Michael Lee Lanning – författare

During World War II, some 10,000 American bombers and fighters were shot down over Europe. Of the crews aboard, 26,000 men were killed, while 30,000 survived being shot down only to be captured and made prisoners of war. Against the longest of odds, nearly 3,000 airmen made it to the ground alive, evaded capture, and escaped to safety. These men proudly called themselves the Blister Club.

Drawing on tens of thousands of pages of mostly untapped documents in the National Archives, Michael Lee Lanning tells the story of these courageous airmen. They had received escape-and-evasion (E & E) training, and some were lucky enough to land with their E-&-E kits—but all bets were off once they hit the ground. They landed after an air catastrophe. The geography was usually unfamiliar. Civilians might or might not be trustworthy. German soldiers and Gestapo agents hunted down airmen as well as civilians who dared help them. If an airman abandoned his uniform for civilian garb, he forfeited Geneva Convention protections. Most faced the daunting task of escaping on foot across hundreds of miles. The fortunate connected with one of the established escape routes to Spain or Switzerland or across the English Channel, or they hooked up with the underground resistance or friendly civilians. Upon return to friendly lines, these men were often able to provide valuable intelligence about enemy troop dispositions and civilian morale. Many volunteered to fly again even though regulations prohibited it.

The Blister Club is history with a punch. With a historian’s eye, Lanning covers the hows and whys of escape-and-evasion and aerial combat in the European theater, but the book also vividly captures the stories of the airmen who did the escaping and evading, including that of a young pilot named Chuck Yeager, who, during his own escape, aided the French Resistance and helped another downed airman to safety—and then begged to fly again, eventually securing Eisenhower’s approval to return to the air, where he achieved ace status.

Stories of escape are popular, especially those set during World War II, as are stories of the war in the air. Combining both of these, The Blister Club should find an enthusiastic audience.

Had Lieutenant George S. Patton not served on the southern border during the Mexican Expedition of 1916, there might never have been a General George S. Patton who took the world by storm as a bold and daring commander during World War II.

Relying on Patton’s detailed personal journals of his eight months in Mexico, Michael Lee Lanning describes the young officer’s exploits during the hunt for Pancho Villa. As an aide to General John Pershing, Patton learned leadership and logistics from the man who would soon command American forces in World War I. Begging for a field command, he received it—and led the first motorized attack in U.S. military history and may or may not have killed two of Villa’s lieutenants. The press ate it up, and Patton learned not only how much he loved attention, but how to promote himself.

In Mexico are the roots of Patton the World War II general, and Lanning tells the story deftly, focusing on Patton the man as well Patton the commander, and always casting an eye forward to Patton’s future career. This is how Patton became Patton.

From the War for Independence to the War on Terror, American military intelligence has often failed, costing needless casualties and squandering money and materiel as well as prestige – and all too often it has failed to learn from its mistakes. Senseless Secrets covers more than 200 years of intelligence breakdowns in every American war, including not only how intelligence has been wrong, but also how good intel has failed to make it to battlefield commanders, how spies and traitors have infiltrated the military intelligence community, and more.

Here are stories of Benedict Arnold’s turn in the Revolution, George McClellan’s reliance on the Pinkertons’ inflated estimates of enemy strengths in the Civil War, Custer’s flawed intelligence prior to the Little Bighorn, the controversy over Pearl Harbor, the surprise German attack that started the Battle of the Bulge, the failure to convey useful intelligence to small-unit commanders in Vietnam, overestimates of Iraqi strength during Operation Desert Storm, the bad intelligence about Saddam Hussein’s supposed nuclear arsenal in 2002-03, and the chaos surrounding the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021.

Senseless Secrets is a military history of the United States through its intelligence operations. It should be required reading inside the U.S. military and beyond.

When Dwight Eisenhower graduated from West Point in 1915, few would have predicted he was destined for greatness. A middling student, he was denied his first choice of posting, missed overseas service in World War I, spent a dozen years as a major, and never commanded a unit larger than a battalion. Yet the young officer made the most of the opportunities he was given, made a lasting impression on superiors including George Marshall, and eventually gained a reputation as an excellent staff officer with a knack for administration, loyalty, and “getting along.” Eisenhower was promoted to colonel in March 1941 and, sixteen months later, was a lieutenant general in command of the European Theater of Operations. His rise through the ranks was first painfully slow, then meteoric. It is one of the great, and most important, stories in military history, and Michael Lee Lanning tells it vividly, with an eye for the dramatic turning points in Eisenhower’s rise.

The West Point class of 1915 was “the class the stars fell on.” Fifty-nine graduates became generals during World War II, but none of that was clear at the time, especially not for the young Dwight Eisenhower, who graduated 61st in a class of 164. He failed to make the baseball team, but made the football team, only to see an injury end his playing career, and was known as a card player and prankster. Denied his request for service in the Philippines, Eisenhower was sent to Texas, where he spent a good bit of his time coaching football. Later denied his request to fight in France, he spent World War I training a tank unit near Gettysburg.

During the 1920s into the early 1930s—lean years for the army during which promotions came slowly and many officers quit the service—Eisenhower started to catch the eye of superiors and earned positions under the U.S. Army’s leading lights, including Fox Conner, John Pershing, and Douglas MacArthur, whom he served under during pivotal years in the 1930s, from the Bonus March to the Philippines.

By the late 1930s, as war broke out in Europe, Eisenhower’s star was on the rise. After serving in a series of staff positions—regimental executive officer, then corps and army chief of staff—Eisenhower joined the General Staff in Washington, DC, where he helped develop war plans and eventually became deputy chief of staff under George Marshall. When the time came to appoint a commander to execute the plans, Eisenhower recommended another officer, but Marshall knew Eisenhower was the man for the job.

Becoming Eisenhower is the story of a young man who first pursued the army for its free education but ultimately found his calling as an officer, the story of an officer who was initially overlooked but was motivated by this frustration to make himself the army’s indispensable man, the story of how General Eisenhower carried these experiences not only into Supreme Command but also the presidency. This book will be essential reading for World War II buffs, people interested in American presidents, and readers looking for the leadership lessons of history.