The Ricochet Podcast - The Greatest Wars

Episode Date: October 19, 2017

It’s relatively rare to put out a Ricochet Podcast with only one guest, but when that guest is Victor Davis Hanson, well that’s all you need. First, we do a deep dive on Victor’s new must-read book The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won, a definitive history of WWII. Then, a bit of talk about current events, including North Korea. Go get your thinking cap out of... Source

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It's the Ricochet Podcast with Peter Robinson. I'm James Lylex. Our guest today is Victor Davis Hanson talking about the Second World Wars, plural. Let's have ourselves a podcast. Welcome, everybody. It's the Ricochet Podcast number 374. Wow, that's a lot of podcasts. How did we get that far? Well, we were brought to you by the fine people at, well, Tracker, for example. You know, we're all looking for something. For some, it's love.

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when Rob Long would come in and make you feel guilty about not belonging. Rob's still out there. Rob's working. Rob will be back. But in the meantime, Peter, it's you or me. Rob's working. Rob will be back, but in the meantime, Peter, it's you or me. We got to do the thing here. Do you want me to do the begging plea?

I'm on my knees. No, just go right ahead, James. I can't even touch your Jolson. Go. You know, you'd best not, because that's a highly problematic thing we just brought up there, the fact that Jolson would. Would you not say? I mean. No, no, that's true.

That's true. There was a minstrel component to his act. Component. Yeah, well, exactly. You know, the jazz singer wasn't the first all-talk film. It just had some songs in it. They had some lines of dialogue. Wait a minute.

Wait a minute. You hadn't heard nothing yet. But it wasn't the first all-talk film. It just had some songs in it. They had some lines of dialogue. Wait a minute, wait a minute, you haven't heard nothing yet. But it wasn't the first all-talking film. This, however, is the first all-talking podcast that's got 374 episodes because people at Ricochet support it. I realize that's a very narrow set of definitions there, but hey. Ricochet, if you've been there, you know why it is valuable and why we keep it going. It's the best community on the web for center-right conversation of a civil sort. Every place else, you know the comments devolve into name-calling and libtards and rethuglicans and the rest of it. No, not at Ricochet. Join today and be part of this conversation and support podcasts like this one and all the others.

The tiers start at a mere $2.50 a month. That's the coins that come out of your pocket at the end of the day. Go to ricochet.com slash join and do it. And once you start adding your voice to the community, you'll find why it's so beloved by those who are there. Well, all right, this week, you know, by the time we get over the latest controversy, there will be another one and we're all kind of tired about them. There are other more important things going on. You would say, as Paul Harvey said,

the news of most lasting significance is not often the thing that everyone's bubbling about at the moment, but the, the stuff below the froth, Peter, what would you say is the one thing you would take away from this week? Aside from the fact that inant phrasing and remarks continue to bedevil the administration in the public sphere?

Honestly, here's what I take away from this week. There was a dinner here at the Hoover Institution for visiting members of the media. We had a two-day conference for reporters, reporters and journalists, almost all of whom were from Washington, some of them from New York, but it was a New York and Washington crowd, mostly mainstream media, although, God bless her, Molly Hemingway of The Federalist came along. And I attended a dinner at which Condi Rice spoke and then opened the floor to questions. And all the questions, here we were sitting in California. All the questions were inside the Beltway questions. What about Trump this?

What about Trump that? Is Tillerson going to stay? Is Tillerson going to go? Is Tillerson being well served by his staff? And I have to say, I realized that one aspect of my own view of Donald Trump is that an entire continent separates us. I just don't care if Donald Trump gets into, I mean, I would, of course, I'd rather have the president of the United States comport himself with dignity. But if he said during a talk with a gold star family that their son knew

what he was getting into, it could very well be that he said that in the nature of he knew what he was signing up for. He was courageous. He was a hero from the first moment. It could very well be that he said that in the nature of he knew what he was signing up for. He was courageous. He was a hero from the first moment. It could have been a very positive thing. And I just, how on earth is the president positioned to adjudicate? And I just realized from this distance, having a continent between me and the president helps. It helps. And so, I was thinking while they were all asking questions about Tillerson up, Tillerson down, I was thinking to myself, wait a minute. I happen to know that my Hoover Institution colleague, Bill Perry, who was Secretary of Defense for Bill Clinton, believes,

has said, I don't know whether to reporters, but to friends, and it's for attribution, I'm sure he doesn't mind having this said bill perry a democratic secretary of defense who served under bill clinton believes that the trump administration donald trump and rex tillerson and james mattis the secretary of defense have made more of an impact on the problem of north korea than any administration has made in two decades. That's what I care about much more than Tillerson staff, this, that, dot, dot, dot. I just, it was like, it was just a revelation to me that really, those reporters were here too briefly. They need to spend at least a year with a continent between them and the president to detox. And just, there are important matters at stake.

And they are, 90% of the questions they ask were about matters that just don't matter. Right. Unfortunately, if you're somewhere else in the country, you can be on the other side of the continent from D.C. and Twitter is there to inject. Twitter is there. The method adrenaline of D.C. and New York attitudes

directly into your veins. You can be looking at North Korea, for example, and saying, you're right, the situation is different now. After decades and decades of kicking the can down the road and finding that the can is glowing even more nuclear-fashioned as the years go by, that something different is being done here, that there is perhaps reconfiguration of our forces underway, that there are, in other words, there's attitude to to let them figure it out let the

military give it its reins as opposed to before when the military and the application of it was sublimated under the idea that we're all going to get along under some wise international order so i mean it is possible to say i am not impressed with the intellect or strategy of Donald Trump or what he says, but I like the fact that he trusts and gives reign to people who know what they're doing. Go ahead. Sorry. I'm agreeing completely. The idea floating around now is that, of course, Donald Trump is insane and wants a nuclear war with north korea uh and i discount that for the same reason that i should have discounted it when i was a young man in the

80s because ronald reagan was insane and wanted a nuclear war with russia that's what you have to believe if you're a good progressive person this person is stupid evil crazy and wants death for everybody right um and so the idea now is that everyone in the military establishment is so freaked out about this that i believe it was matt lauer just uh this morning um on nbc was asking if the rumors are true that the generals are ready to throw trump in a room and lock it up to keep him from doing something crazy the old 25th amendment option here going on when it's entirely possible actually that uh the opposite is true that there's a a a robust discussion of what exactly is the end game with north korea and people are prepared to do something about it it's not pretty it's not nice but but what do we have for 20-25 years so i'm i'm not

that worried about that aspect yeah and the other i I am impressed, as I know many Ricochet readers are, by the works of John Walker, Ricochet contributor John Walker, who brings a kind of, to me, it's a refresh and a kind of offbeat perspective because he's an engineer. And I was thinking of this, it even occurred to me, I'm not making this up. It really did occur to me to think, oh, I think I know how John Walker might look at this. He might look at the press that I was with this past Tuesday evening, these Washington and New York figures, and say, we'll see if John does actually say this.

I don't mean to put words in his mouth, but this is the way I think John would look at it. He would say they are confusing inputs with outputs. Doesn't that sound like something an engineer would say? The inputs are Donald Trump, the Twitter feed. And here in California, from this distance, from the remove of a continent, I really don't care that much about the inputs. What I care about are the outputs. And the outputs are a stock market that is at new highs, an economy that is growing at more than 3% for the first time in many years, a military that is serious.

Look, North Korea is a very frightening matter. But here's what's new about it. We're facing reality. It is recognized by the administration and our military that North Korea possesses nuclear weapons and is run by a madman. And we are putting pressure, examining options, but facing reality so on one matter after another after another the outputs are actually pretty darned good and i you know again i say i'd rather have a dignified president than an undignified president but what i really care about is that troubles in the country get fixed and the the economy isn't going to be per but you one good

thing after another result there are a lot of good things happening in the trump administration good outputs and now i would like you to award me an engineering degree well an engineer might point out that the outputs are depending on what your inputs are, garbage in, garbage out, and that we're actually talking two different things. The inputs that you're talking about, the tweets, the indiscreet comments, the bad locutions, the general effect of those is separate from the policy effects that's going on. I mean, I think they're two different things. You'd be foolish to say that it matters more to concentrate on demeanor and decorum when actually you have interesting and positive transformations of the judiciary, the economy, etc. Correct. But I think to ignore the other conversation is also to shirk your duty as perhaps as conservatives who want to conserve an element of the culture and not see everything tumble down into idiocracy and Twitter fights. By the way, James, just for our listeners who may not be – everybody who posts on Ricochet, of course, knows who John Walker is. But just for our listeners who may not be familiar with John Walker, John Walker is a brilliant engineer who was the founder of one of the first CAD CAM companies, made a fortune, retired Switzerland. And from Switzerland,

he posts regularly and fascinatingly on Ricochet. So when I say John Walker, this is a major figure in the world of business and engineering who loves Ricochet, and believe me, we love him. When you say a genius who moved to Switzerland, you hope that Ken Adam, this great set designer for the Bond movies, built his lair, because I would just love to see him behind a stainless steel desk and a nice little bridge that goes over a bubbling brook, which may or may not be filled with piranhas. Say, by the way, we're trying out something new today, which is the graceless, segue-free podcast, just to see how you like it,

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Hello, Victor. Hey. Victor, when I was growing up and they were teaching us about history of the 20th century in school, you had the First World War, which happened because some nutcase shot a royalty person, and then you had a depression, and then Hitler took advantage of the depression, and then there was World War II, an inevitable course of events as it was presented to us. But was World War II really that inevitable? No, it was preventable on a variety of fronts.

After World War I, the Versailles Treaty combined the worst of both worlds. It was punitive in the sense that it blamed Germany entirely for the war, but it had no mechanism to prevent Germany from rearming. In other words, Germany was never occupied, it was never divided, as it was in World War II, and it was never incorporated into a defense alliance like NATO, or its government wasn't forcibly changed. And had the United States stayed on, or had the United States and Britain and France,

at least in December of 1918, marched into Germany, which they could have done, and occupied the country, I think it would have been a little different. And then in the 30s, when Germany was promulgating this myth that they really didn't lose World War I, they were stabbed in the back in foreign territory. At that point, the Allies who had more resources,

and the Allies at that time were France, the low countries, and Britain, they had actually more resources, military and economic, than Germany did. But they were fragmented and they didn't want to fight. So that first series of border wars from September 1939 to April of 1941, which Germany won them all and pretty much won the continent that's now under the control of the European Union, was preventable. Victor, Peter here. And so I would just like to begin by saying this. The Second World Wars, how the first global conflict was fought and won. I want to repeat that name because I want every listener to know it about the Second World War. Like you, I had a father who fought in the conflict.

This book is a staggering achievement. And I'm just going to say that because I don't think there's anything you can do for me, Victor. There's nothing I want from you and there's nothing you can do for me. So the flattery, it's not flattery. I'm just saying it because it's true. I can give you a job driving a tractor. You get me a job in the raisin country. It is a staggering achievement.

Every page, there's a fresh insight or a new perspective or some assemblage of statistics that says something that I didn't know. It's just a huge, huge achievement and completely and grossingly readable. It's a big book, but nobody should be put off by the sheer size of the book. I want to echo what Peter says, but I have to ask before the tractor job is offered. Case, John Deere, International Harvester, what do you got? I got a John Deere. Okay, good. Okay.

So, Victor, here's one of the striking findings from your book. I'll just quote it to you. The Axis powers were completely ill-prepared to win the war. Hitler and Mussolini and the Japanese started it, but they never had a plan to win it. How can that be? Well, when I made that statement, it was about the critical year 41. They had won all of their wars. Even Italy had been bailed out. And Britain was sort of a draw. The Blitz had not failed to take Britain.

They couldn't take Britain, but Britain was isolated. It was the only ally left. At that point, had they not invaded the Soviet Union or had Japan not attacked Singapore, the Philippines, and Pearl Harbor later in 1941, or had Germany and Italy not declared war on the United States, you wouldn't have had a global second phase, global existential war. And once that series of events transpired, the question was, which side can reach the homeland and the industry

and the sources of manpower? And it turned out that Italy, Japan, and Germany had no ability to go to the United States and bomb it. They had no four-engine bombers. Germany had no aircraft carriers. Japan had no four-engine bombers. It didn't have the fueling capacity to get its carriers past Hawaii, and

Italy had no ability. So they really declared war in the sense of a total war on powers that they couldn't reach. And once Russia moved its industry on the other side of the Euro, they couldn't reach Russia either. And that was not true of their own homelands. When the war started, both

Britain and the United States together had three models of four-engine bombers, and then within 36 months they would have a Lancaster bomber, a B-24 bomber, and a B-29 bomber that had huge ranges and could hit all of the homelands of their enemy, plus a blue-water navy in both cases. So they really did believe that their successful border wars in Phase I of World War II gave them so much confidence that when they had these punitive, surprise, preemptive strikes on Britain and on the United States and on Russia that they would just recoil and say, you know what, we don't want to get into this war. What are your terms?

And that was a terrible miscalculation. And on the other side, on the Allied side, well, you quote Churchill, this famous Churchill quotation, German rearmament could have been prevented without the loss of a single life. It was not time that was lacking. That is to say, as you put it britain appeased germany the united states engaged in isolationism and again and the russians colluded with the germans in divvying up poland so but in particular with regard to brit and the United States. I mean, one of the great themes of this book, it seems to me,

is the perverse and really frightening human capacity, or at least the capacity of leaders, for deep self-delusion. Yeah, it was, and that happened throughout the war and a part of Germany especially. They had no idea about Britain. When they were all during the Blitz, they had no idea that British, this is a staggering statistic, British fighter production of supermarine Spitfires,

which were comparable to BF-109s, was higher while Germany was being bombed than all 109 production in all of occupied Germany and the Third Reich combined. And Goering just couldn't, they couldn't just, they had no way even to imagine that could be true. So you had the, but with regard to the United States and Britain, Churchill says it wasn't time that was lacking, and of course the implication is it was simply will that was lacking. What was going on in the 20s and 30s when the united states ignored europe and britain appeased the germans what were they thinking they had outlawed the word destroyer they called it a

fleet leader they thought the ship any ship named destroyer would be too provocative in france it was against the school code to mention Versailles in their history classes. Excuse me, not Versailles, Verdun. They felt that Verdun would rub it into the Germans. And so there was this idea that the winners somehow felt conflicted, that the war was either the Somme or Verdun had been too bloody, or they had been too mean to the aggressor Germany. But on the other hand...

There was a kind of early version of political correctness, so to speak. There was. Yeah, okay. And in Germany, it was just the opposite. It was, we were right to fight the war. The only thing is we screwed up and we had a two-front war at once. And then we didn't bring troops from the east fast enough when we knocked out Russia. Next time, we're going to do it right.

And that was the whole fuel of National Socialism. So you had the winners that were embarrassed or regretful, and you had the losers that were determined to try it again. And that's kind of a paradox, but the Allies had better planes, they had better tanks, they had a bigger army, and they did not want to fight. Abashed and regretful, that's fascinating. I've been watching over the course of the last couple of nights, Things to Come, which

is an awful movie, but it embodies a spirit that I think we forget was quite prevalent in the land about how war in general is this horrible thing that must be avoided at all costs, that nations are bad, that some sort of pacifistic yet militaristic socialist enterprise will save us all. of the allied nations at the time a desire to uh to to just abjure violence and and war as a sign of a primitive people and that uh good thoughts there had been it was the that was what fueled george zimmerman and people um in england that believed in the league of nations would solve things and he had very strange the treaty of apollo and the Kellogg-Briand Act, where they outlawed war, the Washington naval limitations, all of which the Axis cheated on, the future Axis did. But there was this idea in the West,

it was very akin to the John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, Obama foreign policy, that if you reached out and you professed your magnanimity, it wouldn't be taken as weakness. And, of course, that's what it was by people who were autocratic and dictatorial in Germany and Italy and Japan. But there was a genuine effort to refashion World War I, which was not a decisive victory in a sense. It was ended by an armistice, not an unconditional surrender. But that had taught everybody we never want to go there again. And it hadn't taught anybody that.

It had taught Germany that next time they could divide the Allies and they could do it right and go through the Ardennes and around the Maginot and anybody would build a wall, didn't want to fight. And all of these myths that were unchecked. So there were people in the West, Churchill was one, there were people in the Roosevelt administration, too, who said, we have more power than Germany does, and if we stick together, we can deter it. But they were not listened to. And because the deterrent people were always demagogued as warmongers, they love war. I think it was Toynbee's daughter said that they're just war lovers

that's all they want to do and that's appeasement in the short term always sounds the more noble stance the name of the book again is the second world wars plural

the second world wars by Victor Davis Hanson and it is a magnificent achievement. Victor, why is wars in the plural in your title? For two reasons. One is that, as I said earlier, there was about seven or eight separate wars from 39 to 41, and nobody thought they constituted World War II. Even at that time, they still referred to World War I as the Great War. World War I was only renamed World War I really in 1941 with the invasion of the Soviet Union. And then this dormant war that Germany, I should say dormant border wars that Germany had won in Denmark and Norway, the low countries in France, Greece, Yugoslavia,

all of a sudden it started up again in a very different way. It was an existential, total, global war that involved Africa and Asia. And at that point, when the United States came in on December 7th and Britain was attacked by Japan, and then Italy and Germany declared war on the 11th of December, then it became a whole different set of wars. So the title reflects how all of these little tiny wars that were over with became something quite different. And then the second is that I organized the book by the way they were fought,

earth, fire, water. And my point was that this was such a global, vast war, and the combatants were so different. There was nothing really connected with fighting in Burma in the jungle and being in a U-boat off the Miami coast or being in a desert in a Sherman tank in 1942 versus flying a B-17 over Europe in 1943. So there were so many different experiences.

And my family, I had about five uncles who fought, and my father fought. And when they would talk after the war, you couldn't even believe they were in the same war because they would say things like, I was in a B-29 over Japan. I fought the Japanese in the ice in Dutch Harbor in Alaska. And then another person said, I rode with Patton in the Third Army.

And another person would say, I was on a merchant ship in Iran trying to supply the Russians. So it didn't even sound like it was the same conflict. But only later did people see that it was the same conflict. And my father fought in the Caribbean, which you usually don't think is a major theater. I want to pause here for a second and go from falling bombs to something else. Bombfell, we were going to tell you about, and this is when we're doing it.

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That's B-O-M-B-F-E-L-L dot com slash ricochet for $25 off your first purchase. One more time, that's bombfell.com slash ricochet. And our thanks to Bombfell for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. Going back to Victor, when we talk about the wars of World War II, is there an analog to today? Do you think that somebody's going to be looking back at the aughts and the teens and the twenties and say that similarly there were wars that in the future they will group under one rubric

yeah i think people will say that the war that started in the fall of 1990 between kuwait and iraq and then we began to bomb and then it was finished in 91 then there was a second cold phase of no-fly zones, and then it broke out about 11 years later in 2003. And then it was ended with the fall of Saddam within three weeks, and then there was an insurrection. And then it was over basically in 2011 with an allied victory, and then there was a withdrawal. And I guess you could say ISIS-Radical Islam won, and who knows what's the end of it now, but that's sort of like the first, second, and third Punic War, or the first and second Peloponnesian War, or the series of wars against Napoleon that they finally called the Napoleonic Wars, and we do that a lot.

People who try to do it with World War I and World War II and say they're called the Napoleonic Wars. And we do that a lot. People try to do World War I and World War II and say they're the same war, but that hasn't caught on as much because of the vast differences in the alliances. One of the things that made World War II so violent was that you had not just national religious or ethnic tensions, but you had these ideologies that you didn't have in World War I, communism and fascism, Nazism and Japanese militarism that were sort of force multipliers.

Peter, again, I just want to keep repeating the title so everybody can order it. The Second World Wars by Victor Davis Hanson. Victor, you devote a lot of time to the Soviet war effort. And I'm going to quote, I made a note here, the Soviet war effort is often not given full credit in the West for its near virtuoso destruction of the German army. Explain that. Well, when Hitler went into the Soviet Union on June 22nd, he had not lost a war. He hadn't been able to take Britain out, but he hadn't lost. June 22nd, 1941, right?

Yes, 1941. And he had four million troops, if you count the Hungarians and the Finns and the Romanians and the Spanish even and the Italians even. So it was a huge army, and the Red Army was completely surprised and almost folded within six weeks and went all the way back to Leningrad, Moscow. Kiev was overrun, and eventually by 1942 they would get all the way to the Volga River. But in the next four years they destroyed three and a half millions of Germany's best soldiers.

They destroyed 200 divisions, and that was essential for the Allies because that allowed a specialization of labor. So the Allies said, well, you know what, we can't do that on the West Coast yet of Europe, but they assured Stalin, we will supply you with 20% of your war needs. We will fight the Japanese on the islands in Burma, the Philippines. We will conduct a submarine attack on Japanese and German shipping. We will have a surface fleet. We will have a carrier fleet.

We will invade Italy. We will deal in the Mediterranean, and we will have a strategic bombing campaign. And you don't have to do any of that or arm any of that. You don't need a blue water navy. You don't need a four-engine strategic. Just tie them down on the ground, and that's what the Soviets did. And is it fair to say... It was a horrible war.

Twenty-seven million Russians died in it. Twenty-seven million Russians died. And would it be fair to say that this is one of those things faulkner said uh you know history isn't dead it isn't even passed would it be fair to say that the memory of that sacrifice animates much of russian policy today i think it does i i think you're right. And I think we have to be very careful because this whole bash Russia thing, I understand that Putin is a thug

and he's a criminal, but when you talk about Ukraine, you've got to remember that the Kiev pocket was the largest entrapment of soldiers in the history of warfare. So in September of 1941, 750,000 Russians, more than the British and the Americans lost in the entire war in combat,

were surrounded, and all of those people died. They either were killed or they were put in camps and starved to death. And so eastern Ukraine and Kiev have certain resonances to the Russians. We talk about Crimea. Putin stole Crimea. But Crimea was an integral part of Russia at one time. And the siege of Sevastopol, von Manstein killed 150,000 Russians when he took the city. So it's not like Puerto Rico and the United States. These are areas where Russians have really perished and felt part of Russia.

Right. The Ukrainians would note that they suffered substantially more at the hands of Russian rule being starved. They did. But that being said, the Ukrainians were in a very difficult position because they welcomed the Germans in, and then a large number of them were killed by the Germans, especially Ukrainian Jews. But then a large number of Ukrainian nationalists joined the Germans and fought the Russians. And the same thing happened in the Baltic states, and the same thing happened in parts of Finland. So it's very hard to chart the morality, because I'll give you one example.

In 1939 in November, we had a boycott of the Soviet Union. We're sending arms to the Finns to fight the Soviets. And then just less than a year later, we're sending arms to the Russians to kill the Finns. And that was because of the strange disconnect of the Ribbentrop-Molotov alliance that broke apart when Germany invaded the Soviet Union. So it's hard to know. The way I looked at the war was there was nothing in common in the Allied alliance except one thing. They had all been either

surprised attacked by germany uh or their allies had been surprised attacked in the case of britain and the axis had pretty uniform ideology fascism nazism militarism but the allies i mean the british imperialism and parliamentary government democracy democracy and Soviet communism, and yet the disparate allies work much better with one another than the Axis who had the same ideology, but they were mutually suspicious and they never shared intelligence, weaponry, or strategy. that it's... Victor, how do you... I'm just struck. James mentioned that his dad fought in the Caribbean. My father was on a ship during Okinawa and I grew up... He didn't like to talk about it. It sounds as though out at the ranch in Selma,

your dad and your uncles talked about it, but my father just mentioned to me once or twice when I was a kid that the most horrible sight he ever saw was kamikaze attacks on the American fleet at Okinawa. That was all. But all three of us on this conversation right now had fathers. We're just one remove from it all.

But we have children. And, Victor, you have grandchildren. And I hope your book becomes a bestseller. But even a bestselling book only sells in the tens of thousands. How do you convey to the rising generation of Americans the depth and the horror of this war and how much they need to understand what happened? How do you convey it? When I speak, for example, nobody realizes that we tend to look at Japan as victims because of the two atomic bombs. Japan killed 17 million people in China and another 4 or 5 million civilians in the Pacific and in Southeast Asia. And then Allied troops, they killed a half a million. And of all the combatants in the war, Japan had the highest killing ratio.

They lost 3 million, but they probably killed 25 million. And if you look at World War II in a very different lens than most historians, of the 65 million that were killed, about 54, 75, 78% were civilians. And of that civilian tap that were killed, Japan and Germany killed about 85% of it. And so if you say, what was World War II or Second World War? It was largely a story of German and Japanese soldiers butchering innocent civilians in Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and China. And yet we never get that message out.

And then we say, well, we dropped the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and that was a deadly act. But World War II had been over in Europe, and we were considering how to not invade Japan and lose a million soldiers or a million casualties. So we were going to bring over about 10,000 heavy bombers that were not being used, B-17s, B-24s, Lancaster bombers, B-25, B-26, metal bombers, medium bombers, put them all in Okinawa, not 1,600 miles away in the Marianas, but 350 miles away from the mainland,

and run two missions a day. And the amount of napalm that would have covered Japan is staggering. And that was precluded by the idea that try to shock them into defeat so that Curtis LeMay will not go to town and burn down the entire island, which he could have done, and which would have been a nightmare of death and destruction. Curtis LeMay was the Air Force General in charge of bombing Japan. Yes, he was. Go ahead, Johnson.

They had 7,000 kamikaze soldiers, I mean airmen, and the planes, and they had 3 million soldiers, and they had about 7 million in the defense industry that were civilian soldiers. So it would have been, if you had to go onto that island, it would have made Okinawa, where we lost 50,000 casualties, 12,000 dead, it would have made it look like a cakewalk. It would have been a disaster. When you're talking about the importance of remembering what happened and teaching subsequent

generations of it, and you mentioned that the dropping of the bombs on Japan is seen as the defining element of the time, and we should feel a little bit guilty for it. Well, according to the left, America has two great unique sins,

slavery and the use of nuclear weapons, which, which stain this country beyond all others. So the narrative of the progressive left is always going to be seeing these things, not in terms of history and, and nations and the characters of them, but they're going to be seeing it in terms of victims and oppressors.

And so the narrative eventually rewrites itself so that Japan was forced into a corner by the evil America because of embargoes and the like. They'll never really come out and say that there's culpability on that side. They will try to reframe it into a narrative about colonialism, capitalism, and the rest of it. Are they going to do, do you think they'll be able to do that, Victor? Do you think, I mean, books like yours help. I think that was Peter's point, that when you talk about World War II in a different way,

rather than writing half the book on the atomic bombs, why not write a fifth of the book on who died and the great, as I said, the 50 million, who were they that died? They were Russian civilians, they were Japanese killers that killed Chinese civilians, and German killers that killed Russian civilians, and Eastern Europeans that killed Russian civilians, and the Holocaust. So probably about 15 million Russian civilians, 16 million Chinese civilians, 6 million Asian civilians, 6 million in the Holocaust. And who did all that?

It was two countries that did that. It was Germany and Japan. And if you look at the war in a different way, how many did you lose versus how many did you kill? Japan turns out to be the most lethal killing machine of the entire war. It lost about 3 million and it killed about 25 million. And most of the people, the vast majority of the people Japan killed were civilians. So we have this image of Japan with these martial, bloodthirsty soldiers. Well, they killed about a couple hundred thousand British and American,

maybe more, 350,000. And they butchered some Asian soldiers. But mostly the Japanese army was tasked with killing people who couldn't shoot back, executing them, starving them to death, bombing them. And we just concentrate on the atomic bombs or the fire raids. They were just nothing compared to what the Japanese army did in China, Manchuria, Korea, Philippines, Malaysia, Burma, India, on the borders of India. And people, we don't even remark about that.

Victor, if what led to the war, maybe this, I don't know, the book is full of insights, but maybe this is the one that strikes me most at the moment. I just finished the book a couple days ago, as you know. you call it a fantasy land that seemed a kind of fantasy land mindset that seemed to envelop almost the entire world that is to say we think hitler and the germans those generals were so efficient and they understood reality nonsense hitler never considered what the united states might do to him the japanese never thought thought it through. Likewise, the Allies... If the lesson is that unreality led to an embrace of unreality, a kind of

wishful thinking on both sides led to a conflict that killed 60 million people, what's the lesson for you? Gurin called up Ribbentrop and he said, did Hitler declare war in the United States? And they said yes. He said can you call Halder

head of OKW, the general staff? Yes. He doesn't know why he did either. And then they said does Hitler know where Pearl Harbor is? And Villamont said no I don't know where it is either. So they went to war without having any idea that Japan, what Japan was planning. They went into Russia with no idea of the expanse of Russia. So what is the lesson?

What's the lesson for us today? What's the lesson for Donald Trump, for your friend, the Secretary of Defense, James Mattis, for the American people? What is the lesson about the importance of reality? What's the lesson about the importance of reality uh grant i what's the lesson i think two two things about war what is unanticipated and what you don't think will happen will usually happen and number two most people when they start a war have no way of thinking how to end it and so when you go to war you can say what are your strategic goals? Do you want to annihilate the enemy? Do you want a total war? Do you want to just have a negotiated surrender?

What do you want? When we go into Libya, or we went into Iraq, or we go into Afghanistan, or we go into the Balkans, nobody sits down and says, this is the problem. These are the means to achieve it. That's the end that we want. And so we often just think we're going to drop a few bombs. They're going to say, please stop, please. That doesn't happen. And so Hitler, give Roosevelt and Churchill credit, a lot of credit, because when they started the war at Casablanca in 1942, they got together and they said, this is what we want. And then 1943 and 1944, they reiterated it. We want to destroy fascism.

We're going to have this time to occupy Germany. We're going to occupy Italy. And we're going to occupy Japan. I'm going to change their governments. And we're going to destroy that ideology. That was what we went to war for. And it was clearly articulated. And the funny thing is the warlike Axis who made fun

of the democracies and Churchill had no plan. Nobody ever dreamed they could get to Detroit and stop the production of B-24 bombers. Nobody ever believed they could land in London and stop Spitfire production or go across the Urals. They made bombers. They call it the Ural bomber and the America bomber, four- and six-engine planes that were on the drawing board. They never built them. But I think that's the lesson. If you go to war, you have to be realistic about what you want and whether you have the means to achieve it.

Well, you were talking about the lethality of the Japanese Army. Now, today in 2017, we're looking at Japan and saying, well, it'd be great perhaps if they would surpass their constitutional limitations and maybe step up to the threat that's right next door. North Korea, are we in a similar situation where we're watching something that is an obvious threat and just simply ignoring it, hoping it'll go away or that we can assuage it with diplomacy? I know it's ridiculous to draw analogies, but let's end with that. Where do you think the North Korean situation is going to go? Well, I'm a little worried about the North Koreans because for deterrence to work, the enemy must be aware of it. Hitler said he wouldn't have gone in the Soviet Union had he known there were already 2,000 T-34 tanks

that he couldn't deal with. So I don't think the North Koreans really understand the extent of U.S. firepower and military capability because they look at the withdrawal from Iraq or the mess in Libya and they think, well, these Americans just don't know what they're doing. But they're flirting with a conventional war that's an American specialty. In the case of Saddam, the same thing. So that worries me. And then I think we're living in a myth.

We say they can take out Portland, they can take out San Diego. I don't know that, and you don't know that, and our military doesn't know that. We don't have accurate information, how many missiles they have, what's the status of their nuclear arsenal. We say, well, so we'll be taken out in minutes by 10,000 artillery troops. Well, in the 2006 war, 8,000 rockets were pointed at Tel Aviv. They lost 42 people. 4,000 of them hit Israeli cities.

We're told today that 200,000 missiles and artillery pieces are pointed at Israeli cities, yet Israel's not paralyzed in its strategic choices in the way that South Korea is. And by the way, South Korea has three times more people in Seoul alone than all of Israel. It's 250 square miles, so almost 26 million people. And the idea that that huge municipal area is completely paralyzed by North Korea in a way that Israel's not by almost the same amount of weaponry pointed out doesn't make sense. And yet that's conventional wisdom. So I think when you look at a war, you can't accept conventional wisdom all the time. And I think if you want to prevent a war, we have to tell North Korea and demonstrate to them that any attack on a U.S. state or base or homeland would be synonymous with their destruction.

And if they understand that, they won't do it. But it's very hard to get that message to them, and that's what's worrisome. They really don't think we're going to reply, or if we do reply, it'll be something like withdrawing from Iraq or a quagmire in Afghanistan or losing the Iraq War. I just don't think, and that's dangerous to me. There are ten other topics we'd like to get to, but alas, we have to let you go. The new book

second world wars how the first global conflict was fought and won victor davis hansen thank you for joining us in the podcast victor thank you thank you all of you guys appreciate a lot yeah i've got to get that as soon as possible. Peter, you've read it. Oh, it's a wonderful book. It really is. It's just amazing how much Victor knows. He's read everything. First of all, he's read everything. And then he remembers everything he's ever read. What a mind.

Just what a mind. Yeah, I would have liked to ask him about the John Deere, though. I mean, believe me, I love John Deere. Well, he's not perfect. No, he can go down and get a Minneapolis Moline tractor. They don't make them anymore. I wanted to tell you about something else too. Remember, Segway free

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Believe me, when you go to that site, you'll start loading up on stuff. You'll feel pretty secure when you're done, too. Trust me. I love this product. All right, Peter, before we lose, no, before we leave, we may have lost already. Don't know about that. But some say that the Democrats have already lost big lee in the heartland it seems to be that they you know jimmy kimmel the other day was saying that uh not good riddance to the people

who disagreed with what he was saying and by the way he's not the conscience of the nation except when he is but riddance to those people in other words i don't care if people leave my show because they find my my simplistic emotional jags to be unconvincing. This is not a recipe for continued victory, is it? And it's one of those things they say the Republicans will need the millennials and they're tuning out on the GOP bigly because they don't like the Trump guy. But the Democrats have a problem too. The bumper stickers that they're rolling out now for the next presidential election have a grim Bernie Sanders with his mouth sort of tightly done like he's a Muppet character.

So their bench isn't exactly springy-chickeny. Do you think that they have any chance to figure out how they're going to connect with the heartland, as it's called? At the moment, none. Just none. Donald Trump has his drawbacks. The Republicans in Congress, Lord knows the disarray is astonishing. But the of actually available choices here in California, longtime liberal Democrat who is by the standards of the California Democratic Party, which runs this state, pretty conservative, has just announced that at the age of 84, she's running for another term in the Senate, which she would complete at the age of 90. Jerry Brown, Governor Brown, is 78. And so it goes. This state, the coasts, of course, I'm acutely conscious of California, is run by a liberal

gerontocracy, which I don't know. I haven't thought this through in any great detail, but Donald Trump is the one who's talking about growth. pretty darn grim, America's a wreck, to recent speeches in which he's talking about economic growth, the new market highs, what we can do with tax cuts. It just seems to, whereas the Democrats, Bernie Sanders, everything's falling apart, Elizabeth Warren, as they move to the left, as they consolidate their support in the coasts, they're losing, I think, this is just a theory but i think not only the middle of the country but the younger generation the millennials over time i know donald

trump is not going to win any popularity contest among 18 to 25 year olds today but over time the message of growth and optimism and american greatness i believe is likely to prove far more appealing than whatever the democrats are peddling if you get the growth and if they feel it and if it's no longer impossible for them to live in a city because it's been priced out by google and amazon people and perhaps but if you have a lot of people who are coming out of college with a meaningless degree and a great deal of debt they're going to be looking at the person who says it's not your fault well we may wave the magic federal wand debt will be forgiven you'll be taken care of you'll have free health care because we're all in this together etc etc uh there's a certain sort i mean there's a 50 60 percent of the people

in that demographic are incapable of thinking about getting a bigger pie it's a question about how to slice it more fairly because your heart resonates with ideas like fairness and equality and egalitarianism and the rest of it. But we'll see. I mean, there was... We'll see. Hey, James, so can I ask you a closing question? Enough politics.

We've done history. We've done politics. We've done wars. Here's a question. You sent me... We were exchanging emails just the other day, and you sent me a heartbreakingly beautiful picture of a puppy in your backyard and surrounded by trees that were just blazing with color. Just describe what was happening in that picture to our listeners who suffered the loss of your beloved dog several weeks ago. Tell us what was going on in that.

Tell us about Autumn and your new puppy. Well, we have a new dog. His name is Birch. He's looking at me right now. He's an extremely mellow little puppy. Usually they're bouncing off the walls, but this guy just hangs around with you, goes to sleep, loves to walk, loves to chase, but he also loves to go and stand out in the backyard face west

and for some reason looks like he's receiving instructions from the mothership. He's just downloading something. And the light at four o'clock just ignites everything because whoever planted this neighborhood or perhaps it's happenstance there's a timing to when things go off you will have a tree is fully engulfed in burning hues you will have another that's just still got its lurid liquid green to it about. Then you'll have the palette of the grays and the golds and the greens. It's just incredibly beautiful this time of year. Now, it lasts for about two, three weeks. You know what's coming.

You know that perhaps the day that we're having today, which is going to be 75 degrees, is incredibly rare. The idea that what is as rare as a day in May? It's the days in October that are like this, that you can number amongst both fingers in the course of your lifetime. Because tomorrow the rains come, perhaps, and scour all the leaves off the tree. The day before, it was harsh, but it was bright, but the sun had a quality to it that had no presence. It was wan. So when you look at days like this and the beauty of it all, you just want to take your dog and you want to walk around and kick through the leaves and remember when you were a kid kicking through leaves on your way to school. And glory in all of this because everything is dying.

Everything is going away and there will be nothing but bare limbs scratching at a gray sky for six months after that. We'll have the snow. We'll have the holidays. But we're going to be dumped under the cold stone steps of January soon enough. We know that up here, which is why days like this make us feel privileged to be here because before the tomb, we get this most amazing show, and I love it. I don't know why I'm sitting inside talking about it when I could go outside and experience it. We're going to get out of here right now. Do that next.

Do that next. However, it was Tracker. T-R-A-C-K-R. It was bombfail. And Ring, all of these people brought this podcast to you, and please support them for supporting us. Also, the Ricochet store is there, so you can get a few things with R's on them and answer people's

questions. What is that? It's Ricochet, you tell them. You should join. It's $2.50. Why don't you? And then go from there. Hey, go to iTunes if you'd like. Leave us a little review, which helps us surface in the podcast world. And did I mention again that 250? Well, I'll mention it again and again. It's cheap.

And podcast listeners join at this special new tier. And you can comment. You can read things. And you'll realize why Ricochet is an invaluable civil resource in these fractious times. Thanks to our guest. Thank you, Peter. And we'll see everybody in the comments at Ricochet 3.0.

James, next week, give a pet to Birch in the meantime for me. Will do. Kiss me once, then kiss me twice, then kiss me once again. It's been a long, long time.

Haven't felt like this, my dear Since I can't remember when It's been a long, long time You'll never know how many dreams I dreamed about you Or just how empty they all seemed without you So kiss me once, then kiss me twice Then kiss me once again It's been a long, long time Long time. Thank you. Ah, kiss me once, then kiss me twice Then kiss me once again It's been a long time

Haven't felt like this, my dear It's been a long time. I haven't felt like this, my dear, since I can't remember when. It's been a long, long time. You'll never know how many dreams I dreamed about you. Or just how empty they all seemed without you. So kiss me once, then kiss me twice, then kiss me once again. It's been a long, long time.

Long, long time. Long, long time. Ricochet. Join the conversation.