Join Larry Swikert and Patrick K. ODonnell as they discuss the Battle of Trenton and the American spirit during the Christmas season. Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays from Real America's Voice and the War Room.
00:01:35.880So first, I was going to be Larry Swikert, the historian in back of the Patriots' history,
00:01:40.200the co-author of the Patriots' history of the United States.
00:01:43.820And then in the second hour, we have the great combat historian, Patrick K. O'Donnell.
00:01:47.360We're going to do Trenton. We're going to do the famous battle of the combat history of Christmas.
00:01:53.560And we're going to focus on the Battle of Trenton, which took place Christmas night.
00:01:57.220Larry, Merry Christmas. Thank you for joining us today.
00:02:01.740Give us your overall about the American spirit and the Christmas spirit overall.
00:02:07.140And then we're going to talk about a couple of Christmases where people, you know, we're in fairly trying times now.
00:02:13.040We're going to really talk about trying times in 1814 and I think in 1941.
00:02:18.160But give us your overall take of the Christmas spirit and the American spirit.
00:02:23.780Well, you know, early on, the Puritans didn't really celebrate Christmas a lot.
00:02:28.460And we didn't start celebrating Christmas until about the early 1800s.
00:02:33.760And, you know, of course, other groups did, but some of the Puritans did not.
00:02:40.600And so as it started to be celebrated, recognized as a holiday,
00:02:45.960Americans kind of developed this mood where Christmas brings all things new.
00:02:51.060Yes, we have New Year's, but really the day that sets everything new is the day that Jesus was born.
00:02:56.660And so this is kind of the day that renews our whole whole year.
00:03:01.900You know, when they talk in songs about lifting spirits bright, things like that.
00:03:06.780This is why, because Americans do celebrate Christmas almost as the beginning of the new year.
00:03:14.220What is it were the traditions that informed the American experience of Christmas where they did they come from England or France, Germany?
00:03:26.680When we really started to celebrate Christmas as a as a as an event here, you're saying in what the late 18th, early 19th, I guess early 19th century.
00:03:38.400What what what what was it that that brought us?
00:03:42.500Because the Puritans obviously were not the celebratory type.
00:03:46.260Well, they they began to lose their influence.
00:03:50.580And of course, we began to get a lot of immigrants from Germany and Holland and France.
00:03:58.720And each brought their own Scandinavia, each brought their own Christmas traditions, St. Nick and all this other stuff.
00:04:06.200So we really, truly began to have an American Christmas where all of these Christmas celebrations were blended together.
00:04:14.760It's the perfect melting pot that is America that we are willing to.
00:04:19.380OK, we'll take some of your celebration and some of your celebration.
00:04:26.240We we're going to talk about, you know, we normally do the combat history of Christmas or those Christmases for our fighting men and women that have had, you know, because Christmas when you're in a war, Christmas, you know, comes and goes.
00:04:42.120You've still got to get on with the with the conflict.
00:04:44.820Talk to us about the trying times that America's had during the Christmas season.
00:05:18.240He gathered every boat that he could, not only so he would have them, but also to deprive the British from having any boats.
00:05:27.100And he transported about historians or, you know, debate this, but about 2400 men across on Christmas night.
00:05:36.380And they crossed on icy water, which slowed down their approach.
00:05:42.380Washington wanted to attack the town of Trenton around eight in the morning, and they were slow getting across the river.
00:05:50.800And the fishermen did an amazing job of rowing some 40 boats worth of men back and forth and back and forth all night long and then went on to fight the battle.
00:06:06.220But there is a but he but he but he this is the time that you actually use Christmas because he wanted to in theory, what he wanted to do was attack Christmas morning.
00:06:17.480He used Christmas and particularly the Hessians and the Germans.
00:06:21.400They were fighting as mercenaries would be observing the Christmas holiday.
00:06:27.220He was actually using Christmas as a tactical weapon.
00:06:31.880Now, he didn't get across until Christmas evening, but the holiday itself was one of the reasons he he didn't just plan this because it happened to be on a Tuesday or whatever.
00:06:40.560He was actually using the observance of Christmas as kind of as kind of shelter for himself, correct?
00:06:50.220Right. I mean, he thought in fact, he knew that the Hessians would be partying pretty hardy and he assumed that they would be drunk.
00:06:59.820Well, like the Japanese did at Pearl Harbor, they assumed by attacking at that time in the morning, A, many of the men would be sleeping and B, many of the men would be at church services.
00:07:10.040So they would catch us completely unawares.
00:07:14.340To me, the most amazing thing about that whole story is not that Washington won, which was fascinating in itself.
00:07:23.780But he took several hundred, maybe eight or nine hundred prisoners and marched them back.
00:07:31.580And the guys had to row them back across the river in the middle of the night on the night of the 26th.
00:07:39.760After rowing them all, the whole army were, you know, 24 hours earlier.
00:08:12.440They or the whole revolution and people was in the Christmas of 1776, that incredibly powerful year of the Declaration of Independence.
00:08:23.080But, you know, six months after the Declaration, five months after the Declaration, it's almost all over.
00:08:30.820I mean, you've got the head of the army, the really the commander in chief understands that if he doesn't pull off the surprise attack and at least get back on offense.
00:08:40.720And show the colonies, we can win something here.
00:08:44.440You say Christmas Day is kind of rejuvenation and beginning of things that this would start the next year of the conflict.
00:08:51.740It was all going to be over no matter how many great documents you have, like the Declaration, no matter how many, you know, smart lawyers and great men of rhetoric can write something very moving and have people sign on for.
00:09:05.320If you don't deliver on the battlefield, it's going to be over.
00:09:10.720Well, you know, and to show you that he took that as we're going on offense now, right after the Battle of Trenton, he then advanced back across the river again and attacked at Princeton.
00:09:22.580And while this is not considered a great battle or there weren't significant losses on either side, what I find the most amazing thing is that the battle lines for the first time were drawn up against each other in open field.
00:09:36.700Previously, Washington's men had fought behind embankments or used a surprise attack.
00:09:42.120And the reason this is so significant is you've seen the movie The Patriot, I'm sure, a hundred times like I have.
00:09:49.840And Mel Gibson's character has this great line where he's with Heath Ledger looking at the Continentals and the British going firing volleys at each other.
00:10:00.980And he says it's madness going muzzle to muzzle with the British in open field.
00:10:06.160You know, he spent too much time in the British Army.
00:10:08.580But the fact was Washington knew the only way to win the war was to get the Continentals to the point that they could stand up muzzle to muzzle against the British in open field because you weren't going to win it with militia.
00:10:22.980Militia, kind of interesting, really are a range warfare type of military.
00:10:29.880They're not built for hand-to-hand combat.
00:10:32.320Yeah, they had tomahawks and knives, but they didn't have bayonets on their muskets.
00:24:37.860You have to really get into the nuts and bolts.
00:24:40.360You can't focus on one or two battles like Saratoga and Yorktown and Trenton or Iwo Jima.
00:24:47.840It's not something that lends itself easily to teaching.
00:24:51.320And then you alluded to a really important fact.
00:24:53.480This kind of ends the revolution, and historian Paul Johnson has argued that this war really cemented the Anglo-American alliance forever.
00:25:05.440Because A, the British recognize this now for the first time as equals, and I think it's sometime during this correspondence that for the first time a British foreign minister refers to the United States as a nation.
00:25:16.860And this—when you finish the war, we go back to this boundary, status quo antebellum.
00:25:26.080We go back to the way things were before the war, and so neither side could lord it over the other that, yeah, you really took it on the chin there.
00:25:33.920What tends to happen, for example, in the wars between France and Germany, where they go back and forth, and they're constantly—there's a winner and there's a loser, and the loser is always anxious to get back land or tear.
00:25:45.300That doesn't happen with the war of 1812.
00:25:48.180So the White House is burned to the ground or burned in August.
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00:30:06.580I want to thank everybody for joining us here on Christmas morning as you're maybe, I've opened the gifts already, getting back from church and having a cup of coffee.
00:30:17.560We're about to have something that nobody expected, this battle in New Orleans.
00:30:23.020But talk to us about the Christmas, over the Christmas season.
00:30:26.040Were people thinking that things were getting better, that we were getting through this horrible, since the Capitol is still in disarray and the country has been humiliated?
00:30:35.880Well, we had won some very important battles, and the fact that the British were going to New Orleans kind of signified their last hope, because they had not been able to follow up on their seizure of Washington, D.C.
00:30:54.360They hadn't been able to capture the president.
00:30:56.720I think it was General Coburn who said he wanted to send Madison back to England as a present.
00:31:08.960Again, the same things they saw in the American Revolution.
00:31:11.780They could control the big cities for a very short time, but they couldn't control the countryside at all.
00:31:16.940And so, this was kind of a last gasp attempt by Pakenham to take New Orleans and at least salvage the great port of New Orleans at that time.
00:31:26.960And, of course, Andrew Jackson was ready for him and had dug trenches and everything.
00:31:33.780And like we were, we didn't mention this, but Washington was saved by a miracle on Long Island when he was trying to evacuate his troops.
00:31:42.760They could have been surrounded and destroyed, and he had to move them back to Manhattan in boats.
00:31:48.580But the British Navy was right there, and we're going to blow those boats out of the water until a miraculous fog came in and concealed the movement of several thousand men across from Long Island to New York.
00:32:55.680The revolution essentially ended in – I think it was January 2nd or 3rd of 1815, right?
00:33:02.560It's in the – I think we're still within the 12 days of Christmas when the battle takes place in New Orleans.
00:33:09.320And, Larry, you would agree that that brought the curtain down on the American Revolution?
00:33:14.140Yes, and I think even more important, it solidified our relationship with the British, this special relationship that basically defined us for the next almost 200 years.
00:33:25.860We may have lost a little of that now that they've gotten so woke.
00:33:29.680But it carried us really through a couple of world wars and through leadership of the world for quite a while.
00:33:36.760So talk to us about – and by the way, that was a very dark time.
00:33:42.420We'd lost the capital, you know, Madison, that story about Dolly Madison being turned away at taverns because of the policy and some about the people being angry about how the conflict was being conducted.
00:33:55.360And then to do that and to turn it around in six months is pretty extraordinary.
00:33:59.780Also, it shows you, you know, General Jackson, the first real populist, eventually ran and became president after being defeated or having it stolen from him, like President Trump the first time, became really a president that really defined much of the 19th century, right?
00:34:19.360Just an extraordinary, extraordinary individual.
00:34:24.320Let me think about how dark things were because people forget that right before Christmas, a group of New England, you know, where else, a group of New England states were so unhappy with the war and the fact Madison, of course, is a Republican, small r, and they are federalists, that they are talking secession.
00:34:46.920They are actually meeting and discussing having several of the northeastern states secede in the middle of a war.
00:34:57.720And, of course, what else happens is that once we win the war, in essence, that goes away, and so does the Federalist Party.
00:35:06.460That basically killed the Federalists once and for all.
00:35:08.840Yeah, and like you said, that victory sealed, that was able to lock in the Louisiana Purchase, make sure we could explore it, and then all the great, everything that came out of that, the really opening of the West, it was extraordinary.
00:35:25.020And one of the most important battles in world history is the Battle of New Orleans.
00:35:28.560It doesn't get enough attention because technically it was a few days after the treaty, but quite frankly, this made sure that this was actually more powerful than a treaty because winning on a battlefield is much more powerful than what's written in a term, particularly when people will – well, they will interpret those contracts as they will interpret it.
00:35:55.020Well, I found 1941 interesting because the mood of the country, of course, was horrible.
00:36:02.380We had lost every single – there weren't a lot, but we had lost, of course, at Pearl Harbor, devastating defeat, and we were extremely fortunate that our three aircraft carriers were not in Pearl Harbor at that time or that Halsey went the wrong way, not his fault.
00:36:19.880Well, he only had two ways, but he only had two ways he might go, and so he was heading the wrong direction.
00:36:27.140Had he caught up with the Japanese fleet, he probably would have lost and lost a carrier.
00:36:36.420We lost Wake Island, you know, plucky Wake Island, which kind of held out.
00:36:42.920MacArthur's men were being creamed in the Philippines.
00:36:45.920It was only a matter of time before they surrendered.
00:36:48.500So the mood of the country was extremely dark.
00:36:52.120And then I want to focus on two things.
00:36:54.240First, there was a song written in the summer of 1941, and I think this is interesting because it's the summertime when he writes this song, by Irving Berlin.
00:37:07.720And it's called White Christmas, and he was thinking back to the death of his son in 1928 at Christmastime when he writes White Christmas in the middle of summer.
00:37:25.520So that song becomes kind of a staple, but it's not until early 1942 that a guy named Bing Crosby records it.
00:37:33.820But Crosby then goes on all of these USO tours, and this is his biggest song.
00:37:42.800And he's trying to avoid singing this song because he thought it was a downer, and he thought it was kind of gloomy.
00:37:52.300And he found that every time he would go to sing before the troops, they would demand, you know, sort of like, free bird, man.
00:38:00.980And so he ended up having to sing White Christmas every single time.
00:38:06.440So he ends up right before Christmas in 1944 at a USO show in front of 100,000 GIs, airmen, others, in France.
00:38:20.780And he said, it was the hardest thing I ever did in my life was to sing White Christmas to those 100,000 men, all of them streaming tears and not choke up.
00:38:36.700He said it was the hardest thing of his life.
00:38:38.980So I just found that an incredible Christmas story related to the kind of hardships of World War II.
00:38:45.100What got in the summer of 1941, walk me through, what was it about, why was Irving Berlin, how did he end up writing White Christmas, and how did it happen in 1941?
00:38:58.900Well, as I said, he's in a warm climate.
00:39:01.720He's in, I think he was vacationing in California, and he's feeling this warmth and this heat.
00:39:10.640And for some reason, he was taken back to the Christmas, the ice and snow of 1928 when his son died.
00:39:18.840And many speculate that the lyrics of White Christmas are really written to his son.
00:39:26.440Now, there's another aspect of this that I wanted to get to.
00:39:30.180So let's go back to the Christmas of 41.
00:39:32.900And one of my ongoing themes in Patriot's History of the United States, and by the way, for all of your viewers,
00:39:41.320in response to that great response that we had from the Thanksgiving show, we have created at wildworldofhistory.com a master class in U.S. history and in world history.
00:39:56.400And I teach all 22 chapters of Patriot's History of the United States in video form and 15 units of world history in video form.
00:40:06.820So you can check that out on our website at wildworldofhistory.com.
00:40:10.220So anyway, we're at Christmastime, 1941.
00:41:26.500All of the torpedo planes from the first two aircraft carriers had gone out, and over 50 had gone out.
00:41:33.940Only three came back, and they didn't score a single hit.
00:41:36.940And here's this submarine, the Nautilus, that sneaks inside Japanese defenses and fires three torpedoes at a Japanese carrier, and none of them hit.
00:41:48.300And so, at this time, if you're looking at this submarine, you're thinking, man, we failed.
00:41:55.080And, you know, I just want to speak to people out there.
00:41:57.900How many times have you thought, I failed?
00:45:12.920In the next hour, Patrick K. O'Donnell, the great combat historian, is going to join us.
00:45:17.300We're going to go through Trenton in detail, as we traditionally do here on Christmas Day.
00:45:24.580Larry Swikert is the co-author of the Patriot Society of the U.S.
00:45:28.120Got a new site he's going to tell you about.
00:45:30.120But, Larry, we're on tenterhooks about people fail all the time.
00:45:35.660You're saying we failed so many times.
00:45:38.340And even in the Battle of Midway in May, after that dark Christmas of 1941, we're still failing.
00:45:44.080But it's all down to one submarine, sir.
00:45:45.800So, having sent out all the planes from Midway without scoring a single hit, having sent out all the torpedo planes from the carriers, and out of 50, only three came back and didn't score a single hit.
00:46:00.340And the Nautilus slips inside Japanese defenses of the destroyers, fires three torpedoes, doesn't score a single hit.
00:46:07.680The Nautilus runs, is chased by a Japanese submarine for several miles.
00:46:11.640Finally, the Japanese submarine gives up, goes to rejoin the fleet.
00:46:17.340Meanwhile, our dive bombers have been above, as I said, the Pacific's a big place.
00:46:22.140They knew roughly where the fleet was.
00:46:24.900And they see a single destroyer heading someplace.
00:46:28.220And they figure it's got to be joining the fleet.
00:46:30.720So, they follow it back, and lo and behold, there is the Japanese fleet, and the carriers have no fighter cover, and they have decks full of planes and bombs, and all it takes is a few bombs each, and the Japanese Navy is finished for the rest of the war.
00:46:48.860And literally, within a space of, I know that there's other things, but literally within a space of 15 minutes, the whole world changed, just like at New Orleans, within a space of a couple of hours, the whole world changed.
00:47:03.900And so, it's a message of hope, that even when you think maybe you failed, maybe your failure was permitted so God can succeed someplace else.
00:47:13.020Larry, tell people, I want to make sure people get access to your site.
00:47:18.980In fact, a great way to start the new year and to finish off this is, you can't learn too much history, right?
00:47:25.480It's exciting, it's interesting, but it also informs people of, you know, making decisions in their own life.
00:47:32.300And one of the things you see, hey, people have been through these kind of tough times before.
00:47:35.740So, walk us through, how do they get to your, what you're making available, which is to teach this type of history?
00:47:41.900Well, if you go to wildworldofhistory.com, wildworldofhistory.com, you'll see we have a brand new masterclass in American history.
00:47:53.640That's 22 lessons, 22 videos, tracks perfectly with the book, Patriot's History of the United States.
00:48:00.340We have a masterclass in world history since 1775.
00:48:05.020These are bigger lessons because you're dealing with India, China, Africa.
00:48:09.220So, there's 15 lessons and 15 videos, and you can get them separately, you can get them together.
00:48:15.360And, of course, we always have our special of Patriot's History of the United States available there on sale.
00:48:22.100So, take a look at the wildworldofhistory.com.
00:48:25.220You're going to love how I teach history.
00:48:27.680Larry, you've got about a minute left.
00:48:31.660What should people over this holiday, one of the most sacred days of the year in the Christian calendar is Christmas Day, the birth of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.
00:48:40.240What message of hope do you have for the American people?
00:48:44.680Well, I think it is that we've been in dark times before.
00:48:47.500And, relatively speaking, I know this is hard today because everything is very presentist, but we've been in worse times before.
00:48:54.600I mean, you know, the American Civil War was far worse.
00:48:58.320So, you've got to keep hope, faith, hope, and love.
00:49:03.440And there's a reason why you go through dark times because not only does it make us better, but it reminds you who's in control of all this, and it ain't us.
00:49:13.540Larry Schweikert, the co-author of the Patriot's History of the United States.