented the role of the United States as a superpower for the 80 years that followed right up to today.

My friend Michel Paradis is intimately familiar with those two bookends and hinges of World War II. He joined us in 2020 back on episode 186 to talk about his first book, Last Mission to Tokyo: The Extraordinary Story of the Doolittle Raiders and Their Final Fight for Justice. Today, 80 years after Normandy, Michel returns again to share his thoughts on his second book, out this month from Mariner books, The Light of Battle: Eisenhower, D-Day, and the Birth of the American Superpower. Our conversation with author Michel Paradis on the twin hinges of World War II and getting inside the mind of a uniquely mercurial American character, the future 34th President of the United States, Dwight Eisenhower, and his rare ability to marshal men, and material, and manage the egos of envious generals, and prickly presidents, and prime ministers to win a war. All that and more it's coming up right after this.

Speaker 5:

Explore the world the Viking way from the quiet comfort of elegant small ships with no children and no casinos. We actually have reinvented ocean voyages designing all-inclusive experiences for the thinking person. Viking, voted world's best by both Travel + Leisure and Condé Nast Traveler. Learn more at Viking.com.

Josh King:

Welcome back. Remember, please to subscribe wherever you listen. And rate and review us on Apple Podcasts so other folks know where to find us. Our guest today, Michel Paradis, is author of The Light of Battle: Eisenhower, D-Day, and the Birth of the American Superpower out now from Mariner Books. As I mentioned in the intro, Michel is a repeat visitor Inside the ICE House. Like John Monsky, he's a role model for me. Balancing research, and authorship, and creativity with a day job as a human rights lawyer at the firm of Curtis, Mallet-Prevost, Colt & Mosle. A lecturer at Columbia Law School, and a fellow at the Center on National Security and the National Institute of Military Justice. Michel, thank you so much for joining us Inside the ICE House. Welcome back to our program.

Michel Paradis:

Thank you for having me back.

Josh King:

How accurate was John Monsky's description of what those landing crafts saw when they approached Omaha Beach?

Michel Paradis:

Oh, that's about exactly right. There are literally over what? 150,000 men land on the D-Day beaches. As they're heading off over the surf bouncing ... When you watch the films of these, the original films ... Steven Spielberg did a great job recreating this. You just watch these timorous landing craft just bouncing on the waves like they're going over the Baja Peninsula. Just hitting the beach as soon as the ground gets shallow, assuming they don't hit one of the obstacles or assuming they don't run up on a mine, and then that door just comes right down, that platform door. There's a ramp right into the teeth of the German army. There's a reason it's a story that we tell as often as we do because it's so harrowing, it's so terrifying, right, when you put yourself in that position. Yeah, to hear it sort of set to music and then sort of described. And the way you must have felt just sort of peering over that boat, watching that shore bounce in front of you knowing what ... And not knowing too what could be on the other side of that. Is amazing.

Josh King:

I was reading the book, you go into a lot of detail on the various elements of that armada of Operation Neptune Admiral Charles Cooke told Ike that they'd have 172 LSTs, 131 LCIs, and 685 LCTs. What was Eisenhower's administrative task in assembling that flotilla?

Michel Paradis:

It was a combination of accounting, what we would probably now think of as spreadsheet management and just bare-knuckle diplomatic politics. Intragovernmental politics on top of it. On the one hand, the British are really never fully invested in Operation Overlord. Winston Churchill, he has his doubts about it that he expresses publicly almost to the day the invasion has landed. Or launched. They have their long-preferred strategy in the Mediterranean and so they're trying to get as many landing craft as possible to essentially expand the British operations, British-led operations in the Mediterranean. He has to sort of navigate this literally international fight between the two great allies, the Brits and the United States, over where they should go just at the time that the United States is now beginning to rival the British Empire as a great power in the world. It's not just a matter of accounting, right, it's status that's on the line, it's prestige.

And then at the same time, he's having to negotiate with the US Navy because the US Navy is fully committed to the Pacific and doesn't really want to have that much to do it with it. With the European theatre. It's not that interesting as a naval matter whereas the Pacific is the theatre of some of the great naval battles of all of history. The Marines, as they begin their island hopping campaign up to the main island of Japan, just have an insatiable demand for landing craft of their own. The Navy is ... They own the Marines and so they're going to-

Josh King:

Take care of their team first.

Michel Paradis:

That's right, they're taking care of their team first. And so Eisenhower sort of has to pluck from a tight clenched fist every landing craft he can from the Navy, from the Brits just to have enough to get the men ashore. They not only sort of have this wrestling over the bare minimum, they have to come up with all these just cockamamie ways of overloading the landing craft. So they start essentially double-bunking the men. Literally using every square inch of these landing craft just to get the material and the men they need across the channel in one go. The amount of stress he was under just with that, what they called at the time the battle of the numbers, makes you completely understand how he got up to three packs a day. It's just this constant wrestling with so many different egos, with so many different competing agendas that he has to navigate to achieve what is, as you said, probably the highest risk and most high consequence hinge of the 20th ... Of the Second World War.

Josh King:

And we're going to talk a lot more about Eisenhower's political maneuverings in a couple minutes. Those guys in those landing craft, what were they landing into? Take us to the business end of Field Marshal Rommel's defensive force. He'd been bragging about new and surprising weapons against the invaders. What did intelligence speculate was waiting for the allies?

Michel Paradis:

Everything. It's almost science fiction what they're encountering. There's a big risk that they're concerned about the use of anthrax, they're preparing potentially for the Nazi use of botulism, and they have intelligence suggesting the Nazis are capable of doing it. The basic assumption is correct that if they're capable of doing it they will do it, right? The Nazis immoral scruples are not something that anyone can take for granted. How would you say? Just awe-inspiring as a matter of leadership risks that Eisenhower confronts is when he's told ... And this is probably about maybe a month and a half, two months before the actual invasion. He's told by George Marshall to meet with somebody in private. If your listeners aren't familiar with the military, a major is a mid-level, sort of middle-management military officer. I don't know that Dwight Eisenhower had handed his coat to a major at this point. He's a four-star general, he's the top of the ... He's the top dog.

But it's Eisenhower and this one major who says, "Hi, I'm Major Peterson, I'm from something called the Manhattan Project." The United States has been developing nuclear weapons, the Germans are developing nuclear weapons. We're not entirely sure how far along they are. We don't think they're going to use them but they may use radiological weapons which they can essentially sprinkle on the Normandy beaches that will act as essentially as an invisible minefield. So that if your men are on the beach and they sprinkle radiological weapons onto the beaches, in a significant enough concentration, basically your men will be dead within about a day. Not only is there really nothing you can do about this, you can't really tell anybody about it either. You can only tell people who have an absolute need to know. You can't write about it you can only talk about it.

And so Eisenhower has then just given this piece of information where he all of a sudden is now in on the future. But he can't tell anybody except for a very close-knit circle. And they're actually having this debate. Initially they're going to say, "Okay, well, at least we'll tell Omar Bradley and Bernard Montgomery" who are essentially leading the men across the beaches. Again, he's like "Well, actually, they can't do anything about it so they don't have a need to know. I'm just going to carry this risk." And we know that he was just carrying this because about maybe three weeks before the invasion launches he sends a message to George Marshall, the head of the ... The Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army. Just says indirectly, "Hey, I met with that guy and we talked. And I'm assuming since I haven't heard anything from you that the risks remain low but let me know." And Marshall never says anything to him. Eisenhower's told the odds of the Germans using radiological weapons are low, it's 15%. 15%, right, that's literally Russian roulette.

Josh King:

You just got to focus on the weather and put that out of your mind.

Michel Paradis:

That's right. You just got to focus on the weather and just absorb all of these risks. And so it's not just these just spectacular risks, then there are the risks they know are there which is ... The Germans have fortified the entire coast with something they call the Atlantic Wall which is literally 142 million square meters of concrete that they have poured and armored with big guns, small guns, pill boxes, landmines. Something called Rommel's asparagus which are these, essentially, 10-foot poles with grenades on the end so that when paratroopers or gliders land onto them it sort of detonates before they can even touch the ground. Under the waterline they've dumped all of these obstacles of various strange shapes and design that can essentially gore through the bottom of any landing craft that hits them and sink them well before they're close enough to shore to swim.

Josh King:

Therefore, low tide is the only time to arrive and that leaves a bigger beach to cross with more mines.

Michel Paradis:

That's exactly right. They have to come at low tide to have as much opportunity as possible to remove the obstacles and the mines, but that means they now have nearly an extra mile to run into the German guns all while the tide behind them is rising. So as they're trying to get up the beach, right ... They have to get up the beach because otherwise the tide will come in and essentially they'll be underwater. The risks are just astronomical.

Josh King:

At the end of D-Day plus three, Omaha and Utah Beach have been pretty well secured. From Saving Private Ryan here is Tom Hanks as Captain John Miller reporting in to Lieutenant Colonel Anderson played by Dennis Farina.

Dennis Farina:

Warren was supposed to win an open door for the rest of us. Instead, they misdropped, scattered all their sticks into the wind. What's your situation?

Tom Hanks:

Yes, sir. Sector four is secure. We took out towed 88s here, here, and here. They'd already gotten four of our Sherman's and a number of our deuce-and-a-halves. These two minefields are actually one big one. We tried to make our way up through the middle of it but it turned into a mixed high-density field, a little bit of everything. Spring mine 44, Schü-mine 42s, pot mines, A200s. The little wooden bastards that the mine detectors don't pick up.

Josh King:

That's some serious screenwriting by Robert Rodat. In your research, Michel, how deep did you get into understanding the weapons, maneuvers, and obstacles that the landing force encountered?

Michel Paradis:

I spent an absurd amount of time is the honest answer. It's very easy even to hear a monologue like that which is so brilliant. And I think that's so brilliant because it's so detailed and so specific.

Josh King:

We're not following it in the theater, it just sounds like Captain Miller knows what the heck he's talking about.

Michel Paradis:

Right. Captain Miller knows what the heck he's talking about and that just sounds like a ton of stuff, right? Oh my God, what is all that? But he knows exactly what all that means. Somewhat of my challenge, as an author, was to try and get that granularity in my own understanding of what they were confronting because that's real to them, right? When he says they have those wooden box mines that the metal detectors don't pick up, right? They're thinking risk by risk by risk by risk by risk. Because that's what you have to do when you're literally at war with the most hardened, dug-in, experienced land army that really the world had ever seen to that point, certainly more than the United States. They were exacting astronomical casualties on the Soviets who were exacting large casualties but not nearly at the same rate.

And so the German army is again, one of the most well-equipped, most professional militaries in the world at that point. You just have to know every single detail, every ... Like we were talking before about the underwater obstacles. They had all sorts of different designs they would use to sort of specially destroy different kinds of ships. So there were the tetrahedrons, and the Element C's, and the T's. And each one sort of had its own either amenability to being extra booby-trapped with mines, or to sort of point in a particular way so that it acted like pikeman. If you think about an old sort of siege of a castle, the pikeman just sort of stabbing out.

That's the thing certainly that Eisenhower, right, also, I think is just a remarkable ... His remarkable mind that I think is probably the most underappreciated part of his sort of collection of skills and personality. It's his ability to really understand all of those details. Now he doesn't get bogged down in those details, he knows that delegation is essentially one of the most important things he has to do as a leader. He's being briefed constantly about all of these details, and he knows that okay, that's a risk that we have to pay extra attention to. This is a risk we can't do anything about because who knows if the Nazis actually have nuclear weapons, et cetera. And so yeah, that granularity is just what certainly kept him up at night, and what I think really just gives a reality to the situation too.

Josh King:

And I suspect it's sort of kept you up at night as you got into this. I want to back up, Michel, because we were doing a podcast four years ago. I got the feeling from Last Mission to Tokyo that it was sort of a passion project, a diversion from maybe your day job but still ... You were still immersed in the field of law which was the war crimes trial of the downed aircrews in that circumstance. It was moonlighting in a form or fashion because there was a war crimes element that hit your sweet spot. The Doolittle raid, Ernest King ... Jimmy Doolittle was a self-contained mission compared to Operation Overlord and Eisenhower, his boss, George Marshall. What made you roll up your sleeves to take on the ultimate battle of World War II?

Michel Paradis:

I think more than anything it was Eisenhower himself who ... In the course of, again, doing the publicity for the Last Mission to Tokyo, I got to see what people were talking about when it came to World War II. And people often talked about Patton. People love talking about Churchill. Even people like Stalin. Hitler, obviously, is an endless subject of fascination. And between all of these people, I just had this sense that Eisenhower's taking it for granted.

And that in a way surprised me because I was like, he's the only major figure from that war who not only succeeds in the war and literally beats Hitler. His accomplishments in the war themselves are extraordinary. Most importantly, he's President of Columbia University, he's then the first general of NATO, and then goes on to be president of something called the United States. And then not just President of the United States he's probably one of the most consequential presidents, certainly of the 20th century. He's certainly up there with Roosevelt. And yet everyone just sort of treated him like yeah, well, there's Ike. Everyone likes Ike. And then now let's talk about interesting, important people like Patton.

Josh King:

Intentional on Ike's part to sort of try to get people off his scent.

Michel Paradis:

I think that's exactly right and that's what intrigued me. I was like how is that happening, right? How is it that we're ignoring this person who's clearly wielding so much power? Ordinarily, an individual who wields that much power is the subject of intense attention.

Josh King:

Douglas MacArthur, for example.

Michel Paradis:

Douglas MacArthur. He loves his power and he shows it to you. The same thing with Churchill, right? He speaks as someone who's carrying even more power than he actually even has. And so that made Eisenhower just profoundly intriguing. And the more I read about him, and the more I dug in really into the primary sources like what his life was like, particularly when he was young, the more interesting he became, right? Here you have the most powerful general probably in all of human history who was raised by religious pacifists in deeply rural Kansas. He's someone who masters military history, and military strategy, and ... Enough to be able to launch something like D-Day. But at the same time, certainly early in his army career, his fallback.

Josh King:

I want to get into his backstory in great detail. Before we do that though let's just pause for a second. On June 4 and June 5, 1944, paint a picture of what Ike was like. You said he had a bunch of risks that he couldn't begin to quantify and couldn't even try to. He could talk to his meteorologists and get weather updates every five minutes. He could take trips to inspect his troops in the field getting ready. Here he is as he's issuing the order of the day,

Dwight Eisenhower:

Soldiers, sailors, and airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Force, you are about to embark upon the great crusade toward which we have driven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you. The hopes and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you. In company with our brave allies and brothers in arms on other fronts, you will bring about the destruction of the German war machine, the elimination of Nazi tyranny over the oppressed peoples of Europe, and security for ourselves in a free world.

Josh King:

Dwight Eisenhower on the eve of D-Day. Confident commander or nervous wreck?

Michel Paradis:

Both. And I think that's the leader you should have. As I mentioned before, he's literally chain-smoking constantly. He doesn't sleep probably for days in the lead-up to D-Day invasion. And is ruminating probably on every risk that he has to confront. And you can see it. According to all the people around him, particularly those close, you can see it on his face.

But when he goes to inspect the men ... Actually, not just inspect. To see them off is what he does when ... Both with the British troops and then again the 101st Airborne on D-Day itself, right, he projects confidence and optimism. And he's always making sure that his worries, even though they are the worries of everybody and for everybody, that he owns them, right? That's part of being a leader is mastering your worries but always projecting the confidence and optimism that all the people who are really taking the personal risks, like those kids jumping out of the airplane, that they know they're doing something that is not futile, that's not crazy, that's going to succeed, that's important, that's valuable, and it's going to win the war. His great gift, I would say, is being able to keep that intense sort of roiling worry inside.

Michel Paradis:

Intense sort of roiling worry inside, and also always project the kind of confidence that a real leader in that kind of situation with so much uncertainty really needs to project.

Josh King:

The Light of Battle divided into five parts. [inaudible 00:24:15], Dwight, Supreme Allied Commander, Soldier of the Empire and Crusader. As you sat down in front of the screen, how did you visualize the construction of the book? Because as other people have noted, the writing style is not sort of deeply historical or academic. You bounce around a lot. You bring us back to Abilene, you project us forward to his time as president. Whether it's Stephen Ambrose or The Longest Day, there's been a lot written about this. You had to do something different.

Michel Paradis:

Yeah. And so I guess the two things I did that were really different, as you say, was one, is I tried to not write about a statue. There are lot of great World War II histories, including a lot of great biographies of Eisenhower that are written with the outcome always in mind, and you feel that way. One of the reasons, and I've been accused of having a little too much salty talk in the book as well, so maybe it should have a parental advisory label, maybe, on the cover, but is to give you the sense of immediacy of really what it was like to be a kind of person who... A couple, I think it was three weeks before the actual invasion, Eisenhower's chief of staff, Bedell Smith, says, "I think there's about a 50/50 chance of success," right? That's a 50/50 chance of catastrophic failure as well.

And so to live that in a real way, with real people, with blood in their veins, I think was one of my major efforts. How I wrote this book, too, is, I wanted to actually understand how it was that Eisenhower was able to go from this far-flung place in Abilene with a very peculiar upbringing, to say the least, to the literal pinnacle of power in the world. How does he learn to master power? We have the General Horatio Alger story that we tell, anyone can be anything that they put their mind to, but what does it actually take to go that far. That full arc that makes him, in a way, a quintessential American, but also what does it mean to be a quintessential American?

So, the book is really as much, if not more, a biography of Eisenhower than it is just the story of D-Day, which is, again, as you said, been told many, many times by many great authors, because I wanted to understand why he was the singular person for that job. So yeah, that was my approach, and the main way I went about doing it without geeking out too much is-

Josh King:

We can geek out. This show is famous for geeking out.

Michel Paradis:

Okay. Well, here we go. A lot of documents have just become available. No one's really written a serious first reevaluation of Eisenhower in about 20 years, and a lot of stuff has become available since then, or I was at least able to find that wasn't seen before. One of the big ones was his literal day planners. Particularly for this six month period between November 1943 and D-Day itself, I basically worked out with his day planner sort of day by day reconstruction of what his day was.

Josh King:

First you have to tell me, what form are these day planners in now? Are they digitized, or are you actually dealing with 80-year-old paper?

Michel Paradis:

80-year-old paper. Yeah, these are all in Abilene. They were turned over by essentially a ghostwriter for a woman named Kay Summersby, who we might talk about.

Josh King:

We'll talk about Kay.

Michel Paradis:

A ghostwriter for Kay Summersby. Basically, had these in her possession for decades at that point. Turned them over to the Eisenhower Library in the mid-aughts, if I recall. 2005, I think. No one working on Eisenhower just had the ability to go in and say, "Okay. Who did he meet with today? Who did he talk to? Did he write anything in the diary about who is an asshole, who he likes? [inaudible 00:27:59]?"

Josh King:

I mean, that's the beauty of writing a modern presidential biography, because the calendar is so well appointed.

Michel Paradis:

Right. You can work that, sort of blow-by-blow, out. So yeah, just as a research project. I tried to stick as much as I could to just the old archival documents without relying, or even reading too much, of the secondary sources until after I had put together my own sort of picture of events. But particularly with this six months, I basically just tried to be a fly on the wall. I got every source I could for anyone he met, like what happened that day, and reconstructed them. Very, very long version of that, that thankfully I've edited significantly down into the book, and just sort of watched him. It was like, "Who's he meeting with? What are they talking about? How's it going?" Again, a lot of the salty talk that I've gotten accused of putting in the book, it's just how people talk to each other. I tried to emulate that so that you could really feel that you were there.

Josh King:

Based on my preparation for my conversation with you, he's not filmed a lot and his voice is not recorded a lot during those six months.

Michel Paradis:

Yeah, that's right. There are lots of photo shoots that he'll occasionally do, but he never... He was not someone like MacArthur, who loved seeing himself in film. He had, I think, just a native Kansan sort of embarrassment at being too much in the limelight in any situation. There are a couple scenes, a couple of moments that are recorded that I was able to sort of use in the course of researching the book. Some quite profound. But yeah, you really have to go to his documents, his cables. His, sometimes, transcripts of phone calls. Diary entries that people put in about a meeting with him, things like that.

Josh King:

So, let's go back to this native Kansan, this native Kansas, because there aren't day planners for his time growing up in Abilene. Young Eisenhower boards a train for West Point, New York. "A poor boy could get a free education there," you write, and I can appreciate that. My son just finished his [inaudible 00:29:56] at Annapolis. Ike said that going to a military academy was an instinctive desire I followed persistently until I attained it. Why?

Michel Paradis:

He's a complicated guy, and his upbringing is especially complicated. His parents were both members of what was called the Bible Students Movement, that ultimately becomes the Jehovah's Witnesses when it sort of becomes more institutionalized in the '20s. But at the turn of the 20th century, when his parents are sort of major followers of it, it's a borderline cult. It's a millennial movement that basically believes the world is going to end in 1915 based upon predictions that are drawn from the geometry of the pyramids. I don't mean to make fun of it, but it's just like, this is really mystical, like a really kind of mystical worldview.

The most prominent feature in his boyhood home is a mural, essentially. A wall-sized diagram of the pyramids, showing how the dimensions of the pyramids predict various moments in the future to include the Armageddon in 1915. I'll just say this without overdoing it, his father's profoundly abusive, like physically and mentally abusive. They wouldn't call it that in turn of the 20th century, or let alone turn of the 20th century Kansas, but it would be obvious today, and he's fanatical. He's fanatical about becoming a socialist, he's fanatical about being a Bible student. He has various sort of extreme enthusiasms. I think that, more than anything, makes Eisenhower, and I would say some of his brothers, without putting them on the couch, incredibly moderate people. Because when you're in this sort of just roiling, unstable environment with an abusive person, and anyone who's grown up in that situation I think can relate, is you build, as a defense mechanism, a certain steadiness and a certain [inaudible 00:31:46] as a way to survive that, and that I think serves him extremely well.

I think it explains a lot of his sort of ultra Kansas [inaudible 00:31:55] in some ways, but it also, in a maybe funny way, explains his decision to embrace not only the military, but then to go on and seek out West Point. Because that's almost the ultimate form of rebellion against someone who is fanatically anti-government, especially anti-military and pacifist. He sees in the ancients a certain kind of traditional, for lack of a better phrase, sort of masculine glory in characters like Caesar and Hannibal that he just falls in love with as a boy. As being, I think in a way, more exciting. Certainly more real than the world he's living in at the time, and he follows that so that by the time he gets the opportunity to go to West Point, it's sort of the culmination of this dream in a way that he's had since he was a small child.

Josh King:

Once he gets to West Point, those who knew him said, "Ike," I'm going to quote, "loved life and people, and didn't seem to be very ambitious," and yet he was this line smasher, you write, on the football field, making easy work of the games against Stevens and Yale, but then comes contests against Carlisle and Tufts. What stops Eisenhower in his tracks, and how does he salvage his military career in the aftermath?

Michel Paradis:

Yeah, so he is one of the players in probably one of the most famous football games in all of human history. I think James Maraniss, I may be mistaking his name.

Josh King:

David Maraniss.

Michel Paradis:

David Maraniss just wrote a great book about this, The Game Against Jim Thorpe, where Eisenhower just gets rolled by Jim Thorpe on the football field. It's the first time Eisenhower appears in the New York Times, and it's about how he's getting steamrolled by the greatest athlete, really, of the 20th century. But then in the next game, he survives that game with a small concussion, but then in the next game, his knee is blown out against Tufts. That's looking like it's not only going to end his football career, but his military career, because if he's disabled, he can't run. If he has a knee injury, then the Army's just... They'll let him graduate, but they're not going to keep him. He goes into, what even he describes, albeit not in these terms, is probably this just enormous depression. I think part of it's being sedentary.

He's someone who has just in a tremendous amount of nervous energy, and so being laid up is just profoundly depressing, but also this dream he had of this life as a general is gone. And so his plan is actually to go off and be a gaucho in Argentina, but the army ultimately, instead of Eisenhower essentially becoming Che Guevara, the Army keeps him around because they realize he is an amazingly competent football coach. Football is something the army still takes extremely seriously, but especially back then, and Eisenhower essentially has kept in the Army because he just has a knack for coaching football, which is I think, among all of his influences, probably one of the most significant in terms of how he starts thinking about how to really lead coalitions of men towards a common goal.

Josh King:

I mean, that's the way Belichick approaches next Sunday against Cleveland too.

Michel Paradis:

That's right.

Josh King:

Just want to sort of pause for a second, Michel. I mean, we all benefit so greatly in our lives from mentors, and before I get to Eisenhower's mentors. I mean, you've created both a legal and now a writing career for yourself. Who were your mentors growing up?

Michel Paradis:

So, if I had to name a few, there was one. Certainly when I was in high school, because I was a sort of rambunctious young boy, too, with way more energy than I had skill. There was a priest when I was in high school by the name of Father Krivak, who, for one reason or another, sort of saw through my bullshit. But also cultivated it as well, and gave me things to read. Because I was really curious, and he could see that I wanted to learn about stuff that was beyond Pennsylvania. And so kind of just said, "Here, read this book," and he would give me these relatively heavy sort of scholarly tracks that I barely understood, to be candid.

But more than anything, it was just the idea that someone thought I was worthy of reading something like that, so as a young man, he was an incredible mentor to me. Similarly, other teachers, professors who I could name, and I'm going to stop naming them just because I don't accidentally not name anybody. Even professional colleagues, and frankly also even friends. Close friends who are either close in age to me, or maybe only a few years older, who have mentored me throughout my life. I think that has certainly been to my internal gratitude to all of them, even if I don't probably express it nearly as much as I could or should.

Josh King:

So, I'm wondering if you were channeling the father, or any of these other mentors, when you're writing about General Fox Conner, because he was Ike's mentor. I want to hear a snippet from a lecture by Major Edward Cox delivered at the US Army Heritage and Education Center.

Major Edward Cox:

It was Pershing's G3. He planned most of the operations in World War I, and he brought a young officer to work for him up from the Army staff named George Marshall, which is where we start to get into Conner's mentorship of his subordinates. So, Conner met Marshall when Marshall was the Ops Officer of the First American Division, and he authorized Marshall here to plan two major operations. [inaudible 00:37:30], I always get that wrong, and the Meuse-Argonne Forest.

Josh King:

Meuse-Argonne, an incredible battle that John Monsky talks about in another presentation that he does about World War I, Michel, but General Fox Conner and General George C. Marshall play prominently in Eisenhower's development as an officer, a general, and a leader. What did he take from these guys?

Michel Paradis:

As you've mentioned, Eisenhower had a knack, or an instinct, for cultivating really great mentors, and Fox Conner is probably one of his earliest mentors. Fox Conner, by all accounts, is actually quite a difficult individual. A Mississippian whose father was grievously wounded in the Civil War. He was seen as sort of a major intellectual in the army, which is not always a compliment, frankly, in the army, especially back then, and he would have this enormous library that he would make the Army ship around the world with him everywhere he went. Eisenhower sort of meets him and sees this guy-

Josh King:

Sort of like "Mad Dog" Mattis in the current day?

Michel Paradis:

Yeah, exactly. He's a very sort of Mattis type figure. Fox Conner sort of sees that Eisenhower... Eisenhower is in a very dark period of his life, which I go into a little more in the book, when he goes down to Panama to work with Fox Conner. Conner sort of sees that Eisenhower has a certain grain of curiosity, particularly about history and military history, and so he cultivates that. He just starts giving him things to read, and then starts giving him more challenging things to read. I was able to interview one of Fox Conner's, essentially, son-in-Law, who described sort of as he understood what they would do. They'd basically just sit and drink and smoke over a chessboard, like well into the night, debating Carl von Clausewitz or Shakespeare.

I think it ignited, in Eisenhower, a real love of learning that the military academy of his era beat right out of him, and so he got to really think about military history, and rekindle that I think joy that he had, certainly as a child, about it. It ends up launching Eisenhower's career within the army in a major way, which was by no means a guarantee at that point for a lot of reasons. Then, George Marshall I think is an equally profound mentor in Eisenhower's life. I say that because at the very end of his life, Eisenhower is starting, working on a memoir, and he gives it the working title, Churchill and Marshall. It's mostly focused, frankly, on this period that's covered in this book. After he's beginning to get his feet under him in the Mediterranean and goes off and leads the D-Day invasion. Marshall, I think, was a great mentor for Eisenhower for two main reasons. One is Marshall was brutally competent. He was probably the single most powerful, perfectly well-situated military man maybe in the world at that point.

He could really understand the entire complexity of the American operation in Pacific, in Europe, and had just uniform respect everywhere. And so was able to cultivate Eisenhower, and Eisenhower was able to cultivate him because Eisenhower basically was like, "I'll do what you need me to do." The military has this concept called followership, which we don't normally talk about in civilian life, but is I think a big virtue that Eisenhower understood. But I think the other thing, and probably even the more important thing in the development of his own character, was how different Marshall was from his previous mentor who was Douglas MacArthur. Because in the early '30s, Eisenhower was ambitious, young. He's in his forties, but he's a young sort of up-and-comer in the United States Army, and he hitches his star to the biggest star in the army at that point, which is the Chief of Staff, Douglas MacArthur. Ultimately follows him to the Philippines, where they spend the rest of the 1930s.

MacArthur is literally the yin to Marshall's yang. They are night and day, hot and cold. It's so important, I think for Eisenhower to sort of get in the circle of George Marshall right after MacArthur, because MacArthur is very disillusioning, right? He really falls in love with MacArthur in the early thirties because MacArthur is a megalomaniac, and those people are incredibly charismatic. But by the end of the thirties, he kind of sees where that inevitably leads.

He is certainly at the nadir of his career at that point and kind of despairing on it, and so to see someone like Marshall, who's the consummate professional, who really always puts duty above himself, to the point where he refuses to even sort of entertain Roosevelt in a conversation about who should lead Operation Overlord, even though everyone knows George Marshall just desperately wants to lead Operation Overlord, but he knows that he has to take himself out of the conversation. Because it's not about him, it's about the mission. I think in terms of shaping his character, and really giving him a kind of model for true leadership, George Marshall is just the perfect sort of balance to his time with MacArthur.

Josh King:

And your book so interestingly brings to life their communication through these cables, through their rare actual face-to-face meetings, and through all the other means in which they communicated in. Marshall always imploring Ike to, as a mentor might, "Take it easy, son. Take a couple days off, see if you can get a little shut-eye, because you're working yourself to the bone."

Michel, last week I was in Los Angeles, and made a side trip down to Long Beach to walk the decks of the USS Iowa, which is bird there as a museum ship. At the beginning of the Light of Battle, you have President Roosevelt aboard the Iowa serving as a floating war cabinet for the whole of the American command as they head to the Tehran Conference for a summit with Winston Churchill and Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin.

Speaker 6:

Over the saw-toothed and snow capped peaks of the Hamadan and the Iraqi mountains to Tehran. The route flown by the British and United States leaders and their staffs to meet the Soviet delegates in the drafting of the plan for victory. The start of the four-day conference in the Persian capital, which in effect signs the death warrant of Nazi Germany. Impressive security measures have been taken for this critical and most momentous conference, which will shape the destiny of mankind.

Josh King:

What was the scene like for those leaders? What are the stakes of this summit, and how do the conflicting ambitions of FDR, Churchill, and Stalin lead to Eisenhower's selection as Supreme Allied Commander?

Michel Paradis:

Yeah, so as you say, they're on their way to the Tehran conference, which is the first big meeting between Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt. That is sandwiched in between another conference, which doesn't get as much sort of historical play, called the Cairo Conference, which was primarily the planning conference between the US and British militaries over the where to go next. The British, to that point, had been dictating the vast majority of allied strategy. For good reason. It's the British Empire, they've been at this a long time, and certainly at the start of the war, they were the preeminent force in the world and still were in many ways.

But by November of 1943, the United States' role as the junior partner in the Alliance is beginning to seem no longer tenable, because the United States is a lot more powerful militarily. Just in terms of its industrial production, it's now way outstripping the British. And so they both square up for a real fight, because the British want to essentially press the Allied advantage in the Mediterranean, and the Americans are like, "No, it's time to finally cross the English Channel and charge to the heart of Berlin to end this war against Nazi Germany."

Josh King:

Because Britain is still thinking, "Empire," and America's thinking, "End this war."

Michel Paradis:

Exactly. Remember, the European War is not popular. Because we beat the Nazis, we nostalgically look back on it as this great thing. A great sort of rousing thing that obviously everyone was behind at the time, but most Americans thought the United States shouldn't be bothering too much in Europe because all we were doing is propping up the British Empire, and they'd rather us be often the Pacific killing the Japanese. And so the fact that Roosevelt was willing to invest at all in Europe was politically risky in an election year, which is what 1944 ultimately is. And so they have this just knockdown. I mean, some of the accounts are just hilarious, because you imagine these sixty-year-old guys sitting across a conference table just shouting at each other and almost getting into a fistfight over landing craft allocations and stuff like that.

But it really is this real test of wills, and a fight for preeminence in the alliance. And so by the time Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin meet in Tehran, Roosevelt is thinking much bigger, about the longer-term world. He's trying to ally the United States much more closely with the Soviet Union as sort of in the middle between the British and the Soviets. The British don't like that at all, for obvious reasons. Churchill certainly never gets on with Stalin. Ultimately, I think Eisenhower's selection... Roosevelt has a lot of reasons for choosing Eisenhower over George Marshall, but I think a big one is that Roosevelt knows that this is an incredibly delicate political and diplomatic moment, and that he needs someone with the kind of political skills and canny, and the ability to smile on the outside while he's stewing on the inside, that Eisenhower has, and George Marshall, for all his many great accomplishments and skills, just does not. And so I think that's certainly how, ultimately, Eisenhower gets picked.

Josh King:

Based on all the influences on him that you've already shared with me. Growing up in Abilene, his education at West Point, the early commands of his career. His mentorships with people like Fox Conner, MacArthur, Marshall. What kind of an actual boss was Eisenhower? You paint a picture of him with his official family, ordered to take a couple days off in Cairo, and the general organizing a trip for his team to Luxor on the banks of the Nile. Was it fun to be on the road with Ike?

Michel Paradis:

I think it depends. I think it could be fun. He had a reputation for being simultaneously great to work for, in the sense that he really did care about his people, he took care of his people. He arranged, as you say, for tours. Even though they spent almost every night together in some cases, playing Bridge, drinking, and chatting, he was never their buddy.

Michel Paradis:

...And chatting. He was never their buddy, right? He understood that his job, as a leader, as a boss, was to run a team, not a family, even though he called them his official family, the people closest to him. And so, he could also be quite terrifying. He had a very purple temper, that is difficult to imagine, but you can see flashes of it at different times, that really give you a sense. So I think he was an extremely exacting and, by all accounts, rewarding person to work for, because he cared about people deeply. But it was high stakes and high intensity, and he got things done that everyone could be proud of.

Josh King:

He was never their buddy, you say. There was a TV miniseries, 1979, that sort of introduced me to Eisenhower, as it sure did many other people. It was called Ike: The War Years. I want to hear a little bit of Robert Duvall as Eisenhower and Lee Remick as Kay Summersby.

Robert Duvall:

I'll give it to you straight. It's Dick.

Lee Remick:

Oh, please no.

Robert Duvall:

Yes. The fighting was over. He was walking through a minefield, well-marked. He hit his own trip wire. Dick, Colonel Arnold, was killed instantly. Sorry is such an inadequate word. I hope you understand how I feel.

Lee Remick:

You killed him.

Robert Duvall:

Kay.

Lee Remick:

You and all the other filthy gold braid generals with your bugles and parades, pinning medals on each other.

Josh King:

So Michel, you don't dive into it in great detail in The Light of Battle, but we are to understand that Kay Summersby occupied a unique position with Ike's official family. What can you share with us about what was really going on?

Michel Paradis:

Sure. Well, this has been a cause of speculation for at least 80 years at this point. So Kay Summersby is an British Irish model who goes on to be a war driver in Great Britain and ultimately becomes Eisenhower's essentially personal chauffeur driver, which understates her role, to say the least. He expresses to a lot of people confidentially that he has a certain amount of what we would just, I think, call puppy love for her. And that starts pretty early. And it's also kind of obvious. She's this beautiful young woman, and he's a middle-aged general under a lot of stress and incredibly lonely, too. When I talked before about how he was never anyone's buddy, that's because everyone needed something or wanted something from him. And he knew that he could never be buddy-buddy with anybody, because that would just complicate his ability to actually be the boss.

And so, it's incredibly lonely, so he does have this very tight cadre of people, including Kay Summersby, around him who are what he calls his genuine official family. And so, do they have a sexual relationship has sort of been the speculation. At the time, everyone thinks they are. Patton is teasing him constantly about it. It's one of the few things that Roosevelt knows about him when he goes to visit Eisenhower in November of 1943. He sort of makes a special point of almost hazing Eisenhower over Kay Summersby in their time together. Did they actually have a sexual relationship? I kind of come down with, and I hope this isn't too unsatisfying, that, I think, is kind of not my business, because he is, at the end of the day, yes, a public person, but also a private person. And I'm not that interested, frankly, in his underwear drawer, but maybe other people are.

But I think the closeness of the relationship is fascinating, because he has so few people around him he can genuinely trust. And I think the fact that she is a woman and she's smart and interesting and pleasant to be around, to just put it simply, is incredibly important for him, because of that loneliness, because of just the need to be able to talk to someone who doesn't need anything from you, who's not angling potentially with one of your rivals. Just in that kind of environment, with that much pressure, you need that as a leader. And I think that, most of all, is the role she served in his life.

Josh King:

After the break, Michel Paradis and I are going to dive deeper into the story of Eisenhower, D-Day, and the birth of the American superpower, as chronicled in Michel's new book, The Light of Battle. That's all coming up right after this.

Speaker 9:

To prove that there is such a thing as free money, we gave people a little sample of Ibotta.

Speaker 10:

Hi, could I interest you in a sample from Ibotta?

Speaker 8:

What's going on?

Speaker 7:

It's just money?

Speaker 10:

Ibotta is an app that gives you cash back every time you shop.

Speaker 11:

What is it?

Speaker 10:

It's money.

Speaker 12:

So I can just take this?

Speaker 13:

This is real?

Speaker 14:

This is insane.

Speaker 15:

What's the catch?

Speaker 10:

There's no catch. It's just cash.

Speaker 9:

Get cash back every time you shop with Ibotta.

Josh King:

Welcome back. If you're enjoying this conversation, I want to hear more from guests, like Michel Paradis, author of The Light of Battle: Eisenhower, D-Day, and the Birth of the American Superpower, remember, please, to subscribe to Inside the ICE House podcast wherever you listen to your podcasts, and also, if you would give us a five star rating and a review on Apple Podcasts. Before the break, Michel and I were chronicling Dwight Eisenhower's rise from a football player from Abilene, Kansas to a cadet at West Point to his appointment as Supreme Allied Commander tasked with planning the invasion of Normandy on D-Day.

Coming back now, Michel, to write your first book, Last Mission to Tokyo and now, The Light of Battle, you had to mine the archives of Jimmy Doolittle and Dwight Eisenhower as deeply as possible, working with, you said, 80,000 source documents. Also, you talked about the day planners that you used to recreate the life of Ike from his appointment to the go order on D-Day. We were talking about this a little bit before we started recording, but whether you're on the deck of the Hornet or you're in London in '43 and '44, you have to so immersed into those places and times. What's it like to have your wife and family tug at you and say, "Come back to the 2020s, please, we miss you?"

Michel Paradis:

"Come back."

Josh King:

"No, this is a nice place to be. I want to hang out here." What was it like?

Michel Paradis:

Hard. And I have a wonderful, absolutely patient, and caring wife, who's tolerant of this, especially since I spent certainly the better part of last summer, basically, as you said, living in 1944, writing the bulk of this book last year. And look, it's hard, I'm not going to lie.

Josh King:

But do you enjoy it? Do you like, "Oh, this is so cool. I love looking at these day planners?" Because that's what's sort of what I would feel and Pete would feel.

Michel Paradis:

Absolutely. You do kind of go into a fugue state at a certain point, where you can see how people are talking to each other. You can see just the way they've written something, how they didn't write it, and you can see just all the connections coming together. It's incredibly fun. It's not remunerative, I'll be perfectly honest.

Josh King:

Yeah, I know.

Michel Paradis:

But it is just so much fun and so satisfying to mainly write something that you want to read, I think, is the main task, at least for me. Yeah, so you spend an astronomical amount of time doing it, but as long as it's going well, when it's going well, it's going great. When it's not going well, it's not going well.

Josh King:

Did you, to do Last Mission, did you sort of climb inside of B-25 or get any sort of experience of what flying in that thing was like off of an aircraft carrier?

Michel Paradis:

Yeah, you bet. You bet. It's small. It was real tiny, and yeah, you do what you can. I'm not Daniel Day Lewis, but there is a certain element of method to it. Because you want to really sense it as much as you can, as much as you read it. And hopefully, that comes across in the page, where it's not, as we talked about at the beginning, it's not your sort of, "And then, on June 4th, 1944," in that sort of stentorian tone. It's fine. I've read some great books that way, but for me, it was just the excitement of actually living there with these people that was something I tried to translate to the page. And so, you do everything you can, in some ways, to just recreate that.

Josh King:

So back into the 2020s, earlier in your career, you worked at the Department of Defense, you led a lot of the landmark court cases to arise out of Guantanamo Bay. Frequent podcast listeners, like myself, got a different picture of GTMO painted by the fourth season of Serial, in which Sarah Koenig and Dana Chivvis retell its history told by people who lived through the key moments of its evolution. Have you learned anything new about that chapter of American history and these many years later? What should that tell us about this really odd chapter of the American military justice system?

Michel Paradis:

Yeah, I think, and probably, this is one of the reasons I get drawn into 1944 is having lived through the aughts and the twenty teens through something that is, I'm sure, in some way or another, 50 years from now will be looked back as this strange historical event. And I think, certainly, again, one of the things that drives me probably to write the books the way that I do, which is much more in a way personal and tries to get you to feel like what these people just were like as people is, I think, the experience of doing something that lots of people have opinions about and look at, but don't have an interior sense of. And just how weird it is, right, how funny things can be, how casual... Most people, most of the time, just tell jokes to each other. And that's true in Guantanamo, that was true in Normandy, and that's true pretty much everywhere else you go.

And so, in thinking back on what Guantanamo means, in some ways, it's not over. The trials down in Guantanamo are still going on, and certainly, as with my historians hat on, I'm like I don't know how it ends yet. So it's hard to know exactly what it means, because you don't know where it ends up. But I do think it's just this strange, I'll put this probably too bluntly, but I do think it was this very strange betrayal of a certain kind of American idealism and more than starting it, which I think, arguably, was understandable or could be justified, right, it was right after 9/11, people were terrified, I certainly was, I was living in New York at the time as well, the inability to close it, I think, has done more harm to the United States and its reputation of the world even than having opened it in the first place.

And that now transcends, what, four presidential administrations. And that's the real shame, because you're just seeing this sort of betrayal of American values, so there are people literally graduating from college now who Guantanamo has existed their entire lives. And I remember when Guantanamo opened, it was anomalous then, but now, it's not. And that's a change in America's, I think, just image of itself, the image that America's allowed to have of itself, that it not only opened a place like Guantanamo and did the things that were done there, but then, never resolved it for weird...

Josh King:

-Political reasons, yeah.

Michel Paradis:

Not even good political reasons or compelling political reasons, just like inertia and a lot of CYA and stuff that's petty, stuff that's human, you can understand it, but it's disappointment, I think, more than anything.

Josh King:

When we left our story before the break of Eisenhower and D-Day, Ike was taken over the planning of Operation Overlord. In his review of The Light of Battle for the Wall Street Journal, Paul Kennedy begins his piece, "He had, it must be conceded, the toughest political job of all the Allied commanders during the war, simply because he had so many other commanders to direct and the forces of so many other nations to lead." How did Ike manage those commanders and those nations? You could begin with Bernard Montgomery and Alan Brooke and the impending decline of the British Empire.

Michel Paradis:

Yeah, so I think, extremely deftly, and I ultimately, I do, as I was saying before, I think that's why Roosevelt picked him, because he knew that this was a political job of incredible sensitivity, particularly at this moment where the United States is on the rise and the British Empire, which had been preeminent for a century, is beginning to be on the decline. And Eisenhower had a gift, and I genuinely mean that, it's a gift, that only certain politicians have, of not only having everyone think that he agreed with them, which is the inherent politician's gift, but of genuinely thinking about, "What does this person really care about? And how can I make sure I'm meeting that need?" And so, I think probably one of Eisenhower's most consequential decisions in the planning of Operation Overlord gets right to this, because Bernard Montgomery is foist upon him, right? It's not his first choice to be the commander of the British forces.

And he and Monty just, if you watch the Robert Duvall movie, I think the relationship is portrayed pretty well. Monty, they're not that fair to Monty, but Monty and Eisenhower hate each other, to put it simply. And yet, Monty gets foist upon him, in what must have seemed like an apparent act of sabotage by the British to undermine him. And Eisenhower wants to double the size of the D-Day invasion, which originally was planned to be about only 80,000 men and fairly focused and, therefore, highly riskier and much more likely to fail. And so, Eisenhower basically wants to double the size of the operation, but knows that he can't be the one to propose it, because he's, if nothing else, an American. And so, having been given Bernard Montgomery as his British commander, Eisenhower basically bear hugs Montgomery right after Christmas of 1943 and sort of says, "Hey, Monty, I want you to not just be my British commander, I want you to be the overall ground commander for Operation Overlord."

Now mind you, Eisenhower had no authority to make this promise. He had asked George Marshall, but Marshall had not given him permission to sort of consolidate command in that way. And he approaches Montgomery, essentially fosters his ego, and basically says, "Bernard Montgomery of Alamein, really, don't you think you should be the commander? Isn't this operation something you should be in charge of, the whole operation?" And Montgomery is like, "Yes, Bernard Montgomery of Alamein should, in fact, be the one leading the D-Day invasion." And then, he's like, "And don't you think it's just a little too small, particularly for someone like Bernard Montgomery?" And Bernard Montgomery's like, "Absolutely. This is much too small for Bernard Montgomery."

And so, Monty ends up being the one to really advocate within the British government for its expansion. And so, even though Churchill and Sir Alan Brooke, who's the Army Chief of Staff for the Brits essentially, are basically opposed to Operation Overlord, the fact that Monty, the superstar general of the British Empire, is the one to say, "No, we need to double it," they're like, "Okay, I guess if Monty says so, here we go." And that ultimately, I think, makes D-Day into, not only the success it is, but the scale of operation that it becomes. But it's that kind of deft political skill where Eisenhower has to eat it.

This is a guy whose ego is monstrous, who's never done Eisenhower any sort of gentle favors. And he basically not only has to fully bear hug this guy, but actually then, give him all the credit. So even they start calling the plan the Montgomery Plan, just to sort of remind everybody that it's Monty's plan that we're doing.

Josh King:

Great marketing to Monty. On the American side, Michel, there are men like Omar Bradley and George Patton, who Donald Trump seems to regularly want to resurrect. Thanks to George C. Scott's portrayal as Patton in the 1970 movie, which won the Academy Award for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay, and Best Actor, we are familiar with the challenges of keeping the general in line.

Speaker 16:

It's my nerves, sir. I just can't stand the shelling anymore.

George C. Scott:

Your nerves? Well, hell, you're just a goddamned coward. Shut up. I won't have a yellow bastard sitting here crying in front of these brave men who have been wounded in battle. Shut up. Don't admit this yellow bastard. There's nothing wrong with him. I won't have sons of bitches who are afraid to fight stinking up this place of honor.

Josh King:

How close to reality is that description? And how did Ike deal with it?

Michel Paradis:

So that's near verbatim. Patton, actually, the movie, Patton, is written by George Marshall's aid during the war. So a lot of the particularly lines that Patton says are literally pulled out of reports and transcripts, including the famous speech that opens it, the, "Americans love to fight," speech. The only thing that's not true to life about that is his voice, right? Because I certainly grew up having watched Patton and I always thought of Patton as George C. Scott, but Patton's actual voice, and if you can get a recording of it, I highly recommend it, there aren't that many, he has this high pitched nasal weird voice. It's almost like a Mickey Mouse voice, and it's the most incongruous thing in the world to hear this guy just be full blood and guts, but in the voice of Mickey Mouse. So Eisenhower and Patton go way, way back.

They're basically lifelong friends at this point. And Eisenhower covers for him is the short answer of saying it. He gets these reports right after this happens in August of 1943 and does everything he can, essentially, to bureaucratically cover up for Patton. And so, when the story breaks in November of 1943, just as Eisenhower is about be picked to be the Supreme Allied Commander, it's a very politically tense situation. But Eisenhower knows enough about the press and bureaucracy to sort of have largely insulated himself in Patton. And he does that for two reasons. One is they are buddies, and I don't think you can underestimate that sort of personal connection. Because they go so far back. But it's also, Eisenhower understands Patton's virtues, that are sort of the flip side of all his faults. And that includes not the least the fact that the Nazis are just terrified of George S. Patton. And so, that he knows he can use Patton as a decoy and does to great effect actually in advance of D-Day, because the Germans always assume that wherever Patton is going is about where the war is coming.

Josh King:

So that was the Calais faint?

Michel Paradis:

That's right, the Calais Operation Fortitude, where they essentially have Patton lead an entirely fictitious army group that's poised to attack Calais. And they do all of these great subterfuges to convince the Germans that's where Patton's going, to the point where for weeks after D-Day, the Germans are holding massive amounts of the forces they have in France over by Calais and not responding to the actual fighting in Normandy, because they're just waiting. They just can't believe that George Patton is not the one leading this fight. And George Patton, I should say, doesn't believe this either, right? He's furious that he's not allowed to. He actually offers Eisenhower a bribe.

Josh King:

A thousand bucks?

Michel Paradis:

A thousand bucks a week, a yeah, which is a lot of money back then, to just basically be a brigade commander in Normandy. But Eisenhower does not take him up on the joke. He's like, "No, no, no. You're pinning more Germans down just sitting there than you ever could in the field."

Josh King:

So in the section, Supreme Allied Commander, you've got finally these moments in which Eisenhower is put out in front of the media offering up statements. He's paraphrasing Nietzsche. He says things like, "I have complete confidence that the soldiers and airmen of all the civil populations of the United Nations will demonstrate, once and for all, that an aroused democracy is the most formidable fighting machine that can be devised." So just to geek out a little bit on this formidable fighting machine, let's talk about the mulberries. Bertie Ramsay had a big task ahead to complete two artificial ports within the space of seven days. What was needed to accomplish that mission? And what would've happened had he failed?

Michel Paradis:

The scale of the logistics is just awe inspiring. And there are actually some great books on, essentially, the engineering of the D-Day landing to include the mulberries, but the mulberries, as people paying attention to the news might understand, are basically these floating docks that they needed to, in order to essentially help resupply the ground forces on the Normandy beaches, because we didn't have access to a port yet. And so, they sink, I think, a hundred old ships all around the harbor to essentially operate as breakwaters. They start sinking these just gargantuan caissons, these essentially large what you'd think of as the pillar underlying a bridge, that they drag. I can't remember the rate, but it's like two meters like a minute or so. It's just these slow sort of just drags all the way across the English Channel. And then, they set up this just dense network of interlocking piers that are tied to these caissons, and they put all these other obstacles.

Just the engineering alone is just this astronomical effort to provide the Allies the ability to essentially offload supplies, men, and tanks onto these floating piers and to get them onto the beaches as quickly as possible, which was enormously important, because they wouldn't have a port until the capture of Cherbourg almost a month later. And it's sort of one of the great wild things that they do, because it's initially proposed as a joke. Because they're trying to figure out the planning of all of this.

And one of the American planners just says, "Well, why don't we just build a port?" And then, they're like, "Well, what would it take to build a port?" Right? It's just the amount of just ingenuity and problem solving that goes into this is just fantastic. And when they propose it to Churchill, it's sort of like catnip for Churchill, who just loves these sort of eccentric things. And so, they go with it. But it becomes, certainly in the short term, one of the most important ways that they're able to get enough men and material onto the beaches, as the Germans are charging in the other direction to meet them.

Josh King:

As he's living in London and working out of London, Norfolk House becomes sort of his home base, but then, he gets summoned over to 10 Downing Street, which is an away game. Churchill had his designs. You've talked about it a couple of times, Operation Anvil, hitting France from the South. How did Ike manage Churchill throughout this process?

Michel Paradis:

I hesitate to say, "Manage Churchill," because I think he ends up admiring the hell out of Churchill too. I think, when Eisenhower writes this memoir at the end of his life, he calls it Churchill and Marshall, because I think Churchill is a big mentor to him in his own way, even though they are not entirely on the same...

Josh King:

But Marshall and Roosevelt don't really trust the...

Michel Paradis:

Not at all. Absolutely. And it kind of falls to Eisenhower to maintain a real relationship of warmth and trust with Churchill, while at the same time maintaining a relationship of trust with the Americans, which is no small feat, because neither of those sides trust each other. But they all trust Eisenhower. And he does that, I think, through a combination of things. One is a lot of the stuff I talked about before. He understands that, honestly, his opinions don't matter, and he's not going to take big principled stands just to look like the smartest guy in the room. Quite the opposite.

He's always trying to make sure other people, in those kind of high power situations, are the ones who feel like they're the biggest dog in the room, because that's going to cultivate the kind of trust he needs to work with them. He's also, I think, more sympathetic to the British point of view than certainly Roosevelt and Marshall were. And I think that comes from just being there physically. You're in London, so you get it. He's a bit of an Anglophile, right? He's a big student in military history. His favorite book is The White Brigade, which is probably one of the most Anglophilic books you could ever read. And I think he also gets that...

Michel Paradis:

And I think he also, he gets the politics of his position well enough to know that he's got to have lunch every week with Churchill, he goes to these dinners that Churchill runs that go to like 2:00 in the morning until everyone basically drops exhausted except for Churchill, who's sort of in his normal Churchillian manic frenzy. But he understands that that's almost the most important part of his job with Churchill, is to have that ability to just always have that open line of communication that someone like George Marshall frankly couldn't have had. George Marshall, he wasn't a dinners and drinks kind of guy for all of his great virtues. And so yeah, he manages that relationship essentially like a consummate politician. He learns politics in this period.

Josh King:

He's learning politics and both this sort of managing up in some way to Churchill and also retail politics to the vast numbers of troops that are underneath him. The Bayonet is a private rail car that proves instrumental to Eisenhower to get him out and about out of London to look at preparations in the field. You write that visiting the men, I'm going to quote, "quickly became Eisenhower's favorite part of the job." What did he learn on these trips and how did the logistical machinery around Eisenhower's official family help him ready for the fight?

Michel Paradis:

Yeah, they would go on these day trips, or sometimes like weekend trips, and it was Eisenhower, Kay Summersby typically, Mattie Pinette, who's a largely forgotten figure, but an utterly fascinating woman who's on Eisenhower's staff, as well as a guy named Jimmy Gault, who is Eisenhower's essentially British aide in this period. And by and large, it would be the four of them going out all around the United Kingdom to visit the British, the American, the Canadian, all the forces as they were preparing for the invasion.

And Eisenhower initially is very reluctant. He doesn't like these kind of reviews because I think the way he described it was that he remembered being one of the junior officers sort of being made to stand at attention while some preening general gets to feel like the big dog because all these men are standing at his attention. But he picks up a trick from Monty, just to show how he pays close attention to people, because Monty is just one of these, has an electric effect on his subordinates. And he picks up essentially a trick from Monty where he gives a short statement, a short speech during the formal review and then just sort of says, "Okay, at ease, gather round," and then just walks amongst them like he's doing like a receiving line at a political rally. And just shakes their hands, asks where they're from, tries to get to know them. Not, again, as a buddy, but sort of the way a great boss or a great politician would get to know their constituents and starts to really pay attention to what matters to them.

So something he's fanatical about is the mess halls. He always visits the mess halls to see how good the food is. He makes sure that their shoes and their socks are up to par because they walk on their feet. And he just thinks in a very granular level about these are people that I have to lead and get... I need them to do what I want them to do. And most importantly, it's my job to have them see me as a person who cares about them. And it quickly does, as you say, become his favorite part of the job, because it's just, he sees what this is really all about, what he's doing. It's not this office work that is just soul-crushing in so many ways, but it's these young men who are about to be the guys in those landing craft, watching the coast bounce in front of them and to run into the German guns, and he feels that in his bones.

Josh King:

I played a clip earlier in our conversation as we were getting going of John Monsky's presentation of the Eyes of the World, his story of those 11 months from D-Day to VE-Day. He went to great lengths, John did on stage, to talk about the exploits and contributions of elements like the 761st Tank Battalion known as the Black Panthers, the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion, the 320th Barrage Balloon Battalion, and the Tuskegee Airmen of the 332nd Fighter Group, all comprised of African-Americans. How did Eisenhower deal with the discrimination within his own ranks and with the presence of so many American people of color in Europe?

Michel Paradis:

Yeah, it was a big problem. When I was talking earlier about the method I used of just really actually putting his day-to-day together as best I could, one of the things that jumped out at me as a big surprise, because you just don't see it in the standard histories of either him or this period, is how much time he ends up spending on what we would call civil rights issues. Because at this point, the American army is segregated, and so black soldiers can't sort of serve with white soldiers. Most black soldiers are relegated to what are called SOS units or service units.

And Eisenhower comes to England with this segregated army in the cause for freedom and the British as well as other allies see America like, "What are you doing? How do you not see this hypocrisy that you are fighting Nazi fascism with a segregated army?" And it becomes, not to put it too bluntly, just a diplomatic nightmare from the get-go, right? His first press conference when he's in England in 1942, he takes a question about this and doesn't answer it well, he's sort of clumsily sort of like, "Well, it's army policy, I'm just following orders." It's a terrible answer. And after a few controversies, he sort of goes completely the other way and literally bans racism in the army, makes racism itself a court-martialable offense before he ends up then leaving to go to the Mediterranean.

But by the time he comes back in 1944, this problem has gotten a lot worse for a couple of reasons. One is, the commander who was in place in his stead while he was in the Mediterranean had zero interest in civil rights issues and was perfectly happy to perpetuate Jim Crow in the United Kingdom. But also the size of America's presence, very, very rapidly balloons, both by the time he arrives and then almost doubles by the time of D-Day. And so the British are literally being invaded by America, but they're being invaded by American problems, too, and the civil rights problem is the one that seems both the most inexplicable to the British. They're like, "Why are you so violently hostile to your own fellow Americans?" The British are full of racism, let's not sugarcoat this, but there was something just quite specific about American sort of apartheid-oriented racism in the '40s that just seemed alien, even in the British Empire.

And so it's a problem that Eisenhower frankly doesn't want to have, but he has to deal with it. And so anytime he... He sort of is one of those, and this I think is indicative of how he deals with these issues as president, too, is he waits as long as possible to do something and then when it's finally time to do something, he just takes the most dramatic action he can to try and solve the problem. But it almost compromises the D-Day invasion. The biggest issue he confronts that I spend a fair bit of time on in the book is charges of rape against black soldiers against white women. And this is an incredibly charged issue, especially because rape is a death penalty offense in the army, but it's not in Great Britain.

And so the British and particularly British elite opinion are like, "We're allowing Americans to essentially lynch black men on British soil. What is this about?" And he's having to essentially assure the British foreign office that "No, no, no, we're doing everything by the book. We're behaving incredibly lawfully." And this is literally at the same time he's negotiating with the Foreign Office to maintain a secrecy ban, negotiating with the Foreign Office over the use of chemical weapons. There's all of these things are happening at the same time and race relations is probably one of the biggest challenges he confronts as commander.

Josh King:

Every one of your 45 chapters in The Light of Battle leads with a black and white drawing of a different member of the cast of characters of D-Day. Some we've certainly heard of, like King George VI and Anthony Eden, others seem to be previously lost to history like Black John Smith. At the end of your book, how does Black John Smith figure into your story?

Michel Paradis:

So you asked what is Eisenhower doing on June 4th, 5th, and 6th? Because by June 6th, he has nothing else to do. He's made all of his orders and now it's just the plan and operation. And so he basically spends that night in bed chain-smoking and reading westerns. And I have a very strong high level of confidence that I describe more in the footnotes that the western he's reading is a book called The Czar of Halfaday Creek. And its main character is this character called Black John Smith and it's this great... Great is too strong, but it's a lovely western that has this sort of character who strangely has lots of echoes of Eisenhower himself, where he sort of plays the fool, but he always has something cooking behind the scenes. And the plot always has these sort of O. Henry turns to it. And this is essentially one of the things he's reading as he's waiting for the reports to come in from Omaha Beach.

Josh King:

On June 6th, 1944, President Franklin Roosevelt addressed the nation.

Speaker 17:

My fellow Americans, last night when I spoke with you about the fall of Rome, I knew at that moment that troops of the United States and our allies were crossing the Channel in another and greater operation. It has come to pass with success thus far. And so in this poignant hour, I ask you to join with me in prayer. Our mighty God, our sons, pride of our nation, this day have set upon a mighty endeavor, a struggle to preserve our republic, our religion, and our civilization, and to set free a suffering humanity.

Josh King:

On that day, Michel, Eisenhower writes to his own son who had just graduated from West Point, his tone very different from his prior letters written to his boy. What was his message and how had Eisenhower himself grown over the previous year to that point?

Michel Paradis:

Yeah, his message to his son is really poignant for how formal it is. He addresses his son as Lieutenant John Eisenhower, and there's this kind of welcoming to the profession of arms where he's really... All of his other letters to his son are great because they're just so dad, he's dad. But in this one, there's a kind of just respect for the man that his son had become. And in Eisenhower's case, I think there is a similar... What fascinated me about this period and what I think also fascinated him towards the end of his life about this period is how much he really did change. And he goes from being this broadly liked, well-respected to be sure, sort of military figure, to having a certain confidence on the world stage as someone who can stand with Churchill, who can stand with Roosevelt as equals. And so that certainly by D-Day, certainly by week after D-Day, when he actually steps foot in Normandy for the first time, you can really see the guy who becomes the 34th president. Where you don't recognize... You see hints of that a year earlier or even six months earlier, but by D-Day, you're like, "Oh, yeah, yeah, that's Eisenhower. That's the guy we all know."

And so that was one of the most, I think, fascinating and rewarding parts of this book was to really just see how someone actually learns to become that kind of leader. It's before they're great. And that's what hopefully this book contributes in a way that other books that, as I said before, kind of assume the ending a little bit all throughout and don't try and give him essentially the benefit of having something to learn. And so you see him learning how to wield power in the world with the best of them, like on the varsity team.

Josh King:

The next day after he writes that, he sails to Normandy aboard the HMS Apollo. Omar Bradley greets him as he would a visiting general, but he also thinks of it as a meddlesome distraction, which I suppose we can all relate to when the boss shows up to find out. What does Ike find when he gets there?

Michel Paradis:

He finds that he has nothing to contribute, I think more than anything. He's just going from place to place trying to participate, and he sees people like Monty and Bradley directing the combat operations, which at that point were improving, but still especially touch and go in a place like Omaha Beach. And I think there's a lot of just anxiety and frustration that he, just going from place to place, in senses, I think, to some extent that he's just being a meddlesome interloper. To the point where he demands that at one point, and I think I put this in the book, he demands that the naval captain who's sort of driving the ship that's giving him the tour of the coastline, because it's not yet safe enough or he doesn't decide to go land bound, he wants to get closer and so the ship goes closer and then runs aground and nearly sinks. And so they have to do an emergency evacuation of this ship. And I think that he doesn't have anything good to do, but he's just trying to get a handle on the situation.

Josh King:

But in a larger sense, in the aspect of this hinge of history that we started our conversation about, based on what is sitting on Omaha and Utah Beach, how has this changed America's place in the world based on what's been deposited on a piece of sand in France?

Michel Paradis:

Oh, yeah. It's this real proof that America can fight, that America can not only ride British coattails or sort of act as the junior partner in operations around the world or even do significant but not major operations in places like the Pacific, but really do a continental invasion of something that everyone at the time believed was impenetrable. As I said before, people assumed that casualties would be up to 50%, and those were generous estimates. And everyone kind of thought, yeah, this is going to be a bloodbath no matter what, even if we win. And so not only had the United States succeeded in actually penetrating the Atlantic wall and begun really the beginning of the end of the war, certainly in Western Europe, it had done it in its own kind of way, too, where America is clearly in the lead of this operation, but it never rubs anybody's face in that fact, either.

One of the more poignant sort of things that happens is Eisenhower makes the great announcement, like you played, not just to the troops, but he makes another announcement to the continent of Europe announcing the Allied invasion. And in that invasion, even though it's this tremendous moment not only for him but for the United States, he doesn't mention himself or the United States once. It's all about the United States, sorry, the United Nations, which is what the Allies were called at the time. The United Nations have come to begin the liberation of Europe. We weren't there to conquer like an old empire. We were there to liberate Europe from the rack of tyranny.

Josh King:

And this stays on his mind for the rest of his life in so many ways. 20 years later, 1964, Eisenhower comes back to Omaha Beach for the first time with Walter Cronkite of CBS news, and at the end of that hour-and-a-half program, Cronkite and Eisenhower are sitting at the Normandy American Cemetery at Colleville-sur-Mer in front of the crosses and the Stars of David that we know so well, and Eisenhower reflects on what he's seeing.

Dwight Eisenhower:

To storm these beaches for one purpose only, not to gain anything for ourselves, not to fulfill any ambitions that America had for conquest, but just to preserve freedom, systems of self-government, in the world. Many thousands of men have died for ideals such as these, and here again in the 20th century for the second time Americans, along with the rest of the free world, but Americans had to come across the ocean to defend those same values.

Josh King:

Michel, as you reflect on The Light Of Battle, how are those values that Eisenhower talked about being upheld today and why is it so important to revisit Eisenhower's story against the modern backdrop?

Michel Paradis:

Yeah, it's a great question because I do think the thing that resonated with me the most, especially just hearing him say it just now, is we take all of that very much for granted. When all the things he talked about, the idea that you would have democracy, freedom, self-government, decolonization. These are pipe dreams in 1944 and D-Day makes them a reality, because if D-Day had failed, the world as we know it just would not have existed and United States certainly would've not been at the helm of that, and certainly not American values.

And so as we are in a world where we have what we call peer and near peer powers, whether or not it's Russia or China or other great powers who conceive of themselves that way and are trying to upend that consensus, we have to remember that the world was not always the way it has been and that it took the blood of literally thousands of young men who never came home and were buried on that beach to make the world that we live in that has been more peaceful and more prosperous than at any point in all of human history possible. So that's sort of the macro, the bigger point that this book sort of reminded me of in a very acute way, and I hope people do take from it.

But the other thing I hope people take from it is just an appreciation, not of Eisenhower as a man. I didn't set out to kind of write a great man theory of history, but I did have a sense of his skillset of that kind of humble leadership that is not always seeking to own the limelight but that is seeking really to accomplish the seemingly impossible and the ability to mobilize enormous resources and people in a common mission like that is just, I think, an underappreciated model of leadership.

And so for me, just learning how he developed that style, how he developed those leadership skills, was just interesting and something that I hope people can take a lot from because it's not our normal model of leadership. We have the Churchillian model of leadership, the charismatic speaker who can always own the room, but when it just comes to just the ability to do big things and achieve great things, I think Eisenhower just has a lot to teach us all about how to use power for the good.

Josh King:

Accomplish the seemingly impossible. That's a great way to end our conversation as we reflect 80 years since Normandy and The Light Of Battle. Michel, thanks so much for coming back to the New York Stock Exchange, joining us inside the ICE House.

Michel Paradis:

Thank you so much for this superb, superb conversation.

Josh King:

That's our conversation for this week. Our guest was Michel Paradis, author of The Light of Battle: Eisenhower, D-Day, and the Birth of the American Superpower, out now from Mariner Books. If you like what you heard, please rate us on Apple Podcasts so other folks know where to find us. If you've got a comment or a question you'd like one of our experts to tackle on a future show, please leave us a review. Email us at [email protected] or tweet at us @ICEHousePodcast. Our show is produced by Lance Glenn with production assistance, editing, engineering from Sam Iannotti. Pete Asch is the director of programming and production at ICE, and I'm Josh King, your host, signing off from the library of the New York Stock Exchange. Thanks for listening. We'll talk to you next week.

Speaker 1:

The information contained in this podcast was obtained in part from publicly available sources and not independently verified. Neither ICE nor its affiliates make any representations or warranties express or implied as to the accuracy or completeness of the information and do not sponsor, approve, or endorse any of the content herein, all of which is presented solely for informational and educational purposes. Nothing herein constitutes an offer to sell, a solicitation of an offer to buy any security, or a recommendation of any security or trading practice. Some portions of the proceeding conversation may have been edited for the purpose of length or clarity.

Back to top