 It's not, not often you get introduced by Jack, I mean, John Kennedy, right? Anyway, I'm really glad to be here. I live in Virginia. I spent 22 years in the Navy. I was a Naval Intelligence Officer. I wander a lot. I knew when to let the Admiral sleep when he was at a briefing because he was too tired. You guys, I'm going to keep away for the next 45 minutes. If not, I have failed. I'm going to talk about this book and my uncle. But because it's a Navy audience, I want to emphasize some of the Navy aspects of it. And so, first, I'm going to talk about Operation Dragoon. Has anybody heard of that? Or outstanding, correct me if I'm wrong on anything here. It was Admiral Hewitt. There's a Hewitt Hall here. It was in charge of Western Task Force. And we're going to talk about this. This is the Forgotten D-Day. And we'll go through that in a few minutes. Like I said, I spent 22 years in the Navy. I was stationed in Japan, the Philippines, Italy twice, Germany. Italy, I was the assistant naval attaché. So if you came into Naples between 1981 and 1984, you have me to thank or blame depending upon how good your port visit experience was. I was also the US Navy officer that was designated to go into East Berlin while the wall was up. And I would go up and go through. I had a car, an Opel Commodore. How about that? I got promoted. I had an Opel Commodore in Berlin at Tegel Airfield. And I would slip into the restroom and put on my Navy officer uniform. The only time I ever wore it was when I was stationed in Germany for almost four years. I'd put that on and I'd go through Checkpoint Charlie and exercise our free and open right to be in East Berlin. I took admirals there. I took my mother there. I took my kids there. I would have taken any of you there had you shown up. So I did some pretty interesting things. So without further ado, we're going to talk about, first of all, my uncle. He was my favorite uncle. He died young. He was 52, 53 years old. He was quite a war hero. Two silver stars, bronze stars, two purple hearts. Croix de guerre, c'est pomme, for those of you who know French. Presidential unit citation. He was a great mentor. He suffered from PTSD extensively. You can imagine all of these days in combat as did many of these guys. And so that's kind of another thing that I champion is trying to help veterans that were in combat and to do that. I work with a lot, with a lot of World War II veterans. Any World War II veterans? You guys are all two. Oh, you look too young to be World War II. 17, 17. 17, yeah. Well, we do that. You'll see some of that later. First of all, what is a tank destroyer? You say, what's the Navy guy know about tank destroyers? Well, the answer was not very much when I started this. But it did have a three-inch naval gun on it. The U.S. Army in 1939 watched what happened in Poland. And the Polish cavalry got totally run over by panzers. And we freaked out. Remember, they're right when they say the U.S. Army in 1939 was less than 600,000 men. We were like the 11th largest army in the world. And we got really scared, and we got scared about panzers. And we had to do something. The French, this is actually a picture I took of the Maginot Line. The French thought if they built a fixed defense, that would stop the Germans well. They just went through Belgium just like they did in World War I. So that didn't work. These were the first two tanks destroyers. One was that three-inch gun mounted on the front of a half-track. That was called a purple heart box, with good reason. The other thing was on a Dodge three-quarter truck. That was called the Fargo. Boy, they got rid of that just as soon as they could in North Africa. And as you see here is the patch of tank destroyers. Now, my uncle was the only, as far as I know, the only officer that took his platoon in all three of the World War II tank destroyers into combat of the real ones, the ones that look like tanks. So there's the M-10, M-18, M-36. And we could talk forever about tank destroyers, and maybe we will. But what I want to talk today about, since this is a Navy audience, is the Operation Dragoon, the invasion that you never heard of. The Third Infantry Division, which is the first one listed there in the 36th and the 45th, these guys were in five D-day amphibious landings, none of which repeat, none of which were at Normandy. So everyone thinks D-day, that meant Normandy. But there were a lot of other D-days in World War II, and it just meant this embarkation day. It didn't have the significance it has now. Those of you who have been to Naples will recognize Mount Vesuvius in the background. And of course, that's some of the ships getting ready for the invasion. The patch you see is the U.S. 7th Army. That was the commander, that was General Patch. Notice there are seven steps up and down. That was called Seven Steps to Hell by the GIs in World War II. They had, I think, a better sense of humor in World War II than we have now. So what happened was they started to gather this amphibious force. My uncle's battalion had been on garrison duty in Rome, but they relieved that task. Rome fell on June 4th, 1944. I talk about that in great detail in the books. Nobody remembers that because, I said June 4th and 5th, I should have said, because on June 6th, everybody knows what happened? Everybody knows what happened on June 6th? Anybody not know what happened? D-day, of course, happened. So they decided that they were going to actually do another invasion, and they decided that, and so in about six or eight weeks, they put together this whole invasion of southern France once it got approved. That meant that they had to go back to Anzio, where they had spent four months digging in trenches in World War I, and go back to Naples. Anybody been to Naples? Yeah, we're going to show a lot of pictures in Naples. You weren't born in Naples, my son was born in Naples. Was there a Navy hospital there? Yeah, my wife was a Navy nurse there, but we'll talk later. Anyway, so this is actually Anzio totally destroyed, loading pictures up. I don't talk about pictures, a lot of the pictures in the book are fuzzy. They're not very good. And the reason is because these were taken by the guys on their tank destroyers, and I've got access to the photographs taken by two of my uncle's sergeants. So you're going to see pictures in the book that you don't see any place else. They're not going to apologize for the quality, but these are these little tiny World War II era snapshots. But they record stuff that we wouldn't see otherwise. Okay, Bellinople. You've all been there, you know, down in there. Well, what happened in World War II, of course, is a lot of the action and training took place, not in Naples itself, but around the corner in Potswoldy. Anybody know Potswoldy? Okay, I see a couple of heads nodding. Born in Potswoldy? The love of my life, Sophia Loren, was born in Potswoldy. Anyway, Potswoldy is right here. Here's by a peninsula. Most of the training for the amphibious operations, for Anzio, for southern France, all took place in the Bay of Potswoldy. So I love this particular map. This map belonged to a friend of mine's grandfather, who was a brigadier general in World War II, and that is his World War II battle map. So Potswoldy. Potswoldy was a very unique place. If you went there, it has the best pizza, the best cappuccino, the best cafe in Naples, anywhere I see a smile back there. Carni Park is low. Anybody know Admiral Carni Park in Naples? That's located in Potswoldy. I got married in Potswoldy. You were born if you were at the Naval Hospital on the hill in the crater. You were born in Potswoldy, believe it or not. So anyway, Potswoldy was a pretty exciting place. There's an LST right there on the main mole in Potswoldy. It was a very, very different place. They speak a different dialect than they do in Naples, and all of this training for the troops, both for Anzio and both for the southern France, took place there. It was the principal port of Naples in World War II, principal port in the Mediterranean, long before Marseille took place. Some of these, these are GI, what the GIs in World War II would have seen in Naples. They're lighting up for a theater performance that was, a lot of USO shows their open-air meat markets. They still have those in Naples today. They certainly had them when I was there. I had them in Mexico last week when I was there. This is, those of you who may remember a place called Shoe Alley in Naples, this is the 1944 version of that. The black market was absolutely everywhere. This was out, that was the station hospital. This is the propylactic station. Gentlemen, I will explain that to you later. We have a lady present. And there was in the spring of 1944 a major eruption of Vesuvius. The US Army had to evacuate the town of San Sebastian, 6,000 people, so they're getting ready to support all of this activity, the takeover of Rome, the invasion of southern France, and they have Vesuvius to deal with. A lot of people said that it was the US Army bombing the crater and bombing practice runs that woke up the mountain. It's probably not true, but it's a great story. So, here's, here's what happened. Regrettably, when we invaded in Salerno in September and then in front of Casino in October 1943, we totally disrupted the harvest. Naples was starving by winter of 43-44. Women turned to prostitution with all of the GIs in order to feed their families. One should not judge these women harshly on that. But VD and Typhus were totally epidemic and they suffered more casualties before the guys in Italy then we like to think about. There were constant air raids by the Luftwaffe on Naples. I mentioned the eruption. There was virtually no fresh food. And sea rations, believe it or not, people stalled sea rations in order to eat. The estimate is that one-third of every bit of blanket supply, gun, whatever, that went into the port of Naples was stolen. There is a rumor that I particularly like, I can't substantiate, but the fact that even a liberty ship went missing. An entire 10,000 ton liberty. I admire the Neapolitan people immensely and their way to survive. And they are survivors. The local mob was in charge. The local mob, anybody here ever hear of Vito Genovese? Remember that? After Lucky Luciano was expelled and sent to prison, Vito Genovese took over the New York crime family. Somebody got themselves murdered and in 1939 or 40 he went to Italy. He became Palso Mussolini when that didn't work out. He volunteered and said, I'd like to be the U.S. Army liaison to the city of Naples. And the colonel in charge said, what a great idea. You speak beautiful English. We'll get along fine. What that did, they took all of Naples, all of the port of Naples, all of the service of supply or SSS and port of Naples and gave it to the mob. Now this has really part of the reasons why the Naples Camora is in such good shape these days because it extends back to what we did during World War II in Naples. Being AWOL was a serious problem. So, amphibious training. The reason that Southern France and Anzio, everything was being driven by the invasion of Normandy. There was an extreme shortage of LSTs and other amphibious landing crafts. They needed them for the invasion of Normandy. That was the big show. But that put a real constriction on everything. It also meant that Anzio, for example, could only move two divisions and that's why we were stuck at Anzio for four months. I explain all that in the book. It also meant that they had to do the invasion of Normandy before they could do the invasion of Southern France. Initially, Operation Dragoon was called Operation Anvil. It was to be simultaneous with the invasion of Normandy. In other words, hit them in Normandy, hit them from the France, meet up together, push the Wehrmacht back to Germany very quickly. As it turned out, that exercise got shelved and General Patch, Seven Fleet Commander, said to the Navy officers on the staff, I don't care what you hear. I want you Navy guys to plan for the invasion of Southern France. And, of course, Admiral Hewitt was in charge, who was turned into kind of a hero of mine. This guy was terrific. Anyway, they kept this planning alive so when they got bogged down in the hedgerows of Normandy, as we all know happened in late June and early July, all of a sudden somebody said, gee, we could take the pressure off if we resurrected Operation Anvil now Dragoon and invade Southern France. So that's what happened. The guys did lots of hikes. They had about five and a half weeks to train for this amphibious assault. Imagine that. Luckily, the three divisions involved, this was their fifth assault, so they didn't need to do it. There's a place called Montragoni, which is just north of Naples. I used to work at a NATO radio site called Costa Volterno, and this is about 15 miles up the road. And this is where they used for practice landings. At least 18 men of the 10th Engineering Battalion were killed clearing mines on the beach. So even when these guys were not on the forefront, there was lots of unexploded German ordnance and mines to bedevil everybody. And of course, I think if you all that have lived in Europe know that there are still bombs going off. Here we see, this is that bay of Potswolde I told you about, the practice landing. This is a duck, and by the way, duck is D-U-K-W, and it stands for the order that was done at the factory plant, not for duck. But you can see there's a dead GI right there and a mine hole. And this was right in front of the house that I lived in in Naples for almost four years. Of course, I didn't know that at the time because there was 30 years separating that. But you can see here's a picture of Montragoni and stuff blowing up. So the training was pretty intense for the guys as they got ready. Everybody has the pre-invasion pep talk, right? You've all heard them, you know. We've heard them on the ship before a big exercise. The admiral gets on the 1MC. Well, you know, if you're in the army, you go out in the field and there's a big review. And General Truscott, who was a really great division commander, says, I'm not asking you to hate the Germans. I'm only telling you that you've got the win this war. Win it, win it, I tell you. Okay, pretty low key, right? Then, Iron Mike O'Daniel takes the microphone, shakes his fist, and screams, you take it for me, boys. Hate the Germans, hate the bastards. Cut your initials on there, excuse me. God damn faces. He was really that way and he fired the guys up and they all screamed back, give them hell. By this time, these guys had been through so much in Italy that they really did hate the Germans and really wanted to go and get them. Anybody know where the NATO base is at Bagnoli? Maybe you've gone shopping and building it all back there? Well, right in front of that, there's a big steel mill and right besides that was a huge field. Imagine 10,000 vehicles parked there. Tanks, half-track, stuff like that. In that huge field, that's where they were. That's the 601st Tank Destroyers lined up. More pictures of Potswally. It was a tremendous number of vehicles and things that this invasion required. The guys got their initial briefing on 7th of March. They were actually going to leave on the, I said March. Geez, I got March on my brain. 7th of August. They were told that they were going to have complete air mastery. This time there was virtually no Luftwaffe in southern France. The attack was going to take place at 7.30 in the morning. There were going to be French troops that were designated to liberate Marseille and Toulon, but they were going to come later. It was strictly an American show. Churchill wanted the Brits to stay in Italy and go up to Italy, go up through Trieste, over the Julian Alps and into Austria. He thought southern France was a waste of time. General Marshall said no. We need the ports of Marseille and Toulon. We need to support the forces in Normandy. And finally, General Marshall and Eisenhower won. So that's why the political reasons for the invasion of southern France. This is a great picture of Potswally. See all those little dots there? Those are guys. Those are guys lined up on the beach, lined up on the beach ready to go. Of course I had to include a Navy signalman in there, signaling to the ships to come out. So by August 8th everybody was on board the ships. They were everywhere. You saw that earlier picture. Some of the skippers of the ships allowed the passengers to go over the side and swim. You know, 22 years in the Navy, and I think we were allowed to do that once on the midway. Somebody just doesn't happen. A lot of the officers sneaked over the side every night and went into the bases of town. I'm pretty sure my uncle was one of those. I don't know that for sure. He wrote, my uncle wrote, my grandmother, from where I am now the view is terrific. I can see the whole Bay of Naples with Mount Vesuvius as a backdrop. Don't be alarmed if you don't hear from me for a few weeks. The day he was able to say that he was going to something. You've been to Naples, you know, everybody's very aggressive trying to sell stuff. So they were melons. Do you remember the melon peddlers in Naples? Well, they were out there in boats and they would go out and try and sell melon for a pack of cigarettes. It was the currency. It was the currency in Naples at the time. So one peddler had a good-looking seniorina in the boat with him. The cry was, throw up the seniorina, not the melon. The guys were just what you'd expect. So they sailed for France the evening of August 12. Churchill decided that he would be a good sport. He was visiting the spa on the island of Ischia, one of the islands off of Naples. And he came around in a speedboat and did this back and forth to cheer everybody up. The rumor was that everybody be on the lookout for the melon or Roosevelt's going to be in the next boat that comes by. I thought that was kind of funny. As usual, the guys on the ships had no clue where they were going. France, maybe, who knows. Genoa, who knows. They didn't know. And they weren't told until they got there. But the fleet had over 885 ships and over 1,300 landing craft. It was a huge number of ships. There were four tasks for us, one for each division. There was a separate carrier task force that had some Jeep carriers with Seafire and Hellcat aircraft on it. There were over 150,000 troops on board that night that they sailed for Naples. That's a staggering number when you think about it for a landing. Remember, we got all Normandy and a couple million guys up there. This is just the first wave for southern France. So there were 21,000 trucks, tanks, tank destroyers, bulldozers, tractors, and other vehicles. It's amazing what the U.S. Army carried with them. Included in that figure were 41,000 French Army. Now, the French Army was kind of interesting. They was all pretty much conscripted from North Africa. And that meant that a lot of the soldiers were from North Africa. That meant that they didn't speak French. So you have French officers and non-coms trying to communicate with Algerians and Moroccans and Tunisians who then didn't speak the language. That caused a lot of problems, as you can imagine. Initially, they were scheduled to land six days after D-Day, but things went a lot better than expected. The idea was to go up the Rhome River Valley, if you've ever been down there, wonderful wines, and then force a junction with Normandy. And we're talking distances of 350 miles. The Germans knew all about it. They just didn't know precisely where. They even announced that we're afraid that on the French Riviera there's going to be an invasion. The U.S. Air Corps actually, from Corsica, plummeted every bridge across the Rhome Valley, everything that they could blow up. They tried to blow up. And in addition, you had a lot of free French running around blowing stuff up. Telltale, typical invasion, four days prior. They concentrated all up and down the Riviera. But they still didn't know where. Here you see is the track they took from Naples between Sardinia and Corsica, and right up to Santrope, which is where the landing took place. And that's actually from the 601st map. I really love this quote, because this captures what it's like on an invasion. The ships were very crowded. The food uninteresting. The chow lines fantastically long. The sleeping and toilet facilities practically nil. But the weather was warm, and the sea was smooth, and everybody was too scared and too worried to give a damn about anything. This was written in the unofficial history in 1945 about this invasion by Lieutenant Josowitz. And it specifically describes that, and you can see the route from Naples. So what were the uppercamps? The famous Wehrmacht 19th, Leunzeinth Army. They were severely under strength. They had a 400-mile coastline to take. The only mobile division they had was the 11th Panzer Division, which was actually not bad. Unfortunately, they were on the west side of the Rhône. We were going to attack on the east side of the Rhône, and the air corps had blown up all the bridges. We were trying to keep the Panzers back so they could send them to wherever the invasion came, along those 400 miles. They didn't know. Our troops didn't know. Admiral Hewitt knew, of course. And the soldiers, you can see them. These are captured Wehrmacht soldiers. They look like blonde-haired, blue-eyed Hitler youth, don't they? No, these guys are from Mongolia. These guys are Poles. They're Czechs. They're from all the captured country, and it was, we'll let you out of the prisoner of war camp to fight for the Wehrmacht. Well, these guys were ready to surrender to anybody just as soon as they could. And you'll find that half the strength of 150,000 German 19th Army by the end of the month had disappeared, and they had disappeared into Allied prisoner of war camps. They didn't have the best of weapons. Everything had been sent north to counter the invasion of Normandy. There were a lot of pine woods. Have anybody been around Saint Tropez? Beautiful place. Sorry, guys, the girls are generally topless there. Grateful. Anyway, they're all these pine forests, and they chopped down all of the trees, and they staked all of the fields and wired them because they were afraid of glider troops. The other thing they did was the underwater barriers rigged up with mines, all of that kind of stuff. They teach you to have to look out for an amphibious war training. Anyway, it was awful. There were just thousands and thousands of these defenses. But luckily, we had French civilians, the French of the Interior, the FFI, the Mosque, they're sometimes called. These guys went around and de-mined fields, put up signs, mines here, path cleared here, chopped down the trees. There was a terrific barrage. Admiral Hewitt sent in the Naval Task Force to soften up and blow everything up. He did that. Tons of high explosives on the coastal positions. Hundreds of Allied aircraft. It had said that there were more airmen in the air, Allied airmen in the air that day, than there were German Wehrmacht soldiers on the ground. That's staggering to me. They used rocket boats, 6,000 rockets, or 16,000 rockets, I believe, were fired to rip up the underwater barriers, all this stuff. They had learned a lot from Normandy, and they sent these rocket boats in. The other thing is, they had remote control boats that actually worked pretty well, and they went up and blew past through the undersea defenses. There was also some cover and deception for example, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., everybody heard the name, it's a Hollywood buff fan. He was Lieutenant Commander in the Navy. He had three boats, and all those simulating things just looked like another task force. And he went up and down the coast, pretending that he was landing, just to try and confuse the Germans. I had the privilege in 1984, at the 40th anniversary Liberation of Rome ceremony, to meet a guy named Bill Maudlin. Bill Maudlin was the GI cartoonist, and he was a great gen, he's gone now, but he wrote this about this invasion. The Army likes to pick certain outfits, train them in landing operations, and then use the same men for every invasion. This undoubtedly is an efficient system, but it gets a little rough on the guys that do the invading. My old division, the 45th, was one of several whose only rests seemed to come when they were waiting for boats to carry them to other lands, where the language was different, but the war was the same. And I think that was after five landings. I think he had every right to say that. Here you can see one of those real Army maps that show you where all the different divisions are going in, and we won't spend a lot of time at. I will tell you that the first Special Service Forces, a joint Canadian U.S. group, attacked those two islands down there because supposedly they had big, huge naval guns installed. And they successfully attacked those two islands and found they were telephone poles painted black, which is also what they did at Normandy. But anyway, so that was kind of a non-threat, and the invasion went ahead. So August 14th, almost August 15th, dear mother, this is my uncle writing to my grandmother, it's now 11.30 in five and a half hours we'll go crashing into southern France. I think this will be our last one. This should bring the kraut to his knees within a few months. It's going to be a great show. Josephowitz, writing in the unofficial history, said the Navy fired its rockets and big guns. The bombers dropped their eggs and the assault boats went in. Nothing happened. This is why you don't know about it today. The D-Day landing in southern France was less trouble than some of the practice landings in Naples Harbor. The krauts had taken off inland. So it was an incredibly successful invasion. Here are some pictures. I actually found these on the internet, believe it or not. Color photographs of the landing at Saint-Tropez. You can see the ducks coming in. There was some mines going off. It wasn't as easy as it might have believed, but they did get in. Immediately by mid-afternoon, they started to unload the replacement equipment. You can see those are M-10 tank destroyers being offloaded. There's the troops pretty much waiting for shore, carrying an M-10 right off the LST. So it wasn't like Normandy, where there was thousands of tons of ammunition going. Remember that letter that my uncle wrote to my grandmother? Well, about seven or eight hours later, he says, I just have time to write a few lines and let you know I'm okay. The invasion came off very well and still moves ahead with good speed. I'm the point of a task force consisting of some armored cars, light tanks, and two of my destroyers. We operate well ahead of everyone looking for trouble and killing crowd. The country here is beautiful, the people nice, and quite glad to see us. So it's amazing to me to have two letters right before the invasion and one about three or four hours written by my uncle describing this whole thing. Anyway, there goes an M-10. So two hours after the initial invasion, their 2,000 yards inland beat everybody's expectation. They took on the infantry and the tank destroyers and went fast. The German Army, the Wehrmacht, appeared to be in a general withdrawal. They got everybody ashore pretty quick, captured a lot of prisoners, and the day after, on August 15th, Hitler said, we're out of here. Protect Marseille, protect Toulon, but get the rest of the Army back home to protect Germany. And so that started this. Amazing, Hitler never did that. He always said, we're going to fight to the last man. But in this case, he said, bring everybody home. It was hysterical. The French were thoroughly glad to see him. You see that woman getting her head shaved? She was accused of sleeping with the enemy, literally, and the way that they were punished is they had their head shaved, and very often they were taken out and shot by a court marshal. The tragedy here is that some of these women worked for the Free French, and they were passing information to the Free French. And of course, their neighbors did not know that. They just saw them cavorting with the enemy. So there were quite a few women that were unjustly humiliated this way and also murdered. Obviously, there were some that were guilty. Lots of comments about this being the champagne invasion, but if you were there and getting killed, the 601st Battalion had its worst day. They had six men killed along about the middle of early part of September. But as you can see, 75,000 men in the first 15 days surrendered or were lost on the German 19th Army. What did this do? The Army was not prepared to feed another 75,000 prisoners of war. The other thing that happened is they moved so quickly, the Army and the Navy, we had front-loaded extra ammunition, but we didn't front-load fuel. The guys were literally running on a fuel and spare parts for the vehicles that were going, and this slowed everything down. The port of Marseille was taken fairly quickly. We let the French do that. The French take too long. Marseille and then Lyon, and it was all very political operation. They marched in, got celebrated, helped to support the Gaulle, all of that kind of stuff. But the problem was that the supply lines did not keep up with the rest of the invasion. So, by the 30th, there's my uncle writing to my grandmother again, I had 15 fast, and furious days on the beach in France, and boy, what days they were. We did not have much trouble getting in, but met some resistance as scattered points. We had gotten quite a number of fights, and we managed to kill quite a few crowd. We were moving all the time through the most delightful country in lovely little French towns. The people in these towns were moved with joy at our arrival. Old men and women would cry and kiss you on both cheeks. We felt like Julius Caesar. The wines here are excellent. The famous Rhone Valley, no male for over a month. That's the other thing that didn't come ashore. The male, two months before they got any male from home. And those of you in ships know what that's like. One of the most striking things to me as I was doing all this research was just right up at a place called Montelivar. There was a convoy of the retreating 19th Army. It was thousands of vehicles long. We caught it, we captured it. The 601st, for example, was responsible for getting several hundred vehicles destroyed. Horses, the railway was right next to it, so they got some of those big railway guns. It was utter and complete destruction. We fired every piece of ammunition that the enemy scoring direct hits, even knocking out the steam engine pulling the railroad cars. The three inch naval guns that we were using in our TDs were so hot we could hardly get the shells loaded home due to breach expansion. They killed hundreds of the enemy, wounded more prisoners, over a thousand dead horses, and one man called this the Avenue of Distentious. Now, I was still on active duty during the 1st Gulf War, and I was at the Defense Intelligence Agency, and it was quite controversial when Saddam Hussein pulled out of Kuwait. There was the same thing. There was this long convoy of captured buses and cars and things like this, and the slaughter was immense, and I give President Bush real credit that he stopped the attack because we were just killing kids at this time, just young soldiers. It was the same parallel of this kind of thing for the 19th German Army. You can see the pictures of destruction. First two hours, 14,000 troops were put ashore. War battalions were landed on this D-Day than in any other D-Day operation in the European theater in World War II. Normandy included. It opened the fourth front against Hitler. It was the return of the French Army to their own soil, and the War Department called the operation the most successful operation in military history, a tactician's dream. Very, very unsteady, very, very unknown. We do a seminar in Washington with veterans of this every year in August to try and make awareness of this operation dragoon, but it doesn't help. I wanted to concentrate in this presentation for a Navy audience on what I thought was the most significant enable things, but I left a lot out. I left stateside training, and I just wanted to give you a flavor for what else is in the book. You see this picture right here? That's in Texas at Fort Hood. It's a model Nazi village, and that sign says Gestapo headquarters with the Nazi flag. Fort Hood, Camp Hood at the time, was very instrumental in trying to use live building training. Here's a picture of the 601st tank destroyer battalion at the Kaisereen Pass. I've been able to, thanks to a lot of help, identify who the two officers were. That's an iconic picture of the battle in North Africa. Anybody recognize that ship? SS America, sister to the United States. And this ship was taken over, converted into Norfolk Naval Shipyard in 15 days to become the USS West Point. And we took over all these passenger liners and used them for cruise ships. My uncle took that to North Africa. It made the crossing in seven days. Did not have to go in convoy because the thought was it could go so fast it could outrun the Wolfpack. So 15,000 guys on that ship. A lot of chow lines were fantastically long. The toilet facilities, nil, and you know the rest. Do you have a question? Yeah, I was. I mean, I've done an aircraft carrier and we took 12. I left out the invasion of Sicily, invasion of Slerno. I left out the Anzio beachhead. That's here. I have a whole section about Nazi propaganda, leaflets that were fired at the troops. In mortar shells, the guys used to go out and scrape them. I've got 16 different examples. They're virulently anti-Jewish. Why are you dying for Roosevelt and the rich American capitalist kind of stuff? The guys all laughed at him. You'll see their comments in the book. This is a picture on the back cover of the book. That's my uncle and his tank destroyer. That's going into Rome on June 5th, 1944. You see that big cloud of smoke. He's just blown up a Nazi machine gun nest. My wife and I almost 70 years later found that exact spot, and I have a picture of what it looks like today. And it looks like the same, because that tower in the background is a 2nd century AD Roman water pressure tower from an aqueduct. This is the iconic picture. You see this in a lot of pictures about the liberation of Rome. Well, those two tank destroyers are from my uncle's platoon. And the two guys in front, one is Sergeant Nowak and the other is Sergeant Barson. And I know that because he pointed that out before he died to his son. Hey, that's us. And there's also, I haven't seen it yet, but the Imperial War Museum, there's footage of that. And when I go to London this year, I'm going to go look at it. I also left out the little battle of the bulge, the Comar Pocket. Notice the tank destroyer is a painted white. I left out the whole thing about Audie Murphy, who got his Medal of Honor on one of my uncle's tank destroyers. The attack on Germany, those are dragon teeth, a Siegfried line. Remember, we're going to hang our watching on the Siegfried line, a very popular song of World War II. This is two of the guys in the summer of 1945. They're standing in the window at the Ober Salzburg. That was Hitler's living room. And if anybody saw the movie with Tom Cruise about von Stauffenberg, who by the way was a cousin of mine, they tried to kill Hitler, but there was a big scene in this room looking out through that window. These guys started in North Africa against the Africa Corps and ended up there at the Ober Salzburg. Okay, this is my uncle Tommy right after his war was over. That's my mother in her Wett Cross uniform. Unlike today, everybody was involved in World War II. Here, you say, Army, thank you for your service. That's great, and they walk away and they have a nice day. Now I talk to the Rotaries, I talk to a place like this, and I say, please, please, please, don't forget the veterans. Get proper medical care for them. My uncle didn't have such a swell life. He got married twice. He went to Texas. He died young. The young kid in these two pictures is yours truly. I used to have brown hair, mustache. The name of the book is called An American Night because it's an obituary written about my uncle and said in 1972 and said it's like one of the nights of the round table has died when my one of my uncle passed. So that's why the book is called that. This is the last reunion at Fort Stewart of the 601st Tank Destroyer Battalion took place 12 years ago. I've only met this man right here, George Palin. He's now 94. On the day that Rome was liberated, on the 15th, he was driving alone looking for his platoon, couldn't find him, pulled up to St. Peter's. The doors were unlocked. He went in, looked around St. Peter's, came out, the Swiss guard approached him, took him up, and he met Pope Pius XII, first American soldier. And the first time I did this, in fact, his name is not listed in the book because he was still afraid he was going to be in trouble. The guy's 94. He's going to be in trouble. So he's getting the recognition needs in the next one. They were in 10 campaigns. Probably, that's a record. There were only 10 campaigns in the European theater, practically. 4D days, 546 days in combat. Casualties, 110 mil killed. I think this number is low, 155 tanks, but that's the official. And these are the guys. Their flag is now, it's also the same flag that's on the cover of the book. That's now in Fort Stewart. By the way, I'm terrific in dealing with this Navy officer about doing stuff. Speaking of this Navy officer, that's yours truly. And yes, I can still fit into it. I was joking earlier with John. I said, of course I was going to wear my Navy uniform to Arlington Cemetery. I did not expect to be walking around in my Navy uniform at Arlington Cemetery. So anyway, they squeezed me back into it. We've just laid a reef to the tomb of the Navy officer, and that's Corporal Joe Burrill, who's in the book and quite a guy. So here's the book. 150 letters, untold story, diaries, photography, four visits. I've been everywhere. I've been to France, I've been to Italy, I've been to Germany. I've been to all of these places tracing the route. Been to St. Louis, been to our National Archives, I practically lived there, Army Historical Society. I'd like to stay later. I can talk about you know, places to find. I am delighted to tell you that after running around with this book for four years and selling over 300 copies, which is a lot, I, it's a lot for a self-published book. My first book was on Roman Bronze Coins. It was a runaway bestseller. I sold 700 of those books. Anyway, everybody in the planet that cared bought one. Anyway, Osprey Press, which is the largest military publishing house has, we've signed a contract. They've asked me to rewrite this less as a history and more of a narrative story. I'm doing the research now. I have three quarters of the way finished and it will be their featured book in 2015. It may not be called in American Nights. We're still working on the title, but I'm delighted to say that you can see, you know, I had just one of my tanks up front when the attack started. To my front were no less than 16 German tanks. I thought, well, here goes Welch. Eight of them stayed in reserve and the other eight came on. The German tanks were going in a lateral direction and were about 2,500 yards away. I was pretty scared of the odds. Eight against one, but took a chance anyway. That's what the next book is going to look like. Those of you that are historians, those of you who like family research, those of you who like to read the full letters, this is a book for you. Those of you that want an adventure story and want to watch the movie and help me get in touch with Tom Hanks, that's what we want. This book is available down downstairs. I would be happy to sign copies. It's available in the gift shop. I also have another little book that I did called, this is about my trip to hell. That's a whole other story. I've actually been in the ancient Greek underworld in Naples in the Bay of Potswally and was there 40 years ago and there's a River Sticks and there's an inner sanctuary and it's a whole another story in itself. It's a little book I did and then there's my out-of-print Roman bronze coins. I actually had a real publisher for that. Anyway, there we are. How'd I do on time? Must not have been too bad. Let me just also say one of the things that I do for libraries and stuff is I do a lecture called Researching Your Veteran's Story and it's actually sometimes that's a two and a half hour seminar where people come in and they ask how do I find out what my veteran did? How do I find out where are the records? I think my father was in the Pacific. I get this a lot. I think he was in North Africa. Well, where do you start? And so I do this kind of lecture and I talk about all the research. I don't believe I mentioned but the or maybe I did. I'm getting to that age. Out in St. Louis most of the records were destroyed. Did I mention that? There was a fire in 1971 or 72 and 60% of all of the military records were destroyed. So if your father was in World War II or an uncle or something, chances are his records don't exist. Now what happened was when they left the service they were given a file, the junk file I think we always called it in the Navy and most of the guys, there was a trash can and they threw it. My uncle brought his home gave it to his mother she put it in the attic and I had access to it because all of his records are totally gone. I don't have his fitness reports. He was not the most beloved officer in the 601st tank destroyer. He was arrogant. He was aggressive. He was exactly what you wanted to kill a crowd. He was not what you wanted to have, you know be a very polite. He got in a big fight with the executive officer in battalion that's going to be in the new book because I've got the details of that. So he was that. He would not fit in in today's army or dare I say Navy. But for World War II, when these guys were in Congress, he was exactly exactly what you wanted and he did suffer from PTSD. Absolutely. And all this time he got knocked out of the tank, I don't know, three of them were hospitalized. They had this three inch gun. They were all standing right next to it. None of them could hear. All of these guys suffered all this kind of stuff. So be happy to take any questions. Yes, sir. How long is this process of putting this book together, taking it for you and was there kind of one incident that finally got you? This is what I'm going to do? Or was it an evolutionary process? A second book. And so I knew it was going to be a long slog. But I got fascinated with the letters. The letters were on something called V-Mail. They're about this big. It's a photocopy. And they did this so that they could send over microfilm back and forth across the Atlantic. One bag of microfilm, a mail bag, took up 45 bags of regular mail. So that's why they did it. So about a year transcribing all these letters. And looking, I've got a big microphone left over from the coin collecting days. Big microphone, not microphone, but mirror light. And so I was able to do that. And then I thought, you know, I've got a real story here. I could almost tell where he was every day during World War II. And he was some fantastic places. And he talks in the letters about filling a fanatical sky with full of holes and, you know, capturing another prisoner and getting blown out of his tank. I mean, he talks about all this stuff. He wasn't particularly supposed to. There were censorship. But he was his own censor, as were all of the officers. And he actually didn't do a very good job of censoring his men's letters, which is why this battalion is unique. In that it was so many different places and so everywhere. So to answer your question, as I started to find this, and then I started to get into it, and I found more and more. And my training is as a research historian, you know, 50 years ago. And so I just got, it was a fascinating subject. And in winter in Virginia, there's not that much to do. Kind of like here. At least you have lobster, you know. Anyway, so that's how I got started. And of course I'd lived and been stationed in places, you know, during my naval career. But it was a long, hard slug. And, you know, it's 480 pages this thing. I took it to extremes, and did way, way more research than probably the law allowed. But I've always had them back in mind. What's the admiral going to ask me? Why I'm giving them the morning briefing. You know what I mean? What question haven't I researched that I'm going to get embarrassed about? So that's kind of what I did. That's not what Osprey wants. This exciting story. And actually that's kind of fun because I can throw the rules out of the book. So I don't know if I hope to answer your question. Yes, sir. What does he say about the German weapons? You hear a lot about how superior some of the weapons were and so on and so forth. And we had a tough time getting caught up with them. And I wasn't requesting that. And you're right to question that. I just got some fresh letters from his sergeant that said, you know, their machine guns we fired rapidly but they weren't that accurate. Their artillery, there was a lot of it but it wasn't that accurate. We felt safer in the tank destroyers because we knew that the artillery was going to be off and couldn't hit us. And I just got that letter, you know, two or three months ago. And so their tanks were superior. They had front armor. Ours didn't. So the tanks were very, very good but not accurate firing. And the guys, several of the guys who were coming, we were better gunners than they were. Theirs were more heavily armed. So I think this kind of puts a myth to the German invincibility. The other thing is we were able to you know, if we lost 10 Germans we lost 10 Sherman tanks. Here's 10 more. Oh, you want 20? Here's 20 more. And so we just outbuilt them. You know, it's kind of like outspending them during the Cold War. I have a friend who is the curator of the Bundeswehr Amt Weapons Samlung which is in Koblenz and it's not a museum. It's working copies of German weapons and if you're ever in Koblenz you can go visit that. He was my next door neighbor outside of Washington D.C. for a year and we're pretty good friends but he gave me a 5 hour guided tour of the German weapons collection including, although unmarked Field Marshal Rommel's uniform. And I said is this Field Marshal Rommel's? And he said yes but we don't have a plaque because we don't want people turning it into a shrine. But there it is. The pants, the jacket, the whole whole thing. Field Marshal Rommel. So it's a fascinating collection if you're ever in Koblenz, well worth two hours. I don't know about that. Yes, sir. With all this going on in Naples, in Tzuoli, in the southern part of Italy, were the Germans just totally occupied with the campaign in the north and they weren't able to disrupt a lot of this thing? Well, they tried to disrupt it. For example on May 15th they mined the Harbor at Naples. And that stopped everything for only three or four days. There were constant air raids over Naples as long as they had the planes in the Luftwaffe to do it. But basically you got the whole eastern front and all of that going. Italy just didn't get the resources for the Wehrmacht and for the Luftwaffe that other theaters did and when they were gone they were gone. I will tell you that I think the most impressive commander, German commander, was not Rommel, but it was Kesselring called Smiling Albert and this guy was a Luftwaffe Field Marshal that was in charge of Italy and he's the one that put all these successful defensive lines and said to the Führer, we can stop them from going up Italy. And boy, he sure did. The day of the invasion of Vanzio, we came in nothing. Virtually nothing. We caught a soldier going to pick up bread. There were a few mines, but most of them didn't work. By nightfall from 7 in the morning until 7 at night, let's say 20,000 German troops were there and they were first rate paratroop. He had something called Case Richard which allowed for that eventuality. By the end of the week he had 120,000 German troops surrounding our 80,000 on the Vanzio beachhead and that's why we spent four bloody months on Vanzio. Along with these guys. Do you know which battalion? Do you know which were the 15th? 30th? Yeah, he was 3rd Infantry Division. Yeah, so his story was in there. Any more? Yes, sir? Even though supplies went missing was getting the mob involved was that a good move at that time? I expect you could justify it because it did make things run smoothly, but the end result was pretty disastrous. And the problem is when you go into a foreign country you have a tendency to trust anybody that speaks your own language, especially if you don't know. I don't want to fault these guys too much, but boy, you know, the Comorra is still very strong in Italy. I go back to Naples all the time for the other archaeological work that I'm doing. So I don't want to fault them too heavily, but it was like leaving your wallet on the table in the restaurant in Naples. The wallet might be there, but there won't be any cash left. But that's all part of Italy in Italy. Some of the guys said, boy, France is not Italy because it was so much different. And they also thought the girls were prettier too, but anyway, that's another story. Any more questions? Well, John, let me give you for the library here, a copy of the book. I hope he doesn't loan you this for it. I hope you'll buy one. But anyway, thank you. I really appreciate it. Thank you for coming. My pleasure. If you want to see what the book looks like, there's a couple copies here. There's some cards you can contact me. And please contact me if you have any questions about researching history of veterans, because that's what I care about. But you're welcome to take a look at this stuff, and it'd even be great if you went down and bought a book. I'm going to stay up here for 20 minutes, half hour if you'd like me to inscribe with you. Do you have that museum outside of Oxford? No, I haven't. You won't be here for days. Yeah, and that's one reason. I'll go there the first of October to deliver the book to the company, and I thought I'd want to go to that RAF. Yeah, it's really so many things to see.