Didnt you cowrite something . Were you kind of their expert . Towith steve, i contributed two fiction anthologies at his request. Is a marvelous friend and colleague. In 1984 our mutual publisher , sent me a manuscript written by an aviator called for each other. The publisher asked my opinion and i said this book is so good if you dont publish it, i will, and the next year it was published. So steve and i have kept in touch ever since. He came up with the concept of a military contractor that does deny it will work for the u. S. Government all over the world. That was a trilogy that was a fun change of pace for me because i had not done anything in that realm at that time. So that was an education. You are a wonderful writer. Your nonfiction reads with all the polls of fiction. And so you grew up flying airplanes, and where does all this aviation background come from . I am a Eastern Oregon kid that grew up next to a cropdusting strip in my little bitty hometown in oregon. And airplanes were always overhead and that combined with the fact that my dad had been trained as a naval aviator in world war ii and i was there from infancy, i was blessed and i use that word because i was blessed to be able to help restore vintage airplanes and fly them. I guess overall i have had between five and 600 flying Navy Airplanes from the world war ii timeframe, that has been a tremendous benefit both in the history an infection. Im sure that that is that those who read you know you have an encyclopedic knowledge. Im going to Start Talking about dday and the encyclopedia which is an update and probably, if i work this out right to , commemorate the anniversary of the june 6, 1944 dday landings. Thats right, the original book was published for the 60th anniversary and i woke up one morning and realize that oh, my goodness in 12 to 14 months we are going to have the 70th anniversary. So eventually i wound up doing an update. And the main difference between the original and this is bad there are none of the historic figures still living now smack i havent even thought about that. I was going to ask if there was new material that has come not from records release and things that wouldve changed some of the information that you had. I did expand upon a few of the entries and i know one had to do with intelligence from the allied side and a couple of other entries were expanded on the basis of Additional Information and one of them have to do with the british and Canadian Navy and i found Additional Information on that. This has been very well received. As an author its always interesting to me to get feedback from my readers. Two of them who dont know each other said that this is a wonderful book because most of the entries are just the right length for bathroom reading. And started this yesterday i did dip in and out of it. I thought it was fascinating, i was born in 1940 and so i dont have any memory of the war or dday other than playing with my mothers food stamps. But we talked about these figures in the years after the war and reading this was not just a refresher course but all of the personalities revealed things that you dont know when you are living through it. Its different than when you go back. Thats right. Vietnam was my war and now when i read about that, i think, why didnt i know that then. But you cant always tell. One of the things that i thought was interesting is the personalities that you talked about and we had Dwight Eisenhower who is the supreme allied commander and my question would be was he there because he was a great general or because he was great at logistics or just great at politics. He was great at politics. The conventional wisdom for many years after the war was he was the one who held together the alliance and that is certainly an exaggeration. Its not as if the british and the french were going to take this and go home because they didnt like the fact that an american was a commander. The other aspect was since america provided the huge majority of the manpower or the liberation of northwestern europe, it was a given that eisenhower or another senior american would be the overall commander. But in fairness his subordinates were both british and he was the Deputy Commander and then the head of the navy in the air campaigns which were also british. So it was pretty much a balance between the angloamerican. It was certainly Operation Overlord in this sense. How capitalism saved america and you also talked about Jimmy Doolittle who was really an awful lot. I was very fortunate to get to know the general, as he likes to be known as general jimmy. And of course he came back to world prominence and National Prominence within april april 1942 bombing wave of tokyo and five other cities in that area this includes twinengine bombers from an Aircraft Carrier and that aspect of it worked and it turned out that they had to launch a few hundred miles earlier than expected where all the planes except for one ran out of fuel. That brought him up to Brigadier General and he received the medal of honor and he was almost immediately sent to north africa when he learned the general business running the north African Allied air forces. So by the time he came to italy in november of 1943, he was a known quantitive and he was only there two months before eisenhower who called him to britain to take over this air force. He had his problems in the sense that the weather didnt cooperate for dday. You had very low cloud cover and you wrote that the bombers actually ended up being too far back to really protect the people. The airplane and i found shows the normandy coast running mostly east west and the heavy bombers raised in britain 30 miles away were approaching the german occupied beaches at a perpendicular angle north to south. And the navy said we dont want the bombers dropping because it will endanger the ships offshore. Long story short, most of the bombs fell 1. 5 to 3 miles behind the beaches and really didnt have benefit to the landing troops. Sometimes this is a real obstacle and they have a story about as well. There really was no perfect day. Well, it was originally scheduled for june 5 and eisenhower agreed that they would have a 24 hour weather hold and then after that it was all or nothing because the next favorable tides and in phases will be downstream. Isnt that amazing in the same way that oak ridge remained as well with social media and everything, there is no way that this ever could have existed. Find it fascinating and we will get it to this in a minute. He was an individual and even though he had same with something that had nothing to do with naval subjects, he was one born in maine and grew up on the coast and so the salt water was in his veins early on. When world war ii started he basically knocked on the navys door and said here i am, make use of me. And he was given a directive as a Lieutenant Commander and he had visiting privileges almost everywhere. There is a littleknown but superb documentary that was made in and hes wellknown for that june 1942. Documentary. But less well known is the fact that his film crew was aboard navy and coast guard ship off normandy and some of the combat footage that we see with Tv Documentaries were shot by his cameramen. I was fascinated to see that. The person i liked the best is a british person, simon fraser. He is one of those highland warriors. Lucky him if there was actually a war because he was a man born to fight. Was. Solutely he he was a Senior Commander in the British Armed forces. He is a natural born warrior whose life would have been wasted in any other endeavor and even know he was severely wounded during the Normandy Campaign and receive the last rites, told a subordinate later over sothe water is not he got back into combat before the war ended. Charles has always been controversial in french and among the allies. You give him a pretty good rating. And he was a progressive military theorist before world war ii. He spent most of the war as a prisoner of the germans. He became the leading advocate of tank warfare and consequently, his seniority was such that when france fell in june of 1940, he evacuated to britain with tens of thousands of other free french and he became a significant factor in allied planning and i think the most wonderful statement made about him was from Winston Churchill who said the greatest cross i must bear is the products of million. Of the cross of lorraine. Somebody had to be running a french government when the germans were pushed back, they could actually function. And the goal was able to do that. Most of us know enough about and i thought you could there was a lot of medical theories about, have this person or this illness hadnt gone on and would history would have been different. Fdr in your judgment should not have run for a fourth term. He was done. A dying man. If you look at the films especially from the conference about maybe six weeks before he died, that is a dying man and he really should have stepped down, but it was not in him to vacate the presidency. The reason was there was a paralysis when he was so l, but wasnt actually able and read things that said patton could have made it to berlin before the russians, he was unable to because there was basically no american functioning command from january to march when roosevelt died and truman was kept out of things. Harry truman, a person who had training for any of the role did zero an amazing job. Think about some of the things he learned from the treaty of versailles. They did not have a punishing training, all that stuff and roosevelt has such contempt for him he didnt take him into his confidence. It would have been fascinating to be a fly on the wall the day truman was inaugurated, i assume it was general marshall, the chief of staff, said mr. President , theres something you need to know about what is going on in new mexico. And hitler, you give him a great politician. None of us give him points for being a great human being. But a question always wondered and i think the same thing about napoleon, why . Why russia . Why couldnt they just stick to europe . And be happy with that . May be that is not part of a personality like that. It is not. I think the one thing napoleon and hitler had in common was they believed their own pr. They were drinking their own koolaid. And alexander the great. Was the same. The great captains of history typically overreached themselves, theyre a victim of their own success. That is true. We talked about people, you give a lot of space to the various armed forces, land, sea and air , because they take all three on the american, british and german front which i thought was fascinating. You talk about the weaponry, the kinds of planes and the kinds of guns and you give credit to two american gun designers, mr. Browning, i dont remember the other one. He was born a canadian and became a u. S. Citizen and was an employee of the u. S. Army Ordnance Service and he stood about 12 years or so designing what became the m 1 semiautomatic rifle that meant the u. S. Armed forces were the only ones in the Second World War entirely equipped with a semiautomatic rifle. That made a big difference and her that men John Browning made it more genius, utah mormon gunsmiths designed and held the patents on almost every automatic weapon that the United States used in the Second World War from the browning automatic weapon to the light and heavy machine guns, and the fabulous 1911 kissel, which was in Front Line Service for 75 years and is still issued today. He was a true american genius. And also the guy who designed the Landing Craft. Higgins. The higgins boat. I thought that was fascinating. He is another success story. Established a privatelyowned Boat Building Company in new orleans and he anticipated before the navy the need for massproduced Landing Craft in event of not war but the next war. It is generically called the higgins boat. Actually it was the Landing Craft vehicle and personnel, then made it possible Amphibious Operations in every theater of action. You finally cleared up for me various things about the kinds of airplanes that were used. We all know about the beat 47, the workers bomber. But i had not realized the douglas aircraft, the sky train the c 47, became it was , basically a passenger plane that they managed to turn into a personal carrier. That is right. It was the revolutionary douglas dc3 airliner from the late to mid 1930s and the Army Air Corps recognized that this has tremendous potential not only as a transport on a cargo airplane but it can deliver paratroops, and we could not have conducted the Normandy Campaign as we did gliders. 47s and otherwise, you would have to transport everybody by ship. And even though we won the war in the atlantic against overwhelming forces, not like 1943 or something. The turning point in the battle of the atlantic came in may of 1943 when if you look at the chart, the number of sinkings of merchant vessels that were taking supplies to britain, the number fell below the number of german submarines that were being sunk. So essentially the battle of the atlantic was won 13 months before the day. The theme is the germans were better equipped and probably had better strategy, better training, everything else, once they develop the world wide theater because several times in the book you say they were too thin. They didnt have enough so basically, as long as everything didnt fall to them, they would win. They did not have the sustainability allies did. Deception. You have a section about an attempt to convince the germans the landing would not be in normandy, and the other beaches. There was the lengthy, complex plan called bodyguard of lies was the definitive book on the subject. There was a multitiered plan to deceive the germans, and the landings would take place, would you if you look at the map, is the logical crossing point, was 25 miles from calais across the channel. We turned from german intelligence agents and caught them and made them an offer it they cant refuse. Either you feed false information to your masters in withny, or you have a date 12 gentlemen with rifles. And that combined with signals sending false information we knew the germans would intercept and decode and joyce patton was a big part of the deception because he was given command of a nonexistent army. An organization eight or ten divisions, where he was so visible throughout britain in the days leading up so that the germans focused on him, his appearances coincided or so it seemed with the plan landings. You didnt watch the ian flemings three part bio on television earlier this year. Flemings was crazy in many ways. Great jamese wrote bond novels was because of that but he was an extremely effective agent, because of the fiction abilities. He had a plan to actually take a course. I dont think he killed anybody. And dressed in uniform and state information on it about where the landing would be an floated off. Werenever known if that true. [laughter] it isnt in your book. Leave the germans as to where this is landings, a very wonderful concept. They address this corpse, probably a british sailor, in a major marine uniform with a briefcase handcuffed and the spanish recover the wreckage and immediately told the germans. That deceived them as to where the sicilian landings would occur. If youre interested in following this up in fiction, and author named james r. Bent has written some wonderful books about a fugitive shirt tail relative of eisenhower, a boston cop who gets to do stuff. He shows up in all these theaters. And these most recent books, hes in england right before Operation Overlord launches and he writes about the screwups. You talk about slaps in the sand but he said at one point when he exercise andning the british navy got their signals crossed and wiped out a bunch of people. Operation tiger was a dress rehearsal for some of the American Forces that were going to land in normandy. The germans had a class of torpedo boats. And i think two of the german torpedo boats penetrated the practice landing area at night and torpedoed two or three american ships with heavy loss of life, i think about 400 americans were killed and Operation Tiger became classified until the end of the lord. It is interesting to watch the internet revelations because about every 10 to 12 years somebody discovers the coverup and says look what happened. It has been known since the late 40s. Overlord was the name of the overall thing but then there was operation neptune. Was that the naval part . Correct. The full name of the whole operation was neptune overlord. You cant have an amphibious operation without a naval aspect and neptune as i explained in the encyclopedia involved, and ships from about five allied nations, canada with the Third Largest navy in world war ii and from were individual ships free france and poland. It was a multinational endeavour. You achieve the wonderful balance even though you are clearly an aviation junky but theres a lot in here about the navy and the army and you give great space to the Royal Air Force and the planes that it flew and the Royal Canadian air force. Anyway, it is absolutely fascinating. I particularly like the alphabet. You have a chart that lists the u. S. Version, the british version, and the german version. I thought the choice of names was really fun. Same but they were the the german ones for different. The germans were antoine bruno, caesar, and in fact they even had a word that eludes me. There is a new thriller out foxtrot. Iskey tango three of the co