Two incidents over the span of twenty minutes in 1958 led to this book. One shaped my professional life. In hindsight, the other always was along on that journey, tugging at me.
The Cold War made for a tense summer in 1958. The Soviet Union went from first to first in space, while the United States struggled to get into orbit. Both superpowers tested ever larger nuclear weapons in the atmosphere. Tracking their fallout clouds was a staple of the news. Already interested in world affairs, I was a teenager at the start of a five-day canoe trip into the Canadian bush, my first. We pulled off the highway to read the plaque on a stone monument commemorating the 1943 fishing trip in the same area by Franklin D. Roosevelt, less than three weeks before a crucial wartime conference with Winston Churchill in Quebec. Minutes later, at a dock that Roosevelt had used, we met by chance one of FDR’s Ojibwe fishing guides. With him was his son, about nine years old, who spoke no English. The boy’s black and white dog jumped around us, barking and looking to play. Asked through his father the dog’s name, the boy replied, “Sputnik.”
Through the day’s paddle, I thought about Roosevelt having fished the same waters and about my world’s geopolitics penetrating to even this remote place to touch a young boy. By nightfall I had decided that by some means, I wanted a career in international security.
I had that career in a backroom, supporting role through which I witnessed the intensity of effort to gain negotiated decisions for international security, particularly in arms control. In quieter moments, that first encounter with summit history, FDR’s, would come back to me as questions. How, at a critical moment, could a president leave Washington, the city then at the center of wartime decision making, to go fishing 760 miles away? Why did he do that? Approaching retirement, I started seeking answers. My queries about a president’s ten-day fishing trip led in surprising, multiplying directions that only could be understood in the context of a full year, 1943. Advocating Overlord is the result. I owe my deep thanks to many people for helping to make the book possible.
Advocating Overlord attempts to build on the foundation of superb scholarship on Anglo-American wartime relations, D-Day, and development of the atomic bomb created by many fine historians. Robert Sherwood, Forrest Pogue, Margaret Gowing, Samuel Eliot Morison, and others, such as the authors of the U.S. Army’s official history (the “green books”) made good use of their opportunity to talk with the then still living principals and their staff. Since declassification of many World War II records in all countries, a new generation of historians has continued to refine and expand our knowledge of these events. I am in awe of and grateful for the work of Stephen Ambrose, Rick Atkinson, Graham Farmelo, Doris Kearns Goodwin, John Keegan, Maury Klein, Marc Milner, Ed Offley, Lynne Olson, Richard Overy, Thomas Parrish, Mark Perry, Richard Rhodes, Andrew Roberts, David Roll, Kevin Ruane, Mark Stoler, Nicholas Stargardt, Craig Symonds, and Geoffrey Ward. Their achievements in scholarship informed my own research enormously.
I am especially grateful to Dr. Brian Loring Villa for his encouragement early on and his insightful article, “The Atomic Bomb and the Normandy Invasion,” published in 1978 soon after much of the source material on the diplomatic history of the Manhattan Project was declassified. His article remains a reliable window into the circumstances of the intersection of Overlord and atomic diplomacy.
My telling of this story has been facilitated by historians Marc Milner, Richard Overy, and Kevin Ruane. Each graciously answered my questions and offered leads that illuminated important details. So it was, for example, that I found myself in contact with Maj. Mathias Joost, Canadian Forces. The historical weather data that he provided, combined with air transport information from Archangelo DiFante at the U.S. Air Force Historical Research Agency, explain the COSSAC team’s suspenseful delay en route to Washington with the OVERLORD plan. Thank you for introducing me to the lively community of people dedicated to understanding this history.
Wherever possible, I relied on primary sources. Each archive and library has its own personality. What they share are wonderful people. The archivists and librarians I encountered were passionate about preserving the record of the past and willing guides to its secrets. I’m especially grateful to Virginia Lewick and Matthew Hanson at the FDR Library and Rene Stein at the National Cryptologic Museum. Rob Martin, a historian at the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service, found sources for my exploration of an intriguing, still-to-be-settled wrinkle. Corporate archivists like Nick Richbell and Lise Noel dug into records for me from seventy-plus years ago. Clemson University’s James Cross helped to answer my questions about James Byrnes. Georgetown University’s collection of Harry Hopkins’s papers illuminated that important figure as a man. The helpful staff at the National Archives and Records Administration in College Park, Maryland, the Library of Congress, the British National Archives at Kew, and the Imperial War Museum made accessible the bulk of the primary sources for the book. That the U.S. military services value their history and its lessons shows in the quality of the historical research centers of each. I’ve been honored to benefit from that as a civilian researching alongside the services’ future leaders. Thank you all.
While the internet continues to expand its enormous facilitation of historical research, it is still possible to hold in your hands a piece of paper that takes you into the moment. I shall always remember holding a minute addressed to the “Prime Minister,” bearing Churchill’s nearly illegible red initials, and noticing a little brown spot in the margin. It was a scorch from a cigar ember. Every archive visit was a trip to “Wonder Land.” As to my longest such trip, I thank Mariasole Piatti, Carlo Pagni, and family for providing a wonderful base and for encouraging me as I explored the archival treasures in Kew. Thanks also to Mike and Linda Swinnerton for a weekend respite in Yorkshire that became a trip back seven decades into wartime Britain.
To bring clarity in organizing my research and thoughts into a manuscript, Shannon O’Neill helped a new writer to find his footing and get serious. David Roll and Christian McBurney were generous with their time and thoughtful, experience-based criticism of my early drafts. Both gave good advice on writing for publication. Thanks are due my writing buddy, Dr. Teodora Salow, for her advice on style and enthusiasm for my project, even as she worked on her own intriguing historical novel, and to Norman Last, a patient and eagle-eyed reader of the manuscript. Philip Schwartzberg of Meridian Mapping created the book’s three maps.
An author could not have a better Sherpa than Roger Williams, a lover of history and my steady, effective agent. Roger brought the manuscript to University of Nebraska Press, Potomac Books. There, Tom Swanson, Ann Baker, Natalie O’Neal, Roger Buchholz, Elaine Otto, and the capable production and marketing staff guided Advocating Overlord through publication. Thank you.
Writing a book about the diplomacy of D-Day and the atomic bomb is to be humbled by the intertwined complexity of these consequential events. Where this telling has missed or gotten the story wrong, the fault is mine alone.
From the beginning, my daughter, Lauren, has sustained me with her enthusiasm, confidence in Dad’s book project, and curiosity about history. Words are inadequate to convey my gratitude to my wife, Mary, for the love, patience, understanding, and encouragement with which she has blessed me. As I poked into the corners of history on this journey whose course may have seemed obvious only to me, Mary and Lauren have been there for me always with love. Thank you.