VDH Interviews Michael Walsh on his Latest Book

Speaker 1 What if your drive was fueled with more?

Speaker 1 More protection, more performance.

Speaker 1 Shell V Power Nitro Plus Premium Gasoline removes up to 100% of performance-robbing deposits to rejuvenate your engine's performance. Fueling every drive with a fuel like no other.

Speaker 1 Shell V Power Nitro Plus Premium Gasoline. More performance with every drive.
Compared to lower octane fuels in gasoline direct injection engine fuel injectors.

Speaker 1 Actual effects and benefits may vary according to vehicle type, driving conditions, and driving style.

Speaker 2 Hello, everybody. This is Victor Davis-Hanson.
We're on the Victor Davis-Hanson podcast. I'm solo today with one of our interviews.
Jack Fowler will be with me next time, and Sammy Wink.

Speaker 2 But I'm interviewing an old friend of mine, Michael Walsh, and I think you've known him. He's written about 16 books, fiction, nonfiction, music, popular culture, and more recently, military history.

Speaker 2 And I think

Speaker 2 I have talked about on this podcast his most recent military history, Last Stands, Why Men Fight When All is Lost.

Speaker 2 It was a very successful book, and now he's got, I don't know if it's a sequel, but it's a new book. It's just out, and it's called A Rage to Conquer.

Speaker 2 12 Battles that Changed the Course of Western History. And I want to remind everybody that Michael, for 16 or 17 years, was a Times foreign correspondent for Time magazine and a music critic.

Speaker 2 He divides his time between between Connecticut and Ireland. Welcome, Michael, to the show.
Very happy. So, Victor, it's a real pleasure and an honor to be with you.
I have to

Speaker 2 say right off the bat that without you, these military history books would never have been written. You were kind enough when I showed you the first outline for Last Stance.

Speaker 2 I think we were on a boat somewhere to Hawaii or Alaska or someplace.

Speaker 2 And you encouraged me to do it. And I'm very happy that I'm able to write in a field in which you're an acknowledged master and have had some success.
Well, thank you.

Speaker 2 Everybody, you know, I want to just preface, there has been this great genre, and it's a 19th century genre,

Speaker 2 Great Battles of the 15th Battles of the World by Crecy or

Speaker 2 J.C. Fuller, who was the

Speaker 2 architect of British armor tactics and finally unfortunately became kind of a Nazi sympathizer. But he wrote Great Battles of the Western World.

Speaker 2 I wrote Carnage and Culture about decisive battles that illustrated Western.

Speaker 2 So it's a genre, but Michael, you've done something a little different, I think, and unique in that you didn't just go back and do the regular Salamis or Thermopylae or

Speaker 2 D-Day.

Speaker 2 You've got some unique selections, and they include philosophy or Analauswitz.

Speaker 2 They have fiction about Achilles, and then

Speaker 2 they don't always reflect a battle that you might associate with, say, Caesar. Elysia was a critical battle, but we don't hear much about it.
But yet, that's one of

Speaker 2 your key battles. Just very briefly, what was the rationale or how did you make these decisions that

Speaker 2 include fiction, non-fiction, and battles that maybe the reader hadn't really experienced in this genre before? Well, thank you for that question, because when I started Last Dance,

Speaker 2 as you know, Victor, and my readers know, I grew up in the United States Marine Corps, and my father was,

Speaker 2 it is, he's almost 99 years old now,

Speaker 2 a veteran of the Chosen Reservoir. He was a member of the 2-5, which is the most decorated regiment in Marine history.

Speaker 2 And he is, I would guess, the last of the chosen few.

Speaker 2 And in fact, he believes that he was the last Marine out of the reservoir as they moved south and went towards the sea.

Speaker 2 He never talked about that battle when we were kids. Even though my brother later went into the Navy and became retired as a commander in the Navy, it just wasn't a part of our childhood.

Speaker 2 So when I got the idea of writing a book about warfare, and then I thought, well, last stands would be interesting because

Speaker 2 most people know,

Speaker 2 obviously, Thermopylae or Custer, but they might not know or consider other battles to be last stands. And so I opened, the point is I opened a wide cultural lens on it.

Speaker 2 I wanted to do not just the battle. The battle often gets described

Speaker 2 in a paragraph or two, such as the Milvian Bridge, which is a very important battle in the history of Western civilization that no one ever thinks about.

Speaker 2 Anyway, I then realized I had a last stand in my own family, which was my dad.

Speaker 2 And so the concluding chapter of that was I went to Florida and sat down, put a microphone in front of him and said, tell me what happened

Speaker 2 during those two or three days at the reservoir. And that book, which you were kind enough to endorse,

Speaker 2 became a big bestseller for Macmillan, St. Martin's.
And then they asked for a second one.

Speaker 2 So I decided this time I'd take the same technique, which is to look at all cultural aspects of war, that I wouldn't just look at war as a purely independent thing that has no effect on anything else, but where did it come from, where did it go, what were the thoughts behind it.

Speaker 2 So, for example, in the chapter on Napoleon, which I'm very proud of in this book,

Speaker 2 which focuses on Austerlitz, which everybody knows about Australitz, but now why,

Speaker 2 I'd bring everybody into the party, Goethe, Beethoven, who dedicated the third symphony to Napoleon at this exact moment,

Speaker 2 his effect on Byron, for example, the poet, and Franz Liszt, the

Speaker 2 such pianist, and a whole generation of romantic heroes. I argue that Napoleon really is the first romantic hero.

Speaker 2 He is the embodiment of what Goethe was writing about and asked for a meeting in Erfurt or Jena after the Battle of Jena,

Speaker 2 asked for a meeting with Goethe because Napoleon was not just a military man. He'd started out as a novelist Mankay.

Speaker 2 He brought the Comédé française to Germany with him during this negotiations to show that the French had an appreciation for civilization. So I thought, okay, what makes, why did this battle happen?

Speaker 2 And what are the military

Speaker 2 points behind it? But also, why did these two forces collide?

Speaker 2 And also, I found as I was writing both Last Stance and A Rage to Conquer that commanders

Speaker 2 run into the same situations all the time. So for example, and this is someone we can talk without too much technical detail.

Speaker 2 It seems to me that at Gaugamella, Alexander puts out his usual poison pawn out on the right so he can pull the Persian line far to the right.

Speaker 2 And then he comes across with a right cross to the jaw and finishes the fight almost the way Mike Tyson would.

Speaker 2 And in Australitz, Napoleon does something similar with the Pratzen Heights. He makes a feint, captures it, retreats it, pulls their troops over.

Speaker 2 And Aetius at the Battle of the Catalonian Plains does the same thing with the Visigoths, puts them out on the hill, and then they're able to come in later on and be dispositive.

Speaker 2 So I thought, wow, this is very interesting. And you mentioned the Battle of Elysia, which is funny to me that nobody...

Speaker 2 talks about it since the call literally the culminating battle of the of the gallic wars uh

Speaker 2 in that battle

Speaker 2 Caesar is

Speaker 2 attacking a walled city and he builds a wall around it. And then he builds another wall around himself as the Celts come and attack from the backside.

Speaker 2 And then I realize that's the same situation Beaumond of Toronto was in at Antioch

Speaker 2 in the year 1198, I guess, the Battle of

Speaker 2 1098, the Battle of Antioch.

Speaker 2 And he's just emulating, in a way, Caesar, too.

Speaker 2 And he does, and he fixes it the same way by breaking out at the point where he can bring the most force he has, which is almost nothing, on the weakest part of this much superior force.

Speaker 2 And if he can crack that, as Caesar knew about the Gauls and

Speaker 2 as

Speaker 2 Caesar knew about the Gauls and as Beaumont knew about the Turks, if you cracked them, they'd run. And once they started to run, they'd break.
And that they didn't have enough structural discipline.

Speaker 2 They weren't like Romans that they would fill a breach in their lines. They'd think all was lost and quit.
So both those battles end the same way, and they're in the exact same circumstance.

Speaker 2 I just find that really interesting. Yeah, it is.
We're going to take a quick break and hear something from our sponsors, and we'll be right back.

Speaker 3 This episode is brought to you by Progressive Commercial Insurance. As a business owner, you take a lot of roles, marketer, bookkeeper, CEO.

Speaker 3 But when it comes to small business insurance, Progressive has you covered.

Speaker 3 They offer discounts on commercial auto insurance, customizable coverages that can grow with your business, and reliable protection for whatever comes your way.

Speaker 3 Count on Progressive to handle your insurance while you do, well, everything else. Quote today in as little as eight minutes at progressivecommercial.com.
Progressive Casualty Insurance Company.

Speaker 3 Coverage provided and serviced by affiliated and third-party insurers. Discounts and coverage selections not available in all states or situations.

Speaker 3 Oh, the car from Carvana's here.

Speaker 3 Well, will you look at that? It's exactly what I ordered. Like, precisely.
It would be crazy if there were any catches, but there aren't, right? Right. Because that's how car buying should be.

Speaker 3 With Carvana, you get the car you want. Choose delivery or pickup and a week to love it or return it.
Buy your car today with Carvana. Delivery or pickup fees may apply.

Speaker 3 Limitations and exclusions may apply. See our seven-day return policy at carvana.com.

Speaker 2 And we're right back with Michael Walsh, and we're discussing his new book about critical battles in every aspect of the world, social life,

Speaker 2 political life, diplomacy. I want to turn to one of the chapters I was very interested in when I first read it, and that was chapter nine.
It's kind of a tripartite, Pershing at St.

Speaker 2 Mahiel, Hammetz at Midway,

Speaker 2 Patton at the Bulge. All of them,

Speaker 2 it seemed to me that they all have this, this, and I guess that was one of the themes, they all have this American strain that people have underestimated American commanders compared to the European.

Speaker 2 And they all were brilliant, or at least quite unusually good, especially

Speaker 2 Patton at the bulge. But Nimitz at Midway, even though he wasn't there himself,

Speaker 2 he...

Speaker 2 He was kind of the architect of the battle and the whole...

Speaker 2 I wrote about it in Carnage and Culture, the whole idea they could bring to Yorktown and shut down the grid in Hawaii and fix it after the Battle of Coral Sea and get it. It was just an amazing story.

Speaker 2 And I think that was one of your,

Speaker 2 that was one of the, I think for readers that are versed in World War II, that'll be one of the most interesting chapters for them.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I wanted to point out that the Americans, you know, were undervalued. And why I put Pershing in there is, first of all, he was German, like Nemitz was.

Speaker 2 In fact, our Germans basically beat their Germans, essentially. That's what Hitler said.
Hitler said, I only lost the war because they took all of our Germans.

Speaker 2 They had all the best Germans, right?

Speaker 2 But Pershing, you know, grew up, Fershing was his name, speaking German. Nimitz spoke German until World War I.
And that was

Speaker 2 literally his native language in Texas.

Speaker 2 Patton was not a German, but he certainly dealt with them.

Speaker 2 But I wanted to do a chapter on the Americans to show that the American military, which was widely disparaged at the beginning of World War I, it was Pershing who said, no, we're not going to just fill in the lines for the French.

Speaker 2 You guys have been chopping yourself up for four years, and we're here to win this and end it. And at Samiel and at the Argonne and Ardennes, rather, and

Speaker 2 other battles,

Speaker 2 our entry into the war ended that war within three or four months, really, once those battles were engaged.

Speaker 2 So I wanted to say something about the Americans, and that's why I concluded this book with the 9-11 chapter, which is the most controversial of these, because we lost the Battle of 9-11, and we're still dealing with the effects of that defeat in a way that we have not quite fully embraced or recognized.

Speaker 2 And when people say to me, well, what do you mean we lost the Battle of 9-11? I say, have you been to the airport recently? Do you take your shoes off? Do you shuffle through a line?

Speaker 2 Are you pushed around by thugs wearing uniforms? The only reason you're doing that is because we lost the battle of 9-11. And so

Speaker 2 if you add in the October invasion a month later, less than a month later of Afghanistan, then after 20 years, how that misadventure ended with a billion-dollar embassy

Speaker 2 sacrificed, just abandoned, 50 billion in equipment abandoned to terrorists. The Bagma Air Force Base had just been remodeled, abandoned.

Speaker 2 Well, we forgot.

Speaker 2 Misadventure. We've forgotten the lessons.
This book opens with a long essay on Clausewitz.

Speaker 2 And because I am fluent in German, I decided I would read the famous first chapter of Folk Kliege in German.

Speaker 2 And I've noticed one thing is that there's this mistranslation of the whole cliché that war is basically politics by other means. But he doesn't say by other means.
He never says that. He says mit

Speaker 2 M-I-T with other means. And I argue that

Speaker 2 war is not a proof that diplomacy has failed. War, and Clausewitz says, and I agree with him, is a tool by which you continue to pursue policy.
You just pursue it with bloodshed, with force.

Speaker 2 And we've become so prissy in our attitudes towards these things that we find that would be rude to actually

Speaker 2 really, really fight a war to win it. And as you know, Victor, Patton would consider this just an absurd development in American history.
Yeah, he was.

Speaker 2 Remember when Colin Powell, who wasn't a Patton-like figure, but nonetheless, at the outset of the 901 Gulf War, they asked him what his was to deal with the supposedly formidable Republican Guard, which wasn't very formidable as it turned out.

Speaker 2 But he said, we're going to isolate it, surround it, and destroy it. And everybody got angry and they thought, oh, my gosh, when did we want to destroy all those people?

Speaker 2 And then the highway of death, which really wasn't a highway of death, if you look at the actual casual, I mean, it was grotesque, but it it wasn't tens of thousands of people incinerated that we bombed but it was we've kind of I guess what I got from your chapter on Klaus Witz is this classical idea that is prevalent through Western thought and literature military literature that you have to defeat the enemy humiliate the enemy if you want to make them

Speaker 2 If you want them to be politically aligned or subservient to your political agenda, there's no other way to do it. And you can't put the political agenda before,

Speaker 2 if they're resistant, military defeat. And we knew that in World War II.

Speaker 2 I don't know whether the nuclear age, Michael, and the fear of escalation to DEF CON 1 or what you've kind of hinted at throughout the book, the therapeutic mindset that has taken over.

Speaker 2 But we try to impose political solutions on people who don't feel in any way they're defeated. And that's

Speaker 2 that's hard to do. That's correct.

Speaker 2 Caesar was, as you know, famous for his magnanimity after

Speaker 2 he won, not before he had won. And that cost him his life because he forgave Brutus and Brutus killed, literally killed him, delivered the last sword blow.
So

Speaker 2 he always had on every coin he had clementia caesaris, the clemency of Caesar's tough unless you agree that you were beaten by him.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I think the point is Americans have to come back to the notion that the enemy has to know he's defeated. And this is something that won the Civil War with Grant and Sherman, that

Speaker 2 you can have

Speaker 2 all of the kindness to the enemy after the enemy has acknowledged that he is defeated and has stopped fighting. Otherwise, you get these eternal forever wars.

Speaker 2 And one of the reasons we're in a forever war is we did not defeat, we did not name the enemy in 9-11, which is not,

Speaker 2 it wasn't even Saudi Arabia, it's Islam. Islam had declared war on on us in the fact that there's no Pope of Islam, and any

Speaker 2 one of these muftis can make a

Speaker 2 pronouncement. And bin Laden had declared war on the United States, and we refused to accept it.
We said, you don't really mean it. And then when he did, we didn't act like he meant it.

Speaker 2 And so we let them up off the table. And

Speaker 2 I just think the history of America is very sad from 2001 to the present because of our inability to deal with it.

Speaker 2 And we have this tendency with these figures, and that's why I like your discussion of Patton,

Speaker 2 that we kind of put in the closet and forget about, and then we get an extremist and we say,

Speaker 2 maybe we shouldn't bring out William Decumse Sherman, who's kind of bipolar, or this guy with a drinking problem called Grant, or we'll bring out crazy George Patton that we didn't really want to make a brigadier general until he was 55.

Speaker 2 Or we'll bring out nutty Curtis LeMay, who flew 25 missions at the front of a squadron on B-17 to run the B-29 program. And then they do these spectacular things.
They win the war.

Speaker 2 And as they win the war, we start to turn attention given the laxity and the margin of error we've now had. And we start to say, I can't believe that Patton slapped somebody.

Speaker 2 I can't believe that Patton said the Russians were the real enemy after the war. I cannot believe Curtis LeMay said

Speaker 2 that he would be a war criminal if he lost the war. The Japanese would put him on trial for firebombing their industrial heartland.

Speaker 2 And then we kind of despise them. And then we get in these jams again and we say, where is Pat and where is Sherman? Where is...
But kind of like the Western, you know, Shane,

Speaker 2 Ethan Edwards and the searchers, we have these guys that come out of nowhere and they have these skill sets that we don't have. And then they solve the cattle barren problem or find Natalie Wood.

Speaker 2 And then at the end of the movie, we think, see, you wouldn't want to be you get out of there. No, we literally, at the end of searchers, closed the door on him.
Yeah. Right.

Speaker 2 Thanks, and goodbye. And

Speaker 2 yeah, we do that with our military commanders, too. Oh, we do.
It's terrible.

Speaker 2 I love the thing that Sherman said about his relationship with Grant is that he said, I stood by him when he was drunk, and he stood by me when I was crazy. That was great.

Speaker 2 He said that after the Battle of Shiloh, and Halleck, who was a complete mediocrity, wanted to get rid of Grant. But I just, I think that was one of the things I'm after reading your chapter again,

Speaker 2 whatever we think about what's going on in the military, there is, and it's sometimes haphazard and poorly explained, but there is a tendency now to get away from the therapeutic DI

Speaker 2 and get back to battle readiness. And I hope that effort, if it is that effort, will start to recognize eccentrics.

Speaker 2 and people who want to win wars and not just beltway political officers that are are attached to the National Security Council, or then they go into this and that, but they're not actual field commanders

Speaker 2 that want to win. Well, we went through this in the Civil War.
You had all these political generals like Halleck, whom you mentioned, and then Grant had already retired because

Speaker 2 his career was going nowhere. Like Patton, his career was going nowhere.

Speaker 2 And then he comes back and he has to deal with moving the political generals aside and getting warfighters. So that's why he takes literally a crazy person

Speaker 2 like Sherman, who had been institutionalized, I believe, at one point or was certainly

Speaker 2 threatened with institutionalization. Well, they put him, they don't know if they had a mental institution then, but for a year he was without a command.

Speaker 2 The Cincinnati Observer said that Sherman had lost his mind. Yeah.

Speaker 2 And they predicated on that when he said, before this thing is over, we're going to have to kill 400,000 of these cavaliers in the South.

Speaker 2 He was that almost, he underestimated it, but he was the only person that saw it was going to be a Nixon

Speaker 2 war. We're going to take a quick break, and we'll be right back with Michael Walsh and this brilliant book he's written, A Rage to Conquer.

Speaker 2 So we're back now with Michael.

Speaker 2 I want to make another comment on the book. It's very well written.
Michael is a is a literary artist, and that's very important in military history.

Speaker 2 I was thinking as I was reading this, I got to know John Keegan very well, and one of the things that made him a great military historian was his prose style and his ability to really capture what it was like at that particular moment.

Speaker 2 Another person who was a biographer,

Speaker 2 he's been superseded in the series of biographies by Patton, but Ladislaw Farago wrote a key,

Speaker 2 no footnotes, just beautiful prose.

Speaker 2 It was called

Speaker 2 Ordeal and Triumph, a biography of George Patton Ordeal and Triumph.

Speaker 2 That was what the movie was based on. But all the other subsequent biographies are more detailed.

Speaker 2 They have more information. They're heavily footnoted, especially Carlo D'Este's Patent, A Genius for War, which is a brilliant book.
But no one writes like him.

Speaker 2 And I think that's one of your strengths of these two books, Michael.

Speaker 2 You put a lot of effort, natural effort,

Speaker 2 in trying to capture the reader and bring them into the landscape of battle. Well, thank you for that.

Speaker 2 I would say this, for you mentioned Keegan,

Speaker 2 I read Keegan's book on

Speaker 2 the mask of command, the fourth

Speaker 2 standard volume of

Speaker 2 analyses,

Speaker 2 in which he discusses the notion of the commander always in the front, always, sometimes never. And so we have commanders who do

Speaker 2 all of those things throughout this book. But literarily, when I started to write this book, Adam Bellow was the acquiring editor at St.
Martin's. And he said, I don't want to draw history.

Speaker 2 Write it like you write your fiction. Just make this like you write a movie.
Make this come alive. I really want to feel these things.

Speaker 2 And so that was the challenge that Adam, to whom I'm very grateful.

Speaker 2 I did eight books with him when he was the editor of eight in a row at Free Press. He was kind of a boy wonder in his

Speaker 2 at those days.

Speaker 2 But he's a great, great American editor. Obviously, he has the right lineage.

Speaker 2 I was lucky enough to be a colleague of his dad at Boston University briefly. So I got to know Saul a little bit in his old age.
And

Speaker 2 he had some very memorable things to say about being a writer.

Speaker 2 And one of them that stuck with me forever, we were at a party with the president of the university and Saul and his wife, and me and Kate, and

Speaker 2 I guess

Speaker 2 one other professor was there.

Speaker 2 And the president said to me, Michael, what's it like being a writer? And I said, well, you know, you have a Nobel Prize-winning author sitting right next to me. Why don't we ask him?

Speaker 2 And Saul said, it's like this. He spoke very tersely.
He spoke with this kind of Chicago rat-at-tat-tat rhythm. He said, it's like a building in Chicago.

Speaker 2 under construction.

Speaker 2 You go there with your lunch, you go up the elevator to the 110th floor, you walk out, you drill your rivets, you eat your lunch, you finish your job, you go back down the elevator, and then you do it again the next day.

Speaker 2 That's what being a writer is like. And I thought that was absolutely perfect because it requires, as you know, you've done a bazillion books.
This is my 20th now, Conquest published book.

Speaker 2 It's discipline. It really is discipline.
I used to, when I first started, I always thought, well, why would somebody kind of

Speaker 2 gear themselves to, I'm going to write 3,000 or 4,000 words today? And then I started to talk to authors. Andrew Roberts, I used to talk to him.

Speaker 2 I know Andrew really well. He's at the Hoover Institution.
And

Speaker 2 he has a complete discipline. He gets up very early in the morning.
He has, not that it's an absolute quota, but he has a general idea of how many words he has to make.

Speaker 2 It is like kind of engineering when you look at, you say you have a deadline of a year or two years, and then you see how many words they want and then you

Speaker 2 you know how much you have to do per day it's very absolutely and then it's kind of like an it's kind of like an onion you write it and then you know you have to if you're going to do footnotes you've got to go back and you've got to and then you've got to look for pro style then you've got to look for and you just keep adding layers to it and

Speaker 2 that's the truth it's a very disciplined if people look at my writer's desk and they they think they're going to find all kinds of notes and inspirational sayings and stuff all they see is a page that has numbers on it.

Speaker 2 The date, the number, the date, and the number. So you calculate how far is it from today to when you want that first draft word count done.
And then you know how much it is.

Speaker 2 And then you're always aware of where you are in the process because you can't hit a five-run homer. You can't write a 100,000-word book in an afternoon.

Speaker 2 You just have to be able to get up there and drill those rivets and then go back home, go to sleep, and get up and drill those rivets again. That's really important, especially as you get older.

Speaker 2 I know that when I had a four-book and six-year contract with BASIC, the Second World Wars, and then the Dying Citizen, and then The End of Everything. And I did this Trump book.
But

Speaker 2 I had to, I would talk to my daughter about it, and she'd say, Well, how many hours? She would ask questions, you know, how many hours does it take?

Speaker 2 And I said, Well, 40 hours a week, or maybe 30 if you're doing other things, and then 52 weeks or 1,500, maybe two years, 3,000.

Speaker 2 And then she said things, well, what does that do to your body to sit there for 3,000? I said, well, you have to get up every hour or you have to.

Speaker 2 But as you get older, you're kind of in a dilemma as a writer because you know more.

Speaker 2 You've done it before. You're more experienced.

Speaker 2 the powers of recall and your physicality to do that, to sit there. And that's why I really admired people in their 80s.

Speaker 2 Jacques Barzon, you know, Don and Deck is, oh my God, he wrote that. I don't know how he did it.
I have no idea. Right.
He was 112 years old at the time he wrote that book.

Speaker 2 Absolutely amazing. Writing required, when I was young, I just said, well, yeah, I'll do this book.
What you want? 100,000, 200,000 words, the other Greeks. I can do it.
I can do it.

Speaker 2 And you can, but you've got to be much more disciplined and scientific in the way you approach that.

Speaker 2 Well, it's like that country in Western song, you know, I'm not as good as I once was, but one time I'm as good as I ever was. Let me ask you

Speaker 2 a variety of ways. We're running a little bit out of time, Michael.
So you've got these two books, Last Stands, A Rage to Conquer. What is your next project? And is it going to be with St.

Speaker 2 Martins and Adam Bellow? What are you thinking of? Well, Adam has left St. Martin's,

Speaker 2 but I'm still there. And I have a wonderful editor named Michael Flamini there now.
And they've already bought and paid.

Speaker 2 front money for the third book in this series, which is going to be called The Wrath of God, and it's about religious religious warfare.

Speaker 2 And I think I was kind of heading in that, in the long chapter on Constantine, for example, in Rage to Conquer.

Speaker 2 It's really about the foundation of Christianity and the battle between Catholicism and Orthodoxy and Arianism and the early heretics. And how that manifests itself on the battlefield.

Speaker 2 Yes, it certainly did. I have a student.
I don't know if you ever... There's on one aspect of that, my student,

Speaker 2 he was actually Mr.

Speaker 2 Los Angeles. He was about 6'5, and he was a weight, Raymond Ibrahim, and he wrote Sword and Scimitar.
Oh, yes, yes, I've read him. Yeah,

Speaker 2 and he wrote the Bin Laden Reader and had a new book out on, but it's not just about that area you're doing on all religious tensions, but

Speaker 2 it's kind of a creasy book, Great Battles Between Islam and Christianity. Yeah, I'm going to mention that, but that's not the main focus of it.

Speaker 2 For example, I'm really going to start with the Israelites and the Canaanites. Yeah.

Speaker 2 So So history's first recorded genocide, actually, if you listen to what the Lord God tells the ancient Israelites to do to the Canaanites. And from this starting point,

Speaker 2 all else will flow. I'm interested as I look back at the religious nature of warfare at how coterminous so many of these things are.

Speaker 2 That is to say, the Old Testament, the earliest Hebrew scriptures are roughly contemporaneous with Hesiod and Homer, roughly.

Speaker 2 The Augustus going from

Speaker 2 citizen to emperor happens at the exact same time Jesus goes from nobody to God.

Speaker 2 You see these parallels between temporal and spiritual world.

Speaker 2 One of the battles I want to do in Wrath of God is the Albigensian Crusade, which people don't know about.

Speaker 2 This is an inter-Christian thing, in which the famous expression, kill them all, let God sort them out, from whence we get that, at the Battle of Bezier.

Speaker 2 So I want to, again, like I did with Rich, take some battles that are famous and some battles that you've never heard of, but make the argument they're important. For example,

Speaker 2 what I did last stance, I did Shiloh, which we talked about earlier,

Speaker 2 as a last stand.

Speaker 2 It was

Speaker 2 in this sense, that if they had lost, that war was already over before it had begun. Yeah, Albert Sidney Johnson would have been in.

Speaker 2 Which side are you talking? The Civil War shadow? Yeah, no, well, both sides. Albert Sidney Johnson would have driven him.

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 2 You know, it's funny about one thing about being an author is that you can never tell

Speaker 2 the books that you like writing or you think are good are going to appeal. Yeah.

Speaker 2 And I wrote a book called Ripples of Battle about four battles, antiquity, the Battle of Delium, the Battle of Shiloh, the Battle of Okinawa.

Speaker 2 And I did it, the ripples were in literature. So on, say, Shiloh, I pointed out that Ben-Hur was actually an allegory of what happened to Lou Wallace.

Speaker 2 Gratis in the novel is actually Grant. And

Speaker 2 the missed road was sort of the tile that fell down and ruined his career, Lou Wallace, just like Ben-Hur is put out in the wilderness.

Speaker 2 Exactly. And then I talked about the lost cause came from the lost battle and the lost battle was Shiloh.
And I went through all of contemporary southern literature.

Speaker 2 Said if Albert Sidney had not just been shot behind the knee with that invisible wound and he was leading the charge at the crust of the battle, we would have won.

Speaker 2 We lost Shiloh, then we lost the war, but we really didn't. It was just fate that, and that was a very pernicious idea in the post-war.

Speaker 2 Well, you've been very eloquent about the lost cause thing for sure. But I was also thinking that

Speaker 2 Grant was on shaky ground ground with Halleck at that point anyway. And Sherman was completely untrusted.

Speaker 2 And they got caught with their pants down on day one when the Confederates overran and pushed them all the way back to the river. And had Grant lost that, we never would have had Grant.

Speaker 2 He would have been gone. He would have been cashiered.
No, I think.

Speaker 2 Sherman only had 7,000 men. He was wounded.
Well, wounded. He got shot in the hand.
He's got a shot in the leather strap on his shoulder. Right.
But

Speaker 2 he wrote a good, a weird letter, and he said, I woke up after the battle.

Speaker 2 I had no idea we'd be a national hero because he was the one that withdrew very slowly and kind of a rock that the Confederates lapped around. And they had that famous nighttime conversation when he

Speaker 2 said, lick him tomorrow.

Speaker 2 That's great.

Speaker 2 That was a very, there was more people, not that it compared at all in terms of the dead of Gettysburg and Antietam, but it had, that was something that shocked the nation that had never seen for,

Speaker 2 I think, 40 to 100 years. It was also interesting to me that there was a lot of writers at the time.

Speaker 2 Yeah, there was Brutus was there, I think. And

Speaker 2 James

Speaker 2 Garfield was there, president.

Speaker 2 And Stanley of Stanley Livingston fame was there. He was there, and the explorer of the Colorado River, I'm trying to remember his name,

Speaker 2 he was there, and it really made

Speaker 2 Nathan Bedford Forrest, who was an obscure, no one listened to him, but after the battle, Fallen Timbers at the retreat,

Speaker 2 no one can really figure out if he really did it.

Speaker 2 If he charged right into the Union Army and picked up a Union soldier with one hand, used him as a shield, and then he got shot in the stomach, rode back.

Speaker 2 And after that, he became not just an obscure former slave trader, but the mastermind of cavalry tactics for the Confederacy. But it was all, all these careers were made and lost at Shiloh.

Speaker 2 Well, I think the point I make in Rage to Conquer at the beginning is that war is the,

Speaker 2 I say this in the first two sentences or so, is the principal agent of social change. It makes things happen.

Speaker 2 Like I woke up the next morning and I was famous. And Byron said that famously of Child Harold when it came out.

Speaker 2 He said, I went to bed one night, I woke up the next morning and I was famous because fortunes can turn overnight.

Speaker 2 But in war, they literally turn overnight. And with Shiloh, you saw that happen.
And I think what happens in war, time is compressed.

Speaker 2 So you know the United States goes saying that we can't afford a fourth carrier and then we make 125 light escort and fleet carriers with no problem.

Speaker 2 Or we turn out 100,000 fighters and we can't or we start inventing napalm or the atomic bomb. And it just makes people go into a frenzy and you bring all these people out

Speaker 2 of the woodwork that under normal times, they may be too eccentric or they may be written off as unorthodox, and then they're allowed to flourish because of this extra extremities. Yes.

Speaker 2 And you really, time really goes fast, and you really get talent and great and evil things happen because people are not sleeping nine hours a day. They're working like crazy.
Well, but

Speaker 2 after the Carl Sea, they turned the Yorktown around in three days, didn't they? I mean, they did. They thought it was going to take months.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and they told everybody in Honolulu there's been an outage. You're not going to have power for 2014.
And they just cut off all of the grid and used it to weld.

Speaker 2 And on the way to Midway, they were still

Speaker 2 welding panels. Well, it's the naysayers.
And we're seeing this right now with the Trump tariffs. Whether you think they're a good idea or not,

Speaker 2 it's only been 24, 48 hours. And from one chorus, which is actually two choruses, is saying this is impossible.
It'll never work. Here's the proof.
Look at the stock market. Oh, my God.

Speaker 2 And then you think it's Eisenhower saying, what are we going to do about Bastone? And Patton pipes up and says, I could be there with three divisions in 48 hours or whatever he said.

Speaker 2 And they didn't believe him, but he did.

Speaker 2 And it's even weirder to read the Wall Street Journal every day.

Speaker 2 And they can't finish an article without either trashing Trump's tariffs or quoting Smoot Hawley.

Speaker 2 And he's going to cause a recession.

Speaker 2 And then you look at, you go back and read about Smoot Hawley, and it was 1930, a year and a half after the

Speaker 2 year after the meltdown. It wasn't enacted for another two years.
And the people who caused the Great Depression was Wall Street. Right.
And the tariff wasn't even anything resembling Trump's tariff.

Speaker 2 It was a crazy tariff, but at that time we had one of the largest trade surpluses in the United States, and it was 45 to 50 percent. It was a preemptive, this is,

Speaker 2 I don't even think these are tariffs. They're just basically saying it.

Speaker 2 Tariff policy is in your hands, China. It's in your hands, Europe and Mexico.
Whatever you want to do is fine with us, but we're not going to allow you to be asymmetrical.

Speaker 2 If you want to be symmetrical,

Speaker 2 we'll be symmetrical. Whatever you want.
You say no tariffs, 10%, 30%, it doesn't matter to us, but we're going to do exactly what you're doing.

Speaker 2 The only problem I have with it is I don't think they're messaging it enough. They don't get that out.

Speaker 2 And I wish somebody in the administration would come out and say, well, if tariffs are so horrible,

Speaker 2 why are they so popular in Europe and Japan and China? Are these people insane? Are they trying to destroy their economies?

Speaker 2 Because India or China has twice the economic GDP per year growth than we do, and they have these tariffs that are.

Speaker 2 So what's the deal? Or if somebody came out and just said,

Speaker 2 well, Mexico went from 10 to 20 to 50 to 80 to 100 to 150 to $177 billion trade surplus with us, is that hurting them?

Speaker 2 And then the next thing we know, they're sending $63 billion in cash back to Mexico, mostly from illegal aliens, and the cartels add another $20 or $30 billion.

Speaker 2 Is that good for us that $250 billion leave the country? And if it's so bad for Mexico,

Speaker 2 why do they seem to enjoy it so much? But they never

Speaker 2 they need to put it in that context and explain. Well, I think the real key, this all comes down to leadership.
And again, having grown up in the Marines, which is a very,

Speaker 2 I almost said very unique, it's certainly a unique way to grow up as a young man in the United States.

Speaker 2 There's an ethos to being raised by an Irish Catholic Jesuit educated Marine Corps officer. And you know the type I'm talking about, because there's plenty of them.
And he forced you,

Speaker 2 continues to do so to me,

Speaker 2 forces you to think your position through. And he would, the dinner table would be Socratic interrogations of what you thought and why you thought it.

Speaker 2 And never did you get rewarded. I must say, I talked with him just the other day and he said, well, he's from Boston, so he speaks his New England accent.
I read your book, he said.

Speaker 2 I said, Oh, really? And he said, Yeah, he said,

Speaker 2 I thought it was one of your better ones.

Speaker 2 I said, Thanks, Dad. I really appreciate the endorsement.
Yeah,

Speaker 2 you were very lucky to have your father. That was one of my biggest losses in life.

Speaker 2 The early death of my father and mother. And my worship.
My mother died of a brain tumor at 66.

Speaker 2 And my father died prematurely of a stroke at 74.

Speaker 2 But they were wonderful people.

Speaker 2 It's very important to show gratitude, I think, in this culture of ours, because nobody,

Speaker 2 we never pay, I mean, we always use the morality of the present to condemn the people who gave us this wonderful country and bounty and affluence, but we never honor them.

Speaker 2 We never think, look at the material world they had to live in. I mean, I had a ruptured appendix in Libya.

Speaker 2 I would be dead if there wasn't somebody in Libya that learned about Western medicine to do an emergency appendectomy. I've had three kidneys.

Speaker 2 I'm so happy that and so grateful for what medicine has done and all those people who suffered horribly in the physical world.

Speaker 2 And we have the gumption to go back and use that, you know, that you were racist, you were xenophobic, you were homophobic. And we apply all these standards of a material affluent society.

Speaker 2 Yeah, well, that's what it's called presentism now.

Speaker 2 It is, isn't it?

Speaker 2 Historiographical, right? When it comes through on your your book, I think it's really important

Speaker 2 that you do have this reverence and you don't, you try to imagine what these people were up against at these particular times rather than just saying this was a stupid thing to do or this.

Speaker 2 That's very important, I think, in the historian. Yeah, I think it's important to remember these guys are just guys like us, get up every day, put their pants on one leg at a time.
They really are.

Speaker 2 And they had their insecurities and they're certainly they have their imperfections, but they had, and they all share this quality of

Speaker 2 basically

Speaker 2 this must and will be done.

Speaker 2 Alia yakta est. That's it.

Speaker 2 We're not going to go back on it. We're not going to second guess it.
We're going to win or die trying. And that's.

Speaker 2 Are you saying, Michael, that Caesar didn't say the die is cast, maybe, sort of, kind of? No, kind of. And, you know, that river's not that deep anyway, and we can always turn around and go back.

Speaker 2 And she's, maybe France wouldn't be a bad place for me to spend my retirement after all. And no, they didn't hedge their beds, you know, bets.

Speaker 2 They burned their ships, you know, like the Spanish conquistadores

Speaker 2 in Mexico. Yes, of course.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 So we've lost.

Speaker 2 Let me take a final break, and we're going to come back for a final three or four minutes with Michael Walsh.

Speaker 2 And I urge everybody to buy A Rage to Conquer. It's just out.
It's the sequel to Last Stands, which was a bestseller.

Speaker 2 And it's a prequel to a new book on religious tensions and wars that Michael is now writing. And we'll be right back.

Speaker 2 Thank you, everybody. We're back here for our final segment of a few minutes with Michael Walsh.

Speaker 2 Any last observations, Michael, on military history in general or this trilogy? Do you have plans to have them reissued as a series or something that people could find them? Well, I don't know.

Speaker 2 I was very pleased that the Easton press picked up blast stance and did a special edition of that you know the collector's books and i'm hopeful they'll they'll do the same with rage but uh after uh i finished wrath of god i'm in the middle of writing a a big novel and i i'd be big i like to tell people it's going to be twice as long as as war and peace but but twice as funny as war and peace too so

Speaker 2 in which I'm basically writing about the history of the world from the near future to

Speaker 2 the day the universe was born and using historical personages coming in and out of it. It's all still, it's not inchoate.
I've written down

Speaker 2 a lot of it already in terms of outlining and who the characters are and what the points are. But it's a work of history that will be semi-fiction.
I'm not sure it's any one single genre.

Speaker 2 Do you write some simultaneously or are you going to wait to not normally know, but this novel's been bugging me.

Speaker 2 So at times I just need to do that and i do it and then i get because it's two different kinds of writing very much very much different kinds of writing different part of your brain different different uh when you're writing now are you traveling as well or did you just say i'm gonna stay put Well, I did six months in Europe in part to chase some of the characters in the novel, just to be where...

Speaker 2 I'm very much a method writer. I like to go where they are and see what they saw insofar as that's possible.

Speaker 2 But right now I'm holed up up here in the New England woods for a while and I've outfitted my house in Ireland now with the same computer and the same everything so I don't really have to worry about did I bring the files with me and you do public speaking I've noticed that as I got older I'm I'm saying no to public speaking because it disrupts you have a schedule of writing I'm writing more I think but

Speaker 2 the idea of getting on the today's air do you are you still getting out there and traveling all over New Zealand? Not very much. Well, I'm not no one's asking me for one thing.
So

Speaker 2 and nowadays, you know, you do book tours like we're doing. I don't know if that's true.
I think I saw you most recently on the Hillsdale cruise.

Speaker 2 Yeah, but that was a few few years ago. Yeah, I haven't,

Speaker 2 yeah. They've lost my phone number since then, I think.
But no, I do think that I've got to stay put and finished Wrath of God. I'm not going to do anything except watch that.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I'm going to try to do that as well. Stay put.

Speaker 2 I stopped all travel after June 1st. It is, I'd like to make this point to the young writers who are listening to us.
It is very physically demanding, and it doesn't seem to be.

Speaker 2 It seems like you're just sitting on your ass

Speaker 2 or reading a book. But the toll it takes, I'm at 75, I turned 75 in October.
I feel it much, much more than I did 10 years ago, for sure.

Speaker 2 I do too. My wife said the other day to me, we're watching a movie on TV.
You should see your posture. You're on your...
you know, you're all lying in a weird position. You're typing, typing, typing.

Speaker 2 Then you're stopping and looking at them. This is not good.
This is why you get the flu or COVID. You've got to be, and she's right.

Speaker 2 You've got to, you're writing and then stop and take a break and stop. But when you, when you're writing all the time, you know, on the plane or stressed out about connections or it's not good.

Speaker 2 And I'm late to the game of learning that. And

Speaker 2 Well, I think guys like us only learn the hard way. I think that's the thing.
I know it. I know

Speaker 2 she said to me not too long ago, you've had seven operations, and they were all. I said, and the nice thing about them, they were all preventable.
If I had just

Speaker 2 listened to what was going on, but I was well, I think you've got many, you have many more books left in you, too.

Speaker 2 I read the end of everything

Speaker 2 in Hungary, actually, while I was,

Speaker 2 I took a month and I was a writer-in-residence at the Danube Institute in Budapest. And that was the much maligned Victor Orban.

Speaker 2 I have not met Mr. Orban yet, but I am looking forward to it.
I do know a lot of the people in his cabinet. And I was fortunate that David Goldman, my dear friend, was in town.
We were able to.

Speaker 2 And I gave a piano recital, which I haven't done for years. And I'm now going to give concerts this year in London and Budapest again.

Speaker 2 So I'm. Do you think keeping that travel and getting these things keep you going

Speaker 2 healthy, mentally, and too?

Speaker 2 And I haven't played in public for such a long time. And it's really great because

Speaker 2 it's just a lot of people.

Speaker 2 How long were you the actual music critic for Britain? Well, I was a music critic for 25 years, but

Speaker 2 two newspapers and Time magazine. And then because by sheer dumb luck, and also I could see it coming, I was in East Germany and the Soviet Union between 85 and 91.

Speaker 2 So from the 40th anniversary of the bombing of Dresden, which I was present at when Hanukkah.

Speaker 2 And our friend Vladimir Putin showed up to that party back then. And then 91 was the end of the Soviet Union.
And I left just before the coup against Gorbachev.

Speaker 2 So I think at that point I decided I was really going to get much more involved in this sort of life. And I'm glad I did.
Well, that's fascinating.

Speaker 2 Okay,

Speaker 2 I kept

Speaker 2 Michael for almost an hour. I didn't, but it was fascinating, Michael.
And I want to ask all of our readers to

Speaker 2 go to, Michael, do you have a website or do you, where do you, where do you direct people to buy a rage to conquer? Well, it's on Amazon, but I have been running a website called The Pipeline,

Speaker 2 the-pipeline.org, which commissioned works from writers for the last, we ran it for four or five years. And now it's really turning into my personal thing.

Speaker 2 So I'm going to do one column a week on Monday and then one interview with somebody.

Speaker 2 How do we get to the pipeline? If I turn on my computer, what's the dress? The-pipeline.org.

Speaker 2 Okay. And if I go there, is there an ad for the Rage to Conquer, or can I get access?

Speaker 2 I believe

Speaker 2 it's linked somewhere there. The easiest way is to just go on Amazon or go on Macmillan and get it there.
Or a bookstore, of course.

Speaker 2 Well, Michael, thank you so much for being with us. And

Speaker 2 again, good to see you again. Yes, that's great.

Speaker 2 We should do this more often. Yes, we will.
We will. We'll do it, especially when your novel, your next two books come out.
Great. Thank you, everybody.