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Before he was a two-term Commander in Chief, President Dwight D Eisenhower was the Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe.
The five-star US Army General famously planned and oversaw the D-Day landings, which took place 81 years ago today.
In fact, Brendan Fraser stars as Ike in the upcoming World War 2 film Pressure, which is set during the run-up to Operation Overlord.
After his presidency concluded in 1961, Eisenhower almost starred as himself in John Wayne’s D-Day movie The Longest Day.
However, makeup artists couldn’t make him look as young as he did in 1944. Nevertheless, a set decorator with no acting experience, with the spitting image of the Supreme Allied Commander, was cast. Although Ike himself found that he failed to capture his persona.
Awkwardly, the real Eisenhower ended up walking out of a screening of The Longest Day after just a few minutes, frustrated with all the inaccuracies. It turns out Ike found events overdramatised with a lack of strategic context that failed to emphasise the massive unified effort. He also thought that the D-Day epic gave too much credit to lower-level officers in key decision-making, as though it was partially improvised. If that was bad enough, three years later, he came out of retirement to hold a press conference denouncing 1965’s Battle of the Bulge movie over its inaccuracies.
