Tanks in Ukraine and in History

When empires debase their currency, citizens who hold gold survive the transition.

That's not opinion, it's documented fact.

Trump's economic warning isn't speculation, it's pattern recognition.

The same signals that preceded every major currency crisis are flashing now.

Unsustainable debt, foreign nations dumping our bonds, and central banks hoarding gold.

But Trump's also revealing the solution.

The IRS strategy he's used for decades is available to every American.

It's how the wealthy preserve their fortunes when paper currencies fail.

American Alternative Assets has documented this strategy in their free 2025 wealth protection guide.

It shows exactly how to position yourself before the turbulence Trump's warning about arrives.

Call 888-615-8047 for your free guide.

That's 888-615-8047 or visit victorlovesgold.com.

The patterns are clear.

Make sure you're on the right side of them.

Greetings to the listeners of the Victor Davis Hampson Show.

This is the Saturday edition where we do something a little bit different and look at usually some historical issues today.

Since we've been seeing so much in the Ukrainian crisis of the Russian military and especially their tank columns, though obviously not not exclusively coming into the Ukraine.

We want to have a discussion with Victor on tanks today.

So we will do that right after these messages.

Like you, when I bought my last pair of shoes, I looked for stylish comfort and beautiful engineering.

And that might make you think Italian, but if you're buying sheets, it should make you think bowl and branch.

The colors, the fabric, the design.

Bowl and branch sheets are made with long-lasting quality, offering extraordinary softness to start and getting softer and softer for years to come.

Bowl and branch sheets are made with the finest 100% organic cotton in a soft, breathable, durable weave.

Their products have a quality you can feel immediately and become even softer with every wash.

Plus, bowl and branch comes with a 30-night worry-free guarantee.

I've been sleeping like a baby in my Bowl and Branch sheets, which keep me cool on those hot summer nights, and they're the perfect place for sunrise and morning coffee.

So, join me.

Feel the difference an extraordinary night's sleep can make with Bowl and Branch.

Get 15% off plus free shipping on your first set of sheets at bullandbranch.com/slash Victor.

That's Bull and Branch.

B-O-L-L-A-N-D-B-R-A-N-C-H dot com slash Victor to save 15% off and unlock free shipping.

Exclusions may apply.

And we'd like to thank Bolin Branch for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Welcome back.

And I'm afraid to ask you, Victor, but how are things going with you?

And we can do something

besides the weather.

Can I say that we haven't had rain?

We had actually six inches of snow in this Sierra, and there's another six inches scheduled.

But unless we have a March miracle, it's too little, too late.

Not that it's global warming, because it's been very, very cold, but very dry here.

And it's really a classical environment for a hard, I'm afraid, mid-March frost right during blossom time for the vines and some of the deciduous trees.

But almonds are in bloom, so it's beautiful, and I'm happy.

Yeah, good.

So we're going to talk about tanks today.

I know that your Second World Wars book has a whole chapter and obviously more than that on tanks and tank history.

So, we would like to have that discussion, but also we're going to go all the way at least back to World War I as well.

But I wanted to start at the current and present before we venture back into history and talk a little bit about this Ukrainian crisis, because now we're seeing these images again, of course, with the Hobbesian world of war of tanks and

anti-tank fire and everything, especially that the Ukrainians can do to arm themselves.

But I was wondering if you could give us some reflection on the efficacy of the Russian tanks in this current war first, and then we'll take a step back into World War I.

Yes.

Well, remember thinking things about tanks since their first appearance in war in September 1915 at the Battle of the Somme, they're in a constant, like all weapons are, they're in a constant challenge, counter-challenge response cycle.

So

their armor either gets thicker or better or both.

Their engines get more efficient, their guns get more powerful.

But then at the same time this is happening, what were once ineffective bazookas or

very effective panzerfaus, we'll get into that maybe later, that could penetrate some armor, then the tank reacts to that and the handheld anti-tech weapon gets more powerful.

So when you talk about tanks, you want to know where you are in that cycle.

And I think right now, coming off of the Abrams and this, I think it's called the new T-14 Russian tank, we were in an age where the tanks battlefield and the Marova tank in Israel, the battlefield momentum had gone back to the tank.

But now, as we're starting to see with these

javelin anti-tank weapons,

you can start to see that it's going back again.

Those are those big tubes.

They're kind of like a super World War II bazooka that you shoot and forget, fire and forget, and they can take out an entire tank.

We're starting to see those tanks burning.

They look like they're upgraded T-72s.

I went to Iraq twice as a quote-unquote journalist, although I'm not a very good journalist, but once in mostly Blackhawk, but the second, it was my,

I don't know if I want to say treat in a war zone, but I went with H.R.

McMaster and a Humvee.

And at one point,

I looked at some of the javelin anti-tank weaponry.

And the first time I actually drove for a little bit, because they had a T-72 tank, and they want to know if anybody had driven equipment.

I used to drive, you know, I was a pretty good tractor driver.

So driving it was kind of a...

an experience because when you look at an Abrams versus the T-72, the Russian tank is not designed for comfort.

And American tanks, well, they're not comfortable.

They're designed for ease of handling.

But those tanks have been upgraded.

And those are the ones I think you see mostly burning now in Ukraine.

But remember that the asymmetry, anytime you have a SAM missile, a surfaced air missile, shoulder-fired, heat-seeking, radar guider, whatever it is, its guidance system, and it can take out a 50, a 60, a $70 million jet, or one man with maybe a $2,000 round can take out $3 million tank, then that is a win on the battlefield because one is inexhaustible and the other is non-sustainable.

Yeah, it sounds like a war changer as well, these javelins.

Have they really altered the face of warfare at all?

Yeah, they're called fire and forget anti-tank missiles.

But, you know,

just what I remember, and I'm not.

I'm not in the military.

I just remember I used to read a lot about these dragons.

I think those were the precursor to the javelins.

And they have this high-explosive anti-tank missile that they shoot.

And

they're the same principles that was used in World War II, sort of a recoilless rifle, as I remember.

But the problem with it is the Panzerfaus was anybody could use it.

You remember those pictures of the Wehrmacht or these civilian...

older men that were drafted into the last days of the Wehrmacht.

It was just a wooden stick and it had a shaped charge at the end.

And you pointed at a tank tank and you pulled the trigger and then you threw it away.

But these new things are very sophisticated, although they can be easily trained.

They're heavy and you stick out.

So the point I'm making is to get the type of caliber and destructive power to take off these new tanks that have not just the old sloping armor of four or five inches, but they have what they call reactive armor that explodes on contact back to knock the explosion back.

And then they have all sorts of secret formula ceramics or plastics or carbon barriers bedded in the ceramic part and the steel part of the tank armor itself.

So they're getting harder to penetrate.

And that means that the weapon that the soldier uses has to be bigger and bigger and therefore clumsier and more easy to spot.

So again, keep the idea, it goes back to the classical warfare.

For every weapon, offensive weapon, there is a counter response from a defensive weapon.

And you get long periods in history where the defense is on, it's on the rise and the offense can't do anything.

That was sort of like before the age of the catapult.

You couldn't take a city very easily.

Then a catapult made it equal.

Then you had special walls of stone

in between them so the catapult missile wouldn't knock the stone out because there would be dirt in between two stone walls.

Then gunpowder came, as we know from 1453 at Constantinople.

and that changed the momentum back.

Same thing with hoplite armor, vis-a-vis.

And I don't know where exactly we are in terms of tank versus anti-tank weapons, but it seems to me that these newer, late-generation anti-tank weapons are starting to trump more sophisticated tank armor that was sort of unrivaled the last 20 years.

Yeah, and could you, given the ebb and flow of history and defensive, offensive warfare, can you give us some sense of where you think, even though it's hard to see, where do you see this war either going or, you know, well, actually going is what I want to say.

Well, I don't understand it because even in the Yugoslavian war of the 90s and even in the Israeli wars, there were always war correspondents that had some pulse idea, some sense of the pulse of the battle.

I know that we're in the iPhone, YouTube YouTube videos where people can just take it, but we don't have experienced correspondents that are, say, interviewing an organized resistance.

And so we don't really know what information is accurate or not.

That's number one.

Number two, I'm also baffled that this Russian invasion was starting to reify in November of last year with 70,000 people on the border.

And remember, there are four NATO countries that have common borders with Ukraine.

So I would have thought that in November and December and January, NATO countries in the United States would have been just pouring in thousands of, I think these javelins are about $80,000.

I mean, that's expensive.

It's sort of, it's like each one of them is a BMW.

You would have thought that they would have rushed in a lot of these units.

I think they're about 130,000, 140,000, and the shell is about 80.

And that's a couple of BMWs, but they didn't.

And what I mean by that is, even though it's relatively inexpensive in comparison to a tank,

you would have thought that the NATO and American allies would have been just pouring in weapons.

So when this thing started four months later, the president, Mr.

Zelensky, would not be saying, I don't need a ride.

I need weapons.

I.e., don't, you know, don't evacuate me out of my country.

Give me more weapons.

But you would thought they would be full of weapons.

Every time you have a traditional conventional force tries to overwhelm an outnumbered, maybe asymmetrical enemy that will be using, you know, asymmetrical tactics, they win to the degree that they have closed borders.

We couldn't win Vietnam because of the whole Chi Minh Trail.

We couldn't win very easily in Afghanistan because of the Pakistan border.

We had a big problem in Iraq because of Syria and Iran.

What I'm getting at is if the enemy, no matter matter how much outnumbered they are, if they have common borders that can supply them and you can't close them, and I don't think Putin can close these borders with Romania and Hungary and Poland and Slovakia because three of them are NATO countries.

Didn't he threaten OG?

He did.

Yeah, and that's why he threatened them.

But I guess what I'm saying is, Sammy, I thought that every night there would have been convoys the last four months and you would have huge underground stockpile and we would be watching thousands of people instead of lining up to get ak-47s you would see the whole forest everybody would have an anti-tank weapon or a sam missile shoulder-fired missile and that hasn't happened i don't know why that was whether they got threats not to do it or nato i know that germany wouldn't give them anything but hospital units until recently and they just gave them 500 sams so i think it has to do with our unwillingness we get back to the irony remember that donald trump was impeached for supposedly suspending aid to Ukraine for, I don't know, four or six weeks, and he was yet, yet he was the only person who sold them javelin anti-tank weapon.

Without that, they wouldn't have had any.

And yet, we praised Obama and Biden that didn't really supply them, and we demonized Trump who did.

Yeah, and but equally, I feel like I was expecting the Russian military to just roll in, take over the major cities and the deed to be done, and yet we don't quite see that happening yet.

No, I don't think you're going to see that happen for a couple of reasons

ukraine is a size it's much larger than iraq even and has a bigger population and it's westernized when they went into cheching they leveled they got frustrated and they just you know they shelled grozny it's going to be harder to do that in kiev and western ukraine because of the media and it's part of europe and the outrage will be far greater than going into islamic whether you like that statement or not going into islamic chechnya was going to, and there were terrorism there.

But Ukrainians have been cultural to the West, and they have media contacts and social media and hacking.

So, I think it's going to be harder just to go in there with the type of force necessary to subdue them.

So, they got to do one of two things.

They either got to kill Zelensky and decapitate the leadership, and they haven't been able to do that yet, or they've got to get existential and say, you know what?

On the one hand, if we obliterate Kiev or Kharkov or whatever, we're going to take a big hit.

But if we don't, we may lose control of this government and Putin may be out.

I think that's a possibility.

They'll have a coup or get rid of him because he will have ruined them financially and humiliated them if he loses.

And I think he knows that.

A very dangerous trap tiger who's wounded.

And he may want to, Dr.

Strangelove fashion, take us down with him.

So we've got to be very careful.

But it's going to be much harder.

But I think it would have been even harder had we given them more weapons and trained them and they could have had these militias roving, you know, all over the countryside with sophisticated anti-missile and anti-tank and anti-plane missiles.

Yeah, and I also heard that Putin's army that's amassed at the border is only 400,000.

I thought that sounded 200.

I don't think it's 400.

I think it's only 400.

Really?

It's quite small.

I don't think it's up to the task of the whole, you know.

No, it's sort of like the army that went into Iraq.

It's very effective.

We were very effective at deposing deposing Saddam, but not so effective of turning Iraqis into Democrats.

That would have taken a lot more.

And we tried it in 20 years in Afghanistan.

It didn't work.

And it's going to be very hard for the Russians.

I think there's going to be a lot of opposition.

They've got a conscript army that partly, I mean, in the sense that people sign up.

for military duty and they write contracts whether you're going to what branch of the service and they're sort of forcing people to now sign into combat duty in Ukraine.

And today, it's just very different.

When somebody's captured, they'll probably call their parents back in Russia, you know, and that would be a good thing to let them do it to spread dissension behind the ranks.

So we haven't fathomed all these contours of this new sort of postmodern warfare.

But one thing we do see are tanks, and the tanks,

to tell you the truth, it's kind of a platonic ideal.

It's been 1915 to 2022, so we're 117 117 years into it.

And guess what?

A tank still has tracks.

A tank still,

within two years of SOM, they had turrets.

A tank still has a big main battle gun.

It has auxiliary machine guns and it still has armor.

So it might not quite be the same efficacy.

It might not possess the same efficacy, but that's what it is.

It's not going to change.

From now until end of eternity, you're probably going to have some type of armored vehicle with a big cannon that has some type of ability to go where cars or trucks can't.

Yeah.

All right, Victor, so since you're bringing up World War I, let's turn back into history and have a look at the earliest tanks, which I believe were in World War I.

Although the idea of the tank goes back to at least Leonardo da Vinci and his drawings of armored cars.

And also you mentioned in your book, The Second World War, that H.G.

Wells has a short tale about the land ironclads that was a great i read that it was a great story when i was researching the world war ii and you know the johnson county wars remember they made the homesteaders made sort of movable barriers and they shot and then they moved closer and closer to the cattle barren so there was that idea

exactly but so yeah tank was just a word that they thought the Germans wouldn't know what they meant when they did it.

The problem in World War I wasn't that the idea was on sound.

It had great success for a while at the Somme, but for a World War I tank to work, they were very thinly armored.

They had to be made in pretty great number.

They had to be pretty reliable.

They had to know how to use them.

And almost immediately, a tactical dilemma arose, and that is, when you have soldiers, do they congregate behind the tank and do they have sort of a slow plodding armed platform that clears away for infantry?

Or do you have infantry scattered ahead of the tank and the tank supports them so that they can take out, you know, artillery or mines and make sure the tank is not blown up by a mine or an artillery shell?

And they haven't really resolved that yet.

The British tried to get really fancy in World War II.

They had battle tanks, cruiser tanks, but more or less In World War II, tanks led the way and soldiers followed.

Not always, but mostly.

You know, my image of a tank in World War I is this huge, gigantic clunker thing that had tracks, you know,

the usual tank tracks, but like gigantic and it looked like a tin can almost, though it was really big.

And I was wondering a little bit about the construction of those tanks.

Well, yeah, if you remember, the British invented the tank.

This is very important before we go on that the British invented the tank tank and the french really improved it and they had an illustrious tradition we used french tanks in world war one and by the time of of world war ii they had the best tanks in the world

but the germans didn't build any in world war one so it was catch-up for them but the problem with world war one british tanks the first ones remember the tracks were i guess how would you say it conceptualize it the body was inside the track

and so uh the track went went over the top so to speak and that made it very vulnerable i mean not all the way i'm kind of exaggerating but the the two wheel tracks on either side were almost as large as the body of the tank in between and that meant they had a lot of exposure to the tracks the tracks were exposed the top of the track without a fender over them so they were easy to knock off and they went very slow and they were very heavy and they were not very reliable which brings up, Sammy, a question that I think is really important before we go on to World War II, if that's where we're going.

You got to be very careful when you evaluate the historical role of tanks, because on the one hand, you want to look at the barrel, of course.

Is it a 70, 50 millimeter, 75, 76, 88, 120?

How thick is the armor?

How many tons does the tank weigh?

And those are all important defensive and offensive capabilities.

But the real key to understanding the efficacy of a tank is more subtle and it's very, it's not as romantic.

And popular magazines usually ignore it.

And those are questions like,

how many hours will the tank run versus how many hours of maintenance is required?

Air filters, water, oil changes, transmission services, et cetera.

How fast can the tank be shot?

How is it designed?

Is the armor within range of the enemy in front of the tank or is it back?

Is the motor in the back?

Is it in the front?

Is it diesel or gas?

And all of these questions, then how many are produced, et cetera, these explain a lot more than the actual dimensions or the stats on them, whether they're going to be effective or not.

Yeah, and could I ask you one more question about a World War I tank?

Was it penetrable by machine gun or was it, did that

solve that problem?

It was.

In fact, if you go to museums, I know there's a good war museum in Greece, but the Imperial War Museum, you can see these things called anti-tank rifles in World War I.

And they're kind of like a 50-caliber rifle with an anti-armor shell, kind of like a super.306.

And that could go right through and then ricochet inside the tank.

These World War I tanks didn't have like a big battle gun, but for most small arm fire, 30 caliber fire or the equivalent of a nine millimeter bullet or something, yeah, they were, you couldn't really get into them, but a high-powered steel jacketed 50 caliber round could go through them.

And that's what an anti-tank gun was.

And, you know, when the Germans made the first modern tank, the Mark I, it had no, we all talk about Blitzkrieg, the Wehrmacht went into Poland, but a lot of those tanks were Mark I's.

They had no cannon on them.

They were just machine gun.

They were little, like, they looked like little vanult dolphins, those old little cars.

Yeah, it did.

I mean, the Germans, the fear German, even the Mark II was very, they really didn't have a good tank until the Mark III, and then the Mark IV was a very good tank, but

they weren't ready.

Okay, so you've turned to World War II for me, but let's take a moment before we get to World War II for these messages.

So you just got back from summer vacation.

Maybe you might have even had to book two rooms because of your snoring.

Some vacation, huh?

Snoring can be an underlying cause of high blood pressure, heart disease, stroke, and even memory loss.

Here is my advice.

If you want every night to be a true vacation, you need to get yourself Zipa.

That's happy Z, spelled backwards.

Zipa is a doctor-designed mouthpiece that not only moves your jaw forward, but is also the only device with a patented tongue seat belt to keep your airways open and the snoring away.

The snoring can stop as soon as the first night.

Zipa was proven in a 600 patient clinical trial and sold over half a million units.

From now until the end of October, show your family you actually care by purchasing a limited edition pink Zipa.

Not only will you save $10,

but Zipa is on a mission to raise $50,000 for breast cancer research and they will donate another $10,000 to the Susan G.

Komen Breast Cancer Foundation.

Go to zyppah.com and use the code PINK

or text Victor to 511-511.

Put your snoring on a permanent vacation and help a worthy cause with the snoring device we trust by visiting zyppah.com and use the code pink or text Victor to 511-511.

Remember, Zipa is happy Z spelled backwards.

Text fees may apply and we'd like to thank Zipa for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hansen show.

Welcome back and we're just talking with Victor Davis Hansen on tanks generally and the history of tanks and we're at World War II and tanks become a

important

tactical unit in the military and very consciously so.

I mean writers on military armor etc.

wrote about how important both the tank were going to be in the next war and how important airplanes would be in the next war in between World War I and World War II.

So I would like to just explore, you know, how did it turn out or how does World War II start?

I know it starts very differently with tanks than it ends.

And so maybe we could go with the early tanks, which you've already told us the Germans were behind and that the, you said the British had the best tank.

I thought the French had a pretty solid tank by the beginning of World War II.

Oh, no, I said that the Germans didn't have tanks really at all

in World War I.

The British invented them, but by 1918,

the French had the best tanks in the world.

Got it.

And during the 20s, they were the most, not only were they creating the most numerous, but they had this shard, shard, CHAR tank,

Chart 1B1, and it had a 75-millimeter gun on it.

It had thicker armor.

It was a much better tank.

It was kind of awkward looking, but it was much better than the German Mark I,

Mark II, Mark III, and it was almost as good as the Mark IV.

On May 10th, when the German army blitz-kriegged its way into France, the tragedy was, if you look at the French Air Force, but especially their armored forces, they had superior weapons.

But again, it's the subtleties of tank warfare that matter.

And that is, did the French have radios in the tank?

Did they have gasoline tankers that could come and supply the tank so it didn't have to withdraw to a depot?

Did they have engineers that went with them?

Did they have mechanics?

And the answer is no.

Even that they did give a good account of themselves, but those are very important things to remember.

And when World War II started, nobody had been at war for 20 years and nobody had really been in a tank battle, even in World War I, a full-fledged tank battle.

We in the United States never thought that they were going to be important because we were a land power here in North America.

And we had the Canadians and the Mexicans.

And we didn't think, wow, we're not going to go across their borders.

Where in Europe, there was the idea that somebody could cross your border very quickly.

So there was a greater interest in tanks.

And when you look at literature of armored assault, it was all theoretical.

So there was J.F.C.

Fuller, Hans Woodarian, Liddell Hart, and there were these visionaries.

And we always say that Rommel read them and Patton read them all true.

And they were arguing for basically a blitzkrieg where you would get men in these fast vehicles.

They would break through a hole and they would be like Alexander's heavy cavalry, break through, cause panic, psychological turmoil, go 50, 60 miles a day through enemy lines, and the infantry would come up and find a shattered enemy that was being pounded from the rear.

Of course, it sounded great, but very quickly you needed air support.

Very quickly, you'd have 20 and 30 millimeter rockets on...

planes that had anti-tank rounds that could blow these tanks up.

But at least that was the theory behind Blitzkrieg.

And when they went into Poland, everybody said, wow, we've never seen anything like it.

These Mark IIs and Mark IIIs, just 30 miles an hour and the Germans were everywhere.

And then when the France, it was the same thing.

And keep in mind that that's only part true.

Partly true.

While you're talking, you're reminding me, I remember reading Rommel, who had invaded France.

And I don't know how many weeks he was into France, but he wrote back to his wife, I read in one book, that he told her, this looks like it's going to be over in two weeks and I'll come home at that time.

So he was pretty confident in this tank onslaught that was blitzkrieg into France.

Well, they lost 20,000 dead.

Remember, and they lost between Poland and German and France, the German army probably lost 45,000 dead and those two things.

So the idea that the Poles and the French just fold is not quite true.

Especially the French, what I think the tragedy, what Marc Bloch was writing about, strange defeat, was the tragedy that the French army was huge.

It had the Maginot line, so it could concentrate its forces to the north, where they might come through the Ardennes.

They had good air support.

Their fighters were comparable to the Bf-109.

Their tanks were better, but they didn't want to fight.

Jamelin and

a lot of the French command were in their 60s and 70s.

They didn't like the young Leclerc or

de Gaulle.

They didn't like younger people that advocated more mobile tactics.

So it was a crisis of command, not materiel.

But what I'm getting at is that nobody really knew what a tank should be when that war started.

So for the first 1939 to 41,

I mean, we're talking about tanks that were only 13 to 20 tons with one or two inches of armor with 37 millimeter or 50 millimeter guns.

And they thought that was it.

And the United States was watching this and they thought, wow, that's the tank.

But the poor Americans, they were not up to the day-to-day back and forth challenge response on the later Eastern Front or in Italy.

or in North Africa.

And what they didn't realize was that this thing was just out of control, that all of a sudden a 37 millimeter didn't work.

A 50 millimeter, even with a high velocity shell, didn't work.

You had to have a a 75 millimeter.

You needed three inches of armor.

You needed to be able to go 30 miles an hour.

You needed 150 mile range.

And that took at least two or three years to break out of these early models.

So what emerged out of that conundrum was sort of a standard tank.

And the British made some good tanks, but it was basically in terms of production.

It was the T-34 in Russia and it was the German Mark IV and Panther in Germany, maybe the Tiger a little bit later on.

And it was the U.S.

Sherman tank, and maybe later in the war, Pershing.

And they all had certain things in common.

They were about 30 tons, 25 to 35, 40 tons.

They had a 75 or 76 millimeter gun.

And the best ones of them were wider.

rather than narrower.

That was the Panther and the T-34, but not the Sherman, unfortunately.

and they were lower profile rather than higher and then there was a debate about how they should be powered should they have diesel fuel as the t34 or should they have gasoline like everybody else not that they we didn't have a diesel version of very small production of a diesel sherman but i can tell you that diesel sounds much better because it doesn't ignite.

You can take diesel fuel and put it in your fireplace and it won't blow up.

And it doesn't have a carburetor, it has an injector.

On the other hand, gasoline, if you have gasoline in trucks, it will more likely power your jeeps.

Your fuel trucks can power jeeps, they can power tanks, and diesel engines were less common and support vehicles.

So the point I'm getting, if you have a diesel-fueled tank force, then you should have diesel.

trucks and diesel jeeps and that's hard to do.

The second thing is speaking to somebody who used to get up at five in the morning and it was 28 degrees.

And I think I drove a gas Oliver.

We used to have four Jubilees, nine ends, eight ends.

They just started up like that.

But when you try to start an old Massey Ferguson or a John Deere or an Alice Chalmers diesel engine, at least the old ones, they were very hard to start in the winter.

And so that's a drawback.

The other thing to remember is that Americans were different than the Europeans.

They had to take the tank over to Europe.

That means you have to physically pick it up in a crane and put it on a ship.

And the bigger the tank gets, 40, 50 tons,

the fewer tanks you can bring over to Europe.

The harder it is to get a bigger crane to lift it.

So we kind of found that the ideal tank was about 30-ton Sherman tank with a short barrel, 75.

And then we had versions that went up 76 larger.

But when that tank arrived and we gave 200 to Montgomery at LL Main, it was the best tank in the West.

It could defeat the German 50 millimeter version of the Mark IV for about, I don't know, six months.

And then we completely stopped it.

We just didn't improve.

And we didn't realize that as World War II was going on around us, while we were fighting in North Africa and Italy, the Germans and the Russians on the Western Front were in a huge race to get bigger tanks, more armor, more powerful guns.

And they understood that you had to have wide treads so the tank wouldn't slip, low profile.

And the result was out of that conundrum came the Tiger I, the Tiger II, the Panther, which some people think was the best tank of the war.

It was very hard to maintain.

And the T-34, and then the Stalin, and the improved 34.

And our Sherman was static.

You know, and that was too bad because when we met the Germans in 1944 and we met them in 43 in Italy, they had superior tanks.

But I want to put a footnote that I can add to that a little bit later.

Yes, and since you were talking about the Germans and the Russians, we know that the Kurtz was the biggest tank battle in military history, I believe, even still to today.

And what did that show about the difference between the Germans?

Because the Russians won that, but yet the T-34 is not seen necessarily as a better tank than the Mark IV and the Tiger tanks.

Actually, I think I want to refine what you said.

Tactically, the Germans won that battle.

Yes, they killed a lot more Russians.

They destroyed a lot more tanks.

They were a lot more efficient.

Strategically, it was a disaster for Germany

because everybody knew they were going to close that pocket.

They knew they were coming.

The Russians dug in and they had a lot more T-34 tanks.

But if you look at the actual Panther, that kind of made its maiden view.

It had a host of mechanical problems.

But if the Panther was running, it could blow up the T-34 and the Tiger could really blow it up.

Maybe not a Stalin tank.

But what that showed us is that if you're going to have a classical clash of armor, the side that's going to win is not necessarily the side like the Germans that have the best individual tanks.

It's the side that has the most good tanks that are maybe not quite as good, but far more numerous, and the side that has air support.

We sold them those P-39 air cobras, and they weren't very good.

They shot a big, I think it was a 30-millimeter cannon.

Maybe it was even through the propeller.

I can't recall.

But boy, when they were in Russian hands, close air support, they were lethal.

tank killers and they roamed the skies of the western front by 1943 and so it was quite tragic that this idea of blitzkrieg you know lightning war, it died in Russia.

It was only good for,

A, if you were, you know, 100 miles of good roads outside of Germany or 200 miles.

So it was great in Poland.

It was great in the Low Countries and France, even to a lesser degree in Yugoslavia and maybe in Italy.

But once you had long distances where you couldn't supply tanks and they were dirty air and mud and dirt roads, and you had to ship the transmission all the way back to the factory, then it died and it didn't exist.

So what had started out as blitzkrieg for the first three weeks, within six weeks, they were too far from their support lines, the roads were too bad, their tanks were falling apart, and they were into a static war of attrition.

And they never really had blitzkrieg, except for brief moments on the way to Stalingrad or on the way to the Caspian Sea that didn't work out too well.

But the Americans had it.

I want to just take a footnote and say, there's a whole literature in defense of the Sherman tank.

When you look at them, they look kind of ugly.

They're really high up.

And

part of that is because of the nature of the transmission and the power plant.

But when they blew up, we call them Ronson lighters.

Oh, wow, they're gas.

They're Ronson lighters.

And the German blew us up.

But that's not quite true.

We built almost 50,000 of them.

We learned learned to put the shells in the back.

I think they even put them within water casing so they wouldn't light the tank up.

They made trap doors at the bottom so people could get out.

And of all the tanks that blew up, it was very rare that five people died.

Usually two or three survived.

And they were very easy to maintain.

maybe 10 or 12 hours of being on the road for every hour of oil change or adjustments or works on the brakes.

It was the most reliable tank of World War II.

When the British came in, and as they often did with our fighters, the P-51, but they came in and said, you know what, this is a good tank.

It's very reliable.

It's more reliable than our tanks, but it's undergunned.

So if you put the 17-pounder, which is a high-powered 76-millimeter, we can blow up a tiger tank with the same range of the tiger.

And they ended a lot of concussion in that turret.

But boy, one out of five was a

firefly.

So they were a good tank.

It's just that in those rare times when 50,000 or 45,000 Shermans met 6,000 Panthers, I'm just giving numbers to show you the asymmetry.

If you happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time on the Western Front and you were in Sherman and you saw a Panther, a tiger, you're going to die.

But that was very rare.

Mostly you were fighting against the infantry or you were supporting American.

infantry and they were wonderful tanks for that purpose.

At the end of the war, we came up with this Pershing and we looked at the Panther.

We looked at the T-34, it was low, it had white tracks, it had a lot heavier, it had sloped armor.

And we put a big 90-millimeter gun, and guess what?

It was not as reliable.

When we went into Korea, they were still using upgraded Shermans.

They had Pershings, but they felt they were too slow or underpowered.

You know, I went up to Golem Heights in Israel once, and there was a, I was surprised from the 67-year war, there was a lot of Shermans

from prior, you know, in 67, they were using Shermans with 90 millimeter guns on them.

Wow.

Yeah.

That's a huge gun.

Another thing to remember is we had, I don't want to trash a great general that's dead, but Leslie McNair

was the highest ranking general in World War War in the European theater.

I think, I don't know, he was a three-star general.

I don't know his years of service, but it was almost as much as General Buckler, who died in Okinawa.

And I think he was a three-star general.

My point is he was the highest ranking officer officer to

Simon Bolivar Buckner II.

He died in Okinawa from a coral fragment.

He was a three-star general, Leslie McNair.

But Leslie McNair had kind of a deleterious influence on tanks because he came up with this idea of a tank destroyer, Sammy.

So he said, well, what we're going to do is we're going to make tank chassis, make it really fast with no armor and put a gun on it.

And then it's going to go up to the front and blow up tanks from a distance and then reverse,

turn around and zoom back out out of range.

So when people started to tell the U.S.

Army, they would say, you know what, we're outgunned.

And they say, don't worry, Leslie's a McNara, he's out there working on it.

We're going to get a big, and they never really got, maybe the Wolverine, they never really got a 90 millimeter gun that fulfilled that idea.

So we built all these tank destroyers, but all they were were sort of tank barrels with no armor.

And it was kind of a Russians did it.

They had tank destroyers.

Have you ever seen those things?

They're frightening.

They had 120 millimeter barrels.

And then again, we remember behind every supposed genius development, there's a subtext.

And the subtext was, well, how come the Russians are making such good tanks?

How come they have such good artillery?

What are these Katushka rockets?

Why were these huge tank destroyers?

Why couldn't we do that?

Well, we were supplying 25% of their material needs, and we were very careful to say to them, you don't make ponchos very well.

You don't understand

K and C rations.

You don't make radios very well.

You don't make aluminum enough.

Like we use that for your engines.

And what I'm getting at is our planners and the British went over to the Russian planners and said, concentrate on what Russia does good, heavy industry, and make artillery and rockets and tanks, and we will supply you with all the supportive elements of your military economy.

And we did.

And they did.

Yeah, and they did.

And yet we're told, well, they had more,

they built more tanks than we did.

Yeah, they did, but we built far more airplanes, far more transports, far more, everything but tanks.

Did the tank make a difference in Rommel's war in North Africa at all?

North Africa was fought by tanks because it was ideal tank territory.

I mean, turrets worked well in sand.

It was clear most of the year.

In the winter months, the sand would get wet and it would be a good platform.

And so it was classic, no obstructions,

no clouds.

So it started with the Italians.

They had not very many tanks.

They outnumbered the British.

The British pushed them back.

They sent Rommel in there.

He had inferior Mark IIIs.

They They gave him some Mark IVs and he went all the way, almost, he took Tobruk.

And then in the second battle of Tobruk, there was a long siege at Pabuk that Germans failed.

He came back and he took it and he was off to the races.

He thought with armor support and captured British supplies and fuel.

And Montgomery, who was not very good on the offensive, wasn't very audacious or daring, but you put him on the defensive and give him a lot of equipment and mines.

He prepped an entire battlefield, a minefield dug in, and we gave him 200 German tanks and he stopped Rommel.

And then it was back, the seesaw battle went all the way back into Tunisia, 500 miles back the other direction.

So it was mostly a tank of all the theaters in World War II, there were two theaters where tanks predominated.

June 1941 to about

1944,

and then in the Eastern Front, and then from November 1942 to June 1943 in Europe.

Now, there were tank battles in Italy, but the terrain didn't favor it, and the air support made it very tenuous.

And in the Pacific, we had Shermans on the island hopping campaigns, and they were valuable, but it was the Japanese did not have armor.

There weren't classic armor fights between us and the Japanese.

Japanese were comparable.

They were comparable or superior at the beginning of the war in naval aviation, in carriers, in destroyers, in the quality of some of their mortars, and especially in the zero aircraft.

But they were way, way, way substandard in artillery and tanks.

And they really learned a hard lesson in 1939 against the Zhukov, you know, near the Mongolian border.

You just reminded me of another question on the Italians.

We haven't talked too much about the Italian tanks, and I know that they were in the debate intellectually about the importance of the tanks, but did the Italian army, where did the Italian army's tanks rank?

Well, the problem with Italy was we had this idea that Italy was substandard or they were, I don't know, they didn't have good equipment.

The problem was they made these very well-designed Fiat light tanks and they ran well.

They were well-designed.

I don't know what they were.

They all used the, you know, M13, 14, 15.

I can't remember what it was, M11 or something, M39.

But they were known as tankettes because they had inadequate armor and they were kind of like an armored Humvee.

They were not really a tank as we know it.

So almost every other country.

was superior.

They were used in asymmetrical warfare in Somalia, for example, East Africa.

But once they got up against the British, the British had superior, when they had the Churchill, it would blow an Italian tank out of the, you know, out of the, just blow it up.

So they didn't have good tanks, but like their airplanes and their battleships, they were, everything they made was well-designed, well-crafted, well-engineered, but not conducive to reliable mass production.

Kind of like a Gucci bag rather than an American, ugly, but durable purse that you can buy at Target.

Yeah, it is, but I mean, I'm not deprecating the Italians.

They were geniuses at design, and a lot of their aircraft individually could achieve speeds that were superior to American models.

They just didn't have the wherewithal or the understanding of mass production.

Remember, the way to understand tanks, it's very American.

Americans were practical, they were pragmatic.

Kids, they were taking apart Model T's and Model A's their entire lives.

And the Sherman was designed to be simple,

easily operated, easily maintained, easily fixed by people in the field.

And you could have supply trucks with extra engines, extra transmission.

You didn't have to have a German specialist from the factory, the Porsche factory, to instruct or put it on a train and send it back to Germany.

Everybody understood the principles of transmissions and engines, and they fixed them.

And it was reliable.

And we just didn't think about, you know, well, this is what the Europeans have discovered on the, you know, and the Russians have discovered on the Eastern Front.

We weren't attuned to that.

We'd kind of be stubborn.

There's a little arrogance about military planning.

And Americans say, this is the way we're going to do it.

And we're going to build a lot of them.

And they're going to be practical.

And they're very American.

And I don't want to hear about that the gun is underpowered or there's not enough armor.

General McNero said, you know, we have other units that can do this.

And so that we don't really need a tank comparable to the Mark IV or to the Panther.

And so one way of envisioning the Abrams tank, which from 1990 to the present was the best tank in the world, if you look at its speeds or its barrel or its armor.

its

sophisticated electronics.

It's a reaction to the conundrum after World War II when people started looking at, hearing stories of their children coming home and saying, I was in a German tank and a tiger blew me apart.

Nobody ever said, well, they blew you apart, but most all the tiger tanks, I don't think there's more than five in existence today, they were all blown up.

They were death traps because they ran out of gas, they broke down, they were hit by air power, and they couldn't go over a bridge over a small creek.

They were too heavy.

But anyway, the Americans said to themselves, we're never going to let this happen.

Then we went to Korea and we shipped our Shermans over there.

And guess what?

They had T-34, the improved version of T-34, diesel-sloped armor.

And they were up at this time to 88-millimeter guns.

And my God, we were not up to it.

And so at that, after that, we said.

The Russians were very famous for tanks and they just kept building them bigger and bigger and more lethal.

And we said, we're not going to let this happen.

So the Abrams solved that problem.

I think it still has solved it, along with the Israeli tanks.

So let's take a break, Victor, and then come back and talk about modern warfare after World War II or wars following World War II.

But first, let's hear a few messages.

If you're like me, you have a lot of product on your bathroom counter.

Well, I have found the Secret Serum, and it's vibrant, Super C Serum.

The ingredients in this one bottle can replace your day creams, eye creams, night creams, neck creams, wrinkle creams, and even dark spot reducers.

Made in the USA with the highest quality ingredients including vitamin C, hyaluronic acid, vitamin B5, and vitamin E, Super C Serum delivers noticeable results.

Simplify your skincare routine, get a healthier complexion, and minimize wrinkles and age spots with Vibriance.

I just began using Super C Serum last week and I love it.

My skin feels so much better, soft, moist, and fresh.

And by the way, it smells beautiful like the orange blossoms outside my kitchen door.

Give it a try, and you'll love it too.

And if you don't find it better than your current skincare routine, you'll get a full refund.

Go to vibrance.com/slash/victor to save up to 37% off and free shipping.

That's Vibrance.

V-I-B-R-I-A-N-C-E.

Vibrance.com slash Victor.

And we'd like to thank Vibrance for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Welcome back.

And I would like to remind everybody that Victor has a website, VictorHanson.com.

That's H-A-N-S-O-N.

And it has his writings, his podcasts, his published writings from other places.

And then it also has articles that he writes exclusively for the website.

So come visit the website and we hope that you all subscribe.

So Victor, we wanted to turn to the modern history of tanks.

And I have some particular questions, but I'm willing to field however you would like to talk.

But just one, if I can have one of my particular questions first.

Vietnam.

You know, when I imagine or think about Vietnam, I always think of the air support with napalm and helicopters transporting infantry troops to places.

But you don't really have any sense of the tank in the Vietnam War, or at least I don't.

We did have tanks that were for infantry support, and I'm trying to remember the battle, but I think it was a battle of Analoc or something.

There were tank battles, but they're very rare.

And the terrain and the weather and the climate and the mud was not conducive.

and after saying that i realize that saigon fell in 1975 to a tank column that went right down the proverbial highway one right into saigon and the russians had excellent tanks but when you want to look at 20th century tank battles you want to again look for north african-like conditions or eastern front conditions and where you start to see that is in the Middle East mostly with some exceptions.

I mean, there was the Hungarian revolt and things like that, but we're basically in the modern post-war era talking about

the 56, 67, 73, 2006 battles between Israel and its enemies, and that was everywhere from the Golan Heights to the Sinai to the desert surrounding the Jordanian border, etc.

Or you're talking about the 1990 invasion of Iraq.

And I think you could say that the largest, I want to be very careful to get this right because I have a great admiration for my colleague, H.R.

McMaster, but I think I could say that he, as a captain, was in command of a unit that was involved in the greatest tank battle since World War II.

It's named after the coordinate on GPS.

I think it's 73 Easting.

the Battle of 73 Easting, it refers to a GPS coordinate where the Americans lost one Bradley and they blew up about 170 tanks

and armored vehicles.

It was the most one-sided tank battle in history, and it was predicated on very well-controlled fire and intelligence, but basically the superiority of American training and American Abems tanks that blew apart even the latest generation Soviets.

T-72s and we had greater range, we had much greater accuracy, and we just destroyed an entire tank force of Saddam.

And I think we lost, I don't know what it was, five dead.

And you saw those horrific pictures in the first Gulf War where we took bulldozers and just, you know, bulldozed over ditches full of Iraqi soldiers and dug in tanks.

And we had scrapers and blades on our tanks.

It was really scary to watch it, sort of armed.

armored caterpillars.

So that battle and in the highway of death and all of those battles were reminiscent of World War II, as were the big tank battles of Israel.

They had a terrible time in the Yom Kippur War because of the Soviet anti-tank weapons that they weren't prepared for.

And they lost an enormous number of tanks.

So the first and second Gulf Wars then, the tank was...

Yes, I think we lost.

I think in the whole history of the Abrams tank, there's wonderful books on the Abrams tanks by lieutenant colonels and colonels who have actually fought on them.

But just as a broader historical context, I think in the Second Gulf War, we lost something like five Abrams.

I don't think we've ever, and somebody that's listening to me can correct me, I don't think we ever really lost an Abrams to another tank.

They were always, you know, propane-filled IEDs, or the artillery shell hit one, knocked it off a bridge, or it was damaged, but they were almost indestructible, at least in the wars of the Middle East.

I don't know if that's still true.

I went to Fallujah once and I just walked through the ruins of it.

And you can see a lot of the Marines that took that city used anti-tank weapons.

And rather than go, you know, into the front door and up the stairs to take over a house run by insurgents who were waiting in the top floor, they just took an anti-tank weapon and blew apart the whole wall.

So you walk through the, you see a huge hole in the downstairs living room.

And they, instead of, you know, going in where the Iraqis wanted them, they just blew apart the house and came in through a big hole.

So anti-tank weapons were almost like portable artillery.

Tanks represent in World War II and the post-war period, this age-old intellectual dispute over craftsmanship versus utility.

There was a really wonderful man, Jack Littlefield, and he was an entrepreneur.

He had a lot of capital, and he built a tank museum out of all places in Woodside, about eight miles above the Stanford campus.

And I used to take groups out there, and he and I got to be good friends.

I'd give lectures on patents and he would give lectures on various tanks.

He had about 100 of them.

He passed away, unfortunately.

He has a wonderful brother, Eddie Littlefield.

And I admired both of them.

But it was amazing to look at, he had a Panther tank.

And each time I would go out there, I would talk to the mechanics.

He had every type of Sherman tank you can imagine out there, diesel, gas, alligators, all these different.

this kind of a modular tank and then all the adaptations that you'd see on them and those guys that were trying to fix a transmission and the engine, they just could not believe how finely engineered and how difficult it was to repair and maintain that Panther tank versus a Sherman.

And they came to the conclusion that it wouldn't really matter.

It's kind of like

a Jaguar today versus a Honda,

I don't know, a Honda Accord with a big engine, or a Range Rover, let's say a beautiful Range Rover versus

a Honda pilot

or a Toyota Highlander or a Lexus.

And the idea of the Range Rover, you're going to pay $30,040,000, highly crafted, but that thing is not going to last as long as a Honda or Toyota or Lexus on the road, even though it looks more impressive.

And I know that's a caricature, but when you're making these weapons, people forget that you have to think about how they're going to be be used by 18 and 19-year-old kids.

What's the effect of having those kids killed in this tank?

How do you keep them alive?

How do you keep the tank running?

Do you have air conditioning?

How you make it comfortable, not so that you can pamper them, but they can be more efficient in killing the enemy, and how you get them off of the battlefield, how you transfer them to the battlefield.

If you have a a king tiger, I know that's not the accurate name, but a tiger two,

they weigh almost 70 tons.

They can't go any bridge in Eastern Europe.

How do you get them to the Russian battlefield?

You got to put them on a rail car.

And they, you know, they gulp down fuel two or three, I don't know how many gallons a minute, but I mean, they're just,

you can't keep them more than 50, 60 miles.

So what good are they?

And then remember what Hitler was going to do, Sammy, at the end of the war, he had this mouse tank where he got the Porsche engineers to make this thing that was supposed to be, what, 150 tons?

It was like four.

The biggest tank in World War II were the Stalin, but I think even bigger than the Stalin was the King Tiger.

600 of them or so were made, but they were going to be four or five times bigger than that.

So we get into this thing called gigantism that we've talked about, I think, before.

It was Demetrius, the besieger, this idea that every weapon will get bigger.

It'll get better the larger and bigger it gets.

You get a bomber, it'll get six.

six engines, eight engines, you'll get a tank, it'll get bigger and bigger, heavier, heavier, bigger gun, but it doesn't work that way.

And we're suffering from it right now as we speak with our, say, our carrier fleet.

We have 11 fleet carriers of over 100,000 tons, but they're up to now 12, 15 billion dollars.

And we're probably going to lose one someday from, I don't know, $100,000 worth of missiles that come, that are launched from a Chinese cheap destroyer that are six inches above the surface and go right through it.

Whereas if we had maybe 50 of these carriers that were maybe 20,000 tons with maybe 10 planes on them, you would disperse your assets and they'd be cheap and easy to replace the carrier.

So yeah, it's worth the debate for the military.

They're having that debate, but I think

gigantism

is something

that always is a dead end.

In World War II, remember what they called the largest battleship that was ever made was the Yamato and the Mushasi, 72,000 tons, 18-inch shells.

You know what the Japanese call the Yamoto?

They called it hotel Yamato.

Its problem was it was too slow or something or what?

No, it had great speed.

It was very impressive, but it, you know, it took about 4,000 sailors.

It gulped oil that they couldn't afford.

And when it went out there, you had to have a whole flotilla to protect it because

as it went on a one-way suicide mission to Okinawa, the Americans blew it out of the water.

And the same thing with the Mushashi, its twin.

So they just parked it.

And they did the same thing with the Tirpitz, the sister ship of the sunken Bismarck.

So when you design a ship, you got to remember: I'm going to build this many

watts.

If I don't build this carrier, how many Abams tanks, how many 88-millimeter gun platforms if I don't build the Bismarck?

So every investment is a non-investment in something else.

And generals and admirals and the public are very impressed with big, beautiful battleships, big carriers, big tanks, and not so much with rudimentary, practical, everyday weaponry.

But usually the latter wins wars.

Yeah.

While we're watching this current, I don't know whether we call it, well, it's a war.

I don't think we have to call it a crisis anymore.

This current war in Ukraine, you see alongside these tanks or at different points, these Humvee, I guess, like vehicles that are also armored.

Are they taking over or are they just something that has come alongside the tank and is a little bit more agile?

Well, to be frank, they're a reaction to the Second Gulf War, especially the years 2003 and 4.

So we wanted the replacement of the Jeep, you know, a general-purpose vehicle that was designed.

behind the lines.

That was all the Humvee was designed for.

That you would have the tanks on the front rank, maybe some Bradley bradley armed personnel carriers and then people would go be back and forth and traveling as infantry in humvees very casually but the problem was that there was no front in iraq and so when people went from an enclosed camp out to an outpost or they went from fallujah to they went in columns or out to the airport and that was the front even though we thought it was in our territory.

And they were thin-skinned like

a U.S.-made truck.

And so these IEDs just shredded them and we lost hundreds of people in the first year,

first two or three years.

And then we started up armoring them.

And then we made these rhinos, these big heavy trucks.

We put shields.

And so the reaction to that was that every military looked at that and said, you know what?

In the modern warfare, it's going to be very hard to have a battle of Waterloo.

or a battle of curse with this army there and this army there and no man's land in between.

And

so you're on the front wherever you are so if you're in a vehicle and you're being transported either as a soldier or you're driving an officer or you're just out to bring back ammunition you better be up armored and that's what those vehicles are they're sort of armored humvee like jeeps you see them probably because they've been blown up because they don't have a lot of armor on them Yeah, so they're usually then not going to be sent in.

They're going to send the tank into places where there's real combat, whereas these Humvees are...

Think of the problem they have, though, the Russians, because the tank is going to be on the main roads, and they're going to be the battering ram to get into Kiev.

Let's take an example.

So you're going to have a long,

and they're going to be supposedly invulnerable because you have air superiority.

That means that people with Sam missiles have knocked down two huge transport planes, supposedly.

But let's just say that they still have air supremacy.

They can fly wherever they want.

I know the Ukrainians are claiming that their pilots are shooting them down.

They may be, but they now have air superiority.

I don't think they have air supremacy, the idea they can go anywhere they want.

But nevertheless, so you have air cover for these big columns that are going on roads into Kiev.

But it wouldn't be very hard to have thousands of people, each with a $200,000 javelin and an $80,000 shell, and take one of those in the front rank out, block the freeway, hit another one, hit another one front and back, and stop that entire column in an asymmetrical scenario.

Because what are they going to do?

They're going to go off into the ditch.

They're going to go into the forest.

They're going to go through a vineyard, an orchard, a small town, and they're going to disperse your strength.

So I think the Ukrainians can last five days.

The time is not on the Russian side.

It just isn't.

Because as more of these anti-tank weapons pour in, and NATO has them everywhere.

So when Germany says, I'm ashamed of ourselves, we're just giving them, you know, blankets or something, they're going to send in anti-aircraft missiles, and Poland has stocks.

So everybody will be sending them in the future days these weapons and anti-tank weapons.

And boy, if everybody has access to them, it'll be kind of like the Panzerfaust volunteer Volksstrom in World War II, the Germans that all had one.

That was our biggest worry at the last closing days that these 16-year-old kids were taking out German tanks and running around the corner.

And it'll be very messy.

I mean, 100,000 Soviets died trying to take Berlin, and they did take it.

And another thing to remember is that everybody says, well, as I said earlier, Poland, you know, 25,000, well, you could 25,000 German invaders dead.

If Putin really wants to go through with this, he could lose 10 or 15,000 conscript soldiers.

And in a modern video-connected world, that would be devastating back at home.

We'll see what happens.

It's tragic because most of these Russian kids, I mean, they have no beef with Ukrainians and their way of thinking, Ukraine, we don't really care whether it's Russian or Ukraine.

We can drive across the border and have a good time in Western Ukraine, so what?

It's part of this megalomaniac view that Putin's going to restore the former Soviet Union before he dies or gets in his 70s.

And he thinks that there's a lot of natural resources.

And just give me 280 million people again.

Give me the whole territory, my 35-30%

territory we lost, and I will be feared just like Stalin was.

Well, thank you, Victor.

We're at the end of our hour.

It sounds like the current war in the Ukraine is a race between the anti-tank weapons and the tanks that Russia is sending in to some extent.

And thank you, too, for the discussion or the look back at the history of tanks and tank warfare.

Well, thank you for having me, Sammy.

I know that it's kind of hard to relate the Johnson County Wars or World War I, September 1916, Cambria, to current tank warfare, but there is a continuity.

And I think it's really important, final idea, really important that everybody that's listening understands that there is no such thing as defense over offense or offense over defense.

They're in a constant tension and fluid situation.

And there will be long periods where one triumphs over the other, but then there will be adjustments and counter responses.

And it's always important for the commander to realize where you are in that cycle and to use the advantage of whether offensive weapons or defensive weapons.

And it will be one or the other.

There are stalemates, but you have to understand which it is.

I think that the reign of the modern tank as indestructible is starting to wane with the proliferation of these new anti-tank weapons for now.

But some chemist is working somewhere in some lab or metallurgist and he will come up with some type of armor that these javelins can't penetrate.

In the meantime, we wish the best for our Ukrainian fellow humans, right?

Yeah, I do.

I mean,

I know that a lot of people on our conservative side have tried to suggest that we drove Russia into China true and that Putin had some legitimate concerns about kind of a crazy idea to put Ukraine into NATO, true, and that Putin is not completely without legitimate grievances against the West following the collapse of communism, true.

But all of that, once the shooting starts, it's a zero-sum game.

And I'm afraid that he invaded Ukraine.

He wants to destroy an independent Ukraine.

And for all the culpability, maybe on the West or the naivete, the moral high ground is with the West in general and Ukraine in particular.

And I think all Americans do not want Putin to win.

We want him to lose.

We want him to lose big.

And it would be wonderful if somehow the opposition within Russia could gain the higher ground and Putin would be deposed without some kind of Armageddon last hurrah.

That's what I'm most worried about, Sammy, that he starts to lose in Ukraine or gets stalemated.

There's opposition inside Russia.

There may be a coup.

And he orders some general to do something crazy.

Yeah, that's very possible, but let's hope that we're wrong on that.

And thank you very much, Victor.

I think we'd better sign off.

This is Sammy Week and Victor Davis-Sanson, and we're signing off.

You might be wondering, when is the right time to add collagen to my diet?

How about today?

Calagen production starts to dwindle in your 20s.

By the time you've hit your 50s, decreased collagen contributes to wrinkles, sagging skin, and joint discomfort.

Native Path Calagen can help.

It's packed with only type 1 and 3 collagen fibers, the ones your body needs most for healthy joints, skin, bones, hair, nails, and gut.

Plus, it's third-party tested for purity with no fillers, no additives, and no artificial junk.

Two scoops a day of Native Path delivers 18 grams of protein.

Mix it into your coffee, tea, or any drink.

It's completely flavorless and easy to use.

Right now, get a special deal at a fraction of the retail price, plus free shipping.

Available at getnativepath.com slash Victor.

With over 4 million jars sold, thousands of five-star reviews, and a 365-day money-back guarantee, this is your moment to take control of aging before symptoms get worse.

Go to getnativepath.com slash Victor now.

Supplies are limited and demand is surging.

And we'd like to thank NativePath for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hansen Show.