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- [00:00]
A
Hey, everybody. Welcome back to Bulwark Takes. I'm Sonny Bunch. I'm culture editor at the Bulwark. I'm joined today by Mark Hertling. There's a great new movie out in theaters right now. It's called Pressure, which is about the invasion of D day, but from an angle we don't really see very often in films or in tv. You know, we don't see it in Band of Brothers. You get a little bit of it in Saving Private Ryan with that initial boat ride. But it's about the weather.
- [00:23]
B
Fate of the war hinges on this. There's only one imponderable that remains. I need a forecast.
- [00:30]
A
When the trailer for this movie dropped Mark, I saw some people kind of laughing, like, have they run out of World War II stories to tell. Now we're telling stories about weather forecasts, but it's actually an incredibly important part of the story. And a true story like this is. This is one of those things that I. I had read about and kind of remembered in the back of my head. And when I saw the trailer for this, I was like, oh, that's right. This is actually a really good and interesting story. Right?
- [00:55]
C
It was. I thought it was excellent. I mean, I went to it immediately because, first of all, you said we wanted to do this clip on it, but I pulled my wife to it, too, and she said basically the same thing you just said. Oh, great, another normandy World War II movie. Because she's sick of me watching those. But she was riveted by it because it takes a snippet of the command requirements of Eisenhower having to do with the conditions of the weather, which most people don't know about, and how the storms that were coming into the coast during the week of the scheduled D day invasion of the 5th of June basically caused it to be postponed today. But there are so many things that really emanate from that. The command decisions, the risk mitigations, the kind of pressure, hence the name of the movie, that was on Eisenhower, to really make some tough calls. It turned out to be a central theme of the movie, although it was not the main consideration that was bothering Eisenhower. It wasn't the only thing in his rucksack, as many people said. But it certainly caused a whole lot of tension and it could have caused a disaster in terms of what would have happened next had there hadn't been a break in the weather, which the meteorologist predicted.
- [02:12]
A
Well, let's. Let's talk about the different things that Eisenhower had to keep in mind here, because I do Think that this is, again, this is really the crux of the story here, is that it's not just the weather. It is also, you know, troop movements. It is keeping the alliance together. What were the, what were the things he had to wrestle with before a single shot was fired on D Day?
- [02:33]
C
Oh, my gosh, Sonny. It's a. It's a question that is almost boundless in terms of the things we could talk about. Eisenhower got a message from Marshall that was a one sentence mission statement. It basically said to him, enter the continent of Europe and defeat the Nazi war machine. Sure, you know, there were a couple of other things in that, but it was. It literally fit on one page. And he had to decide many months beforehand, put a staff together and said, where do we enter the continent of Europe? What kind of force do we need? What kind of air power are we going to have? Do we use airborne forces? What about, what are our alliances are like? So these are the kind of things that were part of the planning factors that, that Eisenhower had to address. He had to consider alliance politics and managing some very strong personalities like Bernard Montgomery and George Patton, who he had already fired once and had kind of put in the penalty box for a while. Arthur Tedder, Omar Bradley. I mean, there were some very interesting personalities, each one of them requiring a book or a movie in itself. Prior to the D Day landings, there was a failure that not many people know about of rehearsal. It was called Exercise Tiger just weeks before. And the movie addresses this too, by the way, in a very poignant tone.
- [03:54]
B
Tiger was a training op, dress rehearsal for D Day. They walked right into it.
- [04:02]
C
But it doesn't show why that rehearsal failed. It just showed dead soldiers on a beach that really were impacting Eisenhower as he thought about what was going to happen. You know, German U boats attacked the training grounds. Hundreds of Americans were killed in this training rehearsal. And the event exposed a whole bunch of things that could also go wrong in the real thing, like communication failures and convoy vulnerabilities. Then Eisenhower had to think about airborne operations. You know, when you're putting that a couple of airborne divisions, not just us, but British as well as Polish and French into the air and assigning them drop zones behind the lines of the D Day invasions. You know, there were literally thousands of paratroopers with various missions to help bring the people ashore. How do you assign those drop zones? How. How can they seize the key bridges that the tanks are going to roll off? Then they had the landing craft performance all kinds of things there. You know, we see Saving Private Ryan's, which we talked about during our last movie review. And. And you see all the soldiers coming off the landing crafts. There were also tanks on those landing crafts, the proverbial, they call them the duplex drive Shermans. So if you hit a landing craft and destroy it, you're not going to have armor support once you hit the beaches. There was a deception plan Eisenhower gave Patton, as he put him in the penalty box. He made him the commander of what they called a ghost army in something called Operation Fortitude, where. Where they literally had signals intelligence, inflatable tanks, which they show in the movie Pressure, dummy landing craft, double agents, all sorts of bizarre things. And then, of course, the last thing that all commanders think about are logistics, the kinds of things that flow to provide the force of several hundred thousand soldiers going ashore at key locations to defeat the Germans. So all of those things were part of the planning factors which Eisenhower had to face. And so the movie Pressure takes one thing that should always be a consideration of commander and puts it at the forefront is this storm that's coming ashore with winds up to 100 miles an hour and waves 10 to 18ft tall, you know, knocking around landing crafts, affecting aircraft that are going ashore. All of those things could have been disastrous because of the weather requirements. And then the whole thing, when you're talking about invasion on amphibious assault, gee whiz, I mean, you can't just postpone it and go the next day because you have literally hundreds of staging area, thousands of boats, hundreds of airplanes, hundreds of thousands of soldiers.
- [06:57]
B
This is the largest seaborne invasion in history to the war. Thousands of lives hinge on this.
- [07:05]
C
So, you know, when we talk about this one weather event that really rested on the back of the group captain from the British army that was new to the operation because Winston Churchill suggested to Eisenhower that this guy knew weather better than anybody else. And he basically had to stand up and say, hey, there's a storm front going. And if you go on your planned deployment date of 5 June, a lot of people are going to die.
- [07:34]
A
Hell on earth. Torrential rain. He's selecting the data that suits him and ignoring the rest. And we must face the facts.
- [07:42]
C
And that decision was left up to Eisenhower. And he had Montgomery saying that they should just go anyway. Tedder was saying they should launch the assault. So you can see the kind of things that weigh on the mind of. Of a commander in any operation, something like this. And it was a. I thought it was a great movie.
- [08:01]
A
Yeah, it's. It's a really, it's really compelling, and it's. It's very tight. It's about 105 minutes, something like that. It's, you know, it's a. It's a. It's a good, concise story. It's got a really compelling human element. The group captain, you know, has a pregnant wife and, you know, there are still bombing runs happening on the hospitals. He wants the war to end as well, but, you know, he. He doesn't want to push this thing. And then you get into a lot of the interpersonal conflicts, which. I was saying this before the show, but I don't think I've ever seen a film in which Monty is portrayed as anything other than just like the most arrogant, stereotypical British commander that you could imagine. It's funny, and that kind of plays here. Damian Lewis does a fine job as Monty, but again, this core problem gets to something. This core problem of weather, of an unexpected weather front and an unknown weather front. Just, simply put, they could not be 100% sure what was going to happen one way or the other. They had to make a decision. In your own experiences as a commander, you have come up against this in combat. What were some of the unexpected weather events that you had to deal with as a commander?
- [09:18]
C
Yeah, the first thing I'd say on that, Sonny, is every briefing I got in combat, anytime we were conducting an operation, the first element of a briefing is the intelligence. What is the enemy doing? What are our forces doing? And part of that intelligence briefing is usually the weatherman, as we used to call it, usually an Air Force weather detachment guy who steps, or gal who steps forward and says, here's what the weather is going to be like. And sometimes it's predictable, sometimes it's unpredictable. You don't know what's going to happen. Sometimes it will affect troop movement, or in the case of modern warfare, the intelligence feed. Because you may not get the hits that you may want to get from. From satellites or from communication traffic or even from overhead platforms that are giving you locations. And sometimes you have to call off the event. I had to call off several events in Iraq in 2007 because of something. And we'll introduce our listeners to the terms shamal and haboob. You know, two crazy words which mean dust storm and sandstorm. And in one case, it literally blacks out. Your capability to see the sand is so intense blowing through the area that it not only hinders your observation, but it also affects machinery. You could not launch aircraft during a shamal or a haboob because Sometimes they can't see where they're going. And I was stuck in a Shema one time when we had. We were flying back from northern Iraq to our headquarters in Tikrit and we literally tried to fight our way through it. And finally we had to land because we were in a pair of helicopters that were 50ft apart and we could not see each other. So when you don't have the radar in a helicopter and you're trying to figure out where that wingman is and you can't see them because the winds and the sand are so tough, you have to shut down. There are other times when we had to postpone an operation for more than a week because just a huge wall of dirt, sand, red sand came in and it blinded everyone. So we just had to hunker down where we were. It was interesting at the time. I'll share this vignette with you. We happened to have a USO show that had come in, it was around Christmas time, and it had a Miss Universe, it had Robin Williams, it had Jack Black, it had a couple of sports figures, and they literally were stuck at my headquarters for five days where, you know, Robin Williams was going nuts trying to entertain troops. And yet he was kind of hindered by not being able to move around all that much to all the different locations they were scheduled to go to. So there was a bad thing in terms of the weather, but there was a good thing in the fact that I got to have dinner with Robin Williams a couple of times.
- [12:20]
A
Well, that, I mean, I can just imagine having that energy kind of all bundled up inside for five straight days. I've been in the room with him once and it was a lot, just for that hour.
- [12:32]
C
As one of our soldiers said, he was like a well hit golf ball inside of a telephone booth. That's how he sings around.
- [12:39]
A
That's a good explanation. Just to jump back to pressure for a minute. You know, on the last episode, we talked about how good Tom Selleck was as Ike in the TV movie About D Day. I think we're both a little softer on Brendan Fraser here. I like him a lot in a lot of things. I don't love his performance here. I just think he's slightly miscast.
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C
Yeah.
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B
Monday is not long term for Chris. Does Monday sound like long term? Do you, Lieutenant Summers?
- [13:03]
A
It's still. Again, it's as far as critiques go, go. It's. It's a relatively minor one. It doesn't destroy the, the entertainment or the, the realism of the film. I just. He Just doesn't. He's not quite right.
- [13:16]
C
Yeah, well, I'm a typical military geek and when I go to war movies, I. I'll think to myself, oh, yeah, that, that wouldn't have happened that way. I mean, there were a couple scenes where Brandon Fraser was chewing out people in front of an entire audience. Eisenhower was not like that. He was. Eisenhower was a very good leader. He would not have allowed his emotions over some of the things that we saw in the movie to carry over, I don't think. You know, I didn't know him personally, but I just know of him as a leader and how his troops saw him. And Frazier kind of let his emotions go a couple of times and he was pretty brusque. You don't see that in a lot of four star generals. But you're right, I. Frazier did okay. Just okay. I liked, believe it or not, I liked Tom Selleck a whole lot more playing Eisenhower than I like Brendan Fraser.
- [14:07]
A
It's understandable. And behind you on the wall. Well, explain to folks what's behind the wall. You'll explain better than me.
- [14:14]
C
I'm pointing to a flag. That was a flag given to me as I retired from my last command, which was, excuse me, the head of US Army Europe. That is a successor of the organization that Eisenhower led, the Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force Europe. So that patch in the middle of that flag is the one that all senior troops in Europe wear today. And it was the same patch that Eisenhower designed. Well, it's close to being the same patch that Eisenhower designed. The reason I say that is because in the movie you see Eisenhower with that patch on his shoulder, but the patch is black. And that's because the symbolism was a flaming sword entering the dark continent of Europe. Well, the next commander of Europe, Lucius Clay, said, we have liberated Europe, so let's change the color from black to a light blue. And that you can't see it real well on that flag, but that's a light blue patch with the splaining sword in the middle of it. So it's quite an honor to be a successor to Eisenhower in that command position.
- [15:17]
A
Yeah, that's very cool. Nice continuity there. All right, so Pressure's good. It's in theaters now. You should go see it. There's a great lineup of movies in theaters right now. There's really something for everyone and, and all ages. And Pressure is like prime, prime for that kind of older adult audience wants a little more, you know, adult drama, that sort of thing, rather than, you know, some of the horror movies. That are out there or the, you know, kids movies. This is it's really good. I recommend folks check it out. But there, there's plenty of other examples of, again, like unexpected things that you simply don't know you can't necessarily be expected to deal with as you head out to take part in a military operation. And we wanted to run through a couple of the other films where this sort of thing happens. Sticking with the weather theme you had mentioned, wanted to talk about the Perfect Storm.
- [16:13]
C
We.