Open Book with Anthony Scaramucci - The Greatest Generation Never Told Us the Truth About War - Peter Caddick-Adams

Episode Date: February 24, 2026

Peter Caddick-Adams is a lecturer in military history and current defense issues at the UK Defence Academy. He is the author of Monte Cassino: Ten Armies in Hell and Monty and Rommel: Parallel Lives. He holds the rank of major in the British Territorial Army and has served with U.S. forces in Bosnia, Iraq, and Afghanistan. 📚Get a copy of his books here: Sand and Steel: The D-Day Invasion and the Liberation of France Snow and Steel: The Battle of the Bulge, 1944-45 Fire and Steel: The End of World War Two in the West Winston Churchill: The Prime Ministers Series 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. Pre-order my next book, All the Wrong Moves: How Three Catastrophic Decisions Led to the Rise of Trump, out on the 17th of September in the UK and the 22nd of September in the US: ⁠https://linktr.ee/anthonyscaramucci⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Conditions apply. My uncle Anthony drafted. They moved his high school graduation from June. of 43 to March so that they could put him in the UK to train for the Normandy invasion. My uncle Orlando, slightly older than him, drafted, was deployed in Africa and then redeployed into Belgium for the Battle of the Bulge. So both of them, thankfully, survived. And then my Uncle Salvatore got to Europe as a member of the U.S. Army in May of 1945. So he was there after the war. They worked with the SS. You know, Eisenhower and Marshall allowed SS officers to help

police, the security perimeters in Berlin, in some of the areas that they wanted to prevent looting and have some type of structure, crime control, etc. And so the SS were used. Many Americans don't realize that. Well, this is what you and I call the greatest generation. And I don't think they've been equaled in the task and the challenges they had. Today we call them heroes. Their view collectively, and I've interviewed over 2,000 veterans who took some part in the Second World War. What they will tell you is that they weren't heroes. They didn't do anything special because their whole generation was called upon to serve. Welcome to Open Book.

I am Anthony Scaramucci. Your host, joining us today is Peter Caddick Adams. What a prolific history writer. He's an award-winning author. He's authored many great books, including his most recent Winston Churchill. And, of course, his WW2 trilogy, Sand and Steel. snow and steel, which, you know, my uncle fought in that Battle of the Bulge. We'll talk a little bit about that.

In 1945 victory in the West, and of course, I had the great opportunity to meet you at the Chalk History Festival, which I'm going back to, sir. I don't know if you're going to go back there, but I had such a good time there. I'm going back. So it's a pleasure to have you on. So you've written about D-Day, Monte Cassino, the Battle of the Bulge, and the final months of the war. but let's start with you, if you don't mind. So what drew you to military history and why has the Second War

remains such a central focus of your work? You and I, I think Anthony, are about the same age. And from about the age of 10, I was always making plastic model kits of tanks and aircraft, usually from World War II. And in the 1970s, I met a bunch of guys who restored Second World War military vehicles to military spec and took them over to the battlefields of Europe.

And in 1975, we visited the D-Day beaches. And I saw for real what Utah Beach and Omaha were really like. And this was also right at the beginning of personal, small, handheld metal detectors. And I was transfixed to some. I watched some guys go up the beach and follow the trail of a few soldiers from 1944 by the cartridges and other stuff they left behind. And that made a big, big impression on me. Later on, I became a soldier, and I've had 35 years sort of regular and reserve service

in various combat zones. And all of that thrown together and becoming a professional military historian and teaching at the UK Defense Academy for 20 years, created this sort of impulse to write and put down what I knew from my military studies. But what I found out right going back to 1975. So, you know, I mean, I appreciate all that. I had this love affair with it as well

because of my ancestry and my two uncles. So one was in the Normandy invasion. My uncle, Orlando Scaramucci, fought. in the Ardennes in the Battle of the Bulge. You're probably not going to be surprised by this, but they never talked about this. They kept it to themselves. And I think my uncle Anthony,

who I'm named after that was on Normandy Beach, actually had some PTSD from it, the whole experience in terms of the way he lived his life when he came home. But let's start with that generation, if you don't mind, sir. So I want you to synthesize everything, you've written, and I want you to talk about the generation, and I'm not talking about Churchill,

sir, who was born before these men. I'm talking about men, primarily men, frankly, some women, of course, as well, but men born draft age to enter the Second World War from the West. Well, this is what you and I call the greatest generation, and I don't think they've been equaled in the task and the challenges they had that none of them had anticipated. and today we call them heroes, but they will come back very modestly and, as you say, quite often never discussed what they went through,

but their view collectively, and I've interviewed over 2,000 veterans who took some part in the Second World War of a whole range of different nationalities. What they will tell you is that they weren't heroes, they didn't do anything special, because their whole generation was called upon to serve. And so at the end of it in 1945, if they survived, they were lucky, they mourned their lost friends,

but they didn't think they had done anything special because everybody had done it. Everybody had put on uniform or had worked in war work in some way or another. And it took a long time for them to leach out the stories of what had happened to them, or their close family. That process probably didn't start until after the 50th anniversary of the Normandy landings, when there was a great outpouring of books, and people were ready to open up and understood, actually, they had done something. And they were ordinary people, but in extraordinary times.

And they achieved the stability in the world and the freedom that we enjoy today. but you don't realize that when you're a 10-year-old talking to grown-ups who've seen, looks the elephant in the eye, seen combat, won medals, seen friends die. But now, of course, you and I have a great long list of questions. We wish we had asked that generation while they were alive that we would have really cherished. And those opportunities are fast diminishing because the Second World War generation, are probably less than 100,000 worldwide. It's incredible.

You know, and I believe that we've sort of lost our way from that principle-based discussion and that level of patriotism. Let's go to, if you don't mind, sir. I'm going to talk about all your books, but I want to go to Victory in the West 80 short years ago, soon to be 81 years ago. We are ending the Second World War. There's a lot of commotion towards the end, as we both know. And there's some decision-making done in the last couple of months that lead into the aftermath, sort of the epilogue, which is the Cold War.

So tell us a little bit about that. Tell us about some of the mistakes that the Allies made as we're getting to Berlin and its aftermath. Well, the Allies didn't know how the war was going to end. They had assumed that the worst part would be to cross the River Rhine, which they planned to do. do, at the end of 1944 in the Battle of the Bulge, upset all of that. And Hitler's sending of all his spare troops and tanks to the Ardennes, the Battle of the Bulge, delayed the inevitable by about two months, so we don't cross the River Rhine until March 1945. And by then it's a damp squib.

It's a lot less bloody than we had expected it to be, because all the German resources had been used up in the Battle of the Bulls. Then there's a great competition as to who is going to capture what and particularly Berlin. And by that time, the Russians are a lot closer to Berlin than they would have been at the end of the previous year. I mean, if you take a snapshot of March 1945, we are about 400 miles from Berlin, the the Western allies, the Russians are 40 miles away. And Eisenhower has to take a series of very difficult decisions. Does he commit the Allies to taking Berlin and defying the Russians?

But at enormous cost, I mean, you know, the Germans are going to hang on to this capital city and they're going to fight like tigers and our Butchers bill is going to be huge. Or do we agree to de-conflict? meet the Russians along a river line, concede that the capital city of Germany is going to be theirs, but liberate almost the rest of Germany. And that's what we end up doing. And in so doing, we end up liberating all the concentration caps within Germany that we hadn't anticipated, that we hadn't trained for, we hadn't prepared for,

and those inmates in the most awful state are perhaps the single most vivid memory I found from American veterans in 1945. They weren't prepared to meet the inhabitants of the camps. They didn't know what to do with them. They watched them die in their arms and the single most frightening factor, I think, that caused so many PTSD, as you many,

just now was the inhabitants of the camps rather than cold, hard combat. It was just seeing what mankind could do to mankind, and that was completely unexpected. My uncle was wounded. He then stayed in the, you know, he had the opportunity to get discharged, but like everybody, he stayed, he got healed, and he went to go fight again. And I never got to any of the camps. But he ended up in Potsdam with Truman. And we have a lot of a beautiful picture of him at the Potsdam conference alongside in many so. He never met Truman. How fascinating. Gosh. Yeah, the whole delegation of soldiers. Yeah, it's a really, you know, beautiful story. And we have his military uniform, you know, from 185 years ago, you know, on display

in my cousin's house. But the reason I'm bringing this up is that he said to me that the pictures So I guess Ike had made people take pictures of what was going on when I got to one of the camps and the pictures were getting passed around. And he said that that, you know, of all the things that they experienced in the war, the brutality of the fighting, the death, you know, seeing people die, unfortunately having to shoot at people. And without him telling me so, but probably killing people, the camps where innocent people were torched and murder. I think had this dramatic impact. So what do you say to a current group of young people about all this? You know, some people are saying, oh, that didn't happen and all this nonsense on the social media and the internet and so forth.

What do you say to a group of young people, sir, about this experience that these men, and, you know, some women, but mostly men faced? Eisenhower understood that the scale of the crimes committed would be so beyond human comprehension that some people in generations to come would push back, would claim it had never happened, and even returning Americans in 1945, found that in the United States there were people who were disbelieving that this could possibly happen. So Eisenhower telegraphed Roosevelt initially, because Roosevelt was still alive then, and then had conversations with Truman, that he wanted as many people as possible to visit the camps.

He wanted a delegation from Senate and Congress and the British House of Commons and House of Lords to visit to see with their own eyes and also a delegation of newspaper correspondence who he would give guided tours around all the various camps and they should be flown over as soon as possible and he himself kept a diary of what he saw and made sure that as many photographs were taken as possible

for exactly that reason. He foresaw that A, there were people who ideologically just would refuse to face this, but be that the scale of the camps. These aren't the death camps like Auschwitz. These are mostly work camps. and some were concentration camps. But the Nirenberg trials after the war identified the fact that the Germans had taken from all the occupied countries, 12 million slave laborers.

And these were French and Belgians and Danes and Greeks and Bulgarians and Hungarians and Russians and you name it. Some were civilians, some were military, but they were forced to work in German industry, in German homes, on German farms, in mines, They got no money. They were given prison uniforms and they were kept in behind barbed wire during each evening and marched out to work during each day. And the Nirenberg trials identified the fact that there were 12 million of these people who were half starving, had no idea what was going on. And for the most part, these were the people that were liberated in 1945. and they're, if you like, outside the concentration camp system, they're not Jewish, they're not homosexual, they're not gym gypsies, they're not all of the other categories that the Nazis identified for extermination, and they just get caught up. And then they're sent home and you see them for the next six months, wondering the roads, wondering where to go.

Sometimes by the time they get home, their countries don't even exist anymore. and there is no there's no way to buy anything and money isn't even a topic because paper money is distrusted you know the currency

that everyone respects as cigarettes and this is where my own background as a soldier sort of kicks in and I'm sure it will with many of your viewers and listeners because when I was in

Bosnia it was exactly the same you had a dismembered European country where money was valueless, people were roaming around looking for food, they had lost their relatives and their homes, people in uniform sometimes could give them sort of sucker and help, so we gave them our rations, but the only currency worth anything was cigarettes. And that's how Europe was for the first few years after the Second World War. So not first few months, first few years. And it was this huge drifting population of people that were just trying to find where to go to.

Oh, I appreciate. I appreciate the commentary. When did your uncle come home? How long was he out of it? Well, he, well, two uncles. So I had three uncles in that period. So I'll tell you about the three of them quickly. My uncle Anthony drafted, they moved his high school graduation from June.

of 43 to March so that they could put put him in the UK to train for the Normandy invasion. My uncle Orlando slightly older than him drafted, was deployed in Africa and then redeployed into Belgium for the Battle of the Bulge. So both of them thankfully survived. And then my uncle Salvatore got to Europe as a member of the U.S. Army in May of 1945. And so he was more on patrol. And, you know, he had some fascinating. He had some fascinating stories. So he was there after the war. But, you know, they, believe it or not, and I think you know this from your historical writings, you know, they work with the SS. You know, Eisenhower and Marshall allowed SS officers to help police the security perimeters in Berlin and some of the areas that they wanted to prevent

looting and have some type of legal or, you know, structure, crime control, et cetera. And so the SS were used. You know, many, many Americans don't realize that. I think there's a mistake that Bremer and Wolfowitz and those guys made in Iraq. You know, they had the chance to buy off the Republican Guard and get their help. They disbanded them. They turned out. Most of them ended up in ISIS. You know what I mean? We have a, you know, I don't know. We have principles and then we have reality of life. You know what I mean? So I learned a lot from those three men. My uncle's I get that exactly. I was in Iraq as well.

I was in fact the chief United Kingdom historian in uniform as a major, but working in the national contingent headquarters in Qatar alongside the American headquarters. So I saw it all from a day-to-day basis unfolding. And history was with us so much of the time. you just wanted to shout out and say, no, you know, disbanding the Iraqi army is not the solution. You need them. These guys were whole the country together through the transition phase. And it was all, it turned out to have all been predetermined and contracts were let.

And anyway, you know, that was the joys and the frustrations of being a historian. And I've seen three major campaigns unfold at operational level, Bosnia, Iraq and Afghanistan. And that's why my studies of World War II have been so useful, because you can see the same pressures around today. And, you know, they're still around today as we talk. So let's go to your books for a moment. I mean, this is about your books, of course, but you're such a great historian. I wanted to get some of these questions in. It's talking about D-Day for a second.

What were some of the revelations you learned in your research in writing that amazing book? I think the reference point for D-Day that most people are. familiar with as saving private Ryan. And if you use that as a reference point, you realize it's good cinema, but it doesn't reflect reality. And the reality is that most

of those landing on the 6th June 1994 or in the days after had been training and preparing in the UK for up to a year beforehand. And they had gone through several phases of training, but they had been assaulting

similar-looking beaches, using all the right equipment, practicing all their drills, by day and by night in a variety of different sea conditions, and, you know, disembarking out at sea into landing craft and then piling into the beaches.

They've been doing this for 12 months beforehand. And, you know, the Air Force and the Navy had all also been practicing, you know, along similar lines. And we're not just talking about a few thousand people. If you've got a division landing on each beach on the first day, you've got the same on the second day, the same on the third day, you've got to get all of these guys prepared and trained.

They have to understand amphibious warfare. And during the course of that year before D-Day, going through the individual ward diaries of the American battalions, the British battalions, the Canadians, the various squadrons, the Air Force, the air divisions, the air assault divisions, I suddenly discovered that more people had died on training than actually died on Dedo. And we think of the bloodletting that your uncle saw on Omaha Beach. This was almost almost. does nothing compared with what they had been through in the weeks and the months beforehand. And an awful lot of people, for example, drowned in the surf, in English surf, in training

and preparation. There are a lot of gliders that crashed in the English countryside preparing for D-Day, never mind the German interruption of a practice at Utah Beach in April 1945. And it underlines the point that to get it right on operations for combat in reality, you've got to take your training is going to be as realistic as possible, and you've got to be prepared to take those casualties in training. And that's not being excessive or bloodthirsty. That means on the day you'll get it right.

And so if you tot up the number of people who actually die on D-Day versus the number of people who died in training accidents before, hand, far more dying training before. And that really opened my eyes. You know, again, an awesome book. I'm going to flip it over to the Ardennes. So you've, you've got a successful operation in D-Day. You've got all the trials and tribulations of warfare. And it looks like the war is actually going in favor of the Allies. We're convening in Breton Woods to talk about post-World War II. Economies. All things. are going in the right direction, but then we get to the fall of 1944 in a very, very cold winter

in Europe. And the Germans are not done yet, are they? Right. And they're not ready to give up. And so tell us about your book, Snow and Steel. Well, Snow and Steel was the first one I wrote of the trilogy, funnily enough, because the year after I'd been to the D-Day beaches, that was 1975, 1976, I went to the Ardennes. And just walking through those mountains, the hills of the Ardennes and all the forests, there was so much stuff left from World War II that we discovered helmets, Mestins, jerichans, ammunition, you name it, which was absolutely fascinating. And you realised the battle had only been seemingly sort of fought yesterday.

And as far as the Germans were concerned, the war was over. As far as the Allies were concerned, the war was also nearly over. But Hitler himself had other ideas. And the Battle of the Bulges, Hitler's campaign, no one else's. He was the one who forced it through in the face of massive objections from every element of the German armed forces, including the SS. but after the July plot against him people were afraid of standing up to Hitler too much

because that meant you went to a concentration camp however senior German a general you were and so did your relatives and there had already been executions of people like Rommel Germany's best known and favourite general connected with the July plot So there was a real anxiety about standing up to Hitler. And that's how he bulldoze this whole plan through.

And the senior German staff realized that if you assault with too little fuel, you're never going to achieve your objectives. If you don't have enough manpower, if you don't train properly. And this training point, and I go back to D-Day, To get D-Day right one day, 24 hours, we train for a year. The Germans don't train or prepare properly for the Oddennes because Hitler is so nervous about secrecy. And his great plan leaking out that the divisional commanders are only told what they're about to do three days beforehand. And the soldiers going into battle are only told 24 hours beforehand.

So if you can't train properly, you're never ever going to achieve what you need to do. in combat, and that's one of the things that pulls the rug. The other thing, we, I mean, we, lack of fuel is a common thing that we talk about with the Battle of the Bulge, but air power is probably what finishes the Germans more than anything else. Because sooner or later, the clouds are going to clear. Sooner or later, the snow is going to stop. And then all the German military equipment is going to show up on the, the blanket of white snow throughout the Ardennes. and allied air is

which is supreme it's totally dominant it's just going to be able to pick off everything on the ground on the German side and that's what it does so once the Allied Arsenal is thrown at the bulge and that takes probably a month

it contains it it severs it it bites it off and all the time air power but massive allied logistics petrol ammunition which the Germans simply don't have, is just going to dissipate it. But it's the US Army's finest hour. They are completely surprised.

In a lot of sectors, they react very poorly. There are poor decisions made by fairly senior commanders. There are fleeing logisticians and artillerymen. There is panic. And no one likes to see an army that is panicking. But from that, they grip themselves, reorganised themselves after about a week. And within a month, it's been contained and the bulge has been dissipated. And to go from that position of a complete surprise, a major setback to complete and total victory in a month is something that not many armies are able to.

to do. And the way they reclaim the ground, they reorganize themselves, they restructure themselves, they bring in troops from everywhere you can think of. That's the triumph for the American military machine and its commanders led by Eisenhower. And that's the attraction of the Battle of the Bulge for me. It's not what the Germans are aiming to do because they're never going to succeed. It's how the US Army turns everything round and does that so well. I'm not. I'm so full of admiration. You know, it's just an amazing story. You know, unfortunately, I could talk you for several hours,

sir. We limit these things to about 30 minutes. So before I let you go, though, I'm going to mention three names. General Montgomery, General Rommel, and Winston Churchill. You've written about all three. Any common threads in their personalities? And if not, what are the stark differences? Well, that's a very good question.

If you won't commonalities, I think it's willpower. You have got to have that sense of vision of the end state, what it is you're trying to achieve. A very, very strong personality that will allow you to drive people to the end of their tether and then beyond to achieve that end state. And Rommel achieves that in the Western Desert. Montgomery achieves that by being a really obnoxious personality, but probably a very necessary, one in 1944-45, but he's a great organiser and a great trainer of men. And Winston Churchill, well, what can we say about him? I mean, it's sheer dogged willpower when, you know, Britain is alone.

Britain is on its uppers. It's in a really bad situation in 1940. And if ever history revolves around the dogged character. of one person in 1940, it's Winston Churchill. So I would say that's what links them all together. I love writing biographies, and those are the three I've produced so far. But they were, you know, absolutely fascinating. And fascinating, too, that Rommel and Montgomery are born within three days of each other,

although a few years apart. And to that mid-November birthday, you would add George S. Patton as well. And there's something about that month of November. That is a key time to producing great generals. The fact my own birthday falls there is neither here nor there, but they were fascinating characters. Okay, so we're down to the last couple of minutes here. I'm going to read you five words that have come from my producer and me on your books. And then I need you to give me like a sentence.

Okay, you're ready? Okay. If I say the word leadership, Peter, what do you say? You've got to have leadership in spades. you've got to actually believe what you're delivering in terms of leadership. Because if you can't lead, then others won't follow. If I say military, military, what do you say? You have a great military industrial complex, which serves your needs extremely well.

We don't and we've let it go. And a lot of my work today is lobbying to try and increase the power of Britain's military, both in terms of uniform personnel, but also in terms of manufacturing capability to get us back to the army I know and love that we started to let slide 20, 30 years ago. What about the word war? War is a very difficult concept because it involves the destruction of things and the destruction of people. But you know from your own experience on the other side of the Atlantic, and I know from my experience, this side of the Atlantic and elsewhere, you have got to be strong to defend freedom, and the only way you're ever going to achieve a state where war is minimised, less likely is by being strong and having strong armed forces yourselves. That's what NATO has done. That's what we've managed to achieve since 1945.

And hopefully we will carry on doing that into the future. What about D-Day, sir? I say the word D-Day. D-Day is quite often shorthand for the Second World War. For you guys, it starts with Pearl Harbor. For other people, it may start with June 1941, the invasion of Russia, or the invasion of Poland in 1939. But we can all agree that D-Day is the, probably the single most important day of the Second World War, because that's the beginning of the end. I would say it's probably the most important day of the 20th century.

That's the day NATO was born. It shows you what happens, not just with proper training, but when you get together a coalition, because your country isn't strong enough to solve all the problems it would like on its own. and Europe isn't on its own either. But when we all come together, that just gives you an unbeatable force. And we saw that on the 6th of June, 1994 D-Day. You know, it's interesting.

You're much more eloquent to me, sir. When I hear D-Day, I think that's an ass-kicking that democracies will give you when you piss them off. That's what I think. All right, let's go to the next one, sir, all right? Let's go to Churchill.

What do you think of that word? give me a sentence on that one. Right, Winston Churchill is the personification of resolution, of vision, because he knows what he wants, he knows how to take his country there. He is the most frustrating, annoying individual, if you work close to him, because his contemporaries and his subordinates will say, Winston Churchill has ten ideas. every day, only one of which is any good, but you don't know which one of those 10 is the one worth pursuing. And so he drives his generals, admirals and air marshals mad by coming up with all sorts of

strange ideas. But my first job was working in the House of Commons, and I used to, so I know the British political system very well. and I know how difficult it is to make things happen, and yet Churchill managed to dominate the civil service, his fellow politicians and the military, to an extraordinary extent. We've never had a politician like him,

and we'll probably never see his like again. And the jury is still out as to whether we have great men of history. But I think there are great men of history, and Winston Churchill was so. certainly one of them. Well, I really appreciate you joining me today. I hope we can get you back on. What are you writing next, sir? Well, I'm going back, well, I'm actually doing three books, but the most important is one of the First World War. So I'm looking at 1918 in the same way I looked at 1945. So how an Allied coalition came together to beat the Germans and Austrians on the

Western Front at the end of the First World War. But that's not just an Anglo-American, Australian, Canadian coalition. There are Portuguese, there are Italians, there are lots of Frenchmen, there's Belgians who all get left out of the equation and they're coming into my story. So it's a complete reinterpretation of the First World War. So anyone who looks my Second World War books, I hope I can encourage them to travel back. with me to World War I as well. Thank you, my friend. I really appreciate you being here.

Thank you, Peter Kaddick Adams, for joining us. Legendary offer, so many great books. Sand and Steel, Snow and Steel, Churchill, Rommel and Montgomery, the 1945 victory in the West, and we're looking forward to more great works from you, and hopefully you'll come back on with us when you have them. Anthony, thank you for the honor of chatting to you. It's brilliant.