they inherit the records from the army and the navy. and if you go from 1944, they're literally crumbling in your hands. you've got little flecks of paper dust all over the desk and the floor and your clothes. so, and, you know, 17,000 tons for the u.s. army alone trying to digitize that as a preservative is physically impossible at this point. so it's a serious issue. >> well, thankfully, there are people like you who are writing about it, and being archive reps going into -- i imagine you tunneling into these things and looking for them. ger hart weinberg would like to ask a question here. he asks how well and -- this is the casrean pass. how well and how quickly do you think the american army

recovered from the defeat in the casrean pass? >> i feel like i'm sitting for my orals in front of professor weinberg. [laughter] well, it was fought in february of 1943. the u.s. army very green then with green commanders, it landed in north africa with the british on november 8, 1942, and had advanced eastward across the northern coast of north africa, northwest africa. and on february 14, 1943, the germans under two very competent commanders, one named rommel you've probably heard of, launched a surprise attack directly against the americans, particularly the first armored division, and drove the american forces back more than 70 miles. in terms of yardage lost, it was the greatest single battle defeat for the u.s. army in world war ii, back farther even

than during the bulge in december of 1944. it was a humiliateing defeat with many american casualties. the fact that it was not a strategic victory for the germans was not because we were particularly adept at preventing them from seizing a strategic victory. it was because they were out of fuel, out of time. to some extent out of hope. so my feeling is that casrean was a kick in the teeth, that the future of -- among others -- dwight eisenhower hung in the balance. eisenhower even before casrean thought he was going to be relieved. he wrote an extraordinary letter to his son john who was a cadet at west point saying it may be necessary for my superiors to relieve me of command and reduce me to my permanent rank which was lieutenant colonel. at this point he's a three-star

general. and roosevelt would not give him that fourth star until he proved himself. if this happens, eisenhower writes to john eisenhower, i don't want you to worry about it. these things happen in war. it's an extraordinary testament to eisenhower's character, actually, and reveals something about his relationship with his son. so there's a lot hanging in the balance here including, you know, the future president's fate. my feeling is casrean was really a relatively small speed bump because what you found was after this driving defeat in february of 1943, three months later the german and italian force was utterly destroyed. they were completely defeated. and you had 250,000 axis prisoners bagged in tunis in the

northeast corner of tunisia. it was a loss just in terms of stalin grad. now, nothing makes you recover from a thump in the head better than a good victory, and i think that success that came relatively swiftly after casrean menned the -- helped the army in particular to get past this existential moment really. and it, you know, it blooded those units, some of them quite literally. but what you see in the mediterranean generally starting in north africa and then we go to sicily, invade sicily in july 1943 and then to the boot of italy in september 1943. this whole mediterranean campaign for the american armed forces is a kind of sifting out.

we're determining who's capable from those who are incapable. at all levels, starting with the commanders, but on down to platoon leaders and squad leaders. who can do it, who can't do it? who's physically able to handle it? this was not well understood, the physical rigors of it. who's lucky versus unlucky, the trait napoleon most cherished in his generals. and it's in the mediterranean that we are going through this sifting-out process. it's a very important part of the maturation of the american military in world war ii. it's a very important part of building that force that's going to go into normandy in june of 1944. and casrean was an ugly but probably necessary part of that. >> uh-uh huh. well, the -- a lot of you are

friends talked about leadership and talked about comparing leaders in world war ii and afghanistan and iraq. who stands out for you? the i mean, -- i mean, who do yu like to look at in world war ii in terms of the leadership of our forces? >> well, there are a lot of good ones. you know, there tends to be a denigration of the u.s. military by some historians that whenever one german battalion fought an american battalion or one regiment fought an american regiment that the germans tended to be tactically superior. that mano a mano they were the better military. i think this is just nonsense because it's pointless. global war is a clash of systems.

it's which system can produce the wherewithal to project power in the atlantic, the pacific the indian ocean, southeast asia. which system can produce the civilian leadership to create the transportation systems, the civilian leadership that's able to produce 96,000 airplanes in 1944. so when you look at it that way, you can see that, really, particularly when we've got the russians bleeding for us that the comparison of german and american forces or german and anglo american forces on a small tactical level is, i think, pointless. now, if you look at individual leaders, i start with eisenhower. i've lived with him now very closely, very intimately for 11 years. my respect for him deepens

constantly. i see his flaws, i see those feet of clay. you know, you want to reach back through history and shake him by the lapelses because he is operationally sometimes really less than you would like. he makes mistakes. he lets things go past if he were paying better attention or if he were a better field marshal, it would not happen. but in the larger scheme of things this ability to hold together the coalition i alluded to earlier, i think eisenhower is a very critical, very critical figure in our national history. there are generals who are increasingly lost to history i admire very much. lucien truskett. spent six years of his life teaching school mostly in one-room schoolhouses in oklahoma before he came into the army. he proves to be one of the best

battle captains in the united states army. he lands as a brigadier general in north africa, part of patton's invasion. he doesn't know what he's doing any more than anybody else does, but this sifting out that's going on among other things, people sift to the top who tend to be really very capable and lucky, and lucien is one of those. by the end of the war he goes from in 1942 being a one-star general to commanding an army in italy. and in between he does a lot of admirable things including taking over the force at anzio and preserving the force. he's ree mark bl. remarkable. so there are a number of tactical commanders like that. i tend to be less enthusiastic, frankly, about some. omar bradley, i think, is overrated. george patton is, sure, a lot of fun to write about, but i clearly see his efficiencies as

a commander -- deficiencies as a commander. i think that slapping the soldiers in sicily, two soldiers, two incidents a week apart in august 1943 was unpardonable. it shows a real defect in character. do you want your son to be slapped by his commander? that's not how we run our military. so i, i have less enthusiasm for some of the guys who tend to get a lot of ink. and somebody who's virtually forgotten by many people these days, jacob devers. he commands sixth army group. he's on the same level as omar bradley who's commanding 12th army group, devers is to the south. that seventh army combined with the french army invaded southern france. they come up the roan valley, they swing through the

mountains, capture strasburg and go on into southwest germany. he's very, very capable. he's second only to eisenhower in his deft touch with allies. he doesn't speak french, but he gets along famously with the french, and they're not all that easy to get along with. [laughter] and he's dealing with a prima donna who's the french commander down there, and devers is really good at it. and can that's a critical part of his job. so my intent is to, you know, bring some of these guys back from the dead. and to, hopefully, make them breathe and walk across the room again in a way that allows a 21st century audience readership to appreciate it. >> what about today's leadership? you wrote a tremendous book about petraeus and the 101st, and you say in many talks, in

your talk in 2004 here and 2007 i would commend to people on our web site because they're brilliant about your second book and also the 101st book. but you said in that talk that you developed a great respect and friendship with general petraeus. you were by his elbow every day. what, what is it like today? with the benefit of several years that have passed. >> petraeus specifically, or -- >> yes, petraeus. >> yeah. well, he's, he's put more rocks in his rug sack, as he would say, since then. yeah. i'd known dave petraeus since he was a major. not very well, but i'd bumped into him at the pentagon, that would go back to probably 1990. but i didn't know him very well. and in december of 2002 when it looked -- i was between books, i'd finished volume one of the trilogy and was about to start

volume two, and the post was interested in having me go off with the army if, in fact, push came to shove in iraq. and so i contacted petraeus, and i, he was at fort campbell, had taken over command of the 101st airborne the previous summer, and i wrote him an e-mail, and i said, we know each other -- not well -- but could i come down to you and talk to you about going to the 101st if 101st deploys to kuwait and then into iraq if war comes? and as he always does, he responded instantly. it's as if he's there by the keyboard waiting for your e-mail. that's still a trait he's got, i don't know how he does it. so i went down, and we renewed our friendship or our acquaintance, i guess, and i spent two or three days down there with him and his senior commanders, the brigade commanders and the assistant division commanders, and time with him and told him what it was i was interested in doing. told him that i was, basically,

a book writer now but that i still had an affiliation with the post and would like to consider doing both, that maybe there was a book in there, but there was sure going to be a series of newspaper, ongoing newspaper coverage if war came. and he, i said, can i go with you? i'm too old to go with a rifle company. [laughter] but i'd like to be positioned, and i think in division talk, tactical operates center is about right. you can look down into brigade and even battalion, and you can look up into corps. and my friends at the pentagon had told me it looked like the 101st was likely to go into the fight. and i said, can i come with you? can i be embedded in your headquarters? and he said, sure. so the next thing i know i'm at fort campbell in february preparing, and off we go. i was with him at his elbow all

day, every day, really, through the capture of bag dad. -- baghdad in march of 2003. yeah. he's, you know, he's a pretty remarkable guy. you all have come to know him well. he's exposed, if not overexposed at this point. i, my admiration for him has only deepened because of the fact that now he's been gone carrying the fight for us whether you believe in the fight or not. it's his job. since 2003. before that he was in bosnia. and he's got many of the characteristics, i think, that are important for a good and successful senior military wartime leader. he's very intellectually agile. sparks just are coming off that

little burr cut brain of his. he's extremely competitive. it pins him to the wall sometimes. his aide at that time, now a lieutenant colonel, was at our house in washington for dinner. he's commanding a battalion in afghanistan now. he's home on leave briefly, and at that time, 2003, he said he's the most competitive man on the planet. [laughter] and that's true. it's certainly true. and that's a good characteristic to have as somebody who doesn't like to lose. he's a pretty good listener. i noticed that from the beginning, and nothing that i've seen since then has changed my mind. he listens. he would listen to the captain give tactical advice about how to fight the 101st airborne, for example. he doesn't think he's got all the answers. there's no imperial dave. there's no king david as he

sometimes derisively is called unfairly, i think. so, you know, i think what we're seeing now is the ultimate test, i think. he's got a fight in afghanistan that isn't like the fight in iraq. some of the same war-fighting approaches that he used in iraq he's using in afghanistan, but it is a different place, as he will be the first to say. among other things, there's a timetable and a clock ticking. so he'll be 58 years old next week. and i know he's tired. even he's tired. and who can blame him? if you consider that he has been overseas in command, in combat for twice as long as any general in world war ii, any american general, how could he not be tired? >> this is a different kind of war. >> yeah. >> i mean, it's -- and i just want to take a moment before we,

we run out of time here because we have a very special guest in the audience tonight, and i would like to acknowledging him. iwo jima veteran and medal of honor recipient woody williams. where are you, woody? [applause] and i think that was a good point to make because this is a different war. these are, our forces are fighting a 24-hour combat situation. it's the state of war now. and to quote dave petraeus, tell us how this ends. >> you know, that was the right question. he asked me that. it was outside najaf in march of

2003, and things were not going all that well, and we were in the middle of the worst sandstorm you can ever imagine. we're standing outside his tent, and we're face to face like this. and he looks me right in the eyes and says, tell me how this ends. tell me how this ends. well, that's always a good question for any war, and it was a very good question for that war. it's a good question for the current war. and he's got, you know, an answer to that now. he can speak for himself. you know, he's been asked that so many times, having it thrown back in his face that he's required to have an answer. but it's still the right question. you know, you're right. and woody would certainly know this better than anyone. that war, world war ii, country of 130 million people. armed forces of 16 million.

everyone has skin in the game. everyone is engaged somehow. everyone has someone at risk. today we have a country of 307 million. we have armed forces of about 2 million altogether. it's a tiny fraction of the country. it's a tiny proportion of what we had in world war ii, and almost to one has skin in the game. almost no one has someone at risk. almost no one has an investment in the same way that every american family had in world war ii. it's very important b to understand that. it's very important for the dave fivecoats of the world who's home on leave to see his, you know, daughter for, essentially, the first time. having been away for eight months. and so, you know, it's, i think, understanding the different dynamics and the different cultures of the wars of past and

present is important. >> we're coming to the close of our television portion. i just have one last question from someone in your past. this is not "this is your life," but from the women of science i understand that around, that you've been quoted as saying after studying war for many years you feel it's time to turn things over to women. [laughter] who are the women of science, and why would they feel that way? [laughter] >> well, this is true. i have to admit. the women of science are my wife, jane, who's here who works at the national institutes of health, and my daughter sarah who is in her final year of medical school at the university of illinois. she wants to be a surgeon. and i call them whenever they come into the house together, women of science. [laughter] and it's true. i think i have become as a consequence of the being a student of war a radical

feminist. [laughter] i think, you know, we could do worse than just turn everything over to the women. [applause] and, and let them run things for a while. my bet is that wef choice. and so, you know, i'm half serious about it. i think that there's a lot of testosterone floating around when it comes to war. and there's a lot of manhood proving and can so on. that's inimical to the well being of the species, of the republic. and so i think anything we can do to grapple with that would be useful for all of us. >> very important topics, and what you've said and done and accomplished in your lifetime is truly amazing, rick. tomorrow you'll be awarded this

lifetime achievement award. this is military library literature award. you'll receive that at the palmer house in chicago, and we couldn't be happier that you're receiving our award. [applause] our thanks to rick atkinson for joining us. view other programs by visiting pritzker military library.org. for all the staff at the pritzker military library in chicago, i'm ed tracy. thanks for joining us. [applause] i still have 16 pages of notes and questions from outside, but we're going to turn over to the audience at this point be, rick. max is there, and here's question one. >> first of all, i'd like to thank you for -- not thank you, but congratulate you on your upcoming award. but i'm curious, you've got my curiosity piqued here.

how kid you answer general petraeus -- did you answer general petraeus when he asked you that question as to how do we end this? >> well, as a journalist at that time, it's not my role to answer his question, and i wouldn't presume to do that. it's my job to try to understand as fully as i can what's going on including in the brain of the commanding general of the 101st airborne at that time. so i didn't answer. i looked in those blue eyes of his, and i saw that he was troubled, and it really troubled me, i'll tell you that. it was a very unsettling moment. i'll also tell you, you know, dave petraeus is a guy who's pretty comfortable in his own skin, but when i came back to washington in, depress it was the middle -- guess it was the middle of april 2003 and was writing this book and it was going to be excerpted in "the

washington post" when the book came out in the spring of 2004, i sent him the excerpts. i said to him in my cover note, i said, you know, rather than have you read this in "the washington post" tomorrow or whenever it was going to run, why don't you look at it now. and, certainly, if i've made any errors, tell me now. he had virtually nothing to say other than to ask me if i would delete that phrase, tell me how this ends. because, he said, he felt that there was an impertinence to it, that it sounded as though he were questioning the national command authority. and for a guy at that time who was only a two-star and anonymous to northeast americans, he didn't have the stature that he's got now, obviously, he was sensitive to the notion that he would appear

to be impertinent. and i said i've gotta think about this, dave. and so i really pondered it, and i wrote back to him or called him -- i think i wrote to him, and i said, i can't do that. i can't take that out. and the reasons why include i heard you say it more than once, to me more than once, but i heard you say it within earshot of others, staff officers and so on. it became a private joke between us and then, as jokes do in a small command circle, it became a wider joke, tell me how this ends. and i said, this is the right question. you asked the right question. probably should have been asked before we're actually in iraq, probably should have been asked by people of a higher pay grade than you are, but this is the question. and i had other reasons, also,

but he said, okay. that's kind of how it is. okay, i'm not going to sulk about it. i got it, i understand. you have your job, i have my job. so now people have written books called, "tell me how this ends." >> she was here, yeah. >> thank you. >> nope, hang on. i think he's behind you. >> me, okay? >> a question about your time in the germany. i first went to germany in '68 and just, you know, i studied german there for a while, and i took the usual tours. and i went back in the '70s with a friend of mine who was a high-stakes german collector, and he was visiting guys who had gotten their nights crossed, and he was buying their stuff.

last time i went was in '08, and on one of these fancy barge tours for retirees. and i saw something then that i'd never seen before which were memorials to the resistance. the hitler resis trance. resistance. and i had never seen these before anytime in germany. ..

he was executed in berlin. there is a courtyard and a plaque. and i don't know how long it's been there, but it was there when we moved to berlin in 1993. i assume it's been there for a while. the germans generally -- you know, it's a tricky thing. and there's a desire to believe that the resistance was a meaningful force among 80 million germans in world war ii when it was sent. it's a very small total who believe other than what the fuhrer tells them to believe. and in fact come the stauffenberg plotters were -- you know, they were jeffersonian democrats. [inaudible] >> yeah, it wasn't that they wanted to impose something that

we would perhaps not recognize as a derivative of jeffersonian democracy in germany today. so, you've obviously seen it and i can't recall offhand seen other markers like that around. but you know, there are some heroic figures in world war ii, mostly were executed for being heroic, for standing up for righteousness. and the germans celebrate and to some extent. but they have im leonards no illusion that this represents a meaningful sub culture of the third right. and you know, i've always been impressed by the extent to which germans are educated about the

catastrophe. they understand. they know board were two history better than american students by far. you know they are taken on field trip and that is something that every young german understands and lives with. and so, you know, i lived in germany last summer. i was a fellow at the american academy in the fall of 2009. it didn't come to my attention that this was a necessarily new upsurge of efforts to commemorate the resistance. >> this is a question going back to sources and i archives and research. but we have some organizations now discovering such material can be very useful for

historians, but extremely dangerous at the moment for the organization that's creating them. so you have agencies who don't put anything down work can be electronically copied because data wants to be free and they are afraid it will leak out. so that's a problem for the future. going back to the past, there were people worried about archives that might be problems or provide ongoing careers and that cavities. in one story, there is a rumor out there that the fire will destroy part of the british records in the late 1940s and destroyed a lot of the records of the special operations the lake is. and there are rumors that this happened because some of the people who want baltimore select it in politics and it was an embarrassment. it destroyed all this embarrassing status. in your research into our

archives, have you run into anything where they've gone away or been buried because it might he problem for somebody at some time? >> well, if there is a deliberate effort to bring this soa records, they didn't start enough fires. there's still a fair amount of it around. there is a catastrophic fire in st. louis of the army's personnel records and something like 70% of military records of the world war ii generation up to i can remember when the end it was, but it was a substantial loss of personnel records. there is no evidence that that was done deliberately and anything other then mrs. o'leary's cow. you know, you find gaps for sure there are things that you think were probably written down in

some form and you can't quite find them. the thing i find most aggravating about this issue is that there's been an attempt to reclassify things. and so, particularly after 9/11, you have nsa, national security agent the end others oof organization going into the national archives and reclassify things that have been declassified for decades. so it's hard sometimes to get at things that were easy to get at and is open to anyone for a long period of time. and it has to do with sources and methods of code breaking and so on, that sort of thing at times. the good folks from national archives via march think it's ridiculous. >> what percentage is that? >> it's a very tiny percentage,

but i come across things amok in this dusty crumbling records i talked about earlier in the boxes and there will be a cardboard cheap put down inside. and on it, as this record has been removed per cia or whatever. i find it enough and i felt him of information act request to get it out. and of course they answer in the decades by the time to get around to answering that request to deep declassify things again. so that aggravates me. now i don't think that anybody looking to protect their reputations these days. there's a certain hysteria involved other than personal vanity. so, you know, i would say generally offhand, i don't know of examples of official records. now, there were guys who cut

diaries, personal records have not seen the light of day. and sometimes they seem delighted they very late in the game. i'll give you an example. jeffrey keyes, one of those generals i talked about who is quite confident, and accolade and friend of patton, who was giving command of second court in italy and was the commander on the scene -- the corps commander at casino and the repeater river. though he was a pretty large player in the italian campaign. very interesting guy. west point is said to be the only man who could stop jim thorpe on a football field. he's a tremendous athlete. and after volume one came out, i got a phone call from a man in pittsburgh who said, i'm jeffrey keyes son.

he was also a west pointer, one of the classes in the 1940s. and he said, did you know my father kept a diary? i said no, i didn't know that. he said would you like to see a? [laughter] es. so he flew -- very nice of him. he flew from pittsburgh to dulles airport and i drove out there and picked him up and we went over to one of the hotels that dole is. and he reached into his pocket and pulled out a bound diary and handed it to me and said to right by my father. i said okay, i'll try. i'll do my best. i'm not going to write hagiography, but i'm very interested in him. and so, prove to be like patton's diaries, which are extraordinary, where no thought

goes on under to the diaries. last night and they are voluminous and there in the library of congress that they're available for anybody to look at along with idiosyncratic spelling and grammar. but they are very interesting. and again, we see among other things and go phobia is deeply and go phobic and it helped me quite a bit in writing volume two. jeffrey keyes, somebody trying to bring back from the dead at least in that period of time. and so those kinds of things are still kicking around and you know, hopefully will continue to surface one way or another for your account. >> in light of that will let you know, this might be another difficult question to there, but what would you say was a largest are the worst the greatest american strategic mistake we made in the european theater? can you elaborate on that at

all? the first central strategic that is made by the alliance at least as germany first. and that's made shortly after pearl harbor. that was recognized widely as the rate decision and that is how that very well. the presumption was germany is the strongest of the axis enemies. if you defeat germany, the other axis powers, germany, japan will fall like rotten fruit. the strategic decision really, somewhat by default, but quite conscious to allow the russians to do most of the fighting for us. 26 million dead russians.

that's 26 million americans who don't die. we have 291 battle deaths, american saddlebags. about 491,000 dead in world war ii. it's a small portion of the pleading the russians are doing. and consequently the effort to keep the russians in the game throughout the other things that had to do, wanted to do. that's a correct and important strategic decision. the decision to go into north africa is a complicated -- i wouldn't call it a strategic mistake, but i would call it a strategic conundrum and was recognized as such at the time. we go into north africa, contrary to the druthers of virtually everyone in an american military uniform. because franklin roosevelt leaves and has been persuaded primarily by winston churchill, that with its green army and

green commanders, that's teaching in britain and crossing the english channel and marching for berlin is not a good idea, that you're likely to suffer a substantial reverse. and so, against the advice of martial and eisenhower right when fdr make the decision that we're going to north africa, makes the end of july 1942. he said that franklin d. roosevelt, commander-in-chief, lest there be any doubt once his authority to rice rise. eisenhower right is the blackest day in history, which is a ridiculous overstatement given the blackness of other days. but what marshall certainly recognizes as the mediterranean because they sound. once you're there, it's hard to get out. so, the strategic decision to go there, which i think they allow to send house collateral strategic decisions, which involves i'm going to sicily and southern italy and so on.

because there is now shifting to get that half-million man force that is a north africa at the end of the tunisia campaign back to britain in stagecraft in this channel or go anywhere else. we don't have the wherewithal to do it. so my feeling is that italy becomes increasingly, strategically untenable. there's not a real good understanding by anyone of why it can particularly once we captured the air fields in southern italy and can really take the campaign home to the fatherland from the south in addition to the many airbases and great britain, while trudging up apennine mountains in the winter makes a lot of sense. partly it's because you don't have a lot of alternatives at that point. you don't want to stay connected. the russians are expecting you to be fighting and so on. so that becomes a strategic

meyer. and it's still controversial to this day. you can argue around and argue it's clear. other than that, when you talking about northwest europe, i'm hard pressed to find what i would say is a major strategic error that the allies made. now people have been arguing since it ended in february 1945 and arguing they were strategic errors made there. i actually don't believe that. i believe that roosevelt, as sick as he was, played a we can pretty well, about as well as he could. i don't believe that the catastrophe of postwar europe and eastern bloc and the iron curtain and so on resulted from decisions that were made. i just don't believe that. but it's highly contested and there's some very fine historian who have argued over the decade, that that was part of a

collection for strategic mistakes. >> yeah, i have a question about the mason sicily and operation meet and obviously in your book before. obviously it was successful, but if it wasn't successful, how would the invasion have gone since the germans seem to have that it wasn't going to be sensei. it was going to be east or west of there. so if that fails, what would've happened? him up on missed meat is not the most flamboyant operations of the war. if you're not familiar with it, it's really great sign. the british have a genius for skulduggery. and for operations that require very intricate thinking through of consequences. and mincemeat is the man who never was. they were subsequently a book

written about it and a pretty good movie by that title. and now another new book about the same thing. it involves taking a corpse and for a long time it wasn't known who that corpse was for actually that relies told about who's corpse that was. we now know that it was a derelict who had killed himself while taking rat poison and it turns out that toxicological a rat poison is some of the operations of drowning. and so they took this poor guy. his name is glenn dower michael if i remember correctly and rested not in a british marine major's uniform and handcuffed to his wrist the briefcase with some phony papers and took him from the united kingdom to the

southern coast of spain and ejected him from the submarine along with some debris to make it look as though he had died in an airplane crash in the papers indicated that he was flying from britain to gibraltar. and the papers indicated very cleverly done in fact the next phase after the north african campaign would be not an invasion of sicily, which is what we're planning to do and was quite obvious, but in fact we were looking at sardinia increased. and so, the effort was to get the germans to the both ways. the corpse washed ashore as the british knew would have been. the spanish, treacherous as they are, turned the documents over to the germans. the germans essentially took it hook line and sinker and came to

believe that in fact these were authentic documents. what had happened if there was no successful men's meet? i think history would have been unfolded. we landed the divisions. you know, germans had two divisions in sicily. they moved to more and once the invasion took place. there were hundreds of thousands of the tying troops there, most of whom who have no interest what whoever is fighting an anglo-american fighting for us. sicily is a fairly small place to conquer. it's 100 miles from one into the other. it was a force that was not going to be stopped, even if the germans heeded those who continue believe that sicily with the more likely we ended please for the next invasion. even if they had moved another division in, it was going to be a relatively short campaign. the campaign in sicily ended up being six weeks.

if you think were going to land in sicily and they're not taking sardinia thought maybe it would allow them to take seven weeks. it's not a history changer, but it's a great story. >> thank you. and thank you for each and every one of her books. you profoundly talk about the profound tragedy of four. and what i found in reading your books is that your voices pain comes through in probably no more so for me at the end and the line. would you speak about your literary pain? >> yeah, i never called it that. i don't want to be too grand about it. the long gray line, the first book i wrote this about the west point class of 1966. i got interested in them when i was a newspaper reporter in kansas city.

a father's best friend by one of these coincidences of history had a son in math class. that's how i got interested in him as a reporter. i went to his 15th reunion in 1981. he lost more men in vietnam than any other west point classes. it dirty clothes of the class of 579. he had a right to west point in july 1962, propelled really by the same idealism that was sending their peers and the peace corps, propelled by john kennedy idealism and propelled by the notion that there were going to go off and went whatever war needed to be one. it was a clear and 62 where there was. well, it didn't work out that way. and so they go off his platoon leaders and the platoon leaders are very ill-prepared. they did them no ill favors and preparing them to be platoon leaders in the jungle and they

got shot to pieces. and they stampeded out of the army as quickly as they could. they had a four year commitment than. so in 1970 they were eligible to get out and the exit gate in such numbers that the army commissioned a study called why they quit, resignations and the west point class of 1966. so after the 15th reunion, wrote a newspaper serious about it. went to their 20th reunion. and at that point camino, a full generation of army officers and are now retiring after 20 years. and then i wrote the book about it. you know, the 15th reunion, they always go to the cemetery. i've subsequently been to their 30th and their 40th reunions. i always think of them as the tenure voice, showing up on our day in july 1962, according to the man in the red sash. there were always the 18-year-old boys, which becomes

a harder and harder charade to maintain when you look at it because they are now in their late 60s. but the reality of the young men dying young is never more profound than when you go with them as he do it every union to the west point cemetery and that honor the dead. the honor those who are buried there and quite a few of those in the amount and had died subsequently in buried there. and it's just deeply moving. because they are again 18 years old. the world is their oyster for a moment and then it just hasn't turned out that way. and today, that to back in section 36, were most of them were buried are all these new graves because that's where the recent west pointers were killed in iraq and afghanistan and the same part of that cemetery. it was profound and deeply

affected me as a writer. it deeply affected me as someone interested in military history. it deeply affected me as a citizen. it still does hurt i'm still very close to them. it's like having 579 older brothers whom i really profoundly admire because they went through a lot, not only in vietnam and west point, which is hard enough, vietnam and their lives afterwards because they came back from vietnam. instead of being the leaders of the generation had once been, they come back and they are pariahs in the generation, in a country that really -- that causes a fault line in american has three. and they are despised by many of their countrymen for what they did. so you know, their pain, which still resides in them today is

something that you don't have to dig very deep to feel. >> we have time for one more question. >> could you comment about in discussions about the use of the atomic i'm in germany. >> to use the atomic bomb in germany? well, you know, i think the germans were lucky the war ended in may. you know, i have looked. gearhart, maybe you know. i've never seen definitive evidence that planning to drop the bomb on a german city that they didn't know until very late in the game if the thing would work. and so, to my knowledge there was no operational planning of the same sort that was going into building b-29s for the long-range bombing missions they would carry to be wishing that and nagasaki.

there is great anxiety about what the germans were capable of doing in terms of building an atomic weapon of some sort. and there's an interesting byplay that i've been lucky not to the next volume. when we go into strasburg, i mentioned the second army, part of the 600 group sweeping up in into strasburg. there was a very deliberate and well organized effort to find out how far the germans are in the atomic research and the extent to which they are capable of pulling off something like the manhattan projects. and we knew it through various interesting intelligence means that strasburg is one of the centers of german thinking about this. there were physicists and others in strasburg they are. we captured a lot of

documentation. most of the fish got away, but they left behind their stuff because we were in the strasburg equipped. it showed what had been suspected but not knowing quite clearly in the documentation would very quickly to roosevelt personally for an interesting chain of correspondent that the germans couldn't do it. they didn't have the wherewithal. they were way, way behind and there was no evidence that there was anything even approaching the german atomic tom. so, that allowed us to be less anxious about that aspect of german warmaking. you know, would we have dropped the atomic bomb on berlin had the russians not swept in there at the beginning of may 1945? at that point, my guess is no.

it wasn't necessary. you didn't have the same kind of recalcitrance. he didn't have the same sort of the military circumstances were different. they were beaten badly enough at that point. had the atomic bomb been available in the polls? would we thought about it? well, probably. i mean, there were serious thought. one of the things that i found that is much interesting is the target list for using chemical weapons against the germans in normandy is the germans used chemical spurs. there are two lists. i found that the national archives. i don't think this has ever been deemed. one list is do we care about french casualties? and the other list is we don't care about french casualties. churchill was so agitated activity weapons, they're the ones in particular when they began falling on britain and

wreaking havoc in london in particular, that he became quite exercise and insisted that there be further thought of as initiating chemical warfare against the germans. and even biological warfare. this went up to very high