November 24, 2025 • 17 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, by the final year of World War Two, American forces were closing in on Nazi Germany, and General George Patton stood at the center of that push. Historian Victor Davis Hanson, author of The Soul of Battle, discusses why Patton’s approach to leadership was shaped by his belief that the slow use of power in a conflict of that scale cost more lives than it saved. Hanson walks through Patton’s record in Europe, the end of the war, and the moral reasoning behind the choices he made when entire nations were at stake. We'd like to thank our generous sponsors, Hillsdale College, for this audio.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories,
the show where America is the star and the American
people coming to you from the city where the West begins,
Fort Worth, Texas. Victor Davis Hanson is an historian and
classicist who has written extensively about George S. Patton, with
the general being a key figure. In his book The
(00:32):
Soul of Battle, Hanson argues that the real immorality in
war is not the use of great force to inflict punishment,
but the failure to exercise moral authority at all. Here's
Victor Davis Hanson, and this came from a talk he
gave at Hillsdale College, who sponsor this show. All of
(00:54):
our history stories are sponsored by the great folks at
Hillsdale College.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
George Patten was resented by most of his peers because
he was from one of the wealthiest families in America,
Mount Wilson in LA. That was his grandmother Wilson, the
Wilson family. His father was the City Attorney of LA
and owned a thousand acres in Pasadena. He was fabulously
rich on his own family side, and then he married
(01:21):
in to the air pharmaceutical company Fedwick Air's big Empire.
So when the image of American officers was Omar Bradley
and Eisenhower and Lucian Truscott and Wade Haslip, all of
these great people from the hinterland of America, here came
patent from California, playing polo with his own yacht and
(01:45):
a stable of horses all during the depression. And he
had been in the nineteen twelve Olympics. He came in fourth.
He might have won the pentathlon. He claimed that he
was such a good shot that each time he shot,
he put the bullet right through the prior hole in
The judges didn't understand that, and he may have been right.
(02:05):
But if you follow his career through the twenties and
thirties up until Pearl Harbor, it was characterized by absolute brilliance.
He was the first person to see that the Christie
tank in nineteen nineteen had the best suspension and the
Americans should go for it, and yet we didn't do it,
And that was the model that the T thirty four
(02:27):
rushing tank adopted. He designed the US Cavalry Saber, and
in this entire process he developed US armor tactics nineteen
forty in wargames in Louisiana.
Speaker 3 (02:41):
He captured the senior General. U drumm.
Speaker 2 (02:44):
You may have seen The Dirty Dozen't that movie? That
old movie about captured How they played dirty? That was
basically based.
Speaker 3 (02:51):
On Patten's war maneuvers.
Speaker 2 (02:52):
Well, how he went on a four hundred mile goose
chase they thought, and ended up capturing the red general.
Speaker 3 (02:58):
He was on the blue team. He did that two times.
Speaker 2 (03:01):
Then he went down and got into Indio, out in
the middle of nowhere and set up an entire desert
warfare complex and taught Americans with inferior lee tanks the
elements of armor, pursuit, and breakthroughs. The point I'm making
is that when pearl And he was fifty five and
(03:22):
he was still not a brigadier general, people hated him
because he was drank too much. There were periods in
his life when he womanized. He played polo. As I said,
he was accident prone. He lit a gas limp to
look at his eye and it blew up and burned
(03:43):
his face. He accidentally stabbed himself, he broke he in
a horse accident, he broke his.
Speaker 3 (03:49):
Leg, he got phlebitis.
Speaker 2 (03:51):
He was always and of course he died in a
freak accident as well. So he was known as injury bone, reckless, rich, ostentatious,
and yet he spoke French, Red German and was highly educated.
The point I'm getting at is that he enunciated, or
he articulated, a worldview of war, and it was similar
(04:13):
to his contemporaries like LeMay and Ridgway, and also very
sherman esque. He was a big admirer of William to
come to Sherman and he basically said that democracies are
therapeutic societies and we don't train people, thank God, to
kill people, but there are people in the world who do,
and when they do, they need people like George Patten,
(04:35):
who's part of and yet not part of a democracy
that understands the evil mind and can make soldiers for
brief periods of time have the training and the courage
and the fortitude to stand up to the Herman Guring
division or fokuff one pilots or U boats. And that
(04:57):
was his principle. And then you would kill these evil
people and you were protect the innocent. And he said that,
and we don't like people to say that. When Colin
Powill said, what's your strategy for the first golfer, he said,
we're going to find the Saddam's army, We're going to
cut it off, and then we're going to kill it.
And people got very angry.
Speaker 3 (05:16):
Why did he have to say kill it?
Speaker 2 (05:18):
At the end, that therapeutic alternative is deeply ingrained, and
it's very hard for societies like us to mobilize against.
Speaker 3 (05:26):
These perceived threats without these types of people.
Speaker 2 (05:30):
So when we were ready after Pearl Harbor to fight,
the obvious choice for our first engagement was George S.
Pat Right before Pearl Harbor in October, he was promoted
to major general, two star general. And yet when we
had Operation Torch, the November nineteen forty two landings in
(05:50):
Northwest Africa, he was not chosen to lead the entire
project of Torch. He was given just the Western Command,
thirty thousand troops. The most competent, useless general and American history,
Lloyd Friedenhall was and Eisenhower wrote a report and said,
he looks like a general, he breathes fire, he's our man.
I've never been more impressed. He would swagger around, he
(06:12):
would pound his fist, and he didn't know anything. And
the result was, as you know, the worst defeat in
American history really was, or at least the most humiliating,
the kaiser in Pass, where Rommel destroyed an entire brigade
three thousand missing, four hundred dead, six hundred tanks. Just
friden Hall, where was he fifty miles back, dug in
(06:33):
in a bunker, probably drunk. When it was time to
take over Second Corps, everybody thought Patten will get his chance,
and yet Eisenhower asked General Harmon to do it, who
turned down, said this is pretty embarrassing.
Speaker 3 (06:48):
Patten deserves it. So Patten took over immediately. At the
Battle of l Gazaar.
Speaker 2 (06:55):
He won the first battle Americans had won in World
War Two.
Speaker 1 (07:00):
Listening to Victor Davis Hanson tell the story not just
of General Georges Patten, but about how democracies continue to
be able to defend themselves against evil while enjoying the
fruits of Western civilization. When we come back, more of
Victor Davis Hanson here on our American Stories, Leehabib Here,
(07:30):
as we approach our nation's two hundred and fiftieth anniversary,
I'd like to remind you that all the history stories
you hear on this show are brought to you by
the great folks at Hillsdale College. And Hillsdale isn't just
a great school for your kids or grandkids to attend,
but for you as well. Go to Hillsdale dot edu
to find out about their terrific free online courses. Their
series on communism is one of the finest I've ever seen. Again,
(07:53):
go to Hillsdale dot edu and sign up for their
free and terrific online courses. And we continue with our
American stories, and with Victor Davis Hanson telling the story
(08:14):
if not just George S. Patton, but well the soul
of battle and particularly how a genteel society and Western
democracies themselves can survive and thrive when life and death
are on the line. Let's continue with Victor Davis Hanson.
Speaker 2 (08:35):
He wanted to continue ahead of Second Corps. You had
thought that too many people had died in North Africa
needlessly without giving patent the main responsibility for the invasion of.
Speaker 3 (08:47):
Sicily Operation Husky, And yet we deferred.
Speaker 2 (08:51):
To General Montgomery. Money was a great general and a
set piece, but he was not a pursuer. He didn't pursue.
So what did Patton do? He went all the way
to northwest to Palermo, then made another right turn, broke
orders and got to Messinia before Montgomery, and of course
didn't get there in time to trap the Germans. But
(09:11):
he became very famous after that. And you think that
at that point everybody knew that Overlord was being planned
in conjunction with the Italian invasion, that he would get
a supreme command. He slapped two soldiers quite despicably. He
went into a hospital. He was mad because the absentee
rate of soldiers for what we would call post traumatic
(09:32):
stress syndrome was known then as shell shock. There were
three officers who watched the first slapping incident. The person
had malaria when he was slapped. Second one, two weeks later,
he had some ailment. Whether it was a fever or
it was just stress.
Speaker 3 (09:47):
We don't know, but he slapped him.
Speaker 2 (09:50):
In this period, one of his armored companies was on
a bridge. There was an Italian farmer with two mules.
Speaker 3 (09:59):
They were being strayed.
Speaker 2 (10:00):
They didn't want to run over the mules. It was
a very narrow bridge. Patten went up put took out
his three point fifty seven and right hand and he
had a forty five colt the other and shot these
two mules and had him thrown over the bridge, and
this was considered terrible. Think of this therapeutic mindset. Here
you have a whole column stopped, and the papers and
(10:22):
journalists are angry that patent shot two mules and threw
them over the bridge to facilitate the company getting out
of a strafing attack. But in that was a very
important point though, because he's obviously should have been given
one of three possible appointments. What I'm getting at is
that there's a pattern here of somebody that has undeniable,
(10:46):
experienced preparation and natural genius, who understands the horrific nature
of war and bothers the people that command him, and
yet sequentially or time and time again, when he has
not given a billet or an appointment or a promotion
befitting what he's earned on the battlefield, people die. And
(11:10):
yet the way that the system or the therapeutic society
justifies that is.
Speaker 3 (11:16):
That he slapped a soldier.
Speaker 2 (11:18):
Germans, of course, were bewildered by this. I mean it
is a little mythical that Germans knew a patent. I
don't think the movie is quite right that he was
canonized by the Germans. Mostly after the war, they sort
of changed the reviews. They call him a cowboy and
kind of reckless. But the point I'm making is that
it is true that a number of German intelligence officers
wouldn't believe that somebody of his talent would be relieved
(11:39):
for slapping a couple of soldiers when German officers killed
twenty five thousand soldiers in World War Two, shot them
for cowardice, or had them ordered shot. And so patent
is symbolic of a problem that all Western societies deal
with since the Greeks, that the advent of civilization is
a wonderful thing. It creates lee, it creates material wealth, luxury.
(12:03):
It's civilization. It's not tribalism, it's not barbarism. But in
that process we become tame. And yet the world around
us is not tame, and we don't quite know how
to justify using violence against people who want to kill us.
And so from time to time we see these fossilized
(12:24):
memories of our past and we bring them out of
the proverbial closet and we say, help us, Curtis will May.
The B twenty nine program doesn't work. I know it's
safe for our flyers at thirty thousand feet, but the
bombs are going off, falling off top. Well, you go
down five thousand with napalm, that'll cure it. Oh my god,
you're gonna burn people alive. I'll get rid of the industry.
(12:48):
Our Matthew Ridgeway. I'm gonna let them come in and
then I'm gonna surround them with napalm and I'm gonna
blast them, and it's gonna be winter, and they're gonna
regret they ever went into Korea. Our Sherman, this is
the plantation of Hal Cobb. This is the guy who
said that two hundred and fifty thousand Confederate soldiers were
superior to us burn his plantation. Oh wow, he burned.
(13:12):
He burned a Southern plantation. And so we when we
see somebody like Patten, and you can see it throughout
our culture, it's just not military.
Speaker 3 (13:21):
That was what made John Ford famous.
Speaker 2 (13:24):
That if you're Ethan Edwards in the searchers and you
want to find a small girl, and you're dealing with
some pretty tough Native American tribes, you want somebody with
a dubious pass. We're not quite told what he was
maybe a quantrille raider John Wayne, and you don't know
whether he's going to kill Natalie would or not, but.
Speaker 3 (13:42):
He has the skills that both ensure that.
Speaker 2 (13:44):
He's going to bring her back. But as you remember,
once she's back, he opens the door and walks out.
You don't want a guy like that there anymore than
you want Gary Cooper in high noon to stay around
after he's done what you have to do shoot four
people in the street. You don't want the magnificence even
in the village anymore. I remember that famous Yule Venner
(14:07):
and Steve McQueen said, well, I guess they're happy, and
he said, they'll even be happier when we leave. And
I'll just finish by saying that this is not a
new phenomenon that we sometimes misdiagnose talent throughout all aspects
of American society. When pre civilized Greece was making this
(14:31):
transition to the city state, especially to radical democracy, there
were people who saw the same phenomenon. One of the
great minds of the Western literary canon, Sophocles, in a
series of plays, he looked at this archetype of the
oligarchic aristocratic class that had all of these anti democratic skills,
(14:52):
and by every measure of talent and courage and bravery
they excel, and yet they all end up badly because
to reward them for those very characteristics would be a
referendum on your own society. And I think that's a
dilemma we all have to appreciate, not asking us to
change our views, but to every once in a while
(15:13):
look in the corners and when we see dark people,
maybe they're not so dark after all. So it's hard,
it's very hard to see that it's not the generals.
The generals are representations of us, and there were people
coming out of the depression who were impoverished that didn't
have the luxury to be therapeutic. And so Patton was
(15:33):
the most popular general. The reason he was so successful
was he had broad public support. The parents of the
soldier he slapped wrote a letter and said that I
think it was wrong what you did, but boy, we're
not going to criticize you.
Speaker 3 (15:47):
You're saving lives. I just don't think that would happen again.
Speaker 2 (15:50):
So the general today, and I think General Portrays was
a very good general, but it's more of an intellectual
with a PhD rather.
Speaker 3 (15:57):
Than a blood and guts type of person.
Speaker 2 (16:00):
Now I'm quoting the seventh century BC poe Adhesia that
the most powerful of all human emotions is envy, what
they call fawn ofs. And it's true that the more
successful person, that's what Greek ostracism, the democratic culture created,
ostracized somebody, not because he did something wrong, because everybody
knows who he is. So we don't like people who
(16:22):
do things that we can't in a democratic, pluralistic society.
And so these people who show us and remind us
of that, they're pretty scary people. But you can see
that this person has certain obnoxious characteristics and certain skill
sets that bring results. And you can guarantee that after
we are the beneficiaries of the results, it's going to
(16:43):
be persona non grada.
Speaker 1 (16:45):
And a terrific job on the editing and production by
Greg Hengler, and a very special thanks to Hillsdale College
for providing the audio of this remarkable talk of Victor
Davis Hanson's, which is not just about General Patton, but
how in the end, let's face it, we need our
bad guys who can inflict harm on enemies trying to
(17:07):
kill us. And nobody does a finer job of this
than Victor. And also Hillsdale College again sponsors.
Speaker 3 (17:16):
Of this show. You hear the name again and again.
Speaker 1 (17:18):
Go to their website and sign up for any and
all the Victor Davis Hanson's classes. They're terrific his lectures
on just about everything, and their latest on communism is
a tour de force as much, of course as it
is a mini documentary. I took it with my daughter
and it was fabulous. Go to Hillsdale dot edu to
(17:40):
learn more again. That story and history of communism is
simply terrific. The story of General George S. Patton and
the need for bad guys to fight the fight against
other nations bad guys. Here on our American Stories
This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories,
the show where America is the star and the American
people coming to you from the city where the West begins,
Fort Worth, Texas. Victor Davis Hanson is an historian and
classicist who has written extensively about George S. Patton, with
the general being a key figure. In his book The
(00:32):
Soul of Battle, Hanson argues that the real immorality in
war is not the use of great force to inflict punishment,
but the failure to exercise moral authority at all. Here's
Victor Davis Hanson, and this came from a talk he
gave at Hillsdale College, who sponsor this show. All of
(00:54):
our history stories are sponsored by the great folks at
Hillsdale College.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
George Patten was resented by most of his peers because
he was from one of the wealthiest families in America,
Mount Wilson in LA. That was his grandmother Wilson, the
Wilson family. His father was the City Attorney of LA
and owned a thousand acres in Pasadena. He was fabulously
rich on his own family side, and then he married
(01:21):
in to the air pharmaceutical company Fedwick Air's big Empire.
So when the image of American officers was Omar Bradley
and Eisenhower and Lucian Truscott and Wade Haslip, all of
these great people from the hinterland of America, here came
patent from California, playing polo with his own yacht and
(01:45):
a stable of horses all during the depression. And he
had been in the nineteen twelve Olympics. He came in fourth.
He might have won the pentathlon. He claimed that he
was such a good shot that each time he shot,
he put the bullet right through the prior hole in
The judges didn't understand that, and he may have been right.
(02:05):
But if you follow his career through the twenties and
thirties up until Pearl Harbor, it was characterized by absolute brilliance.
He was the first person to see that the Christie
tank in nineteen nineteen had the best suspension and the
Americans should go for it, and yet we didn't do it,
And that was the model that the T thirty four
(02:27):
rushing tank adopted. He designed the US Cavalry Saber, and
in this entire process he developed US armor tactics nineteen
forty in wargames in Louisiana.
Speaker 3 (02:41):
He captured the senior General. U drumm.
Speaker 2 (02:44):
You may have seen The Dirty Dozen't that movie? That
old movie about captured How they played dirty? That was
basically based.
Speaker 3 (02:51):
On Patten's war maneuvers.
Speaker 2 (02:52):
Well, how he went on a four hundred mile goose
chase they thought, and ended up capturing the red general.
Speaker 3 (02:58):
He was on the blue team. He did that two times.
Speaker 2 (03:01):
Then he went down and got into Indio, out in
the middle of nowhere and set up an entire desert
warfare complex and taught Americans with inferior lee tanks the
elements of armor, pursuit, and breakthroughs. The point I'm making
is that when pearl And he was fifty five and
(03:22):
he was still not a brigadier general, people hated him
because he was drank too much. There were periods in
his life when he womanized. He played polo. As I said,
he was accident prone. He lit a gas limp to
look at his eye and it blew up and burned
(03:43):
his face. He accidentally stabbed himself, he broke he in
a horse accident, he broke his.
Speaker 3 (03:49):
Leg, he got phlebitis.
Speaker 2 (03:51):
He was always and of course he died in a
freak accident as well. So he was known as injury bone, reckless, rich, ostentatious,
and yet he spoke French, Red German and was highly educated.
The point I'm getting at is that he enunciated, or
he articulated, a worldview of war, and it was similar
(04:13):
to his contemporaries like LeMay and Ridgway, and also very
sherman esque. He was a big admirer of William to
come to Sherman and he basically said that democracies are
therapeutic societies and we don't train people, thank God, to
kill people, but there are people in the world who do,
and when they do, they need people like George Patten,
(04:35):
who's part of and yet not part of a democracy
that understands the evil mind and can make soldiers for
brief periods of time have the training and the courage
and the fortitude to stand up to the Herman Guring
division or fokuff one pilots or U boats. And that
(04:57):
was his principle. And then you would kill these evil
people and you were protect the innocent. And he said that,
and we don't like people to say that. When Colin
Powill said, what's your strategy for the first golfer, he said,
we're going to find the Saddam's army, We're going to
cut it off, and then we're going to kill it.
And people got very angry.
Speaker 3 (05:16):
Why did he have to say kill it?
Speaker 2 (05:18):
At the end, that therapeutic alternative is deeply ingrained, and
it's very hard for societies like us to mobilize against.
Speaker 3 (05:26):
These perceived threats without these types of people.
Speaker 2 (05:30):
So when we were ready after Pearl Harbor to fight,
the obvious choice for our first engagement was George S.
Pat Right before Pearl Harbor in October, he was promoted
to major general, two star general. And yet when we
had Operation Torch, the November nineteen forty two landings in
(05:50):
Northwest Africa, he was not chosen to lead the entire
project of Torch. He was given just the Western Command,
thirty thousand troops. The most competent, useless general and American history,
Lloyd Friedenhall was and Eisenhower wrote a report and said,
he looks like a general, he breathes fire, he's our man.
I've never been more impressed. He would swagger around, he
(06:12):
would pound his fist, and he didn't know anything. And
the result was, as you know, the worst defeat in
American history really was, or at least the most humiliating,
the kaiser in Pass, where Rommel destroyed an entire brigade
three thousand missing, four hundred dead, six hundred tanks. Just
friden Hall, where was he fifty miles back, dug in
(06:33):
in a bunker, probably drunk. When it was time to
take over Second Corps, everybody thought Patten will get his chance,
and yet Eisenhower asked General Harmon to do it, who
turned down, said this is pretty embarrassing.
Speaker 3 (06:48):
Patten deserves it. So Patten took over immediately. At the
Battle of l Gazaar.
Speaker 2 (06:55):
He won the first battle Americans had won in World
War Two.
Speaker 1 (07:00):
Listening to Victor Davis Hanson tell the story not just
of General Georges Patten, but about how democracies continue to
be able to defend themselves against evil while enjoying the
fruits of Western civilization. When we come back, more of
Victor Davis Hanson here on our American Stories, Leehabib Here,
(07:30):
as we approach our nation's two hundred and fiftieth anniversary,
I'd like to remind you that all the history stories
you hear on this show are brought to you by
the great folks at Hillsdale College. And Hillsdale isn't just
a great school for your kids or grandkids to attend,
but for you as well. Go to Hillsdale dot edu
to find out about their terrific free online courses. Their
series on communism is one of the finest I've ever seen. Again,
(07:53):
go to Hillsdale dot edu and sign up for their
free and terrific online courses. And we continue with our
American stories, and with Victor Davis Hanson telling the story
(08:14):
if not just George S. Patton, but well the soul
of battle and particularly how a genteel society and Western
democracies themselves can survive and thrive when life and death
are on the line. Let's continue with Victor Davis Hanson.
Speaker 2 (08:35):
He wanted to continue ahead of Second Corps. You had
thought that too many people had died in North Africa
needlessly without giving patent the main responsibility for the invasion of.
Speaker 3 (08:47):
Sicily Operation Husky, And yet we deferred.
Speaker 2 (08:51):
To General Montgomery. Money was a great general and a
set piece, but he was not a pursuer. He didn't pursue.
So what did Patton do? He went all the way
to northwest to Palermo, then made another right turn, broke
orders and got to Messinia before Montgomery, and of course
didn't get there in time to trap the Germans. But
(09:11):
he became very famous after that. And you think that
at that point everybody knew that Overlord was being planned
in conjunction with the Italian invasion, that he would get
a supreme command. He slapped two soldiers quite despicably. He
went into a hospital. He was mad because the absentee
rate of soldiers for what we would call post traumatic
(09:32):
stress syndrome was known then as shell shock. There were
three officers who watched the first slapping incident. The person
had malaria when he was slapped. Second one, two weeks later,
he had some ailment. Whether it was a fever or
it was just stress.
Speaker 3 (09:47):
We don't know, but he slapped him.
Speaker 2 (09:50):
In this period, one of his armored companies was on
a bridge. There was an Italian farmer with two mules.
Speaker 3 (09:59):
They were being strayed.
Speaker 2 (10:00):
They didn't want to run over the mules. It was
a very narrow bridge. Patten went up put took out
his three point fifty seven and right hand and he
had a forty five colt the other and shot these
two mules and had him thrown over the bridge, and
this was considered terrible. Think of this therapeutic mindset. Here
you have a whole column stopped, and the papers and
(10:22):
journalists are angry that patent shot two mules and threw
them over the bridge to facilitate the company getting out
of a strafing attack. But in that was a very
important point though, because he's obviously should have been given
one of three possible appointments. What I'm getting at is
that there's a pattern here of somebody that has undeniable,
(10:46):
experienced preparation and natural genius, who understands the horrific nature
of war and bothers the people that command him, and
yet sequentially or time and time again, when he has
not given a billet or an appointment or a promotion
befitting what he's earned on the battlefield, people die. And
(11:10):
yet the way that the system or the therapeutic society
justifies that is.
Speaker 3 (11:16):
That he slapped a soldier.
Speaker 2 (11:18):
Germans, of course, were bewildered by this. I mean it
is a little mythical that Germans knew a patent. I
don't think the movie is quite right that he was
canonized by the Germans. Mostly after the war, they sort
of changed the reviews. They call him a cowboy and
kind of reckless. But the point I'm making is that
it is true that a number of German intelligence officers
wouldn't believe that somebody of his talent would be relieved
(11:39):
for slapping a couple of soldiers when German officers killed
twenty five thousand soldiers in World War Two, shot them
for cowardice, or had them ordered shot. And so patent
is symbolic of a problem that all Western societies deal
with since the Greeks, that the advent of civilization is
a wonderful thing. It creates lee, it creates material wealth, luxury.
(12:03):
It's civilization. It's not tribalism, it's not barbarism. But in
that process we become tame. And yet the world around
us is not tame, and we don't quite know how
to justify using violence against people who want to kill us.
And so from time to time we see these fossilized
(12:24):
memories of our past and we bring them out of
the proverbial closet and we say, help us, Curtis will May.
The B twenty nine program doesn't work. I know it's
safe for our flyers at thirty thousand feet, but the
bombs are going off, falling off top. Well, you go
down five thousand with napalm, that'll cure it. Oh my god,
you're gonna burn people alive. I'll get rid of the industry.
(12:48):
Our Matthew Ridgeway. I'm gonna let them come in and
then I'm gonna surround them with napalm and I'm gonna
blast them, and it's gonna be winter, and they're gonna
regret they ever went into Korea. Our Sherman, this is
the plantation of Hal Cobb. This is the guy who
said that two hundred and fifty thousand Confederate soldiers were
superior to us burn his plantation. Oh wow, he burned.
(13:12):
He burned a Southern plantation. And so we when we
see somebody like Patten, and you can see it throughout
our culture, it's just not military.
Speaker 3 (13:21):
That was what made John Ford famous.
Speaker 2 (13:24):
That if you're Ethan Edwards in the searchers and you
want to find a small girl, and you're dealing with
some pretty tough Native American tribes, you want somebody with
a dubious pass. We're not quite told what he was
maybe a quantrille raider John Wayne, and you don't know
whether he's going to kill Natalie would or not, but.
Speaker 3 (13:42):
He has the skills that both ensure that.
Speaker 2 (13:44):
He's going to bring her back. But as you remember,
once she's back, he opens the door and walks out.
You don't want a guy like that there anymore than
you want Gary Cooper in high noon to stay around
after he's done what you have to do shoot four
people in the street. You don't want the magnificence even
in the village anymore. I remember that famous Yule Venner
(14:07):
and Steve McQueen said, well, I guess they're happy, and
he said, they'll even be happier when we leave. And
I'll just finish by saying that this is not a
new phenomenon that we sometimes misdiagnose talent throughout all aspects
of American society. When pre civilized Greece was making this
(14:31):
transition to the city state, especially to radical democracy, there
were people who saw the same phenomenon. One of the
great minds of the Western literary canon, Sophocles, in a
series of plays, he looked at this archetype of the
oligarchic aristocratic class that had all of these anti democratic skills,
(14:52):
and by every measure of talent and courage and bravery
they excel, and yet they all end up badly because
to reward them for those very characteristics would be a
referendum on your own society. And I think that's a
dilemma we all have to appreciate, not asking us to
change our views, but to every once in a while
(15:13):
look in the corners and when we see dark people,
maybe they're not so dark after all. So it's hard,
it's very hard to see that it's not the generals.
The generals are representations of us, and there were people
coming out of the depression who were impoverished that didn't
have the luxury to be therapeutic. And so Patton was
(15:33):
the most popular general. The reason he was so successful
was he had broad public support. The parents of the
soldier he slapped wrote a letter and said that I
think it was wrong what you did, but boy, we're
not going to criticize you.
Speaker 3 (15:47):
You're saving lives. I just don't think that would happen again.
Speaker 2 (15:50):
So the general today, and I think General Portrays was
a very good general, but it's more of an intellectual
with a PhD rather.
Speaker 3 (15:57):
Than a blood and guts type of person.
Speaker 2 (16:00):
Now I'm quoting the seventh century BC poe Adhesia that
the most powerful of all human emotions is envy, what
they call fawn ofs. And it's true that the more
successful person, that's what Greek ostracism, the democratic culture created,
ostracized somebody, not because he did something wrong, because everybody
knows who he is. So we don't like people who
(16:22):
do things that we can't in a democratic, pluralistic society.
And so these people who show us and remind us
of that, they're pretty scary people. But you can see
that this person has certain obnoxious characteristics and certain skill
sets that bring results. And you can guarantee that after
we are the beneficiaries of the results, it's going to
(16:43):
be persona non grada.
Speaker 1 (16:45):
And a terrific job on the editing and production by
Greg Hengler, and a very special thanks to Hillsdale College
for providing the audio of this remarkable talk of Victor
Davis Hanson's, which is not just about General Patton, but
how in the end, let's face it, we need our
bad guys who can inflict harm on enemies trying to
(17:07):
kill us. And nobody does a finer job of this
than Victor. And also Hillsdale College again sponsors.
Speaker 3 (17:16):
Of this show. You hear the name again and again.
Speaker 1 (17:18):
Go to their website and sign up for any and
all the Victor Davis Hanson's classes. They're terrific his lectures
on just about everything, and their latest on communism is
a tour de force as much, of course as it
is a mini documentary. I took it with my daughter
and it was fabulous. Go to Hillsdale dot edu to
(17:40):
learn more again. That story and history of communism is
simply terrific. The story of General George S. Patton and
the need for bad guys to fight the fight against
other nations bad guys. Here on our American Stories
Host
Lee Habeeb
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