The Stoic Mind Behind D-Day
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What events led to the significance of D-Day?
Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.
Out on the English Channel 82 years ago, the ocean hosted a moving city. Thousands of ships and vessels holding some 150,000 tense young men bob in the sea under gloomy skies. Some of them begin to vomit in anticipation of what lies ahead. It's nearly six in the morning when the flashes start. The whole horizon lights up. British and American battleships begin an enormous barrage raining fire down on the French coast where these soldiers will soon land. As the boats approach shore, the ramps drop. Machine guns from the bluffs begin to rake and sweep the boats and the men with horrendous fire. Many of the men die before their feet even touch the water, let alone the beach. Some men jump over the sides and are dragged down by their packs and gear.
The ones who do land have to make a mad dash across 200 feet of open sand in some of the most hostile territory imaginable. By nightfall, almost 5,000 men are dead, and yet most of the beaches in Normandy are taken. These are the events of June 6th, 1944, one of the most momentous days in world history. General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces at Normandy, has pulled off one of the most stunning and impressive victories in all of military history. And in this moment, he turns the tides not just of the war, but of the 20th century and Western civilization. He changes the world as we know it. And that's the story filled with a number of Stoic lessons that we're going to talk about in today's episode.
So the Stoics have this phrase called premeditatio malorum, which is a premeditation of evils. It's basically the idea of doing a premortem rather than a postmortem. Postmortem is when you look after the fact at what went wrong, what you can learn from it. The Stoics try to think in anticipation of what could happen and prepare for it. Rehearse it in your mind, Seneca famously said. Exile, torture, war, shipwreck, he says, all the terms of the human lot should be before our eyes. He quotes a famous military historian from the ancient world, in fact, who said that leaders are never allowed to say, wow, I didn't think that would happen. For the Stoics, it's the unexpected who are crushed. It's the unexpected blow that lands heaviest.
And if you want to be resolute, if you want to be successful, if you want to be victorious, you can't be naive. And you have to understand that hope is not a strategy. And so by doing this exercise, Seneca is trying to prepare for what could go wrong, trying to mentally manage his expectations, but he's also trying to anticipate, toughen himself up, put into place what he needs to be in place in order to handle defeat or victory. And I think this pertains to Eisenhower at D-Day because he uses a version of this practice there as he prepares for the invasion. The night before Operation Overlord, Eisenhower writes a short 64-word letter where he takes full responsibility for it failing. Like, he's not sitting there doing positive visualization the night before, imagining it all going his way.
He's actually thinking about, in advance, it not going his way. Because he understood there were a ton of factors totally outside of his control. The weather was touch or go. In fact, there's a new movie coming out just about the weather reports the day of the invasion and what a difficult call that was to make. He knows that the defenses could turn out to be stronger than anticipated. He knows that despite everything he did, it might not go his way. And in fact, Eisenhower had a saying that he liked. He said, plans are worthless, but planning is everything. He understood that you had to plan and anticipate and imagine every contingency And yet he also understood fundamentally this other Stoic idea, which is there's some things in our control and some things aren't.
And that fortune, as a Stoic would say, doesn't care about your plans at all and very often dashes them completely to pieces.
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