Stephanopoulos "Shocked" and the Moral Appraisal of WWII

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This is the Victor Davis-Hampson Show.

Victor is the Martin Annely Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne Marshabuski Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

This is our weekend edition when we look at a few news stories, but then we talk about warfare in these recent weekend editions and then a little bit on agriculture as well.

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We're back and Victor,

there's some in the news.

I know that we had a good session on especially international and then some things going on in the far, far west, as we called, as you called it, as your grandmother called it.

Lots of people have written in to

the website that happy birthday wishes.

And we are recording actually on Tuesday, which is your birthday.

So just wanted you to know that there's lots of fans out there.

Nobody ever thinks it's going to happen to you.

What, turning 70?

Yeah, I've got a lot of people that say happy birthday.

So I just write back and and said, I'm glad I made 50.

So I cannot believe 70?

Yeah.

That's the problem with all these

narcissistic, self-absorbed baby boomers.

We all think, I can't believe this is happening to me.

And

we get old.

70 years old.

I can remember, gosh, 1960, I thought, my grandfather, I remember his birthday party, we had a big 7-0 and a cake.

I thought, wow, he's ancient.

I like that you use the pronoun we and include yourself in those narcissistic baby boomers.

I am.

I'm a part of that.

I fight it every day of my life.

I thought, wow, you've inherited from your generation.

Or I don't think I was a promulgator, but I was inundated with it at UC Santa Cruz.

Yeah.

Despite the best efforts of my Depression era, World War II era parents.

Got to remember what Horace said in the third.

No, actually, that was in the satires when he said, We,

a generation more decadent than our parents, are about to produce a generation more decadent than we are.

Yeah.

That's that idea of pessimistic decline, but something about it.

I just gave a talk today.

I'm at Hillsdale College, and I gave a talk on D-Day, the 79th

anniversary to the Hillsdale Academy, K-12.

Wow.

That was one of the topics.

The 18-year-old, I asked how many were in the class that were 18.

And what would have been like if you were 18 to open that door in LST and have to go shoulder deep in that water knowing that things were starting to go wrong the minute you got out of that landing craft?

The water, you went onto the beach.

There were minefields ahead of you.

The Germans were not undermanned.

They were waiting for you on the cliffs.

And Omaha was turning into a 4,000-plus dead day.

And yet they kept running.

They kept running all the way to the seawall, the ones that made it.

Yeah.

And they all got, that's good.

I think of that because I get so angry when these

people like AOC,

just to pick on somebody, start making fun of this country and

they are so pampered.

And then they don't understand.

Those kids came out of the depression, and then they put them in the army, and 12.3 million of them.

And those guys that got the

lottery ticket to be on Omaha Beach at 6, 5 in the morning,

and there was nothing, none of them turned back.

They opened the doors of the landing craft.

They were up to their knees with 70-pound up to their neck, 70-pound.

They waded through the water.

They waded through the machine gun fields of fire, the artillery blasts, the minefields to get to the sea wall.

And then they had to blow it up and go through, and then they were in the Bokaj,

and none of them turned around.

What a generation.

I hope I asked the class, of course, I'm in Hillsdale, so they're unusual kids.

Would all of them, what would their attitude be like?

I think they would have been the same, but I can't say the same for

half the country.

Yeah.

Well, you know, if it's dangerous to make those statements, but this generation, I'm very worried about it.

If numbers of dead make a difference, it seems to me that

on the Somme in World War I,

the worst day of battle was about 60,000 people.

Casualties, 20,000 dead.

Yeah, there was 60,000 casualties.

That's incredible.

That wiped, I think.

Tolkien was that passionate.

That wiped out that whole generation.

That created modernism.

I mean, it was there in art, in music, in literature, but

after Passchendaele and the Salmon were done, poems would no longer rhyme.

There would no longer be a poetic vocabulary.

Nobody would know what a hexameter was.

There was going to be performance art and impressionistic art,

representational art, but not art that captured what the eye actually saw.

It was just, it was, you know.

The French always talk about a lost generation they lamented yeah it was decas and decorum espatrio more that line from horace and then attached was it siegfried sassoon or wilford owen the old it was wilfred owen at wilfred owen the old eye

and what would you say if 20 000 were told to get up over the trenches and they got killed for what help

Well, I guess it was to stop the Prussian war machine, which they succeeded at, but there could have been a better way than killing 20,000 people in one day.

Yeah.

All right.

Well,

anyway, we'll go ahead.

We'll get, yeah, we'll get back to World War II, in fact, in just a little while.

But some of the news first,

maybe I'm always looking for something inspirational, but this time, if I can't find inspirational, at least funny.

I read on Powerline that George Stephanopoulos was shocked at the polls after all of these indictments of Trump, that it's 46 to 46 Biden to Trump in the polls.

And I was wondering if you had any reflections on that left-wing hack, if that's not too harsh a word.

He is shocked.

This is a guy that says he's a journalist that came right out of the Clinton war room.

Remember, he was the Clinton rapid response head of the war room.

And what it was his job to do was lie about Bill Clinton in 1992.

No, he did not sleep with that woman.

No, that bimbo eruption.

That was not him.

No, that, you know, that he didn't do that.

No, that's all all he did.

All he did was lie about Bill Clinton's past.

And that was a rapid response.

And

so he's now a quote unquote journalist for 30 years.

And he's shocked that after Joe Biden is mentioned by his son as Mr.

10%, the big guy, getting half the money, after Victor Shilkin said he probably took a bribe, after an oligarch says he has

two voice recordings that Joe Biden was there, after there's $20 million

they think

was hidden that came into the Biden coffers, after the

IRS whistleblowers said they were closing the net on Joe Biden's tax and Hunter's tax evasion,

after Devin Archer and Tony Bobolinski swore that

Joe Biden's an abject liar, that he knew about Hunter's business.

In fact, he was involved in it, given all that evidence.

And then you look at Joe Biden, and he cannot finish the sentence.

His syntax is non-existent.

He can't walk very well.

He whispers or shouts.

And George Stephanopoulos is shocked that half the country would prefer Donald Trump to him.

I wonder why that would be, George.

It wouldn't have anything to do with it.

You have the most corrupt man and president in history, and you have

a person who's non compos mentes

and was foisted upon us with lies that he was saying.

And then you have Donald Trump, a flawed individual, but had a record of four years of successful governance despite the Mueller investigation, the hot fake laptop, the fake ping in the bank, all of that stuff, fake impeachment, personal impeachment.

And he's shocked.

What do you think people are going to do?

Oh,

Donald Trump tweets bad.

Oh, Fannie Willis has got him.

Oh, Jack Smith.

And so, for every one of those indictments, George, half the country says this.

Well, if Donald Trump took out classified information, that's wrong.

But how about Joe Biden?

He did it as a senator and a vice president, and he's had it for 15 years, not two, and three locations, not one.

And he had no legal right to declare them unclassified, unlike the president did.

Oh, he made a phone call and he said, fine.

He didn't say invent.

He said, fine, i.e., they're existing somewhere.

You just have to call the local registrars and see if there's missing ballots.

Ooh, it was election interference.

And there were electors that were altered.

It wouldn't be like a bunch of actors on the DNC prompt in 2016 saying, dear electors, we're running a publicity campaign to have you violate your constitutional duties and vote against Donald Trump despite the popular tally in your state.

Or Jill Stein, I'm going to sue to throw out the counts in various states because I think the Dominion voting machines are fraudulent.

Ooh, we're going to indict her too?

Oh, well, you say, well, there's Letita James victorious.

Yes, and Donald Trump is the only real estate mogul in New York City that took out a loan and put his assets down as security, and he exaggerated the value, and then he paid the loan off anyway.

And you're going to indict him for that.

Well, how about Alvin Bragg?

Alvin Bragg.

Oh,

he's got him on a felony campaign violation.

He gave some things to Stormy.

And,

you know, he

did improper accounting on it.

That was all that is.

It wouldn't be like Hillary Clinton, Clinton breaking the law by feloniously hiring a foreign national or maybe two,

Mr.

Deschinko and Mr.

Steele.

And what was their job is to invent lies and disinformation and misinformation to smear her candidate.

And how did she pay for it?

By hiding it through the DNC, Perkins Coe, Fusion GPS.

And what do you do when you catch her red-handed?

And she hasn't had time to destroy 30,000 emails like she did a little bit earlier with complete impunity.

And she didn't get the sledgehammers out to smash everything like she did earlier when they were under subpoena.

You fine her $100,000.

That's why people, George, are angry.

It's asymmetrical.

They don't believe Donald Trump did anything differently than any of these candidates do, but they believe people like you cannot trust to have a transparent, fair election because the dregs, the chumps, the irredeemables, the deplorables, the clingers might not vote for your bicoastal clones.

And I wonder why that would be.

Hmm.

I wonder why that would be, George.

And maybe you should go over to East Palestine, Ohio, and see how people live for a change or go to Bakersfield or go to Dayton.

and just get out of that corridor and see what it means to go out and work all day plumbing or stringing Romex on your house or doing any of those things, and then being told that you're a loser, you're a racist, you're this, you're that.

Maybe you get angry as the rate of inflation goes up much higher than your wages, and you can't live in Kaurama or Martha's Vineyard.

Or you look at the Wall Street Journal online, and what's one of their chief popular features?

A mansion.

So look at today's mansion: French Riviera, Lake Cuomo, Tahoe Shores.

Ooh, it looks great.

Ooh, it's $12 million, $15 million.

Wow, thank you, Wall Street Journal.

It's really nice of you to have a nice feature about all the multi-million dollar mansions and how tastefully they're decorated.

I think I'll buy one in East Powell.

Come on.

Yeah, I know.

Well,

let's move forward because Power Line said he has Trump derangement syndrome, and it's as evident as ever since he can't see all the stuff you just said much more clearly than Caroline actually wrote it out.

But can we look at, there's a article by Charles Lipson in the American Spectator called Biden Impeachment Inquiry Looms, and it talks all about the possibility of impeachment and then the

kind of quandary that Kevin McCarthy and the Republicans are in.

And they state it like this, that there are three things that the Republicans are worried about and need to watch for.

One, they have to have enough evidence and be compelling.

Two, they need to persuade independents who are getting tired of this mutual investigation back and forth.

And then three, that the Republicans don't appear to lose sight of the critical issues of i.e.

the economy and those types of things.

And so I was wondering what your thoughts on.

It was a very good article.

I highly recommend it to everybody.

But what are your thoughts on that, Victor?

Is that all McCarthy needs to worry about?

Yeah, it was a very good article.

It's a political decision when to start impeachment.

So what you don't want to do is impeach Joe Biden

and not have concrete data.

And so what do I mean by that?

So you go to impeach him and you say, well, here's the IRS whistleblowers, but you need the data from them right proof and then you say well here's tony bobolinsky and devin archer then we need to corroborate what they've said and then we got to look at the laptop and say this is exactly what he said this and this and we need where the 20 million went so what we really need are those 4 000 emails that were addressed to hunter under pseudonyms by joe rosemont they went to rosemont mostly and when you say the oligarchs when shokin said that he took a bribe, so we need to get those tapes from the oligarchs that say they have 17, that's all I'm saying.

I think it's all 100% open and shut case, but it's a political challenge.

So when you go before the nation and you want to get that information, and they're not going to want to give it to you.

So what you do now is you say you're having an impeachment inquiry, and then you get a little bit more avenue and a little bit more clout and pressure for the National Archives to fork over those emails, or for banks to fork over that data or for the IRS to start releasing things as the whistleblowers allege.

And then you ramp it up slowly.

And so I think that that's what he's trying to do.

And I know there's a lot of

anger that they haven't impeached him yet, but we've got to make sure that

we don't do what they did.

Or maybe some of you were saying, well, we should do what they did.

They impeached Trump on nothing.

I said, I know it, but we want to get him dead set.

And then there's the other problem,

and that is a lesser problem.

So that you bring this evidence, and then we've got a year and a half.

You can impeach him.

And then

you're not going to convict him with 60 votes.

You only have 49.

But

if those emails are what they may be

that, hey, Hunter, where's the money or we're going to put it here, then that's going to be a lot of pressure on Democratic senators that are up for re-election, especially in iffy district, iffy states, I should say.

And then what do you do?

You've taken Joe out of the equation and you've given the country to Camilla Harris.

And is that good for the country or good for the Republican Party?

Or both or bad, you know what I'm saying?

Will she get the advantage of being an incumbent going into

an election?

Or will she screw up everything and help the Republican but hurt the country?

So you've got to, there's a, it's a

minefield, and we've got to be very careful how he does this.

So I think he's doing the right thing by having an inquiry and then getting

all his ducks in a row, so to speak.

And then maybe by the first year, he's got a whole year to impeach him.

And I think he's also thinking that since these people introduced the idea of weaponizing lawfare and the election and these

bogus prosecutions are going to be synchronized with the campaign primaries, then we'll do the same.

So if they're going to have Donald Trump on trial on, you know,

the big Tuesday, mega Tuesday primary, then maybe we'll have an actual impeachment open that day.

That's what they want to do.

Of course, the left is

the left.

It's infantile.

How can you dare do that?

Why would you ever think you could have an impeachment inquiry and time it just to the

primary that would be so low?

That's why how democracy dies in darkness, that kind of stuff.

Yeah, they're like a petulant adolescent, and they always believe everything revolves around them, and they're morally superior, and they need to have this.

And you would never do to them what they do to you because you're stupid and unimaginative and not sophisticated and cosmopolitan like they are

what do you think of the independence like the position of the independents is that just a wild card or is there any you think that if there's enough evidence then they'll the more of the independents will be swayed to stay away from the left or

um they have to persuade the independents and the independents um are sick of it they're sick of the tit for tat lawfare And so they have to be, they can't just cut open the

Biden body.

They have to be surgical about it.

And they have to do it in such a way that they're not, the independent says this is a corrective for the abuse of this administration.

This is not a blunderbus, just slaughter Biden.

But they have, and so what I mean by that, if you go back and revisit the first impeachment, there was no special prosecutor.

Mueller was all through there was no special

leon you know jawowski or

you know star none of that there was no special prosecutor to investigate it there was no cross-examination there were no witnesses they just impeached him they did it quickly in december and it was quick and it came and it was even oh mueller said he's innocent hmm we said for two years that the walls were closing and we spent 40 million dollars well let's just go to impeachment then because Mr.

Vinman violated the law and he broke his classified

status and he reported a classified phone call to Mr.

Sarah Malla.

And therefore, we're going to impeach him.

And that's what they did.

And if Republicans do that, they won't win the Independence.

So that's why they're trying to...

take the higher ground.

It's very hard to take the higher ground with these people because

they don't learn when you take the higher ground.

No, no.

You know, another article that I was looking at was talking about the, I hadn't thought about this aspect of it, that the Biden administration has set up a war room for possible impeachment charges against him.

And that's been going on for three months.

But what they said was, and this was a left-wing newspaper, that it would be done on the Bill Clinton model, this war room.

And I was wondering, what does that mean, the Bill Clinton model?

And then what does this mean for taxpayers?

Do we have to finance all of this stuff for him?

What do you mean by that?

Well, the taxpayer is paying for his lawyers to defend himself.

So this war room is our, our, is, we're, I'm being facetious.

They're doing it for us.

He's our president.

They're trying to defend it from crazy right-wing clingers that are trying to obstruct the brilliant agendas of Joe Biden.

So, of course, he's got lawyers.

They're legal counsel.

Yeah, Donald Trump is, he spent 50, and I think he's going to end up spending 150 million.

That's the point.

That's what this government does when you have the administrative state.

They try to grind you down because they have all of the accounting on their side.

And that's what these prosecutors do.

And that's what they're doing to Donald Trump, but not to Joe Biden.

No, no, he's going to have government lawyers.

And maybe,

I don't know,

if you say, well, this was something personal,

and he's not, it's not the role of the White House.

This is what he did as vice president, and it's a prior offense.

And then it's kind of like saying, what would he say?

Well, Hunter Biden's not doing private things on Air Force II.

He was helping me navigate the complexity of Ukraine.

So it's the same thing.

They're going to do what they got to do, and

they'll make the necessary adjustment.

Yeah.

Well,

so what do you think it means for the taxpayer?

But what does a Bill Clinton model mean as well?

They're going to go out after people and malign their characters and et cetera.

And then what we're going to pay millions of dollars for this kind of stuff?

Is that what we should just come to expect and live with it?

Live with it?

We're living with it.

i i i just think that what i'm trying to i'm not trying to be sarcastic but i'm all i'm saying is that this administration

by any standard is the most corrupt we've ever seen because

there is no way that joe biden or jill biden or jim biden or hunter biden can match the lifestyle with the income

that they reported.

It's impossible.

So they either broke the law and lied about their income,

or they got money under the table, and whatever it is, they're guilty of tax evasion and they're guilty of some type of influence peddling or bribery.

And that's a fact.

And there's also a fact that Joe Biden is the most

disabled president since Woodrow Wilson.

And he is one step, one severe COVID,

one bad flu away from oblivion.

And that's a fact.

He can no longer work five days a week.

He can't work four days a week.

He can't work three days a week.

He can work 10 to 2, 3 days a week.

And 40% of the time he's been in office, he's been on vacation.

So if there's a tragedy in East Palestine, he said, I can't be able to fit in my schedule.

If there's something in Maui, you think he's going to do what Lon DeSantis did?

Go, you know, just immediately get everybody galvanized, go there and visit the whole state like he did?

No, he's not going to go to Maui.

He's not going to do any of that.

He can't.

That's what it's so weird about.

He cannot do it.

It's,

I mean, I think at a period in my life when I got COVID, I had long COVID, I had no zero energy.

If I was present, I couldn't do it.

I couldn't even walk hardly.

So that's what he is.

He's a long COVID case.

He can't do it.

So we're in a unique situation.

We've never had such a corrupt president and such a disabled president at the same time.

And then we have the Democratic Party that has an agenda through this president that they're ecstatic about because they took the Obama, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, hard left squad, whatever this ridiculousness is.

and they force-fed it through the mouth of Joe Biden, good old Joe from Scranton.

And so I'm going to unite everybody.

I'm good old Joe Bo from Scranton.

I'm kind of a moderate Democrat.

And that was all a joke.

And then they staffed his entire administration with

leftover Obamaites.

And so that's where we are.

And they're going to do anything they can.

They hijack the government of the United States through this vehicle or puppet of called Joe Biden, this facsimile.

He doesn't exist as a president.

He's a construct.

And we're being run by hard leftists.

And they're not going to give up power if they can help it.

And that's where we are.

And they've got a debilitated, corrupt person.

And if he ever says anything like in a moment of clarity, hey, Barack, I'm not going to appoint that judge that you told me I have to appoint.

Hey, Bernie, I don't think that that legislation you want is tolerable.

Hey, Elizabeth.

I don't think we can quite do that.

One of them is going to say, hey, Joe,

remember that email you wrote, or remember that archive, or remember this?

You're corrupt.

Remember that?

We know you're corrupt.

And so that's where we are.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and then come back and talk again about World War II and the end of World War II.

So stay with us and we'll be right back.

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The name of the website is the blade of perseus so come join us so victor um one one plug two for your book the second world wars we highly recommend victor's written a compendium of information and new ideas about world war ii and again it's called the second world wars we finished up last time with the end of world war ii but we were so short of time i didn't have time to ask you some questions so i hope you don't mind if i ask a couple couple of questions before we enter into the legacy.

Why the

first one is, why were the French so weak?

I know that we often say, well, the Germans enacted the Schlieffen Plan redux, basically, and really did it well this time.

But

the French should have been more than ready for them, it seems like.

But what is your analysis of that?

It's a tragedy.

And as Mark Bloch wrote when he was a prisoner, a great medieval historian, he wrote that great essay.

It's not really a book, it's an essay, you know, strange defeat.

And he wrestled with that.

What was he wrestling with?

In World War I, the bulwark of the West was the indomitable French army.

And for all of its mutinies and all of its tragedies, it did not break.

And the Germans did not get...

did not break through to the coast.

They almost did on the spring offensive, but they were stopped.

And so during the 20s and 30s, the thinking of the Western democracies was

there is the French army and it's a million strong and it can get up to four million.

And then they built the Maginal Line up to the Belgian border.

And everybody makes fun of the Maginal Line, but the Germans really never went through it.

They tried to go over it and they only penetrated after basically the defenses had collapsed.

So the question is,

on May 10th of 1940, they knew he was coming.

So, when he went through the Netherlands and he went into Belgium, and by the way, the French were perfectly willing to continue the Maginal line across the Belgian border, but the Belgians objected and said, you can't fence us out.

And the Ardennes

You don't need it because the Ardennes, they can't take panzers through the Ardennes.

And so stop it right at the Ardennes and do not turn left and keep us out.

That was a mistake.

The French should have, because the Belgians, like the Dutch, were overrun very quickly.

But why was that?

Because when you look at the actual wherewithal of the French, the tanks, the Shard tank, was better than the Mark III, and there were very few Mark IVs.

And it was as good as the Mark IV.

It had a 75-millimeter gun, I guess it did, or 76.

And it had heavy armor, and it was good.

And their plane, their fighter planes were as good, if not better, than the BF-109.

And they had almost as many soldiers available.

They had some, you know, some good generals, not the ones in command, but people like de Gaulle.

And you can't make fun of the French fighting man because they had done so well in

World War I.

And then when we were liberating France in June, in July, and August of 1944, we immediately started to

incorporate the so-called Free French.

We got up to 500,000 soldiers in Tassignet and Leclerc.

They were brilliant French commanders and the French armored divisions were excellent.

So what happened?

Why did this indomitable army, just indomitable army, just collapse?

And I guess it was

Mark Bloch said they didn't want to win.

They didn't, again, the people who

won World War I were traumatized and the people who lost World War I were not and

so

there they had been invaded and they had won the war with Germans on their soil and they had never really humiliated and sent the Germans back into Germany and occupied the Germans kept rubbing that in and then during the socialist period of the 20s and 30s Verdun was

recalibrated from they shall not pass, a glorious moment in French history into a modernist nightmare where nearly a million casualties were inflicted for a stupid fort that's what they thought and so all of that

you know that 1920s gay paris where you know hemingway and at scotts fitzgerald and all these great writers were there that was a period kind of like Weimar Germany.

And World War I was considered proof of the decadence of Western civilization and all of its manifestations.

And they were never going to do that again.

And so when people enlisted, they were not the same, they didn't have the same ideas they did in 1914, because they'd been through 1914, 15, 16, 17, 18.

And they had a...

They didn't understand the German army.

The German army was not that,

it was not at that point in 1940 where it was in 1943.

By that I mean it didn't have Mark IV tanks everywhere and Panthers and Fockewolf 190s and hardened veterans.

It was a bully that used the proximity

to Germany and the road system and the affluence of Western Europe to pile up victories, first in Poland, then Norway, then Denmark,

then the Low Countries of Luxembourg and

Holland and Belgium and France, and then the Balkans, Yugoslavia, then Greece and Crete, and then what?

They went into the Soviet Union and all of a sudden the roads weren't too good and the supply lines were long and there was a lot more Soviet soldiers than there were German and the T-34 was as good or better than the Mark IV

and

there were all sorts of new weaponry like rockets

and they didn't do very well and they didn't do very well in Sicily.

They were pretty good in Italy on the defense, but my point is they were never capable of fighting a global war in the fashion of the British, the Americans, or the Soviets.

Just because they were Germany, they only had 80 million people and they didn't have the industrial base.

But nobody really understood that.

So the French felt they were all by themselves and they were up against the entire German Empire, so to speak.

But actually, they could have stopped them.

And

they killed over 20,000 Germans, don't make, make no mistake.

And they probably, along with Spitfire pilots, destroyed maybe 500 or 600 aircraft.

And when you look at the blitz that started in August after the defeat of January 23rd, 25th, I mean, June 23rd, 25th,

they lost another thousand planes in what they considered a devastating attack on London.

And then when you add the Yugoslavian campaign, the Greek campaign, especially the invasion of Crete,

one of the reasons they didn't take Moscow was they had lost probably 40,000 casualties, 50,000 casualties.

They'd lost about 20% of their transport.

They'd lost 1,000 fighters.

And had they not suffered those casualties and gone straight into the Soviet Union,

they would have been a lot better off.

So, what I'm getting at is the French did some good in their defeat.

They did some good.

And they weren't just, I don't know what to say, they were a demoralized people because they felt they were all alone.

And they didn't think the United States was coming in.

They thought Wilson eventually would get there.

And they thought

the British put over 300,000 troops, but

they thought that

all of the British air power would be invested in France, and they couldn't do that.

They had to protect London, so they didn't bring over all of their air power.

They would have had no reserves and the United States was belatedly giving them war supplies.

So they felt they were all alone.

They were, when Germany went into Poland, they were naked on the Western Front.

They put all of their resources to destroy Poland from September 1st, basically to the end of September, and when the Soviets came in and finished Poland off.

But at that point, the French went into the Saarline, and there was no opposition.

If the French had taken that million-man army and left the Maginot line, they could have gone way into Germany and done a lot of damage, but they didn't do it.

They were dropping leaflets.

The British were bombing Germany with leaflets all of the first two weeks of September.

Dear German people, we are your friends.

You have been taken over by a madman.

He is leading you to a war you won't win.

Please stop.

That's what we did: the French and the German and the British.

And remember, on May 10th, it wasn't just that Germany invaded France.

Winston Churchill finally took over as prime minister.

And then things started to change.

It was too late for France, but not too late for the British.

So they did win the Battle of Britain because of Churchill.

Well,

I think that, you know, sort of,

you know, the other face to the coin from the French with their lack of morale would be the Germans when they were invading France with their overconfidence.

I remember reading in Martin Gilbert's book, The Second World War,

that Rommel wrote back to his family, well, he's in the midst of this invasion.

He writes, oh, it looks like we'll be here maybe another two weeks and I'll be home for a vacation stay.

You know, like just casually, you know, know, observing the French defeat and, well, we got after two weeks.

He swam when he got to a river, he swam it.

Rommel did.

He was a division commander.

He didn't even have a, he had been in the bodyguard of the Fjord and he was given a command and nobody really recognized his genius until they sent him in 1940 to North Africa.

And then they said, you're a distraction from the Soviet Barbarossa project.

Yeah.

He was a genius, Rommel.

He was kind of a mad genius,

but there's a lot of mythologies about Rommel that he was an anti-Nazi.

No, he was part of Hitler's bodyguard.

But

he was a very gifted person.

The other problem with the French is that

their

command structure, they were all in their 70s from World War I.

And people like de Gaulle that had studied Blitzkrieg in the 1930s and had been instrumental in getting the Shah tank and things like that and close air support

they were and de Gaulle helped stage a brief counterattack that actually was pretty good but

they were in the minority and it was a top-down chateau generalship

and it was tragic and one of the things when you look at

I'll probably pronounce it if I remember it was the the De Wontenay

5, you know, it was, they had a French fighter plane that was, I think it was the D520 something.

Anyway, it looked sort of like an American P-40 or even somewhat like the

French, I mean, the British Spitfire.

And it was a very, it was, it had that Hispano-Souze engine.

It was a wonderful plane.

But the problem was this,

that when you look at the number of missions they flew every day during that terrible six weeks, the French were flying two missions per fighter plane.

Wow.

And the Luftwaffe was outnumbered by Spitfires

and

De Wontin

French aircraft, both of which the Spitfires and the Dewontin were better planes than the Bf-109.

And yet the Luftwaffe were flying from grass fields, makeshift, and they were flying five and six, seven missions a day.

And that was the problem.

And

the Germans were coming with gasoline tankers so that their

tanks that were not as good as the short tank, they were being refueled and on the move.

They were just,

you can see how the British got away from Dunkirk because, you know,

Goering said, let me have them.

The Luftwaffe will take care of them.

Everybody said, well, Hitler,

Hitler blew it.

He shouldn't have listened to that old cocaine addict.

And the Luftwaffe couldn't do it, and over 300,000 people got away.

And these are the same soldiers that would revisit the Nazis in North Africa and

Sicily, all true, but they were exhausted.

So people forget that.

The German army, by the time it was

by the time it was to attack that pocket of 300,000 allied troops stuck at Dunkirk, they were exhausted.

They had been on the move for six weeks.

Yeah.

And they were short of supplies, food.

And I'm not sure even if they had gone there, they would have been able to break through that.

It was kind of like the Pusan pocket

in Korea that it looks like it's easy to crack, but the North Koreans couldn't get rid of the Americans either.

It would have been difficult.

So

it was

the French were, I mean,

it seems crazy, but the French fighter plane of

1940 could dive at 500 miles.

Every aspect or every calibration of what makes a fighter good, the French have it.

And the same was true of their tanks and their artillery were good.

And it's just tragic that

they had not been able to inculcate the same martial prowess or morale that they had in World War I.

Or maybe it was because of World I they were not, or socialism or whatever we want to say.

But when you look at the actual

man to man, plane to plane, gun to gun, tank to tank, that's why Mark Bach said strange defeat.

It just didn't make sense given the record of France.

I guess somebody's going to say, well, they lost the 1870, 70, the Franco-Prussian War, so you should have known what they were going to do.

But that was before World War I, and they survived World War I.

They're very mysterious.

We always make jokes about them.

We say, oh,

you know, why do

French tanks only have one gear reverse, you know, stuff like that?

But

they rise to the occasion.

They're very capable people militarily.

I mean, there is somebody called Napoleon, remember.

And

so

you really see the French in 1944 and the end of the year in 1945, once they were given American equipment and they were on the winning side and they were wonderful.

They performed wonderfully.

The free French forces under the Third Army, for example.

Patton would always make fun of them.

Well, they're on the Paris.

Let the sons of bitches go in and take Paris.

They deserve it.

But he couldn't control them.

But

there were jokes about them that they had better food and they drank wine after the battle and everything.

And of course, but they were,

I don't know, it is a very strange phenomenon.

That's why poor Mark Walking, that was sad too, because

they executed him, what, 10 days before he was going to be liberated or something like that.

Yeah, that was a really sad story.

And he smuggled out his manuscript explaining

what happened.

What happened?

Yeah.

Well, then that leads me to a second question and also to our end the resolution of World War II.

We always hear about this Atlantic wall, and I've never really heard or read anything on it.

It seems to me that's a huge expanse.

And it seems to me that it should have been full of holes, but they always talk about it as the formidable.

And then, you know, they add that to why D-Day was such an extraordinary invasion.

And I was wondering what your assessment of that Atlantic wall was.

Well, it was never finished.

And so, once they

took

Europe, and as I said on the earlier podcast, they had all of the major capitals, they had all of Europe under their control.

And Hitler's idea was from Norway, basically on the North Sea coast up to near Norway, all the way to the Spanish border, they were going to make an Atlantic wall.

Now, what was that?

That was going to be a series of

Rommel asparagus welded together.

They looked like jacks.

And, you know, they were very...

They were to tear up ships at high tide when they wouldn't see them.

And then the beaches were going to be covered with mines.

And then there was going to be a seawall of reinforced concrete with fortifications and gun emplacements and then there were going to be barracks and stations of fast mobile reserves of panzers and the idea would be there would be no way you could unload soldiers and if you did it low tide and you saw the obstacles that would tear the ships up, then they were going to be slaughtered on the beach.

If you waited to high tide so that they could get out and go right to the seawall, wall,

the impediments would destroy the landing crowd.

But only 20, I think

25% of all that was finished by D-Day.

And so it was a joke.

It was just part of German propaganda, the Atlantic Wall.

There was no such thing.

And

the Allies knew that.

And so the problem with Omaha Beach as compared to Utah or Sword or Juneau or Gold was

the Allies had miscalculated that in that particular beach,

there were more minefields,

the cliffs were higher, the sea wall was in better shape, there were more Germans than they thought.

And the weather,

they didn't quite get all of the people at the sites at the time they thought.

And so really D-Day was an astounding success, asterisk Omaha Beach.

Take away Omaha Beach and it was wonderful.

So a high percentage of the casualties were on Omaha Beach only.

Utah Beach, I think they lost less than 200 killed.

But Omaha was just a nightmare.

But that wasn't...

that wasn't characteristic of the whole Atlantic Wall.

I don't know what would have happened if they went into Calais.

The idea was it's only 26 miles from the British coast.

And you look at the map, it's a straight shot in, you know, across northern France into Holland, right through Belgium.

I mean, right into

the Germans, rather than making this long hook to the south.

But the Germans were waiting for them, and they kept thinking it would be at Calais.

They always thought it was going to be at Calais.

They thought it was at Calais when they were murdering Americans and shooting them on Omaha.

They kept saying, no, don't, it's still coming at Calais.

It wasn't.

But that was part of the genius of D-Day that they fooled them utterly.

And it's very funny about the Germans.

You know, they're so confident, but on every aspect of D-Day, if you look at the meteorology, the British meteorologists knew about the storms much more than the German.

They were all on reserve.

Rommel wasn't even there.

They were on maneuvers.

And Rommel was visiting his family.

He said, oh, it's June 4th, 5th, 6th, it's bad.

And, you know, and then there were good commanders, the people who organized.

Eisenhower was a very good administrator.

When they said, should we go on the 6th?

We can wait two weeks.

He said, how do we know the weather's not going to be bad in two weeks?

And actually, it was much worse in two weeks than it was on the 6th.

Let's go.

And that took a lot of initiative and courage.

So they had

good British and American.

planners.

They had better meteorologists.

The Germans, when they were confronted, and somebody's going to say, well, they had all the advantages.

They were winning, Victor.

The Germans were on the defensive.

Yeah, and the Germans had won in 1940.

They had all of the EU and the NATO countries under their control by August 1940.

And all they had to do was operate Operation Sea Lion.

And all they had to do was go the 26 miles, like William the Conqueror, Julius Caesar, and take Britain.

And they had all the advantages, and they couldn't do it.

They didn't have the landing craft, they didn't have the organization, they didn't have the leadership, they didn't have air supremacy, and yet there was no America in the war.

And the Soviet Union was supplying them with their fuel and their food, and doing their best to make sure the Germans destroyed Britain as they had France.

They had all the advantages, and we, the Americans, were not even in the war yet.

We hadn't really started Lind-Lies yet.

And the British stopped the entire Wehrmacht in a way that the Germans could not stop us.

So you got to look at it in that context.

The Allies were just

wonderful about cooperating with each other.

And the Axis were suspicious of each other.

They didn't trust each other.

Think of an alliance.

It's very funny.

The Japanese are fighting Zhukov in August 1939.

And all of a sudden, these Russian soldiers start popping up.

And the Japanese say, What the?

What's going on here?

Oh, by the way, Japanese allies, we signed a non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union behind your back, and they're sending thousands of troops from their frontier worried about us to fight you.

And then the Japanese say, okay,

what the F?

So when you, right before they went into the Soviet Union, the Germans say, what the F?

The Japanese in April signed a non-aggression pact with the Soviets?

They're not going to invade ever from the east?

They didn't want to, of course, too.

They didn't want them picking the carcass of the Soviet Union, but later they did.

And the Japanese, and then Mussolini says,

wait a minute, you invaded Russia yesterday?

You didn't tell me.

I thought we were going to work on Malta and everything, and North Africa and our Italian maritime empire in the Mediterranean.

And what did the Germans say?

Well, screw you.

We were all ready to go in.

And what did you do?

You invaded Greece and diverted everything.

And we had to go down and bail you out.

So they were all mutually suspicious of each other.

And they didn't trust each other.

And they were screwing each other over in a way that we and the British worked together.

And for all the horrendous crimes of Stalin, we did work with him and coordinated things.

So it was just very odd.

Yeah.

And anyway, and then we had the Yalta agreement.

And

we agreed on how to divide up the world and then things fell apart because it was very clear that somebody had 400 divisions in the east and they were, when Yalta took place, they were 100 miles from Berlin.

And we were saying, oh my God, we gave this guy 25% of his war material.

And he was fighting on the Nazi side against Poland and helping Britain lose the defeat Britain.

And then he became our ally.

And we didn't, we just said, no problem, Stalin, we'll forgive you for that treachery.

And then we gave him all this stuff and we've been bombing all of, we lost 80,000 British and American airmen to bomb Germany to take the pressure off Stalin.

And they brought 10,000,

the Germans had to take back 10,000 88 millimeter guns and use them as flat guns to kill Americans and British so they wouldn't kill Soviets.

We did that for you, Joseph.

And now you want all of Eastern Europe, and you say you're going to have an election, you're violating all of these accords at Yalta.

So that was a big shock.

Big shock.

But, you know, we weren't in a position to,

once you were on the side of the Soviet Union at Yalta, there were the facts on the ground that they were a steamroller and they were going to win, thanks partly to us.

And you couldn't really stop them because they were reasserting who they really were now that they were in control.

And so

we kind of gave them Eastern Europe and then

Churchill said, well,

along with,

you know, we're not going to fight you with the Polish elections, the Czech elections, the Romanian elections,

the Yugoslavian elections, the Hungarian elections, but we're going to take Turkey and Greece and they're going to be Western.

And then we'll agree with you that Finland and Austria will be neutral and nobody can, they won't join your side.

And that was about as best as we could get.

Well, I have a question.

You write in your book,

it's at the end, and you're trying to assess World War II.

And you write: the proper moral appraisal of World War II is not as nuanced as we sometimes are led to believe.

And you go on to talk about the

Axis powers were

very brutal.

What do you say?

You say

they institutionalized

savagery and

brutality that the Allies did not.

But the Allies responded with terrible retribution masked as liberationist idealism,

aimed at destroying, not defeating fascism,

without much worry of what the likely consequences of their desperate

alliance would mean for the post-war world.

For the victors, the way the war was fought and ended was not perfect, but just good enough, given the alternative world of a horrifying Axis victory.

And I was wondering if you could explain a little bit more.

What I explain is

here, we were

trying to go and reclaim Europe.

And so, what are we going to do to invade France?

We got to bomb it before we invade.

Soften it up.

How do you soften it up when Germans are interspersed with Frenchmen?

So from the occupation of

late June 1940 to four years later,

we killed British and American bombing.

We killed more Frenchmen than the Germans did in their occupation.

And we had to.

That's what Churchill said.

We blew up the French fleet, the British did, I should say, in North Africa and killed, I think, I don't know what it was, 130, 1400

Frenchmen, just so that the ships would not fall into the hands of Hitler.

And our attitude about the Japanese was, well, they're killing 15 million Chinese and another four or five million

allies and Pacific Islanders, Philippines, Malaysians, et cetera, et cetera.

And they're ruthless people and they won't stop.

So we're going to burn down the urban core of Japan.

And why we criticized Bomber Harris and the British, we said, you're being savage at Dresden and Hamburger, which we joined in at Dresden and later in Hamburger.

We don't believe in area bombing.

We believe in Norden bombsite precision bombing.

So we go over to Japan and we say, you know what?

This B-29 program costs twice what the Manhattan Project did.

And how do you drop a bomb with an upgraded Norden bombsite when your pilot has flown

eight hours and 1,600 miles, and he's got eight more hours to get home and another 1,600 miles, and he's over the target for just five minutes, and the wind is blowing at 4400, 300.

Excuse me, the wind is blowing at over 100 miles an hour and you're at 28,000 feet and your plane is now going 300 to 400 miles an hour and you're dropping these on the northern bomb site and these high explosives don't hit the target

and you're losing too many planes.

And suddenly a guy named Curtis LeMay said, this is crazy.

Forget about area bombing.

We're going to do it.

We don't care what you say.

I know we're hypocrites, we criticize the British, but we're going to come up with a formula.

And that formula is there's a new thing called napalm.

It's better than any other incendiary in the world,

incendiary, and we're going to use it.

And we're going to take these damn B-29s, and we're going to bring them down to 5,000, 6,000 feet.

And the jet stream is going to be our friend, not our enemy, because we're just going to take a bunch of DuPont napalm, and we're going to drop 20,000 pounds per plane.

And when it hits the wooden infrastructure of Japan, the wind will do all the good instead of all the bad.

But it won't blow the bombs off target.

We'll get close close enough at that low altitude, and then the wind will whip up the flames and napalm cannot be put out with water.

And we're going to burn.

And if you know what, if you say that we're monsters, we're just going to drop a bunch of leaflets before and say, hey, Japanese civilians, you're going to reap the whirlwind.

It's coming.

So we suggest you all leave your cities.

And then what they don't leave your cities, we'll say, well, they decentralized their industry.

All true.

They took a

raid and fighter and they put the propeller in one neighborhood assembly and then people were making landing gear in another and we just burned them all and said, well, it's war production.

And when we're all done, we killed about 400,000 of them.

Did that generation worry about no?

They said, you're killing people, you're murdering them, you're barbaric, you're slaughtering Chinese, you're slaughtering Malaysians, you're slaughtering Filipino, you're slaughtering Americans, you're and we're not gonna, we fought you on Iwo Jima, we fought you at Peililu, we fought you at Okinawa, you do not surrender, and you're gonna pay pay a price.

And then when that seemed to

be working and we were going to ready to invade, all of a sudden they thought, you know,

crazy Curtis LeMay wants to bring over, as I said last time, all the B-24s, B-17s, Lancasters he can get his hands on.

He wants to burn the whole country down.

Let's just end it now.

Let's just drop two bombs on them.

And that generation had no problems with that.

That's what I meant.

And then when it was over, they thought, you know what?

We're not saints.

We never claimed we were.

We didn't start it.

We finished it.

And they're never going to do it again.

And I know we're never going to do it again because unlike World War I, the SOBs are going to get occupied.

And nobody's going to talk about the Versailles Treaty.

Oh, the Versailles Treaty had a war clause.

Oh, it blamed Germany.

Oh, it had reparations.

No, no, no, no.

No, no.

We're not going to let them stay in Belgium and Germany and go Germany and Belgium and France and go back to Germany and say, we could have won.

You stabbed us in the back, you Jews and socialists.

No, no, no, no.

We're going to bomb the homeland and make it into a moonscape this time.

And then we're going to occupy the country and we're going to put a gun to their head and say, you're going to be a parliamentary democracy, whether you like it or not.

And we went into Japan and we landed and we said, you want another atomic bomb or you want more Curtis LeMay?

So you're going to have a democracy and you're going to give women the right to vote and you're going to break up these medieval empires.

You do exactly what we say.

If you don't, we'll just unleash the B-29s again.

And

that's how they looked at the war.

And then they left it to our generation.

When I was in high school, you know,

we were told, we had a textbook.

We said, oh, my God.

I came home and I said to my father, were you near the 509th Composite Group?

Yeah, yeah.

Victor, I was right next to it.

Those guys had it easy.

They had new uniforms, new equipment.

We didn't know what the hell.

They didn't have to go all the way to Tokyo.

They were just training all the time.

I said, they dropped the atomic bomb, dad.

Yeah,

so what?

I said, well, my God, they killed 60,000, 70,000.

Well, hell, we killed 300,000.

We killed 100,000 in one night on March 10th and 11th.

So what?

And I said, well, don't you feel bad?

Well, I feel bad, yeah, but not as bad as the people that they kill.

I'm mad about that.

That was the attitude of that generation.

That's what I was trying to convey.

His attitude, he said, you know,

I wasn't hurting anybody.

I was in a farm with Victor Hansen, and we were just farm kids.

And then we got a scholarship to play football, and we went up to the University of Pacific, and nobody, we didn't hurt any Japanese.

I like Japanese people in Kingsburg, California.

But all of a sudden, they bombed Pearl Harbor, and they made us go over there.

And so we finished it.

And they killed a lot of Americans.

They're never going to do it again.

That's all I have to say of that.

And that was their attitude.

And that was a very different attitude from, you know, the pride flag in Kabul, the gender studies program in Kabul, the George Floyd Murals in Kabul, and the skedaddle from Kadul.

They would have never done that.

For good or evil, they would have never done that.

That generation.

Well, let's go ahead and finish this with the last quote and the last lines in your book and leave it for your reader, your listeners to chew on because we need to go to our last segment.

But here it is.

The tragedy of World War II, a preventable conflict, was that 60 million people had perished to confirm that the United States, the Soviet Union, and Great Britain were far stronger than the fascist powers of Germany, Japan, and Italy after all.

A fact that should have been self-evident and in no need of such a bloody laboratory, if not for the prior British appeasement, American isolationism,

and Russian collaboration.

What an ending.

Well,

what I was trying to do, I think all your readers or listeners, there was a brilliant Australian.

I met him.

I don't know if he's still alive, but

he didn't get the credit that he deserved.

His name was Jeffrey Blaney, I think, and it was called The Causes of War.

And it was a seminal work.

And what he said was that war breaks out when people don't have adequate information.

You know what I mean?

Yes.

So you're in a room, let's say, and there's five chairs.

Five people are sitting there.

And you're arguing over a card game.

But you don't know who is a killer or who is big and strong,

you don't, and who will dominate.

So you need information.

And when you find out,

then you may alter your behavior, right?

If the guy across the street,

the guy across says to you, Victor, we're not going to argue with this hand of poker, and he doesn't look very impressive, or you don't know, but in fact, he's a British SAS professional killer.

If you knew that, you would not argue.

And so, what it's saying is that war is the, it sorts out confusion.

So when that war started to take shape,

if Hitler had looked at the United States in World War I,

he would have seen that they took 2 million people from a frontier constabulary pathetic force of 1914, which by the time we declared war in 1917

was starting to be big, but by the time of spring offensive, the Germans, it was a huge army.

And when you look at American production, it was outpacing France and Britain together by 1918.

And it transported those two million without losing one soldier.

And when you look at the Soviet Union,

The T-34 was there.

They had a Christie suspension.

It was all there.

The Stalin tank, it was all there.

They could have seen it.

And when they looked at the French, they could have seen that they had superior weapons.

They could have seen that the British, when they were bombing the British, the British were producing over 400 airframes a month while they were being bombed.

And it was no longer the days of Stanley Baldwin or even Neville Chamberlain.

They were, at the end, Neville Chamberlain was arming.

So, my point is this: that the economic and military potential

of the Soviet Union

and the British Empire and the United States was so vast and so superior to the pathetic resources of Mussolini's Italy or the militarists in Japan or even Hitler's crazy ideas about Germany.

And what I mean wherewithal, look at the population.

It was about four to one, five to one.

advantage allied economy, 10 to 1, technology, 10 to 1.

And that was all could have been deciphered

before Hitler went into Poland.

But why did he not know that?

Because he chose not to know that.

And why was that he enabled?

And that's why I finished the way I did.

It was three things.

The Russians collaborated with him.

So they took themselves out of the equation in Hitler's mind.

And the British appeased him.

In other words, the British and the French were stronger than he was.

Together, they were stronger.

And yet they appeased him on the Saarinen.

They appeased him on the Anschluss.

They appeased him on the Rhineland militarization.

They appeased him on the Sudeten-Mann-Munich Agreement.

And he came, he called them worms.

Can you imagine that?

He would regret that because within a year, two years, they were shooting down BF-109s and Heinkel, Dernet,

Deuter's bombers like butterfly.

They were just crushing him.

But he didn't think they'd do that because they appeased them.

And then he looked at the United States and he thought, they're just a bunch of cowboys.

They'll never come in.

And Wadarian was bragging that with one division, he could repel any cowboy invasion and they don't like to fight.

But that was because we were isolationists.

And had, so that just to finish, what if we had reversed that equation?

What if

in August

of

1939, the Soviets had said, screw you, we're not going to sign, we're not going to sign any pact with you.

We've got T-34s at 1,500 and we're going to produce 10,000 and they're going to be right on the border with you.

So don't screw with us.

And why didn't they do that?

They did that because they wanted Hitler to turn west, not east, west.

And their dream was to have Hitler and Britain and France fight a World War I replay and destroy each other.

And this time the Soviet Union was not going to be involved and get destroyed in the process.

They were just going to march west, say, in 1920 and pick up the pieces and control the whole continent.

So that's why they did it.

And why didn't the British and the French prepare earlier?

And they said their university, Oxford,

the famous Oxford boat.

the debating society, we would not fight for king and country.

Patrick Lee Femor, the great memorialist, was hiking through Europe when that happened.

He said, oh my God,

they would never fight for king and country.

And why didn't we as isolationists, and we said to ourselves,

well, you know, we came in late, but we didn't suffer like they did, but we did win the war because we put a million men on the field and we had another million in the pipeline.

And that helped stop the German offensive.

Then we went on the offensive.

But, you know, what was the purpose?

Because here they go again.

They did it in 1870, 71.

We kept out of it wisely.

Then they brought us into World War I.

We lost 118,000 dead.

And what did they do?

They had the Versailles Treaty.

And now Germany, 20 years later, it's replay of World War I.

And guess what?

They want us to come in again, Britain for his empire, French socialists.

And we ain't going to do it.

We're tired, so we're not going to do it.

And from 39, 40, and 41, we didn't.

So we were isolation.

But had they all got together and 39 and said, Hitler, Herr Hitler, Mr.

Mussolini, this is our economic wherewithal.

These are the tanks, these are the quality, these are the planes.

Are you blank, blank, crazy?

You want to go up against this?

So Blaney's point was that wars break out because of inexact knowledge or willful ignorance about the potential or the capability of enemies.

But once everybody knows what's going on,

then

there's peace.

We'll have peace with China as long as they know that we have 7,000 nukes.

And when they get 6,000, we're going to have 8,000.

And when they

think they're going to go into Taiwan, then we're going to have the wherewithal.

We're going to have a, I don't know, 800-ship navy that can blast them out.

When they know that, they're not going to do it.

But if they don't know that, what we're capable of, there's going to be a war.

That was Blaney's thesis.

I think he was correct.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and then come back and talk about diversified versus monoculture farming.

Stay with us and we'll be right back.

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We're back.

We are produced by the John Solomon's Just the News, and it's a great website.

He is an investigative reporter, so he does a lot of the news and the investigation, especially with the Biden administration.

So those of our listeners who are interested in that should go look at just the news online.

So,

Victor, so we, our topic is diversified versus monoculture agriculture.

And that's a very interesting question.

How do you know whether to plant a whole bunch of different crops or to just go one?

And what are the advantages?

That's an age-old decision.

I wrote a book called The Other Greeks, and I argued that the city-state, the Paulus, was the creation of a new type of diverse agriculture.

And it was based on small farmers having title to their property because they were planting crops that required a great deal of investment, i.e., olive trees and vines.

And therefore, they wanted protection and have title to that land and their labor that had been invested.

And that was the beginning in the eighth century.

of an agricultural revolution.

And they were diverse and they were not monocrop like the great

serial empires of the Euphrates, Tigris and Euphrates or the Nile Valley.

So what is the advantages of each or disadvantages?

Well, monocropping is you find the right

climate.

And so I am monocrop now.

I have 42 acres I rent out.

It's all in almonds.

In fact, the whole area is monocropped into almonds.

And so what would be the advantages of that?

The advantages of that is you get to master it like no other.

You only have to worry about one thing.

Almonds.

You understand when they bloom.

You understand how to cultivate them.

You understand which is the best way to shake them.

And you specialize.

And therefore you probably get better

production.

And then you

have a predictable year.

So you know that almonds get ripe depending on the variety somewhere between August 15th and September 15th.

And you shake them and you put them on the ground and they dry for a day or two and you scoop them up and you're done for the year.

No harvest.

And so it's a very simplistic, specialized way to farm.

And that's why most farming is specialized.

But if you're diverse,

you have a different philosophy.

You say, yeah, but what if there's a mite species that infects those almonds and destroys a crop?

Or what if they're all on the ground having been shaken and they only need three or four days and it's in August, but unseasonable hurricane goes from Baja, Mexico to the San Joaquin Valley, which happened, and then rained not a tenth of an inch, but almost an inch.

And all those almonds on the ground got sopping wet and they started to grow mold inside their husk.

And that happened.

And that's the only crop you have.

So

you have no insurance policy.

So when I was farming with my brothers, we had, I think at one time we were farming 185 acres, and we had a staple of 60 acres of Thompson seedless for raisin production.

We had 30 acres for ruby seedless and girdle Thompson's for fresh fruit.

We had 30 acres of

perishable fruit, three acres of this apricot, three acres of that apple pear, et cetera.

And then we had 20 acres, 30 acres of farmers market, organic, no pesticides, no chemical fertilizers, and sold at eight or nine markets.

Okay, the advantage.

When it rained on the raisins, we had already marketed the other crops.

When it froze and destroyed the vine crop,

the vines were already through bloom, or they hadn't gone into bloom one or the other.

If it hailed and it destroyed the plum crop, it didn't damage the grape.

You see what I mean?

If somebody screwed up and he was

spraying gerbrillic acid to thin out the bunches on grapes and

he forgot, and he happens to be me, and it was said to be 95 degrees by two.

And he said, you know, I just want to finish.

I don't want to keep on this rig.

It's driving me crazy.

I've been on since four in the morning.

I'll just finish out at 95 degrees.

And then the entire bunch gets shattered because it's too hot to put gerillic acid on.

And you ruin 20 acres.

But you didn't touch the apricots, the apple pears.

You see what I mean?

The peaches.

And so you spread the risk.

The other thing is you spread both the work, but you also minimalize, you maximize your labor.

So, when you're doing specialized work, it's like,

wow, I got to buy all these almond machines and shakers, I got to have all these people out at my plate.

And then, what

you either have your own equipment or you hire somebody with their own equipment, but then it's

what does an almond shaker do?

You know what I mean?

What does it do in December or July?

Just idle because you're doing one crop.

But when you have all these crops, you spread the labor and the capital.

Everything is maximized.

So you can get 10 good guys

and you can say, I can keep you working all year long.

Or you get two great tractors and you're going to use them

for every different crop.

But with specialization, you have one big shot and you're done.

And then there's advantage to that.

You don't have to worry about

the crop, every every crop, you know, getting harvested year-round, citrus in the winter, etc.

So it's efficiency versus

flexibility or durability or insurance.

And

in the case of the ancients, they came across the idea they could take a couple of permanent laborers and keep them busy with vines, olives, and wheat rather than just cereals all year round.

And then they spread risk.

So if the weather was bad for the olives, it was not bad for the grapes.

And then they said to themselves, what do you need to live on?

Well, the olive gave them soap.

It gave them axle grease.

It gave them

cooking oil.

It gave them non-perishable fruit, so to speak, for the years and eating olives.

And what did the grapes give you?

It gave you fresh grapes.

It gave you raisins that would be storable.

And it it gave you wine.

And what did the cereals give you?

Barley and wheat, it gave you bread, it gave you porridge, etc.

So you had a complete diet by diversifying, you spread the risk and you spread the labor, and then each crop has a different requirement.

So if you plant almonds,

even my little 40 acres, there's very deep loams, white ash soil that are high in nitrogen, but because it was an ancient pond basin, there's a lot of sandy areas.

So you can walk down

a royal row of almonds and they look enormous at one end of the 600-feet rows.

But when you get down to the sandy end, they start to get a little bit scraggly.

But in the old days, you could say to yourself, okay,

on my sandy ground, I will plant

an early plum and fertilize it.

And then that sandy soil heats up.

It gets hotter because it absorbs the heat much better than dense

loans, rich loans full of nitrogen.

And then I'll beat the plum market.

It'll be five days earlier on a red butte or a black butte plum.

And so each soil type can be custom synchronized with a crop, and that's what the ancients did.

So if they had a farm, they were usually vertical farms.

They might have an acre or two of a little terraced piece of Greece, it's very mountainous, valley, bottom land.

They put barley and

oats or wheat that need a lot of nitrogen.

As you go up the hill, they would probably use that and terraced it for grapes.

And in case of wine and grapes, they don't need a lot of nitrogen necessarily.

And the cooler temperatures on the hill make better wine.

And then up to about 1500 feet, you would put the olives that were there.

And you could have a vertically tailor-made farm.

So there's a lot of advantages in diversity.

It just is not as productive in any one crop, and it's not as lucrative, and it's not as dangerous.

Well, Victor, thank you for that.

I hadn't,

what about the marketing?

So you said it's not as lucrative.

Is that because you have to go find all the different markets rather than just sending them in bulk to

renter, and he's just the expert on almonds.

He has his own hauling operation.

He's a very good guy, a wonderful person.

He's very smart.

He hauls it, he has, he takes the almonds, he knows exactly what to do.

That's all he, most of what he has.

He hauls them and he's pretty much markets them himself.

And it's very,

he doesn't have to worry about, oh, wow, it's, I've got the plum crop, I got the peach crop, I got the grape crop, I got the raisin crop, I got this, I got that.

And I'm, I'm dealing with specialists.

There's raisin farmers that only do is raisins, and there's plum farmers that all, and I have to keep people with all these experts because I'm diverse.

So there's advantages in being malicrop.

But on the other hand, as I said,

you get a rain when the almonds are all on the ground, which happened, or you have 100,000 trays down of raisins and it rains and that's all you have.

Then you're, it's kind of like going to Vegas.

You know what I mean?

You just go to Vegas and you think you're an expert at blackjack and you've mastered blackjack, so you're going to put all your money on blackjack and maybe the dealers cook it, or maybe there's, you don't know what you're going to lose everything.

But if you're an expert, you think you can outsmart them.

Or are you going to go to the roulette wheel?

Are you going to go to the poker table?

Are you going to go, and you're going to see which of your skills on that particular day help you?

You know, and you're going to spread the risk by playing different types of games rather than put everything on blackjack.

And that it's kind of like life, whether you want it diverse or you want it it specialized.

There's advantages in each.

And for most of my life, I was

diverse.

And it was a lot of work.

It was just every single day it was, hey,

go prune the plum trees, go plume the apricot the next way.

They have to be pruned differently.

Put the oil on the trees, but you don't put oil, of course, on vines.

And you do this and that and this.

And if you're going to use pre-emergent herbicide, you got to get a different kind for each can't pre-emergent Carmex, for example,

on vines, on sandy soil, but you can do it on trees.

It was just very complex.

I think at one point on 185 acres, we had 20 different crops, you know, like an average of eight acres or something.

And it was just, it drove me crazy.

And then, and yet, boy, when we lost a crop of raisins, we had some income coming in.

And then the other thing is you don't have to borrow all the year.

So what happens when your almonds are specialized and you're not a big corporate enterprise?

You got to take out a crop loan, right?

And you're paying 7%.

Or in my day, I thought when I got a loan from the Production Credit Association at 10%

in 1982, I thought I went to heaven.

And it was so low, 10%.

Some of them are 14%.

But the point is, you have that all year accruing.

But when you have all these diverse species, there's income coming in.

You know what I mean?

So that income is: well, the plum income is going to pay for the peach harvest, and the peach harvest is going to pay for the pear harvest, and the pear harvest is going to pay for the raising harvest.

So you're not borrowing money all the time.

And income is self-producing.

And you're not, you know, you don't have to deal with a banker and say, I'm sorry, I lost my entire

raising crop, and I need to borrow, and I'll pay you back this time next year.

So, there were advantages, but you need a lot of labor with diversity.

And I was very lucky.

I had a twin brother who

I kind of did some of the decisions on the actual business side, but he was, I think, I'm kind of prejudiced, but he was kind of an authentic genius about biology.

He had a master's in biology,

and he could walk down an orchard and tell you exactly what was wrong with it or a vineyard.

He was very good at that on the science side.

And

he knew pretty much

everything about weeds and what

herbicide did this to what weed and everything.

He was very good on

what

an orchard would do and what it would not do.

Whereas I was more or less saying, hmm,

let's see, we need X number of boxes per acre to pay all of the hop cost and something, you know.

And I wasn't,

I wasn't a natural farmer, is what I'm trying to say.

It wasn't my forte.

Yeah, but you definitely were able to financially manage it and

work what work needed to be done and what work did not need to be done.

Yeah, the difference was if

I went into a Santa Rosa orchard and it it was below,

if I thought the price had crashed in New York and it did not pay for the harvest of the box,

then I would say, yank out the crew, write the whole crop off.

I'm not paying a broker for the privilege of giving them plums below the cost of the harvest, not production, but harvest.

Whereas

my brother would probably say,

I'm not in it here.

I'm trying to feed people, Victor, and I have produced a beautiful plum crop through my ability.

And you don't know what the ultimate price will be, but I would like to gamble and say to myself, from the moment of bloom to the moment of picking, I did everything right.

And I have produced beautiful red plums and they're delicious.

And I plan to pack them and to give them to the broker and to send them to New York and Chicago and Atlanta.

And they're going to make people happy.

And that's my role in life.

And I would argue, and we can go broke with your role in life.

And he can say, well, we can just turn into a mechanistic, soulless farm, too.

So you see what I mean?

And we have expertise.

And so it's very hard to produce a very beautiful plum or peach and get it to the market in good shape.

It requires

what moment you're going to pick.

You pick one day too early or two days too late, and you've got either green or rotting fruit.

And you don't know how, you can't control that decision because the labor people say, oh, I was going to pick your place, but this other guy offered me a dollar more an hour.

Are you going to match it?

You know, or

something like that.

And you can't control, but he was able to produce very good fruit, no doubt about it.

Well, that's definitely a good topic, maybe, for one of our future agricultural segments to talk about

producing good, tasty fruit, because sometimes we have a natural, yeah, we have a natural inclination to think that mechanization has ruined the taste.

As my brother would say,

we had Santa Rosa plums, think about that.

And we marketed Alberto peaches, which are fragile.

They were old varieties that were delicious,

but they don't exist anymore because they're too difficult.

And so what the people want,

what the people want, they don't want.

They want a bright, red, shiny, beautiful plum the size of a tennis ball or peach.

The problem is to genetically engineer that type of bright red peach that doesn't spoil and it's hard as a rock, so you drop it and it bounces up in your hand.

It tastes awful.

Whereas you have a beautiful Santa Rosa plum or a late Alberta peach.

It's just delicious.

But how do you pick that thing with a window of 24 hours before it goes bad and get it to the market?

Or if you have a beautiful plum that's delicious, but it doesn't look too good.

It's not very shiny.

It's an off-color.

And people look in the store and say, that looks awful.

I like my plums bright red or purple or black.

So,

and then it's just, and then finally, that's what destroyed the fresh fruit market.

We created all these varieties that ship from Reedley, California to Manhattan, and they look exactly the day you picked them, and they're beautiful and they taste awful.

And then finally, people say, hmm, I like the way they look, but I hate the way they taste, so I'm not going to buy them anymore.

And so it really hurt the market.

Yeah, it sure has.

Well, Victor, that we're at the end of our time, way beyond it, actually.

So we're going to have to close off here and thank our listeners.

Well, thank you, everybody.

I know we kind of went crazy from World War II to contemporary news to farming, but I hope

some of you got something in each of those segments.

They're pretty diverse.

This is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis Hansen, and we're signing off.