Of war and democracy. It is great to see you all here, and to have our friends at cspan sharing this wonderful content with their feelings. To their viewers. To those watching on our livestream at home, welcome. I would like to take a moment to recognize some individuals. First off, to we have any world war ii veterans or home front workers in our crowd tonight . [applause] do we have any veterans of any other era . Please stand. [applause] and do we have many members of our board of trustee . Thank you all for your service. Summer, we here at museum have been busy commemorating the 75th anniversary of major events in world war ii, the biggest of which was june 6 for dday, invasion at normandy. Some other recent major anniversaries include last month , on july 20, the assassination in the bunker. Er landings, the dragoon in Southern France took place. This week marks the 75th anniversary of one of the most glorious moments of the war, when the city of light, paris, w as liberated after four years of German Occupation. On the Eastern Front, following the massive summer soviet offensive, the red army approached the river and warsaw, the capital of poland, where the war in europe had begun in 1939. This led to the her relic but tragic to the heroic but tragic warsaw uprising. We have two premier military historians tonight to share their insights and studies on these last two monumental events. Our guest scholar, dr. Cathal j. Nolan, was here for our International Conference on world war two. Dr. Nolan is associate professor of history and executive director of the International History institute, boston university. He is an awardwinning teacher and scholar of military and International History. His 2017 work, allure of battle, a history of how wars are won and lost, received the lehrman prize for military history. The 50,000 prize is cosponsored by the guilder Lehrman Institute of American History and the New York Historical society. It recognizes the best book on military history in the English Speaking world, distinguished by its scholarship, its contribution to literature, and to appeal to both a general and economic audience. His other books include, a twovolume concise history of world war ii, wars of the age of louis the 14th, and a twovolume study, the age of the wars of religion. He consults on military history to the pbs history series nova and other documents or films. Hes currently writing decency, mercy and honor in war, for the Oxford University press. Joining him is the museums own Samuel Zemurray stone, Senior Historian and our executive director for the institute of war and democracy, dr. Robert m. Citino. Dr. Citino is the author of 10 books are primarily focusing on the german military. He is widely known from the museums various public programs, and is one of our featured tour historians. Give adr. Nolan will brief presentation before joining dr. Citino in conversation. So now it is my pleasure to call and dr. Tage dr. Citino nolan. Welcome, gentlemen. [applause] good evening and thank you for the imitation. We are gathered together in a place that remembers ordinary men and women as well, who did many extraordinary things over days and of years of courage and duty and devotion. My words tonight will not do them justice. So let me instead reach out to you with the quiet words of the poet, the englishman john dunn, who meditated this in 1624. It will be familiar to most of you. Meditated on the common mortality that they shared in world war ii, and at the end of the day, we all share. No man is an island, entire of itself. Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, europe is the less as well as if a promontory were, as well if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were. Any mans death diminishes me. Because i am involved in mankind. And therefore, never send to know for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee. Tonight i will talk about two signature events of world war ii and then engage conversation with you all. The liberation of paris and the destruction of warsaw. For they are connected in time. There connected by purpose on both sides. And they tell us much about how the war ended in triumph for some, but in misery for tens of millions of others. They were part of the long end game of an immense world war already by the summer of 1944. We are in the end game of world war two. Where everyone is jockeying for position at the coming negotiation table. World war ii, the worst, most destructive, most slaughter filled conflict in all of Human History. At least, so far. The war started, as you know, in poor, pitiable poland in 1939, where it was invaded not once, but twice in 17 days. First by hitler, and then by stalin. It squatted, the war did, and poland for the next five years, in its worst imaginable form. Ss death camps, gestapo police, mass murders at war with each other on both sides of the nation. Mass murder in polands cities and all around. It took five years of colossal effort and sacrifice to get to the Tipping Point summer of 1944. Five years of fighting and suffering and death, in africa and southeast asia. In china, in the philippines, in the philippines, in the baltic and the balkans, on and under all of the oceans, in the lethal skies overhead. The price was so high that words lose meaning, numbers lose meaning, even death loses much of its meaning. We are here trying to comprehend and we will all fail. The western allies, and this place commemorates, broke through the outer wall hitlers fortress europe in a truly complex and heroic endeavor. But i remind you, it was also a multinational one. Americans assaulted just two of the five dday beaches. In the first 20 minutes of saving private ryan, you saw the fake deaths. Ive not done an actual count, but i will guesstimate 120 men, roughly. That is just enough by the film makers to leave it personal, but also to remind us of the wider carnage of the war. As you know, as this place to commemorates, getting off just one end of omaha took four hours and cost many hundreds of lives more than that, and left hundreds of men, ultimately several thousands, terribly body, in mind, even in soul. There were former beaches on normandys contested coast that day. Bloody omaha was the worst. For more strips of wet sand were fighting handtohand and from distance by shot and shell at the same time. The fight for normandy did not last one day. Not even the longest day, in rommels phrase. It took three weeks to clear normandy. Another four weeks to liberate just the rest of northern france. Southern france took longer. And a second invasion on august 15. Paris did not fall until august 25. And it came within hours of being blown apart by the germans. Before the french took it back, on their own, with the resistance uprising, and free french sherman tanks racing down with the cross of lorraine, joan of arcs symbol on their side. Over the seven weeks in france, allied forces suffered 200,000 casualties. The germans lost Something Like 440,000 casualties. Over 20,000 french civilians were killed by everyones artillery, and by british and american bombs. Hundreds of french were killed by the gestapo and by the vossen s s, including the entire civilian population of the village of ouridour sur glen, who were herded into the Village Church and burned alive. During seven weeks of fighting in the northwest corner france, as you know, there was more heavy fighting to come along the rhine, in the green are and ardennes forest, in flooded soggy holland, cross northern germany, fighting in italy in the balkans, in southern germany. And more fighting, much more fighting, all down the long Eastern Front, from finland through the baltic states, and eastern prussia, in the woods of belarus across the amber fields of ukrainian grain. In romania, in bulgaria, in hungary and began in poland. All of that before death and justice road across germany on horseback, and yes even on camel. The soviets used camels in 1945 to get to berlin. It road in massive t 34 soviet tank armies that germans could not even conceive of earlier in the war. My point in this place is that the war was won by the greatest generations of many nations that thought the axis powers together. The men and women who defeated hitler and fascism came from two dozen countries. They left home starting in 1939 to fight in foreign fields to free faraway peoples of whom they knew little. They came from farms and small towns in queensland, australia. They came from cities like auckland, new zealand, manitoba. From manchester and melbourne, from montreal and marseille. They came from the desert in south africa, from the niger delta, from the mountains of kashmir, and nepal and baluchistan. They came from grassroots villages in kenya, and senegal, they came from trinidad, rio de janeiro, then iowa, and maine. Fighting men bound for europe climbed onto troop ships in halifax, in madras, melbourne. Wasting from mumbai and vancouver. Then, 22 months after it started, they student from san diego, seattle new york, orleans, miami, new york, boston. They spoke 100 languages. They prayed to a dozen ideas of vishnu, thejesus, great spirit. They came from 140 countries aligned later as the United Nations, passed in 1945 at the generation of the United Nations hoped would end war for their children and grandchildren. I say this in all humility, asking you to walk in silence in this great place of memory and trying to remember them all, not just the framed photographic tragedy of the 18yearold from iowa, the 19yearold from arizona, or the 20yearold from nova scotia, who never came home. Tens of millions who never came home did not even need to leave home to find the war. The war found them. It burned villages and homes, it killed parents and children, it raped the land. Poles, yugoslavs, filipinos, chinese, malays, many many more peoples. By the end,and italians, germans and japanese all found the war found them. They were fed into a meatgrinder of industrial war until the butchers bill reached 75 million. Of whom 40 million were killed in the east alone. That is 28,500 lives lost every day in the east, 10 omahas every day for 1400 consecutive days. We cannot comprehend that. When so many are dying, what is the loss of one or a hundred or a mere 10,000 . And leaders thought in those terms. They had to. Raw numbers overwhelmed all personal tragedy. This is the key difference between history and literature, between war and shakespeare. Allyet, in the midst of of war, the mayhem young men and women discovered heroism, sacrifice, moral and physical endurance. That is what i want to turn to now. Two examples maybe less wellknown to most american audiences. The examples of sacrifice of the french to liberate their capital, and the poles who tried to liberate theirs. On each side of germany, in the summer of 1944, soviet and western armies were advancing at great speed. The war had broken wide open. Germany was being pummeled on both sides, and to a lesser degree, also coming up from the south. In the west it was called overlord, you know it well. In the east, it was in operation named for a dead russian general to stop in 1812, trying another invasion of the homeland. The operation smashed and overran the greatest force of the armyn army in group center. Smashed through it in belarus and headed for poland and parts west. The fight for paris back in the west began while general eisenhower was still busy. Eisenhower did not want to enter paris at all, although he was undergoing pressure to take the city for political reasons. Eisenhower despised city fighting. He despised the idea of attrition. He rightly feared getting trapped in a series of western stalingrads. He what do it. He wouldnt do it. The german army was literally cases not, in many able to run because itd been so modernized by aircraft and allied material superiority that the german units had to sit in place and were destroyed in place. It is collapsing. In the west, it was running right past pass, right past paris, heading for the rhine, belgium, netherlands and onto the rhine. The road to the french capital was wide open by the middle of august. Eisenhower chose not to take it. But the city would not wait. It rose on its own. Starting with the general strike called by the resistance leadership. A general strike, not a term most americans are familiar with, but a long historical tradition in european politics, where the entire working class is supposed to go out on a general strike for political, not economic reasons. It began when the metro and postal workers walked out. Then the Police Walked out. And government in paris stopped. It was important in paris, as it is also the same month in warsaw that two proud nations lay down some claim to self liberation. This is what it was all about. And did they understand this would be a marker laid in blood . Yes, they did. They needed to assert in arms, blood, and sacrifice their right to decide their own futures. The poles and the french. Four days after the general strike began, the ffi, the free French Resistance forces inside france, rose in arms. They began attacking key german garrison and government buildings. German armor was moving to the city, trying to get past the city and to the north. It was attacked, it was ambushed. Molotov cocktails were the primary weapon of choice because the resistance was so poorly armed. But the ssi lay in ambush. It sniped. I t threw molotov cocktails from high windows into passing half tracks and burned and attacked fuel trucks. Germans burned. And therefore they retaliated with their usual cruelty. Germans were raging at losing in 1944. And they were losing everywhere. In the sky, in italy. In the east, in the west. So the order was given, direct from berlin, destroy paris. The engineers mined all the great buildings. They were to be brought down, reduced to rubble if the allies reached the city. Let me name them notre dame, the louvre, the historic bridges built by the louiss, the arc de triomphe, the great iron tower was going to come down. So the barricades went up in the grand french tradition of resistance. The barricades went up, cobblestones torn out of the street, piled in cars and trucks made into barricades. Recalling the revolution of 1789, but more recently recalling the French Resistance against the prussians in 1870. Hitler ordered maximum damage done to the city. A week of fighting ensued. During that week of fighting, the best estimates are that somewhere between 800 and 1000 French Resistance fighters gave their lives. Churchill pleaded with eisenhower. But ike would not come. In on the 24th of august, french general leclair disobeyed his immediate american superiors and sent in a fast patrol of armored scouts that reached the citys outskirts. German general dietrich ow uprders from hitler, bl paris. He hesitated. He was in negotiations with resistance. His motive seems to be primarily to spare the lives of his own men, not the city. By all accounts, except his own, he was prepared to carry out the destruction order. But he did not in the end. The next day, as dawn broke, august 25, which we remember as the day of the liberation of paris, the main body of leclairs Armor Division second raced into the citys center. When the french civilians first saw the sherman tanks they thought they were americans or british. They went wild with joy. And what happened to leclairs division over the next two weeks, is what eisenhower feared. In the liberation of wine and sex it disappeared from battle for the next period. The same thing happened when the allied armies were liberating the provinces of burgundy and champagne. It did. The wine cellars were liberated. We liberated the hell out of that place. The french actually took over 300 casualties. The french second armored took over 300 casualties. There was significant fighting in the street of paris. German snipers were in the buildings, german mortar teams, german tanks were still in the city. They lost 35 shermans, the french did, and 1100 more military vehicles on that day. The french general de gaulle spoke in the late afternoon. He was waiting and ready for this. You have to quote de gaulle on this. Paris outraged. Paris broken. Paris martyred. But paris liberated. Liberated by itself. Liberated by its people, with the help of french armies. With the support and the help of all of france, of fighting france. The only france. The real france. Eternal france. He is the french churchill. Or churchill is the english de gaulle. The point is, even Liberation War is a continuation of politics by other means. French and allied politics, american politics, british and german politics. It is best to know this. On the others of europe, at the same time, 50,000 man polish home army chose to strike a blow for its countrys honor and its countrys politics, deciding it was necessary politically not militarily. Poland was going to be liberated. This is not a military necessary decision. It is a politically necessary decision. They needed to rise. To lose, to sacrifice, to die. To be seen to be fighting for their own liberation, lest they be excluded from the victors table when the negotiations come. We now know there were no negotiations essentially over poland, they were excluded from the table. But they rose. To strike a blow for politics and for honor, not to wait for their liberators to ride inside red army tanks into warsaw. They timed the rising to the advance of the red army, which as i said earlier was racing across Eastern Europe and was racing into poland. Although it was getting close to the end of its tether after a 300 mile advance. It is extraordinary by more to standards by world war ii standards. It is amazing considering how the germans broke down and the soviets sped through belarus and poland. The where marked was also retreating, which was was a factor in the polish decision to rise. But the red army was also fighting serious battles south of warsaw. And it stopped at the vistula. We will talk about that during the question period. This is the great controversy of the warsaw rising. I should mention this is the second warsaw rising. The first rising in warsaw took place a year earlier in t