The Megyn Kelly Show - Deep Dives on World War I and World War II - Megyn's History Mega-Episode

Episode Date: May 17, 2026

Megyn Kelly takes a look back in the archives at our past history shows for this mega-episode, featuring deep dives on World War I and World War II.     Follow The Megyn Kelly Show on all social platforms: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/MegynKelly Twitter: http://Twitter.com/MegynKellyShow Instagram: http://Instagram.com/MegynKellyShow Facebook: http://Facebook.com/MegynKellyShow  Find out more information at:https://www.devilmaycaremedia.com/megynkellyshow Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Welcome to The Megan Kelly Show, live on Sirius XM Channel 111 every weekday at New East. Hey, everyone, I'm Megan Kelly. Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show. And today's Sunday mega episode, we are switching things up for a few weeks with a focus on our history shows from the archives. Today, a deep dive on World War I and World War II. You're going to love these. Enjoy and see you Monday. We focus today on World War I, better known to some people. as the Great War. The war began in 1914 and brought in global powers from across the world, with the central powers facing off against the allied powers, which eventually included the United States. By the end of the war, over 20 million lives had been claimed, including more than 100,000

American troops. The impact of the war changed the face of the world, and it's felt even today. But the reasons behind the start of the war and even the rationale for continuing fight are nuanced. Later, we're going to be joined by Doug Brunt. He is my husband. He hosts the podcast dedicated with Doug Brunt, which is about authors, but he's also a historian, and he is neck deep in a tome he is writing that is amazing on this exact period. So he'll join us for a bit. But first, we start with the historian on this period, American author, professor of history,

Bard College, Sean McMeekin. Sean, welcome to the show. So glad to have you. Thanks for having me on, Megan. It's really great to be here. My husband, Doug, is a huge fan of yours. He's read your books. He's a self-taught student of World War I. And I was very excited to hear that I was going to be speaking to you. So I have to pass along his regards. Great. Thank you. All right. So let's start big picture. Because I think a lot of people know a lot about World War II and maybe a little less. about World War I.

Describe sort of the world as we approached World War I, turn of the century into the 1900s. And like, who were the top world powers at that time? Who was waning? Who was strong? Well, the United States was certainly emerging as a world power. But as far as the old world, it was still, I wouldn't say second rate exactly,

but for diplomats, it was not necessarily the prestige post. That is to say, if you were a diplomat, you're ambitious, you probably wouldn't want to get posted to Washington because a lot of the action was still in Europe. The European powers ruled over something like 85% of the surface of the globe. The Great Empire's, Britain's was the largest and certainly the most diverse and global. It was often said the sun never set famously on the British Empire. But France had a pretty enormous empire as well in both Asia and Africa. Russia, of course, bestrored the continent of Eurasia, the entire landmass stretching across,

as we might put it to something like 11-odd time zones. Japan was starting to emerge as a power in Asia, already occupying, much of Korea dating back to a series of wars in the 1890s and early 1900s. The U.S. was certainly a power. The U.S. had already begun to emerge as an empire in the Philippines and also in Cuba with interest stretching beyond her borders. But as far as power politics, the real center of gravity was in Europe. And the alliance system, which you alluded to, we had part of what made things so potentially dangerous was that you have. had two almost equal power blocks. The core of the blocks were France and Russia,

and they were essentially kind of hostile to Germany ever since Germany had been unified in 1871 at the center of the continent. And then Germany relied mostly on Austria-Hungary or the Habsburg Empire to try to see off the Franco-Russian threat. Britain was somewhat aloof, although Britain did have agreements with both France and Russia. They were largely colonial agreements,

that is to say they were about spheres of influence, trying to respect each other's zones where core interests were held, whether in Africa or in Asia. With France, things had gone a little bit further. Britain had already started joint conversations regarding the possibility of naval cooperation in either the English Channel or possibly the Mediterranean in the case of a war. But Britain liked to remain aloof. The British, they were kind of the top dog, the hegemon. And they tended to look down their noses just a little bit at some of the other powers. So they didn't stoop to a life. people have these alliances where it's like, I'll defend you if you get in trouble and you defend me.

And Great Britain was like, we're good. That's right. The British were a little bit aloof. But you're right. It was often quite cynical. Bismarck who had tried to keep France and Russia from teeming up against Germany until he was sacked in 1890 by Kaiserville Helm the second, who undid did a lot of Bismarck's diplomatic design. He actually came up with something called the Reinsurance Treaty in 1887. So the idea of this was that the reinsurance business being the insurance that insurance companies take out on each. other. So what the Germans tried to do was to give these kind of secret assurances that so long as, let's say, Germany didn't invade France, then Russia more or less had a free hand. But Russia would

not cooperate if France invaded Germany. And then the same thing would take place in reverse with Austria-Hungary. There was a lot of secret diplomacy. And this is the kind of thing that the Americans like to rail against. That Woodrow Wilson would famously rail against it in some of his speeches and the 14 points. That is that the powers were kind of drawing each other. in to some extent their spheres of influence. But they had different interests. And that's the thing. They didn't necessarily see things the same way. So there was a potential for conflict. Let me ask you about it. So Great Britain was, I mean, this one, they talk about now on the death of Queen Elizabeth, people talked about, you know, the British Empire and colonialism and all

that. This is the time frame what we're talking about it. You know, like this is when they really were the British Empire and, you know, they controlled India and all these vast landmasses. And they were at the very height of their power. But their isolationism was well-founded, right, as I understand, because they had this huge, really powerful navy. And that Navy had served them very well. And they were kind of like, we're good as long as we have our big Navy. And as we'll fast forward to in a little while, once Germany started to sort of come at them, right, they were like, okay, hold on a second. Now, if you're going to, if you're going to mess with our, with our shores, with our waters, you're going to do anything to threaten our Navy, and Germany was

building up its Navy, it's on. We're talking about a totally different ballgame now. Well, that's right. The British definitely saw the Germans as an emerging threat. For most of the 19th century, Britain had seen Russia as a greater threat over land, the various routes to India. There was this kind of almost fantasy that the Russians might eventually crash across the northwest frontier through Peshawar and into India. But since the turn of a century, the Germans had been building this high seas fleet. And Kaiser Wilhelm I, the second, It's one of his many alleged blunders. Again, the Germans get a lot of bad press for this,

that he had been reading, apparently, the work of Admiral Mahan, the influence of sea power on history allegedly kept it next to his bedside table and was kind of obsessed with the idea that Germany, too, should have a high-seas fleet, just like the British did. And there were various aspects to this where they often built these ships without necessarily that much capacity for coal storage, in part because they weren't necessarily going to go around the world, rather than they were going to go into the North Sea, the English channel to fight the British, it was quite provocative. The British, though, they really

had seen off this threat. I mean, the thing is the newer research on the war, and particularly on spending shows, the British were able to outspend the Germans on the Navy, in part because the Germans had to feel such a large army. About 1911 or 1912, the British really had seen off the German threat. So I think some of the arguments about the Anglo-German naval race is this prime causative factor of the First World War, and we've heard a lot about that. There are many books about that subject. I think they overdo it just a bit. I think Britain, was arrogant enough to see the Germans as a threat. But I think by 1914, the threat had been largely contained, at least the threat to British naval supremacy.

All right, so let's go back. So the war breaks out in 1914, the Great War, World War I. And officially, we are told, it is because some group called the Black Hand, some terrorist group in Serbia, assassinated the Archduke of Austria-Hungary, which is basically an alliance between Austria and Hungary, that we refer to as Austria-Hungary. And Austria-Hungary got very mad. This is the official story. They got very angry that their archduke had been assassinated and went

back to Serbia and wrote this barn burner of a letter. Like, you will do the following things or it's war. And as I understand it, one of everybody's favorite characters, Winston Churchill read this over in England and was like, oh, it's on. I mean, it's war. I mean, clearly, there's no way they're going to meet these conditions.

They want war. War's coming. And Germany is over there behind its friend, Austria, Hungary, like, yes, we want war two. We got you. We got your back, Austria Hungary. And the alliances went. This is my, this is the way I talk about history, just to keep it simple. I know you're way above me on this, but like, is that my, is my dumbed down version essentially correct? No, there's a lot of truth in this. I mean, you're alluding, I assume, to the blank check. That is, the Germans give this assurance to Austria, Hungary, that effectively we have your back in case Russia intervenes and we're ready to back you up to the hilt.

And the blank check was certainly important. So was the assassination. And so is the Austro-Hungarian response to it. It wasn't just a pretext, though. If you actually look at the details, I'm not going to get into the details of what actually happened in Sarajevo, although I do discuss it in great detail in several of my books. What's fascinating about the dynamics surrounding it, is it Franz Ferdin, you think, okay, he's an archduke, he's the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, the Habsburg throne of Austria-Hungary, okay, fine, so you'd think he's not even really sovereign. He's not a politician. Why would it matter so much? But in fact, he was. He wasn't just heir to the throne. But Franz Joseph,

who had been emperor since 1848 was an octogenarian, expected to die really almost every day. Yeah, he was, I mean, a lot of people said, he was staying alive despite his uncle. That's right. He was staying alive just because he didn't like his nephew. But So Fronet was actually running military policy. He was basically running almost a shadow government out of the belvedere.

And what was significant about his assassination, aside from the kind of provocation of it, was that he himself had been blocking the war party in Vienna. Conrad von Hitzendorf, the equivalent of, the more famous Malki in Berlin, the chief of staff, effectively in charge of military planning, he had actually advocated going to war with Serbia something like 25 times in 1913 alone, and Franz Ferdinand had blocked him every single time. In addition to this, Kaiserilhelm I'm the second.

So wait, let me just stop you. Let me stop you, because I want to keep a nice and simple for our listeners who are not experts. So what you're saying is, I mean, the average person would say, well, why would Serbia assassinate that guy if that's the guy who's stopping the war? But the question is, well, did this Serbian terrorist group have an interest in stopping the war? Certainly sounds like maybe not. And did Serbia itself have an interest in stopping the war? Because there's a real question about whether this terrorist group was the only one behind it

or whether Serbia was actually itself behind the assassination. Well, I don't think the terrorists were necessarily pacifists. On the other hand, the people backing them. Some of them may well have wanted the war. If you actually look at the organizer of the Black Hand, Colonel Dmitron Dragutti, Dmitreyevich, his codename was Apis, a little simpler to call him Apis. He was actually the head of Serbian military intelligence. Now, he himself was not necessarily in go-huts with the Prime Minister of Serbia,

but the hardliners definitely wanted war. They thought they might actually win, and they were not averse to provoking Austria-Hungary. So a lot of people overlook Serbia, 1914. But in fact, we have very clear evidence that the Serbian government, at least some rogue elements of the Serbian government, were complicit in the plot, and that the Serbian Prime Minister refused to renounce the plot or to warn Austria-Hungry about it, and later on, that Russia gave effectively her own version of a kind of what we might call a blank check to Serbia, that is to say, we will back you so you can go ahead and reject the ultimate.

So the Russians is also- If we zoom out, if we zoom out on this region at the time, because I think some of our audience may be like, well, why are they fighting to begin with? Like, why? Why would there be these provocations? I mean, as I understand it, you've got a situation here at the beginning of, you know, the turn of the century there, where they're kind of, like the Ottoman Empire is weaker, and Austria-Hungary's weaker, and they're kind of looking at the same territory, all these

countries like Russia and Serbia and Germany and Austria-Hungary, they're all kind of looking at these countries in this region like, well, maybe I would like to take over some of that space that the Ottoman Empire used to encompass. Maybe I would. Maybe. So everyone's getting like a little provocative and then the Serbians really poke the bear by this assassination and then it's on. Well, I'm glad you brought up the Ottomans, Megan, because in fact, I've been trying to popularize the idea of the First World War as the War of the Ottoman succession. This isn't kind of homage to all those famous wars of the Austrian or Spanish or English succession dating back to early modern history. That really is to me kind of what is centrally

an issue. That is to say, the decline of Ottoman power, particularly in Ottoman Europe. And then by the end of the war, of course, you have the great power squabbling over. the inheritance of the Ottoman Empire with the Entente powers, Russia, France, and Britain all staking their claims. It's not quite as simple as just to say that everyone went to war in 1914 to try to carve up the Ottoman Empire. In fact, the Germans and the Austro-Hungarians ended up taking the side of the Ottomans, effectively to try to defend them against the predations of the other powers. It's a little bit like what people say about slavery in the Civil War, that you can't exactly say that the war broke out at 1861 specifically because of slavery, but everyone knew that it was

somehow the cause of the war. In the same way you could say that the decline of Ottoman power is somehow the cause of World War I. The precise sequence of events was not necessarily predetermined. Some of it was quite contingent and even accidental like the assassination, but the clash of interest was real. That is to say that the Russians, the Austro- The neighborhood was getting a little bit more, it was getting more complicated and people were starting to get a little bit more territorial. And by the way, just so that nobody, So the Ottoman Empire is basically Turkey plus. It's Turkey plus.

Right. Just to put a label on it for people. It used to be much bigger than just Turkey. Okay. So they're looking at each other. They're nosing around. They're looking at the territory around them. And then Serbia does this provocative thing or a terrorist group called the Black Hand

within Serbia does this thing. Assassinates the up-and-comer, the next leader of Austria-Hungary, this Archduke. And now everybody starts aligning. And it's basically Germany, Austria-Hungary. they're like, okay, let's go. And the rest of Europe, as we know it, kind of went on the other side. But there was a question about whether Great Britain was going to get involved. America's way across the ocean. Russia, again, is going to back up Serbia at this time, but that would change in the middle of the war. But what are they officially fighting over? You know, like, what's the, what are the two demands on their respective sides?

It is a bit hard to explain how a war, which is sparked by an assassination in Sarajevo, seems to start with the Germans invading Belgium. It is a little bit hard to explain, to be really honest. A lot of that had to do with the factors in German military planning that the Germans had to reckon on a two-front war against Russia and France. The interesting question about Britain, one of the what-ifs of July 1914 right before the war breaks out, has had Britain issued a warning sooner to the Germans that Britain did plan to back France and Russia.

Might that have stayed the hand of Germany and backing Austria-Hungary? There is actually a key moment on July 29th, and I won't go into clinical forensic detail about it. I'll just say that the British, His Majesty's Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Gray, who's most famous for his line about the lamps in Europe are all going out and they will not be litigant in our lifetime, which is not just metaphorical. He was actually losing his eyesight at the time. Sir Edward Gray was famously elliptical in the way that he would speak and interact with other diplomats. And so it was really hard to read him. when the Germans finally got the first slightly ambiguous warning from Britain.

This is when Sir Edward Gray, again, in his elliptical way, says that if events kind of proceeded towards war on the continent, that it would not do to stand aside and wait, which implied that Britain might actually intervene. This actually forced the German chancellor, Betman Holveg, at the last minute, to try to send this note to Austria-Hungary rescinding the blank check. It was about eight or ten hours too late because Austria and Hungary had just started shelling Belgrade across the border. So effectively, hostilities had already broken out. So had Gray gotten a warning across sooner, some people even will go further and say maybe the U.S. could have done this, perhaps if Theodore Roosevelt had been president instead of Woodrow Wilson. He was kind of more of an interventionist who was probably more sympathetic to the British and French cause. Maybe the U.S. could have played a role. I think that's less plausible in part because the U.S. wasn't as directly engaged on the scene as British.

Britain. But the Germans, again, in part because of just the ineptitude and kind of lack of imagination of their own military planning, they really thought they had to secure these towns in Belgium on mobilization day plus three. And it turned out they didn't even succeed anyway. That's what brought Britain into the war, the violation of Belgian neutrality. But the British had not really made clear. Let me jump in. Let me jump in. We're going to keep it. I want to keep it simple. So, I mean, it's one thing to have Austria, Hungary, slash Germany, messing with France. It's quite another to have them messing with England and Great Britain. And Great Britain wasn't yet in. And Great Britain, and you're saying there's this guy, this top

maybe guy who is saying maybe this isn't a good idea. And the two countries might have done well thanks to the invention of the telephone to have had a conversation, Germany and Great Britain. And as I understand it too, Sean, that Germany and Great Britain, England, they had a reason to kind of trust each other or to be allies, I guess. There was a familial relationship. Like, everybody's related to Queen Victoria or descended from her. And they should have been friends, but they were not friends. No, you're right. And there was a real sense of betrayal on the Germans part. I mean, when Betban Holweig, the chancellor is finally told that Britain has sent an ultimatum is about to go to war with Germany. His own metaphor, he said this is a little bit like a man who's already

being attacked from two directions in a bar fight, and then some other guy comes in and hits someone on the head with a bottle, you know, which is perhaps a self-serving way of describing German foreign policy in July 1914, which is foolish in many ways. But you made a really interesting point about the telephone, because you're right, had Sir Edward Gray simply gotten on the phone, or really anyone in the cabinet, with Betman Holbegg or someone else in Berlin, and simply said, you know, look, you're going too far and you better know that we're serious and we're not messing around. Maybe Betman Hovig would have rained in the generals. Interestingly enough, this almost happened between Germany and Russia.

Now, there was another moment. It was on that same night, July 29th, the night I was talking about where Gray finally got his semi-warning across to Berlin. That same night, the Russian Tsar, Nicholas II, received what he thought was actually a kind of real-time telegraphic answer to a question that he had just posed to the German Kaiser, Wilhelm D. I'm the second. In fact, it wasn't true. In fact, because it took so long to transcribe and decode everything, he was responding to another message from about 24 hours previously. So the Tsar was completely mistaken, but he was so moved, he actually called off general mobilization. And so it's a really fascinating, what if had they simply been able to talk to one other on the phone? As you

pointed out, they were actually related. The German Kaiser, the Russian Tsar, the English king, they were all actually related. Had they simply gotten together on the phone, maybe they It could have. And the curious thing is the monarchs were not really the war mongers. In nearly every case, they were the ones who were at least trying to put the reins on just a little bit. The Tsar is the one who kept trying to tell his generals to back down. The Kaiser, despite his reputation for bellicosity, was actually the one with the very last minute, tried to call it off. So it's kind of, the monarchs get a bad rap. But they were actually probably less guilty than a lot of the generals and politicians were in 1914. That is interesting. And the monarchies across this region would look very, very different at the end of World War I. I mean, then they did beforehand. They would, in many cases, be no more soon thereafter. So one of the problems that Germany foisted upon itself was it decided to attack France, which was weak,

and they understood that they could take out France very quickly. Same as World War II. Poor France. They were like, we got France. We're going to go and take France. But they went through Belgium. And this was a problem for England. England was like, oh, no, you're not going through Belgium because even though we've been

very isolationist and we're like, hey, we're Great Britain, we don't need to cut these deals with anybody. Belgium was strategically important to England for a whole bunch of reasons. And there was a neutrality. Like, they decided that they would defend Belgium. And the Belgians, as I understand it, really fought too. Like they put up one hell of a fight when Germany invaded. No, that's absolutely right.

And it's a sign of, again, the ineptitude, really, of Germany. German military planning, not understanding the strategic dimension. If you can believe it, the original so-called Schlieffen plan, which was actually significantly modified by Moltke the Younger, the original plan had the Germans invading the Netherlands as well. They were actually originally going to violate both the Netherlands and Belgium. And it was a little bit of common sense told them that perhaps we should at least keep some country neutral, maybe so we can trade in case it turns into a long war.

But it was so foolish. The French, on the other hand, they originally had looked into the logistics. because Belgium, after all, is kind of the cockpit of Europe, the low countries. But the French had realized its strategic importance that Britain had guaranteed Belgium's integrity and independence by treaty. And so for the British, this was potentially a cause, is barely a cause for war. And so the Germans really brought it to themselves. The only thing I would say about this plan, though, it's not that they necessarily thought

that defeating France would be easy. It's that they thought the French were a more formidable and dangerous opponent that it would take the Russians longer to mobilize. They failed, of course. They did not actually knock France out in six weeks, as they'd expected to do. They never actually did reach Paris. And it was the failure of the Germans with this Schlieffen Moltke plan to subdue France in six weeks that to some extent really turned the war into this horrific war of attrition, particularly on the Western Front.

So England didn't want Belgium invaded because if they get control of Belgium, then they're really close to England, right? I mean, is that the issue? Yes, that's exactly right. We're going to protect them because that's our skin. Yeah, and more broadly, the English is not just that they didn't want a hostile power along the English channel on the Belgian coastline, but they also didn't want one single power to dominate Europe, this kind of traditional precept of British foreign policy. You could trace it all the way back to the wars of the Sun King or Napoleon. The British never wanted one single power to dominate the continent because then they would be effectively under its thumb. Okay. So you got England, you got France, you got Serbia, you got over on the other side, and ultimately the Russians, and then on the other side you got Germany and Austria, Hungary. And they're fighting and it's complex. Now let's spend some time on Russia and then we'll spend some time on the United States because they're also big players in all of this. And things change. Things change for each country in a really profound and important way. If you go up to Russia, as you pointed out, they decided they had that they would back.

Serbia. So they were going to be opposed to Germany and Austria, Hungary. But what was happening in Russia at the time was fascinating. And, you know, my husband's told me a little bit about the Tsar and the Tsarina at the time, who at the beginning of the war, were kind of wacky. Like, she was obsessed with Rasputin. Her kid had hemophilia. I'm going off of what Doug has told me. Forgive me, this is memory. But they had a kid who had hemophilia. And she was convinced that they were, This guy, Rasputin was like this charmer who could save the line. In any event, the Russians started to question the Tsar and Zarina, as I understand it. And before you know it, you've got the revolution.

You've got the Bolsheviks, Lenin coming in, taking over. That was a big game changer in World War I and what the Russians were doing. So what was happening under the Tsar and the Zarina the first couple of years of World War I? Well, it's fascinating about Rasputin. The reason he was important is, just as you said, that it wasn't just any child. It was the sole male child, the heir to the Romanoff throne, dating back to 1801, although Russia had had empresses in the past. It was no longer allowed for a female to ascend to become empress.

And so this was the only heir, and he had hemophilia. And in part because the whole job of emperor, you're supposed to be autocrat of all the Russia's. I mean, you're supposed to be in charge of everything. And the idea that an autocrat to be could not actually heal up from minor scrapes and bruises, I suppose, just didn't really wash. and so they never actually revealed this to the public, which is quite interesting. Had they done so, I think the Russian people would have actually been quite sympathetic. Instead, there were just all these vague rumors.

And the rumors started swirling around, not just about the heir, Alexis, but also about Rasputin. And because he was so close to Alexandra, the reason this mattered politically was that Rasputin himself was actually, if not an out-and-out pacifist. He was not pro-war. In the years up to 1914, there had been a series of war. in the Balkans involving Serbia, Russia's client. And although Russia had not in the end gone to war, there were a lot of very strong Pan-Slavic voices who had said Russia should intervene. Rasputin had criticized them all quite bravely,

effectively saying that, you know, in the end, it's the little people, you know, it's the peasants who are going to suffer and die for these silly abstractions like Penslavism. He probably would have counseled the Tsar against war had he actually been in St. Petersburg in July 1914. He, however, had gone to visit his hometown in Siberia, and you're not going to believe me, but he was actually stabbed by a woman who

cried out, I have killed the Antichrist. He wasn't killed. He was actually alive, but he was in a hospital bed as the powers were immobilizing for war. And so he was unable to exert his influence. The other reason this mattered, his reputation was already being, if not a pacifist and vaguely anti-war, maybe pro-German. Again, the atmosphere of war being vaguely anti-war means you're suspected of being kind of a German spy. Well, the Tsarina Alexandra, or as she was known originally, Alex of Hesse, was, of course, German-born. Or actually, she was born into territory, later absorbed into the German Reich. She was actually not pro-German.

She resented Bismarck and Prussia for having absorbed her former home of Hesse into the Reich. However, most Russians didn't know that. They simply thought, oh, well, because she's from Germany, she must be kind of pro-German. And so by, let's say, kind of 1915, 1916, right on. the eve of what we know as the Russian Revolution, rumors are swirling around Petrograd. There's a kind of a spy mania. There's this anti-German mania. Some of it's also anti-Jewish. Oddly enough, Jews were seen as more pro-Germany and Austria-Hungary in the war, in part because Russia had a traditional reputation for anti-Semitism. So there's anti-Semitism as anti-German

sentiment, and a lot of it centers around the Tsarina and Rasputin. And when the Tsar takes over personal command of the armies, after Russia suffers a series of setbacks against Central Powers in summer 1915. That doesn't just mean that he's going to take kind of all the blame success or failure on the front. But it also means he's no longer in Petrograd. And so the rumors swirl, and it looks like that Sarina and Rasputin are kind of running the government. And there are these other really kind of almost obvious things that the conspiracy theorists settle on. They appointed a guy called Boris Starrmar, chairman of this council of minister. He's got to, even got to have a German name, right? And so you have a German name running, uh,

running the government, and then you have allegedly Rasputin who's supposed to be a pacifist or pro-German and the German-born Empress or Tsarina. Unfortunately, this is kind of what poisoned the political atmosphere quite fatally, I think, in Petrograd in 1916, heading into the winter of 17. So, but in the beginning, I mean, just to dumb it down, in the beginning, Russia was backing the Serbs and on the opposite side of Germany in this war, but then something really important happened over in Russia, and all that, would change and really would set the course for the 20th and now 21st century and the way people

were going to be living in Russia. And that was the revolution and the Bolsheviks and the rise of Lenin. And then these other countries looking at Lenin like, well, what's he going to do? Because it wasn't a foregone conclusion that Lenin was going to come in and just keep doing what the Tsar and the Tsarina had been doing. Well, right. First of all, because Lenin was actually in Switzerland. In fact, when we talk about the revolution of 1917, you really have to bracket it out into two. The February revolution, which is the one that toppled the Tsar, initially seemed, if anything, at least from the perspective of France and Britain, they were quite hopeful. They thought it was more democratic. Right. And they thought that, again, the Tsar had been

surrounded by these pro-German advisors. So they thought they were kind of a cleaning out the Augustian stables and now Russia would rededicate herself to the war effort. This is actually what the U.S. President, Wilson, I assume we'll talk about that as we go, but he sees it the same way. Right. Now, Russia's a democracy. we're all on the same side, and they're hoping that it's actually going to be a positive story for the war effort. Lenin, of course, as we know, is sent back to Russia by the Germans, you know, had, shall we say, perhaps slightly nefarious purposes. They knew about his political program, which was effectively to turn, as he called it, the imperialist war into a civil war, basically to sabotage the war effort, promote mutinies, and take Russia out of the war. And he didn't do it all at once. It took him a number of months,

but the Bolsheviks flood the Russian armies with propaganda, and by the fall, opinion is starting to turn against the war. Although the Bolsheviks, they actually did not win the elections held in Russia. Amazingly, they held elections even after the Bolsheviks took power, and the Bolsheviks got only 24% of the vote. But in the army, they did well. That is, they did make a decisive move to shift opinion in the army against the war. And this really was the key part of London's program, the peace platform. That's what then allows Lenin to take Russia out of the war, effectively. He sues the central powers for peace. They met at Bresklautovsk. The allies refuse to go because they see Lenin as a German agent somewhat reasonably. I mean, he had been sent to Russia by Germany. The Germans had provided funds for his operations, even if there was a lot of controversy about that. And the Russian provisional government was never able to produce the smoking gun in court, although they actually did, they arrested the Bolsheviks. And for time, Lenin was actually supposed to be arrested for treason.

But can I just ask you a quick question on that? Let me clarify just a quick question. I follow what you. you're saying how he had been in Germany, but the Russians are on the other side at this point, right? They're fighting against Germany. So, like, I don't, why would they be so distrustful? Because right now, they've got the Russians, like, I don't know, factor that in, because I don't understand how they could be so suspicious of him when he's, his country, yes, he came from, Germany, but his country's fighting with the allies. Well, he was actually, he came from Switzerland, but to get to Russia from Switzerland, uh, in, in, in the time when you have these massive armies mobilized in both fronts. The only really practical way for him to get there was through Germany.

So the Germans organized his trip and they paid for it and they sent Lenin to Russia. And German diplomats were kind of told to stay quiet about it, but it was very much an operation of the German foreign office because the Germans wanted Lenin to go to Russia wreak havoc with the war effort with his kind of anti-war propaganda spreading mutinist sentiment in the armies. I mean, literally, they would get together and have these meetings in the armies and denounce the war. the Bolsheviks ended up printing massive amounts of anti-war propaganda. And as soon as he arrived in Petrograd, yeah, as soon as he arrived in Petrograd, I'll give an example, an American historian called Frank Golder was there.

And he immediately was told. Oh, yeah, this guy Lenin has showed up. And he's preaching all these kind of damnable doctrines of propaganda and peace and pro-German sentiment. It was quite widely discussed at the time. That is the idea that Lenin was, if not a German agent, then somehow working on behalf of Germany and the Central Palace. So the allies have got to be very unhappy about this development, right? Because they did have Russia on their side. And now suddenly you've got Lenin taking over with this Marxist revolution. And he seems to be much more sympathetic to the Germans, the other side and ultimately winds up pulling Russia out. Right. The Russian armies, they fall apart. Even before Lenin takes power, they're beginning to disintegrate. And by the winter of 1917, after the Bolsheviks take power, and it's actually November by our calendar, we usually call it the October Revolution. After the Bolsheviks take power, they just stopped fighting.

In fact, the Germans at one point in early 1918, the Bolsheviks, Trotsky comes up with this ingenious kind of a slogan when he goes to Breskla Tuvsky calls it no war, no peace. What he means is we're not going to fight, but we're demobilizing our army. And so it's sort of like he's telling the Germans, look, if you really want to, you can just go ahead and occupy Russia, but you're going to have to explain to your own people in the world why you're at war with a country that no longer has an army. Now, as you can imagine, the Allies are not happy about this. A whole front is just collapsed in the war. And so they're desperate to get Russia back into the war by whatever means they can. And they try a lot of different things in 1918. None of them quite work.

The only thing it does help them in the end is kind of unintentional is the Germans do get sucked into Russia. They end up sending about a million troops into Russia, including into Ukraine, where they have nearly 600,000 troops occupying Russia as the war is being decided later that year on the Western Front, particularly after the arrival of U.S. troops, the so-called doughboys. All right, so the allied forces were not as, not nearly as strong as they would become once they got England on board. England with its navy and how strong it was. That was a big, that was a great development for the Allied forces to get England in on this fight.

It was not a great development for them to lose Russia from the war altogether. But then there's this big country across the sea called the United States of America, which, as you point out, is not yet the United States of America that we would be after World War II, a superpower. And it was more complicated for us. You know, we had fought a couple of wars with England in the past hundred years. And, you know, they're kind of wanting us to come over

and help them and join the Allied forces. And we got the big ocean. And what was the mood of the American people at this time? And now we're like 1914 to 1917 right around there. And the war just again went from 14 to 18. So what was the mood of the American? Well, I certainly don't think there was any great desire to get involved in the European war. I mean, we could judge, if by nothing else, the result of the 1916 election, Woodrow Wilson, who really, at that point, was actually running more or less in a peace platform of keeping the U.S. out of the war against Charles Hughes.

The Republicans, oddly enough, back then, were far more of the party of kind of the Northeast and big business and a lot of ties to Europe. And they were much more pro-interventionist and pro-Briton in France than Wilson's party, the Democrats, the base. of which was still kind of, a lot of it was either labor or agrarian populism in the south. And Wilson himself had not wanted to get the U.S. into the war. In fact, Wilson gave a speech as late as January 1917, the so-called Peace Without Victory speech, trying to some extent to use the leverage the U.S. now had over France and Britain because they're buying a lot of their arms in the U.S. They're relying on Wall Street for the loans that are now paying for the war because they've effectively run out of gold. Their gold reserves are running down. The U.S. had leverage.

In fact, there were a lot of ways in which the U.S. might, and this was kind of what Wilson was trying to do initially with the peace without victory speech, was to step in as a broker, as a mediator, to broker some type of a peace, perhaps of mutual exhaustion. Britain and France didn't want that, though, in part because Germany was still occupying parts of Belgium and France, and Germany had also occupied part of what had been Russian Poland. And so the Germans were at the time maybe more willing to parley than the Allies were. But then the Germans shot themselves in the foot by unleashing what was called unrestricted submarine warfare. Effectively, this meant after the sinking of the Lusitania and other ships with Americans on board in 1915, the Germans had made the rules of engagement for their U-boat attacks on British merchant shipping and British naval vessels much stricter. Effectively, Khyde, you'd have to give prior warning to give time for women and children to get to the lifeboats proverbially. now the Germans was like, you know, basically the gloves were off and they were just going to go ahead and fire because the Germans themselves were suffering by that winter.

Berlin, Vienna, all the cities of the central powers, you know, they're kind of slowly starving because of the British blockade. And so they thought, again, this kind of almost typical German self-sabotage, you know, rather than accepting Wilson's professed aims of negotiating a compromise peace at face value, the Germans said, you know what, we don't trust them. We think the U.S. is going to enter the war anyway. so we're just going to speed things along. So they did it first. Yeah, they provoked us. They provoked us, both with unrestricted submarine warfare and then with the Zimmerman Telegram,

which is just an astonishing mistake by the Germans. But wait a second. Before we get to Zimmerman, Teluguay, before we get to Zimmerman Telegram, prior to them doing the unrestricted submarine warfare, which I understand, we, I can understand why Americans were like, no way, that's too much. You're taking out indiscriminately civilians on boats and so on.

Prior to that, what was the lure to the Americans in getting further involved, right? Because, again, if you look at World War II, we're going to go fight Nazis. We're going to defeat Hitler. The Germans bomb, I'm doing my animal house line. The Germans bomb Pearl Harbor. The Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, right? We had very clear reasons to get in. And this war, the way we're talking about it, it's like still remains somewhat amorphous to me why it was started even to begin with, even amongst the powers over there. Now it's expanding and now they're asking us to get in. And I just wonder, like, were we like, wait, why are we, what, why are people calling us before the submarine warfare, the indiscriminate, like, before that, what was the reason ostensibly for us to get in? Well, it's much murkier than the Second World War, not just the origins of the war, as you're pointing out, but why the U.S. gets involved on what pretenses for what purposes. I mean, these debates, they didn't die, of course, in 1917, 18. I mean, they continue to royal American politics on into the 20s and 30s when in retrospected it had come to

seem like a mistake and people couldn't quite fathom why the U.S. had gotten into the war. Now, on the moral side, there had been a lot of criticism of the German invasion of Belgium, a lot of what was then called kind of atrocity propaganda. Obviously, it wasn't all untrue. A lot of atrocities were committed. There was a famous library that burned down in Leuven. There were these kind of sharpshooters who would periodically take out civilians. there were obviously some genuine crimes committed in the invasion of Belgium. But that said, the British and the French were just really good at kind of manipulating American public opinion,

in part because they had a long experience of doing so. And also, by 1916, 1917, there were just a lot of American interests that were increasingly aligned with Britain and France. But again, it was not a popular upwelling of pro-war sentiment. Rather, it was a lot of American arms manufacturers and a lot of American bankers, particularly the House of J.P. Morgan and Wall Street, had just gotten wrapped up in the war effort of Britain and France, in large part because with the British blockade, they couldn't even trade with Germany in the central power. So almost all of that trade had been nullified and wiped out. In fact, there used to be a critique, the kind of Charles Beard quasi-Marxist's progressive critique of the war that, you know, was all kind of the U.S. got sucked in because of Wall Street. The real story is much more complicated than that, but there's a little bit of truth in that, and that these interests were increasingly pushing the U.S. towards war. Wilson, somewhat to his credit, was actually resisting that. And in fact, for a while in the winter of 1916-17, the Federal Reserve actually intervened to try to discourage more of this kind of the war finance egging on Britain and France, because Wilson at the time was actually trying to broker a piece, as I pointed out,

though, the Germans kind of shot themselves in the foot. So then, I mean, I guess it's still hard to convince Americans what they're fighting for, the freedom of the sea, was maybe an issue, but again, Britain's violating that too. They're blockading Europe. Perhaps that's less egregious than the German U-boats actually sinking vessels with civilians on board, but it's still a little bit murky. So in the end, part of what Wilson is able to come up with, it's not just the Zimmerman Telegram, which is when the Germans actually promised, effectively, the reconquista of the American southwest of Mexico. She would keep the Americans busy in case the U.S. enter the war, which is just incredibly stupid.

because it effectively produces the very thing that the Germans should have most feared, which was U.S. intervention once the U.S. government learned about this. On top of this end, the February Revolution happens in Russia, and as we were talking about this before, this gives Wilson this argument. Well, look, Russia had been an autocracy. Now she's a democracy. And so the famous phrase then emerges, it's a war to make the world safe for democracy.

This at least is how Wilson sells it to Congress in April 1917. Even that, it's a little ambiguous, though. The U.S. declares war against Germany. she doesn't declare war against Austria-Hungary until almost eight months later. And the U.S. never actually did declare war on the Ottoman Empire, which by then was closely allied to Germany and Austria-Hungary. One of the really interesting anomalies of the 14 points of Woodrow Wilson, which he announced in January 1918, is that point 12 related to the autonomy of the minority peoples of the Ottoman Empire, and particularly Armenians, Greeks, and others, a country or a power with which the United States was not at war. In fact, by the end of 1918, the Ottomans actually tried to surrender to the United States and the basis of the 14 points, only to be told that they were not at war with the United States. Yeah, sorry, we have no contract with you. Right.

I mean, it does raise the question of, like, you're out there fighting and you encounter a force that you haven't yet declared war on. What do you do? Put the arms down. Let's go back to, you mentioned the Lusitania. That's a really interesting case, a story about the Germans bombing a British ship, and it would precede that unlimited submarine warfare thing that you were talking about. So can you just talk about how important the Lusitania was and what happened thereafter in terms of our involvement and the Germans really starting to unravel? Well, so, I mean, the Lusitania, we certainly exaggerated significance.

It got a lot of press at the time because there were more than 100, I believe, something like 128 Americans on board. And because, you know, they were all almost by definition civilians and even most of the members of the belligerent, nationals of the belligerent countries on board were also civilians. We almost certainly know now, even though it was a long as sensitive subject, that there were also at least some weapons on board. But it got a lot of press. And so it basically seemed like this kind of, again, a war crime, a crime against humanity, one of this long line of German atrocities. However, the Germans, as I pointed out earlier, they did respond to it. They did actually tighten their rules of engagement to try to prevent similar accidents. There were one or two other accidents in 1915 that is involving American, neutral Americans

being on board, being sunk in various ships, which had been shelled by the U-boats, which didn't get as much press as the Lusitania. But again, the Germans, for a while, they did strengthen their rules of engagement because they were worried about getting the U.S. into the war. The same thing actually is true between 1939 and in Pearl Harbor. The Germans actually were quite careful about trying not to violate some of these kind of boundaries in order to draw the Americans into the war. So one of the reasons why it was so astonishing how short-sighted it was when the Germans, again, switch things around in early 1917 in January when they move towards unrestricted submarine warfare. It also marks the moment as far as internal German politics when the Chancellor,

Betman Holweig, the civilian chancellor, effectively gives way to the generals, you know, who effectively kind of take over and overrule his opposition. And a lot of people date, really, the unraveling of a kind of a more genuine, broad political front behind the German war effort to January 1917. It's not that Germany became a military dictatorship exactly, but it took on some of those characteristics, a kind of almost self-sabotaging power, you know, that just couldn't get out of its own way. Which would wind up being very important to the way we viewed them, the way we wound up World War I and the way that World War II would ultimately start. On the Zimmerman Telegram, I understand this is 1917.

It's basically a deal by which I guess Mexico was going to get back, Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, if they attacked us. And the Germans wanted them to, you know, side with them. And just explain it. Because why was it a telegram and how was it discovered? How did it play? Well, it's a fascinating story. Aside from just the stupidity of the Germans sending this, they actually sent it through a U.S. diplomatic cable. Now, it was encrypted, so they thought hopefully the Americans wouldn't read it.

Unbeknownst to them, the British had this team of codebreakers working under the Navy. This is kind of the World War I equivalent of the more famous Bletchley Park from World War II. Among other things, they'd actually captured a lot of German code books, including one used by a German secret agent in Persia or Iran of all places, which helped them to decode this. The British, though, were then in something of a pickle, because, of course, they were reading the U.S. diplomatic traffic between Berlin and Washington, and they didn't want the Americans to know that they were reading the U.S. diplomatic cables. And so somehow, the way I understand the story, the British after discovering it, they couldn't just alert the Americans, because that would give away the fact that they were spying on the Americans too. And so they contrived a way to rescind it through another U.S. diplomatic cable in such a way that the Americans could decode it very easily and think that they themselves had discovered it, which actually worked quite well. And of course, it didn't raged American opinion. Even so, it wasn't until really four, I guess, even five weeks later that the U.S. declared war. So even then, Wilson still had to drum up a little bit more public support and kind of troll the halls of Congress to win support for the Declaration of War. And again, even then, only on Germany, not yet on Austria, Hungary, or the Ottoman Empire.

So we get involved. The Russians are out. The Americans are in. And net net, what are the consequences of that? I mean, what are the unintended consequences of our doing that? I'm glad you asked that because, of course, the intended consequence was supposed to be a war to make the world safe for democracy and some type of more transparent world with collective security, perhaps League of Nations, with the powers disarming and no more secret diplomacy and all the rest of it. Unfortunately, what actually happened was that the U.S. entered the war effectively at the same time that Russia, was falling out of the war. So in the first place, it prolonged the conflict. There might have been

momentum in 1917 in favor of a negotiated peace. With Russia falling out of the war, Britain and France were really desperate, and they would have been much more likely to try to accept mediation. The Germans were obviously in a much stronger position. But frankly, Berlin, as I pointed out, was starving. Vienna was starving. Constantinople, then the Ottoman capital, was starving. A lot of the Ottoman Empire was even worse shape because the British were blocking. in eastern Mediterranean too, and there had been a locust plague, and they were blockading food imports. Everyone was absolutely miserable. Biblical misery. Unfortunately, the U.S. intervening effectively prolonged the war at least another year, if not longer. And if you actually move into 1918,

then, it takes a while for the U.S. to rev up its mobilization. It had really not been a first, it was becoming a first-class naval power, but as far as land forces, it took the U.S. a long time to really mobilize and train an army. And then, of course, get them over to Europe. They were really only starting to arrive in strength in the late spring of 1918 after Germany had sort of wagered all her chips on one last offensive to try to break the back of the Western Allies, the so-called Ludendorf offensive launched in late March, 1918, which in the end, although they got pretty close to Paris, it petered out like most of the other offensives in the war. They outrun their supply lines. They just get exhausted. The allies bring up

reserves. And then the U.S. starts arriving in force over the summer. And again, military historians continued to debate just how decisive the U.S. role. Was it more about morale in the fact so many of them were coming? You know, was it really the fact that the British and the French had begun to master the use of early tanks, for example, which were now being introduced to the battlefield, the creeping barrage, other innovations? I'm sure all of this factored in, but the arrival of the U.S. you simply can't discount. You know, if you have roughly equally matched forces on the Western front where the lines have barely moved in some places, you know, meters or even a few kilometers or in our terms, not even really a mile in most places, well less than a mile for the last three and a half to four

years, and then you have a force of ultimately nearly four million doughboys arriving. It's obviously going to have a huge impact on morale. So it does, in the end, help tip the balance in favor of the allies on the Western Front. But I think more significantly for the consequences of the war for world history is what happens on the Eastern Front. Now, I mentioned before the Germans had distracted themselves. They get sucked in almost by this kind of poisoned chalice of defeated Russia with Lenin, again, just disintegrating, deliberately forcing the Russian armies to disintegrate. They end up having so many troops in the East that they don't really have enough to hold off the Allies in the West. However, they still have a million troops in Russia.

We shouldn't forget this. The Bolsheviks, the first year they were in power after Lenin supposedly inaugurates the world's first proletarian dictatorship, communism. They're effectively a kind of a German satellite state. When a few of the last remaining opposition forces to the Bolsheviks, this group called the left socialist revolutionaries, the left SRs, when they try to launch an uprising against the Bolsheviks in July 1918, they do so by a fascinating the German ambassador because they see him as the real ruler of the country. In fact, although it's little known except by specialist, the German general running the war, Eric von Ludendorff, in September 1918, just before the Germans collapsed in the Western Front, he actually issued orders to the German army to go and topple the Bolsheviks in Petrograd,

because by then the Germans had sort of had enough of Lenin and his government. They just saw them as crazy. So the Germans were actually about to topple and possibly overthrow the Bolsheviks right when the Germans collapsed in the Western Front. The Germans, by their own terms with the Bolsheviks at Bres-Lutovsk had forbidden the Bolsheviks from even building an army. So they weren't even allowed to have the Red Army that they're eventually going to build. When the Germans collapse, now they can build a Red Army. Now they're sovereign for the first time. Now they can actually begin to implement their policies in full, mobilize more than 3 million men under Trotsky and at the

Red Army. So effectively, the U.S. intervention makes the world safe for communism. Right. I'm following you, and I'm kind of slightly horrified. Wait, pause there. Unintentionally, right? Unintentionally. Yeah. I mean, we're dealing with a fallout of that to this day, but pause there and go back to the German, just the Germans, because if we hadn't shorn up the British and the French and so on against the Germans and forced a surrender in which, well, I mean, obviously the Treaty of Versailles would leave Germany absolutely powerless, devastated, and humiliated, which would then lead in part to World War II, the rise of Hitler and, you know, this determination to restore Mother Germany to her former glory. Do you feel, I mean, the humiliation of Germany might not have happened.

We might have reached a more negotiated peace, you know, if the U.S. would stay it out of it, because England and the Allies would have been forced to come to the table and negotiate with Germany. Perhaps they wouldn't have been humiliated, perhaps for Versailles. would have been more fair. I mean, do you make the case that there might not have been a Hitler? There might not have been a World War II. Had we stayed out of World War I? I think had we stayed out of World War I, I think most of that is probably true. We don't know exactly what the world would have looked like, but you would not have had Germany kind of lying prostrate in 1918 with Hitler famously on the bed hearing about the humiliating terms of

the November armistice disenrailing against the November criminals. I mean, there are a lot of different points you could look back to. I already alluded to the idea of Wilson possibly brokering a peace before the U.S. entered the war. But even after the U.S. entered the war, it took so long for the U.S. to get involved, the U.S. still could have helped to negotiate. Now, I talked about Brest Litov. This is where Russia met the central powers to negotiate a peace on the Eastern Front. And this is from basically about December. Just to reiterate, the central powers are the opposite of the Allies. Right. So you have Germany, Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria had been

joined the War II along with the Ottoman Empire. And it was quite an interesting affair. It was actually the first peace treaty or peace conference ever caught on film. So you can actually watch some of it. So you have these kind of... I'm sorry. Who met with them? Who met with the central powers? The Bolsheviks. So the Bolsheviks and what's interesting also just socially is that the central powers and the Ottomans and the Bulgarians, they're all sending these kind of old aristocratic diplomats. And the Bolsheviks are sending these kind of bohemian scruffy revolutionaries. They were supposedly representing the workers and peasants government. That's what they initially called it. They realized they didn't actually have a peasant. So at the last minute,

they just pulled over on the side of the road and they kind of picked up a drunk and they said, hey, where are you from? And he gave the name of some tiny little village and they said, you know, you'll do. And so, you know, they bring them along. You know, there were elements of force to it. On the other hand, they were genuine in trying to invite the Western allies there. I pointed out the reason they didn't go. It's understandable. They saw Lenin as a German agent, which certainly made a kind of sense. But what's so fascinating about Bresla Tuf is if you actually look at what the Germans did there, that is the German vision for Europe before Germany collapsed, you know, at least in part because of the U.S. intervention, what they did was they broke Imperial Russia

into a number of satellite states, many of which actually exist today. So the three Baltic states were basically invited to declare independence. Ukraine was invited to declare independence. Finland became independent. So German. effectively was kind of creating a Europe that actually bears a pretty close resemblance to the Europe that we actually have today, which is not to say that it necessarily would have lasted. It would have required the Germans to maintain these armies in the field. Now, the thing is the war, as we know, ended at least in Europe in fall of 1918. But the other thing to remember is that no one knew at the time that it was going to end.

The German collapse came as something of a surprise to everyone. And it happens even on the Ottoman fronts. Everything just starts to collapse since September 1918. And you can't ascribe all of that necessarily to the U.S. intervention. A lot of these battles, you know, had required all kinds of complicated interplay of material forces, morale, and so on. But the U.S. entry into the war, and particularly Wilson kind of entering the arena with the 14 points and this idea of a new and a better world, definitely played, I think, a huge role. again, first in extending the war, but also then in helping to ensure that the Germans would lose it. Oh, it's like, so we won the war, but we may have helped cause the second, the second world world war.

Unintentionally, I think absolutely. Unintentionally, that's the case. The U.S., and again, most of this is unintentional. Woodrow Wilson obviously did not want Britain and France to impose these harsh peace terms on Germany. I mean, not that he was soft necessarily, but he obviously wouldn't have agreed. with all of the terms or the harsh terms they oppose on Austria, Hungary, and eventually on the Ottoman Empire and on Bulgaria. It's not just the Germans who resent all this, by the way. I mean, if you talk to Hungarians today, they're still angry about the Treaty of Triannon. That was their

version of Versailles, or the Turks about the Treaty of Sevres. That's their own version of Versailles, which truncates the Ottoman Empire, although they eventually fought back and won back some of the territory they had lost under Mustafa Kimal. Wilson, and what's so ironic is back in his peace without victory speech in January 1917, he had argued against intervention precisely for that reason. He wanted a peace without victory because, as he pointed out, victory would have left the defeated power angry and resentful and anxious to refite the war. And he wasn't wrong. It's just, I suppose, in the end, it was partly German blundering and maybe Wilson himself not sticking to his guns, not sticking to his principles, that in the end, instead of a peace without victory. Man, makes you wonder about like,

Ukraine today, whether there could be a peace without victory there, where there's no utter humiliation for, let's say, the Russians, so that there's some face saving so that, you know, I don't know, this is one of the things we're debating right now. But let's go back to Russia and how you think Russia in the 20th and 21st century would have been different if we hadn't stepped in and defeated Germany, which had its eyes on Russia, as you pointed out. Well, it's a great question. I do think Russia probably would have eventually recovered some of the territory she lost at Breast the Tufts. But I think it's entirely possible that those countries that became independent briefly in 1918 and our independent today would have actually remained so.

So we're not just talking about the countries of Eastern Europe I mentioned before, but the so-called Transcaucasian Federative Republic, which sounds really complicated. But you're talking about countries like Azerbaijan and Armenia and Georgia and eventually Dagestan. well, Dagestan is now in Russia, but a lot of these territories have kind of confederated together to become independent. So to some extent, again, the Russian Empire, which the Soviets later reconstituted in an even more virulent and aggressive form, might have actually ceased to exist in that form in 1918 when the Germans broke it apart. But that point about peace with that victory, it's so fascinating because, of course, you could draw entirely diametrically opposed lessons from this. FDR, for example, in the Second World War, drew the lesson that the mistake that the U.S. and its allies had made in 1918 was not pursuing the war all the way to the end and getting unconditional surrender and marching all the way to Berlin and crushing Germany utterly. Whereas obviously a lot of Americans disagreeing and they thought, in fact, we shouldn't have fought at all along some of the lines that we're talking about now that our intervention didn't actually produce a positive outcome.

And obviously, you could make some of these arguments about Russia and Ukraine today. The problem is, of course, that if you do want unconditional surrender and you want, let's say, I guess in this case, that would mean Russia withdrawing entirely from the borders of Ukraine as of 2014. That would require Armageddon. But what would have happened with, you know, the Bolsheviks took over, you had Lenin, you had Stalin coming up, and I know you just wrote a book about Stalin. You know, he was brutal, by the way. God, good God, Stalin was, I mean, truly the face of the way. of evil. That guy was a deeply disturbed evil man. But so what would have happened do you think with Lenin, with Stalin, with communism, you know, post-World War I if we hadn't gotten involved, if there had been a negotiated settlement earlier? Well, the thing about the Bolsheviks is they

didn't expect to last in power very long. One of my earliest research projects, I actually went to Switzerland. It's kind of curious because we've all heard about the banking secrecy laws. I discovered, in fact, most of those laws weren't on the books till the 1930s. And when the Bolsheviks tried to launder money there in 1918, the Swiss didn't let them. They actually kicked them out. The reason they were laundering money there was because they weren't expecting to last in Russia. They were trying to set up a kind of a slush fund. Right.

They've got very little popular support. Most people looking at the Bolsheviks like, ew, no, we don't want anything to do with them. They did have, again, they had some sport in critical areas of the army. They did have some sport in Moscow and Padra. But in the country at large, more than 75% of the people had voted against. them. In fact, I mean, if not for the peace platform, if they had just been open about their economic policies, you know, which were frankly pretty extreme, probably less than 10% of the public would have voted for them. And they knew this. That's why they deposed the constituent assembly.

That is, this body which was elected in November 1917 was actually the largest participation to date, even larger than any U.S. elections. It's like 44 million Russians voted. And again, more than 75% of them voted against the Bolsheviks, the verdict of which, as one commentator put, kind of stuck like a bone in the throat. So what did they do? Of course, they deposed the parliament violently. I mean, they arrested some of the deputies. They actually shot and killed about eight of them. They just shut it down. So they made it quite clear, you know, that they had essentially no democratic mandate and they didn't really intend to have one. They ruled effectively by force. You know, it took it took them a while to really secure and then reconquer all the other elements of the empire.

But it was partly because of the collapse of Germany that we were talking about. They were able to do so. They were also fortunate in their enemies, even after the Germans collapsed, while the Allies got involved in the periphery of Russia's civil war. They never got involved very directly. They never really threw their support to the opponents of the Bolsheviks. The ones we normally call the whites, it's a bit of a misnomer. White basically meant counter-revolutionary. That's what the Reds called them. They didn't call themselves whites. So the Allies didn't really intervene very decisively in Russia's civil war. The Bolsheviks, some of it was astute diplomacy. Some of it was. luck. Some of it was good fortune. But effectively, it was a series of accidents, the largest of which

was, again, that the U.S. intervention in the war destroyed the power of Imperial Germany. And Imperial Germany had been both the sponsor and effectively almost the mandatory power overseeing the Bolshevik dictatorship. The Germans could have toppled the Bolsheviks at any point in 1918 had they simply chosen to do so. They wanted the Bolsheviks there because they thought they were weakening Russia, that they thought they were going to weaken Russia's power for the long term. And curiously enough, the Allies didn't completely disagree. That's part of the reason why Britain and France and the United States, and also Japan, which briefly intervened, did not intervene more decisively and did not really back the whites.

Because they also kind of thought, look, we don't know if we really want the Russian Empire back. Unfortunately, what they didn't realize was that the Bolsheviks looked weak at the time. But once they had begun to reconquer the old Russian Empire and they could absorb its population base and its resources, they were just about the most ruthless rulers that had ever existed on planet Earth. Yes, that's the word. Yeah. And so they were able to leverage this power in the end and create an even more menacing and aggressive power than the Russian Empire had ever been. All right. So we talked a bit about the Treaty of Versailles and the end of World War I. and the position, as you put it, Germany in a prostrate position, exactly right. Can you just expand on the League of Nations, which would ultimately become the United Nations?

There are a lot of people in our country now who have mixed feelings about that group. Certainly, Republicans aren't big fans of the UN and sort of globalist approach to, well, foreign policy and other things, and they think they're rather feckless when it comes to things like human rights, though they claim to be these moral arbiters of assault and so on. So, I mean, that was a Wilson thing. at the end of World War I. Can you talk about it? Well, sure. I mean, it was not his original idea. He glommed on to this idea originally proposed by some kind of British quasi-pacifist intellectuals. But then he kind of made it his idea at Versailles.

He started backing it more and more strongly, the idea that rather than this alliance system with the power is constantly arming, instead you would have this League of Nations and some type of collective security arrangement. They didn't have a security council like the UN would later have. So in some ways it wasn't entirely practical, but the idea was supposed to be that the member states that they would kind of guarantee their territorial integrity and there would be some type of a collective will on the part of the great powers to enforce the settlement and adjudicate disputes and so on. The great irony, of course, is that Wilson ended up forfeiting a lot of his other objectives in order to back the League of Nations at Versailles. And then as we know, the League of Nations along with Versailles, they end up going down to defeat in the U.S. Senate, which, fails to ratify the treaty. And by then, Wilson, I mean, he also, I think some of the mistakes he made, simply going across to Paris and Versailles, he was the first U.S. president to visit Europe in that

official capacity. And he exhausted himself, and he may have even forfeited some of his leverage. You know, if he stayed behind, maybe he could have just kind of ruled on disputed points, using his vast leverage almost because of the mystery of distance. Instead, he started just squabbling along with everyone else, and he wasn't particularly good at it. You know, he often got manipulated. A great example of this is when the British tell him that Italy is making a claim on Turkey, what is now on Talia, the southern coast of Turkey. And their only claim is that it used to belong to the Roman empire. And because Wilson believes in self-determination, and there aren't a lot of Italians there, the Brits tell him, oh, but there are Greeks living there. And so we should have Greece invade

Turkey. And Wilson says, okay, and this actually leads Greece to invade Turkey in 1919. And there's a brutal war fought for three years between Greece and Turkey and what is now Anatolia. So he kind of of gets he gets he gets he gets really just rolled by everyone he doesn't really quite understand the nature of geopolitics uh his principles of self-determination they're very difficult to apply to the map of europe in practice because the peoples are all mixed together and in the end he kind of largely just gives up and allows the more experienced diplomats to negotiate but so the u.s to some extent backs the idea of the league of nations and then doesn't even join it so effectively that just kind of rendered it superfluous and and impotent from the get-go

So, I mean, how would this wind up playing out? Like, if Wilson hadn't done this, if that hadn't been one of the terms, do you think we'd have a United Nations today? Do you think we'd have any of that? That's a really good question. If you look at the Republican opposition to Wilson in the Senate in 19 and 1920, that is, as they were debating the Versailles Treaty and the League of Nations, there were some amendments proposed. Henry Cabot Lodge in particular had this vision of a slightly more practical and less grandiose idea, effectively that the U.S. would simply have treaties with some of its allied powers, perhaps a little bit like the Security Council, but not officially so. that the League of Nations was not necessarily practical or if it was to be created, then at the very least, Congress needed to retain its authority over the deployment of troops. That is to say that the League of Nations would not have the ability to override the U.S. Congress. It is quite interesting that those debates really did, I think, redound on down through the 20th century. Congress, after the Declaration of War on Japan and Germany in December 1941, although Germany actually declared war first on the United States then,

And after those declarations, Congress has not declared war again, so far as I know. Congress has effectively abdicated its own power. The war powers enumerated the Constitution. And I think to some extent, again, even though Wilson failed to get the U.S. to enter the League of Nations, he already injected out the idea that some type of supernatural body might in the end be able to, you know, as you're pointing out, this kind of globalist idea, that is that in the end, they can make the decisions that will be binding on the United States, a little bit like, let's say, the European Union does today, or perhaps NATO does in other

context, I think had the U.S. ratified the League of Nations in 1990, and we probably would have ended up with something like the United Nations. But in the end, I mean, this is, I suppose, both the promise and the tragedy of Woodrow Wilson is he did have a lot of big and grand ideas, but in the end they all failed. Some of it was because, again, he had a stroke. I mean, he came back from Paris and Versailles and he actually traveled back and forth once or twice while he was there. He's utterly exhausted and broken, and he kind of had a stroke out in the hustings as he was trying to promote the treaty. And at the end, he was on a hospital bed as the Senate was debating it, largely invalid. And effectively incapacitated, at least according to some counsel, he wouldn't allow

himself to be declared incompetent. And so in the end, you also had a very ineffective, if not impotent U.S. President. Not for the last time either in the 20th century. There's some interesting comparisons made, let's say, Nixon during Watergate, you know, that you had a U.S. president, effectively unable to even exercise his own constitutional authority. You know, would there have been some type of UN eventually maybe? Yeah, go ahead. When you look at World War I, who are the heroes? You know, you look at World War II, and it seems kind of clear, you know, who the heroes were and who the villains were. You look at World War I, who are the heroes?

Well, it's really hard to say. I sometimes ask my students which countries they think won this or that conflict. Great example is Vietnam, and my usual answer is who won the Vietnam War, Thailand, because Thailand didn't fight in it, and Thailand ended up doing really well economically, because everyone would go there for R&R and to buy supplies and this sort of thing. The countries that stayed out of World War I did really well for themselves. Sweden, Switzerland, Spain, they all did fine, even if Spain had some difficulties in the 20s and the 30s. As far as which country, again, you have maybe like the moral side who's a hero, it's really hard to say, which countries did well for themselves, you could say, well,

Serbia and the end of the war was given this miniature empire, we call Yugoslavia. Some emergent nation states like Poland, which hadn't existed before, arrive on the map, Czechoslovakia. You got a few countries in Middle East emerging out of the wreckage of the Ottoman Empire. But as far as heroes, it's really difficult to say. Again, the Allies obviously tried to make themselves out to be the protagonist in the story, standing up against German aggression, putting forward this idea of German, war guilt, but it was really hard to convince people. The Bolsheviks obviously tried to make a claim in the same way Wilson had tried to make the war about principles. The Bolsheviks also denounced

secret diplomacy, and Trotsky embarrassed the Allies by publishing their secret treaties regarding things like the partitioning of the Ottoman Empire between France, Britain, and Russia. And that did embarrass the Allies, but again, it's hard to make the Bolsheviks out to be heroes. No. They did it for their own reasons, I suppose. You could say some of the principled anti-war activists, many of whom went to jail opposing the war, maybe in retrospect, should be treated with more respect than they were treated at the time. And I think in the end, you might say if you're looking at the United States, perhaps you could say there was some good sense of those Americans who were wary of getting drawn into this conflict, which didn't

actually turn out well. You know, where in most wars, they tend to get denounced. And in fact, a lot of them were actually arrested. We forget that the Woodrow Wilson administration put through the Alien and Sedition Acts, and they actually arrested a lot of political prisoners. Perhaps we should give them a little bit of belated respect for raising questions about the U.S. intervention in the war. So fascinating. You've written so much on World War I and World War II as well. So you know about the respective roles and so on.

I mean, I think, well, do you agree with me that we have a more clear and heroic role in World War II? two, that the United States would clearly emerge as a hero of that conflict. People like Winston Churchill would emerge as, you know, having great respect, and people believe that he saved the future of the Western world, of the free world, that he had a major hand in an event. I just, I never really stopped to think about how clear the morality and the lines around it were drawn in World War II versus the first war. I never really, I've seen the, the t-shirts and the sort of the back-to-back world champion memes, and I like it. It makes me feel pro-America. And if you start drilling down a little deeper, it gets more complicated. Well, it's clearer. I would say comparatively speaking,

the Second World War. We obviously have a very clear villain in Hitler. And even to some extent, although he was on our side, Stalin is something of a villain. It's hard to make Roosevelt. Churchill out to be villains, certainly. They have a much clearer case for heroism and leadership in the war. But some of what I actually do in Stalin's war, is to make the story a little bit more complicated. And even to some extent, again, to revisit some of the critiques made at the time of things like the Lendlease Act, which really did help to draw the U.S. into the war even before the U.S. was ready, when a lot of the U.S. public was still quite wary of intervention.

And even some of the arguments, I know it's a kind of an explosive subject these days, the America First Movement, who are usually just dismissed as kind of fascist or Nazi sympathizes, is Charles Lindberg for anti-Semitism and all this. We shouldn't forget it was actually a very broad movement. And even if in the end, they did largely dissolve themselves after Pearl Harbor and after most of the country got behind the war effort. Some of the questions that they raised were not without merit. That is to say, about the consequences of the U.S. intervention.

On the positive side, yes, in the end, Nazi Germany was defeated utterly. So it was Imperial Japan. But perhaps in the negative side of the ledger, Stalin massively. expanded his empire in Eurasia. There were a lot of unintended consequences of the U.S. intervention. And another point that those critics made at the time was that once the U.S. would enter the war, the U.S. itself would change. The U.S. government, and particularly the executive branch of the U.S. government, would assume massive new powers. Civil rights and civil liberties would be suspended. And to some extent, we're still kind of living in the legacy of both

of the world wars. There are some laws that actually date all the way back to 1917. some of the president's emergency powers date all the way back to 1917. For example. That's fascinating. Yeah. Because the executive branch was meant to be very small. And slowly but surely, especially over the course of the 20th century, we expanded it to a place where I think a lot of us are having real questions about whether we're comfortable with its size now. Right.

It was never meant to be this big. But fascinating to look at it through the eyes of the world wars and how it happened then. And again, unintended consequences. Of course, yes, we liberated Europe. We got Hitler. who would argue that you shouldn't have stopped him. However, let's get real about the other consequences of our intervention and the still lingering effects it's had on the United States. It's amazing to think about. And you know what? I mean, it's very timely because, again, back to the fact that right now,

we're in this kind of proxy war with Russia. And there's a lot of saber rattling from Vladimir Putin right now that may turn really problematic for us very soon, and we're going to have big decisions to make. countries divided right now on just how interventionist we should be over there, just how appropriate our past interventions in Ukraine have been, what role, if any, we had in setting up this conflict, right? I mean, there are a lot of layers to this. And right now in the country, there's sort of a shut up if you're not completely pro-Ukrainian and money and arms and anti-Pudin. No one here is pro-Pudin. But it's more complex because these wars, as you've outlined so well, have real consequences and they can last centuries.

They absolutely can. There's even new discussion of the Lenleys Act as one of the many ways in which the U.S. might get involved without getting directly involved, that is, on the side of Ukraine, where once again, again, the critics are, just as you point out, they're all being kind of tared and feathered to some extent in public as Putin apologists, but the questions they're raising, they're real ones, not just about the consequences for Ukraine and possibly prolonging the war.

I mean, we talked about that with the U.S. intervention in 1917 and 1918, almost certainly prolonging the First World War, along with the agony for so many of the people swept up in it. So you have that angle to it, but you also have, of course, the long-term economic consequences. And we barely scratched the surface of those. But, you know, the Great Depression, for example, cannot really be understood without the legacy of the First World War and the way that it simply destroyed so many of the webs of international trade and finance. And right now what we're seeing in Ukraine, of course, is economic devastation. not just in Ukraine, but across Europe. So I do think it's important to raise these questions to

study the lessons of history, not because they tell us exactly what to do, but rather because I think they help to add context and enrich our discussions of these vital questions of national security and foreign policy. I've been reading a book on Churchill, and he's a good figure through which to learn a lot about the 20th century in the wars because he appears in both, right? He was a young – he was head of the Navy in World War I over in Great Britain, and then, of course, would wind up being the prime minister, but, you know, such a towering figure to take you through these massive conflicts, and he was very bellicose, both in his language and in his actual approach to these situations. You've studied it all. Now, listen, I want people to understand. You've got

eight award-winning books. The most recent one is Stalin's War, a new history of World War II, published last year. What's your best book on World War I if people want to read about all of this in more detail? Well, I have done a number of them. I would say the origins of the war. or the book that I would recommend is July 1914 countdown to war. I did a book on the Ottoman fronts of the Middle East called the Ottoman Endgame and a more recent study of the Russian Revolution, which despite its title, which makes it sound like, it's just about a political revolution,

is actually at root about the First World War and its consequences. And so I would recommend, really, that depending on Ragers' interests, they would choose one of those, although obviously Stalin's war is a great choice for the Second World War as well. Spencer Claven is one of my favorite commentators. He's only 31 years old, but he's brilliant and has read everything. And he's the son of Andrew Claven. He's an expert in the classics. And he's just written a new book. And it talks about how if you study the classics and you read Plato, you read Socrates, you read all these great thinkers that came before, there are a lot of answers in there for modern day problems. I would submit that your hard look at world history and these wars has the same conclusion. You can help, as you point out, the exact answer may not be in there, but the tools to come to a smart opinion on today's problems, those are in there. And so that's why it's so helpful reading your stuff and talking to you. Thank you so much for coming on and sharing your expertise with us. Thanks for having me on, Megan. It was really great fun. Great pleasure to be here.

For me too. All the best to you. I hope I get to be a fly on the wall in one of those classes one of these days. Coming up, my pal and husband, the father of my children, Doug Brunt, comes on to continue the conversation. You won't want to miss that. My next guest is Doug Brunt. He is author of bestselling books. He is the host of dedicated with Doug Brunt, where he interviews top authors. It's fascinating. It's doing really well. And he is one self-taught expert on World War I in which a period in which he has found himself immersed for years now as he works on a nonfiction book that is coming out soon. Can't reveal much more than that, although there's a couple teasers in this segment. Welcome back to the show, honey. So the reason I wanted you to come on is

because you've become your own World War I expert, World War II, too, but also World War I. And this line of what happened with the Russians is very interesting to me. And I think it does relate very much to what's going on today. And so let's go back to the Zon. and Tsarina and just set the scene for us because you and I recently saw an episode of the Crown in which that whole situation was featured. And the Tsar and the Zarina were in Russia, they wanted help from England. England gave them back of the hand and things went downhill from there. So put it in perspective for us how what went down and why it's important. It's important because that chaos of World War I and the internal chaos in Russia in that,

in those period, that period of years, 1916, 17, is the whole reason that we got Lenin and Stalin and communism in the 20th century at all. At the outside of the war, nobody wanted Lenin or the Bolsheviks. He was basically arguing for a violent workers' revolution. And he envisioned that as a global thing. He wanted a Bolshevik uprising for each nation. And so in the war, around 1917, Lenin has already been in exile. And in 1917, there are two revolutions. only eight months apart. In February, there's the initial revolution in which the czar is overthrown.

In early March, he abdicates first in favor of his son, who's just a boy, a 12-year-old boy with hemophilia. And then he decides, you know, what, if I leave and he takes over it, he'll never survive it. So then he advocates in favor of his younger brother. And the other brother's like, I don't want anything to do with this. And so he says no. So basically, this provisional government is in charge. And they are still in favor of staying in the war against the Germans, which the allies are thinking, that's great. We need this Eastern Front to occupy Germany. And the government looks more democratic, so also great. And Germany is thinking, well, we got to get Russia out of the war. And they know that Lenin is over in Switzerland. And Lenin was campaigning basically on three things,

saying, I'll give you peace, land, and bread. The first thing he wants to do upon taking power is pull Russia out of the war. And so Germany, I think Sean mentioned this, there's a train that they put Lenin on in Switzerland. And it's Lenin and about 20 other of his revolutionary friends. And the train drops him off in Russia. And this is in April of 17. By October, you have the second revolution. So eight months after the first one, in which basically Lenin takes over, the Bolsheviks takeover. And as Sean mentioned, they had only minority support, about 20 percent of the people were voting for a Bolshevik takeover. There were three other socialists, or three total socialist factions. There were the Mensheviks who had more support than the Bolsheviks and the socialist revolutionaries. But the

Bolsheviks were the most extreme and the most violent. The Mensheviks were thinking, well, maybe we can do this in sort of a legal way. We'll have trade unions and things like that. And the Bolsheviks were far more brutal in their tactics and started gaining more popular support. Even Trotsky was initially a Menshevik and he came over to be one of the top lieutenants of Lenin by 1917. And so the czar at this point is a prisoner. And initially, after he abdicated back in March, he was offered amnesty by Great Britain. And he's cousins with King George V of Great Britain. He writes him a letter saying, you know, this is where we need to go. And that initial provisional government was thinking exile might be the way. But he, you know, he's cousins. He's cousins. He's

he's imprisoned at this time. And then the Bolshevich's... And then the Bolshevich... And then the King George of 5th is Queen Elizabeth's grandpa, right? That's right. Yeah. So then there's King George V, then the 6th, who was the Colin Firth in the King's speech, and then Elizabeth.

So it's Elizabeth's grandfather. And, you know, everyone's worried about this sort of Bolshevik anti-monarchy sentiment that's really a global thing. And so he has a conversation with his ministers, and they're a little skittish. You know, if the czar comes over here, that could... lead to popular unrest. And is our favorite line from Braveheart, that could be my head in a basket.

So King George the Fifth is like, let's not, so they withdraw their invitation for him to live in exile back in Great Britain in April. So in March, he's invited. In April, the invitation's pulled, and he's stuck in Russia. And then when the Bolsheviks take over.

That was an important invitation to seize in the moment. He needed to get out of there. But that was the crazy thing. All of the industrialists, all the capitalists, all the capitalists in Russia were thinking, we're good. But this is, this Lenin guy is a flash in the pan. He's crazy. He's not going to have popular support. He already doesn't have popular support. And it's not going to grow. They'll get rid of this guy because he's also fighting the Japanese in the East. He's fighting the Czech Legion, the Poles. He's fighting the Mensheviks, the Socialist Republics. And there's the White Army, which is loyal to the Tsar, which is still a very powerful army. So Lenin's fighting on like six different fronts at this point. And he is, however, gaining more control. control. So the czar at this point is a prisoner, and Lenin is worried that he's sort of a rallying

point for the white army that's loyal to the czar. And by July of 1918, he and his family are executed in a really gruesome way, bullets and bayonets, the czar and his whole family, wife and kids. And Lenin's off to the races. And the relationship, as you described it, between Lenin and Stalin. You know, it's like, Stalin, he was looking at Lenin, and Lenin was looking at Stalin. And, you know, when you talk about these two, you talk about Stalin is possibly one of the worst people who ever walked the face of the earth. And Lenin saw it. And, like, he knew it wasn't like Lenin was all that great, but Stalin was uniquely evil. So talk about that and sort of what happened between the two of them. Stalin is one of the worst figures of the 20th century. I think there's some stat on who has,

who's responsible for the most deaths in the 20th century. And Hitler's up the, there at around six or seven million. Mao is number one. Stalin was like 20, 25 and Mao is like 40 million people. They're responsible for killing in the 20th century. It's just insane. Stalin's about eight years younger than Lenin and was a real disciple from afar. He was born in Georgia and southern Russia. He spent a lot of time around the Caspian Sea and the oil regions in Azerbaijan of southern Russia. And he was sort of a thug for Lenin down there, raising money for the Bolshevik cause. So he was basically a gangster, and he would have extortion rackets going on. He was a bank robber. It was almost like the Wells Fargo train in the wild west of

America that would be hijacked. He staged huge bank robberies robbing wagons full of payroll cash, and then he'd send it up to Lenin to support the Bolshevik cause. And he became one of Lenin's top lieutenants and military advisors and leaders. And then after, so there's the red, terror from, you know, in the years immediately after the Great War when the Bolsheviks finally secure power and this bloody Russian civil war ends. And in 1922, Lenin has his first stroke. And he's a little bit incapacitated from that, but he's still this heroic figure to the Russian people. And then in 1924, he has his third and final stroke in which he dies. Only some people believe that he didn't die of a stroke, he may have been poisoned by Stalin. Because in the weeks prior to Lenin finally

dying of this alleged stroke, he wrote a letter to the Soviet, basically the political body beneath him, saying that it cannot be Stalin who succeeds me. He's a madman. It should be somebody else. And most people thought it'd be Trotsky or one of the others, or about four or five guys who were in that level down. Stalin was one of those five. But most people thought it would be Trotsky. But as soon as Lenin dies, Trotsky, it happens when Trotsky's away, suspiciously, and by the time Trotsky gets back, Stalin has already solidified all of his alliances and threatened those who were not initially with him. So when Trotsky gets back, it's kind of a done deal, and Stalin is in charge. He promotes the cult of personality around Lenin. And, you know, he knows Lenin is this very popular

figure, who's a very charismatic speaker. He's only about five foot five, but he was a huge personality. And so Stalin is saying all great things about Lenin. They renamed St. Petersburg, Leningrad and promote this cult because Stalin's thinking, well, if people are behind Lennon, I'm going to say I'm behind Lennon, and that will all continue. But by the 30s, he changes his tune. And he selectively releases some things from Soviet archives that show all the bad things that Lennon did in those years immediately after World War I and sort of dinged Lennon up a little bit and his legacy because now Stalin is firmly in charge and is more concerned

about building the cult of Stalin, which he does and, you know, names a city Stalingrad. and sort of fibs a little bit about the heroic things that he did in those early years, too. We only know this because after the fall of the Soviet Union in the 90s, many of these countries opened up their own archives. We just recently, in the last 20 years, learned a lot more about the early years of Stalin. So was there an opportunity for us to avoid Lenin and avoid Stalin and avoid the Bolsheviks in a way that could have changed the entire trajectory of the 20th century and 21st? Absolutely. Even in the absence of Western intervention in the years 1819, Stalin and Lenin and the Bolshevik movement almost collapsed. They almost lost to the white army and to other forces. In February or March of 1919, Great Britain pulled out its final troops. They only had a small force there and the Americans got out too. They were interested in some of the oil regions and other resources around Russia. But Churchill, among others, was in Great Britain saying, we have got to deal with this problem right now. It's amazing. I mean, Churchill, said this after World War I and World War II. But he said this Lenin guy and these Bolsheviks are going to be a real problem. We need 100,000 troops. We can go in there and route this thing and establish a more democratic

form of government. But after the four and a half years of slaughter of the Great War, nobody had the appetite to do that in America or Great Britain. And they also took that non-interventionist slant of, okay, if this is who the Russian people have selected to be in charge, they should do it. Because not only is it going to be difficult to send troops in there and fight this war, but then we're going to have to fight the peace. We're going to have stick around and help these people establish a more democratic form of government, and nobody wanted to get involved in that. And so Lenin was able to thread the needle because during the war, you know, the Germans hated this guy too. It was only that he wanted to pull Russia out of the war that they sent him in there. They weren't looking for

some workers' revolution either. Monarchs and democratic forms of government wanted nothing to do with Lenin and the Bolsheviks. But they had to deal with the primary threat. And for the central powers and the allied powers, that was each other. And so the Germans thinking, even if he pulls out of the war, you know, he's got all these resources too. And the allies were thinking, well, if we go get rid of Lenin, and this is back during the war years, if we go fight Lenin and get rid of him, try to get rid of him, we could push him into the arms of the Germans. And even if he doesn't declare war against us, he has all these guns, oil, wheat, copper, that he could offer up to the German war machine. So everyone kind of treated him with kid gloves,

even though he was viewed and identified as a threat early on, no one could really take him on. So he was able to kind of thread the needle for those post-war years. Let me ask you about Churchill because he's this crazy figure who played a big role of World War I and not just World War II. We all know him from World War II. But he was very present during World War I and sort of trying to become the military leader that we would later know him as, not with total success, as you just alluded to.

But talk about Churchill during World War I. He was put into the post of First Lord of the Admiralty in 1911. And he was young then. He was like a 37-year-old guy. And that's the top post in the British Navy, which, you know, for the Brits, the Navy is a bigger deal than the Army. So he was a huge figure in the pre-war military apparatus. And he brought in as his first sea lord, Jackie Fisher, who was this legendary admiral. And he was much older.

He was more like 70. So these two guys got along with this one old. Admiral and the young Churchill. And he was very aware of the German threat early on, more so than most. And so he was working very hard to update the military and the technology of the ships. He's sort of a technophile. So he was like, because you've told me before, at this point, England had the navies, and that was extremely important for them to have a strong Navy.

But most of the other powers didn't really have a strong Navy. But then Germany was like, we're going to have one. We want one. And Churchill saw it coming. He did. And that set off this naval arms race. So Britain controlled the seas at that point. Ever since defeating Napoleon in the early 1800s, they were the dominant sea power. And they controlled the sea lanes for merchant shipping and for military purposes as well. In Germany, they were expanding, but they were really a continental power. They had the largest and most powerful army and land-based force. But in order to grow, Kaiser Wilhelm II thought, we need an international system of colonies, an empire. in the way that Britain does so that we can bring natural resources in from the corners of the globe and fuel our industrial growth. But the only way to have an international empire and colonies around

the world is to have strong navies that we can protect it, protect our sea lanes. So he starts building a navy and then Britain starts getting very nervous about the strength of the German Navy and that set off this big arms race between the two. Okay, so back to Churchill. So he's there. He's working on building up, well, preserving the strength of the British Navy, staving off anybody else from getting too strong. And in World War I, he's got this partnership with this older guy, but it doesn't actually work out very well. Right. So he's got this idea. By the way, he's done a ton of work to update the military and the naval ships from coal to oil, and he secures access to oil from the Middle East,

which was sort of the founding of British Petroleum and things like that. But he has this idea. and this ended up being his downfall, but he had an idea to end the war quickly because Russia had basically been capped off. They have their only warm water port in the Black Sea. That's how they get wheat and natural resources out and how they get guns and war supplies in. But in order to get the Black Sea, you have to go through this long straight called the Dardanelles that goes right by Constantinople and Turkey, and it's all controlled by the Ottoman Empire, which is with Germany. So they control access to Russia's warm water port. Churchill has this thought that we can send, a big force, not only naval ships, but ground troops as well. And it's not that well protected

at the moment. We can storm in there. We can take the straight and we can open up Russia and then basically hit Germany right in the belly from beneath and win the war quickly. And they have this whole back and forth. Lord Kitchener is the head of the army. And he's the guy like in America, it's Uncle Sam wants you. Well, in Great Britain, it was a poster of Lord Kitchener, basically doing the same thing that, you know, we want you in the military. So, they're back and forth on how to do this. They ended up sort of like splitting the baby, and they send only some naval ships and no ground troops. So when they get there, this is in 15, 1915. And so the ships go, and they're fighting. It's like this ancient

straight, you know, that's like where the Persians and the Greeks used to fight. So there's ancient fortifications up there, and there are some Turkish troops there, but they're very poorly supplied. They've mined the straight a little bit, but the British ships are making some progress. And as we found out later, the Turks were almost out of bullets. There were very few troops, almost no ammunition. The English had basically gotten through, but it stalled a little bit. And they thought, well, maybe we better stop. We've just lost a couple battleships to some sea mines.

Let's wait and see what goes on. And maybe we'll get another ship up here. So they stall it out. And in that time, more Turks come down and the Germans think this could be a disaster. And they send troops down there and resupply it. By the time the Brits gets some more ships and some land troops in there, now it's on. Like it's a full-on battle. Both sides are supplied and the whole thing bogs down and it turns into this very bloody mess that is prolonged. Lots of people die. It was made into a movie with Mel Gibson

sort of portraying what an ugly, grisly disaster it was. And Churchill's playing for the whole thing. But had they gone in with his initial plan with ground troops, with more ships, they would have easily taken this. You know, history has sort of gone back to resurrect Churchill's reputation in the disaster, which ended up getting him fired from the admiralty, and he spent a couple decades sort of out to pasture until he came back to power closer World War II. You know, I mean, not to reduce it to, you know, life lessons and a self-help therapy session, but it is a good reminder that you can have a massive failure. Like, I prevented world, I failed to prevent World War I.

And you can still come back. I mean, think about Churchill. I know we both admire him so much, but the opportunities that he had, that he sees that he tried for and that he did have some failure achieving only to never give up, to never give up. That's right. I mean, if you have the talent, if you have the goods, you can always come back, which he clearly does. And he, you know, took him some time, but he rose to the top again. So what do you think? Is World War I more interesting than World War II or the other way around? It's funny. I used to think World War II was more interesting. And I'd watch all those, as you know,

like the videos in color and, and that sort of weird mysticism that the Nazis got into. The only thing on our television, if it has to do with the World Wars, Doug is into it. And if you sprinkle an alien in there, so much, they're better. Well, they were there. What do you mean? They were, they're absolutely responsive for almost everything, pyramids, Nazis, all of it. But I find world war one. No sprinkling necessary.

They were everywhere. They're there. Yeah, everywhere you look, right in the surface. I find World War I more interesting, actually. It's more nuanced. It's this incredible, crazy battle. And then at the end of it, we were all like, why did we even do that? It seemed like these petty things between monarchs and shifting alliances.

And it's just way more complex and nuanced than World War II, which is more of this good and evil story. So in Doug's other life, because you may know him as a podcast host now, host of Dedicated with Doug Brunt, in which he goes in depth with the best and best known authors of our time. Go ahead and download it now and follow and subscribe, and you'll be glad you did. But in his other life, he writes books, and he's working on a nonfiction piece right now, which is amazing. It's got this big mystery in it, but it's based on, it's historical, but it's like unearths a big mystery and I think solves it. And that is one of the reasons. That is really the main reason why you became such an expert.

How many books do you think you read in preparation for this book? He doesn't want to talk about the name. He's like keeping it under wraps. that will come out soon. Soon. I'll have advanced copies in a couple months. Okay. Oh my gosh.

A hundred. And that's not counting the small articles and weird journals and things from the air. So as you mentioned, the book that I wrote, 90% of it takes place in the 25 years leading up to World War I. 1890 to 1915 is really the time for this book. And it's a great era of, it's like I was actually talking to an archivist in German. to get some things out. I'm like, I need something. I'm looking for something on this guy,

and he's like, this is the golden age of letter writing. Unlike today where things are happening in tweets and texts of six or nine words or something, in that era, everybody wrote letters. And the whole period is documented. It's amazing. It's really fun to read through it.

But I do worry, I was talking to Anna Quinlan about this in our episode coming up. We're not really documenting our time. You know, what are the archives going to have in them? you know, 100 years from now when people look back on the year 2022. There no, nobody's writing letters to anybody. Covefe.

That's about it. They're going to try to figure it out. Well, I'm excited. I'm excited for the book. That's going to be huge. It's amazing. And the podcast, everybody should go and download now because Doug has this wealth of expertise. This is not what he brings to you on the podcast, occasionally, but he makes it

about the other person, which is what is so enjoyable about the show. You get to know big, big authors who you know and love. and sometimes big, big stars like David Dukovny. And, well, I love the one with Penteller. That was fascinating. And, you know, Paulina Porzkova, we could go on. So, in any event, check it out. Dedicated with Doug Brunt, and we'll bring you more on the book at a later date when Doug's ready to talk about it.

Thanks, honey. Thank you, honey. Perhaps no event defined the 20th century more than World War II. A battle of good versus evil. A story of atrocities, we hope will next. ever happen again. Of the 16 million Americans who served our nation around the globe during that war, only about 167,000 are still alive today. 180 of these heroes are dying every single day. And with them go countless stories of heroism, of depravity that they witnessed, and of honor

in which they participated, perhaps unmatched at any other time in history. Today we're going to talk about their stories and the lessons we can all take from them as we walk through the arc of World War II with the filmmaker who has made it his life's mission to make sure the brave souls who fought and won that war for us are never forgotten. He's interviewed so many members of the greatest generation he's lost count. His dozens of documentaries have taken him to the battlefields of Europe, the Pacific, and here at home in Hawaii, where a third. Sunday morning attack propelled America into World War II. Tim Gray is the founder and president of the World War II Foundation and a documentary filmmaker.

Tim Gray, welcome to the show. So great to have you here. Thank you, Megan. It's a pleasure to meet you. Oh, the pleasure's all mine. I've enjoyed your work for a long, long time, and I appreciate the personal touch you put on everything you do, going right to the guys who fought this battle. and getting their take on it before that's no longer possible. It's hard to imagine, right, that there will be a time on this earth where there are no more members of the greatest generation to walk us through this history. These are precious souls still walking amongst us.

It's amazing when you think about the fact that you can talk to people who actually save the world. I mean, I can't remember. I mean, I can't talk to George Washington. I can't talk to Benjamin Franklin. I can't talk to a lot of those people, but I can actually talk to people who were involved in World War II and actually played a role in saving the world, which I think is extraordinary, but it is also a very short window that we have to talk to these people.

And I think, you know, it's just amazing that we have that opportunity. Let's just start there, because you think of the greatest generation, and in particular those who fought in World War II, there are some seam lines that pull them together and that describe most of them. And you've spent more time with them than anyone. How would you describe these guys? I mean, what is it about them? What are some of the adjectives that jump out at you?

Humble. You know, they could be going around to your local mall or they could be going around to your local place and saying, you know, hey, look at me. I saved the world. I want the likes on my Instagram page. and I want the likes on my Facebook page, but they don't do that. It just blows my mind that there's such a generation that is so humble about the fact that they really dictated where we are today. And so, you know, when I look at that generation, I think, you know, if there's any generation that really deserves the fact to want that attention, it's that generation, but they don't want it at all. That's the thing, is that, I mean, they are literally the opposite of selfie culture that we find everywhere around us today.

And there's a quiet dignity about these guys. I've interviewed a fair amount of them. I'm happy to say over my years as a journalist, there's a quiet dignity. There's a deep patriotism, deep, deep love of America, hard earned and hard fought. And there's just some sort of a bond between them and between them in the country. They survived the Great Depression. They fought World War II like it was a job. And then they came home and they went on with their lives. And their lives were centered around their job and their family. And that was it. I mean, they didn't want the accolades. They felt the accolades belong with those who were buried in American cemeteries in Manila and Normandy and Holland and Belgium and other places. There was almost this survivors. guilt that they had. So when they came home, they took the lessons of World War II and they applied them to their own daily lives. And some of them dealt with them better than others. I mean, some of them came home and they were fine. Some of them came home and they had a problem with alcoholism. Or some of them came home and they had a problem with committing suicide. Or they had a problem with their families in some way where they would wake up their mom or their wife or the their children in the middle of night and be screaming about a Japanese bonsai attack,

and the families at home couldn't understand. But they came home and they rebuilt America to what it is today. And when I think about that generation, anytime I go to a mall or anytime I log on to Amazon or anytime I want to travel to Ohio or Montana or another state, I don't need papers. I don't need someone to check in with me. I don't need someone to authorize my daily activities, and that's all because of that generation. But it's just so funny that they're kind of like the anti-Kardashian generation, that they just went on with their lives and they saved the world. And they just didn't want any credit for it.

And they felt all the credit belonged with those who never had any opportunity to live a full life or to have kids or grandkids or to be. someone who solved cancer or solved the dilemma of autism or dementia or, you know, Alzheimer's or something. So to me, they lived their lives in honor of those who never came home and have the opportunity to do great things. And that's, it's on inspiring. You're so right. I mean, the juxtaposition is stark when you think about someone like Kardashian who is famous for being famous for doing absolutely nothing. All she wants is for us to celebrate her, the way she looks, her money, her vanity. And these guys were famous for doing something extraordinary, but wanted no fame,

eschewed the spotlight and would never have wanted a celebration of anything around them. They would have deflected the credit onto the country and to others. Exactly. And I think that's kind of what's lacking in America as to understand the same. sacrifice that was made to preserve everything that that we are today, our ability to believe in a God and to believe in a religion and to believe in whatever we want to accomplish. And I think that generation humbly did that. And they left us a blueprint in which to follow. And I think we've gotten away from that blueprint in a lot of ways. And so when I look back at that generation,

I always say, you know, I always tell you the younger generation that, you know, these men have left us a blueprint on how to be better Americans and how to be better people. And we've kind of gotten away from that. And I think that's unfortunate in a lot of ways. Yeah. And now we need to follow it. Now we just need to know it and follow it. All right, so let's talk about the war and go through the arc of it so people have a better understanding of it. I think to our understand how we got into World War II, you need a basic understanding of how World War I ended. You know, most of us on tourist trips, if we've ever had the privilege to go through Europe, through France, if you're lucky, you get to go through the Palace of Versailles. And we know that word

Versailles. And what happened there was directly related to the Second World War in a way many people may not understand. So let's start there. Yeah, I mean, Versailles, the Treaty of Versailles, ended World War I. And a lot of people, especially over the last, I say 30 years or so, have decided, historians have decided that World War I was really a continuation of World War II. And it was. And I think World War I directly led to World War II. And a lot of that dealt back with the Treaty of Versailles and how Hitler utilized the Treaty of Versailles to really emphasize how the German people were mistreated and blamed for World War II. one. And there are some lessons there. I mean, my understanding of the Treaty of Versailles is it essentially humiliated Germany. Exactly. And it basically dismantled their military. It imposed harsh penalties

against them. It put all the blame on them and left them unable to really function in many key ways. And they became predictably resentful over those terms. And up rose Adolf Hitler. It was no accident, those things were connected. And he decided promptly to play the victim and play Germany as the victim. And surely thereafter decided that the villain would be Jewish people. Yeah. I mean, he was the right guy at the right time in history like Mussolini was in Italy. He was a flamboyant leader who basically blamed all of their problems, Italy's problems. And then on Hitler's side, Germany's problems on World War I. When he blamed him, he blamed it on. on the Jewish people. He blamed them on the communists. And he was elected on the fact that he was

that person who could take the results of World War I, which was the economic depression that Germany was in, the fact that Germany's military had been decimated and deactivated and that he would restore that aura to Germany. And we've talked to German soldiers who said, basically, that Hitler was that person who said, you know, we were wronged in World War I and this is what we need to do now. And then again, by the time he was in power and his directives were known that it was too late to to have former resistance or to object to what he was doing. So even before World War II, I mean, that's the thing that a lot of people sort of miss. In the 1930s, he built DaKow, one of the, you know, the first concentration camp.

It was Crystal Knock was in 1938, I think. Hitler was doing this before the war was actually launched, targeting Jewish people. But obviously then his eyes became more territorial. And he started grabbing territory. And that's when the war actually broke out in earnest. Yeah, he started looking at Czechoslovakia. He started looking at the expansion of Germany, that Germany needed more room. And because of World War I, that Germany was,

was due this more room. And he looked at Czechoslovakia, and the Brits and the French gave him Czechoslovakia. And then he started to look at Russia, and he started to look at the Soviet Union. And that, of course, led to the start of World War II. And it's just one of those situations where you look at it that Hitler really did a great job of appealing to the common man in Germany in World War II, that the government has, forgotten about you and that we need to get back to, you know, being able to honor you and to help you. But, but then again, he had no plan that would ever succeed in doing that. But he wanted an expansion of the German Empire following what happened after World War II, which basically

ruined Germans' economy and ruined Germans to after, excuse me, after World War I, which ruined Germans' economy after World War I, and then an expansion. So it was just a situation where Hitler took advantage of the Treaty of Versailles and said, you know, Germans were due more land. And we need more land. And we were treated so poorly that we were due to this expansion in Europe. Yeah. And we now know, of course, he was not abiding by the rules in the Treaty of Versailles, saying no more militarization to the contrary. So, Just for the timeline, World War I ended November 11th and 1918. 15 years later, January 30th, 33, Hitler was appointed the German leader.

And September 1st, 1939, is when World War II is considered to have begun. Germany invaded Poland. A couple weeks later, Soviet Union invaded Poland. In the beginning of the war, the Soviets were friendly with Germany. I mean, people forget that that's how it began. I mean, one of Hitler's greatest mistakes, I think, was going after the Soviet Union. Union, just getting so power-hungry and land-hungry, he thought he could take the Soviets as well, which would be a critical moment for the world, right? Because he couldn't, and the Soviets decided

to fight with the Allied powers, and soon thereafter, the war ended. But in any event, in the beginning, he took Poland, he invaded Poland, Soviet Union invaded Poland, and there was fighting going on for quite some time. In 1940, Norway was invaded by Germany. The same year, Winston Churchill becomes prime minister and the war is underway. Now, the United States at this point is isolationist. We've been through a world war. We don't want another world war. The American people are not in the mood at all. But we are helping our friends. Are we not? Yes, we are. We're helping them through what's called Len Lees, which is giving arms to England and giving arms and supplies to the Soviet Union. I mean, there's a point on December 6, 1941, the day before Pearl Harbor, where there's about

88% of the United States that has no interest in helping what's going on in Europe. There's just no interest in getting involved in another world war, and that all changes on December 7, 1941. So 88% of the United States is against getting involved in the war in Europe, despite the fact that England is alone. France has already conceded. The Netherlands have already conceded. Belgium, everybody's already conceded.

But the United States, having been through World War I, or at least the last year of World War I, wants no part of the war in Europe until the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor, which I find interesting is that it's such a high percentage, 88%, 87, 88% that wants no part of that war in Europe until we're attacked. And I think that's the way the United States is, in general, is. that we're not a warring nation, but when we are attacked, like a December 7th or September 11th, 2001, that we respond. So history doesn't repeat itself, but it certainly rhymes. And that's what was the case in 1941. You have a great documentary among many. This one called Remembering Pearl Harbor.

And I recommend it to everybody. It sets the stage with the actual greatest generation, with the actual veterans. But it sets the stage in Pearl Harbor quite nicely about how it was going that day, how it was a rather peaceful day. No one anticipated this. To the contrary, there had been a bulletin not long before suggesting this would never happen. It was just too long a reach, a stretch for the Japanese. They didn't really need to worry about getting attacked at Pearl Harbor.

I mean, a war was underway, so we were watching it, but we didn't think it could happen. So here's, this is from remembering Pearl Harbor on the, day before a Tom Selleck narrating, Sot three. Some sailors and soldiers that Sunday morning were already at church services by the beach. Others were up early playing a little toss and catch on the docks before reporting for duty if they had to work on December 7th. Chau bell sounded for breakfast. All was peaceful and serene on a wahoop from Pearl Harbor to the nearby airfields. Can we just take a step back and talk about the Japanese?

because we set it up by talking about Germany and a little bit about the Soviet Union. What are they doing there? Yeah, what are they doing there? Go back and talk about their participation, their interest, and their start in this war. Japanese were, Japan is a country of zero natural resources. And they'd even in natural resources. And so they had already invaded China. They had already invaded Korea.

They had already invaded French Indochina, which is now Vietnam today, because they wanted to expand, but they needed natural resources. So the United States decided at that point that they would start to cut off supplies to Japan, whether that be oil or steel. So Japan always felt as though they were backed into a corner and their expansion was dependent on these resources, these natural resources.

So if the United States was not going to supply these natural resources, that they would have to disable the American Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor. And that's exactly what they tried to do on December 7, 1941, but they did not understand that, A, that the American aircraft carriers were not there, and B, they never launched the third wave, which attacked the oil refineries at Pearl Harbor. So Japan was trying to expand their empire in the Pacific while Hitler was trying to expand his empire in Europe. And they thought that they could- And it wasn't totally unrelated. They'd been talking. There was an agreement. Like, this wasn't, you know, just two separate.

war is happening at once? No, I mean, they had formed an alliance called the Axis Powers between Italy, Japan, and Germany. So they were talking about what the, what the situation was in the Pacific. So what they needed to do was eliminate the American Pacific fleet for six months or a year, but they did not figure on the resolve of the United States. The United States wants a fair fight. I mean, that's always how Americans are. They want a fair fight. They don't want to be attacked without notice or be attacked by surprise. And that's the slogan of remember Pearl Harbor. And that was the rallying cry of World War II. It was Remember Pearl Harbor. We were attacked without notice by the Japanese and the Japanese had their intentions. But that became the rallying cry. And that's why so many millions of

Americans signed up for the fight in World War II because it was a sucker blow. And Americans don't light sucker blows. Maybe this is hindsight being 2020, but it seems so foolish now in retrospect. Like, why would they want to drag us into the war of all powers? It's not like we were not known for our military might. You know, we had just one World War I. Like, why, why drag the United States into this conflict that we'd been rejecting thus far? It's so funny because, you know, Admiral Yamamoto, who was the key architect of the battle of Pearl Harbor, the attack at Pearl Harbor, and also the Battle of Midway, told the Japanese military, he said, you know, you only have a certain amount of time here to put the United States at bay. Yamamoto had studied at Harvard. He had been a naval attaché in Washington. He had ventured out into the American heartland and seen the industrial power of the United States.

he basically was against a strike against the United States, but the Japanese military, the Japanese army was in control of what the decisions would be in World War II. So, you know, Yamamoto at certain points voiced his concern and said, this is not going to work. We're going to awaken a sleeping giant. And he meant by a sleeping giant, he meant American industry. He meant by the ability to convert the Ford plants in Detroit from cars to tanks and airplanes and everything else. He said, we cannot win a war with the United States, but nobody listened to him, especially the Army, and there were attempts on his life. And so, you know, Japan did not listen to the voice of reason. The Army was hell-bent on attacking the United States because they felt they were inferior in many ways. inferior as soldiers, inferior as Navy, inferior in militaristic ways.

But Yamamoto was the voice of reason, and they did not like that. And they still attacked Pearl Harbor. And they still had Yamamoto plan the attack on Pearl Harbor and planned the attack on Midway. But he was a voice who just said, we cannot win a war. We can only buy time. And how much time we can buy is negotiable. And I think they were looking at some point to say, okay, we're going to buy time. We're going to be able to occupy Guam and the Philippines, and those will be our islands, and then we'll settle for peace.

But Yamamoto was really the only one who understood the industrial might and the capability of the United States. The element of surprise is still hard to understand, given radar and satellite and all the gifts that we have today. But I didn't realize this, actually, prior to preparing for this interview, that there was an alert operator of an Army radar station at 7 o'clock that morning. We got hit at around 8 a.m. But at 7 o'clock that morning, who spotted the approaching first wave of the Japanese attack force and sounded the alarm. And what happened? Well, the problem was, is that radar was so new at that time, what the Joe Lodagh. And his colleague decided at the Opanah radar site on Hawaii was, you know, they reported this to to the authorities in Hawaii. And they thought, well, this is a, this is a crew of B-17 planes coming in California. Radar was not was not being utilized that effectively by the United States at that time. So they thought it was a B-17 squadron coming in from from the west coast of the United States.

And Tyler, the man at Hawaii said, don't worry about it. Those are famous last words. Don't worry about it. It's a group of B-17s coming in from California. And they said, okay, we're going to go for lunch now then. And that's what happened. And so it's almost like 9-11 in terms of things are building up and things are presenting themselves.

And we're saying it's something else. It's not what is actually happening. Radar was so new at the time, Megan, that we didn't trust it enough to say, we assumed. Kermit Tyler was a guy, and I hate to single him out, but he was the guy in the famous movie, Tora, Tor, Tora, who said, don't worry about it. It's a squadron of B-17s coming in from California. Oh, my goodness. And it wasn't. It was Japanese.

It was Japanese planes coming in the sink of Arizona and Oklahoma and everybody else. Yeah, the Arizona took the worst of the damage and the Oklahoma, and all 21 ships of the U.S. Pacific Fleet were sunk or damaged. Aircraft losses, 188 destroyed, 159 damage. The majority hit before they had a chance to even take off. And the Japanese success was, it was overwhelming. I mean, it was incredible. Not to compliment, but it was a great success for them.

And our guys were completely caught by surprise, as documented again in remembering Pearl Harbor. This is a clip from it in which several of the survivors on the USS, Arizona, describe the explosion that destroyed their ship. It's SOT 6. At 9 minutes after 8, one of the bombers came over the lucky bomb. And then the big bomb hit the number two turret. Dropped it from maybe 8,000,000 feet. And it went right into a million rounds. rounds of ammunition and fuel oil and aviation gasoline.

It went in there and exploded. That's what exploded. It blowed 110 foot of the ship clear off. And everything from the main mess forward is on fire. The bowled ship came out of the water about 30 feet. Blue in the water where the fireball went off and it went about five or six hundred feet in the air and just engulfed us up there and the sky control platform. A couple of things there to pick up on.

It wasn't just Pearl Harbor. This hell was unleashed in more places than Pearl Harbor. And you mentioned it before. It was an overwhelming success, but it wasn't a complete success because we did not have our aircraft carriers in Pearl Harbor that day. So can you first explain that the vast amount of areas and locations attacked and then talk about why our aircraft carriers were not there? Yeah, I mean, our aircraft carriers,

were delivering planes to midway. First of all, the Enterprise was delivering planes to midway. The Saratoga was undergoing repairs. So the Japanese decided that, you know, this based on local intelligence given by spies in Hawaii, that, you know, the Pacific Fleet was there for the taking. And they were. The destroyers were there and the battleships were there. But the aircraft carriers were either A,

delivering planes to Midway or out on other missions or being repaired in Bremerton, Washington, or other places. And the Japanese also made a huge mistake in the fact that they did not attack the oil refineries in Pearl Harbor. That would have been the third wave of the Japanese attack. So they missed their opportunity to really inflict a lot of damage on the United States at Pearl Harbor. And I think the Japanese also, Admiral Yamamoto, I go back to him because we've been to Nagaoka, which is his hometown, and we've been to places where we've interviewed his grandson. He was the only one who really had a clear understanding of the industrial might of the United States and that you had to knock it all off at once if you wanted to sever the head of the snake. And they accomplished two of the three goals. And that third part of the goal, which is the aircraft carriers and not attacking the oil refineries at Pearl Harbor, was a major, major mistake on the part of the Japanese.

And Yamamoto was a realist. And he was also one of those people who said, you know, we have about six months to run rampant in the Pacific before the United States industrial might catches up with us. And so, but the Army didn't want to hear that. Tojo and the others didn't want to hear that. But he was a realist. And to hear guys like Don Stratton who passed away a couple of years ago and Lou Contor, who's one of only two survivors still alive from the USS, Arizona in that piece you just ran, to hear them describe what it was like to me, it's just incredible because they were a witness to history. the worst thing the Japanese could have done was launch a sneak attack.

They could have notified us beforehand that we were going to attack, but Americans don't again. Was that done? Was that done? I mean, you know, was that done? Was that, is that how it used to be done? Like, an attack is coming?

Yeah, I mean, it's the Japanese, because there are so many issues with the Japanese with transmissions and everything else on December 7, 1941, their goal was to announce to us that they were going to attack Pearl Harbor. But because of delays in Washington and transcribing documents and telegrams and everything else, it became a surprise attack. And for the record, the number of military personnel killed at Pearl Harbor was 2,335.

That actually includes 68 civilians, I think. So, yeah, I guess the total is 2,403 people dead. 100, I mean, 1,177 from the USS Arizona, which is just stunning. If you go out there now, you can see the memorial to the USS Arizona. The other ships, almost all of them were repaired and sent back out into service. The only other two that weren't, besides the Arizona, were just too old and two out of, you know, commissioned to really care about. But the Arizona is the one that took the brunt of it.

And I will tell you, a couple years ago, I interviewed Jim Downing, who I saw in your piece. He was such a special man, such a special man. So I flew out and I met him in California with his family. He wasn't on the actual ship when it got hit, but then he ran there and held the bodies of many men who were dying and said prayers of them and continued to do so. We have a soundbite actually from Jim on the role of God for him during the attack. I'll play it now. It's Sot 12. What role did God play for you that fateful day?

I thought I was going to be blown up. And my conversation with God is, I'll be within a minute. But a minute went by for about 30 minutes, and I wasn't taken. But I experienced the greatest peace I've ever had in my life, knowing that God's in charge. He was 104 during that interview. And the loveliest thing happened to him. We talked about God, my connection to him, his connection. and Jim wrote me the most thoughtful letter after that interview thanking me.

Of course, it was I who needed to thank him. He wrote me this long letter thanking me and encouraging me to do a couple of things to renew my relationship with my faith and so on. I wrote back to him, and a pen pal relationship developed. He would die not long thereafter in 2018, but what a special, special dear man. Jim was in the mail office, in the post office on the USS West Virginia. So he read a lot of the letters that were sent home. And the West Virginia was attacked on December 7, 1941.

And to me, so he got to know personally the stories of the men on that battleship. And there's been a lot written about Jim. And Jim, to me, represents the best of him. America. And, you know, I think you were very fortunate to know somebody like him. And I think if we could somehow get back to the mindset of men like Jim, you know, we'd be such a better country for that. And he was a hero, but he didn't think himself of a hero, as himself as a hero. And he read the letters home and he was kind of connected to everybody on the USS West Virginia. And the Pearl Harbor was such a, was such a turning point in the history of this world that he was, he was on that

battleship and was reading the personal letters home of the people on that battleship. And to me, he's, he's one of those people I always admired and thought, wow, you know, here's a guy who knew the inner thinking of the people on the battleship and, and how. how they were scared and how they were looking forward to their own futures of being doctors and lawyers and maybe curing cancer or Alzheimer's or dementia. I mean, they had so many, they had so much potential the men on West Virginia and Arizona and Oklahoma and Maryland and Nevada and everybody else. I think what could they have done post-war that it would have changed the world? And Jim is one of those guys. That's the thing is there,

there were almost 3,000 Jim Downings killed that. Yeah. You know, they were all men like that. They were built differently back then. It's like the quality of person that we lost in each one of those guys is just, it's hard to match. It makes you miss them all the more. And it makes you all the angrier. Though, by the way, Jim was not angry.

Of course, he was full of grace. I did ask him a question. Here's a follow up between the two of us. This is SOT 13. You seem like you're a happy person. Are you? I am very happy. I'm a realist. I can't do anything about what happened yesterday. I can't do Bradshaw to happen us tomorrow. Living today is so much fun. So I live it up every day.

I love that. We all need a little more Jim Downing in our lives. He's one of those guys, Megan, who understands that he represents the guys who were buried in cemeteries. in Hawaii at the Punchbowl or Normandy or Manila or Holland or Belgium or other places that, you know, he survived and was able to carry on with his life, but that he also carries the burden of being a survivor. And that's a tough burden for these guys. Why did I survive when the guy on the left of me died and the guy on the right of me died? I mean, what is my mission in life?

My mission in life is to carry on to represent the qualities that my buddies who died, you had. And I think a lot of the times, I joke with people, I said, you know, when you're in Normandy and you're jumping into a foxhole, you're not asking if that guy's a Republican or a Democrat. You're just jumping in that foxhole knowing that that guy's an American and that that guy is going to help you survive. and you're going to help him survive. So why can't we get back to that time where we're looking at it as America first? America is, you know, not a party. It's an idea.

It's an evolution of what the founding fathers discussed. The day after Pearl Harbor on December 8th, 1941, the president of the United States, FDR, address the nation in a speech that would become known for a century plus. Here's a bit of that. December 7th, 1941, a date which will live in infamy, the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan. I mean, that's some 80 years ago.

And people still know that phrase, a day that will live in infamy. I can only imagine what that did to the United States at the time. You know, his address rousing this same president who'd been with the country and we're not going to get into this. The 88% saying we're not going to get into this. And boy, as they say, what a difference a day makes. We rallied behind the president as we rallied behind W on September 11th. of 2001. And it just seems as though what I learned the most from World War II is that we're like an old Irish family where they're like seven brothers and all we do is beat up on each other.

But if God forbid someone from outside the family beats up on one of the brothers, we all to come together and we respond. And that means like it's like why are we so divided now when we could all just find a medium like Eisenhower talked about as a president and come together and figure out what's best for America, not what's best for a Republican Party, or it's best for the Democratic Party or the Independent Party. What is best for America? Why does it take us being attacked to come together as a nation? In Roosevelt's speech, I mean, they detested Roosevelt. The Republicans detested Roosevelt. A lot of the country detested Roosevelt because of the New Deal and because of everything else he was pushing. And a lot of the country despised W. Bush because of what he was pushing. But all of a sudden, because America was attacked, all of a sudden we came together

and said, here is our common goal. Our common goal is to do what's best for America. And I always find that fascinating. I always find that fascinating. You know, I have to say, though, I feel lucky to remember those times. I feel lucky to be one of the citizens who felt that and remembers that America first feeling. Like, this is, we love our country and we love each other and you mess with the family. You know, you're going to pay.

You're going to pay. Well, back to World War II, pay they did. We and Great Britain declared war on Japan. Hitler decided to join in and declared war on us. and it was off to the races. He believed, inaccurately, that we would be too distracted with the Japanese to fight him. And he, again, unlike the Japanese leader, who you mentioned, Hitler underestimated us in a way that would be profound. He didn't think that we had the resolve.

He didn't think we had the military. And he didn't think that despite our booming economy, we had the resources to fight on two fronts. And he was wrong. He was wrong. I mean, most of these people, the Japanese and the Germans looked at the Americans as soft, that they didn't want war. They didn't want to fight in a war and that they would not use all of their resources and initiative and everything else to fight in a war. And they were wrong. The Japanese were wrong. The Germans were wrong. And they paid the price for that.

And so I always look at it as interesting is that they always underestimated the United States and people always underestimate the United States. But Hitler's two main errors in World War II were declaring war on the Soviet Union and declaring war on the United States. The British were major players, of course, as well. And we're in a precarious position for quite some time during the war, not knowing whether they were going to face the same fate as France. Winston Churchill was the prime minister, and in probably the best known speech ever,

I mean, it's got to be at least one of them. rallied his country to the cause, but also with a note of caution about what the enemy that they faced. Here's Winston Churchill addressing the House of Commons June 4th, 1940. We shall fight in France. We shall fight on the seas and oceans. We shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air. We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, which will fight in the hills. We shall never surrender. And if, which I do not for a moment believe, this island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving,

then our empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British fleet, would carry on the struggle until in God's good time, the new world with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and a liberation of the old. That was June 4, 1940 to the House of Commons. The thing about Winston Churchill was, I just recently read a biography on him, if there was one thing he was great at,

it was wordsmithing. And if you could take that to the next level with Winston Churchill, it was wordsmithing when it came to war. which was his particular area of expertise. It was a skill he'd worked on his entire life. He was built for that moment, and he was ready for it when it came. That was before they attacked us at Pearl Harbor.

Great Britain was in it. They were dealing with Hitler. They were dealing with everything, and he was the man who got Great Britain through it, notwithstanding the fact that they would throw him out of office as soon as they won the war. There's that classic scene from the King's Speech, where they're following,

the British story during World War II, and the king is watching Adolf Hitler speak. And the little girl, who is the future Queen of England, Queen Elizabeth, as a little girl, looks at her father and says, what is he saying? What is he saying, Dad? Masses of uniform men stupefying to the eye and incredible to the imagination, has stood in Spellbound audience of the Bureau. I don't know. What do you say? I don't know, but he seems to be saying it rather well.

This is a guy with a speech impediment who's observing how effective a communicator Hitler was. Exactly. There's a reason. There's a reason so many Germans followed this lunatic down the incredible murderous hole that they did. Yes. Yeah.

And we've interviewed German soldiers. And those German soldiers have told us is that Hitler delivered us from the Treaty of Versailles. Our economy was devastated. Our military did not exist. We had no morale. By the time Hitler delivered his oratory, his ability to motivate us. He had controlled the media. He had controlled everything he needed to control in order to be in charge of that country. So it's almost like an apology when we've interviewed German veterans. And they're not SS. They're not fanatical. They're not the guys on the cusp of the concentration camps and everything else.

These are just general German soldiers. They said he motivated us enough to believe in him. His oratory motivated us enough to believe in him. And he also controlled the media at that time. And so the media message was his message. And by the time they discovered or they found out about the concentration camps, and they found out about the Jews, and they found out about the obsession with controlling more territory, whether it be Czechoslovakia or the Soviet Union, it was too late.

It was too late for them to do anything. There would always be a resistance within the community, but the resistance would never be strong enough to overthrow what had already been done. Let's talk about it because the numbers are just stunning. You know, June 6, 1944, it was a Tuesday. More than 156,000 American British and Canadian troops stormed 50 miles of Normandy's fiercely defended beaches in northern France. And if you look back at how the battle was fought with, you know, the men running out of the ships onto beaches that were riddled with mines, taking fire from above, you can't help as a layperson, but to feel like they were sacrificed. There was how on earth could we not lose some 50% of our forces undergoing that kind of an assault, which we knew was going to happen?

You know, we knew it was going to happen, and we had laid traps so they would think that we weren't going to storm Normandy and so on. And they fell for our traps, but they were also prepared at Normandy, as I understand it. And I just wonder, as a historian, when you look at that, did we know the extent of the casualties we were likely to take storming those beaches? We always believed as a country we were going to expect more casualties than we actually attained on that day. The paratroopers, the addition of the paratroopers, the 82nd Airborne and 101st Airborne, was something that was important to Eisenhower, not so much as the British, but we sustained so much less casualties than we expected that day. Eisenhower had written a note taking total blame for the failure of D-Day. Can you imagine that one person writing a note saying,

have accepted the failure of the landings on the coast of Normandy. And he did that. He wrote two notes. And one of them was because he did not know which way the battle would go. And Normandy was a defining moment in the history of World War II. And all of the plans that were laid out, and we talk about this a lot. And it's interesting because we talk about this with corporations as well, big corporation, that, you know, every plan looks great on paper until that first shot is fired. And that is a quote from General Patton.

Every plan looks good until the first firing, you know, first grand, M1 grand is fired. And then all plans go to hell. And then it's the initiative of the Americans at that point. I think it was the initiative of the Americans at that point compared to the Germans. That was the true ultimate success of D-Day in terms of knowing the plans of the divisions around you, the companies around you, knowing the plans of everybody around you. So if something went wrong, you had the training to pick up the rifle and move forward, whereas the Germans were reliant on Hitler and von Roodstatt and reliant on wrong. orders and things like that. It was initiative that won D-Day for the Americans as opposed to what the Germans were defending. How much prep did we put into that effort before we actually

launched the attack? Tons. Tons of prep, tons of maps. Everything, again, looked great on paper. And, you know, this is where we're going to land. This is where the first infantry is going to land. This is where the 29th infantry is going to land. This is where the 82nd. Airborne is going to land. is where the 101st is going to land. This is where the British are going to land. This is where the Canadians are going to land. This is where the French are going to land. Everything went to hell in a handbasket as soon as D-Day began.

But the thing is that the Americans and the allies were also connected with the plans of D-Day that they knew that if something failed in this area, that we'd be able to accommodate it, in this area. The Germans also had the disadvantage of Hitler, having decided he would be commander-in-chief, and he was a terrible military commander. He was taking a nap. He was taking, he was taking a nap. He was sleeping, and they were waiting for him to wake up before they waited for him to make the decision whether to move the tanks forward towards the beaches of Normandy and everything else, whereas the Americans are saying, okay, this isn't working, but the captains and the lieutenants and the corporals and and and the colonels and the privates are taking the initiative. And that's what's so great about America is that is that we recognize that if something's not

working, we take the initiative to make sure works. We lead. We lead. We lead ourselves. Yes. The toughest fighting was said to be on Omaha Beach. First waves of American fighters were cut down in droves by the German machine gun fire as they scrambled across the mine. riddled beach, but U.S. forces persisted all day, pushing forward to a fortified sea wall,

up steep bluffs to take out the Nazi artillery by nightfall. And they say all told, around 2400 American troops were killed, wounded or unaccounted for at Omaha Beach. The Canadians were over at Juneau Beach having an equally, if not even tougher time. The, your, you have a documentary on D-Day as well. And it has an extraordinary segment of survivors talking about that moment. This moment of storming the beach at Normandy. I mean, it's a phrase now that people use to try to describe courage in a few words or less. But you think about having to be one of those guys and actually do it. Understanding, it wasn't a mystery to them, the mines and the machine gun fire that was about to come their way. And here is a couple of

minutes from Tim's documentary on what that was like. As I was going into the beach, I could hear the bullets hitting on the side of the ship, on the side of my boat. And then that's when I realized, I said, well, this isn't going to be a piece of cake. This is for real. I looked into the well of the boat and there was 35 soldiers in there and I don't think there was an atheist in there because every one of us was making a sign of the cross as we were going in.

And I happened to look. I looked at the right, and I'd seen a boat, and that's where I realized what we were going into. Our job was to roll up these obstacles. They had what they call hedgehogs, and then they had these telephone poles with a ramp, and on top of the telephone pole was a mine. That was for when the tide came in, the boats had just slid. light up there, the mine would explode. And our job was to blow up 50-odd gaps

so the infantry could land. I carried out of a rifle, a web belt with canteen and ammunition on a rifle. And I forgot how many pounds of explosives I had on my back. I believe they called it Tetatol. And as I got to the ramp with a small boat that was in, to land, there was, just as I jumped into the water, there was this explosion. And while I was on the water, maybe a couple of seconds, someone pulled me out.

And I couldn't find anything. I couldn't find any of the crew that I was attached to. I found out later that they were all killed. I was the only one left. American hero and God bless you, Tim, for interviewing these guys and getting their stories on camera. That was Day of Days by Tim Gray. You should definitely watch that one too. They're just humans, you know, they really, they seem superhuman, but they're just men,

and they were young men asked to do the most extraordinary things, and they did it without complaint and with valor. Bernie Corvacy, who you just heard from, I said, you know, what did you do after the war? He said, I went back to high school. I mean, can you imagine that going through the fact that you're a naval combat demolition unit guy, like today they're called Frogmen or Navy Seals, and seeing all of your guys killed? And then he went on to the Philippines. I said, what did you do after World War II? He said, I went back to high school.

And I said, you know, when I was in high school, Megan, I would think I was still sucking my thumb. You know, I looked at that guy and I'm like thinking myself, what an incredible American you are to be able to accomplish that and then go back to high school and finish high school. And Richard Fasio, the guy behind him who lived the first half hour of saving private Ryan. And Richard's still alive. Ernie passed away this year, unfortunately. But I look at them and I talk to young people today who are 17 or 18. years old and I go, you know, this is what you're capable of. I said, whether you know it or not, you're capable of this. You're capable of being the next greatest generation, you know,

and they look at me like I'm a alien from Austin Space or something like that. And I said, these guys didn't think they were capable of doing that themselves at 17 or 18, but they did it. Well, think of the sad obsession now with identity and, you know, skin color and gender and patriarchy. It's like, oh, my God, you could be devoting your energies to something so much bigger than just you and these immutable characteristics that we've decided to obsess over right now. Think of what you could accomplish if you would take all of that time and energy and devoted to something greater than yourself. if not a war, innovation, solve the problem of the closure of those steel mines and the people looking for a new career or identity. Find a way to help America find its new footing in the age of electronics and the supercomputers and so. That's what we need all the energies devoted to,

not navel-gazing, selfies and hysterical focus on things over which we will never have any control. Yeah, people based their self-worth today on how many likes they get. And that generation did not. They based their life on coming out of the Depression and surviving the Depression when their parents went from lawyer to selling apples. And they fought World War II as a war. And they fought it as a job. And they came home and they raised their kids on the values that they learned during the war. and the attributes that they brought home.

And there's just, there's too much. There's too much that's going by the wayside to, to make America a great country. There's too much divisiveness. And this is what these guys fought about. You know, they fought about, they fought against Mussolini. They fought against Hitler. They fought against all these things that were trying to tear America apart.

And I think of it. when I walk through the cemetery in Normandy, I look at the names from Connecticut and Montana and California and other places. And I said, you know, this kid who was 18 or 19 could have cured autism or cancer or dementia or Alzheimer's or all of these things that were battling today. If he had the chance, if he wasn't killed on June 6th or June 15th or something like that. And I think to myself, boy, oh boy, you know, what a waste of you. opportunity that this young man buried in the cemetery under this white cross or star of David could have changed the world but instead, you know, was killed on June 6, 1944. And I just think,

what if? What if? What would this country be? And I look at that. I've been to cemeteries all over the world in Manila where there are 35,000 missing in action, burrow. you know, on the wall of the missing there, the punchbow in Hawaii or Holland or Belgium. I said, geez, what is there? What would have been their destiny? And I think we think that today with soldiers who were killed in Afghanistan or Iraq or other places, their families feel as though what would have been, have there been their destiny? What would they have grown to do? Those poor families, though, have a different, such a different outcome. You know, at least we got to declare victory in World War II.

And there was zero doubt about whether who are the bad guys, who are the good guys, and whether it was worth it. Yeah. We don't know that today. And today, these soldiers go through a situation where when they're fighting, they don't know who, I mean, in World War II, the Germans were helmets where we could identify them. The Japanese were helmets and uniforms where we could identify them.

And today in Iraq and Afghanistan and other countries, we don't. don't know if that 12-year-old is the enemy or not. And that adds an entire layer of stress to these men and women who are fighting that I just can't imagine. Yeah. Can't imagine. Well, you were not the only one floored by the sacrifices made by our troops. You had mentioned Rommel, the German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel. Well, you've got a soundbite from his son.

Manfred Rommel, and his dad had left the front lines to attend his wife's 50th birthday party on D-Day. And you actually got sound from his son, which is pretty extraordinary. Listen to how he reacted. He was very surprised because we relied on the expert view of the German Greeks Marina that nobody could land under such weather conditions. It was a very courageous decision of General Eisenhower and very successful. My father was away from the theater and some others as well. He said, this is very painful.

They are learning while I'm not there. The British and Americans were more courageous than the Germans concerning the better. Put that in a context. It's a little tough to understand. And for the listening audience, Tim, what was he saying there? Well, his father had gone home to Germany because he did not feel as though that the Allies would be landing under such weather conditions as were, you know, as were the case on June 6, 1944. He believed that the Allies would land in better weather conditions. So Manfred Rammel's father had gone home for his wife's Lucy, his wife Lucy's 50th birthday and bought her shoes in Paris. So Manfred was home as the 13, 14-year-old who witnessed his father getting the call back

in Hurlington, Germany that the Allied invasion had begun in Normandy. And Erwin Rommel's headquarters at La Roche Guillaume, which is outside of Paris, was unoccupied by Rommel on D-Day. Rommel should have been there on D-Day to direct the forces, to direct the German forces. And here he is in Germany because he did not think that the Allies would land under such weather conditions, whereas Eisenhower had said the conditions are marginal, but will go. And so Manfred was home watching his father's reaction, getting the telephone call back in Hurlinger, in Germany that the Allies had landed.

in Normandy, and here he is in Germany. And Manfred, you know, articulated that. Manfred Rommel was an outstanding human being. He was the mayor of Stuttgart, Germany for 23 years. He also became very good friends with the family of General Montgomery after the war. And he was a humanitarian, but he was also witnessed to a momentous time in history when his father got a phone call in Germany that the Allies were landing on D-Day in France. And, and, and, and, And Manfred was also there when his father was taken away to be forced to commit suicide by Hitler because of the failures of Normandy and because Rommel had been an outspoken critic of Hitler during World War II. So Manfred Rommel, who passed away several years ago, gave us this perspective of what it was like to be a 13 or 14-year-old in the German army, but to witness his father's reaction. to these momentous events.

Extraordinary. And him relaying his father saying the Americans and the Canadians, the Brits, they were just more courageous. That's extraordinary. Your jaw must have dropped when you got that sound bite. Well, it did. It was one of those things where as a filmmaker, you say there are certain people you want to interview

who had a first row seat to World War II. And Manfred Rahmell was one of those people. And after he passed away, You know, we were very devastated in his passing, but he was a benevolent and he was a kind mayor in Stuttgart, Jiminy. But he was also an observer to some of the most momentous events in World War II. And to have him in some of our films was just one of those things where it's just dumb luck that we got him when he was alive. And filmmakers are always, dumb luck is always part of being a good thing. filmmaker, whether you're Kim Burns or anybody else. But to have his perspective, yeah, to have his

perspective on that was, was incredible. And, you know, he was firmly in the belief that the Allies would not land in bad weather on June 6, 1944, and that's exactly what Eisenhower did. Within a year, Hitler would surrender. The Japanese would be another story. It would take two atom bombs to make them finally surrender. And that, I want to get to the USS Missouri, which was the ship on which the surrender papers were signed. And just an aside as to John McCain, Senator John McCain's grandfather who was on the ship reluctantly, he had wanted to get back home. He knew they won. He was ready to get it back home to his family.

And tell us what happened. Well, you know, it was just a situation where we had dropped two bombs on Japan, and the Japanese military, the army especially, still did not want to surrender. So we dropped bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the Japanese army did not want to surrender, even after two atomic bombs, which is absolutely nuts. But then the emperor Hirohito decided enough as enough. So when Herahirohito decides enough as enough, the Japanese military, the army, decides they want to assassinate Hira Hirahito. So we had planned to invade Japan in November of that year of 1945, and the casualties would have been in the millions. And Japan probably would have been wiped off the face of the earth. So it goes to show you that when the surrender was officially signed by the Japanese,

Hirohito was the emperor and decided enough was enough. The Japanese military still, after two atomic bombs, wanted to continue the fight. So when we knew at that point, Truman knew at that point, that the Japanese were willing to defend their homeland to the last, whether that be children with spears and women and men and everybody else with with everything else, he decided we would drop two atomic bombs. And those who served in the Pacific totally agreed. And those who had served in Europe totally agreed.

We've never come across a World War II veteran who said that we should not have dropped the atomic bombs on Japan. Now, we're looking at this at a 20th century lens. We're not looking at this at a 21st century lens. Atomic bombs today are devastating. We do not want them. We do not want Russia to drop an atomic bomb on the Ukraine. We feel as though as that would be just, you know, but in 1945, in the lens that we're looking at in the 21st, in the 20th century,

that was the appropriate thing to do to save lives. So the surrender in Tokyo Bay on the USS Missouri was attended by the Navy and Marines and the Japanese and they finally decided to surrender. But at that point, the Japanese Army still did not want to surrender. So that tells you the fanaticism of what the Americans were going to face or the Allies, the Russians, everybody else, were going to face if they invaded Japan in 1945, November of 1945. So Japan would have been wiped off the face of the earth. We would have suffered another million plus casualties. We'd already printed another million purple hearts in anticipation of the fight in Japan. So Truman decided enough and it's enough.

This world war needs to end. And it eventually did end. But only because Emperor Hirohito decided that enough was enough and that the Japanese were defeated. And even then, Japanese did not apologize and have never apologized. for Pearl Harbor or starting World War II in the Pacific. And that has always been a sticking point for the United States that Japan has never apologized for that. And Japan always felt that the war in the Pacific was legitimate, legitimate, and that it was caused by the oil embargo and the embargo of natural resources and that they were forced to do what they did. So Japan has never officially

apologized for Pearl Harbor or starting World War II in the Pacific. And that's always been a little a sticking point with Pacific veterans. I know one veteran who was at home one day, and Megan, his son came home with a Honda motorcycle, and his son was washing his hands in the kitchen sink and looked outside. And his dad, who was a survivor, Pearl Harbor at Schofield Barracks, was pouring gasoline on this Honda motorcycle and about ready to light it on fire. And his son came running out and saying, what are you doing? And he said, I'm not going to let you drive this Japanese motorcycle. And his son said, why not?

And his dad had to explain to him why. And those feelings still linger with veterans of the Pacific War. And I tell people today that the Pacific War and the European War were two different wars. They were two specific wars. They were totally different wars. The savagery of the Pacific War was no comparison to what was going on in Europe. And the Geneva Convention was not observed by the Japanese. And they treated prisoners as cowards. And the fight in Pacific, beginning with Guadalcanal and moving on to the other islands,

was a totally different war. And the veterans in Europe had such a respect for the veterans who fought in the Pacific because there were no rules in the Pacific War. It was a free-for-all. It was just a total, absolutely bloody free-for-all compared to what was going on. in Europe. We've only touched briefly on the Holocaust and what happened there. Hitler's atrocities were discovered in full. He took his own life on April 30th, 1945, about a week before his country surrendered, as I pointed out, Japan would come later.

The story about the Missouri that I thought was kind of interesting, just because people know the name John McCain, so it's a modern-day reference that they can relate to, is his granddad was on the Missouri when the surrender papers were signed. He didn't want to be there. He wanted to go home to his wife. He then got, his commanding officer said, you will stay here because you were critical to all of this. We want you to be there. So he stayed. He went home to his wife. And this is again, John McCain's granddad. And I think it was four days later while celebrating his coming home party with his wife,

he dropped dead of a heart attack. A death that was on the front page of the paper. That's how important he was to us. And it explained so much about how John McCain wound up in military service, and he, of course, would be tortured and endured terrible things during, and just, you know, his legacy and his family's legacy of sacrifice for country. It was only, I think, 61. It was a young man, but just the stresses of the war would take lives well beyond the end date of the surrender. Yeah, I just had the opportunity about a month ago to visit John McCain's grave at the Naval Academy in Annapolis. and also Steve Belichick, who was the father, Bill Belichick, and others at the Naval Academy.

And there are others who were buried at Arlington, who are in the same boat, you know, just men who served. And our mission as a foundation is that we never forget that generation. And unfortunately, it takes December 7th or September 11th for us to all of a sudden discover the American flag. And I wish it wasn't that way. But history shows us that unfortunately the only times that we come together as a country is during those times who are attacked.

But we do have the potential. And I underline that word, potential to come together for causes that can help America as a whole. I would love to think that we'll do it. I mean, the problem is now even hanging the flag is considered a partisan act. It is. It is. It is. If you put the flag out in front of your house, it means you're a Republican, which is absurd.

That's absurd. There are still a lot of Democrats who love the flag. Exactly. But it's being made. It's being made into a partisan symbol. Can I just spend a minute on this and I'll wrap it up? I read a story about how back to Pearl Harbor, the guys who are on the ships who are dying now, who survived and are dying now, if they so desire they can have their ashes placed on the ships? Yeah. if you were on the USS Arizona and you were on the Arizona on December 7th, 1941, you can have your urn brought back to the battleship and interred and turret number four.

And that's the only situation. If you were on the Arizona, let's say you spent the night in Honolulu on the night of December 7th, you're not eligible. But if you were on the Arizona on December 7th, 1941, and you would like to go and rejoin your crewmates, the folks at Pearl Harbor and the United States Navy will make that happen. So your urn will be taken by divers down to turret number four and placed among the 42 or so urns who have been placed in turret number four since this all started in the early

1980s. If you're a Pearl Harbor survivor and you want your ashes brought back to Pearl Harbor, can be spread in the harbor as well or brought back to the USS Utah, which was a battleship also at Pearl Harbor. It was not an active battleship. But it's interesting because we've attended some of these ceremonies where the sons or daughters or grandchildren of these survivors have had their urns returned to the crew. So there are about 900 plus who are still entombed on the USS Arizona, who never left the battleship after December 7, 1941, of the 1177 who died. And at some point in their life, they decide that they want to rejoin their crewmates. And one guy, Raymond Harry, who is from the state of Rhode Island, never talked about the USS Arizona after Pearl Harbor.

He never mentioned the fact that he had a strong connection. But on his deathbed, he decided that he wanted to rejoin his crewmates. So it was left up to his granddaughter to carry the urn back through New Jersey and Dallas and Honolulu. Now hear this. Master Chief Raymond Harry, effective immediately. Shore duty is canceled. Report back to USS, Arizona, to your appointed place of duty, and assume the watch. As we bring Raymond Harry to his final resting place here on earth, we pray that your blessings and your peace will be upon all those who rest here.

For Raymond's remains will now rest alongside many of his former shipmates, even as his spirit reunites with them in your heavenly kingdom. It's your most holy name that I pray. Amen. It's always an honor to dive the Arizona, and the ultimate honor is to be able to bring one of the sailors back home. The last thing that the family sees is the error in passing. into the water and into the ship. And to have divers at the USS Arizona

in a ceremony, take his urn and bring his urn back to turret number four on the Arizona and put it in there with about 42 other urns. And to me, it's probably one of those most amazing things I've ever witnessed is a man who never ever talked about Pearl Harbor, who never ever wanted to go back to visit Pearl Harbor post-World War II, was offered the chance to go back and see the memorial that was built and to see the oil that was leaking from the battleship, to smell the oil that was leaking from the battleship.

He never wanted anything to do with it, never wanted to talk about it. But on his deathbed, he decided, I want to rejoin my crewmates. One of the Navy diver, who is responsible for lowering the remains in, said as follows in one report, quote, it's a large hole, we place the urn through, and then you can kind of feel it, release. I tell the family, when I feel that pull, it's the ship accepting back one of its own. Oh, my goodness. I mean, it's to be on the Arizona Memorial when that flag is presented to a granddaughter and then to watch the divers bring the urn down to turret number four and placed in with

the rest of the guys who wanted to go back after. I mean, that to me tells me that the defining moment of their lives happened when they were 17 or 18 years old. The defining moment of their life didn't happen when they were 40 or 50 or 60 or 30. It happened when they were a teenager. It happened when they were 18 or 20 years old. And that to me is an incredible thing to have the defining moment of your life happen when you're a teenager. and to know that anything else you did in the rest of your life would be insignificant to what happened during your time in World War II.

And a lot of these guys took such risks after the war. They started their own businesses. They became cab drivers or plumbers or Jack Taylor founded Enterprise Rent a car or the men who came back founded U-Haul because they had been through the worst of their life. They had been through the ultimate risk in their life that anything else after that was just gravy. And I find that fascinating.

They never accept the word hero. Oh, no. They'll kick you. They'll kick you in the knee. They won't allow it. You've documented that as well. And this is one of the sound bites that jumped out at us. So beautiful from, this is again from your second piece on D-Day remembered, SOT 22.

I'm not the hero. I'm not the hero. I'm just a survivor. The heroes, most of the heroes, over there under the white crosses that you all know about, and their mothers and their fathers and their brothers and their sisters, and even their children of some of those people. Those are the heroes in this war. We're the survivors now, and I'm glad you feel that way, and I hope you always do, because democracy and liberty are too precious. and until I came over here, I didn't realize how pressure it was. Yeah. Yeah, that was Chris Heisler. Chris was in the 507th Parachute Infantry Regiment.

He was landed on D-Day and was taken prisoner on June 7, 1944. And if you call these men heroes, they will cut you off right away. And they will say the heroes are buried in these cemeteries. And they're just, there's that survivor's guilt, I think, that any veteran faces that why, why the guy in the left of me was killed and why the guy in the right of me was killed and why I was spared. And that generation is really in tune with that. And so when I make the mistake every blue moon of saying, you know, hey, you're a real hero. I know. And then I brace for the kick in the knee. And I say, these guys are going to beat me up because they're always to a man. or a woman are going to say that the heroes are buried in the American cemeteries. And I said, God, how humble is that? Before we go, I'm going to end it on this. On D-Day, FDR, who was president, he died in office.

That's why Truman took over by the time we dropped the bomb, offered remarks to the country, which was unaware that this battle was underway and concerned for their loved ones who were over there fighting this treacherous fight. and in part he offered the following prayer listen almighty god our sons pride of our nation this day have set upon a mighty

endeavor a struggle to preserve our republic our religion and our civilization and to set free a suffering humanity lead them straight and cruel. Give strength to their arms, stoutness to their hearts, steadfastness in their faith.

They will need thy blessings. Their role will be long and hard. For the enemy is strong. He may hurl back our forces. Success may not come with rushing speed. But we shall return. again and again. And we know

that by thy grace and by the righteousness of our cause, our sons will triumph. Those words from FDR a mighty endeavor, a struggle to preserve our republic, our religion, and our civilization, and to

set free a suffering humanity. Our sons will triumph. And they did, they did triumph. And they have the gratitude of generations after generations here in America and beyond. Tim, thank you so much. It's been a pleasure getting to meet you

and getting to watch your work. Keep it up. All the best to you. Thank you, Megan. It's been great to watch your career as well and keep up your great work as well. God bless America. Yes, definitely.

Thanks for listening to the Megan Kelly show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear.