Kelly Magill on Telling the Story of the Tennessee Maneuvers'
In this episode, Kelly Magill sits down with Spencer and Carli to share the remarkable story behind her upcoming documentary on the Tennessee maneuvers during World War II. Inspired by her grandmother’s memoirs, Kelly discusses how these forgotten military exercises helped prepare soldiers for D-Day and shaped the Allied victory. She delves into the emotional journey of interviewing the last living participants and highlights the significance of preserving these untold stories.
About Kelly Magill
Kelly Magill, an eighth-generation Tennessean and founder of KGV Studios, a video production company, is dedicated to honoring the stories of American veterans. She is currently producing a documentary on the Tennessee maneuvers during World War II, which trained 850,000 soldiers for D-Day and beyond.
Since 2017, Kelly has interviewed over 80 veterans and historians, building a comprehensive collection of first-hand accounts from this significant period. Her work not only highlights the crucial contributions of Tennesseans to the war effort but also emphasizes the importance of preserving these untold narratives for future generations. With growing interest from major platforms, her documentary is set to bring these vital stories to a wider audience.
Watch the official trailer for the docuseries set to air in 2025.
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Spencer Patton 00:36
Kelly McGill, welcome to signature required. You are the director of a maneuvers documentary project. You're an eighth generation Tennessean, and you are producing something that speaks to a very overlooked part of World War Two that involves Tennessee. So tell us what you're up to.
Kelly Magill 01:04
Well, thank you very much for inviting me on. I'm excited to be here today with other Tennesseans. So Tennessee is really known for whiskey and for country music and for mountains and for Dollywood and Memphis Elvis, Elvis, but we have a huge world war two story as well, and it's not Oak Ridge. It doesn't have to do with the bomb. In World War Two things are different. It's a different type of war. World War One is trench warfare. World War Two, Hitler is using all of this new equipment. He's using tanks. He's using planes. It's mechanized. It is the first war that really is reliant on the combustion engine. And so now you have a mobile war. And we don't we realize we don't know how to go to war in a mobile way. We've never had to do this in these generals lifetimes, because the generals that are leading in World War Two were young generals during World War One in this very different style. And when we realize we're going to have to start going to war, the military in the United States even begin fighting amongst themselves, the older generals are thinking they're going to put together an army that looks a lot like what it looked like in World War One. And you've got these younger guys, you've got General Marshall, you've got Omar Bradley, you've got Patton, you've got Eisenhower. And they're saying, no, no, this is a different war. Those things are not going to work. We have to do it differently. So there's this huge infighting. General Marshall, who's the Chief of Staff, is the person who puts Eisenhower in his position, puts Patton in his leadership position. But Marshall has really been forgotten, compared to those generals that were in battle, like Patton and Eisenhower, right? But Marshall is the person who, after the war, Churchill called the architect of victory, and he is our Army Chief of Staff at the time he is inducted in, or he's, he's, he becomes chief of staff on September 1, 1939 the day that Hitler invades Poland. And he realizes he needs to put together an army very quickly. He needs to put together a very competent army very quickly. And then we need to start practicing with all this equipment we never gone to World War before with, so that we know how to use it. And one of the things he realizes we have a very small army at the time. It's 17th largest in the world. Now think about that for a second. Can you name 16 countries that would have a bigger military than the United States? No, no. And Poland has been conquered. Their army was bigger than ours. France gets conquered in 1940 just six months later, their army was significantly larger than ours, and so Marshall realizes we are absolutely an underdog. If we had shared a border with Germany, they would have done the same thing to us that they did to Poland. And so the first thing that they do is they press for this, this first peacetime draft in history. And we think that it's bad today. The United States is very divided today. And you know, our Congress is very divided. They were so divided at the time between isolationist and interventionist, that as they were voting on this first peacetime draft in history, there were fist fights on the floor of the House of Representatives. I've never seen a fist fight on the floor of the House of Representatives.
Carli Patton 04:32
And Tiktok to document it for all the sea exactly.
Kelly Magill 04:35
I wish there had been. We would put it in the documentary right. Have your footage for you? Yeah, I'd have my footage instead of just the story, but it was very contentious at the time, but they passed the first peace time draft. And you know, there's also this myth of the greatest generation. They're different than we are. The first million men that get called up to the draft. 500,000 are rejected. 30,000 have. Venereal disease. 100,000 cannot read or write. 50,000 of them have serious dental problems, and another 150,000 of them are they look big and strong, but they're malnourished. This is when we start putting vitamins and minerals into bread to start bulking people up. But when you think about it, our country had just come out of a Great Depression, it makes sense that all of these young men who are supposed to be in their fighting prime are a ragtag punch. They aren't the greatest generation, yet it's what they have to do to train and prepare for this war that transforms them into the greatest generation as we know it. So one of the things that Marshall realizes he needs to do, our army is so small that the regular army can fit into Yankee Stadium. It's tiny, and it's made up of people who are pretty incompetent. And he realizes he has an officer corps that cannot lead men. So one of the things he decides to do, beginning in 1941 is stage, these large scale maneuvers. A maneuver is a war game where you have army on each side, a Red Army and a blue army, and their generals and their captains and their majors and everyone, all the officers, are given their orders every week. So you deploy out into the field. You're going to be out in the field for eight weeks at a time. You're going to live off the land, just like you're going to have to have to live off the land when you go into combat. And every week, there's a different problem. The officers are given their assignment. You have to cross the river and take this hill, or you have to retreat successfully across the river in the face of larger enemy forces. And so it wouldn't be 10,000 against 10,000 sometimes it was 3000 against 20,000 they're trying every single thing that could possibly happen in battle, and a few things are happening. The first thing that they're doing is they're toughening up these new recruits who've never had to live off the land before. They're learning how to live off the land when it's summertime and it's a drought and it's hot. They're learning how to live off the land, and it's winter, and it's three or four feet of snow, and a lot of the soldiers who maneuvered in Tennessee the summer of 1943 1944 were involved in the Battle of the Bulge one year later, and said having had that experience of living through that winter in Tennessee is what kept them alive. So that's the first thing that's happening. Second thing that's happening is it's sort of the proving ground for which theories about how to use this equipment best are correct. And so the manual says, use a piece of equipment, use a tank or a motorcycle or a Jeep one way or another way. But then they realize, when they do what the book says, it fails. And so they all get together, and they said, Well, what would have worked better? How do we use this? And so they start learning on maneuvers, how to combat tanks, how to really use anti artillery, how to move your troops along with your tanks. At first they thought you would send the tanks in all by themselves, but then they realized when they would send the tanks in by themselves, the enemy's troops would coalesce behind them, and they would be trapped and surrounded. So they went, Oh, that's not how we do it. We have to send the tanks in with the infantry at the same time. So they're learning all these things here stateside, so they don't have to learn them in combat. So that's the second thing that's happening. The third thing that's happening, which is very critical, and only the United States and Germany did this, is Marshall is looking at all of the officer corps very intently, and at the end of the maneuvers in 1941 Tennessee is in June of 1941 Louisiana is August of 1941 and the Carolinas are the fall of 1941 he removes over 1000 officers from duty for incompetence, and he starts an officer training school where they are intentionally training men to lead and be officers. And he then seeds this new army with officers he knew could lead men. And like I said, the United States and Germany are the only two countries who purge their officer corps and really make sure that our troops are led by people who are good at what they're doing. They're good at leading, they're good at making these combat decisions. Makes all the difference in the world. So from 1941 to 1944 just 11 WEEKS BEFORE D DAY, Tennessee was the battleground that replicated the fields and the hills and the rivers in France and Germany, and fortunately, being in the United States, you've got all different types of topography, right? We know we're going to be going to war in North Africa. We use the deserts of California. We know that we're going to be in the Pacific and islands. We're going to be in India, in the jungles near Burma. So we use Louisiana for the swamps in the jungle, like atmosphere and the heat and the humidity and the allegations.
Carli Patton 09:59
Leaders and the alligators, right? Never know what you're going to encounter in war alligators.
Kelly Magill 10:05
No, you are correct. And then beach landings. We know we have a lot of beach landings, and so they're using the Carolinas, but we know we're going to be going into France and Germany, and that's where Tennessee comes into play. So 21 counties in Middle Tennessee, essentially the entirety of the middle of the state are used for these war games, and it ends up comprising 45,000 private farms. And it's really the only place in the United States that this much private property is used for war games for this long and ultimately, 850,000 soldiers did their Maneuver Training on these private farms in Middle Tennessee, with all of the accompanying chaos, destruction, disruption, death that goes along with war. So Tennesseans basically lived through the closest thing that the French people would be living through, you know, compared to any other Americans at the time,
Spencer Patton 11:04
your mission to create this documentary, and we got to see a three to five minute sizzle reel of what you're putting together. And it's sensational, and it's amazing how few people, even as a born and raised Tennessean, I had no idea the role that Tennessee played in the preparation for World War Two. So maybe just talk for a second about the documentary itself. So now we have a little bit of historical context. What are you trying to accomplish in the documentary? Okay,
Kelly Magill 11:38
so first of all, don't feel badly, because most people and most Tennesseans don't remember it, and World War who two historians don't know about it. So it was hard for me to find historians who could speak about this. So interestingly, the documentary is going to be educating not only civilians, but World War Two historians as well. My grandmother came from a farm in grant. We had a family, multi generational family farm in grant, which is about an hour east of Nashville, just outside of Lebanon. And Lebanon was the headquarters for the maneuvers from 42 to 44 and she wrote her memoirs in 1986 and she had this one little pair of little paragraph in there that talked about what was happening at the farm, and I didn't understand it, because if you don't know that they're practicing war games here, this paragraph doesn't make sense. And so I can remember stopping as a teenager and saying, Granny, I don't understand this. Can you explain it? And she told me for the first time about these maneuvers, and I can remember thinking, this is so much better than Daniel Boone, like, why don't we learn this in school? I don't understand, but we never had so I just put it away. And then in 2017 I realized nobody had captured anyone's interviews. This is a whole part of history that, at least from the perspective the people who lived it, was going to die within this generation. And so I started working with county historians and locals in different parts of Middle Tennessee to find people who had first hand accounts of these maneuvers. So my first objective was really historic preservation. How do I get all of their memories before they pass away? And I didn't think I could find soldiers, right? Because if you're in the Navy, you can't help me. If you're in the army, but you're not in the second army, you can't help me, because the second army is is the army that did their Maneuver Training in Tennessee. If you were in one of the divisions in the second army that did their Maneuver Training here, you had to be in that division before it came here. Then you had to be alive, and you had to remember things. I had to find you. So I thought this is just a Herculean effort, but I ended up finding a way to discover these soldiers. And found 17 soldiers who had done their Maneuver Training in Tennessee and traveled all across the country to go to them, because they're in their late 90s, to get their stories. Because another thing that I noticed was when I would look at these oral histories at the Library of Congress or the World War Two Museum, where they interview World War Two vets, if they mentioned maneuvers, all they would say is, well, then we maneuvered, and then we went overseas, and the person doing the interviewing didn't know enough about maneuvers to dig and so I realized, wow, not only is the history going to be lost locally in Tennessee, the history is going to be lost from a world war two perspective as well. And so to date, I've interviewed over 100 people in preserving this history. All but one of my soldiers has passed away. About 25% of my civilians have passed away, and so I feel like we have now at least preserved the largest body of first hand accounts of this event that exists. So that was my primary thing that I wanted to accomplish. Then with the documentary, I felt like we look back at World War Two, and I think that. Yeah, the stories that are told about World War two that have really come to the surface to be told over and over again are the same stories. It's Pearl Harbor, it's D Day, it's the fall of Germany, it's Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It's midway, it's Hitler, it's the concentration camps. But all of this unpreparedness, the fact that America was an underdog, which none of us can understand, that concept that we would be an underdog, that was going to be completely lost to history as well in this world war two narrative. And to me, it's so much more impressive, right? Than Oh, America was a superpower. This happened. Pearl Harbor was attacked, and we got our ally, and we got together with our allies, and we went in and we defeated the Nazis and we saved the world. No, it was we were the 17th largest army in the world. We were completely unprepared. It was absolute chaos, our military was fighting with each other. The nation was divided between isolationist and interventionist. And in the face of all of this, we still managed to learn what we needed to do, not only come up to parity with our enemies, but exceed their knowledge and their capability in a very short period of time to do what we did. That's an amazing story. It's more amazing than what we've been taught. And without this sort of origin story, you lose it
Carli Patton 16:28
well. And I love the piece about, did you say it was 45,000 farms, personal farms, the sacrifice of civilians. We obviously care a great deal for our men and women in service and honor them greatly. But the people of Tennessee made tremendous sacrifice, just in their home state and in their land. Tell us a little bit about what you learned in those stories.
Kelly Magill 16:52
The stories are beautiful. I mean, the summer really hard too, and some are really hard. I mean, there was, if you think about it, this is the first time since the Civil War that Northern troops are on southern land with weapons. And so you go into maneuvers with a lot of those prejudices, old feelings, you know, those animosity that was a holdover from the Civil War. And I interviewed a number of people who said, you know, they came down here with that Yankee doc, and you know, they didn't understand us and we didn't understand them. And we'd say, don't have no one have anything to do with you. And the more we got to know them, the more we realized they were just like us.
Spencer Patton 17:43
That's so important. It's like you forget that context is that was like 80 years post Civil War, and you're having people from the north coming on your land with weapons. I mean, that's an amazing piece of historical context that you just do not think about sitting here today.
Kelly Magill 18:01
One of the women I entered or and I interviewed was named Mary doubler, and she's interesting in that her grandfather was Uncle Dave Macon, one of the founders of country music. And there's a country music tie in to this story. And she married a maneuver soldier, and so she was one of those women who married one of the soldiers who came down on maneuvers, and her son ended up becoming a historian and a teacher at West Point, and he's one of our interviewees, one of our historians we interviewed. But she was telling me a story about how there was an African American woman who lived across the street from them when she was young and growing up during the maneuvers, and this woman would come over, and Mary's mother would cook breakfast or lunch, and they'd sit and visit like friends do. And this woman was in her late 80s, and Mary remembers her saying, one day, you know, I can hear these maneuvers at night, the guns, because you hear the battle at night when they're, you know, conducting their exercises. And she said, I can hear these guns at night, and it reminds me of laying in bed and listening to the Civil War. So here's a woman who was alive for the Civil War and for maneuvers, saying they remind me of each other. It's really astonishing. So you've got that part of it. You have all of these subsistence farmers, you know, they don't have cash, they go to the local store, and they trade for things that they need. They don't have electricity, they don't have running water. And a lot of the northerners get down here and they're shocked and appalled at how these people have to live. They don't understand how they live like this. But they're they're kind people, they're generous people, even though they don't have anything. And I heard this from the soldiers over and over again. They didn't have much, but they gave us anything, and they were told. The farmers were told, Don't feed the soldiers, don't house the soldiers, don't give them directions, because they when they are in combat, combat, they cannot. We're. Rely on any of that. We're Southern, and those soldiers would be out in the winter. And I heard so many stories about a mother telling a father, you go out there and you get those boys and you bring them in. We've got room by the fire. And so they were constantly letting these soldiers into the barn, into the house. They were constantly feeding these soldiers. They go out and kill every chicken that they had and beat all these soldiers, and they didn't ask for anything for it, but the soldiers would want to give something back. And so very often, let's say a farm wife had made breakfast for 10 soldiers, and they leave, they would have slipped money under the plate. So as these women were picking up the plate, there would be money under there. So it's helping economically, they go to the stores. They buy things their wives or sweethearts would want to be with them as long as possible. So they would follow them to a maneuver area. And these women would rent rooms from local people, and they're able to make money. So when you look at it economically, it's like bringing 850,000 tourists with money into an area that's been so hard hit by the Great Depression, it really helps get Tennessee back up on its feet again. And if you've ever wondered why they're all these tiny little airfields, generally, they were built from maneuvers, and we still have them today. But you originally said the price that people paid they were all, there were convoys all the time of trucks, because they're all coming into this area, and they're, you know, they're constantly moving around. And so you could be stopped for hours at a time, and you can't get across the street for a convoy, and there's nothing for you to do. You could be late to work. Your farm is destroyed. Your fences are destroyed. It's very dangerous, and the worst scenarios are where civilians were killed. Soldiers died, but civilians were killed. And I found three different stories of children who were killed by army, two by army vehicles and one in an accident related to the maneuvers. And so these farm families aren't just having their adult sons drafted and sent to war. They are losing their babies on their property in front of their eyes in violent ways. And this has been forgotten as well, in terms of sacrifice that these people made.
Spencer Patton 22:18
And so sitting on our table is where this started, right? This is your grandmother's memoir. For those that are just listening, we have a book maybe just describe what this is, so that way they can have the context.
Kelly Magill 22:29
So my grandparents, their hobby was genealogy, and this is before ancestry, so you had to go to all of the different county courthouses and get your information. And I think that hobby inspired my grandmother to write her memoirs. And think about it, this is just a farm girl who came into Nashville and got an associate's degree at David Lipscomb at the time, and you wouldn't think she really had anything to write about, right? I mean, but it's an amazing piece of memoir, and there's one paragraph in there where she describes the farm being destroyed by maneuvers during World War Two. And if you don't know what maneuvers are, the paragraph makes no sense. And so I can remember as a teenager, stopping and looking at her and saying, granny, can you explain this? Because I don't understand it, and that's where it began.
Spencer Patton 23:21
And I guess while we're talking about amazing stuff on the table, we got to talk about the other piece that's sitting here on the table. So again, for those listening, it is a circular, Rusty, maybe kind of four inch tall disc. So tell us what we're looking at.
Kelly Magill 23:37
So this is a casing for an explosive that would be buried in the ground, and it would have explosive material put into it and a detonator cap in the top, so that when tanks would run over it, there'd be enough psi there to set this off as a smoke bomb. And umpires, because all of these war games were overseen by umpires, and the umpires would be the one calling, you're dead, you're casualties, you're out of it.
Carli Patton 24:08
Besides, like a real game, it's like, yes, yes, because you can't make a referee, yes, actual umpire, wow, yes. They
Kelly Magill 24:15
had umpires all over and the umpires were the ones they said. The umpires took the place of the bullets, they were the ones calling what was actually happening, and they were the ones teaching to say, hey, that was really good, what you did at the beginning. But after after this point, when you did this, you would have been killed. So the umpires are using all of these maneuvers as teaching moments and experiences, so that they would learn here not to clump up. If you clump up, you're all going to get killed at once. You always have to scatter. You always have to be apart. So the umpires would see the smoke bomb go off, and they would be able to say that tank is out of action and everybody in it is dead, or half the people are dead, half the people are injured. And so then the medics would come through, and they would. Half the people is injured, and they would come up with whatever injuries they would have. And then the medics are going through their job too. How do you get this person who's supposedly broken his neck or has been shot, you know, in his belly? How do you move him? How do you wrap him? What do you do here? You know, what do you wait to do until you get to the hospital? So the medics are all performing their job at the same time.
Spencer Patton 25:25
So you could have done what some kind of hobbyist historian people do, and write a book, but you decide to bring this to life and film, which is a whole different budget, that's a whole different understanding of making it real and doing it justice. So talk about the decision to create a film and why you just didn't decide to write this down. So
Kelly Magill 25:49
there is already a book about the Tennessee maneuvers that is fantastic, and it was written by a guy named woody McMillan, and it's called in the presence of soldiers, and that I read that book probably 15 years ago something like that, and he does a great job. But I own a video production company, and so for me, the natural thing was to film all of these, as opposed to writing another book, because woody did a beautiful job of that. And for me, it's that, you know, we've got the capability now, look, we're doing a podcast in your offices that you know rivals a studio, a proper studio. We have the ability now to film somebody where you feel like you're in their presence. You're sitting across from them. You see them exactly. You hear exactly what their voice is. It's a better way, in my opinion, to preserve oral history than simply writing something down. So it's just another layer. You can always take an interview and transcribe it and have a written account, but you can't go in the other direction. Plus, there are all these films. I found, all this Army Signal Corps film footage, all these Army Signal Corps photos from the time. And then we started reaching out into the communities. And civilians started giving me their photographs, giving me their letters, giving me their souvenirs from the time that they had collected. One little one woman I talked to was a little girl. She'd had this little spiral notebook, and she started writing down every single name of a Jeep that she saw, because everybody would write a name on their Jeep. They would name their jeeps, just like they would name the airplanes. And there are 745 names in this little spiral that she meticulously wrote down all year long. And so she handed me that, and so I've got this now, and I need to get it to a museum once we're finished with this. But that's another thing I'm hoping for, because this is this generation is dying. If they haven't really talked in detail about the maneuvers with their children as their children are going through the attics and things that haven't seen the light of day in 75 years, they're not going to recognize things that should be making it to a museum. If the documentary comes out and they understand the history, they're much more likely to understand these artifacts that they're finding when they're starting to clean out these houses. They're more likely to make it into our museums in Tennessee.
Carli Patton 28:16
You don't want all that stuff going to Antique Roadshow. You want it coming to you or
Kelly Magill 28:20
and I don't want it to go into landfill, yeah, because I think that's really where it will go. Is landfill, more than anything, because people don't know what it is.
Carli Patton 28:28
When do we get to watch this? Like, I'm getting really excited about your storytelling, and your passion is so contagious for this story, but now I want to watch it. When do we get to see it?
Kelly Magill 28:40
So I formed a nonprofit that owns the documentary, and so the first thing we had to do is raise a lot of money. We're pretty much done raising money, but we could still use more, but we have enough to be in production. So we are in production now, and our goal is to release this in August of 2025 that is the 80th anniversary of the end of World War Two, and it's most likely the last sort of major anniversary that the soldiers will still be alive. They're not going to be alive five, five years from now. Interestingly, just four months later, we hit 2026 which is the 250th birthday of the United States. So the content is really relevant for both of those reasons, not necessarily just for World War Two. And as a Tennessean, to come back to the, you know, the theme of the podcast, as a Tennessean, I'm so proud of what the state did then, and we don't even realize that we did it. The country doesn't know that we did this. Our you know, the descendants of the people who were involved, if you get a few generations down, don't really know about it. And so I think it's important to bring this back, especially now, because it does give you a very real example of what. It means, in my opinion, to be a great American, and that means to not be fighting with each other. That means to support each other, even if you see things differently, even if you vote differently, to realize that you know when, when times get tough, we are all each other's allies. And and a lot of people that I was interviewing would say, and these are the older people who had lived through this, would say, oh, it's not the same now. Was very patriotic. It's not patriotic anymore. And I've done a lot of thinking about that to say, Are we, are we just have we devolved? Are we not the greatest generation, or are we not worthy of them. And I realize two things. One, what we've already talked about, the greatest generation was anything, but they weren't this. War made them that great generation. Just
Carli Patton 30:50
out of war, they didn't choose to be the greatest generation. It was thrust upon them
Kelly Magill 30:54
exactly. That's one thing. But the second thing is this, the two things that happened that triggered that uniformity of purpose at the time, there were two things that happened. Number one, we were attacked. Number two, there was a draft that affected every single family in this country. Those two things in combination, have never happened again, ever, if they ever happen again, my money says we will see another Greatest Generation, because we are the descendants of those people. We just haven't been faced with that one two punch that they were faced with. And I think if that generation had been faced with only one of those elements, they would have responded very similarly to how we respond today. I just don't see it as being too different as
Spencer Patton 31:45
you've done the documentary. Undoubtedly, there have been people that you've talked to or stories that have stuck out to you. What is a story or a person that really resonates in your mind, that when someone sees the documentary, you might be able to say, Hey, this is something that I'd love you to pay particular attention to. I'm
Kelly Magill 32:05
gonna go with something kind of small. And it feels small, but it's not. And it goes back to these farm families feeding all these soldiers. Doesn't seem like a big deal, right? These guys are out in the woods. They're eating their C rations and K rations and things like that. And these farm families invite them in. They don't have anything, but they're feeding these young men. Maybe their sons are someplace else, and they're hoping they're going to be treated like that. And these women make food for these soldiers. A number of the soldiers write home, and they tell their parents that this family has fed them, and they share that family's address and information with their families. And so the mothers would start writing to each other and saying, Thank you so much for being so good to my son. Oh, wow. Sometimes this is the last home cooked meal that soldier had before he died, given to him, not by his mother, by a stranger in another state. And one of the women I interviewed is a woman named faith donner. I love her. She's from Carthage, Tennessee, and she tells a story one night about how there was a pontoon bridge across the river, and it broke threw all these soldiers into the river, and so they were scrambling trying to get all these soldiers out of the river. One of them was swept away, and he died. But it's the middle of winter, and they pull all these soldiers out. They're completely wet, cold, shivering, and her father goes down to the river, and he picks up a car load, brings them back another car load, brings back another car load. They end up with like 15 or 20 soldiers in their house. It's a small house. They have a tiny bathroom, she says, the size of a closet. They don't even have a shower. They only have a bathtub. And one after the other, these soldiers are in their house, in this bathtub, getting clean, getting warm, until the hot water heater goes out, and then her mom is heating up pots of water on the stove and filling up the tub and filling up the tub until faith finally had to go to sleep. So she goes to sleep, and all this is still happening. She wakes up the next morning, and the living room and the dining room floor are covered with sleeping soldiers, and she has to walk through them, tiptoe through them to get to the kitchen. And her mother is cooking these boys breakfast, and she said her mom is not the greatest cook, but these boys don't care. Anything is fine. Fast Forward, decades later, Faith Nolan is with her husband, and they're in Normandy, and they're at the cemeteries in Normandy with all of these American crosses. And she is thinking, how many of these boys did we have in our house for breakfast? And that just brings it home to me, because. Is, it's how we care for these strangers who are still Americans, how their parents feel about us as Tennesseans, that we treat their children like there are children and and to me, that's an example of what we need to be doing today and always as Americans. That, to me, is what it means to be an American.
Carli Patton 35:20
And don't you think that's the fabric of what it means to be a Tennessean? Absolutely, I didn't have the privilege of being born here, but I say I got here as quickly as I could. And there's this indescribable something about being in Tennessee. It's about the people, it's about the heart. And I think what you just described is that underpinning of not just hospitality but grit mixed with love that is almost impossible to describe about the people of this state. It's special. I
Kelly Magill 35:54
love how you just described it. I never thought about it like that before, but you're right. It's definitely grit mixed with love. It's not just one or the other. It is kind of unique, isn't it?
Carli Patton 36:04
They're a bless your heart. I'm gonna love you and slap you upside the head. And I just it's special in America. I think there's this hunger for what we have in this state. I just do
Kelly Magill 36:15
I completely agree with you, absolutely. And having traveled around and and met so many people I would not have met otherwise and heard their stories. I would see the same thing and again and again and again, and I heard the same thing again and again and again, regardless of what county I was in, who I was talking to. It makes me very proud to be from this state. It makes me very proud that I had a family that was one of those 45,000 farm families. And there are so many descendants of those families, and oftentimes they still live in the same houses or on the same land as they did before.
Carli Patton 36:51
Well, your project is nothing but unifying, and I think it brings back the heart of what makes us proud to be Americans, proud to be Tennesseans and just some wicked good storytelling. Yeah,
Kelly Magill 37:03
and they're hilarious. This I hope, I hope one of the stories makes the cut. But faith was also telling me she's like my daddy was a joker. And she said, all these boys would come down here. They'd never been on a farm. They didn't know where milk came from. They all tried to milk a cow. None of that would work, right? And we've got these hills, and people will plant all the crops on the hills right. And she said, this one soldiers looking. And he goes, how do you how do you keep the mules from falling off that hill? And her dad said, Well, I tell you, we've got long legged on the right mules and long legged on the left mules. And when we're going that away, we use the long legged on the left mules, then we unhitch him, and we hitch up the long legged on the right mules, and we go that way. And she said that soldier believed him, you know what I mean? So it's like just, it's like having fun with the other, the other ignorance. And I was talking to this other woman named Florence Hall, who's the most precious. She's got this amazing southern accent. And she was talking about how those soldiers came down here, they didn't know anything at all. And she said, but we would have been just as bad if you'd put us in New York, we wouldn't have understood an elevator since, like, you know, it's just precious.
Carli Patton 38:19
If you can joke about it. You can get through it. Yes, just the common ground there. Kelly
Spencer Patton 38:24
is under an NDA to not be able to tell you how cool and fascinating, how big this is actually
38:29
going to be.
Kelly Magill 38:31
I'll just say we have interest from the people you would absolutely want to be your narrators for this project. They want to see how we do if it's the quality it needs to be. But we have interest from people who you would absolutely want to be narrating this project.
Spencer Patton 38:48
That is fantastic. Well, we cannot wait for those that want to learn more or are interested in giving, and maybe even some of their story or something that they share, that they want to express to you. How do they get in touch with you? What's a way to figure out how to keep a pulse on this?
Kelly Magill 39:05
Thank you. So we have a website, and it's w, w, I, I, maneuvers, M, a, n, e, u, v, E, R, s.com, so World War Two maneuvers.com, and the trailer, the three minute trailer, is there? A way to donate is there, and also there's a form there, if people have first hand accounts or memories, they can get in touch with me that way as well.
Spencer Patton 39:27
Awesome. Kelly, thank you for being an entrepreneur, to use your film studio to be able to bring life to people's stories that are uniquely American, uniquely Tennessee, in making sure that they're not forgotten. That's that's so important well,
Kelly Magill 39:49
and you're doing your part too, because the whole podcast is centered around Tennessee and our DNA. What makes the state so special? And, you know, I think that especially now. As people are moving in, as we were discussing, it's so important to do this, so I feel like you're preserving part of Tennessee as well with what you're doing every week. So thank you.
40:16
On today's episode, we have Kelly McGill, an eighth generation Tennessean, who is producing a documentary on the Tennessee maneuvers, an overlooked part of World War Two training. And the takeaway from what I saw from our conversation today is true to my heart, logistics plays a big role. Of
40:35
course, it was at the very beginning I was like, Oh, his heart language,
40:39
war is a majority logistics game. If you don't have supplies, if you don't have food, if you don't have ammunition, if you don't have personnel like you literally cannot run a war machine. And it's fascinating that Tennessee, because of the similarities of the landscape, the topography of what this state has is similar to Germany and France, that Tennessee had to be the place where logistics said, All right, we got to deal with slopes and hills and streams and all the things that you would see in that same space. So definitely, my logistics heart appreciated that Tennessee played such an important role in
41:23
well, it was a double whammy, right? It was logistics and leadership. And I think from our stance, from looking back at World War Two, we've read countless novels, we've taken countless classes, but I think it's really hard to remember we were underdogs, because we have this sense of victory in hindsight, but how that could have turned out very differently. And when she was talking about how young our generals were and how they had never fought this way, and the newness of the equipment, I was really shocked, because I hadn't thought about that perspective before. I
41:58
think we spend a lot of time as Americans, just believing rightfully so, that we are The overwhelming favorite. But just like in football, when you have a team that comes in and is just the overwhelming favorite, a four touchdown favorite, it's hard to get up for those games, and that's why you look and see let down games happen. And I think America can be vulnerable to moments like that, where, rather than the pride swell of we can do it and we will do it, it's almost like, well, we're supposed to, and we're expected to, and I think we're suffering from that to some degree in where our culture sits. That
42:50
was interesting when she talked about the one two punch of being attacked and having a peacetime draft, and how that really birthed the greatest generation that they didn't choose that that was thrust upon them. And her hypothesis was that if our country was ever faced with that one two punch again, we might see a similar response. And I was sitting here, I don't know that that's inaccurate, but it's so I would never wish that upon our nation, right? And so I just felt like that was so similar to all the hard things that happen in life, personal, business, whatever it is is you never wish those hard things on yourself, but what comes out of it can be truly intense and scary, but also wonderful.
