Major Jonathan Bratton

And of course, then there's Russia and the Soviet Union, not an easy guy to get along with.

So you're asking Eisenhower to go be a diplomat, a general, a personal diplomat,

You would almost call him like a therapist, you know, listen to these woes of these field commanders who are all, you know, he's got not just Patton, he's got Montgomery.

He's got guys who are going to get kicked back to the American theater because they fail in North Africa.

But yeah, so it's he's he's looking for someone who's not going to make a bunch of enemies.

And Dwight David Eisenhower is exactly the right guy.

Cross-continental logistics is just not something that you wave your hands and it happens, especially when you consider the North Africa operations in 1942.

So many of those troops actually embarked not from England, not from the U.K.

because we didn't have enough troops there.

They embarked from the United States.

They did a cross-ocean landing in North Africa.

So Eisenhower learned so much from the Tunisian North African campaign in 1942, rolling into 1943, invasion of Sicily.

Again, learning really to understanding...

not just allied but also joint operations now you've got to roll in the navy and you know boy you thought things were bad between the united states and the uk bringing the bringing the u.s navy and the royal navy and and the u.s army and the british army and oh my god you know no one's talking the same languages then there's the air force and you've got to think it's not just 3d chess it's uh

You understand why he smokes like five packs a day the entire war.

Right.

Because he's trying to think on multiple planes and dealing with just problems such as Vichy France, for example.

He's got to go negotiate a way to try to get the French to quit fighting on the side of the Nazis, come over to the Allies, allowing them to save face.

Very similarly with the Italians.

And this is all getting him prepared for that 1944 cross-channel invasion.