Part I The Second World Wars with Victor Davis Hanson

he farms 40 acres in the small town of Selma California and he's just published what may be the best history of the Second World War that you will ever read Victor Davis Hanson joining us today on common knowledge now welcome to uncommon knowledge I'm Peter Robinson a classicist and historian Victor Davis Hanson is a fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford where he serves as editor of strategic ax a journal of military history and contemporary conflict dr. Hanson is the author of many books including the classic study of the Peloponnesian War a war like no other dr. Hanson's newest book the second world wars how the first global conflict was fought and won Victor welcome thank you for having me all right let's begin at the beginning this s the second world wars why is there a plural in the title I think for two reasons one is that from 1939 when Germany divided up Poland with the Soviet Union until April of 41 there was a Polish war there was a Norwegian war there was a Danish war there was a low country war there was a French war there was the Blitz there was the ukís Le'Veon war there was a Greek war and all of those together really weren't called the second world wars or World War two they were seen as isolated border blitzkrieg in which Germany with exception of the Blitz one every one of them and then something weird happened in 1941 Germany preempted and invaded its de facto ally the Soviet Union on June 22nd 1941 Japan bombed Pearl Harbor the Philippines and Malaysia and Singapore on the next day and brought Japan in the war not just against us but against Britain too and then nobody thought in December 11th Italy and Germany would declare war on us and suddenly these border wars that nobody really knew what they were were renamed the Second World War and because it really was in Asia and in North Africa even in the Americas in the sense of off the coast of South America and there was a submarine campaign and suddenly they were plural then the other thing was of course nobody had ever fought a war where it was so disparate the spirit I mean you're fighting in the desert and armor you're under 500 feet of water in the North Atlantic here's 20,000 feet above Germany in a British bomber you're fighting in Burma you're one of the 15 million people that will probably kill in China so it was so disconnected what did somebody who was fighting it in Bulgaria have have to do with the Japanese party in China yet nominally they were on the same axis side so it's it was trying to capture that ambiguity it's not a monolithic easily comprehended war how it began I'm quoting again from the second world wars the Axis powers were completely ill-prepared to win the war that's your quotation and I by the way I have to say one of the pleasures pleasures is too small a word one of the one of the important aspects of the book is that even somebody who's read a fair amount of the second I'm no military historian but I've read a fair amount there's an insight or a fresh perspective on every page and so I come to this I'm giving you a little more setup for this first question because it's so striking to me that if you're if you've read what I've read and you're of my generation you grew up thinking that the Germans were a military machine now and they were much to be feared and you say the Axis powers were completely ill-prepared to win the war Hitler from the get-go didn't know quite what he was doing is that what's the argument there the argument was that if you're Japan and you modernize and re armed in the 1930s then your very powerful visa V Southeast Asia or Indonesia or China or if you're Italy maybe you have more power than Somalia or if your Germany and you have good roads and you have sources supplies you can run over your neighbors if you preempt all of these were surprise attacks but if you want to fight a global war which as I said in 1941 that's what their arrogance led them into right and it's going to be an existential war and that's a fancy term for just saying you're gonna just you have to destroy the enemy not have an armistice like World then you have to be able to reach the homeland of the enemy and once the Soviets move most of their industry across the Urals Germany had no ability to get to them from the very GetGo neither Japan nor Germany could reach Detroit and even during the Blitz of night late 1940s as the bombing attack bombing of London there was greater Spitfire production their signature fighter plane then there was BF 109 Germany's best fighter plane so what I'm getting at is if you want to start a global war and they started it and attack these countries then you better have a four-engine bomber or if your Germany you better have an aircraft carrier fleet they had neither Japan did not have a 4a now where did they spend their money on the v2 and the v1 which in terms of how many marks were necessary to deliver a pound of explosive were about 30 times more expensive than not only conventional bombing which the Allies had four-engine bombers when the war started both Brittany night but even the b-29 program are the atomic bomb they were as expensive were more expensive yet the latter really paid dividends right so they didn't spend their money wisely and they lived in a world of fantasy and romance and after 1941 it caught up to them alright I want to return to that fantasy in romance that's the Axis powers here here the Allies why the Western world to chose to tear itself apart in 1939 is not a story so much of accidents miscalculations and over rach reactions as of the carefully considered decisions to ignore appease or collaborate with Nazi Germany by nations that had the resources and knowledge to do otherwise close quote explain that the United States and World War one had delivered two million troops within 18 months to the soil of France and didn't lose one they had that ability believe it or not in 1941 but even 40 if they had of rearmed a little bit and then 30s Britain started to rearm in 1938 and thirty-nine and they really got going and it was so successful that when the war started Germany didn't realize that they were almost comparable and fighter production but deterrence doesn't do you any good unless the enemy knows that Germany still thought that this was Britain of 1935 and 939 in the case of the Soviet Union Hitler himself said had they told me they have already 2,000 t-34 tanks which were better than every class of German tank I wouldn't have invaded what I'm getting at is that something shouldn't have happened and by that I mean if you take the assets of Britain and France alone in 1940 they were greater than Germany's when Germany invaded France they had less tanks their air forces were no better and they had less fewer men than the democracies had the United States had a non-aggression pact or even an alliance with France and delivered soldiers there Germany would have never invaded had Britain we armed a little bit earlier and France a little bit earlier they wouldn't have invaded and if the Soviet Union had have not signed an aggression non-aggression pact with Germany and assured it there would be no Eastern Front as was true in World War one Germany would have never gone west so it took Soviet collusion American indifference or isolation and British and French appeasement and the 30s to convince Germany of something that they should have never been convinced of ie that they thought they were stronger militarily in terms of manpower and in terms of industrial capacity they were not only not stronger than the eventual allies of the Soviet Union United States and Britain they weren't even stronger than the two original allies of Britain and France they had one thing going for them and that is they looked at World War one as a tragedy that could it be replayed with different results in other words if you were growing up in Germany in the 1920s and the word Great War came it was we should have won that we were on their soil and we were stabbed in the back so the myth went but we were on the offensive and no allied soldier ever set foot in Deutschland if you were in the Allies it was we never want the song we can't ever get back to the Verdi one but the I suppose we want it was just so terrible there were the war brilliant war poets they if you were in the Netherlands you they renamed destroyers they didn't use that term to fleet leaders they thought it was to bella calls if you were in france you couldn't talk about they shall not pass it for done the germany was bragging on their defeat and the Allies were ashamed of their victory you quote Churchill quote this is Churchill now German rearmament could have been prevented without the loss of a single life it was not time that was lacking meaning it was will that was lacking right yes it was will I mean so what is so in the early chapters as you've described how it began it's so chilling and so hard to believe but you argue it so compellingly that the Second World War was a result a fantasy willful fantasy it was on both sides it was I the Allies didn't realize their own capabilities so they were talking in 1941 the United States of maybe building a four-engine bomber at b-17 which that had been in production for maybe once every two days they didn't realize that within three years they could build a better be twenty four and one an hour and they built more airframes than all of the other allies and enemies combined their GDP at the end of the year the American GDP was larger than anybody else in the war put together so they didn't understand fully their capability and their potential and they underestimated their power and the axis always overestimated their capability and so war is a laboratory and what it does is it says these are realities and you have impressions about realities that are often false so war is unnecessary because if everybody just had deterrence and they knew exactly what everybody in this room they're the relative capability is you wouldn't fight but fights take place to discover to discover whose fine so after sixty five million people are killed we come to the conclusion in 1945 wow the Soviet Union the United States and Great Britain were much stronger than the axis which was clearly discoverable in 1939 and even 41 you make the point the axis is is dominant right up through 1941 or so yeah and tide shift the Second World War is at the beginning of the war the Axis powers appeared resolute determined and calculating under the leadership of strongmen but by early 1943 the very opposite had proven true so let's take let's take briefly you have a whole book here on it but briefly the first phase and how did the Germans do all that they do so quickly there's a moment when they seem yes indomitable absolutely we got to remember one thing that the Allied coalition of very disparate allies I mean British imperialism American democracy and Soviet Communism right they all have one thing in common they were either surprise-attack themselves or one of their allies in the case of Poland but written so that brings them in so they don't what I'm getting at is a lot of their victories were incumbent upon attacking they meaning the axis unarmed or poorly armed adversaries and they were surprised attacked this applies in to Japan and Asia as well and so after 1941 there was no more opportunity for surprise attack everybody knew what the score was Japan was in a war they it wouldn't do any good to surprise attack the United States they didn't knock us out Germany had surprise attack the Soviet Union it didn't work to knock them out so now we were in a war where industrial capability and manpower in one year the axis had redefined the war they had gone from having about a hundred and eighty million people versus about seventy sixty million left maybe a few allies if we count the empire and Britain to 400 million people against them and if you counted China and India which had manpower that was used various degrees on the Allied you might have been up to a billion people right and then if you look at GDP they had gone from having a greater GDP than Britain they're having a fraction of it the axis so what what was their their race was and they started to understand this the race was superior morale there were more ferocious were more savage we believe in blood and soil we've to knock these guys out before they can get going and they almost for a moment in late 1942 if you look at the map from the Arctic Circle in our Norway - when they took Tobruk in the summer of 1942 and from the Volga River in early 1942 the very mark was in the caucus mountains and they had climbed that the highest peak and put their flag there all the way to the British Channel and the Japanese controlled territory even larger from the Aleutians to the Indian Ocean and some Manchuria all the way to off you know Wake Island and then it ran out of gas because finally the Soviets the lend-lease the cooperation between three allies the industrial compassed the United States the overwhelming manpower and the Soviet Union put twelve point three million people in uniform and we put 12.1 and Britain put six and Germany only put seven so what you're seeing is they were overwhelmed so suddenly and let's just take some names water canal late 1942 the first Marine Division can fight the Japanese veterans from China just as well but they had much more support and logistics el-alamein it turns a tide Stalingrad turns it tight and after that Kursk isn't Kursk in of 1943 but turns a tide as well but after Stalingrad the very mark will not be able to mount an offensive stomach and after water canal the Japanese are not gonna go on the offensive and Midway as well so then it was a question what was the last two and a half years of the war it was a question of the Allies unlike the first time in World War one no armed assist no negotiations unconditional surrender was announced at Casablanca conference so what that mean it meant it's pretty hard to go into those countries and kill capture disarmed fifteen million Japanese Italian Eastern European and German soldiers occupy or destroy their homelands and change their political system that was a differs with the last two wars were years were of the war about that's very hard to impose an unconditional surrender and yet we did it right so in the end there's something almost a little unsatisfying about it this notion that the axis expands by surprise surprise surprise suddenly everybody's wide awake and then what finally permits the Allies to win the war is not better generalship it's not higher morale it's not superior or more noble systems of government it's just industrial production it's I think got quite right though no I don't think so it was industrial production and by that I mean 70% of the airframes were a lie 90% of the aviation fuel was produced by the United States but the key is that when you had the British Expeditionary Forces in North Africa or you had the 1st Marine Division or the 6th Marine Division on earth they fought as well as the axis soldier but the they fought like axis they learned to fight like axis but the axis never learned how to produce like Allies that was one thing and then they had brilliant commanders general Hama Yamaguchi von Manstein Rommel of course badarian but we had when Patton and especially that second I mean Nimitz Halsey these people were almost as good if not better but at the supreme leader Roosevelt Stalin and Churchill compared to Mussolini who was buffoonish and Hitler was delusional finally and Tojo was just sort of a unimaginative bureaucrat they had no strategic sense and what that meant was the Allies did not get themselves into Quagmire's such as losing an entire army in North Africa which they did that was bigger than Stalingrad or going into the deep Ukraine and the caucuses and losing the entire sixth army or having the entire Italian army destroyed in North Africa they didn't when they had setbacks they weren't they were tactical there's tactical mistakes things like Tobruk or bridge too far campaign at Arnheim but not are the bombing campaign in the first year but they were not elemental crisis that proved fatal and they had greater margins of error if they had have done something so stupid but it's very hard to fart fault Roosevelt and Churchill because they made most of the big decisions the war in a correct fashion all right Russia Victor I'd like to spend a little time in Russia because you spend quite a lot of time on Russia and you make the point that Americans need to know about it I'm quoting you as a result of the Cold War the Soviet war effort is often not given full credit in the West for its near virtuoso destruction of the German army and near virtuoso destruction of the German army explain that three out of four German soldiers were killed on Eastern Front and the price we lost total about 450,000 depending on how we calibrate the losses in Britain about four twenty and fifty thousand civilians Russia lost Soviet Union 27 million people civilian and soldiers but they did kill three out of four Germans and they destroyed an army that was over three million people and and strength and it was a very strange partnership we said essentially I don't know if it was so explicit but we said we will fight in Italy we will fight in North Africa will fight in the Mediterranean we will fly the skies of Europe and bomb we will have four-engine bombers we will fight the Japanese alone we being the British and the Americans will go to Burma will go to the Pacific will have the b-29 program will do all of these things but you're gonna be you don't have to build a blue water neighbor you don't have to have four-engine bombers both supply you with 20% of all your needs however you're gonna tie down and destroy the best army in the world in which the German army was and they did that after the war Stalin remember cut a deal with every single person every single party in that war he had a non-aggression pact with Hitler he had a non-aggression pact with the Japanese he had a semi one with Italy he had an agreement with us and he had agreement of the British he tended to keep his word with the axis and he didn't keep his word with us and so what I'm getting at is that there's a lot of reasons to be very angry at the Soviet you they with the world war ii would not have started had they not had the non-aggression pact with Germany that being said when two wishes explained the non-aggression pact of Germany the the molotov-ribbentrop yet pact August 23rd 1939 they the Hitler says Hitler and Stalin agree there and you're going to leave each other alone and they divvy Poland up they hated both hated because of the Versailles Treaty Poland and they carved it up and they made that deal seven days before they invade and astonishingly enough what's your view on this by the way they're the only man that Joseph Stalin ever really seems to have trusted was Adolf Hitler Stalin really did was taken by surprise when Hitler invaded and Molotov said famous quote we didn't deserve this when he found out and Hitler in turn said if the war had been if we had won I would have hung Churchill but I would have given a state to Stalin and let him because he was a genius they had a mutual admiration because they were very alike much alike in some ways so historians I'm quoting AG and historians still seek to sort out the degree to which the Soviets catastrophe twenty seven million dead civilian and military was a result of their own duplicity yeah well how do you what to you them by that and how do you wait just takes one example okay and for sake of brevity the Kiev parka they lost about seven hundred thousand people by no surrender not one step back orders by Stalin so from June of 1941 to December they intentionally ordered I shouldn't say intentionally they just ordered Soviet armies not to retreat and when withdrawing into the interior and when you reasonable thinking when you were dealing with people like von Bach or would Aryan or runch dead who were masters encircle meant they lost an entire four million person army they lost fifty because Stalin was a bonus fifty million people their population went from one eighty down to about 130 they lost a million square miles they should have been knocked anybody else would have been knocked out of the war France would have been I mean they didn't do that to France and France quit very six weeks but Stalin the Russian people were a different type of people they were like sis it used to adversity and worse than adversity and they rallied and then the United States and Britain supplied them and Stalin began to do something that Hitler didn't do he said to himself I've got brilliant commanders in Zhukov and Konya and Hitler never understood what Rommel was trying to do in North Africa or what good Aryan wanted to do so he didn't trust his he started to get more and more distrustful of his commanders and Stalin who had been like Hitler and trying to be a virtue also Supreme Leader started to delegate and the tide started to change but what I was getting that too is when we get angry at the Crimean we should or Ukraine we in the West don't say well wait a minute the siege of Sevastopol cost the Russians a hundred and fifty thousand people in World War two and the Ukrainian pocket was a seven hundred and fifty thousand so they do have claims at least psychological mystic I don't know what they are but they have claims on these territories that are a little bit different than us visa vie Puerto Rico and yet we're very defensive with the Caribbean so I think we have to keep that in mind how they view the Second World War the Second World War is I'm quoting you one more time here on Russia Russia helped to save the Allied cause yes yet the Allied war effort saved communism yes I think after the show trials and the great terror starvation's in the 30s and the especially the liquidation of the soviet officer class they had so weakened themselves and they had so lost international public opinion and the system was not working that what happened in 1989 could have happened in the 40s without a war but once the war was occurred the Soviet took on the mantle of anti-fascism they fought heroically the United the people and they copied mass productive strategies of Washington and London and they retooled their economy and they were very successful and that gave them a cachet that they otherwise didn't deserve Isis especially after the war you know because we had a terrible propaganda we had to say to the world yes Japan Germany and Italy were bad they start a World War two they were fascist but now they're the good guys and the Soviets propagate was the war still going on we're still liberating people from fascism whereas the United States and our imperialist enemies Britain have flipped and they've joined the axis and that was very hard to combat in the late 40s and 51 more while we're on the lake for one more question about the late the late 40s and 50s the the Red Army sweeps into as best I can tell it's the biggest invasion from the east since attila yeah so they sweep in and Red Army is in place in much of Eastern Europe and you all it doesn't matter is it true or to is it not true that it really roosevelt surrendered Eastern Europe at Yalta or is it simply the case the Red Army was already in place throughout Eastern Europe yeah I think it was allow I think it was Roosevelt was very naive but if you actually look at the concessions he gave he gave concessions out of naivete and Churchill gave the same level of number of concessions out of realism and the fact was we're not going to war again to push them down 350 divisions with t-34 tanks American boots American ponchos radios and remember they they broke every agreement and one thing the Germans called the silent Holocaust because they had no claim on anybody's sympathy but 13 million Germans that had been in East pressure to take one example or parts of was now that Czech Republic they walked home and they'd been there for four or five hundred years 13 million walked home 2 million died walked home meaning back into back into what we would think of as Germany proper and they lost 30% of their I mean Germany today has the same amount of people 80 million that they did in World War two but nobody's talking about leavens room anymore but they lost 30% of their territory and that and that was ceded to Soviet Pro Soviet allies in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union was very careful that all of the land they stole when they were a partner of Hitler the Baltic States and eastern Poland they kept and they said if you want to be nice to the poles and you take it out of Germany you're not taking out of what we stole and that was a tragedy that they came out they came out a winner geostrategic in geopolitical terms they came out a loser in human terms because of the vast number of people who were killed Victor Davis Hanson author of the second world wars we'll continue this discussion in a second program but for now thank you thank you for having me I'm Peter Robinson for uncommon knowledge of the Hoover Institution thank you [Music]

Channel: Hoover Institution

Views: 115,015

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Keywords: World War II, Word Wars, Second World Wars, Military History, Victor Davis Hanson, military, Axis, Allies, Strategika

Id: EUELed7UuDQ

Length: 27min 42sec (1662 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 28 2017