It's A Saturday Morning Bonus Podcast For 06-01-24

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
The Michael Berry Show. This comingThursday will be the eightieth anniversary of D
Day. And many of us havedads, uncles, grandpa's who fought in
World War Two. And we knowthe importance of the defeat by these great

(00:24):
men of the Nazis and Japan.But do you know how much that war
mattered in the context of history,not just the aftermath of that war,
but how that war was different thanany war before it, in any war
since. One of our favorites,Victor Davis Hansen, gave a public lecture

(00:45):
at Hillsdale College on why World WarII matters. I hope you enjoy this.
I hope you learn from it.I hope you go to Hillsdale College
and support them financially. And Ihope you'll follow Victor Davis Hanson because he's
one of the great historians, thinkers, critics, commentators of our day.

(01:10):
Thank you very much. This ismy thirteenth year that I visited Hillsdale to
teach. It's been fourteen years sinceyour President, Larry arn came to my
farm, called me up and said, I like to talk to you about
coming to Hillsdale And I said,where is it? And he said Michigan.
I knew where it was, butI acted as if I didn't,

(01:30):
and I said, God, Ican't go to Michigan. And he said,
when I'm done with breakfast, you'llbe coming to Hillsdale, and he
was right. So I like totalk for about thirty five minutes about World
War two. That's what we callit in Britain. It's known as a
Second World War, and then i'dlike to entertain questions. I have a

(01:52):
book that's coming out from Basic Bookscalled The Second World War's Plural because this
idea, but a holistic single warwas a very late concept, not until
about nineteen forty one. And we'llget to that minute. But I was
always confused as a little boy growingup in the late nineteen fifties and early
nineteen sixties, we would go tothese family dinners on the farm, and

(02:15):
I had one uncle who fought inthe Illusians, and he'd say he fought
the Japanese and it was cold,and he'd tended plane tenders. I had
a first cousin who fought in Iran, and his job was to be at
Basra and convey dodge trucks to theRussians to fight Army Group South on the

(02:37):
Eastern Front in nineteen forty two andthree. I had a father who was
the loudest of everybody, who flewthirty nine missions in a B twenty nine.
He would talk about his brother,Victor Hanson, who I was named
after, who was killed on SugarLoaf Hill on the last day six Marine
Division in nineteen forty five. Ihad another first cousin who had come to

(03:00):
these things, and he said herolled with pat And I said, what
does roll with Patent? Me?He fought in the Third Army as well,
and I'd always when it was allover, I'd say to my dad,
these guys, you didn't fight inthe same war. I remember that
conversation. So it was the impetusfor this book. He said, what
do you mean. I said,well, some guys fought the Italians,

(03:22):
and some guys fought the Germans,and some guys fought the Japanese. And
I mean, I was only abouttwelve. I didn't know what I was
talking about, but I had agood instinct in that sense. I said,
they fought from the Aleutian Islands,in the Japanese theater, the Pacific,
all the way down to New Guinea, and from the middle of China
all the way to Hawaii, andin the European Front, from the Volga

(03:46):
River all the way out to theoff the coast they sank submarines three miles
off the coast of Miami, andfrom Norway in the Arctic Circle to the
Sahara Desert. And then as Igot older, that kept reverberating into my
mind, and I thought, whatdid they have in common? I know
that the fascists at least could makethe argument that Italian fascism in Japanese militarism

(04:06):
and national socialism in Germany were alike. But what did we the allies?
The three major belligerents, I mean, the British were parliamentary democracy, but
they did want to hold the empire. There was no person who wanted to
get rid of it more than FranklinRoosevelt. We were very anti British in
that sense, And of course weallied with Joseph Salm, who had killed

(04:28):
more people than anybody alive at thattime. And the answer, of course
is they were had only one thingin common, the Allies. They all
had either been surprise attacked by anaxis power or in the case of Britain,
their ally had been attacked. Thatwas all they had in common at
that point. That was the basisof the Allies that they said, we

(04:49):
don't have to be perfect, wejust have to be good because these people
have attacked us, our interest,and that was the basis for this idea
of a Second World War as aunique whole. If you think about it,
it really matters because there's a lotof things we're going to I'm gonna
try to get in the next thirtyminutes. But one thing is there had
never been an event like it before. Sixty to sixty five million people died.

(05:15):
That figure at the end of WorldWar Two is forty million. It
keeps going up every year as researchcomes in, mostly from two fronts,
the Chinese Front, where the totalis now up to seventeen million people,
and of course the Eastern Front twentyseven million people. So, in other
words, it was much more lethalthan the Great plague of the fourteenth century,
the Black Death. It was morelethal than any tornado earthquake in the

(05:40):
history of the human experience. Ofall the wars that have happened in the
last three hundred years together, thedeath toll did not match World War two,
there's been nothing like it. Twentyseven thousand people died per day for
six years. Why we've been intoHillsdale two day. More people died in

(06:01):
the same commiserate three and a halfhours than died in Iraq in the Late
Iraq War. It was that lethal. A couple of other things that are
just mind boggling. It's the onlywar, major war, in which more
civilians were killed. Eighty percent ofthe sixty five million were civilians. It's
the only war where the losers killedseventy five percent of the people the losers

(06:27):
did the winners. You know,Japan killed seven times more people than they
lost, and they lost. Sothere's things that are bizarre about and how
do we explain this. It's inexplicable. Why was it so lethal? A
couple of things jump out at us. It was the first war when we

(06:49):
had two billion people on the planet. More people died because there were more
people alive. We never had amechanized war with that many people alive.
It was the first truly global warwe call world World War one, but
it didn't go down to Africa.The graft spree was in World War two
was sunken Buenos aarrows that nothing likethat was comparable in World War One.

(07:10):
There was not a Pacific theater inWorld War One. This was a total
global war all over the globe,and it unfortunately occurred at a period of
Western technological excellence, the zenith ofWestern technology. So there was the internal
combustion engine had reached the pinnacle ofefficiency, five hundred four hundred mile planes,

(07:32):
ships, people could travel very quicklyand reach these places. There were
instantaneous communications that added to the deathtoll. There had never been weapons like
this before in any war. Thiswas a Western versus a Western war.
It was not the Western versus anon Western. It wasn't the British fighting

(07:53):
the Zulus, where it was veryquick and lethal because they had the technology
and the others didn't. It wasnot a non Western and non Western the
Aztecs fighting the toll TECs. Itwas a Western powers turning that tradition on
each other at a time when theyhad reached the pinnacle of their ex So
there had never been anything in theworld like napalm. There had never been

(08:16):
anything like the plutonium and uranium bombs. There had never been anything like a
B two rocket. There never beenanything like a B twenty nine, So
technology accounts for a lot of it, as does the sheer numbers of people
alive. The war was long.There had been longer wars thirty years War,

(08:37):
one hundred years War, but notrecently in the modern industrial ages.
Civil War was four years roughly WorldWar One was four years. This war
was six years long. That explainedsome of it. In every technological cycle,
there's peaks and valleys between offensive weaponsand defensive weapons. And the ancient
world, Greek armor was detective,so it was not able to be penetrated,

(09:01):
and casualties were only ten percent ofbattles. Until the age of gunpowder,
a city could resist a catapult.At other times, even with the
introduction of gunpowder, the arquebus wasso slow firing that it was hard to
kill a lot of people. Todaywe're back into a defensive cycle. There

(09:22):
are things in kevlar helmets and ceramicplaces that protect I went to Rack twice
during the surgeon. I remember goingto the operation headquarters and there was a
wall with people's body armor where theywere shattered with AK forty seven bullets and

(09:43):
a little sign this person got nowounds. That was inconceivable in World War
Two. Machine guns today marine arenot that much different than World War Two,
but defensive armor exists in a wayit did not in World War Two.
There was also, and I thinkthe this is very important, there
were ideologies that had never quite existedbefore. Most of the wars of the

(10:05):
past in Europe and Asia were foughtover territory or religion, or race or
ethnicity, but never quite ideology.There were new ideologies of the twentieth century
that were secular, agnostic, atheistic, mostly national socialism, Italian fascism,
and Soviet communism. And they werea mish mash of bastardized views of everybody

(10:28):
from Wagner to Nietzsche to Darwin tothe progressive idea of eugenics and natural selection
and sterilization. But they all hadone thing in common. They introduced to
the equation a relativism about good andbad. They were relative movements, so
if you wanted to kill six millionJews, you could find a Exe Jesus

(10:52):
to support that without having to becondemned by religion. There was the idea
of survival of the fittest, orthere was the idea of national destiny or
an idea in Russia of radical equalityis worth it. But in all of
these ideologies, the so called exaltedends justified any means necessary. We put
all of that together and we endup with this stew that nobody ever dealt

(11:16):
with and explains for a large part, this horrific tally. Now, the
word World War II in America andthe Second World War was a very late
word, not really employed until aboutnineteen forty one. If people look back
at World War One, in September, when Germany invaded Poland, they still

(11:37):
knew it as the Great War.For about a year and a half,
there was no indication that this warwould become what it was, a global
blood bath. Germany invaded Poland withthe Soviet Union thirty days, twenty eight
days. The war was over.Germany invaded the next spring, Denmark one

(11:58):
day, Norway. About six weeksin April, it was over. Germany
invaded the Netherlands, Luxemburg, Belgium, and France. Nobody could believe that
would be possible. They had notbeen able to do it in World War
One. They'd only gone seventy miles. This time, they took the entire
Western democracies, all that area inseven weeks Battle of Britain, the first

(12:24):
time they had been stopped, butnot their army, only their navy and
their air force. And they tookthe Balkans, as you remember, in
April of nineteen forty one in Greeceand Crete, and all that period Germany
only lost one hundred thousand soldiers.The war was over. Hitler had achieved
what nobody else in history had done, not Napoleon Nazesar. He had basically
combined what is now the European Union. Any country that opposed him were pro

(12:50):
Nazi anyway, Switzerland, the Iberiansin Portugal and Spain. My ancestors in
Sweden were not only selling him ironOre but doing it with free transit and
credit. Turkey was pro Nazi.At this time. He'd achieve it.
The war was over. There wasa problem in Britain only because there was
this problem called Winston Churchill. Halifaxwould have cut a deal. The former

(13:15):
King Edward would have cut There wasone man who had come to be Prime
Minister of the day that the invasion. He would not yield. But that
was the only We were isolationists andthe Soviet unit collaboration. Here's what's I
think a very valuable lesson. Howdid that happen? It had not happened
in eighteen seventy seventy one, Ithad not happened nineteen fourteen to nineteen eighteen.

(13:37):
How in less than two years didthe whole infrastructure of Europe crumble.
I know some of us think,well, they were Nazis, they had
panzers, they had BF one ohnine's, And the answer is no.
It was a weird combination of Britishand French appeasement, Russian collaboration in America,

(14:00):
isolations very quickly to run through whatI mean by that. When Hitler
turned to the West after conquering Polandand building an alliance with Bulgarian Romania and
Hungary, and having the help ofthe Soviet Union on his rear, his
generals came to him an, okhand okw you can't go into France.

(14:20):
We did that one time. Weonly got seventy miles. We lost one
point one million people. And Churchillhad said the hope of the West is
a French army. We think todaythat the panzers were indestructible. The German
army was three million people, Francehad three million people. The combined Arms
of the Netherlands and Belgium was almostanother five hundred thousand. The British Expeditionary

(14:45):
Army was going to have three hundredthousand. The Allies had almost four million
soldiers. They had three thousand tanks. The Sharbi tank, to take one
example, had a seventy five millimetergun superior to anything in the German arsenal
market one, Mark two or Markthree. The Mark ones that went into
Poland didn't even have a main gunon them. The Germans were quite surprised

(15:07):
that the submarine spitfire and most characteristicwas comparable to the BF one oh nine,
and French Dwane fighters were superior.What I'm getting at is, materially
it shouldn't have happened. It shouldhave been a deadlock. Even though they
had the maginal line, they knewthey could not go through it. They
had to go through the Ardent.So what happened, and it's a lessened
for the time, and that isthey lost deterrence. It's comparable to this

(15:31):
last six months in the United Statesand all of a sudden putin is buzzing
all of you know. It isthat all of our airplaft all of a
sudden, the Iranians are trying tocause an incident with our ships. All
of a sudden, people in SouthSudan shoot an American diplomatic car. All
of a sudden, North Korea issending these things. And it can't be

(15:52):
true because we have overwhelming military power. And the answer is military power is
important up to a point, butyou have to have deterrence and not deferently
and to get back. What I'mgetting at is if a man from Mars
looked at the comparable military strength inEurope at that time, they would have
said Hitler would be insane. Ashe was told by General Haller, you're

(16:15):
insane to even think of it.General Beck resigned, O, you cannot
do this, and he said,I've seen them at Munich and their worms.
It's the term he used. Themore you tried to be affable to
Hitler, lest Chamberlain did, hesaid Herman Geren said, well, Chamberlain
was very nice to it. Hesaid, if I see that old man
again, I'm going to jump onhis umbrella. And he brought out a

(16:36):
trait in human nature that the moreyou tried to defer to someone when you
have power, that you did notneed to defer. The more you earn
contempt for your magnanimity rather than appreciation. In nineteen twenty eight and France,
it was against the law to putin a school book any mention of the
triumph that we're done. And Holland, in nineteen thirty a destroyer was renamed

(16:57):
to a flow till a leader becausethey thought the word destroyer was too provocative.
In nineteen thirty two nineteen thirty three, the Oxford Debating Society and a
very famous debate said for King andcountry, I shall not fight. At

(17:18):
the same time, they were alreadytrying to violate the tenants of the Varsay
Treaty in Germany, Mussolini was alreadyplanning to go into Ethiopia. The Japanese
had been fighting for two years.So there was a sense of appeasement,
which is a good word at thattime, that you were ready to listen,
soft power lead from behind. That'swhat it was. But it meant

(17:38):
that they sacrificed their material advantages becausethe people in it were not willing to
fight. In other words, theylost to turns because they were not willing
to lose a few thousand soldiers.So they wouldn't lose sixty million people in
a war, and that translated onthe battlefield as a BF one oh nine
was no better than a French Markthree tank was no better or worse than

(18:03):
a shar tank. But five missionsfor BF one oh nine per day two
for a French fighter. French tanksran out of gas. Germans did not.
French got to the Moose River todefend it. They asked where the
bridging bridging equipment was. They waitedthe day to have Rommels swam across the

(18:25):
river. That was the difference.There was another ingredient that made the inexplicable,
not just possible, but certain,and that was American isolationism. Now
we had to fight over the VersaillesTreaty. Today we often think that Versailles
Treaty was too punitive. The Americansdidn't want any part of the League of

(18:47):
Nation. They said, you know, we bought two million people over there,
we saved them at the last moment, and we don't get involved.
All they had to do in theUnited States is say forget the League of
Nations and never multipower never works.We just have an alliance with the French
and the British that if they areinvaded, we will send a two million
people as we did in the war. We got a million over there in

(19:08):
six months. Had we done thatafter the invasion of Poland and had a
million soldiers been there, they probablywould have had a deterrent and Hitler would
not have gone into Western Europe.We didn't do that because we felt that
the Versaies Treaty had been unfair.There were people who's saying World War One,
now that I think about it wasthe cause of arms, merchants,

(19:29):
automatic alliances that caused automatic mobilizations,greedy capitalists, everything but German imperial aggression.
Believe me, the Versailles Treaty,compared to what we did to Germany
after World War II, was apiece of cake. Nothing in the Zei
Treaty said We're going to go intoGermany, occupy it, cut it in
force and have troops there for fiftyyears. Does anybody here in Germany say

(19:53):
we have to go to war againbecause you were mean to after nineteen forty
five. And the answer is,we did the two stupid things that you
do in the history of war,as you are punitive and you're weak.
We humiliated Germany and the war clause, and then we were not willing to
occupy the country and stand with agun to their head and say you're gonna
have a Weimar Republic and we're gonnawatch it day by day by day.

(20:15):
And so if you compare the Versaillestree, if we had just looked at
what the September program, that's theidea of what Germany would have done had
they won in World War One,annex all of Belgium, all the French
ports, get rid of Luxembourg.It's pretty punitive what they did to Russia
in nineteen eighteen at Breslatabic they annexedfifty million people. We forget today that

(20:37):
in World War One there were onlyeighty miles outside Saint Petersburg. The German
army they took a million eight amillion square miles of Tsaris Russia. It
was the most punitive piece, andnobody said that's too mean. So eighteen
seventy one they took all the AlsaceLorraine. So we were wedded to the
wrong ex of Jesus of what hadhappened. We wanted no part of it.

(21:00):
Empowered Hitler. There was a finaland probably the most important catalyst for
this unnecessary war that turned border skirmishesinto World War two, and that was
the Soviet Union was not just appeasingand isolation, it was collaborationists. On
August twenty third of nineteen thirty nine, they signed a non aggression pack with
Adolf Hitler and they ended up providingHitler with thirty percent of his oil,

(21:26):
thirty percent of his wheat, almosttwenty percent of precious metals chromium and think
tungksen and things like that. Atone point later on, when Stalin,
of course as he always did,berated Churchill for not opening the Second Front,
Churchill turned to him and said,well, wait a minute. The
bomber, the junkers and the Dornersbombers that were killing British people in September

(21:48):
of nineteen forty were fueled by youroil wells and the Caucasus. We forget
something about Stalin. Of the sixmajor belligerents in World War two on the
Acxisi, Italy, Japan and Germanyand the United States, Russia and Britain,
Stalin made to cut a deal withevery one of them at one time
or another, and he honored theones with the axis better than he did

(22:10):
us. He never broke the nonaggression pack with Germany and by affiliation with
Italy. He signed one with theJapanese in April of nineteen forty one,
right before the invasion by the Germans. And it was so effective that you
could take a liberty ship from Portlandor Seattle, full it full of aluminum,

(22:32):
take it all the way to Vadistavik, the pacific port of the Soviet
Union. The Japanese would get awayand not touch it because they didn't want
to violate that non aggression even thoughthey were killing us in places like Tarrownivejima.
That collaboration, which didn't do himany good, did it. That
collaboration allowed Hitler to turn westward.And he said, he said later in

(22:56):
table talk, I would have neverdone that had I not had a secure
flank. So you think of thisisolationism, appeasement and collaboration. Did something
that shouldn't have happened. It turneda border war in nineteen forty one into
a global confliguration because of three events, all explicable by these three motives.
Number one, nobody thought that Hitlerwould be so stupid to invade the Soviet

(23:18):
Union the Soviet Union in the periodfrom August twenty third, nineteen thirty nine
to the period when Hitler stabbed andstall on the back invaded, Russia gave
more precious metals and resources to theThird Reich each month than they got an
entire year by looting the Soviet Union. It was the stupidest thing in the

(23:41):
world. The Third Reich had eightymillion people, the Soviet Union had one
hundred and eighty million, and yetthey almost, as you know, pulled
it off. That would not havehappened had these other events not occurred.
First, that meant that all ofa sudden, a dormant border war there
had been no fighting since the Creteand April turned into a new World War.

(24:02):
Suddenly the front went from Crete andAthens very quickly to Rostov outside of
Saint Petersburg. And if you canbelieve, I don't know if he should
believe the soldiers of Army Group Center, but they said, on December fifth
they saw the spires of the Kremlin. The front had turned into a continental

(24:22):
war between Asia and Europe that wasnot just a world war yet. Two
other events that nobody had decided occurredon December seventh, when the Japanese surprise,
US attacked us in the Marianas,the Philippines Wake Island, of course,
Pearl Harbor, and then the Britishin Malaya, Burma, and most

(24:45):
tragically Singapore. Why did that happen? Because as General Yamamoto, we all
think he was such a wonderful man. I can raise hell for six months.
No, he said, I willresign if you don't let me do
Pearl Harbor. Will Yamamoto would likeForeign Minister Masuka and General Yamagushi, they'd
all been in the United States inthe twenties. They respected us, they

(25:07):
understood how nice we were. No, they'd had contempt for us. They
said so in their memoirs. Yamamotosaid, I've seen these people. They
have nice cars and they wear spats. He was right, and he thought
that he would give us a terribleslap on the face and we would say,
please, we'll do it. Andwhy did you think that? Because
he said, and the Japanese ForeignMinister said, any country that won't come

(25:30):
to the aid of Britain, whyit's burning down, surely won't care about
a few battleships and carriers at PearlHarbor. We had the second largest navy
in the world. We all thinkthe Japanese navy had eleven carriers, most
carriers in the world, but intonnage and types of ships and quality,
the United States had a superior navy. And as they were bombing Pearl Harbor,

(25:51):
we had twenty seven carriers on orderthat were built. Within two years,
we built one hundred and fifty onelight escort and fleet care. It
was insane to do that. Whydid they do it? The same reason
the Hitler went into the Soviet Unionbecause they didn't think that the dangers outweighed

(26:11):
the possible glory and material benefit.And they had good reason, because of
appeasement. Isolation is in collaboration.And then finally, the third unfortunate event
that turned a border war in Europeinto a global holocaust. I don't know
why it happened. We can argueabout this. On December eleventh, Germany
and Italy declared war on us.Think of that and why did they do

(26:33):
it? Hitler gave fifty different reasons, depending on what day of the week
you happened to transcribe his rants atnight two in the morning. Sometimes he
said, I wanted to help ourU boat commanders who were sick and tired
of seeing American ships go right outin Miami with a silhouette in the city
and they couldn't touch them. Andthey did sink fourteen million tons of Anglo
American shipping by the time of thewar with it. Sometimes he said,

(26:56):
I went to war because I owedit to the Japanese. And as General
Wardamont says, you didn't know himanything. You double cross them with a
non aggression pack when they were fightingZukov in nineteen thirty nine, and they
did it to us. That's whatwe do. We're Axis. Sometimes he
said that the Americans will have atwo front war. I'm brilliant. I've
never had a two front war.And they said, you have a two
front war. You've got Britain nowin America and you've got oh, no,

(27:18):
Americans are cowboys. They'll take themfive years to get Who knows what
the reason was, and even lessso Mussolini. But those three events,
the invasion of Soviet Union in JunePearl Harbor and the declaration by the Germans
followed by our own counter declaration laterin the day, meant that now the
war was as I said, globaland it was pretty inevitable that it was

(27:42):
going to be a lethal war likeno other. And there was a simple
calculus that sums up the war andwe'll get to the end, and that
is, could the Axis Powers,who had been fighting in Spain, in
China, in the Anschlus, bullyingCzechoslovakia and had rearmed much earlier, could

(28:03):
they defeat the Allied Powers before theyrearmed. If they couldn't, they were
going to lose. They had twohundred million people, Soviet Union, United
States and Great Britain had four hundredmillion. They had tanks. Britain produced
more tanks in World War Two thandid Germany. Soviet Union produced seventy thousand.

(28:26):
We produced fifty five thousand. Germanyonly produced twenty thousand. There were
six hundred thousand airframes produced in WorldWar Two, six hundred thousand. We
produced four hundred thousand of them.Germans never built a four engine bomber.
They couldn't do it. Japanese couldn'tdo it, the Italians couldn't do it.
The Americans and the British produced fortythousand of them. So that was

(28:51):
going to be in evidable by nineteenforty five and September. The United States
gross domestic product was larger than Germany's, Japan's, what was left of Italy's,
Britons, and the Soviet Union puttogether. There was no way they
were going to win that war ifwe mobilized, we being the Allies,
so they had to win it veryquickly. They thought they almost did it.

(29:14):
They almost did it by I thinkthe high water mark would be sometime
in July of nineteen forty two.Army Group Center was about one hundred miles
from the Caspian Sea and Grossny.They just about had their grip on all
of the oil of the Soviet Union. German soldiers had climbed the Caucasus and

(29:34):
put a squatchika on Mount Ebra's.The front was fifteen hundred miles long.
Moscow was still besieged, so wasSaint Petersburg. The Japanese had lost a
total of three thousand soldiers only Theyhad had a setback at midway, but
they had most of the Greater Asiaprosperities fear under their control. They were

(29:56):
going into Guadalcanal to cut the supplylines Australia and in North Africa. Rammel
was sixty miles from Cairo, excuseme, Alexander. And then suddenly in
there was something called Guadalcanal, firstUS Marine Division, Stalingrad and l L

(30:17):
LA Main and the whole thing vanished, and then the war was essentially over
in the sense it was just aquestion of how many million people are going
to be necessary to lose their livesto insist on unconditional surrender rather than on
armisis. So we get to thequestion why did the Allies win so easily?
I mentioned that the war was thestory of the people who killed the

(30:38):
most. The nations that killed themost people lost to the nations that built
the most stuff. They killed eightypercent of all the sixty million, and
we built most of the We builtover eighty percent of the munitions, and
in war, unfortunately, munitions canbe more important than lives. But there
were a few other reasons. Numberone, we had a more appealing message

(31:03):
to third powers like India not torevolt or the Indonesian people to not cooperate
in Switzerland to give back pilots.And the message was we didn't start this.
They attacked us, and we hadsomething called the Atlantic Charter, the

(31:26):
Four Freedoms, the Casablanca conference.It was very hard to do because we
were working with Stalin, who wasa mass murder. But the appeal,
at least the propaganda was we arenot taking anybody's land. The United States
didn't take anybody's land. We don'twant anything other than to beat the Axis.
That was much more appealing than theYamoto race. The Raza race in

(31:49):
Italy and the Volkan Germany deserve thisbecause they are superior. Uber mentioned to
you people that helped a great deal. Second thing that helped is you don't
have to be democratic to win awar, but it's good to have some
democratic allies because their leaders don't lieas much. So what do I mean
by that? Every time that Hitlertalked to the Japanese he lied. Don't

(32:13):
believe me. Count Chiano, theson in law Mussolini, said, we
saw Hitler today and he lied.He said he wasn't going into the Soviet
Union. We know he is nextweek, so we're going to lie back
to him and go into the Balkansagain. And the Count Chiano then says
the next day, well, wecan't get too mad at him that he

(32:36):
invaded Russia because we invaded Greece anddidn't tell him when the Japanese bomb Pearl
Harbor. Hitler said, where's PearlHarbor? Nineteen thirty nine, The Japanese
are in the middle of a fighton the Mongolian border, and Foreign Minister
Matsuka says that we're part of anaxis, the Pact of Steel, the

(32:59):
Anti Common turn Pack. Hitler justsigned a deal with the Soviets. Hitler's
ready to go in to the SovietUnion. He's planning in March, talks
to the Toady General Title and says, do you think there's any chance that
the Japanese will invade from the east. He says not now. They just

(33:21):
signed a non aggression pack with theSoviet Union. He said, that's terrible.
He said, yeah, they didwhat we did to them, so
there was no trust when people arenot democratic. Stalin was a liar,
but he had two democratic leaders,Roosevelt and Churchill, that honored their word,
and he did business with him.And he was more or less,
until the end of the war,pretty dependable that he would do things that

(33:43):
he said he would do, andthat was he didn't He didn't sign a
separate piece with the Germans. Wedidn't sign a separate pieces that was very
important. A couple of other things. We had cooperation. They didn't.
What do I mean by that?Mussolini invaded everybody with almost He invaded the
Balkans, he invaded Greece, heinvaded Somali land, he invaded Libya.

(34:04):
He did and he never told Hitlerthere was no cooperation. Hitler said,
oh my god, he's gone intoYugoslavia. I can't. I got to
go unto Russia in two months.Why did he do that? I've got
to go down there. And hedelayed, supposedly, he delayed Operation Barbarossa
by thirty days. We sat downwith our partners, we being the Allies,
and said, the Russians are goingto fight on one front and one

(34:28):
front only. They're not going tohave strategic bombing, they're not going to
have four engine bombers. They're notgoing to fight in Italy. They're not
going to have a U boat war, they're not going to be in the
Pacific. All we want from themis to kill German soldiers. And they
killed seventy five percent of all theBehrmark soldiers in the war, almost five
million of them. They broke theback and they did it because they moved

(34:52):
their factories to the URLs. Theyhad great munitions, but we gave them
two thousand locomotives three hundred and seventyfive dodge truck, so much so that
Gering said, these are automatic robots. He used the word robot automatons.
He said, because these damn Americanshave motorizer divisions and seventy percent of our
divisions are driven by horses. AndGeren said, they have an oil war,

(35:16):
we have a grass war. Wehave to find grass. They all
have to get is oil and theyhave it and we don't have grass.
So we divided up the labor.We said to the Russians, we'll go
to Italy, we'll go to Sicily, and we'll go to the Pacific.
And with the British, we saidto them in the Pacific, we're not

(35:37):
going to get along as here aswell as we did in Europe. You
have colonial interests. We understand thatyou want to protect India. You want
to get back Burma, want toyou're worried about Malaya. We just want
to We're not a colonial power.We were attacked and we're close with the
Japanese. We just want to gostraight to Japan. So we'll do our

(35:58):
thing and you do our thing.Maybe we'll meet in nineteen forty four or
something, and it worked out.There was a division of labor. It
was more than just that though.For the first year of the U boat
wore. German torpedoes bounced off likeours did. They were no good.
At the same time they were bouncingoff. Japan had the greatest torpedo in
the world, auctionated longtime best torpedoforty mile range, and they didn't even

(36:24):
know what the Germans did. Japaneseneeded a fuel injected supercharged aircraft engine.
German Germany had a good one.They didn't even know it. There was
no cross fertilization between the axes becausethey didn't trust each other. As you
would imagine. We take the Shermantank, we find out it doesn't work

(36:45):
very well against these new panthers aBritish. They don't worry. We have
a seventeen pounder. We'll put itin the turret. But they gave us
two thousand fireflies. They could blowa tiger out at one mile and they
were much cheaper than building a newtank. We had a great plane,
the P fifty one, and wedidn't quite match the fockwoff one night and

(37:06):
the British said, don't worry,we'll drop of rolls marilin engine in it.
And suddenly it was the best fightof the war. That was constant,
and finally there was one other thinggetting to the end. When you
go to war, you have tohave some conception of how to destroy the
enemy's ability to fight, because mostenemies will not have an armacist. Sometimes

(37:27):
they do. In World War One, we had an idea. What do
I mean by that? The Americanssaid, as soon as after Pearl Harbor,
we have a way. We havefour engine bombers. We have two
on the drawing boards. We're goingto bomb their capitals into smither rings and
we're going to land. We havethe navy to do it. Britain says,
we have a navy and we're goingto help you. We have a
four engine bomber, and the Russianssaid, we don't need those. We're

(37:51):
on land, but we will bein Berlin, Germany. Hermann Gering of
all people said to Hitler, minefire, how are we going to get to
New York? You declared war?And he says, We're gonna have an
America bomber. He says, wedon't even have any bomber. How are
we gonna get there? Admiral Yamamotowas asked, when are you gonna bomb

(38:12):
San Diego? When are you gonnabomb Portland? He said, I'm never
gonna bomb Portland. Well, what'sgonna stop Detroit and all these places from
making weapons? They had no idea, So they started a war with powers
they had no ability to reach theirhomeland, and they lost. Unsurprisingly,
if we look back at the war, who was the big winners and losers?

(38:34):
Biggest winner and the biggest loser.With the Soviet Union they lost twenty
seven million men, partly because ofthe stupidity of Joseph Stalin, partly because
they took on the Behmark, partlybecause they had collaborated and they were surprised
that being said, for such adeplicitut power, as I said, cut
a deal with everybody. When thewar was over, the Soviet Union,
even though they had that lost fiftymillion people who had been occupied, twenty

(38:59):
seven million dead. For the firsttime in their history, they were in
the most advantageous strategic position umadue.All of Eastern Europe was now Communist The
Baltic stakes were backed inside the SovietUnion, so was the crimea Ukraine.
And as one Soviet diplomat laughed inBritain, you guys went to war to

(39:22):
stop totalitarianism in Eastern Europe by Hitler, and you've insured it by us.
And it was sort of true,wasn't it. George Patten said that Britain
waged a brilliant war. It wasthe only country to fight the first day
of the war and the last dayof war September first of September second six
years. No other country fought theentire war. No other country went to

(39:42):
war. Think of this for theprinciple of an ally. We only went
to war when they attacked US.Soviet Union only went to war when they
attacked US. Germany attacked people,Italy attacked people, Japan, not Britain.
They went for a war for principle. They were brilliantly led. They
put forty percent of their investment andland in seap, airror and naval power.

(40:04):
They avoided the psalm that were done. They lost the fewest of all
the major four hundred and twenty five, less than half what they had lost
in World War One, and theyfought a much more ambitious war. Into
that being said, they mobilized.We think we mobilized. They mobilized to
a degree that was unprecedent, moreso in terms of per capita investment than

(40:24):
the United States and the Soviet Union. And they were flat broke when the
war was over. And then,unfortunately, because of the deprivation, they
began to socialize their rails, theirhealth care system, their transportation, their
iron, their steel industries or powerand lo and behold, within ten years
the countries that were flatten, likeJapan in Germany were industrial powerhouses, turning

(40:47):
out Mercedes and Hondas and Toyotas,and Britain's car industry, to take one
example, was over with. Sothey had a very tragic and they also
gave up their empire willingly. So, but theirs was a tragic experience,
and it makes me very mad whenI hear Obama saying they're going to get
back at the queue. They werethe most admirable and idealistic of all the

(41:09):
Allies, and they fought way abovewhat they people have thought. They were
capable in every single category minitions exceptone year of planes. They outproduced the
third Reich that had all of occupiedthe EU up today under its power.
Not much to say about the Italians. They quit in forty three, and
so after the war was over wesaid, well, they weren't really involved

(41:31):
in the Holocaust. People fought twoyears in Italy with the Civil War.
Germans fought at Italians. We foughtthem, Let them go. They're Italians,
Vatican, etcetera. So they didn'tend up suffering Japan. Japan was
strange because, as I said,they were the most vicious. They killed

(41:51):
seventeen million people in China and yetthey lost three million. Quite a lot.
We burned down forty percent of theirurban through the B twenty nine incendiary
raids Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but wenever invaded their land as we had done
Italy and Germany. So they hadnot seen a battle on their own turf.

(42:12):
I know they'd been bombed, butwhen they unilaterally then surrendered, they
never quite accepted that the American Marinesor Army could get face to face with
them, and they never came todeal with their past as they do today.
If you don't believe me, theyjust put their big first big carrier,
you see it, They just launchedit. You know what the name
of it was, the Kaga.You know what the cargo was. It

(42:35):
was the leading carrier at Pearl Harbor. Finally, we come to the United
States, and if you look atwhat our aims and objective were, we
achieved all of them. We wantedto not just defeat Germany and Japan and
Italy. We had done that interms of Austria, Hungary and Germany and

(42:59):
World War One. We said again, are we going to have to come
back here. We're going to havean unconditional surrender, even though it's going
to cost us several hundred thousand lives. And we occupied their country, all
three of them, and we've hadpeace. We don't have any problem.
And then we discovered something. Welost four hundred and twenty five thousand people,

(43:21):
only three percent of our military.Only Britain lost less, and we
lost a smaller percentage. We hadthe second largest military twelve million people,
larger than Germany's only the Soviet Unionslightly bigger. As I said, you've
seen Willow run here be twenty nine, be twenty four every hour. We
had the largest GDP every category.It's just stunning to think what we did

(43:42):
in a major three years. Andyet when the war was over, we
had this dilemma that the bad guys, the fascist, the Nazi, Nazis,
the people who started the war wereours. We had to rebuild them.
We had to go to the joband even say to the Chinese,
I know they killed seventeen million,but we're going to make them democracy and
they're going to be your friend fromnow on. Then we had to go

(44:06):
to the French and we had togo to the polls, the polls lost
three and a half million and saythey're not that bad. Now they're good
Germans and they're going to be ableto democracy. And then we had to
go the same thing to the Ethiopiansand the Libyans, say the Italians didn't
mean it. Now they're good.That's a hard thing to do. Meanwhile,
the Soviet Union is telling all ofthe world China, the war never

(44:27):
ended. We're still liberating people fromfascists, and only the difference is now
the Americans of the British, especiallythe Americans, have joined the fascist To
conclude, what do we make senseof this? How did it all started?
I think one of the things toremember about World War two is in
every war, but especially World Wartwo is to get a general view of
what war is. War is alaboratory, a barometer, a thermometer.

(44:52):
It's a measuring device, that's allit is. It's a very bitter one.
So two sides have different and nobodyknows who's stronger and who's weaker,
because there's material consideration, tanks,planes, and there's willpower. If you
have Churchill on your side, he'sworth ten twenty divisions. But they didn't
have him. Of course, theyhad the tradition of Stanley Baldwin and Neville

(45:14):
Chamberlain. But the point is warthen tells you, in a very very
difficult way, who was stronger afterall. But it doesn't need to occur
if you can convey that message beforethe war breaks out. So we went
to World War two to prove abanality that nobody in his right mind ever

(45:36):
thought that Italy, Germany and Japancould ever fight the combined power of the
Soviet Union in the United States andGreat Britain. It was physically impossible,
but it took a war to proveit was sixty five million because of American
isolationism, British appeasement, and Russiancollaboration. Thank you very much in your

(45:58):
life to Michael Berry and Podcast.Please tell one friend, and if you're
so inclined, write a nice reviewof our podcast. Comments, suggestions,
questions, and interest in being acorporate sponsor and partner can be communicated directly
to the show at our email address, Michael at Michael Berryshow dot com,

(46:22):
or simply by clicking on our websiteMichael Berryshow dot com. The Michael Berry
Show and Podcast is produced by RamonRoeblis, the King of Ding. Executive
producer is Chad Knakanishi. Jim Muddis the creative director. Voices Jingles,

(46:45):
Tomfoolery and Shenanigans are provided by ChanceMcLain. Director of Research is Sandy Peterson.
Emily Bull is our assistant listener andsuperfan. Contributions are appreciate it and
often incorporated into our production. Wherepossible, we give credit. Where not,

(47:06):
we take all the credit for ourselves. God bless the memory of Rush
Limbaugh. Long live Elvis, bea simple man like Leonard Skinnard told you,
and God bless America. Finally,if you know a veteran suffering from
PTSD, call Camp Hope at eightseven seven seven one seven PTSD and a

(47:31):
combat veteran will answer the phone toprovide free counseling