The Classicist: Memories for Memorial Day

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This is the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

Hello, ladies and gentlemen.

This is the classicist.

The namesake of this podcast is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution.

Victor is also the Wayne and Marsha Busk Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

Victor Davis Hansen is a best-selling author.

I hope folks have purchased and have read his tremendous World War II history called The Second World Wars.

Victor also has a forthcoming book that many of us are really, really looking forward to.

It's called The Dying Citizen.

It will be out this October.

How can you pre-order it?

Go to victorhanson.com.

That's Victor's website known as Private Papers.

You'll see a link,

the Amazon link for the book there.

Also on Private Papers, you'll see a lot of original writing from Victor, and that's basically what we're going to talk about today on the classicist, some of those pieces he's written there.

Victor is a farmer, a classicist, military historian.

He's an essayist at American Greatness.

On Facebook, you can find his page.

You can find a Victor Davis Hanson Fan Club.

But I'd like to recommend VDH's Morning Cup.

Put it in the search function.

You'll find it.

And if you're on Twitter, follow Victor at V D Hansen.

at V D Hansen.

So Victor, I'm Jack Fowler, by the way.

I am the former publisher of National Review.

And I think this week I start my new position, and I'm a senior philanthropy consultant at American Philanthropic.

But Victor, we're going to talk about some of the pieces you've written on

private papers.

And there's a three-part series on the firebombing of Japan.

You've also written some beautiful pieces.

on your growing up on the farm, in particular, your, let's call it, interconnectedness with

God's creatures who surrounded and lived on and above the farm.

I'd also like to talk since we've just passed Memorial Day about a couple of war movies and also, Victor,

your experience, if I may call it that, at the American

Battlefields and Monuments Commission, if you might give us

a little discussion about what that institution does.

So, Victor, we'll talk a little bit about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but the firebombing of Japan that you focus on is a specific event, and it happened on March 9th, 1945.

Curtis LeMay, the great general who you have praised

on our podcast, you've written about him at length in, I think, in the Savior Generals.

He ordered 334 B-29 heavy bombers loaded with over 2,000 tons of napalm bombs to hit carpet bomb, so to say, at

low height, Tokyo, a very wooden city.

It was a catastrophic event, Victor, as you know, and you've written about

between 80,000 to 120,000 people are believed to have died in that attack.

This is not Hiroshima.

That came afterwards, and Nagasaki came afterwards.

So this event in itself,

coupled with the others, though, have led for two generations, or maybe we're even into a third generation, of ethicists and other critics of America to criticize what happened on that day.

What are they talking about?

What are the main contentions, the critiques of what happened this day?

It was the sheer loss of life, that most of the dead were civilians, that this was an area bombing, it wasn't precision bombing, that it was one-sided, you know, it was poor Japanese, you know,

they couldn't put up much a fight against this onslaught of bombers.

There's a claim that in this area of Tokyo, there were no significant military targets.

And then this kind of 2020 hindsight view, which I think is truly bogus, but well the war was ending anyway soon.

We know that now.

I don't think we knew that then.

Why kill all these civilians at this point when World War II or the war in the Far East was going to end?

So, Victor, these are the claims that have been repeated over, they're taught in schools.

How many millions of hours have been spent discussing this?

But you take this on.

If you want to contend with any, as I explained, the events, please do.

But talk about

the validity or the the invalidity, Victor, of this really

important

and truly catastrophic, but important event during World War II.

Well, I mean, we start with

the facts that the March 9th and it extended into the early hours of March 10th fire raid by this huge fleet.

I think actually 290 or so, 280 had bombs, and then there were these other pathfinders that made up the,

that dropped incendiary marks where to follow them but that was the most lethal attack i think in the history of warfare i think the official death toll of 100 125 was probably less than the actual number which could have been much much greater but it burned out about 11 acres of downtown japan which had been pretty pristine and It used to be that when we talked about amorality in the West in World War II, people focused on the British bombing and the American American bombing the next day at Dresden and to a lesser extent Hamburg.

And it was considered not necessary and we suddenly decided Bomber Harris was a war criminal, etc., etc.

But recently, I think part of the woke decade, we've gone over now to the Japanese bombing and

entered another criterion that unlike the Germans, this was a a different people racially and that therefore white America hated the Japanese in a way that they didn't even hate the Germans.

So, while they burned American bombers, dropped incendiaries on Dresden, they really dropped them on Tokyo.

And therefore, it was a war crime or it was unnecessary, etc.

So,

and these three essays that are on the website, victorhanson.com, I just tried to go over the traditional criteria, how you judge that, and let the reader judge for himself.

But

the Japanese army military in World War II killed more people versus the number it lost that death ratio than any other military, including the German Army.

By that I mean of the 65 to 70 million people, about 80% of those that were killed in World War II, of that large finger, about 85%

were out of uniform and they were killed.

And the vast majority were killed by German and Japanese soldiers.

But Japan in particular, largely because of its 15 million plus civilians that it butchered in China and the five to seven million Asians that it killed, the 500,000 Allied troops that it killed or they executed or were lost in experiments or prisoner of war camps versus the 3 million that it was lost.

And that is lost sight of.

And what that meant was, Jack, in that last year of war, the worst month of U.S.

casualties was April 1945, not 1942, 43, 44.

And people after the Okinawa disaster, they said, you know what?

We've got to continue this bombing that started a month earlier.

And we've got to, they didn't know if the bomb would work.

A lot of people didn't know about it.

And so there was a sense that you can't invade the Japanese mainland because it'll be a bloodbath.

The second thing is there was no way that you were going to avoid that

campaign except with a B-29, this new experimental bomber that had been rushed into production.

Huge bomber, much, much bigger, a third as much larger as a B-17.

This was the real fortress, not the flying fortress.

We were told the

super fortress.

It could fly at 240 miles an hour.

It could go up to 30,000 feet with its crew of 11.

The

50 caliber machine guns, and in some cases, the 20 millimeter cannon, they could be synchronized by a central fire control

gunner.

It was a computerized system.

It was pressurized.

It had an enormous 3,200 mile range.

So all you had to do was find an island somewhere 1,600 miles from Tokyo.

And they found that in the Mariana Islands, Tinyan Guam, and Saipan.

Okay, so they brought this bomber there.

And immediately they discovered certain things that when it had been based in China and India, it gulped so much fuel that you could only really deliver it, not by air or by dangerous land como, by sea.

So you had to have these huge 7,000-foot runways.

The second thing they noticed was

the air over Japan

was turbulent because of the jet stream and it could go from anywhere from 60 miles to 200 miles an hour at certain elevations.

And the Norden bomb site was not as accurate as people had said.

The improved Norden bombsite was not accurate.

And then they discovered that while in theory you could put in 10 tons of explosives, but when you tried to go up to 30,000 feet, the engines overheated.

And then they discovered that when you're flying largely at night, 1,600 miles one way over the empty ocean, you only have about 20 minutes of airtime.

So if you're going to a traditional bomb run and you get a cloud at target, you know, you have to make that huge loop and go back again.

And B-29s were running out of gas, at least until they got Iwo Jima.

And so the whole multi-billion, and this was a $2 billion project, twice the cost of the Manhattan, it was a mess.

And they were bombing off target.

They were losing planes at a rate at that point of about 2%.

And you do

35 required missions and 70% of your planes are gone.

So they brought in a 38-year-old, what they thought was a maverick.

He was a brilliant critis LeMay.

He had revolutionized fighter tactics.

He was personally courageous.

He flown on some of the most dangerous B-17 and they sacked a very moral

General Hansel who wanted to use the B-29 the way it was intended.

And LeMay said, you know, you're not getting any results.

And within a month or two, he said, I have a new idea.

We're going to make this thing into a huge dive bomber.

So we're going to go in low at 5,000 or 6,000 feet.

We're going to go in at night.

We're going to lighten the plane from some of its defensive armament.

We're going to load up to 20,000

pounds, 10 full tons of incendiaries.

And we're not going to Napalm and we're new Harvard University joint project, I think, with DuPont.

And we're going to go in low, and we're going to save the engines.

You don't have to climb.

We'll get more power.

And then, once we get on the jet stream, it will not be the enemy.

It'll be the ally because we'll drop these bombs and we'll get a rush.

We'll be going so fast at 300 miles an hour.

They won't see us.

We'll be below the arc of the flak guns.

Once we drop them, it doesn't matter if we're on target or not, and the wind will fan the flames.

And they said, this will be morally justified for the following reasons.

Number one, the Japanese are killing 10,000 people a day and nobody can stop them in China and Asia and the Pacific.

This is the only way you can stop this.

Number two, they have decentralized fear of precision bombing.

They decentralize much of their productive capacity into family-orientated, neighbor-oriented.

centers of production in municipal areas, sort of like what Hezbollah has done in Beirut.

In other words, a propeller would be delivered from a house or a group of houses to a central assembly plant, but it would be very hard for the Americans to fight all of those individuals, fight against all the bomb and destroy those individual targets.

And then they were going to drop leaflets, and they did.

But I'm not sure how moral or ethical that was.

And you get a leaflet and says, you've got to go up in the mountains for the next three months because we're going to destroy all your cities.

I don't know what you do when the Japanese authorities won't let you.

But nevertheless, that was the argument.

And so they did it.

And the first raid was on March 9th, and it shocked everybody.

The planes came in fast, they came in low, the casualties went down, they had enough fuel to get back, there was less loss for equipment damage, the engines didn't overheat, and

the results were devastating.

They destroyed half of the industrial potential of the Japanese corridor centered in Tokyo.

And then from March 9th all through the rest of the month and in April and in May and in June, they destroyed about 75%

of the Japanese industrial potential.

And then they turned the B-29s loose on mining harbors, etc.

And so

the May said,

We don't need the atomic bomb once it was dropped.

We were destroying cities.

And the irony is in this terrible calculus of war, one thing that Hiroshima did, killing 85,000 people at Nagasaki 60 it stopped the fire raids because remember the war was over in Europe on March excuse me May 9th and 10th

and we had about 8,000 B-24s and B-17s and the British had about three or four thousand heavy landcasters that had a bomb load almost like a b-29.

I don't even mention the B-25 and B-26 middle bombers and there were plans to bring a lot of those bombers over to Okinawa, which was only 350 miles.

And we were in the process of building these huge air bases.

So you can imagine had we not dropped the bomb in August, we would have probably been bombing from the Marianas as we were, but there wasn't much targets left, but still napalming small cities.

And then we would be conventionally and napalming two or three missions a day with a force from Okinawa that was two to three times larger than the B-29 force.

And we were bringing in another 1500 to 2 000 b-29s off the production line so that's what we were doing and we did it because that generation said we're not going to go through an iwo jima anymore we're not going to go into okinawa and lose 50 000 casualties and we're not going to invade japan we're going to plan to invade japan but we're going to either make it impossible for the japanese to resist uh either with firebombing or then later the atomic bombs and in the process we're going to shorten this war and we're going to stop this

killing machine called the Japanese Imperial Military.

Well, Victor, what was it about

the Japanese military or maybe influenced by Japanese culture?

I'm not sure.

But

why the bloodlust?

Why the 10,000 civilian deaths a day?

What was it about the Japanese military that made that part of their

standard operating procedure?

Well,

it was similar to the Nazis, how they differed from Imperial Germany.

I mean, that had been a militaristic society, as Japan and the samurai culture as well.

But just as the Nazis were able to capitalize on historical developments and manipulate them and propagandize them, so did the Japanese military.

And after the failure in the 1920s of constitutional government, a myth arose, partly based on some factual basis, some reality.

They said that we lent our navy and we joined the Allies in World War I, and then we were shut out

of the spoils of World War I.

We didn't get any colonies, we got nothing.

And then we were said to be backward, but we beat the Russians in 1905 and six, and we sent a quarter million of our best students to France and Britain and Germany and learned artillery and armor and infantry tactics.

But most importantly,

we lent Japanese craftsmanship to these Western nautical design schools and we created a bigger navy and a more sophisticated navy than a lot of European powers.

And then we

told

our Asian neighbors that they had been victims of European, French, Dutch, and English colonialism, and we were going to liberate them.

And they had a racial component.

And they said, and we are racially superior, not just to other Asians, but to Occidentals, as they use that term as well.

And that was a powerful narcotic for people

in the middle 1930s.

They bumped into the Russians, of course, in 1939, and it didn't work well

along the Mongolian border.

But in China, they used that racial superiority argument and the idea they were liberating the Chinese from the

nefarious fumes of colonialism.

And they had superior technology because they were superior people.

And then they thrived on the appeasement and the isolation of Europe and the United States.

And so what the result of all that is they got an inflated ability

of their war potential.

And what they didn't realize is that had they just left America alone and not gone into Pearl Harbor and not gone into Singapore,

Hitler had already given them basically the entire Pacific Dutch and French colonial system.

In other words, they'd already occupied Southeast Asia from France, the Vichy French,

irrelevant.

And the Dutch East Indies and the Shell oil fields were all there for them to take on impeded.

And there was nobody who was going to do anything about it.

The United States wasn't going to do anything.

and the British weren't going to do anything.

And then once they consolidated that empire, they might have gone after Britain while it was tied down in Europe.

But what it did not want to do was attack the United States, because the United States had an industrial potential about 10 times larger than Japan.

And when you combine the Soviet Union and the British Empire,

Japan realized that it was outnumbered, as was its partner, Germany, by a magnitude of about five to to one in terms of manpower, industrial production, military technology production, etc.

Here's how the collective, we'll call it an essay, even though it's three parts, it's about 2,500 words.

I do recommend it, folks.

Again, it's at victorhanson.com, and here's how it ends.

Victor writes, Japan sowed the winds of war with its atrocities and reaped history's most lethal single-day whirlwind.

But the ferocity of the latter, 76 years later, makes us of a a more affluent, safer, and leisured world wish that somehow we could have been New Testament rather than Old Testament warriors.

But then again, the ghosts of those of Nanking or at Bataan, or who surrendered at Singapore, or of those rounded up in China after the Doolittle raid, or of the South Korean comfort women, or of the quarter million subject to Japanese military crewed lab experiments, or of the survivors of the Manila, Borneo, and Malay massacres might well beg to differ.

So, anyway, Victor, this is a wonderful piece.

I'm so glad you wrote it.

Folks who dig military history, military ethics, it's well worth your reading and contemplating.

Victor, while we're in a military mindset today, again, we're recording this right before Memorial Day, which I know is something you take

quite seriously.

Would you talk a little bit about

one of your former roles?

You were, I'll call it a commissioner, I assume it's commission, for the American Battlefield and Monument Commission, which

oversees and administers across around the world, I think the Philippines and across any number of countries in Europe, even in Mexico, the Mexican War,

the graves and monuments of America's war dead who are buried overseas.

Victor, you were on that commission.

Would you talk a little bit about it?

And if there actually was any, I assume you've seen any number of them.

I know there are dozens of

these

cemeteries and final resting places, but if there was any one of them that maybe particularly struck you as sacred.

Yeah, the American Battle Monuments Commission was formed right after World War I to deal with a new event in American history.

That is 117,000 people were killed 3,500 miles away

and there was a question arose most of them were interred very quickly because of the

exigencies of war and they didn't know what to do when the war ended and about half of

the families of the dead asked that the remains be shipped home but the other half felt that somehow it might be a better commemoration of their family members sacrifice that they be buried And with typical American precision, technology, organization, and morality, Pershing appointed this commission.

And what happened was that we planned these very beautiful cemeteries.

And if anybody's interested, there's a wonderful book on the commission by Tom Thomas Connor, a Hillsdale Endowed Military History Professor that discusses the commission.

And

you should all look at it.

But the idea was that we were going to honor the dead and remind everybody what had happened in World War I.

And so we had these wonderful cemeteries, and they're mostly, at least until 1941, they were mostly in Belgium and France, obviously.

And then when World War II broke out,

the same problem happened, but at a magnitude of four times larger.

And so when that war was over,

by this time, the commission had been well established and there were local groups, believe it or not, in World War I that they would raise, when veterans came home in the 1920s or 30s, they said, you know what, we didn't get adequate recognition for our performance at Bella Wood or at

the Ardennes.

And so they would make their own monument.

there and kind of endow a church or a statue.

And so what happened, the ABM then, these groups died off, the people, the veterans died, sometimes they were not funded, and they had to make decisions about whether to incorporate these monuments, hence the name monuments as well.

And in World War II, about half of the people who fell overseas were buried in these cemeteries.

And they have very strict rules about the type of grass, the carai, Italian marble, white marble that's used, the exact dimensions.

They hire families, to give one example,

at the Normandy battlefield or the battlefield at Ham Cemetery that Patton's buried at, they hire families over generations that are very loyal to the United States.

And so a commission member, then it's a presidential appointee,

they are responsible for adjudicating the issues that come up about

these cemeteries.

And they can be from

the practical about, you know, there's flooding or the water table is rising or the one in Tunisia doesn't have enough water or or we're having political protest

or they can be existential philosophical.

People can say, you know, war is bad, so a European group wants to partner with us.

And so out in front of the Normandy cemetery, they want to have a peace pavilion, i.e.

they want to they want to get a lot of the attention that otherwise the cemetery does, but for different reasons.

Not so much about the tragedy of war and the sacrifice to keep us free, but about the futility of ever fighting at all.

And so there was a lot of controversies on that.

One of the largest, after the movie Saving Private Ryan, it turns out that about 65 or 70% at the time I was on the commission of all of the attendants to all of the cemeteries, and they range from Tunisia to the Mexican War Cemetery in Mexico City to Punch Bowl, Hawaii, to the Philippines.

They're all over the world.

But most people, because of the movie and the accessibility, go to the Normandy Cemetery and right above the beaches of Normandy for its, you know, its commemorative residence with people.

So

there were ways to try to encourage people to go to the other equally impressive, I don't know if that's the right words, but

solemn occasion.

They're very beautiful places.

They are.

And

so that's what the commission does.

They tend to be political, although the Bush administration that appointed me, when I was on the commission, there were people that were apolitical.

I thought I was, at least in this capacity.

But when the Obama administration came in after the election of 2008, within weeks, maybe even days, we got a letter, at least I did.

I think most members of the commission said that you would be,

you know, you're resigning, you have to leave the commission, your tenure is now over, and you have to surrender your passport.

They gave each of us a passport if you wanted to visit and inspect all of the battlefields.

I did inspect about 12 of them, but I tried not to ever bill the government for it.

I always say if I was in Europe or North Africa, I will go and look at a particular

and talk to the people who were running it or the superintendent and see if there were any questions or anything that would be brought to their attention.

But again, if people are interested, there's a fascinating book by Thomas Connor about the history of of the American Battlefield Monuments Commission.

Well, thanks for that, Victor.

Now, I'm quite the fan of old movies, as are you.

I really must tip my hat every year to Turner Classic Movies, which does dedicate Memorial Day weekend to war movies.

You know, there are war movies that are truly touching about war.

There are some kind of goofy.

you know, military-related movies, not that they're bad movies, but Kelly's Heroes or No Time for Sergeants is not exactly, you know, a war movie in a class of

the best years of our life.

But I had asked you earlier before the show, I said, Victor noted, I'll tell you this: there were three or four movies that if I saw they were on, I would stop everything, drop everything just to watch them.

And two of them, Victor, one was the

Red Badge of Courage, which is about the Civil War.

It's a very short movie.

I just think it's

a terrific movie.

And The Paths of Glory

about

trial

and

French military trial from World War I.

I also love Battleground and they were expendable, the great Robert Montgomery John Wayne movie.

Victor, the first two, I don't know.

I'm just asking, you can have no opinion.

I wonder if you had any opinion of Paths of Glory or Red Badge of Courage, and if you have any particular military war movie that

really matters to you.

Well, those are excellent movies.

Kurt Douglas

was wonderful in Paths of Glory, and it was a very tragic movie.

It was based on a historical incident, a little bit exaggerated, about the mutinies that followed 1916, 1970 in the French army that was finally worn out until Bataan came in and made necessary

reforms that stopped the,

people were not getting food that was warm or even edible.

They were in the trenches.

The wounded were not being attended to.

They were sent out over the top in funnel attacks.

And finally,

a number of companies just said, and actually, it spread to thousands, we're not going to do this anymore.

We're not going to run into German machine guns.

And then they selectively decided to decimate units.

And I think they ordered 30 or 40 dead, but they commuted those sentences.

But in the movie, three of them are executed, even though they're not culpable for any crime individually.

But it's a commentary on the insanity of the military establishment in times of war.

There's a couple of modern ones that I've really liked that don't get too much attention.

We all like, I think Saving Pride and Ryan was a great movie.

Black Hawk Down was a great modern war movie.

The

Thin Red Line was wonderful, I thought.

It had a lot of great marquee actors in it.

A little bit earlier, I think people liked The Great Escape.

George Patton, the movie Patton was good, although I felt that it was, it shorted really Patton.

And the Carl Malden-Omar Bradley reflected the fact that Bradley was an advisor to the movie.

It sounded like he was the judicious, wise uncle that had to constantly monitor the silly, inane, emotional Patton, when in fact it was Patton who was fluent in French, well-read in languages, studious, careful, concerned about his troops, systematic, and was a much more gifted judge.

You are not the president of the Omar Bradley fan club, I believe.

No, I liked, I mean, I have nothing critical to say of him, but if one were to be disinterested and compare his generalship or his role in World War II compared to that of George S.

Patton, you would come to a conclusion even different than the movie, which is supposedly a tribute to Patton.

But two that I really like, the modern ones, I mean, we can talk about The Last of the Mohicans was a great Michael Mann movie.

Black Out Donald was a great movie.

I thought that was

wonderful.

But there's two that I really like, and one of them is Breaker Morant

about the execution of two Australian soldiers by the British military during the Boer War.

And that's based on a historical incident.

Although Breaker Morant was a little bit more dubious character than, I think it's Edward Winward, who's Woodward.

Woodward.

The equalizer.

Yeah.

Yeah.

The equalizer.

He's a great actor.

He died, but it's a wonderful movie.

And so

I thought that was.

You're right.

That's terrific.

My favorite war movie, and this is Das Boot, the boat.

Oh, yeah.

It's a long two and two hours and 40 minutes in German.

But

Jürgen Procknow, I think, is the captain.

He's a brilliant actor.

And it's, again, about the futality of war.

There are just scenes in that when they break out and they're supposed to die and they're sitting there dying under, they can't submerge, they can't move the submarines, and he's yelled at people before, and all of a sudden, the crew comes together and they save the submarine.

They're going to get back out of the Mediterranean, break out.

And

when

they open the hatch, they just say, Not yet, not yet.

And they escape, they go up the coast of France.

The movie is almost over.

They've survived when almost all the U-boats that have been destroyed, and 75% of them were, remember, 40,000 submariners were killed.

And then they get to their

fortified pens, which were indestructible from area bombing.

But I think they're at Le Have and they go in there and then the Mosquito fighter planes that had rockets and machine guns can go and pull up right before and they machine gun and destroy most of the crew.

So they were home and safe.

But throughout that movie, it was what a tragedy that these heroic men have enlisted in a cause that's evil and beneath them.

And the captain seems to understand that.

So they're very critical of Hitler.

But it would be very hard to know what to do when

you're trapped and to not fight for your country.

You're going to be executed or your family persecuted.

And yet, if you don't fight, you're fighting for somebody who wants to kill you.

Maybe their reasons are better than yours, but that doesn't.

You can't escape the fact that you're trapped in a tragic lose-lose situation.

And that really came through in the movie.

Well, Victor, let's end this edition of The Classicist for the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Again, by returning to your website, VictorHanson.com, private papers, where of late you've begun to write about growing up on your family farm.

I believe you're fifth generation

there,

and particularly the other residents of the farm, not the grapes, not the almonds, the persimmons,

but the animals uh that are there now but that you you experienced knew

dealt with

exterminated and other things uh as a child a couple of i you have a new one it's called child's child's world of animals you talk at you write at length about owls you've written about owls before you also write about opossums.

And I wish you'd talk about

both of them.

But before you do, I think you wrote

a few weeks back that there are some, maybe some birds of a kind that

just live a damn long time and may actually be the same birds that you witnessed and you know dealt with from your from when you were little boy uh hansen is that true or am i am i uh imagining that

sort of

imagining what i meant was that

when I've lived in this house most of my life,

and I can remember stories of people who lived here before me and my family telling me stories.

So what I'm getting at is I know a woodpecker that probably lives three or four years, but the woodpeckers I see out destroying the barn look exactly the same species.

And the bumblebees that are in only one portion of the yard, only one portion, look exactly the same as I remember them 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60.

And when I was a little boy, my grandfather would say, Well, that was where the wisteria is.

Those are the same bumblebees I grew up with.

So you get the impression that these critters or whatever you want to call them have a secret life of their own, that they inhabit your house and grounds and they know exactly where what belongs to them.

And if you think you're going to go out there and say, This is mine, get out of here, you're kind of crazy.

They've been here.

Cohabitants.

Well, talk about your particular experiences, Victor, with owls and a kind of painful, but yeah, kind of painful story about possums.

Yeah, my parents were really good.

I guess they would be called free rangers.

They just turned us loose on 135 acres.

And we had all of these networks of neighbors or hired men that you'd bump into when you were six, seven, and eight.

You know, I'd be running through the vines and Delmas Marshall, a guy from the Oklahoma diaspora, would be out digging.

And he'd say something to me about,

Victor, tonight I'm going to get a pole with a flashlight, and we're going to go up those pecan trees near your grandfather, and we're going to get those damn possums that are eating the chicken eggs.

And then I'd be scared, and I'd look up there.

I said, There's no possums.

Yes, they're up there.

And he would knock one off, and he called it polling possums.

And then they would splat, and it was gross.

And these, these, and then he would have a black sense of humor in the sense of, he's not playing dead, Victor, he's dead.

And it was just a very brutal but honest way of encountering animals.

And one of the things that I really liked were owls.

And we were terrified of these great horned owls.

We have, they're still here, the same family.

But when I was younger, I think I weighed 50 pounds.

And we would, my twin brother and I would ride our bikes all over the ranch with dirt tires.

And these big things would be, they're low hanging.

I mean, they hang out low.

Right.

And by that, I mean three or four feet.

And then they'll swoop along the ground.

And every once in a while, when we come, the one would swoop right by us.

And we remembered the Wizard of Oz, how they picked up

the flying monkeys picked up.

And we thought, oh, my God.

And we would go run, we would turn around and hide.

And then we'd wait till it went back.

We'd run back to my ride back to my parents.

And my dad would say, you know, you're 50 pounds and that damn owl's three pounds.

Figure it out.

But never, you know, they might peck you or be careful about their talons.

And

so I got to really,

I see them every day growing up.

And then we had a, we have a barn still there made out of eucalyptus poles in 1871.

And we had these white barn owls, fleck speckled, and they kind of patrolled the whole area.

And it was the weirdest thing in the world.

They had these talons and they'd stick into the cracks of this old redwood siding and then they'd hang there, not like a bat, but upright, almost like they had

right-angle legs.

They were the exact same color as the whitewash.

And then you'd get up up in the morning, you'd see a squirrel, and then

it disappeared.

And then we would go

look at their feces.

In fact, one of our high school friends later

made a prize-winning science fair project by examining the feces and reconstructing all the skeletons of all the types of animals they ate.

And

she was really one, Joan Otemo.

She did it all over the area.

But the weird, tragic thing is, every once in a while, these very clever, sophisticated owls would stick their talons into much,

and they would get hooked.

And I don't know if the temperature or the moisture expanded the wood or what, but they couldn't get out.

And we would never see this happen.

We could hear it wake up, but we didn't know what it was.

And then, when you would go out there in the morning, way up on the top of the barn, 30 feet above the ground, there'd be this beautiful owl dead and hanging by one talon.

He was, he freed three or four, and he just had one left, and he was worn out and died.

And I think I've buried maybe five, six, or seven of them.

And next, next for the next submission, just as a foretaste, there's another thing that's called the Enchanted Grove.

I wrote it, and this is very interesting, very quickly, but there was no lumber here in the San Joaquin Valley.

You had to go to the Sierra, and everybody was planting vineyards, and they needed stakes,

and they needed poles for their endpost to tie the wire, and they needed trusses for their for their barns.

And the Sierra gigantea, the sequoia gigantea wood would not work, thank God, because they're monumental trees, but they tried it and they split.

And it turns out that they couldn't really grow trees because there was no water here.

It was a desert before the California Water Project.

So they imported the idea of bringing a blue gum eucalyptus species from Australia.

And every farm around here had one to two to three to four acres of eucalyptus.

And these things got enormous.

I'm not talking 40 or 50, but 200 feet, 250 feet.

And

the leaves were full of oil.

So when they fell, they were evergreen, but the leaves would shed, and then that oil would permeate the ground.

And it was a natural herbicide.

So there was not a lot of weeds in there.

And it was pitch black.

And we had a neighbor right on our pole that had inherited one of these.

And you couldn't really take them out because they had enormous roots and you'd only gain two or three acres of farmland.

And when you did take them out,

you couldn't plant anything because the ground had been ruined by the eucalyptus oil over 50 or 60 years.

And then the eucalyptus didn't really work.

You couldn't mill it.

It was crooked, it split,

it was as hard as steel.

So our barn still has its framework made out of eucalyptus in the 1870s.

It's still there.

And it's a wonderful wood, and it's good for firewood.

But my point is that they reverted to nature.

So every little damn coyote who was getting crowded out by a tractor somewhere, or a rare San Joaquin Valley kit fox, or a golden eagle that got lost or came down from the mountains, or

a raccoon pack, or whatever that is, they ended up in those things.

And there were sparrow hawks, there were scoopers hawks, there were red-tailed hawks, there was every type type of sharp-shin hawks.

And it was really a menagerie, but it was scary.

So if you were a little kid, you'd go in there and all of a sudden three coyotes would go right by you.

Or you'd see two foxes.

Or I remember going in there and all of a sudden I heard this little chirp, chirp.

And there's a whole family of weasels of all things.

So the weasel family, we'd always talk about.

And then snakes were, rattlesnakes were wiped out of the valley in the 1870s by farmers.

But there were a lot of snakes in there, garter snakes, golfer snakes, and a few rattlesnakes.

So it was just a weird place for a young kid.

And we were told, don't go in there.

Under no circumstances, go into that dreadful forest.

I don't know if they were kidding us or what, my mom and dad, but one day I got up, looked around.

I was six and years old, seven years old, and I ran three quarters of a mile to the edge of the ranch and I plunged in.

And I went further and further and it was pitch black.

And all of a sudden, I'd see an owl's eye staring at me, or I'd see a coyote yapping, or I would see two foxes carrying their babies coming at me.

And I was, you know, I was a little kid.

And all of a sudden, right in the middle of it, nobody in our family, I guess, had been in the middle of it.

Our neighbors were not on good terms with us at that time.

I heard this yoda dolly, and I thought it was a Swiss yodeler or somebody.

I'd seen, you know, from a Disney movie.

Right.

And I ran it

full blast back home.

And I woke up my parents.

I said, there's monsters in there.

There's ghosts.

There's something in there.

And they just laughed as loud as they could.

They said, the neighbor has a huge turkey farm, Victor.

He doesn't want the ag inspectors to know where it is.

He's had it for years, right in the middle of the enchanted, dangerous grove.

There's as much turkeys, and that's where he farmed them.

It's cool, it's shaded.

And that's what you heard was turkey gobbling.

And then they said, they laughed and said, now don't go in there meaning you want to go explore go ahead it's okay

are they is it grove still there on your property or it is but um

the new owners have been cutting it down i don't know why they're doing that because it's such a monumental i think for firewood but it's only it's gone from five acres down to about an acre and it's been thinned out and in the 1950s we had what we call i guess it's an ethnic slur now so forgive forgive me if I sound politically incorrectly, gypsy camps, people from Eastern Europe who were gypsies.

And when the fair would come, they would participate in, they worked in it.

But they would camp out there because it was cool.

Nobody seemed to own it, they thought, and they would stay there for weeks on end.

And

there were a lot of really later when I left graduate school and finished, I farmed here full-time for five years.

So I looked at at as an adult in my late 20s and i would go in there and to just look at with binoculars and examine all the wildlife and it was pretty amazing and every once in a while i would call uh the county ag commissioner or the national wildlife foundation officer and they'd come in and i'd say i i think there's a there's a real california endangered kit fox there and they would come and take pictures of it or I'd say I think a bald eagle or golden eagle's lost his way.

And I thought they were important.

They had seen things like that before, but a lot of them would say

it's very strange how these

artificially constructed eucalyptus groves are now oasis for wildlife in an area where 99% is either suburban housing or agriculture, and there's nowhere for animals to go.

So they flock to these places as refuges.

Well, that will be, Victor, again, that's on

Victorhanson.com.

This, what we were just talking about, what you're going to file later.

And I recommend folks go deep into

the website.

You'll find other stories from Victor about his life.

And there are things about Eeyore and

the Optimist and the Angry Reader.

And

it's a wonderland of fun.

VictorHanson.com.

Well, Victor, that's all the time we have today.

Thank you so much, Victor.

And we will be back again in a few more days with the next episode of the new Victor Davis Hansen show.

Thank you.

Thank you, Jack, and thank you all for tuning in.

I appreciate it a great deal.

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