masterful opening address thursday night, then alex kershaw telling us about the first wave yesterday. now we are going to wrap up with a panel on two new books on d-day that came out this year. to chair this session is the man most responsible for all of us being here today, our founding president and ceo, dr. nick mueller. [applause] crean: as if building one of the greatest museums in the world was not enough, it has just published a book on d-day. we have taken the liberty of stealing his book title for the title of this session, so for everything we have, it is my pleasure to give the stage to dr. nick mueller. dr. mueller: i had the opening session and the last 1, 2, so we are the bookends. i saw jeremy put out here what i was looking for. are the only things between you and drinks, as they say, the evening session, so we are going to make this an exciting program. before we get going, you may have seen outside there were brochures out there for our programs we are going to run before next year's international conference. this is another international conference we are holding september 10 through 12, 2020, right here, entitled memory wars: world war ii at 75. this is different than the typical programs we run here when we talk about the battles and campaigns and strategies and tactics. this is going to be a very important conference with a stellar lineup of speakers from onund the world, experts china, europe, the nazi period, the soviets. i want you to understand that what we are going to do here is look at how world war ii is held in public memory. this country has a memory of the good war. tom brokaw is going to be here. we have other people that question that narrative. we are going to look at other great national museums from europe, from poland. the director of the imperial war museum talking about, what is the british narrative? head just stepped down from the australian war memorial. otts talking about the american battle commission, cemeteries in normandy and around the world where american soldiers are buried. his counterpart from germany will be talking about how the germans do it. gabrielle rosenfeld wrote the hit lirc, about how hitler's is being normalized in the media. how films gave us our images and memories, whether you are talking about saving private ryan, the longest day, how those are films that create a public memory and is not. how much is myth and how much is not there will be a whole section on the holocaust. . the director of the anne frank house from amsterdam. becausethis memory wars these are wars, and there are some countries where rising national populist regimes are toing to change history and spin it behind the current narratives of their own country, and even how videogames are shaping our views of world war ii among our young. , who you know from classic turner movies, the host of that show, will be here to host the last session about how film has shaped world war ii. it is going to be a tremendous, one-of-a-kind conference. no museum in the world has done anything like this. we are the hosts and organizers. alex ritchie has been the chair of the planning committee, working on it for 18 months. comment get a brochure before you leave. let me just make a few opening comments here to get this panel underway. obviously we are coming to the daysf a whole day or two of dealing with june of 1944 and the fall and all the events surrounding that. i am pleased to introduce and dr. peter adams and sarah rose to discuss their books and their new discoveries about the people who were important to the success of d-day, and also to give fresh insight. book,ust mentioned my old which i talked about last year. everything we have that we produced here with carlton publishers in london for the 75th anniversary of d-day, and everything we have is because eisenhower went down to his generals and said, we are going to throw everything we have into this battle. that is exactly what happened. it was paying tribute to stephen ambrose, whose seminal work on museumelped inspire this out of the oral histories that he took of d-day. the volume includes the best of the very best of the oral histories that we have in our collection. some 1200 were taken by steve ambrose and 45 of them are in the book. you walk in the shoes for 24 hours, whether it is airborne or the rangers or omaha, utah. it is a different account than what you are going to hear about today. today with all the old new works on d-day and the months before in after and its importance that month of june of 1944, we are going to introduce you to two speakers who are going to change your perspective of your understanding of d-day based on research that i know you will want to hear. i am going to introduce them both very briefly, then we will take them in order with dr. adams first. dr. adams is an illustrious author who has written several books on the war in europe, including his most recent, sand and steel. he was educated at the royal military academy sandhurst at wolverhampton university as well as cranfield university, where he earned his phd. he has taught at oxford, at the u.k. defense academy. he wrote five other books on the bulge and rommel. just to name a few. with thesteel begins early planning stages for d-day, but he breaks away from any of the other books on d-day, challenging some of the long-held perspectives and narratives about certain events and even the landings themselves. he takes a look at the unity among the allied partners until late 1943 about the fundamental thatts of the allied talk we are all unified. rangers and the historical analysis and critique of some of the other works on d-day. questioning some of the long-held myths. i think you are going to find that he adds value. taking a different approach, sarah rose will bring the insides of a journalist and a best-selling author. her works are featured in a number of top magazines, including saturday evening post, and a recent book, the subject of today's talk, d-day girl: the spies that armed the resistance, sabotaged the nazis, and helped win world war ii. we always thought it was the higgins boats, but -- [laughter] dr. mueller: we are open for new studies. i can tell you from what little i have seen of this book, it is going to change her mind, too. work focusingstic on a relatively unknown story of ,emale spies and saboteurs mostly french natives in the united kingdom recruited by the special operations executive and deployed into france to assist the resistance and sabotage the nazis. important they were former french natives, so there french was fluent. you are going to be amazed by what she tells you about this story that is relatively unknown. one of her reviewers calls it people parts espionage, romance, thriller, and historical narrative. some have likened it to the female version of james bond, so maybe we call it the jamie , whoes of world war ii parachuted into france at night. some succeeded, others betrayed. comrades flipped during gestapo torture and some were raped. that is enough, i hope, to tantalize you. we will start with dr. craddick-adams, then move on with the program. we will have a great time in this last hour. [applause] dr. craddick-adams: i gather my red pants, or i would call them red trousers, are making a bit of a stir. i brought a red jacket, and then it occurred to me that the last brits around new orleans wearing redcoats -- duke of wellington's brother-in-law was bested by andrew jackson, the future seventh president, and died here. the red pants became the obvious choice to wear. having great privilege been here at the conference over the last few days and to bring up the rear. i have also had the privilege of doing at the world war ii museum is asking -- acting as historian on some of the excellent travel programs that they offer. around you are many of the guides who live locally on the battlefields. no doubt you have all been talking and reconnecting with them. my thanks to the world war ii museum. coupled with that, the guides who don't really have a voice here and they absolutely love what they do and of course they bring to that a huge passion. in terms of d-day 1944, it is impossible to understand operation overlord. this is one of the takeaways i hope has occurred to you over the last few days. understandsible to 1944 without understanding the mediterranean theater to begin with. withis how we kicked off our first presentation yesterday morning so long ago. butt the mediterranean -- the mediterranean set the scale. so many of us came to normandy to look at this like a new campaign. we were exiting from a perfectly serviceable aircraft down into the french terrain or landing on the beaches. also have experience from the mediterranean. whether it is north africa, is the road to d-day. that's important to consider because on none of those amphibious landings did the germans defend the shoreline. they raised to the point of invasion and that's what the allies were expecting normandy to be like, because when the plans were put in place most of the coastline was undefended. not much was in place until the spring of 1944. to consider the great day itself, there is a vitally important hinterland that we are in danger of overlooking and hopefully that has been very evident over the last few days. that, thenstance of big city in the eastern sector that the british have to seize. the battle plan to seize kohn reflects the fact that when the planners are putting forward isir final ideas, anzio happening. that was born of a bold plan to see his realm that did not come off. when the allied planners are talking up a bold initiative to the first day, they are saying there will be no .nzios here they will not make the same mistake. there is interplay between what's happening in the mediterranean and what will happen in normandy. launched froms the united kingdom. i am reminded of the alliance eisenhower'seneral initial visit to his majesty, king george vi. king george vi puts eisenhower at ease. for king's first question is, how are you getting on with general montgomery? there was a pause as he searches for a diplomatic answer. being the politician he is, he comes up with the interesting observation. he says, i am perfectly well, but i am rather worried that he is after my job. his majesty said, you relieve me greatly, general eisenhower. i always thought he was after mine. [laughter] that is sortadams: of setting the scene. i have no idea how the alliance .anaged here because i think we all believe june 6, 1944 was one of the most, if not the most important day of that century. and youres you all know have all studied, but it is worth just interrogating them for a moment. nevermind the fact that around about 156,000 soldiers have been landed by air or by sea by the end of the day. i put up the percentages because that reflects it as a coalition effort. we often forget the canadians are present. there are sailors of various nationalities manning those 939 number justawesome offshore. 170,000 sailors and this huge number of aircraft. nationalitiess of involved, whether vessels or the personnel manning them, shows this is a -- we tend to focus on those landing in france, but those protecting them from the air and getting them thereby sea have just as vital a role. those individuals were just short of .70 5 million. our story is not about 150,000 .75le, it is about at least million. that is excluding everyone in the united kingdom who are sustaining the invasion, manning the ports, doing the logistics. d-day is an operation that directly involves well over a million people. many are ancestors of those of you here in the room. we forget it is much larger than that tip of a spear which is the 156,000 people. it is also a coalition effort. main threeested the nations that take part in this. this is america at the peak of your achievement with world war ii, the peak of 12 million people wearing uniform, the peak of your mass production. the figures reflect you cannot do this on your own and neither can the british empire, because this isn't just the united kingdom. d-day is so important, it cannot fail. it has to be a coalition effort because of the vast resources involved. it is over a million people meeting that first day of many d-day's. within a week, we have landed nearly 350,000 people on a hostile sure, more than half americans, and supported by all these others. it is a huge undertaking and beyond the capability of one coalition partner, which is something we often lose sight of. the national d-day memorial in bedford, virginia, are totaling the number of people killed on d-day. it is more than we ever suspected. at the moment, and the count is progressing month by month, year by year, we are on 4414. wasexpected casualty rate 20,000 of those 156,000, about 13%. fertility rate, i am talking about -- fatality rate, i am talking about. the number actually killed is less than 3%. why is that figure so low? why were the casualty expectations so high? that included 7.5 thousand expected to be drowned on the first day of the assault. i think the figure is plucked out of the air by the british war office, who do the assessment and, with that figure. that happens to be the number of soldiers killed on the first day in 1916 before breakfast. they are reaching back to the worst military disaster the british army had ever suffered in a world war and projecting bad as what we might be faced with on the first day of d-day. that's why it has to go right. where does the road to d-day start? louisianain the september 1941 with the louisiana maneuvers. there had been smaller maneuvers the year before, but in 1941 nearly .5 million americans come to american -- come to louisiana to battle it out. isre are two armies and this the first test of the newly mobilized federal army raised through the beginnings of conscription the year before. it all really begins here. into two, this is the first test of army aviation, the new mechanized force mobile tank destroyers, all sorts of different concepts put into practice by george marshall with his vision of how the u.s. army will fight, because there is an inevitability that the u.s. army will be brought into operations at some stage in europe. it is of interest not because it is testing how things will be, but because of the individuals involved. the colonel of the blue army was dwight david eisenhower. mark wayne clark is another senior staff officer present. omar bradley is there. and of course, george patton, commanding the newly created second armored division. of thefinal throes louisiana maneuvers, patton is told under no circumstances to cross the border into texas. under no circumstances will he sweep deep behind the enemy lines and take the town of shreveport, which is their base. under no circumstances will you do that. which is like a red rag to the bull, and that is what he does. he does not quite capture the bridge in shreveport, but the folk memory is of patton coming down the bridge to shreveport at the head of a long column of tanks, disobeying every order over the last three weeks. we know how he is going to play the rest of world war ii. in thecomes to an end dying days of september 1941. the armistice came to the city of shreveport, as you can read, with a successful defense of the city by the red army against the blues. the headline also tells us that seven soldiers during the maneuvers died. in the whole maneuvers, 26 soldiers died. that number of young men with complicated pieces of machinery and things like rivers are bound to produce fidelity's. -- produce fatalities. d-day's,s researching it led me to one of the reasons why fatality on the day of battle is so low. more people died during training for d-day than the actual day. if you ask how many, i have arrived at a figure well in excess of 10,000. if you talk to those who trained for d-day, they nearly always observe that training was much tougher than the eventual june 6. is of the points i throw out because these people have no memorial. we commemorate those who died on d-day itself. preparation for d-day, they have no voice. they have been lost. one of the things i have tried to do in sand & steel's have a look at the extensive training they undertook and give them the respect they deserve. one of the unsung heroes of ,-day is admiral bertram ramsey the supreme naval commander. let's say he works out that his major opponent is not the germans, but the weather. shows youre postcard the weather of the great storm of february 1905 that hit the normandy coast line exactly where the invasion was about to take place. this was extensively documented amongst the normans, and the meteorologist knew that the storms hitting normandy was a once in a 40 year catastrophe. wecourse, that was 1905 so are going forward to 1944. is this going to repeat itself? we know these story about how the bad weather was seen coming across the atlantic, how eisenhower delayed d-day by 24 hours. there was also a strong body of opinion that he should delay d-day yet again. the next time the tides would have been right was june 18. so a strong inclination to delay until june 18, and we would have landed 156,000 people by air and by sea. channel19, the worst storm of the 20th century hit normandy. it destroyed the artificial harbor at omaha beach and very severely damaged the one in the british sector. in other words, had eisenhower gone down the route of even more caution, delayed d-day by another factor, we would have landed everybody in normandy. the germans would have had three days to bottle up the front and destroy it. we would not have been able to intervene by sea because the channel was too rough and would not have been able to intervene by air because the cloud was too low. we would have been powerless to prevent that catastrophe. we are within an eight of failure, and i think it is a much more closely run thing, a tribute to eisenhower, for making the call when he did, because he got it right. the consequences of getting that wrong are infinitesimal. they beggar belief. it would have failed and we could not have done d-day. -- would fdr have been reelected with a major failure of d-day? would churchill have survived? bradleyan monti and have come out with their reputations intact? we had invested an enormous amount in trying to persuade the germans we were never going to land there. d-day could not be mounted again at least within a year, possibly two. how does that play out in terms of fatalities for the rest of the war? there are huge consequences on that single day and it works very well. eisenhower's chief naval officer is bertram ramsey. he has dug the british out of a hole by rescuing the british army from dunkirk. no one knows more about assembling huge armies of small boats and ferrying armies across the channel. he oversaw the arrangements for the invasion of sicily. he is the unsung hero because at the end of the war in january 1944 to 1945, bertram ramsey is killed in a plane crash. he is not involved in the peacetime honors and largely slips from history, which is a shame because he single-handedly with his genius and vision is the architect of operation neptune, which gets everybody across the channel but they trust anybody goes deeper. be ais where it is fun to military historian because you dig into people's backgrounds. bertrand ramsey'sbertrand ramsen the service as an army officer. regiment on the british northwest frontier near the end of the 19th century. in holidays, he would spend time with his father's regiment, being a young regiment on the british man, he would get to know the new the arrived officers in his father's regiments. in the light -- the late 19th century, the officer he piled up with was winston churchill. they go back 50 years. churchill does not have to tell ramsey what to do, there is no need for trust or written orders. they know each other so well and it is bertrand ramsey who brings the secrets of how little the british government is spending on their navy to churchill in private. churchill owes him doubly. 1944, it is a no-brainer that ramsey is commanding the naval effort because those two are intertwined and go back 50 years. suddenly, once you dig, the character -- you realize the full nature of the churchill-ramsey connection at what a hero he is. efforts is huge not just the big three, the royal navy, british navy -- the u.s. navy and canadians, other nations provide warships because this is as much a political coalition of as many nations as possible, and the rest of the world needs to see that. that is why we call the coalition the united nations. encompasses art huge range of vessels. the effort reaches out to us here. i would hazard a guess most people in this room have been terrorized when they studied in english literature by the officer there on the left with the wavy stripes on his sleeve with the note he is a navy in charge of a rocket firing lct. you all know him as the author of lord of the flies. it was his agreement view of humanity market in specific environments, his first fighting -- first writing is after d-day. that is where it all comes from. landed on utah beach because he was told that there will be such an effective bombardment, there will not be anything left to oppose you. when he landed, he had a manuscript for what became catcher in the rye. can you believe that? omaha beach, we would not have catcher in the rye. allied believe in victory and the success of the bombardment, it pays off at utah beach. in such that people land with his most precious possession in his backpack. beach is of omaha entirely different. when i was looking for media to illustrate the story of omaha beach, i looked at the common illustrations we all know. that i came across the story of the postcards. army toou prepare an land in northern france? in 1942, an announcement went out across the bbc, if any listeners had holiday snaps or postcards or guidebooks or brochures for hotels of their time in france, could they send them into the bbc because they would be of use in future operations. the bbc immediately regretted this broadcast of the war effort. by the end of the week, 30,000 items arrived. a 1944 thatu by total reached 10 million, you realize how much the bbc regretted going down this route. most of these went into the incinerator. captured theandy imaginations. we have a postcard, the western end of omaha beach. this is how it looked in 1910 on a postcard somewhat sent to someone else. it arrives in london where the headquarters is. the see retreats more than a kilometer, leaving firm sand. you have not got special forces who can spy on the beach, at we have miniature submarines and aerial photographs, these are doing a wonderful job. they deliver in spades. along, this is the middle of omaha beach. today, if you go there, the shingle has been bulldozed away. this is how it was in 1910. the american military cemetery is on the right. the beach has been replaced by bunkers and minefields. there is the snapshot of how american assault wave troops were prepared for their assault landing. becauseit is accurate here is the same stretch of beach in a well-known photograph , photographed after midday on june 6. you can see a body wrapped up in a stretcher there. of thethe paraphernalia first six hours. sector -- there we are. you have this delightful still life of frenchmen doing what they do best, which is playing ball. in the background, they were told to aim for that villa. they are in the middle of the beach,codenamed juno they would be in the right place. on d-day, one of the canadian official war photographers takes this picture. the first prisoners and the canadians have landed in the right spot. further down, this distinct village. again, there is a match to that photograph which the poor photographer took later on, showing the same place, but surrounded by tanks. the story to conclude began in 1975 when i went to visit the d-day beaches. millan.is man, bill france is his brigade commander. bill millan was striding up and down the sands, playing the bagpipes. when billded you that millan stepped down the ramp into the sea, he was less worried about the germans , that is how i described him. to bills killed floating around like a tutu. ilt floating around like a tutu. surrounded melt like a jellyfish. bill is no longer with us. this is how i remember him. last year, a statue was put up .o him on the beaches as he said to his son, it is a shame there will be no one around to play the bagpipes in normandy. his son took up the challenge, not ever having played the pipes before. johns donna millan -- millan playing the bagpipes as his father would have wished him to do. we have a continuity 75 years later. you can walk along the beaches and still hear the swirl of pipes and understand what that meant. thank you very much. [applause] >> thank you. get us to having women behind the lines on d-day, i will take us back to 1942. summer of 1942 is a poor time with the allies. the height of the german empire, the height of the japanese empire. americans had been in the war for six months. if you were in britain, you had been at war for almost three years. nowwere a world power and you have watched your empire stripped away. hong kong, don. india, itching to leave. europeire continent of belongs to hitler's. the democracies of the continent are gone. it is a dire time. moment, picture yourself, you got a call from your government and they say, we need you. you have a skill, you alone have , skill that could change this that could change everything. i could make it safe for democracy in the world. most of us would say yes. what can i do? have three children at home under the age of six, would we say yes? most of us would think, i do not often my children. children.my this question was posed to a 30-year-old mother with three dollars at home and she and -- three doctors at home. she answered any languor july mother. -- in the language of a mother. but shed about serving, framed everything in domestic terms. she said, what happens to my girls if britain falls? she had a british passport and that was because she was married to a brit. you received the nationality of your husband. as a french speaker with a british passport was a hard to find skill in 1942 because all the men fighting had already been drafted. there was no one left. the allies are not calling on women because they get enlightened about how wonderful women are and how capable we are. they do not get woke. they are desperate. there is a manpower shortage. charleshings worse is de gaulle. he would not allow anyone to do this job who had a french passport. he did not want french citizens answering to british officers. pool to choose from, but there are a bunch of frenchho have capable who can go behind the lines and convince not just the germans that they are french, but the french that they are french. allies organize women, they recruited women. this group of women, 30 nine women, will become the first women in combat. they will become the first sabotage agents, the first female paratroopers, the first female communications officers. they are nothing but firsts. me that interesting to i had not heard of them. i had not heard of this story framed in this way. reason for this. overwhelmingly, more histories are written by men and not women. women for theeing work they were doing. this is a story that is well known in britain, less so here. from a desperate moment in the war as well. leaves, last brutal there is not a single ally disorder -- no ally forces left on the continent. thanks, --rchill thanks, what are we going to do? why not try to harness the anger of occupied nations? underground,te an train them, get them answering day we comeso the back, whenever d-day comes, we can detonate that underground toy and they will be there hit heckler from the rear -- hit hitler in the rear. it is a fairytale of a story, but it is not the story. what we hear about the event resistance -- french resistance, this is how france behaved in the war. they resisted. moments an important that a general degaulle wants to make to the world. there is an unbroken line between the third and fourth republic. we did not get in bed with hitler's for four years. we were a nation of the residencisters. the work of the resistance is on when the of june 5, bbc radio broadcast goes into france, a signal goes out there out length of the country and says to the resistance troops, way.is it, we are on our that night, there are 950 on roads and bridges and railways. normandy is isolated. telecoms, blowup underground cables, this forces the germans to broadcast a be out radio and we have decrypted their code. the french resistance was an important part of our success on d-day. a trip that should have taken it alert -- should have taken hitler two days took three weeks. the french resistance was important. important maneuvers on the day. this and iearching find it fascinating because i had not been a war scholar before this, i discovered there was a woman in command of these troops throughout the entire summer of 1944. i had not heard of her. old.as 38 years she comes from an island off the coast of africa. it was captured in the napoleonic wars. , but she hasench british citizenship. she lived in paris from when she was a teenager and felt french. in may ofrches in 1940 and she is an enemy alien. they were put in concentration camps in france. she had no choice but to leave. for her, it was a common sense issue. why wouldn't i learn to parachute behind enemy lines and raise a secret army in france? she had to missions, her second mission was in normandy throughout the summer. it covers a lot of places and we know -- that we know well. every big battle in the summer of 1944, when the resistance was there, they were her troops. they were using ammunitions dropped from the sky to her guys. we had not heard of her. it is not just that men are writing histories and not just a failure of leadership, because general degaulle needed event resistance to be a certain kind of story he could tell about french strength. women's work gets mis-categorized. when i started researching this, i spoke to experts and they said, the women did not do much, they were couriers. lines withhind enemy guns in their hands blowing up bridges and railways, but they did not do very much. this kind of erasure is problematic. we can see it again and again. we see the code breakers in virginia, they were thought of as secretaries. , they know, after the war were breaking the most important codes of the war and building the first computers. for a long time, they were glorified clerks. work is ang women's problem for our armed forces today. when the allies were forced to intowomen begrudgingly harms way, every culture on earth had a combat tattoo, every culture says women do not belong in war. it is universal. , theyhe allies break that discover quickly that women are actually bring a lot to the job that men do not. when you are recruiting an underground army, you are not great young men, you are recruiting from the margins of society. teenagers, old men, the people keeping a struggling nation together by their fingernails. you need to say to them, leave in the woods,ve you might not come back, we will train you, but come without. it was hard to do and required coercion at coaxing and listening to people. that women were really good at it. to bee women are raised caretakers and listeners. this is a skill men had to learn on the fly. the allies saw that. the other thing the allies in 1942,d in france men were scarce. hitler cap the french army officers -- it is not a peace treaty. because he was afraid they would rise up against them. a lot of men are in prison. those that are not arguing forced labor for hitler. they are building the airplanes for the nazis and building the atlantic wall. men are scarce. women are not. cover when a natural she goes behind enemy lines that men do not have. this is where it is important for our national security today. i got interested in this because i was interested in women in combat. a story that happened recently for armed forces. in 1994.and exquisite it is not until 2016 that we have a integrated forces. four years. i saw this coming and i was interested in women in male spaces. know how they behave and how they act. i realize that war is not a male space. war is a bipolar space. you have a male frontline and an occupied nation that is very female. women taking care -- children. it is not a bunch of men. we had to integrate our forces. we are not just woke. we have been fighting in iraq and afghanistan for so long, we learned you have a unit go into a small village deliberate them and it is only women there and they are terrified when it is a bunch of green berets. long ago, we were sending women behind and we called them combat support. the women were there at every .oment to speak to the women it changed again. thes not -- it changed game. it is not just that women receive participation trophies. they are changing the way we fight and when we do not recognize their work, we are less safe. our national security suffers. things. did change the french resistance helped change d-day. they helped change the world. it is not about participation trophies. war isson we study because we know another one will always come. if we only think of the military as a masculine space, we will not be as successful the next time around. thank you. [applause] >> all right, jeremy. i will turn the crowd loose with questions. before we get to questions, raise your hand and i will come to you. we have important announcements about this evening. as soon this session concluded, we will ask you to quickly exit this building so we can flip it over for tonight's banquet. take your stuff with you. gently but quickly get out of here. dinner will be at 7:30 in this building. those glass doors there will be shut down until 7:30. we want to try to accommodate that. those glass doors will be closed until 7:30. speakers, if you have not stopped by the hospitality desk, please do so for your instructions for dinner. to onest question goes of our battlefield guides. a poor perspective than a question, but you can comment on this. i think there was a book to write about the campaign. you rock to authors in your presentation, both of you, thank you. i think there was more. there was one -- you heard more whot stanley, but the man created captain america is jack fewy, jack kirby landed a days after d-day on omaha beach. many pictures and .ketches there are many little stories to put together. second comment is to do. i just want to say something about the importance of women in the french resistance. thank you for taking care of that. i would like also to say, while there were young people like my , or over 40 years ,ld with three or four kids those remain after the french ,efeat of 1940 in the country 1.8 million prisoners in germany who were young men from 2345. thank you very much. >> the undercount of women is intentional. it is not an accident. when a general de gaulle is sagging the french resistance, he is alsosted, making an argument that france deserves a seat in the new international order that is a strong nation. if you are basing your case on your resistance, the more women you have, the less barrel you sound. he would not allow himself to be photographed with african an importantwere part of the battle of france. he would not allow himself to be photographed with them. he was managing the story so closely, having blacks beside him compromised the image of strength he was trying to project. not a comment about art. when i was looking at these women, i realized i had been hearing about them my whole life and i did not know it because i had heard of 007 and ms. money penny is supposedly based on the woman who ran this unit. i actually did know and did not know about it because it had been told in a romanticized way. >> next question is to your right. much for youro studying of this subject. had you compared this with or incorporation of women throughout their military service? >> i had not. i do not know i have enough to say about it. there is an important military hero to the israelis, the only the sop that was not sent to france. she is a national hero in israel. >> to your left, towards the back. youow difficult was it for to do the research on this case under book, what obstacles did you face? >> i did not speak french when i started. the first obstacle was learning french. from women ranged in age 20 to 55. these were ordinary women, not athletes necessarily. they had two important qualifications. frenchspacing -- speaking and not a french passport. they were trained in hand-to-hand combat, they had to parachute. i thought, so do i. i jumped out of a plane and tried a boot camp and excited to learn to shoot things. i wanted to experience what they experienced. i discovered i would be a worthless spy. no one should asked me to do that. but it gave me a sense of what it meant to be this ordinary woman put in these extraordinary circumstances. >> isn't that what a spy would say? [laughter] >> the next question will be in the front row. i have a microphone, let me say, this has been a wonderful conference. well done to everyone. absolutely tremendous. [applause] you said 10,000 casualties and training. i can think off the top of my head of the disaster of operation tiger, a lot of casualties there. largely beyond operation tiger small numbers multiplied many times or are disasters like operation tiger that get you up to 10,000? >> exercise tiger is the last exercise of seven core who will the 20thtah beach on of april, 1944. they are infiltrated by germans who lose 40 beetles -- who loose torpedoes, 946 u.s. servicemen died. complete the unexpected, comes as a shock. there is a security lockdown. that is the biggest single issue of debts in training. there is a steady drip almost every day. 1944 -- third and fourth of may, 1944, the equivalent exercises happen for the troops going to the other beaches. there are drownings and injuries from gunfire and deaths from mines and explosives on each of the beaches. that accounts for about another 50. it is a drip. a couple instances. may, just over , twoweeks prior to d-day planes collided in midair practicing. that involves the loss of all 14 on both aircraft. on the same day, six swimming tanks exercising in the english cannot go down with the loss of six personnel. the following week, a british brendan bomber with a crew of seven towing a glider with 28 on board crashes into the ground on a night exercise and that kills .verybody on the glider this is happening every day and not being recorded. the other interesting thing, there are a number of suicides. we do not tend to acknowledge those. there was atold me chaplain who pitched a sermon before they were about to go, you are about to die, but do not worry, the afterlife is taken care of. morale slumped. the brigade commander immediately issued an order for the recall of the chaplain, before him, -- the day he was to be recalled, the chaplain committed suicide. these were put down as d-day kinder touse it is the next of kin. that further obscurity issue. all the time, this drip. it underlines the fact that training have to be necessarily brutal to give us that victory on d-day. we never acknowledged those individuals because they do not feature in a military history. right. question to your ago, a guideyears told us that showed us a building and set a number of female spies had been cap there and executed there. arguably it of that? -- are you aware of that? >> of the 39, 13 did not make it home. the interesting things about this force of women, they were not considered soldiers. there was no such thing as a female soldier. there was no way of conceiving of them. world war ii marks the first time women are doing deadly combat. with the churchill's daughter is a goner -- is a gunner. women are not allowed people eat lanyard on the gun because it is considered killing at this is a problem with the geneva convention. churchill says, anyone who can save 10,000 men from the front could be given a metal, why wouldn't we use women for this? spy --he war, antimale spy who is not cot can unveil himself, i am an officer of the army, please treat me with the geneva conventions. no woman could do this because there is no such thing as a female officer. it is a problem when we went looking for women at the end of the war. these lists,using it is a game of go fish. you give them a name, they look on their roles. it was embarrassing to put down a woman's name. it had not been done before. you could not say this was a soldier. they were not considered soldiers. it made it hard to find that women after the war. money penny,iss made it a mission to track down every woman. it was much harder to figure it of because of the sort liminal space women held at that point in combat. we need to recategorize women for lots of reasons. people have combat casualties. it was embarrassing to lose women. there is a problem when you -- if you give that name of a spike to the red cross, you are giving it to the enemy. you are reviewing combat operations that are classified to your enemy and we had -- even our allies, we had a new enemy coming. you would let the soviets know what kind of operations you have been doing about this new idea. it is not that guerrilla warfare was new, but mobilizing it in the service of the nation at systematizing it was new. they did not want the soviets to know how much they had been using it. it became hard to find women at the end of the war. >> next question at the back to your right. >> i want to say, complement all three of you on what you brought to this program. tigerommand of exercise was excellent. my question is for sarah rose. since we did not have the opportunity to have played also here, whether you might give who wasto medical card, disrespected by charles de gaulle. >> i do not feel qualified to do that. but i would encourage everybody -- >> we have another question to the front was your right. >> this is for sarah. or twoou give one examples of specific spies and missions they accomplished? it is nice to put a name to specific actions. lines, throughout operation cobra, harry and regimens. also sending to the fund. front.he things move very fast. no one knows where the font is. it is moving so fast every day. men,s recruiting young running back, radioing back to see where the front light is at any given moment. those are some kinetic things they were doing. was 22, the first female paratrooper. in dropped in france september 1942 and she goes to paris, which will become the hub of the northern networks. she goes in and begins recruiting for all the networks that will be along the channel coast. we have no idea where d-day will land or where people are coming. we do know they are going to be on the channel coast and every one of those networks was exceeded by andre tirrell. she does not make it to the end of the war. we can thank her for starting what became an important part of the operation. >> rather than a final question, i will see of our founding president and ceo has any final question or statement before colonel crane's closing remarks. you did not really talk much about the rangers, and in your book you do. some of the reasons they were overlooked until president reagan showed up in a 1984. since then, they have gotten a great deal more attention. going back to longest day -- they were not recognized to the extent they have been recently. could you explain from your perspective why that was? rangers. they achieve an important thing. khan in a sixgun german place. the piece of terrain is important. the germans make an effort to defend the terrain even though the guns are not there. --re is debate about whether where the guns were. the germans considered that vital ground. they contested even though the guns are not there. casualties holding the hawk over the next few days than he did scaling it in the initial assault. there he is, with this vital piece of ground, surrounded by germans for the next two days. the assault forces depleted by two thirds. he and several of his men are rewarded a distinguished service cross. i think that should be a medal of honor. thatall the importance of and the fact that the action attached has operational significance rippling beyond that piece of ground to the successful tenure of utah and why was this, but belittled? because the rangers were little-known. they were a new unit set up a year or two earlier. they had no one to bat for them. voice.d very little that is partly why they were overlooked. that continued into popular history like gorillaz ones on the longest day. he has done and a norma's service. andou look at his goods interviews he conducted. he sets out questionnaires to people who responded to him and his newspaper advertisements, can you give me a story? if you did not respond with many answers to his questionnaire, you did not get a look in. general ofas major the texas national guard, president of a&m university. a busy man. him aius my and sent questionnaire. the first two questions were, where you on d-day, and it did you have an interesting story? he wrote to one-word answers, which were yes. and nothing else. if you read the longest day, rutter does not reach her and he is not in the movie. the story of the renters is known, but not him by name. you realize, what is handed down to us through the narratives is a subjective account and some people -- they are pastoring to be included in the story. other people who are equally there becausenot for one reason or another they did not answer the questionnaire or did not stick their hand up. context i the widest found more subjective than i felt possible. my point of -- from view as a historian, a strong case for the rangers led by al rutter to be considered for a medal of honor. >> thank you to our panelists thank you -- what a wonderful conclusion. [applause] thank you two, peter, and conclusion.great when we planted the conference, we knew there would be books that would offer insight into one of the most talked about and written about subjects in world war ii history. i think we put the right three people together. thank you very much. [applause] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2020] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] ♪ >> you are watching our history tv, covering history with c-span style. archival films, lectures, and college classrooms, and visits to museums. all weekend every weekend on c-span3. >> howard lee was the first african-american elected mayor in a majority white southern city. coming up, we sit down with mr. lee to talk about serving as the chapel hill's mayor and the challenges he faced while in office. >> mayor, why did you decide to run for mayor of chapel hill? >> well, it was probably more of an accident than it was a purpose. i went to a friend of mine and asked if he would consider running for mayor because i frankly didn't think a black person had any prayer of being elected mayor of chapel hill. he didn't want to do that and couldn't persuade me to do it and he went to the local newspaper and told them that he had a scoop, which is that i planned to run for mayor, and the