Bill O’Reilly’s No Spin News and Analysis - BONUS: Bill O'Reilly Breaks Down America's Wars

Episode Date: May 24, 2025

As Memorial Day approaches Bill O'Reilly takes a look at America's wars, and the impact they've had on the country. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Memorial Day honors the armed forces and people who were killed. Let's go over what has happened to this country. So in 1775, the Revolutionary War started. It lasted eight years. Most people don't know that. George Washington was the big hero. About 70,000 patriots died in that war, mostly from disease, not from bullets. About 25,000 British regulars were killed.

That was a big number. King George lost a big number there. And people who were wounded back then usually died for their wounds because they didn't have medical procedures as they do now. Now, I wrote a book called Killing England. If you want to know about the Revolutionary War, that's the book you read. Then the next huge war, we had the War of 1812, didn't really matter, Mexican War. It was a small thing. But the Civil War, that was the worst thing that ever happened to this country by far.

Start on April 12th, 1861, when the South said FU to the federal government and shooting began. It ended four years later. In the interim, about a million Americans lost their lives, more than a million. $620,000 is the estimate on a battlefield, but if you were wounded again in the Civil War, you usually die, maybe not right away. But I estimate more than a million Americans are killed, and that includes 200,000 Confederate soldiers, about 280,000 Union soldiers, died in direct combat. Okay? So that was the worst thing by far as ever, ever happened. Then you had the Indian wars that lasted from 1609 to 1890. My God. All right. We have no stats, reliable stats. And I did write a book on the Civil War called

Killing Lincoln. So we got one on a Revolutionary War. We got one on a Civil War. And we have one on the India Wars called Killing Crazy Horse. We cannot nail down stats about deaths, but when you're fighting from 1609 to 19 to 1890, there were hundreds of thousands of people killed on both sides in the India War. Savage. Most savage wars fought on this continent by far and killing crazy horse documents. Then we segue into modern times World War I, July 28th, 1914. It started in Europe. Most Americans didn't want any part of it. We had to get in it at the end because it was just the whole world was collapsing. And Woodrow Wilson was the president. And he said, all right, we've got to go in. We're only in there for about a year.

year, 117,000 Americans killed in a year because we had to take on Germany. It was really Germany against France and Britain. That's what it really was. There were other countries involved, but the Germans were the big, bad guys, as usual. And we went in and we kicked their butts, but we lost 117,000. My grandfather was a hero at Muse Argonne. He didn't get a scratch. but it was horrendous. Get the poison gas going on. You got all that stuff. It was horrible, horrible that war.

And then the Treaty of Versailles stripped the Germans of pretty much everything. And the nation plunged to poverty in the Great Depression. And then Hitler promised prosperity. And the Germans said, okay, now we'll bring in Adolf. Because we know he's bad. We know it'll kill anybody. but we want to live better. And everybody got a car, by the way.

In Germany, the Volkswagen, hey, that came from Hitler. And one of our Hitler's big enablers was Mercedes-Benz. And to this day, I will not do any business with them. Mercedes-Benz. They never were held to account. So World War II was just, the stats are, listen to this. Okay, this is according to the national, World War II Museum, okay? 15 million human beings killed on a battlefield in World War II,

which lasted six years, 15 million debt, 45 million civilians. You know about the six million Jews and the Holocaust. You don't know about the 15 million Chinese slaughtered by the Japanese, and maybe even more, because we don't have any reliable stats. out of there. The estimate is 45 million civilians. 25 million human beings wounded in this war. That Hitler started and then Japan started at Tojo. These guys led that. I mean, that's why when my new book comes out at September 9th, confronting evil, I got all this in there. You'll see how it happened. Okay. Then we say, into the Korean War, which few people pay attention to, 1950 to 1953, three years, U.S.

killed 37,000, wounded, more than 100,000 U.S. service people killed, I mean, sorry, wounded. In Korea, and that broke out because the communist from the north, aided by China, invaded the South, wanted to take over the whole thing, just like Vietnam. We'll get to that in a moment. And Harry Truman said, no, you know, we're going to protect the freedom of the South Koreans. I am going to South Korea next week. I have not been. I'm going to the DMC and all that. But that was a very vicious war that people have forgotten. Then we go into Vietnam, and this is my error. So it began very early in 1955. U.S. didn't get really involved in it for 10 years. Lyndon Johnson's a big villain there.

And then it ended 1975. But for the United States, it was basically 1966 to 71, a five-year period of intense combat. And we lost about 60,000. And more if you did the Asian orange stuff and all of that. Dead. All right. The Vietnamese lost three million, both south and north. and very hard to get a wounded number

because they were just couldn't you couldn't count them. Nobody could count them. So Vietnam, the vets that went over were drafted, as you probably know. And in my town, Levitown, I went to college, so I wasn't. But the guys who didn't go to college were and they all came back screwed up.

All of them, 100% of them, screwed up in some way. So we all knew them from early, childhood, and when it came back, they weren't the same people. Horrendous. It was horrendous psychologically and emotionally on the draftees. But they performed magnificently, and that story has not been told. All right, U.S. didn't lose that war. We won every engagement, including way, including all of the invasions by the North Vietnamese. We beat them. And we couldn't fight the war the way it should have been fought with air power and all that because of Johnson. Johnson was a

coward and a liar, Linda Johnson, one of the worst presidents in history. Again, I chronicle him in confronting the presidents. He was just horrendous. Yet, a U.S. military went over, did their duty largely, and they got scorned. And I'm hoping that we can recognize them, much better than we have as a nation, the Vietnam War. And then you go to Iraq, and this was off 9-11, and the Bush administration, Bush the Younger, believed that Saddam Hussein was helping terrorists and could give them weapons of mass destruction. That's what the belief was. So we went in and we removed him. The war lasted from March 20, 2003. And then we stayed in Iraq to try to make that a democracy for eight years. A U.S. dead, 4,500.

Iraqi dead, probably 400,000, 400,000 Iraqis, okay. Wounded, and some of them horrendously by the bombs, 32,000 Americans wounded. Now, I've read a lot of money for them. And I admire them just as I admire the Korean and Vietnam vets. I mean, this is my epic here. So I'm so was deposed. Iraq today is stable. So you could say we won that, but it was a horrendous price. Afghanistan lasted 20 years, because we had occupied that country, so al-Qaeda couldn't come back, reconstitute, and then Biden surrendered after 20 years. Americans won it out. You've got to be fair here. U.S. combat deaths, 2400. Okay? Afghan deaths, about 200,000.

Afghans died. U.S. wounded in Afghanistan, about 21,000. So again, it's not on the par with Iraq, a little bit less, but Biden surrendered it, didn't have to. Another terrible reason for that guy. I mean, he's just absolute worst. So that's our war history. And let's, you know, look, now it's a different.

thing. And it's important for all Americans to know that. We're not going to fight the Chinese on the ground or Putin on the ground. That's not happening anymore. We have skirmishes. We have special forces that go in and dismantle ISIS and they go after certain groups that are causing trouble. But mass infantry warfare is over because they got all these horrendous weapons, drones and all of that. That's what's going to be. And that's almost worse. because they incinerate everybody. You really can't have a war between superpowers anymore. That's what Putin's card is.

He always saber rattles with the nukes. He's not going to do it, I don't think. But the fear level, you know, you start that, and then the whole planet just goes up. And we need to think about that. So on this Memorial Day, I want everybody to have fun. But I do want you to know your history. I wrote three books on World War II,

killing Patton, killing the Rising Sun, killing the SS. All three, we haven't bundled on Bill O'Reilly.com, get all three of them for a very, very good price. But you need to know about the history of the U.S. military. And it's a very, very proud and noble history.

We've done some bad things, particularly with the Indians, the Native Americans. But, boy, we have freed billions of people, billions with a bee, all over the world. A tremendous sacrifice to the USA.