Dec. 25, 2024 - Bannon's War Room
47:55
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unidentified
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Bring a torch and let his of hell up. | |
| Bring a torch, come hurry and run. | ||
| It is Jesus, the Lord of the village. | ||
| Christ is born and there is God in our heart. | ||
| I'm Patrick K. O'Donnell and I'm hosting America's Combat History of Christmas. | ||
| And we're going to go back in time to our most important Christmas, the Christmas of 1776, where all could have been lost But all was won in a series of crucial victories, ten crucial days that will change the course of history. | ||
| Let's go back first to the summer of 1776, the Battle of Brooklyn, the Battle of Long Island, where a massive British force, most of the entire British Army and Navy congregate in New York Over 35,000, | ||
| along with their German allies, to crush the nascent United States, which is now only about a month, a little more than a month old, after the signing of the Declaration of Independence. | ||
| This wasn't a situation of negotiation. | ||
| It was a situation of we were going to crush the Americans, as they had done in all the other empire's history. | ||
| They had always won any kind of rebellion or revolution. | ||
| And they planned—the British Empire had planned to do it again. | ||
| And a massive and important hub was New York City because of its strategic location and its ability to make—to sally forth from different parts to the various parts of the colony. | ||
| It was one of the largest cities in the colonies at the time, and the British rolled up their entire fleet—or two-thirds of their fleet and much of their army, along with— Thousands of German or Hessian volunteers. | ||
| They land at Long Island and it's the summer of 1776. It's August. | ||
| And they make a sort of an epic attack. | ||
| The American lines, half the army is in New York and half is in Brooklyn or Long Island. | ||
| And the army is arrayed where It's on a long spur called the Heights Iguanas. | ||
| This is current day Greenwood Cemetery. | ||
| It's one of the greatest cemeteries in the United States where many, many notables have their final resting place. | ||
| But it's also the scene of an epic battle, the Battle of Brooklyn. | ||
| And it's here on the night of August 27th, 26th, 1776, that the battle begins in a watermelon patch where British skirmishers are out and they encounter Edward Hans, Pennsylvanian's rifleman, in a watermelon patch. | ||
| The British want the melons for obvious reasons and then a small battle occurs there in that patch. | ||
| But it's really, it just touches off a much larger operation. | ||
| The British are conducting a massive flanking maneuver around the Heights Iguanas with General Cornwallis in the lead, along with General Clinton and Lord Howe. | ||
| And they flank the American lines while another force approaches from the It's a classic hammer and anvil maneuver where they're trying to smash the Americans. | ||
| And the force that's the flanking maneuver is unseen. | ||
| They attack, you know, they move out in the midnight hours of the 26th and 27th. | ||
| And they move around. | ||
| And it's that morning, though, that General Grant with the British attack, the main line of resistance at the Heights of Gowanus. | ||
| And it's here that the Washington's immortals earn immortal fame. | ||
| I wrote this book, which is a multiple bestseller. | ||
| It's been through about 12 reprintings. | ||
| It's here that they conduct a rearguard that literally saves the United States. | ||
| The British are attacking from the flank and the front, and it's near a stone house that they lead a series of charges that allow the American army to escape back to their entrenchments in Brooklyn Heights. | ||
| And it's here that, you know, this epic stand, which is, as one historian at the time would say, It was an hour more important in our history than any other. | ||
| They make the stand. | ||
| It's in blood. | ||
| And there's about 400 Marylanders. | ||
| Nearly the entire force is annihilated or captured. | ||
| And what drew me to this book, like all the other books I've written, is it found me. | ||
| And I found a rusted old sign near that area that I mentioned, that battleground near that house. | ||
| Which says, here lie 276 Marylanders, Maryland heroes. | ||
| And I wanted to know more. | ||
| Where are they buried? | ||
| And the answer is we don't know. | ||
| They're buried in a mass grave in and around that area. | ||
| And it's one of the great mysteries in American history of where these men are located. | ||
| Many of them were captured and put on prison ships and their bodies were never seen again. | ||
| Because the prison ships were literally floating concentration camps, and most of the men that went on the ships never survived. | ||
| Fast forward a little bit, and it's... | ||
| Washington has to make a decision. | ||
| Does he stand and fight, or does he retreat? | ||
| And he has a war council in the middle of a massive lightning storm, and they decide to retreat. | ||
| And it's here... | ||
| That the story of the Marbleheaders relates directly to Christmas 1776. It's here that their first epic evacuation occurs. | ||
| They affect an American Dunkirk. | ||
| They pull off the entire American army in extraordinary circumstances. | ||
| The massive British army of 25,000 men is The entire front of the Brooklyn defenses, they face this army. | ||
| The British Navy is in the East River and about to sail behind the American defenses and crush it. | ||
| It's here at this time that the United States, which is only 45 days old, is in its greatest peril because Washington's army is potentially going to be destroyed. | ||
| Washington is about to be captured, and a miracle needs to occur, and that's exactly what God provides. | ||
| The Marbleheaders, the most experienced seamen or mariners in the Continental Army, are given the task of bringing the army off, 10,000 men, along with its horses and cannon, and somehow pull off The impossible. | ||
| In the middle of the prying British eyes and loyalists and everybody else, in the middle of the night, Washington orders the men that they are going to be attacking, when in reality they're moving back towards the boats. | ||
| Glover is only given a few hours. | ||
| They round up all the boats that they can, and they begin the task of bringing off the army somehow into To New York City itself. | ||
| And it doesn't go well at first. | ||
| The water in the river is so treacherous. | ||
| There's so many currents that they literally are not able to move the boats across and they have to abandon the operation. | ||
| They try to find Washington to call it off and he can't be found. | ||
| And miraculously he can't be found because they move forward with the operation. | ||
| And it's a race against time. | ||
| They only have about six or seven hours to move 10,000 men across the river. | ||
| And it's not just one time. | ||
| They have to go back nearly a dozen times with these boats under the eyes of the entire large portion of the British Navy somehow, which is parked not far on the East River. | ||
| And they are doing that back and forth The British Army is about to pounce in front of them. | ||
| The Navy is about to potentially be unleashed, but miraculously the winds don't favor the Navy to move behind the fortifications. | ||
| And they're able to move more men across, but daylight is coming. | ||
| And it's here that the hand of God, as the men say, shows itself in a fog. | ||
| A miraculous fog sets in and screens the movement of the remaining boats. | ||
| And they're able to evacuate the rest of the force back to New York City. | ||
| And it's from there that the American Army sustains one massive defeat after another. | ||
| And it's a situation of retreat and defeat, the greatest being at Fort Washington. | ||
| If you are familiar with the Fort Washington Bridge, the base of that bridge, a portion of it was a massive fortification that stretched over a mile. | ||
| It was a massive American fortification known as Fort Washington. | ||
| And they had a number of redoubts and defensive areas. | ||
| There was a star fort. | ||
| And it's here that The Americans make an epic stand, but what they don't know is that the second-in-command had deserted only a few days earlier and delivered the entire plans of the fort, all of its weak points, and where the forces were positioned so the British knew exactly where to attack. | ||
| And that's exactly what they did in mid-November when they started to To roll up the fort and roll up many of the men inside it. | ||
| The Washington's Immortals and the Indispensables, which is the book about the marble headers, is all based on original primary source documents, one being pension applications. | ||
| And one of the great stories of this book, both books actually, is a pension application from an individual worker That was lucky enough to escape Fort Washington. | ||
| And he talks about how the fort is being surrounded. | ||
| They find a rowboat and they row across the Hudson River and they make their way to New Jersey where Washington is in a house overlooking the entire battle through his spyglass. | ||
| And he sees Washington, distraught Washington. | ||
| And he sees Washington with tears in his eyes as the fort has fallen and many of his men are run through a gauntlet where British and German soldiers form a gauntlet and the men are run through the gauntlet and they're kicked, beaten, in some cases bayoneted, and robbed of their personal possessions. | ||
| This is just one of the defeats That Washington's army faces as they make their long retreat back through White Plains where they make a stand as well. | ||
| And eventually they cross over and make their way through New Jersey. | ||
| And it's the British Army that's never too far behind as they're felling trees and making their way towards the safety, the relative safety, they think. | ||
| Of the Delaware River in the farms of Pennsylvania. | ||
| And it's here that they're only just a little bit ahead of the British Army, that they escape across the Delaware and they are making preparations. | ||
| This is a situation where they escape one demise, but they now face another. | ||
| This is known as the crisis. | ||
| Some of the most crucial days in American history because everything was collapsing. | ||
| The enlistments for the men were about to expire. | ||
| Washington was about to lose his entire army. | ||
| Hyperinflation racked the colonies. | ||
| Prices for food skyrocketed. | ||
| The cause was about to be lost. | ||
| Many Americans in New Jersey had In other areas had taken a pardon from the king and we're now turning sides. | ||
| And everything was being lost. | ||
| The potential for the entire war ending was very much in the month of December 1776. And it's here that Washington plans one of the greatest comebacks in military history. | ||
| The crossing of the Delaware that will change the course of the entire Revolutionary War. | ||
| It's a epic stand. | ||
| It's an epic battle. | ||
| One of the greatest battles in American history, the Battle for Trenton. | ||
| And it's appropriately Washington's call sign or code words for that night were victory or death. | ||
|
unidentified
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Good morning and Merry Christmas. | |
| I'm Patrick K. O'Donnell, combat historian and best-selling author, hosting The Combat History of Christmas with the worm. | ||
| Today Steve is traveling, so I'm hosting it alone. | ||
| But we're talking about The combat history of Christmas and our most important history of Christmas, which is the Christmas of 1776 in the counterattack at Trenton, which changes history in the world. | ||
| And it's at in and around in Pennsylvania that Washington near Trenton on the Pennsylvania side decides to mount One of the greatest comebacks in military history. | ||
| An attack on the garrison of Hessian troops. | ||
| These are German mercenaries that are based in Trenton. | ||
| He's got one problem, though. | ||
| He somehow has to get across the Delaware River. | ||
| And this is a very difficult obstacle. | ||
| And it would... | ||
| Washington decides... | ||
| To launch the attack or the counterattack on Christmas Day. | ||
| What they don't know is that there will be a raging nor'easter that day that will make it almost impassable. | ||
| But days before the planning, he asks the most experienced mariner in the Continental Army, John Glover, who initially has the Marblehead Regiment with the Indispensables, he's now a brigade commander, if it's even possible to cross the river. | ||
| You know, making an assault crossing on a river against an enemy force is one of the most difficult things imaginable in a military maneuver. | ||
| And it was compounded by the climate that day. | ||
| But they don't know at the time if it's even doable. | ||
| So he asked Glover if it's possible. | ||
| Glover says to General Washington, don't worry, my boys can handle it. | ||
| And that's exactly what they do. | ||
| They pull off the impossible. | ||
| Washington, who's kind of known for complicated strategies, has three prongs of an attack that are to attack the Trenton garrison under the command of Johann Rahl. | ||
| And Rahl is an extremely experienced commander that has been, you know, since his childhood, A soldier, and a very, very good one. | ||
| He had, at White Plains, he had led the attack, and he even took, he led the attack at Fort Washington, which I mentioned earlier, and was, you know, incredibly important, played an important role in seizing the American garrison there. | ||
| This man's an incredible war hero. | ||
| He's also a very, very skilled commander and knows military strategy. | ||
| But he's left with a very difficult task. | ||
| He somehow has to defend this isolated garrison. | ||
| New Jersey has a number of smaller isolated garrisons that are tying down the British gains there. | ||
| And his 900 or so men are garrisoning the Trenton area. | ||
| They're on constant alert for American attacks and raids. | ||
| And he is given information by British intelligence. | ||
| There's a spy in Washington's camp that General Grant has that they will attack on Christmas. | ||
| So he's warned. | ||
| His men are armed. | ||
| They sleep in their arms and in their uniforms. | ||
| This is not the Christmas story that many children's books have of these men being drunk on Christmas and not ready to do battle. | ||
| It's just the opposite. | ||
| They're very trained. | ||
| They're ready to go. | ||
| But they're also worn out because the Americans had raided them multiple times. | ||
| And that night he's warned. | ||
| He's given a really quite extraordinary story. | ||
| He's given intelligence by a loyalist that the American Army had crossed the Delaware River and the enslaved individual tried to see him multiple times. | ||
| He was playing checkers at the time with another loyalist and later played cards. | ||
| And eventually, after being pestered multiple times, he sees the man and then takes the message which says that the Americans are coming and puts it in his pocket and never reads it. | ||
| And the Americans indeed are coming that night, on Christmas night. | ||
| And it's mission impossible, though, because John Glover and his men have to somehow cross a river, which is a raging torrent. | ||
| There's pieces of ice. | ||
| There is a nor'easter occurring where snow and sleet is pelting the men. | ||
| Only the most experienced mariners in the Continental Army can do this task. | ||
| They have to somehow transport over 2,500 men across the river About 12 miles north of Trenton, and they have to battle the different currents that are inside the river. | ||
| If they fail, there's literally an eight-foot waterfall several hundred yards down the river that will capsize the boats and drown many of the men, will die of hyperthermia if they're not successful. | ||
| But they're able to somehow... | ||
| With their skills and mariner skills, which they developed in the Grand Banks, which is off Nova Scotia, where they were fishermen, which are the most treacherous waters in the world, they're able to bring the men and the army across against all odds. | ||
| For perspective, Washington had two other attacks that were trying to cross the river, two other forces that were trying to cross the river. | ||
| They failed because the water was too treacherous. | ||
| It was only through the skilled hands of the marble hunters that they were able to cross the river, the Delaware, that night. | ||
| And they're using a variety of craft. | ||
| There's flat bottom boats. | ||
| There's also something called the Durham boat. | ||
| There's 25 to 40 of these boats which deliver iron to a Durham, the Iron Foundry near Durham, the Durham Iron Foundry. | ||
| And these boats are used to bring the men across in this raging snowstorm. | ||
| And I think what's so incredible is as the men get off the boats There's snow on the ground and many of them don't have shoes. | ||
| And there's many, many accounts of how they literally leave a trail of blood as they march in their wake because the men have no shoes. | ||
| But, you know, somehow they have this Elan in the spirit that is extraordinary. | ||
| One of the accounts in The Indispensables That chronicles the Marbleheader story talks about how they had a cheerfulness despite the fact that they were facing this weather that was beating down on them. | ||
| And as they probe forward, they had to go through a ravine, which was very slippery. | ||
| And many of the men were literally, some of the men were so exhausted that they almost fell asleep in the snow. | ||
| One man almost did. | ||
| And that would have been instant death. | ||
| He would have died of hypothermia. | ||
| And in this march, they move along and they meet a doctor whose dog is barking near his house. | ||
| And they approach him. | ||
| Anybody that approaches the army is literally apprehended because they could give away the great secret of the Revolutionary War that Washington had landed as force and they were moving towards Trenton. | ||
| They bring this doctor forward, who is a patriot, and he tells them that he will very gladly come. | ||
| And they move down the road and they encounter a force under the command of a guy by the name of Wallace, who was authorized by Adam Stephen to make a revenge raid. | ||
| And Washington is in a tower of rage. | ||
| Because he says to him, you, sir, have destroyed my entire plan, and it destroyed the element of surprise. | ||
| In reality, it's an unintended consequence that may have occurred. | ||
| The raid may have alerted Johann Rahl that the Americans had landed, but it was a small force, and that this was indeed the force that British intelligence had warned him of. | ||
| And he then went back to sleep. | ||
| Johan Rohl went back to sleep and never read the message that the Americans were coming. | ||
| And the Marylanders, who I chronicle Washington's immortals, there's a small force of Marylanders. | ||
| There's the stalwart men. | ||
| That remained, including the Marblehead Mariners that marched towards Trenton as daylight approaches. | ||
| And John Glover is marching along the River Road that corresponds with the Delaware River. | ||
| And without orders, he sees a bridge across the Assampeak Creek and realizes that this is an absolutely important target And he orders men to seize the bridge and attack the Hessian guards there, and then move a number of cannon on the high ground at the bridge. | ||
| And it's here that Johann Rahl alerts his men. | ||
| The garrison in Trenton is alarmed, and they attack Washington with a number of cannons. | ||
| And he has three regiments at his disposal. | ||
| Two of those regiments Make a desperate attack on Washington to somehow break the grip of the American attack on Trenton. | ||
| And it fails. | ||
| Johan Rahl is mortally wounded. | ||
| The Glover's force at Assipi Creek basically seals one of the last escape routes for Johan Rahl's force at Trenton. | ||
| It becomes one of the greatest American victories in history, one of the great military victories in world history that will change the entire course of the Revolutionary War. | ||
| And it was part of 10 days of battles that would change the entire Revolutionary War and world history. | ||
|
unidentified
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I'm Patrick O'Donnell. | |
| Merry Christmas. | ||
| I'm hosting the Combat History of Christmas today. | ||
| It's our annual tradition with Stephen K. Bannon. | ||
| And what we like to do is we go back in time and look at the inflection points in history, which often revolve around Christmas. | ||
| But there are also stories about individuals and their agency that change the course of events in one way or another. | ||
| And that is certainly the case with the next story that I'm going to tell, which is a Christmas story set in World War II. It's set in the mountains, the Dolomite Mountains of Northern Italy, where a raging guerrilla war was taking place against the SS, against the Germans. | ||
| It's a situation where small groups of OSS men Otherwise, the first Special Forces, small groups of teams that were arming the resistance behind the lines, would do some extraordinary things and are complete with the hallmarks of today's Special Operations Forces. | ||
| And that story begins and has some really key points For me, it's a special story. | ||
| It found me many years ago, over 15 years ago, where I was contemplating going back overseas, embedding with another combat unit in Afghanistan, and it was my great friend, whose nickname was The Brain, who was an operations officer with the OSS that ran the Special Ops missions Deep into Northern Italy. | ||
| He said to me, Pat, don't go. | ||
| It's too dangerous. | ||
| And I said, okay. | ||
| He's like, I want you to tell the story. | ||
| I want you to tell Howard's story. | ||
| Howard Chapel's story. | ||
| The Tacoma Mission. | ||
| I said, that's great. | ||
| But Howard will never talk. | ||
| I spent years trying to get Arguably one of the greatest World War II veterans I ever interviewed to talk. | ||
| And he would never talk. | ||
| I would always call him up and he'd say, well, Pat, you know, you need to come out here and maybe interview me. | ||
| And it was always a throwaway line because I did go out a couple times and try to interview him and it never succeeded. | ||
| But finally, I got the brain to... | ||
| To basically triangulate and pressure Howard to letting me talk to him. | ||
| And he said to me, I landed in San Francisco and I called him up and I expected sort of the usual treatment. | ||
| Instead he said, Pat, meet me at the gas station at Spyglass Road at Pismo Beach at noon tomorrow. | ||
| And I was there. | ||
| I was there, you know, ten minutes ahead of time. | ||
| And I'll never forget, this big Lincoln kind of rolled up, and he had sunglasses on. | ||
| He looks over at me. | ||
| He goes, follow me. | ||
| And I went back to his house. | ||
| And Howard Chappell was six foot two, kind of built like Schwarzenegger, and still kind of had that frame and physique. | ||
| And he immediately tried... | ||
| To intimidate me. | ||
| And I'll never forget, I tried to bring him back in time, and he said to me, you know, Pat, he starts to open up his mail with his Fariburn Sykes fighting knife right in front of me to sort of intimidate me. | ||
| And then he started to, like, sharpen his fingernails. | ||
| He's like, you know, you need to use the bathroom or anything. | ||
| I'm like, no, I'm fine, Howard. | ||
| And then I said to him, well, let's go back in time to when you killed the German officer with your bare hands with a ski pole. | ||
| And that was, like, the opening that I needed. | ||
| And he went back in time and told me how He killed, he was running for his life from what was known as an SS for Stalamento, behind the lines where his entire team was captured. | ||
| Going back a little bit, that team was sent behind the lines on Christmas Day 1944. And they dropped at a place called Valmoral, which is nestled in the Dolomite Mountains on the side of a mountain. | ||
| The place is something you can visit today. | ||
| There's a grappa bar there on the drop zone. | ||
| And I went back, like I always do, to the places that I write about. | ||
| And I visited Valmoral. | ||
| I visited San Antonio, which is nearby. | ||
| And I interviewed all of the old partisans that were with the Tacoma team. | ||
| I'll never forget, one of the first and most important people that I interviewed was an old man who was a mayor of a town. | ||
| And I was there with one of the partisans' relatives that had died in combat on Chapel's team. | ||
| And we went from house to house to interview the old partisans. | ||
| And this former mayor was sitting there watching TV and his door was kind of open. | ||
| And I knocked on the door and he looked up at me and he said, what do you want? | ||
| And I said, one thing. | ||
| I just said, Howard Chappell. | ||
| And this man's jaw literally dropped as I said that. | ||
| And he said to me, Rambo. | ||
| And that's what Chappell, that's how tough, that's how much of a badass and legitimately Howard Chappell was. | ||
| And I'll start to tell you that story of the Brenner assignment. | ||
| And these men drop in on Christmas Day and it's almost immediately hot. | ||
| The entire area, there's a very active SS presence there that they hunt partisans. | ||
| And it's not a pleasant thing at all. | ||
| If you're found to be aiding the Americans Or in a resistance group, you're hung from a meat hook. | ||
| And many of the squares of the small towns in and around this area, there were dozens of men that were hung from meat hooks for helping the Americans or just being part of the partisan group or just being, you know, in the wrong place at the wrong time. | ||
| And that's how brutal and ruthless the SS were. | ||
| And it's this environment the chapel had to operate in. | ||
| His primary mission Was to find another main character in my book, a guy by the name of Stephen Hall. | ||
| And Stephen Hall, in his story, is epic and extraordinary. | ||
| He dropped in August 1944, and he would be part of a single one-man mission to somehow destroy the sub-passes that were part of the Brenner Pass. | ||
| And he wrote a letter to the OSS Command months earlier as he was going back to Corvallis, Oregon on a troop train. | ||
| He was an engineer, combat engineer that knew how to blow things up. | ||
| But he's also an expert skier. | ||
| He was a mountaineer. | ||
| He was a rich kid that went to Harvard and Yale, dropped out of both, and then sort of traveled the world. | ||
| He went to Cortina, which is in the Dolmite Mountains, a ski area, he hiked and skied all the mountains for six months. | ||
| And he wrote in a letter in 1944 to the OSS, if they dropped a man with explosives and the proper equipment, he could destroy the passes that led into the Brenner Pass. | ||
| And why is the Brenner Pass important at this time? | ||
| It was the lifeline or the artery. | ||
| Where the German army was bringing their supplies and their men into Northern Italy and Italy from Germany and Austria. | ||
| And it was bombed relentlessly by the Allied Air Corps, but it was so heavily fortified that the troop trains and everything else were getting through. | ||
| So they had to look at an alternative means, a special operation to arm the resistance in the area And then potentially take out the subpasses. | ||
| And this is Stephen Hall's mission. | ||
| And he drops in with another team initially, a guy by the name of Lloyd Smith. | ||
| And I interviewed all of these men that were alive. | ||
| And Smith, nickname was Smitty, was an epic legendary. | ||
| He was a rising star within the OSS at the time because he rescued a bunch of nurses that had crashed in a C-47 behind the lines in Albania. | ||
| He went in. | ||
| With a 357 Magnum alone and had to navigate all these partisan groups with a letter from President Roosevelt saying that, don't harm me, he somehow gets out these men along with Sterling Hayden, who's the famous movie star later, and then also Jack Taylor, who was a main character in my book, First Seals. | ||
| But Smitty then is given the task of bringing in Stephen Hall and You know, I connected immediately with him because I was a Division I wrestler in college and so was he. | ||
| And we had this immediate rapport. | ||
| And I'll never forget, he pulled out the 357 Magnum that he had behind the lines in Albania and then also in Northern Italy and showed it to me. | ||
| And he talked about how Hall was a unique character that in many ways was trying to find himself. | ||
| This is an incredible movie. | ||
| It's been an option a few times. | ||
| Of him trying to find himself, but also to accomplish Mission Impossible. | ||
| They jump in to an area known as the Fraioli, which is further away from the Dolomites, and he goes in with Smith, and then he goes alone to the Dolomites area where his mission will take place. | ||
| And he has to march, climb, and ski for days. | ||
| Weeks. | ||
| Alone. | ||
| In the mountains. | ||
| In some of the most treacherous terrain in the world. | ||
| As he is being hunted by the SS. And he's blowing up bridges. | ||
| He's working with the resistance to some degree. | ||
| But he's a fish out of water because... | ||
| He is a, I mean, he's kind of this white Anglo-Saxon guy that went to Harvard and Yale, and he's dealing with partisans, in many cases, who are communists. | ||
| He has nothing in common with them, and he is able to thwart, you know, several attempts on his life, but he makes his way towards the mission area. | ||
| And it's here, you know, like every great story. | ||
| This is, I think, In my opinion, I've interviewed thousands of World War II veterans. | ||
| I've written seven or eight books on World War II. This is one of the greatest World War II stories of all time. | ||
| It also has a love story with it. | ||
| And it's here that he's making his way towards Cortina, that he encounters a woman that will change his life. | ||
| A Countess who is also a French agent, but he's also working for the Germans, and she is a mayor of a small town. | ||
| And his entree to this woman, the Countess d'Obligato, and her small home in a place called Morrison still exists. | ||
| All of these places still exist. | ||
| And oh, by the way, The World War II Museum is planning on doing an epic tour of the Brenner assignment and this mission. | ||
| It's such a special place. | ||
| It's a story that is not known in World War II. It's also, as I mentioned, a love story. | ||
| It's here that he encounters her in a strange way. | ||
| He receives a book, The Scarlet Pimpernel, Which is sort of her call sign for him to meet her. | ||
| And she has a specific code. | ||
| She leaves a pine branch at the windowsill of her home out if the Germans are not in the house. | ||
| And it's a wintery night in November 1944, and he, along with a partisan leader, is making their way to Marzon and they see the pine branch near the window and he goes into the countess's house and encounters a woman which will change his life and she's sort of seated on a sofa rather seductively | ||
| and it's there that life will change for Stephen Hall. | ||
| I'm Patrick K. O'Donnell and I'm hosting the Combat History of Christmas for the War Room, our annual tradition. | ||
| I'm taking you back behind the lines in the Brenner assignment. | ||
| It's Christmas Day, 1944, and Stephen K. Hall is in the house of the Countess, who's a double agent. | ||
| She works for France, but also Germany, but she's also a sympathizer with the Resistance, and a Resistance leader in and of herself. | ||
| It's here that Stephen K. Hall is given sort of the mission impossible to destroy a small light railroad and a transformer that is about 10 miles away. | ||
| Hall spends the night Christmas Eve with the Countess and what's extraordinary is he records his story on cigarette paper and buries his diary in wine bottles in and around various homes This book that I'm talking about, this story, is in a book called The Brenner Assignments, bestselling book. | ||
| It's made up of over thousands, tens of thousands of documents, including Stephen K. Hall's diary that was on cigarette paper, but also the Mission Report's From Howard Chappell and the Tacoma team and Hall's mission reports, there's radio messages. | ||
| It's thousands of documents, tens of thousands of documents to assemble a narrative, which is extraordinary. | ||
| It's here he's given this impossible mission on Christmas Day, and he sets out on skis in the middle of a snowstorm to blow up The rail station and the transformer because it's a mercury condenser. | ||
| It's something that has to come from Germany. | ||
| It would disable the line for months or weeks and sets off in the middle of this raging snowstorm trying to destroy this light rail station. | ||
| Which is an artery towards the Brenner Pass and moving troops and supplies. | ||
| And he's disoriented after several hours of skiing. | ||
| And he basically collapses not far from this rail station, which is his mission. | ||
| And he's captured by a forester who's sympathetic to Germany. | ||
| And he's brought to a priest. | ||
| And it's here that he is... | ||
| He's arrested and he's very tragically tortured, tortured to death. | ||
| By the SS. And what this book is about is an epic story of the SS against Howard Chappell in the partisans and resistance behind the lines. | ||
| This is the first special operations team. | ||
| These were known as operational groups and he had the German operational group. | ||
| If you've ever seen the movie Inglorious Bastards at the beginning, This is his group. | ||
| He was a German-speaking guy that was built like Arnold Schwarzenegger that went behind the lines and then accomplishes Stephen Hall's mission. | ||
| And it's amazing. | ||
| Hall is captured and he's killed by the SS. And then Chappell has to somehow get towards Hall. | ||
| He doesn't know he's killed. | ||
| And he reforms Stephen Hall's partisans, and they set up what is really one of the great ambushes of the war. | ||
| They seal a portion of the Brenner Pass as the SS are escaping, including the 504 Heavy Tiger Tank Battalion, which has one operational Tiger tank, as they're making their way to the Brenner Pass. | ||
| They blow up a bridge before the pass, and then they capture the high ground above it, and they fire upon the SS. And the SS thinks that they have Chapel in checkmate. | ||
| They tell him under a white flag that they will blow up the church, which contains all the civilians in the small town of Caprilli. | ||
| And Chapel basically calls their bluff, goes down to the The area of Caprilli on a motorcycle with one of his men. | ||
| He's only armed with a.45 and he confronts the SS and says it is you that are surrounded. | ||
| You are cut off and there's a parachute battalion that has landed nearby and you must surrender. | ||
| And he does the impossible. | ||
| The SS surrenders 3,500 men, including the payroll for the German army, to Howard Chapel. | ||
| A single man. | ||
| How a single person with agency changes the course of an entire campaign in Northern Italy. | ||
| And, you know, Stephen K. Bannon, who's my favorite host of this show, always asks me, Where do you find... | ||
| Where do you get these books, Pat? | ||
| Or where can the audience find them? | ||
| You can go to my website, patrickkodonald.com. | ||
| You can go to at Combat Historian, which is at Getter or Twitter. | ||
| And the book, The Unvanquished, is at the front of the store at Barnes& Noble nationwide. | ||
| But what is it about? | ||
| It's about agency. | ||
| It's about... | ||
| You are responsible. | ||
| You, the individual, can change the course of history. | ||
| Merry Christmas. | ||
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We're good to go. |
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