Historical illiteracy has become a real problem in our time. The downsides of this have become rather glaring lately, as for instance in Tucker Carlson’s 2024 interview with Daryl Cooper, whom Carlson called “the most honest popular historian in the United States.” Cooper claimed that Americans’ understanding of WWII was deeply flawed and that the true villain was Winston Churchill.

　　The fact that some young Americans found this message sympathetic is very troubling and speaks volumes about our failure to educate the young about history.  I regularly tell my students that reading history is their best defense against disinformation. So, I, along with many lovers of history, welcomed the release of the film Pressure, advertised as “the untold true story of D-Day.” Directed by Anthony Maras and starring Brendan Fraser as Dwight Eisenhower and Andrew Scott as allied meteorologist James Stagg, this film aims to tell the story of the days leading up to the D-Day invasion. Unfortunately, at a time when the public needs significant reeducation about the historical events surrounding WWII, Pressure both informs and misinforms. The film accurately portrays the essential role of weather and chance (more accurately, Providence, in my opinion) in the success of the D-Day landings. The success of the landings was not a foregone conclusion, and Pressure makes that perfectly clear. Though the film does too little to emphasize the likely costs of such a failure. Had the landings not been delayed—the central and harrowing decision portrayed by the film—the history of the twentieth century would have been fundamentally altered for the worse. In addition, by beginning and ending with scenes of domesticity, the film captures the moral core of the WWII struggle between the forces of freedom and totalitarianism. At the same time, however, the film is replete with missed opportunities to combat historical illiteracy and highlight the lessons about war and crisis leadership that D-Day can impart. Instead of offering models of courageous leadership, the film inadvertently supports the claim that Americans (and specifically our generals) are little more than hot-tempered blunderers.

　　Pressure tells the story of the last seventy-two hours before the final decision to launch the D-Day invasion. The main action surrounds the arrival at Allied headquarters of James Stagg, a civilian meteorologist tasked with providing the weather forecasts essential to the timing of the invasion. Stagg clashes with other Allied meteorologists who, based on historical weather patterns, contend that the weather on June 5, the original date for D-Day, will be favorable. Stagg, a careful student of the meteorological vicissitudes of Northern Europe and therefore deeply skeptical of this rosy view, works furiously to marshal real-time data showing that a landing on June 5 would lead to the Allied forces being “washed away.” Eisenhower, though enraged by the divisions among his weathermen, calls off the landings, and Stagg is vindicated when the landing areas are deluged by a major storm on June 5. In the climax of the film, Stagg and his team, putting their previous differences aside, spot an unusual and fortuitous break in the weather for June 6. They advise Eisenhower to snatch the opportunity and avoid further delays. And the rest, as we say, is history. Though to call the film “history” is a bit too generous.

　　I’ll limit myself to dealing with three of the films main elements: the weather, which is really the main antagonist (the Nazis are barely mentioned at all), Eisenhower as leader, and finally, the portrayal of the D-Day attack itself. The film accurately depicts the great anxiety that Allied high command experienced with regard to the weather. James Stagg, very ably portrayed by Andrew Scott, was indeed a civilian meteorologist hand-picked to lead the meteorological team in charge of forecasting the weather in the English Channel and its environs for the D-Day landings. Of central concern to the Allies was delaying the landings due to poor weather because it risked unmasking their elaborate espionage program. As depicted in the film, the Allies had amassed a Ghost Army of rubber tanks, trucks, and landing craft and a cacophony of fake radio traffic to convince the Germans that the landings would take place at Calaise instead of Normandy. Had the Germans discovered the true target, they would have moved their tank and infantry reserves to Normandy and pushed the Allied forces into the sea, ending, likely for good, any Allied attempt to establish a second front in WWII. This would have left Western Europe to the tender mercies of Stalin and his Red Army, after it completed its annihilation of the Third Reich.

　　What the film gets wrong is the timing of Stagg’s involvement in the planning for D-Day. According to the film, Stagg is plucked from obscurity by Eisenhower at the behest of Winston Churchill, a mere three days before the D-Day invasion, and bullied into producing accurate weather forecasts at the last minute. In reality, Stagg and his team were part of the D-Day planning for months prior to the invasion. Eisenhower did not wait until the last minute to bring in his meteorologist. Eisenhower was a very demanding superior, as Pressure is at pains to convey, and in the months leading up to the invasion he did indeed ride Stagg’s team hard, demanding that they produce accurate weather forecasts at three-day intervals. In short, the weather was not an afterthought but was central to D-Day planning from the beginning. This inaccuracy makes the military commanders involved in the most important operation of the war look like rank amateurs who left the most important element, the elements, to chance. While this shortened timeline increases the intensity of the action, it does so at the expense of historical accuracy and, as is Hollywood’s wont, makes the military look overly aggressive and shortsighted.

　　The Ike of Pressure is a blustery worrywart who always seems to be on the verge of pummeling his subordinates.

　　Fraser’s Eisenhower accurately portrays two key aspects of Ike’s personality in the lead-up to D-Day: his often-explosive temper and his constant anxiety about the success of the landings. Eisenhower did have a notoriously bad temper and, as the historian Jean Edward Smith put it, “blew his stack frequently.” Eisenhower was also a demanding superior, whose typical reaction to a subordinate’s ability to handle a taxing workload was to pile on more work. In several scenes, Fraser’s Ike looks as though he were on the verge of striking those who are frustrating his grand design for the invasion.

　　Fraser also captures the trepidation surrounding the decision to delay the invasion from June 5 to 6, 1944. While Eisenhower often moved about service members and his subordinates with his infectious grin, exuding confidence, internally, he was nearly crushed by worry. When ensconced in his private trailer in the lead-up to D-Day, he paced back and forth, riddled with anxiety, smoking four packs of cigarettes per day and drinking innumerable cups of coffee. Fraser does a nice job of portraying this aspect of Ike’s character, though he often does so seated instead of frantically pacing as did the real Eisenhower.

　　But Fraser’s portrayal completely misses the diversity in Ike’s temperament and how he used both anger and persuasion to motivate his subordinates. While Ike had a temper, which he sometimes used to motivate subordinates, Fraser makes it seem as if this was the only tune in his motivational repertoire. Far from it. Eisenhower was fond of quoting his mother’s biblical advice: “He who is slow to anger is better than the mighty, and he who rules his spirit than he who takes a city” (Prov. 16:32). This Ike is completely absent from Fraser’s portrayal. One would be flabbergasted to hear the following words from Fraser’s Ike: “You do not lead by hitting people over the head—thats assault, not leadership,” or “I would rather try to persuade a man to go along, because once I have persuaded him, he will stick. If I scare him, he will stay just as long as he is scared, and then he is gone.” Yet these are Eisenhower quotations and reflect ideas central to his style of command. The Ike of Pressure is a blustery worrywart who always seems to be on the verge of pummeling his subordinates. A leadership style that relied solely on intimidating subordinates was almost the antithesis of Ike’s.

　　In the end, while some aspects of Fraser’s Ike are accurate, it is incomplete and thereby does a disservice to Eisenhower and to those in the present generation who might learn leadership lessons from him. In this way, the film represents a missed opportunity to educate the American public about the complexities of leadership in a crisis, as taught by one of the most effective American leaders to ever wear the mantle of supreme command.

　　At the climax, when the landing craft hit the beaches on D-Day, the film again takes major liberties with the historical record. In the film, the Allied commanders anxiously mill about the command post, waiting for radio silence to end and then listened as the first waves hit the beaches. The Allied troops are bogged down by heavy fire and are only pressed forward by Ike’s final bellowed command to “Go! Go!”

　　None of this happened. General Omar Bradley was on a ship off the coast of France when the first waves began hitting the beaches. As Bradley recounts, the information from the beaches was sporadic and incomplete. Information on the progress of the landings was delayed by at least an hour, making the kind of direct intervention portrayed in the film impossible. Pressure portrays Allied high command as having real-time information on the progress of the battle and Ike as being able to communicate directly with the troops that were engaged. Nothing could be further from the truth. As Eisenhower well knew, once the plan had been formulated and the troops trained, it belonged to the sailors, soldiers, and airmen responsible for its execution. In the fog of war, only they would be aware of the ground truth of the battlefield, a reality that makes untimely interventions from high command detrimental to mission success. Pressure portrays Ike as engaging in exactly the kind of micromanagement he considered impractical and imprudent.

　　While Pressure may get the how of D-Day quite wrong, it gets the why of D-Day quite right. The film opens and closes with domestic scenes, both involving Stagg and his wife, pregnant with their first child. These scenes nicely encapsulate the why of the Allied efforts to open a second front in WWII. They help remind us of the stakes involved in the landings. Had the invasion been launched on June 5, the results might have been catastrophic. Today, however, we tend not to appreciate the extent of such a catastrophe. Had the English-speaking peoples, beginning with Winston Churchill, not defied Hitler and failed to establish a second front in Europe, its hard to say what would have survived of Western Europe and freedom as we know it. Had General Eisenhower’s assault failed, all of Western Europe likely would have fallen again, this time at the hands of the Red Army. The decision at the heart of Pressure was far more important than a decision that meant victory or defeat in the Battle of Normandy. Victory ensured that Western Civilization would persist in Western Europe and that the Iron Curtain would not begin at the English Channel. The domestic scenes that are the bookends of Pressure would have been replaced by a cold totalitarianism that sees the family unit as just another tool of the state instead of the reason for the existence of the state, its protection, its primary purpose. Apropos Cooper and Carlson’s critique of WWII historiography, none of this would have been possible without Churchill’s decision to fight on rather than capitulate to Hitler. Great Britain provided the indispensable staging area for the invasion that accomplished so much.

　　While Pressure includes some masterful performances, especially Andrew Scott’s James Stagg, it is riddled with historical inaccuracies that make it a poor substitute for reading actual accounts of the planning of the D-Day landings. The film’s portrayal of Eisenhower is one-dimensional and misses an opportunity to teach a younger generation about the virtues and vices of leadership. What it gets right in the end, however, is the moral core of the struggle against the totalitarianism that haunted the twentieth century and against which we must still contend today. Those forces would like nothing better than that we forget their previous incarnations.