For more than three decades, Major General William E. "Joe" Potter operated at the heart of some of the twentieth century's most consequential enterprises. He helped sustain the Allied drive across Europe after D-Day, governed the Panama Canal Zone at the height of Cold War tension, directed operations for the 1964-65 New York World's Fair, and later joined Walt Disney's inner circle to help build the Florida Project that became Walt Disney World. Despite influencing projects that reshaped American military power, global commerce, and popular culture, Potter's name has largely disappeared from history.
In D-Day to Disney World, historian Brian D. Laslie restores Potter's place in the story of the American century-and reveals the extraordinary reach of the military engineers, logisticians, and administrators who built the modern world from behind the scenes.
During World War II, Potter became one of the Army's indispensable organizers inside the Communications Zone, the vast logistical network that sustained Allied armies after Normandy. As American and Allied forces raced across France faster than railroads and pipelines could support them, Potter helped oversee the systems that kept fuel, ammunition, vehicles, and food moving eastward, including operations connected to the famed Red Ball Express. Victory depended not only on battlefield leadership, but on supplies reaching the front before the advance stalled.
After the war, Potter's career carried him into the center of America's expanding global and political ambitions. As governor of the Panama Canal Zone, he confronted rising unrest over U.S. control of one of the world's most strategic waterways. Later, working alongside master builder Robert Moses, Potter helped coordinate the immense logistical and construction demands of the New York World's Fair before Walt Disney recruited him for an even more ambitious undertaking in central Florida.
Disney needed more than imagination to build his experimental city in the swamps outside Orlando. He needed roads, drainage, utilities, construction systems, and organizational control on a near-military scale. Joe Potter knew how to build exactly that.
Blending biography, military history, and the history of American infrastructure, D-Day to Disney World tells the remarkable story of the soldier-engineer whose unseen work helped shape modern America.
