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We want to welcome to VeteransRadio today Michelle Paradis.
He is a historian and author, a law professor, and he has a new book out called The Light
of Battle really about Dwight Eisenhower, about Ike Dede, the birth of American superpower.
It's an interesting and timely read.
Michelle, welcome to VeteransRadio.
Thank you so much for having me on.
It's one of those things we're always good to remind us of our own history.
But tell us why this book now?
Yeah, it's a great question.
I think for me, the real draw was Eisenhower because we have this received image of Eisenhower.
Almost as everybody's grandfather who loved to go golfing.
That, I think, does short service to someone who is utterly fascinating.
Here you have probably the most powerful generals in all of human history who was raised by
religious pacifists in rural Kansas.
Here you have someone who wanted to be a general from the time he was a little boy, but convinced
that he may be forced out of the army at West Point, decided his fallback clan would
go being a gout show in Argentina.
You have someone, and I decided to discover in the writing of the book, who is warned
in advance of D-Day that the Nazis are not only developing nuclear weapons, but there's
reasons to believe they might even try and use them.
He's then told that not only can he not do anything about this information, he can't
tell anyone really either.
He focuses on the things he can control, which in his mind is the weather.
You have this person who is as interesting, complicated, and as conflicted as America
itself in many ways.
He is just, I think, a deeply underappreciated source of study.
I think that's particularly important, particularly at a time like now, where I think we also
need to understand how real leaders use power.
One of the downsides of his fairly benign Saturday evening post-image that we've inherited
is that it leads you to misunderstand how it is that a farm boy from the middle of Kansas
goes on to be the first president to be called the leader of the free world.
Seeing him closely, I think not only does he deserve what he deserves, but I think it
also tells us what we should be looking for in leaders, because he's someone who did
learn to master the art of power under the most difficult circumstances and amid some
of the greatest personalities and rivals of the 20th century, whether it's DeGaulle or
Churchill or Roosevelt.
That to me is, especially this time when the United States is very divided, when the world
seems incredibly uncertain and we're in a political election here ourselves, thinking
about what real leadership is, is always valuable.
I think Eisenhower just provides an invaluable window into someone who really masters the
art of leadership and the responsible use of power.
That's one of the reasons, or the reason one should read history, is to learn lessons
that we can apply in our world today.
One of those things I got out of reading The Light of Battle was, and you mentioned his
intersection with all these historic figures now, Roosevelt, Marshall, Churchill, Monty,
Caddon, Omar Bradley, Jimmy Doolittle, Hap Arnold, Wild Bill Donovan.
He intersects with all of these folks and really demonstrates a skill in relationships.
Talk to us about that.
Yeah.
You know, Eisenhower never serves in combat prior to World War II.
He rises up through the army as what was derisively called back then a desk general.
And yet he goes on to be trusted to command the most powerful military force ever assembled
in the most complicated military operation ever conceived.
And how does he do that?
I think a big part of that is he is liked to use a cliche, Ike is liked.
And he's not liked in a superficial way.
He's liked because he understands, I think, two very important things.
One is, and this is, I think, something that outside the context of the military is important
for people to hear, is he understands the virtue not just of leadership, but of followership.
Because throughout his career, he essentially is the trusted mentee to a number of very
important mentors in his life, to include Douglas MacArthur, to include a guy I write
about at length in the book, Fox Connor, and to include General Marshall himself.
And that art of followership is valuable not just because it serves his ambition to rise
ever higher in the ranks by being a trusted subordinate.
He understands the value of genuine service.
And that, in turn, I think, is the second thing that allowed so many people to not
only just like Eisenhower in a superficial way, but to genuinely trust him.
And that is, he was never as much of an ego as he did have, to be sure.
You don't get to that position in the world without having a strong sense of self-confidence
or something else.
He always understood that it was never about him, that he was always about the mission.
And he would always make sure, sometimes just through his good old, hopey Kansas sort of
geniality, but really in the acceptance of blame and the distribution of credit for when
things went well, he always kept in mind that if anyone around him ever believed for a moment
that he was in it for himself, that he was in it for what we would call today clout,
that not only would people not trust him, the only people who would ever help him achieve
the amazing things he achieves as the Supreme Allied Commander and then as the Co-Chair of
the United States are going to be yes men and toadies.
And almost the worst thing you can have when you have real responsibility on your shoulder,
shoulders is a bunch of people around you who are unwilling to tell you the unbornish
truth.
And so that aspect of Eisenhower, his commitment to something greater than himself, his understanding,
I think deep in his bones, whether it's he's coaching a football team or leading the Allied
Invasion of Normandy, that we can always and will always be able to accomplish more together
than any one person can accomplish and that the only way to collectively achieve what
seems like it might be impossible is if everyone understands the goal and understands that
he as the leader is 100% committed to them and the goal, not to his grandiosity, not
to himself.
And that kind of skill is a leadership skill to be sure, but it's an interpersonal skill
because that sense of an integrity is really what drew people to him.
And it's really that those personal qualities as well as being smart and articulate and being
able to listen to different sides and make decisions that led him to ultimately being
command of overlord and the D-Day Invasion.
We're at the 80th anniversary of D-Day where 4,414 men died on the beaches, including 2,500
Americans.
Let's remember that's 400,000 people who died in World War II as compared to say 58,000
in Vietnam and 2,500 in Afghanistan.
But it's those personal qualities of his that he had because not everybody wanted him to
run the show, did they?
No, quite the opposite.
The British were never fully convinced of the value of Operation Overlord.
And for the first two years of the war, the British were very much the senior partner
of the Atlantic Alliance.
And they thought the invasion was too risky.
And in some ways they were right about that, even though we ultimately did pull it off.
But it also, the British understood that there were essentially long-term opportunities
to be gained for the British Empire in this war.
This was neither Britain's first, and I'm sure at the time they did not think it was
going to be its last war either.
And so for the first two years of the war, the Allies largely pursued British strategy,
which was to expand the Allied control over North Africa, then Italy, and the British
had broader designs on the Eastern Mediterranean, not the least to cut off the Soviets from
having their own sphere of influence in the Eastern Mediterranean, if and when Nazi Germany
ultimately fell.
And so when the decision to finally launch D-Day is May, November of 1943, it's one
of the most acrimonious fights that you could almost imagine at some of these high-level
summits, right?
We had stuff be prepared, formal affairs, and the records we have from it show that
George Marshall and Sir Alan Brooke, his counterpart on the British Chief of Staff, nearly broke
out into a fifth fight at one point over the future direction of the war.
And so Eisenhower, when he's given this job, it's a very sensitive position.
It's a position where he is now stationed in London, launching a mission at the British
government stationed also in London, is at best unenthusiastic about.
And so Eisenhower has to have both wisdom, humility, and frankly, political cunning to
get the British as on board, and in many respects fully on board with this operation.
And that's in the sense, one of the hardest parts of his job is holding the alliance together
and keeping the British in the cross-germ invasion.
So it's a great success.
And that's one of those things you learn from reading history is that you realize sometimes
you're given a job.
A, nobody wants you to have, maybe B, you didn't want to have.
It isn't going to be easy, but you still have to soldier on.
And obviously, we can all relate to that in our life.
And adversity is part of that.
You write about the adversity that Ike faces through these years, whether it's the press
or politicians, or you mentioned Alan Brooke, Jenna Brooke.
He's just part of it, isn't that part of what builds Ike and highlights his ability to hold
it all together?
Yeah, absolutely.
And that's why I'm sure this is slightly controversial in some quarters, but I think
he was the indispensable man, certainly when it came to the D-Day operation.
I don't know that there was a single person alive in a position to be given the job who
could have done everything that it required to have the victory that it did.
Because chief among that was patience, was an ability to put himself and what people
thought of him second.
And that partly is everything that I talked about before, which is just humility and the
power that one can wield if one is humble about the power at one's disposal.
But it's also cunning.
Eisenhower, one of the things that I hope this book offers somewhat of a corrective for
is this idea of Eisenhower as sort of a just go along, get along nice guy.
He, when he needs to be, and pardon my French, can be a ruthless son of a bitch, and he understands
that if he's prancing around, jutting his chin out, trying to show that he's boss, not
only is that going to not win him any friend, it's going to be deeply counterproductive.
And so he's someone who can by his time be patient, take the bad press onto himself as
a way of ensuring that people in a way underestimate him.
And one of the most important things he does, it's very subtle, but I think it's in some
sense crucial to his success is he, when he goes to visit British soldiers during inspection
tours, he wears a British officer's coat to signal to everyone that he does not see
himself as an American commander, he sees himself as an Allied commander.
And even on D-Day himself, he's stating to Europe and his announcement of the invasion
to the European people.
He doesn't mention the United States once.
He talks about how the United Nations have come to liberate Europe.
And it's a genuine point, it's humility.
He genuinely does understand and believe in the value of what we would now call multilateralism.
But it's a crucial political move to make in that kind of situation too, because America
is largely unknown around the world at this time and objectively dangerous.
Right?
We are suddenly, not only the world's largest economy, but one of the worlds largest militaries.
We have the ability to project power all over the world.
And whether it's in Great Britain or France or China or Africa, you name it.
The entire world at that point is having to make a judgment about whether or not the United
States should succeed or should they resist the rise of this new superpower on the world.
And really there was no even the term superpower, if you will, invented because of this.
It is.
It's 1944, is the term that's first invented.
And honestly I give Dwight Eisenhower a lot of personal credit for understanding that
in that moment, when this new idea of not an empire, but a superpower is coming onto
the world stage, that that superpower needed to be different than the great powers of old.
And an important way of showing that difference was showing that this American superpower
was committed to working as a team, working for the liberation of people, working for
democracy, human rights, ultimately decolonization in a way that I don't know that any other
American figure of the time, maybe say President Roosevelt, could have credibly sold to the
world the way that Dwight Eisenhower did.
You mentioned his patience, and I'll just touch on this briefly because you write about
General Patton's slap of the soldier in Sicily and all the fallout from that.
And as I'm reading that, I thought, Ike's got incredible patience here to realize the
value of Patton and not overreact to this, I mean many of us would have said, just fire
the guy, you know.
So patience was one of those virtues.
But he's also deeply human and the pressures get to him, and you write about that a little
bit and you talk about Kay Summersbee, the Irish Catholic, you know, British service
woman who's his chauffeur all over Europe.
So those pressures got to him in a human way, didn't they?
Oh, for sure.
He ended up, by the time D-Day comes around, he's smoking three packs a day.
He develops a sky in his eye, his ear starts ringing, he acquires a cold, right before
he's appointed to be the Supreme Allied Commander, that he basically never shakes, certainly
up through D-Day.
And that to me, one of the ways I wrote this book that I think differs not only from a lot
of books about D-Day, but even a lot of biographies about it now, rather than go to the received
stories and the memoirs and other histories and biographies of him, I went back to the
primary sources and particularly from this period, I pulled out his day planner, which
I was able to locate in the archives, and went day by day with him just to see what
he really cared about, what worried him, who bothered him, who liked him, and what he
dealt with on a day-to-day basis.
And I just came away from that.
Like, my blood pressure was going up, that I was reading all of this, because just the
amount of stress that this man had, the amount of pressure leading up to an operation D-Day
that his own Chief of Staff, Walter Bedell Smith, projects only a few weeks in advance
of it, estimates that he has a 50-50 chance of success.
And that means he has a 50-50 chance of failure.
And for Aidenhower to be dealing with all of this conflict on every side and to be the
center of that and to be the one steady post in the storm, just took something superhuman
in terms of patience.
One of the things, and I want to get to this before we run out of time, you write about,
and I categorize these as sort of ethical issues that he as Commander-in-Chief had to
deal with, with all these other pressures going on, and there are two of them in particular
I want you to talk about.
There were a number of racist charges, charges against Black soldiers in Britain that he
had to deal with, and second, the use of white phosphorus, and particularly both of those
you don't read much about.
So I thought, you probably pulled these out of going back to his day planner and saying,
what did he have to deal with every day?
Talk about these two issues.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
I would never have known any of that had it not been for really just trying to be with
him on a fly, like a fly on the wall day to day.
And the one thing that jumped out at me was how much the problem of civil rights just
dragged everything that he was attempting to do.
Because here you have, by the time D-Day launches, 1.5 million young Americans being imported
into the British Isle.
About 12% of them are Black, but at this time in our history, the Army is segregated.
And the British see American segregation, really Americans sort of separate but equal
D-Juray segregation, as morally repugnant and almost inexplicable.
They can't understand why the United States sort of has this sort of violent racism at
the very same time it's preaching democracy, equality, and human rights around the world.
And it's a constant point of friction in the British Isles where Black service members
are being mistreated by superiors.
They're not necessarily being given the same access to public recreation facility.
The whole question of interracial relationships between Black soldiers and white British women
is not only provocative to a lot of Americans who have sort of retrograde views on race
at the time, but Eisenhower is quite worried that the British might not respond to this
with complete equanimity.
It's a fire tag and he understands that.
And that complicates his life not just because it's a really important ethical issue that
he has to deal with, but it's a diplomatic issue.
At the very same time, all of these controversies about American sort of race relations being
imported into the British Isles are flaring up.
He's also having to negotiate with Britain's foreign office about the use of ports, about
the sending of men abroad, about the access of American soldiers to various facilities,
the use of water in Great Britain.
These are lots of delicate diplomatic negotiations that he's having to conduct.
At the same time, he's attempting to explain the great American shame of segregation.
And then at the same time, the British are coming to him and saying, as you mentioned,
we can't support the use of white phosphorus in the D-Day landings, which at that point,
the US Army had started regularly using not only for its screening effects, but as an
anti-personnel weapon.
The British Foreign Office lawyers, apologies as a lawyer for those who find the involvement
of lawyers in these war time decisions frustrating.
But lawyers in the Foreign Office determined that this would be a violation of Britain's
commitments under the Chemical Weapons Convention, which it was a party to, but the United States
was not at the time, as well as even the Geneva Conventions.
And the Foreign Office basically says, look, we can't allow his Majesty's Army to be implicated
in more crimes.
And so Eisenhower has to essentially negotiate a settlement on whether and how they can use
white phosphorus in the literal day before D-Day.
And so these diplomatic stresses that he's operating under, which touch issues of grand
strategy like empire, but touch really profound and difficult questions of ethics, like the
use of chemical weapons, arguably, or American race relations, just show the complexity of
the job he has.
And frankly, just as a concluding thought, show why he was so well equipped to become
president.
It was almost an easier job than the one he had in London.
It was.
Yeah.
We're talking to Michelle Peridis, author, historian, lawyer, who wrote and is now out
in publication The Light of Battle.
It's a great update, I'll say, to Eisenhower D-Day and the birth of American superpower.
Michelle and I were talking earlier.
He quotes, and I have out of print copy of Dwight D. Eisenhower's personal account of
World War II called Crusade in Europe on my shelf, which is also a great read, and probably
one that nobody could write today because it's way too candid for a politician.
But he didn't view himself as a politician, did he?
Not quite yet.
He was keeping his ears in the ground a little bit.
He writes that in 1946, 1947.
But he is not interested in running for president in 1948, even though Harry Truman more or
less offers him the presidency then.
But he hasn't fully shut the door.
As humble as Eisenhower is, he's also a man who knows his place in this.
Absolutely.
A great read.
Thank you for spending some time today, Michelle, with Veterans Radio to talk about The Light
of Battle and shed some insight into General Eisenhower and the whole D-Day as we are here
celebrating or recognizing the 80th anniversary of D-Day.
Thank you so much, Kevin Lyon, for a really interesting discussion.
And I want to thank everybody for listening to Veterans Radio today.
I am Jim Fawcone.
It's been a pleasure to be your host.
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