The Classicist: World War II Reconsidered

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Hello, ladies and gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis Hanson Show, The Classicist, a special summer military edition where Victor is going to be talking today about the world wars.

I'm Jack Fowler, the director of the Center for Civil Society at AmericanPhilanthropic.com.

But more importantly, for the purpose at hand, I'm the co-host of this show.

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Victor, today you're going to indulge me this last year, summertime, and it's good and we find a break to talk about one of those areas of obvious great interest to you, and that's military history.

And in 2017, you wrote a book on the second, well, I'll say it's the Second World War.

That's what people thought was going to happen.

And of course, one would think like, oh, another book on Lincoln, another book on Churchill, another book on the Second World War.

But what you produced was a truly different,

highly acclaimed, new perspective on what you called the Second World Wars, plural, and subtitle is How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won.

So, on today's episode, we're going to talk about this book and about what are the wars.

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We are back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show, The Classicist.

This is a military edition of the show.

Victor is the author of The Second World Wars.

And on today's episode, two or three questions.

One is what motivated Victor to write this book in this way.

What was the inspiration to look at this colossal historic event from the perspective he did.

Then we're going to talk about one of the wars of the Second World Wars, and that's the war between Finland and Russia, the Winter War.

And then if we have a little time, maybe we can talk about one of the other wars.

I'm curious if, Victor, if you would consider it one of

the wars that is housed in your general concept.

So let's begin with, before we get to Finland and Russia, which is a particular interest to me, and I would believe of many of our listeners.

Victor, why did you write this book in the way you did?

What was your inspiration?

Was there an inspiration?

Was there a Eureka moment?

Tell us how this book came about.

As I said in the preface, I grew up with stories in my family.

My mother's first cousin, Belden Holt, was killed in Normandy or shortly after.

Excuse me, Holt Cather.

Then Belden Cather, his brother who visited us, was disabled.

He had had dinghy fever in the Philippines and had some brain damage.

And my father flew on a B-29 for 40 missions.

His first cousin, who grew up as his brother, because his Victor's mother died in childbirth.

His father was blind.

He died on Okinawa and I was named after him.

And then my uncle by marriage was in Alaska during the landings.

of the Midway campaign, the Japanese landing.

So I heard of, that was something I'd always, so I've been reading and writing about World War II.

And I had mentioned it in other books, Okinawa, just to take one example, in The Ripples of Battle.

But I was also influenced that John Keegan wrote a book called The History of Warfare, where he looked at things topically.

I'm not sure it worked, but it was an imaginative, where he said, you know, stone.

He did it chronologically, but he thought that there were periods in history.

But the main impetus, Jack, was there's 7,000 books written on World War II, and they're one of two types.

They're either the majority on micro campaigns or generals or weaponry or they're chronological surveys.

So I wanted to do both but I didn't know how to do it so I came up with the idea that there was not a world war as we define it from September 1st, 1939 to September 2nd, 1945.

There were a lot of wars and people at the time, at least till December 7th, 1941, did not see it as a continuum.

There were wars in Western Europe between 1939, the invasion of the Soviet Union by Germany and its allies, almost 4 million people on June 21st, 1941.

And then that was a second stage.

And they still did not quite use the word World War.

They still talked about World War I.

And one way that you can do it, I should say, is you, how did people refer to World War I?

Do they talk about the Great War or the World War, or did they say World War I?

That term World War I did not come into common use until after Pearl Harbor.

And then the third stage was two things happened.

The United States was attacked and Britain was by the Empire of Japan on December 7th and 8th.

And more importantly, in some sense, Adolf Hitler, followed by Mussolini, declared war on the United States on December 11th.

And had he not done that, I'm not sure we would have declared war on Germany preemptively, given we had our hands full with Japan.

So I wanted to say there were a lot of wars and show how they were grouped together into this construct.

And then the second thing is, I wanted to say this was the first global war.

There were areas in World War I that were fought outside of Europe, of course, but what I was trying to say here is not just was every continent, and I mean that literally, whether it was the Graf Spree sinking in Latin America or North Africa campaigns or the Japanese in Asia or the supply lines and fights just over Murmansk and you know the Arctic Circle Lin-lease supply to Russia.

But what I also wanted to do was say it was so different.

There were these huge tank wars at Kursk and it had nothing to do with what it would be like in a B-17 with strategic bombing that killed 80,000 British and American flyers and that had nothing to do with the U-boat that killed 40,000 Germans or the surface clashes like the Bismarck or the great air wars at Midway or Coral Sea, or the jungle fighting in Burma, or the traditional infantry slogs that you saw in Western Europe in 1944, or the invasions of Sicily.

So there were so many different types of fighting that it was hard to think of that this, it wasn't quite what we saw in Iraq.

There were air and naval, but There was really no naval war in Afghanistan.

There's a landlocked country.

There was supply, you know, supply ships coming off carriers, supply planes.

There was no real naval war in first or second Gulf Wars, except for some sorties.

But this thing, this thing, this World War I, had every imaginable weapon and theater of operations, as well as these micro-wars that became aggregated into one.

Right.

Victor, the book is, look, we're not here to sell books, but we're going to, I'm going to try anyway.

The book is a bestseller.

I assume 85,000, 90,000 copies have sold since it was published.

It is a big,

meaty book.

And the last thing I'll say about it for our listeners who have not gotten it and who are history, military history buffs, it's broken down, as you were saying, basically into these kind of concepts, air, water, earth, fire, people.

And then you also have ideas and

how it concluded.

So this is the Second World Wars, how the first global conflict was fought and won.

I want to talk about the war between Russia and Finland, one of these wars, but it struck me of the wars, what would you say was the first one?

Well, the war started, the European war, when Germany on September 1st and 2nd invaded Poland, and then it was joined under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact by the Soviet Union dividing Poland in two and invading from the east.

That triggered that was over with.

I mean, the French made a half-hearted effort to go into the Saarland, but that was over by October 1st.

And there were people, believe it or not, who said, you know what?

The Maginot Line and the mighty French army that never broke at Verdun is going to stop the Germans.

And had the French invaded Germany from the west, they might have been very successful had they wanted to fight because Germany was very

vulnerable.

And they lost about 25,000 dead.

and then in the following spring they went into Scandinavia in the Norway campaign in April and then they invaded the so-called Low Countries by going around remember the Maginot Line through the Ardennes and they took Luxembourg and the Netherlands and Belgium and then that terrible fall of France and that was basically from May 10th to 46 days into the middle of June, however you want to have design the last day.

And nobody thought that this army of 3 million people that had the Shah tank that was better than the German Mark III and even probably comparable to the new Mark IV, the Dwight fighter plane was at least as good as the Bf-109,

and the whole thing collapsed.

We can talk about that, but it had some

authorite command.

And then that was over, Jack.

So people thought he's got all of Northern Europe, Western Europe, and he's got a peace treaty with Russia, and the United States is not going in, and Japan has got its hands full with China, and he's won.

And people were in Germany.

If you look at contemporary documents, they were saying there was a blitz that started then immediately in July and August.

But by February of 1941, it was unsuccessful.

And then the British continued to fight in North Africa because the Italians could not sustain

the British Eighth Army.

And then things started to get a little messy because the Yugoslavian government rebelled.

Greece was felt to be a problem if you were going to invade the Soviet Union.

So in April and May,

right before the invasion of the Soviet Union, March, April, and May, the Wehrmacht went into Yugoslavia and then they bailed out the Italians that were stuck in Albania and they defeated Greece and they took Crete.

This has some importance because when they went into Russia a month later, whether or not that was delayed because of the weather, they were short about 100,000 cracked troops and about 2,000 to 3,000 fighter planes and 1,000 transport planes.

It would have been very handy.

And they were short about 500 tanks.

They had a huge army.

but they had taken considerable losses to the British in the Battle of Crete, in the Battle of Greece, and in the fall of France, as well as to the French.

Victor, you indulge my lameness here.

Japan's invasion of China, Italy's invasion of war with Ethiopia, and even the Spanish Civil War, which we know was a training ground for Russia, Germany, and Italy all involved in that.

Would you not consider them wars that are part of the broader plural concept?

Well, they were preliminaries.

And they were, people say, take the Spanish Civil War, 36 to 39.

That was a showcase of whether, you know, Blitzkrieg or armored warfare or strategic bombing.

And Italy and Germany were ahead of the Western people because they survived the depression better and they were armed.

And the Western powers did not intervene on behalf of the loyalists, probably because they were communists, a a lot of them.

The Soviet Union did.

And the case of Somalia and East Africa, Mussolini, that was ironic because any time the British, who had the largest fleet in the world until 1943, when the Americans surpassed them, could have shut down the Suez Canal.

And for all Mussolini's braggadaccio about his new six battleships, he would have been in trouble.

He could have never supplied Italian troops there.

That was the only victory Italy ever won in World War II.

Rub it in.

And yeah, and it was very brief, and they expelled the British from East Africa.

Right.

And

so these wars were fought, but I don't, and then China, Japan, of course, the Manchurian War, and along the Mongolian border, that was important because right before the invasion of Poland, Marshal Zhukov was fighting the Japanese

and along that border, and he was more or less successful.

Japan, remember, had westernized that right before the Russo-Japanese War of 195 and 1996, and so they had parity in aircraft and naval forces with the West.

What I mean by that is the Zero Fighter or the Akagi or the Kaga aircraft carrier were comparable to the best of what, but they were way behind in terms of artillery, personal arms, machine guns, and armor especially.

And that really proved true when they fought the Soviets.

And that was very important because quickly that was settled before the Polish war began.

And then it would come back to haunt Germany and Japan because there were people who suggested that when Hitler got in trouble, not that he wanted the Japanese to help him, but when he got in trouble in December of 1941, there was an enormous effort to get the Japanese, who had not attacked in Pearl Harbor yet, first, second, third, fourth of December, and even in November, to invade Russia from the east.

And had they done that and just inherited

the orphaned European colonies and maybe attacked Britain, that is, they took Singapore, they took the Dutch East Indies for oil, they got British rubber in Malaysia, they got, and they did go into French Indochina and got the rice basket of Asia.

But had they just done that and not attacked Pearl Harbor, but invaded the Soviet Union from the east, then Stalin would not have transferred 20 divisions to defend Moscow and Trans-Siberian Railroad.

He would have had a two-front war.

But they didn't do that for two reasons.

Hitler did not want them originally because he said, we're going to do the work and they're going to clean the carcass and we don't want to share the spoils.

That was quickly dropped and he would change his mind in December, as I said.

But more importantly, the Japanese Navy had said to the Army, you did not do well

in 1939 and don't go back there again.

And it's the Navy's turn.

And so there was an inner rivalry between branches of the Japanese military.

Well, Victor, fascinating to me, and I assume many others, is the Winter War between Finland and the Soviet Union.

Finland didn't exist as a country until 1917.

It had been part of Sweden, lost in the early 1800s to Russia.

in a war, the Finnish war.

It becomes a duchy or a duchy, however, it depends on if you're from Bronx or Brooklyn.

But it's a Russian autonomous zone that eventually Nicholas II tried to rucify, but could not.

And then he got bumped off and Lenin takes over.

And Lenin was a tool of the Germans.

World War I is still in full bloom.

And the Germans pressure Lenin to recognize the Finns who now claim independence as a nation.

And so here is Finland now, it's a nation.

There was a civil war there there of whites versus red, and the whites won.

The whites were led by the famous General Gustav Mannerheim, who 20 years later was still the most important figure in Finland.

But 20 years later, Finland is a nation that borders Russia's northwest.

And it has three to three and a half million people.

Russia has 168 million people.

The size of the army, the amount of tanks, airplanes, it is comically out of whack what the firepower and manpower that Russia has compared to Finland.

Russia seeks Finnish territory under the guise of needing security.

Finland rejects the claims.

Russia attacks.

And what should have been another lopsided quick war did not happen.

So I'm curious your analysis of this war

and

what, I don't know if we're allowed to talk about people as people, but is there anything that you might say about the Finns as a fighting people, if that can be said?

Well, there was a lot of terrible miscalculations on the part of Stalin and the Russians.

And the war posed a lot of paradoxes for the Allies and Hitler as well.

But you start off with the idea that Finland had been part of Imperial Russia.

And then when the revolution ended and World War I was ended, as you said, Russia lost its control of a lot of Finland.

And the communists were in no position to complain.

But in 1939, they were because they had a non-aggression pact with Germany, who was close with its Scandinavian

allies.

And

more importantly, they felt they had been cheated out of Finnish territory.

And now, because America was isolationist and Britain was soon to be facing a blitz and Hitler occupied by November 30th when the so-called war started.

He had already occupied and they had divided up together.

So you add all that up and Stalin said, we can get back this that the revolution lost and Hitler won't do anything because we helped him in Poland and we're now de facto allies and the Europeans never helped Poland so they're not going to get involved.

They're scared of Hitler.

So now is the time to go in.

But the problem with all this was that Stalin had a lot of problems, but the the biggest was that he had liquidated his officer corps in 36, 37, 39.

So he had non-entities.

They had a lot of bright ideas about training, but they did not have these weapons in full development, the T-34 tank, these 155 caliber guns, Katushka, all that is in the design stage.

And they're facing some guy called Mannerheim, you've talked about him, Carl Manorheim, who was an absolute genius.

And more importantly, had been an officer.

I think because

in the Russian Imperial Army, he knew how Russians fought, he knew Russian fluently and he was willing to fight and he understood that this would have complications for Stalin because he was backed by Germany and he was backed by Britain and the United States, at least informally, because everybody wanted to stand up.

to the Soviet Union.

And Hitler understood that, and yet Hitler didn't want to offend Stalin yet.

So it was very hard to see who was supplying whom.

But then basically, from the end of November all the way into March of the next year, Stalin threw almost a million men into this very cold, wintery climate.

And they were traditional Russian troops.

Not that they weren't winterized, but they weren't winterized like the Finns were, who were on skis.

They were defending their territory, not attacking.

And when it was all over, they lost about 25,000 dead.

I think the Soviets lost about 170,000.

And that was very important because Stalin was forced then to concede and have a truce and take a small sliver of Finland.

But it made a profound impression on Hitler.

And he said to himself, when we had this idea to divide Poland, I got to my embarkation point quickly.

And then I went through where I was supposed to meet.

the Soviets more quickly than the Soviets did.

They didn't do well in Poland.

They liquidated their office corps.

And now look what they've done in Finland.

They could scarcely beat the Finns.

And

everybody thought, well, the Finns are Scandinavian.

Sweden is Norway.

Denmark will be shortly overrun.

And

Norway was going to be emasculated.

But the Finns were not quite like the rest of the Scandinavians.

They were far more martial.

They had a brilliant commander in Mannerheim.

The guy lived, I mean, he was just indestructible.

He lived into his 80s.

And so that gave, I think, Stalin an unrealistic idea of how easy easy it would be.

And once that he was rebuked, that was a very important event because Hitler, when his generals said, do not go into Russia.

Some of them did.

I know a lot of them lied later and they didn't.

But a lot of them did.

And they said, why would you go in when they're supplying us oil and grain and et cetera, et cetera?

And Hitler said, look, they can't fight in Finland.

They killed their officer corps.

They didn't fight well.

It's going to be a...

rollover.

So it had a lot of repercussions strategically for misreading history, as I should say.

But courageous.

And then when the war actually started, Mannerheim was very brilliant.

So when they, he was in charge of meeting the invading German army around St.

Petersburg, Leningrad.

But he was very careful what he did.

He said, we're only going to fight and occupy Finnish territory and help them.

take Leningrad.

And as the Germans did very well in the first, they got there within six weeks and they encircled the city.

But had the Finnish been more offensive-minded, they might have helped Germany take it, but they were very careful.

And so while they had a half a million man army that was superb and protected the shoulder of the German army, they never actually went that far into Russian territory.

So when Germany collapsed, Mannerheim was able to say to the Soviets, look, When you guys were down, we didn't take advantage of you.

Our point is that you invaded us and you occupied our territory.

Now, we're willing to make territorial concessions given our disputed history, but if you want to come in, even with your enormous power, we're going to do what we did in 39.

Or if you give us our autonomy with some territorial concessions, we will be neutral in any disagreements that you have.

So, that was the deal that countries like

we can use the word Finlandization today, but they were not to be a member of NATO, like Austria was not to be a member of NATO.

And they survived as an independent country.

Well,

almost strategic brilliance and diplomatic, military, et cetera.

I mean, it didn't end up being Bulgaria, right?

But Victor on the Russians' weakness in Finland,

bouncing that off of the Russians' ability to easily handle the Japanese action.

in eastern Russia.

Is the difference of doing well in one place and poorly in all about General Zhukov or were there other factors?

The main difference was that the

Japanese army was suffering from a victory disease in the 30s, and that is it was unleashed against Asian countries that were not fully equipped.

I can use that Chaldeanistic term, westernize.

And by that, I mean coordinated artillery attacks, close ground support.

And the Japanese were.

They had sent military advisors to learn from the German army, the French army.

But the problem was that as an island country, all island countries, Britain was no exception, they specialize in air power and sea power.

Not that they're not good on the land, but Japan was never able to fight a sustained war on the ground in China and win.

I mean, they take over the whole country.

They were good in island fighting on the defensive.

But what I'm getting at is they were not comparable to a Western army very quickly at the maybe, but if you look at tanks and artillery and ground support, it just wasn't there.

That is in contrast to the Navy.

When the war started, Japan, at least in the Pacific theater, outnumbered the American fleet at Pearl Harbor.

And was, you could make the argument was quantitatively better.

By that, I mean the Aviator Corps was better.

Their ships were better.

Their ships were newer.

The United States fleet was larger, but it was divided between Europe and the Pacific.

So in the Japanese way of thinking, when they looked at their fighter craft and some of their dive bombers, they said, we have parity or even superiority.

And so if we attack Pearl Harbor and we get in a war at sea and in the naval warfare, but we don't get into a ground war, we're going to do really well.

We do not want to get tied down again with the Russians.

And we don't want to get tied down any more than we have to in China.

Would you say an exception to that is Singapore as a ground war battle?

I don't know if that's a fair comparison, but Japanese army versus British Army.

That was a very strange campaign because it was an amphibious campaign.

Remember, Singapore was this island city-state, and it was superbly protected with naval guns, permanent emplacements, but they were pointing out to sea.

And they had the visiting Task Force X that was supposed to have a carrier but it only ended up with the Prince of Wales and the Repulse but those were the two of the most powerful British ships in the world and they had hurricane fighters that were placed there and these fighters had done very well in the Battle of Britain so the British idea was that we are protected but nobody in their right mind thought that the Japanese after they took Southeast Asia would have a huge air force

and they would have carrier craft, but mostly they were land-based craft from Southeast Asia.

But more importantly, the British did this because they didn't think anybody could go through the Malaysian jungle and attack Singapore from the rear.

And the Japanese had practiced these types of tactics in jungle conditions, even though when they came out of the jungle and approached Singapore, they had about parity.

There was only about 75,000 battle-ready troops left, and they were out of food and everything.

But the British had no mechanisms to turn their permanent placements and pound them successfully.

They panicked, they repulsed, and Prince of Wales, these marquee ships, were sunk by Zeros and Tonys and other Japanese aircraft and they were demoralized and they surrendered, which Churchill said was the worst day in British history, right up to Tobrook later on.

But that was kind of, I don't want to say amphibious, but that was not a grind-em-down western open terrain.

It was infiltration through the jungle.

They used bicycles a lot on jungle paths and then an advance expeditionary force.

The Japanese just did not want to fight in situations in which the army was on its own against a western army.

And they had learned that even in places like the closest they got was the Philippines.

And in every one of these scenarios, their strategy was to be on the defensive, dig in, never surrender, and cause a degree of Western casualties and fatalities that they won't endure.

In other words, if we can lose, kill one of them for every eight of us, then they will stop at some point everywhere from Tarawa, Ibojima, Okinawa, the Philippines, Guatemal.

And they didn't realize that actually

somebody from Bakersfield, California, or Dayton, Ohio, if he was in the U.S.

Marine First Division, as we know from the memoirs of E.B.

Sledge, you could train a person from from a pacifist tradition and you could equip them in such a way, even in as early as 1942, where they could go one-on-one with hardened Japanese soldiers that had been fighting in China in some cases, at least the officer corps, and beat them.

And we did in Guadalcanal, even though we were, we had five naval battles, and I think we lost two of them.

The end of mid to late 1942, we only really had one operational carrier in the Pacific.

They arrested either, you know, Lexington was sunk, the Yorktown was sunk, Saratoga was torpedoed, the Enterprise had been attacked, and the Wasp was sunk, the Hornet was sunk, and then the Japanese were starting to get encouraged, and they, and then thanks to a guy named Carl Vinson in the Naval Acts, we immediately put in 17 Essex carriers, each of them better than either the American or the Japanese existing fleet.

We put in eight battleships.

Victor, you write about this, I think, brilliantly in the book, The Second World Wars, in the naval section, which is called Water.

I thank you for indulging my desire to talk about the Winter War and I think one of the more

interesting wars in history of mismatch with an unexpected outcome.

Victor, that's about all the time we have today for this episode of the Victor Davis-Hanson Show, The Classicist.

We're going to be back next week with more more episodes of The Classicist, The Traditionalist.

Those are two of the versions of the show that I do.

Sammy Wink, the great Sammy Wink, does the culturalist with you.

We encourage our listeners to follow them all.

And if you are listening to this podcast on iTunes, go to Stitcher, Google Play, et cetera, whatever floats your boat.

God bless.

Please subscribe.

If you're on iTunes, though, we kind of recommend you please consider giving a review, hopefully five-star review for Victor's brilliance and leave a comment if you wish.

Maybe stick a question in there if you feel like it.

We read the comments and if we can glean questions, we'll try to ask them.

Again, the title of the book is The Second World Wars.

You can find it on Amazon.

A great book, great gift to someone in your life who likes military history.

Victor, thank you very much for the wisdom you shared today.

And we'll be back soon again with another episode of the Victor Davis Hanson Show, The Classicist.

Thank you very much.

Thank you, everybody, for listening again.