too fat. c-span: where is pointe de hoc? >> guest: it's in between omaha and utah beach. it's about a hundred-meter-high vertical cliff. i tied a rope at the top and ran it down to the bottom, and i tried to pretend to be a ranger. i got about halfway up, and i decided that this was a mistake so i came down again. c-span: how many are alive today that climbed pointe de hoc? >> guest: about 260 climbed, and i would expect that about 60 of them are still alive. about half of them never got through the sixth day of june, and of the 260 -- 200 were either killed or wounded. so not a lot. c-span: you also mention -- and then we'll come back to that -- in the preface the number of 1,380 accounts of oral histories that you have. >> guest: yes. c-span: how many of those did you do? >> guest: five hundred, maybe,

and then my assistants maybe did another couple of hundred. then i did a bunch by telephone, and then some of them were written. some guys didn't want to be interviewed, but they were willing to write about it. c-span: how come? >> guest: they'd break down, even this long after the event. they'd start thinking about their buddies who fell to the left of them and the right of them, and they can't handle it. c-span: where were you on d-day? >> guest: in whitewater, wis. my father was in the pacific. i was 10 years old, and i was doing what i could for the war effort. i had a victory garden; i collected tin cans. we used to save the tin foil from the chewing gum and get great big balls of it, and we would turn it in. i'm not sure that it was anything more than a morale booster for the kids. i guess they made use of it. but we felt very much a part of the war effort. c-span: i talked recently with john keegan, the historian. he was about the same age. >> guest: we're exactly the same age. c-span: do you know him? >> guest: oh, yes, sure. c-span: you quote him in the

book. >> guest: oh, yes. we're in the same racket. we've been doing this for a long time. c-span: he said he got interested because there are lots of american soldiers in his village of taunton. how did you get interested in this subject? >> guest: i was a civil war historian, and in 1964 i got a telephone call from general eisenhower, who asked if i would be interested in writing his biography. he had read a couple of my civil war books. "yes, sir," said i, and it got started there. i mean, you can't do eisenhower's biography and not be interested in d-day. c-span: do you remember the first time you met him? >> guest: certainly. it was in his office in gettysburg. we talked for a whole afternoon about what access i would have, what papers would be available to me, what would be involved in doing this work. at the end of that conversation, he said, "i notice you're teaching in new orleans. did you ever know andrew higgins?" "no, sir," i said. i knew who he was, but he

died in 1959 and i didn't move to new orleans until 1960. "well, that's too bad," eisenhower said. "he's the man who won the war for us." well, my jaw just dropped at a statement like that from a source like that. c-span: here is a picture, by the way. what are these? >> guest: that's the higgins assembly line in new orleans. that's where they turned out the landing craft, and that's what he said. he said, "if andy higgins hadn't designed and built these landing craft, we never could have gone in over an open beach. i don't know how we ever would have gotten back into europe," he said. that got me very interested in mr. higgins, and we followed that up at the eisenhower center. i've had graduate students do various studies of the higgins boat yard, and one of them, jerry strahan, just this spring published a biography of andrew higgins. c-span: what did he have that was so special when he built those -- is this the lcvp that he built? >> guest: that's it, landing craft vehicle personnel. he had been building flat-bottomed boats for the exploration of the oil companies in the swamps of

louisiana in the late 1930s, so he was into flat-bottomed boats already. the marines came to him in 1939 and said, "we're going to get into the war, and we're going to need landing craft. you're doing the best flat-bottomed boats around. will you enter a competition?" and he did. the navy bureau of ships didn't like his boat, but the marines loved it and they insisted on it. it was a 32-foot boat -- it carried a platoon of men; 30 men and two officers -- a flat bottom with a steel ramp and made out of plywood. very cheap construction. very simple design. a floating cigar box is what it is. but it was a boat that could handle heavy seas; it could go through a surf. it could go into a beach, drop that ramp, and you've got 30 men charging out of that boat, going right on into the enemy position. then, and this was the key to the thing, he developed a system. he had a protected propeller on it so that he could go right on into the sand and bottom-out on it, drop an

anchor, a stern, as he went in. then he put a little briggs & stratton motor on the back of that boat, and he could winch himself off with that briggs & stratton, pull that boat back off the sand, and then -- here was the key to it all -- turn in the surf and get headed back out again without broaching when it was broadside to the surf, go out to the mother ship and pick up another load. higgins had 80 employees in 1939. the marines went for this boat. the army loved the boat. orders were placed. higgins expanded from a little almost ma-and-pa kind of a factory into an assembly plant. he had four different ones in new orleans, some of them under canvas, 30,000 employees, and he turned out 20,000 of these landing craft in the course of the war. he was just a genius at design and a genius at production. he was a lousy businessman, and he went bust after the war. but he's the man who won the war for us. c-span: now, you're doing

something at the ... >> guest: we're building a museum in new orleans, the national d-day museum, on the site where higgins built some of these boats and tested them. it's bigger than just honoring higgins' industry. it's going to honor all of american industry because you've got similar figures. we had no landing craft at all -- none -- in 1940. we had 30,000 in 1944. we virtually didn't have an air force in 1940. by 1944 we were building 8,000 planes a month. some of these were big four-engine bombers. so we want to honor american industry for what it did to make d-day possible, and higgins is the man we center our attention on. but there was henry kaiser and there was henry ford and general motors, and everybody pitched in -- and then the men of d-day, of course, and what they did. so we're building this museum in new orleans. it will be the only museum in the united states that is devoted exclusively to world war ii and the only museum in the world that has as its central theme one day in the

world's history. but what a day. c-span: why was it a great day? >> guest: you know, you can't exaggerate it. you can't overstate it. it was the pivot point of the 20th century. it was the day on which the decision was made as to who was going to rule in this world in the second half of the 20th century. is it going to be nazism, is it going to be communism, or are the democracies going to prevail? if we would have failed on omaha beach and on the other beaches on the 6th of june in 1944, the struggle for europe would have been a struggle between hitler and stalin, and we would have been out of it. if stalin had won, the iron curtain would have been on the english channel. if hitler had won, i don't think he would have been able to take britain, at least not in the immediate future, but he would have gone all the way to the urals. hitler's plan was to turn the problem of conquering america over to the next generation, utilizing the resources that he intended to have as a part of the greater german reich as a result of

victory. it really did turn on getting ashore and penetrating that atlantic wall. now, once that atlantic wall was penetrated and we had a beachhead and you could begin to move from england into the continent, this tremendous outpouring of america's factories that we had managed to get over to england by winning the battle of the atlantic in 1943, if you penetrated the atlantic wall then it was no longer a question of who was going to win. it was when is the end going to come. germany could not possibly prevail against -- but if rommel stopped them cold on the beaches -- this was an all-or-nothing operation. eisenhower, when he took command in january of 1944, said, "this operation is being planned as a success. there are no contingency plans." had they stopped him -- and they came very close to stopping him -- we would not have been able to mount another operation in 1944. this was hitler's great chance

to win the war -- stop them in june of 1944 on the atlantic coast, then he can move 11 panzer divisions to the east. eleven panzer divisions might well have swung the balance on the eastern front, or they might have had another effect. they might have led stalin to conclude, "those blankety-blank capitalists. they're up to their old tricks. they're going to fight till the last red army soldier. to hell with that. i'm going to cut a deal with my friend adolph again, just like we did in 1939. we'll divide eastern europe between us." that wouldn't have lasted. sooner or later they would have clashed, but the democracies wouldn't have been in on it anymore. c-span: i want to ask you a question, and i don't know that this is fair to you, but of all the 1,380 accounts and the 500 that you did -- oral histories -- the first question is, are

they all stored somewhere? >> guest: oh, yes, absolutely. they're in the eisenhower center at the university of new orleans, and they'll be a part of the national d-day museum when we get it built. that's what they're there for, and it has been extraordinarily satisfactory to us this year, because abc has come down, nbc, cbs, cbc, bbc, the works, have come down and mined our archives, and they can come in. "do you want a story from the rangers? here, we've got maybe 300 rangers all told" -- no, not that many -- 100 rangers all told. they read one, "god, this guy is great. where do i find him?" we'll give them his name and his address and telephone number, and the network will go out and do an interview with him. and it's just great for these guys. i mean, they just love it, being able to go on national television and tell their stories. as i say, it's just immensely satisfying to us. but it's for 13 years that we've been collecting these in obscurity, looking forward to the 50th anniversary. and it's

not just the television, it's the newspapers and it's book writers and scholars of all kinds, and they're all coming to new orleans because we have the most accounts from eyewitness sources -- "i was there" -- of any single battle in history. c-span: what are some of your favorites? >> guest: oh, there are so many. those higgins boats may have won the war for us, but every man who went in on one hated them. they were flat-bottomed, they did this in the waves, the gunnels were only 6 feet high, the waves were washing over. everybody was seasick -- everybody. the decks were just awash in vomit. there was no place to sit down on these boats. they were like sardines packed into them, and everybody was sick. one guy told me the

story, he said, "i'm from omaha. i'd never been on salt water before. everybody around me was getting sick, and i was holding on. i was proud of myself. the guy next to me took his helmet off and upchucked into the helmet, and i held on even when that happened. i wondered, why the hell is he bothering to do that since the deck is already awash in vomit? and then he reached into his helmet and he pulled out his false teeth and popped them back into his mouth, and i lost it all when that happened." ken russell was another favorite. ken was from tennessee. he was 18 years old. he was in the airborne, and as they were flying across the channel he was struck by the thought, my high school class is graduating tonight. he came down in ste.msre eglise, where there was a fire on the edge of town in a hay barn, set by a tracer bullet. he watched as the guy next to him got hit in his grenade, coming down in his parachute, and that set off -- they all were carrying land mines underneath their reserve

chutes, and that grenade set off that land mine, and just suddenly the guy wasn't there. it was just an empty parachute. he looked to his right, and his buddy over to his right was being sucked into the fire. the fire was drawing oxygen and drawing parachutists into it. he screamed once, ken says, and he screamed once more and then he disappeared into the fire and he didn't scream anymore. ken came down onto the steeple of the church at ste.msre eglise. now, this is famous from cornelius ryan's book and daryl zanuck's movie, but actually, it was more than one guy. it wasn't just john steele who was caught on that roof. ken russell also was. he's hanging there, trying to get to his trench knife so he can cut himself loose from his risers, when a german sergeant came around the corner. ken says, "i'll never forget him -- blue-eyed and red-haired." and this german sergeant pulled up his schmeisser -- a machine pistol -- to shoot russell and steele, hanging there on the

steeple, and sgt. john ray from homer, louisiana, came down right behind that german. the german turned and cut him, as i gather from ken's story, almost literally just cut him in half with a burst from that schmeisser, turned back to shoot russell and steele, and sgt. ray, in his dying gasp with his guts spilling out, got that .45 out and shot that german in the back of the head. then ken cut himself loose from his risers, and in the process he cut off one of his fingers and didn't know it for the next three hours. he ran. he said, "i was the loneliest man in the world." he ran through the village, got to the edge, and there was a german flakwagen, a 20mm gun, shooting up at the dakotas, the c-47s bringing in the american airborne. ken says, "i did what i was trained to do. i pulled the pin on my grenade and tossed it up there on that platform, and they weren't shooting anymore." then he saw a german runner on a bicycle, obviously carrying a message,

and he pulled up his m1 and shoots him. now, all this happens before 5 a.m. from an 18-year-old kid. gee, with soldiers like that, it's no wonder we won the war. c-span: by the way, you say you don't agree entirely with "the longest day," cornelius ryan's book. what are the differences in what you've found? >> guest: first of all, ryan didn't have access to anything like the number of sources that i did. ryan interviewed 250 men. c-span: when did he write that book? >> guest: in 1955-57. ryan didn't know about the ultra secret, for example. there is an awful lot of high command stuff that ryan never knew about. i'm not knocking ryan's book. it was an inspiration to me. i read it when it first came out. i saw the movie, like everybody else in this country, and i loved the movie. c-span: he's dead. >> guest: yes. c-span: and what was the ultra secret? >> guest: the ultra secret was the breaking of the german enigma code. the germans had this fabulous encoding system

which they thought was the best in the world, and they were right. it was. they also thought it was unbreakable, and they were wrong about that. ryan didn't know that we knew so much about the germans. the biggest disagreement that i have with ryan -- it's not a disagreement; it's where he was wrong. he just didn't have the full story. for example, he missed ken russell. he didn't interview him, so he didn't know that there was not just john steele hanging from that church steeple. but ryan and zanuck then repeated this in the movie and presented the battle as if it went according to plan. the plan was, at omaha beach, to go up the draws, up the ravines. little dirt roads ran up them. the bluffs were too steep for a vehicle. a man can hardly get up them. so everybody was supposed to go up these ravines. the whole movie turns on this incident, with robert mitchum in the end encouraging a couple of lieutenants to get up there and

get those torpedoes under that barbed wire and then get the tnt up to the antitank obstacles at the head of the ravines and blow them up. and that happens as a climax in the movie, and robert mitchum says, "let's go on up that hill," and it's like the cavalry to the rescue. guys from all over the beach start yelling like banshees and start moving up that draw. it's a great movie scene, but nothing remotely like that ever happened in fact. what happened in fact was, those ravines were much too well-defended to get up. the tanks that the infantry were told were going to be coming in with them, beside them -- these swimming tanks, these shermans that had the inflatable rubber skirts around them, 32 of the 35 of them sank. there was no way to get up the ravines, and the true story of what happened at omaha was much more inspiring than the way daryl zanuck presented it. the true story is, junior officers and noncoms who had been college students two years before and had rotc commissions

pinned down at that sea wall and couldn't retreat, couldn't go back -- it was just chaos back behind them -- couldn't, as the plan called for, go up the draws. they were getting butchered where they were all the sea wall because the germans had it all zeroed in with their mortars that were coming down on top of them. and, "over here, captain," "over here, lieutenant, over here." a sergeant looked at this situation and said, "the hell with this. if i'm going to get killed, i'm going to take some germans with me." and he would call out, "follow me," and up he would start. hitler didn't believe this was ever possible. hitler was certain that the soft, effeminate children of democracy could never become soldiers. hitler was certain that the nazi youth would always outfight the boy scouts, and hitler was wrong. the boy scouts took them on d-day. joe dawson led company g. he started off with 200 men. he got to the top of the bluff with 20 men, but he got to the top. he was the first one to get

there. he's going to be introducing president clinton tomorrow at omaha beach. john spaulding was another. he was a d lieutenant. many of them are nameless. i don't know their names. i've talked to men who've said, "i saw this lieutenant and he tossed a grenade into the embrasure of that fortification, and out came four germans with their hands up. i thought to myself, hell, if he can do that, i can do that." "what was his name?" i will ask. "geez, i don't know. i never found out his name. i never saw him before, and i never saw him again, but he was a great man. he got me up that bluff." c-span: let me go back to when you were 10 years old in wisconsin, on d-day. why were you there? >> guest: my father was in the pacific, in the navy, and it was my grandmother's hometown. my mother had three boys, and she was working in the local defense plant and grandma could take care of us during the day while she worked. it seems in my

memory that every night we had tuna fish and noodles, with stale potato chips crumbled on top, and we would groan at the sight of another tuna fish. and my mother would say, "think of the poor, starving children in europe." i'm not bragging on her. there were millions of american women doing that. one of the features of d-day is, we were all involved. i was making the contribution that a 10-year-old could make; my mother was making the contribution she could make. women all over this country were working night shifts in the factories, turning out munitions or boots or binoculars or any of the other myriad items that troops need to go into battle. and then they were working days, volunteers at the red cross rolling bandages. when the news came to this country on the morning of june 6 that the invasion had started, there was an overwhelming impulse to go to church or synagogue and pray, and what these people prayed was, "god, i hope i did it

right. the bandages that i rolled, the bullets that i made are going into battle, even as i am here praying. please, god, let me have done it right." c-span: how long did you stay in that town, by the way? >> guest: whitewater? i stayed until i went to college, because when dad came home from the war he liked that town better than the one we had left before the war. he was a doctor, and he set up a medical practice in this small town. c-span: was he drafted into the army? >> guest: no, sir. he enlisted on december 8, 1941. c-span: did you ever talk to him about his experience? >> guest: sure, of course, but it was in the pacific. it wasn't in the european theater. c-span: did you ever do the oral history like you've done on 1,300 others? >> guest: no, i didn't. i've never touched the pacific because i'm an eisenhower man, and it's too big a war to be an expert on the whole of it. c-span: where did you go to college? >> guest: the university of wisconsin. c-span: when do you remember first getting interested? you say you were a civil war historian. >> guest: i first got interested in military history and history in general as a sophomore. i was

a pre-med. i was going to follow in my father's footsteps. then i went into a course in american history that the university required you to take, which i thought was -- you know, i wanted to take biology and anatomy and embryology. but they forced you to take a history course, so i just willy-nilly signed up for one. i walked in, and the professor -- his name was william b. hesseltine -- had been talking about three minutes, and i wasn't a pre-med anymore. i was a history major. after that lecture i went up to him, and i said, "i want to do what you do for a living. how do i go about doing that?" c-span: why did he impress you? >> guest: oh, he was a great lecturer. he was a great teacher of writing. he was not really a very good writer himself. i continued at the university for my ph.d., and he was a real bear on writing. he would come down on you so hard. we used to go in an see him and say, "but dr. hesseltine, look at this book you've done. it's not all that

good. how can you be demanding so much of us?" and he would smile and say, "you've got a better teacher than i had." he had, at one time in a seminar, harry williams, ken standt, dick current, frank friedel and three other men who won pulitzer prizes in history, all in one seminar. c-span: in what year did you get your ph.d.? >> guest: 1960. c-span: what then? >> guest: i went to the university of new orleans and began teaching and writing. c-span: why did you pick unl? >> guest: because in my junior year in college at christmas vacation time i hitchhiked down to new orleans with my roommate dick lamm, who later went on to great fame as governor of colorado, and when we left madison it was 40 degrees below zero. i'm not talking wind chill; i'm talking the real thing. we got down to new orleans, and it was just

gorgeous. i thought, gee, they let people live here? and, plus, new orleans is new orleans, and i'm a small-town boy from the midwest. you walk down bourbon street, and it makes an impression on you. so from the beginning i wanted to get a job in new orleans. i had fallen in love with the city, and i'm still in love with it, hopelessly, lo these many years later. c-span: how big is the school, by the way? >> guest: twenty-five thousand. c-span: is it a state school? >> guest: yes. it's part of the lsu system. c-span: i counted in the front of your book 16 books, plus this one. is that right, 17? >> guest: that sounds pretty good. c-span: which one sold the most? >> guest: gee, i couldn't tell you -- oh, "rise to globalism," certainly, by far. i'm sorry. that's a book on american foreign policy that is widely used as a textbook, and it's now in its ninth printing. it's been for 18 years a standard, really, around the english-speaking

world. it's been a fabulous -- it put five kids through college for me. c-span: i started to say earlier, i've got another book that you did, one of the many that's on former president nixon, and in the introduction you say that "it's a lonely life that you spend, five-and-a-half or six days a week at a typewriter, and you wonder if anybody ever reads what you're going to write" and in the last month you can't turn on television, pick up a newspaper without seeing you or your name. what happened? >> guest: i guess i just kept at it. c-span: why all of a sudden are you on "nightline," on cbs, at the nixon funeral? >> guest: in this past couple of months nixon died, and i knew when he died that i was going to be getting a lot of calls from reporters and that the television people would want me on, and that happened. and that period stretched out because he was comatose for four days, and then they stretched the funeral. he died on a friday and they

didn't bury him until the wednesday, so that stretched out into quite a long period. then these haldeman diaries came out, and i had done an intro for them, so koppel put me on "nightline" two night in a row and i've been besieged with calls from reporters on the haldeman diaries. and then here comes d-day. i've been planning this book for 13 years, and i knew 13 years ago i wanted to have a big book on d-day to come out in the period of the 50th anniversary. it's the coincidence of nixon having died and the haldeman journals coming out at the time that the d-day book aired. c-span: where is this picture from? >> guest: frank capa took that picture, and there is a wonderful story with it. he is a famous photographer. perhaps the most famous war still shot of the 20th century is from the spanish civil war. everybody knows it. it's the spanish soldier getting killed, and frank capa took it. he went in on d-day with the first wave at the toughest part of omaha

beach, and capa shot, i think it's eight rolls of film, and then holding his camera high over his head he went running back out to an lct. there are a couple of his pictures. i interviewed a guy who was in the lct who helped capa back over the side. they took him out to an lst, and from there he got to england toward dark on d-day. he got on the train in portsmouth and ran up to london, got to the development studio. the kid doing the developing was so anxious to see these pictures that he overheated them, and the emulsion melted down and they all came out blurry. only eight of them came out. the kid ruined all the others, and capa was just furious because he's shot clean. but it turned out that that blur to these pictures suited perfectly omaha beach, so that's undoubtedly the most

famous picture from the invasion. c-span: when you go in the book stores today -- i just happened to walk by a book store this afternoon -- and it's just full of d-day books. what's different about this book that you've done from all the rest, and what's new in here? >> guest: well, first of all, it's based on a much broader set of interviews than anybody else's. i mean, i've done four or five, 10 times as much interviewing as anybody else, and it covers every level. my interviews on d-day begin with the supreme commander. i spent five years working with him, interviewing him, and it goes down to the lowest private. and i've been studying this battle and the whole war for such a long time. i know a great deal about operation fortitude, the deception plan, for example. i've written separately on that subject. i know an awful lot about the enigma system. i know an awful lot about how these plans developed. and i know a lot about the politics of world war ii. i've been writing about

the grand strategy and the diplomacy of world war ii for a long time. what sets this book apart from the others is the breadth of the coverage of the thing. this isn't just d-day. this book starts in 1940 with the british being kicked off the beaches at dunkirk and beginning to plan how to go back. and the americans get into the war, and immediately general eisenhower in a february 1942 note to general marshall said, "we've got to go to europe and fight. that's the only way we're going to win this war." this book has a long account of the two years leading up to d-day that the others don't have. so, it's the breadth of the book. c-span: you dedicate this book to dr. forrest pogue. who is he? >> guest: he was the first historian of d-day. he later went on to become george marshall's biographer. he also wrote the official history of the supreme headquarters of the allied expeditionary force, but on d-day he was working the other end of the chain of command. on d-day he was an army historian on an lst hospital