Open Book with Anthony Scaramucci - James Holland is Back: The Forgotten Campaign That Shaped the World We Live In

Episode Date: September 25, 2025

James Holland is the author of Cassino ’44, The Savage Storm, Brothers in Arms, Sicily ’43, Normandy ’44, Big Week, The Rise of Germany, and The Allies Strike Back in the War in the West trilogy, Burma ’44, and Dam Busters. He has written and presented the BAFTA shortlisted documentaries Battle of Britain and Dam Busters for the BBC. He is also the co-host of the brilliant WW2 Pod with Al Murray. Get a copy of his brilliant book Cassino '44: The Brutal Battle for Rome, you won't regret it: https://amzn.to/4gB8OZ2 Listen to the podcast here: https://open.spotify.com/show/34VlAepHmeloDD76RX4jtc?si=6695d3eef52944c0 Anthony Scaramucci is the founder and managing partner of SkyBridge, a global alternative investment firm, and founder and chairman of SALT, a global thought leadership forum and venture studio. He is the host of the podcast Open Book with Anthony Scaramucci. A graduate of Tufts University and Harvard Law School, he lives in Manhasset, Long Island. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connects Ontario at 1-866-531-2,600 to speak to an advisor. Free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. We're back with a story in James Holland, this time diving into his passion for the Italian campaign of World.

World War II. For me, this part of history hits closer to home. It's not just about strategy and battles, but what ordinary Italian families live through. The human story can often get lost behind the bigger headlines of history, and James brings those struggles back into focus. We also explore the brutal reality of the Gustav line, the gamble of Anzio Beach, and the leadership choices that shaped it all. Like me, James is very passionate about the Italian campaign. We learn a lot about the Italian people, the culture of what was going on at that time, the decline of fascism. Fascism has a failed political idea in the country of Italy and how the allies generally got along with the Italian people, despite having to fight the Italian soldiers and some of the German

soldiers that were stationed there. So tremendous importance in this book and in your lives about collaboration, the importance of putting a team together despite the disparate nature of the team, potential differences in politics or policy or ethnic heritage. But putting a team together made all the difference in the Second World War, particularly in this brilliant masterpiece that James Holland has written. Welcome back to Open Book. I am your host, Anthony Scaramucci, and joining us, can't get enough of this man, James Holland, award-winning historian, best-selling writer. He's also a broadcaster, a fellow podcaster, a goalhanger with me. And this was part of his trilogy on the Italian campaign in World War II. And it's the last piece of his trilogy.

And I'm going to venture to say that I think it's the best piece. I'm going to explain why in a second. But the title of the book is Casino 44, the brutal battle for Rome. First of all, it's great to have you back on. Can't get enough of the game. You know I'm a huge fan. But Casino to me was the best because it was the conclusion. you got to see the channels of politics and human behavior all converging together. And you got to see the Italian citizens in terms of the mistakes that they were making. And what a lesson that is actually for today, by the way, James. And so I want to discuss that with you as well.

But for me, this was human tragedy, warfare, strategy related to warfare. But it was also about human beings having. a reckoning with themselves about what right and wrong in their country. So anyway, sorry I'm being so long-winded, but thank you for coming back on. No, thank you for having me. What kept pulling you back into the Italian campaign, though? Tell me why you decided your love affair with World War II continues, but why Italy, why the Italian campaign, which frankly is not as well written about as the Battle of the Boulds or the Battle of Britain, et cetera, et cetera. Well, I guess that was part of the reason, to be honest.

But also, I mean, as you know, I'm a massive atalophile, so I love Italy. And actually, you're right, James. We love you. And Italy loves you, okay? Well, I've got to say, I mean, it is a trilogy because I wrote Sicily Savage Storm Casino kind of pretty much concurrently, you know, together. but actually about 20 years ago I wrote a book which

I suppose would be the fourth in a quartet if you were to put them together but it was such a long time ago and it was such an outlier that it's hard to see it in those terms but actually that covered the last year of the war in Italy, it was called Italy's sorrow and it came out, I don't know, maybe

best part of 20 years ago now but what drew me that in the first place was I was reading a story in the Times newspaper over here in the UK. And it was a story about how the then German president, not the chance of the president, President Rao had been to Italy, had been to Bologna, and he'd been to a little town called Marzabotto, which is about, I don't know, 15 miles south of Bologna. And there he had publicly apologized for a massacre that had taken place in the mountains overlooking Mazzabotto, called the

Mazzaboto Massacre at the end of September 1944. And there was an account of a witness who had survived. and he was saying, you know, I saw a baby being burneted and all these women and children were just lined up and murdered. And it said, you know, it was the biggest civilian massacre in Western Europe outside of, you know, deaf camps, you know, bigger than Lediqi, bigger than Oridore, aglame. I thought, what?

You know, how come I don't know about this? So I looked into it and started and tried to find out a bit more about it and just got completely obsessed of it. And that was my start point for writing Italy Sorin. And I went out to Montessori. this mountain where this incredibly beautiful place where I think it was 785 civilians were massed over a couple of days

and I interviewed some survivors which was just the most amazing and grueling experience and one that I will never get I mean literally when I was talking to Cornelia Pazelli who had lost her twin brother and sister her mother her father had seen it all from a mountain above and gone demented and died a couple of months later her second sister had been raped

and badly wounded, but it survived too. And it was just, I can remember every bit of it. And I've been to that place. You can still go to the little cemetery where she was one of 202 of, you know, because there were massacres within the bigger massacre. They were lined up in this little cemetery and there's still bullet holes on the crosses and stuff and in the walls. I mean, you just can't believe it.

I remember one thing she told, which I've never forgotten. She said that there were marched from the church into this walled cemetery. And she said there was an old, one of the old ladies, and one of the Germans helped, offered a hand to help her this old lady through the gate and into the cemetery. And she just couldn't understand it. And it really stuck with me. And I wanted to understand what had happened. But I also wanted to understand why that happened.

And that led me to kind of, you know, thinking, well, why does no one know about the end of the war? And partisans and fascists and Mussolini and all the Allied armies and, you know, what the heck's going on in Italy, this amazing place that you and I love so much. So then I kind of put it to bed And I didn't do anything for all this time And then I kind of did Sicily And then then the invasion of Italy in In 1944 and then as you say, casino So it was that that kind of sucked me in in the first place

And I just you know I visit Italy every year There's not a year goes by where I don't go there I love it And I and I love the Italian people And I think you know Their war experience is just such a tragedy You know Mussolini Just didn't have the great

geopolitical understanding. You know, he thought he could pull the wall over everybody. He thought that Britain was beaten. Thought he had his main chance and that he could dominate the Mediterranean and North Africa and East Africa. He thought he could just wrap it all up, be easy-peasy. It was like his on a plate. And he hadn't reckoned on the Brits, you know, fighting on in 1940.

That, you know, that took him to various forks in the road. He just kept taking the wrong one. And he ended up being embroiled in a war in the Mediterranean. and then, you know, which ended in Tunisia in May, in 1943, which then progressed to Sicily, which then progressed to Italy, which he was, you know, powerless to do anything about, really, as were the Italian people.

I mean, after Mussolini was deposed in the third week of July, 1943, the Italian leadership was just crippled. They were between a massive rock and a hard place. You know, what do you do? Do you kind of just go, okay, you're in the towel? They were also occupied, but if you do that, you know, you're going to be absolutely shafted by the Germans

who are not. take kindly? Or do you kind of try and hedge your bets? And also, their leadership just wasn't up to it. You know, the king was pathetic. His senior ministers were, you know, just repugnant and morally just bankrupt. And the poor Italian people, you know, it might have been a nation since 1860 or whatever, but it was still a, wasn't really a nation state as such, despite fascism. Fascism was a structure for the cities, for Rome maybe, for the elites. But for your average Italian punter living in this little walled village, you know, somewhere in the back-house of nowhere in a mountain in the Brutzi Mountains or something, what do they care about Mussolini? You know,

what do they care about central authority? You know, the rhythms of daily life of the annual seasons are just being going on year after year after year for centuries. And then suddenly this typhoon of steel arrives in southern Italy and it's just bulldozes this terrible path up the leg. And, you know, anyone unfortunate enough to be in the middle of this is, it's just horrific. I mean, I don't know if you've ever been to San Pietro, which is just south of Casino. John Houston made a famous film about it, but there is the village as it was left in

December 1943. And it's so wistful, Anthony. I mean, you're just there and you look into these houses. You can still see paint on the walls. You can see the kitchen sink, you know, all this kind of stuff. You can half close your eyes and you can hear the, the, the, the, the, the, laughter of children and the chatter of an Italian family. But it's gone. There goes. It's, it's, it's, it's, it's, that's the tragedy and it and it moves me. Well, I'm just to give you some context from

my family. So my family, it was from one of those villages. It wasn't walled because it was up in the mountains and it was an agrarian village. It was a farming village. And my grandparents obviously left that village because they were impoverished. interestingly enough, my grandmother's brother stayed in the village. So when I was a young man, I used to go back to the village and see him and the, you know, the house that my grandmother was born in and so forth. And that part of the family stayed there. But when they talked about the war, that's how they talked about it, you know, which is what I found so fascinating about your book.

You captured what the Italian people that were living outside of Rome felt about the war. like, what the hell is going on? And why are we, why are we doing this? You know, and, and, you know, you, you, you, you, you, you know this about Bob Dole, uh, the former senator from Kansas. He was severely wounded at April of 1945 in the mountains. He was serving as a second lieutenant in the, uh, 10th Mountain division. Yep. Yep. When he was wounded. Uh, and he, you know, he has a limited use of his right arm. Uh, when he went against Richard Nixon. in the 1970s, and they asked them why. He said, well, you know, I was wounded in Italy fighting for the Constitution. Imagine these people today. Fast forward, James, right? So, no, no, Richard Nixon has broken the Constitution. I watched several of my friends die in these

battles in Italy fighting for the Constitution. So even though he's part of my party, the Constitution, Uber-Alas, the Constitution is more important than every everything else, you know. And so this stuff is is gone now, James. And this is the sadness that I feel about it. When I read your books, the books are about valor. There's books, the book represents confusion from some of the Italian citizens, some hope, some despair. But the books are really about valor and what people did during the war, personal sacrifices they were making for the greater good of something. You know, the rejection of fascism. and the pursuit of freedom.

But I want to go to the Gustav line. What is the Gustav line? Tell us what it is. Tell us why it was so important. Talk about the morale. Talk about the weather during the period of time. But start with the Gustav line, if you don't mind. Well, it's your thing.

Well, the Gustav line is the second part of a kind of like a double look. Think of like the most secure safe you can think of. You know, you've got the first cage, you know, outside the front. You've got to let through that. Then you've got to get through the next door before you can get to your, to your mullah. And that's, the first line is the Burnhard line, and US Fifth Army under the command of General Mark W. Clark

bashes its way through this. And by the way, this is an international army as well. It might be the US Army, but it's got British troops. It's got Indian troops. It's got North African troops, French troops in it, and Canadians, for that matter, as well, all fighting under the banner of US Fifth Army. They get their way through the Burnhard line,

and then literally eight miles further on is the Gustav Line. The Gustav Line is not, it's not like a Great Wall of China or anything like that. It's not, it's not like a solid wall of defense. It's a series of interlocking defenses. So it's a series of, you know, you'd have kind of machine gun posts and mortar positions up in the mountains, interlocking fires, so they're all crossing every little bit covered. You'd have observers on the high ground looking down on the valleys. That's where the roads are.

So those are your key arteries if you're attacking and trying to push north to Rome. You'd have lots of minefields around the rivers, lots of barbed wire. You know, it's pretty solidly defended. And the big problem is, is when you've got these artillery observers on the high ground, they are looking down on the roads and they are directing artillery fire, which is further back, indirect fire. So they're lobbing shells in an arc over the mountains onto this road. It's all been zeroed.

So what that means is they've already worked out. the coordinates of where they've got to drop their shells. So anything that moves along that road is just going to get absolutely trashed unless you cleared the observer from the high ground above. But the trouble is the observers are then defended by infantry, also in the mountains above. And the big problem for the Allies is they're very mechanized. That's their kind of USP, as you steal not our flesh, to do a lot of the hard yards as you possibly can.

But in winter, in mountains, there's a limit to how many showmen's you can set up a mountain. or Dodge Trucks or GMCs or half-tracks or whatever. This ends up being a foot sluggers war, you know, augmented by the use of mules, which Americans and British and French are not really trained to use in the first place, to get up there. And it just, it's brutal. I mean, it is absolutely brutal.

These mountains are really high. They're kind of 3,000 foot high plus. Lots of jagged peaks, lots of gullies where mortars, and machine guns can hide, lots of very, very thin soil. And what that means is that when a mortar round comes down, which is a fairly small explosive, or a bigger shell from an artillery piece comes down, it chips lots of, not only does it splinter and spray shrapnel, bits of metal all over the place, it also smashes the rock because there's no soil to absorb the explosion.

And razor shards of stone also kind of fly around the place. So it's just absolutely horrendous. And what the Allies discovered was that when you attack these positions, there's only so many men you can attack with at one time. And it ends up being quite a narrow front because you physically can't fit more than, let's say, for example, a company's strength attack should be about 100 men on one place. And they get mowed down or cut down or kind of cut to pieces or whatever, you know, 30% wounded, 10% dead.

And suddenly you're kind of 60% down on where you are. You can't really function. And then you're in the next hundred in and then the next hundred. It just rotates. And you can never attack on mass. And that's the problem they have. But they're so close at the end of January, beginning of February, 1944, despite the awful weather, despite the conditions, despite being very much kind of bottom of the pile in terms of priorities in the war in Europe. They're so close to the breakthrough.

but they just can't quite do it. And that's the tragedy of all concerned, including the Germans I estuad, who are also having an absolutely horrific time. You know, again, it's as brutal as Normandy. It's as brutal as anything else that we've seen in the war, and yet it's fairly underreported. You know, when I was a kid, my grandmother,

I used to collect these models, you know, put these models together. I'm going to send you a picture of the box, but it was a 1968, vintage Aurora, the model company, Anzio Beach. Nice. My grandmother said, okay, you have to learn about Anzio Beach. And I was seven years old. What the hell is Anzio Beach?

And then when I read your book about Anzio Beach, I didn't realize the stalemate that took place at Anzio Beach. So tell us a little bit about this, you know, because this is obviously the Allies are coming into the beach. The beach is incredibly well fortified in some ways even more well fortified than Normandy Beach. Yeah. And they're stuck on the beach. Tell us a little bit about that. Yeah.

So the idea with Vanzio is to do an invasion behind the Gustav line, kind of about 30 miles south of Rome, and kind of hopefully unlock the Gustav line. So the plan is to hammer the Gustav line in lots of different places all at once, or in sequence, rather. Draw lots of German troops away from that. And then at the same time, do this attack around the back. And hopefully the combination of this huge pressure on the Gustav line, combined with kind of the risk of being attacked around the back, would kind of turn, would persuade the Germans to abandon that position

and retreat back to the north. And I have to say literally every single German commander in Italy thought that that was definitely the right course of action. The only person who didn't was the guy who was overall commander-in-chief, was a chap called Field Marshal, who was a Lufloffa Field Marshal, but he was also the overall ground commander, well, the overall military commander in Italy at that time. And he was sort of slavishly devoted to his oath to Hitler.

And Hitler had turned his eagle eye onto the Italian campaign. And when the Hitlerian spotlight falls on you, that's pretty bad news, because it means you can't run, but you can't hide. What, he can't run and you can't hide either. and it means no reverses. You know, no, you can't retreat. So you just have to keep going, even though your men are absolutely a breaking point.

So everyone else was going, I really think we should pull back, Herr General Feld-Marshal, and customers going, no, I can't, because the Vera won't let me. So it could have worked. The big problem that the Allies have is the obvious thing to do in Italy,

where it's non and narrow and it's got lots of mountains, and it really doesn't sort of encourage an overland approach. is to outflank it by sea. And, you know, all allied operations are by their nature amphibious, because they've got to come from America or from Britain, and they've got to get across oceans and seas and stuff.

So they all are. But it doesn't matter the fact that, well, first of all, there were no landing craft in 1939, and there weren't really many, many, and even until 1941. And so the landing craft, the assault craft, the Higgins boat, but also the much bigger landing ships, which are about 120 yards long. and those are the really key things.

They were new to warfare in the early part of the 1940s. And Americans alone between May 1942 and April 1943 built 8,719, assault craft of varying kind, which seems like a huge number. But then you have to think, oh, you have a hang on a minute. They're also fighting an island hopping war in the Pacific. Oh, and by the way, you've got to do Sicily. And they're all taking huge amount of punishment because these landcraft aren't just depositing people on the,

day of the invasion, they're going back every single day, all day, every day and night dropping supplies off. And every time a landing craft hits the beach, it's a crash landing. You're coming onto the beach. And these things are really cheaply made, so they cause damage, which then means you've got to repair them. And at the same time, by the way, you've also got to prepare for Operation Overlord, which is the priority in the main event. So what sounds like a huge number of landing craft actually means there isn't much left for an operation in Anzio. There's enough to kind of to make it a punt worth taking, but there isn't enough to guarantee. decisive victory. And that's the problem. And that is not the fault of General Alexander,

who is the overall commander-in-chief of the Allies in Italy. It's certainly not the fault of Mark Clark, who is the U.S. 5th Army commander. It's certainly not fault of the troops. It's just the way it is. You can only do what you can do with what you've got. And the allies constantly throughout the Second World War are constantly fighting this battle between got to get a move on, got to get the war over and done with. But at the same time, we don't want to have catastrophic losses. So it's a kind of, you know, and we've only got X number of supplies. I mean, everyone always wants more than they've got. And that is absolutely the case for Italy.

And the real problem with Italy is that there's enough to do something to make it worth invading Sicily. But there's not enough to secure a victory easily and convincingly. And that's the fate of the poor, poor bastards that end up having to kind of slog out mountains or land on the Andio Beachhead. And they just don't quite have enough. And the commander of the American Corps that goes in, which again, is a polyglot force of British and Americans, US Six Corps. He's not kind of a thruster. He's not a kind of tactical.

This is General Clark, right? This is General Clark, right? No, this is John Lucas. So Mark Clark, I think, is superb. I'm a big fan of Mark. No, I was going to say, you write very favorably of Mark Clark. Yeah, I think he's great. I think he, you know, no man has, in the U.S. Army, ever has a larger army, a single army.

I mean, there are commanders like Bradley or of Ozzy, Eisenhower, you have army. under their command, but no one has a largest single army than Mark Clark, and not a single American army commander has the nationalities that he has to deal with, you know, which makes life a lot more complicated because you're dealing with lots of cultural differences and all sorts of stuff and politics come into play in a way. They don't if it's just your own nation, own national force. So he does all that. And, you know, he's broken through the Bernhardt line in winter, which is an amazing feat. He's very closely, nearly broken through the Gustav line.

He's not given enough landing craft to be comfortable for Anzio, but it kind of almost works. And what it does do is draw off a huge amount of German troops, and when they counterattack at Anzio, they get rebuffed. So that's both tying down lots of German troops and destroying them, attritting them at the same time. And when you're then planning your big effort,

which is Operation Diadem, which is finally launched on the evening of the length of May 1944, which is a big, big concentrated effort, But now the rains have dried out and the mudders turned to dust and all the rest of it. You can bring to bear your superiority and airpower and mechanization and all the rest of it. Suddenly, having that foothold in the Anzio Bridgehead, 30 miles south of Rome and kind of 40 miles north of the Gustav line, is really damn useful. So, you know, I'm broadly in favor of, I think the Anseo Bridgehead was a good idea. And I don't think it was the fault of the ground commanders.

If you want to do any finger pointing for the failures of the Italian campaign, point them at the combined chiefs of staff who authorized it in the first place without the proper kind of backing and support and prioritization. Well, you may remember this. You know, Churchill wanted more of an attack through the Mediterranean. Roosevelt didn't want it. He wanted to wait for the Normandy invasion, and so you can see some of the implications here in these battles.

I'm going to implore you to look at the... the text that I sent you and look at the copywriting on the instruction manual for the model because it's 1968, James, and this is copywriting for a seven-year-old's model, and the density of history that's in the copywriting is extraordinary. I went back and looked at it in preparation for this interview, and the copywriter knew the story, you know, as rendered in your book. All right, well, we're getting the last few minutes of this podcast. So we are fortunate to limit these things to 30 minutes. Of course.

I want to go to the five words, the famous five words that me and my producer come up with. I'm going to say the word. You're going to give me the feeling that you get when I mention the word. These are actually people because they're in and around tangentially this story about the Italy campaign. So let's start with Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Well, I think he was a great man. I think he was a man of vision. He was a man of enormous geopolitical understanding.

And he was a man who offered possibilities. You know, when you're in a life and death struggle, you need people that can persuade you. You need people that combine you. You need men of vision, of dynamism, of charisma. You know, that's the problem with the moment is we haven't got those guys. I mean, you know, say what you like about Kiersa. I mean, he seems like a very nice man, and I think he's an honorable fellow. This is the current Prime Minister of Britain?

But, you know, is he hugely charismatic and a great visionary? Not so sure. So I think he was a great man. You know, he's flawed, of course. All the great men are. But thank goodness for the developed world and the democratic world, but he was the political leader of Great Britain in 19. 1940, I threw out the whole of level two.

No, no question. I mean, he literally, in so many different ways, man of the century, I think, because Roosevelt was a charmer. Roosevelt was a great strategist. He pulled the Americans through the Depression and helped to manage the war. But without Churchill holding ground in May and June of 1940, it would have been a much darker, much, much worse world. It would have been not a lot that the Americans could have done.

without Churchill's steadfastness and his inspiration to his fellow citizens. So let's go to Franklin Roosevelt. Let's go to FDR. Well, I just think he's, well, I think he is one of the great men of his entry. I think he's, for me, he's the greatest president you've ever had. Well, we agree. Again, Dominic Sanbrook and I are always fighting, James Holland. We're always fighting about different things.

We both agree on FDR. So this, this would be the trilogy of Holland, Scaram, But tell us why you feel that. Well, I think he's a great man. And I'll tell you for why, because I think he understood very early on the Wilsonian utopia, this idea of free trade, low tariffs, we'll all be beautiful together, everyone be happy and prosperous, and then you want to go to war. That was great, but it was just ahead of his time and the delivery wasn't right. But he knew that the premise of it was spot on. And that's what he was working to from the moment he comes into power. And what are the first things you do? He enacts a good neighbor policy.

Because we've been traditionally really against Mexico and our Latin American neighbors. We've been brutal to them. Let's be nice to them. And maybe, okay, so the trade deficit might work against us on the bookkeeping. But overall, we'll be richer for this. Because if everyone's happy and prosperous, then we can benefit from that prosperity. And he was absolutely right. And he then took this into the Four Freedoms, which he announced on his inauguration in March 1941. You know, freedom of self-determination, freedom of religion, freedom of fear, freedom of want. I mean, what's not to like about any of those four freedoms, which then gets developed into the Atlantic Charter,

which he sort of, you know, springs on Churchill and I absolutely gets him to sign up to in a moment of just striking genius. Out of that comes Bretton Woods, you know, which is an economic conference in July 1944, in which the IMF and the World Bank get established. Again, what's not to like about this? I mean, this has helped stabilize economies. Britain's been a beneficiary of an IMF bailout. Looks like France is about to be a beneficiary of an IMF bailout. You know, this is what stabilizes economies

when they're going through particularly tough times. And as we all know, when the economy is rough, politics can get rough. When politics gets rough, economies can get rough. And when economies and politics get rough, rough, you can have war. It's like a really easy three-way process. So in the future, let's try and limit that. And out of that comes his vision for the post-war, which is inherited by Harry S. Truman, which for me is, who for me is kind of a pretty close second, actually,

to Roosevelt. I think he's a great man because he's not born to greatness. He's not obviously great. He's a humble guy from Independence, Missouri, from the Midwest. He hasn't been in a university. He has nothing about him on the evening of 12th of April that suggests he's going to be a great president. But I think he is. You know, and he is the one who, you know, okay, it's a Marshall plan, but it really is a Truman plan. And he's the guy who persuades Congress, persuades America that the victors need to help out financially, the vanquish to make a better world. Again, genius. I mean, I've rifted off from Roosevelt.

But I mean, he's a great man, great man. The most fascinating thing about all of that is that he only meets Roosevelt a few times. Yes. And so what people, David McCullough writes about this in a biography 33 years ago, he's reading through Roosevelt's papers. He asks Eleanor Roosevelt for his papers. And he's like, okay, listen. And he says this literally to his staff. This guy is better and way bigger than me.

I don't even know how I'm going to fill his shoes. But let me tell you something. All these ideas that he has. I'm going to try to execute. And then he does something that we don't do anymore, James. There is a senator by the name of Arthur Vandenberg. He was a senator from Michigan from 1928 to 1951. He was a member of the opposition.

He was a devout isolationist. Truman goes to him. He had work with him in the Senate. He's now the president of the United States. Vandenberg's a Republican. He goes to Vandenberg and he lays out the plan. And Vandenberg, this Midwestern American idealist, sides with Truman. Think about this.

No, we're not going to pee on each other. We're not going to blast each other. We're going to build a new, better world. Okay. And that world is going to be on the back of America. And that world is going to be supported by America. Okay. And you fast forward 80 years.

We have this grievance president now that wants to be. to extract pain from the rest of the world. It's so heartbreaking for somebody like me because this is, you know, the Scaramucci family's had an eternal love affair with America. And to watch America go into this direction, it would be like if Charles Lindberg

had won the 1940 presidential election as opposed to FDR. Okay, two, three, three. This is precisely why I'm writing a book about it right now. I mean, I'm doing a very short, 40,000-word polemic on all this stuff. You know, and it's just fascinating.

And unfortunately for you, you'll have to come back on open book and you'll have to describe this book to me after I'm done reading. Just tell me when I'm there. All right. So let's go to the last three. Okay. Joseph Stalin. How is, and I want in the context of the Italian trilogy, Joseph Stalin. Well, he's a monster.

He's an absolute monster and he's constantly interfering. He's trying to get, you know, what he wants is a post-war, a communist Italy over which he's. he can have yet more influence. I mean, his burning ambition, once he realizes he's not going to lose the war, is to hoover up as much territory as he possibly can under his own influence. Because he's power crazy.

You know, it's not because he's ideologically communist. It's because he's power crazy, like another person in charge of Russia at the moment. And, you know, he's constantly putting a spanner in the works. And it makes life very difficult. One of the consequences of this, by the way, is that the British, are trying to rearm the partisans in the north,

a number of whom are, or the majority of whom are in communist-backed resistance brigades, Garibaldi brigades. And what the British do is they say, oh, yeah, we're going to do this arms drop at a certain time. We're going to send you loads of stuff. It's going to be great. We're going to send you some British and American liaison officers.

They're going to help with the drops and everything. It's all going to be cool. And then they never happen. Oh, no, it got crashed into a mountain. Oh, I'm really sorry about that. Or it didn't happen. So the gulf between what the British and Americans were actually saying they were delivering to partisans in the Alps and the upper eponines, and what they were actually delivering was enormous. So they were delivering a trickle promising a huge amount.

Consequence of that was the loss of partisans struggled and died and suffered and were killed needlessly. That was because at the end of the war, the last thing the Allies want is lots of commies running around northern Italy with stand guns and Tommy guns and stuff. And that's a direct consequence of the interference of Stalin. Okay, last two. Adolf Hitler. Oh, it's just, I mean, it's just amazing. I mean, if you think about the end of the First World War, why does it end? It ends because Germany's not going to win and they run out of money.

You know, on that basis, Germany should have thrown in the towel in November 1941. That, you know, Barbaros had failed. They hadn't gone to Moscow. They couldn't possibly win. You know, take an arbitrary date like the middle of June, 19th, 4041. Middle of June, Germany's got one enemy, Britain plus Dominions and Empire.

Fast forward six months. It's got three enemies. It's got the USA, USSR, and Britain plus Empire and Dominions. It's not going to win. It's not going to win. Give up. But of course, he can't because Hitler, it's a Faustle-Year Reich or his Armageddon. He's a black and white kind of guy. There's no gray area whatsoever.

And so he consigns the Germany and the rest of the world that comes into contact with him. And, of course, world Europe's to this catastrophe from which the ramifications are still being felt. So, you know, I mean, he's delusional and mad and just a despicable character in every single way. But in addition to all of that, his generals know that certain strategies are incredibly flawed. You know, we can go to the Ardennes, we could go to Casino, we could go to Normandy, we could go to Calais, where he thinks Patton is amassing an army in Calais,

and yet they listen to him. And it's very reminiscent of what's going on right now. You have a group of people, wow, the guy's crazy. He's saying crazy things, but no, no, we're going to kow to the guy. So when people look back on these things, they always have the following attitude, James.

Oh, that wouldn't be me. That wouldn't be me to tell the emperor that he doesn't have, of course I would tell the emperor he has no clothes on, but they don't. they sit there and they tell the emperor that they're beautifully adorned. And so it's just a fact thing is, is the history doesn't repeat itself, but patterns of human behavior do.

And that's a subtle difference, but it's a really, really important difference. In other words, exactly right. People behave the same way when they're confronted with certain scenarios. And when there is someone who is kind of autocratic and powerful and has a certain kind of charisma, people just fall at their feet.

They just do, you know, and, you know, it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's like a it's like a sort of spell has been cast on people. I mean, you know, you experienced it yourself very briefly. I mean, you you know what I'm talking about here. What do you call it the Potomac? Pottomac. No, no, it's Potomac fever. You want to be close to the power. You have infection for this and then you start to your mind wanders away from your principles into something more delusional. And so, uh, And listen, and by the way, the reason why I think I'm a good candidate to talk about this is that I fell into it. I felt I was susceptible to it.

So you can sit there and pretend otherwise that your moral and your principled and all these other things, but we're human. And we have a tendency to do human things being human. And so there's human frailty, James. And that's why this period of time is so interesting because there were so many men and women in times of great. stress where they rose to the occasion as opposed to falling into something more frail. Okay, the last guy on my list, and then I'm going to let you go, sir, is Dwight David Eisenhower. Oh, what a great man. I mean, again, I love him for the same reason I love Harry S. Truman, you know, a humble guy

born in Texas, brought up in Abilene. I've been to his house, the family home in Abilene, Kansas, by the way. It's a pretty humble place. The railroads still cross the center of town. And yet there he is, suddenly on the world stage, and he responds to that, and he just gets it. And one of the things that makes D-Day successful, one of the things that makes the Western allies so successful is because they're not actually allies, their coalition. They're not formal allies at all. And the coalition, and particularly the one that kind of sees Allied forces invading Normandy on the 6th of June 1944, is in my mind the kind of the apogee of coalition warfare, of cooperation, of coordination, of coming together towards a single common goal that everyone gets, everyone knows what they've got to do, everyone's pulling together.

It doesn't matter that you might have different views, doesn't matter that you might come from different cultural backgrounds, doesn't matter that when all this fighting's over, you're going to have a few things that you need to are now. right now, right here, the most important thing is to get the hell out of, get rid of the world of narcissism and get a job done. And he is just the master at focusing that and bringing that together and ensuring that little international spats and schisms or even just national spats and skivings that, you know, there are as many spats and problems and arguments and personality clashes within the U.S. armed forces as, you know, there's, there are as many spats and problems and arguments and forces as there are between British and American or between British and British. So the idea that it's kind of, you know, everyone in America's anglof, anglophob and everyone in Britain is Americaphobic

is just nonsense. Compared to the kind of alliances that Germany has, you know, they're a marriage made in heaven. But if they are a marriage made to heaven, I honestly believe they were. You know, they're like the kind of adored couple that kind of stick together 35 years, but have a few spats occasionally and kind of, you know, a few periods where they're not talking to each other. But generally it kind of works. And the person who's binding it, who's the glue on all of that, is Eisenhower. And let's also not forget that he's the guy at 4.15 a.m. on Monday, the 5th of June, 1945, is not raining outside.

They could actually go that day, but they don't. They've decided to postpone 24 hours. The weather looks dodgy. There's a little narrow little bubble of high pressure that may disappear off into the North Sea or it may not. On his shoulders, the rest of the decision, only he can make that decision. Do we go or not go? He sits on his armchair in the library, he goes his hands of hands,

and he goes, okay, let's go and does it. 60 cigarettes into the decision, right? Smoking, no, one and a half. His camels, yeah, yeah, yeah. But point is, he makes a single, arguably the single most important decision that anyone in the Allied High Command has to make in the mortality. He's a ringing in his ear.

And, you know, listen, I, I. He's a great man, great, great man. He is so under a preemptive. appreciate it also as a president. You know, I mean, because there were so many things he did in the post-World War II era that kept the peace despite the intensity of the Cold War, the rise of anti-communism in the U.S. and all the different things that he did. But these were great men. And you are one hell of an historian. And I really appreciate you coming on, James. The title of the book is Casino 44, the brutal battle for Rome, but embedded in this book,

is lessons in psychology, lessons in warfare, lessons in principles. And it's amazingly well done. I appreciate you coming on to discuss it. Thanks, James. Oh, thank you so much, as always. I am Anthony Scaramucci, and that was Open Book. Thank you so much for listening. If you like what you hear, tell your friends,

and make sure you hit follow or subscribe wherever you listen to your podcast. While you're there, please leave us a rating or review. If you want to connect with me or chat more about the discussions, it's at Scaramucci on X or Instagram. I'd love to hear from you. I'll see you back here next week.