The Greatest Generation Never Told Us the Truth About War - Peter Caddick-Adams

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1:59Peter Caddick-Adams:My uncle Orlando, slightly older than him, drafted, was deployed in Africa and then redeployed into Belgium for the Battle of the Bulge. So both of them thankfully survived. And then my uncle Salvatore got to Europe as a member of the U.S. Army in May of 1945. So he was there after the war. They worked with the SS. You know, Eisenhower and Marshall allowed SS officers to help police the security perimeters in Berlin and some of the areas that they wanted to prevent looting and have some type of structure, crime control, etc. And so the SS were used. Many Americans don't realize that.

2:34Anthony Scaramucci:Well, this is what you and I call the greatest generation. And I don't think they've been equaled in the task and the challenges they had. Today we call them heroes. Their view collectively, and I've interviewed over 2 ,000 veterans who took some part in the Second World War, what they will tell you is that they weren't heroes, they didn't do anything special, because their whole generation was called upon to serve.

2:58Peter Caddick-Adams:Welcome to Open Book. I am Anthony Scaramucci. Your host joining us today is Peter Catek-Adams. What a prolific history writer. He's an award-winning author. he's authored many great books including his most recent Winston Churchill and of course his WW2 trilogy Sand and Steel Snow and Steel which you know my my uncle fought in that Battle of the Bulge or we'll talk a little bit about that and 1945 victory in the West and of course I had the great opportunity to meet you at the Chalk History Festival which I'm going back to sir I don't know if you're going to go back there, but I had such a good time there.

3:40Peter Caddick-Adams:I'm going back. So it's a pleasure to have you on. So you've written about D-Day, Monte Cassino, the Battle of the Bulge, and the final months of the war. But let's start with you, if you don't mind. So what drew you to military history and why has the Second War remained such a central focus of your work?

3:58Anthony Scaramucci:You and I, I think, Anthony, are about the same age. And from about the age of 10, I was always making plastic model kits of tanks and aircraft, usually from World War II. And in the 1970s, I met a bunch of guys who restored Second World War military vehicles to military spec and took them over to the battlefields of Europe. And in 1975, we visited the D-Day beaches and I saw for real what Utah Beach and Omaha were really like and this was also right at the beginning of personal small handheld metal detectors and I was transfixed as I watched some guys go up the beach and follow the trail of a few soldiers from 1944 by the cartridges and other stuff they left behind um and that made a big big impression on me later on i became a soldier um and i've had 35 years sort of regular and reserve service uh in various combat zones um and all of that thrown together and becoming a professional military historian and teaching at the uk defense academy for 20 years um created this sort of impulse to to write and put down what i knew from my military studies um but what i found out right going back to 1975

5:32Peter Caddick-Adams:so you know i mean i appreciate all that i i had this love affair with it as well uh because of my ancestry and my my two uncles so one was in the normandy invasion my uncle orlando scaramucci fought uh in the ardennes in the battle of the bulge uh you're probably not going to be surprised by this, but they never talked about this. Okay. They, they, they kept it to themselves. Uh, and I think my uncle Anthony, who I'm named after that was on Normandy beach actually had some, uh, PTSD from it, the whole experience in terms of the way he lived his life when he came home. Um, but let's start with that generation, if you don't mind, sir.

6:13Peter Caddick-Adams:So I want you to synthesize everything you've written and I want you to talk about the generation. And I'm not talking about Churchill, sir, who was born before these men. I'm talking about men, primarily men, frankly, some women, of course, as well, but men born draft age to enter the Second World War from the West.

6:31Anthony Scaramucci:Well, this is what you and I call the greatest generation. And I don't think they've been equaled in the task and the challenges they had that none of them had anticipated. And today we call them heroes but they will come back very modestly and as you say quite often never discussed what they went through um but their view collectively and i've interviewed over 2 000 veterans who took some part in the second world war of a whole range of different nationalities what they will tell you is that they weren't heroes they didn't do anything special because their whole generation was called upon to serve um and so at the end of it in 1945 if they survived they were lucky they mourned their lost friends but they didn't think they had done anything special because everybody had done it everybody had put on uniform or had worked in war work in some way or another uh and it took a long time for them to uh leech out uh the stories of uh what had happened to them uh or their close family uh um you know that process probably didn't start until after the 50th anniversary of uh the normandy landings when there's a great outpouring of books and people were ready to open up and understood actually they had done something and they were ordinary people but in extraordinary times and they you know they achieved the the stability in the world and the freedom that we you know we enjoy today but it's you don't realize that when you're a 10 year old talking to uh to grown-ups um who've seen looks the elephant in the eye, seen combat, won medals, seen friends die.

8:24Anthony Scaramucci:But now, of course, you and I have a great long list of questions we wish we had asked that generation while they were alive that we would have really cherished. And those opportunities are fast diminishing because the Second World War generation are probably less than 100 ,000 worldwide.

8:45Peter Caddick-Adams:It's incredible. You know, and, you know, and I believe that we've sort of lost our way from that principle-based discussion and that level of patriotism. Let's go to, if you don't mind, sir, I'm going to talk about all your books, but I want to go to Victory in the West. 80 short years ago, soon to be 81 years ago, we are ending the Second World War. There's a lot of commotion towards the end, as we both know. and there's some decision making done in the last couple of months that lead into the aftermath sort of the epilogue which is the cold war so tell us a little bit about that tell us about some of the mistakes that the allies made uh as we're getting to berlin and and its aftermath well the allies

9:30Anthony Scaramucci:didn't know how the war was going to end um they had assumed that the the worst part would be to cross the river rhine which they planned to do at the end of 1944 in the battle of the bulge upset all of that um and hitler's uh sending of all his uh spare troops and and tanks to the ardenne the battle of the bulge delayed the inevitable by about two months so we don't cross the river rhine until march 1945 uh and it's by then it's a damp squib it's a lot less bloody than we had expected it to be because all the german resources had been used up in the in the battle of the bulge um then there's a great competition as to who is going to capture what and particularly berlin and by that time the russians are a lot lot closer uh to berlin than they would have been um at the end of the previous year um i mean if you take a snapshot of march 1945 we are about 400 miles from Berlin the Western Allies the Russians are 40 miles away and Eisenhower has to take a series of very difficult decisions does he commit the Allies to taking Berlin and defying the Russians but at enormous cost I mean you know the Germans are going to hang on to this capital city and they're going to fight like tigers and our butcher's bill is going to be huge um or do we agree to de-conflict meet the russians along a river line concede that the the capital city of germany is going to be theirs but liberate almost the rest of germany um and that's what we end up doing and in so doing we end up liberating all the concentration camps within germany that we hadn't anticipated uh that we hadn't trained for we hadn't prepared for um and those you know inmates in a the most awful state uh are perhaps the single most vivid memory i found from american veterans in 1945 they weren't prepared to to meet the the inhabitants of the camps they didn't know what to do with them they watched them die in their arms uh and the single most frightening factor i think that caused so many ptsd as you mentioned just now was the inhabitants of the camps rather than cold hard combat it was just seeing what mankind could do to mankind and that

12:10Peter Caddick-Adams:was completely unexpected my uncle was wounded he then stayed in the you know he had the opportunity he got discharged but like everybody he stayed he got healed and he went to go fight again and he never got to any of the camps but he ended up in potsdam with truman and we have a beautiful picture of him at the potsdam conference alongside him in many so he never met truman how fascinating gosh yeah the whole delegation of soldiers yeah it's a really you know beautiful story and we have his military uniform uh you know from 185 years ago you know uh on display in one in my cousin's house but uh the reason i'm bringing this up is that he said to me that the pictures so i guess i could made people take pictures of what was going on when i got to one of the camps and the pictures were getting passed around and he said that that you know of all the things that they experienced in the war, the brutality of the fighting, of the death, you know, seeing people die, unfortunately having to shoot at people and without him telling me so, but probably killing people.

13:24Peter Caddick-Adams:The camps where innocent people were torched and murdered, I think had this dramatic impact. So what do you say to a current group of young people about all this? You know, some people are saying, oh, that didn't happen and all this nonsense on the social media and the Internet and so forth. What do you say to a group of young people, sir, about this experience that these men and some women, but mostly men faced?

13:52Anthony Scaramucci:Eisenhower understood that the scale of the crimes committed would be so beyond human comprehension that some people in generations to come would push back, would claim that it never happened. And even returning Americans in 1945 found that in the United States, there were people who were disbelieving that this could possibly happen. So Eisenhower telegraphed Roosevelt initially because Roosevelt was still alive then and then had conversations with Truman that he wanted as many people as possible to visit the camps. He wanted a delegation from Senate and Congress and the British House of Commons and House of Lords to visit, to see with their own eyes, and also a delegation of newspaper correspondents who he would give guided tours around all the various camps and they should be flown over as soon as possible.

14:52Anthony Scaramucci:and he himself kept a diary of what he saw and made sure that as many photographs were taken as possible for exactly that reason he foresaw that that a there were people who ideologically just would refuse to face this um but be that the the scale of um of of the camps and these aren't these aren't the death camps like Auschwitz these are mostly work camps um uh and some were concentration camps but the the Nuremberg trials uh after the war identified the fact that the Germans had taken from all the occupied countries 12 million slave laborers um and these were French and Belgians and Danes and Greeks and Bulgarians and Hungarians and Russians and you name it some Some were civilians, some were military, but they were forced to work in German industry, in German homes, on German farms, in mines.

15:51Anthony Scaramucci:They got no money. They were given prison uniforms and they were kept in behind barbed wire during each evening and marched out to work during each day. and the Nuremberg trials identified the fact that there were 12 million of these people um who were you know half starving had no idea what was going on and for the most part these were the people that were liberated in 1945 and they're if you like outside the concentration camp system they're not Jewish they're not homosexual they're not gym gypsies they're not or the other categories that the Nazis identified for extermination, and they just get caught up.

16:34Anthony Scaramucci:And then they're sent home, and you see them for the next six months wandering the roads, wondering where to go. Sometimes by the time they get home, their countries don't even exist anymore. And there's nowhere to buy anything. And money isn't even a topic, because paper money is distrusted. trusted uh you know the the the currency uh that everyone respects is cigarettes and this is where my own background as a soldier sort of kicks in and i'm sure it will with many of your viewers and listeners because when i was in bosnia it was exactly the same you had a dismembered european country uh where uh money was valueless people were roaming around looking for food they had lost their relatives and their homes um people in uniform uh sometimes could give them sort of sucker and help um so we gave them our rations but the only currency worth anything was cigarettes and that's how europe was for the first few years after the second world war so not first few months first few years and it was this huge drifting uh population of people that were just trying to find where to go to.

17:53Peter Caddick-Adams:I appreciate it. I appreciate the commentary. When did your uncle come home?

17:56Anthony Scaramucci:How long was he out there?

17:59Peter Caddick-Adams:Well, he, well, two uncles. So I had three uncles in that period. So I'll tell you about the three of them quickly. My uncle Anthony drafted, they moved his high school graduation from June of 43 to March so that they could put him in the UK to train for the Normandy invasion. My uncle Orlando, slightly older than him, drafted, was deployed in Africa and then redeployed into Belgium for the Battle of the Bulge. So both of them thankfully survived. And then my uncle Salvatore got to Europe as a member of the U.S. Army in May of 1945. And so he was more on patrol. And, you know, he had some fascinating stories.

18:46Peter Caddick-Adams:So he was there after the war. but you know they believe it or not and i think you know this from your historical writings you know they work with the ss you know eisenhower and marshall allowed ss officers to help police the security perimeters in berlin and some of the areas that they wanted to prevent looting and have some type of uh legal or you know structure crime control etc and so the ss were used you know many many americans don't realize that i think that you know there's a mistake that bremer and Wolfowitz and those guys made in Iraq. You know, they had the chance to buy off the Republican Guard and get their help.

19:22Peter Caddick-Adams:They disbanded them. They turned out most of them ended up in ISIS. You know what I mean? We have a, you know, I don't know. We have principles and then we have reality of life. You know what I mean? So I learned a lot from those three men, my uncles. I get that exactly.

19:41Anthony Scaramucci:I was in Iraq as well. I was in fact the chief United Kingdom historian in uniform as a major, but working in the national contingent headquarters in Qatar alongside the American headquarters. So I saw it all from a day to day basis unfolding. And history was with us so much of the time. You just wanted to shout out and say, no, you know, disbanding the Iraqi army is not the solution. you need them these guys will hold the country together through the transition phase and it was all um it turned out to have all been predetermined and contracts were let and anyway that you know that that was that was the joys and the frustrations of being a historian and i've seen three major campaigns unfold at operational level bosnia um iraq and afghanistan um and that's why my studies of World War II have been so useful because you can see the same pressures around today.

20:46Anthony Scaramucci:And, you know, they're still around today as we talk.

20:48Peter Caddick-Adams:So let's go to your books for a moment. I mean, this is about your books, of course, but you're such a great historian. I wanted to get some of these questions in. Let's talk about D-Day for a second. What were some of the revelations you learned in your research in writing that amazing book?

21:04Anthony Scaramucci:I think the reference point for D-Day that most people are familiar with is Saving Private Ryan and if you use that as a reference point you realize it's good cinema but it doesn't reflect reality and the reality is that most of those landing on the 6th of June 1944 or in the days after had been training and preparing in the UK for up to a year beforehand and they had gone through several phases of training but they had been assaulting similar looking beaches using all the right equipment practicing all their drills uh by day and by night in a variety of different sea conditions um and you know disembarking but disembarking out at sea into landing craft and then piling into the beaches they'd been doing this for 12 months beforehand um and you know the air force and the navy had also been practicing you know in along similar lines um and we're not just talking about a few thousand people if you've got a division landing on each beach on the first day you've got the same on the second day the same on the third day you've got to get all of these guys um prepared and trained they I have to understand amphibious warfare.

22:29Anthony Scaramucci:And during the course of that year before D-Day, going through the individual war diaries of the American battalions, the British battalions, the Canadians, the various squadrons, the Air Force, the air divisions, the air assault divisions, I suddenly discovered that more people had died on training than actually died on D-Day. And we think of the bloodletting that your uncle saw on Omaha Beach. This was almost as nothing compared with what they had been through in the weeks and the months beforehand. And an awful lot of people, for example, drowned in the surf, in English surf, in training and preparation.

23:20Anthony Scaramucci:There were a lot of gliders that crashed in the English countryside preparing for D-Day. Never mind the German interruption of a practice for Utah Beach in April 1945. And it underlines the point that to get it right on operations for combat in reality, you've got to take your training has got to be as realistic as possible. And you've got to be prepared to take those casualties in training. And that's not being excessive or bloodthirsty. That means on the day you'll get it right. And so if you tot up the number of people who actually die on D-Day versus the number of people who died in training accidents beforehand, far more die in training before.

24:08Anthony Scaramucci:And that really opened my eyes.

24:10Peter Caddick-Adams:Again, an awesome book. I'm going to flip it over to the Ardennes. So you've got a successful operation in D-Day. You've got all the trials and tribulations of warfare. and it looks like the war is actually going in favor of the allies. We're convening in Bretton Woods to talk about post-World War II economies. All things are going in the right direction. But then we get to the fall of 1944, a very, very cold winter in Europe, and the Germans are not done yet, are they? They're not ready to give up. And so tell us about your book, Snow and Steel.

24:50Anthony Scaramucci:Well, Snow and Steel was the first one I wrote of the trilogy, funnily enough, because the year after I'd been to the D-Day beaches, that was 1975, 1976, I went to the Ardennes and just walking through those mountains, the hills of the Ardennes and all the forests. there was so much stuff left from World War II that we discovered helmets, mastins, jerrycans, ammunition, you name it, which was absolutely fascinating. And you realize the battle had only been seemingly sort of fought yesterday. And as far as the Germans were concerned, the war was over. As far as the Allies were concerned, the war was also nearly over.

25:35but Hitler himself had other ideas and the Battle of the Bulge is Hitler's campaign no one else's

25:42Anthony Scaramucci:he was the one who forced it through in the face of massive objections from every element of the German armed forces including the SS but after the July plot against him people were afraid of standing up to Hitler too much because that meant you went to a concentration camp however senior German a general you were and so did your relatives and there had already been executions of people like Rommel Germany's best known and favorite general connected with the July plot so there was a real anxiety about standing up to Hitler and that's how he bulldozed this whole plan through and the you know the senior german staff realized that you know if if you uh if you assault with too little fuel you you're never going to achieve your objectives um if you don't have enough manpower if you don't train properly and this training point i and i go back to d-day to get d-day right one day 24 hours we train for a year the germans don't train or prepare properly for the Ardennes because Hitler is so nervous about secrecy and his great plan leaking out that the divisional commanders are only told what they're about to do three days beforehand and the soldiers going into battle are only told 24 hours beforehand.

27:13Anthony Scaramucci:So if you can't train properly you're never ever going to achieve what you need to do in combat and that's one of the things that pulls the rug. The other thing we, I mean, lack of fuel is a common thing that we talk about with the Battle of the Bulge, but air power is probably what finishes the Germans more than anything else, because sooner or later the clouds are going to clear, sooner or later the snow is going to stop, and then all the German military equipment is going to show up on the blanket of white snow throughout the Ardennes. And Allied air, which is supreme, it's totally dominant.

27:52Anthony Scaramucci:It's just going to be able to pick off everything on the ground on the German side, and that's what it does. So once the Allied arsenal is thrown at the bulge, and that takes probably a month, it contains it, it severs it, it bites it off, and all the time, air power, but massive Allied logistics, petrol ammunition which the germans simply don't have uh is is just going to dissipate it but it's the u.s army's finest hour um they are completely surprised um in a lot of sectors they react very poorly there are poor decisions made by fairly senior commanders um there are fleeing and logisticians and artillerymen, there is panic.