The Megyn Kelly Show - Deep Dives on World War I and World War II - Megyn's History Mega-Episode

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00:01:00.400 Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, live on Sirius XM Channel 111 every weekday at New East.

00:01:12.100 Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show. In today's Sunday mega episode,

00:01:17.260 we are switching things up for a few weeks with a focus on our history shows from the archives.

00:01:23.340 Today, a deep dive on World War I and World War II. You're going to love these. Enjoy,

00:01:29.740 and see you Monday. We focus today on World War I, better known to some as the Great War.

00:01:37.840 The war began in 1914 and brought in global powers from across the world, with the Central

00:01:43.180 Powers facing off against the Allied Powers, which eventually included the United States.

00:01:49.200 By the end of the war, over 20 million lives had been claimed, including more than 100,000

00:01:53.980 American troops. The impact of the war changed the face of the world, and it's felt even today.

00:02:00.560 But the reasons behind the start of the war and even the rationale for continuing the fight

00:02:05.980 are nuanced. Later, we're going to be joined by Doug Brunt. He is my husband. He hosts the podcast

00:02:12.880 dedicated with Doug Brunt, which is about authors, but he's also a historian, and he is neck deep in

00:02:19.800 a tome he is writing that is amazing on this exact period. So he'll join us for a bit. But first,

00:02:25.300 we start with the historian on this period, American author, professor of history at Bard

00:02:30.360 College, Sean McMeekin. Sean, welcome to the show. So glad to have you.

00:02:39.140 Thanks for having me on, Megan. It's really great to be here.

00:02:42.280 my husband doug is a huge fan of yours he's read your books he's a self-taught student of world war

00:02:50.380 one and i was very excited to hear that i was going to be speaking to you so i have to pass

00:02:54.480 along his regards great thank you all right so let's let's start big picture because i think a

00:03:00.800 lot of people know a lot about world war ii and maybe a little less about world war one um describe

00:03:07.680 sort of the world as we approached World War I, turn of the century into the 1900s.

00:03:13.320 And like, who were the top world powers at that time? Who was waning? Who was strong?

00:03:19.540 Well, the United States was certainly emerging as a world power. But as far as the old world,

00:03:24.480 it was still, I wouldn't say second rate exactly, but for diplomats, it was not necessarily the

00:03:29.880 prestige post. That is to say, if you were a diplomat, you're ambitious, you probably wouldn't

00:03:34.580 want to get posted to Washington because a lot of the action was still in Europe. The European

00:03:38.580 powers ruled over something like 85% of the surface of the globe. The Great Empires, Britain's, was 0.73

00:03:44.360 the largest and certainly the most diverse and global. It was often said the sun never set

00:03:49.480 famously on the British Empire. But France had a pretty enormous empire as well in both Asia and

00:03:53.940 Africa. Russia, of course, bestrode the continent of Eurasia, the entire landmass stretching across,

00:03:59.780 as we might put it, something like 11 odd time zones. Japan was starting to emerge as a power 0.91

00:04:05.520 in Asia, already occupying much of Korea, dating back to a series of wars in the 1890s and early

00:04:11.940 1900s. The U.S. was certainly a power. The U.S. had already begun to emerge as an empire in the

00:04:16.360 Philippines and also in Cuba, with interests stretching beyond her borders. But as far as

00:04:21.220 power politics, the real center of gravity was in Europe and the alliance system, which you alluded

00:04:27.780 to. We had part of what made things so potentially dangerous was that you had two almost equal power

00:04:34.680 blocs. The core of the blocs were France and Russia, and they were essentially kind of hostile

00:04:40.040 to Germany ever since Germany had been unified in 1871 at the center of the continent. And then

00:04:45.340 Germany relied mostly on Austria-Hungary or the Habsburg Empire to try to see off the Franco-Russian 0.63

00:04:50.880 threat. Britain was somewhat aloof, although Britain did have agreements with both France and

00:04:56.040 Russia. They were largely colonial agreements. That is to say, they were about spheres of influence,

00:05:01.520 trying to respect each other's zones where core interests were held, whether in Africa or in Asia.

00:05:09.140 With France, things had gone a little bit further. Britain had already started joint conversations

00:05:13.260 regarding the possibility of naval cooperation in either the English Channel or possibly the

00:05:18.060 Mediterranean in the case of a war. But Britain liked to remain aloof. The British, they were

00:05:22.600 they were kind of the top dog, the hegemon. And they tended to look down their noses just a little 1.00

00:05:27.980 bit at some of the other powers. So they didn't stick to alliances. Yeah, it seems like a lot of

00:05:31.380 people have these alliances where it's like, I'll defend you if you get in trouble, and you defend

00:05:34.880 me. And Great Britain was like, we're good. That's right. No, the British were a little bit aloof.

00:05:39.820 But you're right, it was often quite cynical. Bismarck, who had tried to keep France and

00:05:43.980 Russia from teaming up against Germany until he was sacked in 1890 by Kaiser Wilhelm II,

00:05:48.920 and who undid a lot of Bismarck's diplomatic design.

00:05:51.800 He actually came up with something called the Reinsurance Treaty in 1887.

00:05:55.640 So the idea of this was that the reinsurance business being the insurance that insurance companies take out on each other.

00:06:01.600 So what the Germans tried to do was to give these kind of secret assurances that so long as, let's say, Germany didn't invade France,

00:06:10.220 then Russia more or less had a free hand.

00:06:13.100 But Russia would not cooperate if France invaded Germany.

00:06:15.620 And then the same thing would take place in reverse with Austria-Hungary.

00:06:19.180 There was a lot of secret diplomacy.

00:06:20.680 And this is the kind of thing that the Americans like to rail against.

00:06:23.920 Woodrow Wilson would famously rail against it in some of his speeches and in the 14 points.

00:06:28.660 That is that the powers were kind of drawing each other in to some extent to their spheres of influence.

00:06:33.960 But they had different interests.

00:06:35.300 And that's the thing.

00:06:35.700 They didn't necessarily see things the same way.

00:06:37.840 So there was a potential for conflict.

00:06:40.540 Let me ask you that.

00:06:41.580 So 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.

00:06:50.260 This is the time frame when we're talking about it.

00:06:52.080 You know, like this is when they really were the British Empire and, you know, they controlled India and all these vast land masses.

00:06:58.700 And they were at the very height of their power.

00:07:01.980 But their isolationism was well-founded, right, as I understand, because they had this huge, really powerful navy.

00:07:10.840 And that Navy had served them very well.

00:07:12.900 And they were kind of like, we're good as long as we have our big Navy.

00:07:16.000 And 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

00:07:26.220 Now, 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

00:07:33.700 We're talking about a totally different ballgame now. 0.85

00:07:36.060 Well, that's right.

00:07:36.660 The British definitely saw the Germans as an emerging threat.

00:07:39.120 For most of the 19th century, Britain had seen Russia as a greater threat over land, the various routes to India.

00:07:44.800 There was this kind of almost fantasy that the Russians might eventually crash across the northwest frontier through Peshawar and into India.

00:07:52.040 But since the turn of the century, the Germans had been building this high seas fleet. 0.51

00:07:56.060 And Kaiser Wilhelm II was one of his many alleged blunders.

00:07:59.960 Again, the Germans get a lot of bad press for this, that he had been reading, apparently, the work of Admiral Mahan.

00:08:05.420 the influence of sea power on history allegedly kept it next to his bedside table and was kind of

00:08:09.960 obsessed with the idea that Germany too should have a high seas fleet just like the British did

00:08:15.360 and and there were various aspects to this where they often built these ships without necessarily

00:08:20.560 that much capacity for coal storage in part because they weren't necessarily going to go

00:08:24.380 around the world rather they were going to go into the North Sea the English Channel to fight

00:08:28.340 the British it was quite provocative the British though they really had seen off this threat I mean

00:08:32.740 the thing is that the newer research on the war and particularly on spending shows, the British 0.55

00:08:37.240 were able to outspend the Germans on the Navy in part because the Germans had to feel such a large

00:08:41.040 army. By 1911 or 1912, the British really had seen off the German threat. So I think some of the

00:08:46.560 arguments about the Anglo-German naval race is this prime causative factor of the First World

00:08:51.600 War. And we've heard a lot about that. There are many books about that subject. I think they

00:08:55.860 overdo it just a bit. I think Britain was arrogant enough to see the Germans as a threat. But I think 0.94

00:09:00.760 by 1914 the threat had been largely contained at least the threat to british naval supremacy

00:09:05.780 all right so let's go back so the war broke breaks out in 1914 the the world the great war

00:09:11.880 world war one and um officially we are told it is because uh some some group called the black hand

00:09:19.740 some terrorist group in serbia assassinated the archduke of austria-hungary which is basically an

00:09:26.880 alliance between Austria and Hungary that we refer to as Austria-Hungary. And Austria-Hungary

00:09:32.180 got very mad. This is the official story. They got very angry that their archduke had been 0.51

00:09:35.700 assassinated and went back to Serbia and wrote this barn burner of a letter. Like you will do

00:09:41.840 the following things or it's war. And as I understand it, one of everybody's favorite

00:09:46.200 characters, Winston Churchill, read this over in England and was like, oh, it's on. I mean,

00:09:49.860 it's war. I mean, clearly there's no way they're going to meet these conditions. They want war.

00:09:54.040 war is coming and Germany is over there behind its friend Austria-Hungary like yes we want war 0.81

00:10:00.080 two we got you we got your back Austria-Hungary and the alliances went this is my this is the way

00:10:04.560 I talk about history just to keep it simple I know you're way above me on this but like is that my

00:10:10.160 is my dumbed down version essentially correct no there's a lot of truth in this I mean you're

00:10:14.020 alluding I assume to the blank check that is the Germans give this assurance to Austria-Hungary

00:10:18.140 that effectively we have your back in case Russia intervenes and we're ready to back you up to the 0.66

00:10:22.940 hilt and the blank check was certainly important so was the assassination and so is the austro-hungarian

00:10:27.760 response to it it wasn't just a pretext though if you actually look at the details i'm not going to

00:10:32.660 get into the details of what actually happened in sarajevo although i just do discuss it in great

00:10:37.660 detail and in several of my books what's fascinating about the dynamics um surrounding

00:10:42.760 it is it franz fernand you think okay he's an archduke he's the heir to the austro-hungarian

00:10:46.480 throne the hapsburg throne of austria-hungary okay fine so you'd think he's not even really

00:10:50.800 sovereign he's not a politician why would it matter so much but in fact he was he wasn't just

00:10:54.760 heir to the throne but franz joseph who had been emperor since 1848 was an octogenarian expected

00:11:00.900 to die really almost like 85 yeah he was he was i mean a lot of people said guy despite his uncle

00:11:06.980 that's right he was staying alive just because he didn't like his nephew um but but so franz

00:11:11.060 fernand was actually running military policy he was basically running almost a shadow government

00:11:15.000 out of the belvedere and what was significant about his assassination aside from the the kind

00:11:19.060 of provocation of it, was that he himself had been blocking the war party in Vienna.

00:11:24.960 Conrad von Hitzendorf, the equivalent of the more famous Moltke in Berlin, the chief of

00:11:29.740 staff effectively in charge of military planning, he had actually advocated going to war with

00:11:34.380 Serbia something like 25 times in 1913 alone, and Franz Ferdinand had blocked him every

00:11:39.100 single time.

00:11:40.280 In addition to this, Kaiser Wilhelm II—

00:11:42.260 So wait, let me just stop you.

00:11:43.060 Let me stop you because I want to keep it nice and simple for our listeners who are

00:11:46.840 not experts.

00:11:47.740 So 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?

00:11:54.920 But the question is, well, did did this Serbian terrorist group have an interest in stopping the war?

00:12:00.580 Certainly sounds like maybe not. And did Serbia itself have an interest in stopping the war?

00:12:04.560 Because 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.

00:12:11.160 Well, I don't think the terrorists were necessarily pacifists.

00:12:14.180 On the other hand, the people backing them, some of them may well have wanted the war.

00:12:18.740 If you actually look at the organizer of the Black Hand, Colonel Dragutin Dmitrievich, his codename is Apis, a little simpler to call him Apis.

00:12:29.060 He was actually the head of Serbian military intelligence.

00:12:31.820 Now, he himself was not necessarily in quotes with the prime minister of Serbia, but the hardliners definitely wanted war.

00:12:39.120 They thought they might actually win and they were not averse to provoking Austria-Hungary.

00:12:43.400 So a lot of people overlook Serbia in 1914.

00:12:45.420 But 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.

00:12:53.700 And that the Serbian prime minister refused to renounce the plot or to warn Austria-Hungary about it.

00:12:58.680 And later on that Russia gave effectively her own version of a kind of what we might call a blank check to Serbia.

00:13:04.200 That is to say, we will back you so you can go ahead and reject the ultimatum. 0.57

00:13:08.940 So the Russians also play it.

00:13:10.540 If we zoom out on this region at the time, because I think some of our audience may be like, well, why are they fighting to begin with?

00:13:16.980 Like, why?

00:13:17.640 Why would there be these provocations?

00:13:20.000 I 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.

00:13:31.860 And they're kind of looking at the same territory.

00:13:35.100 All 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.

00:13:49.420 Maybe I would. 0.75

00:13:50.320 So 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

00:13:57.220 Well, 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.

00:14:04.480 This isn't kind of homage to all those famous wars of the Austrian or Spanish or English succession dating back to early modern history.

00:14:11.380 That really is to me kind of what is centrally an issue.

00:14:13.980 That is to say the decline of Ottoman power, particularly in Ottoman Europe.

00:14:18.280 And 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.

00:14:28.100 It's not quite as simple as just to say that everyone went to war in 1914 to try to carve up the Ottoman Empire.

00:14:33.640 In 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.

00:14:41.580 It'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.

00:14:50.760 But everyone knew that it was somehow the cause of the war.

00:14:53.280 In 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.

00:15:02.520 some of it was quite contingent and even accidental like the assassination but the clash of interest

00:15:07.580 was real that is to say that uh the russians the australian neighborhood was getting a little bit

00:15:11.900 more it was getting more complicated and people were starting to get a little bit more territorial

00:15:16.000 and by the way just just so that nobody so the ottoman empire is basically turkey plus uh it's

00:15:22.240 turkey plus right um just to put a label on it for people used to be much bigger than just turkey

00:15:28.180 Okay, so they're looking at each other.

00:15:30.340 They're nosing around.

00:15:31.640 They're looking at the territory around them. 0.88

00:15:33.340 And then Serbia does this provocative thing

00:15:35.060 or a terrorist group called the Black Hand

00:15:36.800 within Serbia does this thing,

00:15:38.680 assassinates the up-and-comer,

00:15:40.480 the next leader of Austria-Hungary, this Archduke.

00:15:43.340 And now everybody starts aligning.

00:15:45.140 And it's basically Germany, Austria-Hungary.

00:15:47.740 They're like, okay, let's go.

00:15:49.220 And the rest of Europe as we know it

00:15:51.220 kind of went on the other side.

00:15:53.400 But there was a question about whether

00:15:55.400 Great Britain was going to get involved.

00:15:57.440 America's way across the ocean. 0.78

00:15:59.960 What's Russia, again, is going to back up Serbia at this time, 0.67

00:16:03.460 but that would change in the middle of the war.

00:16:05.340 But what are they officially fighting over?

00:16:08.400 You know, like what's the what are the two demands on their respective sides?

00:16:12.540 It is a bit hard to explain how a war which is sparked by an assassination in Sarajevo

00:16:17.160 seems to start with the Germans invading Belgium.

00:16:19.800 It is a little bit hard to explain, to be really honest.

00:16:22.620 A lot of that had to do with the factors in German military planning that the Germans had direct

00:16:27.440 on a two-front war against Russia and France.

00:16:30.040 The interesting question about Britain,

00:16:32.040 one of the what-ifs of July 1914,

00:16:34.540 right before the war breaks out,

00:16:36.060 it's had Britain issued a warning sooner to the Germans

00:16:39.220 that Britain did plan to back France and Russia.

00:16:42.280 Might that have stayed the hand of Germany

00:16:44.940 in backing Austria-Hungary?

00:16:46.660 There is actually a key moment on July 29th,

00:16:49.440 and I won't go into clinical forensic detail about it.

00:16:52.400 I'll just say that the British,

00:16:54.100 His Majesty's Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Gray,

00:16:56.600 who's most famous for his line about the lamps in europe are all going out and they will not be lit

00:17:01.040 again in our lifetime uh which is not just metaphorical he was actually losing his eyesight

00:17:05.160 at the time uh sir edward gray was famously elliptical in the way that he would speak

00:17:10.560 and interact with other diplomats and so it was really hard to read him when the germans finally

00:17:16.060 got the first slightly ambiguous warning from britain this is when sir edward gray again in

00:17:22.100 his elliptical way says that you know how if if events uh kind of proceeded towards war on the

00:17:27.100 continent that it would not do to stand aside and wait uh which implied that britain might actually

00:17:34.280 intervene um this actually forced the german chancellor bethman holweg at the last minute

00:17:40.080 to try to send this note to austria-hungary rescinding the blank check it was about eight

00:17:45.500 or ten hours too late because austria-hungary just started shelling belgrade across the border

00:17:50.540 So 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.

00:18:10.040 Well, I think that's less plausible in part because the U.S. wasn't as directly engaged on the scene as Britain.

00:18:15.420 But 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

00:18:28.740 And it turned out they didn't even succeed anyway. 0.52

00:18:30.320 That's what brought Britain into the war, the violation of Belgian neutrality.

00:18:33.600 But the British had not really made clear.

00:18:35.180 Let me jump in.

00:18:35.980 Yeah.

00:18:36.300 We're going to keep it.

00:18:37.180 I want to keep it simple. 0.70

00:18:38.760 So, I mean, it's one thing to have Austria-Hungary slash Germany messing with France.

00:18:44.700 It's quite another to have them messing with England and Great Britain.

00:18:49.300 And Great Britain wasn't yet in.

00:18:51.600 And Great Britain—and you're saying there's this guy, this top Navy guy, who is saying maybe this isn't a good idea.

00:18:57.800 And the two countries might have done well, thanks to the invention of the telephone, to have had a conversation, Germany and Great Britain.

00:19:05.500 And 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.

00:19:16.060 I guess there was there was a familial relationship, like everybody's related to Queen Victoria or descended from her.

00:19:22.400 And they should have been friends, but they were not friends.

00:19:26.540 No, you're right. And there was a real sense of betrayal on the Germans part.

00:19:30.300 I 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

00:19:43.480 And 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.

00:19:53.460 But 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.

00:20:13.060 Interestingly enough, this almost happened between Germany and Russia.

00:20:16.040 There was another moment.

00:20:17.240 It was on that same night, July 29th, the night I was talking about where Gray finally got his semi-warning across to Berlin.

00:20:24.780 That 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.

00:20:39.600 In fact, it wasn't true.

00:20:40.940 In fact, because it took so long to transcribe and decode everything, he was responding to another message from about 24 hours previously.

00:20:48.320 So the Tsar was completely mistaken, but he was so moved he actually called off general mobilization.

00:20:53.560 And so it's a really fascinating what if, had they simply been able to talk to one another on the phone?

00:20:57.200 As you pointed out, they were actually related.

00:20:59.980 The German Kaiser, the Russian Tsar, the English king, they were all actually related.

00:21:04.540 Had they simply gotten together on the phone, maybe they couldn't.

00:21:07.100 And the curious thing is the monarchs were not really the warmongers.

00:21:10.760 In nearly every case, they were the ones who were at least trying to put the reins on just a little bit.

00:21:18.360 The Tsar is the one who kept trying to tell his generals to back down.

00:21:21.620 The Kaiser, despite his reputation for bellicosity, was actually the one who at the very last minute tried to call it off.

00:21:30.400 So 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.

00:21:37.100 That 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.

00:21:49.940 So 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.

00:22:00.340 Poor France. 0.86

00:22:01.720 They were like, we got France. 0.97

00:22:02.960 We're going to go and take France.

00:22:04.620 But they went through Belgium, and this was a problem for England.

00:22:08.420 England 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.

00:22:14.920 We don't need to cut these deals with anybody.

00:22:16.960 Belgium was strategically important to England.

00:22:19.360 for a whole bunch of reasons and there was a neutrality like they weren't allowed they decided

00:22:24.980 that they would defend belgium and the belgians as i understand it really fought too like they

00:22:29.420 put up one hell of a fight when germany invaded no that's absolutely right and it's a sign of

00:22:34.580 again the um the ineptitude really of german military planning not understanding the strategic

00:22:39.120 dimension if you can believe it the original so-called schlieffen plan which was actually

00:22:44.220 significantly modified by moltke the younger the original plan had the germans invading

00:22:48.440 the Netherlands as well. They were actually originally going to violate both the Netherlands

00:22:52.500 and Belgium. And it was a little bit of common sense told them that perhaps we should at least

00:22:57.780 keep some country neutral, maybe so we can trade in case it turns into a long war. But it was so

00:23:03.060 foolish. The French, on the other hand, they originally had looked into the logistics because 0.99

00:23:07.080 Belgium, after all, is kind of the cockpit of Europe, the low countries. But the French had

00:23:11.260 realized its strategic importance, that Britain had guaranteed Belgium's integrity and independence

00:23:17.360 by treaty. And so for the British, this was potentially a casus belli, a cause for war.

00:23:22.660 And so the Germans really brought it to themselves. The only thing I would say about this plan, 0.87

00:23:26.080 though, it's not that they necessarily thought that defeating France would be easy. It's that

00:23:30.100 they thought the French were a more formidable and dangerous opponent, that it would take the

00:23:34.660 Russians longer to mobilize. They failed, of course. They did not actually knock France out

00:23:39.700 in six weeks as they'd expected to do. They never actually did reach Paris. And it was the failure

00:23:44.800 of the Germans with this Schlieffen Moltke plan to subdue France in six weeks that to some extent

00:23:50.960 really turned the war into this horrific war of attrition, particularly on the Western front.

00:23:56.600 So England didn't want Belgium invaded because if they get control of Belgium,

00:24:01.320 then they're really close to England, right? I mean, is that the issue?

00:24:04.200 Yes, that's exactly right.

00:24:04.920 We're going to protect them because that's our skin.

00:24:07.340 Yeah, and more broadly, the English, it's not just that they didn't want a hostile power along

00:24:11.420 the English Channel on the Belgian coastline, but they also didn't want one single power to

00:24:16.160 dominate Europe, this kind of traditional precept of British foreign policy. You could trace it all

00:24:20.900 the way back to the Wars of the Sun King or Napoleon. The British never wanted one single

00:24:25.220 power to dominate the continent because then they would be effectively under its thumb.

00:24:30.200 Okay. So you got England, you got France, you got Serbia, you got, or on the other side,

00:24:35.740 and ultimately the Russians. And then on the other side, you got Germany and Austria-Hungary.

00:24:40.160 and they're fighting and it's complex.

00:24:43.480 Now let's spend some time on Russia

00:24:44.920 and then we'll spend some time on the United States

00:24:46.700 because they're also big players in all of this

00:24:49.240 and things change.

00:24:51.000 Things change for each country

00:24:52.520 in a really profound and important way.

00:24:54.660 If you go up to Russia, as you pointed out,

00:24:56.900 they decided that they would back Serbia.

00:25:00.140 So they were gonna be opposed to Germany and Austria-Hungary.

00:25:03.820 But what was happening in Russia at the time was fascinating.

00:25:06.700 And my husband's told me a little bit

00:25:08.680 about the Tsar and the Tsarina at the time, 0.71

00:25:12.480 who at the beginning of the war were kind of wacky.

00:25:16.440 Like she was obsessed with Rasputin.

00:25:19.680 Her kid had hemophilia.

00:25:21.840 I'm going off of what Doug has told me.

00:25:23.540 Forgive me, this is memory,

00:25:24.500 but they had a kid who had hemophilia

00:25:26.580 and she was convinced that this guy Rasputin

00:25:29.860 was like this charmer who could save the line.

00:25:34.240 In any event, the Russians started to question

00:25:37.620 the czar and czarina, as I understand it. And before you know it, you've got the revolution,

00:25:41.780 you've got the Bolsheviks, Lenin coming in, taking over. That was a big game changer 0.90

00:25:45.500 in World War I and what the Russians were doing. So what was happening under the czar and the 0.73

00:25:50.040 czarina the first couple of years of World War I? Well, it's fascinating about Rasputin. The

00:25:55.000 reason he was important is just as you said, that it wasn't just any child. It was the sole

00:25:59.660 male child, the heir to the Romanov throne dating back to 1801. Although Russia had had

00:26:05.420 empresses in the past it was no longer allowed for a female to ascend to become empress and so

00:26:10.720 this was the only heir and he had hemophilia and and in part because the whole job of emperor you're

00:26:16.480 supposed to be autocrat of all the russes i mean you're supposed to be in charge of everything and

00:26:19.940 the idea that an autocrat to be uh could not actually heal up from minor scrapes and bruises

00:26:25.680 i suppose just uh didn't really wash and so they never actually revealed this to the public which

00:26:31.540 is quite interesting had they done so i think the russian people would have actually been quite

00:26:34.660 sympathetic instead there were just all these vague rumors and the rumors started swirling

00:26:38.800 around not just about uh the air alexis but also about rasputin and because he was so close to

00:26:45.040 alexandra the reason this mattered politically was that rasputin himself was actually if not

00:26:51.420 an out and out pacifist he was not pro-war uh in the years up to 1914 there had been a series of

00:26:58.440 wars in the balkans involving serbia russia's client and although russia had not in the end

00:27:03.380 gone to war, there were a lot of very strong Pan-Slavic voices who had said Russia should

00:27:07.480 intervene. Rasputin had criticized them all quite bravely, effectively saying that, you know, in 0.67

00:27:13.500 the end, it's the little people, you know, it's the peasants who are going to suffer and die for 0.63

00:27:17.100 these silly abstractions like Pan-Slavism. He probably would have counseled the Tsar against 0.81

00:27:23.180 war had he actually been in St. Petersburg in July 1914. He, however, had gone to visit his

00:27:28.060 hometown in Siberia. And you're not going to believe me, but he was actually stabbed by a

00:27:33.140 woman who cried out i have killed the antichrist um he wasn't killed he was actually alive but he

00:27:38.580 was in a hospital bed as as the powers were mobilizing for war and so he was unable to

00:27:44.260 exert his his influence um the other reason this mattered his reputation was already being if not

00:27:49.560 a pacifist and vaguely anti-war maybe pro-german again the atmosphere of war being vaguely anti-war

00:27:55.860 means you're suspected of being kind of a german spy well the tsarina alexandra or as she was known

00:28:02.200 Originally, Alex of Hesse was, of course, German born.

00:28:06.180 Actually, she was born into territory, later absorbed into the German Reich.

00:28:09.520 She was actually not pro-German.

00:28:11.620 She resented Bismarck and Prussia for having absorbed her former home of Hesse into the Reich.

00:28:19.260 However, most Russians didn't know that.

00:28:21.000 They simply thought, oh, well, because she's from Germany, she must be kind of pro-German.

00:28:24.280 And so by, let's say, kind of 1915, 1916, right on the eve of what we know as the Russian Revolution,

00:28:31.940 rumors are swirling around Petrograd.

00:28:33.680 There's a kind of a spy mania.

00:28:35.200 There's this anti-German mania.

00:28:37.180 Some of it's also anti-Jewish.

00:28:38.720 Oddly enough, Jews were seen as more pro-Germany and Austria-Hungary in the war,

00:28:43.140 in part because Russia had a traditional reputation for anti-Semitism.

00:28:46.460 So there's anti-Semitism, there's anti-German sentiment,

00:28:48.720 and a lot of it centers around the Tsarina and Rasputin.

00:28:52.760 And when the Tsar takes over personal command of the armies

00:28:55.900 after Russia suffers a series of setbacks against the central powers in summer 1915,

00:29:01.380 And 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.

00:29:08.560 And so the rumors swirl and it looks like the Tsarina and Rasputin are kind of running the government.

00:29:14.020 And there are these other really kind of almost obvious things that the conspiracy theorists settle on.

00:29:19.260 They appointed a guy called Boris Starmark, chairman of the Council of Ministers.

00:29:22.960 He's got even got has a German name, right?

00:29:24.800 So 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.

00:29:37.120 Unfortunately, this is kind of what poisoned the political atmosphere quite fatally, I think, in Petrograd in 1916, heading into the winter of 1917.

00:29:45.080 so but in the beginning i mean just to just to dumb it down in the so in the beginning russia

00:29:50.880 was backing the serbs and on the opposite side of germany in this war but then something really

00:29:55.900 important happened over in russia and all that would change and really would set set the course

00:30:01.060 for the the 20th and now 21st century and the way people were going to be living in russia and that

00:30:06.760 was the revolution and the bolsheviks and the rise of lenin and then these other countries looking at

00:30:12.040 Lenin, like, well, what's he going to do? Because it wasn't a foregone conclusion that Lenin was

00:30:15.520 going to come in and just keep doing what the Tsar and the Tsarina had been doing. 0.64

00:30:19.880 Well, right. First of all, because Lenin was actually in Switzerland. In fact, when we talk

00:30:24.220 about the revolution of 1917, you really have to bracket it out into two. The February revolution,

00:30:29.780 which is the one that toppled the Tsar, initially seemed, if anything, at least from the perspective

00:30:34.540 of France and Britain, they were quite hopeful. They thought it was more democratic. Right. And

00:30:39.280 they thought that that again that czar had been surrounded by these pro-german advisors so they

00:30:42.980 thought they were kind of a cleaning out the augustian stables and now russia would rededicate

00:30:47.320 herself to the war effort uh this is actually what the the u.s president wilson i i assume we'll talk

00:30:53.180 about that as we go but he sees it the same way right now russia's a democracy so we're all on

00:30:57.540 the same side and they're hoping that it's actually going to be a positive story for the war effort

00:31:02.460 uh lenin of course as we know is sent back to russia by the germans you know had shall we say

00:31:08.520 perhaps slightly nefarious purposes they knew about his political program which was effectively

00:31:13.740 to turn as he called it the imperialist war into a civil war basically to sabotage the war effort

00:31:18.220 promote mutinies and take russia out of the war and he didn't do it all at once it took him a

00:31:24.000 number of months but the bolsheviks fled the russian armies with propaganda and by the fall

00:31:28.740 opinion is starting to turn against the war although the bolsheviks they actually did not

00:31:33.420 win the elections held in russia amazingly they held elections even after the bolsheviks took

00:31:37.200 power, and the Bolsheviks got only 24% of the vote. But in the army, they did well. That is,

00:31:41.460 they did make a decisive move to shift opinion in the army against the war. And this really was the

00:31:47.980 key part of Lenin's program, the peace platform. That's what then allows Lenin to take Russia out 0.82

00:31:53.020 of the war. Effectively, he sues the central powers for peace. They meet at Brest-Litovsk.

00:31:58.340 The Allies refused to go because they see Lenin as a German agent, somewhat reasonably. I mean,

00:32:03.240 He had been sent to Russia by Germany.

00:32:05.360 The Germans had provided funds for his operations, even if there was a lot of controversy about that.

00:32:09.900 And the Russian provisional government was never able to produce the smoking gun in court, although they actually did.

00:32:16.120 They arrested the Bolsheviks.

00:32:17.560 And for a time, Lenin was actually supposed to be arrested for treason.

00:32:20.660 But can I just ask you a quick question on that?

00:32:22.600 Let me clarify just a quick question.

00:32:23.960 I follow what you're saying, how he had been in Germany. 0.54

00:32:26.580 But the Russians are on the other side at this point, right? 0.55

00:32:29.180 They're fighting against Germany.

00:32:30.840 so like i don't why would they be so distrustful because right now they've got the russians

00:32:36.420 like i don't know factor that in because i don't understand how they could be so suspicious of him

00:32:41.600 when he's his i guess he came from from germany but his country's fighting with the allies well

00:32:46.180 he was actually he came from switzerland but to get to russia from switzerland uh in in in the

00:32:51.680 time when you have these massive armies mobilized in both fronts the only really practical way for

00:32:56.300 him to get there was through germany so the germans organized his trip and they paid for it and they

00:33:01.360 sent lenin to russia and german diplomats were kind of told to stay quiet about it but it was

00:33:06.800 very much an operation of the german foreign office because the germans wanted lenin to go

00:33:11.000 to russia wreak havoc with the war effort with his kind of anti-war propaganda spreading

00:33:15.620 mutinous sentiment in the armies i mean literally they they would get together and have these

00:33:19.540 meetings in the armies and denounce the war the bolsheviks ended up printing massive amounts of

00:33:24.180 anti-war propaganda um and as soon as he arrived in petrograd yeah and as soon as he arrived in

00:33:29.420 petrograd i'll give you an example an american historian called frank golder was there and he

00:33:33.780 immediately was told oh yeah this guy lenin has showed up and he's he's priesting all these kind

00:33:37.680 of damnable doctrines of propaganda and peace and pro-german sentiment it was it was quite widely

00:33:43.700 discussed at the time that is the idea that lenin was if not a german agent then somehow working on

00:33:49.200 behalf of germany in the sense so the allies have got to be very unhappy about this development

00:33:54.360 right because they did have russia on their side and now suddenly you've got lenin taking over with

00:33:58.040 this marxist revolution and he seems to be much more sympathetic to the germans the other side

00:34:02.980 and ultimately winds up pulling russia out right the russian armies they fall apart even before

00:34:08.000 lenin takes power they're beginning to disintegrate and by the winter of 1917 after the bolsheviks

00:34:13.160 take power and it's actually november by our calendar we usually call it the october revolution

00:34:16.720 after the Bolsheviks take power, they just stopped fighting. In fact, the Germans at one 0.58

00:34:21.520 point in early 1918, the Bolsheviks, Trotsky comes up with this ingenious kind of a slogan

00:34:26.700 when he goes to Brest-Litovsk. He calls it no war, no peace. What he means is we're not going

00:34:31.580 to fight, but we're demobilizing our army. And so it's sort of like he's telling the Germans,

00:34:37.000 look, if you really want to, you can just go ahead and occupy Russia, but you're going to

00:34:40.260 have to explain to your own people in the world why you're at war with a country that no longer

00:34:44.340 has an army now as you can imagine the allies are not happy about this a whole front is just

00:34:49.220 collapsed in the war and so they're desperate to get russia back into the war by whatever means

00:34:54.280 they can um and they they try a lot of different things in 1918 none of them quite work the only 0.97

00:34:59.800 thing that does help them in the end is kind of unintentional as the germans do get sucked into

00:35:04.100 russia they end up sending about a million troops into russia including into ukraine where they have

00:35:08.780 nearly 600,000 troops occupying Russia as the war is being decided later that year on the

00:35:15.460 Western Front, particularly after the arrival of U.S. troops, the so-called Doughboys.

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00:36:20.120 all right so the the allied forces were not as not nearly as strong as they would become

00:36:30.420 uh before once they got england on on board that england with its navy and how strong it was that

00:36:36.560 was a big that was a great development for the allied forces to get england in on this fight

00:36:40.420 it was not a great development for them to lose russia um from the from the world together but

00:36:45.440 then there's this big country across the sea called the united states of america which as

00:36:49.400 as you point out, is not yet the United States of America that we would be after World War II,

00:36:53.740 a superpower. And it was more complicated for us. You know, we had fought a couple of wars with

00:36:59.940 England in the past hundred years. And, you know, they're kind of wanting us to come over and help

00:37:06.380 them and join the Allied forces. And we got the big ocean. And what was the mood of the American

00:37:12.080 people at this time? And now we're like 1914 to 1917, right around there. And the war,

00:37:18.300 The war, just again, went from 14 to 18.

00:37:20.380 So what was the mood of the Americans?

00:37:22.560 Well, I certainly don't think there was any great desire to get involved in the European war.

00:37:26.400 I mean, we could judge, if by nothing else, the result of the 1916 election.

00:37:31.320 Woodrow 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.

00:37:38.580 The 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.

00:37:45.420 And 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.

00:37:57.740 And Wilson himself had not wanted to get the U.S. into the war.

00:38:00.680 In 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.

00:38:13.460 They're relying on Wall Street for the loans that are now paying for the war because they've effectively run out of gold.

00:38:18.860 Their gold reserves are running down.

00:38:20.740 The U.S. had leverage.

00:38:22.420 In fact, there were a lot of ways in which the U.S. might.

00:38:24.940 And 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.

00:38:36.200 Britain and France didn't want that, though, in part because Germany was still occupying parts of Belgium and France.

00:38:41.140 And Germany had also occupied part of what had been Russian Poland.

00:38:45.160 And so the Germans were at the time maybe more willing to parlay than the Allies were. 0.53

00:38:49.700 But then the Germans shot themselves in the foot by unleashing what was called unrestricted submarine warfare.

00:38:56.360 Effectively, 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.

00:39:10.740 Effectively, kind of you'd have to give prior warning to give time for women and children to get to the lifeboats proverbially.

00:39:17.260 Now 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.

00:39:24.920 Berlin, Vienna, all the cities of the central powers, you know, they're kind of slowly starving because of the British blockade.

00:39:30.700 And 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.

00:39:42.260 The Germans said, you know what? We don't trust them. We think the U.S. is going to enter the war anyway.

00:39:45.640 So we're just going to speed things along. So they did it first. 0.99

00:39:48.420 They provoked us. 0.90

00:39:49.180 They provoked us both with unrestricted submarine warfare and then with the Zimmermann telegram, which is just an astonishing mistake by the Germans. 0.86

00:39:58.500 Wait 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

00:40:10.300 you're taking out indiscriminately civilians on boats and so on. Prior to that, what was the

00:40:16.820 lure to the Americans in getting further involved, right? Because again, if you look at World War II,

00:40:22.620 we're going to go fight Nazis. We're going to defeat Hitler. The Germans bombed, I'm doing my 0.68

00:40:28.060 animal house line, the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor, Germans, no, the Japanese bombed Pearl

00:40:32.800 Harbor, right? We had very clear reasons to get in. And this war, the way we're talking about it, 0.98

00:40:38.880 It's like still remains somewhat amorphous to me why it was started even to begin with, even amongst the powers over there.

00:40:44.960 Now it's expanding and now they're asking us to get in.

00:40:47.780 And 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?

00:40:57.740 What was the reason ostensibly for us to get in?

00:41:00.400 Well, it's much murkier than the Second World War.

00:41:02.640 not just the origins of the war as you're pointing out but why the u.s gets involved

00:41:07.060 on what pretenses for what purposes i mean these debates they didn't die of course in 1917-18 i

00:41:13.260 mean they they continued to royal american politics on into the 20s and 30s when in retrospect it had

00:41:18.580 come to seem like a mistake and people couldn't quite fathom why the u.s had gotten into the war

00:41:22.600 now on on the moral side there had been a lot of criticism of the german invasion of belgium a lot

00:41:28.260 of what was then called kind of atrocity propaganda obviously it wasn't all untrue a lot of atrocities

00:41:33.740 were committed uh there was a famous library that burned down in louvain there were these kind of

00:41:38.860 uh sharpshooters who would periodically take out civilians there were obviously some

00:41:43.760 genuine crimes committed in the invasion of belgium but that said the british and the french

00:41:48.800 were just really good at kind of manipulating american public opinion in part because they

00:41:53.240 had a long experience of doing so and also by by 1916 1917 there were just a lot of american

00:41:59.640 interests that were increasingly aligned with britain and france but again these it was not a

00:42:03.360 popular um upwelling of of pro-war sentiment rather it was a lot of american arms manufacturers

00:42:11.140 and a lot of american bankers particularly the house of jp morgan and wall street had just gotten

00:42:14.860 wrapped up in the war effort of britain and france in large part because with the british blockade

00:42:19.000 they couldn't even trade with germany in the central power so almost all that trade had been

00:42:22.480 nullified and wiped out um in fact there used to be a critique uh the kind of charles beard

00:42:28.160 quasi-marxist progressive critique of the war that you know it was all kind of the u.s got sucked in

00:42:32.120 because of wall street the real story is much more complicated than that but there's a little

00:42:35.680 bit of truth in that and that these interests were increasingly pushing the u.s towards war

00:42:40.240 wilson somewhat to his credit was actually resisting that and in fact for a while in the

00:42:45.240 winter of 1916-17 uh the federal reserve actually intervened to try to discourage more of this kind

00:42:53.100 of the war finance egging on britain and france because wilson at the time was actually trying

00:42:58.520 to broker a peace as i pointed out that the germans kind of shot themselves in the foot

00:43:02.840 so then i mean i guess it's still hard to convince americans what they're fighting for

00:43:06.280 the freedom of the seas was maybe an issue but again britain's violating that too they're

00:43:10.860 blockading europe perhaps that's less egregious than the german u-boats actually sinking vessels

00:43:16.640 with civilians on board but it's still a little bit murky so in the end part of what wilson is

00:43:21.700 able to come up with uh it's not just the zimmermann telegram which was when the germans

00:43:27.660 actually promised effectively the reconquista of the american southwest of mexico she would 0.98

00:43:32.180 keep the americans busy in case the u.s enter the war which is just incredibly stupid because it 0.95

00:43:38.140 effectively produces the very thing that the germans should have most feared which was u.s 0.92

00:43:42.020 intervention once uh the u.s government learned about this um on top of this then the february

00:43:47.260 revolution happens in russia and as we were talking about this before this gives wilson

00:43:50.980 this argument well look russia had been an autocracy now she's a democracy and so the

00:43:54.940 famous phrase then emerges it's a war to make the world safe for democracy this at least is how

00:44:00.120 wilson sells it to congress in april 1917 even then it's a little ambiguous though the u.s declares

00:44:05.440 war against Germany, she doesn't declare war against Austria-Hungary until almost eight months

00:44:10.020 later. And the U.S. never actually did declare war on the Ottoman Empire, which by then was

00:44:15.920 closely allied to Germany and Austria-Hungary. One of the really interesting anomalies of the

00:44:20.800 14 points of Woodrow Wilson, which he announced in January 1918, is that point 12 related to

00:44:27.020 the autonomy of the minority peoples of the Ottoman Empire, and particularly Armenians,

00:44:31.160 greeks and others a country or a power with which the united states was not at war uh in fact by the

00:44:37.360 end of 1918 the ottomans actually tried to surrender to the united states on the basis of

00:44:41.300 the 14 points only to be told that they were not at war with the united states yeah sorry we have

00:44:46.300 we have no contract with you right i mean it's it does raise the question of like you're out there

00:44:49.840 fighting and you encounter a force that you haven't yet declared war on what do you do you

00:44:53.240 put the arms down let's go back um to you mentioned the lusitania that's a really interesting

00:44:58.400 case, a story about the Germans bombing a British ship and it would precede that unlimited

00:45:06.320 submarine warfare thing that you were talking about. So can you just talk about how important

00:45:11.060 the Lusitania was and what happened thereafter in terms of our involvement and the Germans really

00:45:15.840 starting to unravel? Well, so, I mean, the Lusitania, we certainly exaggerated significance.

00:45:21.180 It got a lot of press at the time because there were more than 100, I believe, something like

00:45:24.440 128 americans on board um and because you know they were all almost by definition civilians and

00:45:30.940 even most of of the the members of the belligerent nationals of the belligerent countries on board

00:45:35.740 were also civilians uh we almost certainly know now even though it was a long and sensitive subject

00:45:40.260 that there were also at least some weapons on board um but it got a lot of press and so it

00:45:44.420 basically seemed like this kind of again a war crime a crime against humanity one of the this 0.92

00:45:49.480 long line of german atrocities um however the germans as i pointed out earlier they did

00:45:54.240 respond to it. They did actually tighten their rules of engagement to try to prevent similar

00:45:59.100 accidents. There were one or two other accidents in 1915 that is involving American, neutral

00:46:05.300 Americans being on board, being sunk in various ships which had been shelled by the U-boats,

00:46:10.480 which didn't get as much press as the Lusitania. But again, the Germans, for a while, they did 0.76

00:46:14.680 strengthen their rules of engagement because they were worried about getting the U.S. into the war.

00:46:18.960 The same thing actually is true between 1939 and Pearl Harbor. The Germans actually were 0.60

00:46:23.960 quite careful about trying not to violate some of these kind of boundaries in order to draw the

00:46:31.120 Americans into the war. It's one of the reasons why it was so astonishing how short-sighted it was

00:46:35.540 when the Germans again switched things around in early 1917 in January when they moved towards 0.56

00:46:41.120 unrestricted submarine warfare. It also marks the moment as far as internal German politics when

00:46:45.900 the chancellor, Beth Mann-Holweg, the civilian chancellor, effectively gives way to the generals

00:46:51.460 You 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.

00:47:04.660 It's not that Germany became a military dictatorship exactly, but it took on some of those characteristics.

00:47:10.680 A kind of almost self-sabotaging power, you know, that just couldn't get out of its own way. 0.52

00:47:15.940 which would wind up being very important to the way we viewed them the way we wound up world war

00:47:21.760 one and the way that world war two would ultimately start on the zimmerman telegram i understand

00:47:26.840 this is 1917 it's basically a deal by which um i guess mexico was going to get back texas arizona

00:47:33.680 new mexico if they attacked us um and the germans wanted them to you know side with them and just

00:47:40.960 explain it because i how why was it a telegram and how was it discovered how did it play

00:47:45.620 Well, 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

00:47:54.280 Now, it was encrypted, so they thought hopefully the Americans wouldn't read it. 0.99

00:47:58.480 Unbeknownst to them, the British had this team of codebreakers working under the Navy.

00:48:04.820 This is kind of the World War I equivalent of the more famous Bletchley Park from World War II.

00:48:09.460 Among 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.

00:48:18.380 The 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.

00:48:30.600 And 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.

00:48:40.440 And 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.

00:48:52.600 And, of course, it enraged American opinion.

00:48:55.820 Even so, it wasn't until really four, I guess, even five weeks later that the U.S. declared war.

00:49:02.980 So 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.

00:49:13.920 And again, even then, only on Germany, not yet on Austria-Hungary or the Ottoman Empire.

00:49:18.520 so we get involved the russians are out the americans are in and net net what are the

00:49:28.280 consequences of that i mean what what are the unintended consequences of our doing that i'm

00:49:33.820 glad you asked that because of course the the intended consequence was supposed to be a war

00:49:38.440 to make the world safe for democracy and some type of more transparent world with collective

00:49:44.440 security, perhaps the League of Nations with the powers disarming and no more secret diplomacy and

00:49:50.760 all the rest of it. Unfortunately, what actually happened was that the U.S. entered the war

00:49:55.640 effectively at the same time that Russia was falling out of the war. So in the first place,

00:50:00.080 it prolonged the conflict. There might have been momentum in 1917 in favor of a negotiated peace.

00:50:06.220 With Russia falling out of the war, Britain and France were really desperate and they would have 0.82

00:50:10.720 been much more likely to try to accept mediation um the germans were obviously in a much stronger

00:50:16.100 position but frankly berlin as i pointed out was starving vienna was starving uh constantinople

00:50:22.300 then the ottoman capital was starving a lot of the ottoman empire was even worse shaped because

00:50:26.520 the british were blockading the eastern mediterranean too and there had been a locust

00:50:30.080 plague and they were blockading food imports everyone was absolutely miserable biblical

00:50:34.740 misery um unfortunately the u.s intervening effectively prolonged the war at least another

00:50:40.340 year, if not longer. And if you actually move into 1918, then it takes a while for the U.S.

00:50:47.060 to rev up its mobilization. It was becoming a first class naval power. But as far as land

00:50:52.900 forces, it took the U.S. a long time to really mobilize and train an army and then, of course,

00:50:57.360 get them over to Europe. They were really only starting to arrive in strength in the late spring

00:51:02.860 of 1918 after Germany had sort of wagered all her chips on one last offensive to try to break

00:51:08.860 the back of the Western Allies, the so-called Ludendorff Offensive, launched in late March 1918,

00:51:15.040 which in the end, although they got pretty close to Paris, it petered out like most of the other

00:51:19.620 offensives in the war. They outrun their supply lines. They just get exhausted. The Allies bring

00:51:24.300 up reserves. And then the U.S. starts arriving in force over the summer. Again, military historians

00:51:30.300 continue to debate just how decisive the U.S. role was. It more about morale and the fact so

00:51:35.840 many of them were coming uh you know was it really the fact that the british and the french had

00:51:40.320 begun to master the use of early tanks for example which were now being introduced to the battlefield

00:51:46.360 the creeping barrage other innovations i'm sure all of this factored in but the arrival of the

00:51:51.620 u.s you simply can't discount you know if you have roughly equally matched forces on the western

00:51:56.560 front where the lines have barely moved in some places you know meters or even a few kilometers

00:52:02.140 or in our terms, not even really a mile in most places, well less than a mile for the last three

00:52:08.860 and a half to four years. And then you have a force of ultimately nearly four million doughboys 0.98

00:52:13.220 arriving. It's obviously going to have a huge impact on morale. So it does in the end help tip 0.98

00:52:19.200 the balance in favor of the allies on the Western front. But I think more significantly for the

00:52:24.500 consequences of the war for world history is what happens on the Eastern front. Now, I mentioned

00:52:29.820 before the germans had distracted themselves they get sucked in almost by this kind of poison 0.94

00:52:35.180 chalice of defeated russia with with lenin again just disintegrating deliberately forcing the

00:52:41.940 russian armies to disintegrate they end up having so many troops in the east that they don't really

00:52:46.340 have enough to hold off the allies in the west however they still have a million troops in

00:52:50.040 russia we shouldn't forget this the bolsheviks the first year they were in power after lenin

00:52:54.140 supposedly inaugurates the world's first proletarian dictatorship communism um they're

00:53:00.400 effectively a kind of a german satellite state uh when a few of the last remaining opposition

00:53:06.440 forces to the bolsheviks this group called the left socialist revolutionaries the left srs when

00:53:12.620 they try to launch an uprising against the bolsheviks in july 1918 they do so by assassinating

00:53:18.660 the german ambassador because they see him as the real ruler of the country in fact although it's

00:53:23.840 little known except by specialist uh the german general running the war uh eric von ludendorff

00:53:30.800 in september 1918 just before the germans collapsed in the western front he actually

00:53:35.540 issued orders to the german army to go and topple the bolsheviks in petrograd because by then the

00:53:40.160 germans had sort of had enough of lenin and his government they just saw them as crazy um so the 0.52

00:53:45.740 germans were actually about to topple and possibly overthrow the bolsheviks um right when the germans

00:53:51.520 collapse of the western front the germans by their own terms with the bolsheviks at brest

00:53:56.100 latovsk had forbidden the bolsheviks from even building an army so they weren't even allowed to

00:53:59.920 have the red army that they're eventually going to build when the germans collapse now they can 0.73

00:54:05.320 build a red army now they're sovereign for the first time now they can actually begin to implement

00:54:09.600 their policies in full mobilize more than three million men under trotsky and the red army so

00:54:15.580 So effectively, the U.S. intervention makes the world safe for communism.

00:54:20.180 Right.

00:54:20.780 I'm following you, and I'm kind of slightly horrified.

00:54:23.760 Wait, pause there.

00:54:25.120 Unintentionally, Marty.

00:54:26.160 Unintentionally.

00:54:27.080 Yeah. 1.00

00:54:27.860 I 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

00:54:34.420 because 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

00:54:43.020 Obviously, 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

00:54:57.700 Do you feel, I mean, the humiliation of Germany might not have happened? 0.68

00:55:01.900 We 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.

00:55:11.640 perhaps they wouldn't have been humiliated. Perhaps Versailles would have been more fair.

00:55:16.640 I mean, do you make the case that there might not have been a Hitler? There might not have

00:55:20.840 been a World War II had we stayed out of World War I? I think had we stayed out of World War I,

00:55:25.780 I think most of that is probably true. We don't know exactly what the world would have looked 0.98

00:55:29.820 like, but you would not have had Germany kind of lying prostrate in 1918 with Hitler famously on

00:55:35.160 the bed hearing about the humiliating terms of the November armistice and railing against the

00:55:39.420 November criminals. I mean, there are a lot of different points you could look back to. I already

00:55:43.480 alluded to the idea of Wilson possibly brokering a peace before the U.S. entered the war. But even

00:55:48.120 after the U.S. entered the war, it took so long for the U.S. to get involved, the U.S. still could

00:55:52.740 have helped to negotiate. Now, I talked about Brest-Litovsk. This is where Russia met the

00:55:58.300 central powers to negotiate a peace on the Eastern Front. And this is from basically about December

00:56:03.680 1917. And just to reiterate, the central powers are the opposite of the Allies. Right. The central

00:56:07.040 powers of this so you have germany austria hungary bulgaria had then joined the war too along with

00:56:12.460 the ottoman empire um and it was it was quite an interesting affair it was actually the first peace

00:56:17.240 treaty or peace conference ever caught on film so you can actually watch some of it um so you have

00:56:21.560 these kind of who met with them who met with the central powers uh the bolsheviks uh so the

00:56:26.280 bolsheviks okay and what's what's interesting also just socially is that the central powers

00:56:30.700 and the ottomans and the bulgarians they're all sending these kind of old aristocratic diplomats 0.53

00:56:35.260 And the Bolsheviks are sending these kind of bohemian, scruffy revolutionaries. 0.64

00:56:39.640 They were supposedly representing the workers' and peasants' government.

00:56:42.700 That's what they initially called it.

00:56:44.300 They realized they didn't actually have a peasant.

00:56:45.960 So at the last minute, they just pulled over on the side of the road,

00:56:48.380 and they kind of picked up a drunk, and they said,

00:56:50.720 hey, where are you from?

00:56:51.720 And he gave the name of some tiny little village.

00:56:53.680 And they said, you know, you'll do.

00:56:54.900 And so, you know, they bring him along.

00:56:57.380 You know, there were elements of force to it.

00:56:59.360 On the other hand, they were genuine in trying to invite the Western allies there.

00:57:03.280 I 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.

00:57:28.360 So 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.

00:57:53.960 Now, the thing is, the war, as we know, ended at least in Europe in fall of 1918.

00:57:58.520 But the other thing to remember is that no one knew at the time that it was going to end.

00:58:02.860 The German collapse came as something of a surprise to everyone.

00:58:05.660 And it happens even on the Ottoman fronts.

00:58:07.320 Everything just starts to collapse in September 1918.

00:58:10.580 And you can't ascribe all of that necessarily to the U.S. intervention.

00:58:13.900 A lot of these battles had required all kinds of complicated interplay of material forces, morale and so on.

00:58:21.280 But 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.

00:58:33.040 Again, first in extending the war, but also then in helping to ensure that the Germans would lose it.

00:58:40.340 It's like, so we won the war, but we may have helped cause the second World War. 0.66

00:58:46.480 Unintentionally. I think absolutely unintentionally that's the case.

00:58:49.600 The 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.

00:58:59.140 I 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.

00:59:10.100 It's not just the Germans who resent all this, by the way.

00:59:12.780 I mean, if you talk to Hungarians today, they're still angry about the Treaty of Trianon. 0.56

00:59:17.180 That was their version of Versailles.

00:59:19.020 Or the Turks about the Treaty of Sevres. 0.90

00:59:21.220 That's their own version of Versailles, which truncates the Ottoman Empire.

00:59:24.500 Although they eventually fought back and won back some of the territory they had lost under Mustafa Kemal.

00:59:30.220 Wilson, and what's so ironic is back in his Peace Without Victory speech in January 1917,

00:59:34.880 he had argued against intervention precisely for that reason.

00:59:38.860 And 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.

00:59:49.300 And he wasn't wrong. 0.89

00:59:50.480 It'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

01:00:00.220 I 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.

01:00:13.520 But 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.

01:00:28.720 Well, 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.

01:00:45.100 So 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.

01:00:59.080 Well, Dagestan is now in Russia, but a lot of these territories have kind of confederated together to become independent.

01:01:03.880 So 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.

01:01:17.780 But that point about peace without victory, it's so fascinating because, of course, you could draw entirely diametrically opposed lessons from this.

01:01:27.740 FDR, 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.

01:01:42.000 whereas obviously a lot of americans disagreed and they thought in fact we shouldn't have fought

01:01:47.080 at all along some of the lines that we're talking about now that our intervention didn't actually

01:01:50.440 produce a positive outcome um and obviously you could make some of these arguments about

01:01:55.000 russia and ukraine today the problem is of course that if you do want unconditional surrender and

01:02:00.020 you want let's say i guess in this case that would mean russia withdrawing entirely from

01:02:03.800 uh the borders of ukraine as of 2014 uh that would require armageddon

01:02:10.580 But what would have happened with, you know, the Bolsheviks took over, you had Lenin, you had Stalin coming up.

01:02:17.740 And I know you just wrote a book about Stalin.

01:02:20.540 You know, he was brutal, by the way.

01:02:22.780 God, good God, Stalin was, I mean, truly the face of evil. 0.89

01:02:26.720 That guy was a deeply disturbed evil man.

01:02:29.840 But 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

01:02:40.740 Well, the thing about the Bolsheviks is they didn't expect to last in power very long.

01:02:44.900 One of my earliest research projects, I actually went to Switzerland. 0.63

01:02:48.140 It's kind of curious because we've all heard about the banking secrecy laws.

01:02:52.520 I discovered, in fact, most of those laws weren't on the books until the 1930s.

01:02:55.940 And when the Bolsheviks tried to launder money there in 1918, the Swiss didn't let them.

01:03:00.280 They actually kicked them out. 0.69

01:03:02.280 The reason they were laundering money there was because they weren't expecting to last in Russia.

01:03:05.600 They were trying to set up a kind of a slush fund.

01:03:07.180 Well, this is not a popular group, right?

01:03:08.380 Right.

01:03:08.660 They've got very little popular. 0.93

01:03:09.740 Most people looking at the Bolsheviks like, ew, no, we don't want anything to do with them. 0.75

01:03:13.180 They did have, again, they had some support in critical areas of the army.

01:03:16.520 They did have some support in Moscow and Patrick.

01:03:18.140 But in the country at large, more than 75 percent of the people had voted against them.

01:03:22.980 In 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.

01:03:32.660 And they knew this. That's why they deposed the constituent assembly.

01:03:35.400 That is, this body which was elected in November 1917 was actually the largest participation to date, even larger than any U.S. election.

01:03:42.300 So like 44 million Russians voted.

01:03:44.960 And 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.

01:03:52.740 So what did they do? Of course, they deposed the parliament violently.

01:03:55.840 I mean, they arrested some of the deputies.

01:03:57.480 They actually shot and killed about eight of them.

01:03:59.140 They just shut it down.

01:04:01.380 So they made it quite clear that they had essentially no democratic mandate and they didn't really intend to have one.

01:04:08.540 They ruled effectively by force.

01:04:11.540 It took them a while to really secure and then reconquer all the other elements of the empire.

01:04:16.220 But it was partly because of the collapse of Germany that we were talking about they were able to do so.

01:04:21.180 They were also fortunate in their enemies.

01:04:23.160 Even 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

01:04:29.880 They never really threw their support to the opponents of the Bolsheviks, the ones we normally call the whites.

01:04:35.140 It's a bit of a misnomer. White basically meant counter-revolutionary.

01:04:38.560 That's what the Reds called them. They didn't call themselves whites.

01:04:41.860 So the Allies didn't really intervene very decisively in Russia's civil war. 0.85

01:04:46.640 The Bolsheviks, some of it was astute diplomacy. Some of it was luck. Some of it was good fortune. 0.86

01:04:53.180 But effectively, it was a series of accidents, the largest of which was, again,

01:04:57.980 that the U.S. intervention of the war destroyed the power of Imperial Germany, and Imperial

01:05:02.280 Germany had been both the sponsor and effectively almost the mandatory power overseeing the

01:05:07.740 Bolshevik dictatorship. 0.79

01:05:08.580 The Germans could have toppled the Bolsheviks at any point in 1918 had they simply chosen 0.76

01:05:12.800 to do so. 0.87

01:05:13.660 They wanted the Bolsheviks there because they thought they were weakening Russia, that 0.77

01:05:17.160 they thought they were going to weaken Russia's power for the long term.

01:05:20.800 And curiously enough, the Allies didn't completely disagree.

01:05:24.060 That'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.

01:05:38.600 Unfortunately, what they didn't realize was that the Bolsheviks looked weak at the time. 0.87

01:05:42.740 But 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

01:05:54.000 Yes, that's the word. 0.93

01:05:54.640 Yeah, 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

01:06:03.380 All right, so we talked a bit about the Treaty of Versailles and the end of World War I. 0.91

01:06:07.340 and the position, as you put it, Germany in a prostrate position. Exactly right.

01:06:13.420 Can you just expand on the League of Nations, which would ultimately become the United Nations?

01:06:19.040 There are a lot of people in our country now who have mixed feelings about that group. Certainly,

01:06:23.180 the Republicans aren't big fans of the UN and sort of globalist approach to, well, foreign policy and

01:06:29.640 other things. And they think they're rather feckless when it comes to things like human

01:06:32.360 rights, though they claim to be these moral arbiters of assault and so on. So, I mean,

01:06:36.500 that was a Wilson thing at the end of World War I. Can you talk about it?

01:06:39.800 Well, sure. I mean, it was not his original idea. He glommed onto this idea originally proposed by

01:06:45.260 some kind of British quasi-pacifist intellectuals. But then he kind of made it his idea at Versailles.

01:06:50.940 He started backing it more and more strongly, the idea that rather than this alliance system

01:06:56.380 with the powers constantly arming, instead you would have this League of Nations and some type

01:07:00.960 of collective security arrangement. They didn't have a security council like the UN would later

01:07:05.520 have. So in some ways, it wasn't entirely practical. But the idea was supposed to be that

01:07:10.200 the member states that they would kind of guarantee their territorial integrity and there would be

01:07:14.660 some type of a collective will on the part of the great powers to enforce the settlement and

01:07:20.220 adjudicate disputes and so on. The great irony, of course, is that Wilson ended up forfeiting a lot

01:07:25.760 of his other objectives in order to back the League of Nations at Versailles. And then, as we

01:07:30.640 know, the League of Nations, along with Versailles, they end up going down to defeat in the U.S.

01:07:35.200 senate which uh fails to ratify the treaty and by then wilson i mean he also i think some of the

01:07:39.780 mistakes he made simply going across to paris and versa he was the first u.s president to visit

01:07:44.980 europe in that official capacity and he exhausted himself and he may have even forfeited some of his

01:07:50.480 leverage you know had he stayed behind maybe he could have just kind of ruled on disputed points

01:07:54.300 um using his his vast leverage almost because of the mystery of distance instead he started

01:07:59.920 just squabbling along with everyone else and he wasn't particularly good at it you know he often

01:08:03.700 got manipulated a great example of this is when uh the british tell him that italy is making a

01:08:09.340 claim on on turkey what is now ontalia the southern coast of turkey and their only claim

01:08:13.840 is that it used to belong to the roman empire and because wilson believes in self-determination

01:08:18.400 and there aren't a lot of italians there the brits tell him oh but there are greeks living there and

01:08:22.600 so we should have greece invade turkey and uh and wilson says okay and this actually leads greece

01:08:27.720 to invade turkey in 1919 and there's a brutal war fought for three years between greece and turkey

01:08:32.680 What 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.

01:08:49.340 And 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.

01:08:59.920 So effectively, that just kind of rendered it superfluous and impotent from the get go.

01:09:05.420 So, I mean, how how would this how would this wind up playing out?

01:09:09.720 Like 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?

01:09:15.240 Do you think we'd have any of that?

01:09:17.060 That's a really good question.

01:09:18.300 If 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,

01:09:28.820 There 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.

01:09:56.500 That is to say that the League of Nations would not have the ability to override the U.S. Congress.

01:10:01.680 It is quite interesting that those debates really did, I think, redound on down through the 20th century.

01:10:06.720 Congress, after the declaration of war on Japan and Germany in December 1941,

01:10:12.380 although Germany actually declared war first on the United States then,

01:10:15.840 after those declarations, Congress has not declared war again, so far as I know.

01:10:20.320 Congress has effectively abdicated its own power, the war powers, enumerated the Constitution.

01:10:26.500 And 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.

01:10:50.760 I 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.

01:10:59.840 But 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.

01:11:06.540 But in the end, they all failed. Some of it was because, again, he had a stroke.

01:11:09.740 I mean, he came back from Paris and Versailles and he actually traveled back and forth once or twice while he was there.

01:11:14.980 He's utterly exhausted and broken. And he kind of had a stroke out in the hustings as he was trying to promote the treaty.

01:11:19.840 And 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.

01:11:32.480 And 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.

01:11:42.660 There'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.

01:11:51.560 You know, would there have been some type of U.N. eventually?

01:11:53.120 So when you look at.

01:11:53.860 Yeah, go ahead.

01:11:55.180 When you look at World War I, who are the heroes?

01:11:59.120 You know, you look at World War II and it seems kind of clear, you know, who the heroes were and who the villains were.

01:12:03.820 You look at World War I, who are the heroes?

01:12:07.580 Well, it's really hard to say.

01:12:08.860 I sometimes ask my students which countries they think won this or that conflict.

01:12:13.120 Great example is Vietnam.

01:12:14.540 And my usual answer is who won the Vietnam War? 0.91

01:12:17.100 Thailand, because Thailand didn't fight in it.

01:12:19.260 And Thailand ended up doing really well economically because everyone would go there for R&R and to buy supplies and this sort of thing.

01:12:25.280 The countries that stayed out of World War I did really well for themselves.

01:12:28.140 Sweden, Switzerland, Spain, they all did fine, even if Spain had some difficulties in the 20s and the 30s.

01:12:34.400 As far as which country, again, you have maybe like the moral side who's a hero.

01:12:38.620 It's really hard to say which countries did well for themselves.

01:12:41.900 You could say, well, Serbia in the end of the war was given this miniature empire we call Yugoslavia.

01:12:47.280 Some emergent nation states like Poland, which hadn't existed before, arrive on the map.

01:12:54.540 Czechoslovakia.

01:12:56.020 You've got a few countries in the Middle East emerging out of the wreckage of the Ottoman Empire.

01:13:00.620 But as far as heroes, it's really difficult to say.

01:13:03.920 Again, 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.

01:13:13.280 But it was really hard to convince people.

01:13:15.280 The Bolsheviks obviously tried to make a claim in the same way Wilson had tried to make the war about principles.

01:13:20.560 The 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

01:13:32.660 And that did embarrass the Allies, but again, it's hard to make the Bolsheviks out to be heroes. 0.86

01:13:38.720 They did it for their own reasons, I suppose. 0.81

01:13:40.940 You 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.

01:13:52.100 And 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.

01:14:05.420 You know, where in most wars they tend to get denounced, and in fact a lot of them were actually arrested.

01:14:09.620 We forget that the Woodrow Wilson administration put through the Alien and Sedition Acts, and they actually arrested a lot of political prisoners.

01:14:16.400 Perhaps we should give them a little bit of belated respect for raising questions about the U.S. intervention in the war.

01:14:25.400 So fascinating because you've written so much on World War I and World War II, too, as well.

01:14:30.580 So you know about, you know, the respective roles and so on.

01:14:34.200 I 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?

01:14:46.240 People 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.

01:14:56.640 I 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.

01:15:06.160 I've seen the T-shirts and the sort of the back-to-back world champion memes, and I like it.

01:15:13.780 It makes me feel pro-America.

01:15:15.580 And if you start drilling down a little deeper, it gets more complicated.

01:15:18.920 Well, it's clearer, I would say, comparatively speaking, the Second World War. 0.74

01:15:22.660 We 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

01:15:37.140 But 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.

01:15:57.540 And 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.

01:16:11.500 We shouldn't forget it was actually a very broad movement.

01:16:13.760 And 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.

01:16:25.160 That is to say about the consequences of the U.S. intervention. 0.57

01:16:29.260 On the positive side, yes, in the end, Nazi Germany was defeated utterly. 0.78

01:16:32.940 So it was imperial Japan. 0.75

01:16:34.680 But perhaps on the negative side of the ledger, Stalin massively expanded his empire in Eurasia.

01:16:40.820 There were a lot of unintended consequences of the U.S. intervention.

01:16:43.140 And 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.

01:16:51.200 The U.S. government, and particularly the executive branch of the U.S. government, would assume massive new powers.

01:16:58.020 Civil rights and civil liberties would be suspended.

01:17:00.960 And to some extent, we're still kind of living in the legacy of both of the world wars.

01:17:05.120 There are some laws that actually date all the way back to 1917.

01:17:08.960 Some of the president's emergency powers date all the way back to 1917, for example.

01:17:14.200 That's fascinating, because the executive branch was meant to be very small.

01:17:17.580 And 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.

01:17:25.900 It was never meant to be this big.

01:17:26.920 But fascinating to look at it through the eyes of the world wars and how it happened then.

01:17:31.600 And again, unintended consequences.

01:17:33.140 Of course, yes, we liberated Europe. 0.94

01:17:34.780 We got Hitler, who would argue that you shouldn't have stopped him. 0.83

01:17:39.100 However, 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

01:17:46.720 It's amazing to think about.

01:17:48.740 And you know what?

01:17:49.300 I mean, it's very timely because, again, back to the fact that right now we're in this kind of proxy war with Russia.

01:17:56.480 And there's a lot of saber rattling from Vladimir Putin right now that may turn really problematic for us very soon.

01:18:03.940 And we're going to have big decisions to make.

01:18:05.720 And 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,

01:18:12.800 what role, if any, we had in setting up this conflict, right?

01:18:17.140 I mean, there are a lot of layers to this.

01:18:19.520 And right now in the country, there's sort of a shut up

01:18:21.620 if you're not completely pro-Ukrainian and money and arms and anti-Putin.

01:18:28.740 No one here is pro-Putin.

01:18:30.300 But it's more complex because these wars, as you've outlined so well,

01:18:34.700 have real consequences and they can last centuries.

01:18:37.500 They absolutely can.

01:18:38.660 There's even new discussion of the Lend-Lease Act

01:18:40.800 as one of the many ways in which the U.S. might get involved without getting directly involved,

01:18:45.000 that is, on the side of Ukraine, where once again, again, the critics are, just as you point out,

01:18:50.200 they're all being kind of tarred and feathered to some extent in public as Putin apologists.

01:18:54.600 But the questions they're raising, they're real ones, not just about the consequences for Ukraine

01:18:59.640 and possibly prolonging the war. I mean, we talked about that with the U.S. intervention in 1917 and

01:19:04.480 1918, almost certainly prolonging the First World War, along with the agony for so many of the people

01:19:09.700 swept up in it. So you have that angle to it, but you also have, of course, the long-term

01:19:14.620 economic consequences. And we barely scratched the surface of those, but the Great Depression,

01:19:20.040 for example, cannot really be understood without the legacy of the First World War and the way

01:19:24.940 that it simply destroyed so many of the webs of international trade and finance. And right now,

01:19:31.600 what we're seeing in Ukraine, of course, is economic devastation, not just in Ukraine,

01:19:35.580 but across Europe. So I do think it's important to raise these questions, to study the lessons

01:19:40.080 of history, not because they tell us exactly what to do, but rather because I think they help to add

01:19:45.540 context and enrich our discussions of these vital questions of national security and foreign policy.

01:19:52.700 I've been reading a book on Churchill, and he's a good figure through which to learn a lot about

01:19:57.520 the 20th century and the wars because he appears in both, right? He was a young, he was head of

01:20:01.540 the Navy in World War I over in Great Britain, and then, of course, would wind up being the

01:20:05.540 prime minister. But, you know, such a towering figure to take you through these massive conflicts,

01:20:10.740 and he was very bellicose, both in his language and in his actual approach to these situations.

01:20:16.580 You've studied it all. Now, listen, I want people to understand, you've got eight award-winning

01:20:21.100 books. The most recent one is Stalin's War, A New History of World War II, published last year.

01:20:26.240 What's your best book on World War I, if people want to read about all of this in more detail?

01:20:31.540 Well, 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.

01:20:54.320 And so I would recommend, really, that depending on Raiders' interests, they would choose one of those.

01:20:59.840 Although, obviously, Stalin's War is a great choice for the Second World War as well.

01:21:04.700 Spencer Clavin is one of my favorite commentators.

01:21:07.220 He's only 31 years old, but he's brilliant and has read everything.

01:21:10.720 And he's the son of Andrew Clavin.

01:21:13.220 He's an expert in the classics.

01:21:15.260 And he's just written a new book.

01:21:16.820 and it talks about how if you study the classics

01:21:21.040 and you read Plato, you read Socrates,

01:21:23.440 you read all these great thinkers that came before,

01:21:26.240 there are a lot of answers in there for modern day problems.

01:21:28.940 I would submit that your hard look at world history

01:21:32.000 and these wars has the same conclusion.

01:21:34.740 You can help, as you point out,

01:21:37.420 the exact answer may not be in there,

01:21:39.060 but the tools to come to a smart opinion

01:21:41.940 on today's problems, those are in there.

01:21:44.820 And so that's why it's so helpful reading your stuff

01:21:46.420 and talking to you.

01:21:47.040 Thank you so much for coming on

01:21:48.100 and sharing your expertise with us.

01:21:50.800 Thanks for having me on, Megan.

01:21:51.920 It was really great fun.

01:21:52.980 Great pleasure to be here.

01:21:54.320 Ah, for me too.

01:21:55.860 All the best to you.

01:21:56.540 Hope I get to be a fly on the wall

01:21:58.320 in one of those classes one of these days.

01:21:59.620 Coming up, my pal and husband,

01:22:02.640 father of my children, Doug Brunt,

01:22:04.720 comes on to continue the conversation.

01:22:07.340 You won't want to miss that.

01:22:10.240 All right, full-time thoughts.

01:22:11.740 Craig, who stood out?

01:22:12.720 Brazil's lime cheesecake started bright,

01:22:14.620 didn't let up.

01:22:15.160 Nah, for me, Italian cappuccino was the standout in the box. 0.73

01:22:18.340 But if we're talking decadent performance, that's all France.

01:22:21.160 Chocolate creme brulee had the richest finishes.

01:22:23.560 Canadian fireworks really showed up big too.

01:22:25.540 And Mexico's caramel churro ice cap.

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01:22:29.060 We are, of course, talking about Tim's taste of the globe liner.

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01:23:12.980 My next guest is Doug Brunt. He is author of bestselling books. He is the host of

01:23:19.500 Dedicated with Doug Brunt, where he interviews top authors. It's fascinating. It's doing really

01:23:24.380 well. And he is one self-taught expert on World War I, a period in which he has found himself

01:23:31.380 immersed for years now as he works on a nonfiction book that is coming out soon. Can't reveal much

01:23:38.180 more than that, although there's a couple of teasers in this segment. Welcome back to the

01:23:41.560 show, honey. So the reason I wanted you to come on is because you've become your own World War I 0.95

01:23:46.380 expert, World War II too, but also World War I. And this line of what happened with the Russians

01:23:52.400 is very interesting to me. And I think it does relate very much to what's going on today.

01:23:56.740 And so let's go back to the Tsar and Tsarina and just set the scene for us because you and I

01:24:03.060 recently saw an episode of The Crown in which that whole situation was featured. And the Tsar

01:24:10.680 and the Tsarina were in Russia. They wanted help from England. England gave them back of the hand

01:24:14.960 and things went downhill from there. So put it in perspective for us, what went down and why

01:24:20.240 it's important. It's important because that chaos of World War I and the internal chaos in Russia

01:24:25.740 in that period of years, 1916, 1917, is the whole reason that we got Lenin and Stalin and communism

01:24:31.660 in the 20th century at all. At the outside of the war, nobody wanted Lenin or the Bolsheviks. He was

01:24:38.080 basically arguing for a violent workers revolution. And he envisioned that as a global thing. He wanted

01:24:43.420 a Bolshevik uprising for each nation. And so in the war around 1917, Lenin has already been in

01:24:52.860 exile. And in 1917, there are two revolutions only eight months apart. In February, there's

01:24:58.980 the initial revolution in which the czar is overthrown. In early March, he abdicates first

01:25:04.160 in favor of his son who's just a boy a 12 year old boy with hemophilia and then he decides you

01:25:09.720 know what if if i leave and he takes over he'll never survive it so then he advocates in favor

01:25:13.720 of his younger brother and the other brother's like i don't want anything to do with this and

01:25:16.620 so he says no um so basically this this provisional government is in charge and they are still in

01:25:25.580 favor of staying in the war against the germans which the allies are thinking that's great we

01:25:31.220 need this eastern front to occupy germany and the government looks more democratic so also great

01:25:36.720 and um germany is thinking well we got to get russia out of the war and they know that lenin

01:25:42.620 is over in switzerland and lenin was campaigning basically on three things saying i'll give you

01:25:47.360 peace land and bread the first thing he wants to do upon taking power is pull russia out of the

01:25:53.600 war and so germany this i think uh sean mentioned this there's a train that they put lenin on in

01:26:00.640 Switzerland. And it's Lenin and about 20 other of his revolutionary friends. And the train drops

01:26:06.420 him off in Russia. And this is in April of 17. By October, you have the second revolution. So

01:26:11.360 eight months after the first one, in which basically Lenin takes over, the Bolsheviks 0.70

01:26:15.500 take over. And as Sean mentioned, they had only minority support. About 20% of the people were

01:26:20.540 voting for a Bolshevik takeover. There were three other socialists, or three total socialist

01:26:25.640 factions. There were the Mensheviks who had more support than the Bolsheviks and the socialist

01:26:30.640 revolutionaries. But the Bolsheviks were the most extreme and the most violent. The Mensheviks were 0.70

01:26:35.620 thinking, well, maybe we can do this in sort of a legal way. We'll have trade unions and things like

01:26:39.240 that. And the Bolsheviks were far more brutal in their tactics and started gaining more popular

01:26:48.140 support. Even Trotsky was initially a Menshevik and he came over to be one of the top 0.84

01:26:52.860 lieutenants of Lenin by 1917. And so the czar at this point is a prisoner. And initially,

01:27:02.500 after he abdicated back in March, he was offered amnesty by Great Britain. And he's cousins with

01:27:09.560 King George V of Great Britain. He writes him a letter saying, you know, this is where we need

01:27:13.240 to go. And that initial provisional government was thinking exile might be the way, but he's

01:27:18.460 imprisoned at this time and then the king george the fifth is queen elizabeth's grandpa right

01:27:23.760 that's right yeah so then there's king george the fifth then the sixth who was the colin firth and

01:27:29.200 the king's speech and then elizabeth so it's elizabeth's grandfather and you know everyone's

01:27:35.740 worried about this sort of bolshevik anti-monarchy sentiment that's really a global thing and uh so

01:27:43.000 he has a conversation with his ministers and they're a little skittish you know if the czar

01:27:46.480 comes over here, that could lead to popular unrest. And as our favorite line from Braveheart,

01:27:52.080 that could be my head in a basket. So King George V is like, let's not, so they withdraw

01:27:57.040 their invitation for him to live in exile back in Great Britain in April. So in March,

01:28:03.100 he's invited. In April, the invitation's pulled and he's stuck in Russia.

01:28:07.560 And then when the Bolsheviks take over. That was an important invitation to seize in the moment. 0.87

01:28:11.460 He needed to get out of there. But that was the crazy thing. All of the industrialists,

01:28:14.580 all the capitalists in Russia were thinking, we're good. This Lenin guy is a flash in the pan.

01:28:20.700 He's crazy. He's not going to have popular support. He already doesn't have popular support, 0.98

01:28:24.400 and it's not going to grow. They'll get rid of this guy. Because he's also fighting the Japanese

01:28:28.620 in the East. He's fighting the Czech Legion, the Poles. He's fighting the Mensheviks, 0.92

01:28:33.940 the Socialist Republics. And there's the White Army, which is loyal to the Tsar, 0.77

01:28:37.600 which is still a very powerful army. So Lenin's fighting on like six different fronts at this

01:28:42.560 point. And he is, however, gaining more control. So the Tsar at this point is a prisoner, and Lenin

01:28:51.460 is worried that he's sort of a rallying point for the white army that's loyal to the Tsar.

01:28:56.080 And by July of 1918, he and his family are executed in a really gruesome way, you know,

01:29:04.200 bullets and bayonets, the Tsar and his whole family, wife and kids.

01:29:07.540 hmm and lenin's off to the races and the relationship as you described it between lenin

01:29:14.940 and stalin you know it's like stalin he he was looking at lenin lenin was looking at stalin and

01:29:21.760 you know when you talk about these two uh you talk about stalin as possibly one of the worst people

01:29:26.340 who ever walked the face of the earth and lenin saw it and like he knew it wasn't like lenin was

01:29:31.900 all that great but stalin was uniquely evil so talk about that and sort of what happened between

01:29:36.280 the two of them? Stalin is one of the worst figures of the 20th century. I think there's

01:29:40.040 some stat on who's responsible for the most deaths in the 20th century. And Hitler's up there at 0.91

01:29:45.460 around six or seven million. Mao is number one. Stalin was like 20, 25, and Mao was like 40 million 0.72

01:29:52.760 people. They're responsible for killing in the 20th century. It's just insane. Stalin's about 0.75

01:29:57.260 eight years younger than Lenin and was a real disciple from afar. He was born in Georgia in

01:30:01.380 southern Russia spent a lot of time around the Caspian Sea and the oil regions in Azerbaijan

01:30:05.860 of southern Russia. And he was sort of a thug for Lenin down there raising money for the

01:30:14.180 Bolshevik cause. So he was basically a gangster, and he would have extortion rackets going on.

01:30:21.120 He was a bank robber. It was almost like the Wells Fargo train in the Wild West of America

01:30:24.720 that would be hijacked. He staged huge bank robberies robbing wagons full of payroll cash,

01:30:29.520 And 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.

01:30:52.320 and in 1922 Lenin has his first stroke and he's a little bit incapacitated from that but he's still

01:30:58.600 this heroic figure to to the Russian people and then in 1924 he has his third and final stroke

01:31:06.680 in which he dies only some people believe that he didn't die of a stroke he he may have been

01:31:12.300 poisoned by Stalin because in the weeks prior to Lenin finally dying of this alleged stroke

01:31:19.580 He wrote a letter to the Soviet, basically the political body beneath him, saying that it cannot be Stalin who succeeds me. 0.99

01:31:25.940 He's a madman. 0.95

01:31:27.340 It should be somebody else. 0.98

01:31:28.120 And most people thought it'd be Trotsky or one of the others, or about four or five guys who were in that level down.

01:31:34.880 Stalin was one of those five, but most people thought it would be Trotsky.

01:31:38.160 But as soon as Lenin dies, Trotsky, it happens when Trotsky's away, suspiciously, and by the time Trotsky gets back,

01:31:44.720 Stalin has already solidified all of his alliances and threatened those who were not initially with 0.66

01:31:49.560 him so when Trotsky gets back it's kind of a done deal and Stalin is in charge he promotes the cult

01:31:54.980 of personality around Lenin and you know he knows Lenin is this very popular figure who's a very

01:32:01.320 charismatic speaker he's only about five foot five but he was a huge personality and so Stalin is

01:32:05.960 saying all great things about Lenin they renamed St. Petersburg Leningrad and promote this cult

01:32:11.340 because Stalin's saying well if people are behind Lenin I'm going to say I'm behind Lenin and that

01:32:14.580 will all continue. But by the 30s, he changes his tune and he selectively releases some things from

01:32:20.100 Soviet archives that show all the bad things that Lenin did in those years immediately after

01:32:26.340 World War I and sort of dinged Lenin up a little bit in his legacy because now Stalin is firmly

01:32:32.940 in charge and is more concerned about building the cult of Stalin, which he does and, you know,

01:32:37.460 names the city Stalingrad and sort of fibs a little bit about the heroic things that he did

01:32:44.080 in those early years, too. We only know this because after the fall of the Soviet Union in

01:32:48.260 the 90s, many of these countries opened up their own archives. We just recently, in the last 20

01:32:52.800 years, learned a lot more about the early years of Stalin. So was there an opportunity for us to

01:32:58.780 avoid Lenin and avoid Stalin and avoid the Bolsheviks in a way that could have changed 0.60

01:33:05.060 the entire trajectory of the 20th century and 21st? Absolutely. Even in the absence of Western 0.65

01:33:12.340 intervention in the years 1819. Stalin and Lenin and the Bolshevik movement almost collapsed. They

01:33:18.440 almost lost to the White Army and to other forces. In February or March of 1919, Great Britain pulled

01:33:25.180 out its final troops. They only had a small force there, and the Americans got out too. They were

01:33:29.600 interested in some of the oil regions and other resources around Russia. But Churchill, among

01:33:34.700 others, was in Great Britain saying, we have got to deal with this problem right now. It's amazing.

01:33:38.460 I 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

01:33:45.420 We need 100,000 troops. 0.93

01:33:46.660 We can go in there and rout this thing and establish a more democratic form of government.

01:33:51.560 But 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

01:34:00.700 And 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

01:34:08.080 Because 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.

01:34:13.040 We're going to stick around and help these people establish a more democratic form of government.

01:34:17.540 And nobody wanted to get involved in that.

01:34:20.200 And so Lenin was able to thread the needle because during the war, you know, the Germans hated this guy too.

01:34:25.160 It was only that he wanted to pull Russia out of the war that they sent him in there.

01:34:28.380 They weren't looking for some workers' revolution either.

01:34:30.660 Monarchs and democratic forms of government wanted nothing to do with Lenin and the Bolsheviks.

01:34:34.940 but they had to deal with the primary threat and for the central powers and the allied powers that

01:34:40.280 was each other and so the germans thinking even if he pulls out of the war you know he's got all

01:34:46.620 these resources too and the allies were thinking well if we go get rid of lenin you know this is

01:34:51.260 back during the war years if we go fight lenin and get rid of him try to get rid of him we could 0.93

01:34:55.460 push him into the arms of the germans and even if he doesn't declare war against us he has all these 0.79

01:34:59.560 guns, oil, wheat, copper that he could offer up to the German war machine. So everyone kind of 0.92

01:35:05.780 treated him with kid gloves, even though he was viewed and identified as a threat early on,

01:35:10.960 no one could really take him on. So he was able to kind of thread the needle for those post-war

01:35:14.700 years. Let me ask you about Churchill, because he's this crazy figure who played a big role

01:35:20.820 in World War I and not just World War II. We all know him from World War II, but he was very

01:35:25.380 present during World War I and sort of trying to become the military leader that we would later

01:35:30.000 know him as, not with total success, as you just alluded to. But talk about Churchill during World

01:35:37.380 War I. He was put into the post of First Lord of the Admiralty in 1911. And he was young then. He's

01:35:43.220 like a 37-year-old guy. And that's the top post in the British Navy, which, you know, for the Brits,

01:35:48.860 the Navy is a bigger deal than the Army. So he was a huge figure in the pre-war military apparatus.

01:35:55.380 And he brought in as his first sea lord, Jackie Fisher, who was this legendary admiral.

01:35:59.860 And he was much older.

01:36:00.560 He was more like 70.

01:36:01.380 So these two old guys, these two guys got along with this one old admiral and the young Churchill.

01:36:07.380 And he was very aware of the German threat early on, more so than most.

01:36:12.260 And so he was working very hard to update the military and the technology of the ships.

01:36:17.260 He was sort of a technophile.

01:36:18.960 So he was looking at the weapons.

01:36:19.620 Because you've told me before, at this point, England had the navies.

01:36:24.280 And that was extremely important for them to have a strong navy.

01:36:26.600 But most of the other powers didn't really have a strong navy.

01:36:29.060 But then Germany was like, we're going to have one.

01:36:31.180 We want one. 0.98

01:36:32.800 And Churchill saw it coming.

01:36:34.780 He did.

01:36:35.160 And that set off this naval arms race.

01:36:39.020 So Britain controlled the seas at that point.

01:36:40.840 Ever since defeating Napoleon in the early 1800s, they were the dominant sea power.

01:36:45.580 And they controlled the sea lanes for merchant shipping and for military purposes as well.

01:36:50.860 And Germany, they were expanding, but they were really a continental power.

01:36:53.860 They 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.

01:37:10.960 But 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.

01:37:18.460 So 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.

01:37:26.500 Okay, so back to Churchill.

01:37:27.880 So he's there.

01:37:28.660 He's working on building up, well, preserving the strength of the British Navy, staving off anybody else from getting too strong.

01:37:36.300 And in World War I, he's got this partnership with this older guy, but it doesn't actually work out very well.

01:37:42.700 Right.

01:37:43.260 So he's got this idea.

01:37:45.220 By 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.

01:37:57.660 But 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.

01:38:06.520 They have their only warm water port in the Black Sea.

01:38:10.360 That's how they get wheat and natural resources out and how they get guns and war supplies in. 0.65

01:38:14.620 But 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

01:38:24.140 So they control access to Russia's warm water port.

01:38:28.140 Churchill has this thought that we can send a big force, not only naval ships, but ground troops as well.

01:38:35.240 And it's not that well protected at the moment.

01:38:37.220 We can storm in there. 0.92

01:38:38.280 We can take the strait and we can open up Russia and then basically hit Germany right 0.93

01:38:43.680 in the belly from beneath and win the war quickly. 0.85

01:38:46.340 And they had this whole back and forth.

01:38:47.960 Lord Kitchener is the head of the army.

01:38:50.000 And he's the guy like in America, it's Uncle Sam wants you.

01:38:53.240 Well, in Great Britain, it was a poster of Lord Kitchener basically doing the same thing

01:38:57.240 that, you know, we want you in the military.

01:38:59.360 So they're back and forth on how to do this.

01:39:01.440 They ended up sort of like splitting the baby and they send only some naval ships and no

01:39:06.780 ground troops so when they get there what year is this this is in 15 1915 okay and so the ships

01:39:14.200 go and they're fighting it's like this ancient strait you know that's like where the persians

01:39:17.680 and the greeks used to fight so there's ancient fortifications up there and there are some turkish

01:39:21.720 troops there but they're very poorly supplied they've mined the strait a little bit but the

01:39:26.120 british ships are making some progress and as we found out later the turks were almost out of

01:39:30.920 bullets there were very few troops almost no ammunition the english had basically gotten

01:39:34.940 through but it stalled a little bit and they thought well maybe we better stop we've just

01:39:38.320 lost a couple battleships to some sea mines let's wait and see what goes on and maybe we'll get 0.96

01:39:42.900 another ship up here so they stall it out and in that time more turks come down and the germans 0.92

01:39:50.300 think this could be a disaster and they send troops down there and resupply it by the time

01:39:54.220 the brits gets the more ships and some land troops in there now it's on like it's a full-on battle

01:39:59.080 both sides are supplied and the whole thing bogs down and it turns into this very bloody mess

01:40:03.640 that is prolonged, lots of people die.

01:40:06.600 It was made into a movie with Mel Gibson

01:40:08.040 sort of portraying what an ugly, grisly disaster it was.

01:40:12.700 And Churchill's blamed for the whole thing.

01:40:14.200 But had they gone in with his initial plan

01:40:15.840 with ground troops, with more ships,

01:40:18.000 they would have easily taken this.

01:40:20.420 History has sort of gone back

01:40:22.000 to resurrect Churchill's reputation in this disaster,

01:40:25.500 which ended up getting him fired from the Admiralty.

01:40:27.740 And he spent a couple of decades sort of out to pasture

01:40:30.480 until he came back to power closer to World War II.

01:40:33.640 I mean, not to reduce it to life lessons and a self-help therapy session, but it is a good 0.57

01:40:39.460 reminder that you can have a massive failure like I failed to prevent World War I, and you can 0.75

01:40:46.600 still come back. I mean, think about Churchill. I know we both admire him so much, but the

01:40:52.100 opportunities that he had, that he sees, that he tried for, and that he did have some failure

01:40:55.960 achieving only to never give up, to never give up. That's right. I mean, if you have the talent,

01:41:01.820 If you have the goods, you can always come back, which he clearly does.

01:41:05.600 And it took him some time, but he rose to the top again.

01:41:09.960 So what do you think?

01:41:11.020 Is World War I more interesting than World War II or the other way around? 0.98

01:41:15.880 It's funny.

01:41:16.580 I used to think World War II was more interesting. 0.79

01:41:19.100 And I'd watch all those, as you know, the videos in color and the sort of weird mysticism that the Nazis got into. 0.58

01:41:26.760 The only thing on our television, if it has to do with the World Wars, Doug is into it.

01:41:31.640 And if you sprinkle an alien in there, so much the better.

01:41:35.640 Well, they were there.

01:41:36.540 What do you mean?

01:41:36.800 They were absolutely responsible for almost everything. 0.78

01:41:39.240 Pyramids, Nazis, all of it. 0.93

01:41:41.580 But I find World War I. 0.62

01:41:42.840 No sprinkling necessary. 0.62

01:41:43.880 They were everywhere.

01:41:44.540 They're there.

01:41:45.080 Yeah, everywhere you look.

01:41:46.040 Right out on the surface.

01:41:47.560 I find World War I more interesting, actually.

01:41:49.240 It's more nuanced.

01:41:50.420 It's this incredible, crazy battle.

01:41:53.140 And then at the end of it, we were all like, why did we even do that?

01:41:56.740 It seemed like these petty things between monarchs and shifting alliances.

01:42:00.580 And it's just way more complex and nuanced than World War II, which is more of this good and evil story.

01:42:10.740 So 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.

01:42:21.400 Go ahead and download it now and follow and subscribe, and you'll be glad you did.

01:42:24.660 But in his other life, he writes books, and he's working on a nonfiction piece right now, which is amazing.

01:42:29.940 It'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.

01:42:37.060 And that is one of the reasons—that is really the main reason why you became such an expert.

01:42:40.800 How many books do you think you read in preparation for this book?

01:42:43.840 He doesn't want to talk about the name.

01:42:45.200 He's, like, keeping it under wraps.

01:42:46.380 It'll come out soon.

01:42:48.460 Soon, yeah.

01:42:49.040 I'll have advanced copies in a couple months.

01:42:51.560 Okay.

01:42:52.020 Oh, my gosh.

01:42:53.040 A hundred.

01:42:53.380 And that's not counting the small articles and weird journals and things from the air.

01:42:59.220 So 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.

01:43:10.860 And it's a great era of – it's like I was actually talking to an archivist in Germany to get some things out.

01:43:17.780 And I was like, you know, I need something.

01:43:19.720 I'm looking for something on this guy.

01:43:20.760 And he's like, this is the golden age of letter writing.

01:43:23.700 Everybody wrote.

01:43:24.400 Unlike today where things are happening in tweets and texts of six or nine words or something,

01:43:29.440 in that era, everybody wrote letters.

01:43:31.660 And the whole period is documented.

01:43:34.840 It's amazing.

01:43:35.660 It's really fun to read through it.

01:43:37.760 But I do worry.

01:43:38.960 I was talking to Anna Quinlan about this in our episode coming up.

01:43:42.060 We're not really documenting our time.

01:43:44.580 You know, what are the archives going to have in them, you know, 100 years from now

01:43:47.380 when people look back on the year 2022?

01:43:50.360 Nobody's writing letters to anybody. 0.99

01:43:52.560 Kovefe.

01:43:53.440 wtf that's about it they're gonna try to figure it out well i'm excited i'm excited for the book

01:44:00.320 that's gonna be huge it's amazing and the podcast everybody should go and download now

01:44:04.060 because doug has this wealth of expertise this is not what he brings to you on the podcast

01:44:08.680 occasionally occasionally but he makes it about the other person which is what is so enjoyable

01:44:12.580 about the show you get to know big big authors who you know and love and sometimes big big stars

01:44:17.520 like david duchovny and um well i love the one with pen teller that was that was fascinating and

01:44:23.400 And, you know, Paulina Portskova, we could go on.

01:44:26.400 So, in any event, check it out.

01:44:27.880 Dedicated with Doug Brunt.

01:44:28.920 And we'll bring you more on the book at a later date when Doug's ready to talk about it.

01:44:32.800 Thanks, honey.

01:44:33.740 Thank you, honey.

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01:45:26.920 Perhaps no event defined the 20th century more than World War II.

01:45:32.300 A battle of good versus evil.

01:45:34.360 A story of atrocities we hope will never happen again.

01:45:38.340 Of the 16 million Americans who served our nation around the globe during that war,

01:45:43.200 only about 167,000 are still alive today.

01:45:48.200 180 of these heroes are dying every single day.

01:45:53.160 And with them go countless stories of heroism, of depravity that they witnessed,

01:46:01.460 and of honor in which they participated, perhaps unmatched at any other time in history.

01:46:07.620 Today, we're going to talk about their stories and the lessons we can all take from them

01:46:11.740 as we walk through the arc of World War II

01:46:15.720 with the filmmaker who has made it his life's mission

01:46:19.700 to make sure the brave souls who fought

01:46:22.320 and won that war for us are never forgotten.

01:46:25.820 He's interviewed so many members

01:46:27.160 of the greatest generation, he's lost count.

01:46:29.680 His dozens of documentaries have taken him

01:46:32.200 to the battlefields of Europe, the Pacific,

01:46:34.680 and here at home in Hawaii,

01:46:36.580 where a Sunday morning attack propelled America

01:46:39.360 into World War II.

01:46:42.080 Tim Gray is the founder and president of the World War II Foundation and a documentary filmmaker.

01:46:53.120 Tim Gray, welcome to the show. So great to have you here.

01:46:57.400 Thank you, Megan. It's a pleasure to meet you.

01:47:00.740 Oh, the pleasure's all mine. I've enjoyed your work for a long, long time and appreciate the

01:47:05.800 personal touch you put on everything you do, going right to the guys who fought this battle.

01:47:11.740 and getting their take on it before that's no longer possible.

01:47:16.120 It's hard to imagine, right, that there will be a time on this earth

01:47:19.600 where there are no more members of the greatest generation

01:47:22.880 to walk us through this history.

01:47:24.700 These are precious souls still walking amongst us.

01:47:27.920 It's amazing when you think about the fact that you can talk to people

01:47:32.320 who actually saved the world.

01:47:36.420 I mean, I can't remember.

01:47:37.920 I mean, I can't talk to George Washington.

01:47:39.660 I 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.

01:47:52.700 But 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.

01:48:03.480 Let's just start there because you think of the greatest generation and in particular those who

01:48:07.260 fought in World War II. There are some seam lines that pull them together and that describe most of

01:48:13.040 them. And you've spent more time with them than anyone. How would you describe these guys? I mean,

01:48:18.440 what is it about them? What are some of the adjectives that jump out at you?

01:48:22.400 Humble. You know, they could be going around to your local mall or they could be going around to

01:48:27.780 your local place and saying, you know, hey, look at me. I saved the world. I want the likes on my

01:48:34.780 Instagram page. I want the likes on my Facebook page. But they don't do that. It just blows my

01:48:42.120 mind that there's such a generation that is so humble about the fact that they really dictated

01:48:49.560 where we are today. And so, you know, when I look at that generation, I think, you know,

01:48:56.480 if there's any generation that really deserves the fact to, to want that attention, it's that

01:49:02.160 generation, but they don't want it at all. That's the thing is that, I mean, they are

01:49:07.740 literally the opposite of selfie culture that we find everywhere around us today. And there's the

01:49:14.740 quiet dignity about these guys. I've interviewed a fair amount of them. I'm happy to say over my

01:49:18.620 years as a journalist, there's a quiet dignity. There's a deep patriotism, deep, deep love of

01:49:25.000 America, hard-earned and hard-fought. And there's just some sort of a bond between them and between

01:49:33.200 them and the country. They survived the Great Depression. They fought World War II like it

01:49:38.320 was a job. And then they came home and they went on with their lives. And their lives were centered

01:49:43.640 around their job and their family. And that was it. I mean, they didn't want the accolades.

01:49:50.980 They felt the accolades belong with those who were buried in American cemeteries in Manila and Normandy and Holland and Belgium and other places.

01:50:01.480 There was almost this survivor's guilt that they had.

01:50:06.080 So when they came home, they took the lessons of World War II and they applied them to their own daily lives.

01:50:12.080 And some of them dealt with them better than others.

01:50:14.780 I mean, some of them came home and they were fine.

01:50:16.800 some of them came home and they had a problem with alcoholism or some of them came home and

01:50:22.940 they had a problem with with with committing suicide or they had a problem with with their

01:50:28.220 with their families in some way where they would wake up their mom or their wife or their children

01:50:34.640 in the middle of the night and be screaming about a japanese bonsai attack and they and the families

01:50:40.500 at home couldn't understand. But they came home and they rebuilt America to what it is today.

01:50:46.820 And when I think about that generation, anytime I go to a mall or anytime I log on to Amazon or

01:50:52.880 anytime I want to travel to Ohio or Montana or another state, I don't need papers. I don't need

01:51:00.400 someone to check in with me. I don't need someone to authorize my daily activities. And that's all

01:51:08.840 because of that generation. But it's just so funny that they're kind of like the anti-Kardashian

01:51:14.500 generation that they just went on with their lives and they saved the world and they just

01:51:20.700 didn't want any credit for it. And they felt all the credit belonged with those who never had any

01:51:26.380 opportunity to live a full life or to have kids or grandkids or to be someone who solved cancer

01:51:33.980 or solve the dilemma of autism or dementia

01:51:37.540 or Alzheimer's or something.

01:51:41.680 So to me, they live their lives in honor of those

01:51:44.660 who never came home and have the opportunity

01:51:46.380 to do great things.

01:51:49.820 And it's awe-inspiring.

01:51:52.940 You're so right.

01:51:54.180 I mean, the juxtaposition is stark

01:51:56.520 when you think about someone like Kardashian

01:51:58.240 who is famous for being famous,

01:52:00.080 for doing absolutely nothing. 1.00

01:52:01.400 All she wants is for us to celebrate her, the way she looks, her money, her vanity.

01:52:09.080 And these guys were famous for doing something extraordinary, but wanted no fame, eschewed

01:52:16.340 the spotlight, and would never have wanted a celebration of anything around them.

01:52:21.600 They would have deflected the credit onto the country and to others.

01:52:25.460 Exactly.

01:52:25.860 And 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.

01:52:47.200 And I think that generation humbly did that, and they left us a blueprint in which to follow.

01:52:54.580 And 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.

01:53:18.600 Yeah. And now we need to follow it. Now we just need to know it and follow it. All right. So

01:53:23.740 let's talk about the war and go through the arc of it so people have a better understanding of it.

01:53:31.120 I think to understand how we got into World War II, you need a basic understanding of how World

01:53:35.700 War I ended. You know, most of us on tourist trips, if we've ever had the privilege to go

01:53:42.300 through Europe, through France. If you're lucky, you get to go through the Palace of Versailles,

01:53:47.820 and we know that word Versailles. And what happened there was directly related to the

01:53:53.360 Second World War in a way many people may not understand. So let's start there.

01:53:58.240 Yeah, I mean, Versailles, the Treaty of Versailles ended World War I. And a lot of people,

01:54:03.320 especially over the last, I'd say, 30 years or so, have decided, historians have decided that

01:54:09.840 World War I was really a continuation of World War II. 0.59

01:54:14.060 And it was.

01:54:15.060 And I think World War I directly led to World War II.

01:54:19.800 And a lot of that dealt back with the Treaty of Versailles and how Hitler utilized the

01:54:25.040 Treaty of Versailles to really emphasize how the German people were mistreated and blamed

01:54:31.100 for World War I.

01:54:32.700 And there are some lessons there.

01:54:33.900 I mean, my understanding of the Treaty of Versailles is it essentially humiliated Germany, and it basically dismantled their military.

01:54:44.640 It imposed harsh penalties against them.

01:54:47.040 It 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.

01:55:00.480 It was no accident.

01:55:01.180 those things were connected. And he decided promptly to play the victim and play Germany 0.63

01:55:07.840 as the victim. And shortly thereafter, decided that the villain would be Jewish people. 0.95

01:55:14.340 Yeah. I mean, he was the right guy at the right time in history, like Mussolini was in Italy. 0.98

01:55:20.240 He was a flamboyant leader who basically blamed all of their problems, Italy's problems, and then

01:55:26.560 Hitler's side, Germany's problems on World War I. He blamed it on the Jewish people. He blamed

01:55:32.860 them on the communists. And he was elected on the fact that he was that person who could

01:55:39.660 take the results of World War I, which was the economic depression that Germany was in,

01:55:46.220 the fact that Germany's military had been decimated and deactivated, and that he would

01:55:52.640 restore that aura to Germany. And we've talked to German soldiers who said, basically, that

01:56:01.280 Hitler was that person who said, you know, we were wronged in World War I, and this is what we need

01:56:08.540 to do now. And then again, by the time he was in power, and his directives were known, that it was

01:56:16.780 too late to to have former resistance or to to object to what he was doing so even before world

01:56:24.460 war ii i mean that's that's the thing that a lot of people sort of miss in the 1930s he built dachau

01:56:30.100 uh one of the you know the first concentration camp and it was kristallnacht was in 1938 i think

01:56:35.640 hitler was doing this before the war was actually launched targeting jewish people but obviously

01:56:42.680 then his eyes became more territorial and he started grabbing territory. And that's when the

01:56:48.740 war actually broke out in earnest. Yeah, he started looking at Czechoslovakia. He started

01:56:53.820 looking at the expansion of Germany, that Germany needed more room. And because of World War I,

01:56:59.660 that Germany was due this more room. And he looked at Czechoslovakia and the Brits and the French

01:57:06.620 gave him Czechoslovakia. And then he started to look at Russia and he started to look at the

01:57:11.060 Soviet Union. And that, of course, led to the start of World War II. And it's just one of those

01:57:19.080 situations where you look at it and that Hitler really did a great job of appealing to the common

01:57:26.760 man in Germany in World War II, that the government has forgotten about you and that we need to get

01:57:34.080 back to, you know, being able to honor you and to help you. But then again, he had no plan that

01:57:42.360 would ever succeed in doing that. But he wanted an expansion of the German Empire following what 0.56

01:57:48.160 happened after World War II, which basically ruined Germans' economy and ruined Germans'

01:57:53.440 after World War I, which ruined Germans' economy after World War I, and then an expansion. So it

01:58:03.020 It 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.

01:58:11.880 And we were treated so poorly that we were due this expansion in Europe. 0.60

01:58:18.760 Yeah. 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.

01:58:27.300 So just for the timeline, World War I ended November 11th, 1918.

01:58:32.460 Fifteen years later, January 30th, 1933, Hitler was appointed the German leader.

01:58:37.180 And September 1st, 1939 is when World War II is considered to have begun.

01:58:42.420 Germany invaded Poland.

01:58:45.060 A couple of weeks later, the Soviet Union invaded Poland.

01:58:48.240 In the beginning of the war, the Soviets were friendly with Germany.

01:58:51.720 I mean, people forget that that's how it began. 0.71

01:58:54.460 I mean, one of Hitler's greatest mistakes, I think, was going after the Soviet Union, just getting so power-hungry and land-hungry.

01:59:00.560 He thought he could take the Soviets as well, which would be a critical moment for the world, right? 0.68

01:59:05.600 Because he couldn't, and the Soviets decided to fight with the Allied powers, and soon thereafter, the war ended.

01:59:12.260 But 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.

01:59:20.480 In 1940, Norway was invaded by Germany.

01:59:23.900 Same year, Winston Churchill becomes prime minister, and the war is underway.

01:59:30.620 Now, the United States at this point is isolationist.

01:59:33.500 We've been through a world war.

01:59:35.260 We don't want another world war.

01:59:36.960 The American people are not in the mood at all.

01:59:40.640 But we are helping our friends, are we not?

01:59:43.700 Yes, we are.

01:59:44.280 We're helping them through what's called Lend-Lease, which is giving arms to England and giving arms and supplies to the Soviet Union.

01:59:52.940 I 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.

02:00:04.300 There's just no interest in getting involved in another world war.

02:00:08.700 And that all changes on December 7, 1941.

02:00:11.440 one. So 88% of the United States is against getting involved in the war in Europe, despite

02:00:18.220 the fact that England is alone. France has already conceded. The Netherlands have already

02:00:23.260 conceded. Belgium, everybody's already conceded. But the United States, having been through World

02:00:29.880 War I, or at least the last year of World War I, wants no part of the war in Europe until the 0.91

02:00:36.100 Japanese attack Pearl Harbor, which I find interesting is that it's such a high percentage,

02:00:41.320 88%, 87%, 88% that wants no part of that war in Europe until we're attacked. And I think that's 0.89

02:00:49.820 the way the United States is in general, is that we're not a warring nation. But when we are

02:00:55.340 attacked, like a December 7th or September 11th, 2001, that we respond. So history doesn't repeat

02:01:05.420 itself, but it certainly rhymes. And that's what was the case in 1941. You have a great documentary

02:01:12.520 among many, this one called Remembering Pearl Harbor. And I recommend it to everybody. It sets

02:01:18.380 the stage with the actual greatest generation, with the actual veterans. But it sets the stage

02:01:23.860 in Pearl Harbor quite nicely about how it was going that day, how it was a rather peaceful day.

02:01:29.320 No one anticipated this. To the contrary, there had been a bulletin not long before

02:01:34.200 suggesting this would never happen.

02:01:36.240 It was just too long, a reach, a stretch for the Japanese.

02:01:39.540 They didn't really need to worry about getting attacked at Pearl Harbor. 0.86

02:01:42.980 I mean, a war was underway, so we were watching it,

02:01:45.920 but we didn't think it could happen.

02:01:47.500 So here's, this is from Remembering Pearl Harbor

02:01:49.380 on the day before Tom Selleck narrating Sot 3.

02:01:54.340 Some sailors and soldiers that Sunday morning

02:01:57.220 were already at church services by the beach.

02:02:00.580 Others were up early playing a little toss and catch on the docks

02:02:03.700 before reporting for duty if they had to work on December 7th.

02:02:08.240 Chow bell sounded for breakfast.

02:02:12.040 All was peaceful and serene on Oahu,

02:02:15.260 from Pearl Harbor to the nearby airfields. 0.96

02:02:18.460 Can we just take a step back and talk about the Japanese? 0.97

02:02:20.720 Because we set it up by talking about Germany

02:02:22.440 and a little bit about the Soviet Union. 0.99

02:02:23.920 The Japanese, what are they doing there?

02:02:25.680 Yeah, what are they doing there?

02:02:26.640 Go back and talk about their participation,

02:02:29.700 their interest, and their start in this war. 0.81

02:02:31.260 Japanese 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

02:02:52.720 So the United States decided at that point that they would start to cut off supplies to Japan, whether that be oil or steel.

02:03:02.080 So Japan always felt as though they were backed into a corner and their expansion was dependent on these resources, these natural resources.

02:03:10.220 So 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.

02:03:17.880 And 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-

02:03:44.460 And it wasn't totally unrelated. They'd been talking. There was an agreement. This wasn't

02:03:49.200 just two separate wars happening at once. No. I mean, they had formed an alliance called the

02:03:54.020 Axis Powers between Italy, Japan, and Germany. So they were talking about what the situation was

02:04:01.200 in the Pacific. So what they needed to do was eliminate the American Pacific fleet for six

02:04:06.220 months or a year, but they did not figure on the resolve of the United States. The United States

02:04:11.900 wants a fair fight. I mean, that's always how Americans are. They want a fair fight. They don't

02:04:17.360 want to be attacked without notice or be attacked by surprise. And that's the slogan of Remember

02:04:24.460 Pearl Harbor. And that was the rallying cry of World War II. It was Remember Pearl Harbor. We

02:04:30.160 were attacked without notice by the Japanese and the Japanese had their intentions. But that became 1.00

02:04:35.960 the rallying cry. And that's why so many millions of Americans signed up for the fight in World War

02:04:41.320 too because it was a sucker blow and Americans don't like sucker blows. Maybe this is hindsight

02:04:49.520 being 2020, but it seems so foolish now in retrospect. Like why would they want to drag 1.00

02:04:55.100 us into the war of all powers? It's not like we were not known for our military might. You know,

02:05:01.720 we had just won World War I. Like why, why drag the United States into this conflict that we'd

02:05:07.960 been rejecting thus far? It's so funny because, you know, Admiral Yamamoto, who was the key

02:05:15.080 architect of the Battle of Pearl Harbor, the attack at Pearl Harbor, and also the Battle of

02:05:20.740 Midway, told the Japanese military, he said, you know, you only have a certain amount of time here

02:05:27.860 to put the United States at bay. Yamamoto had studied at Harvard. He had been a naval attaché

02:05:35.140 in Washington. He had ventured out into the American heartland and seen the industrial

02:05:40.420 power of the United States. So he basically was against a strike against the United States,

02:05:47.740 but the Japanese military, the Japanese army was in control of what the decisions would be

02:05:54.460 in World War II. So Yamamoto at certain points voiced his concern and said, this is not going

02:06:01.520 to work. We're going to awaken a sleeping giant. And he meant by a sleeping giant, he meant American

02:06:08.400 industry. He meant by the ability to convert the Ford plants in Detroit from cars to tanks and

02:06:17.780 airplanes and everything else. He said we cannot win a war with the United States. But nobody

02:06:23.580 listened to him, especially the army, and there were attempts on his life. And so, you know,

02:06:29.340 Japan did not listen to the voice of reason. The army was hellbent on attacking the United States 0.67

02:06:37.320 because they felt they were inferior in many ways, inferior as soldiers, inferior as Navy,

02:06:43.380 inferior in militaristic ways. But Yamamoto was the voice of reason, and they did not like that.

02:06:51.660 And they still attacked Pearl Harbor, and they still had Yamamoto plan the attack on Pearl Harbor

02:06:57.120 and plan the attack on Midway, but he was a voice who just said, we cannot win a war. We can only

02:07:03.060 buy time, and how much time we can buy is negotiable. And I think they were looking at

02:07:09.960 some point to say, okay, we're going to buy time. We're going to be able to occupy Guam and the

02:07:14.500 Philippines, and those will be our islands, and then we'll settle for peace. But Yamamoto was

02:07:19.560 really the only one who understood the industrial might and the capability of the United States.

02:07:24.740 The element of surprise is still hard to understand, given radar and satellite and all the gifts that we have today.

02:07:32.820 But 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.

02:07:43.800 We got hit at around 8 a.m.

02:07:46.120 But at 7 o'clock that morning, who spotted the approaching first wave of the Japanese attack force?

02:07:53.500 Exactly.

02:07:53.860 and sounded the alarm. And what happened? Well, the problem was, is that radar was so

02:08:00.000 new at that time. What Joe Lockhart and his colleague decided at the Opana radar site on

02:08:06.460 Hawaii was, you know, they reported this to the authorities in Hawaii. And they thought, well,

02:08:13.440 this is a crew of B-17 planes coming in from California. Radar was not being utilized that

02:08:22.480 effectively by the united states at that time so they thought it was a b-17 um squadron coming in

02:08:28.320 from from the west coast of the united states and and and and and tyler the man at uh at hawaii said

02:08:36.960 don't worry about it those are famous last words don't worry about it it's just a it's a group of

02:08:41.600 b-17s coming in from california and they said okay we're gonna go for lunch now then and um 0.97

02:08:47.640 And that's what happened. And so it's it's almost like 9-11 in terms of things are building up and things are presenting themselves.

02:08:58.060 And we're we're saying it's something else. It's not what what is actually happening.

02:09:04.660 radar was so new at the time megan that we didn't trust it enough to to to say we assumed kermit

02:09:11.840 tyler was a guy and i hate to single him out but he was the guy in the famous movie tora tora tora

02:09:18.780 who said don't worry about it it's a it's it's a squadron of b-17s coming in from california

02:09:23.800 oh my goodness it wasn't it was japanese planes coming in the sink the arizona and oklahoma and

02:09:29.880 everybody else yeah the arizona took the worst of the damage um and the oklahoma and all 21 ships

02:09:37.060 of the u.s pacific fleet were sunk or damaged um aircraft losses 188 destroyed 159 damaged the

02:09:45.380 majority hit before they had a chance to even take off and the japanese success was it was

02:09:50.680 overwhelming i mean it was it was incredible and it's not to compliment but it was it was a great

02:09:56.980 success for them. And our guys were completely caught by surprise as documented again in

02:10:02.320 remembering Pearl Harbor. This is a clip from it in which several of the survivors on the USS

02:10:08.960 Arizona describe the explosion that destroyed their ship. It's SOT-6. At nine minutes after

02:10:15.500 eight, one of the bombers came over the lucky bomb. And then the big bomb hit the number two

02:10:21.840 It dropped it from maybe 8,000, 10,000 feet.

02:10:24.900 And it went right into a million rounds of ammunition and fuel oil and aviation gasoline.

02:10:33.900 It went in there and exploded. That's what exploded.

02:10:36.540 It blowed the 110 foot of the ship, clear off.

02:10:40.760 And everything from the main mess forward is on fire.

02:10:43.600 the bow the ship came out of the water about 30 feet

02:10:51.860 blew in the water

02:10:54.240 where the fireball went off and it went about five or six hundred feet in the air

02:11:02.120 and just engulfed us up there in the sky control platform

02:11:06.100 a couple of things there um to to pick up on it wasn't just pearl harbor this this hell was

02:11:15.020 unleashed in more places than pearl harbor and you mentioned it before it was an overwhelming

02:11:20.400 success but it wasn't a complete success because we did not have our aircraft carriers in pearl

02:11:24.960 harbor that day so can you first explain that the vast amount of areas and locations attacked

02:11:30.700 and then talk about why our aircraft carriers were not there.

02:11:34.800 Yeah, I mean, our aircraft carriers were delivering planes to Midway.

02:11:39.060 First of all, the Enterprise was delivering planes to Midway.

02:11:42.460 The Saratoga was undergoing repairs.

02:11:45.480 So the Japanese decided that, you know, this based on local intelligence

02:11:50.900 given by spies in Hawaii, that, you know, the Pacific fleet was there for the taking. 0.91

02:11:59.280 And 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.

02:12:15.000 And 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

02:12:34.180 And 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

02:12:47.560 He 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.

02:13:00.800 And 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

02:13:17.220 And 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.

02:13:29.680 and um so but the army didn't want to hear that tojo and the others didn't want to hear that

02:13:35.980 and but he was he was a realist and to hear guys like don stratton who passed away a couple years

02:13:42.300 ago and luke contor who's one of only two survivors still alive from the uss arizona in

02:13:48.860 that piece you just ran to to hear them describe what it was like to me um it's just incredible

02:13:56.480 because they were a witness to history. 0.99

02:13:59.520 The worst thing the Japanese could have done 0.55

02:14:01.680 was launch a sneak attack. 1.00

02:14:03.280 They could have notified us beforehand

02:14:05.300 that we were going to attack, 1.00

02:14:07.200 but Americans don't again-

02:14:08.800 Was that done?

02:14:09.720 Was that done?

02:14:10.400 I mean, you know, was that done?

02:14:12.320 Was that, is that how it used to be done?

02:14:14.180 Like an attack is coming? 1.00

02:14:15.700 Yeah, I mean, it's the Japanese, 1.00

02:14:17.740 because there are so many issues with the Japanese 0.90

02:14:19.800 with transmissions and everything else

02:14:21.520 on December 7th, 1941,

02:14:23.320 their goal was to announce to us

02:14:26.060 that they were going to attack Pearl Harbor.

02:14:28.400 But because of delays in Washington

02:14:30.640 and transcribing documents and telegrams

02:14:35.380 and everything else, it became a surprise attack.

02:14:39.280 And for the record,

02:14:40.420 the number of military personnel killed

02:14:43.220 at Pearl Harbor was 2,335.

02:14:48.780 That actually includes 68 civilians, I think.

02:14:53.180 So yeah, I guess the total is 2,400.

02:14:56.060 403 people dead a hundred i mean 1177 from the uss arizona which is just stunning if you go if

02:15:04.440 you go out there now you can see the uh memorial to the uss arizona the other ships almost all of

02:15:09.040 them were repaired and sent back out into service the only other two that weren't besides the

02:15:14.580 arizona were just too old and too out of you know commission to really care about um but the arizona

02:15:20.840 is the one that took the brunt of it and i will tell you a couple years ago i interviewed um

02:15:24.600 Jim Downing, who I saw in your piece, who was such a special man, such a special man. So I flew out

02:15:31.660 and I met him in California with his family. He wasn't on the actual ship when it got hit,

02:15:36.460 but then he ran there and held the bodies of many men who were dying and said prayers to them and

02:15:42.680 continued to do so. We have a soundbite actually from Jim on the role of God for him during the

02:15:48.640 attack. I'll play it now. It's SOT 12. What role did God play for you that fateful day?

02:15:53.900 I thought I was going to be blown up.

02:15:57.760 And so my conversation with God is, I'll be with you in a minute.

02:16:03.980 But a minute went by for about 30 minutes, and I wasn't taken.

02:16:09.300 But I experienced the greatest peace I've ever had in my life, knowing that God's in charge.

02:16:16.720 He was 104 during that interview.

02:16:19.580 And the loveliest thing happened to him.

02:16:22.380 We talked about God, my connection to him, his connection.

02:16:25.680 And Jim wrote me the most thoughtful letter after that interview, thanking me.

02:16:31.240 Of course, it was I who needed to thank him.

02:16:33.660 He wrote me this long letter thanking me and encouraging me to do a couple of things to

02:16:37.720 renew my relationship with my faith and so on.

02:16:39.740 I wrote back to him.

02:16:40.680 And a pen pal relationship developed.

02:16:43.900 He would die not long thereafter in 2018.

02:16:47.320 But what a special, special dear man.

02:16:50.080 Jim was in the mail office, in the post office on the USS West Virginia.

02:16:56.520 So he read a lot of the letters that were sent home.

02:17:01.700 And the West Virginia was attacked on December 7th, 1941.

02:17:06.580 And to me, so he got to know personally the stories of the men on that battleship.

02:17:13.180 And there's been a lot written about Jim.

02:17:16.480 Jim, to me, represents the best of America. I think you were very fortunate to know somebody

02:17:25.180 like him. I think if we could somehow get back to the mindset of men like Jim, we'd be such a

02:17:38.440 better country for that. He was a hero, but he didn't think himself of a hero as himself as a

02:17:46.360 hero. And he read the letters home and he was kind of connected to everybody on the USS West

02:17:53.060 Virginia. And Pearl Harbor was such a turning point in the history of this world that he was

02:18:03.220 on that battleship and was reading the personal letters home of the people on that battleship.

02:18:08.820 And to me, he's one of those people I always admired and thought, wow, here's a guy who knew

02:18:14.700 the inner thinking of the people on the battleship and how they were scared and how they were looking

02:18:21.200 forward to their own futures of being doctors and lawyers and maybe curing cancer or Alzheimer's or

02:18:28.820 dementia. I mean, they had so many, they had so much potential, the men on at West Virginia and

02:18:34.400 Arizona and Oklahoma and Maryland and Nevada and everybody else. I think what could they have done

02:18:40.740 post-war that it would have changed the world. And Jim is one of those guys.

02:18:46.180 That's the thing is there, there were almost 3000 Jim Downings killed that day. You know,

02:18:52.620 they were all men like that. They were built differently back then. It's like the quality

02:18:57.160 of person that we lost in each one of those guys is, is just, it's hard to match. It makes you

02:19:03.260 miss them all the more and it makes you all the angrier. Though, by the way, Jim was not angry.

02:19:08.180 Of course, he was full of grace.

02:19:10.180 I did ask him a question.

02:19:11.960 Here's a follow-up between the two of us.

02:19:14.020 This is Sot 13.

02:19:15.740 You seem like you're a happy person.

02:19:17.460 Are you?

02:19:18.420 I am very happy.

02:19:20.200 I'm a realist.

02:19:21.400 I can't do anything about what happened yesterday.

02:19:26.360 I can't do much about what happens tomorrow.

02:19:30.040 Living today is so much fun.

02:19:32.660 So I live it up every day.

02:19:36.340 I love that.

02:19:38.080 We all need a little more Jim Downing in our lives.

02:19:41.880 He'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.

02:20:00.540 But that he also carries the burden of being a survivor.

02:20:04.260 and that's a tough burden for these guys you know why did i survive when the guy on the left of me

02:20:11.560 died and the guy on the right of me died i mean what what is my mission in life my mission in life

02:20:18.000 is is is to carry on to represent the qualities that my buddies who died you had and i think a

02:20:28.260 lot of the times you know i i joke with people i said you know when you're in normandy and you're

02:20:32.560 jumping into a foxhole, you're not asking if that guy's a Republican or a Democrat. You're just

02:20:38.960 jumping in that foxhole knowing that that guy's an American and that that guy is going to help you

02:20:44.560 survive and you're going to help him survive. So why can't we get back to that time where we're

02:20:52.780 looking at it as America first. America is not a party. It's an idea. It's an evolution

02:21:02.680 of what the founding fathers discussed.

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02:21:33.560 Pick some up today and while you're at it, check out Footy Prime Daily.

02:21:40.720 The day after Pearl Harbor on December 8th, 1941, the president of the United States, FDR,

02:21:49.600 addressed the nation in a speech that would become known for a century plus. Here's a bit of that.

02:21:56.860 December 7th, 1941, a date which will live in infamy. The United States of America

02:22:10.660 was suddenly and deliberately attacked

02:22:14.240 by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.

02:22:22.760 I mean, that's some 80 years ago,

02:22:25.260 and people still know that phrase,

02:22:27.140 a day that will live in infamy.

02:22:29.260 I can only imagine what that did

02:22:31.540 to the United States at the time.

02:22:33.500 You know, his address rousing

02:22:35.260 this same president who'd been with the country,

02:22:37.800 and we're not going to get into this,

02:22:38.860 the 88% saying, we're not going to get into this. And boy, as they say, what a difference a day

02:22:44.160 makes. We rallied behind the president as we rallied behind W on, you know, September 11th,

02:22:52.580 2001. And it just seems as though what I learned the most from World War II is that we're like an

02:22:59.540 old Irish family where they're like seven brothers and all we do is beat up on each other.

02:23:05.540 But if God forbid someone from outside the family beats up on one of the brothers, we all to come together and we respond.

02:23:15.200 And 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?

02:23:30.840 not what's best for the Republican Party or it's best for the Democratic Party or the

02:23:39.420 Independent Party. What is best for America? Why does it take us being attacked to come together

02:23:46.080 as a nation? In Roosevelt's speech, I mean, they detested Roosevelt. The Republicans detested

02:23:52.140 Roosevelt. A lot of the country detested Roosevelt because of the New Deal and because of everything

02:23:58.960 else he was pushing. And a lot of the country despised W. Bush because of what he was pushing.

02:24:05.420 But all of a sudden, because America was attacked, all of a sudden we came together and said,

02:24:12.600 here is our common goal. Our common goal is to do what's best for America.

02:24:18.560 And I always find that fascinating. I have to say, though,

02:24:23.320 I feel lucky to remember those times. I feel lucky to be one of the citizens who felt that

02:24:27.980 and remembers that America first feeling.

02:24:31.160 Like this is, we love our country and we love each other

02:24:34.160 and you mess with the family.

02:24:36.160 You know, you're going to pay, you're going to pay.

02:24:38.500 Well, back to World War II, pay they did. 0.79

02:24:41.240 We and Great Britain declared war on Japan.

02:24:45.500 Hitler decided to join in and declared war on us.

02:24:49.040 And it was off to the races.

02:24:51.140 He believed inaccurately that we would be too distracted

02:24:54.340 with the Japanese to fight him.

02:24:56.820 And he again, unlike the Japanese leader who you mentioned, Hitler underestimated us in a way that would be profound.

02:25:05.080 He didn't think that we had the resolve. He didn't think we had the military.

02:25:07.420 And he didn't think that despite our booming economy, we had the resources to fight on two fronts.

02:25:12.220 And he was wrong. He was wrong.

02:25:14.540 I mean, most of these people, the Japanese and the Germans, looked at the Americans as soft, that they didn't want war.

02:25:20.960 They 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.

02:25:29.440 And they were wrong. The Japanese were wrong. The Germans were wrong. 0.99

02:25:33.160 And they paid the price for that. 0.97

02:25:35.760 And 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

02:25:45.340 But Hitler's two main errors in World War II were declaring war on the Soviet Union and declaring war on the United States.

02:25:57.020 The 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.

02:26:07.980 Yes. Winston Churchill was the prime minister and in probably the best known speech ever.

02:26:15.140 I 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.

02:26:26.780 Here's Winston Churchill addressing the House of Commons June 4th, 1940.

02:26:31.460 We 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.

02:26:46.500 we shall fight on the beaches

02:26:48.560 we shall fight on the landing grounds

02:26:51.500 we shall fight in the fields

02:26:53.720 and in the streets

02:26:55.420 we shall fight in the hills

02:26:57.460 we shall never surrender

02:26:59.620 and if

02:27:00.880 which I do not for a moment believe

02:27:03.940 this island

02:27:05.660 or a large part of it

02:27:07.220 was subjugated and starving

02:27:09.480 then our empire

02:27:11.380 beyond the seas

02:27:13.180 armed and guarded by the British fleet

02:27:16.360 would carry on the struggle

02:27:18.560 until in God's good time

02:27:21.180 the new world

02:27:23.060 with all its power and might

02:27:25.040 steps forth to the rescue

02:27:27.020 and the liberation of the old.

02:27:32.120 That was June 4th, 1940

02:27:34.640 to the House of Commons.

02:27:35.860 The thing about Winston Churchill was,

02:27:37.380 I just recently read a biography on him,

02:27:39.520 if there was one thing he was great at,

02:27:41.280 it was wordsmithing.

02:27:42.520 And if you could take that to the next level

02:27:44.920 with Winston Churchill,

02:27:45.740 it was wordsmithing when it came to war, which was his particular area of expertise. It was a

02:27:51.180 skill he'd worked on his entire life. He was built for that moment, and he was ready for it when it

02:27:58.500 came. That was before they attacked us at Pearl Harbor. Great Britain was in it. They were dealing

02:28:02.740 with Hitler. They were dealing with everything, and he was the man who got Great Britain through 0.94

02:28:06.920 it, notwithstanding the fact that they would throw him out of office as soon as they won the war.

02:28:10.300 Sure. 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

02:28:24.600 And 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?

02:28:32.680 Masses of uniformed men, stupifying to the eye and incredible to the imagination, have stood in spellbound audience of the Führer. 0.70

02:28:39.140 I don't know, but he seems to be saying it rather well. 0.89

02:29:03.740 This is a guy with a speech impediment who's observing how effective a communicator Hitler was. 0.84

02:29:08.000 Exactly. There's a reason there's a reason so many Germans followed this lunatic down the incredible murderous hole that they did. 0.91

02:29:16.920 Yes. 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

02:29:33.500 By 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

02:29:50.140 So 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.

02:30:08.740 they said he motivated us enough to believe in him his oratory motivated us enough to believe in him

02:30:18.680 and he also controlled the media at that time and so the media message was his message

02:30:25.300 and and by the time they discovered or they found out about the concentration camps

02:30:30.820 and they found out about the jews and they found out about the the um the obsession with controlling

02:30:37.960 more territory, whether it be Czechoslovakia or the Soviet Union, it was too late. It was too 0.91

02:30:45.160 late for them to do anything. There would always be a resistance within the community, but the

02:30:51.640 resistance would never be strong enough to overthrow what had already been done.

02:31:00.900 Let's talk about it because the numbers are just stunning. You know, June 6, 1944, it was a Tuesday.

02:31:07.960 More than 156,000 American, British, and Canadian troops stormed 50 miles of Normandy's fiercely defended beaches in northern France.

02:31:17.760 And 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,

02:31:32.180 you can't help it as a lay person, but to feel like they were, they were sacrificed. There was

02:31:38.180 how on earth could we not lose some 50% of our forces undergoing that kind of an assault,

02:31:46.140 which we knew was going to happen. You know, we knew it was going to happen and we had laid

02:31:49.220 traps so they would think that we weren't going to storm Normandy and so on. And they fell for

02:31:53.040 our traps, but they were also prepared at Normandy as I understand it. And I just wonder as a,

02:31:57.960 as a historian, when you look at that, did we know the extent of the casualties we were likely

02:32:02.100 to take storming those beaches? We always believed as a country we were going to expect

02:32:09.040 more casualties than we actually attained on that day. The paratroopers, the addition of the

02:32:17.720 paratroopers, the 82nd Airborne and 101st Airborne, was something that was important to Eisenhower,

02:32:25.560 Not 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.

02:32:41.260 Can you imagine that one person writing a note saying, I have accepted the failure of the landings on the coast of Normandy?

02:32:53.620 And he did that.

02:32:54.940 He wrote two notes.

02:32:56.520 And one of them was because he did not know which way the battle would go.

02:33:02.660 And Normandy was a defining moment in the history of World War II.

02:33:07.600 And 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.

02:33:27.740 And 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.

02:33:43.520 And 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

02:33:59.540 So 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.

02:34:15.860 It was initiative that won D-Day for the Americans, as opposed to what the Germans were defending.

02:34:23.400 How much prep did we put into that effort before we actually launched the attack?

02:34:27.920 Tons, tons of prep.

02:34:29.540 tons of maps. Everything, again, looked great on paper. And this is where we're going to land.

02:34:36.700 This is where the 1st Infantry is going to land. This is where the 29th Infantry is going to land.

02:34:41.440 This is where the 82nd Airborne is going to land. This is where the 101st is going to land.

02:34:45.840 This is where the British are going to land. This is where the Canadians are going to land. This is 0.82

02:34:49.480 where the French are going to land. Everything went to hell in a handbasket as soon as D-Day began. 1.00

02:34:57.380 But 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

02:35:14.880 The Germans also had the disadvantage of Hitler having decided he would be commander in chief and he was a terrible military commander. 0.71

02:35:20.660 He 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

02:35:34.260 Whereas 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.

02:35:56.100 We lead ourselves. The toughest fighting was said to be on Omaha Beach. First waves of American

02:36:03.860 fighters were cut down in droves by the German machine gun fire as they scrambled across the

02:36:09.560 mine-riddled beach. But U.S. forces persisted all day, pushing forward to a fortified seawall,

02:36:17.540 up steep bluffs to take out the Nazi artillery by nightfall. And they say all told around 0.59

02:36:25.420 2,400 American troops were killed, wounded, or unaccounted for at Omaha Beach. The Canadians 0.76

02:36:30.660 were over at Juneau Beach having an equally, if not even tougher time. You have a documentary on

02:36:39.800 D-Day as well, and it has an extraordinary segment of survivors talking about that moment.

02:36:47.160 This moment of storming the beach at Normandy, I mean, it's a phrase now that people use to try

02:36:53.100 to describe courage in a few words or less, but you think about having to be one of those guys

02:36:59.540 and actually do it, understanding. It wasn't a mystery to them, the mines and the machine gun

02:37:05.240 fire that was about to come their way. And here is a couple minutes from Tim's documentary on what

02:37:11.620 that was like. As I was going into the beach, I could hear the bullets hitting on the side of the

02:37:17.340 ship, on the side of my boat. And then that's when I realized, I said, well, this isn't going to be

02:37:23.000 piece of cake this is for real I looked into the well of the boat and there was

02:37:31.580 35 soldiers in there and I don't think there was an atheist in there because

02:37:34.980 every one of us was making a sign of the cross as we were going in and I

02:37:42.800 happened to look. I looked to the right and I seen a boat. And then I realized what we

02:37:59.040 were going into. Our job was to roll up these obstacles. They had what they call hedgehogs

02:38:08.620 And then they had these telephone poles with a ramp, and on top of the telephone pole was a mine.

02:38:17.180 That was for when the tide came in.

02:38:20.540 The boats would just slide up there, and the mine would explode.

02:38:25.020 And our job was to blow up 50-yard gaps so the infantry could land.

02:38:38.620 I carried a rifle and a wet belt with canteen and ammunition and a rifle.

02:38:56.760 And I forgot how many pounds of explosives I had on my back.

02:39:01.820 I believe they called it tetra-tall.

02:39:03.540 and as I got to the ramp

02:39:08.160 of the small boat that was in to land

02:39:11.340 just as I jumped into the water

02:39:15.640 there was this explosion

02:39:17.620 and while I was underwater

02:39:20.900 maybe a couple of seconds

02:39:22.760 someone pulled me out

02:39:24.860 and I couldn't find anything

02:39:30.460 I couldn't find any of the crew

02:39:40.560 that I was attached to.

02:39:43.300 I found out later that

02:39:44.640 they were all killed.

02:39:54.880 I was the only one left.

02:39:59.300 Oh, wow.

02:40:00.460 American hero. And God bless you, Tim, for interviewing these guys and getting

02:40:04.960 their stories on camera. That was Day of Days by Tim Gray. And you should definitely watch that one

02:40:12.220 too. They're just humans. They seem superhuman, but they're just men. And they were young men

02:40:21.680 asked to do the most extraordinary things. And they did it without complaint and with valor.

02:40:26.920 ernie corvesi who you just heard from i said you know what did you do after the war he said i went

02:40:33.360 back to high school i mean can you imagine that going through the fact that you're a naval combat

02:40:39.560 demolition unit guy like today they're called frogmen or navy seals and seeing all of your guys

02:40:45.840 killed and then he went on to the philippines i said what'd you do after world war ii he said i

02:40:51.040 went back to high school and i said you know when i was in high school megan i would think i was still

02:40:55.580 sucking my thumb you know i i looked at that guy and i'm like thinking myself what um what an

02:41:02.040 incredible american you are to be able to accomplish that and and and then go back to 0.95

02:41:08.540 high school and finish high school and richard fazio the guy behind him who lived the first

02:41:13.440 half hour of saving private ryan and i and richard's still alive ernie passed away this year

02:41:19.100 unfortunately um but i but i look at them and i and i and i talk to young people today who are

02:41:25.980 17 or 18 years old and i go you know you this is what you're capable of i said whether you know it

02:41:31.820 or not you're capable of this you're capable of being the next greatest generation you know and

02:41:40.000 and and and they look at me like i'm a like i'm a alien from lost in space or something like that

02:41:45.820 And I said, these guys didn't think they were capable of doing that themselves at 17 or 18, but they did it.

02:41:53.380 Well, think of the sad obsession now with identity and, you know, skin color and gender and patriarchy.

02:42:01.680 It'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.

02:42:13.460 Think of what you could accomplish if you would take all of that time and energy and

02:42:18.940 devote it to something greater than yourself, if not a war, innovation, solve the problem

02:42:26.360 of the closure of those steel mines and the people looking for a new career or identity.

02:42:31.980 Find a way to help America find its new footing in the age of electronics and the supercomputers

02:42:38.960 and so on. That's what we need all the energies devoted to, not navel-gazing, selfies, and

02:42:46.180 hysterical focus on things over which we will never have any control.

02:42:50.860 Yeah, people base their self-worth today on how many likes they get. And that generation did not,

02:42:57.400 they based their life on coming out of the Depression and surviving the Depression when

02:43:02.880 their parents went from lawyer to selling apples. And they fought World War II as a war

02:43:08.800 and they fought it as a job and they came home and they raised their kids on the values that

02:43:15.140 they learned during the war and and and the attributes that they brought home and there's

02:43:20.460 just there's too much there's too much that's that's going by the wayside to to make America

02:43:26.760 a great country there are too many you know there's too much divisiveness and this is what

02:43:32.780 these guys fought about. They fought against Mussolini. They fought against Hitler. They

02:43:40.340 fought against all these things that were trying to tear America apart. And I think of when I walk

02:43:47.440 through the cemetery in Normandy, I look at the names from Connecticut and Montana and California

02:43:52.860 and other places. And I said, this kid who was 18 or 19 could have cured autism or cancer or

02:44:01.540 dementia or Alzheimer's or all of these things that we're battling today, if he had the chance,

02:44:07.620 if he wasn't killed on June 6th or June 15th or something like that. And I think to myself,

02:44:14.920 boy, oh boy, you know, what a wasted opportunity that this young man buried in the cemetery under

02:44:22.580 this white cross or Star of David could have changed the world, but instead, you know, was

02:44:28.780 killed on June 6, 1944. And I just think, what if? What if? What would this country be? And

02:44:38.300 I look at that. I've been to cemeteries all over the world in Manila, where there are 35,000

02:44:44.920 missing in action buried, you know, on the wall of the missing there, or the Punchbowl in Hawaii,

02:44:51.220 or Holland, or Belgium. I said, geez, what is their, what would have been their destiny?

02:44:57.520 And 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?

02:45:09.960 What would they have grown to do?

02:45:12.920 Those poor families, though, have a different, such a different outcome. 0.81

02:45:16.680 At least we got to declare victory in World War II.

02:45:20.840 And there was zero doubt about who were the bad guys, who were the good guys, and whether it was worth it. 0.60

02:45:26.780 Yeah. We don't know that today. And today, these soldiers go through a situation where

02:45:31.520 when they're fighting, they don't know who. I mean, in World War II, the Germans wore helmets

02:45:36.940 where we could identify them. The Japanese wore helmets and uniforms where we could identify them. 0.55

02:45:43.020 And today in Iraq and Afghanistan and other countries, we don't know if that 12-year-old

02:45:48.680 is the enemy or not. And that adds an entire layer of stress to these men and women who are fighting

02:45:56.040 that I just can't imagine.

02:45:58.620 Yeah.

02:45:59.440 Can't imagine.

02:46:00.280 Well, you were not the only one

02:46:03.060 floored by the sacrifices made by our troops.

02:46:07.060 You had mentioned Rommel,

02:46:09.340 German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel.

02:46:11.880 Well, you've got a soundbite

02:46:13.840 from his son, Manfred Rommel.

02:46:18.580 And his dad had left the front lines

02:46:20.660 to attend his wife's 50th birthday party on D-Day.

02:46:24.520 And you actually got sound from his son, which is pretty extraordinary.

02:46:27.880 Listen to how he reacted, SOT-21.

02:46:54.520 My father was away from the theater, and some others as well.

02:47:01.800 He said, this is very painful.

02:47:07.520 They are learning while I'm not there.

02:47:10.780 The British and Americans were more courageous than the Germans concerning the better. 0.79

02:47:16.540 Put that into context.

02:47:17.480 It's a little tough to understand for the listening audience, Tim.

02:47:20.460 What was he saying there?

02:47:21.660 Well, 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.

02:47:37.960 He believed that the Allies would land in better weather conditions.

02:47:40.880 So Manfred Rommel's father had gone home for his wife Lucy's 50th birthday and bought her shoes in Paris.

02:47:51.660 So 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.

02:48:04.700 And Erwin Rommel's headquarters at Le Roche-Guillon, which is outside of Paris, was unoccupied by Rommel on D-Day.

02:48:14.600 Rommel should have been there on D-Day to direct the forces, to direct the German forces.

02:48:19.700 And 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.

02:48:31.800 And so Manfred was home watching his father's reaction, getting the telephone call back in Herlingen, Germany, that the Allies had landed in Normandy.

02:48:43.320 And here he is in Germany.

02:48:45.080 And Manfred, you know, articulated that.

02:48:48.500 Manfred 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.

02:49:12.100 And 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.

02:49:31.340 So Manfred Rommel, who passed away several years ago, gave us this perspective of what

02:49:36.720 it was like to be a 13 or 14 year old in the German army, but to witness his father's reaction

02:49:42.620 to these momentous events.

02:49:45.480 Extraordinary.

02:49:45.820 And him relaying his father saying the Americans and the Canadians, the Brits, they were just

02:49:50.740 more courageous.

02:49:51.920 That's extraordinary.

02:49:52.920 Your jaw must have dropped when you got that soundbite.

02:49:57.020 Well, it did.

02:49:57.740 It 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.

02:50:10.500 And 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.

02:50:20.560 But he was also an observer to some of the most momentous events in World War II.

02:50:26.260 and um to to have him in some of our films was just one of those things where you just it's just

02:50:32.680 dumb luck that we got him when he was alive and and filmmakers are are are always um a dumb luck

02:50:41.080 is always part of being a good filmmaker whether you're kim burns or or anybody else but but to 0.78

02:50:46.180 have his perspective yeah to have his perspective on that was was incredible and um you know he was

02:50:53.520 firmly in the belief that the Allies would not land in bad weather on June 6, 1944, and that's

02:50:59.360 exactly what Eisenhower did. Within a year, Hitler would surrender. The Japanese would be another

02:51:06.380 story. It would take two atom bombs to make them finally surrender. And I want to get to the USS 1.00

02:51:17.000 Missouri, which was the ship on which the surrender papers were signed. And just an aside

02:51:23.500 as to John McCain, Senator John McCain's grandfather, who was on the ship reluctantly.

02:51:32.220 He had wanted to get back home. He knew they won. He was ready to get back home to his family. And

02:51:38.460 tell us what happened. Well, you know, it was just a situation where we had dropped two bombs on

02:51:45.080 Japan. And the Japanese military, the army especially, still did not want to surrender.

02:51:52.220 So we dropped bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the Japanese army did not want to surrender,

02:51:59.260 even after two atomic bombs, which is absolutely nuts. But then the Emperor Hirohito decided,

02:52:07.080 you know, enough is enough. So when Hirohito decides enough is enough, the Japanese military,

02:52:12.580 the army decides they want to assassinate Hirohito. So we had planned to invade Japan in 0.95

02:52:22.740 November of that year of 1945, and the casualties would have been in the millions, and Japan

02:52:27.300 probably would have been wiped off the face of the earth. So it goes to show you that when the

02:52:33.760 surrender was officially signed by the Japanese, Hirohito was the emperor and decided enough was

02:52:41.080 enough, the Japanese military still, after two atomic bombs, wanted to continue the fight. 0.72

02:52:47.640 So when we knew at that point, Truman knew at that point that the Japanese were willing to

02:52:54.320 defend their homeland to the last, whether that be children with spears and women and men and

02:53:01.160 everybody else with everything else, he decided we would drop two atomic bombs. And those who

02:53:08.840 served in the Pacific, totally agreed. And those who had served in Europe, totally agreed. We've

02:53:14.880 never come across a World War II veteran who said that we should not have dropped the atomic bombs

02:53:20.680 on Japan. Now we're looking at this at a 20th century lens. We're not looking at this at a

02:53:26.800 21st century lens. Atomic bombs today are devastating. We do not want them. We do not

02:53:32.700 want russia to to drop an atomic bomb on the ukraine we we feel as though as that would be

02:53:39.000 just you know but in 1945 and the lens that we're looking at in the 21st in the 20th century 0.77

02:53:46.720 that was the appropriate thing to do to save lives so the surrender in tokyo bay

02:53:54.500 on the uss missouri was attended by you know the navy and marines and the japanese and they

02:54:00.820 finally decided to surrender. But at that point, the Japanese army still did not want to surrender.

02:54:06.600 So that tells you the fanaticism of what the Americans were going to face or the allies,

02:54:12.580 the Russians, everybody else were going to face if they invaded Japan in 1945, November of 1945. 0.54

02:54:18.980 So Japan would have been wiped off the face of the earth. We would have suffered another million

02:54:23.100 plus casualties. We'd already printed another million purple hearts in anticipation of the

02:54:28.500 fight in Japan. So Truman decided enough is enough. This world war needs to end. And it

02:54:34.860 eventually did end, but only because Emperor Hirohito decided that enough was enough and that

02:54:40.580 the Japanese were defeated. And even then, Japanese did not apologize and have never apologized 0.93

02:54:47.540 for Pearl Harbor or starting World War II in the Pacific. And that has always been a sticking 0.97

02:54:53.920 point for the United States that Japan has never apologized for that. And Japan always felt that

02:55:00.800 the war in the Pacific was legitimate and that it was caused by the oil embargo and the embargo of

02:55:07.920 natural resources and that they were forced to do what they did. So Japan has never officially

02:55:13.180 apologized for Pearl Harbor or starting World War II in the Pacific. And that's always been a 0.96

02:55:17.540 little sticking point with Pacific veterans. I know one veteran who was at home one day

02:55:23.280 And 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.

02:55:42.740 And his son came running out and said, what are you doing? And he said, I'm not going to let you

02:55:48.740 drive this Japanese motorcycle. And his son said, why not? And his dad had to explain to him why. 1.00

02:55:56.320 And those feelings still linger with veterans of the Pacific War. And I tell people today

02:56:02.580 that the Pacific War and the European War were two different wars. They were two specific wars.

02:56:08.600 They 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.

02:56:30.320 And 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.

02:56:37.740 It was a free-for-all.

02:56:39.240 It was just a total, absolutely bloody free-for-all compared to what was going on in Europe. 0.90

02:57:00.320 France. Chocolate creme brulee had the richest finishes. Canadian fireworks really showed up

02:57:04.740 big too. And Mexico's caramel churro ice cap gave me chills. We are, of course, talking about Tim's

02:57:10.460 taste of the globe lineup. New globally inspired Timbits and ice cap flavors available at Tim

02:57:14.860 Horton's for a limited time. Pick some up today. And while you're at it, check out Footy Prime Daily.

02:57:23.680 We've only touched briefly on the Holocaust and what happened there.

02:57:26.920 Hitler's atrocities were discovered in full. He took his own life on April 30th, 1945,

02:57:34.600 about a week before his country surrendered, as I pointed out, Japan would come later.

02:57:41.140 The story about the Missouri that I thought was kind of interesting, just because people know the

02:57:44.360 name John McCain, so it's a modern day reference that they can relate to, is his granddad was on

02:57:50.380 the Missouri when the surrender papers were signed. He didn't want to be there. He wanted

02:57:55.680 to go home to his wife. He then got, his commanding officer said, you will stay here

02:57:59.580 because you were critical to all of this. We want you to be there. So he stayed. He went home to his

02:58:05.180 wife. And this is again, John McCain's granddad. And I think it was four days later while celebrating

02:58:12.880 his coming home party with his wife, he dropped dead of a heart attack. Yeah. A death that was

02:58:18.740 on the front page of the paper. That's how important he was to us. And it explains so much

02:58:23.140 about how John McCain wound up in military service.

02:58:25.540 And he, of course, would be tortured

02:58:27.360 and endured terrible things during,

02:58:29.360 and just, you know, his legacy

02:58:31.700 and his family's legacy of sacrifice for country.

02:58:35.740 It was only, I think, 61.

02:58:37.440 It was a young man,

02:58:38.660 but just the stresses of the war

02:58:40.420 would take lives well beyond the end date of the surrender.

02:58:44.500 Yeah, I just had the opportunity about a month ago

02:58:46.900 to visit John McCain's grave

02:58:48.280 at the Naval Academy in Annapolis.

02:58:50.680 And also Steve Belichick, who was the father of Bill Belichick, and others at the Naval Academy.

02:58:58.340 And there are others who are buried at Arlington who are in the same boat, you know, just men who served.

02:59:07.300 And our mission as a foundation is that we never forget that generation.

02:59:12.300 And unfortunately, it takes December 7th or September 11th for us to all of a sudden discover the American flag.

02:59:19.180 And 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.

02:59:29.400 But we do have the potential, and I underline that word potential, to come together for causes that can help America as a whole.

02:59:38.760 I would love to think that we'll do it.

02:59:40.840 I mean, the problem is now even hanging the flag is considered a partisan act.

02:59:44.840 I 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.

02:59:50.720 That's absurd.

02:59:51.440 There are still a lot of Democrats who love the flag, but it's being made into a partisan symbol.

02:59:58.380 Can I just spend a minute on this and I'll wrap it up?

03:00:00.740 But 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?

03:00:17.640 Yeah. 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.

03:00:32.240 um and that's the only situation um if you were on the arizona let's say you spent the night in

03:00:38.740 honolulu on the night of december 7th you're not eligible but if you were on the arizona on december

03:00:44.480 7th 1941 and um you would like to go and rejoin and rejoin your your crewmates um the the folks

03:00:53.040 at pearl harbor and the united states navy will make that happen so your urn will be taken by

03:00:57.280 divers, down to turret number four and placed among the 42 or so urns who have been placed

03:01:06.480 in turret number four since this all started in the early 1980s.

03:01:11.280 If you're a Pearl Harbor survivor and you want your ashes brought back to Pearl Harbor,

03:01:15.660 they can be spread in the harbor as well, or brought back to the USS Utah, which was

03:01:20.760 a battleship also at Pearl Harbor.

03:01:23.440 It was not an active battleship.

03:01:25.340 But 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.

03:01:39.660 So 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.

03:01:50.920 and at some point in their life they decide that they want to rejoin their crewmates

03:01:58.240 and one guy raymond harry who is from the state of rhode island never talked about the uss arizona

03:02:06.220 after after pearl harbor he never mentioned the fact that he had a strong connection but on his

03:02:14.020 deathbed he decided that he wanted to rejoin his crewmates so it was left up to his granddaughter

03:02:20.700 to carry the urn back through New Jersey and Dallas and Honolulu.

03:02:26.120 Now hear this. Master Chief Raymond Harry, effective immediately.

03:02:31.000 Shore duty is canceled. Report back to USS Arizona, to your appointed place of duty, and assume the watch.

03:02:38.380 As we bring Raymond Harry to his final resting place here on Earth,

03:02:41.900 we pray that your blessings and your peace will be upon all those who rest here.

03:02:47.060 For Raymond's remains will now rest alongside many of his former shipmates,

03:02:51.300 even as his spirit reunites with them in your heavenly kingdom.

03:02:55.340 It is your most holy name that I pray. Amen.

03:02:57.600 It's always an honor to dive the Arizona, and the ultimate honor is to be able to bring

03:03:19.940 one of the sailors back home.

03:03:27.600 The last thing that the family sees is the urn passing into the water and into the ship.

03:03:48.220 And to have divers at the USS Arizona in a ceremony take his urn and bring his urn back

03:03:56.000 to turret number four on the Arizona and put it in there with about 42 other urns.

03:04:01.480 And to me, it's probably one of those most amazing things I've ever witnessed is a man

03:04:06.260 who never, ever talked about Pearl Harbor, who never, ever wanted to go back to visit

03:04:12.160 Pearl Harbor post-World War II, was offered the chance to go back and see the memorial

03:04:17.940 that was built and to see the oil that was leaking from the battleship, to smell the

03:04:25.280 oil that was leaking from the battleship. He never wanted anything to do with it, never wanted to

03:04:29.160 talk about it. But on his deathbed, he decided, I want to rejoin my crewmates. One of the Navy diver

03:04:35.280 who is responsible for lowering the remains in said as follows in one report, quote,

03:04:41.400 it's a large hole. We place the urn through and then you can kind of feel it release. I tell the

03:04:47.820 family when I feel that pull, it's the ship accepting back one of its own. Oh, my goodness. 0.99

03:04:54.520 I 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.

03:05:09.660 I mean, that to me tells me that the defining moment of their lives happened when they were 17 or 18 years old.

03:05:16.960 The defining moment of their life didn't happen when they were 40 or 50 or 60 or 30.

03:05:22.660 it happened when they were a teenager it happened when they were 18 or 20 years old

03:05:28.960 and and and that to me is an incredible thing to have the defining moment of your life

03:05:34.280 happen when you're a teenager and to know that anything else you did in the rest of your life

03:05:39.740 would be insignificant to what happened during your time in world war ii and a lot of these guys

03:05:45.720 took such risks after the war they started their own businesses they became cab drivers or plumbers

03:05:52.180 or Jack Taylor founded Enterprise Rent-A-Car

03:05:55.380 or the men who came back founded U-Haul

03:05:58.420 because they had been through the worst of their life.

03:06:01.580 They had been through the ultimate risk in their life

03:06:04.140 that anything else after that was just gravy.

03:06:08.100 And I find that fascinating.

03:06:10.980 They never accept the word hero.

03:06:15.240 Oh no, they'll kick you. 0.99

03:06:16.840 They'll kick you in the knee. 0.99

03:06:18.660 They won't allow it. 0.71

03:06:20.100 You've documented that as well.

03:06:21.900 And this is one of the soundbites that jumped out at us.

03:06:25.160 So beautiful from, this is again from your second piece on D-Day, Remembered, Sat 22.

03:06:32.360 I'm not the hero.

03:06:33.900 I'm not the hero.

03:06:36.720 I'm just a survivor.

03:06:38.400 The heroes, most of the heroes over there under the white crosses that you all know about,

03:06:43.700 and their mothers and their fathers and their brothers and their sisters,

03:06:47.060 and even their children and some of those people,

03:06:49.040 those are the heroes of this war.

03:06:51.900 We're the survivors now, and I'm glad you feel that way.

03:06:55.300 And I hope you always do, because democracy and liberty are too precious.

03:07:02.040 And until I came over here, I didn't realize how precious it was.

03:07:08.800 Yeah.

03:07:09.660 Yeah, that was Chris Heisler.

03:07:10.960 Chris was in the 507th Parachute Infantry Regiment.

03:07:14.120 He was landed on D-Day and was taken prisoner on June 7th, 1944.

03:07:19.280 for and um and and if you call these men heroes um they will cut you off right away and they will

03:07:28.740 say the heroes are buried in these cemeteries and they're just there's that survivor's guilt

03:07:34.160 i think that any veteran faces that why why the guy in the left of me was killed and why the guy

03:07:39.000 in the right of me was killed and why i was spared and that generation is really in tune with that

03:07:45.840 And so when I make the mistake every blue moon of saying, you know, hey, you're a real hero, I know.

03:07:54.040 And 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.

03:08:05.660 And I said, God, how humble is that?

03:08:08.360 Before we go, I'm going to end it on this.

03:08:09.720 on D-Day, FDR, who was president, he died in office. That's why Truman took over by the time 0.68

03:08:16.040 we dropped the bomb, offered remarks to the country, which was unaware that this battle

03:08:22.120 was underway and concerned for their loved ones who were over there fighting this treacherous

03:08:27.720 fight. And in part, he offered the following prayer. Listen.

03:08:32.140 Almighty God, our sons, pride of our nation

03:08:39.220 this day have set upon a mighty endeavor

03:08:43.360 a struggle to preserve our republic

03:08:46.740 our religion and our civilization

03:08:50.720 and to set free a suffering humanity

03:08:55.080 lead them straight and true

03:08:59.100 Give strength to their arms

03:09:02.600 Stoutness to their hearts

03:09:04.520 Steadfastness in their faith

03:09:07.720 They will need thy blessings

03:09:11.140 Their road will be long and hard

03:09:14.820 For the enemy is strong

03:09:18.120 He may hurl back our forces

03:09:20.300 Success may not come with rushing speed

03:09:25.220 but we shall return again and again and we know that by thy grace and by the righteousness of our

03:09:35.700 cause our sons will triumph those words from fdr a mighty endeavor a struggle to preserve our

03:09:44.380 republic our religion and our civilization and to set free a suffering humanity our sons will

03:09:51.160 triumph. And they did. They did triumph. And they have the gratitude of generations after generations

03:09:58.600 here in America and beyond. Tim, thank you so much. It's been a pleasure getting to meet you

03:10:03.480 and getting to watch your work. Keep it up. All the best to you. Thank you, Megan. It's been great

03:10:09.060 to watch your career as well and keep up your great work as well. God bless America. Yes, definitely.

03:10:14.900 thanks for listening to the megan kelly show no bs no agenda and no fear 0.98

The Megyn Kelly Show - May 17, 2026

Deep Dives on World War I and World War II - Megyn's History Mega-Episode

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