What Eisenhower Did the Night Before D-Day

June 5th, 1944. Southwick House near Portsmouth, England. Rain hammers the windows so hard the glass seems to shudder. And inside a converted country manor, one man is about to decide whether history’s largest invasion force sails into a storm or waits and risks everything. Dwight David Eisenhower has not slept properly in 4 days.

He is 53 years old, a general who has never commanded troops in actual combat. And tonight, the fate of nearly 3 million Allied servicemen rests on a decision only he is authorized to make. Behind him stand 5 years of planning. Ahead of him lies a 50-mi stretch of French coastline codeamed Normandy, defended by German bunkers, minefields, and machine guns positioned with brutal precision.

Somewhere out in the channel, a fleet larger than any assembled in human history, sits at anchor, engines idling, waiting for a single word. That word is his to give. And as the wind screams outside Southwick House, Eisenhower has no idea if he is about to save the free world or send tens of thousands of young men to drown before they ever fire a shot.

To understand the weight pressing down on this one man in this one room, you have to understand what operation Overlord actually is. It is not simply a battle. It is the largest amphibious invasion ever attempted by human beings, nearly 7,000 vessels, over 11,000 aircraft, and more than 156,000 soldiers from the United States, Britain, Canada, and Free French forces.

all poised to cross the English Channel and strike Adolf Hitler’s Atlantic Wall in a single synchronized blow. 5 years of a war that has already claimed tens of millions of lives now hinges on a 48-hour weather window and the judgment of a man from Abalene, Kansas, who once sold his father’s mules to help pay for his education at West Point.

Eisenhower himself is in many ways an unlikely figure to be standing at the center of this storm. Born in Dennis, Texas in 1890 and raised in the small railroad town of Abalene, Kansas, he graduated from West Point in 1915 in a class so heavily represented among future generals that it would later be nicknamed the class the stars fell on.

Yet for most of his career, Eisenhower was a staff officer, not a battlefield commander. A man who spent the interwar years studying logistics, writing training manuals, and serving under demanding superiors like Douglas MacArthur in the Philippines, never once leading troops into combat. When the United States enters the Second World War in December 1941, Eisenhower is a relatively obscure lieutenant colonel.

Within 18 months, propelled by his organizational brilliance and his rare talent for managing volatile personalities, he rises to command the entire Allied war effort in Western Europe, chosen over far more experienced combat generals, precisely because he can hold together an alliance that might otherwise tear itself apart from internal rivalry alone.

It is this same quality, the diplomat’s patience layered over a soldier’s resolve that he will need more than ever in the smoke-filled room at Southwick House. Eisenhower did not rise to supreme Allied commander through battlefield glory. He rose through something rarer in the upper echelons of military command. The ability to make prickly, egotistical Allied generals work together toward a single goal.

British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, brilliant and insufferable in equal measure, commands the ground forces. American General Omar Bradley leads the US First Army, British Air Chief Marshall Trafford Lee Mallalerie oversees the air forces. Convinced privately that the airborne portion of the plan will be a bloodbath, Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay commands the naval armada that must ferry this entire force across one of the most unpredictable stretches of water in Europe.

Each of these men has his own theories, his own temperament, his own certainty that he is right. It falls to Eisenhower, not the most brilliant tactician in the room, but perhaps the only man capable of holding the room together, to weigh their competing council and make the final call. And the call could not be more consequential.

Hitler’s Germany has spent four years fortifying the coast of Western Europe, pouring concrete into bunkers, planting millions of mines, and staking wooden poles into open fields to shred any glider. foolish enough to land among them. Field marshal Irwin RML, the desert fox himself, has been personally overseeing these defenses since the start of the year, driven by a conviction that the invasion must be crushed on the beaches themselves within the first 24 hours or Germany will lose the war. He is not wrong.

Everyone on both sides of the channel understands that this single operation may determine the outcome of the Second World War. But an invasion of this scale cannot simply launch on any given day. The tides must be right for landing craft to clear underwater obstacles. The moon must be bright enough for airborne troops to find their drop zones, yet dark enough to conceal the fleet’s approach.

These conditions align on only a handful of days each month. And in June 1944, they converge on June 5th, 6th, and 7th. Miss window, and the next viable dates do not arrive for another 2 weeks. Two weeks in which German intelligence might discover the true invasion site. Two weeks in which the fragile deception operation, convincing Hitler that the real attack will come at Kala, might unravel.

two weeks in which 156,000 men sitting coiled on ships and in sealed camps might lose the psychological edge that comes with imminent action. There is also a darker clock ticking. Every additional day of secrecy is a day closer to discovery. Soldiers have been briefed. Maps have been distributed. Somewhere in England, a piece of paper with the invasion plans could fall into the wrong hands. and everything.

The years of planning, the deception operations, the hopes of a world at war could collapse in an instant. To reach this single night, this single decision, an entire architecture of deception and preparation, has been under construction for more than a year. The invasion plan itself traces back to a British planning staff known as Kossac, led by Lieutenant General Frederick Morgan, tasked in 1943 with sketching the outline of a cross channel assault long before Eisenhower was even named Supreme Commander. At the

Tehran Conference in November 1943, Franklin Roosevelt, [music] Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin agreed that a Western invasion of France would open in the spring of 1944, easing pressure on the Soviet Union, which has been absorbing the overwhelming majority of German military casualties for nearly 3 years on the Eastern Front.

Stalin has been demanding a second front since 1942. By the time Eisenhower takes command in England in January 1944, the promise made at Thran has become a debt owed to millions of Soviet debt and a debt Eisenhower is personally responsible for repaying on schedule. Around this operational core, an elaborate deception campaign called Operation Fortitude has been constructed to convince German intelligence that the true invasion will land not at Normandy but at Cala, the narrowest point of the channel and the most obvious target for

any invading force. inflatable tanks, fake radio traffic, and a fictional army group supposedly commanded by the flamboyant General George Patton, a man the Germans respect and fear more than any other Allied commander, have been assembled in southeast England, specifically to hold German reserves in place near Calala, even after the real invasion begins.

If this deception fails, if German intelligence sees through the ruse even slightly, the Panza divisions held in reserve could be unleashed on the Normandy beach heads within hours and the entire invasion could be crushed before it establishes any real foothold. Eisenhower is gambling not just on weather, but on a lie holding together for at least the first critical days after the landing.

So on the evening of June 4th, 1944, Dwight Eisenhower has already postponed the invasion once. Now gathered in the library of Southwick House with his senior commanders, he listens as a Scottish meteorologist named Group Captain James Stag delivers a forecast that will either liberate Europe or drown it. The rain outside is real.

The wind outside is real. And somewhere in the darkness, thousands of paratroopers are already checking their gear, believing tonight might be the night. What Eisenhower does next, in a shabby, smoke-filled room, sleepdeprived and utterly alone in the weight of his authority, will be remembered as one of the most consequential decisions any single human being has ever made.

Does he send them into the storm, or does he wait and risk losing everything? The library at Southwick House is thick with cigarette smoke by 9:30 on the evening of June 4th, 1944. Eisenhower sits with his senior commanders, Montgomery, Ramsay, Lee Mallalerie, Bradley, and his own chief of staff, Walter Bedell Smith, in a room lit by dim lamps.

The windows rattling under gusts strong enough to bend trees outside. Group captain James Stag steps forward with the forecast that has already forced one postponement. The weather, he reports, is deteriorating. High winds, low cloud ceilings, rough seas. Landing craft will struggle to hold formation. Bombers will not be able to see their targets.

Paratroopers dropped in these conditions will be scattered across the French countryside, isolated and vulnerable. Eisenhower has already ordered a 24-hour delay once on June 4th itself, pulling back ships that had already begun to sail. A logistical nightmare that saw some vessels literally turned around in the channel.

A second postponement of this magnitude has never been rehearsed. Nobody in that room knows exactly what will happen if they must do it again. At 4:15 on the morning of June 5, Eisenhower’s commanders reconvene. Stag returns with news that stuns the room. A narrow window of clearing weather is moving in behind the stormfront, arriving in roughly 36 hours and lasting perhaps a day and a half. Winds will drop.

Cloud cover will lift just enough for bombers to see their targets and paratroopers to find their drop zones. It will not be good weather. It will barely be adequate weather, but it will be a window. And windows like this do not wait for generals to make up their minds. Eisenhower turns to his commanders one by one. Montgomery says, “Go.

” Lee Mallerie remains deeply uneasy about the airborne operation, still convinced the American paratroopers dropping behind Utah Beach, face casualty rates as high as 70%. Ramsay defers to the ground and air commanders, but stresses that any further delay pushes the operation into a period of unfavorable tides that could set the invasion back until late June.

Bedell Smith later recalls the silence that follows. Nearly 45 seconds, an eternity in a room where everyone is waiting for one man to speak. Eisenhower sits with his chin resting on his hands. Then he says the words that will be remembered for the rest of human history. Okay, let’s go. It is 4:15 in the morning on June 5th, 1944.

In less than 24 hours, Operation Overlord will begin. But saying the words is only the beginning of the longest day of Dwight Eisenhower’s life. Because even after the order is given, there remains one operation Eisenhower fears more than any other part of the invasion. The airborne assault. Three divisions, the American 82nd and 101st Airborne and the British 6th Airborne are about to drop behind enemy lines in darkness hours before the seaborn landings even begin.

Tasked with securing bridges, causeways, and gun batteries before German reinforcements can reach the beaches. Lee Mallalerie has told Eisenhower directly in blunt and pessimistic terms that he expects the airborne divisions to suffer catastrophic losses. Gliders smashed on Raml’s anti-glider stakes, paratroopers shot from the sky before they even reached the ground.

Eisenhower has weighed this warning for days. He has not overruled Lee Mallalerie lightly. He has made the calculation that without the airborne assault, German armor could reach the beaches before the seaborn troops establish a foothold and the entire invasion could be repelled at the water’s edge, just as RML intends.

While Eisenhower agonizes over the American airborne divisions, another critical piece of the plan is already unfolding under his authority hundreds of miles away. one he cannot personally oversee, but has approved in every detail. Shortly after midnight, six gliders carrying men of the British 6th Airborne Division under the command of Major John Howard cast off from their tow planes and descend in near total silence toward a small crossing point over the Con Canal, a target that will become known to history as Pegasus Bridge. Howard’s

glider pilots, flying blind in darkness with no engines and no second chances, must land within yards of the bridge itself. In fields ringed with obstacles designed to shred exactly this kind of aircraft, the first glider strikes the ground so hard it very nearly kills every man inside, plowing through barbed wire before finally stopping barely 50 yard from the bridge.

Within minutes, Howard’s men have stormed the German positions and seized the crossing intact. One of the first Allied objectives of D-Day secured and a vital link that will allow troops moving inland from Sword Beach to link up with the airborne forces holding the eastern flank of the invasion. It is a success built on split-second precision and enormous risk.

Exactly the kind of outcome Eisenhower has no way of predicting as he paces his trailer near Portsmouth hours before he receives any word of it. That afternoon, Eisenhower does something almost no biography of a wartime general prepares you for. Instead of remaining at his headquarters reviewing maps and logistics, he climbs into his car and drives to Greenham Common Airfield where the 101st Airborne Division, the Screaming Eagles, are preparing to board their C47 transport planes, faces blackened with grease paint, weighed down with nearly 70 lb of

equipment each. Hundreds of paratroopers stand in loose formation as the Supreme Commander of Allied forces in Europe walks directly into their ranks. He does not deliver a formal speech from a podium. He moves from group to group, shaking hands, asking soldiers where they are from, joking with a private from Michigan about fishing back home.

Learning that one young sergeant from Texas has never even been on an airplane before tonight. Photographs taken that evening, among the most famous images of the entire war, capture Eisenhower speaking with Lieutenant Wallace Strobble, a 22-year-old jump officer from Michigan. The number 23 chokeked on a placard around Strobble’s neck to mark his aircraft.

Eisenhower asks him if he’s ready. Strobel says he is. Eisenhower tells him, “Go get him.” What the cameras do not fully capture is what one of Eisenhower’s aids later describes. The visible strain on his face after the men climb into their planes and the engines roar to life. As the last C47 lifts off into the darkening sky, Eisenhower stands alone on the tarmac, watching until the aircraft disappear from view.

His driver, K. Summersby, later recalls that his eyes were wet. He turns to her and says quietly that he hopes he has not just sent these men to their deaths for nothing. He knows standing on that airfield that some fraction of the young men he just shook hands with, men whose names he does not know, whose mothers do not yet know their sons are airborne, will not live to see the sunrise.

He returns to his command trailer near Portsmouth sometime after 10 that night. What happens next is the detail almost no documentary gets right because it reveals something about Eisenhower that his carefully composed public image rarely shows. Alone with nothing left to do but wait, Eisenhower takes out a pencil and a small notepad and writes a message meant only to be read if the invasion fails.

It reads in essence that the troops, the air force, and the navy did everything that bravery and devotion to duty could do, and that if blame or fault attaches to the attempt, it is his alone. He misdates it July 5th instead of June 5th, a small human slip from a man running on no sleep and pure adrenaline, and folds it into his wallet.

This is not a document written for cameras or for history. It is a private acknowledgement that he alone will carry the full weight of failure that he has already accepted the personal consequences of the deaths he cannot yet count. He does not show it to anyone. It will not be discovered until weeks later. Nearly forgotten, tucked behind other papers in his wallet.

Now comes the part of the night almost nobody discusses. The hours between midnight and dawn on June 6th, 1944, when Eisenhower has absolutely nothing left to do, the order has been given. The Armada is moving. The paratroopers are already in the air, jumping into darkness over Normandy at this very moment.

Some landing precisely on target near S Marglees. Others scattered miles off course into flooded marshland, drowning under the weight of their own equipment before they can even unbuckle their parachutes. Eisenhower cannot stop what he has started. He cannot speed it up. He cannot manage it from a distance. All he can do is wait.

And waiting is by every account from those who knew him the thing Eisenhower found hardest of all. While Eisenhower waits in his trailer, out on the black water of the channel, the invasion fleet is enduring its own private hell that no situation report can fully capture. Tens of thousands of soldiers packed into the holds of transport ships and smaller landing craft are being tossed violently by the residual swell of the storm that nearly canled the entire operation.

Seasickness sweeps through the ranks with brutal efficiency. Men who have trained for months for this exact night spend its final hours wretching over the sides of pitching vessels. Weighed down by equipment, unable to sleep, unable to eat, simply enduring. Naval crews work in near total blackout conditions.

No lights, no radio chatter beyond the essential, guiding thousands of vessels through cleared minefield channels marked only by dim buoys in a nighttime maritime traffic jam unlike anything ever attempted before or since. A single navigational error, a single collision in the dark could kill hundreds of men before they ever see the coast of France.

Eisenhower knows all of this is happening as he paces his trailer and knows there is nothing left he can do about any of it. His aids describe him pacing his trailer, chain smoking cigarettes. He will later admit to smoking nearly four packs a day during the peak of the invasion planning and reading paperback western novels to distract his mind.

Though he later confesses he cannot remember a single word of what he read that night. He plays checkers with his staff and loses interest halfway through the game. He drafts and reddrafts communicates that will not be sent for hours. At one point, he simply sits in silence, staring at a map of the Normandy coastline that he has already memorized down to the smallest German gun imp placement.

Then at approximately 4:15 in the morning, nearly the exact same hour, 24 hours earlier, when he gave the order to launch, reports begin trickling in from the airborne divisions. [music] They are fragmentaryary, incomplete, contradictory. Some units report successful drops. Others report scattered chaos. Men landing miles from their objectives, radios lost, entire companies reduced to a handful of soldiers, stumbling through hedgerros in the dark, trying to find any friendly face.

For a brief, gut-wrenching period, it is entirely unclear whether the airborne assault, the operation Lee Mallerie warned might be a slaughter, has succeeded or catastrophically failed. This is the moment of near collapse hidden inside Eisenhower’s night. Not a single dramatic battlefield reversal, but a prolonged agonizing stretch of not knowing in which the man who gave the order to launch the largest invasion in history has no way of confirming whether he has just won the war or doomed thousands of young men for nothing. By dawn, clearer reports begin

arriving. Pathfinders from the 101st and 82nd Airborne, despite being scattered across a wider area than planned, have managed to seize key bridges and causeways. German communications in the region are in disarray, confused by dummy paratroopers dropped specifically to draw attention away from real drop zones and by the sheer chaos of scattered Allied troops appearing in unexpected places, making German commanders wildly overestimate the scale of the airborne assault. At 6:30 a.m.

, the first waves of the Seaborn invasion begin hitting the beaches Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno, and Sword as more than 5,000 ships unload men and machines onto French sand under withering fire. At Utah Beach on the western flank, the US Fourth Infantry Division lands nearly 2,000 yards off its intended target due to strong currents.

An error that turns out almost unbelievably to work in the allies favor, putting troops ashore at a point far more lightly defended than planned. Brigadier General Theodore Roosevelt Jr., son of the former president, insists on landing with the first wave despite being 56 years old and walking with a cane from old war wounds and arthritis.

When he realizes the current has pushed his men to the wrong beach, he makes a decision on the spot that becomes one of the most quoted lines of the entire invasion. We’ll start the war from right here. His improvisation holds the beach head together in its most disorganized opening minutes. At Omaha Beach, there is no such fortune.

The US 1st and 29th infantry divisions faced the most heavily defended stretch of the entire invasion front where German defenders of the 352nd Infantry Division, a unit Allied intelligence had badly underestimated, sit dug into bluffs nearly 100 ft above the sand. Their machine guns and mortars presited on every possible approach.

Landing craft ramps drop and entire platoon are cut down in the surf before a single man reaches dry sand. Men drown under the weight of their packs in water still stained red by 8:00 a.m. Their bodies rolling in the tide alongside burning wreckage and abandoned rifles. Bangalore torpedo teams die trying to blow gaps in the barbed wire.

For nearly 2 hours, Omaha Beach teeters on the absolute edge of catastrophic failure. So dire that Omar Bradley, watching reports from the command ship USS Augusta, seriously considers diverting all follow-on waves away from the beach entirely and evacuating the men already pinned down on the sand. A decision that had it been made could have unraveled the entire eastern half of the invasion.

It is only through the desperate improvisation of small groups of soldiers and junior officers, men like those of the First Infantry Division’s 16th Regiment, cutting through wire and clawing up the bluffs under direct fire with no orders beyond their own instinct to survive, that the beach is finally secured by early afternoon.

Further east, British and Canadian forces storm gold, Juno and sword beaches supported by specialized armor, tanks fitted with flails to detonate mines, and devices to breach seaw walls. Innovations that spare these beaches some of the horror unfolding at Omaha. Though Canadian troops at Juno still suffer casualty rates among the highest of any beach that day, fighting through the same kind of pill boxes and machine gun nests that nearly broke the Americans to the west.

Eisenhower receives these updates in fragments throughout the morning. Unable to leave his headquarters, unable to do anything but process reports relayed from ships and radio operators hundreds of miles away. It is a strange almost unbearable position for a man defined by decisiveness. The architect of the largest military operation in history.

Reduced to waiting for scraps of information about a battle he cannot see, cannot touch, cannot influence in any way beyond the single order he gave hours before. By that evening, the picture becomes clear enough to report with confidence. All five beaches have been secured, though at staggering cost. An estimated 4,400 Allied dead among more than 10,000 total casualties on June 6th alone, with Omaha Beach absorbing the worst of it.

The airborne divisions, despite their scattered drops, have accomplished the majority of their objectives, disrupting German reinforcement routes and creating exactly the confusion Eisenhower had gambled they would. Raml, who had left the front to celebrate his wife’s birthday in Germany, believing poor weather made an invasion unlikely for days, is caught entirely offg guard, arriving back at his headquarters only after the invasion is already underway.

The gamble on the weather window, the decision made in a smoke-filled room at 4:15 that morning, has paid off in the most consequential way imaginable. The consequences of what Eisenhower decided that night ripple outward for the rest of the war and then for the rest of the 20th century.

Within a week, more than 326,000 troops, over 50,000 vehicles, and more than 100,000 tons of supplies have crossed the channel and established a firm Allied foothold in France. A foothold the Germans never managed to eliminate. Hitler, still partially deceived by Operation Fortitude into believing Normandy might be a diversion for a larger attack at Calala, delays releasing critical armored reserves for crucial early hours.

A hesitation historians consider one of the decisive factors that allowed the beach head to survive its most fragile first days. From this single towh hold on the Normandy coast, the Allied armies break out through the hedge country in the following weeks, liberate Paris by the end of August 1944, and begin the grinding push toward Germany that will end the war in Europe less than a year later on May 8th, 1945.

The cost of that single day is staggering by any measure. Total Allied casualties on D-Day alone are estimated at more than 10,000, including roughly 4,400 confirmed dead. German casualties that day are estimated between 4,000 and 9,000 over the full Battle of Normandy that follows through August 1944. Casualties on both sides climb into the hundreds of thousands with an estimated 20,000 French civilians killed as well.

caught between two colliding armies in their own towns and fields. These are not abstract statistics. They are the fishermen from Michigan, the sergeants from Texas, the 22-year-old lieutenants whose names Eisenhower learned by their chocked airplane numbers the night before they died. Men he shook hands with on a darkened airfield.

Men whose faces he watched disappear into the night sky, never to return. For Eisenhower personally, the decision made that night at Southwick House becomes the defining act of his career and arguably the single most consequential judgment call of the entire war. It elevates him from a competent administrator managing difficult Allied personalities into a historical figure whose name becomes inseparable from the liberation of Western Europe.

Within a decade, the general who agonized alone in a trailer, uncertain whether he had sent thousands of young men to their deaths, becomes the 34th president of the United States. Carried into office in no small part by the trust the American public placed in the man who made the right call on the worst night of the war.

Eisenhower rarely spoke publicly about that night in detail, even decades later. When he did, in later interviews and in his own memoirs, he tended to downplay the personal anguish, framing the decision in terms of weather charts and tactical necessity, rather than the sleepless fear that those closest to him witnessed firsthand.

It is a pattern common to men who carry command through history’s largest moments. The private torment sanded down into a clean quotable line for posterity. While the truth, preserved only in scattered letters and the memories of aids like K. Summersby and Bedell Smith tells a far more human story of a man who wept on a darkened airfield and wrote his own resignation from history in advance just in case the gamble failed.

But strip away the presidency, the medals, and the history books, and what remains from that night is something smaller and more human. It is a man alone in a trailer, unable to sleep, writing a letter he hopes never to send, accepting blame in advance for deaths he has not yet caused, because he understands that command means carrying the weight others cannot see.

It is a supreme commander walking uninvited into a crowd of paratroopers, learning their first names and hometowns because he cannot bear to send men into darkness as strangers. It is the particular isolating agony of having made an irreversible decision and then having absolutely nothing left to do but wait for the consequences to arrive, one fragmentaryary radio report at a time.

History has a way of compressing enormous agonizing decisions into single tidy sentences. Okay, let’s go. As though the words themselves carried no weight. As though Eisenhower simply glanced at a weather chart and made an easy call. The truth preserved in the letters, the diaries, and the recollections of the men who stood beside him that night is far heavier.

Eisenhower carried the accepted blame letter in his wallet for weeks afterward, largely forgotten amid the flood of operational demands that followed the successful landing until an aid discovered it by accident and asked whether it should be destroyed. Eisenhower reportedly told him to keep it, perhaps as a private reminder of exactly what he had been willing to accept on the night before the invasion began.

It survives today, dated wrong, imperfect, unmistakably human. A document written by a man who did not yet know if he would be remembered as a liberator or the architect of the worst military disaster in American history. The strategic consequences of that single decision reach far beyond the beaches of Normandy. The successful establishment of the Western Front forces Germany to fight a two-front war at its most desperate hour, splitting already strained resources between the advancing Red Army in the east and the Allied forces now pouring into France

from the west. Historians widely regard this two-front pressure as decisive in accelerating Germany’s collapse, shortening a war that might otherwise have dragged on for additional years. at additional millions of lives. The political order that emerges from this campaign, a liberated Western Europe rebuilt under American and British influence rather than absorbed into a Soviet sphere reaching to the Atlantic coast shapes the entire architecture of the Cold War that follows.

The formation of NATO and the map of Europe that persists into the present day. every version of the 20th century that did not happen. A Europe entirely behind Soviet lines, a negotiated peace that left Hitler’s regime intact, a war extended by years rather than concluded within one, was foreclosed, at least in part, by the decision made in a smoke-filled library at 4:15 in the morning on June 5th, 1944.

Every war in every era eventually comes down to moments like this one. Not the battle itself, but the decision that makes the battle possible. Made by one exhausted human being who cannot know in the moment whether history will call him a liberator or a butcher. Dwight Eisenhower gave his order at 4:15 in the morning and then spent the longest night of his life discovering that command is not the power to control outcomes.

It is only the burden of choosing and then living with what you cannot take