Victor Davis Hanson - How a Border War in Europe Led to WWII

good evening everyone we'd like to get ourselves underway thank you for your attention very soon our guest of honor dr. Hansen will give his lecture on the second world wars and our topic this evening of course then is dealing with military history and it seems that it would be entirely fitting to acknowledge that among us we probably have a number of people who have served in arms for our country and I would ask all the veterans in the room to stand and be recognized [Applause] thank you our speaker this night will be introduced by the president of the college dr. Larry P Arnn who was the 12th president of Hillsdale College dr. Ahn received his bachelor's degree from Arkansas State University and his MA and PhD degrees in government from the Claremont Graduate School he served as director of research for Sir Martin Gilbert the official biographer of Winston Churchill dr. Arnn served as president of the Claremont Institute for the Study of statesmanship and political philosophy from 1985 to 2000 in 1996 he was the founding chairman of the California Civil Rights initiative which was passed by California voters and prohibited racial preferences in state hiring contracting and admissions dr. Arnn is on the board of directors of the Heritage Foundation the Henry Salvatori center of Claremont McKenna College the Philadelphia society the intercollegiate Studies Institute and the Claremont Institute he served on the US Army War College Board of Visitors for two years for which he earned the Department of Army's outstanding civilian Service Medal in 2015 dr. Arnn received the Bradley prize from the Lynde and Harry Bradley foundation he's a member of the American Political Science Association the Churchill Center the council for national policy the Federal Society the Mont Pelerin society and the philanthropy roundtable published widely in newspapers magazines and periodicals on issues of Public Policy history and political theory he is the author of three books Liberty and learning the evolution of American education the founders key the divine and natural connection between the Declaration and the Constitution and what we risk by losing it and Churchill's trial Winston Churchill and the salvation of free government dr. Arnn is a professor of politics and history here at Hillsdale College he teaches courses on Aristotle Winston Churchill and the American Constitution he and his wife Penelope have forged Henry Katie Alice and Tony please join me in welcoming dr. Larry on [Applause] it's an exaggeration to say it but I am mark cost boss mark is one of our senior professors and I'm grateful to him for his fabulous work he's a dutiful department chairman and he makes his department behave which is something almost nobody else around here achieves I think all of you for coming I want to recognize because he's a friend of mine and because I don't see him as much as I like Dave Leffler is here tonight and Kathy still married to him nobody understands that congratulations Dave [Applause] a trustee Gunnar Clark is here he's married to Louise who's from the Searle family that gave us this room and I just found out that Gunnar sells beef to another special guest I'm going to introduce John Harris in just a minute and we've just organized the deal I've bought a bunch of cattle from these guys and I need volunteers from the students next summer we're gonna have a cattle drive from California to Michigan I [Applause] don't think we'll get here with any cattle but what wouldn't that be cool would you like to do that yeah yeah see it was all girls that we're clamping to I give a special welcome to John and Carol Harris from near Fresno California where they're farmers ranchers on a big scale the famous Harris Ranch but if you live in California as I did for a long time everybody knows about that but everybody knows about it all over and they're closed good friends of our speaker not Victor Hansen Victor himself is a fifth generation farmer from Selma where they have a big installation in their beef business and they're just as solid as the land they farm as is Victor and I just want to welcome them and say how probably already have them here tonight thank you for coming Victor Hansen has been a distinguished fellow here since 2004 he teaches every far every fall he's a born teacher because of some qualities he has that I'll mention he's teaching a class this term on the nature of war and if you eat in the dining hall when you're in town as I do you'll find out that his course when it's going I was always one of the talking points of the campus everybody talks about it everybody tries to use my influence to get into Victor Hanson's class I'm powerful but maybe not that much he built a classics program at Fresno State he started Stanford in the Naval Academy and Santa Cruz and Pepperdine and all over the place oh I meant to mention because I forgot William Bordeaux who works for John Harris is over there and he's sending his kids to Hillsdale College and Don Meyer a colleague from California is here and we're glad to have all those California victor is the Martin and Ilya Anderson senior fellow at Hoover he won that Bradley prize and he's the trustee of the Bradley Foundation he won the Eric rondelle prized the Nimitz Leadership Award in military history the National Humanities medal given by George W Bush president the way M F Buckley tried a prize in the statesmanship award with the Claremont Institute he won all the prizes he's written or edited 24 books and they are consistently works of scholarship and also inspiration I myself read them all the newest one is entitled the second world wars I've heard him lecture on that subject twice now and again tonight I look forward to it I always learned something although I'm supposed to know something about that he is one of those rare men and brings the most serious knowledge the kinda chief only by a combination of talent and decades of devotion but then beyond that he has a commanding kind of understanding he makes complex things seem simple he makes high things seem to be within our grasp all who attend to him learn from him and they are legion all over the country this gift makes him a resource in any age like ours especially when things are confused and shifting and dangerous and when everything seems new but everything is not new and what sureness of understanding we can achieve begins with a deep knowledge of the past and a comprehending mind that can make some sense of it you will find if you get to know him what everybody does and that is any conversation with him is fun and a way to learn presidents and prime ministers have enjoyed that he is influential in the way that the wise and the knowing can be please welcome a great man Victor Hansen [Applause] thank you very much for that kind introduction I think it's been 16 years since dr. aren´t showed up in my farmhouse in Selma California and asked me to teach her and 14 I came here as a young man of 49 I was turned 64 last week and I really feel it but I've been very fortunate you know when you go to a university as a visitor usually it's very territorial but when I came to Hillsdale people in my field of classics professor raw pave excuse me and Tom Connor mark Cal called they were welcoming they wanted me to teach in their field that was very unusual and so I felt like I was in a special place so for the last fourteen years one month of my life is just completely schizophrenic I mean here the way America should work and I'm leaving a place that I dare Lee love where America doesn't work California but it's it's been a schizophrenic experience it's almost as bad as what living in the San Joaquin Valley and then working at Stanford where you go from somewhat stability into lunacy and I don't know which one you're going to count as lunatic or stable but they're very different I like also to think of John and Carol Harris that came I grew up and you know obviously on the farm and the Harris name in California agriculture is sort of like Hillsdale this name in in education it's synonymous with integrity and respect for the law and it has a reputation that transcends business success it's it's really unusual so when they came I was very thankful for that I'd like to talk about a book I've written on World War 2 that's coming out on October 17th called the second world wars plural but before I get to that I I'll speak for about 40 minutes and I want to ask because I know there's veterans here and I open it up for questions but thing that strikes one about World War two is it was the most lethal period of six Wars six years in the history of civilization more deadly than the six years of the bubonic or black plague of the 14th century more deadly than World War 1 more deadly than the Civil War more deadly than any 6-year period in history there are greater body counts by Stalin and Mao of course but it took them longer so why was it so deadly 27 thousand people died every year of the six years of World War two from September 1st 1939 to September 2nd 1945 think about just it's absolutely astounding one way to look at the war if you step back from it is it was a war against the unarmed so of the 60 to 65 million people who died in the six-year period 80% were not combatants that had never happened in history it was the first major war in which the civilian toll was much greater than the combatant toll so we want to know what happened why was it so lethal well ostensibly you could look at we could reduce World War two even further and say it was basically a story of Germans and Japanese killing people who didn't have weapons and that's the story of world war ii 27 million people in the soviet union were killed by the Vera Marcal and another five million in Eastern Europe and Japan killed about three million people in Asia in the Pacific and seventeen million Chinese take that away in World War two is not that unusual that's important to remember in the context the war because we were so obsessed in our generation with Hiroshima or the bombing of Dresden or the bombing of Hamburg and we forget that World War two was a story of Germans and Japanese killing people who had no weapons why was it so lethal though aside from the civilian toll why was it so lethal in a way that the other wars had not been one of them was the world had never been more populated by 1939 there were 2 billion people living so there were more people living and more people to die the second was that there was not just nationalism or territorial chauvinism or even ethnic chauvinism but there was an ideology by that I mean that Italian fascism made Italy do things in Libya and Somalia that it did not do in World War one and Nazism or National Socialism made the German army do things and the German Third Reich do things that even it had not considered under the worst moments of Prussian militarism and it made Japanese nationalism fascism in Japanese and it had not done in the Franco excuse me the Japanese Russian war of 1905 and six take those players away from World War two and you have a war and the Soviet Union as well the Soviet Army committed atrocities kilfer two million German prisoners not as much as they lost five million but Nazis killed Russian prisoners but they did things that the Czarist Army had never done take those ideologies out of the equation and it was a pretty humane war if you look at what the American army and the British Army did in comparison but AD fascism and communism and Nazism into the mix and a lot of people being alive at that time and people not being prepared for the advent of fascism in Russia and China and you have the ingredients for 65 million dead one final thing to remember is this was at a peak of Western technology that the world had never seen and more importantly we all have Western technology that has a challenge response challenge you have catapult you build walls you build bigger catapults bigger walls you have armor on a knight then you can't penetrate to get a cross post but at this particular cycle the offensive was predominant by that I mean the war started with biplanes it ended with jets it started with World War one artillery shells it ended with proximity fuses v1 and v2 rockets it started with the knowledge of chlorine gas was used by the Japanese but not in your but it ended with Zaycon B and the death camps so the technological fury of 20th century technology explains a lot and the fact that we were in an offensive cycle we're sort of in a defensive hot cycle today where we have missile defense we have the ability to shoot down incoming planes we have body armor all that in this particular cycle was not there so it was much easier to kill people in mass and we'll work through technologically ideologically politically than it has ever been any think time when I say second world wars I refer just really quickly to two things when the war started on September 1st when Germany invaded Poland followed three weeks later by their Russian Soviet invasion of Poland people still referred to World War one or what the British call the first world war as the great war nobody had envisioned this as any other thing than a intensive version of what Nazis do all the time in the last decade they had gone and militarized the Rhineland they had sort of stepped over the bounds a little bit in the Saarland plebiscite they had the on sluice which was forbidden in Versailles they had destroyed Czechoslovakia and they went into Poland this time Hitler didn't believe that they would be declared war on by France and Britain they did but nothing really happened so Hitler thought this is just another border war and he prepared the Third Reich for that purpose and what had followed Poland of course was the destruction of Denmark the destruction of Norway later the destruction of the Low Countries Belgium Luxembourg the Netherlands France and by April of 1941 yuccas la vía in Greece and the Blitz against Britain but all of these had something in common they were all border wars or wars against neighbors and forth at the BRIT the fascist powers had been preparing for a decade nearly and the Allied powers had not what do I mean by that I mean empirically if you look at the German army seventy five percent of it was still horse powered they were not so worried about gasoline for their pens they were more worried about pasturage and hay for their horses the tanks that went into Poland had a 20 millimeter gun the planes that flew stupid the dreaded Stukas were obsolete within a year what I'm trying to suggest is these were a series a border war we can even call in them bully wars until they did to things that they had not anticipated they had declared war in Britain and they had no strategic method to defeat Britain think of that you declare war in an enemy and you have no means to limit their production by that mean the British Navy was the largest Navy in the world Germany was not even a close 7th or 8th they had no aircraft carriers they were outnumbered in destroyers cruisers battleships they had no means to achieve naval superiority they could not invade Britain they could not cut written off by sea even though they had a very successful u-boat they could not bomb Britain they had no idea that in the worst moment of the Blitz Winston Churchill was producing more airframes of spitfire supermarine fighters than were me-109 think of that the present EU all under the control of one government all the way from the English Channel to the borders with Russia and Little Britain was producing more Spitfires and the Germans were producing 109s so they had no conception of who the British were and they hit a obstacle the second thing that this sort of border wars found is they invaded the Soviet Union and that changed everything and changed the second world wars into a global war because for the first time the very mark was not fighting someone next to their borders fighting someone a outnumbered infighting someone that was clearly technologically inferior they were fighting in an army that was three times their size and had plans for a t-34 tank that was better than anything that they had and could be supplied generously by the British Empire in the United States by naval convoys and the had no way to deflect it that process then changed border wars that were all had certain things in common the German army fought people nearby they spot them to surprise surprise and they had easy logistics and they were numerically or they were militarily unprepared and then they found out that Britain didn't quite fit that bill the Soviet Union didn't quite fit that bill and by December 7th when they'd the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor the United States didn't fit that bill then they got into a global war but they could not win and I'd like to walk us through there through that process very quickly but one other reason that I use the plural was that this was the first war that was almost unconnected there were two billion people on the planet 1 billion people were actively engaged in the war either fighting it or preparing to fight it industrially or in manufacturing by the time the war ended there was only about eight nations that had not declared war and was one of the two sides but if you were in a u-boat in the North Atlantic you had no experience of what a combatant was doing in the jungles of water canal if you were 25,000 feet up in a b-29 over the Marianas taking off you had no idea what Ramos Panzers were doing in North Africa and it wasn't just that the theaters were so diverse but the mechanisms and the methodology of fighting you could be in a tank you could be on the ground you can be in artillery you could be in a heavy cruiser you can be in a high bomber this had never really happened before most Wars a civil war or First World War were one-dimensional there had been u-boats in the World War one but they were not three dimensional or maybe even four dimensional fighting on the surface fighting below the surface fighting on land fighting on the air and so it was so complicated and complex that people didn't know really what to call it once once Germany invaded Russia then the idea of border wars disappeared and now we were in World - and the Anglosphere we called the second world war and we went back and renamed the first world war not as the great war but World War one or the first world war so what happened why didn't he in Japan and Italy go to war because Germany had won these border wars and it had a numerical superiority over Britain maybe not the British Empire but in 1941 by May there were 80 million Germans and there was only 45 million Britons and that was all that was left there was no other major power fighting in the Third Reich or Italy except Britain and they were outnumbered two to one and yet in six months Hitler managed to change that equation that even with the addition of 78 million Japanese he was going to be outnumbered two to one so he went from outnumber in his enemy two to one to being outnumbered two to one once he brought in 300 million Russians and Americans into the problem but why would he do such a stupid thing when you asked why people start wars there's always the superficial reason what started that fighting and why didn't somebody existentially are theoretically wanting to go to war well Hitler still went into Poland a win of these countries and he went into the Soviet Union because no one had stopped him he felt that the United States was isolationist Britain Britain had been appeasing and prior governments prior to Churchill the Soviet Union to be colluding he didn't think anybody would really want to expend treasure and blood to stop the mark they did they had seen what he had done against weaker powers and they were intimidated he was quite right people in the United States Charles Lindbergh people in the Soviet Union said Stalin went in some type of catatonic fit for two weeks people really did believe that the very mark was unstoppable they were not empirical they did not measure actually the size of the army the equipment of the army and compare it to the resources that he was up against so what I'm saying is that Hitler was crazy to do such a thing to bring in 200 300 million people the largest economy in the world United States and remember within five years the US GDP will be larger than all of the six major belligerents together and yet he declared war on us on December 11 so why would he do such a thing he these countries lost deterrence but more importantly in the last 20 years the German people had believed that as losers of World War one they had been cheated of a victory because they had they had surrendered seventy miles in Belgium and France and almost immediately when the army came back they said this was an armistice this was not an unconditional surrender we were stabbed in the back by Jews and communists we could have won we knocked out Czarist Russia they capitulated we again X 50 million people and a million square miles we had a treaty with them the Progress LaCava and yet we lost the war we shouldn't have lost the war and then when they signed the Versailles Treaty they had the worst combination a treaty could imagine it was punitive and humiliating and weak it put war guilt on Germany and made them pay reparations and yet it didn't occupy Germany as we did in World War two we had no mechanism to enforce the Versailles Treaty and very quickly the German sized up the Allies that in their victory they were depressed and in their defeat the Germans were confident so if you read war poetry in between the wars or you look at French textbooks the messages we never want another song we never want another Verdun if you look what Germany is doing at the same time we want another bought Verdun and we want another song because this time we're going to win and yet only one person knew that that's Winston Churchill the only country that was left before the Third Reich went into the Soviet Union so after this war started in Japan also had had sense that the United States had lost deterrence they did something equally foolish it had the third largest Navy in the world but we were second but what they didn't realize or they did realize is we were second but we would be the largest Navy in the world within 12 months and within 24 months would have a navy that was larger than every other Navy in the world combined we had on order seven battleships 60 destroyers a hundred submarines and most importantly 27 essex carriers and with light and escort we would build a hundred and forty-five aircraft carriers and yet they had they attacked the country of that magnitude why because they felt that we either would not fight or if we thought we would fight fight how heartedly they said in in japanese memos and communications they said well that their closest friend was britain they just watched it they just watched it be bombed they didn't lift a finger they they just barely had a drop by one vote half their fleets in europe they're not serious and people in the japanese war department said just don't don't touch Pearl Harbor and take the Dutch East Indies Holland doesn't exist take Southeast Asia France doesn't exist anymore you can have everything you want just don't touch the United States at Pearl Harbor the Philippines and the Japanese war minister said why they don't want to fight and saying voices in Japan said we you have no ability just like Germany has no ability Germany has no ability to go to Moscow they don't have the logistical capability they have no ability to bomb written and you have no ability to bomb San Diego much less a place like Detroit and yet you're declaring war in a country that you cannot defeat but again they thought because that we had lost deterrence and that we wouldn't react in the way we did or if we wanted to react in the way we did we wouldn't have a capability because we hadn't shown that in the 1930s so the war basically was a story once Germany and Italy a declared war on us three days after four days after Pearl Harbor it was a simple story of will the Allies the Soviet Union and the United States and Great Britain will they be able to fight like axis soldiers will they be as deadly as the deadly Japanese and will they be as deadly as German soldiers or will German and Japanese economies be able to produce as many war materials and weapons as the Allies so we had to do was we had the industrial ability but we didn't know we had a 17th largest army in the world and the Soviets had been very very poorly performing in Finland they had been late when they invaded Poland they hadn't done well when they sent advisor to the Spanish Civil War Britain seemed like it was half-hearted they hadn't they were still standing and had a standoff that Dunkirk they had to evacuate so the question was the axis said well they can't fight like we do but we can learn to produce like they do and in fact the exact opposite happened the United States as you know from Guadalcanal as early as November of 1942 American members of the 1st Marine Division were as deadly as Japanese without any more material support british soldiers fought as well as Rommel in North Africa Soviet Union the Red Army within a year was this deadly or more deadly than the very mark it didn't seem that that was foreordained if we had taken a date in late 1942 the Madden designs of Hitler and Tojo almost seemed they almost seemed to bear fruition they thought you know what they haven't really geared up yet we've been in the war almost a year and if you looked over the map Hitler would say we're a hundred miles from Grozny and all of the Caspian oil that supplies the Soviet Union our soldiers have just climbed Mount Airy Erebus in the caucus mountain highest mountain in Europe we own territory from the Volga River to the English Channel from Norway and the Arctic Circle all the way to the Sahara Desert we have were almost surrounded we're still surrounded Moscow we blockaded Leningrad we've taken Kiev Rommel has just accepted the British surrender in June 23rd at Tobruk the Americans have lost the Philippines the British have lost Singapore that Japanese have now destroyed in a series of devastating this is after the Battle of Midway devastating sea battles off Guadalcanal they have destroyed every single carrier in the Pacific except the crippled enterprise and now they are on the offensive Aguada canal and if they take water canal they've cut off the lifeline to Australia so it looked like that that we had not been able to fight like they are and we hadn't really geared up yet but they were producing material like we were and then it all vanished within six months Americans became British became Russians became much more skull for soldiers the United States didn't produce 30,000 airframes 40,000 airframes that produced a hundred thousand airframes per year it didn't produce twenty or thirty thousand it produced 55,000 German tanks Soviet Union produced 60,000 Stalin and t-34 tanks we supplied two thousand locomotives to the Soviet Union four hundred thousand four hundred thousand heavy trucks a type of production that nobody had ever seen before everybody had said Roosevelt's a socialist he's a central planner nobody thought he would turn over the war effort to people like William Knudsen and Charles Wilson some of the most brilliant people at General Electric General Motors Ford Motor Company Henry Ford producing a b24 every hour 30 miles from here at Willow Run and so we overwhelmed the axis in an amazing time of less than four years nobody had ever thought that would be possible and we did in a combination of economic superiority but we learned a fight in a way that was much better there were three or four there are things that explain why this war which could have gone on for 20 years 27 in the Peloponnesian wars cases it could have gone on longer but it didn't another reason that was very short and I hesitant to use the word short because as I said 60 million people were killed but the Allies were very diverse politically there was communist Russia Democratic American Americans parlamentary and monarchic all Britain with an empire you think they would not get along on the other hand there was fascist Italy fascist Germany and fascist Japanese they would all coordinate just the opposite happened something about the nature of fascism that was inherent in line was inherent and fascism double-dealing so in Hitler women to the Soviet Union Italy had no idea they invaded Japan said my gosh they're gonna invade the Soviet Union we fought them in 1939 we're gonna conclude a non non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union Hitler said you can't do that we're going to invade and they said you did it to us when we were fighting and then Hitler said well don't get mad at me for going the Soviet Union you never told us you were going into Greece and yet because there were at least two of three partners on the Allies side that were transparent and consensual those governments as early as Casablanca basically figured out a way to cooperate for all the evil of the Soviet Union there was only one Soviet Union not three so the Allies were able to task out jobs they said to the Soviet Union your job is destroyed of their mark on the land and indeed they did 75% of all soldiers and the German army were killed by Russians their job was not and they said to the owlet you do not have to fight in Italy do not have to fight North Africa you do not have to stop the u-boat campaign you do not have to fight the Japanese you don't have to do strategic bombing just fight we will give you boots we will give you radios we will give you food will give you uniforms will give you truck we will mechanize but just destroy the German army on the Eastern Front and the British will and the Americans will handle the Japanese they will handle strategic bombing and there was a very sophisticated outsourcing of tasks in the ways that the axis never cooperated the Oxus had very good airplanes if the Japanese had just got the plans earlier of a 262 MIG excuse me at the Messerschmitt if they had just been able to deal with the Germans on the focke-wulf 190 engine if the Italians could have just borrowed some early mark 3 designs of surplus German tanks they would have been okay there was no such cooperation when the Sherman tank met the tiger tank in 1944 in Normandy the British said the great tank it's reliable its pragmatic its durable but it's not under gun so we have a 17 pounder we think we can put that huge barrel in your tank when we had a p-51 it was the best aerial dynamic fighter in the world but it had an Allison engine the British said we have a Merlin old rolls-royce engine such cooperation would be unheard of with the axis Hitler would have said let's steal it or don't give him the designs the British said here's the designs for the Merlin engine you can make it in the United States and it up the speed by 75 miles an hour it made the best fighter in the world that was very important that there was this cooperation there was another thing as well it was quite different from the two sides that explains its in asking explicable victories so quickly that the bullies lost and as I said once the war got globally lost in four years and another reason was the attitude toward war production the fascist powers had a nineteenth-century idea that morale along battlefield prowess with Trump logistics material and there's something to that as you know through military history but the Allies were far more pragmatic so if he wanted a tank the Germans said well a Sherman tank is not very good we met it it's got a 75 millimeter even the 76 millimeter gun can't penetrate either a panther or a tiger it's only got three inches of armor Czar's have six we can blow them apart into two miles away and the americans said in answer to this maybe so but not if there's one tiger or one Panther on the bow field for every six Sherman's and you just bypass a German tank and let the Air Force deal with it and you attack infantry that have no tanks or they said we have to go see we have to go three Mont three thousand miles so we have to pick up a tank on a crane and put it in a ship be nice to have a 60 or 70 ton king tiger but what would we do with him we couldn't even pick him up and put him on ships they wouldn't fit and then they said the designers of the Sherman tank I've got a Chrysler engine you can go ten hours for one hour of maintenance tiger tank can go one hour for one hour of maintenance you can take out a Sherman transmission in three hours you have to take that's Tiger tanks transmission from the Ukraine and put it on a rail and send it back to the factory Porsche factory in Germany so there was this idea that we're gonna be practical we don't have to build the best weapons they have to be reliable they have to be durable and integral to this philosophy is we're not going to be addicted to the idea of gigantism that's the age old idea that a weapon is good if it's big sort of like Demetrios that the seizure built this huge Heliopolis to take loads took so much capital labor and it fell over and that's what the Japanese did they said we have the largest battleships in the world the yeah moat Miyamoto and the Mousasi seventy one thousand tons they were the largest warships until the 1960s when US aircraft carrier exceeded that tonnage those two ships together sunk one of a hundred and forty five American carriers that's all they did in the entire war they call it the hotel Musashi because it was so expensive to get out of Port it had an 18 inch gun they could fire 27 miles but Americans could blow it up at sea very easy with a carrier and that's what happened to both of them but Bismarck and the Tirpitz were wonderful bit ships in fact in a an old-fashioned battle as you know the Bismarck blew up the hood and disabled the Prince of Wales and that was it it was quickly sunk the Tirpitz the most expensive ship that Germany ever built they could have built 25 destroyers or 30 30 the 30 u-boats or 5000 priceless 88 millimeter anti-tank guns and yet they built the Tirpitz and it fired one salvo and anger the entire war they had a weapons program that was the most expensive we thought 1 billion dollars in dollars the v2 and the v1 rocket programs v1 was a simple cruise missile v2 was an basically an intercontinental missile those together terrified Britain they killed 11,000 Britons the two programs together but the cost to deliver a pound of explosive was 30 times more expensive than a lumbering Lancaster or b-17 we burned down the cities of Japan and Germany very cheaply if who can be so go test and they spent all her money dreaming of a vengeance weapon that did almost no vet doubt value at all we had 2 billion dollar weapons programs the b-29 program and 14 months we built a bomber it had 20,000 rivets in the cone alone it had over 150,000 parts as the most complex bomber in the world but it destroyed 65% of the urban core of Japan in four months and we had a Manhattan Project that after Nagasaki and Hiroshima along with the bombing that forced Japan to surrender so our idea of weapons programs and spending large amounts of capital were not in obsolete dinosaurs that were battleships or rail guns Germans had 7500 men that the Manning a Gustaf rail gun that shot a 400 millimeter projectile into Sevastopol and it could do that about a hundred and twenty times and you had change the barrel finally they were of no value they represented about 7,000 88-millimeter platforms that were not built so that American practicality and British practicality even Soviet was much different than the world of fantasy that Mussolini Tojo and Hitler lived in that too was a reason that the war ended as quickly as it did and finally you could argue that the German and Japanese generals general Hama or Yamaguchi or von Bach or von Rundstedt or Guderian or Roma were comparable to Patton comparable to ylim a comparable maybe to Nimitz and Halsey and you can make that argument but you cannot argue that Hitler Mussolini and Tojo had the strategic knowledge that Stalin Roosevelt and Churchill did the big three did not do things like invade China and find themselves in a quagmire of 12 years it would eat up a million soldiers they did not in 1944 when they were losing the war invade Burma and try to go into India they did not do something stupid like invade the Soviet Union without any knowledge that there was such a thing as a t-34 coming off they did stupid things they lost two Broke they lost Singapore they lost Corregidor but these were all manageable and correctable they did not and why didn't they do it because Roosevelt and Churchill did not say I want to do this Churchill said I want to go and something stupid and I want to go into roads or I want to attack the island the Ionian Islands people in a consensual Society said don't and they hashed it out when Hitler said I want to go in the Soviet Union you should read the minutes on the bear marks okay W don't do it but they didn't tell him that he could do whatever he wanted so they had a mythic leadership that was nursed on these cheap easy victories of the mid-1930s against underpowered and unprepared enemies and they translated that into wrongly concluding that they were actually formidable power and they went to war against the three most powerful countries in the world and they lost and it was quite predictable after 1941 let me just finish by asking ourselves did World War two achieve anything and the answer of course is yes the aim of World War two was to stop the horrific governments and Italy Japan and fast and fascist Germany Nazi Germany it did that late but it was late but it did save half of European Jews six million were killed six million survived the point was that it went into Eastern Europe to free use of Eastern Europe from the dangers of totalitarianism if however as Franklin Roosevelt saw as Churchill didn't that the purpose of the war was not just to defeat these three ugly Hydra heads of fascism but to end war altogether and how the United Nations and under the aegis of the paternalistic United States both tell the Soviet Union to behave and Britain to give up its empire then everything would be wonderful it didn't work at all because we went to free Eastern Europe and Eastern Europe was on free under Soviet rather than German domination and so if you want to be perfect than you if you define victory and wars being perfect and you can't be good but we fulfilled all of our names but if your aims are redefined as something impossible then we felt wow the war didn't work because our ally the Soviet Union became our enemy Germany in conclusion let's just finish with five minutes and look at the individual six belligerence what happened after the war of the axis power Italy got off pretty easy there were no war crime trials there were no reparations Italy was not occupied why was that well largest foreign population the United States who identified separately Germans had been all assimil integrated we're Italian Americans that help the Pope and the Vatican help and the Italians throughout Mussolini they said on their own and Italy was fought over for three and a half years by Germans on behalf of Italian fascist and then against Italy and the idea was well what there was Germany only had war in its soil for three months Japan never did Italy suffered we're gonna let Italy go did Italy suffer it lost a million point one soldiers more than it did in World War one it committed terrible atrocities in Somalia and Libya and yet people said it had suffered enough and for what it had gambled on her mercy Mussolini it got off pretty closely it was occupied and integrated into the Western alliance if you look at Japan people think Japan was nude it was the only country ever to be on the receiving end of a nuclear weapon that's true and it's tragic but the nuclear to the nuclear weapon drops at Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed about 30% of those Japanese that were killed through conventional napalm by b-29 fire race that toll number was about 600,000 Japanese Japan lost a total of three million for a country that had started the war and made it global in December of 1941 by declaring war on the United States and Britain and had been fighting a war of genocide in China they came off pretty easily they were not invaded they were occupied but we insisted they have things that turned out quite beneficial land reform the franchise for women and we were pretty benign occupier for a country that had killed nine people for every person they lost it was the most efficient killing machine in World War two when you look at the Japanese army did in the Pacific not just against Americans and British but Islanders people in Java people in Southeast Asia in China a Japanese soldier was the most lethal soldier in the war in terms of how many people he killed versus Khamenei he lost Germany this time around after Versailles nobody said I don't really know who started the war the arms merchants maybe it was mobilization no nobody said any of those stupid things this time they said you started the war and we're going to occupy you and we're going to divide your country in four parts and you're not going to be able to rearm and you're not going to be able to have a military capability comparable to your former enemies and so we occupied the country we put a gun to their head and said this time you're going to have a democracy it's not going to be like why more and we're not going to do what we did it Versailles and you know what the world said by any objective measure that was much tougher than the Versailles Treaty and not a person said anything they didn't say you can't do that that's meaner than Versailles they still said Versailles was too mean but they never said that the peace imposed on Germany after World War two that was much meaner was mean at all such was the anger at Germany and so East and West Germany came out of that division we incorporated at NATO and it became part of the Western alliance it exploded today we see that much weaker economies and smaller populations in France and Britain have nuclear weapons Germany doesn't and that's for a reason isn't that and I would say that one of the formulas after looking at these axis and I liked I like soldiers one of the forms I want to get the Soviets in the United States to conclude but one of the formulas after world war two was incorporated NATO the way to keep the peace is not to have the United Nations necessarily it's to keep Russia out of Europe and the United States in Europe and Germany down and today if you look at that formula as long as the United States is engaged with alliances and balance of powers it's able to preempt situations that would lead into global wars as long as you have a country like the Soviet Union by extension Japan China that can be contained those totalitarian autocratic governments that have large populations and territories will not start a global war and as long as you can have a very dynamic country like Germany with a very checkered history you're okay as someone you're going to say well I'm German American how can you say that and I can say that after just coming back from Germany and the Czech Republic I heard this from Germany's neighbors Germany's back they're telling everybody in Eastern Europe that we have to have an immigration suicidal immigration just like they do people in southern Europe said they're running a mercantile system where they artificially lower their deutsche mark under the guise of using the euro and were in hock to them the rest of their life and people in Britain are saying they don't have to be so punitive on the brexit and the reason that that's not going to translate into a world war is that they're disarmed and they have two nuclear neighbours France and Britain that are not gonna let him arm again so that formula after World War two kept the peace and it's a tribute to the geniuses who crafted at Churchill and Roosevelt especially Anthony Eden people like George Marshall and finally how did the United States and the Soviet Union and Great Britain do Soviet Union lost 27 million people most of any country in the war its land was occupied for most fertile and industrial sections were occupied for four years it suffered a great deal but it went to war so that it would never have to be vulnerable again and that that object was fulfilled it got all of Eastern Europe is a buffer zone it broke every agreement that had made with the Allies about free elections and places like Poland a Hungarian Hungarian Hungary or Romania it never gave the Baltic States back it kept territory had stole from Finland so in the Communist way of thinking the war to free as I said totalitarian control of Eastern Europe ended up guaranteeing it and the Soviet Union's were quite happy with that we should know in pass that of all the six belligerents the Soviet Union in World War one made a deal with every other belligerent they had cut a non-aggression pact with Germany and Italy they cut a non-aggression pact with Japan they cut a alliance with the United States they cut an alliance with Britain and they basically broke all of their agreements with our allies that saved them and they never broke one agreement with their axis that tried to destroy them they were the most duplicity of all the powers and and World War two and they came out for all the misery and death that they suffered they came out in a stronger position than they had gone into the war in which communism had been discredited there were the great famines the great terror the liquidation of the officer corps and people thought it was a real empower it was set to be a superpower in the Cold War we should give more credit to Britain Britain was the only country to folks fight the first day of the war September 1st 1939 or September 2nd when it declared and in the last day of the war September 2nd it was the only country that fought Nazi Germany by itself for over a year it was the only country that went to war in World War two without being attacked in a surprise attack by an enemy and without attacking another country it went to war for the idea of helping Poland and Britain as I said outproduced Germany and every aspect of munitions except tanks but think of it artillery pieces vehicles planes bombers fighters ships it was one of the most we think of the United States but it given its much smaller industrial base in population its war production was just as impressive what happened after the war was sort of tragic because if you look at the war - and you could the post-war era and you compare it today there was no Chinese juggernaut it was flattened there was no Russian it was flattened there was no Japan it was flat and there was no Germany it was flat and there was no France had been occupied there are only two countries that were going to supply the world trucks and appliances and they were Britain in the United States and the tragedy is the man who'd won the war they displaced and they brought in a socialist government and they nationalized their coal their steel their power the help almost everything and within ten years they were not as competitive as the countries that were in rubble at least not until the resurgence of Margaret Thatcher and finally the United States pretty brilliant we had 12 point 1 million people in the military we waged that we were the only country to wage a war and every single theater of World War two whether it was Burma whether it was high-altitude bombing over Japan whether it was nuclear war whatever it was we fought we lost the smallest number of people per military soldiers deployed of any country in the entire world Oh point three percent 420,000 out of 12.1 million so it was a brilliant effort to save lives through the use of capital and machinery the war led to some very good things that led to the integration of troops because we had campaigned our propaganda said we're here to our poor freedoms and that had to be redeemed with the integration of blacks into the military by Korea and women were in factories so it had positive social effects it gave the United States power and a role in the world that only Britain had had enjoyed in the past and you could say that Americans did not make the mistake they did after World War two they stayed engaged and they kept a peace for 70 years let me just finally sum up and say well if all that was true did we really have to go to the war to prove all that and that way to look at it I think is that war is like a laboratory experiment in this room if we didn't like each other we would know who was strong and who was weak by their size or their prior experience in fighting but maybe we didn't and we would say stupid things and we would find themselves a stronger person might be angry at a weaker person and what worden does it's the testing that shows you reality it's tragedy because you shouldn't have to do that and by that I mean the United States were the largest economy even in the Depression years did not have to spend point five percent under defense if we had a four percent GDP - and a pact with France Germany was said I'm never gonna go into France they landed two million people in World War one I don't want that again and they would have stopped if Britain had have said we want Churchill in 1937 and he's going to give us 450 airframes a month and we're going we have a better plane than German Goering would have said I don't want to go into there if Stalin had have said we would have had t-34 tanks and great numbers Hitler himself said if I had have known how many tanks they had that were of the caliber that t-34 I would have never gone into Russia but people forget that so they're nursed on ideas of utopian idealism Kent military spending is a waste and they lose deterrence and with the loss of deterrence you lose the perception of who's strong and who's weak and then the laboratory comes into play and says I'll show you who's strong and weak and 60 million people have to prove what we should have known from the very beginning of the war the Soviet Union the United States and Great Britain were much more deadly than the fascist powers of Italy Germany and Japan thank you very much [Applause] Michael Goldstein you have State Director for playing justices and Nations and a student in World War two I have a question about the Japanese strategy before the word their strategy was to lure the American family into the western Pacific him of the family there were submarines and land-based in there and then beat them in the jugglin style but then didn't come masticated why to destroy battle to feed their what was their thinking understand that the American industrial capacity would be put to use and the Americans didn't they fought holding action in the Pacific but they didn't have to come West until we had our huge battle fleet and we're ready to do it was it just hubris or they really thought we wouldn't fight very quickly I think Admiral Yamamoto has a very inflated reputation because basically on the premise that he said supposedly that I can raise hell for six months and after that it can go whether he said that or not we don't know but we do know that he was the one not the Japanese evil people we always associate with the Tojo regime that wanted to start the war he threatened to resign if he didn't get the attack Pearl Harbor and he didn't have a plan to deal with the three carriers if they were not there and they weren't there he had no idea how to deal with the 27 that would soon be on order and so he either sunk or he submerged battleships seven that had been built in 1917 1622 that were obsolete and that's not a good way to start a war against the largest economic power so that what I'm getting at is if you ask Yamamoto today after Pearl Harbor what's next he would say well I've crushed their battles so they won't fight they're humiliated the way that we did to end the the Japanese Russian war and that's about the limit of a strategic thinking I don't know why we ordered a assassination attempt on him in 1943 that was successful we killed him with p-38s long-range fighters because if we had left him in he would have done even stupider thing because his strategy at Midway was absolutely insane he split his forces up and he had a huge advantage and carriers cruisers battleships and he wasted those assets in Alaska so he was not a strategic thinker I sorry I went a little bit long because I didn't want to have more question yeah much the movie Dunkirk the other day don't know if you've seen it or yeah I reviewed it on it what about the red that there were actually the Germans were surrounding the British and French but just sat there for two three days they did because Hitler would not give them the go watch what's your inclination to think about why they want to hear a conspiracy theory or what happened the conspiracy theory is that Hitler was going to stop the certain destruction of British and French forces and as in return for that token of magnitude Churchill was going to say okay we appreciate what you've done and the bloody British monarchy some members of the monarchy some aberrant members and the aristocracy want to cut a deal that's did not happen I think I think much more likely as the German Panzers had gone through the Ardenne and they had been fighting for six weeks we forget we just say the fall of France they were wiped out Germany suffered to about two hundred thousand casualties and they lost somewhere between 30 to 40 thousand dead and missing from the French and the British and their wonderful defeat and they were completely exhausted that was one reason and they were weak riah quipping and they thought that the u-boat presence and the presence of the Luftwaffe gave them superiority over the channel and Britain did not have the where all to get the men out so they said we don't we want to rest we want to re-equip and then they're not going to go anywhere because we have air superiority and the British don't want to go into the waters with u-boats and so they waited three days and that turned to be about to be quite stupid because the British were much more resourceful than the Germans thought and then the final thing to add to that is that Hermann Goering was not a doubting or half Arnold and so he was one of the most incompetent members of the Reich and he was a commander of the Luftwaffe and he assured Hitler that his Luftwaffe could handle could achieve it not just air supremacy purity of it air supremacy and wiped them out at their choosing and he didn't realize that not only were British fighters better than the 109 under with good pilots but even French fighters were as good some of their models and so they fought very effectively they took a terrible beating but the Luftwaffe would lose over France about 1,500 fighters over the fall of France and another 1,600 over Britain so that when they win into the Soviet Union they were three thousand planes short so we talked about the Blitz or the cowardly French but we don't realise that their contribution and airpower damage to the Luftwaffe may have saved the Soviet Union any other questions you can enroll a book called the unnecessary war yes to the extent I think he meant that if Hitler had been stopped sooner you know yeah I reviewed that book as well on YouTube very strange due to Christopher Hitchens and I were supposed to debate that book but we ended up agreeing that the thesis was not persuasive because there had been a movement it's very logical and I said Stalin killed more people in Hitler house and he's got a dynamic ideology that transcends race and religion communism Hitler's ideology is confined to Arianism it's not going to appeal to people people in Burma or in China so let him fight it out and then people started to suggest that the Soviet Union would probably lose and if Germany got its hands I don't mean that they looked at this empirically if thought in advance I'm not suggesting that Buchanan was wrong that there were communist sympathizers in the State Department there were but the preponderance of opinion among American military minds was Germany if will probably defeat the Soviet Union unless we help them and we can give the Soviet Union areas we can help areas that allow to free them up and to do what they do well they do two things well they be they build guns artillery and they build tanks they can't build but can't make boots they can't make radios they can't make aluminium they can't make local motors will do that and specialized the economy and that will wear out the Third Reich and that is why 27 million Russians died and four hundred and five thousand Americans and four hundred three hundred and eighty five thousand British so we said we're going to use Soviet manpower to blunt the Third Reich we have to remember also at the time there had never been an army I said it was incompetent maybe it was logistically but not the German soldier even on the Western Front in 1944 they've lost three million men they still killed one and a half million one and a half Americans for every one they lost and they killed seven Soviets for every one they lost so they were a deadly deadly force the German soldier and thank God for the Red Army that dealt with him and then we had to not that we it was such a brilliant policy afterwards cuz I said we empowered the Soviet Union but we had a bad and a worse choice and I think we took the bad choice thank you any final question okay oh one more provide some comments from a historical basis on the current conflict or issues with North Korea in North Korea yeah well the problem with North Korea is that for a variety of reasons we're in an Orwellian situation where the country with a second largest number of deliverable nuclear weapons which is us six I think at sixty-six thousand nine hundred feels that it's an existential danger from a country that might have 11 News now why is that happening and it's happening for two reasons we have lost conventional deterrence because over the last 10 years whether it was the skedaddle from Iraq in 2011 which created Isis or it was the fake red lines in Syria or it was the bombing and going home of Libya I don't know what that was about or it was the tough talk about Ukraine and Crimea or whether it was the five deadlines we gave to Iran I'm not suggesting we was smart or stupid to go into these places I'm just saying it was very stupid to threaten people without consequences so North Korea said to itself they have no deterrence their word we're not worried about them and then secondly they posed as that their unhinge that's a value that's a value in nuclear poker in other words we're not subject to deterrence it's because we're so crazy we're willing to eat grass and lose our cities to get Portland OR Seattle and we know that you'll do anything not to lose Portland or Seattle or San Francisco la so we needed missile defense and if you look what William Perry the Secretary of Defense said under Clinton he said we could build a very expensive anti-ballistic missile system but the idea that North Korea would ever threaten us the continental United States that's absurd said that in the 1990s Bill Clinton made fun of Star Wars and canceled it Brock Obama and the hot mic with the outgoing Russian president said I'll be flexible about missile defense ie I'll cut it if you tell Vladimir to be until I get elected so we lost the chance to have missile defense and we lost the chance that we're capable of anything and anything at any given time and the result was that China's patron that that basically supplies the technology in the capital to North Korea said go ahead we enjoy what you're doing every once in a while say you're crazy then threaten the United States and meanwhile we can go on to our policy of bullying Taiwan South Korea and Japan so South Korea North Korea is a big asset for China what do we do about it now that we don't have missile defense and we're not likely to do a preemptive strike I think we have to really talk about things that are now favorable because they're not nuclear war if nuclear war is a specter you want to do anything but that I would expel every Chinese member of the Communist Party I would expel him from the United States if he's here I was expelled their children from all US universities and relieved me if you go to Stanford University this number of Chinese nationals that are there is quite amazing and I would suggest that if China if Japan and South Korea want to go nuclear that's a decision that they're going to make and then China would look around and say wow do I really want nuclear South Korea Japan Taiwan maybe to join nuclear to Russian nuclear Pakistan on my borders with a nuclear Iran that's not such a good scenario so we've got to be creative and think the unthinkable if we don't want to go to war but China is that we is responsible for it and finally all of this talk about Russian collusion it hasn't proved anything but it did prove one thing we lost a valuable Russian car they have the largest number of deliverable nuclear weapons they can be very effective in joining us on sanctions and blockades they can get out of our way in the area they have an 18-mile border with North Korea we could have made an argument you really want a thermonuclear weapon going off near your border and yet we've lost all influence so with the former Soviet Union and Blatter more poof so we got to work on that because we've got to say look you've got to help us with China because you don't want these nuclear come countries that are democratic pro-american next to your border have a nuclear weapon so those are the lessons it's deterrence deterrence deterrence thank you very much thank you everyone for being here a couple of announcements first there will be a afterglow reception with refreshments outside and the lobby down here and more importantly dr. Hansen's book based on his lecture tonight the second world wars is due to be released October 17th this is just a nun corrected proof so I'm not at liberty to share it however is available for advanced purchase and dr. Hansen will be signing books plates and so if you're interested in purchasing a copy you can have dr. Hansen sign the book plate and the book will be sent to you through the mails as soon as it's published so that will be taking place as well out in the lobby so we are adjourned thank you for being here have a good evening [Applause] you

Channel: Hillsdale College

Views: 866,209

Keywords: Victor Davis Hanson, History, Hillsdale, Hillsdale College, VDH, WWII, WW2, World War 2, liberal arts

Id: tQq-ORA4fHw

Length: 74min 4sec (4444 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 13 2017