Silicon Valley Technology and the Generals Kenney and LeMay

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Hello, ladies. Hello, gentlemen.
This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show. I'm Jack Fowler, the host, the star, and the namesake.

Victor Davis-Hanson 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.

This is the third of four special episodes we are pre-recording because Victor will be traveling and we did not want there to be

an empty zone with no Victor. So we had asked our listeners for questions and many sent in questions.
So these are listener question special episodes. We thank those who have provided these.

And Victor, today

we'll try to get to at least two full questions and maybe part of a third, but we'll talk about your thoughts on social media. And then since this episode, I believe, is coming out on the 4th of July,

I have a World War 2 question that I think just might be. appropriate for the for the day.
And we'll see what else we have time for.

So we'll get to your social media thoughts, Victor, right after these important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen show. So Victor, Nick from Clifton Park

writes this. He says, the psychologist Jonathan Haight has said it.
in his excellent book,

The Righteous Mind, an absolutely fantastic book, in my opinion, writes Nick from Clifton Park, stated, we are still in the infancy of social media.

He likened it to the first year or two after television or newsprint became widely

communized, not communist, but

community. Where do you, Victor Davis Hansen, see social media ending up? And what effects do you see? And what timeframe do you see this happening?

I don't know if you have a crystal ball, Victor, but maybe you have some thoughts on are we in the, do you agree with Haiti? Are we in the infancy?

And any other broader thoughts you might have about the social media?

Well, I think the big

elephant in the room is artificial intelligence. Already professors are seeing students, you know, that can turn in papers that they didn't write.

And they just type in guidelines and then it spews it out. And we're put it this way.

What we thought the internet and social media were going to do was

recreate in the terms of Facebook, the family Thanksgiving dinner only electronically, or the church social on Twitter, or Google was going to be all of the world's knowledge in your palm.

That turned out to warping Google searches or making sure Christmas was never there on the 25th on the header on a Google search or the Russian disinformation or laptop suppression or FBI.

So it deteriorated. And the problem with all of this is that it's electronic sized.
In other words, it's sped up.

So unlike the printed word or writing or reading or a book or a magazine, that it's instant. That's why you have

people who will tweet, tweet, tweet and make a fool of themselves.

And then all of a sudden it'll go down the so-called memory machine, or they'll have a others will have a pro a program called the Wayback Machine to get it back out because it's kind of like electronic twitches or stutters or burps, and there's no reflection involved of all of social media, just instant stream of consciousness.

It can be good,

but

I think it's becoming a bastardized, dangerous form of communication. And I'm always struck by

when I get letters in the mail, I get three or four a week from readers. They're always better composed, more thoughtful than,

and I don't write very many myself anymore than people that just post on Facebook. Not that you can't do it on email, but it's just

it just speeds up everything. And speed is the enemy of deliberation and audits.
And so that's a big problem. And then what are we talking about, Jack?

We're talking about, I know that there's Austin and there's a Portland and there's Seattle and there's a research triangle.

There's little tolls of social media, but we're basically talking about 70 square miles

in Silicon Valley or that 80-mile corridor between San Francisco and Sunnyvale. And we're talking about Facebook and Google and Apple and Oracle and all of those companies.
And who works there?

Well, it's people who come out of the Stanford, UC, Berkeley Nexus. And 99.9 of them are left-wing.
90.9.9 have no worldly experience outside of that suburb or suburbs like that.

They've never driven a semi. They've never driven a tractor.
They've never welded. They've never used a chainsaw.
They don't know anything. They've never hammered.
They've never put on shingles.

They have no experience with what most people have to contend with. And they control our thought processes.
And they wire programs in that we don't know anything about.

And they don't have any moral code. And what do I mean by that? That I mean that if I happen to turn, if I'm going to speak in Portland,

University,

say Reed College or something, and I come home, all of a sudden, Jack, I get ads that pop up on my phone from the Portland store.

How did they know I was there? How did they do that?

Or if I go onto Amazon and I want to buy a snow shovel, but I don't buy it, the next thing I know, it pops up that Victor, you might be interested in this.

And there's like snow machines, all more expensive.

And for like three weeks. Yes, three weeks.

Or if I go onto a site, and I'm trying to look for a fuel pump for my truck, and I just, it says

for information about this give us your email if you do that then it opens up the entire site you see all the fuel pumps and then for the rest of your life you get from this little company somewhere and know who's ads every blank day about fuel pumps and so

it's all comes out of the mind of the silicon valley coder program or whatever you and i know those people because i went to graduate school there i taught at stanford i'm a hoover Fellow.

I visit there. I understand who they are.
And they're very, very dangerous people because they're self-righteous and they believe that their exalted ends justify any means of obtaining them.

And they will

doctor a program. These are the people, you know, that

gave us

They gave us the FBI hiring Twitter 1.0.

These are the people that convinced Mark Zuckerberg gave $419 million to warp the registrar's work in key precincts in the 2020 election. So they're capable of anything.

And you put artificial intelligence, they are going to be the people who are programming it. And their morality is what the rest of us are going to follow.
Just like right now,

Sammy and I keep going back to that. We just said, I just out of the blue said, I'm going to do insurrection of 2020, Google.

I said, Sammy, looks like, and I said, insurrection of 2020, 120 days of rioting when they took over police precincts, etc. And what comes up? January 6th came up.

Only came up. I had to go three pages before I got to, you know, Donald Trump fleeing the White House grounds under assault to go into a bunker.
So that's what they do.

And they have algorithms that we can't even imagine. Yeah, I don't remember the name of the documentary.
It was like a jagged line, but Peter Schweitzer was involved in it, and it was about

how easy it is to affect the algorithm. Look what they have more power.
I mean, take a little, little parlair right after they shut down. They shut the whole thing.

All they wanted to do was offer an alternative. Instead, they said, This is misinformation, this is disinformation, this is in retrograde.
And all of a sudden, just by accident, Google

and is it Amazon and Apple

They all collude and they take their apps off and you can't get on it. And that was sort of like,

I don't know, Jay Gould or J.P. Morgan.
And yet these are left-wing people that make our 19th-century monopolists look like pikers. So

that's what I'm worried about. And any question when you talk about electronic communication,

you're ultimately talking about

a couple hundred thousand people of a particular hardcore leftist persuasion that feel that they can program our ways of communication for political ends.

Yeah.

And to cancel you.

Monopolies, too. Google buys up about 200 companies a year.
I think Eric Schmidt at one time bragged that he was buying up a company a day.

And half the time they incorporate the company and half the time they just destroy it. So get rid of competition.
They all do that. tick tock you too that all of them do you know

well um

i know you you engage just a little bit just barely informational here's hey this on twitter here's our new podcast the end etc i can i uh so you're you're there but you're you've as we discussed on a one of these previous episodes, you've got much more important things to do.

Well, I'm going to try.

My daughter,

Pauline, you know, she's a

40-year-old mom, and she has a disabled child and two other children, and she's pretty busy. But

she's doing my social media just to broadcast. And she is

much more adept than I am. And she points out that if I would just give her some original commentary on the news, that it would help bring attention to other stuff we're doing.

So I'm going to try to do that. I haven't done it very regularly, but I've done it four or five times, and she's been able to do that.
And she persuades me gently to cooperate with her.

Well, there's a balance here. So well, Victor, that's wonderful.
Now I have another question,

and this is from

BJ Swiss 79.

I remember seeing the bumper sticker. Who is John Galt? Before I knew of or actually read any Ayn Rand

or actually read Ayn Rand's classic, Atlas Shrugged. It seems as though we're living in her world now.
What are your opinions on that book, assuming you've read it and her philosophy?

Do the competent, and Victor, I don't know. We've never discussed this before.
So let me finish this question, but I don't know if you've read Rand's stuff.

Do the competent of today need to start a new society for

tomorrow?

Victor, I've never read any Rand. I know of

my two things are, of course, I've seen The Fountainhead with Patricia Neal and Gary Cooper. And then I know some history of Bill Buckley's

battles early on with her. Not battles, but

confrontation with Aaron Rand, who was a specie meatball back in the day in New York City. Victor, any thoughts on Rand and any thoughts on that

larger final question? Do the competent of today need to start a new society for tomorrow?

Well, I mean, she was a product

of the dark face scene, trying to tell people what communism was like.

And I read The Fountainhead, I think, in high school, and I try read half of Atlas Schrugg. It's very difficult to read.
She was not a stylist, to tell you the truth.

And sometimes the novels become not just libertarian

or laissez-faire, but they become kind of preachy. But, you know, they've sold, I don't know, 40 or 50 million copies.
So she's very influential.

And it's kind of a Nietzschean view of the world, John Gaughan, that the world

exists to suppress people who are talented that cause others to feel envy and inadequacy. And yet that very suppression,

you know, makes people impoverished because we cannot,

within our human nature being what it is, we can't acknowledge that there's other people who, A, can do things better than we can. And B, if they were unrestrained, they would not be

lions or tigers that devour us. They would be noble elephants that build and help us.
And they have to be uncompromising.

So when we see these steppenwolves or whatever you want to call them, we've got to acknowledge it because they have to play by different roles than we do.

It's kind of an elitist argument in some ways. But

I guess what I'm trying to say is that

it's a very common Nietzschean thing.

Even people like Tocqueville talked about this unfortunate trade in America that everybody would rather be poor and equal than all better off, with a few really better off.

And I think that that's a very important message. If you can get over that in your life, if you feel you're unique or you're talented

and

you have certain abilities, and then you see a guy that you think is a hack or a kiss ass, and he's getting ahead, or he has more than you, or your wife has poor health, or your mom dies, or you can see all of the

setbacks, unexpected disasters that for the sake of God, you would be where that person is.

And you start to develop an envy, and then you translate that envy into formal policy, and you start voting for

radical equality of result mandates, socialists, sort of like California. Then she's trying to tell you that that's a very human, weak thing to do.
And you have to have these

uncompromising people.

You need a guy like Elon Musk. He's going to be ego-eccentric, yes.
But how many people can have a space company or revolutionize the car industry? or we can't. So, what do we do? We hate Elon Musk.

And

she's, I think, the point of the book is to acknowledge that these people exist and to honor them and to

let them do good for everybody. Yeah, it's kind of a naive, but I think

non-Christian way of condemning envy. Yes.

It goes back to

it goes back to

Hesiod's works in days where

the 8th century, early 7th century oral poet who wrote in Askra, a little town up in the mountains above Thebes, he said at one point there's two types of envy

and one causes eros and phawthonos of the other.

It's the envy of emulation and the envy of resentment.

And when you see your neighbor, he says it has a better field of wheat or it has a nicer wagon than it says, oh my God, you can make it. I'm going to make a wagon better than his.

I'm going to put more manure in my field and my, that competition is friendly and positive and everybody develops it. Or that damn guy, I'm going to go shoot his cow because he thinks he's better.

It's they used to translate Hesiotic envy into the difference between British socialist life of the 1950s and Americans. So if you saw the proverbial Cadillac in America and you were driving a Ford,

you walked up to the Cadillac driver and said, Man, I like that car. How fast does it go? Yeah.
Wow, it has air conditioning and a radio. Yeah.
How would you buy it? Oh, you can do that, huh?

So you get it on top, and that's the good envy. You want to aspire.
to get that and the materialistic.

But in Britain, when you see a Bentley or a Rose, you look around and you kick it to make a din in it and say, that parasite, that insect that preys on the working man, I'm going to damage his ostentatious, needless, showy.

And that's the difference. And she's trying to, I think,

the objectivist view is that

whether you like it or not, communism or not, social, you're never going to get rid of talented people. And

it's always a race to let them express themselves and let them help other people because of their talent.

And this idea of mandated equality is what destroys and makes life dreary and same, and et cetera, et cetera.

So she's trying to also excuse our,

I don't know if that's the right word, but it's been a long time since I read The Fountainhead. But it's also the idea that part of the package may bother you, but so what? So they're arrogant.

So Elon Musk tweets too much. So he's been married, I don't know, three or four times.
So he's got 10, who gives a blank is what she would say,

given his talent and what he does.

By the way, Victor,

I can't compare the book to the movie. I've not read The Fountainhead, seen the movie several times.

It's a good movie, don't you think? Oh,

I think other than his performances, you know, young Abe Lincoln, that Raymond Massey was just absolutely perfect for that role. And Patricia

gosh, she was so beautiful. And she was a great actress.
And Garrett Coop wasn't he. Right, he was.
And he was, I think that role was ideal for him. I always found him a little wooden.
He was wooden.

The thing about Gary Cooper was he wasn't a great actor. in a multiplicity of roles, but he had screen presence.
And you give him a particular aweshucks role and principled role.

And he was just wonderful. He could take up the whole screen.

We know he had another presence, but we're not going to talk on that.

Will Kane

did

our friend Will Kane at

Fox,

you think his parents deliberately named him Will after

High Noon?

I don't know. I never

ask him next time. Yeah, you know, Will is,

he, he was

a a very interesting guy.

Well, before that, he had started this, the, this,

actually,

he had created some magazine in Texas

for what when, you know, Hispanic girls turned 15. I forget what that is called, the, the celebration.
Quincent. Quincent the terror.
I can't pronounce it. Yeah.
But, but a magazine.

So it's like a bride magazine, but for that, and it was somewhat popular. And then he came to New York and he was filming these like

you know, talk shows of Rich Lowry and somebody else in a Jewish deli talking about kind of retro renegade.

And then he did stuff with us, and he actually was considering becoming the editor of National Review Online. Will Kane was? Yeah, yeah.
Well, he, this was,

I don't know, he's still young. 2015.
Are you thinking of the same guy on Fox at Guest Coast?

Yeah.

Will Dane, who does the Frox and Friends weekly.

I thought he was in his 30s. No, no.
Will, well, he's not in his 50s, I don't think. But Will's,

he's very young looking. But I didn't know that he had anything to do with, I think they're called

Quincy Aneras. Quincy Aneras.
They're all over my hometown. There's whole shops called Quincy Anera.
But it's a great entrepreneurial idea, right?

Hey, create a magazine like that because the women buy, the young girls buy the dresses, et cetera, et cetera. So he's very entrepreneurial.
And I, and he's a wonderful, I'm very fond of him.

Pete Hugseth, too. You know, they tag team on the weekends there, Fox and Friends.
He's one of those guys, if he's in his late 40s or 50s, he looks 30 years old. Yeah, you know, got to envy him.

So

I wonder what Aaron Rand would say about that. All right, Victor, we have to get to a big,

interesting question, and we'll get to that right after this important message.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen show.

Good listeners, I know you love what Victor writes.

But

if if you're not subscribing to his website, The Blade of Perseus, which is found at victorhanson.com,

you're not going to be able to read the ultra articles that Victor writes two or three times a week for the website. So you're short changing yourself.

I suggest you subscribe. Very reasonable.
Five bucks gets you in the door, $50 for the year while you're at the website. By the way, you'll find links to his books, to other appearances.

Victor's on various other podcasts and radio shows. So check it out regularly, but do subscribe.

As for me, Jack Fowler, I write Civil Thoughts, a free weekly email newsletter for the Center for Civil Society at Anvil.

And we are determined to strengthen civil society. And it's, you know, I give a dozen plus recommended readings.
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So, Victor,

another question from

listener Kajrellwap from, he happens to be from Connecticut. He was watching a World War II documentary.
on Turner Classic Movies about America's defeat of the Japanese.

This is like an hour-long documentary, I believe.

This particular film praised General George Kenney for his leadership in the Battle of the Bismarck Sea, which was waged from March 2nd to the 4th in 1943, during which a Japanese convoy bringing troops to reinforce positions in New Guinea was largely destroyed.

This helped relieve pressure on Australia. The documentary called this action the quote-unquote the turning point

in America's war in the pacific although maybe it was more to do with the turning point uh

related to the threat to australia anyway victor how important was this battle uh what can you tell us about general kenny and including if your dad served under uh his command in the um army air force and if he, your dad, ever held an opinion of him.

I mean, I know you've talked about your dad's service,

and and I believe your dad won the equivalent of a silver star for bravery for his service in World War II. So, Victor, any,

what can you tell us about this big question?

Well, I don't know if it was a seminal battle. The losses were comparable to what we suffered at Pearl Harbor.
I mean, they lost, I think, eight destroyers and half of their transports.

And the idea was that

after we took Guadalcanal and we were

isolating New Britain. That's where Rabal was, the big base of the Japanese Navy in the South Pacific.
They had eyes on Darwin, and they had actually bombed Darwin.

And the idea with the Australians were isolated. They were closer to them than we were.
And the British were in no position after the loss of Singapore and

being bogged down in Burma and trying to protect India to protect, believe it or not, Australia. And they were very bitter because they had sent troops, you know, all the way to North Africa.

And they had been,

they had been, you know, they were, they were trapped by Rommel in the second battle at Tobruk. So the United States had a commitment to help Australia.

And one of that meant that we had to help stop them basing their operations in Papua New Guinea. And so when they were...
we got, and we had cracked their naval codes.

And so we knew exactly how many troops they had, what their destinations in New Guinea were. But the problem we had was that was a backwater.
So we didn't have enough troops.

We didn't have enough ships.

And this was in a very critical transition period before

at a time we were getting rid of the P-39, the P-40, P-41 fighters.

We didn't have B-29s yet. The B-24s were just coming on.
The B-17s were mostly given to Europe. And the earlier out-of-date models were in the Pacific.
And we concentrated on,

there was a good plane called the B-25 Mitchell Doolittle use. The B-26, I think, Marauder was very good, better, but it was very dangerous to fly.

It was too fast on landing. I think

Charles Lindbergh solved that problem for us. And then there was that A-20 that was a pretty good plane.
So they had medium bombers. Anyway, they'll make a long story short.

The Americans sort of sent everything they had and they surprised the Japanese and they killed about 28, 3,000 Japanese troops. They destroyed the landing cohesion.
They sunk

the destroyers and they had to turn back. At that point, they were never going to get back in in a serious way in New Guinea.
And without New Guinea,

there was no way to have a launching pad against Australia. Their idea about Australia was very lightly populated.
You know, Australia at that time was

essentially Canberra and Sydney. And I mean, there was Perth and Darwin, but there wasn't a lot of population there and there was a lot of resources and the Japanese wanted that.

And so at that point, they decided,

and we had been very successful in the Bismarck Sea,

which was where this took place, with the Battle of Guadalcanal. And then there were five sea battles.

People forget that, that even though we supposedly took Guadalcanal and had turned the tide, after those five sea battles were over, of which we won, I think you could say we won three and tied one and lost one.

There was no,

there was only the Enterprise. That was the only carrier we had.
They sank the Wasp, they sank the Hornet, they had sunk the Lexington

at Coral Sea, they sunk the Yorktown at Midway,

and the Saratoga had been torpedoed. So, believe it or not, we had, yeah, we had 18 Essex carriers, all better than what we had, each one of them, but they weren't online yet.

So, there was that critical period right around now where the U.S. Navy was in dire straits.

They were just developing their submarine arm, and then this victory came, and it really gave us a shot over the arm. And then, very quickly, these Essex carriers came online.

We started to, people started to get the early models of the

Hellcat fighter that replaced the Wildcat and Corsair planes coming in, the Marine fighter. And pretty soon by the end of 43, beginning of 44,

the United States was buried Japan in terms of production and quality of arms. So this was that.
that transition point.

And they didn't have a lot of wherewithal. And they defeated the Japanese that were still considered, even after Guadalcanal, very formidable.

And we did protect Australia, and they never were seriously after that

threatened Australia. And that was very important because

you think about the

relationship between Australia and the United States, in some ways we were closer to them than the British even. And that was very odd.
And we fought, they fought very heroically in Korea.

They went to Vietnam. They were very prominent in Afghanistan and Iraq.
And they've been there for us all throughout their history. Have you ever been there? Yes, I have.

Have you felt like some sort of camaraderie, some kind of ideas?

I took my son, William, and

I was asked to go to a conservative think tank and do a series of lectures with Joe Joffe, the editor of Deseit in Germany.

And he was a Hoover affiliate.

Yeah, he writes for Strich.

Yeah, he's a very smart guy, very pro-American, very unusual unusual for a German. And he and I gave some lectures together over about 10 days.
We went to Canberra and we went to Sydney. And

it was

a good time. And I really liked Australians.
It was a very funny story, if I can just detour. We went up to Queensland.

My son was very adventurous at that age, at 18. I mean, he would get lost.
He would just,

I remember I said to him when we were

in Melbourne, we're going to fly out of Maryland tomorrow, 18 hours or whatever to California. And Bill, be in the hotel room by 8.
I've got to go speak and go to a dinner. And he said, no problem.

I get back at 10 o'clock. He's gone.

And so I walked over every bar at 11, 12. I thought, oh my, he's been Shanghai.
And then I went to sleep. I thought, well, I'll have to cancel everything.
And he just quietly comes in at two o'clock.

I said, what happened? Nothing. What'd you do? I had a drink.

Where were you? I walked home. Were you lost? Nope.

I said,

he was sober?

Yeah.

Wow. He had to have something to drink.
And then he's the same thing. We went to Queensland.
He said, I'm going to take a walk while you're at this conference. And I said, well, be careful.

This is a weird country. So he went to this sea.
park and a hike. And

my Australian host said, where's your son? I said, said, well, he wanted to explore. He said, no problem, but you know, this is mamba season.

So on the pathway into the nature reserve, there are black mambas or the equivalent in Australia. And don't have him go on the beach because this is a great white shark attack season.

And so

I got panicky. So I thought, well, you know, Bill wouldn't do that.
So I came back and I said,

well, where will you? And he said, well, I want to take a hike. And there was this little chain that said, I don't know what it said.

so i just jumped over it and walked all to the snake path and then i said what'd you do he said well i went on the beach you know there was nobody there it was so great it was just warm and i just went out and swam as far as i could in the ocean

And I said, well, you were in shark and poisonous snake territory. You know, these Hansen men are

like my father rather than me. I mean, I'm a worry ward, but he is, he just has confidence to do stuff like that.
He was with just another anecdote.

We had to pull a 7,000-pound boat and I have a new diesel pickup. So I said, you know, I'll take your Toyota, 17 years old, and I'll follow you up and you can take the new,

well, they have a recall in the fuel pump.

And I tried to get it fixed and they don't make the new fuel pump. So they just said, wait, and they haven't made it.

So basically they said, you have a defective fuel pump in your new truck and it will go out. I have 18,000.
It was like a time bomb. So he's got,

it's pulling a lot of weight and

going up. And I said to myself, it's going to go up several thousand feet, right? And it's Memorial Day weekend and it's packed on a four-lane freeway.
And he is pulling a 7,000-pound boat.

And I'm 10 minutes behind him. And he calls me and said, the whole car just froze.

Everything's out. It's uphill.
I'm stuck. I thought, oh my God.
He wasn't upset. So he found, somehow, he found an exit.
We pull in and he just matter of factly says, you know what?

We're going to have to take the boat off this truck. It's got the throttle light on.
It's got the engine check engine emission light on. It's got a warning.
I said, well, it's the fuel pump.

It's got filaments in the gas tank.

And it'll sit there for six months because only Dodge could sell you a truck and then immediately tell you that the Bosch fuel pump is inadequate and they haven't designed a new one yet and you should not drive it, but we can't fix it yet.

And I said to the guy at the time, well, why don't you just take this one out that's got 18,000 miles on it and put a new bad pump in, right? And give me another 18.

No, no, we can only give you the new pump. I said, well, where is a new pump? We don't have it.

So my pickup, I'm looking right now at the window. It looks beautiful and just sitting there inert.

It hasn't looked and I can't get it fixed. But my point is, he just said to me, well, we have to be careful because we're off an uphill grade.

So if we take the boat off the one truck and it weighs 7,000 pounds, it could go all the way down the hill. So we have to maneuver the other truck in that I was in, the old one, and hook it up.

And so the next thing I know, he's carrying about an 80-pound boulder and putting them under the wheels. And so we did it.
And then he just said, well, I'll take the old truck. I'll see you.

Be careful.

Well, that's a good way to go through life. Yeah,

it's very calm and not perturbed. Well, let's just take a break and then we'll

conclude this episode with your thoughts about the aforementioned General George Kenny. We'll do that right after this final break.

We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show, the 4th of July. Happy birthday, America.

Well, you're still not yet officially communist.

Victor General Kenney, how did he rank as Generals?

I know Curtis LeMay has been someone in the same theater, and maybe he was even his boss at some point eventually. I don't know.
Well, he was

a tactic.

He got the control of

the South Pacific Air Forces. I think both Australian and British.
He was a supreme commander. I think it was a three-star.

And he did a pretty good job in concert. He got along with, I don't know how anybody did that, but he got along with Douglas MacArthur.

But the problem was that he was at a point where he got to the highest rank. So when the war was over, he had done pretty well

with not a lot of resources. But the thrust of the

Army Air Force power power and strategy shifted from tactical warfare of support and conventional warfare to strategic bombing.

And

General Haskell had not done a good job with his new B-29 flying from India and China. And then they took the Marianas.
They made these huge bases in

Saipan and Tenyan and Guam.

But they were flying, as I said, you know

eight, nine hours to Tokyo at 30,000 feet, and they they were burning these Allison Cyclone engines, which weren't very good, and they were burning them up, getting to that 30,000 feet.

And they were only dropping four or five, 6,000 pounds, which is a lot, but mechanical, they were losing mechanical

to mechanical problems. They had some very sophisticated Japanese fighters, and they were not doing the job.
Right.

And they brought in,

they didn't bring in Kenny, they brought in Curtis LeMay. Whatever anybody said about Curtis LeMay,

he was a certified military genius.

He had had the long, he had established in a B-17, the world's longest solo, I mean, continuous flight all the way down, I think it was to Chile right before the war in a B-17.

He got Bell's palsy right during the flight, and he just said, screw it, and put a cigar

in his mouth to stop the dripping. And

that's why he did that ever since. And he just took the B-29s and he just took them down to 6,000 feet and made them into a huge huge dive bomber, basically, level bomber, but low level.

And they all were aghast. They said, we're up there.
It's hard to get us. And he said, hey, you're going to save the engines.
You're going to get 40 miles at increased speed.

We're going to go in at night. We're not going to use the Norden Weim site.
We're going to use Napalm,

new development from DuPont.

And their guns are geared to shoot us at 25,000 feet, but they're not geared to shoot us at 6,000 or 7 or 8,000.

And we're going to, and that Gulf Stream that blows all of our bombs off target, it's going to be our friend because we're not going to do precision bombing.

I'm sorry, if it's a war crime, then they'll kill me after they win the war.

But for now, we're going to stop Japanese military production and we're going to drop incendiary napalm bombs at 6,000 feet. And when that Gulf Stream hits,

when that hits

these explosions, it's going to take off and make a firestorm. That's what happened.
And then he said, you know, know, I know you don't. He stripped the early B-29 raids of all their guns.

He gave everybody an extinguisher. And he said, I remember my dad said that they had, he was with Rosie O'Donnell.
He was a very famous general. And they were all yelling and asking questions.

Our captains and pilots were. He was a single fire control gunner.
And he said to him, hey, every objection they made, they had an answer. They said, oh.

Well, you're not going to be his arm, but you're going to be not going to be going 250 miles an hour. You're going to be going 350 because you're going to have the Gulf Stream right behind you.

And it's going to blow you over Tokyo. You're going to drop the bombs with a Pathfinder Big X will go ahead of you.
You'll drop the bombs.

It'll ignite all of Tokyo and you're going to be out of there on your way home. And it worked.

But Kenney was not a part of that and he was passed over for that. And then the other thing to remember about him was.

I think he was the original general and start in charge of the Strategic Air Command. And he got a little dicey.
In those days, the Soviets had a very long, undefended border

near Alaska. And we were

conducting raids that were going inside Soviet territory to probe their defenses.

And, you know, we had the B-29. Intuitive.
Yeah, we had that soup up, I think they were called B-50s.

They were the B-29s of World War II, but they were outfitted with a new Allison Cyclone engine that went from something like 2,000 to 3,000 horsepower. And they were going like 400 miles.

They were really good planes. And then

we had that crazy B-36, that huge plane that was twice the size of the B-29. And they were carrying nuclear weapons on patrol.
And anyway, it was kind of a demoralized mess.

He became a political kind of a right-wing figure. And they brought in LeMay

and they said, fix this.

And he did.

He did. Yeah.
First, he went down to

North Fork and he saw the submarines and they were starting to put preliminary Polaris missiles, you know, on

American submarines. He said, nope,

we are the Air Force. Those are missiles.
And

people point the paint sack on the submarines. Oh, my gosh.
So he was a... He was.
That's not during the war. That's after the war.
After the war.

He saved. Yeah.
Kenney didn't do a good job with SAC. Right.
LeMay. The thing about LeMay, to change the the topic a little bit, everything that LeMay touched worked.

And everything he said didn't work. He was a 1964 running mate of George Wallace.
68, right? It's hard to take care of.

Wallace, you know why?

He didn't, he was not prejudiced. He was very fair to African Americans.
He was an ecology guy. He was for cleaning up America.

He believed he was kind of a health nut, even though he smoked and had his

liquor. But everything he did worked.
When he took, he was a colonel in B-17s. He flew lead formation.
He created the stack formation.

He calculated the collective firepower of the B-17 guns in a type of formation. He cut down losses.
When he took over the B-29, it was bigger than the Manhattan Project, $2 billion.

It was a complete failure. These huge planes that were killing people, they weren't working.
He revised the maintenance schedules. He calibrated how many people would be killed

trying to reach the preferred level and going over Tokyo versus how many bombs would be dropped.

And he fired a lot of this

commanders. He brought in his own team.
They were wonderful. And he developed.
He called in all of his wing commanders every week. And he said, what's working and what's not.

And my dad said one day they, you know, they would fly over and they'd see these dead on the cliffs of Tenyon where these planes couldn't, they were so overloaded.

They carried 20,000 pounds of napalm, 10 tons, 10 tons going, you know, around, you know, 1,600 miles, often at night. And so

they could see the wreckage of B-29s that went off the cliff. They couldn't make it.

And then they had the protocol where they would rub up to, I don't know, four or five thousand RPMs with their foot on the brake and then pop, kind of like pop the clutch and just boom off.

And they had all of these things that LeMay allowed people to develop. And he was a pretty tough guy.

I remember my dad said that, you know, you always took your, for a while, they had 20 millimeter cannon, they got rid of them.

But the 50 caliber, every central fire control gunner was responsible for making sure that everybody took the

onused ammunition out of the gun magazine.

And because it could get like 110 there and one didn't and it sprayed one of the quons and huts and killed a couple a couple of people i don't think they ever publicized it so my dad said the next day he woke up and the guy was gone

and everybody lemay let the rumor spread they took him out and shot him of course they didn't they just took him right there and sacked him and sent him home but leMay wanted the impression that if you're going to get Americans killed by sloppiness, then you're going to be shot.

Did your dad dad ever meet LeMay? He did. Well, he's been in a lecture hall with LeMay.
And

all I remember, this is a funny story. I was 11 years old.
My parents were strong conservative Democrats, but they did not like George Wallace. And Wallace had a,

you know, in 1964, they were Kennedy people. Kennedy got shot.
And most of the country voted for Johnson. Big mistake, but they did.

But there was, excuse me, this was 68.

And

Johnson wasn't running, and of course, Humphrey was running, and Nixon, and Wallace was this conservative,

kind of like a MAGA, but without, but he had racist components, of course. Although he changed,

he became a decent human being by the time he died in the appraisal of many black people that voted.

And he was contrite and remorseful for what he had done in 1961 and two, although he's a terrible governor in that sense of his racism.

But nevertheless, we were sitting in our living room and they had this press conference and there was George Wallace and he says, and I want to introduce a great patriot who will be my running mate.

And my dad just, and they,

that's him.

Oh my God, he put me at 5,000 feet, 40 missions. I was supposed to sign up for 25, and then it was 30.
And then they said, you got to do 35, and then you got to do 40.

And then we had 16 planes in the squadron. And then three got down.
And I said, Dad, remember Thumper? He said, yes, Thumper got a big scrapbook of all the

nose cartoons. And I said, how about Running Rabbit? Dad, was he one? Yeah, Running Rabbit.
He bit it over Kyoto. We flew over it.
We couldn't bomb it, but he got shot down.

And then I'd say, how about Laughing Duck? How about him? Well, Laughing Duck, they blew up with a napalm. It got caught in the bomb.
It was every and he said, that was him.

And when they got done out of the 16 planes, they had two of the original 16 that made it. Oh my.
So he, but he did, he, he was, my dad was a funny guy. He was very funny.
So he didn't get angry.

He was just telling us.

And I would go run up and I climb up in the bookcase and I'd get the big B-29 scrapbook and I come out and there were all the planes with the, they have pictures of everyone that they take and give them to people.

So I'd go, oh dad,

how about him? Him. They had the picture of the crew and the nose art.
It was very funny. I said, don't tell me, Dumbo made it, didn't he? Dumbo made it.
Look, Dumbo made it.

And he said, No, I'm sorry, kids. I said, What happened to Bungo? We had to go.
We had a mining mission off the Korean coast and Dumbo, just a freak accident. Dumbo was

got into a wind drift and he blew up, and the mine dropped on top of him or the plane above him. They blew him all up.
Oh, man.

It was like that. And then he was looking at LeMay, and

my mom said, Oh, my gosh.

This man,

this man,

Bill, this man said he wanted to bomb Vietnam back to the Stone Age.

And my dad said, well, he did it once, Pauline. He'll do it again.

So my dad had a good dad. He liked LeMay, but

everybody, he said, hated what he was doing and then

said that he saved their lives. Yeah, well, it's a larger than life.
One of the more.

Remember, I'll finish today by remembering we saw him and Dr. Strangelove, the composite Buck Rickinson member.
Yeah, yeah.

He was the composite of two guys there. I think

it was a great movie.

Oh, I love that movie. I love it.

That was a composite of Curtis LeMay.

Yeah.

And remember that transcript of the Cuban Missile Crisis when

I don't know if you saw that

scene in

Doctor Strangelove when George C. Scott, he's kind of part, and the other one is Sterling, what's his name? Was the other guy? Sterling Hayden.
Yeah, LeMay was

the Scott character and Sturden Hayden that were derivative of LeMay. And they're telling about how it's so dangerous.

And George C. Scott, well, we're going to go in there.
And he gets into,

and he puts his hands, well, I'm not going to go here. And he said, I'm not going to say, you know, we're not going to say we're not going to get a little skin off or

lose a little skin in the process and we can take a few nukes. And it's very, it's scary, but it's very funny.

Yeah, no, it's, it's, I, it's the bodily fluid stuff, too. It's just, yeah, I don't know if LeMay, and that I think that came from kind of LeMay, as I said earlier.
He was a health nut, but also

LeMay was a

he kind of was an amateur race car driver and he knew a lot about cars. There was a really good biography by an American lawyer that I think I reviewed.
It was really good about him.

He wasn't the sinister, mean person he was. I knew a person that knew him personally, one of my close friends

who was much older than I knew Curtis LeMay.

And he hunted bear with Curtis LeMay. And all he would do is

when I would go to these meetings, he was there, this friend, I'd say, Jack, can you tell me a LeMay story? Victor, I don't want to tell you, but I will. Kurt and I were up in Alaska.

Kurt was at the base, and Kurt did this. And that whole generation,

we tend to hate them now, but my God, where would we have been without them? They were completely fearless.

That guy flew as a B-17 commander mission after mission after mission, right in the front plane. And he had a big fight.
Can you imagine the entire architect of 2,500 B-29s?

And he demanded, they wouldn't let him do it. They They threatened to, he wanted to fly the lead B-29.

And, well, he had all of his wing generals. They all did.
Rosie O'Donnell flew right there. My dad said they couldn't believe it.
They saw this two-star general. He was flying in the lead plane.
Yeah.

Yeah. What a, what a group of people.

Well, Victor, we, um, I appreciate all that.

It's really intriguing and informative. And

I have to admit, I said that that question was posed by Kaj

Relwaff which by the way is Jack Fowler backwards so it was my question so anyway thanks Victor for answering it and all the questions you answered today and all the wisdom you shared thank our listeners for listening and happy fourth of July and we will be back soon with yet another and final special episode of the Victor Davis Hansen show thank you and bye-bye thank you everybody and thank you for putting up with my indulgences.