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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-Hansen is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Buskie Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College, where on this day, and this podcast should be aired on September 8th, Victor will be teaching that college as he's done for the last 19 or 20 years.

And we are recording a series of podcasts based on the questions that you, our beloved listeners, have submitted.

And today's questions are going to be about China and some military history.

And we're going to get to your Victor's thoughts on boycotting products from China right after these important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Victor, I'm going to get this plug-in up early in the podcast.

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It's called ultra, and you cannot read it, read those pieces unless you subscribe.

I have to tell you, there is a lot of, lot of ultra content.

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That's victorhanson.com.

So, Victor, quick, simple question here from from John on China.

Should U.S.

consumers be boycotting all products made in China?

And also, why isn't this idea more talked about in the public forum?

Of course, we're assuming he means by China, the People's Republic of China, i.e., the commies, not Taiwan.

Victor, what are your thoughts about boycotting products from China?

Well,

we can't do that.

Can't do it.

I wish we could.

We can't.

And what do I mean by we can't?

Well, 90% of our vitamins and supplements and about 60% of our essential drugs are from China or some from India, but most from China.

We haven't produced, I think, penicillin since 2004.

So

insidiously, just look around your house or go to Walmart where it says buy American and see how many things that we produce.

Does that mean we can't do it?

No, we can do it.

All we have to do is transition

and we have to pay a little more, I suppose, but not as much as we think we do because we have cheaper energy costs than they do.

We would have no transportation costs and their labor is becoming more expensive.

So yeah, we can do it, but we have to decide how we're going to do it and we have to

transition.

You know, who's really good on this?

I would recommend him to the reader is David Goldman.

He is a uh financial you know him really well and i like david and he's been kind of a maverick as i said earlier he's been critical of me sometimes warranted i think and uh but he's an outsider and he's uh

he's not part of the orthodoxy and he his main answer to the the question that was posed is uh be smart but don't boycott or embargo stupidly.

By that, he means find out, first of all, what your industries are that are the most vital to your survival.

Quietly, stealthily, serially, insidiously master them and be self-sufficient in them.

And he gives sometimes he gives an example about how the Americans created fracking and horizontal drilling.

And that's an American forte.

And the result is we own that.

And do that with all of these other industries.

And then when you get to that position of exclusivity, then tell them, screw you.

We're not going to be reciprocal if you're not.

And do that down the line, but don't go in a blunderbuss, oh, we hate China, we're not going to do this.

And you find out that they've got 20 times the engineers graduating every year than you do.

And

you can't divorce from them.

And they can hurt you.

And we've learned that during COVID when we were, who was that Chinese official who said, maybe we'll just delay protective equipment?

Ha ha ha.

And they did that a lot.

So we're not in a position.

And that's what we have to be very careful about.

We're the strongest economy in the world.

We've got the most talent, but we have not been on the ball lately.

And we have underutilized our natural and human assets.

And we've got to get together and just systematically say,

we don't believe in protectionism.

And

we can't be self-sufficient everywhere.

And we want the global community to prosper.

But

The Chinese Communist Party is toxic and it has a agenda that's antithetical to freedom and constitutional republicanism.

And we're going to protect ourselves from it.

And here is what we're drawing the line on.

And this is an internal, not a public discussion.

And then we're going to, you know, we're going to beef up our engineering.

It's just,

it's a tragedy right now that

in all of these underserved communities

that we are teaching in the public schools and the four-year colleges that this particular group is a victim of that particular group and this particular thing happened 30, and they're not learning what geometry, and algebra, and physics, and mathematic analyses, and grammar, and syntax.

The world doesn't give a damn whether we're woke or not.

They could care less.

They just want to either compete with us if they're allies or destroy us whether they're enemy.

The only reason that China likes us being woke is so they can use it to divide us.

Right.

Throw it in our face, right?

Exactly.

So that's the answer is yes, but do it selectively and

mindfully and

intelligently.

Victor, this is maybe I'm tone deaf, but you know, Mrs.

Fowler wakes up every morning and immediately rants in a good way, like you're ranting, you rant.

But she

of late

always mentions China buying our farmland now as something that finds particularly disturbing.

So along the theme of, you know boycotting their products is different than preventing you know the sale of something but it's of a of a piece what do you do you think of do you think a ban on

selling

farmland to red china is something uh

appropriate or

well we have to be careful because we have you know

several million, hundreds of millions of acres of farmland.

I think they're up to about a quarter million acres.

So they haven't taken it over.

They're in the Bill Gates category.

So the question is, why are they doing it?

Is it just a hedge against inflation or is it a good investment given the acceleration in land prices or the little dip right now in prices that they feel is a good time to come into the market?

I don't know.

People, the range of exegesis run from they're trying to get near military bases

so they can monitor flight patterns of testing or aircraft or coding or electronic communications.

That's one.

I think a more realistic one is they want to actually assume large-scale farms and then they want to see how they're organized, how they use computers, what type of farm machinery is the best, and then they're going to take it apart as they do everything and copy it and Xerox it.

Right.

I think what they're doing is they're making laboratories all over the United States of particular crops.

And then way that they do it, and I've mentioned this with Sammy, it's very analogous to 1880s with the Japanese imperial government that wanted, you know, to have the best navy in the world.

They just sent a quarter million people over to Britain to copy nautical engineering.

So they get a farm and they say, okay, we're going to try Caterpillar or Ford or Massey or whatever particular farm product it is.

And we're going to get this guy to show us the greatest irrigation technology.

And then we're not going to do it in the abstract.

We're going to watch you how you do it.

We're going to hire you to do it.

And we're going to copy the protocol and the labor and the management style.

That's how they do it.

And that's what they're doing.

And so

I don't know what to say.

Yeah, no, that's that's

if we I wrote in an article that everything should be symmetrical.

You can't own land.

I don't think

I'm not sure

any foreigner can own any land in China.

I don't think they can.

In theory, the Chinese Communist Party is the owner of all land.

But I know they have ways of getting around that.

But my point is, whether it's dumping currency or patent or copyright infringement, the whole purpose was

after

the fall of the Berlin Wall, people said, well, China is next.

And we never, you know, except for the Korean War, China has always been a traditional romantic place for Americans, underprivileged.

We helped in World War II, and

now he's gone, and they're going to follow the Russian end of communism, and then they're going to be like Poland or Czechoslovakia.

They're going to be a member.

So, we've got to do.

This was the George H.W.

Bush, Bill Clinton, George W.

Bush, Barack Obama paradigm.

And we've got to give them concessions because the more concessions we give, they're going to interpret that magnanimity,

reciprocal kindness toward us.

They're going to be a member of the global family.

They're going to be a pillar for the international order.

They're going to enforce tariffs.

And that was just crazy.

They're communists, damn it.

They never, communists can't ever tell the truth.

And so we, we, and then it was just a green light for a lot of opportunistic corporations to say, oh, I'm going to go have a joint policy project, or I'm going to have joint investment over in China, and then I'm going to liberalize it, and I'm going to be part of the transformation into a just and rules-based society.

No, you're over there for just profits, and you're dealing with a satanic force.

Okay.

And that didn't work, did it?

And that's where we are right now.

Yeah.

Well, work for Michael Bloomberg and some others that made bundles on it.

What was it, $10 billion to capitalize new startup companies run by the Chinese government?

And then he lectures us on all of these

supersized drinks.

If he's worried about New Yorkers getting too fat because they're drinking a 32-ounce Coke, he should ask himself, what's his moral culpability,

putting $10 billion into China when they've got a million people in a re-education camp.

Yeah.

Hey, Victor, lots of the questions that came in

for these

Victor's Teaching at Hillsdale podcast series.

Some were personal.

And we asked one of the other podcasts about music, and that should have been its own podcast all New York.

But that's okay.

But here's one from Gary, a question from Gary.

Loved your podcasts on movies, which you and I did about, I think, a year ago.

We did two on

Victor's favorite movies.

That was really proved quite popular.

I'm interested to know if VDH watched the Band of Brothers miniseries and what he thought.

I know that there are some issues with Mr.

Ambrose, but I just think Band of Brothers is outstanding and gives such insight into the men who fought World War II.

And someone like Dick Winters seemed like an outstanding military leader.

And when you see the actual clips of the men of Easy Company, my heart is stirred.

So, Victor, about Band of Brothers, and then there was, if I may, there was a, I can't remember the title of it, there was a similar series about the war in the Pacific,

nowhere near as as popular as Band of Brothers.

It wasn't as well done, but it was based on half of it, I think, was,

what was it, My Pillow, and then the great E.B.

Sledge.

I wrote the introduction to one of E.B.

Sledge's editions, the editions of With the Old Breed, which that's a great narrative that finishes up with a disaster on Okinawa, where my namesake Victor Hansen was killed.

So, yeah,

all I can say is I did watch it.

For some reason,

my wife got fixated on it.

So she bought the whole series.

So she watches it all the time.

I guess maybe her favorite actor is Damian Lewis, who I think played Dick Withers.

And he was sort of an American legend major.

And then he went out.

I think he had a successful career as a businessman and AgriBusiness or something.

Or he was, he lived a long time.

He had a wonderful life.

I think he lived into his late 80s or early 90s.

And I don't know how he survived.

Stephen Ambrose wrote about that.

I don't, I had mixed,

I had a little anecdote about Stephen Ambrose when I was a graduate student.

I was in, because I was from a farm and I was interested in the West.

And he had that, I think you and I talked about it, Jack, once he wrote that book about Custer and Red Cloud, I think.

Yep.

And that was one of his first books.

Anyway, he was speaking at Stanford.

And I was in the classics department.

And nobody, you know, in those days, you were so limited and specialized, you never poked your head out of your field.

But for some reason, I went over.

I don't know whether he spoke on that or not.

It was in 1975, as I recall.

So you're talking 55 years ago.

He came in with like long hair

and he came in with buckskins.

And

I never seen anybody smoke like that.

In those days, you could smoke right anywhere.

And

it had just been after,

see if I'm right about that, the Jerry Ford pardon.

And he had,

and I think I'm right, I'm doing this by memory, that he had been one of the only professors, was it Tulane or somewhere, Baylor, I can't remember, that he had been fired.

And

he was a hard left revolutionary.

And he was just railing.

The talk wasn't even on this topic, he was just railing about

Richard Nixon.

And then I'm trying to remember where it was.

It wasn't at Hillsdale.

It was another place.

I saw him 40 years later.

And of course, he was

very different.

He still drank and smoked, but he was very different.

And

I had, I mean, the thing about him was that he had written a lot of really enjoyable books that were already out in the public domain and had not really sold that well.

But then when the D-Day and the Reagan S thing,

you know, the Panda Brothers and all of the Peggy Noonan speechmaking

around the

50th, was it the 50th anniversary of D-Day?

That would have been Reagan gave the speech at Point de Hope.

That was early.

40th, I think.

40th it was.

Yeah.

And that brought him, and then his book on D-Day, and then he was off to the races.

He just, all of his books were reprinted, and Pegasus Bridge, and all of them.

Then he became a celebrity.

And it was once you start speaking and you get attention, and you get obviously less chance to write, less chance to write.

You don't do the things that made you want to to be heard in the first place or read.

So it's kind of a paradigm.

So if you write a good book or you've written a couple of bestsellers, and I've done that, the problem is, is that you get more media attention.

It takes time to do what they wanted you to do in the first place.

And he learned very quickly that you can't turn out those big books.

So he started, you know, the Transcontinental Railroad and he started taking shortcuts.

So

I think it was called Into the Wild Duel Yonder.

It was about bombing crews and it was plagiarized.

And

Fred Barnes, I think he was the one in the Weekly Standard who wrote about it.

And then people went back and looked at his

authoritative biography of Dwight D.

Eisenhower, and they found that in the, I'm doing this from memory, but in the appendix where he documents the oral histories, that Eisenhower wasn't there where he said he was.

And so

he, the allegation was he just made up these supposed interviews.

Yeah.

What's the other?

What's the other explanation?

Yeah.

Yeah.

People.

So he was, and then

I don't know if it was the smoking or perhaps maybe a little drinking more than usual, but the point is that

he was getting in his 70s, I think.

He was world famous and very, very wealthy.

And I think the stress of that,

the charges that he had been a plagiarist,

he got ill and got cancer and died.

But he was unapologetic to the end.

He never came out and said, I'm sorry, I apologize.

I plagiarized.

He ignored it or denied it.

He was.

Or he didn't.

I don't know what the word would be.

But they all did.

I mean, Doris Kearns, right?

John, she plagiarized and she got.

And Michael, what's his name?

Did Belasar, whatever his name was.

Oh, he did too?

Belshloss?

No, not him.

No, no, no, no, no.

It was, he was, he wrote a book on

the revol uh early colonial America, Belisides.

Okay.

I shouldn't even talk about it.

And he

claimed that he had gone into inheritance records

and

found that the

found that

I want to be very careful because these are very serious charges, but

he had made the argument that based on inheritance records that

early Americans did not own very much firearms, didn't many, because when they filed their inheritance

There wasn't any

right there wasn't any sign that they passed them on as if anybody would even list them in those records.

But the point I'm making is then when people demanded to see the archival support for it, there was none.

Right.

And,

but.

Okay.

Okay.

But I mean, if you're thinking,

Stephen Amber, we're getting off topic, but who, who's one of the,

don't you remember that Joe Biden, wasn't he kicked out of,

he got an F, didn't he, for stealing five pages in law school?

And then when he was in the top of his class, except that he wasn't.

And the sad thing about that Wild Blue, the Wild Blue book, the Ambrose.

Right.

The thing that got me angry about it was there was a guy who was a very good historian.

I think his name was

Childers.

And he had written about it, Winds of the Morning.

And that book sold maybe 10,000, 15,000 copies.

It was a really good book.

And Ambrose came through and plagiarized it and then put his brand on it and called it wild blue and never cited him.

Wow.

And

that wasn't fair.

Alex Haley, remember?

Sure.

He plagiarized.

Martin Luther King plagiarized.

I mean, my gosh, his PhD thesis, we're not supposed to say that at Boston University.

There was a lot of it that was taken.

Right, the guy who wrote one the didn't he win the Pulitzer Prize for his biography of King?

And then he tried, he found the other documents about the

guy at Stanford did that found it and in the archive and uh you get that accusation um

all the time in music you know people didn't john harris was accused of it uh george harrison george harrison i don't remember that but gosh i loved him i did too yeah hey i got uh

i just have to say one thing quickly about ambrose uh he did um did well

did you ever go to the museum i did

okay uh was it in conjunction with a request from him or was it independent of that and this is the world war ii museum i'm doing it i i think his son was on the board or uh was had played a very positive and important role in establishing as had stephen ambrose right no i did it um

uh the conservative i shouldn't put adjectives in front of historians, but the traditionalist historian Max Hastings, who wrote a great historian.

but he was on a panel and then I was asked kind of to debate him in a very polite debate.

He gave a particular view of World War II, that the Red Army and Russia should be given primary

credit for the Allied victory.

And it was basic,

I'm not going to be fair to him if I just collapse the exegesis into one.

point, but the main point he made was that two out of every three soldiers in the Wehrmacht had been killed.

And I refuted that by suggesting that 20% to 25% of the material

for the Red Army,

everything from rubber ponchos to sea rations to

fuel to raw aluminum, came from Britain and the United States.

And then it was a multifaceted war.

So until the last two weeks, Russia did nothing to fight the Japanese.

They did nothing to reclaim the Mediterranean.

They did nothing

to

fight the key wars that destroy the U-boat fleet.

They did no strategic bombing, where we resulted in 10,088 millimeter platforms being transferred from the Eastern Front to protect German cities.

And the Allies lost 80,000 American dead and British aviators.

And they did a lot, a lot to cause World War II, because I don't think World War II would have become World War II

had Adolf Hitler on August 23rd not signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which gave him a green light to go into Poland and then turn his attention after that to the West with the assurance that Russia was a de facto ally and supplying, as Winston Churchill pointed out, a lot of the supplies that...

that went into the Luftwaffe, its fuel when it was bombing London came from Russia.

Right.

And I think I said in the Second World War.

Wow.

Quite a debate.

Yeah, it was a good debate.

Gerhard Weinberg, who's a brilliant historian,

you know, the world, that massive history of World War II, a global history, World War II, World at War, a global history,

was there as a moderator.

He knew more than I think Max Hastings and I put together about World War II, especially his knowledge of

modern Eastern European languages.

So he could read all the archives of a lot of stuff.

But,

you know, just

of general interest, people should remember one thing about World War II:

that Russia violated every single

agreement that it made with its allies, and it

upheld every single agreement that it made with our enemies.

So it signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression pact, and it adhered to it.

It was Germany who broke it.

Russia would have never broken it.

I know a lot of contrarians say that they would have.

They didn't.

It made a pact with the Japanese in April of 1941, a non-aggression pact.

And it abided by that to the letter until it was opportunistically in their advantage to grab some of Manchuria, et cetera, et cetera.

And in the last two weeks of the war,

they started to move.

But otherwise, they had no problem of us being slaughtered on Iwo Jima and Okinawa while Japanese

ships were in the Pacific under

Russian flag.

So they had no problem.

They made a de facto agreement with Italy before the invasion on June 21st, 1941.

And they made a lot.

And so they...

Russia honored all of its fascistic agreements and it broke all of the accords that appeared at Potsdam, for example, about the future of Eastern Europe and the future of China, etc., etc.

So that was some of the things I introduced into that debate.

But Max Hastings is a very good historian, and

he was very controversial

in the Falklands War, but I don't want to get into that.

But otherwise, he was a great historian.

Well, we're going to continue on a military theme here, Victor,

with a question about

did the little guy beat the big guy?

And we will get to that right after these important messages.

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Back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

This particular podcast and, well, about five others were recorded in late August, and they're being aired through early September as Victor is up at Hillsdale College for his annual two-week, three-week teaching gig

in year 19 or so of that.

I want to recommend again folks check out

Victor's website, victorhanson.com.

Victor just talked quite a bit about World War II.

And if you have not yet gotten the Second World Wars that Victor wrote about four or five years ago, I think it sold about 100,000 copies now or somewhere in that ballpark.

You have been denying yourself.

So rectify, you'll find a link for it there.

Victor, here's a question from Fletch,

which

I did not like that movie.

Fletch, perhaps you and VDH, no, perhaps VDH can discuss any wars or battles where an inferior army on the defensive lost specifically because they took up the offensive.

Whereas had the inferior army maintained the defensive, that inferior army could have sustained itself at least and or possibly won the war on battle.

I bring this up because of a discussion I had recently about our American Civil War, where it was suggested to me that the South lost the war when it invaded the North.

The contention was that the South could have lasted had it maintained the defensive only.

Maybe this is true, maybe not.

Worth discussing.

And he says, can you title the discussion, the best course of action is inaction?

What do you think about that, Victor?

That's discussed in Machiavelli's Prince.

But

the thing about the South, to go to the second part first, very quickly, there was a big discussion in the South.

And

one of the arguments, I think that was James Longstreet and others, said that

we don't really have to win.

We just don't have to lose because we don't want to take anything from the North.

There's no desire.

It's not integral for us to go up north,

only in the sense of harming our industry or something, but there's no need to.

All we have to do is keep them out of the South.

We just want to be free from them.

They want to force us back in, so they're going to have to come into an area the size of Western Europe and

they're going to have to conquer us.

So, therefore, we should go on the defensive and the counteroffensive when they come into our territory.

And

that Lee felt just the opposite.

And I think Lee's strategy was: well,

yes, but they have a blockade around our ports, and we cannot export cotton to England, especially.

We have no source of foreign exchange, and we're not self-sufficient in manufacturing.

William Decumster Sherman gave a great speech when he was the head of what became Louisiana State University.

It was a military academy.

Then he lectured his southern host.

He was the college,

almost the college president, I suppose, the commandant.

And he said,

you can't even make a glass resistor on a telegraph.

How are you going to fight these people?

How are you going to fight us?

We're going to defeat you.

And this is before the war started.

So Lee's argument was

just being on the defensive means we're being strangled with

the Anaconda strategy that Lincoln embraced.

And

so

his idea was that after the brilliant victories at Chancellorville, for example, that they could go into the on the offensive and go into Pennsylvania.

And

they could really raise havoc.

And that would so terrify the North that when the election was coming up in 1864, there was a large copperhead movement, especially in Ohio.

And that would create enough

dissension that you would have a challenge to Lincoln.

And there was a challenge

initially from the left.

On the left, there was John C.

Fremont, and then, of course, George McClellan on the right, who was his argument was: let's go back to the status before the war.

And if they want to leave, let them leave.

And so, Lee thought that he could precipitate that dissension, and then the Copperhead movement would take over.

So, he went into Pennsylvania, and

the rest is history.

They ended up in a disaster after Gettysburg.

So, the point, and then it turned out that later in the summer of 1864, the next year, he was absolutely brilliant on the defensive as everybody knew he was.

But

Sherman understood something.

He kind of encapsulated the strategies and he basically said,

if you're going to go north, you've got to do what I did when I went south.

Lee went up and he stole some stuff and he caused terror, but he had no systematic strategy to destroy morale, to burn a swath,

and go into, you know, go into

wanted to, after the Battle of Shiloh, go into southern Ohio and really cause havoc.

And so Sherman's idea was:

if I go south, I'm going to scare the blank out of them and turn everybody against the plantation class.

And he got to, you know, when he got to the plantations of Howell Cobb and others, they said, hey, go over to South Carolina.

They started it, not us.

And that was the unraveling.

But the point I'm making is they never took Richmond.

Grant didn't.

And he suffered that horrible 100,000 dead, wounded, and missing in the summer of 1864.

And that was, you know, these horrible places at Cold Harbor, Wilhelm.

Right.

And that was, that was Robert E.

Lee on the defensive.

Yeah.

He was not a good offensive commander in the sense that he wasn't a long-term strategic thinker.

And you can argue that,

you know, when Napoleon had a small, small, I mean, Napoleon was outnumbered throughout that decade.

And he was an expert at dividing the forces at Austerlitz that outnumbered him.

But those were not

huge aggressive campaigns on the offensive.

What they were was within the realm of the possible in Western Europe, in Italy, in Prussia, in Germany, and not so much in Spain.

But the point I'm making is he could divide superior armies and conquer.

He tried to do it at Waterloo and failed.

But the point is,

France did not have the ability to take on a coalition of Britain, the German-speaking peoples, and Russia.

And when he went into Russia in 1812, that was a disaster.

And so that's an example of a small country not doing when Germany went into Russia.

Germany was outnumbered.

And by eight, you could argue that as early as

1941, it was getting close to the limits of its expansion.

And so if it hadn't gone into Russia, we would have had a big trouble.

That was, I don't think that by itself necessarily lost the war.

But and the same thing was true in World War I.

They did not have the, they were on the defensive after the failures of 1914 and 1915.

And had they just after 1917 had a static front on the east

and not been so expansionary to have, you know, 50 million people now under German control in Russia at the Treaty of Brest-Latovitz, and they just sent everybody back west,

rather than four or five hundred, but a million and a half German soldiers in that March 1918 offensive,

they would have been probably with a better chance of victory.

So, yeah, the question is: there's a lot of times that

numerically inferior nations or armies that have started wars or they find themselves in the middle of wars and they don't adapt a defensive posture, but they're still, and Japan is another example, they're still expanding, trying to go into India in 1944, then that's catastrophic.

There's a whole discipline of how the South could have won the Civil War.

And it's supposed to, I think, the consensus is that had it been able to

inflict counter

offensives against Union armies coming in before the election of 1864, they would have won.

What destroyed that strategy was they had no idea, none, nobody did, of the absolute singular genius of William Tecumseh Sherman.

So when he was in Tennessee and he said he's going to go to Georgia,

they thought they could stop him.

And, you know, John Bell Hood was so outclassed, and so was Johnston.

They were just not in his class.

And when he took Atlanta on September 2nd, he said, Atlanta is ours and fairly won.

And that was the end of, that was the end of McClellan.

And at that point, Lincoln had no worries about the election.

Then when he went all the way to Savannah in the March to the sea in November, and then he said, you know, I've done two of these.

And everybody said, wow, he went all the way to Atlanta and he won Lincoln in the election.

Then he cut a swath through Georgia, humiliated the Confederacy and got all the way.

He said, no, no, no, I'm going through the Carolina.

You can't go through the Carolinas.

It's winter.

And he made Corduroy Rose and he ended up pulling in where he ended Virginia.

And so he's the one that won the war.

Did he, Victor, I want to ask a question.

We only have about five minutes left, and there's a question about Vietnam.

But quickly, did Sherman lose, were there any small battles during that whole campaign that he lost?

Yes, he did.

He, at one point, at, I think it was Kinshaw Mountain, and I'm doing this by memory, but he was under such pressure

to resume the offensive that he played into the hands hands of

the South, and he had a one offensive, and they were entrenched, and

he lost.

And after that,

his attitude was, I'm not going to do that.

And he was severely criticized, you know, in the post-war

battles, because all these generals fought it out in magazines.

for the next 30 years.

And the

argument from the South that he wasn't really a great commander and from the Grant people.

I remember Grant was not just the commander of the Union armies, but he was president.

So he had that for two terms.

So he had at his disposal the whole apparat

of the government.

And the argument was that Grant had attrited or worn out or bled white the South and Sherman had not lost anybody.

But Sherman's argument was

this is a political war.

And this union,

it's not, you know, it's got the West and the Midwest and the abolitionists in New England, and it's not unified.

And if you don't give it victories and you think you're going to go down to Richmond and you're going to lose 100,000, you're going to lose the election.

And you lose the election, you're going to have a copperhead government, you're going to have two nations.

So what you got to do is you've got to get a huge army of Midwesterners who know how to live out in the rough.

and you need to live off the land and you've got to take an iconic city and humiliate them.

And then he took Atlanta.

And then he said, then you've got to go right through the heart of the plantation belt and say, these people started it.

We're finishing it.

And all you middle class, to the extent you even exist in the South, poor whites, you didn't start it.

We're not going to burn your house down.

We're going to just do two things.

We're going to burn every damn plantation in our pathway, and we're going to burn armories and Confederate public buildings, and we're going to free slaves.

That was enormously psychologically potent strategy.

And then when they couldn't stop him, and they had a lot of armies, they had General Hardy there, you know, and

they had Braxton Bragg, and nobody wanted to take him on.

He had 60,000 people.

And when he turned from Savannah and went north, it was incredible when he went through the Carolinas.

And, you know, on the victory parade, Grant had the entire Army of the Potomac, which was a construct.

Everybody that was in that army in 1861 was dead or wounded or retired.

It was mostly immigrants going in and out from the northern cities.

But when this army from the West came, you know, I think 200 plus regiments of the 240 or 50 were from Minnesota, Iowa, Michigan, Indiana.

And they were yeoman farmers.

And when they came through, the German military attaché said, my God, who are these six foot tall, bronze hand people?

And they all, he'd intentionally had them wear tattered uniforms.

They had been living off the land.

He had all of these freed slaves.

He gave them a lot of prominence.

They were, you know, miners and engineering troops in the sense that they built the roads.

And he had them in the parade.

And they had all of their officers who were all beat up.

And it looked like a...

like a Cossack army.

And there was a lot of because Secretary of War

Stanton had been so unfair unfair to Sherman, and he was so angry at him because they had accused him of being a racist, and he hadn't freed enough slaves.

He gave them islands off the Carolinas.

I mean, he was kind of actually

ahead of his time.

So, my point is that when they got there, there were people who said quietly, if he wants to take over the country, he can.

And where in the hell is this army going to go?

Because there's nobody, Grant's army could not stop it.

And he's beat Uncle Billy, is at the head of 65,000.

So he marched them and then he marched them to the other side of the Potomac and he he waited about a day and then he disbanded them.

But he wanted to make the point that I won the war and this is an army of the West and that's the future of the country and we have a different type of strategy and we're not going to take people and bleed them white on the terms of trying to ram through the stockades and entrenchments in Richmond.

It's just not going to do it.

So he was the first real American general that was holistic in the sense of economic, social, political, cultural, military theories, all

combined or amalgamated into one.

And he is one of the main subjects of the Savior Generals, correct?

He was.

He, Patton, and an obscure, but I think unduly obscure general,

a pamanongus of Thebes.

And

so there was a, and there's been a lot written about Sherman,

a lot written.

There's been some negative, but they tend to be kind of pre-woke biographies.

But

he's one of the most unappreciated people in American history.

I mean, I think

he was, you could argue he may have been bipolar.

He had a mental breakdown.

He was relieved or he resigned from command, 1862.

But he was resurrected at Shiloh.

I wrote about a little bit about him in the savior generals and then the battle of shiloh in ripples of battle but

he was absolutely a military genius he and i know it seems trite to say that george patton was that but he was yeah for all he had a briefer i mean

his great moment was the summer of

of 1944.

He had some big successes, but he was unduly relieved.

We lost him for over a year

right now i was thinking i i mispronounced that i want to correct that on our earlier broadcast i was trying to say bella siles or bellasiles yeah michael the person who was charged uh with

oh with uh right plagiarism yes with plagiarism uh with i i remember because one of my first books was alfred knop

uh the western way of war which came out and i was always curious about that publisher.

I knew that there was a very gifted editor, Elizabeth Sipton, and he had written a book about, as I said, the origins of our gun culture.

And he made the argument that the Second Amendment's not that important.

Guns are not that important.

I'm a scholar.

And I went through the inheritance records.

And there's no evidence that they even owned guns.

It was just totally made up, and there were fake all.

And I think they took, I think he taught at Columbia.

I think they took, as I said, I I think they took the bancroft prize from him.

And he wrote me a note.

It was a very nice note once.

I think we had been students at the same time at UC Santa Cruz.

Oh, wow.

Sad because I think he was a nice person, but I, but that's an example of having a theory and then inductively making the facts that the theory rather than

finding the evidence.

As you know, my old employer, National Review, is being sued by Michael Mann and

the climatology.

Yeah, yeah,

that's still going on.

That is

in you, it just had its 10th anniversary.

Yeah.

And it hasn't even been to trial yet.

But we can talk about that another time, Victor.

Hey, because we've run out of time right now.

So I just want to say thank you to you again for all the wisdom you shared.

We'll get to Vietnam questions and other on an ensuing podcast.

Thank our listeners for listening and for sharing your comments and your very high, always very high ratings on Apple Podcasts.

Deeply appreciated.

We have a few more podcasts to record, and we will get to the other reader questions when we do those.

And thanks to those who submitted.

Yeah.

I still think I still have a little brain fog from long COVID, so I hope I'm not having these lapses because my memory is.

You, you, if you're lapsing, Victor, I wish, I wish I could lapse like you laugh.

But I feel like I have brain problems.

Well, you're not talking like it.

So, hey, everyone, thanks so much.

We'll be back again soon with another episode of the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

Bye-bye.

Bye, everybody.