The VDH Show: The Italians on the Weekend Edition

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Hello, and welcome to the listeners of the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

This is the weekend edition where we take a step beyond current news stories and politics to look at things from the past.

So it's a little change up for Victor.

This weekend edition, we're going to be looking at Dante Alighieri and the Italian military in World War II or before World War II.

And I would like to remind our listeners that Victor is the Martin and Ily Anderson Senior Fellow in Classics and Military History at the Hoover Institution and the the Wayne and Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

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Welcome back and let's get to our content today.

I want to just remind everybody we're looking at Dante Alighieri's The Inferno and some aspects of the Inferno.

And then a little discussion.

I've heard Victor before talk about the Italian military.

And I thought that would be an interesting subject because Dante is, and his inferno is really very ingenious in many fashions.

And so too was the technology in the Italian military prior to and during World War II.

So we would like to do that.

But I would also like to give Victor a moment just before to talk about anything he has in the news that he feels is pressing, sort of address anything.

So how are you doing today, Victor?

Very good.

And I just turned on my computer, Sammy, to communicate with you.

And I learned that the written house verdict came in and he was acquitted on apparently all counts.

Which raises the question: why in the world was he ever charged in the first place, given

that

the prosecution did not turn over accurate video recordings, at least they had one version that they used and one version the defense used,

given that they kind of concocted arson charges against the other person accompanying him who had a gun in an effort so to prevent him from testifying in a manner that might favor Rittenhouse, given Fifth Amendment considerations,

given that the prosecutor pointed a gun with his hand on the finger, loaded or not, and it wasn't loaded apparently, at the jury, given that the other prosecutor said essentially that Rittenhouse should have been beaten up or he wasn't a man because he didn't face down a mob, given that

Two of the people who were chasing them were convicted felons, one a convicted pedophile on numerous counts who had been released after a suicide attempt from a mental institution that day and was on record using the n-word threatening people, given that the third assailant was had a prior arrest record, not singularly, but with repeated circumstances, given that the person who stomped him and then exited the scene and was supposedly not available to the defense.

The prosecuting team seems to have known all about and didn't turn that information over to the defense.

And he too was a convicted felon.

So let's just distill it, Sammy.

We had a person who, unlike the media, unlike the

prosecutor's suggestions, did not travel out of state, but rather had parents and family in Kenosha, went from his mother's residence 20 miles across the border, was not possessing, as alleged, an illegal gun, but a legal gun, did not buy it illegally himself, but had a friend buy it, and then was erasing graffiti and trying to protect people who had asked for assistance.

Okay,

that's the truth, and that was known to everybody.

And then we have a final Tessra in this horrid mosaic, and that is that

the BLM and Tifa or their associates were protesting outside the courtroom in a manner that would suggest intimidation of the juries or obstruction of justice.

So this thing from A to Z was corrupt.

It was a political ideological trial that was conducted so that the prosecuting attorney and municipal officials in general could say to the forces of radicalism and violence, we did this.

The only thing that I have a mystery of, and I know this sounds perverse, is this prosecution was so flawed, was so corrupt, was so inexact, was so duplicitous that it almost begs a question,

well, were they trying to get a mistrial?

Because they knew he was innocent and they wanted to go through the motions.

So they deliberately screwed the thing up so much that they were hoping that they could be exonerated by saying, well, at least we prosecuted him, but we didn't have much to work with, but we felt he was guilty.

Sorry, it was a mistrial.

But the judge, in ironic fashion, himself was still terrified that if he had declared a mistrial, then the object of vituperation would have gone away from the targeted jury onto the targeted judge.

And of course, the prosecuting attorneys did not want to be targeted.

So think about that.

There's three entities that could have been the objects of violence and were being probably docks.

You had the jury, you had the prosecutors, and you had the judge.

The prosecutors, you know, tried the case, so they were exonerated, they felt, and maybe it would be up to the judge to declare a mistrial because their performance was so dismal.

I can't believe anybody would be that competent, but maybe they are, given the critical legal theory that's predominant in law school.

So then the judge is worried that they might go after him and says so.

So then he fobs it on to

the jurors.

And they were the more courageous people of all.

Yeah, they certainly were.

Well, my head is spinning, Victor, and it's spinning right into the inferno because you almost seem like you're reiterating a scene from the inferno.

I think they belong in the ninth.

the ninth circle to tell you the truth.

The deliberately violent, duplicitous, and insurrectionist civil disuniters, or so to speak, as Dante would say.

Yeah, so let's just start with something a little bit more

benign than that and look at Dante's relationship to Virgil, because I thought that it would be a nice connection to our earlier episode in which we looked at the fourth ecologue of Virgil.

And Dante takes him, and I'm going to read a little passage here, as his mentor, basically.

And he says, in the inferno, he's talking to Virgil.

He's just met him.

And he says, you are my master and indeed my author.

It is from you alone that I have taken the exact style for which I have been honored.

And I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about this exact style.

I think it's, you know, also translated, or at least for the Romans, it was called the Bel Stilo, and the Italians often use that as well.

And talk a little bit about the expectations of writing in that fashion, if you would like to, or address Virgil and the relationship to Dante in any way.

I can do both, I think.

I've read The Inferno.

One of the weird things is that when I was a graduate student, I mean, an undergraduate, I wanted to go to graduate school.

Being from a farm, I did not know the requisite secondary languages.

At that time, I thought I was told they were German and French, or you could substitute Italian for either German or French.

It turned out you could only substitute Italian for French.

So I, that summer, read the Inferno and tried to teach myself Italian and read it.

And it's not that distant from Latin.

That's my larger point.

By that, I mean it's really the first work of Italian literature that takes a vernacular Italian, which itself is the vernacular of classical Latin, which was still spoken in the early Renaissance, and tries to suggest that the spoken Italian or vernacular actually has an elevated form and a grammar and a syntax and a vocabulary.

And Dante uses that unabashedly and without apology in the Inferno.

So it's really the first, what I'm getting at, it's the first legitimization of Italian as a literary elevated language and without need or recourse to Latin.

And so it is a beautiful, it's beautifully written.

And

the sentence pattern, word order, even though it's poetic, has a lot in common with classical Latin.

The second is,

why Virgil?

I mean, because Virgil is not a Christian.

He's not a pagan.

And there's two purposes, I think, in using him as the guide.

Remember, the poem opens, I think it's on Good Friday.

And

he's going to go all the way to Easter through hell.

And they need.

Dante needs a guide to get him through.

And so you have to have two elements in that guide.

One is he has to be a pagan because so many of the references are to Caesar or Homeric Heroes or the Pantheon, because that was in the early Renaissance and the Renaissance, that was the locus classicus.

That was the frame of reference when anybody wanted to bring in similes or metaphors.

It was Zeus or Apollo or Hercules or something.

whatever.

So you need somebody that is a bridge to that prior pagan world.

However, pagans are by

definition sinners.

They were not given God's grace.

They did not understand that Christianity in some cases was on the immediate horizon.

So they neglected, even if inadvertently so, the gift of Christ.

However, in Virgil's fourth ecologue, the so-called messianic ecologue, that's a poem remember about

pastoral rural life, I should say, in the Italian countryside.

He gives a, we talked about that before, a forecast of a golden age to come based on the birth of a child.

Most people believe that that might have been, you know, Julian, Agrippa's son, or somebody that was high up.

There's a number of various candidates that would bring healing to the civic discord in Rome.

But

because of

Virgil's own proximity, you know, writing in the 30s BC to the date of Christ, people later in the Renaissance and even earlier thought that Virgil was given a divine gift, i.e., you can't be a Christian because Christ is not here yet, but we're giving you a vision of his coming.

And therefore, Virgil wrote an

ecologue that forecasts a beautiful age to come based on the birth of a son.

But while everybody thought he was referring to a prominent Roman, deep down in his spiritual essence, he knew it was Christ.

And therefore, he's the perfect intermediary as a good man and a pre-Christian to guide Virgil both through the pantheon of Greek mythology and also as the one pagan who, had he been born just a few decades later, would have been a good Christian.

So he's floating out there, I'm trying to say, in limbo.

I think that concept of limbo no longer exists.

And although I'm not a Catholic, I think it no longer exists in formal Catholic orthodoxy, but there was for a time an idea of limbo, all of the blessed people who for some reason either, you know, they were died the second they were born and were not baptized

or they were born before Christ in this case.

All right.

So I, the

is that anything else?

So I answered

your question about why.

Yeah.

Well, yeah, and why Virgil?

And you said the eclogues, but even in the Dante's Inferno itself, he does suggest that it's Virgil's style in addition, but do you think it's more that the Christians liked Virgil and so he was the...

Oh, no, no, you're absolutely right to include that.

He's a pagan

entree to the pagan world, because remember, what, 30 or 40% of all the people in these various nine circles of hell are not just Italian

Florentines or Venetians or Romans of the contemporary

early 14th century, i.e.

people who've done Dante wrong, or maybe I don't want to be so cynical, but all in every case.

But they're also classical figures.

So you need a classical figure to introduce them, and you need somebody whose Christian, pre-Christian credentials are impeccable, and you got Virgil, but you're right.

He also wrote an epic poem, the Aeneid.

And so people,

he's the illogical person to say, I'm one epic poet.

who wrote the greatest thing in Latin to guide what Dante thinks will be the greatest epic poem in Italian.

Of course,

events proved him right.

It's considered now that not just the greatest epic poem in Italian, but the greatest thing ever written in Italian.

That is

the entire trilogy of the Paradisio, Purgatorio and the Paradisio, as well as the Inferno.

So

it seems like there's one question that

everybody has to answer to themselves since he says he's imitating Virgil's style to some extent.

Does he best Virgil in your estimation, in his Italian epic?

Is his work better than the Aeneid, for example?

Would you say, as a whole?

Or is that an unfair question?

Not an unfair question.

It's very similar.

And

in the sense that just as Virgil mentions contemporary figures when he's giving these prophecies, and just as Virgil as Homer has an underworld theme, what Dante's done is taken that idea of going into the underworld and getting prophecies and events and then putting contemporaries within that supposedly historical poem in a way that Homer doesn't do.

Then by the same token, Dante follows that lead.

So a lot of the idea of a, and also there's something Homeric in the idea of a quest.

He's going to start entering these three monsters, you know, the lion, the leopard, and the wolf, and they represent various aspects of sin, I suppose, the three subdivisions of the nine circles

and each monster, but he's going to start going through limbo and then he goes down, down, down, down, down.

And then he's finally going to get home right before Easter in the way that Odysseus had this long quest

to get back home and to go through all these monstrous,

witnessing all these monsters.

They're all grotesque.

The only difference is that he's got a Christian element that they're grotesque because of something they did.

And remember, the punishment and the grotesqueness of the characters he meets is directly correlated to the sins they committed so people who are gluttons just eat mud and terrible things they can't stop it or people

who are false prophets have their head backwards so that you know they're looking back and not forward that kind of stuff and that's kind of yeah but to understand

the inferno on two levels, you can understand it as great poetry, but you can also understand it as if you have an annotated edition as a kind of a compendium of, you know,

Florentine society around 1300 to 1310 or something.

Yeah, it sure was.

And I think that I would answer that Dante does best Virgil myself.

And I think part of the reason I would say that is for, you know, a whole lot of layers in the Inferno, of course, but the layering on of humor in the Inferno is just amazing and the clarity of his vision that he's able to convey in his words also something else but i wanted to read one one very um funny part where he is encountered by the devils in canto 21 who are following who are soldiers basically of malakota and they're supposed to take him across this tar pit that a bunch of sinners are in and they're going to slap him down so that they don't get virgil and the pilgrim dante and he finishes up the canto with this: these

the soldiers are assigned to Dante and Virgil to take them across.

And he says about them at the very end of the canto, on the left embankment, they turned around, put their,

but first each of them stuck out his tongue between his teeth towards their chief as a sign.

And he sounded a trumpet call from his arsful.

And so so that's the end of the canto.

And Dante does that quite often.

The poet does that quite often throughout the entire canto.

And I always found that his ability to weave in all of that humor, kind of like an Italian comedy, I suggest.

Yeah, he does.

It's quite ingenious.

He does.

And then he also,

it's funny.

And then he also

has periods of real,

you think he's just a malicious gossiper or he's writing this for vengeance, but every once in a while, I think, especially when he gets to the circle that includes the Sodomites, he mentions people who had been very instructive in his own education.

And he kind of laments that they're there.

And it's almost like you're saying they don't really belong in hell because the sin

was incidental, not essential to who they were.

So he's doing that all through the poem.

He's either expressing disgust or lamentations that a good person sinned or was born at the wrong time or died or had reasons to kill somebody, but nevertheless killed them.

I think I'm thinking of the two adulteresses that the poor young, beautiful woman was forced to marry this sort of unattractive person by a remainder married, and then she fell in love with a brother.

Paolo and Francesca.

Yes,

Francesca.

So he is constantly editorializing and joking and serious.

And that's what makes it kind of an interesting poem, very interesting, because of the radical shifts in tone and mood on the part of the poet.

Yeah, and also for his own audience in his own time.

And if I can turn to the very end for this and just ask for your reflections on the devil himself, finally, or Cocketus is, I hope I got that pronunciation wrong, with the three heads, who's frozen at the bottom.

And he has, of course,

the sinners in his mouth, in the mouths of his three heads are Judas in the middle.

That's not surprising.

But Cassius on one side and Brutus on the other side.

And I was wondering your take on what,

why these sinners in the very lowest level of hell in the mouths of the devil?

I think that in Florentine

society with the Glouths and the Ghiblings and all those factions and the intrigue that was going on.

And then you add the Medicis and Rome

and that whole Italian sort of clannish subculture,

that loyalty and giving your word and

honor as opposed to perfidy and conspiracy is very, it's kind of the most important trait to keep alive.

And when somebody says something, they're going to support you and they don't stab you in the back, so to speak.

So it is kind of odd that the backstabbers or the conspirators, and the real sin, remember, of people like Brutus in Dante's eyes is not just that he waged a civil war with

a tyrant, because remember, Caesar's also mentioned there in another context, because I remember as an autocrat,

not necessarily entirely favorable, but is that they were beneficiaries of Caesarean

benefits, beneficence.

And so so they were traitorous, treacherous.

And for a Florentine, that was a mortal sin.

Even though they were all sinful, they seemed to all be treacherous.

And so

I think that's very important.

Another thing that I think is really important for people, this is not Sermon on the Mount stuff,

that aspect of the New Testament.

This is trying to convey the idea that I, Dante,

I was a recipient of injustice in this world.

I was unfairly exiled from my beloved Florence.

I think when you go to Ravenna, there's that tomb of Dante there next to the, it's not too far from the Byzantine church, remember?

And so, and then there's that, I guess we'd call it a cenotaph.

It's in Florence as you go in by the Santa Croce search, and it says that big shrine that says Dante's burial.

But there's nobody in there because he's buried in Ravenna.

And I think crazy Mussolini wanted to dig him up in Ravenna and bring him back to Florence for political reasons of northern Italians, you know, having possession of the Italian spiritual father, especially when they were up in northern Italy and under assault.

But

anyway,

I guess what I'm saying is that Dante himself believed that in this world,

The sins you commit will not necessarily or at all be forgiven in the next world.

And you're not only going to be suffering forever from them for what you did in the material world, but there's no way to get out of it.

And they're going to be ironic and they're going to be horrific.

And I don't know if that's driven mostly by his own psychological torment and anger that the people who were culpable did things to him or that they do things to people around him in general or they do places things that destroy Florence because everybody, those characters on two or three occasions come up and go, how's things going in Florence?

You know, they're dead, and he has to tell them what's going on, or it's just a larger, or all three, and it's a larger context on the human condition that don't worry about justice.

There is no justice in this world, but you must believe there's a transcendent justice.

And that transcendent justice doesn't mean that we're all going to, you know, sing kumbala, kumbaya in heaven, that there's going to be a judgment.

And there is such a a thing as a hell, and it's a wicked, horrible, dirty, smelly, violent place.

And you do not want to go there.

So it's kind of serves as a warning for people reading it: don't do these things.

Yeah, it does.

And I've often taken it, though, in another manner entirely, which is that he's writing the inferno and all these things we encounter in our everyday life.

And so he just fills it up with all the contemporary political issues of his time and sort of makes the world that we live in is the inferno, right?

And then after that,

you know, hopefully you can get out of that, but so we walk every day in

several worlds.

No, no, that's not, that's true because that's why we read it today.

We don't read it as a warning to contemporary Florentines, although that might have been one of the main incentives that.

made him write it among the others we discuss.

But

it exists as a quote unquote great book because because it appeals across time and space to universal human concern.

We all have that feeling.

We look at the world today.

I was thinking the other day when I was looking at all these people who have lied and done all of these things and were praised for.

Can I fill in the blanks?

I mean, when I see John Brennan or James Clapper, highly paid as CNN or MSNB analysts, and I think to myself, you people lied under oath to your own countrymen, under oath, and there were no consequences.

You went out and told everybody night after night that there was this collusion that ossified the country, stagnated it for two years.

And then you went and testified stealthy that was leaked, however, to

the pertinent congressional committees that you didn't believe it.

Do you have evidence that there's Russian collusion?

No.

So why were you telling people?

Well, I don't know.

So they were doing two things.

They were going out on television, winking and and nodding to us that they had security clearances and therefore privileged but exclusive knowledge about russian trump collusion but then when called on by uh congressional representatives and while under oath they denied it they said no information in other words they're saying well i'm going to go lie to the american people and get paid for it but i'm not going to go to jail for lying so when it when you put my hand on the bible and i swear i will tell the truth but not to the public on tv

entirely evil, yes.

Yeah, that's what they belong in the ninth circle, I guess.

Yeah, so let's move on because we don't have a whole lot of time left.

And I'd like to take Dante as sort of the genius, and you mentioned it, that it's considered the best work in all Italian literature by some.

And

on to their genius in technology at the turn of the century in the building of their military.

And the Italians, I've heard you you talk about it before, were quite ingenious in their technology, and yet their showing in World War I was less than inspiring or impressive.

And I would like to hear you talk a little bit about that.

I know it's not a big part, but it's part of your tome, the Second World Wars.

And so it would be interesting to hear you on that.

It was very complimentary, believe it or not, of aspects of the Italian military.

And

I mean, they had terrible leadership.

And Mussolini, we had this dismal impression of them in World War II because they didn't take Malta.

They surrendered en masse in Egypt.

They got bogged down in Albania.

They were bailed out.

in Greece, and about 160,000 of them were killed for no purpose.

And they were under-equipped, underclothed, underfed

as part of operation barbarossa when mussolini sent them there but what i'm getting at is with this two million person army had they just had a competent leader i'm not talking about good or evil they were evil in their role in world war ii but had they just said to themselves we're going to not go into albania we're not going to go into greece we're not going to go join this campaign in the soviet union we're just going to stick on stick to two things we're going to take malta in 1940, and we're going to go into Egypt, and we outnumber the British 10 to 1, and we're going to concentrate this entire force.

They could have done it.

They had for a brief moment control of the Mediterranean with the fall of France in

June of 1940.

Remember what Mussolini's idea was?

He didn't like Hitler.

And Hitler, he was the senior.

He'd been in power since what, 21, 22, 23, and Hitler thought he was a senior statesman.

he hitler looked up to him and the dutch said mar nostrum we're going to recreate the idea of a mediterranean so they had taken possession of the dodecanese islands you know roads etc along the uh greek coast and then they had cooked up this corfu incident i think it was in 1923 with greece where somebody killed an italian uh envoy in his entourage up near yannana and they said the greeks did i don't don't think the Greeks did it, but they used that as an excuse to invade Corfu and say, you know, the Venetians had it, so we're taking it back.

And then they invaded France, right?

what, a week before France fell.

They just went across the border and even then couldn't take it.

But they had this magnificent navy.

Maybe that's what you were inquiring about, because

the Reggia Marina,

once Italy was unified in the 1860s, they took all the little navies from all of the different principalities and combined them.

And then they didn't do much in World War I.

But under Mussolini, they took what they had in World War and refurbished these battleships.

And then he went on this massive shipbuilding program.

And he had this vision.

He said to himself, the biggest navy in the world is the British, and they're overextended.

And this was in the 20s and 30s.

Someday there'll be a war in the Mediterranean.

They'll be in Asia with their colonial possession.

They'll be in the Atlantic.

They'll be in the Pacific, etc.

And then there's the Americans and they're isolationists.

They have a two-ocean navy.

And then

there's the Japanese, the third, and they're our friends.

They could be.

And then there's the French.

And they were worried about the French.

And they wanted complete control over the Mediterranean.

Remember after Corfu Mussolini would rail,

I'm trapped in the Mediterranean.

They've got door stops on me.

I can't get out and I can't get in.

They control Suez, they being the British, and they control Gibraltar.

And this is our lake, always has been.

And we can't control it because they have the entry and the exit.

And more importantly, they have all the key stuff.

They have Cyprus and they have English help, Crete, and they control Malta, the British.

So we are shackled.

This was all his act.

So we're going to build this huge navy.

And he built

six battleships.

I think he had like 15 cruisers, 50 destroyer.

He built in the 30s and 40s, or rehab, World War I, beautiful ships.

And

as Italian, people don't give Italian craftsmanship its due, but you know, Gucci bags is transferable to the craftsmen of nautical design.

And they were beautifully designed.

And they had 14, 12 and 14 inch guns.

But They didn't have a sophisticated, even though, you know, Marconi and all these guys were

the architects of the electronic age of the time, they didn't invest in sonar and they didn't invest in radar and they didn't therefore have a nighttime capability.

But and to make up for that, and they didn't have aircraft carriers, they were under construction.

So what they said was this, we are going to make this fleet of up to beautifully designed, powerful battleships, battlecruisers, cruisers, and they're going to be very fast, 30 knots.

They're going to go all over the Mediterranean.

They have big guns.

So when they see this superior British fleet, and it won't be superior, or the French fleet, it won't be superior because they have other responsibilities.

We're going to blast them with our bigger guns, and then we're going to run away back to, you know, La Spezia up in the base up in northern Italy, or maybe Sicily, and we'll be under

Italian aircraft control.

We don't need an aircraft carrier because our little peninsula sticks out in the Mediterranean.

And it was kind of a crackpot idea.

But when France fell,

the

third or fourth biggest navy in the world, and then the British destroyed it so that the Vichy's wouldn't turn over these wonderful ships to Germany.

Then Italy just had everything.

They said, wow, we've got Germans on our side.

They can help us provide air cover.

We'll give them a base in Sicily.

There's no more French fleet.

And the British have been,

you know, they were attacked in Singapore, da-da.

But before all that happened, that what it was quite tragic because the british said to themselves hmm

we've appeased mussolini and corfu in 1923 we appeased him in 1935 and 1936 but now we're at war and this means war and they do not have an aircraft capability that's mobile and they do not have sonar and radar so they went up to tarentim

And they, I think they sank or severely damaged three battleships through air attacks.

And then at Cape Matapon, they blew apart three or four cruisers.

And the Italians kind of got back at them for a while, but they used mines.

They went into Alexandria and put limpet mines and blew up

a battlecruiser and a battleship, I think.

And then in the fights over Malta,

Even though they stupidly didn't take Malta when they could, they mined all of the sea routes.

And the Italian Navy did, and the British took a lot of losses.

And in one naval engagement, the Italians did pretty good.

But more or less, every time after that, that they encountered an under-manned British fleet,

given the lack of sonar and radar and night fighting capability, they didn't do too well.

And then after the torpedo attack on Sicily, they had to move the fleet back up to Las Bezia.

And that was too far away to be.

And then the rest of it was all downhill.

Yeah, until the Germans were defending the Italian peninsula for them.

Well, Germany thought,

see, Germany was very envious of Britain because they had this maritime empire, this worldwide global empire.

And the British fleet had been the biggest fleet in the world for centuries.

And so they thought, World War I, we built this dreadnought fleet and we were ready to use it.

And at Jutlon, we almost got a draw with them.

And then we lost the war.

So they came in and made us destroy this fleet.

And now we don't have enough money to keep up.

So on the cheap, we're going to build all these U-boats.

And maybe that'll, and they should have kept doing it.

But instead, Hitler and especially crazy Admiral Radar started building these beautiful German battleships, Tirpitz, Bismarck, and then they had.

a number of French Eugen and the rest of them, Graftsbury, and there were not enough of them.

So they were pretty much blown out of the water or up hiding in the fjords in Scandinavia by late 1941.

And so Hitler kept thinking that, well, we're going to win in North Africa.

And even though I didn't want to support Rommel,

he did too late, of course.

Maybe there was a route through Suez all the way up to join Army Group South if we take Malta.

But Mussolini's got the hardware to allow us to have a navy, so to speak, a surrogate navy, in the way that the Japanese have

the hardware to stop the British maritime empire.

We don't need to to build another fleet that we've lost because the Italians and Japanese are sea powers.

What he didn't realize was that when you declared war on December 11th in the United States, that had the second biggest fleet when the war broke out, but more importantly, was under construction the world's biggest fleet in addition to the fleet that was deployed under the series of Carl Vinson Acts.

By 1944, the United States Navy had more ships than the Italian, what was left of the Italians, the Germans, what was left of them, the Japanese and the British.

I think you can make the argument by late 1943, they had a larger fleet than the world's fleets put together.

Yeah.

Wow.

But Italy always was famous for craftsmanship, elegance,

and very gifted.

commanders that nobody listened to and then mussolini hacks that were fascist mediocrities graziani and those people, and they did untold damage.

Yeah, and your book really makes a point of all the mistakes Mussolini made, I think, as well.

So, Victor, we're coming to the end of our time, and I need to take a break for our sponsors.

And so, we'll do that for a second and be right back.

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Welcome back.

And we were just talking about the Italian fleet and

its record in World War II.

And really, it's the beauty of the technology of the Italian fleet.

So very interesting.

I would like just at the very end here, Victor, just ask you, we're coming right on Thanksgiving weekend, and if you have anything you would like to say about Thanksgiving and what the people are celebrating or anything that's the first Thanksgiving in my memory where we're reminded that affluence and materialism is not our birthright

because In the lead up to this Thanksgiving, gasoline prices have gone up 40%

And the shelves are empty.

There's even talk that you might not be able to get your Christmas turkey.

And whether it's farmers who can't export their almonds in this area out of the port of Los Angeles or Long Beach, or whether you can't get Thanksgiving food or Christmas gifts coming in, or

this

you're going to go fly this weekend.

It's projected to have the largest air travel patronage in history, but yet this is the nadir of passenger service.

I'm speaking of somebody who was gone about 65 or 70 days out the last 90.

I can tell you that getting on a flight today, as I keep ranting, is a horror story.

Because if you have one glitch, one plane that doesn't have fuel, one plane that has one baggage handler only, one attendant that doesn't

show up, one baton guider who doesn't get you out of the air, and you're late for a connection, you've got a good chance you're going to be sitting in that airport because all the other flights are going to be booked.

They're overbooked.

And so it's going to be a horror on Thanksgiving.

So what I'm getting at, Sammy, is that I think we should be very thankful for what we have, but also very wary that think it's always going to continue unless we are more vigilant.

We haven't been vigilant in this country.

We don't hold our officials to account.

We think that, you know, we can just snap our fingers and have solar power or snap our fingers and have high-speed rail or snap our fingers and have perfect human relations with each other when human existence is tragic and we have to work at it.

So let's go back to the idea this Thanksgiving that until we get a utopian carbon-free future that we are very blessed that we have natural gas and oil in this country and that's going to make it affordable for the lower and middle classes to exist.

And let's be very thankful that we have the most productive agricultural sector in the world and we have been given food, and that is very fragile food.

And let's remember that you just don't get on a plane and go anywhere you want.

In Presto, you're there when the little timetable says you're going to be there.

And so, I think what I'm getting at is that because of the challenges to the system, whether that's race relations, safety in the big cities at night, safety anywhere at night, transportation, fuels, the border, we're kind of in a systems collapse.

And everything we took for sure, and everything we thought was guaranteed isn't so, and isn't so in

the space of nine and a half months.

So, let's thank God what we have, but also be more viligent that we can give it to our next generation.

Yeah, and I think that we often miss that because the conveniences of life and our material well-being are relatively smooth.

I know they're not perfect for everybody, but we don't then look outside and recognize the things that may

take the system down, and yet we're seeing them right now.

So, thank you for reminding us of that.

And we'll be thankful on Thanksgiving.

Thank you, Victor, for all of your advice and words of wisdom, especially on the Italian military or the Italian Navy today and on Dante.

Thank you.

And we'll see you next time, Sammy.

All right, this is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis-Hanson, and we're signing off.