A Q&A with VDH on World War II

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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

Welcome to the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

Victor is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

And he has a website, The Blade of Perseus.

Its address is victorhanson.com.

This is a special episode of the show.

I'm Jack Fowler.

I'm the host.

And I asked members of the Victor Davis-Hanson Fan Club on Facebook to send me some questions that I could pose to Victor.

Why?

Why the special show?

Well, we are recording, as I said, Monday the 9th of June, and I believe Tuesday, tomorrow the 10th, or the next day, Victor will be having some surgery, which he has talked about on this podcast, and he will be recovering from that surgery next week.

And we don't like to have any holes here.

So we are filling them with your questions.

And today's special episode, I don't know, Victor, we should call it Sinus Recovery One.

Oh my God, we'll see.

Okay.

I'm trying to get an EKG.

I was just notified that my EKG is a year old.

I've got to do something today.

Well, we better chop, chop it then, so you can hit the EKG store in Selma.

I know.

I've got a number of questions related to World War One, and I will begin asking them when we return from these important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

I'm all duted up today.

Victor, I had a very important meeting earlier today.

Sometimes I have important meetings.

So, the folks at the Victor Davis-Hanson Fan Club who sent questions, thank you so much.

So many came in.

We're going to record today one episode.

Well, actually, we're going to record two episodes.

This episode will be heavy on World War II questions.

And the the first question I have, Victor, is from Terry and Marshall.

And

they took your Second World Wars course at Hillsdale.

But they have questions about Dunkirk and what Marshall writes: What puzzles me, though, is why Hitler delayed his pursuit of the Allies for three days, allowing them to retreat and regroup in Britain.

Couldn't he have finished them off right there?

Did he make other timing mistakes?

So there's two questions.

Could he have finished them off?

And did he make other timing mistakes?

He could have finished them off, but we've got to remember that he invaded on May 10th, and the bulk of the army groups came through the Ardennes.

It's not the Sierra, but it's rugged territory, and they had been fighting from May 10th all the way into June 10th, 15th, and they were exhausted.

They had been on the and they had everybody

thinks the French had folded wasn't quite that easy.

They had certain advantages.

They had the Dewant fire aircraft that was comparable.

They had the Shar B tank that had a better gun than the Germans.

And they killed about 25,000 Germans, the French army that collapsed.

So my point is they were pretty tired when they got to Dunkirk.

And then they were looking at this thing.

And it was much larger than the D-Day Beachhead of 180,000.

It was over 300,000 people.

There were French there and mostly British.

And they said to themselves, oh my god, this is a huge army.

And

the other thing was

that the

Spitfire Hurricane fighter force in charge of defending the homeland had

been kind of wiped out and lost about 40% of its strength over that month fighting over France, where they had only 10 to 15 minutes of actual operation time.

And if they bailed out, they were captured.

So Goering came to Hitler and he said, the panzers are exhausted.

They can't go anywhere.

We have air parity or supremacy.

If they tried to remove from the beaches, the Luftwaffe will wipe them out.

They're trapped and they can't get out.

Let my Luftwaffe get the credit.

And they went to the, you know, von Rensted and all the other people.

They said, okay, they're not going to go anyway.

So they didn't think they could go anywhere.

And Goering's point was that the next idea was to invade England, Britain, and they thought that one of the ways they could do this was to bring out the British fighter force.

Because if the Luftwaffe was bombing this trapped army, they would have to send out all the hurricanes and all of the Spitfires.

At this point, the Bf-109 was vastly superior to the hurricane.

It was comparable to the Spitfire, But they had already established bases in that month on French soil that were being, so they were, that was kind of like their home base.

So it was a mixture of A, they thought they weren't going to go anywhere.

Nobody thought they were going to send a flotilla of private boats.

Nobody thought that

Britain would invest half of their fighter strength, key to protect them from being bombing in a few weeks, to defend these people.

And Goering always had bad judgment.

And he did this again and again.

I'll give you one other example.

During the Stalingrad entrapment of late 1942, there were key moments where Paulus could have broken out and met Monstein and the relief force.

And Hitler, of course, said, no, no, we're not going to let them out.

They're going to fight for the last, and they'll probably survive.

But he also was told by Goering,

don't worry, we can supply them by air.

And he couldn't.

So he was a cocaine addict, and he was morbidly obese.

After Dunkirk, Hitler lost confidence, but he gave.

It's hard to think of one.

He had been a hero in World War I and been one of the original members of the Nazi Party.

So Hitler had a lot of respect for him, but he was incompetent.

That was a bad decision, but I don't think anybody thought that the British Navy would be able to send the whole flotilla of the civilian fleet and the British Navy and get them all out.

Was that Victor Seed of the Pants, or was there any evidence that there was some kind of

strategic plan filed?

Yeah, they had a general idea that each of the private, I mean, they announced it on the radio, but there had been since 1939, September, there had been

not mobilization, but the Home Guard had started to form that people knew that they might be contacted

if there there was an emergency.

And

it was kind of tragic because the French fought heroically as a kind of a shield to get the British back out.

And they wanted them to stay, of course, because they said, you know what, this is with our army that hasn't fallen yet, we still have 400,000 people and we have our equipment and maybe we can make a ring and like we did in World War I and we can save

a salient or something.

And the British said, no, we don't have any other army.

If we lose this army, we have nobody to reinforce people in North Africa.

As it was, they lost all their equipment.

And some people have argued that might have been too bad because it was mostly by German standards obsolete.

So it was a miscalculation.

I think that was Marshall and Terry Sorensen, right?

Yeah, I don't know.

I think that's my wonderful doctor of 30 years.

Yeah, he was from Riedley Kalfin.

He was a brilliant guy.

He is a brilliant guy.

And he kept me running for 30 years.

He'd seen everything.

Every time you had something, you'd go in.

Hey, Doc, I got this big

swollen thing on my elbow.

Hey, Doc, I'm really dizzy.

I got this white patch on my head.

Doc,

well, Victor, this is what it is.

And then bang, bang, bang, he diagnosed it, gave you the suitable pharmaceutical or specialist

visit, and he was just wonderful.

So actually, I can think that all my health problems started happening after he retired.

He was a wonderful doctor and a wonderful person, too.

He and his wife.

He had been a student of my mom's sister, my aunt, Marshall Sorensen.

So, I'm very happy.

I think that's from him.

Well, I have a blimp.

There's not very many Marshalls and Terries in the world.

I bow to your wisdom.

Who doesn't?

I have a blimp question coming up, but very quickly to

sum up, Dunkirk,

did you like the movie?

Did you see Dunkirk?

It came out a few years ago?

I did.

You liked it?

I did.

There were all these.

I criticized it a little bit because it gave you no strategic or tactical analysis of what was happening.

Usually a director would have, as a prop or a lead-in, he would have a general with a map showing, here's what we are.

Or you would think the British admirals would be looking over there on the beach and say, here the Germans are, this is what's going to happen.

Or Churchill would have a little talk with Admiral Pound and say, okay, what's the chance?

But they didn't have any of that.

But they had these vignettes of that pilot, you know, who

landed on the beach, or the guys that are in that shell of a ship with a machine gun.

So it was, that was the same guy that did the Batman movies, wasn't it?

The director, Lloyd?

May have been

Nicholas.

Yeah.

After John Ford, I'm Lost.

Yeah, I think it was.

But I liked the movie, although it was more, put it this way, it was impressionistic rather than

a traditional narrative of what happened.

Right.

It's not the longest day by any stretch.

Victor, interesting question from Carl here.

What was the role of blimps in World War II?

My dad flew in the K-2 and mentioned the depth chargers and the 50-caliber guns.

Submarines feared them.

I never heard of anything related to blimps in World War II.

Is that news to you?

There were two uses.

One were cable blimps.

So they had big, thick metal cables on them, and they had them all over the skies of London, Manchester, etc.

So, and they were, it was very hard at night to see them.

So, when the German bombers came through, it would be like a forest of cables.

And the blimp wasn't the purpose.

The purpose was to keep the cable suspended, and it would tear apart a plane, and it was kind of effective.

The other was for submarine warfare, and that was the idea that there was an open spot in the Atlantic where American aircraft aircraft from the East Coast and British aircraft both from Britain and also from Scotland couldn't get out there, even Greenland.

And one of the things they did was they had people in blimps with radios and their idea was to go through and locate when they saw a sub come up, locate and text the location.

So the Germans were they were afraid of anything that they that could see them.

This is this is kind of there's a tangential aside when Trump keeps talking about Greenland, Greenland, Greenland,

he's really channeling the status of Greenland from

April 1940 to May 1945 for five years.

You see, there was no Denmark.

It had been conquered in six hours.

So this huge continental-size island peninsula like Greenland on the North American Way on the edge of North America was essential for Americans to grab it it before the Germans did and use it as a base to attack the U-boat fleet and ensure the safety of the convoy in the North Atlantic, of the Canadian-American convoys.

And it was independent.

The United States ran it.

It's not so crazy what Trump is basically saying, you know, they couldn't protect it in World War II.

And if we hadn't have gone in there and taken it, it would have been in commie hands or German hands, and maybe they can't do it again.

So it's kind of, there was a backstory to that that made

that's a it's a yeah, it's a very legitimate backstory, yeah.

Yeah, there is about Alberta, too.

Everybody thought he was crazy about the 51st straight

state, and there's a what, a poll, 50-50 of the people of Alberta would like to be either independent or part of the United States.

There's some very red areas in Western

Canada.

Hey, Victor, we're going to look at the declaration of war, and we're going to do that when we come back from these important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show, Sinus Recovery One special episode.

We are recording on Monday the 9th.

I'm pretty sure this episode will be up on Tuesday, June 17th, while Victor is recovering.

Victor's website, The Blade of Perseus, you should subscribe $65 a year.

That's discounted from $6.50 a month, and you get to read Victor's ultra-articles, which are exclusive for the website, and his ultra-video weekly.

Twice a week, he writes an article, once a week, he does a video, and that's on top of everything else you get there.

So check it out, VictorHanson.com, The Blade of Perseus.

Victor, I have a question from Bob Hyde, and I love Bob.

And Bob Hyde, H-Y-D-E, is the son of the great

Henry Hyde.

Yes.

Bob's a great man.

He lives down in the Dallas area.

He says, my question concerns the reasoning on why Great Britain and France didn't also include a declaration of war on Stalin's Soviet Union when they, the Soviet Union, invaded Poland soon after Germany's invasion.

Perhaps this is a factor that Hitler couldn't anticipate that the democracies would ever ally themselves with Stalin.

Question mark.

But that's an interesting interesting point.

Yeah, why?

Yeah, there were two reasons why that.

In the 1930s, it had been central to France and, to a lesser agree,

Britain, to repeat the World War I strategy that you had to have an ally on the other side of Germany so they'd have a two-front war.

And that was pretty.

The problem they were having with Stalin and Russia was they were starting to hear

information about the great famine in Ukraine, and they were starting to hear things about the show trials, and they were starting to hear things about

the murdering of 30 or 40,000 Russian officers.

And so they...

Polish officers, right?

Well, no, these were Russian officers.

Later, it would be Poland when the war started, but before the war, he wiped out the entire senior command of the Red Army.

So there was a lot of people in Britain that said, don't ally with these people.

And there were a lot of of people in France that said, they saved us in World War I, and they've got a huge army.

So the idea was when they were shocked, and they'd seen what Stalin did in the Spanish Civil War, the anarchists, I mean, the Communists were pretty awful, even though they were allied with the democracies against the French.

Orwell wrote about it, homage to Catalonia, and they were pretty awful.

So they always thought that at some point that that alliance would break up.

So when they heard that right before Poland, just seven days before the war started, Stalin had cut a deal, they thought, well,

it's just sort of contingental transactional.

So Stalin wants part of Poland, which is now western Ukraine, and he wants the Baltic states.

Yeah, well, why get in a big world war with both of them?

Because they're the two greatest powers in Europe.

And maybe they'll turn on each other if we just sort of ignore what's and that's exactly what happened.

So there was some logic to it.

Okay.

This is a groovy question because of the name of the person who submitted the question.

She writes, my husband Vaughan, who is more of a history buff than I am, asks, what do you think would have happened if Patton had got his way and gone into Russia?

I wish you a fast recovery and successful surgery, V D H, sincerely

Victoria Hansen Hunter.

Yes, and she's from she's from, I think, the Central Valley.

So Victoria question has a question for Victoria.

Is it S-E-N or S-O-N?

It's S-O-N.

Maybe she was from Selma High School.

S-EN are Danes.

S-O-Ns are Danes when their brain's blown out.

Okay.

That's what people used to say about us.

All right, Patton gets to Russia.

What happens?

Why don't you say just the last part of the question again?

I want to make it.

What do you think would happen if Patton had gotten his way and gone into Russia?

Well, the problem with that is everybody got this.

The background of that is Patton was authorized or active with the Third Army.

Remember, he was kept out of the D-Day landing.

So a month,

almost a month and a half, really, he was given the Third Army at the end of July, and it just was phenomenal.

It was supposed to go the wrong direction.

It was supposed to go west and take Brittany, the peninsula, and Shakur Brest.

But he just said, I only need two divisions to do it.

So then he lit out eastward, and that was not what he was supposed to do.

But he did not just do something that was ad hoc.

He did something magnificently.

So he was traveling more and more and more and more territory faster faster faster than was the first army of General Hodges or the Canadian Britain under

Montgomery.

And if you look at the map, he was the furthest most from Berlin.

So if you looked at his trajectory, it was the longest and it would lead you to Prague, not Berlin.

So everybody said he's on the right.

That's not supposed to happen.

That is not supposed to happen.

He was supposed to go and get breast and then he was supposed to be a holding action slow and protect the flank.

He said, blank the flanks, I've got air power.

And he worked with Pete Queseta, who was a brilliant fighter general.

And anyway, he got all the way, it looked like by September.

And he kept saying, I got to go, I got to go, I got to go, the on-forgiving minute, because once it gets cold, my Shermans have narrow tracks.

They're going to be slipping in the mud and the snow, and the Germans are going to have housing, and we're going to be sleeping out in the snow, and the days are going to get really short, and we won't have air power that's covering us, and our troops will not be equipped.

He predicted pretty much what happened at the Ardennes and the bulge.

So they cut, they drained his supplies to supply the market garden fiasco.

That was a terrible thing to do.

But her question is: well, once they recovered from the bulge in January and February and March and April, Patton got across in March, as they all did, the Rhine, and then he went wild and gobbled up territory, and they got to the Elbe River.

They could have taken Berlin, but that was not part of the deal.

Ike said, what would be the point?

And Patton said, I think you're going to regret that later on, because he was thinking geostrategically.

And Patton knew that the Germans would have surrendered Berlin to the British and the Americans, and he knew they would fight to the death against the Russians.

So the idea that, well, we're going to lose all these people taking Berlin wasn't quite factual.

We could have broken our deal with Stalin and taken Berlin.

But then the question is

what would have happened after that when the Russians started to break their agreements almost immediately?

What I mean by that is they occupied Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, and they liquidated the non-communist parts of those coalitions.

And it was pretty clear by the end of the war they were going to be a big problem.

And we had this army in Europe about 2 million.

The problem with that is that the Russians had 12 million.

They had over 400 active combat divisions.

They had, thanks to us, they had better tanks than we did.

They had better artillery than we did.

And they outnumbered us four or five to one.

So the idea that Patton was going to take off with a bunch of Sherman tanks and fight these huge tank armies with Stalin and T-34s and Katushkas and these massive mobile artillery programs.

It was just crazy.

And the other problem was there was a sizable, this sounds familiar, there was a sizable number of naive people in the United States who were leftist,

to the left of the New Deal, and there were strong

aficionados of Russia, and they thought that he was a great ally, and he had saved us, and he had rehabilitated their communist feeds, and now we were friends with the communists.

And so I think a lot of people would have said, oh, wait a minute, we went over there and fought and now we're fighting our allies after we've lost all these people?

I'm tired of war.

Why would we fight our allies?

And Patton's argument, well, we went over there to free Eastern Europe, we were told, Poland in particular is where it all started from Nazism.

And what did we do?

We freed it from Nazism, then we turned it over to something worse or as bad, totalitarian Soviets.

So we've got to correct that.

And that was why he was relieved of command, remember, in the peacetime army of occupation.

They put him in a fake division that was record-keeping to write a history.

And

Eisenhower didn't like him.

He said that he saved Patton.

It wasn't Eisenhower that saved him.

Bradley hated his guts.

It was George Marshall who said,

you do what you want with Patton after he slapped

the two incidents in Sicily.

But if you asked me, I would more or less give him a stern lecture, put him on ice for a while, but you've got to get him into the European campaign.

And then

you wouldn't believe this because Patton was far right, but probably his biggest supporter was FDR.

And that was an old aristocratic tie between Patton's wife,

who was very, very wealthy.

pharmaceutical fortune, and they had known the Roosevelt families way back.

And she went and lobbied for her husband.

I just saw a clip of Patton's granddaughter meeting some members of the Third Army.

Obviously, they're 100 years old.

Have you ever met any of his family members?

I have.

Ten years ago, a wonderful man, Jack Littlefield, he was a big investor.

He had a private tank collection, and it was like number fourth largest in the United States.

And he was a polymath.

And

I went there for maybe 10 years, and we have a program with colonel, lieutenant colonels that are up for promotion.

They can choose the Hoover Institution.

Every year there were four of them.

H.R.

McMaster was one.

Chris Gibson, the congressman, was one.

And they had me take the four over to Jack Littlefield's Woodside.

He died, and his widow sold it off, but it was just incredible.

They had every imaginable tank there.

And on one occasion,

Jacques asked me if I would would lecture on the tanks.

Not that I knew as much as he did.

He knew every little.

And

anyway, there was a grandson of George Patton, a wonderful guy.

Patton's son was a three-star general in Vietnam.

And

there was a Robert Patton, I think he wrote The Fighting Pattons.

It's kind of a weird book about the family going back to the Civil War, but it was almost kind of critical about the patents.

There was some controversy because he was sort of a philanderer and his daughter, you know, he had two daughters.

One of them was promised to be married to

John J.

Pershing, and he backed out of it.

He was kind of a playboy after his tragic death of his children and wife in a fire.

But

he broke it off.

But they were very loyal to him, the two patent daughters and the wife.

And the son idolized his father.

Okay.

Awfully cool.

He was very Trumpian character.

He had

Bernie was larger than life, but he was very, very talented.

And I think over the years, once the Marshall, the George Marshall, Bradley, Eisenhower,

Army War College, Archives,

Lobby, or whatever you would call it, that had a lockhold on a lot of the papers and the interpretation.

Once that moved on,

Then the Ladislaw Fargo and

some of the other Martin Bloomson, the people who had been empirical and actually looked what Patton did and not what he said, he started to be rehabilitated.

Carlo D'Asti wrote a great biography of Patton.

Well, anyone of a certain age loves the movie, too, which how accurate it was, I don't know.

The problem with that movie was that it was accurate, but the problem was that

General Bradley was a consultant on it.

So the Carl Mulden figure that's sort of the wise guy and calm down, George, and I, you know,

that is all

crazy.

Yeah.

It would have been much better had they showed that Bradley was always talking behind Patton's back to Eisenhower and trying to get him fired.

Bradley was a better person in the sense of his character.

He wasn't excessive with alcohol or profanity or womanizing, but he had just a fraction of the military genius of Patton.

Isn't it interesting they named the tanks after him, right?

There's a patent tank.

Yeah, there is.

It was used, I think it was the M46 and M55.

It was used in the Korean War.

And they used it in Vietnam until it was a good tank.

And there were people in the Marine Corps that wanted to keep it.

They didn't like the Abrams.

But after World War II, and the Sherman was a really underrated tank, there were certain things about the Sherman that were very advantageous.

But because it didn't have the gun or the protection of the German or Russian tanks, the Americans said,

this is never going to happen to us again.

And they came out with a Pershing and then a Patton tank that were pretty good, and then the Abrams was dominant.

Yes,

I think it is today.

Bradley's not a tank.

It's an armored transport, but it has a gun on it.

Okay.

Well, Victor, we have time maybe for one more question for you, maybe too quick, and we're going to do that when we come back from this

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show special episode recording on the 9th.

This episode is up on Tuesday, June 17th.

We thank the good people of the Victor Davis Hansen Fan Club on Facebook for submitting questions.

Victor, here's one from Rosemary in Plano.

And

she is interested in recommendations for some general history, especially after World War II, books or documentaries or free online courses.

And she writes why.

She says,

she went to school.

She's generally our age.

I didn't didn't learn about the Korean War, Vietnam War, the Cold War.

I pick up some here and there, but I don't really have a good overall knowledge of more recent history.

She's been enjoying the discussions and things you do, I assume, with Hillsdale on World War II.

But do you have any book that you, in particular, you like that's maybe about Korea, Vietnam, Cold War?

Well, on the Vietnam, Mark Moyer is writing a three-volume revisionist history.

I don't think that's the right word for it.

It's trying to look, and he has a

colleague who's translated Vietnamese communist archive.

And it is a look at what actually happened in Vietnam, not just that it was all bad and we lost the war.

And his argument is revisionary.

I'll just give you a couple examples.

So we always are told that William Westmoreland, William Wastemoreland, and search and destroy missions.

And he makes the argument that they had had pretty much destroyed the Viet Cong in the south and that the Phoenix program that targeted CIA had been very successful.

And

most of the war after Tet had been won.

And then he looked at other things that were kind of ridiculed.

There's always this idea that Operation Lang the smart bombing,

I think it was called Linebacker, where Nixon bombed during Christmas.

Remember when he got angry?

72?

That was very successful because they had laser-guided bombs and they could really target specific targets, and that brought the North Hitman's to the table.

But the old revisionist is that we were very crude.

We took in B-52s, Operation Rolling Thunder, you know, that Rolling Thunder was just horrific.

It didn't do anything.

He argues very differently that that had a profound effect.

Another revisionist, just to finish, is that

we're told that it was a good thing to get rid of Madame Ngu and

the early

Vietnamese government,

her brother, I'm trying to remember his name, and then we had Cai and then Thu, but the idea that we had Diem assassinated, I think we understood.

We claim that we didn't order his assassination, that somebody did it in our name and we were angry about it.

In a church, of all places.

Yeah, of all places.

But Mark's argument is that diem was actually very good and he was winning the war so if you look at that i think the third volume is coming out pretty soon that's something you should you should look at and then uh

trying to remember the two korea anything yeah there's two authors i know them very well i hadn't i wasn't prepared for this question but he's um he just passed away he was a

professor actually he's a professor at oio state as a co-wick murray excuse me he writ he wrote williamson murray wrote a lot about the Korean War, especially the air.

He was an expert on air power.

And it's fascinating about the

communist corridor among the Yalu and Manchuria and the fights between the F-80s and the MiG-15 to get air superiority, which we did get and allowed the B-29s to really

but they had superior were not the Soviet jets at the outset better than Lawrence.

Yes, that's true.

We had the Panther and then we had the shooting star, the F-80 and they looked really sleek, but the Mikoyan MiG-15

was about 50 to 80 miles faster.

It could turn better, it could climb better, it had a cannon on it.

And then we came out really quickly then with this F-86 and that was

a heavier, bigger plane.

It could dive faster, it had more thrust, it couldn't maneuver as well.

But once the Americans learned how to use it, it's kind of controversial.

We said that the kill rate was eight to one.

The Soviets claimed it was three to one.

But we did learn after the war that

the

Russian, most of those pilots were Russian.

They were not North Korean or Chinese.

So that was something that came on.

I'm trying to remember the, you know, he wrote The Coldest Winter.

It's a good account of the Korean War.

The guy that was killed in an auto accident on the way to Berkeley, he wrote the best and the Brightest.

Yeah, he was a journalist.

He got killed in an intersection in East Palo Alto.

He was on his way.

David Halberd, oh, David Halberstam.

David Halberstam, yes.

It was very tragic.

A graduate student was driving and they went through a stop sign.

He got killed.

And he wrote something, I think, called The Coldest Winter.

Yeah.

It was kind of a journalistic account of the march up to the Yallow River and then the million-man invasion by the communists and the longest retreat in American military history, and Choison Reservoir, and the freezing cold, and the Marine Corps, and the Army.

It was really, it's really good.

Yeah.

I actually met him once.

He was filming a firing line.

While I was babysitting, of all people, it's not fair to call him babysitting, Billy Bulger, the former president of the Massachusetts Senate, and the brother of the infamous

Whitey Bulger.

Hey, Victor, let's close this out with a question that is, I don't know, interesting, but quick, if you don't mind, and it's literally quick.

It's from Ed Rowley.

I've seen videos of a Supermarine Spitfire flying parallel to and with its wing knocking a German V1 rocket off course.

Did that really happen?

How could a Spitfire catch up with a V1 rocket?

Well the Model 8 and 9 by 1944 had a level speed of 400 miles an hour.

And what they would do is they would wait for the...

This is not the V2, by the way, the Intercontinental Ballistic.

Nobody could stop that.

But the V-1, the buzz bomb, which was a pulse jet.

It had a big, you know, heavy 1,500 pound, I think, of explosive,

and it had a gyroscope, so they would launch it from Belgium or France, and then they would time.

It was kind of a terror weapon.

They wasn't very accurate, but they could get within the city limits of the place they wanted to hit.

And then they had a timer

and a pressure.

So when it started to descend,

they knew exactly how fast it would go.

And it would then indiscriminately hit something in Liverpool or Manchester or something.

But a Spitfire who was, they had them on patrols, and what they would do is

rather than

try to blow up, to shoot them and have them blow up, they would go, and this wasn't the common way of getting them.

The common way was using 50-caliber machine guns or 20-millimeter cannon.

But

they could catch up to them on the gradual dive, and then they would put a wing underneath the short, stubby wings of the V-1 and

turn right or left and flip it.

And once they did that, if they could get away and some people got killed trying it, then the thing would gyrate out of control.

And they would do that before it got near the target.

And they were pretty good at it.

I think everybody thinks Germany was so much more advanced, but when you look at the Rolls-Royce engine and the improvements of the Spitfire from 1940 all the way to 45, the last version

outclassed

the Falkwoof 190.

It was a better plane, and the P-51

had a Rolls-Royce same engine in it, and it was better than the

FW-190.

And they

updated the BF-109 a lot, too.

That was a very difficult plane to fly.

A lot of people got killed because of the landing gear and everything about it.

The speed of upgrading existing weapons seems remarkable.

I wonder if

this happened today, how long it would take to upgrade.

Yeah, what happens in war is that everybody works an eight-hour day in peace or seven hours, and then you go to war and then people start getting, you know, I'm going to work 15 hours, I'm going to take my work home with me, and the women are going to work, men, everybody gets involved, and

time is redefined.

And so if you look at World War II, if you started the war, the Mark I tank, I think it weighed 10 tons, German tank, and it had a machine gun on it.

The Mark II, I think, had a 8-millimeter gun.

That was considered.

And then the Mark III and IV had a 50-millimeter.

And then the standard gun within a year or two was the 75 and 76 millimeter.

And then the Germans came out with the best gun of the war, the 88 millimeter.

They use as a flat gun, but they put it on a Tiger.

And then the Pershing came out, and the Stalin had a 90 millimeter.

That was all in the space.

And then the armor went from one inch to two, three, four, five, six inches even, and it was sloped.

The horsepower of the engines doubled.

All within three or four years.

The same thing with planes.

If you look at the first generation

P-39 Air Cobra or the P-40

flying tiger plane, the one that we associate it with, or you look at

the F-4 Wildcat, you'd compare the F-4 Wildcat to the F-6 Hellcat, or you look at the P-40 compared to even a P-38 Lightning, but especially a Corsair or a P-47 Thunderbolt.

It wasn't even close.

It was just

brilliant engineers staying up all night in Germany and Russia and Britain and the United States.

Where we really excelled was in nautical engineering.

So you could make the argument that we started comparable to the British Navy.

We were smaller in tonnage and number of ships and maybe behind the Japanese in craftsmanship.

But by 1943,

we were turning out North Carolina battleships, 44 Iowa-class battleships, Essex carriers, heavy cruisers, Gato submarine.

We had the best of everything.

It was just amazing.

The Navy was just

unchallenged.

It was the most formidable Navy in the world.

It was larger in 1945 and May than all the navies put together.

Viva la meritocracy, Victor.

Yeah, I was just thinking that the other day.

I was watching an old movie.

Remember Apollo 13 with Tom Hanks?

Yeah.

And I looked at all those guys with their flat tops,

pocket protectors.

Short sleeves protectors.

Some of them had slide reels and to check their computers, and they all had slight Texas accents.

And they were just brilliant guys.

And I thought, oh, look, they're all white males.

This could never happen today.

Where are the women?

Where are the minorities?

Who are these guys?

They're racist.

They're horrible.

And then, you know, they were all brilliant people.

Nobody ever says those guys, we don't care what they look like.

We don't care what race they were.

They were brilliant.

And they created.

We haven't been back to the...

I don't know if we can go to the moon anymore.

All those guys are dead.

And I think a lot of their knowledge went with them.

Well, you've been brilliant.

You think that MIT students are much better than they were in the 1970s.

Guys like Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, you know, everybody thought Buzz Aldrin was nuts.

Yeah.

He endorsed Trump.

I think he's still alive.

He's 90.

He was absolutely brilliant.

He had a Ph.D.

Yeah.

I mean, he did original research, and so did Neil Armstrong.

They were just,

they were pilots.

And I think

a lot of the old, you know, Chuck Yeager and the guys who weren't academic that were World War II veterans in Korean War.

And, you know, Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong had fought in the Korean War and shot down planes.

Yeah.

I think later Aldrin said, well, they bailed out.

I didn't kill them.

But he had, I think, 10 kills or something.

Yeah, they were brilliant pilots, but Chuck Yeager then said they were scientists and physicists and a good pilot.

You know, had instinct and natural, but if you were going to be an academic, they knew more.

He didn't, he said they knew more about my plane than I did.

They knew everything about it, but that doesn't make a good pilot.

You have to be welded psychologically to the plane and have experience.

But

that generation of Chuck Yeager, Neil, all those guys are just absolutely phenomenal.

I don't know.

All right, Victor,

we're doing truncated shows

today, so we thank you, all the wisdom you shared.

Thank the good people who, again, who submitted the questions.

Remind you, folks, if you're on Facebook, check out and join the Victor Davis Hansen Fan Club.

If you're on X Victor's Handle, there's at V D Hansen.

You want more of Victor, you go to his website, The Blade of Perseus, sign up there.

And as for me, Jack Fowler, I write Civil Thoughts, the free weekly email newsletter that gives 14 recommended readings.

I do that for the Center for Civil Society.

Go to civilthoughts.com, sign up.

I know you're going to like it.

Thanks, Victor, for all the wisdom you shared.

Again, thanks, folks, for watching, listening, and submitting questions.

And we will be back soon with a healthier Victor Davis-Hansen on the Victor Davis-Hansen show.

Bye-bye.

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