the book if if you've noticed if you've looked at even flipped through it getting it today probably the first thing that strikes you is actually the organization of the book not only is it not chronological in a way it's not even topical in you know a normal way that we think of it it starts off there are five six parts the first is ideas that talk about the war in a large context and as you know Victor and his work obviously all of this is referenced with ancient history throughout the book and then goes through sort of the functions the air water and earth of how the war was fought and then fire and then people and then finally what were the ends so it's it's immediately a conceptual approach to the war and the lessons that at least jumped out to me I wanted to maybe without a sort of hierarchy of them but just to get to get them from new Victor's the the first one that that keeps recurring through the book I think is this concept of innovation in war and I'm wondering if you might talk a little bit about that and and how you saw that playing out through the war both at the personal level the technological level and the like well you know you you can define you can define innovation by technological innovation and by that standard as many of the technological breakthroughs came from the axis as the Allies whether the war started off with biplanes and ended up with German Jets it started off with a mark one tank of six tons and ended up with a king tiger seventy tons it ended up with a Mauser rifle from the German army maybe with a clip eight bullets a minute and it ended up with a Sturm girl so that could shoot in theory 1,200 bullets a minute so there was enormous technological change and they were largely not all there were cartouche Karass boots on the Soviets but they were largely American British sonar radar Manhattan Project the b-29 thought they were mostly British American and German and I'd like to say that transparent governments and the Allies gave them some advantages but German science and physics accept it with such a level that it's hard to make that argument but the second aspect is the pragmatics of using technology and here there was a a noticeable difference the American idea and the Russian idea and the British idea was we build as many weapons because they had a large much larger economy that are serviceable that can be maintained so a Sherman tank maybe one hour of operation for ten hours on the road a much more impressive King Tiger just a tiger one one hour of operation may be requiring two hours of maintenance or maybe even one-to-one a rail gun like Gustave 7,500 people to man it and yet it only shot 130 projectiles into Sevastopol or the price per delivering a pound of explosives four in a b-17 versus of v2 or v1 was a magnitude of one to a hundred or one to a thousand even in terms of cost analysis so in every aspect of weapons technology the Allies and I think this was because they were more transparent they had more affinities with challenge and response they took weapons and they've looked at the practical side the battleship was obsolete and dinosaur-like by 1942 given the role of carriers remember with a carrier you could project power maybe one way 300 and eventually 400 miles and 16-inch gun might shoot 25 miles but that didn't mean that battleships were not very valuable in amphibious assaults in the Pacific as mobile artillery and so we were able to use these battleships and both that were resurfaced reefs we used after Pearl Harbor but the Montana class and the Iowa Klauss were very very valuable in a way that the Yamamoto which I think they the amount of yamoto they called it Hotel Yamoto it was at Rabaul it was so impractical in terms of fuel 72,000 tons 18 inch gun and the Mousasi and the Emotiv together sank one carrier light carrier and they were of no practical value they probably use enough capital and labor to a build 40 or 50 destroyers which would have been very invaluable to the Japanese so and science and technology is one thing but the ability to use it in a pragmatic manner was what really helped the Allies and then sharing things Italy not only were there no strategic conversations and this is odd among the axis because they were alike fascist power the Allies were ideologically different Soviet Communism American democracy really British imperialism but they cope they collaborated all the time if American airframe the p-51 didn't pan out with its Allison engine the British put a Merlin engine and painted the best fighter in the world if a Sherman was in Normandy and that they discovered to their horror that it was not up to even a mark for much less a panther and tiger the British came and said we can put a 17-pound gun in it and make it a firefly very cheaply and there was no cross-fertilization between Japan and Italy and Germany as far as weapons sharing technology if we had a pretty worthless Airacobra p39 the Russians thought well this is a very good air support with the 20 or 30 millimeter gun to bust tanks on the Eastern Front and Hitler woke up and said on December 7th 41 where is Pearl Harbor had no idea what the Japanese he had cut a non-aggression pact in 39 that undermined the Japanese fighting in Manchuria and then Japanese paid him back and 41 on the eve of Barbarossa in April doing the same thing Italy Mussolini said I had no idea he was going to invade Soviet Union County on Oh said well he had no idea you were going into doubt Misha in Greece and yet even with a partner like the Soviet Union Normandy was synchronized lend-lease was synchronized anglo-american cooperation was synchronized and it really paid off in terms of Technology there's another element of innovation that you bring in which is during campaigns learning from mistakes so that for example you talk about the US strategic bombing campaign and you talk about our amphibious campaigns and you know the the first amphibious campaigns were disasters and operations or disasters and strategic bombing change so there's but but it seems that it was really on the Allied side that you saw that innovation within campaigns which in some ways is odd we think of ourselves as an innovative people but you also think that democracies are slower to try to come to this this this change point everybody has to sort of get heard whereas you would think that the totalitarians would be better you know the lesson is learned and immediately everyone's told to shift left so did that how did you see that playing a role as well well I think in the terms of Otto Krupp the more autocratic society the more top-down decision-making so Hitler would have ended that if Hitler had been in charge he would have ended the strategic bombing campaign when it started suffering 10 to 15 percent losses by 1940 late 42 it was a failure 40,000 b-17 crewmen but there were people in the cruise and squadron commanders that said we have improved b-17s we can there's theories about drop tanks that can extend the range of a p-51 we are going to occupy France and deny the forward fields for the Luftwaffe and we are going to redirect from precision bombing the British were right about area bombing and start looking at rail yards and synthetic fuel plants and the point I'm making is that second phase they were pretty effective in the third phase when somebody like Jimmy Doolittle says well why would we have p-51s exporting b-17s when we got eighteen year olds behind the controls of the best fighter in the world let him just go out and hunt and so they would you know literally just be up in the air waiting for a one focke-wulf go take off or even at me ma 262 so there was all of this innovation and decentralized decision-making that was not to the same degree true and Hitler said we're gonna have a v2 program we're going to have v1 and people complained and said you're sucking resources out of fighter planes or if we take these if you build these big rail guns or that you build the v1 we're not gonna have enough 80 mil 88 millimeters and you're gonna take them all back to protect the cities they were the only thing that really worked against a t-34 in this Eastern Front so it was not a flexible bottoms-up challenge and response cycle to the degree that the Allies were and I think just having to transparent societies in an alliance of three rubbed off in the Soviet Union because Stalin unlike Hitler began to trust his generals he started out like Hitler and Hitler got more and more inclusive in the same in his own small circle and ignored it the advice that Stalin became more like us and we became like him as evil as he was and it was very different the approach let me shift now again just to move through because we don't have that much time before we move to questions second big lesson that I think jumps out of the book and you reiterated at different points is the question of strategy just actual you know top-level strategy it comes out when you talk about supreme command obviously when you talk about the Warlord's but but earlier in the book as well it's stunning the way that you point out the just almost basic fundamental strategic mistakes at the ally that the axis make yeah from the very beginning of the war going forward and yet the Allies who are perceived early not to initially have much of a strategy by the end are very clear how that dynamic is was it something that had surprised you at all to see and to sort of overturn you know the the images that we had had of you know it was sort of very clear German view in a very clear Japanese view of what they wanted to do I think a lot of it originated from two strategists that were entirely incompetent and one was Adolf Hitler that had been warped by his experience in World War one at a ground view level and he kept thinking equating the superior superiority of the German army in border wars and he waits nine of them remember in Norway Denmark Belgium Luxembourg Holland France Yugoslavia and he won them all and he by extension thought that an army that was 80% powered by horses could extend blitzkrieg to the Eastern Front 1,500 miles to the Volga with no ability to hit half of German Russian industry on the other side of the euro so he equated the idea of border wars with existential war and when you fight an existential war you have to be able to destroy Detroit or Manchester or the Earl's and he had no four-engine bomber never built one that worked he had no aircraft carrier he had no ability to project force and he kept saying well I'm not gonna be blockhead like World War One I'll take the Soviet Union but the Soviet Union was not France and the Russian people could lose seven million and keep fighting in a way that 250,000 nach France out of the war and Yamamoto was the same way when he looked at the strategic situation the army actually mr. blinkered Tojo had much better strategic sense I think than Yamamoto he the army had said we have a million people in China and it looks like Hitler is going to win late November he's finally gutted army group south and and center straightened out and we're on our way to Moscow and they're nearing the first subway station but we're not going to invade Russia we fought them in 39 and we're not going to invade from the east and this non-aggression pact is tit-for-tat they did it to us in 39 and pulled the rug from under us and we did it to them this is a Japanese speaking and at that point the Navy said well we're the only branch of the service that has has Western parity our ships are comparable or planes are comfortable you don't have tanks so we're gonna really take over the war and the army said well I'm not I'm paraphrasing a number of you we're not really sure the Germans are gonna win because if we don't attack they're gonna send 20 or 30 divisions from Siberia that will arrive in Moscow but more importantly if this is now a naval war we're bogged down in China and we've got these occupations plan of what was the Dutch East Indies the South East Asia and we we have to be very careful so why don't you take these orphan countries and you'll get all the oil you want from shale oil and you'll get all the food you want them Southeast Asia you'll get all the most even attacked Britain you'll just skip the Philippines in the United States and that was something that your motto Yamamoto threatened to resign and yet he had no ability to hit Detroit reporting under San Francisco so how in the world who is going to win the war he had some nine nice fleet carriers he had not one single four-engine bomber Italy didn't build when Germany didn't build when Germany didn't build a carrier Italy didn't be a carrier and it was it taxed all of the limits of Japanese ingenuity was brilliant campaign to get those six carriers all the way 3,000 miles off the coast of Pearl Harbor in the middle of winter refueling at sea under radio silence but that was about the extent of the Japanese Imperial capability and they were not able to attack the sources of American power whereas the Allies as soon as after the Casablanca and they started synchronizing it was to end this war we're going to go to Rome Berlin and Tokyo and destroy their ability not just to make war but their ability to function as a civilization and we have the aircraft and the mobility at sea and air and we have the Red Army we can do this a very different attitude they didn't live in a world of fantasy and myth that a German soldier kills seven Red Army soldiers so what if Berlin is being bombed so when you talk about Japan in the war you know from certainly from from hindsight it is it seems a you know in same suicidal gamble a country that has no natural resources and has all the limitations and that I think you bring out in in so many ways with each of the protagonist and antagonist when you talk about what is in essence the question of national power compared to Japan for example your I would say almost I don't know if sympathetics the right word but the Soviet Union comes off really much better in your telling than I expected in some ways Stalin himself does but the Soviets do you know the fact that they're turning out more and better quality material than the Germans and then almost anyone else by the end of the war which is again not something that you know is the normal story but this when you look back at the beginning and sort of link to the strategy question the beginning of the war and I think you you draw out your very blunt about the fact that the national leaders made these terrible calculations about what weight their national power could actually bear in in this type of war and maybe it was a miscalculation because Hitler thought it was border wars the Japanese thought the Americans would sue for peace but can you talk a little bit about that that element of national power when you talk about the homefront you talk about all of it and and how that played into this this question of the wars development well there were four key decisions in the war and they were all and with the benefit of our hindsight wrong the first was why in the world did Hitler declare war and get into a get himself into war was declared war on by the British Empire so nothing could stop in 1939 the German army and as soon as he cut a deal with Stalin Stalin was more than happy to in August 23rd 1939 because he thought these deviant capitalist countries National Socialism and that democracies would wear each other out and we'd have Saum after Somme after Salm he never in his right mind thought that France would be knocked out in six weeks the indomitable French army of World War one but once he got into war people in okw the general staff of the ver mark started to ask Hitler very quickly well how do you extend it knock written out of the war he said well we have all of Europe what is now the EU we have Norway to the Sahara we have the English Channel to the Russian border they'll have to quit and people would say what if they don't quit they have the resources of the British Empire they have Iraqi oil they have Australian mutton they have Canadian trucks and we don't have a surface fleet they said well the u-boat my Fuhrer you went to but you went to war with 52 u-boats and we have no lift capacity we have no air power that can go in and destroy the in the industrial might have Britain and the worst days of the Blitz Spitfire production exceeded that of the calm in Europe of bf109 production it's just amazing and Hitler had no idea that what to do with the British that was the first one when he went in the Soviet Union he had no idea how to make that country he thought that if you killed X number of people they would quit there was no historical evidence that Russia ever did that there was no error historical evidence that anybody whether it was Charles at 11th or Napoleon could wait until the mud dried out and get there before the snow fell and destroy that country 180 million people and nobody had ever thought and you declare war in the United States and December 11th Germany did when there was no need to we wouldn't have just we wouldn't have fought the Germans we would have fought the Japanese what we did and people had said to Hitler there were very astute people in the very marked and they said this is a country that landed two million people in World War one just in 17 months they didn't lose one transporting them once they geared up they were making more artillery shells in French and British production together and we declared war of them for what and Hitler said well you know Admiral Raider and donut said that we have now the East Coast that we can hit our u-boats that stop and strangle and he had such an inordinate respect for sea power given his impotence in it that we have the Italian Navy now we'll be dominant the Mediterranean and the Japanese Navy is has parity with the American Navy and they'll have to take their assets over and Japan will tie them down and we will star Britain it was all in a world of fantasy and of course the other decision with Japan attacking at at Pearl Harbor and tacking Singapore Singapore Malaysia getting those two powers in and that that was a disaster again based on this fantasy idea that given Russian collusion in the past given British appeasement given American isolationism these people would not want to fight an existential war and you know I think one lesson from the war is we have this ethnocentric idea whether it's in the Middle East or whether it's with China that the more people come over here the more that they appreciate the complexity the diversity the richness of American country and the more they're impressed and the more they love Americans that's true in some cases but a lot of people have an opposite we saw that 9/11 so when foreign minister Masuka grow-up grew up as you know in Portland and even Tojo took a train ride across the United States and Yamamoto as a che they came back with exactly the opposite conclusion they're frivolous they were spats they drive fast cars their isolation as they let London burn they're not to be taken seriously they're just not engaged in the world and we didn't expect that that so we lost incremental E and insidiously the sense of deterrence even though you know with her second largest we had a larger Navy Atlantic Pacific than the Japanese did and we had another one that was larger than all navies in the world put together by 1944 and yet Japan thought they had it there is a particular throughout history a particular contempt aggressors have for stronger powers who are materially impressive but they get the wrong impression they won't use it I think that's part of the problem in North Korea they don't really know that we're not much powerful they have an idea but they have contempt for us because they think that that power is somehow not to be used or it's predictably and that can be fatal I'd like to dig a little bit more before we move to questions on the United States yeah first throughout the book you know your your the insights and the comparisons you make are just unendingly rich but particularly in the United States you draw out a lot of a lot of things that are are fascinating one that I remember that jumped out at me is you have a little paragraph in there where you talk about when the Americans went to war this it was a unique generation it was the first generation that had grown up with motor cars and everyone was a mechanic and in fact I think you have you have a quote from one of the generals you could send the Americans out there and they could just they could fix the things they could sort of propel themselves forward but they were they were also men from the cities they were men from the the countryside that was this incredible mix that was able to very well be sort of self-sustaining but you have a if a fascinating quote when you talk about how it was the homefront that developed you know the the unbeatable industrial production during the war on in the chapter on soldiers and armies you have a quote that quote the system rather than the man was what would win the war it's on page 218 and it struck me as a as an ironic quote given that we focus so much on the individualism and the myth of American individualism Audie Murphy and and the like but what you talk about is actually the system which is what we would have thought you would have might have said about Germany you might have said about the Soviet Union but you said it was it was the Americans well I meant that system of free-market capitalism so we basically Anil socialist government turned over the ward of men like William Knudsen at GM and Henry Kaiser and Henry Ford and they were allowed to make a profit and they did things that are inconceivable I mean just destroying parts of Hayward or Willow Run Michigan and turning out a b24 won an hour or liberty ship every 48 hours and there were levels of production that when they were presented by intelligence to the Japanese the Germans they just didn't believe them or creating a GDP by 1945 that was larger than all five belligerents put together allied and axis or building 450,000 of the 600,000 airframes our presiding providing 90% of all the aviation fuel in the war think about and that gave us an enormous advantage over training and yet we only had a population of 135 million the population of Japan was about 75 in Germany was about 80 they had to combine had a larger population than we did but they occupied territory remember by 1942 from the English Channel to the Volga River and from the North Arctic Circle in Norway to the Sahara Desert and larger in the case of the greater Asia East Asia prosperity sphere from the Indian Ocean all the way to the Aleutians and from Manchuria to Wake Island so the problem wasn't resources or manpower it was organization and transparency and profit motive and Germany for all of Albert Speers supposed brilliance he didn't have an ounce of the of the savvy that William Knudsen did or Emma Kaiser did just didn't do it you mentioned as well that of all the belligerents only the US was a completely or exclusively I think you said an exclusively an expeditionary force yeah and so we invested in air and sea power and over emphasis not over emphasis but you know extraordinary emphasis on logistics mobility which offset the fact that we did not put nearly as many combat men under arms part of that and what you talk about in and it's part of this question of innovation is that unlike how we do it today we went smaller and lighter you know you make a lot about talking about escort carriers the destroyers fighter planes you know not to b-29 which you said the most expensive and biggest most lethal weapon system of the war but so much else was light and small and mobile is it something that we're not in obviously a comparable situation in any way today but when when did we lose that sense that this was the route to go that that this is what I'll gave you so much flexibility and today we're in a very different way where we build monstrous machine I think it was like the Germans I think it happened in the toward the end of the Cold War when the Soviets started producing massive missiles and Megaton and we tried to match them and then they were we thought we got into this mindless competition but we valued an airplane by how fast it could go not how much it cost so ironically gigantism is the plague of every autocracy whether it's Demetrius and a siege machine at the siege of Rhodes but the axis suffered from what we're suffering now they built railguns they built the Emoto the muchassi the bismarck the Tirpitz and these were not practical weapons system King Tiger 2 was worthless they had a mouse tiger on the a mark 8 that was supposed to be 200 ton tank imagine that and yet we built lightweight 30 ton medium Sherman tanks very easy to maintain we were adapted them we put a rhino of blades if we had to go through hedgerows we put a British 17 pounder if we want to take out a tiger I think we're getting back to that idea that decentralized escort hundred and forty two carriers we build only 27 of her fleet carriers there were escort and light carriers for about a half the price we could put the same plane in the sky and think of the American ingenuity so we have these first generation of fighters Wildcats and we have these SBDS and we all of a sudden we build a whole new generation of Hellcats and coursers we give the British and we have the Helldivers and the Avenger and then we have all these Oh planes we made so we just put them on the escort and light carrier and there's good there pretty good parity with the Japanese once we have the fleet carriers with the good stuff so we were so practical about using stuff and I think maybe with our emphasis now on lightweight drones lots of bones thousands of them flooding as own or we're talking now about escort carriers maybe in the future this idea we're getting back to decentralization is gonna be wise but I really when I see three big battle groups that they're very impressive right now in the Pacific I'm thinking to myself if we get in a war with China are they gonna unload 5,000 two-foot-long missiles 16 inches above the ground at night they go right through them and are they going to take down 180 million dollar plane and how many can we lose when they do that and if we are afraid they're gonna do that we're gonna be cost risk aversive so I think we've got to get back to that idea world war two you know and a half now we can we can barely scratch the surface of all the things that that you discuss though I'm glad we got to this this is a question about the parallels in some ways in between what we're doing today and and what the axis did and then how we might be going back but we do want to open it up for a discussion so we have mics if you can let us know who you are and just ask a question I appreciate it so first one yes Sebastian Golka Thank You professor I look forward to reading the book clearly World War two is just a case study in the difference between good strategy and bad strategy would you be so kind as to grade America since 1989 give us a strategic grade and to explain the grade you give us and I think you picked 1989 as the fall of the Cold War and so we were what the French called the the single hyper power and the pluses are of it are that we included about over that period of the last 30 years about 40 or 50 million 60 million maybe even two or three hundred million more into the global system so today we can call Africa we can take a plane to Bolivia there's antibiotics under globalization as somebody who lost his upend a ruptured appendix and Libya I'm alive today because Gaddafi had some taste of globalization and I had my butcher pending so that was a plus but we got into these optional Wars some of which I supported some of which I didn't some of you did some you didn't where we didn't ask fundamental classical questions what is the mission what is the agenda what are the proposed end of it and I think the Cohen powell critique was not right because he called it the Pottery Barn you own it you break that wasn't the right question it was what do you want Libya to look like what do you want Iraq to look like what do you want Afghanistan to look like what means are you willing to invest to achieve that goal and how are you going to get public support for and we didn't ask those questions and not that we haven't done pretty well with radical Islamic terrorism I mean we haven't had another 9/11 we've been pretty good at putting things down we we've made it a series of colossal mistakes when we call Isis JV or Eppley pulling out of Iraq reminded me of Matthew Ridgway sad it's the only worst thing of a bad war is to lose a bad war and so I think we're pretty much on the idea that we've tried a neoconservative nation-building and we've tried apologetics the last eight years and I think now we're I do like the term principal realism and we we don't have good or bad choice and we have bad or worse choices and yet we're not so naive to think that Jacksonian means you just go bomb somebody and you don't have to have a base or you don't have to have a relationship with a foreign power or an ally and I one of the things I like about our policy I mean in American policy is that we don't get credit for some of the things we do there's about nine or ten really impressive countries in the world that are very weak so Israel is surrounded by a sea of hostile powers in the Arab world the Kurds are they are different than the Arab world they wouldn't survive without us they're very impressive I think people they deserve our support Armenia is always was the first Christian nation it's in a sea of hostile labor so is Greece for all Greece's angle by in the United States if we weren't there and they weren't in NATO there's about 70 overflights of Greek airspace a month Turkey is a now a neo Ottoman power on their way at least I hope but there's a fight for the soul of Turkey going on it within Turkey there wouldn't be a Taiwan without the United States it was created by the United States there wouldn't be a South Korea without the United States and so in a very insidious way we protect a lot of really noble experiments everything from Kia to Samsung exists because of us and yet we don't get much credit and I don't want to say that that's a waste or a waste of material to be the world's policeman but I think the better way to look at it is we have certain interests and we have to protect our friends and as Jim mattis who always seems to quote I think correctly so although it's a bad guy the dictator so uh no better friend no worse enemy it's a quote out of Plutarch's life of so low I think that's the part that's the we're sort of coalesced back to principal realism we can't save the world we're only confronted with bad and worst choices we see a general Sisi we're not gonna give them a lecture about you should have elections one time and get back the Muslim Brotherhood and give another Cairo speech but on the other hand general Sisi we can't support all the stuff you're doing but we have some common interest same thing with Putin I think he's an autocratic dangerous person with blood on his hands but Russia's got the second largest number of nuclear weapons in the world and we're forfeiting an ability to triangulate with him as we did in the past visa V China or other things that we might have mutual interest that doesn't mean that we approve of what Russia does internally but one of the worst things in history is to talk loudly about human rights or lecture than carry a twig it's much better to be quiet and carry a stick so yeah and and conversely can can you grade the Americans in World War two I mean you're actually critical of a lot of early strategic thought the British rained us in in certain good ways so how would you grade the Americans in World War two the thing that the Americans was they learned so quickly so they had these crazy ideas they were going to invade Europe in 1942 without Aaron or naval superiority land on and the British who were traumatized by the psalm and Passchendaele said you know you can't do that and here's why and we've learned they said okay how about 43 and then finally the British said now wait a minute we've got 700 Soviet divisions and they're destroying 2 out of 3 German soldiers and why would you want to stop that that's good and so we can fight in a way that Soviets can't we can supply them but we can go around the periphery North Africa Sicily we can have learning experience and as we got to do that we start to enjoy then we were able to tell the British nobody has ever gone up the spine of Italy from Sicily this is stupid yeah the British were wrong about that there is no soft underbelly do not go into the deck and not you know the Dodecanese and roads that's by water so we're the and then when the b-29 the most expensive weapons project in the world beautiful bomber 25,000 individual parts in the nosecone alone much more expensive than Manhattan Project 25,000 feet and above even the advanced post zero fighters couldn't reach it in theory it could carry ten tons of explosive but it heated up the Allison engines they couldn't fly from China India because they were fuel hungry they had to be supplied by the ocean we put him in the Marianas 1,600 miles one way and back and precision bombing when the jet stream could go 200 miles an hour they had zero results and was well made ooh he said this is the world's greatest dive bomber and the people were asked well it's a pressurized bomber which spent a billion dollars to pressurize the cabin it doesn't matter we'll fill the whole thing full napalm will go down at 6,000 feet we'll say were precision bombing but basically the British were right about area bombing will use napalm and we'll burn these cities down they're made of wood and it was frightened Lee successful and yet it was just no other Air Force would have made that radical and the people who designed it a Boeing were shocked well you should have told us you wanted a low-level bomber and we would have made one but it turned out to be the best one of the war and so whether it was in there was just some brilliant things I mean in the Pacific we didn't work well at all with the British like we did in the Europe because they had colonial interest and basically we found out well they really want to protect India and not go to Tokyo so let them have Burma and protect the shoulder of India and we will go to Tokyo and they will do a lot of damage to the Japanese and open up a corridor week supply China that's great and then we had another problem we had MacArthur's ego and he had this plan to go through New Guinea and and go into Philippines and Nimitz and the Marines wanted to go straight into Tokyo so typical American fashion let's build enough carriers and drafted much people twelve twelve point three million people out of the country over 135 million much more impressive even the Soviet Union and we did both I don't think we should have done both that it worked and so we had this ability to improvise and the only thing about Americans in the war they were we were very self righteous and we were very deadly because once we were convinced that we had been wrong I'll give you one anecdote so came up I'll be very careful because I think you enjoy it so the debate about the atomic bomb is the left says we only use it to show Stalin our power and to kill yellow people Asians and it was racist and it was geostrategic tomfoolery and traditionals and the rights say no no it avoided an okinawa like invasion at the tenth degree and we would have lost a million people based on the casualty rates of okinawa I think the real the real reason we it was good that we dropped them not why we dropped them but why it was good that we dropped me because it saved millions of lives mostly Japanese because Curtis LeMay was probably the genius of the American war of all the commanders he's right up there with Patton and others and he said if you give me Okinawa and now we've secured it on July 2nd I can have a mission per day not going 1,600 miles but 400 miles and I have 2,000 more b-29s on order we can put them on Okinawa and by the way what are these b-17s and b-24s been doing since the European theater ended they're just sitting over there and the British said well we have 5000 Lancaster's and then people started saying well we have 5,000 25 and 26 two inches they're fine to go to Oklahoma when you start to see what the communications were that this man was thinking of ten to fifteen thousand bombers with napalm flying every day over Japan that already had suffered 65% of its urban center burned out and so I had you unleashed LeMay in August September October nobody would have invaded but we would have killed so many Japanese before we go it would have been not as dramatic as the atomic bombs and later after the war a lot of Japanese officials said that the fire raids and the fear of much greater fire rage was the reason they conceded so the atomic bomb really and ylim aide objected to the use self-serving li he said I could have won a war I would have been tried as a war criminal if we lost but I could have won the war and he was probably right about them with other questions in the back so one of the things that you've emphasized is American ingenuity the ability to adapt pre-existing technology put it to different uses like you just described with the Bombers does our present acquisition strategy dampen that sort of innovative impulse in the American armed forces today it's hard to know if it's a strategy or it's a complexity of technology but I think it's endemic in the American I'm not saying that Americans out in the wilds of Afghanistan or during the Iraq war didn't innovate like World War two so they see a Sherman tank they can't get through the hedgerows somebody you know starts to weld obstacles that the Germans put on the beaches and turns them into rhino teeth and they dig it out and everybody says well let the sergeants do it if that's what they're going to do I think that spirit is still there more in our military than other militaries but you're right that as we become more technological and less manpower than there's all these protocols technological protocols that are designed we're in a challenge in response phase where we're interested more in defense than offense because of the price of human life has gone up and so we're spending a lot of money on body armor protecting the soldier air so it's expensive air support calling in lawyers and stuff and that dampens the human imagination for war one of the things that it's kind of strange is under the laws of deterrence going back to classical antiquity the I central tool was disproportionality don't dare do this because we are unpredictable and we're going to apply in a way that's overwhelmingly disproportionate and the way that the Israelis they do but what would would encourage an aggressor to do something stupid would be to ensure that you're believed in proportionality so if you attack Portland don't worry we'll just to attack Pyongyang but nothing else and you and the old idea was if you dare attack Pearl Harbor you're gonna have an extension war we're going to bring down Tokyo but we didn't communicate that and once we started to communicate that in the Cold War we had a relative peace so I think in some ways we've got to go back to human nature doesn't change and we shouldn't be fooled by technology that it has and we can learn a lot from World War two but the enemy of deterrence is proportionality you have to be a little bit unpredictable and disproportionate if you want to keep the peace yeah our army retired historian historic for the Joint Chiefs of Staff and I've had a theory for many years that you you started to say something about we are self-righteous and deadly and I've had a theory for many years that the reason we haven't really won a war since World War two is because the atomic bomb scared American leadership as much as it scared everyone else and they have been afraid to unleash the righteous anger of the American people ever since and I just saw this if you cared to comment on that I think that's mostly true but again yes I mean there were areas in the after the Afghan war or the Iraq war we were we could have applied a greater level of force to defeat you milli eight you can't reconstruct a country unless they're defeated and they know they're defeated and they have only one alternative but besides the fear the nuclear fear in a postmodern society we knew that the Simmins we had toppled the statue of Saddam was saying the next scene was gonna be Christiane Amanpour with us a little girl after Obama striking said we did this and it's going to be flashed to all the United States and so we were worried about our self-image that we killed innocent people our prior generation said it's either them or us so partly we haven't found ourselves in an existential war we did a little bit after 9/11 but believe me if North Korea god help us were to send a missile into Portland the most progressive therapeutic minds and Washington are going to okay a retaliatory strike because they feel that they don't do that we don't have a civilization so part of it is these are optional Wars that we feel we have a margin of error that we can lose we can screw up Libya we can lose in Afghanistan it's going to be somebody else who dies but once we get to the existential level then you'll be surprised how this therapeutic veneer gets peeled off Mindy Cutler from Asia policy point I work on Japan like I said one of the questions of the early months of World War two it's always debated a year prior to the war it was decided that there would be a Europe first strategy yeah that Asia would be abandoned and so the guys on wake in China and a Guam and Philippines were left behind what where do you come down on that was that a sensible decision as a historian I always look at what palsy and rhetoric say and what actually happened so when we were attacked at Pearl Harbor Roosevelt didn't he prayed that Germany would declare war on us because he knew the Americans would not declare war in Germany when how could you ask the Americans to attack somebody who hadn't attacked us and not really fight somebody who had so after they did would declare war the quandary was okay America Japan attacked us but they're gonna be the secondary target and the people who did not attack us because they represent a greater existential threat or the primary that's what we said practically when you start to look at actual statistics it's not 70/30 8020 it's more like 55 45 for example they were able to have such they had no idea what they were capable of doing nobody thought they could turn out a bomb or an hour or they could build another 11 battleships or 27 fleet carriers so they decided that fleet carriers most aircraft carriers 90% of aircraft carriers went to the Pacific all six crack marine divisions went to the Pacific 20 of the best army divisions went to the Pacific Sherman tanks were used sometimes in but not much not much Armour so if you start to look at artillery and armor and you start to look at a certain types of aircraft they didn't use coursers or Halleck Hellcats for a variety of reasons in the European they only later use Thunderbolts and p-51s of Iwo Jima so they were able to bifurcate the war effort and why they said to Britain this is Europe first if you actually look at the resources it was much closer than we thought and what not the first six months when that was because we didn't have any resources the US Army started the war behind the 19th army in the world Portugal and so of course we sent more when the invasion of North Africa siphoned all of our resources off but after Midway and after the the Carl Vinson building program kicked in we had some I mean we as I said we by 1944 our fleet was bigger than all the fleets in the world so you could divide it any way you wanted but whoever was on the 45% in was still going to be bigger than anybody put together the other thing I think to remember something about the Pacific if we looked at the war just in terms of casualties it was the first war where there were more dead civilians than soldiers first major war there was the first major war in which submit besides the Civil War the winners lost far more than the losers and of the sixty-five million that were killed about 80 percent were out of uniform and unarmed and they were killed by German and Japanese soldiers so one way to reduce the war was if you ask somebody asked me the other day what was World War two about and I said it was about Japanese and Germans butchering people who couldn't fight back in Eastern Europe Soviet Union in China all together about 48 50 million people so a lot and yet twelve point three million we lost point zero three of our own and yet we were fighting people that killed 50 million people and that was what the war was about it was us trying to stop Germans and Japanese from killing innocent people and that's what it we might not articulate it that way but that's what happened they had no ability to kill us here in the United States they did not have ability to kill the British but they they had the ability to kill millions of people and they did I have a less sympathy for the Japanese soldier and the German soldier in the sense that if you look at the actual number of civilians that died in Japan versus the number of people were killed by the Japanese just overwhelmingly disproportionate at bad word and in the sake case of Germany Germans say we had our own Holocaust thirteen million people were ethnically cleanse two million died it was or was a tragedy but compared to 27 million people in the Soviet Union they killed so it was a it was a worst catastrophe in human history much more than the Black Plague or the great famines in Russia 65 million people were killed because of Russian collusion American isolationism and British appeasement and basically I think you give the suggested it's 3% of the global poppy yes in those six years yeah and you think it was 1 billion people were involved in the war and so what was the war all about the war was all about hey axis power it's very stupid to attack the Soviet Union the United States of America and the British Empire so it took it took 65 million people to prove what we should have known from the beginning and we didn't know from the beginning because the Russians had colluded the British had appease and the Americans were isolationist and had given a false message to the Japanese and the Germans that they're unhinged ideas of intervention and uber mentioned and Yamato and Raza and Italy meant something it meant nothing it meant nothing compared to what the United States could do and what the Soviet Union and what British would and yet they faced that's what war is it's it's a basically a laboratory every war is a laboratory where it corrects wrong impressions on the eve of war so what you want to do to prevent a war is to tell everybody in the room these people have these assets don't do something and be stupid because in a cost-benefit analysis you're gonna lose and you're gonna have to have a war to prove what we told you so it's incumbent upon the targeted people us all usually to apprise people the dangers they're that they're incurring and we didn't do that World War two so after everybody shrugged and said well 65 million dead but we we knew what we knew in 1939 that seems to be a tragedy or there was you know a lot of like strategic just mistakes you had think of like Anzio where you know we invaded and didn't come up anything we were allies or bogged down in Normandy for six weeks in the hedgerows you know battle of the ball do you think the Allies had 80,000 casualties because of basically a massive intelligence failure on the part of Eisenhower but the American people really didn't know that much about that at least not till after the war could the Allies could we have won the war if we had the instant communication that we have today when they see day to day all of the mistakes that were going on throughout the war I think we could have been more difficult after all Life magazine published the beach at Tarawa and people were shocked that the Marines were rotting on it on the beach that was a screwed up operation that we really didn't know what we're doing it would have been much more difficult all wars if you look at the number of generals that Lincoln went through before he got to Grant and Sherman so we had a problem with pre-war Friedan Hall in North Africa was an alcoholic incompetent and I revered the memory of Omar Bradley but he wasn't up to the job kortnee O'Jays was not up to the job John Lucas was not up to the job mark knew Clark was not up to the job what saved us was at that one star two star three star people like Matthew Ridgway or Jim Gavin or those core and division commanders were excellent they came out of West Point and and post grad post ba army schools infantry school Fort Leavenworth they were excellent men but it took us time to get to them and it took us time to get major LeMay to general LeMay and it took us time to see that maybe IRA Eaker wasn't the great genius that we thought and and that's happens in war but we were very quick in getting the right people there if I could criticize the American system there was a little bit of too much emphasis on status quo and what how you looked as a general and whether you were consensus-builder and most of the time the people who saved us were eccentric obnoxious who were failures in peace and would be eccentric failures after the war if they survived I'm talking particularly a guy like Matthew Ridgway was very much disliked the absolute military genius Curtis LeMay was a genius I mean he was him the source of two characters in dr. Strangelove and George Patton was ridiculed nobody if I said to people at George Patton spoke French read German tried to learn Latin was very educated they wouldn't believe it if I said that Omar Bradley really was not very educated it was not very mad they wouldn't believe it he was the GI general with a very plush trailer and Patton wasn't flying a Piper Cub by himself but so we had this image of Americanism that would that sometimes hindered merit and we really paid a terrible price you mentioned Anza there's no way in the world of Gianluca should ever been in charge at that level our Courtenay arches the Hurtgen forest was a disaster the Bulge was a disaster not closing the Falaise gap was a disaster and all of those decisions were either Bradley or Hodges somewhat Montgomery but also Eisenhower who did a lot of wonderful things but strategy and tactical operational genius wasn't it he was there for I think we may have time for one more that was a really great summation if we have one more excellent question it can top the last question you have to be excellent if anyone has has a last a last question did you have one sir yes Roosevelt Stalin and Yalta and the sort of post Cold War critique of you know the issue I'm talking about yes well the post Cold War critique is that as a neo socialist Democrat and surrounded by people like Harry Hopkins and Alger Hiss etc etc and with blood pressure of 180 over 200 probably suffering from chronic urinary infectious sinus infections melanomas and to be dead in three months four months Roosevelt was not up to dealing with Stalin and he was naive about Soviet intentions and he deliberately triangulated in a very mean way toward Churchill because he saw the world both the post-war world is the Soviet Union the United States as two superpowers and he wasn't really convinced that British imperialism was that much better than Soviet Communism which is a fatal mistake that said in retrospect when you have 500 divisions posted into East going into Eastern Europe and you have a hundred divisions in the West it's it's really hard to know had he stood up to Stalin and he said you're gonna have to have free elections in Poland we're gonna have we're gonna hold you to honoring your commitments in Hungary and Romania and Finland it's hard to know what he did whereas Churchill said I don't have anything to work with I don't trust the SOB so I'm going to sell out Poland and try to save Austria make it and make Austria and Finland non-nato neutral countries and then really get my hands on save Greece and Turkey and that was considered horse trading by the Americans they didn't see they were very naive in their assessment of selling but whether it would have made any difference given the disproportionate power in the East it's hard to know and again we went to war for three reasons to destroy Japanese militarism Italian fascism and German Nazism and we did that and then we went to war to create a post-war order that allowed freedom of expression communications travel and we more or less did that because we turned right around and stopped the Soviet Union when I look back at it boy we had a terrible propaganda that they used against us from 46 on I don't know how we did it because if you remember what the Russians and the Chinese were saying to plate people in Burma two people in Korea the people in Vietnam two people in Europe we wish that this the Allies had to continued the normal stroll against fascism but what are they done they joined the axis now they're in hand in league with the Germans they're high end in league with a Japanese their hand in league with the Italians us we're still liberating people in the spirit of World War two that's a difficult propaganda to counteract especially when we Germany is destroyed and you've got to bring out at the core you know the closet people like general holder or you're dealing with burn around wrong or somebody you're dealing with Nazis to protect them from becoming losing Germany and the same thing in Japan so we had a very difficult propaganda and yet it we pulled it off and I'm just amazed at sort of this Germany down Russia out America in to create the post-war world and it really worked as I got a I did an interview with a German journalist he third day and he said well we all believe that Russia out with you did that pretty well in a cold war and you stayed in but what was the deal about Germany down and I said well I go to I've got back from Greece two years ago and they call you people gout lighters because you're a mercantile economy that are bankrupt southern Mediterranean they just got back from Eastern Europe and they say that you've ruined Europe because of your dictatorial immigration policies I just got back and written and they say that you're holding them up over brexit so I don't think that your popularity I just look at the Pew poll of the 22 European countries you're by far the most anti-american fifty two percent of Germans approve of America maybe you look at Hungary of Poland or Italy at 65 67 so I'm not so sure that wasn't a bad idea anyway thank you very much so
