Tanks for the Memories

1h 8m

In the weekend edition, VDH and Sami discuss RFK Jr.'s stance on vaccination mandates, more nuttiness from Joy Reid, and developments in Gaza and Venezuela. The professor also offers an in-depth look at the development and employment of armor in World War II, with a particular focus on the Battle of Kursk, the largest tank battle in history.

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Hello and welcome to the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

This is our Saturday edition in which we do something a little bit different in the middle segment and Victor is going to talk today on tanks in World War II.

So stay with us for that.

Before that, we'll look at a few news stories that we've been toying with this week.

JFK Jr.

was in front of the Senate Finance Finance Committee on some of the policies of the Trump administration.

So we'll have a look at that first.

So stay with us and we'll be right back.

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Welcome back to the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

Victor is the Martin and Nealey Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne, and Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

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So Victor, I know you wanted to talk about JFK before the Senate Finance Committee.

Oh sorry, RFK.

Did I say JFK?

RFK and he was talking on vaccinations and I just want to make one note.

There is also

coincidental with this that the Florida Surgeon General is saying that they are going to try to work in Florida to get all vaccinations off the law books so that people are not legally required for those.

There was a big confusion, I think.

RFK Jr.

did not say that he was banning vaccinations.

What he was saying was that the mandates for vaccinations

should not be enforced in all cases.

This got a lot of hysteria because there's an anti-vax movement, for example, on German measles.

But in California, where I am, you have to be vaccinated.

And when people put their children in homeschooling and do not get

vaccinated, then there's measles for the whole population is vulnerable to.

So the issue was this.

The Democrats had two agendas.

90% of them just wanted to embarrass Trump, and most of the questions were interruptions.

The same old thing, you know, you're dangerous, you should quit, you should should be ashamed of you.

Trump, Trump, Trump.

10%

were serious.

And they said,

well, yeah,

you're going to let us get access to vaccinations, but if you don't have mandates, then people,

you know,

won't get vaccinated, a small number, and then they will infect everybody.

And of course, his attitude is

vaccinations are advertised that you will not not infect anybody and you will not get infected.

So if you're a thousand kids going to the local school and there's a hundred homeschoolers say, I'm not going to get vaccinated, they're not going to be able to infect the kids that were vaccinated.

That's his whole point.

And he's saying that when you make everybody get vaccinated, then you can get some type of side effects.

And that was his point, especially as it pertained to the mRNA vaccinations.

I think people realize that there's, I know in my case, I didn't know what I had when I was young.

It was called mastocytosis.

So when I, every time I got a vaccination, everybody said my brothers, everybody thinking it was great.

And I got a severe reaction.

When I went to Greece as a young person for a year, I got all-in-one vaccination.

This is what the county health department said you had to have if you were going to go to the Middle East, which I said I was going to.

Plague,

yellow fever,

typhus,

typhoid, gamma gobulin for hepatitis,

and I had one more, and I had all five of them.

And as soon as I got that inoculation, I was sick for two weeks.

Then I went, and I had to get boosters to go to Egypt in 1974.

I got sick for three weeks.

And then after that, I got a tetanus shot with a live tetanus

in Greece, and I got sick for two weeks.

And then when I came back, I used to get on the farm a cut.

And when you go into the emergency room, they didn't even check.

They would say, oh,

you dropped a pruning shear on your foot.

Oh, you were working and you stepped on a nail.

You got to get a tetanus shot.

And you'd say, oh,

wait a minute.

And so by the time I was 34,

I had about nine tetanus boosters.

They just kept giving them to me at the ER.

So I finally went to a doctor and he said, in Europe we only get one.

You crazy Americans say it's one for every ten years.

And so he said, don't ever get another.

You've had nine of them.

And I got ill, the last one, for almost three months.

I got the Moderna.

First shot, fine.

I thought I'd have no problem.

Next one, sick for two weeks.

And every time I would get a

flu shot,

if I got the senior flu booster, which is five times stronger than the regular one, I would get really ill and I would get the flu.

Finally, I asked a well-known immunologist why that was.

And he said,

they don't like to tell you this, but if you look at most vaccinations,

not all, but most,

when you are inoculated, there is a period in which I know doctors are listening to me and I want to be very careful what I say

that your body has to deal with that artificial intrusion and it sometimes lowers your white blood count.

So what happens is

people who get a flu shot or a COVID shot, they think, well, I'm safe.

I'm going to go to the party tonight.

I'm going to go out.

And that's just the opposite.

attitude.

You need to take 10 days or 2 or 2 weeks to let your body create defenses and let your white blood count come back back up to normal, especially if you're older.

I never understood that until, as I said, an immunologist whom I won't name told me that.

I said, why do I always

get the flu right after I get a flu shot?

And he said, Victor, it's not from the flu shot.

It's because your body is processing that challenge.

And sometimes in some people,

and what he meant was, white blood counts usually go from about four to twelve.

If you're six or seven and it goes down two, you're fine.

But for people that have low normals, and I'm like 3.8 to 4,

it goes down below the normal and then you can get the flu.

But you're a special case.

But there's all sorts of people like that, is what I'm saying.

And what RFK is saying is get the vaccinations.

Fine, we'll make them available.

But let's look at the mandatory.

And I don't know if it was true.

I was watching the news this morning and they said by the time a child is 18, they've had 76 vaccinations on average.

76.

Each one of those represents a challenge to the immune system.

And if you have, you know, a hypersensitive immune system like I did,

you know, but it was very strange because every time I would get a vaccination, my parents would say, I don't know what's wrong with you.

The other two boys are fine.

But I would get a fever and sick for a week, too.

And then finally, when I was 30 years old, the final tetanus booster, I was sick for three months.

So I'm somewhat sympathetic.

I'm not an anti-vaxxer.

He isn't either.

And I think for some childhood vaccinations, they should be mandatory to be in the public schools.

But when they go and, you know, papillomaviruses for young girls, you know, that are like four or five,

they're not going to be exposed to the papillomavirus at four or five.

That is a sexually transmitted virus.

So, why not wait a little bit?

You know what I mean?

And the same thing with shingles.

I get these things on the email.

Did you get your shingle shot?

Did you get your shingles booster?

Did you do that?

I'm not going to get a shingle shot.

I may get shingles, but I know what my immune system would do if I got that shot.

And so I think he's just trying to,

you know, but they didn't, they went in and they, I thought the worst was Senator Lujan.

He kind of did the La Raza thing.

He said, this is my New Mexico accent.

Can you understand it?

And then he kind of gave kind of like a

he turned away and as the thing ended, he insulted him.

You know, you shouldn't.

He didn't look at it.

I thought it was insulting.

I thought Elizabeth Warren was completely out of hand.

And

it's a very complex issue.

I have another friend that I won't mention that every time he gets a booster, it seems like he gets COVID.

And I think that's because for 10 or 12 days it lowers his white blood count, and he's low normal, and he goes out there and he gets it.

So I don't know.

Yeah, I agree with you.

The tenor of

these committee meetings when they're questioning these administration officials tends to be not productive.

And the Republicans do it too.

But there's something about

this generation of left-wing senators.

They are obnoxious.

They are not very bright.

They're pompous.

They're kind of atom shift steroids, all of them.

And they're really repulsive.

And when I watched all that, they would say, just say yes or no, cut them off.

And some of their questions, you couldn't answer yes or no.

You know, like, have you been beating your wife today?

And if you were to say, well, I've never, no, I want to know yes or no.

And that's the kind of stuff they do.

Did you hear that the DOJ is considering banning the purchase of firearms by transgendered people?

And that

they said it's hard to know whether they're suffering from gender dysphoria or they have a true mental illness.

And so the left wants, the left is fighting that.

I don't understand that.

They told us that there was red flag laws for people who were in high propensity categories to commit.

If somebody sounded.

We've had, according to scientific literature, as I've said before, it's about 001%.

I don't know if that's sad.

It's about one or two per 100,000.

But we've had four or five of these mass shootings by transgender people, so they're way over their demographic.

So according to the logic of the left, you would say this particular group has been inordinately committing them.

Okay.

And then when you look at them, and of course the left said, well, it's white white boys, it's not.

I mean, they are about demographically typical.

White boys make up about

30 to 35% of the demographic.

That's about one out of every three

shooter is a white male.

So what I'm getting at is that

if you are going to inject someone with, depending on the type of transition,

estrogen or testosterone, and then they also are on

serotonin inhibitors, uptake inhibitors, and then they're on other drugs as well, you know, anti-inflammatory, whatever, steroids.

You're just making a pot-parie and you're asking for side effects.

And that's all they're saying.

But it's

the left has no consistency on any of this issue other than their little antennas sprout out of their heads and they say, where is Trump?

Wherever Trump is, I'm the opposite.

And that's how you can gauge where Trump is by what they say.

Just do the opposite, and that's Trump's position.

Well, let's before we move on to what Joy Reid has to say about Trump recently, I have a to welcome back our sponsor, Hillsdale College.

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So Victor Joy Reed is out trying to get herself in the news again.

And her recent claim, and she's not the only one, actually.

There's others saying this, that Trump was never shot in Butler, Pennsylvania.

And there's other rhetoric of such, but go ahead.

No, she was an anchor woman at at MSNBC, and

she cratered her show because she's an utter, outright, I'm going to be blunt, a racist.

That is, she judges people by the color of their skin.

And she's very insecure, and she's typically conflicted and hypocritical.

I remember a show where she said that she was going to wear a natural Afro hairstyle and that people should not culturally appropriate that hairstyle.

And she was talking as well about dreadlocks.

Remember, there was a blonde girl like Bo Derrick wore dreadlocks, and then all of a sudden that was wrong.

And then the next thing I knew, she had blonde hair on.

And I'm thinking, well, you're culturally

expropriating my culture, Scandinavian.

But I'm just giving you an example that

she's unbalanced.

So when she says that Donald Trump was not not shot, there's videos of the whole thing.

You can see him.

You can see

the people.

There must have been, what, 20 or 30,000 people there.

They saw the blood come across his face.

They saw the Secret Service jump on him.

They saw him get up and say, fight, fight, fight.

It's all on the public record.

Does she think they were all staged?

I mean

so what...

I think she does think they were all the same.

Well, if we use the juicy smollett analogy, remember when I said juicy smollett, ask America to believe, that he was walking out, I'm hungry, it's three in the morning.

Oh, it's wind chill factor 40 below.

I'll just go out and get a subway salmon.

Uh-oh, I'm attacked by two big white men with red MAGA hats on, and they are mad at me and yelling about Empire, a black show, which apparently is their favorite show, and that Empire, I think they said, sucks.

That's what he said.

And then I fought them off.

I whooped their blank, blank.

And he came back and he had a little bump where they hit him.

And then he said, and they put this rope around my neck because they're lynchers.

And they tried to bleach me white, and they threw bleach.

And then, but I fought them off.

And I thought to myself, as soon as I heard that, so you fought them off holding your sandwich in your right hand, your cell phone in your left, and somehow they put put a thing over it, but you kick them so, and you're about 5'8, and these people are huge.

And then we find out

that there's a video showing these two African Americans, and I mean African Americans from Africa, and they are buying rope, and they are buying bleach, and they're buying red caps.

And then he writes a check to pay them, and it's there.

And then they testify that they even set up the whole thing with him.

And there's still people who say that that he was not...

He was attacked.

He was attacked.

And they let him off, basically.

He was mitigated.

And so when she says that,

you can't appeal to reason with her.

You can't.

It's just, it's a...

I don't know how to put it.

And then there were four days.

Donald Trump wants to take two days off.

during Labor Day, basically, four-day weekend.

And the next thing we know, these people are saying that he's either dead or

he's disappeared.

I mean, what do they think Joe Biden was three days a week he was in the White House?

I don't remember any Republicans saying Joe Biden's dead.

So,

and then we have this,

I don't know what, what do you call him, Tim Waltz?

Where did he come from?

What planet did he live on?

I mean, he's

he does sort of look like a Martian.

Maybe it was Mars.

I mean, he came out and he's just

he said so many things.

He said so many foul words.

He spouts out, you know, he spouts out filthy words, pejoratives, expletives.

And then he says that

I woke up in the news and there was no Donald Trump.

And then I got a phone call that he was alive.

And, you know, but someday you will get one and he won't be.

So he hears the President of the United States that

as he was speaking, he had already survived two near-death

assassination attempts and a woman, Judge Brodsberg, had just let out a woman who had threatened him openly on social media to kill him.

And then you have the governor of Minnesota joking about it, that he wished the president was dead.

This is the man who would not call out the National Guard because it was too severe during the 2020 riots.

When he finally did, his daughter, remember, tipped off everybody.

Be careful, dad's going to call this.

She didn't quite say it like that.

And then

Miss Waltz said, I had to leave the window open so I could smell the burning rubber from the riots.

He's a toxic person.

He really is.

He's buffoonish, but he's also toxic.

Why anybody would vote for him?

Something is really wrong with him.

You know what I mean?

His movements, his herky jerkiness, his complete fabrications about his tour to Iraq, the lies he said about China, Tineman Square.

He lives in a fantasy world.

He really does.

And these are not just obscure people.

These are leadership of the Democratic Party.

And he was the nominee.

He couldn't be.

He came very close to being the vice president of the United States.

Yeah.

It makes you wonder, though, who could find themselves associated with the Democratic Party, but crazies.

I hate to say that.

We might have some Democrats out there listening, but

it seems pretty strange.

I guess

we should all ask them, what are they for?

If you were to put Tim Waltz and Kamala Harris right now with the Democratic Party in control of the White House and the Congress, what would they do?

Would they open the border again?

I think so.

Would they say we're going to get not 10,000, but we're going to get 15,000 more?

Would you try to decriminalize the police again?

I think so.

Would DEI be everywhere?

Yes.

Would the Tram would they probably go after any school that said we're not going to let biological males compete in female sports?

Yes.

Would Iran still have the nuclear apparatus?

Yes.

Would we be cutting off all supplies to Israel?

Yes.

That's where we'd be.

No doubt.

And since they don't have power, the Democrats, they have other ways of trying to create government inertia.

Powerline had a great story about the Democratic obstruction of government appointments, Donald Trump's appointments, to lower positions, not necessarily the cabinet positions, that they are keeping those,

they're resisting getting any of those appointments done.

The chart that they had said they've resisted and they've kept it to zero, I think it meant at the beginning, but very, very slow to get people in that Donald Trump wants to.

They really don't because they're so used to this lap dog media, and they really do believe sincerely they're morally and intellectually superior to everybody, so they don't have to be consistent that whatever they say has authority.

So you look at them and you say, wait a minute, be very careful because you are setting precedents, and the next administration will follow.

So if we're looking at Adam Schiff for lying lying about his prime residence, or we're looking at Letita James, who taught us to do that?

You did.

If you are

looking at,

I don't know, John Bolton, because you're going to go into his home and say he has, who taught you that?

They did.

They never think it's going to come back to them.

So what I'm getting at is that when they come into power, you know that this generation of Republicans are going to say, I'm not going to confirm any of them.

That's what they did.

And that's the only thing they understand.

And this gets back to this age-old question.

It's not age-old, it's months-old.

What do you do with them?

Half of the Republican MAGA movement or the Republicans in general say, Victor, if you go do what they do, and it's tit for tat, tit for tat, then the Republic goes down the grain.

There has to be adults in the room.

And then the little

devil on the other shoulder said, no, no, no, no, no.

Human nature being what it is.

If you don't restore deterrence, they will keep doing it.

You've got to tell Adam Schiff, if he lies on a federal affidavit, no matter how you found out about it,

and you've got to tell Letita James, if you're lying to get favorable

interest on your loans and favorable tax consequences, and you're the Attorney General, we're going to go after you.

And then we're going to make a point of going after you.

And that's the problem.

Well, just before we go to the historical section, since you brought brought it up,

recently this week had a case of Lisa Cook, a Federal Reserve agent, and they caught her on having three homes that she claims as her promise.

She's a board member on the Federal Reserve Board.

Yeah, and she has three homes that she claimed as her primary residence, and she is getting rent out of them.

There are three reasons that she should have never been on the Federal Reserve Board.

One,

one,

she is dishonest.

For all of her anger and all of the lawsuits, all she had to say is, I have never, ever taken a document,

notary public document, notarized public document, and lied that this was my principal residence and that was my principal residence, nor have I ever tried to disguise the nature of my purchase to get

mortgage fraud.

I've never done she hasn't done that.

She will not deny it.

Second, she's a plagiarist.

So she should have never been appointed.

She's a clotting gay, who is also a plagiarist.

And

people have accused, remember,

was it,

there was another person that they have accused.

I'll get back to it.

And then third, If you look at her expertise,

there's nothing economic on it.

There's nothing, she doesn't have banking.

You know what it is?

It's this particular, particular group, blacks, have been discriminated this way and this way, and this way, and this way.

So she is

what I have seen where I work when we have people apply to the Hoover, a cultural economist, cultural.

She's not interested in finance and interest rates.

She doesn't have any expertise.

So she was put on there by Biden under DEI.

And that's just a fact.

Do you think they can get her off by exposing this stuff about her?

Well,

the law is very clear that if they do something during their tenure that is illegal, then they can be taken off.

Now, the question

has to be adjudicated.

She committed probably a felony, I don't know, but that would be a felony to doctor or to provide false documentation for loans and

property tax.

If that's still in effect now,

is that part of her job?

I don't know.

If you're a Federal Reserve officer and you're in charge with the nation's home interest rates and you are cheating on your own home interest rate, that seems to me very parallel.

And that's the argument that the DOJ is using.

She's using, well, I'm not going to talk about my private life.

You only brought it up because I'm a proud black woman and I hate Trump.

And she's been very vocal in her private life, how she hates Trump, and she's on records.

We'll see what happens to you.

Adam Schiff had a, for once, he kind of told the truth when he said, Donald Trump, if you speak out, he'll go after you.

No, he won't go after you.

If you speak out and call him a monster and everything, and you're criminally culpable, you will no longer be given a blank exemption as you were in the Biden administration.

So, mark my words.

People in the Biden administration knew that Lisa Cook had problems, and they knew that Adam Schiff is that way too.

But they felt it'll never happen to us.

Never.

And that's what they're learning right now.

Well, yeah, that's what they're learning.

That things can happen.

I thought, you know what, I'm going to go in MSNBC, I'm going to go in CNN, and I'm going to

damn

Donald Trump in every way I can.

He wouldn't dare touch me.

I'm a senior diplomat.

And I'm going to comment on the Mar-Lago rate and said, hey, hey, hey, just before you say it's excessive, let's just take a deep breath.

It might be there.

And then he'll go on the next week and say, well, he had no respect for classified documents at all.

Next week, anything that came across his desk, whether it was a file, classified file, or French fries.

So he thought he was really neat, you know, and cute.

And then I thought, if I were, when I watched all that and his memoirs and he was kind of winking and, you know,

I have a memoir.

It might come out right during the campaign of 2020.

I obey the law.

They're trying to stop me.

The Trump DOJ, this was in the first term, they're trying to stop me.

I wonder why they're trying to stop me.

It's not because I have classified access and I'm abusing that privilege.

It's because I have some really embarrassing things.

And it was a best seller.

He made a couple million dollars off it.

And

Trump, they sued him.

And the judge said, shame on you, John Bolton.

We know that you are abusing your security, your privileges.

You're going to be subject at some point to criminal liability, but I'm not going to stop it.

It's already out.

The books come out.

And so he thought he was home-free, and then he thought Biden will win the election.

He was right, Biden, and he just dropped the case.

But it's the same arrogance.

They thought that Biden and the Democrats were going to keep winning the elections.

and they couldn't.

They were going to just believe that they could do anything he wants.

And we'll see.

I don't want to prejudge.

I do not want to prejudge John Bolton, but if the press reports have a kernel of truth that they found out about his access to classified information and he transmitted it through a foreign intelligence service, I don't know if that means friendly or hostile, but if they picked up something that he was sending documents or the information of documents or the replication of documents in notes to members of his family or friends on the idea that they wouldn't check the recipient.

He's in big trouble.

I don't know.

I don't want to prejudge him, to use his own word.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and then come back and we'll hear a little bit about tanks in World War II.

Stay with us, and we'll be back.

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Welcome back to the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

Victor is available on X.

His handle is at V D Hansen and on Facebook at Hansen's Morning Cup.

And you can join him there.

There is a group called the Victor Davis-Hanson Fan Club on Facebook, and they do a lot of good work finding his old lectures and talks and conversations with and interviews.

So

you might want to give them a try.

They are not affiliated with us, but they do a good job.

So, Victor, I'm really excited about hearing about tanks because I feel they're somehow a little bit more interesting than airplanes.

If all of you airplane fanatics out there, don't forget about it.

I'm talking about fighters.

I was going to talk about bombers.

We'll do that next time.

Oh, okay.

I want to make a correction.

I think somebody wrote and said I referred to the Thunderbolt engine as a Wright R.

Allison engine.

It was a Pratt Whitney engine.

And I think the Double Wasp engine achieved with a turbocharger 2,200 horsepower.

I just want to mention that another person said something about the P-47 Thunderbolt wrote me when I said that the P-51 Mustang and the Supermarine Spitfire were the top ally planes.

They were in terms of strict performance performance in most categories.

But if you look at a different figure, how many sorties were flown and how many fighters got back alive and how much damage did they do, then the P-47 was hands-on the best American fighter.

It could almost go as much, I think they got up to speeds of 460 miles an hour.

It was a huge plane.

It had a huge air-cooled engine.

Air-cooled engines, as I said, are much less vulnerable.

They have no water jackets, radiator like

the Merlin Rolls engine and the P-51.

So you could shoot all day at a P-47 and it wouldn't necessarily come down where a P-51 would.

So there were different types of planes, but I want to make that clear.

Just as a general rule, there's three types of phases.

In 1935 to 1939,

it was during the interlude between World War I and World War II.

People really didn't know much about tanks.

And they had appeared at the Battle of Cambra in World War I.

And remember, the treads went all the way around.

So they made all of these.

There were very brilliant people, Adel Hart, J.F.

Phil Fuller in Britain, Hans Guadarian,

Rommel, that were writing about armored warfare.

So in this period, the tank then

created a turret

and it had a platform and it had tracks and they were usually very small, about 10 tons, with very thin 10 millimeter armor.

The Mark I German tank that went into Poland it only had a machine gun.

The Mark II I think only had a 37 millimeter cannon.

So they were very light and then all of a sudden the war started.

And this next group was what they called the median tank.

Suddenly people said, oh my gosh, the Germans have something called the Mark IV.

The Russians have the T-34.

So they began to make

tanks about 30 tons, three times as big, with 50 millimeters and up, 100 millimeters.

And they put a gun 37 millimeter, then 50 millimeter,

and then they got up to 75.

And then there was a third phase at the end of the war when they were pretty much like modern tanks in some ways.

They were huge, 50 or 60 tons.

They had high-powered 76 or 88 millimeters.

They had a lot of armor.

But

how do you judge which country?

France, before it fell with the Char B tank, Britain, they had some great tanks.

The end of the war, the Comet was a great tank.

The Cromwell tank, the Churchill wasn't too bad.

And then the United States had these Lee and Grant's weird little tanks where they had a turret and then they had two guns and they looked like a skyscraper.

They were really high.

And then they came out with a Sherman, which everybody, I think, misunderstands.

And then the Germans had their Mark IV.

That's when they went into...

Most of the tanks that Germany made were Mark IVs, about 10,000 of them.

And then they made...

the Tiger, which was the best tank if it was mechanically sound, which it wasn't a lot.

Heavy, heavy tank with a huge 88 millimeter gun.

And then the Panther, they made about 6,000.

So everybody thinks that's the best.

And then the Russians claim they were the best.

They had the T-34

medium.

It was kind of like a Sherman or a Mark IV, but it had a better gun and more armor.

And it was diesel.

And that was really I mean, they made a a diesel version of the Sherman, but very few of them.

But diesel had certain advantages.

I remember when I farmed, we had a gas tractor and diesel tractors.

And if you were filling up and you spilled the gasoline on the hot manifold, be careful.

Diesel would not ignite.

It doesn't ignite.

On the other hand, and it's got a lot more torque.

Cylinders, it pulls better,

and it's got a lot more power.

It goes slower, but it's got more torque.

However,

is it better in very cold conditions since Russia had that?

No, okay.

It's much harder to ignite it doesn't have spark plugs like a gas engine and the gas will start much quicker

and gas and the other reason why the Americans preferred it and the British and the Germans not the Russians was that

Although you might get more miles per gallon of diesel, if you take a barrel of oil and you refine it, you get a lot more gas than you do diesel.

So in a way gasoline is cheaper because it's not so heavy, and you can get a lot more gallons per barrel of oil.

But I wanted to say

the way to evaluate relative tanks are not,

not, not

just go into a book and look at the dimensions and say, well, the tiger has an 88 millimeter,

the Sherman only had a little short 75 for so long, or the Panther 76.5 or whatever it is, was a high caliber, or and look at at the armor.

You have to look at other things.

How many were built?

How many were built?

How easy were they to maintain?

And that's hours per running versus hours of maintenance.

How long does it take to take a Panther transmission out versus a Sherman transmission?

And then what type of theater were they in?

So if you say, well, Victor, I saw the movie Fury with Brad Pitt, and those Shermans just went up like

a Ronson Leiter when they saw a tiger.

Yes.

But there were only 1,600 tigers made.

There were 50,000 Shermans.

So what they didn't show you in the movie is that Shermans were going all over the Normandy and French landscape, blowing apart machine gun nests.

They were used against infantry.

More importantly, if you wanted to ship a,

it wasn't like you could run out of a Russian factory or a German factory, just run a tank out.

They were right there.

In the case of the Americans, you had to put it on a crane and put it on a ship.

And anything over 35 tons is almost impossible.

It's too hard to.

So that was a limitation.

Put it all together.

If you look at each country,

you could argue that the most tanks made were the T-34 Russian.

It had a great gun on it, 76 mil.

It had a lot of armor.

It was sloped.

It had a Christie American suspension.

It had a diesel engine, aluminum,

but it had no radio.

It was very uncomfortable for the crew.

They were short.

They only had four people in.

The person who was the navigator, who also had to arm the thing.

It was cramped.

If you look at the craftsmanship, and they made 80,000 of them though, but if you look at the craftsmanship of a panther, 6,000 made, a tiger,

1,600, a king tiger, that's like an Abrams tank.

Everybody's afraid of it, but there was only 600 of them.

And then they can't go over certain bridges in Europe.

They couldn't go.

So what if you have a...

you know, a squad of six tigers and you're going after some British or American tanks and they're sitting two miles away and you can't get over the the bridge because it's too heavy.

So there's all these different considerations, but when you look at

the German tanks were the most finely crafted.

They had the best guns, they had the best armor, and they had really the worst maintenance problems.

So that you were spending on a tiger tank maybe or a panther even an hour of maintenance for every two hours that it went.

And then it was very hard to maintain them.

There was a really wonderful guy named Jacques Littlefield.

I know his brother Eddie, who's a very nice guy, and he had a tank museum in the Pahuaco Hills.

He passed away tragically, and the tanks had been moved to another location.

But when I was writing my book on World War II, he called me up, and I would go out there and speak to groups he had.

He was a polymath.

He knew everything about tanks.

So I said,

why does everybody berate the Sherman tank?

He said, Victor, come over here.

And he had a Panther tank,

a German Panther.

They found it, I think, in a river in Poland or something.

And he had three mechanics, and they just shook their head.

He said, oh my gosh, this thing is so complex.

And look at it.

And they showed me the transmission, the engine.

And then I went over there and looked at a

Sherman.

They had something called, I think, a Jumbo Sherman.

And that was souped up 500 horsepower.

It was one with a 75, 76 millimeter longer gun.

And

it could use sabo rounds, you know, the shape charges, heavy explosive, etc.

And I said, well, how much

if you take the engine and the transmission out of this one, how much, he said, we can do it in one-tenth the time.

And it wasn't just because they were more familiar with America.

They were great mechanics, so you've got to consider all that.

And when you consider all that, And you look at the Sherman, it was as good as the Mark IV, and when it had an up,

this last models was 76 millimeters they were as good as a T-34 in most cases the Germans we gave a 2,000 of them to the Russians they liked them but the Sherman got a bad name because it came up every once in a while against a tiger or panther which could blow them apart and then

The British came along and said, we have a seven they didn't use millimeters.

They called them pounds by the size of the round.

We have a 17-pounder 76 millimeter, meaning the shell was not this long, but

full of powder and a reinforced barrel.

So it was highly accurate, and it would blow up a tiger tank

or a panther at a great distance.

And they said, we will take this barrel and give us your Sherman.

We like your Sherman.

And we'll put it in it.

And they said, it's too big.

It'll just

blow up the turret.

And they said, no, no, we'll do it.

So they put it in a turret.

They made 2,000 of them.

So then they put a, they called them fireflies.

And so they would have six or seven Shermans

and they would be going along and they would see German infantry and they'd blast them, they'd machine gun them, and then all of a sudden out of nowhere might come a tiger or a panther.

And then they'd back off and the big firefly would come through and it had a better gun actually than either the Panther 76 or even the 88 millimeter tiger and it would blow them apart.

And

it was really, it was very hard for the crew in the turret because of the concussion of that powerful round.

What did it take to take a tank out?

Would it always take another tank with a bigger gun?

Or how could you?

Most of the tanks that were taken out were taken out by what they called anti-tank weaponry.

And that

could be three different kinds.

The

British had this Pak 75, I think it is.

So these are artillery pieces with two wheels you tow with a Jeep or something.

Well, in a battle, they would bring them up, and

they were just artillery.

And if they spotted a tank, they had longer range a lot, and they could take out a tank.

And the Germans were masters of it.

They had 88 millimeter artillery on two wheels.

So what they did, say,

most of the battles in North Africa, if they had a Mark IV with a little 50mm gun and they were getting out blasted by a Sherman, then an 88 millimeter anti-tank weapon on wheel, they would bring it up and they could blast it away and the Sherman couldn't do anything.

I think they could blow them up at a mile and a half.

And then at the end of the war,

I shouldn't say at the end of the war,

they wanted infantry to have

weapons that could take out tanks.

Because if you didn't have any tanks around and all of a sudden a tiger tiger or somebody came at you and the British made a very good tank gun.

I think it was four inch and six inch and the guy held the barrel.

The Americans came up with a really good idea.

They called it in Vietnam a recoilless rifle.

It's a bazooka from the comic about bazooka joe and

and

It was a round that you put in and it was a hollow tube so the concussion came out the back.

You had to be careful.

But it wasn't very good.

At least the original ones weren't.

And

they could not take out a panther or a tiger.

The Germans came out with something brilliant called a panzerfaust.

And then they had another version that was like the American bazooka but

even bigger.

And the panzerfaust was disposable.

It was just like a broom handle, wood, with a big shaped charge on the end and then a trigger.

and so the Germans could go up and maybe 200 yards push the trigger and blow up a Sherman tank make a hole in it and then throw away throw it away and they made thousands of them at the end of the war and they took out a lot of American armor

and that was sort of the

that and the bazooka were kind of the

forerunner of the javelin American anti-tank weapon and the RPG you know, the big sh shell they put on rifles.

When I went when I was embedded, I went to a city and I talked to some people and I saw all these Iraqi places where

the

ISIS people or the insurgency was.

And then you'd see these huge holes.

And I was talking to a Marine.

He said we had javelins, and we just blew away the stairway, and they were upstairs, and they couldn't get out.

So they were shooting at us, and we just came in with these javelins.

That's what we were giving Ukraine.

It's It's an anti-tank weapon.

Why does Kursk end up the biggest tank battle in all of World War II?

What brought it.

I mean, it doesn't, you could have had, did they have any air support?

Where was

the infantry fight at all, or was it all just?

What happened was after the fall of Stalingrad in 1942 in February,

the offense stalled.

And everybody thought the German offense of 42, not 41.

41, they tried to take three cities, Leningrad, Moscow, and the Crimea.

They took the Crimea, they never got to Moscow.

They got to the first subway station, and they surrounded Leningrad and never took St.

Petersburg.

The next year, everybody thought they would continue that.

They didn't.

They wanted to go get the oil in the Caspian Sea.

So Operation

Blue, they went to the south and they went all the way to the Don and Deipner rivers.

Unfortunately, they foolishly split their forces, and General Paulus went up to Stalingrad.

He should have never gone there.

They could have just got the oil,

and they might have been able to cut off oil.

It was the stupidest thing they did in the war.

In any case,

Everybody thought after they surrendered the 6th Army the war would be over, but it wasn't.

The Germans under Manstein, they kept fighting back, and they took Kharkov again.

They had a successful offensive.

So in early 43 they were fighting, they call them hedgehogs, where Germans would make

individual units that were not

making a solid line.

In other words, they would make redoubts.

They would get an armored unit, infantry unit, heavy artillery dig in, and they would be like little squares like on a check

checkerboard, but not off.

And then the Russians would pour through,

and then they would shoot them from the sides.

It was very successful.

The Russians didn't make much,

they did not make much progress in the first

six months.

And so then the Russians had made a huge pocket, a bulge, like a blister or a cyst in the German lines

near Kursk.

So they said,

at some point, Hitler will want to cut that bulge.

That's what Germans like to do.

That's what they did in 1941, and we're going to be ready for them.

So they went and told Monstein and the OKW, said, do not do this.

The Russians are sending thousands of tanks, artillery pieces, and they think you're going to go on both sides, try to cut this thing, and they're going to be ready for you.

And they said, it doesn't matter.

We have new Panther tanks and we have Tigers and we're going to do it.

And so they started to do it.

I think it was about 30 miles wide and they kept pouring more and more and more tanks.

And the

Supreme Commanders were reporting, this is not working.

This is how many tanks we have.

This is how many you're losing.

And they were saying, you don't understand, the Panthers and the Tigers are blowing up 10 to 15 Russian tanks per day per tank.

And then then they would say, yes, but they finally get your tank.

And they have 80,000

T thirty fours they can make.

We don't.

So it was a war of attrition and exhaustion.

And then finally the Germans called it off.

But the Germans got only about halfway through that bulge and they met tank traps, and the Russians stopped them.

But when you look back at the battle and you look at total deaths, total tank losses,

the Germans had far fewer than the Russians, but that didn't matter.

The Russians won that battle strategically.

The other thing that was happening that the Germans

didn't understand is by July of 1943, June and July, we were supplying fully 25% of the Soviet, we were the British, the Soviet war material.

We were giving them radios and ponchos and sea rations and things that were really good, but we didn't want them, like a P-39 Air Cobra fighter that had a big cannon in it and it went really fast and low to the ground.

We thought, you know, it can't escort bombers.

And the Russians said, we don't want it to.

We don't bomb.

We just want it to attack tanks.

And so we were giving them all the stuff that were good, but we didn't find them as useful.

And the second thing, we were were bombing.

And some of you are going to say, yes, Victor, but without daylight escort, fighter escort, the 8th Air Force was taking 10 and 12% losses at Potoisi and Schweinfurt.

Yes, but

the Germans took from the Eastern Front about 10,000 88 millimeter cannon.

that were blowing up Russian tanks and turned them straight up as flak guns to stop American bombers.

And then most of their best

fighter aircraft, the ME-109 and the Fokwuff 190 air support in Russia, they were being called back to Germany to attack Americans.

So the American and British bombing

offensive, I know we lost 80,000, I know it was a disaster in 1942 and 43 before we got Daylight Escort and knew what we were doing, but we did do one thing.

We drained the

Eastern Front of of a lot of German assets, and that's why the Russians started to make a lot of progress.

Plus the Italian front that drew a lot of Germans away.

I think people forget that about World War II, that the Russians only fought on one front.

They were not fighting the Japanese.

They were not fighting North Africa.

They were not fighting in Italy.

They were not fighting on the Western Front.

They were not bombing.

They did not have a navy, no submarines.

No strategic bombing, any of that.

They were just...

We just basically supplied them and said, kill Germans.

And they killed three out of every four German soldiers.

It's amazing.

You mentioned a tank trap as you were running through this.

What does a tank trap look like quickly before we go to our break?

What is a tank trap?

It's a very generic term.

It can be a ditch where

you put foliage over it or you put thin something like plywood and

so the tanks go in and they go into the ditch and they can't get out, they'll flip over.

Or they can be triangle, sort of like foundation pyramids, big concrete alligator teeth, they're shark teeth.

That was what the Siegfried line was.

They can be a half mile wide, but they're just concrete pyramids and the tanks can't go over them without going up.

Or they can be two-man

dugouts where people pop up with anti-tank bazooka, kind of anti-tank guns and shoot them.

But

they're not going to be open field.

So they knew, but the problem with the

German strategy is they knew what the Germans like to do.

They liked to get complete encirclements like the Battle of Canai or what they had done at Kiev in 1941.

And so

these pockets, they deliberately left that pocket open.

And they knew exactly.

And they knew the Germans would try to cut it off at the base and they fortified that base.

And that's exactly what the Germans did.

They should have never gone there.

if they were going to try to stop the bulge, the Germans should have gone way to the rear of the Russians and come back and

they didn't.

All right Victor we better go to a break and then we'll come back and talk a little bit more about the news and Israel's war in Gaza.

Stay with us and we'll be right back.

Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

So you can find Victor's podcast now on YouTube and on Rumble and on Spotify.

So please come join us for these video versions of the podcast.

So Israel's war in Gaza had a couple of things this week.

I know that it's kind of peripheral to Gaza, but they killed Hamas, president and vice president, at a conference, at a Houthi conference in Yemen, I believe it was.

And then also they apparently killed in his apartment Abu

Abeda,

and he was the face of the PR man for Hamas and the spokesman for al-Qassan, which is the military wing of Hamas.

And a Palestinian activist inside the United States wrote on his social media that it was a very significant death.

It was, in fact, quote, the end of an era and a big blow, quote, blow to Hamas.

They have essentially, the Israelis Israelis have taken out all of the Hamas leadership that was there on October 7th.

They're all dead.

And anybody who thinks they would like to replace them is not telling anybody, because they will be dead.

And they're now converging on the last area where there's resistance.

The rest is wreckage, basically.

And so what they're trying to do is they're basically saying, we're going to find the hostages dead or alive, but we're going to eliminate Hamas.

And they're squeezing them.

And Hamas has nowhere to go because

the Egyptians will not let them get into Egypt.

And the Egyptians, at the same time, are training a huge militia that doesn't

that are well-armed, 10,000 people, to be the Palestinian authority takeover of Gaza once the Israelis have wiped out Hamas.

They want to come in and wipe out Hamas.

If you're wondering how Israel knows where these people are

in Yemen, the Yemeni,

Apparat, and they know where the Hamas people travel, a lot of it's coming from Palestinian Authority rival groups.

In other words, they're saying to the Israelis,

slaughter these people, and then we get to have all of Gaza, and we will not do what they did on October 7th.

We'll try to have our own country or whatever.

I don't believe them, but that's what they're saying.

And so they give the Israelis a a lot of information about Hamas, where it is, who they are.

And then there's people within

the Gazan population that don't like Hamas.

And they give the Israelis information.

Showing how competent the Israeli government and military are.

I think their attitude was, this is too much.

If you're going to go and kill 12,000 Jews on October 7th,

we're never going to forget.

And we're going to hunt down and kill all of you.

And then maybe you won't be so stupid to do it again.

But we're going to kill every one of you people who were responsible.

That's what they're doing.

All right.

And another story is the hot mic between Putin and Premier Xi.

They were discussing organ transplants to extend life,

this span of life.

And I think for myself, this is very suspicious given the suspicion that we see out in the press, and it might be wrong, but that China is suspected of harvesting organs, especially from the Uyghur population.

Yeah, they know that

they harvest organs from live people who

maybe don't die, but they take a kidney, or in some cases, they do die.

They take a liver or something.

Yeah, and that's a terrible, disgusting hot mic.

It's kind of sad and weird because here you have Chi, who's in his mid-70s, late 70s, and you have Putin, and they both have reported health problems, and here they're speaking as if nobody can listen to them, and they're talking about how they're going to live to be 150 or something by taking organs and

drugs and something.

It's just an insight into the mind of the dictator class that they, any means necessary to keep them in power.

They all do that.

I mean, Franco wouldn't leave until he could hardly walk.

Castro,

the dictator always wants eternal life and, you know, never happens.

While you're talking about it, you're giving me images of Joe Biden who wouldn't leave either, although he was democracy's president.

Yeah, Jill did everything she could to keep him.

Anything's possible in a democratic city?

Well,

he was at the beach house three days a week.

I think most of the doctors who remarked on his announcement 90 days after he left office that he had stage four prostate cancer, they said that he must have known that for two or three years.

So she knew that her husband was fighting a metastasizing cancer and she didn't do anything.

I wouldn't want to be married to somebody like that.

They would say to me, hey, Victor,

prostate cancer, we all die of something, but it's really good.

You've got to keep at your job.

You've got to get that income.

You've got to keep working.

No, you don't.

That's what she was saying to him.

She should have said,

I'm not going to sacrifice the health of my husband when we have a capable

Democratic Party.

It wasn't true, but it was Kamala Harris.

Just take over, and Joe, he would have been better off.

They sacrificed his health.

for that.

He was so, I felt, you know, I never quite got into the idea of making fun of him him, like Joe's Law, because when you looked at him, he was obviously demented, and he was frail.

He walked in a very strange way.

He looked bewildered.

I've seen people, friends and family, like that, and it was sad.

And somebody should have had an intervention and said, we're not going to do this to you.

Especially Hunter.

Hunter got mad that

he stepped down.

He should have been happy.

He should have recognized his father needed it but that's not hunter step down from the nomination you know he should have he should have been happy i doubt a cocaine addict crack addict whatever he is addicted

cocaine wasn't that bad yeah for your health not as bad not as bad as alcohol

all right and the last thing is

There was an interesting article in Pajamas Media by Sarah Anderson, and she was talking about the potential that Maduro in Venezuela might fall.

It sounded like she felt his administration was purely a drug-connected administration, that it might fall and it would have ripples in the region of compromising Cuba and Nicaragua.

And I thought that was an interesting anticipation of what might come in the near future.

Your thoughts are.

I think Trump's trying to deport a quarter million back to Venezuela.

And everybody says, why is he doing that?

They were ante-Maduro.

That's why he's doing it.

He wants people who were dissidents to go back there and turn up the heat.

And so he has no popular support.

The country is broke.

It could be very wealthy.

Countries around him despise him.

The United States is embargoing him.

So we'll see.

As a general rule in diplomacy and military affairs, when you say that this particular dictatorship has no popular support, it's being embargoed and sanctioned, it's going to fall any moment, that's not true.

They have an

unique ability to suck out every resource of a state before they'll fall.

I lived in Greece during a dictatorship, the Papadopoulos dictatorship.

When he fell in the fall of 73, Mr.

Ioannides took over, and he lasted until the next summer, and he would have kept going except for the Cypriot War.

They backed, and that was it, blew up in his face.

But as a general rule, they're very hard to get rid of.

Iran is the same thing.

We're hearing all these stories that it's about ready to topple, but I don't know if that's true or not.

All right.

So, as we do at the end, we have some comments.

This time they're on Victor and Jack's podcast from YouTube.

And I particularly like this first one by Penny Lankheim.

And she writes this, and I agree with this.

So, who makes a left turn from the right lane or a left U-turn from the right lane?

Don't you at least first get in the left lane?

Oh, the truck driver needed more room to turn his big long truck.

That turns geometry would persuade a reasonable person not to make that turn.

Common sense would compel a truck driver to drive to the next exit and turn around.

What that driver did was no mere mistake or an accident.

It was a deliberate violation of basic common sense.

If he is not permanently deported from the U.S., he should never be issued a driver's license.

And that's Penny Lankheim.

And

she's absolutely right.

And those 3 million people that signed that petition are just equally weird and suspicious.

But if you came in illegally to the United States, which he did,

and you knew he was illegal and nobody did anything to him.

And then he worked without a green card illegally, and then he applied for a license, and somebody was paid off because he couldn't speak or read English.

Reportedly, he only identified one of 12 traffic.

So, in his view, there were no consequences.

So,

if you say, well, they must be afraid of me because I came in illegally, I resided illegally, I got a driver's license I didn't earn, I'm now driving when I don't know one traffic, I can't read any of the signs, I don't know English.

And I can do whatever I want.

That's the attitude that you inculcate.

I don't think people think that.

Once you let in people across the border illegally and you let them do whatever they want, you get an obrego garcia.

It's like, well, why are you doing this to me?

I have a right to do it.

You never did anything else.

Yeah, continued illegality.

I think there's going to be a story coming up.

My prediction is in the next six months, this is going to be a national story that somewhere around 20%

of the nation's truckers are here illegally, either from Mexico or India, and they're not qualified.

And somebody's going to do a statistical analysis of all the wrecks and will show that.

And there's going to be a backlash and a call that I think Trump just did it, that to get a driver's license in the United States, you have to be a citizen.

It's sort of like being a pilot.

You know, those trucks trucks can kill so many people.

Why would you let anybody drive them if they were not a citizen?

I don't understand that.

And they have to have English proficiency.

And some expertise in things.

So here are two shorter comments.

One is from Andre Rodriguez.

Economics are simple.

Chinese students, this is on Chinese students coming in.

Chinese students do tend to pay fully for colleges like Harvard and so on.

And let's be honest, okay?

okay?

All of them are spies or potential spies.

Just handle them like so and try to switch their assets to our side.

Yeah, I mean they all are interviewed.

Double spies.

They are interviewed when they go home.

Yeah.

And the last one is for Jack, who seems to think people worry about the way he hosts the show.

Jeremiah McClure says, I do not mind at all when Jack interrupts Victor.

This is a conversation, not a monologue.

If you want Victor, want a VDH monologue, there are options to get that.

This is something different, and it's enjoyable and meaningful as a different person.

I like it much better.

Yeah, absolutely.

My voice is getting old and whispery.

So I like it a lot better.

So I'm happy.

Jack does a good job.

Thank you, Jeremiah McClure.

Yes, Jack does a great job.

So thank you, Victor, for today.

It was a wonderful show.

Thanks to the audience.

Thank you, everybody, for listening and watching.

We'll see you next time.

This is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis-Hansen, and we're signing off.