p patton as a deception. they created what was essentially a phony army. there s phony tanks that are nothing but balloons. there s barracks. it appears there are hundreds of thousands of ally troops assembled across the channel from france. wow. anticipating an attack from dover that never came, hitler waited seven days before moving his army to confront the real invasion. joining us is michael. michael, this is just amazing stuff. a comic aspect to it, that first of all, that george patin would get the assignment to lead a phony army, but hitler, who is beginning to lose it, didn t commit. he never gave the authority to throw everything he had at the normandy invasion, so we got on the beach and we broke out because hitler didn t have the troops there to stop us. we did, and you know, it s a case of where you sometimes can be too suspicious and too
first time? as time went on, if you look at the decisions at the end of the war, military historians who are a lot more on this account than i am, would say he was not the leader he was four years earli earlier. let me ask you about george patton and the role he played here. i remember from one of my favorite movies, patton, and i was in the peace corps and everybody liked it there, broad audience, what do you think it was about him that he was able to take this phony job and turn it into such a success? did that help him get back into the action afterwards? absolutely because it was an enormous success. not only what we saw in the film but phony radio broadcasts and dummies of soldiers and all sorts of things that ultimately helped bolster the idea that we, the allies were going to invade in a place we were not and at a time we were not. where did we find this
state senate. in illinois. and a lot of people thought why do you want to do something like that? and i tried to explain to people my motivation and by the way, in illinois when you re in state legislature, you don t get paid a lot of money and have to drive down to springfield, which is three and a half hours away. but the reason i told folks i did it was because i thought back to my own life. to the fact that my grandparents participated in world war ii. my grandfather fought in p patton s army and my grandmother worked on a bomber assembly line and when they got, when my grandfather got back from the war, my mother had just been born, he was able to get a college education on the gi bill.