Transcript of Why World War II Matters: Victor Davis Hanson

Read the full transcript of classicist and military historian Victor Davis Hanson’s lecture titled “Why World War II Matters” at Hillsdale College, [Sep 16, 2016].

TRANSCRIPT:

Introduction

MODERATOR: Our speaker for tonight is a renowned military historian, former classics professor, and a commentator on modern warfare and politics for several prestigious media outlets, including the National Review and The Washington Times. He received his bachelor’s degree from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and his doctorate, both in classics, from Stanford University. He’s a senior fellow in residence in classics and military history at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University, and he’s been a visiting professor here at Hillsdale College since 2004, where he teaches an intense three-week course each fall.

In 2001, he published his best-known work, Carnage and Culture, Landmark Battles and the Rise to Western Power, which became a New York Times bestseller. In 2007, he was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President George W. Bush. When he isn’t teaching, writing bestsellers, and receiving awards, he enjoys time on the family farm in Selma, California, which has been the Hanson home for several generations.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Thank you very much. This is my 13th year that I’ve visited Hillsdale to teach. It’s been 14 years since your president, Larry Arnn, came to my farm, called me up and said, I’d like to talk to you about coming to Hillsdale. And I said, where is it? And he said, Michigan. I knew where it was, but I acted as if I didn’t. And I said, God, I can’t go to Michigan. And he said, when I’m done with breakfast, you’ll be coming to Hillsdale. And he was right.

So I’d like to talk for about 35 minutes about World War II. That’s what we call it. In Britain, it’s known as the Second World War. And then I’d like to entertain questions. I have a book that’s coming out from Basic Books called The Second World Wars, plural, because this idea of a holistic single war was a very late concept, not until about 1941. And we’ll get to that in a minute.

Personal Connections to the War

But I was always confused. As a little boy growing up in the late 1950s and early 1960s, we would go to these family dinners on the farm. And I had one uncle who fought in the Aleutians. And he’d say he fought the Japanese, and it was cold. And he tended plane tenders. I had a first cousin who fought in Iran. And his job was to be at Basra and convey Dodge trucks to the Russians to fight Army Group South on the Eastern Front in 1942 and three.

I had a father who was the loudest of everybody, who flew 39 missions in a B-29. He would talk about his brother, Victor Hanson, who I was named after, who was killed on Sugarloaf Hill on the last day, 6th Marine Division in 1945. I had another first cousin who would come to these things. And he said he rolled with Pat. And I said, what does roll with Pat mean? He fought in the Third Army as well.

And I’d always, when it was all over, I’d say to my dad, these guys, you didn’t fight in the same war. I remember that conversation. So it was the impetus for this book. He said, what do you mean? And I said, well, some guys fought the Italians. And some guys fought the Germans. And some guys fought the Japanese.

The Global Scale of the War

And I mean, I was only about 12. I didn’t know what he was talking about. But I had a good instinct in that sense. I said, they fought from the Aleutian Islands in the Japanese there, the Pacific, all the way down to New Guinea, and from the middle of China all the way to Hawaii, and on the European front from the Volga River all the way out off the coast. They sank submarines three miles off the coast of Miami and from Norway and the Arctic Circle to the Sahara Desert. And then as I got older, that kept reverberating in my mind.

And I thought, what do they have in common? I know that the fascists at least could make the argument that Italian fascism and Japanese militarism and national socialism in Germany were alike. But what did we, the Allies, the three major belligerents? I mean, the British were a parliamentary democracy. But they did want to hold the empire. There was no person who wanted to get rid of it more than Franklin Roosevelt. We were very anti-British in that sense. And of course, we allied with Joseph Stalin, who had killed more people than anybody alive at that time.

And the answer, of course, is they had only one thing in common, the Allies. They all had either been surprise attacked by an Axis power, or in the case of Britain, their ally had been attacked. That was all they had in common at that point. That was the basis of the Allies, that they said that we don’t have to be perfect. We just have to be good, because these people have attacked us or our interests. And that was the basis for this idea of a second World War as a unique whole.

The Unprecedented Scale of Death

If you think about it, it really matters, because there’s a lot of things I’m going to try to get in the next 30 minutes. But one thing is there had never been an event like it before. 60 to 65 million people died. That figure at the end of World War II was 40 million. It keeps going up every year as research comes in, mostly from two fronts, the Chinese front, where the total is now up to 17 million people, and of course, the Eastern front, 27 million people.

So in other words, it was much more lethal than the great plague of the 14th century, the Black Death.

It was more lethal than any tornado, earthquake in the history of the human experience. Of all the wars that have happened in the last 300 years together, the death toll did not match World War II. There has been nothing like it.

27,000 people died per day for six years. Why we’ve been at Hillsdale today, more people died in the same commensurate 3 and a half hours than died in Iraq in the late Iraq War. It was that lethal.

Unique Characteristics of the War

A couple of other things that are just mind-boggling, it’s the only war, major war, in which more civilians were killed. 80% of the 65 million were civilians. It’s the only war where the losers killed 75% of the people. The losers did. The winners, you know. Japan killed seven times more people than they lost, and they lost.

So there’s things that are bizarre about, and how do we explain this? It’s inexplicable. Why was it so lethal? A couple of things jump out at us. It was the first war when we had two billion people on the planet. More people died because there were more people alive. We never had a mechanized war with that many people alive. It was the first truly global war.

We call it World War I, but it didn’t go down to Africa. The Graf Spee in World War II was sunk in Buenos Aires, and what happened was that nothing like that was comparable in World War I. There was not a Pacific Theater in World War I. This was a total global war, all over the globe. And it unfortunately occurred at a period of Western technological excellence, the zenith of Western technology.

Technology and the War’s Lethality

So there was the internal combustion engine had reached the pinnacle of efficiency. 500, 400 mile planes, ships, people could travel very quickly and reach these places. There were instantaneous communications. That added to the death toll. There had never been weapons like this before in any war. This was a Western versus a Western war.

It was not a Western versus a non-Western. It wasn’t the British fighting the Zulus, where it was very quick and lethal because they had the technology and the others didn’t. It was not a non-Western, non-Western. The Aztecs fighting the Toltecs. It was a Western powers turning that tradition on each other at a time when they had reached the pinnacle of their excellence.

So there had never been anything in the world like napalm. There had never been anything like the plutonium and uranium bombs. There had never been anything like a V-2 rocket. There had never been anything like a B-29. So technology accounts for a lot of it. As does the sheer numbers of people alive. The war was long.

There had been longer wars, 30 Years War, 100 Years War, but not recently in the modern industrial age. Civil War was four years roughly. World War I was four years. This war was six years long. That explains some of it.

Offensive vs. Defensive Technology

In every technological cycle, there’s peaks and valleys between offensive weapons and defensive weapons. In the ancient world, Greek armor was protective. So it was not able to be penetrated and casualties were only 10% of battles. Until the age of gunpowder, a city could resist a catapult.

At other times, even with the introduction of gunpowder, the arquebus was so slow firing that it was hard to kill a lot of people. Today, we’re back into a defensive cycle. There are things in Kevlar, helmets and ceramic plates that protect. I went to Iraq twice during the surge and I remember going to the operation headquarters and there was a wall with people’s body armor where they were shattered with AK-47 bullets and a little sign, this person got no wounds. That was inconceivable in World War II. Machine guns today are not that much different than World War II, but defensive armor exists in a way it did not in World War II.

The Role of Ideology

There was also, and I think this is very important, there were ideologies that had never quite existed before. Most of the wars of the past in Europe and Asia were fought over territory or religion or race or ethnicity, but never quite ideology. There were new ideologies of the 20th century that were secular, agnostic, atheistic, mostly National Socialism, Italian Fascism and Soviet Communism and they were a mishmash of bastardized views of everybody from Wagner to Nietzsche to Darwin to the progressive idea of eugenics and natural selection and sterilization.

But they all had one thing in common. They introduced to the equation a relativism about good and bad. They were relative movements. So if you wanted to kill six million Jews, you could find a exegesis to support that without having to be condemned by religion. There was the idea of survival of the fittest or there was the idea of a national destiny or an idea in Russia of radical equality is worth it. But in all of these ideologies, the so-called exalted ends justified any means necessary.

We put all of that together and we end up with this stew that nobody ever dealt with and explains for a large part this horrific tally.

The Early War Years

Now, the word World War II in America and the Second World War was a very late word, not really employed until about 1941. If people look back at World War I in September when Germany invaded Poland, they still knew it as the Great War. For about a year and a half, there was no indication that this war would become what it was, a global bloodbath.

Germany invaded Poland with the Soviet Union, 30 days, 28 days, the war was over. Germany invaded the next spring, Denmark, one day, Norway about six weeks, in April, it was over. Germany invaded the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Belgium, and France. Nobody could believe that would be possible. They had not been able to do it in World War I. They’d only gone 70 miles.

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This time, they took the entire Western democracies, all that area in seven weeks. Battle of Britain, the first time they had been stopped, but not their army, only their navy and their air force, and they took the Balkans, as you remember, in April of 1941 in Greece and Crete. In all of that period, Germany only lost 100,000 soldiers.

The war was over. Hitler had achieved what nobody else in history had done, not Napoleon, not Caesar. He had basically combined what is now the European Union. Any country that opposed him were pro-Nazis, anyway, Switzerland, the Iberians in Portugal and Spain. My ancestors in Sweden were not only selling him iron ore, but doing it with free transit and credit. Turkey was pro-Nazi at this time.

Churchill’s Resistance

He’d achieve it. The war was over. There was a problem in Britain, only because there was this problem called Winston Churchill. Halifax would have cut a deal. The former king, Edward, would have cut. There was one man who’d come to be prime minister the day of the invasion. He would not yield, but that was the only, we were isolationist, and the Soviet Union were collaboration.

Here’s what’s, I think, a very valuable lesson. How did that happen? It had not happened in 1870, 71. It had not happened 1914 to 1918. How, in less than two years, did the whole infrastructure of Europe crumble? I know some of us think, well, they were Nazis. They had Panzers. They had BF 109s, and the answer is no. It was a weird combination of British and French appeasement, Russian collaboration, and American isolationism.

The Military Reality

I’d like very quickly to run through what I mean by that. When Hitler turned to the West after conquering Poland and building an alliance with Bulgaria and Romania and Hungary and having the help of the Soviet Union on his rear, his generals came to him in OKH and OKW, and you can’t go into France. We did that one time. We only got 70 miles. We lost 1.1 million people, and Churchill had said, the hope of the West is a French army.

We think today that the Panzers were indestructible. The German army was three million people. France had three million people. The combined arms of the Netherlands and Belgium was almost another 500,000. The British Expeditionary Army was going to have 300,000. The Allies had almost four million soldiers. They had 3,000 tanks. The Char B tank, to take one example, had a 75 millimeter gun, superior to anything in the German arsenal, Mark I, Mark II, or Mark III.

The Mark Is that went into Poland didn’t even have a main gun on them. The Germans were quite surprised that the submarine Spitfire in most characteristic was comparable to the BF 109, and French Duane fighters were superior. What I’m getting at is, materially, it shouldn’t have happened.

The Causes of World War II

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: It should have been a deadlock. Even though they had the Maginot Line, they knew they could not go through it. They had to go through the Ardennes.

So what happened? And it’s a lesson for the time, and that is they lost deterrence. It’s comparable to this last six months in the United States that all of a sudden, Putin is buzzing all, you notice that, all of our aircraft. All of a sudden, the Iranians are trying to cause an incident with our ships. All of a sudden, people in South Sudan shoot at an American diplomatic car.

All of a sudden, North Korea is sending these things, and it can’t be true because we have overwhelming military power. And the answer is, military power is important up to a point, but you have to have deterrence and not deference. And to get back, what I’m getting at is, if a man from Mars looked at the comparable military strength in Europe at that time, they would have said, Hitler would be insane, as he was told by General Halder.

You’re insane to even think of it. General Beck resigned. You cannot do this.

And he said, I’ve seen them at Munich, and they’re worms. That’s the term he used. The more you try to be affable to Hitler, as Chamberlain did, he said, Herman Goering said, Chamberlain was very nice to it.

The Failure of Appeasement

He said, if I see that old man again, I’m going to jump on his umbrella. And he brought out a trait in human nature that the more you try to defer to someone, when you have power that you did not need to defer, the more you earn contempt for your magnanimity rather than appreciation. In 1928, in France, it was against the law to put in a school book any mention of the triumph at Verdun.

In Holland, in 1930, a destroyer was renamed to a flotilla leader, because they thought that the word destroyer was too provocative. In 1932, 1933, the Oxford Debating Society, in a very famous debate, said, for king and country, I shall not fight. At the same time, they were already trying to violate the tenets of the Versailles Treaty in Germany.

Mussolini was already planning to go into Ethiopia. The Japanese had been fighting for two years. So there was a sense of appeasement, which was a good word at that time, that you were ready to listen.

Soft power, lead from behind, that’s what it was. But it meant that they sacrificed their material advantages because the people in it were not willing to fight. In other words, they lost deterrence because they were not willing to lose a few thousand soldiers so they wouldn’t lose 60 million people in a war.

And that translated on the battlefield as a BF 109 was no better than a French fighter. Mark III tank was no better or worse than a Char tank, but five missions for BF 109 per day, two for a French fighter. French tanks ran out of gas, Germans did not.

French got to the Meuse River to defend it. They asked where the bridging equipment was. They waited a day and a half.

Rommel swam across the river. That was the difference. There was another ingredient that made the inexplicable, not just possible, but certain.

American Isolationism

And that was American isolationism. Now, we had a fight over the Versailles Treaty. Today, we often think the Versailles Treaty was too punitive.

The Americans didn’t want any part of the League of Nations. They said, you know, we brought two million people over there, we saved them at the last moment, and we don’t want to get involved. All they had to do, the United States, is say, forget the League of Nations.

Multipower never works. We just have an alliance with the French and the British, that if they are invaded, we will send two million people, as we did in the war. We got a million over there in six months.

Had we done that after the invasion of Poland, and had a million soldiers been there, they probably would have had a deterrent, and Hitler would not have gone into Western Europe. We didn’t do that because we felt that the Versailles Treaty had been unfair. There were people who were saying, World War I, now that I think about it, was the cause of arms merchants, automatic alliances that caused automatic mobilizations, greedy capitalists, everything but German imperial aggression.

Believe me, the Versailles Treaty, compared to what we did to Germany after World War II, was a piece of cake. Nothing in the Versailles Treaty said, we’re going to go into Germany, occupy it, cut it in fours, and have troops there for 50 years. Does anybody here in Germany say, we have to go to war again, because you were mean after 1945? And the answer is, we did the two stupid things that you do in the history of war, is you are punitive, and you’re weak.

We humiliated Germany in the war clause, and then we were not willing to occupy the country, and stand with a gun to their head, and say, you’re going to have a Weimar Republic, and we’re going to watch it day by day by day. And so, if you compare the Versailles Treaty, if we had just looked at what the September program, that’s the idea of what Germany would have done had they won in World War I, annexed all of Belgium, all the French ports, get rid of Luxembourg. It’s pretty punitive, what they did to Russia in 1918 at Brest-Litovsk.

They annexed 50 million people. We forget today that in World War I, there were only 80 miles outside St. Petersburg, the German army. They took a million square miles of Tsarist Russia.

It was the most punitive piece, and nobody said, that’s too mean. So, 1871, they took all the Alsace-Lorraine. So, we were wedded to the wrong exegesis of what had happened.

We wanted no part of it, and that empowered Hitler. There was a final, and probably the most important catalyst for this unnecessary war that turned border skirmishes into World War II, and that was the Soviet Union was not just appeasing and isolation, it was collaborationist.

Soviet Collaboration with Hitler

On August 23rd of 1939, they signed a non-aggression pact with Adolf Hitler, and they ended up providing Hitler with 30% of his oil, 30% of his wheat, almost 20% of precious metals, chromium and tungsten, and things like that.

At one point, later on, when Stalin, of course, as he always did, berated Churchill for not opening the second front, Churchill turned to him and said, well, wait a minute, the bombers, the Junkers and the Dorners bombers that were killing British people in September of 1940 were fueled by your oil wells in the Caucasus. Forget something about Stalin. Of the six major belligerents in World War II, on the Axis side, Italy, Japan, and Germany, and the United States, Russia, and Britain, Stalin made a deal with every one of them at one time or another, and he honored the ones with the Axis better than he did us.

He never broke the non-aggression pact with Germany, and by affiliation with Italy, he signed one with the Japanese in April of 1941, right before the invasion by the Germans, and it was so effective that you could take a liberty ship from Portland or Seattle, fill it full of aluminum, take it all the way to Vladivostok, the Pacific port of the Soviet Union, and the Japanese would get away and not touch it, because they didn’t want to violate that non-aggression, even though they were killing us in places like Tarawa and Iwo Jima. That collaboration, which didn’t do him any good, did it? That collaboration allowed Hitler to turn westward, and he said later in table talk, I would have never done that had I not had a secure flank.

How Border Wars Became a Global Conflagration

So you think of this, isolationism, appeasement, and collaboration did something that shouldn’t have happened. It turned a border war in 1941 into a global conflagration because of three events, all explicable by these three motives.

Number one, nobody thought that Hitler would be so stupid to invade the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union, in the period from August 23rd, 1939 to the period when Hitler stabbed Stalin in the back and invaded Russia, gave more precious metals and resources to the Third Reich each month than they got in an entire year by looting the Soviet Union.

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It was the stupidest thing in the world. The Third Reich had 80 million people, the Soviet Union had 180 million, and yet they almost, as you know, pulled it off. That would not have happened had these other events not occurred first.

That meant that all of a sudden, a dormant border war, there had been no fighting since Crete in April, turned into a new world war. Suddenly, the front went from Crete and Athens very quickly to Rostov, outside of St. Petersburg, and if you can believe, I don’t know if we should believe the soldiers of Army Group Center, but they said on December 5th, they saw the spires of the Kremlin. The front had turned into a continental war between Asia and Europe.

Pearl Harbor and America’s Entry

That was not just a world war yet. Two other events that nobody had anticipated occurred on December 7th, when the Japanese surprised us, attacked us in the Marianas, the Philippines, Wake Island, of course, Pearl Harbor, and then the British in Malaya, Burma, and most tragically, Singapore. Why did that happen? Because as General Yamamoto, we all think he was such a wonderful man, I can raise hell for six months.

No, he said, I will resign if you don’t let me do Pearl Harbor. We all say, well, Admiral Yamamoto would like Foreign Minister Matsuoka and General Yamaguchi. They’d all been in the United States in the 20s.

They respected us. They understood how nice we were. No, they had contempt for us.

They said so in their memoirs. Yamamoto said, I’ve seen these people. They have nice cars and they wear spats.

He was right, and he thought that he would give us a terrible slap on the face, and we would say, please, we will do it. And why did he think that? Because he said, and the Japanese Foreign Minister said, any country that won’t come to the aid of Britain while it’s burning down surely won’t care about a few battleships and carriers at Pearl Harbor. We had the second largest Navy in the world.

We all think the Japanese Navy had 11 carriers, most carriers in the world, but in tonnage and types of ships and quality, the United States had a superior Navy, and as they were bombing Pearl Harbor, we had 27 carriers on order that were built within two years. We built 151 light escort and fleet carriers. It was insane to do that.

Why did they do it? Same reason that Hitler went into the Soviet Union, because they didn’t think that the dangers outweighed the possible glory and material benefit, and they had good reason, because of appeasement, isolationism, and collaboration.

Germany Declares War on America

And then finally, the third unfortunate event that turned a border war in Europe into a global holocaust, I don’t know if you’ve heard of it, I don’t know why it happened. We can argue about this on December 11th.

Germany and Italy declared war on us. Think of that. And why did they do it? Hitler gave 50 different reasons, depending on what day of the week you happen to transcribe his rants at night, two in the morning.

Sometimes he said, I wanted to help our U-boat commanders who were sick and tired of seeing American ships go right out in Miami with a silhouette in the city, and they couldn’t touch them, and they did sink 14 million tons of Anglo-American shipping by the time of the war. Sometimes he said, I went to war because I owed it to the Japanese, and as General Warren says, you didn’t owe him anything. You double-crossed them with a non-aggression pact when they were fighting Zhukov in 1939, and they did it to us.

That’s what we do, we’re Axis. Sometimes he said that the Americans will have a two-front war. I’m brilliant, I’ve never had a two-front war.

And they said, you have a two-front war. You’ve got Britain now and America, and you’ve got, oh no, the Americans are cowboys, it’ll take them five years to get, who knows what the reason was. Even less so Mussolini, but those three events, the invasion of Soviet Union in June, Pearl Harbor, and the declaration by the Germans, followed by our own counter-declaration later in the day, meant that now the war was, as I said, global, and it was pretty inevitable that it was going to be a lethal war like no other.

The Inevitable Allied Victory

And there was a simple calculus that sums up the war, and we’ll get to the end of it, and that is, could the Axis powers, who had been fighting in Spain, in China, in the Anschluss, bullying Czechoslovakia, and had rearmed much earlier, could they defeat the Allied powers before they rearmed? If they couldn’t, they were going to lose. They had 200 million people, Soviet Union, United States, and Great Britain had 400 million. They had tanks.

Britain produced more tanks in World War II than did Germany. Soviet Union produced 70,000, we produced 55,000. Germany only produced 20,000.

There were 600,000 airframes produced in World War II, 600,000, we produced 400,000 of them. Germans never built a four-engine bomber, they couldn’t do it. Japanese couldn’t do it, the Italians couldn’t do it.

The Americans and the British produced 40,000 of them. So that was going to be inevitable. By 1945, in September, the United States’ gross domestic product was larger than Germany’s, Japan’s, what was left of Italy’s, Britain’s, and the Soviet Union put together.

There was no way they were going to win that war if we mobilized, we being the Allies. So they had to win it very quickly. They thought they almost did it.

They almost did it by, I think the high-water mark would be sometime in July of 1942. Army Group Center was about 100 miles from the Caspian Sea in Grozny. They just about had their grip on all of the oil of the Soviet Union.

German soldiers had climbed the Caucasus and Przhevochka on Mount Everest. The front was 1,500 miles long. Moscow was still besieged, so was St. Petersburg.

The Japanese had lost a total of 3,000 soldiers only. They had had a setback at Midway, but they had most of the greater Asia Prosperity Sphere under their control. They were going into Guadalcanal to cut the supply lines to Australia.

And in North Africa, Rommel was 60 miles from Cairo. Excuse me, Alexander. And then suddenly, there was something called Guadalcanal, 1st U.S. Marine Division, Stalingrad, and El Alamein, and the whole thing vanished, and then the war was essentially over.

In a sense, it was just a question of how many million people are going to be necessary to lose their lives to insist on unconditional surrender rather than an armistice. So we get to the question, why did the Allies win so easily? I mentioned that the war was the story of the people who killed the most, the nations that killed the most people lost to the nations that built the most stuff. They killed 80% of all the 60 million, and we built over 80% of the munitions.

And in war, unfortunately, munitions can be more important than lives. But there were a few other reasons.

Why the Allies Prevailed

Number one, we had a more appealing message to third powers like India not to revolt or the Indonesian people to not cooperate in Switzerland to give back pilots. And the message was, we didn’t start this. They attacked us, and we had something called the Atlantic Charter, the Four Freedoms, the Casablanca Conference. It was very hard to do because we were working with Stalin, who was a mass murderer, but the appeal, at least, the propaganda was we are not taking anybody’s land.

The United States didn’t take anybody’s land. We don’t want anything other than to beat the Axis. That was much more appealing than the Yamato race, the Rasa race in Italy, and the Volk in Germany deserve this because they are superior, uber-mentioned to you people.

That helped a great deal. Second thing that helped is you don’t have to be democratic to win a war, but it’s good to have some democratic allies because their leaders don’t lie as much. So what do I mean by that? Every time that Hitler talked to the Japanese, he lied.

Don’t believe me? Count Ciano, the son-in-law of Mussolini, said, “We saw Hitler today, and he lied. He said he wasn’t going into the Soviet Union. We know he is next week, so we’re going to lie back to him and go into the Balkans again.”

And Count Ciano then says the next day, “Well, we can’t get too mad at him that he invaded Russia because we invaded Greece and didn’t tell him.” When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, Hitler said, where’s Pearl Harbor? 1939, the Japanese are in the middle of a fight on the Mongolian border, and Foreign Minister Matsuoka says that we’re part of an axis, the Pact of Steel, the anti-combatant pact. Hitler just signed a deal with the Soviets.

Hitler’s ready to go in to the Soviet Union. He’s planning in March. Talks to the toady General Keitel and says, “Do you think there’s any chance that the Japanese will invade from the east?” He says, “Not now. They just signed a non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union.” He said, “That’s terrible.” He said, “Yeah, they did what we did to them.”

So there was no trust when people are not democratic. Stalin was a liar, but he had two democratic leaders. Roosevelt and Churchill had honored their word and he did business with them, and he was more or less, until the end of the war, pretty dependable that he would do things that he said he would do, and that was, he didn’t sign a separate peace with the Germans.

Allied Cooperation vs. Axis Dysfunction

We had cooperation. They didn’t. What do I mean by that? Mussolini invaded everybody with almost nothing. He invaded the Balkans. He invaded Greece. He invaded Somaliland. He invaded Libya. He did, and he never told Hitler. There was no cooperation.

Hitler said, “Oh my God, he’s gone into Yugoslavia. I can’t, I gotta go into Russia in two months. Why did he do that? I’ve gotta go down there,” and he delayed, supposedly, he delayed Operation Barbarossa by 30 days.

We sat down with our partners, we being the allies, and said, the Russians are going to fight on one front and one front only. They’re not going to have strategic bombing. They’re not going to have four-engine bombers. They’re not going to fight in Italy. They’re not going to have a U-boat war. They’re not going to be in the Pacific.

All we want from them is to kill German soldiers, and they killed 75% of all the Wehrmacht soldiers in the war, almost five million of them. They broke the back, and they did it because they moved their factories to the Urals. They had great munitions, but we gave them 2,000 locomotives, 375 Dodge trucks, so much so that Goering said, “These are automatic robots.”

He used the word robot. “Automatons,” he said, “because these damn Americans have motorized their divisions, and 70% of our divisions are driven by horses.” And Goering said, “They have an oil war, we have a grass war. We have to find grass, they all have to get his oil. And they have it, and we don’t have grass.” So we divided up the labor.

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We said to the Russians, we’ll go to Italy, we’ll go to Sicily, and we’ll go to the Pacific. And with the British, we said to them, in the Pacific, we’re not going to get along here as well as we did in Europe. You have colonial interests, we understand that. You want to protect India. You want to get back Burma. You want to, you’re worried about Malaya.

We just want to, we’re not a colonial power. We were attacked, and we’re closer to the Japanese. We just want to go straight to Japan. So we’ll do our thing, and you do our thing, and maybe we’ll meet in 1944 or something. And it worked out. There was a division of labor.

It was more than just that, though. For the first year of the U-boat war, German torpedoes bounced off like ours did. They were no good. At the same time they were bouncing off, Japan had the greatest torpedo in the world. Oxygenated long-term, best torpedo, 40-mile range, and they didn’t even know it, the Germans did. Japanese needed a fuel-injected, supercharged aircraft engine. Germany had a good one. They didn’t even know it. There was no cross-fertilization between the axes because they didn’t trust each other, as you would imagine.

We take the Sherman tank. We find out it doesn’t work very well against these new Panthers. The British say, “Don’t worry, we have a 17-pounder. We’ll put it in the turret.” They gave us 2,000 Fireflies. They could blow a Tiger out at one mile, and they were much cheaper than building a new tank.

We had a great plane, the P-51, and we didn’t quite match the Focke-Wulf 190. The British said, “Don’t worry, we’ll drop a Rolls-Morlan engine in it,” and suddenly it was the best fighter of the war. That was constant.

Strategic Vision

And finally, there was one other thing, getting to the end. When you go to war, you have to have some conception of how to destroy the enemy’s ability to fight because most enemies will not have an arm assist. Sometimes they do in World War I. We had an idea.

What do I mean by that? The Americans said, as soon as after Pearl Harbor, we have a way. We have four-engine bombers. We have two on the drawing boards. We’re going to bomb their capitals into smithereens, and we’re going to land. We have the Navy to do it. Britain says, we have a Navy, and we’re going to help you. We have a four-engine bomber. And the Russians said, we don’t need those. We’re on land, but we will be in Berlin.

Germany, Hermann Göring, of all people, said to Hitler, “Mein Fuehrer, how are we going to get to New York? You declare war,” and he says, “We’re going to have an America bomber.” He says, “We don’t even have any bomber. How are we going to get there?” Admiral Yamamoto was asked, “When are you going to bomb San Diego? When are you going to bomb Portland?” He said, “I’m never going to bomb Portland.”

“Well, what’s going to stop Detroit and all these places from making weapons?” They had no idea. So they started a war with powers they had no ability to reach their homeland, and they lost, unsurprisingly.

Winners and Losers

If we look back at the war, who was the big winners and losers? Biggest winner and the biggest loser were the Soviet Union. They lost 27 million men, partly because of the stupidity of Joseph Stalin, partly because they took on the Wehrmacht, partly because they had collaborated and they were surprised. That being said, for such a duplicitous power, as I said, cut a deal with everybody, when the war was over, the Soviet Union, even though they had that lost 50 million people who had been occupied, 27 million dead, for the first time in their history, they were in the most advantageous strategic position.

Imagine, all of Eastern Europe was now communist. The Baltic stakes were back inside the Soviet Union, so was the Crimea, Ukraine, and as one Soviet diplomat laughed in Britain, “You guys went to war to stop totalitarianism in Eastern Europe by Hitler and you’ve ensured it by us.” And it was sort of true, wasn’t it? George Patton said that.

Britain waged a brilliant war. It was the only country to fight the first day of the war and the last day of the war. September 1st to September 2nd, six years. No other country fought the entire war. No other country went to war, think of this, for the principle of an ally. We only went to war when they attacked us. Soviet Union only went to war when they attacked us. Germany attacked people, Italy attacked people, Japan, not Britain. They went to war for a principle. They were brilliantly led.

They put 40% of their investment in land, in air and naval power. They avoided the Somme, the Verdun. They lost the fewest of all the major, 425, less than half what they had lost in World War I and they fought a much more ambitious war in two.

That being said, they mobilized, we think we mobilized, they mobilized to a degree that was unprecedented, more so in terms of per capita investment than the United States or Soviet Union and they were flat broke when the war was over. And then unfortunately, because of the deprivation, they began to socialize their rails, their healthcare system, their transportation, their iron, their steel industries, their power and lo and behold, within 10 years, the countries that were flattened like Japan and Germany were industrial powerhouses turning out Mercedes and Hondas and Toyotas and Britain’s car industry, to take one example, was over with.

So they had a very tragic and they also gave up their empire, willingly so, but theirs was a tragic experience and it makes me very mad when I hear Obama saying they’re going to get back at the Q. They were the most admirable and idealistic of all the allies and they fought way above what people thought they were capable and every single category of munitions, except one year of planes, they outproduced the Third Reich that had all of occupied the EU of today under its power.

Not much to say about the Italians, they quit in 43 and so after the war was over, we said, well, they weren’t really involved in the Holocaust, people fought two years in Italy with a civil war, Germans fought the Italians, we fought them, let them go, they’re Italians, Vatican, et cetera. So they didn’t end up suffering.

Japan, Japan was strange because as I said, they were the most vicious, they killed 17 million people in China and yet they lost three million, quite a lot. We burned down 40% of their urban through the B-29 incendiary raids in Hiroshima and Nagasaki but we never invaded their land as we had done Italy and Germany so they had not seen a battle on their own turf. I know they’d been bombed but when they unilaterally then surrendered, they never quite accepted that the American Marines or army could get face to face with them and they never came to deal with their past as they do today and if you don’t believe me, they just put their first big carrier, did you see it? They just launched it, you know what the name of it was? The Kaga, you know what the Kaga was? It was the leading carrier at Pearl Harbor.

America’s Postwar Dilemma

Finally, we come to the United States and if you look at what our aims and objectives were, we achieved all of them. We wanted to not just defeat Germany and Japan and Italy, we had done that in terms of Austria-Hungary and Germany in World War I and we said never again are we going to have to come back here. We’re going to have a unconditional surrender even though it’s going to cost us several hundred thousand lives and we occupied their country, all three of them and we’ve had peace, we don’t have any problem and then we discovered something.

We lost 425,000 people, only 3% of our military, only Britain lost less and we lost a smaller percentage. We had the second largest military, 12 million people, larger than Germany’s, only the Soviet Union slightly bigger. As I said, you’ve seen Willow run here, a B-24 every hour. We had the largest GDP, every category, it’s just stunning to think what we did in a major three years and yet when the war was over, we had this dilemma that the bad guys, the fascists, the Nazis, the people who started the war were ours.

We had to rebuild them. We had to go to the Japanese and say to the Chinese, “I know they killed 17 million but we’re going to make them democracy and they’re going to be your friend from now on” and we had to go to the French and we had to go to the Poles. The Poles lost three and a half million and say they’re not that bad now, they’re good Germans and they’re going to build democracy and then we had to go, the same thing to the Ethiopians and the Libyans, say the Italians didn’t mean it, now they’re good, that’s a hard thing to do.

The Aftermath of World War II

Meanwhile, the Soviet Union is telling all of the world, China, Burma, the war never ended, we’re still liberating people from fascists and only the difference is now the Americans and the British, especially the Americans have joined the fascists.

Understanding the Nature of War

To conclude, what do we make sense of this? How did it all start? I think one of the things to remember about World War II as in every war but especially World War II is to get a general view of what war is. War is a laboratory, a barometer, a thermometer, it’s a measuring device, that’s all it is, it’s a very bitter one.

So two sides have differences and nobody knows who’s stronger and who’s weaker because there’s material consideration, tanks, planes and there’s willpower. If you have Churchill on your side, he’s worth 10, 20 divisions but they didn’t have him of course, they had the tradition of Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain but the point is, war then tells you in a very, very difficult way who was stronger after all. But it doesn’t need to occur if you can convey that message before the war breaks out.

So we went to World War II to prove a banality that nobody in his right mind ever thought that Italy, Germany and Japan could ever fight the combined power of the Soviet Union, the United States and Great Britain. It was physically impossible but it took a war to prove it was 65 million because of American isolationism, British appeasement and Russian collaboration. Thank you very much.