Current and Past Military Strategies

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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show, the fourth of four special podcasts we're doing while Victor is in Israel.

I'm Jack Fowler.

I'm the host.

Victor 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.

Victor is, of course, the best-selling author.

His most recent bestseller was the dying citizen, farmer, classicist, military historian, essayist at American Greatness.

You can find everything Victor writes at his website, victorhanson.com.

Some of what he writes is exclusive.

You need to subscribe.

I'll tell you about that a little later.

Today, we're going to talk about things military.

And we're going to begin.

Well, Victor is in Israel.

And we're going to talk about some of the wars that have happened in Israel in the last half century and more.

And we'll get to that right after these important messages.

So we're back with the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

Victor, as you know, of course you know, and as our listeners, I hope they know, many sent questions anticipating these four special episodes.

And we thank those who sent in questions.

And let's rock and roll.

Here's one.

As a military historian, could Victor analyze Israel's wars, especially from the point of view of the unique nature of the IDF, a few of its renowned military strategists, and some of its groundbreaking military tactics.

Victor, have at it.

Well, I mean, the IDF was formed by European émigrés that had training in the French, but especially the British military, and they mastered, and they were non-commissioned and commissioned officers.

So there was a European tradition that these British citizens brought with them to Israel.

And that was sort of the basis for the IDF.

And they had a force multiplying philosophy that they figured that given the landscape in which the state of Israel is founded, they were never going to have numerical parity.

And they were going to be vulnerable because of the terrain and the geography of the Middle East, i.e.

there's not a lot of mountains or jungles or foliage.

So air power would be very important.

And they would have very little time.

So once if the Arabs on rare occasions would unite and cross their easily accessible borders, they wouldn't have very much time.

So they created this

very strange, brilliant system of reserves.

So the Israeli army was able to triple literally in three

to ten days by people going directly to their units, not going to someplace and getting a uniform, but they'd have depots, get the uniform, and they trained during the year.

They were like the Swiss.

It was the nations in arms.

And they were preemptory military.

If they felt there was a sword of Damocles over their heads, they would take the initiative as they did in the 67 War.

So they had certain strategic goals.

And one of them was that if the state of Israel was attacked, they would not limit their reaction to a defensive war within Israel's border.

So in 1973, to take one example, if they are attacked, then they're going to unleash the IDF.

I think about the day 5th, they were in Syria and they could have easily gone in and destroyed.

Damascus.

They could have destroyed Amman Jordan.

They could have got

Sharon was on his way with not a very large force, but it was wide open all the way to Cairo.

So there was that preemptory nature

to establish kind of a defense in depth.

And then, of course, the Israeli Air Force was considered preeminent.

And that was because it had to be.

And then finally, with their, I think it was Demona, their nuclear facilities, they're very quiet about it, but they have a nuclear deterrent.

They have to be that way because when Ralph Njani, the

second to the supreme leader at one point, I think 20 years ago, he disputes that term, but he was reported to say that he liked this idea of Israel because half the world Jews were in one place.

You didn't have to hunt for the, you know, the 20 million Jews in the world.

They were all 12 million or 11 or eight at that time, probably nine.

And they were therefore, quote unquote, a one-bomb state.

So when you have enemies like that, the Air Force has to take the initiative of being preemptory.

They've also had an ambiguous relationship with the United States because they depend wholly on American for supplied arms and technical, I shouldn't say assistance because they're so sophisticated technologically themselves, but collaboration.

And yet, especially during the days when we were dependent on oil imports,

our national interest as perceived by both parties was not always in line with Israel because of Saudi Arabia and etc.

So we have this tense relationship.

And now with the rise of anti-Semitism, which is more or less a left-wing monopoly and the progressive nature of the Democratic Party, the left has sold Israel out.

So all of the great, all they have left is that Shrill, oh, you're an anti-Semite.

So Trump was an anti-Semite, we were told by the left, ad nauseam.

Anti-Semite, anti-Semite.

Now forget about Jared Kushner was his son-in-law and his daughter converted to Judaism.

Forget that he moved the embassy to Jerusalem, that he declared the Golden Heights would be forever Israel.

Forget all of that.

He was considered an anti-Semite, but the Democratic Party has severed its allegiance to Israel.

Well, there's just some general thoughts about the political and strategic nature of Israeli defense.

Victor, I'm just making an assumption here that you know Benjamin Netanyahu, and maybe you know him a little more than in passing.

And if that's true, what are your thoughts about him as a leader?

Well, a former leader.

I assume he's going to want to be leader again somewhere.

I don't know him.

That's an oversight.

I know members of his family, put it that way.

And I

talked to him.

But

I think the Netanyahu phenomenon is only seen through the lenses of foreign policy.

What he did was

he brought a Milton Friedman sort of free market deregulation to Israel.

So when you see these things that are going on in Israel, or it's oil developments, gas developments, working on the East Med pipeline project, which Joe Biden is trying to stop, by the way, and the incredible gains in wealth in Israel and its power,

a lot of that is attributable to Netanyahu.

And then, you know, it's kind of trumping in the sense that you can say all you want about pro or con Netanyahu, but the fact of the matter is when he was in power, you didn't have the violence you saw recently in Israel.

It just didn't happen because the IDF knows where everybody is that is potentially a terrorist and is planning a terrorist operation, and they preempted him.

And usually, when you had an Obama or Biden in office, they had undue leverage over a non-Netanyahu

leader, and they would tell him

not to be preemptory.

And then take the blow foreign policy was what the Americans and the Israel left sort of settled on.

So I have a lot of respect for him because under Netanyahu, Israel was not only economically a powerhouse and it was very confident that it could protect its own, but it was starting with Trump with this Abrams Accord to create something that was unfathomable 20 years ago and a strategic alliance.

between Egypt, the largest country in the Middle East by population, and Saudi Arabia down the line, the wealthiest, but

Kuwait, they would have, by now, we would have had 15 or 20 Arab countries, I think, in alliance with Israel, and they would have basically isolated Iran from the type of things they're now capable of.

And we wouldn't have an Iran deal 2.0.

Iran would not be a partner of China and Russia.

Russia would not basically be putting Iran under its nuclear umbrella.

So it was a disaster for Israel, the 2020 election.

And this Ukrainian war, as we've talked earlier, is kind of a disaster because the Israelis have been criticized for being a little bit late in condemning or sanctioning Russia.

Russia is basically a patron of Iran now and allows Israel on rare occasions to retaliate within Syrian airspace.

And I think more or less would have stayed out a preemptory Israeli attack.

And that's not true now, I don't think.

Yeah.

Well, let me ask a question from another listener.

Mention Russia.

You just mentioned Ukraine.

So here's the question.

Victor, do you think we are in a slow creep towards war with russia in ukraine nato and or u.s are there similarities to what is happening now in ukraine to events that led us into war in vietnam

well it's more like yugoslavia because the

the nature of the enemy is your european-like It's on the European-Asian landmass.

We have allies in the region.

The terrain and geography is favorable for American firepower.

The Ukrainians resonate as Europeanized people more than, say, the Taliban that were pre-modern.

And more importantly, for all the politicalization diminution

of the U.S.

Armed Forces under Milley and Austin, if the United States Air Force were to intervene in Ukraine, they would destroy the Soviet Air Force.

And there's no way in the world the Soviet Union tactically could stand up to American forces, much less NATO forces, in that type of environment.

If we didn't invade Russia, we kept out of Russia, just fought within Ukraine.

But the point is, if we did that, Putin would know that we were doing that, and he would be humiliated, and that would be synonymous with his loss of power.

He wouldn't let that happen.

So he would try to threaten or maybe use a tactical nuclear weapon.

And nobody knows if he crossed that threshold, whether he dropped, let's say, a half a kiloton weapon on Kiev or on a battle, a base or something, or used a small missile, even an artillery shell.

If he were to do that,

how do you reply?

I mean, we have conventional weapons that would be more destructive in theory than a small tactical nuclear weapon, maybe.

But the fact that it was nuclear would really change things.

And there'd be a lot of people that would be demanding a retaliatory strike in kind.

So I'm very favorable to the Ukrainians.

I want them to win, but we have to be very careful when Joe Biden or Lloyd Austin brag that we're going to make sure that we so damage Russia that it's never going to, of course we're going to do that.

But you don't want to quite say that because they're nuclear power.

You don't want to push them against the wall.

They have to have an off-ramp or a lot of people are going to kill who don't need to die.

So we have to get in our minds with Zelensky.

This is take a map and draw like Churchill did with Stalin, even though he's highly criticized for it.

This is what we can keep, which is the vast majority of Ukraine.

But this 8 to 10% that's on the Russian border, that's mostly Russian-speaking and may well want to join Russia and want some kind of puppet government, do we want to go liberate that?

To go liberate that, I think is going to start another war, a big war.

And so that's where we are today.

Well, I'm not going to ask you to reap this.

I don't think this would be a repeat question to what you, how you just answered the previous question, but someone, let me just ask what another listener presents could he that means you victor comment on the quote-unquote long game with russia given their weapons of mass destruction huge resources and growing deference to china methinks a kissinger would seek a face-saving compromise for russia so that may be a little more nuanced than what you just addressed, but but also Victor, I think it's is it important to distinguish between Russia's long game versus Putin?

I mean, if Putin kicked the bucket tomorrow, would Russia have a different long game than Putin's long game?

I would just say if we survey Russian history from the Tsars to the Soviets to the Yelsen

transition to the Putin era, does anybody know a liberal politician that came into power?

I don't.

I don't.

So this idea that a lot of the left have that we're going to humiliate Putin and then all of these westernized Russians in exile in Europe, the United States are going to rush back and they're going to have some kind of,

I don't know, Minneapolis or Wisconsin democratic government.

It's not going to happen.

It's not going to look like, as I say, Cornell.

I just don't see it happening.

And so Russia is going to be autocratic.

And you have to put yourself into the enemy's position.

And then you have to ask yourself when you go to war, what do you want?

and what cost are you willing to pay at what point and what point beyond it you're not going to so we're telling the Ukrainians you're going to fight for your existence you've saved Western Ukraine and you've saved eastern Ukraine in a way I mean he has a power to destroy it and now you're fighting for 60 to 70 percent Russian speaking territory that he wants to institutionalize as non-Ukrainian and we understand that if he were to do that he would always be a thorn in your side and always want want to at any moment invade you and send a signal.

We know all that.

So the point is, what's the strategy?

The strategy is arm them to the teeth

and put a plebiscite, some type of negotiated settlement over the borderlands.

Have a plebiscite.

I have a feeling they probably vote to be aligned with Russia and accept it.

And then weaponize so that if it goes in any other place, you're going to make him pay an exorbitant price.

And the cost of benefit analysis is not worth it.

But you can't talk to these zealots.

They say, no, no, we're going to win.

We're going to get them all out of Ukraine.

You know, we're going to get rid of Vladimir Putin.

We're going to have a no-fly zone.

We're going to put America.

So just think of that.

We've just humiliated ourselves in the greatest military defeat in 50 years.

And the people who engineered that, Lloyd Al Austin, Mark Milley, Joe Biden, are going to do what?

Get us involved with a nuclear Russia.

I don't understand the logic.

Supply them to the teeth.

Great.

Arm them.

great.

But let's not turn this into a quasi-war with Russia.

And the reader's comments are well taken.

Kissinger said that again and again.

We've said it often that Russia should not be closer to China than it is to us, and China, not to Russia, than it is to us.

We know that.

Strangulation.

But what I'm worried about now is that these zealots on their high horses and all these lectures the Biden administration has given to Saudi Arabia, now to India, to Russia, of course, and to China.

They all deserve it.

I understand that.

But you're making lectures from a position of weakness.

Right.

Weakness.

Biden froze the defense budget.

He begged Putin not to hack.

He begged him to pump more oil.

He was humiliated in Afghanistan.

He had to have his pride flag in his gender studies program at Kabul.

Okay.

They look at that, these hardcore cynics, as weakness.

When you lecture them and say, India, you're going to sanction them, or we're going to go after your human rights record.

Or he says to Saudi Arabia,

your Saudi royal family has done this and this and this.

We don't want anything,

but you still have to pump oil.

We're creating an anti-American, anti-Western league of China and Russia, of course, but also India.

India, can you imagine forcing India, which is a

potential ally into

adversary?

They think Modi, they have this idea, the left, that Victor Orban and Modi and all these people are, you know, these horrible right-wing people, and we're going to get rid of them somehow.

And the Saudis, we're going to get, we've alienated the Saudis.

They're going to probably deal with,

I think they're going to turn to the Chinese and say, we'll give you more oil than Iran will.

Just get Iran off our backs.

So we went through this 2012.

in Syria with John Kerry inviting the Russians back in.

But, you know, I read these essays by very liberal people who appeased Putin under reset from 2009 to 2015-16.

And they take no culpability for creating this monster by their appeasement.

And yet now they all want to go to war with him.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, we have some questions from a listener about Nazi Germany.

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

We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen show.

This is the fourth of four special episodes that we're doing while Victor is in Israel.

I mentioned before victorhanson.com.

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You're depriving yourself if you're not subscribing.

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So Victor, here's a lengthy, this is a set of questions and it's a part A and a part B.

And this is from a young man, admirer of yours.

I'm pretty sure he's from Rhode Island.

So here's what he wrote me.

Could Professor Hansen provide any insight?

into the circumstances taking place within Germany during the two decades following the conclusion of World War I?

Here are are the string of questions.

What drove so many people to follow the lunatic in Adolf Hitler?

Was it the economic situation, ideology, bitterness from the Treaty of Versailles, and the way that World War I ended for Germany?

How could millions of, quote, ordinary citizens, end quote, eventually construct the concentration death camps and send so many people to the crematoriums?

To me, there are no circumstances in the world that could exist in which so many people could commit such evil.

It is simply incomprehensible, and yet it did happen.

Also, he didn't, this I will, the German people, as nations go, were pretty illiterate relative to others.

So, you know, smart,

a smart European nation did these things.

So, Victor,

would you address this ball of questions?

There's a lot there, but in people's whole lives, the great German historian Gordon Craig wrote a lot about this, but

with German unification

between 1864 and 1871,

there was a blood and soil element to combining German-speaking peoples in this huge unification, which created the German problem because you had the most industrious people.

And now they were the largest people, and they were in the center of Europe, and they would exercise influence that would be commiserate with their economic strength.

And that, and people didn't know what to do with it.

But one of the resonant themes of unification was a racial argument.

And that is discussed by Nietzsche, it's in Hegel, it goes in Oswald Spingler, it goes back to the lunatic racialists, that there was something about Germany and this mythical tradition that was unlike the rest of Europe because the polluting Roman Empire never crossed the Danube and the Rhine in number.

And Germany then was not a Romance language.

And it was a tribal, racially pure people.

And that was essential to their foundational myth, unlike ours.

I mean, Hannah Nicole Jones may say all she wants, but we did not have a racial mythology as Germany did.

These were the mythical Germane

from Tacitus's

Germanica.

And they were the unified people that had a common to be German under this new nationhood, it wasn't just enough to live in Germany and to speak Germany.

You had to look Germany.

And that were the seeds for this Aryan philosophy that fed into

the Third Reich.

That was one element.

And the other was German power.

And they had been left out because they were not unified.

And they were fragmented during the great heyday of colonialism in the 18th century.

and the early 19th century.

So France got its Algeria, Morocco, and Britain Britain and Syria and France got, I mean, British got everything they wanted in Asia

and Egypt, etc., excepted.

What did Germany get?

They got very little and they felt very upset about that.

They got some places in Africa.

And then there was World War I,

in which we did something very stupid.

We punished an enemy.

psychologically and rhetorically, but not

materially.

By that, I mean

Germany invaded Belgium and France.

And when the war ended, they were 70 miles inside the borders of France and Belgium.

And we stopped at the border of Germany, unfortunately, because of Woodrow Wilson's lunatic ideas.

But had they listened to John Pershing and others, they would have gone into Germany and they would have occupied the country and they would have put a gun to a defeated people and said, you lost the war and here's why.

Instead, we sent sent everybody home in November by the time of the Versailles Treaty, which remember was January of 1919.

There was nobody really enough to enforce any of the edicts of the Versailles Treaty.

Then we had these 400 and something articles.

If you read the treaty, the war guilt clause says Germany started the war, it is guilty, okay, it must pay reparations.

But I know that they created the Czech state and Yugoslavia came out of it, and I understand East Prussia and the Danzig corridor, but compare that treaty to what Germany had planned to inflict on France in 1914 with the September program.

That was their blueprint for an end of World War I, or what they had inflicted on France.

Well, I'm sorry, could you explain that a little bit?

What was

Reisling as a professor?

He ended up at Columbia, and he said, once we cross the Marne and we get into central France, we have to have a plan because the war will be over.

It'll be over in 1914.

What started in August will be done by December.

So we have to have ports on the Atlantic Ocean.

We're boxed in

the Baltic Sea and they can stop us from getting out, the British.

And it's frozen there and we only can use it in the warmer months.

So we need to carve off a sliver on the Atlantic coast

and then we have to make that part of Germany and we have to take the Alsace Lorraine which they did and

which they you know they they were occupied and then we have to make France a subordinate to a German mercantile system so it was pretty harsh after 1871 that was the terms they dictated to the French in 1918 in February they dictated even harsher terms to the Russians they occupied one million square miles of Eastern Europe and Russia and 50 million people under Brezlitoviks treaty, which the Soviets sold Russia out.

Okay, so when you look at the treaties in their ascendance or in their victories they inflicted on others, the Versailles Treaty was a joke.

It didn't really punish them, but it did say, we're going to punish you.

And you started the war and you're going to be a liberal democracy like we are.

However, we're not going to occupy your country.

We're not going to tell you what to do.

We're not going to, any of that stuff.

And that was

the worst thing you could do is to insult somebody without ensuring that they won't be able to hit you back.

And you combine that with the blood and soil traditions of this new unified country and the idea that it never felt that it lost the war.

By 1930, 29, 28, Adolf Hitler was screaming and yelling in Bavaria, things like,

Can anybody here tell me one foreign soldier set foot in German soil after World War?

And where did we surrender?

We sent her, my Fuhrer.

We surrendered in Belgium.

We surrendered in France.

Yes, we surrendered on the move.

And did anybody tell me, did we lose the war to Russia?

No, my Fuhrer, we occupied all of Russia, we defeated it, and yet we lost the war.

Now, why did we lose the war?

Because we were stabbed in the back.

There were revolts in our Navy.

There were revolts in our factory by communists and Jews.

That was the line that he took.

And for people who have been humiliated.

And then finally,

they issued enormous reparations, not as much per capita as Germany had required of other defeated powers, but a lot.

And one of the ways to pay it back was

to pay back the debt in non-gold backed marks.

So they printed a lot of money and they sent it to the French and British and it ruined the German currency and it ruined most of Europe too.

But that was a deliberate act, by the way, that inflation idea that they would pay back what they owed other countries and indemnities and reparations in terms of cheap inflated German marks.

So, my point is that, yes, it was wrong for us to lay all the blame on one party because it was a complex, but they did.

They were the one that invaded.

They were the one that started the war.

They were the ones that lost the war.

They were the ones when they won wars, inflicted harsher terms on other people, and they could have lived with Versailles.

And we did the worst thing in the world.

It's very this is what Biden is doing, yelling and screaming at Russia, but being weak at the same time.

It's going to end badly.

Victor, you mentioned General Pershing and his desire to continue into Germany.

And I know I'm throwing this at you because I didn't let you know ahead of time that I might be asking this.

But would you comment on General Pershing as a general?

You are a military historian.

How do you assess him as a military man?

There was an older professor that my mother and father had when they were in college.

And

when he died, his widow gave a two-volume first edition, My Experience in World War I.

I think it won the Fulsa Prize by John J.

Pershing.

And I read it when I was 12.

Very dry, but there's certain strengths and strategies that come forward.

So, what was his good things that he did?

He believed in a unified American command.

And he was a master logistician.

So, we declared war in April of 1917.

And we didn't do much until the fall.

But within one year, we had landed by May of 1918, we had a million men in France.

Think about it.

And not one was lost crossing the Atlantic to U-boats.

And by the end of the war, we had 2 million.

We were landing them at 10,000 a day.

It was an absolute stunning feat.

And the British and the French demand that we fill in the gaps, that we take a division of 16,000 men, and World War I divisions, I think, were 18 and even 20, and we fill them into the gaps of the French army, or we spread them around battalion by

would have been destroying, destructive of the American Expeditionary Force.

So he resisted that.

And he said, Americans are going to fight as Americans are going to carry an equal share.

And he could do that because the arithmetic was radically changing.

As Britain and France were worn out from four years of war, we were fresh.

And so he had enormous cost where he was a bad, and he was right about you're going to have to defeat with an unconditional surrender and occupy Berlin.

That would be the only thing to end it, not diplomacy, not Versailles, none of that.

But General Foch and Patang and

earlier General French and General Haig, they all went to Pershing and they said, now you may have the Springfield rifle and it may be very accurate.

And your guys may be big, tough American farm boys.

But if you send people over over the top and lead them on headfront charges into German entrenched position, you will ruin your army.

We did it at Verdun.

The British did it at the Somme.

Don't do it.

You have to have armor.

You have to have rolling artillery strikes.

You have to focus and very narrow.

And he didn't listen.

So we took enormous casualties in late 1917 and 1918.

And we lost almost 120,000 dead in just a year and a half.

So he was a great patron of George S.

Patton, one of very few people who were.

He helped Patton's career.

He was promised to marry George Patton's sister.

You know, his wife was very tragic.

She died in a fire with all four of his kids, four or five of his kids.

So he lost his, yeah, he lost his whole family.

But he was kind of a very handsome guy and dignified.

And all the widows and single women in Washington were after him.

And apparently he was going to propose to be Patton and then he dumped her.

And George Patton was very bitter about that.

Well, Victor, we have time for one more question on today's episode.

And we'll talk about Chairman Mao.

And we'll do that right after these important messages.

We're back with the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

Victor, thank you for taking the time to do these these four special episodes while you were in Israel.

And this is the final question of the four.

And it's not really much of a question, but it's a curiosity of all the podcasts you and I have done over the last couple of years.

We never really had a conversation, or I never really have.

We don't have a conversation.

I ask you a question, you answer, but about Chairman Mao.

And I'm curious about your thoughts about him.

As I'll just call him a madman, you may disagree with that.

I don't think you will.

But as a historian, is he at the top top of the heap of the of the truly evil sons of

history he's at the top jack he's the grand killer of all humanity and of all time i don't know i mean the high numbers are 100 million the low numbers are 30 million and part of that was the revolutionary fervor between you know when he fought the Japanese and he fought Shang Kai-shek.

And then after he won in 1949,

he had that, I don't know what they call it, the anti-right wing movement or Sufin movement.

They killed just all the intellectuals and the dissidents.

But the biggest thing was the famine of 1958 onward for what, six years, where he tried to collectivize the farms and

30 or 40 million people died.

And then we went right from that.

A few years later,

67 to 76, the Cultural revolution another 30 million died cleansing out the so-called free thinkers and so he was a monster and he ruined the economy of china he turned it into a totalitarian state he deliberately starved millions of people and he was a monster an utter monster and my first introduction to the mao cult was when it was september of 1971 when i went to uc santa cruz and this guy walked by and he had those little Mao caps with this red star on them.

That was a big thing in the college days to be Maoist, not pro-Russian.

You were Maoist.

And my dad goes, wait, is there an all-star team here, Vic?

These guys all have stars on their cap.

I said, no, that's Mao's cap.

He goes, Mao, Mao who?

I said, Mao said, Don.

They love him.

My dad goes, oh my God, they have posters and stuff?

I said, yeah, on the dorms.

They love him.

Remember that, what was her name, Jack?

The communications director for Obama, Dunn, Anita Dunn.

She had to resign because they asked her who her hero, and she told those kids she loved or her big, the man she was most impressed with was Malise Dunn.

He was see, he was a big cult figure that was supposedly the pure communist, not the Stalinists, who hijacked communism.

So he was a monster.

He killed more people than any other person in history.

And I wanted to say something.

The other day, I said more people had died in the last 30 years in World War, II or 100 million or something like that.

What I meant was the last, I should have said 40 years instead of 30 because 40 or 5, but it was really what I was referring to was that period from 67 to 76 when that cultural evolution had killed 30, 40, 50, and some higher.

And then you add that on to the earlier famine.

Right.

And China alone killed more people than died in World War II in the post-war era.

And then you have, that's not even, you know, adding in all of these other wars wars that have took place.

No, he was a monster job.

Just a personal question.

Did your dad, who flew in the Air Force under General LeMay, I believe, did he ever land in China for any reason?

Was he ever there?

Did he just?

No, he they had based in China and India.

And I think he had three flights there.

They had conquered the Marianas and they built these three huge fields, Tenyan and Guam and Saipan.

And he was stationed in the big one, Tenyon.

I think he started flying out of Tenyon on one of the first flights.

He got over there.

He was trained in Nebraska.

He had a first cousin whose mother died that they adopted, basically, Victor Hansen.

They looked alike.

They were very big Swedes.

They all joined the Marine Corps.

They both joined the Marine Corps.

Nobody wants to talk about the family, but one of them, I think it was my father, they were...

A sergeant was picking on one of them on Victor, and they got in a fight.

And my father struck, I think he did.

I never asked him.

So they brought him up and said, One of you dumb Swedes is going to take the blame.

So he was the older one.

He took the blame.

Victor then went on to the 6th Marine Division and would be killed in Okinawa on the last day of Sugarloaf Hill, May 19th of 1945.

And my dad was never the same after that.

That's why I was named after him.

And he was an only child whose mother had died in childbirth, and my grandparents adopted him or brought him up.

And then

to punish my father, they had heard in the Marine Corps they were taking people and putting them in this new experimental program.

And my father, all he told me was, he said, Well, that SOB commandant told me that he was going to get back at me.

So he was going to put me in a death plane in Nebraska.

So they sent me Nebraska and all the B-29s were crashing, killing everybody.

But he said, ours wasn't.

And then they had this brilliant pilot named Alan B, and they flew 40 missions from Tenyon, the worst missions, you you know, the March 10th fire raid.

He flew into Kobe, flew all of them.

And they were crashed land.

I think they were in Iwo Jima twice, shot down.

He got the equivalent of the Silver Star because he went out right over a bombay with a screwdriver when they had a napalm bomb that didn't drop and it was burning the plane up.

And he went out and walked over the catwalk with a screwdriver and really by hand got rid of this napalm bomb.

But you you mentioned santa cruz you know i'll just end with this anecdote and i said that he had kind of a very blunt so i was graduating

and my parents never really came over there i don't think i didn't want them to come over there not just because i was a teenager i love my parents but it was such a wacky place And I think they felt bad that they had all won, saved money by putting my two brothers there.

So anyway, they had the final graduation, 1975.

They had a little dinner for people who won, they called it highest honors.

They didn't believe in the elitist terms like summa comp, cum laude, so they called it highest honors and college.

And I had won these two honors with a lot of four or five others.

So we had this dinner and we were sitting there.

And the person in charge, provost, was trying to be very diplomatic.

And there was a Japanese American there, a very sweet woman, and her son was there.

And she started, she said, I'm very happy to be here.

You know, I came, but, you know, I've had a very terrible life.

And I taught my son, I was in Japan, in Japan, meaning she wasn't born in America, and she was a Japanese citizen that had been naturalized after the war.

So she was sitting next to my dad, and she said, you know, these Americans were barbarians.

They bombed.

So my mom looked at my dad.

He didn't say anything.

And then

I saw the wine start to be poured.

And I thought, oh my God, I got to get out of here.

Go, dad, go.

Go, dad, go.

And then this was my little graduation.

I had a pip squeak 20-year-old.

And my mom kicked me under the table, whispered, could you please talk to your father and go take a walk?

And then the woman said, and then, you know, they bombed him because they were war criminals and they burned people up.

And she went on and on.

And then my dad was so bright red and he just interrupted.

There was, you know, table provost and everybody there.

He said, Yeah,

and we didn't finish the job quite because the war ended.

Oh, wow, she looked

oh, wow,

and another Dale Carnegie moment.

I know, and he said something that was very erudite.

He said, Something, could I ask you a question?

And she said, Yes, she was very angry at him when he said that we didn't finish the job.

Very bad thing to say.

And he said, Two days after the bomb was dropped, I landed on a Japanese airfield, and

one of 100 B-29,

she just turned, you know, you did?

And he said, yeah, could I ask you something?

Why didn't anybody come and shoot us?

She said, what do you mean?

She said, it was a Japanese military airfield.

They had just surrendered, but why didn't they come and shoot us?

Because at Pearl Harbor, it was...

there wasn't war and they shot us and they killed a bunch of innocent people and your country and you're a citizen because you were there and you you didn't have any problem.

But so, you want to shoot us on December 7th, but you don't want to shoot us on September 5th of 1945.

Could you please tell me why?

Oh my God.

And she said, I don't know.

And he said, I can tell you why, because we had orders that if you did, we were going to not even land.

We were going to take off

and we were going to go right back to Tenyon and load up and do it again and again and again and again until you got the message.

Wow.

Imagine just saying that.

Wow.

Then it was quiet

and everybody was like tense.

And then being UC Santa Cruz and touchy feeling, one of the parents said, oh, this is Mr.

Hansen.

I feel your war trauma pain.

Oh, God.

I thought, solution.

And then my dad just couldn't let it be.

Then he went through.

the

squadron, the wings losses.

And then there was Smokey, and he was in Thumper, and he flew over the Yokohama that raid, and they shot him down.

And we watched him jump out of the plane with no parachute.

And why would you wear a parachute when they were going to behead you?

So

that was the end of Thumper.

Now, Dumbo was a different story.

And he named all of the insignia of the V-29 crews.

11 men there, 11 men there.

And he said, Mrs.

So-and-so, you know, I started out with the 16 planes, and we had 180 men, and there were three left 33 of us and you know what it was no picnic flying 1600 miles at night to stop you people from killing us again but you started it and we finished it and then the final coup de grace and we'll be happy to do it anytime you try it again damn so wow so

Victor you had a cool dad you really did

the conversation ended jack when I looked around my looked at my mom and everybody was moving their chairs at increments of two or three inches from the table back away from this crazy nutty fresno area family farm and this demented father so then we walk by and he sort of says well son i think that went well that was a nice party and you know what

Everybody loves a history lesson.

That's right.

And he gave it.

Wow.

I really worshipped him.

And he wasn't racist at all.

My mother, in fact, as I said earlier, just to finish during the Japanese relocation, by the way, signed by Earl Warren, liberal Republican attorney general, signed by a Democratic governor, signed by a Democratic FDR.

My mom helped farmers.

She was 17, student body president of her high school, and they tried to save as many Japanese farms as they could.

pull their resources and keep them from being sold off.

And they were very successful with the local town editor, Lowell Pratt.

But anyway, so he wasn't a racist at all, but what he didn't have any tolerance, he would not stand for somebody to deprecate his country.

Not when his brother's cousin was slaughtered on, not only slaughtered, but shot after he was killed.

He was up on, you know,

they couldn't bring him down.

And he wasn't going to listen to that crap after all those people got killed.

And he shortened the war, he felt.

And he saved a lot of Japanese and American lives.

And he would do it again in a heartbeat.

And not that he liked doing it, he really was affected the rest of his life.

He told me that, but he wasn't going to listen to somebody lecture him.

And he said at one time, I'm very sorry you were on the receiving end, but we had been on the receiving end, and we're not going to ever going to be on the receiving end again.

You understand that?

And so that was the end of it.

And she stopped.

Wow.

Well, Victor,

I don't know what to say.

You mentioned the best year of my lives.

I thought of that movie because remember how Myrna Lori was kind of supportive of her husband when he got drunk.

And Yes.

Well, my mom was kind of that way.

She would try to say, and then I thought, she goes, okay, there he goes.

And then your mom must have loved him.

And then we were walking by and my mom kind of winks at me and she says, she's kind of laughing.

So there he went.

And so that was, she was.

She was something else, too.

Well, anyway.

All right, my friend.

Well, that's really special, different and special way to end this podcast.

We thank our listeners for listening.

And if you listen on itunes consider giving it giving a rating it's up to five stars you can do and if you leave a comment we know that we do read them so thanks for listening victor thanks for very special story there and and everything else you all the other wisdom you shared today and i'm assuming i'm going to be talking to you when you get back from israel and until then well we'll be back soon right with another episode of the victor davis hansen show thanks thanks for supporting listening everybody and some of my crazy upbringing stories.

But it served a purpose that we all have to be very proud of our country, works on all, and we're better than the alternative.

You do not have to be perfect to be good.

Amen.