World War I, better known to some as the Great War, began in 1914 and brought in global powers from across the world, with the Central Powers facing off against the Allied Powers, which eventually included the United States. By the end of the war, over 20 million lives had been claimed, including more than 100,000 American troops.
00:06:41.580So Great Britain was, I mean, this one, they talk about now on the death of Queen Elizabeth, people talked about, you know, the British Empire and colonialism and all that.
00:06:50.260This is the time frame when we're talking about it.
00:06:52.080You know, like this is when they really were the British Empire and, you know, they controlled India and all these vast land masses.
00:06:58.700And they were at the very height of their power.
00:07:01.980But their isolationism was well-founded, right, as I understand, because they had this huge, really powerful navy.
00:07:10.840And that Navy had served them very well.
00:07:12.900And they were kind of like, we're good as long as we have our big Navy.
00:07:16.000And as we'll fast forward to in a little while, once Germany started to sort of come at them, right, they were like, okay, hold on a second.0.85
00:07:26.220Now, if you're going to mess with our shores, with our waters, you're going to do anything to threaten our Navy, and Germany was building up its Navy, it's on.0.71
00:07:33.700We're talking about a totally different ballgame now.0.85
00:07:36.660The British definitely saw the Germans as an emerging threat.
00:07:39.120For most of the 19th century, Britain had seen Russia as a greater threat over land, the various routes to India.
00:07:44.800There was this kind of almost fantasy that the Russians might eventually crash across the northwest frontier through Peshawar and into India.
00:07:52.040But since the turn of the century, the Germans had been building this high seas fleet.0.51
00:07:56.060And Kaiser Wilhelm II was one of his many alleged blunders.
00:07:59.960Again, the Germans get a lot of bad press for this, that he had been reading, apparently, the work of Admiral Mahan.
00:08:05.420the influence of sea power on history allegedly kept it next to his bedside table and was kind of
00:08:09.960obsessed with the idea that Germany too should have a high seas fleet just like the British did
00:08:15.360and and there were various aspects to this where they often built these ships without necessarily
00:08:20.560that much capacity for coal storage in part because they weren't necessarily going to go
00:08:24.380around the world rather they were going to go into the North Sea the English Channel to fight
00:08:28.340the British it was quite provocative the British though they really had seen off this threat I mean
00:08:32.740the thing is that the newer research on the war and particularly on spending shows, the British0.55
00:08:37.240were able to outspend the Germans on the Navy in part because the Germans had to feel such a large
00:08:41.040army. By 1911 or 1912, the British really had seen off the German threat. So I think some of the
00:08:46.560arguments about the Anglo-German naval race is this prime causative factor of the First World
00:08:51.600War. And we've heard a lot about that. There are many books about that subject. I think they
00:08:55.860overdo it just a bit. I think Britain was arrogant enough to see the Germans as a threat. But I think0.94
00:09:00.760by 1914 the threat had been largely contained at least the threat to british naval supremacy
00:09:05.780all right so let's go back so the war broke breaks out in 1914 the the world the great war
00:09:11.880world war one and um officially we are told it is because uh some some group called the black hand
00:09:19.740some terrorist group in serbia assassinated the archduke of austria-hungary which is basically an
00:09:26.880alliance between Austria and Hungary that we refer to as Austria-Hungary. And Austria-Hungary
00:09:32.180got very mad. This is the official story. They got very angry that their archduke had been0.51
00:09:35.700assassinated and went back to Serbia and wrote this barn burner of a letter. Like you will do
00:09:41.840the following things or it's war. And as I understand it, one of everybody's favorite
00:09:46.200characters, Winston Churchill, read this over in England and was like, oh, it's on. I mean,
00:09:49.860it's war. I mean, clearly there's no way they're going to meet these conditions. They want war.
00:09:54.040war is coming and Germany is over there behind its friend Austria-Hungary like yes we want war0.81
00:10:00.080two we got you we got your back Austria-Hungary and the alliances went this is my this is the way
00:10:04.560I talk about history just to keep it simple I know you're way above me on this but like is that my
00:10:10.160is my dumbed down version essentially correct no there's a lot of truth in this I mean you're
00:10:14.020alluding I assume to the blank check that is the Germans give this assurance to Austria-Hungary
00:10:18.140that effectively we have your back in case Russia intervenes and we're ready to back you up to the0.66
00:10:22.940hilt and the blank check was certainly important so was the assassination and so is the austro-hungarian
00:10:27.760response to it it wasn't just a pretext though if you actually look at the details i'm not going to
00:10:32.660get into the details of what actually happened in sarajevo although i just do discuss it in great
00:10:37.660detail and in several of my books what's fascinating about the dynamics um surrounding
00:10:42.760it is it franz fernand you think okay he's an archduke he's the heir to the austro-hungarian
00:10:46.480throne the hapsburg throne of austria-hungary okay fine so you'd think he's not even really
00:10:50.800sovereign he's not a politician why would it matter so much but in fact he was he wasn't just
00:10:54.760heir to the throne but franz joseph who had been emperor since 1848 was an octogenarian expected
00:11:00.900to die really almost like 85 yeah he was he was i mean a lot of people said guy despite his uncle
00:11:06.980that's right he was staying alive just because he didn't like his nephew um but but so franz
00:11:11.060fernand was actually running military policy he was basically running almost a shadow government
00:11:15.000out of the belvedere and what was significant about his assassination aside from the the kind
00:11:19.060of provocation of it, was that he himself had been blocking the war party in Vienna.
00:11:24.960Conrad von Hitzendorf, the equivalent of the more famous Moltke in Berlin, the chief of
00:11:29.740staff effectively in charge of military planning, he had actually advocated going to war with
00:11:34.380Serbia something like 25 times in 1913 alone, and Franz Ferdinand had blocked him every
00:11:47.740So what you're saying is, I mean, the average person would say, well, why would Serbia assassinate that guy if that's the guy who's stopping the war?
00:11:54.920But the question is, well, did did this Serbian terrorist group have an interest in stopping the war?
00:12:00.580Certainly sounds like maybe not. And did Serbia itself have an interest in stopping the war?
00:12:04.560Because there's a real question about whether this terrorist group was the only one behind it or whether Serbia was actually itself behind the assassination.
00:12:11.160Well, I don't think the terrorists were necessarily pacifists.
00:12:14.180On the other hand, the people backing them, some of them may well have wanted the war.
00:12:18.740If you actually look at the organizer of the Black Hand, Colonel Dragutin Dmitrievich, his codename is Apis, a little simpler to call him Apis.
00:12:29.060He was actually the head of Serbian military intelligence.
00:12:31.820Now, he himself was not necessarily in quotes with the prime minister of Serbia, but the hardliners definitely wanted war.
00:12:39.120They thought they might actually win and they were not averse to provoking Austria-Hungary.
00:12:43.400So a lot of people overlook Serbia in 1914.
00:12:45.420But in fact, we have very clear evidence that the Serbian government, at least some rogue elements of the Serbian government, were complicit in the plot.
00:12:53.700And that the Serbian prime minister refused to renounce the plot or to warn Austria-Hungary about it.
00:12:58.680And later on that Russia gave effectively her own version of a kind of what we might call a blank check to Serbia.
00:13:04.200That is to say, we will back you so you can go ahead and reject the ultimatum.0.57
00:13:17.640Why would there be these provocations?
00:13:20.000I mean, as I understand it, you've got a situation here at the beginning of, you know, the turn of the century there where they're kind of like the Ottoman Empire is weaker and Austria-Hungary is weaker.
00:13:31.860And they're kind of looking at the same territory.
00:13:35.100All these countries like Russia and Serbia and Germany and Austria-Hungary, they're all kind of looking at these countries in this region like, well, maybe I would like to take over some of that space that the Ottoman Empire used to encompass.
00:13:50.320So everyone's getting like a little provocative, and then the Serbians really poke the bear by this assassination, and then it's on.0.60
00:13:57.220Well, I'm glad you brought up the Ottomans, Megan, because in fact I've been trying to popularize the idea of the First World War as the War of the Ottoman Succession.
00:14:04.480This isn't kind of homage to all those famous wars of the Austrian or Spanish or English succession dating back to early modern history.
00:14:11.380That really is to me kind of what is centrally an issue.
00:14:13.980That is to say the decline of Ottoman power, particularly in Ottoman Europe.
00:14:18.280And then by the end of the war, of course, you have the great powers squabbling over the inheritance of the Ottoman Empire with the Entente powers, Russia, France and Britain all staking their claims.
00:14:28.100It's not quite as simple as just to say that everyone went to war in 1914 to try to carve up the Ottoman Empire.
00:14:33.640In fact, the Germans and the Austro-Hungarians ended up taking the side of the Ottomans effectively to try to defend them against the predations of the other powers.
00:14:41.580It's a little bit like what people say about slavery and the Civil War, that you can't exactly say that the war broke out in 1861 specifically because of slavery.
00:14:50.760But everyone knew that it was somehow the cause of the war.
00:14:53.280In the same way you could say that the decline of Ottoman power is somehow the cause of World War I, the precise sequence of events was not necessarily predetermined.
00:15:02.520some of it was quite contingent and even accidental like the assassination but the clash of interest
00:15:07.580was real that is to say that uh the russians the australian neighborhood was getting a little bit
00:15:11.900more it was getting more complicated and people were starting to get a little bit more territorial
00:15:16.000and by the way just just so that nobody so the ottoman empire is basically turkey plus uh it's
00:15:22.240turkey plus right um just to put a label on it for people used to be much bigger than just turkey
00:15:28.180Okay, so they're looking at each other.
00:16:54.100His Majesty's Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Gray,
00:16:56.600who's most famous for his line about the lamps in europe are all going out and they will not be lit
00:17:01.040again in our lifetime uh which is not just metaphorical he was actually losing his eyesight
00:17:05.160at the time uh sir edward gray was famously elliptical in the way that he would speak
00:17:10.560and interact with other diplomats and so it was really hard to read him when the germans finally
00:17:16.060got the first slightly ambiguous warning from britain this is when sir edward gray again in
00:17:22.100his elliptical way says that you know how if if events uh kind of proceeded towards war on the
00:17:27.100continent that it would not do to stand aside and wait uh which implied that britain might actually
00:17:34.280intervene um this actually forced the german chancellor bethman holweg at the last minute
00:17:40.080to try to send this note to austria-hungary rescinding the blank check it was about eight
00:17:45.500or ten hours too late because austria-hungary just started shelling belgrade across the border
00:17:50.540So effectively, hostilities had already broken out. So had Gray gotten a warning across sooner, some people even will go further and say maybe the U.S. could have done this. Perhaps if Theodore Roosevelt had been president instead of Woodrow Wilson, he was kind of more of an interventionist who was probably more sympathetic to the British and French cause. Maybe the U.S. could have played a role.
00:18:10.040Well, I think that's less plausible in part because the U.S. wasn't as directly engaged on the scene as Britain.
00:18:15.420But the Germans, again, in part because of just the ineptitude and kind of lack of imagination of their own military planning, they really thought they had to secure these towns in Belgium on mobilization day plus three.0.62
00:18:28.740And it turned out they didn't even succeed anyway.0.52
00:18:30.320That's what brought Britain into the war, the violation of Belgian neutrality.
00:18:33.600But the British had not really made clear.
00:18:51.600And Great Britain—and you're saying there's this guy, this top Navy guy, who is saying maybe this isn't a good idea.
00:18:57.800And the two countries might have done well, thanks to the invention of the telephone, to have had a conversation, Germany and Great Britain.
00:19:05.500And as I understand it, too, Sean, that Germany and Great Britain, you know, England, they had they had a reason to kind of trust each other or to be allies.
00:19:16.060I guess there was there was a familial relationship, like everybody's related to Queen Victoria or descended from her.
00:19:22.400And they should have been friends, but they were not friends.
00:19:26.540No, you're right. And there was a real sense of betrayal on the Germans part.
00:19:30.300I mean, when Bettmann Holweg, the chancellor, is finally told that Britain has sent an ultimatum, is about to go to war with Germany, his own metaphor, he said this is a little bit like a man who's already being attacked from two directions in a bar fight.0.83
00:19:43.480And then some other guy comes in and hits him on the head with a bottle, you know, which is perhaps a self-serving way of describing German foreign policy in July 1914, which is foolish in many ways.
00:19:53.460But you made a really interesting point about the telephone because, you're right, had Stredward Gray simply gotten on the phone or really anyone in the cabinet with Bettman Holbeck or someone else in Berlin and simply said, you know, look, you're going too far and you better know that we're serious and we're not messing around, maybe Bettman Holbeck would have reigned in the generals.
00:20:13.060Interestingly enough, this almost happened between Germany and Russia.
00:20:17.240It was on that same night, July 29th, the night I was talking about where Gray finally got his semi-warning across to Berlin.
00:20:24.780That same night, the Russian Tsar, Nicholas II, received what he thought was actually a kind of real-time telegraphic answer to a question that he had just posed to the German Kaiser, Wilhelm II.
00:20:40.940In fact, because it took so long to transcribe and decode everything, he was responding to another message from about 24 hours previously.
00:20:48.320So the Tsar was completely mistaken, but he was so moved he actually called off general mobilization.
00:20:53.560And so it's a really fascinating what if, had they simply been able to talk to one another on the phone?
00:20:57.200As you pointed out, they were actually related.
00:20:59.980The German Kaiser, the Russian Tsar, the English king, they were all actually related.
00:21:04.540Had they simply gotten together on the phone, maybe they couldn't.
00:21:07.100And the curious thing is the monarchs were not really the warmongers.
00:21:10.760In nearly every case, they were the ones who were at least trying to put the reins on just a little bit.
00:21:18.360The Tsar is the one who kept trying to tell his generals to back down.
00:21:21.620The Kaiser, despite his reputation for bellicosity, was actually the one who at the very last minute tried to call it off.
00:21:30.400So it's kind of the monarchs get a bad rap, but they were actually probably less guilty than a lot of the generals and politicians were in 1914.
00:21:37.100That is interesting. And the monarchies across this region would look very, very different at the end of World War I. I mean, than they did beforehand. They would, in many cases, be no more soon thereafter.
00:21:49.940So one of the problems that Germany foisted upon itself was it decided to attack France, which was weak, and they understood that they could take out France very quickly, same as World War II.
00:22:04.620But they went through Belgium, and this was a problem for England.
00:22:08.420England was like, oh, no, you're not going through Belgium because even though we've been very isolationist and we're like, hey, we're Great Britain.
00:22:14.920We don't need to cut these deals with anybody.
00:22:16.960Belgium was strategically important to England.
00:22:19.360for a whole bunch of reasons and there was a neutrality like they weren't allowed they decided
00:22:24.980that they would defend belgium and the belgians as i understand it really fought too like they
00:22:29.420put up one hell of a fight when germany invaded no that's absolutely right and it's a sign of
00:22:34.580again the um the ineptitude really of german military planning not understanding the strategic
00:22:39.120dimension if you can believe it the original so-called schlieffen plan which was actually
00:22:44.220significantly modified by moltke the younger the original plan had the germans invading
00:22:48.440the Netherlands as well. They were actually originally going to violate both the Netherlands
00:22:52.500and Belgium. And it was a little bit of common sense told them that perhaps we should at least
00:22:57.780keep some country neutral, maybe so we can trade in case it turns into a long war. But it was so
00:23:03.060foolish. The French, on the other hand, they originally had looked into the logistics because0.99
00:23:07.080Belgium, after all, is kind of the cockpit of Europe, the low countries. But the French had
00:23:11.260realized its strategic importance, that Britain had guaranteed Belgium's integrity and independence
00:23:17.360by treaty. And so for the British, this was potentially a casus belli, a cause for war.
00:23:22.660And so the Germans really brought it to themselves. The only thing I would say about this plan,0.87
00:23:26.080though, it's not that they necessarily thought that defeating France would be easy. It's that
00:23:30.100they thought the French were a more formidable and dangerous opponent, that it would take the
00:23:34.660Russians longer to mobilize. They failed, of course. They did not actually knock France out
00:23:39.700in six weeks as they'd expected to do. They never actually did reach Paris. And it was the failure
00:23:44.800of the Germans with this Schlieffen Moltke plan to subdue France in six weeks that to some extent
00:23:50.960really turned the war into this horrific war of attrition, particularly on the Western front.
00:23:56.600So England didn't want Belgium invaded because if they get control of Belgium,
00:24:01.320then they're really close to England, right? I mean, is that the issue?
00:28:48.720and a lot of it centers around the Tsarina and Rasputin.
00:28:52.760And when the Tsar takes over personal command of the armies
00:28:55.900after Russia suffers a series of setbacks against the central powers in summer 1915,
00:29:01.380And that doesn't just mean that he's going to take kind of all the blame, success or failure on the front, but it also means he's no longer in Petrograd.
00:29:08.560And so the rumors swirl and it looks like the Tsarina and Rasputin are kind of running the government.
00:29:14.020And there are these other really kind of almost obvious things that the conspiracy theorists settle on.
00:29:19.260They appointed a guy called Boris Starmark, chairman of the Council of Ministers.
00:29:22.960He's got even got has a German name, right?
00:29:24.800So you have a German name running the government, and then you have allegedly Rasputin, who's supposed to be a pacifist or pro-German, and the German-born empress, or Tsarina.
00:29:37.120Unfortunately, this is kind of what poisoned the political atmosphere quite fatally, I think, in Petrograd in 1916, heading into the winter of 1917.
00:29:45.080so but in the beginning i mean just to just to dumb it down in the so in the beginning russia
00:29:50.880was backing the serbs and on the opposite side of germany in this war but then something really
00:29:55.900important happened over in russia and all that would change and really would set set the course
00:30:01.060for the the 20th and now 21st century and the way people were going to be living in russia and that
00:30:06.760was the revolution and the bolsheviks and the rise of lenin and then these other countries looking at
00:30:12.040Lenin, like, well, what's he going to do? Because it wasn't a foregone conclusion that Lenin was
00:30:15.520going to come in and just keep doing what the Tsar and the Tsarina had been doing.0.64
00:30:19.880Well, right. First of all, because Lenin was actually in Switzerland. In fact, when we talk
00:30:24.220about the revolution of 1917, you really have to bracket it out into two. The February revolution,
00:30:29.780which is the one that toppled the Tsar, initially seemed, if anything, at least from the perspective
00:30:34.540of France and Britain, they were quite hopeful. They thought it was more democratic. Right. And
00:30:39.280they thought that that again that czar had been surrounded by these pro-german advisors so they
00:30:42.980thought they were kind of a cleaning out the augustian stables and now russia would rededicate
00:30:47.320herself to the war effort uh this is actually what the the u.s president wilson i i assume we'll talk
00:30:53.180about that as we go but he sees it the same way right now russia's a democracy so we're all on
00:30:57.540the same side and they're hoping that it's actually going to be a positive story for the war effort
00:31:02.460uh lenin of course as we know is sent back to russia by the germans you know had shall we say
00:31:08.520perhaps slightly nefarious purposes they knew about his political program which was effectively
00:31:13.740to turn as he called it the imperialist war into a civil war basically to sabotage the war effort
00:31:18.220promote mutinies and take russia out of the war and he didn't do it all at once it took him a
00:31:24.000number of months but the bolsheviks fled the russian armies with propaganda and by the fall
00:31:28.740opinion is starting to turn against the war although the bolsheviks they actually did not
00:31:33.420win the elections held in russia amazingly they held elections even after the bolsheviks took
00:31:37.200power, and the Bolsheviks got only 24% of the vote. But in the army, they did well. That is,
00:31:41.460they did make a decisive move to shift opinion in the army against the war. And this really was the
00:31:47.980key part of Lenin's program, the peace platform. That's what then allows Lenin to take Russia out0.82
00:31:53.020of the war. Effectively, he sues the central powers for peace. They meet at Brest-Litovsk.
00:31:58.340The Allies refused to go because they see Lenin as a German agent, somewhat reasonably. I mean,
00:32:03.240He had been sent to Russia by Germany.
00:32:05.360The Germans had provided funds for his operations, even if there was a lot of controversy about that.
00:32:09.900And the Russian provisional government was never able to produce the smoking gun in court, although they actually did.
00:32:30.840so like i don't why would they be so distrustful because right now they've got the russians
00:32:36.420like i don't know factor that in because i don't understand how they could be so suspicious of him
00:32:41.600when he's his i guess he came from from germany but his country's fighting with the allies well
00:32:46.180he was actually he came from switzerland but to get to russia from switzerland uh in in in the
00:32:51.680time when you have these massive armies mobilized in both fronts the only really practical way for
00:32:56.300him to get there was through germany so the germans organized his trip and they paid for it and they
00:33:01.360sent lenin to russia and german diplomats were kind of told to stay quiet about it but it was
00:33:06.800very much an operation of the german foreign office because the germans wanted lenin to go
00:33:11.000to russia wreak havoc with the war effort with his kind of anti-war propaganda spreading
00:33:15.620mutinous sentiment in the armies i mean literally they they would get together and have these
00:33:19.540meetings in the armies and denounce the war the bolsheviks ended up printing massive amounts of
00:33:24.180anti-war propaganda um and as soon as he arrived in petrograd yeah and as soon as he arrived in
00:33:29.420petrograd i'll give you an example an american historian called frank golder was there and he
00:33:33.780immediately was told oh yeah this guy lenin has showed up and he's he's priesting all these kind
00:33:37.680of damnable doctrines of propaganda and peace and pro-german sentiment it was it was quite widely
00:33:43.700discussed at the time that is the idea that lenin was if not a german agent then somehow working on
00:33:49.200behalf of germany in the sense so the allies have got to be very unhappy about this development
00:33:54.360right because they did have russia on their side and now suddenly you've got lenin taking over with
00:33:58.040this marxist revolution and he seems to be much more sympathetic to the germans the other side
00:34:02.980and ultimately winds up pulling russia out right the russian armies they fall apart even before
00:34:08.000lenin takes power they're beginning to disintegrate and by the winter of 1917 after the bolsheviks
00:34:13.160take power and it's actually november by our calendar we usually call it the october revolution
00:34:16.720after the Bolsheviks take power, they just stopped fighting. In fact, the Germans at one0.58
00:34:21.520point in early 1918, the Bolsheviks, Trotsky comes up with this ingenious kind of a slogan
00:34:26.700when he goes to Brest-Litovsk. He calls it no war, no peace. What he means is we're not going
00:34:31.580to fight, but we're demobilizing our army. And so it's sort of like he's telling the Germans,
00:34:37.000look, if you really want to, you can just go ahead and occupy Russia, but you're going to
00:34:40.260have to explain to your own people in the world why you're at war with a country that no longer
00:34:44.340has an army now as you can imagine the allies are not happy about this a whole front is just
00:34:49.220collapsed in the war and so they're desperate to get russia back into the war by whatever means
00:34:54.280they can um and they they try a lot of different things in 1918 none of them quite work the only0.97
00:34:59.800thing that does help them in the end is kind of unintentional as the germans do get sucked into
00:35:04.100russia they end up sending about a million troops into russia including into ukraine where they have
00:35:08.780nearly 600,000 troops occupying Russia as the war is being decided later that year on the
00:35:15.460Western Front, particularly after the arrival of U.S. troops, the so-called Doughboys.
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00:36:20.120all right so the the allied forces were not as not nearly as strong as they would become
00:36:30.420uh before once they got england on on board that england with its navy and how strong it was that
00:36:36.560was a big that was a great development for the allied forces to get england in on this fight
00:36:40.420it was not a great development for them to lose russia um from the from the world together but
00:36:45.440then there's this big country across the sea called the united states of america which as
00:36:49.400as you point out, is not yet the United States of America that we would be after World War II,
00:36:53.740a superpower. And it was more complicated for us. You know, we had fought a couple of wars with
00:36:59.940England in the past hundred years. And, you know, they're kind of wanting us to come over and help
00:37:06.380them and join the Allied forces. And we got the big ocean. And what was the mood of the American
00:37:12.080people at this time? And now we're like 1914 to 1917, right around there. And the war,
00:37:18.300The war, just again, went from 14 to 18.
00:37:20.380So what was the mood of the Americans?
00:37:22.560Well, I certainly don't think there was any great desire to get involved in the European war.
00:37:26.400I mean, we could judge, if by nothing else, the result of the 1916 election.
00:37:31.320Woodrow Wilson, who really, at that point, was actually running more or less on a peace platform of keeping the U.S. out of the war against Charles Hughes.
00:37:38.580The Republicans, oddly enough, back then were far more the party of kind of the Northeast and big business and a lot of ties to Europe.
00:37:45.420And they were much more pro-interventionist and pro-Britain and France than Wilson's party, the Democrats, the base of which was still kind of – a lot of it was either labor or agrarian populism in the south.
00:37:57.740And Wilson himself had not wanted to get the U.S. into the war.
00:38:00.680In fact, Wilson gave a speech as late as January 1917, the so-called peace without victory speech, trying to some extent to use the leverage the U.S. now had over France and Britain because they're buying a lot of their arms in the U.S.
00:38:13.460They're relying on Wall Street for the loans that are now paying for the war because they've effectively run out of gold.
00:38:22.420In fact, there were a lot of ways in which the U.S. might.
00:38:24.940And this was kind of what Wilson was trying to do initially with the Peace Without Victory speech was to step in as a broker, as a mediator, to broker some type of a peace, perhaps of mutual exhaustion.
00:38:36.200Britain and France didn't want that, though, in part because Germany was still occupying parts of Belgium and France.
00:38:41.140And Germany had also occupied part of what had been Russian Poland.
00:38:45.160And so the Germans were at the time maybe more willing to parlay than the Allies were.0.53
00:38:49.700But then the Germans shot themselves in the foot by unleashing what was called unrestricted submarine warfare.
00:38:56.360Effectively, this meant after the sinking of the Lusitania and other ships with Americans on board in 1915, the Germans had made the rules of engagement for their U-boat attacks on British merchant shipping and British naval vessels much stricter.
00:39:10.740Effectively, kind of you'd have to give prior warning to give time for women and children to get to the lifeboats proverbially.
00:39:17.260Now the Germans was like, you know, basically the gloves were off and they were just going to go ahead and fire because the Germans themselves were suffering by that winter.
00:39:24.920Berlin, Vienna, all the cities of the central powers, you know, they're kind of slowly starving because of the British blockade.
00:39:30.700And so they thought, again, this kind of almost typical German self-sabotage, you know, rather than accepting Wilson's professed aims of negotiating a compromise peace at face value.
00:39:42.260The Germans said, you know what? We don't trust them. We think the U.S. is going to enter the war anyway.
00:39:45.640So we're just going to speed things along. So they did it first.0.99
00:39:49.180They provoked us both with unrestricted submarine warfare and then with the Zimmermann telegram, which is just an astonishing mistake by the Germans.0.86
00:39:58.500Wait a second. Before we get to Zimmermann telegram, prior to them doing the unrestricted submarine warfare, which I understand, I can understand why Americans were like, no way, that's too much.0.65
00:40:10.300you're taking out indiscriminately civilians on boats and so on. Prior to that, what was the
00:40:16.820lure to the Americans in getting further involved, right? Because again, if you look at World War II,
00:40:22.620we're going to go fight Nazis. We're going to defeat Hitler. The Germans bombed, I'm doing my0.68
00:40:28.060animal house line, the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor, Germans, no, the Japanese bombed Pearl
00:40:32.800Harbor, right? We had very clear reasons to get in. And this war, the way we're talking about it,0.98
00:40:38.880It's like still remains somewhat amorphous to me why it was started even to begin with, even amongst the powers over there.
00:40:44.960Now it's expanding and now they're asking us to get in.
00:40:47.780And I just wonder, like, were we like, wait, why are we, why are people calling us before the submarine warfare, the indiscriminate, like before that?
00:40:57.740What was the reason ostensibly for us to get in?
00:41:00.400Well, it's much murkier than the Second World War.
00:41:02.640not just the origins of the war as you're pointing out but why the u.s gets involved
00:41:07.060on what pretenses for what purposes i mean these debates they didn't die of course in 1917-18 i
00:41:13.260mean they they continued to royal american politics on into the 20s and 30s when in retrospect it had
00:41:18.580come to seem like a mistake and people couldn't quite fathom why the u.s had gotten into the war
00:41:22.600now on on the moral side there had been a lot of criticism of the german invasion of belgium a lot
00:41:28.260of what was then called kind of atrocity propaganda obviously it wasn't all untrue a lot of atrocities
00:41:33.740were committed uh there was a famous library that burned down in louvain there were these kind of
00:41:38.860uh sharpshooters who would periodically take out civilians there were obviously some
00:41:43.760genuine crimes committed in the invasion of belgium but that said the british and the french
00:41:48.800were just really good at kind of manipulating american public opinion in part because they
00:41:53.240had a long experience of doing so and also by by 1916 1917 there were just a lot of american
00:41:59.640interests that were increasingly aligned with britain and france but again these it was not a
00:42:03.360popular um upwelling of of pro-war sentiment rather it was a lot of american arms manufacturers
00:42:11.140and a lot of american bankers particularly the house of jp morgan and wall street had just gotten
00:42:14.860wrapped up in the war effort of britain and france in large part because with the british blockade
00:42:19.000they couldn't even trade with germany in the central power so almost all that trade had been
00:42:22.480nullified and wiped out um in fact there used to be a critique uh the kind of charles beard
00:42:28.160quasi-marxist progressive critique of the war that you know it was all kind of the u.s got sucked in
00:42:32.120because of wall street the real story is much more complicated than that but there's a little
00:42:35.680bit of truth in that and that these interests were increasingly pushing the u.s towards war
00:42:40.240wilson somewhat to his credit was actually resisting that and in fact for a while in the
00:42:45.240winter of 1916-17 uh the federal reserve actually intervened to try to discourage more of this kind
00:42:53.100of the war finance egging on britain and france because wilson at the time was actually trying
00:42:58.520to broker a peace as i pointed out that the germans kind of shot themselves in the foot
00:43:02.840so then i mean i guess it's still hard to convince americans what they're fighting for
00:43:06.280the freedom of the seas was maybe an issue but again britain's violating that too they're
00:43:10.860blockading europe perhaps that's less egregious than the german u-boats actually sinking vessels
00:43:16.640with civilians on board but it's still a little bit murky so in the end part of what wilson is
00:43:21.700able to come up with uh it's not just the zimmermann telegram which was when the germans
00:43:27.660actually promised effectively the reconquista of the american southwest of mexico she would0.98
00:43:32.180keep the americans busy in case the u.s enter the war which is just incredibly stupid because it0.95
00:43:38.140effectively produces the very thing that the germans should have most feared which was u.s0.92
00:43:42.020intervention once uh the u.s government learned about this um on top of this then the february
00:43:47.260revolution happens in russia and as we were talking about this before this gives wilson
00:43:50.980this argument well look russia had been an autocracy now she's a democracy and so the
00:43:54.940famous phrase then emerges it's a war to make the world safe for democracy this at least is how
00:44:00.120wilson sells it to congress in april 1917 even then it's a little ambiguous though the u.s declares
00:44:05.440war against Germany, she doesn't declare war against Austria-Hungary until almost eight months
00:44:10.020later. And the U.S. never actually did declare war on the Ottoman Empire, which by then was
00:44:15.920closely allied to Germany and Austria-Hungary. One of the really interesting anomalies of the
00:44:20.80014 points of Woodrow Wilson, which he announced in January 1918, is that point 12 related to
00:44:27.020the autonomy of the minority peoples of the Ottoman Empire, and particularly Armenians,
00:44:31.160greeks and others a country or a power with which the united states was not at war uh in fact by the
00:44:37.360end of 1918 the ottomans actually tried to surrender to the united states on the basis of
00:44:41.300the 14 points only to be told that they were not at war with the united states yeah sorry we have
00:44:46.300we have no contract with you right i mean it's it does raise the question of like you're out there
00:44:49.840fighting and you encounter a force that you haven't yet declared war on what do you do you
00:44:53.240put the arms down let's go back um to you mentioned the lusitania that's a really interesting
00:44:58.400case, a story about the Germans bombing a British ship and it would precede that unlimited
00:45:06.320submarine warfare thing that you were talking about. So can you just talk about how important
00:45:11.060the Lusitania was and what happened thereafter in terms of our involvement and the Germans really
00:45:15.840starting to unravel? Well, so, I mean, the Lusitania, we certainly exaggerated significance.
00:45:21.180It got a lot of press at the time because there were more than 100, I believe, something like
00:45:24.440128 americans on board um and because you know they were all almost by definition civilians and
00:45:30.940even most of of the the members of the belligerent nationals of the belligerent countries on board
00:45:35.740were also civilians uh we almost certainly know now even though it was a long and sensitive subject
00:45:40.260that there were also at least some weapons on board um but it got a lot of press and so it
00:45:44.420basically seemed like this kind of again a war crime a crime against humanity one of the this0.92
00:45:49.480long line of german atrocities um however the germans as i pointed out earlier they did
00:45:54.240respond to it. They did actually tighten their rules of engagement to try to prevent similar
00:45:59.100accidents. There were one or two other accidents in 1915 that is involving American, neutral
00:46:05.300Americans being on board, being sunk in various ships which had been shelled by the U-boats,
00:46:10.480which didn't get as much press as the Lusitania. But again, the Germans, for a while, they did0.76
00:46:14.680strengthen their rules of engagement because they were worried about getting the U.S. into the war.
00:46:18.960The same thing actually is true between 1939 and Pearl Harbor. The Germans actually were0.60
00:46:23.960quite careful about trying not to violate some of these kind of boundaries in order to draw the
00:46:31.120Americans into the war. It's one of the reasons why it was so astonishing how short-sighted it was
00:46:35.540when the Germans again switched things around in early 1917 in January when they moved towards0.56
00:46:41.120unrestricted submarine warfare. It also marks the moment as far as internal German politics when
00:46:45.900the chancellor, Beth Mann-Holweg, the civilian chancellor, effectively gives way to the generals
00:46:51.460You know, who effectively kind of take over and overrule his opposition. And a lot of people date really the unraveling of a kind of a more genuine, broad political front behind the German war effort to January 1917.
00:47:04.660It's not that Germany became a military dictatorship exactly, but it took on some of those characteristics.
00:47:10.680A kind of almost self-sabotaging power, you know, that just couldn't get out of its own way.0.52
00:47:15.940which would wind up being very important to the way we viewed them the way we wound up world war
00:47:21.760one and the way that world war two would ultimately start on the zimmerman telegram i understand
00:47:26.840this is 1917 it's basically a deal by which um i guess mexico was going to get back texas arizona
00:47:33.680new mexico if they attacked us um and the germans wanted them to you know side with them and just
00:47:40.960explain it because i how why was it a telegram and how was it discovered how did it play
00:47:45.620Well, it's a fascinating story. Aside from just the stupidity of the Germans sending this, they actually sent it through a U.S. diplomatic cable.0.99
00:47:54.280Now, it was encrypted, so they thought hopefully the Americans wouldn't read it.0.99
00:47:58.480Unbeknownst to them, the British had this team of codebreakers working under the Navy.
00:48:04.820This is kind of the World War I equivalent of the more famous Bletchley Park from World War II.
00:48:09.460Among other things, they'd actually captured a lot of German code books, including one used by a German secret agent in Persia or Iran of all places, which helped them to decode this.
00:48:18.380The British, though, were then in something of a pickle because, of course, they were reading the U.S. diplomatic traffic between Berlin and Washington, and they didn't want the Americans to know that they were reading the U.S. diplomatic cables.
00:48:30.600And so somehow, the way I understand the story, the British, after discovering it, they couldn't just alert the Americans because that would give away the fact that they were spying on the Americans, too.
00:48:40.440And so they contrived a way to resend it through another U.S. diplomatic cable in such a way that the Americans could decode it very easily and think that they themselves had discovered it, which actually worked quite well.
00:48:52.600And, of course, it enraged American opinion.
00:48:55.820Even so, it wasn't until really four, I guess, even five weeks later that the U.S. declared war.
00:49:02.980So even then, Wilson still had to drum up a little bit more public support and kind of troll the halls of Congress to win support for the declaration of war.
00:49:13.920And again, even then, only on Germany, not yet on Austria-Hungary or the Ottoman Empire.
00:49:18.520so we get involved the russians are out the americans are in and net net what are the
00:49:28.280consequences of that i mean what what are the unintended consequences of our doing that i'm
00:49:33.820glad you asked that because of course the the intended consequence was supposed to be a war
00:49:38.440to make the world safe for democracy and some type of more transparent world with collective
00:49:44.440security, perhaps the League of Nations with the powers disarming and no more secret diplomacy and
00:49:50.760all the rest of it. Unfortunately, what actually happened was that the U.S. entered the war
00:49:55.640effectively at the same time that Russia was falling out of the war. So in the first place,
00:50:00.080it prolonged the conflict. There might have been momentum in 1917 in favor of a negotiated peace.
00:50:06.220With Russia falling out of the war, Britain and France were really desperate and they would have0.82
00:50:10.720been much more likely to try to accept mediation um the germans were obviously in a much stronger
00:50:16.100position but frankly berlin as i pointed out was starving vienna was starving uh constantinople
00:50:22.300then the ottoman capital was starving a lot of the ottoman empire was even worse shaped because
00:50:26.520the british were blockading the eastern mediterranean too and there had been a locust
00:50:30.080plague and they were blockading food imports everyone was absolutely miserable biblical
00:50:34.740misery um unfortunately the u.s intervening effectively prolonged the war at least another
00:50:40.340year, if not longer. And if you actually move into 1918, then it takes a while for the U.S.
00:50:47.060to rev up its mobilization. It was becoming a first class naval power. But as far as land
00:50:52.900forces, it took the U.S. a long time to really mobilize and train an army and then, of course,
00:50:57.360get them over to Europe. They were really only starting to arrive in strength in the late spring
00:51:02.860of 1918 after Germany had sort of wagered all her chips on one last offensive to try to break
00:51:08.860the back of the Western Allies, the so-called Ludendorff Offensive, launched in late March 1918,
00:51:15.040which in the end, although they got pretty close to Paris, it petered out like most of the other
00:51:19.620offensives in the war. They outrun their supply lines. They just get exhausted. The Allies bring
00:51:24.300up reserves. And then the U.S. starts arriving in force over the summer. Again, military historians
00:51:30.300continue to debate just how decisive the U.S. role was. It more about morale and the fact so
00:51:35.840many of them were coming uh you know was it really the fact that the british and the french had
00:51:40.320begun to master the use of early tanks for example which were now being introduced to the battlefield
00:51:46.360the creeping barrage other innovations i'm sure all of this factored in but the arrival of the
00:51:51.620u.s you simply can't discount you know if you have roughly equally matched forces on the western
00:51:56.560front where the lines have barely moved in some places you know meters or even a few kilometers
00:52:02.140or in our terms, not even really a mile in most places, well less than a mile for the last three
00:52:08.860and a half to four years. And then you have a force of ultimately nearly four million doughboys0.98
00:52:13.220arriving. It's obviously going to have a huge impact on morale. So it does in the end help tip0.98
00:52:19.200the balance in favor of the allies on the Western front. But I think more significantly for the
00:52:24.500consequences of the war for world history is what happens on the Eastern front. Now, I mentioned
00:52:29.820before the germans had distracted themselves they get sucked in almost by this kind of poison0.94
00:52:35.180chalice of defeated russia with with lenin again just disintegrating deliberately forcing the
00:52:41.940russian armies to disintegrate they end up having so many troops in the east that they don't really
00:52:46.340have enough to hold off the allies in the west however they still have a million troops in
00:52:50.040russia we shouldn't forget this the bolsheviks the first year they were in power after lenin
00:52:54.140supposedly inaugurates the world's first proletarian dictatorship communism um they're
00:53:00.400effectively a kind of a german satellite state uh when a few of the last remaining opposition
00:53:06.440forces to the bolsheviks this group called the left socialist revolutionaries the left srs when
00:53:12.620they try to launch an uprising against the bolsheviks in july 1918 they do so by assassinating
00:53:18.660the german ambassador because they see him as the real ruler of the country in fact although it's
00:53:23.840little known except by specialist uh the german general running the war uh eric von ludendorff
00:53:30.800in september 1918 just before the germans collapsed in the western front he actually
00:53:35.540issued orders to the german army to go and topple the bolsheviks in petrograd because by then the
00:53:40.160germans had sort of had enough of lenin and his government they just saw them as crazy um so the0.52
00:53:45.740germans were actually about to topple and possibly overthrow the bolsheviks um right when the germans
00:53:51.520collapse of the western front the germans by their own terms with the bolsheviks at brest
00:53:56.100latovsk had forbidden the bolsheviks from even building an army so they weren't even allowed to
00:53:59.920have the red army that they're eventually going to build when the germans collapse now they can0.73
00:54:05.320build a red army now they're sovereign for the first time now they can actually begin to implement
00:54:09.600their policies in full mobilize more than three million men under trotsky and the red army so
00:54:15.580So effectively, the U.S. intervention makes the world safe for communism.
00:54:27.860I mean, we're dealing with the fallout of that to this day, but pause there and go back to the German, just the Germans,0.86
00:54:34.420because if we hadn't shorn up the British and the French and so on against the Germans and forced a surrender in which, well, I mean,0.70
00:54:43.020Obviously, the Treaty of Versailles would leave Germany absolutely powerless, devastated, and humiliated, which would then lead in part to World War II and the rise of Hitler and, you know, this determination to restore Mother Germany to her former glory.0.83
00:54:57.700Do you feel, I mean, the humiliation of Germany might not have happened?0.68
00:55:01.900We might have reached a more negotiated peace, you know, if the U.S. had stayed out of it, because England and the Allies would have been forced to come to the table and negotiate with Germany.
00:55:11.640perhaps they wouldn't have been humiliated. Perhaps Versailles would have been more fair.
00:55:16.640I mean, do you make the case that there might not have been a Hitler? There might not have
00:55:20.840been a World War II had we stayed out of World War I? I think had we stayed out of World War I,
00:55:25.780I think most of that is probably true. We don't know exactly what the world would have looked0.98
00:55:29.820like, but you would not have had Germany kind of lying prostrate in 1918 with Hitler famously on
00:55:35.160the bed hearing about the humiliating terms of the November armistice and railing against the
00:55:39.420November criminals. I mean, there are a lot of different points you could look back to. I already
00:55:43.480alluded to the idea of Wilson possibly brokering a peace before the U.S. entered the war. But even
00:55:48.120after the U.S. entered the war, it took so long for the U.S. to get involved, the U.S. still could
00:55:52.740have helped to negotiate. Now, I talked about Brest-Litovsk. This is where Russia met the
00:55:58.300central powers to negotiate a peace on the Eastern Front. And this is from basically about December
00:56:03.6801917. And just to reiterate, the central powers are the opposite of the Allies. Right. The central
00:56:07.040powers of this so you have germany austria hungary bulgaria had then joined the war too along with
00:56:12.460the ottoman empire um and it was it was quite an interesting affair it was actually the first peace
00:56:17.240treaty or peace conference ever caught on film so you can actually watch some of it um so you have
00:56:21.560these kind of who met with them who met with the central powers uh the bolsheviks uh so the
00:56:26.280bolsheviks okay and what's what's interesting also just socially is that the central powers
00:56:30.700and the ottomans and the bulgarians they're all sending these kind of old aristocratic diplomats0.53
00:56:35.260And the Bolsheviks are sending these kind of bohemian, scruffy revolutionaries.0.64
00:56:39.640They were supposedly representing the workers' and peasants' government.
00:56:54.900And so, you know, they bring him along.
00:56:57.380You know, there were elements of force to it.
00:56:59.360On the other hand, they were genuine in trying to invite the Western allies there.
00:57:03.280I pointed out the reason they didn't go. It's understandable. They saw Lenin as a German agent, which certainly made a kind of sense. But what's so fascinating about Brest-Litov is if you actually look at what the Germans did there, that is the German vision for Europe before Germany collapsed, at least in part because of the U.S. intervention, what they did was they broke Imperial Russia into a number of satellite states, many of which actually exist today.
00:57:28.360So the three Baltic states were basically invited to declare independence. Ukraine was invited to declare independence. Finland became independent. So Germany effectively was kind of creating a Europe that actually bears a pretty close resemblance to the Europe that we actually have today, which is not to say that it necessarily would have lasted. It would have required the Germans to maintain these armies in the field.
00:57:53.960Now, the thing is, the war, as we know, ended at least in Europe in fall of 1918.
00:57:58.520But the other thing to remember is that no one knew at the time that it was going to end.
00:58:02.860The German collapse came as something of a surprise to everyone.
00:58:05.660And it happens even on the Ottoman fronts.
00:58:07.320Everything just starts to collapse in September 1918.
00:58:10.580And you can't ascribe all of that necessarily to the U.S. intervention.
00:58:13.900A lot of these battles had required all kinds of complicated interplay of material forces, morale and so on.
00:58:21.280But the U.S. entry into the war, and particularly Wilson kind of entering the arena with the 14 points and this idea of a new and a better world, definitely played, I think, a huge role.
00:58:33.040Again, first in extending the war, but also then in helping to ensure that the Germans would lose it.
00:58:40.340It's like, so we won the war, but we may have helped cause the second World War.0.66
00:58:46.480Unintentionally. I think absolutely unintentionally that's the case.
00:58:49.600The U.S., and again, most of this is unintentional. Woodrow Wilson obviously did not want Britain and France to impose these harsh peace terms on Germany.
00:58:59.140I mean, not that he was soft necessarily, but he obviously wouldn't have agreed with all of the terms or the harsh terms they oppose on Austria-Hungary and eventually on the Ottoman Empire and on Bulgaria.
00:59:10.100It's not just the Germans who resent all this, by the way.
00:59:12.780I mean, if you talk to Hungarians today, they're still angry about the Treaty of Trianon.0.56
00:59:19.020Or the Turks about the Treaty of Sevres.0.90
00:59:21.220That's their own version of Versailles, which truncates the Ottoman Empire.
00:59:24.500Although they eventually fought back and won back some of the territory they had lost under Mustafa Kemal.
00:59:30.220Wilson, and what's so ironic is back in his Peace Without Victory speech in January 1917,
00:59:34.880he had argued against intervention precisely for that reason.
00:59:38.860And he wanted a peace without victory because, as he pointed out, victory would have left the defeated powers angry and resentful and anxious to refight the war.
00:59:50.480It's just I suppose in the end it was partly German blundering and maybe Wilson himself not sticking to his guns, not sticking to his principles, that in the end instead of a peace without victory.0.87
01:00:00.220I actually wonder about, like, Ukraine today, whether there could be a peace without victory there, where there's no utter humiliation for, let's say, the Russians, so that there's some face-saving, so that, you know, I don't know, this is one of the things we're debating right now.
01:00:13.520But let's go back to Russia and how you think Russia in the 20th and 21st century would have been different if we hadn't stepped in and defeated Germany, which had its eyes on Russia, as you pointed out.
01:00:28.720Well, it's a great question. I do think Russia probably would have eventually recovered some of the territory she lost at Breast the Tufts. But I think it's entirely possible that those countries that became independent briefly in 1918 and are independent today would have actually remained so.
01:00:45.100So we're not just talking about the countries of Eastern Europe I mentioned before, but the so-called Transcaucasian Federative Republic, which sounds really complicated, but you're talking about countries like Azerbaijan and Armenia and Georgia and eventually Dagestan.
01:00:59.080Well, Dagestan is now in Russia, but a lot of these territories have kind of confederated together to become independent.
01:01:03.880So to some extent, again, the Russian Empire, which the Soviets later reconstituted in an even more virulent and aggressive form, might have actually ceased to exist in that form in 1918 when the Germans broke it apart.
01:01:17.780But that point about peace without victory, it's so fascinating because, of course, you could draw entirely diametrically opposed lessons from this.
01:01:27.740FDR, for example, in the Second World War drew the lesson that the mistake that the U.S. and its allies had made in 1918 was not pursuing the war all the way to the end and getting unconditional surrender and marching all the way to Berlin and crushing Germany utterly.
01:01:42.000whereas obviously a lot of americans disagreed and they thought in fact we shouldn't have fought
01:01:47.080at all along some of the lines that we're talking about now that our intervention didn't actually
01:01:50.440produce a positive outcome um and obviously you could make some of these arguments about
01:01:55.000russia and ukraine today the problem is of course that if you do want unconditional surrender and
01:02:00.020you want let's say i guess in this case that would mean russia withdrawing entirely from
01:02:03.800uh the borders of ukraine as of 2014 uh that would require armageddon
01:02:10.580But what would have happened with, you know, the Bolsheviks took over, you had Lenin, you had Stalin coming up.
01:02:17.740And I know you just wrote a book about Stalin.
01:02:22.780God, good God, Stalin was, I mean, truly the face of evil.0.89
01:02:26.720That guy was a deeply disturbed evil man.
01:02:29.840But so what would have happened, do you think, with Lenin, with Stalin, with communism, you know, post-World War I, if we hadn't gotten involved, if there had been a negotiated settlement earlier?0.67
01:02:40.740Well, the thing about the Bolsheviks is they didn't expect to last in power very long.
01:02:44.900One of my earliest research projects, I actually went to Switzerland.0.63
01:02:48.140It's kind of curious because we've all heard about the banking secrecy laws.
01:02:52.520I discovered, in fact, most of those laws weren't on the books until the 1930s.
01:02:55.940And when the Bolsheviks tried to launder money there in 1918, the Swiss didn't let them.
01:03:09.740Most people looking at the Bolsheviks like, ew, no, we don't want anything to do with them.0.75
01:03:13.180They did have, again, they had some support in critical areas of the army.
01:03:16.520They did have some support in Moscow and Patrick.
01:03:18.140But in the country at large, more than 75 percent of the people had voted against them.
01:03:22.980In fact, I mean, if not for the peace platform, if they had just been open about their economic policies, you know, which were frankly pretty extreme, probably less than 10 percent of the public would have voted for them.
01:03:32.660And they knew this. That's why they deposed the constituent assembly.
01:03:35.400That is, this body which was elected in November 1917 was actually the largest participation to date, even larger than any U.S. election.
01:03:44.960And again, more than 75 percent of them voted against the Bolsheviks, the verdict of which, as one commentator put it, kind of stuck like a bone in the throat.
01:03:52.740So what did they do? Of course, they deposed the parliament violently.
01:03:55.840I mean, they arrested some of the deputies.
01:03:57.480They actually shot and killed about eight of them.
01:04:11.540It took them a while to really secure and then reconquer all the other elements of the empire.
01:04:16.220But it was partly because of the collapse of Germany that we were talking about they were able to do so.
01:04:21.180They were also fortunate in their enemies.
01:04:23.160Even after the Germans collapsed while the Allies got involved in the periphery of Russia's civil war, they never got involved very directly.0.88
01:04:29.880They never really threw their support to the opponents of the Bolsheviks, the ones we normally call the whites.
01:04:35.140It's a bit of a misnomer. White basically meant counter-revolutionary.
01:04:38.560That's what the Reds called them. They didn't call themselves whites.
01:04:41.860So the Allies didn't really intervene very decisively in Russia's civil war.0.85
01:04:46.640The Bolsheviks, some of it was astute diplomacy. Some of it was luck. Some of it was good fortune.0.86
01:04:53.180But effectively, it was a series of accidents, the largest of which was, again,
01:04:57.980that the U.S. intervention of the war destroyed the power of Imperial Germany, and Imperial
01:05:02.280Germany had been both the sponsor and effectively almost the mandatory power overseeing the
01:05:13.660They wanted the Bolsheviks there because they thought they were weakening Russia, that0.77
01:05:17.160they thought they were going to weaken Russia's power for the long term.
01:05:20.800And curiously enough, the Allies didn't completely disagree.
01:05:24.060That's part of the reason why Britain and France and the United States and also Japan, which briefly intervened, did not intervene more decisively and did not really back the whites because they also kind of thought, look, we don't know if we really want the Russian Empire back.
01:05:38.600Unfortunately, what they didn't realize was that the Bolsheviks looked weak at the time.0.87
01:05:42.740But once they had begun to reconquer the old Russian Empire and they could absorb its population base and its resources, they were just about the most ruthless rulers that had ever existed on planet Earth.0.85
01:05:54.640Yeah, and so they were able to leverage this power in the end and create an even more menacing and aggressive power than the Russian Empire had ever been.0.90
01:06:03.380All right, so we talked a bit about the Treaty of Versailles and the end of World War I.0.91
01:06:07.340and the position, as you put it, Germany in a prostrate position. Exactly right.
01:06:13.420Can you just expand on the League of Nations, which would ultimately become the United Nations?
01:06:19.040There are a lot of people in our country now who have mixed feelings about that group. Certainly,
01:06:23.180the Republicans aren't big fans of the UN and sort of globalist approach to, well, foreign policy and
01:06:29.640other things. And they think they're rather feckless when it comes to things like human
01:06:32.360rights, though they claim to be these moral arbiters of assault and so on. So, I mean,
01:06:36.500that was a Wilson thing at the end of World War I. Can you talk about it?
01:06:39.800Well, sure. I mean, it was not his original idea. He glommed onto this idea originally proposed by
01:06:45.260some kind of British quasi-pacifist intellectuals. But then he kind of made it his idea at Versailles.
01:06:50.940He started backing it more and more strongly, the idea that rather than this alliance system
01:06:56.380with the powers constantly arming, instead you would have this League of Nations and some type
01:07:00.960of collective security arrangement. They didn't have a security council like the UN would later
01:07:05.520have. So in some ways, it wasn't entirely practical. But the idea was supposed to be that
01:07:10.200the member states that they would kind of guarantee their territorial integrity and there would be
01:07:14.660some type of a collective will on the part of the great powers to enforce the settlement and
01:07:20.220adjudicate disputes and so on. The great irony, of course, is that Wilson ended up forfeiting a lot
01:07:25.760of his other objectives in order to back the League of Nations at Versailles. And then, as we
01:07:30.640know, the League of Nations, along with Versailles, they end up going down to defeat in the U.S.
01:07:35.200senate which uh fails to ratify the treaty and by then wilson i mean he also i think some of the
01:07:39.780mistakes he made simply going across to paris and versa he was the first u.s president to visit
01:07:44.980europe in that official capacity and he exhausted himself and he may have even forfeited some of his
01:07:50.480leverage you know had he stayed behind maybe he could have just kind of ruled on disputed points
01:07:54.300um using his his vast leverage almost because of the mystery of distance instead he started
01:07:59.920just squabbling along with everyone else and he wasn't particularly good at it you know he often
01:08:03.700got manipulated a great example of this is when uh the british tell him that italy is making a
01:08:09.340claim on on turkey what is now ontalia the southern coast of turkey and their only claim
01:08:13.840is that it used to belong to the roman empire and because wilson believes in self-determination
01:08:18.400and there aren't a lot of italians there the brits tell him oh but there are greeks living there and
01:08:22.600so we should have greece invade turkey and uh and wilson says okay and this actually leads greece
01:08:27.720to invade turkey in 1919 and there's a brutal war fought for three years between greece and turkey
01:08:32.680What is now Anatolia. So he kind of gets he gets he gets really just rolled by everyone. He doesn't really quite understand the nature of geopolitics. His principles of self-determination, they're very difficult to apply to the map of Europe in practice because the peoples are all mixed together.
01:08:49.340And in the end, he kind of largely just gives up and allows the more experienced diplomats to negotiate. But so the US, to some extent, backs the idea of the League of Nations and then doesn't even join it.
01:08:59.920So effectively, that just kind of rendered it superfluous and impotent from the get go.
01:09:05.420So, I mean, how how would this how would this wind up playing out?
01:09:09.720Like if Wilson hadn't done this, if that hadn't been one of the terms, do you think we'd have a United Nations today?
01:09:18.300If you look at the Republican opposition to Wilson in the Senate in 1919 and 1920, that is, as they were debating the Versailles Treaty and the League of Nations,
01:09:28.820There were some amendments proposed. Henry Cabot Lodge in particular had this vision of a slightly more practical and less grandiose idea, effectively, that the U.S. would simply have treaties with some of its allied powers, perhaps a little bit like the Security Council but not officially so, that the League of Nations was not necessarily practical or if it was to be created, then at the very least Congress needed to retain its authority over the deployment of troops.
01:09:56.500That is to say that the League of Nations would not have the ability to override the U.S. Congress.
01:10:01.680It is quite interesting that those debates really did, I think, redound on down through the 20th century.
01:10:06.720Congress, after the declaration of war on Japan and Germany in December 1941,
01:10:12.380although Germany actually declared war first on the United States then,
01:10:15.840after those declarations, Congress has not declared war again, so far as I know.
01:10:20.320Congress has effectively abdicated its own power, the war powers, enumerated the Constitution.
01:10:26.500And I think to some extent, again, even though Wilson failed to get the U.S. to enter the League of Nations, he already injected out the idea that some type of supernatural body might in the end be able to, you know, as you're pointing out, this kind of globalist idea, that is that in the end they can make the decisions that will be binding on the United States, a little bit like let's say the European Union does today or perhaps NATO does in other contexts.
01:10:50.760I think had the U.S. ratified the League of Nations in 1919, then we probably would have ended up with something like the United Nations.
01:10:59.840But in the end, I mean, this is, I suppose, both the promise and the tragedy of Woodrow Wilson is he did have a lot of big and grand ideas.
01:11:06.540But in the end, they all failed. Some of it was because, again, he had a stroke.
01:11:09.740I mean, he came back from Paris and Versailles and he actually traveled back and forth once or twice while he was there.
01:11:14.980He's utterly exhausted and broken. And he kind of had a stroke out in the hustings as he was trying to promote the treaty.
01:11:19.840And in the end, he was on a hospital bed, as the Senate was debating it, largely invalid and effectively incapacitated, at least according to some accounts, so he wouldn't allow himself to be declared incompetent.
01:11:32.480And so in the end, you also had a very ineffective, if not impotent U.S. president, not for the last time either in the 20th century.
01:11:42.660There's some interesting comparisons made to, let's say, Nixon during Watergate, you know, that you had a U.S. president effectively unable to even exercise his own constitutional authority.
01:11:51.560You know, would there have been some type of U.N. eventually?
01:12:56.020You've got a few countries in the Middle East emerging out of the wreckage of the Ottoman Empire.
01:13:00.620But as far as heroes, it's really difficult to say.
01:13:03.920Again, the Allies obviously tried to make themselves out to be the protagonists in the story, standing up against German aggression, putting forward this idea of German war guilt.
01:13:13.280But it was really hard to convince people.
01:13:15.280The Bolsheviks obviously tried to make a claim in the same way Wilson had tried to make the war about principles.
01:13:20.560The Bolsheviks also denounced secret diplomacy, and Trotsky embarrassed the Allies by publishing their secret treaties regarding things like the partitioning of the Ottoman Empire between France, Britain, and Russia.0.75
01:13:32.660And that did embarrass the Allies, but again, it's hard to make the Bolsheviks out to be heroes.0.86
01:13:38.720They did it for their own reasons, I suppose.0.81
01:13:40.940You could say some of the principled anti-war activists, many of whom went to jail opposing the war, maybe in retrospect, should be treated with more respect than they were treated at the time.
01:13:52.100And I think in the end, you might say if you're looking at the United States, perhaps you could say there was some good sense of those Americans who were wary of getting drawn into this conflict, which didn't actually turn out well.
01:14:05.420You know, where in most wars they tend to get denounced, and in fact a lot of them were actually arrested.
01:14:09.620We forget that the Woodrow Wilson administration put through the Alien and Sedition Acts, and they actually arrested a lot of political prisoners.
01:14:16.400Perhaps we should give them a little bit of belated respect for raising questions about the U.S. intervention in the war.
01:14:25.400So fascinating because you've written so much on World War I and World War II, too, as well.
01:14:30.580So you know about, you know, the respective roles and so on.
01:14:34.200I mean, I think, well, do you agree with me that we have a more clear and heroic role in World War II, that the United States would clearly emerge as a hero of that conflict?
01:14:46.240People like Winston Churchill would emerge as having great respect, and people believe that he saved the future of the Western world, of the free world, that he had a major hand in it in any event.
01:14:56.640I never really stopped to think about how clear the morality and the lines around it were drawn in World War II versus the first war.
01:15:06.160I've seen the T-shirts and the sort of the back-to-back world champion memes, and I like it.
01:15:15.580And if you start drilling down a little deeper, it gets more complicated.
01:15:18.920Well, it's clearer, I would say, comparatively speaking, the Second World War.0.74
01:15:22.660We obviously have a very clear villain in Hitler. And even to some extent, although he was on our side, Stalin is something of a villain. It's hard to make Roosevelt and Churchill out to be villains, certainly. They have a much clearer case for heroism and leadership in the war.0.71
01:15:37.140But some of what I actually do in Stalin's war is to make the story a little bit more complicated and even to some extent, again, to revisit some of the critiques made at the time of things like the Lend-Lease Act, which really did help to draw the U.S. into the war even before the U.S. was ready, when a lot of the U.S. public was still quite wary of intervention.
01:15:57.540And even some of the arguments, I know it's a kind of explosive subject these days, the America First movement, who are usually just dismissed as kind of fascist or Nazi sympathizers, Charles Lindbergh for anti-Semitism and all this.
01:16:11.500We shouldn't forget it was actually a very broad movement.
01:16:13.760And even if in the end they did largely dissolve themselves after Pearl Harbor and after most of the country got behind the war effort, some of the questions that they raised were not without merit.
01:16:25.160That is to say about the consequences of the U.S. intervention.0.57
01:16:29.260On the positive side, yes, in the end, Nazi Germany was defeated utterly.0.78
01:16:34.680But perhaps on the negative side of the ledger, Stalin massively expanded his empire in Eurasia.
01:16:40.820There were a lot of unintended consequences of the U.S. intervention.
01:16:43.140And another point that those critics made at the time was that once the U.S. would enter the war, the U.S. itself would change.
01:16:51.200The U.S. government, and particularly the executive branch of the U.S. government, would assume massive new powers.
01:16:58.020Civil rights and civil liberties would be suspended.
01:17:00.960And to some extent, we're still kind of living in the legacy of both of the world wars.
01:17:05.120There are some laws that actually date all the way back to 1917.
01:17:08.960Some of the president's emergency powers date all the way back to 1917, for example.
01:17:14.200That's fascinating, because the executive branch was meant to be very small.
01:17:17.580And slowly but surely, especially over the course of the 20th century, we expanded it to a place where I think a lot of us are having real questions about whether we're comfortable with its size now.
01:17:33.140Of course, yes, we liberated Europe.0.94
01:17:34.780We got Hitler, who would argue that you shouldn't have stopped him.0.83
01:17:39.100However, let's get real about the other consequences of our intervention and the still lingering effects it's had on the United States.0.95
01:17:49.300I mean, it's very timely because, again, back to the fact that right now we're in this kind of proxy war with Russia.
01:17:56.480And there's a lot of saber rattling from Vladimir Putin right now that may turn really problematic for us very soon.
01:18:03.940And we're going to have big decisions to make.
01:18:05.720And the country's divided right now on just how interventionalist we should be over there, just how appropriate our past interventions in Ukraine have been,
01:18:12.800what role, if any, we had in setting up this conflict, right?
01:18:17.140I mean, there are a lot of layers to this.
01:18:19.520And right now in the country, there's sort of a shut up
01:18:21.620if you're not completely pro-Ukrainian and money and arms and anti-Putin.
01:18:38.660There's even new discussion of the Lend-Lease Act
01:18:40.800as one of the many ways in which the U.S. might get involved without getting directly involved,
01:18:45.000that is, on the side of Ukraine, where once again, again, the critics are, just as you point out,
01:18:50.200they're all being kind of tarred and feathered to some extent in public as Putin apologists.
01:18:54.600But the questions they're raising, they're real ones, not just about the consequences for Ukraine
01:18:59.640and possibly prolonging the war. I mean, we talked about that with the U.S. intervention in 1917 and
01:19:04.4801918, almost certainly prolonging the First World War, along with the agony for so many of the people
01:19:09.700swept up in it. So you have that angle to it, but you also have, of course, the long-term
01:19:14.620economic consequences. And we barely scratched the surface of those, but the Great Depression,
01:19:20.040for example, cannot really be understood without the legacy of the First World War and the way
01:19:24.940that it simply destroyed so many of the webs of international trade and finance. And right now,
01:19:31.600what we're seeing in Ukraine, of course, is economic devastation, not just in Ukraine,
01:19:35.580but across Europe. So I do think it's important to raise these questions, to study the lessons
01:19:40.080of history, not because they tell us exactly what to do, but rather because I think they help to add
01:19:45.540context and enrich our discussions of these vital questions of national security and foreign policy.
01:19:52.700I've been reading a book on Churchill, and he's a good figure through which to learn a lot about
01:19:57.520the 20th century and the wars because he appears in both, right? He was a young, he was head of
01:20:01.540the Navy in World War I over in Great Britain, and then, of course, would wind up being the
01:20:05.540prime minister. But, you know, such a towering figure to take you through these massive conflicts,
01:20:10.740and he was very bellicose, both in his language and in his actual approach to these situations.
01:20:16.580You've studied it all. Now, listen, I want people to understand, you've got eight award-winning
01:20:21.100books. The most recent one is Stalin's War, A New History of World War II, published last year.
01:20:26.240What's your best book on World War I, if people want to read about all of this in more detail?
01:20:31.540Well, I have done a number of them. I would say in The Origins of the War, the book that I would recommend is July 1914, Countdown to War. I did a book on the Ottoman fronts in the Middle East called The Ottoman Endgame, and a more recent study of the Russian Revolution, which despite its title, which makes it sound like it's just about a political revolution, is actually at root about the First World War and its consequences.
01:20:54.320And so I would recommend, really, that depending on Raiders' interests, they would choose one of those.
01:20:59.840Although, obviously, Stalin's War is a great choice for the Second World War as well.
01:21:04.700Spencer Clavin is one of my favorite commentators.
01:21:07.220He's only 31 years old, but he's brilliant and has read everything.
01:23:05.880Visit your Ontario Ford store or Ford.ca.
01:23:12.980My next guest is Doug Brunt. He is author of bestselling books. He is the host of
01:23:19.500Dedicated with Doug Brunt, where he interviews top authors. It's fascinating. It's doing really
01:23:24.380well. And he is one self-taught expert on World War I, a period in which he has found himself
01:23:31.380immersed for years now as he works on a nonfiction book that is coming out soon. Can't reveal much
01:23:38.180more than that, although there's a couple of teasers in this segment. Welcome back to the
01:23:41.560show, honey. So the reason I wanted you to come on is because you've become your own World War I0.95
01:23:46.380expert, World War II too, but also World War I. And this line of what happened with the Russians
01:23:52.400is very interesting to me. And I think it does relate very much to what's going on today.
01:23:56.740And so let's go back to the Tsar and Tsarina and just set the scene for us because you and I
01:24:03.060recently saw an episode of The Crown in which that whole situation was featured. And the Tsar
01:24:10.680and the Tsarina were in Russia. They wanted help from England. England gave them back of the hand
01:24:14.960and things went downhill from there. So put it in perspective for us, what went down and why
01:24:20.240it's important. It's important because that chaos of World War I and the internal chaos in Russia
01:24:25.740in that period of years, 1916, 1917, is the whole reason that we got Lenin and Stalin and communism
01:24:31.660in the 20th century at all. At the outside of the war, nobody wanted Lenin or the Bolsheviks. He was
01:24:38.080basically arguing for a violent workers revolution. And he envisioned that as a global thing. He wanted
01:24:43.420a Bolshevik uprising for each nation. And so in the war around 1917, Lenin has already been in
01:24:52.860exile. And in 1917, there are two revolutions only eight months apart. In February, there's
01:24:58.980the initial revolution in which the czar is overthrown. In early March, he abdicates first
01:25:04.160in favor of his son who's just a boy a 12 year old boy with hemophilia and then he decides you
01:25:09.720know what if if i leave and he takes over he'll never survive it so then he advocates in favor
01:25:13.720of his younger brother and the other brother's like i don't want anything to do with this and
01:25:16.620so he says no um so basically this this provisional government is in charge and they are still in
01:25:25.580favor of staying in the war against the germans which the allies are thinking that's great we
01:25:31.220need this eastern front to occupy germany and the government looks more democratic so also great
01:25:36.720and um germany is thinking well we got to get russia out of the war and they know that lenin
01:25:42.620is over in switzerland and lenin was campaigning basically on three things saying i'll give you
01:25:47.360peace land and bread the first thing he wants to do upon taking power is pull russia out of the
01:25:53.600war and so germany this i think uh sean mentioned this there's a train that they put lenin on in
01:26:00.640Switzerland. And it's Lenin and about 20 other of his revolutionary friends. And the train drops
01:26:06.420him off in Russia. And this is in April of 17. By October, you have the second revolution. So
01:26:11.360eight months after the first one, in which basically Lenin takes over, the Bolsheviks0.70
01:26:15.500take over. And as Sean mentioned, they had only minority support. About 20% of the people were
01:26:20.540voting for a Bolshevik takeover. There were three other socialists, or three total socialist
01:26:25.640factions. There were the Mensheviks who had more support than the Bolsheviks and the socialist
01:26:30.640revolutionaries. But the Bolsheviks were the most extreme and the most violent. The Mensheviks were0.70
01:26:35.620thinking, well, maybe we can do this in sort of a legal way. We'll have trade unions and things like
01:26:39.240that. And the Bolsheviks were far more brutal in their tactics and started gaining more popular
01:26:48.140support. Even Trotsky was initially a Menshevik and he came over to be one of the top0.84
01:26:52.860lieutenants of Lenin by 1917. And so the czar at this point is a prisoner. And initially,
01:27:02.500after he abdicated back in March, he was offered amnesty by Great Britain. And he's cousins with
01:27:09.560King George V of Great Britain. He writes him a letter saying, you know, this is where we need
01:27:13.240to go. And that initial provisional government was thinking exile might be the way, but he's
01:27:18.460imprisoned at this time and then the king george the fifth is queen elizabeth's grandpa right
01:27:23.760that's right yeah so then there's king george the fifth then the sixth who was the colin firth and
01:27:29.200the king's speech and then elizabeth so it's elizabeth's grandfather and you know everyone's
01:27:35.740worried about this sort of bolshevik anti-monarchy sentiment that's really a global thing and uh so
01:27:43.000he has a conversation with his ministers and they're a little skittish you know if the czar
01:27:46.480comes over here, that could lead to popular unrest. And as our favorite line from Braveheart,
01:27:52.080that could be my head in a basket. So King George V is like, let's not, so they withdraw
01:27:57.040their invitation for him to live in exile back in Great Britain in April. So in March,
01:28:03.100he's invited. In April, the invitation's pulled and he's stuck in Russia.
01:28:07.560And then when the Bolsheviks take over. That was an important invitation to seize in the moment.0.87
01:28:11.460He needed to get out of there. But that was the crazy thing. All of the industrialists,
01:28:14.580all the capitalists in Russia were thinking, we're good. This Lenin guy is a flash in the pan.
01:28:20.700He's crazy. He's not going to have popular support. He already doesn't have popular support,0.98
01:28:24.400and it's not going to grow. They'll get rid of this guy. Because he's also fighting the Japanese
01:28:28.620in the East. He's fighting the Czech Legion, the Poles. He's fighting the Mensheviks,0.92
01:28:33.940the Socialist Republics. And there's the White Army, which is loyal to the Tsar,0.77
01:28:37.600which is still a very powerful army. So Lenin's fighting on like six different fronts at this
01:28:42.560point. And he is, however, gaining more control. So the Tsar at this point is a prisoner, and Lenin
01:28:51.460is worried that he's sort of a rallying point for the white army that's loyal to the Tsar.
01:28:56.080And by July of 1918, he and his family are executed in a really gruesome way, you know,
01:29:04.200bullets and bayonets, the Tsar and his whole family, wife and kids.
01:29:07.540hmm and lenin's off to the races and the relationship as you described it between lenin
01:29:14.940and stalin you know it's like stalin he he was looking at lenin lenin was looking at stalin and
01:29:21.760you know when you talk about these two uh you talk about stalin as possibly one of the worst people
01:29:26.340who ever walked the face of the earth and lenin saw it and like he knew it wasn't like lenin was
01:29:31.900all that great but stalin was uniquely evil so talk about that and sort of what happened between
01:29:36.280the two of them? Stalin is one of the worst figures of the 20th century. I think there's
01:29:40.040some stat on who's responsible for the most deaths in the 20th century. And Hitler's up there at0.91
01:29:45.460around six or seven million. Mao is number one. Stalin was like 20, 25, and Mao was like 40 million0.72
01:29:52.760people. They're responsible for killing in the 20th century. It's just insane. Stalin's about0.75
01:29:57.260eight years younger than Lenin and was a real disciple from afar. He was born in Georgia in
01:30:01.380southern Russia spent a lot of time around the Caspian Sea and the oil regions in Azerbaijan
01:30:05.860of southern Russia. And he was sort of a thug for Lenin down there raising money for the
01:30:14.180Bolshevik cause. So he was basically a gangster, and he would have extortion rackets going on.
01:30:21.120He was a bank robber. It was almost like the Wells Fargo train in the Wild West of America
01:30:24.720that would be hijacked. He staged huge bank robberies robbing wagons full of payroll cash,
01:30:29.520And then he'd send it up to Lenin to support the Bolshevik cause. And he became one of Lenin's top lieutenants and military advisors and leaders. And then after, so there's the red terror from, you know, in the years immediately after the Great War, when the Bolsheviks finally secure power and this bloody Russian civil war ends.
01:30:52.320and in 1922 Lenin has his first stroke and he's a little bit incapacitated from that but he's still
01:30:58.600this heroic figure to to the Russian people and then in 1924 he has his third and final stroke
01:31:06.680in which he dies only some people believe that he didn't die of a stroke he he may have been
01:31:12.300poisoned by Stalin because in the weeks prior to Lenin finally dying of this alleged stroke
01:31:19.580He wrote a letter to the Soviet, basically the political body beneath him, saying that it cannot be Stalin who succeeds me.0.99
01:31:28.120And most people thought it'd be Trotsky or one of the others, or about four or five guys who were in that level down.
01:31:34.880Stalin was one of those five, but most people thought it would be Trotsky.
01:31:38.160But as soon as Lenin dies, Trotsky, it happens when Trotsky's away, suspiciously, and by the time Trotsky gets back,
01:31:44.720Stalin has already solidified all of his alliances and threatened those who were not initially with0.66
01:31:49.560him so when Trotsky gets back it's kind of a done deal and Stalin is in charge he promotes the cult
01:31:54.980of personality around Lenin and you know he knows Lenin is this very popular figure who's a very
01:32:01.320charismatic speaker he's only about five foot five but he was a huge personality and so Stalin is
01:32:05.960saying all great things about Lenin they renamed St. Petersburg Leningrad and promote this cult
01:32:11.340because Stalin's saying well if people are behind Lenin I'm going to say I'm behind Lenin and that
01:32:14.580will all continue. But by the 30s, he changes his tune and he selectively releases some things from
01:32:20.100Soviet archives that show all the bad things that Lenin did in those years immediately after
01:32:26.340World War I and sort of dinged Lenin up a little bit in his legacy because now Stalin is firmly
01:32:32.940in charge and is more concerned about building the cult of Stalin, which he does and, you know,
01:32:37.460names the city Stalingrad and sort of fibs a little bit about the heroic things that he did
01:32:44.080in those early years, too. We only know this because after the fall of the Soviet Union in
01:32:48.260the 90s, many of these countries opened up their own archives. We just recently, in the last 20
01:32:52.800years, learned a lot more about the early years of Stalin. So was there an opportunity for us to
01:32:58.780avoid Lenin and avoid Stalin and avoid the Bolsheviks in a way that could have changed0.60
01:33:05.060the entire trajectory of the 20th century and 21st? Absolutely. Even in the absence of Western0.65
01:33:12.340intervention in the years 1819. Stalin and Lenin and the Bolshevik movement almost collapsed. They
01:33:18.440almost lost to the White Army and to other forces. In February or March of 1919, Great Britain pulled
01:33:25.180out its final troops. They only had a small force there, and the Americans got out too. They were
01:33:29.600interested in some of the oil regions and other resources around Russia. But Churchill, among
01:33:34.700others, was in Great Britain saying, we have got to deal with this problem right now. It's amazing.
01:33:38.460I mean, Churchill said this after World War I and World War II, but he said this Lenin guy and these Bolsheviks are going to be a real problem.0.97
01:33:46.660We can go in there and rout this thing and establish a more democratic form of government.
01:33:51.560But after the four and a half years of slaughter of the Great War, nobody had the appetite to do that in America or Great Britain.0.94
01:34:00.700And they also took that non-interventionist slant of, okay, if this is who the Russian people have selected to be in charge, they should do it.0.66
01:34:08.080Because not only is it going to be difficult to send troops in there and fight this war, but then we're going to have to fight the peace.
01:34:13.040We're going to stick around and help these people establish a more democratic form of government.
01:34:17.540And nobody wanted to get involved in that.
01:34:20.200And so Lenin was able to thread the needle because during the war, you know, the Germans hated this guy too.
01:34:25.160It was only that he wanted to pull Russia out of the war that they sent him in there.
01:34:28.380They weren't looking for some workers' revolution either.
01:34:30.660Monarchs and democratic forms of government wanted nothing to do with Lenin and the Bolsheviks.
01:34:34.940but they had to deal with the primary threat and for the central powers and the allied powers that
01:34:40.280was each other and so the germans thinking even if he pulls out of the war you know he's got all
01:34:46.620these resources too and the allies were thinking well if we go get rid of lenin you know this is
01:34:51.260back during the war years if we go fight lenin and get rid of him try to get rid of him we could0.93
01:34:55.460push him into the arms of the germans and even if he doesn't declare war against us he has all these0.79
01:34:59.560guns, oil, wheat, copper that he could offer up to the German war machine. So everyone kind of0.92
01:35:05.780treated him with kid gloves, even though he was viewed and identified as a threat early on,
01:35:10.960no one could really take him on. So he was able to kind of thread the needle for those post-war
01:35:14.700years. Let me ask you about Churchill, because he's this crazy figure who played a big role
01:35:20.820in World War I and not just World War II. We all know him from World War II, but he was very
01:35:25.380present during World War I and sort of trying to become the military leader that we would later
01:35:30.000know him as, not with total success, as you just alluded to. But talk about Churchill during World
01:35:37.380War I. He was put into the post of First Lord of the Admiralty in 1911. And he was young then. He's
01:35:43.220like a 37-year-old guy. And that's the top post in the British Navy, which, you know, for the Brits,
01:35:48.860the Navy is a bigger deal than the Army. So he was a huge figure in the pre-war military apparatus.
01:35:55.380And he brought in as his first sea lord, Jackie Fisher, who was this legendary admiral.
01:36:35.160And that set off this naval arms race.
01:36:39.020So Britain controlled the seas at that point.
01:36:40.840Ever since defeating Napoleon in the early 1800s, they were the dominant sea power.
01:36:45.580And they controlled the sea lanes for merchant shipping and for military purposes as well.
01:36:50.860And Germany, they were expanding, but they were really a continental power.
01:36:53.860They had the largest and most powerful army and land-based force, but in order to grow, Kaiser Wilhelm II thought, we need an international system of colonies and an empire in the way that Britain does so that we can bring natural resources in from the corners of the globe and fuel our industrial growth.
01:37:10.960But the only way to have an international empire and colonies around the world is to have strong navies so that we can protect it, protect our sea lanes.
01:37:18.460So he starts building a Navy, and then Britain starts getting very nervous about the strength of the German Navy, and that set off this big arms race between the two.
01:37:45.220By the way, he's done a ton of work to update the military and the naval ships from coal to oil, and he secures access to oil from the Middle East, which was sort of the founding of the British Petroleum and things like that.
01:37:57.660But he has this idea, and this ended up being his downfall, but he had an idea to end the war quickly because Russia had basically been capped off.
01:38:06.520They have their only warm water port in the Black Sea.
01:38:10.360That's how they get wheat and natural resources out and how they get guns and war supplies in.0.65
01:38:14.620But in order to get to the Black Sea, you have to go through this long strait called the Dardanelles that goes right by Constantinople and Turkey, and it's all controlled by the Ottoman Empire, which is with Germany.0.60
01:38:24.140So they control access to Russia's warm water port.
01:38:28.140Churchill has this thought that we can send a big force, not only naval ships, but ground troops as well.
01:38:35.240And it's not that well protected at the moment.
01:41:53.140And then at the end of it, we were all like, why did we even do that?
01:41:56.740It seemed like these petty things between monarchs and shifting alliances.
01:42:00.580And it's just way more complex and nuanced than World War II, which is more of this good and evil story.
01:42:10.740So in Doug's other life, because you may know him as a podcast host now, host of Dedicated with Doug Brunt, in which he goes in-depth with the best and best-known authors of our time.
01:42:21.400Go ahead and download it now and follow and subscribe, and you'll be glad you did.
01:42:24.660But in his other life, he writes books, and he's working on a nonfiction piece right now, which is amazing.
01:42:29.940It's got this big mystery in it, but it's based on—it's historical, but it, like, unearths a big mystery and, I think, solves it.
01:42:37.060And that is one of the reasons—that is really the main reason why you became such an expert.
01:42:40.800How many books do you think you read in preparation for this book?
01:42:43.840He doesn't want to talk about the name.
01:42:53.380And that's not counting the small articles and weird journals and things from the air.
01:42:59.220So as you mentioned, the book that I wrote, 90% of it takes place in the 25 years leading up to World War I. 1890 to 1915 is really the time for this book.
01:43:10.860And it's a great era of – it's like I was actually talking to an archivist in Germany to get some things out.
01:43:17.780And I was like, you know, I need something.
01:43:19.720I'm looking for something on this guy.
01:43:20.760And he's like, this is the golden age of letter writing.
01:47:37.920I mean, I can't talk to George Washington.
01:47:39.660I can't talk to Benjamin Franklin. I can't talk to a lot of those people, but I can actually talk to people who were involved in World War II and actually played a role in saving the world, which I think is extraordinary.
01:47:52.700But it is also a very short window that we have to talk to these people. And I think, you know, it's just amazing that we have that opportunity.
01:48:03.480Let's just start there because you think of the greatest generation and in particular those who
01:48:07.260fought in World War II. There are some seam lines that pull them together and that describe most of
01:48:13.040them. And you've spent more time with them than anyone. How would you describe these guys? I mean,
01:48:18.440what is it about them? What are some of the adjectives that jump out at you?
01:48:22.400Humble. You know, they could be going around to your local mall or they could be going around to
01:48:27.780your local place and saying, you know, hey, look at me. I saved the world. I want the likes on my
01:48:34.780Instagram page. I want the likes on my Facebook page. But they don't do that. It just blows my
01:48:42.120mind that there's such a generation that is so humble about the fact that they really dictated
01:48:49.560where we are today. And so, you know, when I look at that generation, I think, you know,
01:48:56.480if there's any generation that really deserves the fact to, to want that attention, it's that
01:49:02.160generation, but they don't want it at all. That's the thing is that, I mean, they are
01:49:07.740literally the opposite of selfie culture that we find everywhere around us today. And there's the
01:49:14.740quiet dignity about these guys. I've interviewed a fair amount of them. I'm happy to say over my
01:49:18.620years as a journalist, there's a quiet dignity. There's a deep patriotism, deep, deep love of
01:49:25.000America, hard-earned and hard-fought. And there's just some sort of a bond between them and between
01:49:33.200them and the country. They survived the Great Depression. They fought World War II like it
01:49:38.320was a job. And then they came home and they went on with their lives. And their lives were centered
01:49:43.640around their job and their family. And that was it. I mean, they didn't want the accolades.
01:49:50.980They felt the accolades belong with those who were buried in American cemeteries in Manila and Normandy and Holland and Belgium and other places.
01:50:01.480There was almost this survivor's guilt that they had.
01:50:06.080So when they came home, they took the lessons of World War II and they applied them to their own daily lives.
01:50:12.080And some of them dealt with them better than others.
01:50:14.780I mean, some of them came home and they were fine.
01:50:16.800some of them came home and they had a problem with alcoholism or some of them came home and
01:50:22.940they had a problem with with with committing suicide or they had a problem with with their
01:50:28.220with their families in some way where they would wake up their mom or their wife or their children
01:50:34.640in the middle of the night and be screaming about a japanese bonsai attack and they and the families
01:50:40.500at home couldn't understand. But they came home and they rebuilt America to what it is today.
01:50:46.820And when I think about that generation, anytime I go to a mall or anytime I log on to Amazon or
01:50:52.880anytime I want to travel to Ohio or Montana or another state, I don't need papers. I don't need
01:51:00.400someone to check in with me. I don't need someone to authorize my daily activities. And that's all
01:51:08.840because of that generation. But it's just so funny that they're kind of like the anti-Kardashian
01:51:14.500generation that they just went on with their lives and they saved the world and they just
01:51:20.700didn't want any credit for it. And they felt all the credit belonged with those who never had any
01:51:26.380opportunity to live a full life or to have kids or grandkids or to be someone who solved cancer
01:51:33.980or solve the dilemma of autism or dementia
01:52:25.860And I think that's kind of what's lacking in America is to understand the sacrifice that was made to preserve everything that we are today, our ability to believe in a God and to believe in a religion and to believe in whatever we want to accomplish.
01:52:47.200And I think that generation humbly did that, and they left us a blueprint in which to follow.
01:52:54.580And I think we've gotten away from that blueprint in a lot of ways. And so when I look back at that generation, I always say, you know, I always tell the younger generation that, you know, these men have left us a blueprint on how to be better Americans and how to be better people. And we've kind of gotten away from that. And I think that's unfortunate in a lot of ways.
01:53:18.600Yeah. And now we need to follow it. Now we just need to know it and follow it. All right. So
01:53:23.740let's talk about the war and go through the arc of it so people have a better understanding of it.
01:53:31.120I think to understand how we got into World War II, you need a basic understanding of how World
01:53:35.700War I ended. You know, most of us on tourist trips, if we've ever had the privilege to go
01:53:42.300through Europe, through France. If you're lucky, you get to go through the Palace of Versailles,
01:53:47.820and we know that word Versailles. And what happened there was directly related to the
01:53:53.360Second World War in a way many people may not understand. So let's start there.
01:53:58.240Yeah, I mean, Versailles, the Treaty of Versailles ended World War I. And a lot of people,
01:54:03.320especially over the last, I'd say, 30 years or so, have decided, historians have decided that
01:54:09.840World War I was really a continuation of World War II.0.59
01:54:33.900I mean, my understanding of the Treaty of Versailles is it essentially humiliated Germany, and it basically dismantled their military.
01:54:44.640It imposed harsh penalties against them.
01:54:47.040It put all the blame on them and left them unable to really function in many key ways, and they became predictably resentful over those terms and up rose Adolf Hitler.
01:55:01.180those things were connected. And he decided promptly to play the victim and play Germany0.63
01:55:07.840as the victim. And shortly thereafter, decided that the villain would be Jewish people.0.95
01:55:14.340Yeah. I mean, he was the right guy at the right time in history, like Mussolini was in Italy.0.98
01:55:20.240He was a flamboyant leader who basically blamed all of their problems, Italy's problems, and then
01:55:26.560Hitler's side, Germany's problems on World War I. He blamed it on the Jewish people. He blamed
01:55:32.860them on the communists. And he was elected on the fact that he was that person who could
01:55:39.660take the results of World War I, which was the economic depression that Germany was in,
01:55:46.220the fact that Germany's military had been decimated and deactivated, and that he would
01:55:52.640restore that aura to Germany. And we've talked to German soldiers who said, basically, that
01:56:01.280Hitler was that person who said, you know, we were wronged in World War I, and this is what we need
01:56:08.540to do now. And then again, by the time he was in power, and his directives were known, that it was
01:56:16.780too late to to have former resistance or to to object to what he was doing so even before world
01:56:24.460war ii i mean that's that's the thing that a lot of people sort of miss in the 1930s he built dachau
01:56:30.100uh one of the you know the first concentration camp and it was kristallnacht was in 1938 i think
01:56:35.640hitler was doing this before the war was actually launched targeting jewish people but obviously
01:56:42.680then his eyes became more territorial and he started grabbing territory. And that's when the
01:56:48.740war actually broke out in earnest. Yeah, he started looking at Czechoslovakia. He started
01:56:53.820looking at the expansion of Germany, that Germany needed more room. And because of World War I,
01:56:59.660that Germany was due this more room. And he looked at Czechoslovakia and the Brits and the French
01:57:06.620gave him Czechoslovakia. And then he started to look at Russia and he started to look at the
01:57:11.060Soviet Union. And that, of course, led to the start of World War II. And it's just one of those
01:57:19.080situations where you look at it and that Hitler really did a great job of appealing to the common
01:57:26.760man in Germany in World War II, that the government has forgotten about you and that we need to get
01:57:34.080back to, you know, being able to honor you and to help you. But then again, he had no plan that
01:57:42.360would ever succeed in doing that. But he wanted an expansion of the German Empire following what0.56
01:57:48.160happened after World War II, which basically ruined Germans' economy and ruined Germans'
01:57:53.440after World War I, which ruined Germans' economy after World War I, and then an expansion. So it
01:58:03.020It was just a situation where Hitler took advantage of the Treaty of Versailles and said, you know, Germans were due more land and we need more land.
01:58:11.880And we were treated so poorly that we were due this expansion in Europe.0.60
01:58:18.760Yeah. And we now know, of course, he was not abiding by the rules in the Treaty of Versailles saying no more militarization to the contrary.
01:58:27.300So just for the timeline, World War I ended November 11th, 1918.
01:58:32.460Fifteen years later, January 30th, 1933, Hitler was appointed the German leader.
01:58:37.180And September 1st, 1939 is when World War II is considered to have begun.
01:58:45.060A couple of weeks later, the Soviet Union invaded Poland.
01:58:48.240In the beginning of the war, the Soviets were friendly with Germany.
01:58:51.720I mean, people forget that that's how it began.0.71
01:58:54.460I mean, one of Hitler's greatest mistakes, I think, was going after the Soviet Union, just getting so power-hungry and land-hungry.
01:59:00.560He thought he could take the Soviets as well, which would be a critical moment for the world, right?0.68
01:59:05.600Because he couldn't, and the Soviets decided to fight with the Allied powers, and soon thereafter, the war ended.
01:59:12.260But in any event, in the beginning, he took Poland, he invaded Poland, the Soviet Union invaded Poland, and there was fighting going on for quite some time.
01:59:20.480In 1940, Norway was invaded by Germany.
01:59:23.900Same year, Winston Churchill becomes prime minister, and the war is underway.
01:59:30.620Now, the United States at this point is isolationist.
01:59:44.280We're helping them through what's called Lend-Lease, which is giving arms to England and giving arms and supplies to the Soviet Union.
01:59:52.940I mean, there's a point on December 6, 1941, the day before Pearl Harbor, where there's about 88 percent of the United States that has no interest in helping what's going on in Europe.
02:00:04.300There's just no interest in getting involved in another world war.
02:00:08.700And that all changes on December 7, 1941.
02:00:11.440one. So 88% of the United States is against getting involved in the war in Europe, despite
02:00:18.220the fact that England is alone. France has already conceded. The Netherlands have already
02:00:23.260conceded. Belgium, everybody's already conceded. But the United States, having been through World
02:00:29.880War I, or at least the last year of World War I, wants no part of the war in Europe until the0.91
02:00:36.100Japanese attack Pearl Harbor, which I find interesting is that it's such a high percentage,
02:00:41.32088%, 87%, 88% that wants no part of that war in Europe until we're attacked. And I think that's0.89
02:00:49.820the way the United States is in general, is that we're not a warring nation. But when we are
02:00:55.340attacked, like a December 7th or September 11th, 2001, that we respond. So history doesn't repeat
02:01:05.420itself, but it certainly rhymes. And that's what was the case in 1941. You have a great documentary
02:01:12.520among many, this one called Remembering Pearl Harbor. And I recommend it to everybody. It sets
02:01:18.380the stage with the actual greatest generation, with the actual veterans. But it sets the stage
02:01:23.860in Pearl Harbor quite nicely about how it was going that day, how it was a rather peaceful day.
02:01:29.320No one anticipated this. To the contrary, there had been a bulletin not long before
02:02:26.640Go back and talk about their participation,
02:02:29.700their interest, and their start in this war.0.81
02:02:31.260Japanese were, Japan is a country of zero natural resources, and they needed natural resources. And so they had already invaded China, they had already invaded Korea, they had already invaded French Indochina, which is now Vietnam today, because they wanted to expand, but they needed natural resources.0.76
02:02:52.720So the United States decided at that point that they would start to cut off supplies to Japan, whether that be oil or steel.
02:03:02.080So Japan always felt as though they were backed into a corner and their expansion was dependent on these resources, these natural resources.
02:03:10.220So if the United States was not going to supply these natural resources, that they would have to disable the American Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor.
02:03:17.880And that's exactly what they tried to do on December 7th, 1941. But they did not understand that A, that the American aircraft carriers were not there. And B, they never launched the third wave, which attacked the oil refineries at Pearl Harbor. So Japan was trying to expand their empire in the Pacific while Hitler was trying to expand his empire in Europe. And they thought that they could-
02:03:44.460And it wasn't totally unrelated. They'd been talking. There was an agreement. This wasn't
02:03:49.200just two separate wars happening at once. No. I mean, they had formed an alliance called the
02:03:54.020Axis Powers between Italy, Japan, and Germany. So they were talking about what the situation was
02:04:01.200in the Pacific. So what they needed to do was eliminate the American Pacific fleet for six
02:04:06.220months or a year, but they did not figure on the resolve of the United States. The United States
02:04:11.900wants a fair fight. I mean, that's always how Americans are. They want a fair fight. They don't
02:04:17.360want to be attacked without notice or be attacked by surprise. And that's the slogan of Remember
02:04:24.460Pearl Harbor. And that was the rallying cry of World War II. It was Remember Pearl Harbor. We
02:04:30.160were attacked without notice by the Japanese and the Japanese had their intentions. But that became1.00
02:04:35.960the rallying cry. And that's why so many millions of Americans signed up for the fight in World War
02:04:41.320too because it was a sucker blow and Americans don't like sucker blows. Maybe this is hindsight
02:04:49.520being 2020, but it seems so foolish now in retrospect. Like why would they want to drag1.00
02:04:55.100us into the war of all powers? It's not like we were not known for our military might. You know,
02:05:01.720we had just won World War I. Like why, why drag the United States into this conflict that we'd
02:05:07.960been rejecting thus far? It's so funny because, you know, Admiral Yamamoto, who was the key
02:05:15.080architect of the Battle of Pearl Harbor, the attack at Pearl Harbor, and also the Battle of
02:05:20.740Midway, told the Japanese military, he said, you know, you only have a certain amount of time here
02:05:35.140in Washington. He had ventured out into the American heartland and seen the industrial
02:05:40.420power of the United States. So he basically was against a strike against the United States,
02:05:47.740but the Japanese military, the Japanese army was in control of what the decisions would be
02:05:54.460in World War II. So Yamamoto at certain points voiced his concern and said, this is not going
02:06:01.520to work. We're going to awaken a sleeping giant. And he meant by a sleeping giant, he meant American
02:06:08.400industry. He meant by the ability to convert the Ford plants in Detroit from cars to tanks and
02:06:17.780airplanes and everything else. He said we cannot win a war with the United States. But nobody
02:06:23.580listened to him, especially the army, and there were attempts on his life. And so, you know,
02:06:29.340Japan did not listen to the voice of reason. The army was hellbent on attacking the United States0.67
02:06:37.320because they felt they were inferior in many ways, inferior as soldiers, inferior as Navy,
02:06:43.380inferior in militaristic ways. But Yamamoto was the voice of reason, and they did not like that.
02:06:51.660And they still attacked Pearl Harbor, and they still had Yamamoto plan the attack on Pearl Harbor
02:06:57.120and plan the attack on Midway, but he was a voice who just said, we cannot win a war. We can only
02:07:03.060buy time, and how much time we can buy is negotiable. And I think they were looking at
02:07:09.960some point to say, okay, we're going to buy time. We're going to be able to occupy Guam and the
02:07:14.500Philippines, and those will be our islands, and then we'll settle for peace. But Yamamoto was
02:07:19.560really the only one who understood the industrial might and the capability of the United States.
02:07:24.740The element of surprise is still hard to understand, given radar and satellite and all the gifts that we have today.
02:07:32.820But I didn't realize this, actually, prior to preparing for this interview, that there was an alert operator of an Army radar station at 7 o'clock that morning.
02:11:45.480So the Japanese decided that, you know, this based on local intelligence
02:11:50.900given by spies in Hawaii, that, you know, the Pacific fleet was there for the taking.0.91
02:11:59.280And they were. The destroyers were there and the battleships were there. But the aircraft carriers were either, A, delivering planes to Midway or out on other missions or being repaired in Bremerton, Washington or other places.
02:12:15.000And the Japanese also made a huge mistake in the fact that they did not attack the oil refineries in Pearl Harbor. That would have been the third wave of the Japanese attack. So they missed their opportunity to really inflict a lot of damage on the United States at Pearl Harbor.0.53
02:12:34.180And I think the Japanese also, Admiral Yamamoto, I go back to him because we've been to Nagaoka, which is his hometown, and we've been to places where we've interviewed his grandson.0.68
02:12:47.560He was the only one who really had a clear understanding of the industrial might of the United States and that you had to knock it all off at once if you wanted to sever the head of the snake.
02:13:00.800And they accomplished two of the three goals. And that third part of the goal, which is the aircraft carriers and not attacking the oil refineries at Pearl Harbor, was a major, major mistake on the part of the Japanese.0.91
02:13:17.220And Yamamoto was a realist. And he was also one of those people who said, you know, we have about six months to run rampant in the Pacific before the United States industrial might catches up with us.
02:13:29.680and um so but the army didn't want to hear that tojo and the others didn't want to hear that
02:13:35.980and but he was he was a realist and to hear guys like don stratton who passed away a couple years
02:13:42.300ago and luke contor who's one of only two survivors still alive from the uss arizona in
02:13:48.860that piece you just ran to to hear them describe what it was like to me um it's just incredible
02:13:56.480because they were a witness to history.0.99
02:13:59.520The worst thing the Japanese could have done0.55
02:19:38.080We all need a little more Jim Downing in our lives.
02:19:41.880He's one of those guys, Megan, who understands that he represents the guys who are buried in cemeteries in Hawaii at the Punchbowl or Normandy or Manila or Holland or Belgium or other places that he survived and was able to carry on with his life.
02:20:00.540But that he also carries the burden of being a survivor.
02:20:04.260and that's a tough burden for these guys you know why did i survive when the guy on the left of me
02:20:11.560died and the guy on the right of me died i mean what what is my mission in life my mission in life
02:20:18.000is is is to carry on to represent the qualities that my buddies who died you had and i think a
02:20:28.260lot of the times you know i i joke with people i said you know when you're in normandy and you're
02:20:32.560jumping into a foxhole, you're not asking if that guy's a Republican or a Democrat. You're just
02:20:38.960jumping in that foxhole knowing that that guy's an American and that that guy is going to help you
02:20:44.560survive and you're going to help him survive. So why can't we get back to that time where we're
02:20:52.780looking at it as America first. America is not a party. It's an idea. It's an evolution
02:21:02.680of what the founding fathers discussed.
02:21:22.780And Mexico's Caramel Churro Ice Cap gave me chills.
02:21:26.180We are, of course, talking about Tim's taste of the globe lineup.
02:21:29.080New globally inspired Timbits and Ice Cap flavors available at Tim Hortons for a limited time.
02:21:33.560Pick some up today and while you're at it, check out Footy Prime Daily.
02:21:40.720The day after Pearl Harbor on December 8th, 1941, the president of the United States, FDR,
02:21:49.600addressed the nation in a speech that would become known for a century plus. Here's a bit of that.
02:21:56.860December 7th, 1941, a date which will live in infamy. The United States of America
02:22:10.660was suddenly and deliberately attacked
02:22:14.240by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.
02:22:38.860the 88% saying, we're not going to get into this. And boy, as they say, what a difference a day
02:22:44.160makes. We rallied behind the president as we rallied behind W on, you know, September 11th,
02:22:52.5802001. And it just seems as though what I learned the most from World War II is that we're like an
02:22:59.540old Irish family where they're like seven brothers and all we do is beat up on each other.
02:23:05.540But if God forbid someone from outside the family beats up on one of the brothers, we all to come together and we respond.
02:23:15.200And that means like it's like, why are we so divided now when we could all just find a medium like Eisenhower talked about as a president and come together and figure out what's best for America?
02:23:30.840not what's best for the Republican Party or it's best for the Democratic Party or the
02:23:39.420Independent Party. What is best for America? Why does it take us being attacked to come together
02:23:46.080as a nation? In Roosevelt's speech, I mean, they detested Roosevelt. The Republicans detested
02:23:52.140Roosevelt. A lot of the country detested Roosevelt because of the New Deal and because of everything
02:23:58.960else he was pushing. And a lot of the country despised W. Bush because of what he was pushing.
02:24:05.420But all of a sudden, because America was attacked, all of a sudden we came together and said,
02:24:12.600here is our common goal. Our common goal is to do what's best for America.
02:24:18.560And I always find that fascinating. I have to say, though,
02:24:23.320I feel lucky to remember those times. I feel lucky to be one of the citizens who felt that
02:24:27.980and remembers that America first feeling.
02:24:31.160Like this is, we love our country and we love each other
02:25:14.540I mean, most of these people, the Japanese and the Germans, looked at the Americans as soft, that they didn't want war.
02:25:20.960They didn't want to fight in a war and that they would not use all of their resources and initiative and everything else to fight in a war.
02:25:29.440And they were wrong. The Japanese were wrong. The Germans were wrong.0.99
02:25:35.760And so I always look at it as interesting is that they always underestimated the United States and always and people always underestimate the United States.0.76
02:25:45.340But Hitler's two main errors in World War II were declaring war on the Soviet Union and declaring war on the United States.
02:25:57.020The British were major players, of course, as well, and were in a precarious position for quite some time during the war, not knowing whether they were going to face the same fate as France.
02:26:07.980Yes. Winston Churchill was the prime minister and in probably the best known speech ever.
02:26:15.140I mean, it's got to be at least one of them rallied his country to the cause, but also with a note of caution about what the enemy that they faced.
02:26:26.780Here's Winston Churchill addressing the House of Commons June 4th, 1940.
02:26:31.460We shall fight in France. We shall fight on the seas and oceans. We shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air. We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be.
02:27:45.740it was wordsmithing when it came to war, which was his particular area of expertise. It was a
02:27:51.180skill he'd worked on his entire life. He was built for that moment, and he was ready for it when it
02:27:58.500came. That was before they attacked us at Pearl Harbor. Great Britain was in it. They were dealing
02:28:02.740with Hitler. They were dealing with everything, and he was the man who got Great Britain through0.94
02:28:06.920it, notwithstanding the fact that they would throw him out of office as soon as they won the war.
02:28:10.300Sure. There's that classic scene from The King's Speech where they're following the British story during World War II, and the king is watching Adolf Hitler speak.0.54
02:28:24.600And the little girl, who is the future Queen of England, Queen Elizabeth, as a little girl, looks at her father and says, what is he saying? What is he saying, Dad?
02:28:32.680Masses of uniformed men, stupifying to the eye and incredible to the imagination, have stood in spellbound audience of the Führer.0.70
02:28:39.140I don't know, but he seems to be saying it rather well.0.89
02:29:03.740This is a guy with a speech impediment who's observing how effective a communicator Hitler was.0.84
02:29:08.000Exactly. There's a reason there's a reason so many Germans followed this lunatic down the incredible murderous hole that they did.0.91
02:29:16.920Yes. Yeah. And we've interviewed German soldiers and those German soldiers have told us is that Hitler delivered us from the Treaty of Versailles. Our economy was devastated. Our military did not exist. We had no morale.0.99
02:29:33.500By the time Hitler delivered his oratory, his ability to motivate us, he had controlled the media. He had controlled everything he needed to control in order to be in charge of that country.0.86
02:29:50.140So it's almost like an apology when we've interviewed German veterans, and they're not SS. They're not fanatical. They're not the guys on the cusp of the concentration camps and everything else. These are just general German soldiers.
02:30:08.740they said he motivated us enough to believe in him his oratory motivated us enough to believe in him
02:30:18.680and he also controlled the media at that time and so the media message was his message
02:30:25.300and and by the time they discovered or they found out about the concentration camps
02:30:30.820and they found out about the jews and they found out about the the um the obsession with controlling
02:30:37.960more territory, whether it be Czechoslovakia or the Soviet Union, it was too late. It was too0.91
02:30:45.160late for them to do anything. There would always be a resistance within the community, but the
02:30:51.640resistance would never be strong enough to overthrow what had already been done.
02:31:00.900Let's talk about it because the numbers are just stunning. You know, June 6, 1944, it was a Tuesday.
02:31:07.960More than 156,000 American, British, and Canadian troops stormed 50 miles of Normandy's fiercely defended beaches in northern France.
02:31:17.760And if you look back at how the battle was fought with the men running out of the ships onto beaches that were riddled with mines, taking fire from above,
02:31:32.180you can't help it as a lay person, but to feel like they were, they were sacrificed. There was
02:31:38.180how on earth could we not lose some 50% of our forces undergoing that kind of an assault,
02:31:46.140which we knew was going to happen. You know, we knew it was going to happen and we had laid
02:31:49.220traps so they would think that we weren't going to storm Normandy and so on. And they fell for
02:31:53.040our traps, but they were also prepared at Normandy as I understand it. And I just wonder as a,
02:31:57.960as a historian, when you look at that, did we know the extent of the casualties we were likely
02:32:02.100to take storming those beaches? We always believed as a country we were going to expect
02:32:09.040more casualties than we actually attained on that day. The paratroopers, the addition of the
02:32:17.720paratroopers, the 82nd Airborne and 101st Airborne, was something that was important to Eisenhower,
02:32:25.560Not so much as the British, but we sustained so much less casualties than we expected that day. Eisenhower had written a note taking total blame for the failure of D-Day.
02:32:41.260Can you imagine that one person writing a note saying, I have accepted the failure of the landings on the coast of Normandy?
02:32:56.520And one of them was because he did not know which way the battle would go.
02:33:02.660And Normandy was a defining moment in the history of World War II.
02:33:07.600And all of the plans that were laid out, and we talk about this a lot, and it's interesting because we talk about this with corporations as well, big corporation, that every plan looks great on paper until that first shot is fired.
02:33:27.740And that is a quote from General Patton. Every plan looks good until the first firing, you know, first Garand, M1 Garand is fired. And then all plans go to hell. And then it's the initiative of the Americans at that point.
02:33:43.520And I think it was the initiative of the Americans at that point compared to the Germans that was the true ultimate success of D-Day in terms of knowing the plans of the divisions around you, the companies around you, knowing the plans of everybody around you.0.60
02:33:59.540So if something went wrong, you had the training to pick up the rifle and move forward, whereas the Germans were reliant on Hitler and von Rudstadt and reliant on Rommel's orders and things like that.
02:34:15.860It was initiative that won D-Day for the Americans, as opposed to what the Germans were defending.
02:34:23.400How much prep did we put into that effort before we actually launched the attack?
02:34:29.540tons of maps. Everything, again, looked great on paper. And this is where we're going to land.
02:34:36.700This is where the 1st Infantry is going to land. This is where the 29th Infantry is going to land.
02:34:41.440This is where the 82nd Airborne is going to land. This is where the 101st is going to land.
02:34:45.840This is where the British are going to land. This is where the Canadians are going to land. This is0.82
02:34:49.480where the French are going to land. Everything went to hell in a handbasket as soon as D-Day began.1.00
02:34:57.380But the thing is, is that the Americans and the allies were all so connected with the plans of D-Day that they knew that if something failed in this area, that we'd be able to accommodate it in this area.0.75
02:35:14.880The Germans also had the disadvantage of Hitler having decided he would be commander in chief and he was a terrible military commander.0.71
02:35:20.660He was taking a nap. He was taking a nap. He was sleeping and they were waiting for him to wake up before they waited for him to make the decision whether to move the tanks forward towards the beaches of Normandy and everything else.0.69
02:35:34.260Whereas the Americans are saying, OK, this isn't working. But but the captains and lieutenants and the and the corporals and and and the colonels and the privates are taking the initiative. And that's what's so great about America is that is that we recognize that if something's not working, we take the initiative to make sure it works.
02:35:56.100We lead ourselves. The toughest fighting was said to be on Omaha Beach. First waves of American
02:36:03.860fighters were cut down in droves by the German machine gun fire as they scrambled across the
02:36:09.560mine-riddled beach. But U.S. forces persisted all day, pushing forward to a fortified seawall,
02:36:17.540up steep bluffs to take out the Nazi artillery by nightfall. And they say all told around0.59
02:36:25.4202,400 American troops were killed, wounded, or unaccounted for at Omaha Beach. The Canadians0.76
02:36:30.660were over at Juneau Beach having an equally, if not even tougher time. You have a documentary on
02:36:39.800D-Day as well, and it has an extraordinary segment of survivors talking about that moment.
02:36:47.160This moment of storming the beach at Normandy, I mean, it's a phrase now that people use to try
02:36:53.100to describe courage in a few words or less, but you think about having to be one of those guys
02:36:59.540and actually do it, understanding. It wasn't a mystery to them, the mines and the machine gun
02:37:05.240fire that was about to come their way. And here is a couple minutes from Tim's documentary on what
02:37:11.620that was like. As I was going into the beach, I could hear the bullets hitting on the side of the
02:37:17.340ship, on the side of my boat. And then that's when I realized, I said, well, this isn't going to be
02:37:23.000piece of cake this is for real I looked into the well of the boat and there was
02:37:31.58035 soldiers in there and I don't think there was an atheist in there because
02:37:34.980every one of us was making a sign of the cross as we were going in and I
02:37:42.800happened to look. I looked to the right and I seen a boat. And then I realized what we
02:37:59.040were going into. Our job was to roll up these obstacles. They had what they call hedgehogs
02:38:08.620And then they had these telephone poles with a ramp, and on top of the telephone pole was a mine.
02:40:00.460American hero. And God bless you, Tim, for interviewing these guys and getting
02:40:04.960their stories on camera. That was Day of Days by Tim Gray. And you should definitely watch that one
02:40:12.220too. They're just humans. They seem superhuman, but they're just men. And they were young men
02:40:21.680asked to do the most extraordinary things. And they did it without complaint and with valor.
02:40:26.920ernie corvesi who you just heard from i said you know what did you do after the war he said i went
02:40:33.360back to high school i mean can you imagine that going through the fact that you're a naval combat
02:40:39.560demolition unit guy like today they're called frogmen or navy seals and seeing all of your guys
02:40:45.840killed and then he went on to the philippines i said what'd you do after world war ii he said i
02:40:51.040went back to high school and i said you know when i was in high school megan i would think i was still
02:40:55.580sucking my thumb you know i i looked at that guy and i'm like thinking myself what um what an
02:41:02.040incredible american you are to be able to accomplish that and and and then go back to0.95
02:41:08.540high school and finish high school and richard fazio the guy behind him who lived the first
02:41:13.440half hour of saving private ryan and i and richard's still alive ernie passed away this year
02:41:19.100unfortunately um but i but i look at them and i and i and i talk to young people today who are
02:41:25.98017 or 18 years old and i go you know you this is what you're capable of i said whether you know it
02:41:31.820or not you're capable of this you're capable of being the next greatest generation you know and
02:41:40.000and and and they look at me like i'm a like i'm a alien from lost in space or something like that
02:41:45.820And I said, these guys didn't think they were capable of doing that themselves at 17 or 18, but they did it.
02:41:53.380Well, think of the sad obsession now with identity and, you know, skin color and gender and patriarchy.
02:42:01.680It's like, oh, my God, you could be devoting your energies to something so much bigger than just you and these immutable characteristics that we've decided to obsess over right now.
02:42:13.460Think of what you could accomplish if you would take all of that time and energy and
02:42:18.940devote it to something greater than yourself, if not a war, innovation, solve the problem
02:42:26.360of the closure of those steel mines and the people looking for a new career or identity.
02:42:31.980Find a way to help America find its new footing in the age of electronics and the supercomputers
02:42:38.960and so on. That's what we need all the energies devoted to, not navel-gazing, selfies, and
02:42:46.180hysterical focus on things over which we will never have any control.
02:42:50.860Yeah, people base their self-worth today on how many likes they get. And that generation did not,
02:42:57.400they based their life on coming out of the Depression and surviving the Depression when
02:43:02.880their parents went from lawyer to selling apples. And they fought World War II as a war
02:43:08.800and they fought it as a job and they came home and they raised their kids on the values that
02:43:15.140they learned during the war and and and the attributes that they brought home and there's
02:43:20.460just there's too much there's too much that's that's going by the wayside to to make America
02:43:26.760a great country there are too many you know there's too much divisiveness and this is what
02:43:32.780these guys fought about. They fought against Mussolini. They fought against Hitler. They
02:43:40.340fought against all these things that were trying to tear America apart. And I think of when I walk
02:43:47.440through the cemetery in Normandy, I look at the names from Connecticut and Montana and California
02:43:52.860and other places. And I said, this kid who was 18 or 19 could have cured autism or cancer or
02:44:01.540dementia or Alzheimer's or all of these things that we're battling today, if he had the chance,
02:44:07.620if he wasn't killed on June 6th or June 15th or something like that. And I think to myself,
02:44:14.920boy, oh boy, you know, what a wasted opportunity that this young man buried in the cemetery under
02:44:22.580this white cross or Star of David could have changed the world, but instead, you know, was
02:44:28.780killed on June 6, 1944. And I just think, what if? What if? What would this country be? And
02:44:38.300I look at that. I've been to cemeteries all over the world in Manila, where there are 35,000
02:44:44.920missing in action buried, you know, on the wall of the missing there, or the Punchbowl in Hawaii,
02:44:51.220or Holland, or Belgium. I said, geez, what is their, what would have been their destiny?
02:44:57.520And I think we think that today with soldiers who were killed in Afghanistan or Iraq or other places, their families feel as though what would have been their destiny?
02:47:21.660Well, his father had gone home to Germany because he did not feel as though that the Allies would be landing under such weather conditions as were the case on June 6, 1944.
02:47:37.960He believed that the Allies would land in better weather conditions.
02:47:40.880So Manfred Rommel's father had gone home for his wife Lucy's 50th birthday and bought her shoes in Paris.
02:47:51.660So Manfred was home as the 13, 14-year-old who witnessed his father getting the call back in Herlingen, Germany, that the Allied invasion had begun in Normandy.
02:48:04.700And Erwin Rommel's headquarters at Le Roche-Guillon, which is outside of Paris, was unoccupied by Rommel on D-Day.
02:48:14.600Rommel should have been there on D-Day to direct the forces, to direct the German forces.
02:48:19.700And here he is in Germany because he did not think that the Allies would land under such weather conditions, whereas Eisenhower had said the conditions are marginal, but will go.
02:48:31.800And so Manfred was home watching his father's reaction, getting the telephone call back in Herlingen, Germany, that the Allies had landed in Normandy.
02:48:45.080And Manfred, you know, articulated that.
02:48:48.500Manfred Rommel was an outstanding human being. He was the mayor of Stuttgart, Germany for 23 years. He also became very good friends with the family of General Montgomery after the war. And he was a humanitarian. But he was also witness to a momentous time in history when his father got a phone call in Germany that the Allies were landing on D-Day in France.
02:49:12.100And Manfred was also there when his father was taken away to be forced to commit suicide by Hitler because of the failures of Normandy and because Rommel had been an outspoken critic of Hitler during World War II.
02:49:31.340So Manfred Rommel, who passed away several years ago, gave us this perspective of what
02:49:36.720it was like to be a 13 or 14 year old in the German army, but to witness his father's reaction
02:49:57.740It was one of those things where, as a filmmaker, you say there are certain people you want to interview who had a first-row seat to World War II, and Manfred Rommel was one of those people.
02:50:10.500And after he passed away, you know, we were very devastated in his passing, but he was a benevolent and he was a kind mayor in Stuttgart, Jiminy.
02:50:20.560But he was also an observer to some of the most momentous events in World War II.
02:50:26.260and um to to have him in some of our films was just one of those things where you just it's just
02:50:32.680dumb luck that we got him when he was alive and and filmmakers are are are always um a dumb luck
02:50:41.080is always part of being a good filmmaker whether you're kim burns or or anybody else but but to0.78
02:50:46.180have his perspective yeah to have his perspective on that was was incredible and um you know he was
02:50:53.520firmly in the belief that the Allies would not land in bad weather on June 6, 1944, and that's
02:50:59.360exactly what Eisenhower did. Within a year, Hitler would surrender. The Japanese would be another
02:51:06.380story. It would take two atom bombs to make them finally surrender. And I want to get to the USS1.00
02:51:17.000Missouri, which was the ship on which the surrender papers were signed. And just an aside
02:51:23.500as to John McCain, Senator John McCain's grandfather, who was on the ship reluctantly.
02:51:32.220He had wanted to get back home. He knew they won. He was ready to get back home to his family. And
02:51:38.460tell us what happened. Well, you know, it was just a situation where we had dropped two bombs on
02:51:45.080Japan. And the Japanese military, the army especially, still did not want to surrender.
02:51:52.220So we dropped bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the Japanese army did not want to surrender,
02:51:59.260even after two atomic bombs, which is absolutely nuts. But then the Emperor Hirohito decided,
02:52:07.080you know, enough is enough. So when Hirohito decides enough is enough, the Japanese military,
02:52:12.580the army decides they want to assassinate Hirohito. So we had planned to invade Japan in0.95
02:52:22.740November of that year of 1945, and the casualties would have been in the millions, and Japan
02:52:27.300probably would have been wiped off the face of the earth. So it goes to show you that when the
02:52:33.760surrender was officially signed by the Japanese, Hirohito was the emperor and decided enough was
02:52:41.080enough, the Japanese military still, after two atomic bombs, wanted to continue the fight.0.72
02:52:47.640So when we knew at that point, Truman knew at that point that the Japanese were willing to
02:52:54.320defend their homeland to the last, whether that be children with spears and women and men and
02:53:01.160everybody else with everything else, he decided we would drop two atomic bombs. And those who
02:53:08.840served in the Pacific, totally agreed. And those who had served in Europe, totally agreed. We've
02:53:14.880never come across a World War II veteran who said that we should not have dropped the atomic bombs
02:53:20.680on Japan. Now we're looking at this at a 20th century lens. We're not looking at this at a
02:53:26.80021st century lens. Atomic bombs today are devastating. We do not want them. We do not
02:53:32.700want russia to to drop an atomic bomb on the ukraine we we feel as though as that would be
02:53:39.000just you know but in 1945 and the lens that we're looking at in the 21st in the 20th century0.77
02:53:46.720that was the appropriate thing to do to save lives so the surrender in tokyo bay
02:53:54.500on the uss missouri was attended by you know the navy and marines and the japanese and they
02:54:00.820finally decided to surrender. But at that point, the Japanese army still did not want to surrender.
02:54:06.600So that tells you the fanaticism of what the Americans were going to face or the allies,
02:54:12.580the Russians, everybody else were going to face if they invaded Japan in 1945, November of 1945.0.54
02:54:18.980So Japan would have been wiped off the face of the earth. We would have suffered another million
02:54:23.100plus casualties. We'd already printed another million purple hearts in anticipation of the
02:54:28.500fight in Japan. So Truman decided enough is enough. This world war needs to end. And it
02:54:34.860eventually did end, but only because Emperor Hirohito decided that enough was enough and that
02:54:40.580the Japanese were defeated. And even then, Japanese did not apologize and have never apologized0.93
02:54:47.540for Pearl Harbor or starting World War II in the Pacific. And that has always been a sticking0.97
02:54:53.920point for the United States that Japan has never apologized for that. And Japan always felt that
02:55:00.800the war in the Pacific was legitimate and that it was caused by the oil embargo and the embargo of
02:55:07.920natural resources and that they were forced to do what they did. So Japan has never officially
02:55:13.180apologized for Pearl Harbor or starting World War II in the Pacific. And that's always been a0.96
02:55:17.540little sticking point with Pacific veterans. I know one veteran who was at home one day
02:55:23.280And Megan, his son came home with a Honda motorcycle, and his son was washing his hands in the kitchen sink and looked outside, and his dad, who was a survivor of Pearl Harbor at Schofield Barracks, was pouring gasoline on this Honda motorcycle and about ready to light it on fire.
02:55:42.740And his son came running out and said, what are you doing? And he said, I'm not going to let you
02:55:48.740drive this Japanese motorcycle. And his son said, why not? And his dad had to explain to him why.1.00
02:55:56.320And those feelings still linger with veterans of the Pacific War. And I tell people today
02:56:02.580that the Pacific War and the European War were two different wars. They were two specific wars.
02:56:08.600They were totally different wars. The savagery of the Pacific War was no comparison to what was going on in Europe. And the Geneva Convention was not observed by the Japanese. And they treated prisoners as cowards. And the fight in the Pacific, beginning with Guadalcanal and moving on to the other islands, was a totally different war.
02:56:30.320And the veterans in Europe had such a respect for the veterans who fought in the Pacific because there were no rules in the Pacific War.
02:58:50.680And also Steve Belichick, who was the father of Bill Belichick, and others at the Naval Academy.
02:58:58.340And there are others who are buried at Arlington who are in the same boat, you know, just men who served.
02:59:07.300And our mission as a foundation is that we never forget that generation.
02:59:12.300And unfortunately, it takes December 7th or September 11th for us to all of a sudden discover the American flag.
02:59:19.180And I wish it wasn't that way, but history shows us that, unfortunately, the only times that we come together as a country is during those times we were attacked.
02:59:29.400But we do have the potential, and I underline that word potential, to come together for causes that can help America as a whole.
02:59:38.760I would love to think that we'll do it.
02:59:40.840I mean, the problem is now even hanging the flag is considered a partisan act.
02:59:44.840I mean, even now, according to the New York Times, if you put the flag out in front of your house, it means you're a Republican, which is absurd.
02:59:51.440There are still a lot of Democrats who love the flag, but it's being made into a partisan symbol.
02:59:58.380Can I just spend a minute on this and I'll wrap it up?
03:00:00.740But I read a story about how, back to Pearl Harbor, the guys who are on the ships who are dying now, who survived and are dying now, if they so desire, they can have their ashes placed on the ships?
03:00:17.640Yeah. If you were on the USS Arizona and you were on the Arizona on December 7th, 1941, you can have your urn brought back to the battleship and interred and turret number four.
03:00:32.240um and that's the only situation um if you were on the arizona let's say you spent the night in
03:00:38.740honolulu on the night of december 7th you're not eligible but if you were on the arizona on december
03:00:44.4807th 1941 and um you would like to go and rejoin and rejoin your your crewmates um the the folks
03:00:53.040at pearl harbor and the united states navy will make that happen so your urn will be taken by
03:00:57.280divers, down to turret number four and placed among the 42 or so urns who have been placed
03:01:06.480in turret number four since this all started in the early 1980s.
03:01:11.280If you're a Pearl Harbor survivor and you want your ashes brought back to Pearl Harbor,
03:01:15.660they can be spread in the harbor as well, or brought back to the USS Utah, which was
03:01:25.340But it's interesting because we've attended some of these ceremonies where the sons or daughters or grandchildren of these survivors have had their urns returned to the crew.
03:01:39.660So there are about 900 plus who are still entombed on the USS Arizona who never left the battleship after December 7th, 1941 of the 1177 who died.
03:01:50.920and at some point in their life they decide that they want to rejoin their crewmates
03:01:58.240and one guy raymond harry who is from the state of rhode island never talked about the uss arizona
03:02:06.220after after pearl harbor he never mentioned the fact that he had a strong connection but on his
03:02:14.020deathbed he decided that he wanted to rejoin his crewmates so it was left up to his granddaughter
03:02:20.700to carry the urn back through New Jersey and Dallas and Honolulu.
03:02:26.120Now hear this. Master Chief Raymond Harry, effective immediately.
03:02:31.000Shore duty is canceled. Report back to USS Arizona, to your appointed place of duty, and assume the watch.
03:02:38.380As we bring Raymond Harry to his final resting place here on Earth,
03:02:41.900we pray that your blessings and your peace will be upon all those who rest here.
03:02:47.060For Raymond's remains will now rest alongside many of his former shipmates,
03:02:51.300even as his spirit reunites with them in your heavenly kingdom.
03:02:55.340It is your most holy name that I pray. Amen.
03:02:57.600It's always an honor to dive the Arizona, and the ultimate honor is to be able to bring
03:03:27.600The last thing that the family sees is the urn passing into the water and into the ship.
03:03:48.220And to have divers at the USS Arizona in a ceremony take his urn and bring his urn back
03:03:56.000to turret number four on the Arizona and put it in there with about 42 other urns.
03:04:01.480And to me, it's probably one of those most amazing things I've ever witnessed is a man
03:04:06.260who never, ever talked about Pearl Harbor, who never, ever wanted to go back to visit
03:04:12.160Pearl Harbor post-World War II, was offered the chance to go back and see the memorial
03:04:17.940that was built and to see the oil that was leaking from the battleship, to smell the
03:04:25.280oil that was leaking from the battleship. He never wanted anything to do with it, never wanted to
03:04:29.160talk about it. But on his deathbed, he decided, I want to rejoin my crewmates. One of the Navy diver
03:04:35.280who is responsible for lowering the remains in said as follows in one report, quote,
03:04:41.400it's a large hole. We place the urn through and then you can kind of feel it release. I tell the
03:04:47.820family when I feel that pull, it's the ship accepting back one of its own. Oh, my goodness.0.99
03:04:54.520I mean, it's to be on the Arizona Memorial when that flag is presented to a granddaughter and then to watch the divers bring the urn down to turret number four and placed in with the rest of the guys who wanted to go back after.
03:05:09.660I mean, that to me tells me that the defining moment of their lives happened when they were 17 or 18 years old.
03:05:16.960The defining moment of their life didn't happen when they were 40 or 50 or 60 or 30.
03:05:22.660it happened when they were a teenager it happened when they were 18 or 20 years old
03:05:28.960and and and that to me is an incredible thing to have the defining moment of your life
03:05:34.280happen when you're a teenager and to know that anything else you did in the rest of your life
03:05:39.740would be insignificant to what happened during your time in world war ii and a lot of these guys
03:05:45.720took such risks after the war they started their own businesses they became cab drivers or plumbers
03:05:52.180or Jack Taylor founded Enterprise Rent-A-Car
03:05:55.380or the men who came back founded U-Haul
03:05:58.420because they had been through the worst of their life.
03:06:01.580They had been through the ultimate risk in their life
03:06:04.140that anything else after that was just gravy.
03:07:10.960Chris was in the 507th Parachute Infantry Regiment.
03:07:14.120He was landed on D-Day and was taken prisoner on June 7th, 1944.
03:07:19.280for and um and and if you call these men heroes um they will cut you off right away and they will
03:07:28.740say the heroes are buried in these cemeteries and they're just there's that survivor's guilt
03:07:34.160i think that any veteran faces that why why the guy in the left of me was killed and why the guy
03:07:39.000in the right of me was killed and why i was spared and that generation is really in tune with that
03:07:45.840And so when I make the mistake every blue moon of saying, you know, hey, you're a real hero, I know.
03:07:54.040And then I brace for the kick in the knee and I say, these guys are going to beat me up because they're always to a man or a woman are going to say that the heroes are buried in the American cemeteries.