this my pleasure to introduce David Simpson the market and analyse Anderson a fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University Victor's extraordinary output in quality and quantity speak for themselves we do speaking some of the highlights picture is the author or editor of 23 books including among others his splendid District Sacramento Board that he's going to talk about tonight city to the generals combination culture among others Victor is written hundreds of articles I have won awards for his commentary that's one awards nationally the brand new awarded 2008 and he is a syndicated columnist for the National Review and and his fingers across the country I'm gonna speak about this book on World War two which is extraordinary even by Victor's high standards there were a lot of that sort box on World War two with Mari and out of a million wrote one Gerhard Weinberg Richard ovary but this is extraordinary for variety of reasons one its comprehensive - it is in cycling female 3 and Victor makes some points that have almost be buried under the historiography one and I roll it like this one the United States was the primary use in the Second World War not Soviet Union - our victim recovers and often been lost how extraordinary is a matter of proportionality Britain's effort was during the Second World War so please Victor Davis Hanson to talk about his book I think is that microphone work oh good I'd like to talk for about 35 minutes just an outline on World War 2 and then I want to hear what you all have to say cuz everybody has a different take on World War 2 and I'll try to answer as many questions as Bob thinks is appropriate you know if you look at conflict throughout 2500 years of time and space World War 2 stands out it was the single largest death toll of any natural or man-made event more than the 14th century Black Plague more than the 20 million under the great famine and terror of Stalin maybe mouthed 60 million but that took place over 30 years more than the 17 million of World War 1 so first thing we have to ask is who got killed and why and it was very rare for another reason it was long it was a six year war but it was one of the only wars in history were more people out of uniform and civilians and non-combatants got killed than combatants World War one 65 percent of all the people died died as soldiers in uniform and World War two 20 percent did second thing was very strange about the war was it was one of the only wars in history where they defeated the losers Japan Italy and Germany killed far more than the winners of the 60 to 65 million people who died about 80 percent died on the Allied side think of that whatever we say about the losers they were one thing there were savage killers and if we look at if we wanted to reduce the war down to just a sentence if somebody asked you what was World War two about you might say it was about German German and Japanese soldiers killing Chinese and Russian civilians so of the 60 million dead about almost 40 million or maybe 45 million were Russians and Chinese we forget that and they were killed it as astounding ratios we in America are obsessed with her Oshima or Dresden but the German army killed about seven times more people than it lost and the Japanese was about eight times more so one of the themes of the book is I had very little pity pity for Japanese and German revisionism because they started the war and then they waged it with a ferocity that had never seen before and it was waged entirely almost against civilians final thing to think about when we talk about why was it so lethal and unfortunately there was about six six factors that collided in an unfortunate series of events one it was six years long six years in the day longer than World War one longer than civil war not as long as obviously as a 30 Years War in the Seven Years War but it was a long war second it came at the culmination of Western technology there had been on the design boards things like successful 30-ton aircraft carriers or assault weapons that is guns the individual soldier could carry like the German GS 42 that could fire at about 600 rounds a minute it was some somewhat like an ak-47 but they hadn't produced them yet there was a theory of incendiaries but they were mostly aluminum and magnesium and not jelly gasoline as the Dow Chemical Company thought they could do and which turned out to be napalm there were experiments with heavy water but not no indication they could build a practical bomb no indication that could build a jet fighter there was not an easy way of making a claymore mine all of these developments sort of collided at once so the Warsaw the replacement or the displacement of traditional bolt-action rifles of traditional battleships battleship could destroy another ship at 27 miles an aircraft carrier could bring about 10 the that amount of munitions a tag range of 250 miles radius so you can see that Expo tension exponentially you the killing factors are going to be increased when the war started in World War 1 about 20% of soldiers had been mechanized by the end of the war about 65% were mechanized so world war one soldier could advance at about 25 miles at most a day a world war ii soldier in theory could go 55 60 70 mile gasoline was the fuel that ran world war ii and just as a precursor of i'm going to say of all aviation gas produced in world war ii the united states produced 90% of it and of all the oil available in the world the three allies the Soviet Union the United States and Great Britain had access to 90% of the world's petroleum so you're gonna sort of interrupt and say well why do the hell with the axis go to war that's what we want to ask why would they do such a stupid thing and war the thing to remember about war is it's like a laboratory a bitter cruel laboratory in other words there is a reality a Platonic reality that before war starts we know who's strong and who's weak we know that we got in a war with North Korea we but demolishing but what happens if that reality is not made known by the process of deterrence powers delude themselves into thinking that they have power that they otherwise don't deterrence is lost you have a war and then when it's all over 65 million people are dead people shrug and say you know what Soviet Union the United States and Great Britain really were a lot stronger than the three Axis powers but it took a war because that reality had been obscured by events in the 1930s the first of course was the Perseid treaty there's a lot of Mythology about the Versailles Treaty that it was unduly harsh or was punitive that's the standard orthodoxy you hear in university today but harsh by what standard by the standard that the Germans imposed in France in 1871 not at all they didn't they did not annex as much territory by the standard of what professor Riesling had said in 1914 remember when the German army invaded France in 1914 before it was stopped at the Marne they had a plan to you know Larry unilaterally subject France to terms in which there would have been no Belgium at all and the entire coast of Northwest France would be annexed by the Germans along with the Alsatian arraigned permanently with along with enormous reparations in perpetuity if it was a comparison the Versailles to the Treaty of brest-litovsk remember in that treaty Germany annexed about a third of European Russia and fifty million people so by any contemporary treaty the Versailles Treaty was not unduly harsh the problem with it was it was humiliating to the Germans because as you read those 400 some elements of the treaty it presuppose that Germany the war guilt clause was charged with causing the war and being responsible for the destruction and death and yet there was no permanent occupation there was no permanent trisection of germany in fact Germany surrendered as you know on in November of 1918 seventy miles inside France so the German homeland was never touched and if you weren't gonna occupy it as you know fokin and General Pershing wanted to do you could see what was going the mythology was going to happen very quickly we were stabbed in the back we were on the offensive and then communist riots and Jews and socialists made us lose and add to the problem the Versailles Treaty was started the discussions at Versailles start in January 1919 and that four month period 75% of the Allied troops had been disbanded were gone and it went on for six months and by the end of six months the Germans said there's no there's no occupation army there's no army at all they've all gone home so let's recalibrate a little bit what we agreed to and out of that mythology there was this idea that Germany had not been beaten that Versailles had been punitive and mean and humiliating and it was imposed on them by weaker people unfortunately there were events in the 1930s it sort of superimposed that idea onto an existing falsehood the winners of World War one vow that they never go through anything like the Million Man lost at the Somme and 1.1 million ever done the losers at those battles said we're gonna do it again and do it right next time so at the 1936 Oxford debating society at Oxford University they passed emotion we shall never again fight for king and country the students did meanwhile in Germany people were volunteering to join the brown shirts and what would become the SS determined to rectify the injustice they thought had been done to them there were a series of events in Europe the collapse of resistance to Mussolini's 1935-36 expedition to Ethiopia which he couldn't have carried off had the British just closed the Suez Canal to him they had three times the number of ships they were afraid of causing a war the Germans had been more successful in the Spanish Civil War they had looked at the United States a military budget except for the Pacific Navy and they had looked at the British budget and that had been in decline they looked at the cultural Malou or atmosphere in the in the countries of the winners remember and I'll give you two examples in Holland they outlawed the word destroyer for their small fleet they thought it was too provocative it might start another World War one and they renamed the ship a fleet leader in France they outlawed all mention of the word Verdun in schoolbooks remember the great Pathan they shall not pass that was the rallying cry of the great French army and yet that was not allowed to be in a schoolbook France had by 1940 they had better tanks the sharp B tank was better than the mark 1 2 maybe even the new mark 3 their fighter planes were as good as the mr. ship one on 109 the great hope of the the indomitable French army was larger than the German army even though they did not have as population base as Germany did they were they could have fought had they wanted if you put the combined armies of Britain the Low Countries and France that is the European anti German alliance they had about three to two assets in every category of war material this is without the Soviet Union well the United States so why would Hitler do such a thing because he believed as General von Rundstedt General Holder said to him they will not fight they're not up to it they feel guilty that they won by cheating we're going to redo we're going to reverse the Versailles thing so there was a combination of really three things more specifically there was American isolationism people like General Pershing had tried to convince Woodrow Wilson that they needed to stationed troops in occupied Germany just like we did after 1945 and you can see where we're going 1945 peace settlement after the destruction of the Third Reich was predicated on doing exactly the opposite of what Versailles did and it's given us 75 years of peace American isolationism British a British and French appeasement remember that was a good word in 1930s it was a word that suggested that you like as it's French and Latin roots suggested you that you'd like to be peaceful or pass pacifist and not Bella cost but the idea was as and I should say here that Neville Chamberlain was not the the worst practitioner much worse was his conservative predecessor Stanley Baldwin but it was summed up by Lord Halifax when he said that if we just give Hitler what he wants then he will stop asking for more so you had created a situation what I'm saying in other words that the weaker power the formerly defeated power believed that it could reverse the verdict of World War one and do so very easily because the victors did not want to fly and one other final ingredient in this fatal triad American isolationism British appeasement Russian collaboration Hitler said I will never fight a two-front war like the idiots in Hindenburg and Ludendorff did I will only fight this is kind of funny would say as in it that he did exactly that but he didn't think he was going to do it at the time and so he signed on August 23rd of 1939 the Ribbentrop Molotov pact in which the Soviet Union we forget this about World War two the Soviet Union provided 30 percent of the fuel food and strategic materials of the Third Reich while it was invading France and bombing Germany later forget that remember one alles thing about the Soviet Union lest we forget the Soviet Union made a deal peace deal or non-aggression pact with every single major belligerent world war two it made a deal with the Germans it made by extension with the Italians it made a non-aggression pact with the Japanese and of course it made an alliance with Britain in the United States the irony was it broke every single agreement with us and the British and it kept every single one with the enemies of ours the axis and the Japanese so much so I'm tangent but gets me very angry why Americans were dying in b-29s in Okinawa and iwo jima they would see Liberty ships leaving Seattle and Portland with Russian goods on them sail right through Japanese infested waters who were killing Americans and the Japanese would not touch them because they had a non-aggression pact predicated on the idea that the Japanese had allowed them to concentrate all their troops on their Western rather than their Eastern Front it was a very Orwellian situation I think it's really important to keep that in mind when we start to read sort of Soviet revisionism of World War two but those three factors started the war the war was very brief I said second world wars because there was 11 of them between September 1st 1939 and May 1941 if you think about it Germany had a very standard practice they went into Poland they Denmark they were in a Norway they went to Luxembourg they went into Belgium they went into the Netherlands they went into France they wouldn't Yuka Slavia they attacked Britain and they went into Greece and every single case with exception of Britain and that's important because the exception always pools the rule they were very proximate to gener centres of logistical support of their factories of their fuel plants they attacked every one of those countries through surprise attack without a declaration of war and they almost created a mythology of the unbeatable nature of what they call blitzkrieg but you actually looked at blitzkrieg analytically and without emotion you would say that blitzkrieg was only work with its neighbors and only work on European roads and only work within a 200-mile proximity of Germany because they did not have sophisticated tankers they did not have adequate air support they did not have good tanks and yet they had they had conquered because of the prior ill preparation and appeasement and isolationism and Soviet collaboration they had conquered what is now the European Union so we fast forward to 1941 in May and every every major capital is either pro-nazi Pro axis whatever term we use or neutral Lisbon Madrid occupied Athens occupy of fascist Rome Rotterdam Amsterdam Paris Oslo and places like Stockholm are not only volunteering to supply and these are my Swedish ancestors supply iron or to the Third Reich but offering to pay the transportation cost and eyes are the portuguese with things like tungsten so the war is over in Germany one remember we're not in it and then in the fatal year 1941 what were regional second world wars remember the word second world war had not really appeared if we were to look at a newspaper in 1942 41 we would still refer RC World War one referred to as the great war and these would be referred to the Polish war or the blue the bomb battle of britain the norwegian war the danish war but three events in 1941 recalibrated what had been a the end of this war with a victory of germany and its ally italy and the first of course is the invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22nd 1941 the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7th 1941 six months later and most mysteriously the declaration of war in the United States by Italy and Germany on December 11 1941 those three events and would look at them very briefly explain why the second world world wars became one world war I should say these regional Wars became Second World War and by the invasion of Russia people were using the word Second World War and the expansion of the theater now went from the arctic circle all the way to the Sahara Desert and from the Chinese mainland or even deep in the Chinese mainland all the way to the east coast of the United States why did they invade the Soviet Union they had an ally that was supplying them 30% of their strategic goods they had one they they had some notion that the t-34 tank and they had created 2,000 of them Germany had about 15,000 tanks that were deplorable the Soviet Union had about 30 but 2,000 of them in every category of armament ballistic speed reliability were superior to German tanks German artillery posit production was about one-fourth of the Soviet Union this is before lend-lease or American aid but what was in their mind why would they think that three or four reasons remember what we as historians have to do we can't with the benefit of hindsight go back and condemn a prior generation for their ignorance and we have all the answers because we have history with us so what was Hitler thinking at the time he was thinking a lot of things the first was that he had all of Europe and he could integrate the economy just like the EU today so he had the French arms works he had the Czechs he had Natural Resources iron are from Sweden he had hydroelectric power in Norway you can make aluminum he could get tungsten as I said he had fuel pretty 10% of the world's oil from Romania so he felt that it was no longer just Germany but a Third Reich of 80 million people and another 200 million people the problem was he not the Nazi ideology was not the European Union and very quickly after he invaded the Soviet Union he learned that Dutch French Greek food for every category of food production manufacturing industrial output went down and the Germans could not do what by coercion what these countries had did on their freedom of will that was a terrible misunderstanding of the economic nature and that you could not integrate these economies under the German model the German model was to exploit them kill populations and then extract that wealth back into Germany and offered manpower as well so that was one fundamental miscalculation the other is he had fundamentally miscalculated Russia he looked back at Russia and he said Poland beat them in 1922 we divided Poland up in 1939 we made our embark or demarcation points in three weeks we took Poland Soviet Union couldn't even do it they almost didn't get the eastern half of Poland and then in 1939 oops it's always bad form in 1939 the Finnish war broke out the Third Reich said this is sort of an ally the United States was actually allied with Finland trying to Finland had a population of about two million the Soviet Union had 240 million it took them six months and they lost 250,000 soldiers and the Finnish army out fought the man for a man for six months when Hitler looked at this he said kicking the door of the Soviet Union and it will collapse second thing he thought is third fourth thing he thought that Japan was a de facto ally not a formal one yet but the Soviet Union would never transfer 40 divisions from its eastern coast over to the West because they were worried about a Japanese invasion and indeed marshal zhukov of all people had fought the Japanese in 1939 and had it killed 40,000 lost 20,000 there's been a major battle there and so Hitler was thinking they're gonna have a two-front war finally and most importantly he looked at World War 1 and he developed a calculus he said this quite explicitly in some of his letters he said we got seventy miles into France and you could not crack the German of the French army seventy miles and we lost two million Germans doing it and it took four years and they beat us on the Eastern Front we destroyed the the Russian army in two and a half years knocked them out of the war annexed as I said all the way to Kiev and all the way almost to st. Petersburg and so he had that calculus that now no victory in the West victory in the East and two and a half years he looked at World War two he said the French army collapsed after French army collapsed in six weeks from May 10th June twenty second nineteen forty two think what the calculus world one says the Soviet Union won it'll collapse in three weeks because France is the the great terror not the Soviet Union and what did he miss calculate I said Soviet Union didn't I its Soviet Union was a little different than Russia it could bring a level of coercion that the Czar would not even imagine so Stalin lost 27 million soldiers and when the end of the war he had 700 divisions more than 200 more than when he started he had a pretty didn't really care about human life and he transferred in masses entire industrial sector beyond the Urals so people were starving they had no shelter they were living in tents they were eating gruel and they were making t-34 tanks and 250 milliliter guns and that czars couldn't imagine a government without ability to coerce its population finally Hitler did not realize the Soviet Union and Russia had a long record of very poorly outside the borders of Soviet Union or Russia but as his generals reminded him of the Napoleonic effort it's a very stupid thing to invade the homeland of the love Russia because Russians fight very differently when their home versus away there was one final wrinkle and that is the Japanese were very very upset at Hitler because as I said in August 1939 they were engaged in a terrible war with the Soviet Union along the Mongolian border and in the middle of that war Hitler had ordered Ribbentrop to cut this deal with Molotov the molotov-ribbentrop non-aggression pact and it was a betrayal of a Japan who was fighting Russia in the field the Japanese said my gosh we had this axis of steel we were an anti common to communist alliance and all of a sudden Hitler betrayed us and they actually sent divisions to the east to defeat us because they had an ally when German and we're gonna do the same thing to them so Hitler is preparing to invade the Soviet Union in april and may of 1941 and what happens on April 15 14th the Japanese signed a non-aggression pact to pay him back and that freed up the entire Eastern Front of the Soviet Union with the surety that they would not be fighting the Japanese and remember what the Japanese thought who were fighting the Navy came to the Japanese and said we haven't had a chance to show our stuff you've been fighting in China since 31 you've been fighting the Soviet Union we're the only branch of the services that has parity with Western powers our battleships our carriers or as good or better but they're not being used so we want a naval war and so Hitler had reasons he thought to invade the Soviet you and he thought it would be over in three weeks general Halldor said at day 22 by all practical purposes I can now write that the Soviet Union has been defeated and indeed they killed six million Russian soldiers and two mil in two months they captured five million they destroyed three hundred divisions they were outside about a hundred miles outside Moscow in August of 1941 they had taken Kiev they had two of the largest defeats in history of warfare 650,000 could Kiev pocket and there were six miles outside Leningrad and the primary object of Army Group North Leningrad the primary object of Army Group center Moscow the primary object of Army Group South the Caspian Sea oil field had not been attained and at that point Hitler realized that blitzkrieg did not apply to a front that was 1,500 miles from Berlin and 1700 miles long and had enormous reserves of manpower Germany had a population of 80 million the greater Third Reich the Soviet Union as I said could draw him almost 240 million and this machine for the first time started to wear down and this would go on for four years now of course each Soviet 7 soldier 7 Soviet soldiers were killed for each German and of all German soldiers that were killed in World War two the Soviet Union killed 3 out of 4 of them which is a very stark statistic and it's it bursts this narrative that the Soviet Union won the war because they killed the most German soldiers but that faded invasion the Soviet Union what I'm getting at is created a world war that Germany could not win second event is why in the world - Japan bombed Pearl Harbor they bombed it for a variety of very good reasons there was a great debate among Japan the Navy said you guys didn't do very well the army against the Soviet you know non-aggression pact you haven't done very well in China you've been there since 31 then you came back in 37-38 you're still haven't won but if you look at our quality of battleships we have more battleships than does the United States Navy in the Pacific in the Pacific we have more carriers 11 to 3 advantage and they're better than the and carriers of British will not transfer all of their carriers because of the Battle of Britain and its aftermath and so we have parity over the United States and more importantly the United States did not do anything not only do they not do anything when we invaded China but there's staunchest Ally Great Britain they watched it burn 50,000 killed between August of 1940 and February of 1941 during the Blitz and the Japanese if you look at the minutes of Japanese discussion say any country that would let their closest ally burn to death and do nothing why it's surrounded won't fight well hit them very hard and then they'll sue for peace they'll do sort of what France did I've sort of Vichy attitude and then we'll we'll go on there were a lot of us Duke Japanese that said do not do it and they argue they said in World War one this argument was made against the United States and they had no army in 1917 when they declared war in April and November of 1918 a year and a half later the United States landed two million troops without losing one in transit of the France and by 1918 a American industry that was 50th in the world in artillery production was producing moral chili shells in France Britain and Germany combined and people had warned the Navy remember we all love Admiral Yamamoto you know I can give them hell for six months and I can't get Admiral Yamamoto was the architect of this disaster he was the one who insisted on Pearl Harbor the army of all people told you of all people were sober injudicious and they made a very compelling argument they said look at the Pacific our co-prosperity sphere goes all the way up to India all the way near all the way up to excuse me the Aleutians down to India to China all the way off the shores of Wake Island and all we have to do is tiptoe over two or three places do not touch the Philippines and do not touch Pearl Harbor but there is no more Netherlands they disappeared with a German invasion of 1940 and they have the Dutch East Indies it's we can supply all our oil from Indonesia what we call Indonesia today and the Americans won't do a thing and we and they said we can find all of our rough you want to attack somebody attacked the British and Singapore and get the lover of Malaya and there is no more France Vichy France is a paper tiger we'll just take all of Southeast Asia and the rice basket of the East brilliant strategy they did take Southeast Asia they did take Singapore but they made a terrible mistake in attacking the Philippines and Pearl Harbor because they bought into a war a country that in three years had a gross domestic product product that was larger than Great Britain the Soviet Union Italy Japan and Germany combined we only had a population of about a hundred and fifty million people we fielded a military of 12.2 million people Soviet Union was just slightly bigger but it had almost a third larger population there had never been a mobilization like that in the history or ever before ever since and yet there were people in the Japanese army they did not want to do that but that second event of 1941 cemented that this would be an idea of a World War a global war that the axis now had been very very successful could not win and finally Hitler and Mussolini declare war in the United States why did they do such a stupid thing and they hadn't done it earlier they did it for again we have to go back and look at what they were thinking stupid as it was in retrospect but they said the United States we have not been able to stop their support of Britain we almost starved them out in 1940 with a submarine we campaign we were sinking three out of every five ships at left Kent Canadian and even American ports a Canadian point we can't touch these Americans and they're all sitting off the East Coast if Admiral Doughnuts said my Fuhrer if you'll let me go attack these ships declare war the United States will be right off from New Jersey to Miami they don't even have blackouts we will wipe them their entire merchant marina and they did almost the second happy time they destroyed 70% of the convoys by April of 1942 arriving what they didn't understand that we were building a liberty ship in the Kaiser ship you are every week and as an experiment we built one in one day we were building 7,000 10,000 and victory and Liberty ships we were building them three times faster than the Germans could sink them the second thing they said is that the Americans have been supplying the Soviet Union true and they've been doing it through Japanese waters and the British have been doing it through the Arctic Circle we might as well go to war with them anyway because they are at war with us and third in a very typical axis way of thinking what is the United States done in the 30s their army is smaller than Portugal and they have not mobilized and they have 3,000 miles to get over up here so those three divisions decisions really wrecked the axis alliance and turned a heretofore victory and to assure defeat one couple of things and I'll open up for questions one thing you do when you get in yourself into a global existential war you have to ask your question of yourselves do I have the power to destroy the enemy's ability to make war if we get in a war today with North Korea we can destroy North Korea's ability to make war they cannot destroy our ability so they would not do it if they knew that we would reply in total so when this global war broke out there were very brilliant people in the German army and they're very stupid people but there were some very brilliant people and people like WA Darien and then at the field command Field Marshall level Rommel von wretch that they asked okw at the German General Staff how do you how do you plan on knocking out Detroit how do you plan on knocking out the Kaiser shipyards how do you plan on knocking out the b-29 plants in the Middle East how do you plan on knocking out US Steel how about Standard Oil and Hitler said what do you mean he said already we haven't even been at war they have 6,000 four-engine bombers they have this new b-17 they've had for five years they're on we our intelligence say they're making a b24 the British have 4,000 Halifax and Handley pages aren't we we hear they're making a new land count we have not one four Baumer Germany never made one for injured in two portable bomb either to Japan the Navy came to Hitler and said well it's very nice about submarine warfare but there's only ten submarines off the East Coast and you went to war with 50 submarines they finally lose over a thousand they would produce 2,000 but they were not able to produce submarines in great number but most importantly Admiral Rader who there's a battleship commander said you know I think I've miscalculated we have not built one aircraft carrier and Italy has not built one aircraft carrier and before the war even started the United States had seven and Britain had seven but we've been reading about the Carl Vinson Naval Act and in 1942 they're going to have 27 of them each one bigger than any aircraft carrier in the world and how are we going to get to the shores and the discussions very fascinating when you read these discussion and how is Japan going to get to the shores of the United States with a carrier fleet like that in a bomber fleet so the axis went to war and the theory that they were morally superior their soldiers were better trained they've been fighting longer they were more professional than these cowboys and American Guderian said to Hitler give me one SS division and I will wipe out all the cowboys who try to land in Normandy some Cowboys and the same with the Soviet Union they're a motley group of people there are different races there are there they're ready to revolt as if National Socialism had anything to offer so when this war broke out then the final one in December 1941 it was a race wasn't it would the experienced Japanese and German and Italian so and Italian soldiers didn't fight all that badly and they had some very good munitions factories but were they with this alliance of less than 200 million people would they be able to win the war before the United States could gear up and before the Soviet Union could produce military goods across the girls and would Britain still survive isolated as it was and look by I'd say that the key period was September October 1942 they almost pulled it off if we were to look at the app of the world in 1942 from northern Norway to the sub Sahara Desert and as I said from deep into China all the way to the East Coast everything was access control and then something happened the Americans landed in November 1942 and two months earlier bernard montgomery and they the army stopped Rommel 65 miles from Cairo at the Battle of El Alamein almost at the same time the Japanese had landed in Guadalcanal he had cut they thought all routes of supply to Australia and they did not realize the United States six weeks later would land the Army Group South ran out of steam as I said 60 miles from the Caspian Sea right in so almost within they could bomb Grozny the site of most of Russian oil production and then on the Volga River they got trapped in the streets of Stalingrad and would lose 1 million wounded and lost before surrendering what was left of the 6th army everything turned at the limits of axis manpower industrial capability a couple of other observations before we asked questions so the white of the Allies when they had greater manpower they had greater industrial put they had greater economic clout but there was another reason to they worked together so the United States said to the Soviet Union and they said to Britain we're going to fight Europe first and then they said back to themselves but we really don't have to fight Europe first because we're so big we can fight both the same time will tell Churchill everybody goes to Europe but what we really do is send all the Marines six seven divisions and Marines and we'll send them all to the Pacific we'll send all of the carriers without very few most of the battleships will let the Canadians and the British outsourced naval power to the extent where it's needed in the Mediterranean and the Atlantic and army divisions will end b-17 strategic bombers will go to Europe and West Coast ports will supply most of the things specific East Coast so it was almost as if we had two nations each of them bigger than Japan and German combined and we supplied the Soviet Union we said to the Soviet Union what do you need and they said we want to work on artillery tanks shells but we need certain things we need rubber boots we need food we need aluminum we need radios and we need especially six ton three axle trucks we supplied four hundred and seventy-five thousand Chrysler GM trucks to the Soviet Union they were so frequent that Goering after the war said we got so sick of those Russian robots on American trucks we would see them in one place and the next by evening there were fifty miles inside early they were the most mechanised the most primitive army in the world when the war started in some sense by 1945 it was the most mechanized and we worked we mesh very well together same thing with Britain and we had a strategy to go into Normandy Churchill wanted to go into the soft underbelly up through the new beyond a gap into the agenda we settled on a anglo-american strategy of try it out in North Africa see if Italy will work invade Normandy let the British be in the north so they can go straight 500 miles into the Ruhr let the Americans with more power more manpower take the longer route into Germany and the entire time coordinate with the Soviet Union so there are offensives coincide with ours and they we did it pretty well and tell the Soviet Union and we did you don't have to do anything other than kill Germans we want you to fight an infantry battle will supply a lot of the trucks use concentrate on fighters you concentrate on tanks you concentrate on artillery will supply everything else we will fight the Italians you don't have to fight the Italians we will bomb the Germans you don't have to build a four-engine bomber you don't have to fight the Japanese don't worry about it we won't you don't have to build one battleship you don't have to build one aircraft carrier you can build some submarines but just kill Germans and that's what they did they killed as I said three out of four of every German soldier but they were not responsible for providing an aid to anybody they did not have strategic bombing they did not have a submarine campaign they did not have a surface vessel campaign they did not have aircraft carriers they only fought the Japanese for two weeks in war and so it was this integration and outsourcing of particular responsibilities that were very effective and you would think that this would be impossible because you were dealing with British colonial monarchy and in some sense parliamentary British democracy and then you were dealing with radical American democracy you're dealing with Soviet Communism and then the opposite side was Nazi fascist militarists they had the same idea about the way organized society could be organized and they never coordinated Germany stabbed Japan in the back when they signed a non-aggression pact Japan stabbed Germany and when they did the same a few months later why didn't they just coordinated attack the Soviet Union at the same time from both coasts when Hitler declared war on Pearl Harbor his okw said where is coral Pearl Harbor the Fuhrer has declared war in a place he doesn't even know where it is in the map and the Italians said on June 22nd you didn't tell us you were going to invade the Soviet Union we don't really want to go and Hitler said we need a hundred and eighty thousand a hundred thousand Italians got killed on the Eastern Front we need a hundred and eighty thousand right now they said but we need them in North Africa and then the Germans said well you guys invaded Albania and Greece and got us on a quagmire right before we were gonna invade Russia and you never told us you were gonna do that so you can see that the fascist mind doesn't trust anybody including other fractions and that was a great disadvantage so the war ended when the Allies from the very beginning of their this weird alliance between the Soviet Union United States to a lesser extent China India every country but sixteen and the world fought this war the vast majority joined the Allied cause it ended because they had a plan how to get to Tokyo or destroy it and how to get to Rome or destroy it and how to get to Berlin or destroy it and the Germans and the Italians and the Japanese had no idea how to get to London and destroy they tried they did not have the resources they did not have the transport craft to invade Italy Germany they could not get the United States they could not take Moscow Leningrad or get to Soviet industry and that was pretty much why the Allies won and the axis lost I like to finish by just very quickly reviewing the fates of the six countries let's start with a Japanese everybody thinks Japan did pretty poorly because they lost 75% of their urban area but they lost a million fewer than Germany did three about three million 2.8 and as I said they killed over about 25 million people mostly the vast majority were Asians some about 500,000 Americans British and Commonwealth troops died but the vast majority were Pacific Islanders Indonesian Southeast Asians and Chinese that were out of uniform and butchered by the Japanese one thing to remember and this is very important all of you were brought up in this mythology that we dropped the bomb and it was very amoral the United States invasion we all say well save the invasion of Japan and it might have done that but I don't think that's quite the way we should look at it the way we should look at it is Curtis LeMay had 2,400 b-29s that from March 11th until August 11th had burned down 75 percent of the cities of Japan and it was 1,600 miles one way 1,600 miles back my father flew 40 of those missions and he said it took him two years to get off the Benzedrine that they gave all the crews to stay awake 16 hours in the in the mission but even under those conditions they were very successful after Okinawa was declared secure on July 2nd of 1945 the distance from Okinawa to the mainland was not 1,600 miles about 375 miles curtis lemay you may say he was the inspiration for dr. Strangelove that George C Scott character but he had he had an animal cunning he said I've got 2,000 more b-29s on order and there is 10,000 b-17s and b-24s and they haven't been doing a damn thing since May's sitting over there in England and the British want to get in on the sport kill they've got 5,000 Lancaster's that have a heavier bomb capacity than any American playing let's put 10 to 15,000 four-engine bombers on Okinawa and let's have not three missions a week from the Marianas let's have two a day and his only worry was Cadell chemical build enough napalm so he would have burned down the entire country of Japan by December of 1945 and killed probably a 2 million Japanese the atomic bomb was much less lethal than the March 11th napalm attack that was the most devastating day in the history of warfare 100 to 150 thousand Japanese died on March 11th when 325 b-29s came in very low with napalm second thing one other thing about Japan Japan unlike Italy and Germany never really came to terms with what they had done they did not they had a revisionist history almost immediately South Korea they never admitted culpability for what they did to South Korea they never made it a culpability for China and there were two reasons for that one was that we didn't trisect that country and the British did not occupied as they did a sector in Germany and the Soviet cinema that was an entirely and American and MacArthur enterprise and almost immediately there was a Chinese civil war our allies that people we'd given all this way aid to were fighting and communism had just taken over and then there was a Korean war just five years after the end of World War two and it was felt under MacArthur that we needed Japan unity we had to keep communism out of Japan we were this the only show in town we could do what we want and we allowed Japan keep their Emperor and never have a revisionist history that would come to deal with Japanese culpability and that's true today if you meet Chinese scholars about World War two they cannot even finish the sentence without saying why do you support the criminal world war two government still in power Japan very different with Germany Germany was as you remember it lost 30 percent of its population it went from 80 million to 60 million it lost East Prussia had lost the alsace-lorraine it lost the Sudetenland more importantly Germany got no sympathy for the largest trance from transfer of population in history 13 million German speakers walked back to present-day Germany from Czechoslovakia Poland and what is now the bulk of Baltic States they got no sympathy because they had been responsible for the Holocaust in killing 27 million Russians and another 3 million non-jewish poles and yet 2 million German civilians died in that walk back to Germany Germany then was divided into 4 sectors 3 of them would be United on what we call West Germany and automatically became the tripwire when the Soviet Union thought that given their superiority and armor and manpower they could take over all of Western Europe so almost immediately we had to arm the Germans and integrate them within 5 years into NATO Germany then lost about 4 3.8 million people about about a million of them were civilians that died through fire bombing mostly at places like cologne or Hamburg or Dresden or starved to death or were killed in the transfers back Italy got off the easiest well I shouldn't say easiest they lost 500,000 soldiers but they were out of the war by 1943 because it came up with a slick trick that if you were an axis power and you were gonna lose and you flip sides and say that you were never voted for Mussolini and you got rid of him which they didn't July of 1943 with this puppet government then we felt well who are we fighting when we got into Italy we were fighting Germans but Germans were fighting Italians and Italians were fighting us but Italians were helping us British were fighting Italians Germans were fighting British it was a mess Italy was we never Italy never was resolved we never got into Austria as we thought and the idea was that there was a large large italian-american population there was a large Catholic population the Pope had come out and condemned very belatedly the German so their idea was well Germany Italy was the only back battleground we only fought in Germany for three months we never fought in the ground in Japan we fought for two and a half years in Italy give him a break so we kept the Soviets out we did not trisect the country we did not make them have we did not make them surrender very much territory in the north and they were our allies almost immediately and that we felt they had not been responsible for war crimes they were delusional and incompetent rather than vicious and anti-american I'll finish with the three allies as I said the Soviet Union came out the worst and the best it lost as I said the most of any nation 27 million was a great tragedy because in 1939 Stalinism and the great terror had more or less failed when the German army Army Group south entered Kyiv people greeted them the Ukrainians were ready to revolt had they been treated with just a smidgen of goodwill they probably would have formed as it was 1 million Russians joined the German army but more would have because the Soviet Union was just about on the point of collapse the war gave a great credibility it was forgotten as I said that it made a deal with all the other belligerents on both sides and most importantly they were in the best geostrategic position they'd ever been in because the traditional bulwark of Western Europe against the Soviet Union that is Poland the Czech Republic what we call the Czech Romania Bulgaria now these were all Soviet satellites and the Soviets had a buffer but also a border right on Germany so they had advanced communism about 250 miles westward and they were completely armed and most importantly they had a great propaganda so almost immediately in 1945 we were stuck with the the terrible propaganda of having to reform the Italian fascist the German Nazis and the Japanese militarists meanwhile the Soviet Union says we're still fighting World War two we've saved China now they're on our side as communists were going into Thailand lay out Laos the Middle East and were in will Eastern Europe and we still had the spirits that the United States used to have used to have but now they're they've joined the fascists and they're part of the German Italian Japanese war machine and for people who were peasants and Asia that sounded pretty persuasive Koreans to Vietnamese and we were burdened with that propaganda for the next 30 years so the United States in some ways I think even though we came in late we were the last of the major powers to get in we did not help the Soviet Union when it was attacked militarily we did not help written when it was attacked military we only went in when we were attacked and yet we were the only country to fight a two-front war in every theater and when we left the war we suffered the fewest casualties per capita of any country in the war about 425 as I said out of 150 560 million one hundred and forty if you count some if I count the army itself twelve Millions so we had a we were the most economical and manpower and that was largely because we had invested 40 percent of our military budget and naval and air power most countries had invested about 70 percent in the army we were very careful not to turn the American army loose against the bare mark and when we did in Italy and we did in France we paid a terrible price even as Germany was falling apart even when Germany was being bombed 24/7 the German army killed in Europe between June of 1944 in May of 1945 1.7 American soldiers for every German that was killed including German soldiers that were bombed so you can imagine what we were up against was the greatest army that was ever produced in terms of fighting power not logistics or support finally I want to finish with a kind of an iconoclastic that Bob mentioned about Britain we have this view that Brit Britain was weak but Britain's Army and Navy and Royal Air Force and its empire played in some ways the most inspirational pivotal World War sure Britain was the only country of everybody in World War two that went to war on the principle of saving another country poem we went to war when we were attacked Germany attacked it Italy attacked Japan attacked Soviet Union only went to war when it was done Britain went to war to save Poland Britain was the only country that fought on the first day of the war September 1st 1939 and the last day of the war September 2nd 1945 only country that did that Britain was the only of the Allied powers that fought the Soviet Union by itself from the fall of France in June 23rd of 1942 the invasion of Soviet Union in June 22nd a whole year there was only Britain and Britain and I'll leave you with this statistic we think of German manpower today in German industrial might the British and their empire out produced the Soviet Union in every category by itself of war material except tanks and they got very close in tanks they created more machine guns more airframes more small arms fire more trucks more fighter planes than did Germany and as you know British technology we sort of make fun of Jaguars and many's but very early in the war the Supermarine Spitfire was either equal or superior to the me-109 the Germans never produced a bomber like the Lancaster bomber and they never produced radar sets or sonar most of the sophisticated technology that won the naval war sonar and radar came from the British and most of the cryptology and the intelligence breakthrough came from Britain in some ways we would not have won the war the way we did without the British and their empire and without I'll open it up thank you very much I don't know if you have time protection I don't know how much time I talked about too long yes yes I mean the question was what was the role of ideology and racial ideology and yes well - there were two roles played and we associate usually racial animosity with the Axis powers because they had a formal doctrine of national socialism but actually Japanese Bushido and Shia Shinto Buddhism was almost as racial as more racial but in the negative sense that diluted them to the role of economics and GDP and total manpower they felt that the Japanese soldier was such and the German soldier was such that they could defeat enemies that relied on airpower or relied on transportation but did not have the guts to mix it up they were quickly disposed of that idiocy when they met the first Marine Division in Guadalcanal all you have to read is William WB sledges were the old breed and you can see the Americans 1st Marine Division fought hand-to-hand better than the Japanese we've been fighting for 10 years in China the second thing about their racial triumphalism is that they lost enormous opportunities and enlisting sympathetic population so there was a revolt against socialism in Europe when the German army went into France or Belgium there were appeasers and there were collaborators but there were a lot of people who were more afraid of the Soviet Union given its behavior in the great terror than they were of Germany and there was a lot of pro-fascist movements and had Hitler been able to capitalize on that and even with his racial triumph aside e ology he didn't list over 200,000 non Germans in the waffen-ss one of the things we don't like to talk about is most of the waffen-ss divisions that committed two or three of them that committed the most atrocities in Germany were made up of Norwegian Swedish Dutch and especially Austrian SS officers but they lost opportunities Japan lost opportunities with Asian allies it was very strange that for most of the 1920s and 30s people in Indonesia and the Philippines and Southeast Asia had been told that so-called white Anglo Saxons ie the British were the real imperialist and with it only took the Japanese two years to make the white anglo-saxon imperialists more sympathetic characters to them than fellow Asians and almost in every case with its minor exceptions in India Asian populations preferred to be liberated by Americans and British than to cooperate with the Japanese yes yeah I think we all on the campuses we we all object to this industrial military complex or militarism or why are we spending 4 percent GDP in the military 700 million 700 billion dollars but it's a reaction to what we did in nineteen thirteen fourteen fifteen sixteen and what we did from 1935 to forty one with one major exception we had this brilliant southern congressman Carl Vinson through three naval acts if it wasn't for him the fleet that defeated Japan in 1945 was already being built in 1941 the SX carrier and the Iowa and the Missouri Klauss battleships in Montana the future Montana class that was envisioned b-29 the ideas for the b-29 so all but those military drawings we were starting to gear up in 41 but as a reaction to that we said we're never going to get our situation get in that situation again and and that woke down very elementally so when the Sherman tank was a good tank there was 30 tons it had three and a half inches of armor it had a short barrel 75 millimeter cannon it went up against a panther and tiger and it was blown apart 88 millimeter or long barrel 78 millimeter five inches of sloped armor in the case of the Panther so the American said even though it took ten hours of maintenance to make a German run one one hour and it took 1 hour maintenance to make a Sherman run 10 hours so we never saw tigers and Panthers because there was only 2,000 of them and we had 50,000 Sherman's but when you did see them its frightens people for the rest of their life and the Abrams tank project it took us almost 40 years what we said we'll never get in a situation where we're inferior as we were in Korea with Russian tanks and World War 2 and we're never going to have a fighter that is inferior to the zero or inferior to the 109 what they all of ours were till we built the p-47 p-51 and the courser in Hellcat so there was a reaction that we don't want to ever get in that situation again and more importantly we felt that Germany and Japan would not have been as bellicose had we been armed they would have understood it would've been a reminder how big the United States is and how capable we were I think we've been pretty successful with some clear misadventures along the way but nevertheless it's work yes yeah that's a very good question the depression really did influence situation because as you know most depressions in American history had lasted about a year to three years the great depression that started in 29 had a mini depression in 38 and 39 it went on for a decade and I think I think economic historians will believe that a lot of the policies of the New Deal of expanding government expanding regulations expanding taxes of were the wrong thing that they suppress business activity but whatever your view of that is Germany and Japan were felt to have gone through depression much easier and so was britain so there was a sense that in the united states especially with charles lindbergh to take one example he went over and looked with Goering at the German he said this is the middle of the depression and they have this Junkers a Stuka spot Stuka dive-bomber we have nothing like it we're way behind the me-109 and they went through the depression because they feel something they they're United were a motley and it led to this right-wing sort of self-criticism the United States so the depression did one other thing and that is it created a level of hardship rampant poverty the United States that it created a ideology that America I remember my father I said well how could you take Benzedrine all day long and then a sleeping pill and then when you guys had sinus infections you had to go up 30,000 feet and her eardrums blew out and then they told you not even to wear parachutes when you got over Japan because they were gonna execute you would behead you when he said compared to the depression it wasn't that bad we got he said for the first time in his life he had steak and ice cream and I think that was true that entire Greatest Generation yes in the back well first the question was why did germ Britain and France in 1939 declare war on Germany but not the Soviet Union well ostensibly they had no way of getting to the Soviet Union because it was on the other side of Germany and that was the real reason but they needed an a an excuse and the excuse was that on when they went to war in 1939 on September 1st the Soviet Union did not invade Poland from the backside 217 days later and then they did this oh my gosh the Soviet Union Bay we had no idea they'd do that but you know it's too late to declare war on them now because we're in extremis but there was a great it had some effect and most importantly if you look at what the appeasing party had been saying is that they they didn't just appease because they were afraid of Germany they felt that Germany was a check on the Soviet Union and they used that and even though they had a non-aggression pact they thought well deep down inside the Germans will eventually attack them so why attack them with Germany just keep Germany out and remember that when they fought when they declared war on Germany did they do anything no they called it remember the phoney war or the Sitz group they the first day of the war what did Britain do they put in 20,000 pamphlets and they bombed Berlin with pamphlets at night saying please don't go to war with us and they didn't do anything France went eight miles into the Saarland why the German army was in Poland and the French general said well where's the German army and the intelligence came back so there is no German army they're all in Poland you can go all the way to Berlin they said now we don't want to do it we'll go back and hope we don't provoke them so we they send a letter through diplomatic circles and said we went into your country but we didn't mean to and now we're back and they had the Maginot Line all the way along the French border up to unfortunately the Belgian border and then they figured that the Germans would never go through a second time as they did in World War one and of course the Germans planned to do that all along yes Bob you cut me off when yeah yeah no I'm not you cutting off just tell me when I'm out of town I don't like listening to myself so I know I don't know the effect on you so go ahead yeah the question is where are we militarily at present and the good news is that we still spend even with the armament of China about 17 times more than all the budgets in the world to get today military budgets and if you look at our fleet our Air Force and the quality of our ground troops I think we're still preeminent and you look at our technology we're preeminent the problem we're having is that after saying that no other country has so many strategic responsibilities so we have guaranteed the integrity of Korea and there under our nuclear umbrella we haven't I think we have winked a nod and guaranteed the integrity I hope of Taiwan we have of Japan we have of all of Europe that can't even spend 2% we've declared the integrity of Australia New Zealand and Israel and we have alliances de facto with certain Gulf and moderate so-called modern Arab States the problem with all of this is we don't have a big enough military to fight say two wars at once to protect all of those strategic interests not to mention these optional Wars like Syria or Libya or Afghanistan or or Isis and our the Iraq war so our strategic ambitions are not are much greater than our military ability and what China is doing I'll just finish on one example so we have 12 fleet groups each fleet group with the carrier's now about 8 to 10 billion and the fleet that follows it is about 25 billion we have 12 of them China's got one no other country can take off they have to take off vertically that we were the only ones that have this technology it's mastered that being said there are areas now that we can't operate near the Spratly Islands or the Chinese water the the South China Sea because they have defensive mechanism same thing off Finland I'll give you one example the Chinese have developed technology to send maybe six to seven thousand missiles about as long as my arm about six to eight inches off the water and they can go about 60 miles so if a US carrier was in international waters supporting a invasion or an attack on North Korea and China wanted to intervene they could send a swarm of those right along the cut and it would take out a ten billion dollar carrier in five thousand American we could not stop that could China do the same and pretty carrier off our coast no so their attitude is we're going to by the United States the ability to move and be Mobile in our sphere of interests and that's new but it's not a global threat yet it will be we still have a GDP that's twice Japan I think my most assessments almost twice China even though we only have one third of the population but we're getting there it's it's not good on the horizon two more questions right there one quick one the question was in anybody tried to talk Hitler relevant it was sort of like the Iraq war you remember everybody said when the statue fell and 72% of the Wall Street Journal said they were happy with Iraq and then by Abu Ghraib you only had 22% and you couldn't find anybody that was ever for the war word that 50% go it was sort of my brilliant war was screwed up by your terrible occupation and the same thing happened in the Soviet in the diaries of Halldor and the deities of Villa Mont in some of the transcriptions of Rommel you see things that say why are we doing this but most of the High Command thought that they could win because they hadn't been beaten and the Soviets had such a dismal and they were very happy up until August and after the key a pocket and a race to Moscow by December 7th you know Japan said they're gonna take Moscow that's one of the reasons they declared war as well they thought Moscow would fall but after that little mini Soviet offense I'd say that half the German people they had lost 600,000 dead the Germans had by December and 50% of the population was all negative and there were major people member he sacked 32 generals of Field Marshal staff 12 field marshals on the rest were our equivalent of four star general in December 41 to a march of 42 after Stalingrad which fell and Feb weary of 1943 there was nobody in the army thought it was a good idea and and if I think most people would say there was no gold gurbles wrote a letter and say there's no public support so I better change the message it's not we're going to conquer the Soviet Union deserved it we're gonna save Western civilization from the raping communist Asiatics horde that's going to come so whether you like us or not you were your only choice and that was a new propaganda because there was no public support for it last question well remember that the America first group did not really start I mean there was isolationism but it really didn't get going till May of 1940 so it was groped with my point is it was growing not declining even though Britain had been bombed even though there was no more France and part of the reason was there was a great resentment there was two reasons for the America first movement one was there was a great resentment against the Soviet Union because of the great terror and the show trials and they thought that people were quite willing to see the Soviet Union wiped out and they thought this was good that these two autocratic Jigar nuts were going to destroy them and you'd be surprised American politicians who said that Henry Stimson said let him kill each other off that was the attitude the second we have still had a large German population it was it was the largest ethnic minority United States not as powerful war one and there was a lot of anti-semitism who said that these Jewish conspirators because this was coming from Europe European propaganda they're trying to get us into another war to save the Jews and they didn't really believe the stories coming out of Germany or when there were people in the US State Department let me put it that way who were openly anti-semitic and felt that we're telling Roosevelt that this was a war for the Jews and so it was very strong had they not attacked Pearl Harbor I don't think we would have entered unless Britain may invaded if Germany and Italy had not declared war on us after Pearl Harbor it's clear to me we would have not declared war on Germany or Italy we would just fought that the Japanese in the Pacific and then we would have been and this was clear people said that for three days Roosevelt's advisor said we're gonna defeat the Japanese then we're gonna be in a very good position and Britain will have to come to us if it's still around in beg us but we we declared war right back on them and so had they not declared war on us I I think it would have been pretty bad and Germany by this time was processing heavy water and we know now that their nuclear program was about two years further developed and we have thought so I would say that in Germany was talking about a three-stage missile that we placed the v2 which was on the drawing boards the v1 was two years away from deployment they were talking about they had a new bomber called the gyro bomber and the American bomber six engine bomber and they were going to use the Portuguese Azores to bomb what they thought these so there was some bad things on the horizon and Pearl Harbor in a very counterintuitive way shook us up destroyed the American 1st movement kind of discredited Charles Lindbergh who actually fought quite bravely in the war but was forever discredited and really saved Western civilization without oh thank you very much - pop pop I'm the director of the Center for us consider the sponsor this event in addition to events like this one thing we do is that we sponsor every year a visiting scholar and conservative plot is any of you know this year we are tremendous asset to our students in the broader community so thank you for thanking him and thank you
