LUCAS: Good evening. My name is Lucas, and I'm
a senior premed student from Phoenix, Arizona,
and it is my pleasure to introduce your
speaker for tonight. Victor Davis Hanson, the Wayne
and Marcia Buske Distinguished Fellow in History at
Hillsdale College, is also a senior fellow
at the Hoover Institution and a professor of classics
emeritus at California State University, Fresno. He earned his BA
at the University of California, Santa
Cruz, and his PhD in classics from
Stanford University. In 2007, he was awarded the
National Humanities Medal, and in 2008, he received
the Bradley Prize from Lind and Harry
Bradley Foundation. He has written for
numerous publications, including the Claremont Review
of Books, The New Criterion, and The Wall Street Journal. He is the author
of several books, including A War Like No Other,
How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian
War, and The Second World Wars, How the First Global
Conflict was Fought and Won. Would you all please welcome
me in joining Victor Davis Hanson to the stage? [APPLAUSE] VICTOR DAVIS HANSON:
Thank you very much. AUDIENCE: Give it
to us straight. VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: When
Doctor Arnn mentioned stitches in the face, I get a lot of
emails from people who say, I think you need some
work on your face. I said, I've already had it. [LAUGHTER] But Al Phillip and I were
supposed to go on a trip seven days later, so I had a
concussion, a spinal injury, and I had 170 stitches. And I asked Al how
much money we would lose with all the cancellations,
so suddenly, I got cured. [LAUGHTER] And I wanted to tell
Larry, when he mentioned all of these
disasters, I thought, I hope Hillsdale's not
the common denominator. But it hasn't been for me. It's been a wonderful experience
for 15 years coming here. I'd like to talk just
about 35 minutes, not just about George
Patton and the tragic, view but our strange and
ambiguous relationship in the United States between
generals and politics. We've had 12 presidents that
were generals, but none of us really know any of them. And who cares whether Chester
A. Arthur was a general? We remember Harrison
and his grandson, or Pierce, or Taylor, but
most of the generals-- Andrew Johnson? Who cares that he was
a brigadier general? We have four that
became presidents. With the exception
of Jackson, they were pretty much apolitical. By that, I mean Grant was
a Unionist more than he was a radical Republican. And I think both Democrats
and Republicans approached Eisenhower, and no one was
quite sure what side he was on. And Washington, of course,
was the father of our country. By the way, we had three
generals, remember, working for Donald Trump at one time-- General Kelly, the
chief of staff, General Mattis, Secretary
of Defense, and HR McMaster, lieutenant general, was a
national security advisor. I have a feeling two
out of the three of them either didn't vote for Trump or
won't vote for him next time. [LAUGHTER] So I guess they're called
bipartisan or apolitical, but we have had
ideological generals. And I don't know if ideology
is the right word for it, but we've had
generals who connected what they did on the
battlefield with a larger view of human nature. And I guess we would call it
the tragic, or pessimistic, view that we are born into this
world pretty despicable or evil, and religion, and culture,
and civilization save us. But it doesn't always
reach everybody, and there's always
going to be people who want to take things
that are not theirs, whether on the personal
or national level, or they're psychopathic and
they like to kill people. And it's the duty
of certain people among us-- this view, I
think some generals have-- that they have certain talents,
and they spot these people, and they're willing to do
what it takes to protect the innocent from them. And out of that
ideology, they also develop a conservative or
reactionary political view. And you think of MacArthur,
but in our own history, think of William Tecumseh
Sherman, Curtis LeMay, and Matthew Ridgway. And they don't end up well. They have a dark
view of human nature, and we're a therapeutic, sunny
society, an upbeat society. And when we're done with
them, we're done with them. They provide a useful service. Sherman said, I will
not run for office. If nominated, I will not
accept the nomination. If selected, I will not
enter the presidency. And people thought, to this
day, that he was a barn-burner, that he was-- I see the word
terrorist and Sherman. Sherman had a philosophical
view, a tragic view, that they were in an existential
war and a lot of innocent people were getting killed, and
the people who had precipitated that war-- he called them the
Chevalier class in the South-- should not function
with impunity at home. And so when he went to
Atlanta and the March to the Sea and the
March to the Carolinas, if you actually do the terrible
arithmetic of how many people he killed vis-a-vis that summer
of the Army of the Potomac with Grant locked with Lee,
there were far fewer dead, but he did something
that was unspeakable. He destroyed property, and he
humiliated an entire class, and he developed an
ideology and explication of what he was doing and
why they deserved it. And that was intolerable. And to this day, Grant
had been responsible for some of the
most bloody battles in the history of American
wars, but Sherman has an asterisk next to his name. The same is true
of another general. We all love Hap Arnold. We hear of Tooey
Spatz, Doolittle, but when we say
Curtis LeMay, we stop. Some of you think the cigar-- we don't ever hear that he
had Bell's palsy on a record flight. Set the distance
record, 1937, in a B-17. On the way in the flight--
he got Bell's palsy-- stuck a cigar there to absorb
the dripping of saliva. So it wasn't some Hollywood
gimmick to be tough, it was a way of trying to
disguise a disfiguring ailment. But he ended up after
the war, remember, as the model of Buck
Turgidson in Dr. Strangelove. And then during the
Cuban Missile Crisis, people caricatured
him because he wanted to be pretty tough
on the Soviet Union. And he ended up
running, tragically, with George Wallace
as his vice president candidate, third-party American
Independent Party, 1968. We forget that he actually
tried to convince Wallace not to run on a segregationist
or racist ticket, and he was one of the
first green candidates we've ever had. But we had this
image that LeMay said that it would be inhuman
for a million people to die invading the
mainland of Japan and he could do it
through bombing. And he inherited the B-29
billion-dollar program-- $2 billion, bigger
than the Manhattan Project-- and they had no
results from China, India, or from the Marianas. And he took this wonderful,
high-precision, high-altitude bomber that could fly
up to 28,000 feet, and he took it
down to 5,000 feet and he basically created
a four-engine dive bomber and filled it with
20,000 pounds of napalm and in 90 days, burned down 65%
of the urban industrial area of Japan. And he was adamantly opposed
to the 509th Composite Bombing Group because he didn't think
the atomic bomb was necessary. In other words, he thought
that he could, as he said, render Japan into
a pre-modern state. Had the war gone
on, he had plans to use four airfields from
Okinawa and to bring-- remember, the war in
Europe had ended in May-- and there were 10,000
four-engine B-24, and B-17, and Lancaster bombers
that were idle, another 8,000
two-engine bombers-- B-26s and B-25. He was going to
aggregate them with 2,500 B-29s in the Marianas,
triple the mission capacity because Okinawa was a
third of the distance, and finish off the rest of the
Japanese industrial sector. It's pretty
nightmarish scenario. But the idea that he
was behind all that-- remember, he said,
if we lose the war, I'll be tried as
a war criminal-- was that we're not
going to send people who had nothing to do with this
war from Nebraska and Missouri and invade the mainland when
people who were actively killing 15 million
people in China are going to escape a
rendezvous with judgment. That's what he said. Matthew Ridgway inherited,
in late December of 1950, a losing Korean War. Remember, the Chinese
had crossed the Yalu. We had gone up in November-- MacArthur had, and
General Walker. As you go north, the
peninsula widens. In November, the weather worsens
and the proximity to China decreases. And the F-80 was not able
to provide air support against a MiG-15 for B-29s. So essentially, we sent 150,000
people farther and farther from their supplies and closer
to a million Chinese soldiers, and we didn't have adequate air
cover in the height of winter. And when they broke
across, it was the longest military
retreat in US history, and MacArthur was
relieved, and Ridgway, who had never been to Asia-- he was an expert
in Central America, and of course, he was
commander of the 82nd Airborne. He created, basically, the
82nd Airborne in World War II. 50 years old, he
parachuted into Normandy. Distinguished record
in World War II. I suggest that if any of
you have heart trouble, don't despair. He had a heart
attack, and was told he had to be
decommissioned and go back into civilian service at
54 at the end of the war, and he lived to be 98. So don't despair. But in any case, he wore
a little medical kit here and a hand grenade here. They called him Old Iron Tits. And he walked the battlefield. He said, find them, fix
them, and kill them. And he said, don't despair,
we're going to take Seoul back. They took Seoul back by March. The B-29 napalm and
artillery killed, as we heard today
quite correctly, about a million Chinese. One reason that China did
not want to invade in Vietnam is because of the
terrible losses that they hid from
historians in the West that were incurred by Ridgway
in that counter-offensive. And then Ridgway got, after
basically saving and taking back Seoul, what was
the reward for it? Eisenhower, when he
wrote his memoirs, said that Matthew Ridgway
didn't take Seoul. Crusade in Europe-- it's there. He hated him so much. And when Eisenhower
wanted to go in Vietnam, he called in Ridgway. Said, don't do it. You can't win a
land war in Asia. Johnson went into Vietnam and he
thought, it's time to get out. I'll get that old Ridgway. He'll give me the same advice. And he said, I got to get out. And Ridgway says, can't get out. He said, why can't I get out? He said, there's
only one thing worse than getting into a bad
war, and that's losing it. So he gave people advice and
he talked in a certain manner. He was married
three times, which was a no-no at that
time in the top echelons of the American general. And he didn't end up well. He didn't get the type
of credit that he should, in the way that LeMay didn't
and the way that Sherman didn't, which all brings
us to George Patton. I wish I could say that
he had superb character. He did, in many ways,
but I think in many ways he was Trumpian, if I could. And that's not meant as
a criticism gratuitously. By that, I mean he could be
gratuitously cruel to people. He, as you know, slapped two
soldiers in Sicily, one of whom probably had malaria. We know had a high temperature. He was resented by
most of his peers because he was from one of the
wealthiest families in America. Mt. Wilson in LA-- that was his
grandmother, the Wilson family. His father was the
city attorney of LA and owned a thousand
acres in Pasadena. He was fabulously rich
on his own family's side, and then he married into the
Ayer Pharmaceutical Company, Frederick Ayer's big empire. So when the image
of American officers was Omar Bradley, and
Eisenhower, and Lucian Truscott, and Wade Haislip,
all of these great people from the hinterland
of America, here came Patton from
California playing polo with his own yacht and
a stable of horses, all during the Depression. And he had been in
the 1912 Olympics. He came in fourth. He might have won
the pentathlon. He claimed that he was such
a good shot that each time he shot, he put the bullet
right through the prior hole and the judges didn't
understand that. [LAUGHTER] And he may have been right. But if you follow his career
through the '20s and '30s, up until Pearl Harbor,
It was characterized by absolute brilliance. He was the first person to see
that the Christie tank in 1919 had the best suspension and
the Americans should go for it, and yet we didn't do it and
that was the model that the T-34 Russian tank adopted. He designed the US
Calvary's saber. He'd also designed the
first US tank suit. I think it was called the Green
Arrow or the Green Lantern. It was kind of silly. It had a gold helmet, and
green pads, and gaudy boots, but it was built to be
comfortable-- a jumpsuit. And in this entire
process, he learned-- or I shouldn't say he learned. He developed US armor tactics. 1940 in war games in Louisiana,
he captured the Senior General Hugh Drum. You may have seen The
Dirty Dozen, that old movie about how they played dirty. That was based on
Patton's war maneuvers, about how he went on a
400-mile goose chase, they thought, and ended up
capturing the red general. He was on the blue team. And he did that two times. Then he went down
and got into Indio, out the middle of nowhere, and
set up an entire desert warfare complex and taught Americans,
with inferior tanks, light Chaffee tanks
or inferior Lee tanks, the elements of armor
pursuit and breakthroughs. The point I'm making
is that he was 55 and he was still not
a brigadier general. People hated him because
he drank too much. There were periods in his
life when he womanized. He played polo, as I said. He was accident-prone. He lit a gas lamp
to look at his eye and it blew up and
burned his face. He accidentally stabbed himself. In a horse accident,
he broke his leg. He got phelebitis. And of course, he died in
a freak accident, as well. So he was known as injury-prone,
reckless, rich, ostentatious, loud, and yet, he spoke
French, read German, and was highly educated. The point I'm getting at is that
he enunciated or he articulated a world view of war. And it was similar to
his contemporaries, like LeMay and Ridgway,
and also very Shermanesque. He was a big admirer of
William Tecumseh Sherman. And he basically
said that democracies are therapeutic societies and we
don't train people, thank God, to kill people. But there are people
in the world who do. And when they do,
they need people like George Patton, who's
part of, and yet not part of, a democracy that
understands the evil mind and can make soldiers,
for brief periods of time, have the training,
and the courage, and the fortitude to stand up
to the Hermann Goring division, or Focke-Wulf 190
pilots, or U-boats. And that was his principle. And then you would
kill these evil people and you would protect the
innocent, and he said that, and we don't like
people to say that. When Colin Powell said,
what's your strategy for the first Gulf
War, he said, we're going to find Saddam's army,
we're going to cut it off, and then we're going to kill it. And people got very angry. Why did he have to say
kill it at the end? [LAUGHTER] Remember when we
killed Baghdadi, Nancy Pelosi was mad
that Trump said that. Why did he kill everybody? And then when Trump
said, we're going to get rid of these monster and
these animals, MS-13, she said, they're all God's creatures. So that therapeutic
alternative is deeply ingrained and it's very hard
for societies like us to mobilize against
these perceived threats without these types of people. So when we were ready after
Pearl Harbor to fight, the obvious choice for
our first engagement was George S. Patton. Right before Pearl
Harbor, in October, he was promoted to major
general, two-star general. And yet, when we had Operation
Torch, the November 1942 landings in Northwest
Africa, he was not chosen to lead the
entire projective torch. He was given just the Western
command, 30,000 troops. The most incompetent, useless
general in American history, Lloyd Fredendall, was. And Eisenhower wrote
a report and said, he looks like a general. He breathes fire. He's our man. I've never been more impressed. He would swagger around. He would pound his fists. And he didn't know anything. And the result was, as
you know, the worst defeat in American history, really, or
at least the most humiliating, the Kasserine Pass, where Rommel
destroyed an entire brigade. 3,000 missing, 400 dead,
600 tanks just fighting. Where was he? 50 miles back dug in in
a bunker, probably drunk. When it was time to
take over Second Corps, everybody thought, Patton
will get his chance. And yet, Eisenhower
asked General Harmon to do it, who turned down, said,
this is pretty embarrassing. Patton deserves it. So Patton took over immediately
at the Battle of El Guettar. He won the first
battle Americans had won in World War II. And he wanted to continue
ahead of Second Corps. And then Omar Bradley-- he had a very strange
relationship with Bradley. And the movie was
quite, I think, misleading about the attitude
of Bradley toward Patton. But Bradley then was given
command of Second Corps and Patton was supposed
to plan Sicily. You would thought that too many
people had died in North Africa needlessly without giving
Patton the main responsibility for the invasion of
Sicily, Operation Husky. And yet, we deferred
to General Montgomery. Both the Seventh Army
and the British 1st Army landed in southern Sicily. Everybody knew what the aim was. It was to get to Messinia, two
miles from the Italian coast, cut it off, and cut
off 400,000 troops. And Patton looked
at his assignment. It was to stay to the left,
or west, of Montgomery, and protect his flank, and
be stationary, basically, and give Montgomery the chance
to speed right to Messinia and then trap the entire Italian
and German-- and of course, he knew Monty wouldn't do that. Monty was a great
general and a set piece, but he was not a pursuer. He didn't pursue. So what did Patton do? He went all the way
northwest to Palermo, then made another right
turn, broke orders, and got to Messinia
before Montgomery. And of course, didn't or
didn't get there in time to trap the Germans, but he
became very famous after that. And you'd think
that at that point, everybody knew that Overlord
was being planned in conjunction with the Italian invasion, that
he would get a supreme command. He slapped two soldiers
quite despicably. He went into a hospital. He was mad because the absentee
rate of soldiers for what we would call post-traumatic
stress syndrome, what was known then
as shell shock-- there were three officers who
watched the first slapping incident. The person had malaria
when he was slapped. Second one, two weeks
later, he had some ailment, whether it was a fever or it
was just stress, we don't know, but he slapped him. In this period, one of
his armored companies was on a bridge. There was an Italian
farmer with two mules. They were being strafed. They didn't want to
run over the mules. It was a very narrow bridge. Patton went up, took out
his .357 in his right hand, and he had a .45 Colt in the
other, and shot these two mules and had them thrown
over the bridge. And this was
considered terrible. Think of this
therapeutic mindset. Here, you have a
whole column stopped, and the papers and
journalists are angry that Patton shot two mules
and threw them over the bridge to facilitate the
company getting out of a strafing attack. But that was a very
important point, though, because he obviously
should have been given one of three possible appointments. One would have been
overall commander in Italy, and that went to Mark Clark,
who we know mostly from falling for the German gambit,
where basically, the German forces
under Kessling allowed us to take Rome as a way
to escape an encirclement. And they knew that Mark
Clark, of all generals, would want to go
into Rome, especially during the D-day operations
and get some glory. And then that would
give them a chance to escape the encirclement, and
they predicted it perfectly. Patton wouldn't have done that. On the Anzio,
earlier in January, remember, that was a
tricky amphibious operation to land at the main port or
near the main port of Rome. People didn't know
whether we could do it. Surprise. We had a beachhead. There was only one
German battalion there for about 24 hours. General John Lucas sat
there for five days until the Germans made an entire
semicircle of heavy artillery and armor against them. Patton would not have done. He was not given
either appointment because he was under suspicion
for slapping two soldiers. He was not saved, as is
often seen in the movie and in popular literature,
by Omar Bradley, who wanted him sent home. He was not saved
necessarily by Eisenhower. His letters of support
were post-facto. It was not even George Marshall. It was Henry Stimson,
secretary of war, who said that we can't win
the war without this man, or at least we can't win it
at a cost that we can afford. So then we come to the
big command's decision, the planning of the
invasion of Normandy, that had been talked
about since 1942. Americans under Marshall
had told the British, we want to invade
November of 1942. Even they, after
they admitted what had happened in North Africa,
thought that was a mistake. And then we wanted to go in '43. And then after our
problems in Sicily, they said, that was why. So then we wanted to
go in January of '44. Then they said, you're
right, to the Brits. We had trouble in Italy. Patton had said that all along. He was completely shut out
of all planning for Overlord. In fact, it was adding
insult to injury where he was in command
of a shadow army, what the Germans called Army Group
Patton, where he just raced around in a car all up
and down from Scotland all the way to Wales with horn
blaring so everybody thought he was going to invade at Calais. And then four Panzer
divisions would be held in reserve, waiting
for Invasion Patton, which never would come. And then their Panzers would
not be released to cut off the American beachhead. So he didn't
participate in Normandy. Remember, after that
brilliant landing, at least outside
of Omaha Beach, we were ossified, calcified
for about 40 days. We lost more in
the next two weeks than we did in the
landing, and we eventually had 80,000 casualties before we
broke out of [INAUDIBLE] July 28 with Operation Cobra. Even then, when Patton's
Third Army was operational, Bradley tried to stop the
publicity of the release of news accounts of it. I'm not suggesting that he
was mild-mannered and polite about this. He said things that
were absolutely insane. He said, Brad, just point
me in the right direction and you're not going
to even see me. I'll be gone all the
way to the Rhine. Said things like
that all the time. But again, the point was to
take a civilian conscript group of young men and make them into
an army that could stand up to people who had been
fighting on the Eastern Front for four years against the
toughest soldiers in the world. When you start to look at
some of those German armored divisions, Panzer
Lehr division, and you see the type of equipment-- 88-millimeter Panther Tiger
1 and 2 tanks-- it's amazing that we could stand up to them. And that was Patton's idea. So they assigned him the
furthest south position in the advance toward Germany. And if you take a map
and draw a line on it, it would go into
Czechoslovakia, not Germany. That was by intent. But most importantly,
they ask him to take Brest, which if you
look at the map from Normandy, he would have to turn around
and go the opposite direction. And he was not designated to
go really, in the first month, east at all. Of course, you know
Patton-- what he did. He took one third of
his army and went north, and he sent one west,
and then he headed east. And in a series of orders
that were overridden, he said to General John Wood
[INAUDIBLE],, take Brest now. And they were a day away,
and Bradley stopped it. And of course, you know
what happened after that. Brest was heavily fortified. It took us about two months. We had about 40,000
casualties, and the port was never used until October. It was a complete waste of time. When he did go east, he soon
was able, after the break out, to go about 40 miles a day. He went 400 miles by the middle
of first week in September. When we got to Argentan
and the Falaise Pocket, there was the entire
Army Group West. 300,000 Germans were
advancing toward the Atlantic, while Patton was coming
up to the rear in hopes of meeting the Canadians. And Hitler would not
let Von Kluge retreat and it looked like
the war would be over. All we had to do was
close the Falaise Pocket. And Omar Bradley
said, you will not do that because I'd
rather have a round shoulder than a broken neck. We have to have an escape
route for some of them. And Patton said, oh, hell. I'll meet the Canadians. I'll meet the Brits. And if the Brits
get in my way, I'll push them all the
way to Dunkirk. You can't say that. And so Monty will
never close it. Well, it was never
closed for seven days. It was heavily bombed. 10,000 Germans were killed. Most of the equipment was lost. But about 155,000 Germans
escaped, about 10 divisions, 2 of which were re-armored
and we dropped-- Montgomery did-- the 101st,
the 82nd, and the 1st British Parachute Division
right on top of them basically in the
Arnhem Market Garden. So when General Model defeated
us and destroyed Monty's plan to leapfrog in,
most of those troops had been in the Falaise Pocket. When he got past
Paris, he begged to close another gap,
another encirclement, on the eastern side
of the Seine River. He was not listened to. He said, he had too few troops. And then he headed
back into Lorraine. And on September 2, his daily
allotment-- think of this-- 400,000 gallons of gasoline,
he got 15,000 gallons. Part of it was
because the operation was conceptually flawed. There was not enough supplies
to get from the beaches 300 or 400 miles into
Germany and support about 700,000 troops-- Canadian, American, and British. And part was that
Eisenhower had made, I think, a disastrous
decision by redirecting most of the supplies of
the US 3rd and 1st Army in the month of September
1944 to Montgomery to do this Market
Garden bit when he didn't close the estuaries
at the harbor at Antwerp. Had we got Antwerp, nobody
would have had problems with supplies. The net result is Patton
stayed 45 days without fuel and ended up in a World
War I slugfest, which wasn't his forte, around Metz. And finally, in March, when
he went across the Rhine with the 1st Army to
his North, the rest is pretty much history. He captured about
350,000 prisoners, and he went 300
miles in two weeks, and that was the end of the war. He did tell Eisenhower,
I can take Berlin. And Ike said, we're
not gonna lose 300,000. That's how much we think
the Russians will lose. They lost 170,000 men. And he said something
that was very prescient. He said, they will
lose that many, but when the Germans
see Americans coming, they'll be all too
happy to surrender to us and not go into
gulags or be killed. And he was not allowed
to take Berlin, and I think that
had repercussions. So all of these decisions that
I talked about where I think he was right had repercussions. We lost an inordinate
amount of people in Italy. We never got into Austria. The whole idea of
Churchill's soft underbelly going into Europe or going
through the Ljubljana Gap was a failure. When the war ended, American
troops were still in Italy. I don't know what the purpose
of the Sicily campaign was. It was to be a stepping
stone into Italy. You go through history all
the way back to Hannibal, and no army has ever
invaded Sicily and gone-- invaded Italy and gone
into northern Europe successfully by taking Sicily. You usually have to go
to Sardinia or Corsica and go across, or cut off
somebody, or go from the north, south. So those entire campaigns,
I think, were flawed. The Normandy
campaign, I think, we could have said it could have
been over in September 1944 had we closed the gap, or had
we tried to close it again at the Seine. His greatest moment,
of course, was during the Battle of the Bulge. Patton was finally
given gasoline. He was on the offensive. And-- called the Von
Runstedt Offensive, but it was not really his idea. It was Hitler's mad idea that
we had two green divisions in the 1st Army and if he took
a 250,000-man salient and broke through, he could separate the
Americans from the British. There would not be
overall command. He could go to the
Meuse River, and then maybe, just maybe go
to Antwerp, and then have some type of private deal
with the British or us and say, let's just call it off. But he exhausted
most of the reserves. The problem was if you were
one of 50,000 US troops in that pathway, and you woke up for 10
days every morning and it was snowy and you had
no air support, when 90% of the aircraft in the
sky for the last 60 days had been American or British,
and suddenly you were looking at battle-hard veterans
and they had, as I said, Tigers and Panthers, you were
gonna die or be captured-- 80,000 Americans are. Patton saw that happening. And when he went to the meeting
with Eisenhower at Verdun, he knew what was
going to happen, that somebody had to
cut off the salient. He had already told
his staff, we've got to turn around
three entire divisions. I mean, that's 45,000
men, and turn them in the opposite
direction in 24 hours. So it was his greatest moment. It was very theatrical. He went to the meeting
and Eisenhower said, I don't know how we're
going to stop these guys. They're going to take Bastogne. They may get to the Meuse. And he announced to
Bradley, and to Montgomery, and Eisenhower, I can
turn three divisions and I can cut them off. And he said, George,
that'll take two weeks. And he said, I'll go out and
give the signal on the phone and they will start in
24 hours, and that's exactly what they did. The tragedy of that is, of
course, he argued vehemently that the way to stop a bulge
is not to go at a diagonal and push the nose back,
it's to take a chance and cut it off at the
base and allow a few more casualties at the
tip, but therefore, destroy the entire invasion. Of course, that was
considered too reckless, and we didn't do that. And that battle went all
the way into February, and we lost more men after
Bastogne than before. What I'm getting at is
that there's a pattern here of somebody that has undeniable
experience, preparation, and natural genius,
who understands the horrific nature of war, and
bothers the people that command him, and yet, sequentially
or time and time again, when he is not given
a billet, or an appointment, or a promotion befitting what
he's earned on the battlefield, people die. And yet the way that the system
or the therapeutic society justifies that is that
he slapped a soldier. Germans, of course,
were bewildered by this. I mean, it is a little mythical
the Germans knew of Patton. I don't think the movie's
quite right that he was canonized by the Germans. Mostly after the war, they
sort of changed their views. They call him a cowboy
and kind of reckless. But the point I'm making
is that it is true that a number of German
intelligence officers wouldn't believe that
somebody of his talent would be relieved for slapping
a couple soldiers when German officers killed 25,000
soldiers in World War II, shot them for cowardice
or had them ordered shot. And so this brings up
finally, to conclude, I entitled his talk
"The Tragic Nature," and I think Patton is
symbolic of a problem that all Western societies
deal with, since the Greeks, that the advent of civilization
is a wonderful thing. It creates leisure. It creates material
wealth, luxury. It's civilization. It's not tribalism. It's not barbarism. But in that process,
we become tame. And yet, the world
around us is not tame, and we don't quite know how
to justify using violence against people who
want to kill us. This sounds very contemporarily
relevant, I think all of you know, in the war against terror. And so from time to time, we
see these fossilized memories of our past and we bring them
out of the proverbial closet and we say, help us. Curtis LeMay, the B-29
program doesn't work. I know it's safe for our
flyers at 30,000 feet, but the bombs are
falling off [INAUDIBLE].. Well, you go down
5,000 with napalm. That'll cure it. Oh, my God. You're going to
burn people alive? I'll get rid of the industry. Or Matthew Ridgway. I'm going to let him
come in, and then I'm going to surround
them with napalm, and I'm going blast them,
and it's going to be winter, and they're going to regret
they ever went into Korea. Or Sherman. This is the plantation
of Howell Cobb? This is the guy who said that
250,000 Confederate soldiers were superior to us? Burn his plantation. [INAUDIBLE] he burned
a Southern plantation. And so when we see
somebody like Patton-- and you can see
it in our culture, throughout our culture. It's just not military. That was what made
John Ford famous, that if you're Ethan Allen-- Ethan Edwards, excuse
me-- in The Searchers and you want to
find a small girl, and you're dealing
with some pretty tough Native
American tribes, you want somebody with
a dubious past. We're not quite told what he
was, maybe a Quantrill Raider-- John Wayne. And you don't know whether
he's going to kill Natalie Wood or not, but he has the skills
that both ensure that he's going to bring her back. But as you remember, once
she's back, he opens the door and walks out. You don't want a
guy like that there, any more than you want
Gary Cooper in High Noon to stay around after he's
done what you have to do, shoot four people in the street. You don't want the Magnificent
Seven in the village anymore. Remember that famous Yul
Brynner and Steve McQueen said, well, I guess they're happy. And he said, they'll even
be happier when we leave. [LAUGHTER] And I'll just finish by saying,
this is not a new phenomenon, that we sometimes
misdiagnose talent throughout all aspects
of American society. I did make a promise-- I just want to
interrupt-- that I wasn't going to mention the
name Donald Trump in this talk. But you can see
that this person has certain obnoxious
characteristics and certain skill sets
that bring results. And you can guarantee
that after we are the beneficiaries
of the results, he's not going to be
on PBS in 10 years with ex-presidents
shooting the breeze. It's just not going to happen. He's going to be
persona non grata. And I'll just finish by-- when pre-civilized Greece
was making this transition to the city-state,
and especially to radical democracy,
there were people who saw the same phenomenon. One of the great minds of
the Western literary canon, Sophocles-- he wrote 113 plays. We have seven extant. But in a series of
plays, he looked at this archetype of the
oligarchic aristocratic class that we had all of these
anti-democratic skills, and you needed them. And it was right in the
middle, some of the plays-- the latter plays were
the Peloponnesian War. I'm thinking here of
Philoctetes, Ajax, Antigone. But he makes these
characters come out, and by every measure
of talent, and courage, and bravery, they excel. And yet, they all end up
badly, because to reward them for those very characteristics
would be a referendum on your own society. And I think that's a dilemma
we all have to appreciate. I'm not asking us
to change our views, but to, every once in a
while, look in the corners. And when we see dark
people, maybe they're not so dark after all. Thank you very much. [APPLAUSE] SPEAKER 1: Thank
you, Dr. Hanson. We now have time
for a few questions. Please make your way
to the microphone if you have a question. SPEAKER 2: Yes? AUDIENCE: Dr. Hanson,
thank you very much. Excellent presentation. The one element of
Patton that I've always wanted to get more information
on is right before his death, he got into more trouble because
he wanted to invade Russia. And he wanted to arm
the Germans in the camps and push all the way to
Moscow because he said, it'll avoid problems
in the future. Can you comment on it? VICTOR DAVIS HANSON:
Well, remember that I think his name was-- they called him Jeep Sanza. His regular chauffeur had been
transferred home after the war, so he had a new driver, and the
new driver wasn't as skilled. And the three people who
were with the driver-- there were Patton
and two others-- they had superficial injuries. So the fact that
he hit the glass partition was kind of
a freak accident and he was on his way home. The reason that these conspiracy
theories arose was because-- two things. He'd been relieved by
Eisenhower for a phone call he had with Walter Bedell
Smith, and in it, he said, my God. We've got the people here. They're all over here. And the Russians
are natural killers, and we went to war, supposedly
to free Eastern Europe from Nazis, and now we're
going to enslave it. So he said stuff. I don't know how serious he
was, but that helped get him-- and then he said another thing. They said, you've got too
many Nazis working for you. And he says, they're like
Democrats and Republicans. When Republicans come
in, they can't get rid of all the Democrats out
of the civil service. How can I get rid of these guys? And he said it in such
a way that was callous. So his main argument was
that Bolshevism, communism, after the war would be
as existential a threat to the United States
as Nazi Germany, but he had greater respect-- not admiration, but respect-- for Russian military
prowess and capability than Germany because of their
population and industry. So he was terrified
of T-34 tanks and the ruthlessness
of the Soviet Army. They had, remember,
lost 11 million soldiers and 9 million civilians-- 20 million people. And he thought any
regime that could survive that was terrifying. So I think he was
right in the diagnosis, but America was in no
psychological position in May, when we were still
fighting the Japanese. And we were still a
nominal ally of Russia, and we were trying to
flatter the Russians-- we didn't know if the bomb was
going to work, or if it worked, it would bring a surrender. And we didn't believe LeMay
could end it through air power, so we thought we were going
to have to get the Soviet Union to help us. AUDIENCE: Dr. Hanson,
you talked a bit about the therapeutic
society that we live in and you gave a few examples
in more recent times about how it seems to
have advanced a bit. Do you think it could
get to the point-- Patton himself, you gave
many examples in which he was ridiculed and attacked. Do you think it could
ever get to the point where we would turn to
someone like him again? VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Well,
in the first Gulf War, you could see that Arnold-- I mean, General Schwarzenegger-- thought he was going
to play that role. You remember? Not Schwarzenegger. I've been hanging around
Al Phillip and my Austrian. But there were people
in the first Gulf War and the second Gulf War that
wanted to play that role. But if you look at
both those wars, after the so-called
Highway of Death, there wasn't really a highway
of death, as the media said. And then during the so-called
armistice with Saddam, we let them have helicopters. They butchered--
it was a disaster. We didn't have anybody who said,
the more the Imperial Guard is given a reprieve,
the more innocent people are going to be killed,
and therefore, we have to destroy them. We just didn't do that. So it's getting harder
as a society becomes more leisured and more
materially enriched to find people from more
pre-civilized paths, because that's what war is. It's pre-civilized. And so I kind of
worry about that. And we're all experiencing
a war that started in 2001. It's been 19 years
in Afghanistan. We're told by this whole array
of experts all the reasons that we have-- and I supported the initial war. But I counted. I wrote an article once. There were 23 different
reasons I was told we had to be in Afghanistan. Nobody said we're
going to win the war, and there's no
substitute for victory. So I don't know what
Libya was about. I don't know what
the Syria thing was. Iraq, we kind of won the
war, but then we pulled out. So it's hard. It's very hard to see that. It's not the generals. The generals are
representations of us, and there were people coming
out of the Depression who were impoverished that
didn't have the luxury to be therapeutic. And so Patton was the
most popular general. The reason he was
so successful was he had broad public support. The parents of the soldier
he slapped wrote a letter and said that, I think it
was wrong what you did, but boy, we're not
going to criticize you. You're saving lives. I just don't think that
would happen again. So the general today-- and I think General Petraeus
was a very good general, but it's more of an
intellectual with a PhD, rather than a blood-and-guts
type of person. I don't think you'll see
people like Grant or Sherman again, or Lee. I think if a
general said today-- just imagine the new
theater commander in CENTCOM went over to Afghanistan. He had a press
conference, said, I'm going to beat those
sons of bitches. They say, the Taliban? Sons of bitches? That's too simplistic. [LAUGHTER] So I just don't think
it's going to happen. AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: What? AUDIENCE: Dr. Hanson,
thank you for coming. VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Yeah. Question? AUDIENCE: And I'd also like to
say on behalf of my father, who specifically told
me to tell you, that he's read just about
every word you've ever written. But I specifically
wanted to ask, sort of like you talked
about how Patton was clearly strategically sound in
a lot of his thinking, and seeing what was happening
on the Eastern Front, and just the brutality of
the Nazis, is we got to go in and make
the other poor bastard die for his country. So like you talk about, just
feeling democratic societies get kind of soft. Was that so ingrained and
the Allied high command having to play all the
politics of the reasons, and the fact that
he was abrasive-- yeah, sorry. So why exactly was the fact that
he was clearly strategically sound putting away? Was it really just
the fact that he made people a little
uncomfortable because he acknowledged that we
were going to have to be violent to win the war? VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Well,
we know from his own War As I Knew It that he
made faces in the mirror. A lot of it was show,
and they weren't pearl. They were ivory-handled guns. He had that weird horn on
his Jeep with the placards, polished his helmet. All of that was an image
to show people that-- he'd give these speeches. Nobody ever won a war
by dying for a country. You kill the SOB, not dying. And he gave a terrible speech. It may be effective, but
it was frightening when he said, all of you wounded-- this was in Boston,
of all places-- all of you should be very happy
because you didn't get killed. People get killed never did-- just trying to create
this image of himself and the American Army
as the equivalent on the battlefield of the
Germans and the Russians. And he had a lot of
distinct disadvantages of doing that in a society. And then when he
went out of character at the Lorraine Campaign and
Metz, he didn't have fuel and he had, as I said, a World
War I stagnant objective, he didn't do very well. So his idea was the
Americans are growing up. They're young people. Everybody works on a car. Germans don't. Russians don't. 1942, everybody knew how to
take apart a Model A or a Chevy. They like their frontier image. They're horsemen. They like to move. So you've got to adopt
those natural tendencies and have armor outflanking
thrusts with air support. Forget the flanks. Circle around. Confuse the enemy. Don't lose a lot of people. Bam, bam. And he tried to craft a
strategic doctrine of war that he felt was compatible
with the American character as far as he could do it. I think he did a
pretty good job. In comparison to people
that had no idea of this. Hodges had no idea of this. Mark Clark would
never think like this. Bradley would never think. Eisenhower's chief
worry is, how do I keep the coalition together? He did a good job. But they'd always say-- when Patton said, I can
move three divisions and save Bastogne, Eisenhower
said, careful now, Patton. Your reputation hasn't
been too good lately. He said, I think
it's pretty good. Can you imagine the Supreme
Commander telling that to somebody who's just offered a
way to save an entire division? So it was constant
and it wore him out. It was constant ankle-biting,
bureaucratic, deep state. And he, himself, was a throwback
to a pre-civilized mentality, an aristocratic mentality where
he felt that rich people who were well-educated and knew
how to ride horses, and play polo, and sail should be
given certain latitudes. And that was an anathema
to a guy who grew up really poor, like Omar Bradley. AUDIENCE: Thank you for joining
us again on campus, Dr. Hanson. Throughout this
series, I can't help but wonder how
the same qualities seem to make a person
both famous and infamous. I'm curious if this is
perhaps a curse of success or just a factor
of human nature. VICTOR DAVIS HANSON:
Well, I think you're quite correct in
your general observation. Now I'm quoting the 7th
century BC poet Hesiod. "The most powerful
of all human emotions is envy," what they
called [INAUDIBLE].. And it's true that the
more successful person-- that's what Greek ostracism and
the democratic culture created. Ostracize somebody not because
he did something wrong, because everybody
knows who he is. So we don't like
people who do things that we can't in a democratic,
pluralistic society. But I think in this
case, we have a sense, as a democratic, affluent,
21st century-- I think Barack Obama
summed it up best. He always used this term, the
arc of history is bending. And it was always as if things
are getting better, better, better, and we're going to
get more humane and humane. And we're changing human nation. We have more colleges. There's more kids
in the Ivy League. We've got all this technology. And we're getting better,
and better, and better. And we're going to eliminate
people like Patton. And I don't think we
are getting better. I don't think there's any proof
in history that we all are-- other than technology, and
even that is up and down-- that we're getting
into a moral-- human nature is human nature. And so these people who show
us and remind us of that-- they're pretty scary people. I think when-- I won't break my promise. When that person
starts with a T said-- [LAUGHTER] --we don't want
these animals there, the people in the
neighborhood were relieved, but the people who had
private estates or gates were shocked, like
Nancy Pelosi's got a nice walled estate in Napa. So we've created, in our own
society, people that have-- I don't want to
be to deprecatory, but they have pretensions
about human nature, but they're never subject
to the ramifications of their own ideology. [APPLAUSE] AUDIENCE: I'm going
to tempt you to break your promise because I'm
sure you heard there was a recent report that Rex
Tillerson and General Mattis brought President Trump
to the Pentagon to brief him-- to educate him-- on the
importance of America's alliances and so forth. And the report came
out that, at one point, Trump got so angry that
he yelled at the generals and said, you're
a bunch of losers, or something to that effect. And lo and behold,
after he got in, he changed the rules of
engagement, and we beat ISIS, and so forth. But just wondering if that's
another example of what you're describing. VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: We have an
oath at the Hoover Institution. We're not allowed
to speak publicly about another senior fellow. So I have great respect
for General Mattis, but in a larger
sense, I think what Trump was trying to say
is that he values optics-- he's reality TV-- and ratings. Remember, every time
he gets mad at CNN, he doesn't just say
that CNN is fake news. He always said, low ratings. [LAUGHTER] Or he says, have
you seen that guy? He looks really bad on TV. So in his way of
thinking, he's practical. And when you look
at Afghanistan, it's bad ratings and bad optics. But he's also got a
pre-civilizational animal cunning. And why wouldn't you? How could you succeed in
the Manhattan real estate market dealing with crooked
unions, crooked politicians, crooked community? You got the builders union. You got Al Sharpton. You've got Bill de Blasio. How do you deal with all of
them and build a skyscraper? So he has certain skill
sets, and those skill sets are not compatible
with administrative-- whether it's civilian
or military-- parlance and the way you solve problems. And I guess the only way we
could reconcile that paradox is that you wouldn't want
a government of Trump's, or Patton's, or those
types of people, but you might want
one or two of them on occasion when the
system finds itself incapable of doing things. So if you haven't had worker's
wages increases in 12 years, or you haven't had 3.5%
unemployment in 50 years, or African-American
unemployment in seven years, then maybe half the
country decided, I'm willing to put up with the
President of the United States saying that Jerry
Nadler is a sleazebag. [LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE] And then just as a
[INAUDIBLE] to that, I was really struck when
I hear people that voted for him that talk about him. It reminds me so
much about reading, when I was researching
a book on Patton, news reports about Patton. Because usually you hear, well,
I really like what he did, I just wish he
wouldn't say that. I just wish he wouldn't tweet. And they would say
things about Patton. Wow, I really liked the
idea that he beat Montgomery to Messinia, but why'd
he have to do that? And same thing with LeMay. Why did he do that? Curtis LeMay created the
Strategic Air Command. Essentially, he inherited
it, but it was nothing. And when he left it,
it had 200,000 people. It was the most sophisticated
deadly air force in the world. And the reward for that
was being caricatured by George C. Scott
or Buck Turgidson, both characters in Dr.
Strangelove, as a mad nut. And he was anything but a nut. He's a very sophisticated,
educated person. Omar Bradley couldn't
speak a word of French. You would never know it. And he had a very beautiful
cabin with upholstery that he towed out in
the battlefield that was his personal-- Patton slept on the ground. Patton walked around
to make sure everybody had dry socks so they
wouldn't get trench foot, but it didn't fit the image. Bradley was a GI
general, but in fact, when people went on
leave into England and they were from the
1st Army, Hodge's Army, they would lie and
say they were 3rd Army because they thought
they would get better dates from the nurses. [LAUGHTER] I don't know if you have-- SPEAKER 1: We have time
for one more question. AUDIENCE: First of
all, thank you again, Dr. Hanson, for speaking. You were talking about Patton's
strategies and approach to things, and how
different it was from pretty much every other
general of World War II. What would you say was
the reason for that? He was schooled at VMI, like
most of our other leaders were. But was there something like
his early days in the military, or do you think
that's just how he was as a person, that caused
him to approach things so differently? VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Well,
his preeminent biographer, Carl de Estes, said he had a
number of serious concussions, traumatic brain-- [LAUGHTER] He did. He used it in the
context because there was a period in his life where
he did some despicable things, like date his step-niece. Or I shouldn't say date-- have
an affair while he was married. He had a wonderful wife. But there were certain elements. He did believe in reincarnation. And he did believe that
the Patton family-- his grandfather was
killed in the Civil War, so he had this idea
that he had a destiny. And he kept saying,
I'm not going to be cheated out of my destiny. And he went into a
severe depression when he was not allowed
to fight in the Pacific. So he had this idea
that he was exceptional in his knowledge of war. And he would say
again and again, when they talked about
closing the Falaise Gap, or taking Palermo and
then making a right turn, or having amphib, he'd
always say to his staff, I don't know where
I got this idea. I woke up at 2:00 in the
morning with this idea, and I wrote it down. And then he would give
meticulous diagrams of which particular battalions and
brigades he would move. And so he believed,
at least, he had some kind of artistic
inspiration about war. I think that's why-- I think it was de Estes--
named Patton a genius for war. There was something
about him-- mystical. And the movie tried to bring
that out, maybe exaggerate it. But people around him
thought that he was not stable mentally. And he was completely unaware
of the effect, sometimes, he had on people who had
control over his destiny. So if he was on
maneuvers, and right in front of Eisenhower
and Bradley, he went over and screamed
at a lieutenant colonel, said you son of a bang. You did this. You're going to get men killed. And then he walked by
and smile, back thinking that Eisenhower was impressed. And Eisenhower later
would say, this guy is not fit for high command. So he was sui generis. We saw Sherman like
him, and I think there were elements like him,
as we heard today, in MacArthur. MacArthur had some
of the same traits, although he is much more
institutionalized than Patton, and much more politically savvy,
I think, at least sometimes. Is that it, then, or one more? SPEAKER 1: Thank
you, Dr. Hanson. VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Thank you. [APPLAUSE]
