The Truth About World War II, Henry Ford’s Controversial Past, and America’s Atomic Decisions

Even if it was after Hiroshima, they had three days and they said we're not going to surrender. So they dropped another one on Nagasaki. Then, even then, there was an attempted coup to kidnap the emperor. So it would have been Okinawa ten times worse. They were experimenting, had no idea. They didn't know what was going to happen in New Mexico. Unfortunately, it was tragic that such a devastating weapon had to be used to stop more devastating killing. Hello and welcome. This is Victor Davis Hanson, In His Own Words. This is our Friday edition. We have a special edition. We're going to look at some questions from readers on World War II, the Iran War, and on Israel. And if we have time, we may do more on culture. But we'll take those three. And we're going to look at some questions from readers on World War II, the Iran War, and on Israel. And that will be the show today. So stay with us. And we'll be right back after these messages. A disturbing curriculum is being used in hundreds of schools around the country. And many parents don't even know. It's called Rights, Respect, and Responsibility, or the three R's. But behind those simple words are lessons with graphic depictions of naked children requiring young children to name and identify genitalia. This isn't a health concern. It's not a curriculum. It's extremely explicit sex ed material pushed on kids as young as five. And parents who are sounding the alarm on it in one state report that their school district has been ignoring them. Our friends at Alliance Defending Freedom are gathering 100,000 signatures on a petition to get this program out of schools and to protect parents' right to direct their kids' education. Sign the petition by texting Hanson. That's Hanson to 83848. Or visit joinadf.com slash Hanson. Welcome back. Victor Davis Hanson in his own words. Victor's the Martin and Neely Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution. And the Wayne and Marsha Buskey Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College. You can find him at his website, victorhansen.com. And the name of that website is The Blade of Perseus. Please come join us there. We have lots available, especially for ultra-subscribers. We have two articles and a special video for the ultra-subscribers. And then you can get everything if you just want a free subscription. Come on and you can get Victor's articles that are out, his podcasts, links to his podcasts, and his books. So please come join us there. So, Victor, I know that you had this conversation with me. I had some corrections to make first on this show. I don't think they're quite, they're adjustments. I had some queries. The first one was, I did not say that the Cornell 7 had broken the law. I made it very distinct, as two readers, I think, failed to note. I said it was unethical. Not that it was illegal. I don't know whether it was illegal or not. It seems that she's given Jane Doe. She's given so many contradictory statements that her testimony in any future trial would be torn apart by a good trial lawyer. But I did say that she was intoxicated. She was under 21 and was drinking. She went into a very unwise situation. People like Camelia Pally have brilliantly exposed how naive women are on campus when they demand equal sexuality as is. But I don't think that's the case. I don't think that's the case. Which they have, of course, I don't mean equal, but they want to be as adventurous as males without considering that maybe they're biologically wired to be a little bit more civilized when it comes to sex. And then the idea that she would go up into a room and immediately one of the boys would suggest a threesome when she was drunk. And then other boys would join in sexual congress later. And then they would broadcast at least in one conference. That's. not a good word in strategic terms, but we were pledging our national security to protect North America. And by that, I meant if you're going to have a nuclear exchange or you're going to have attacks by drones or aircraft, they're going to come over the Arctic Circle, the shortest route. And Canada is going to be first in line. But we would use our 400 F-35s. We have about 2,500 combat aircraft. They have 78. And we have a much bigger Navy. So they would be protected by us. And in a nuclear standoff, it would be implicit that our enemies, China or Russia, would threaten New York or Washington more than they would, say, Ontario or Alberta, the provinces, or maybe Montreal or Toronto. And Trump made that explicit today. He said that the price of the Golden Dome protection would be $61 billion. If Canada wants to have their skies protected from intercontinental attack, they can pony up $61 billion, which is pretty close to the $50 billion surplus. So I think there was a connection he must have been making. But maybe somebody in his administration has been listening. And he gave an out. He said, of course, if anybody in Canada wants to join the United States, then they get complete protection. And I don't think it quite works like that way. If, say, Alberta said, well, I want to be an American, part of America, so I'm protected by U.S. missiles. So then there's a missile coming close to Manitoba or Saskatchewan. And we would say, well, let's wait a minute and see if it's in Alberta or there or, you know, in one megaton. It won't make much difference. I think he's playing, too, with the Quebecois separatist movement is getting a little stronger with Carney. And his antics didn't work. If his idea was to whip up nationalism with Canada and now the September jobs market report came out, they lost over another 25,000 jobs. And they had 40 before. He's going to ruin that economy. Everybody should tell him, please stop. Take a breath. We don't hate the Americans. The Americans don't hate us. We profit. They profit. We can work this out. Mr. Carney, just swallow your globalist pride, sit down, pop a Valium, take a martini, chill out, call Donald and say, hi, Donald. This is ridiculous. I kind of went crazy. Give me five years and I will lower that trade deficit by $10 billion a year. And we'll even it out. And if you get a $10 billion surplus or I do one way, it's not going to matter. Then let's work individually. We're going to work together. We're not going to work together. We're not going to allow the Chinese that have a million Uyghurs in the labor camp and are antithetical to all Canadian values and are the biggest mercantile cheaters in history. We're not going to allow them to dump cheap products so that we can reassemble it and send it to you and therefore aid them in avoiding your tariffs. We're not going to do that. So let's just get back and we'll keep – we'll have another two million in Canada coming up to live there and you're going to love them as you do. And you're going to have another two million. You're going to have another 250,000. And then he can say, you know, I don't want to repeat this, but you were right about this green madness. We've got to stop that because it's so expensive. We see what California is doing with 40 cent a kilowatt energy and we don't want to follow that. We have all these natural gas resources and oil. So we're going to develop that. And we looked at what you guys did with 10 million people coming in in four years. And you were bigger than that. And we are. We're getting up to 45 percent, first and second generation. And we can't acculturate or assimilate that. And we're going to take a look at that. And we understand that you guys are appalled by the euthanasia. And, you know, we don't have the resources. So maybe people got carried away and thought this was a way of saving money by offering death to the near dead or maybe not even that. So we're going to look at that. And if he just said that. It would be all over in a minute. And he and he could. But he'd have to drop his little. I can't believe I'm only prime minister of Canada. I was in charge of the Bank of England. I was a big globalist banker. I was a citizen of three countries. I went to all the Davos conferences. I looked like a globalist Macron. I can't just settle for PM of Canada. I've got to change it into. I'm prime minister of the middle nations and Canada's leading under my aegis and America won't lead anymore. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Your ego is making a lot of Canadians suffer for no reason. Yeah. I mean, it doesn't take a genius to know that doing commerce with the biggest economy in the world is going to way outdo the EU or China. Oh, my gosh. And together. Right. Well, they're calm. Put it this way. 1.4 billion people is 20 trillion, almost 21, and 450 million is 21. So, you're talking about almost 2 billion people and we have a third of a billion, right? They have 2 billion and we have a third of a billion. So, they have six times what we do. Yeah. Six times the population. We have $10 trillion greater GDP. You put them together. They have 42 trillion and we have, I think now, 32 trillion. So, we're almost where they are with 2 billion people at the helm of their economy and we only have 345 million. So, Canada should take a great look at that. We like you, Canadians. Yeah, we do. We just feel bad for you that he riled you all up and he didn't tell you what was going on or he didn't tell you the truth and he didn't tell you the truth. And he didn't tell you what you're vulnerable and he didn't tell you what Donald Trump is a little different. Yeah. And so, just, Mr. Carney, if you're listening, just call up and say mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. But don't tell anybody I said that, Don. Don't tell anybody I caved. Just say it was a mutual agreement and let's cut a deal. And they will. Yeah. I still think it's like Agamemnon and Achilles arguing over birds. Yeah. And neither one's going to let go. They're like pit bulls with their egos. Donald Trump says that they, well, he has a point. They were our closest friend and only two countries have gone public against the trade negotiations. Yeah. And Canada was one. But it would have been all right if it was Canada, France, Germany, and UK. Yeah. It was Canada and communist China. Yeah, I know. That was a problem. It would want to be aligned with Canada. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It would have been all right if it was Canada, France, Germany, and UK. Yeah. Yeah, I know. That was a problem. It would want to be aligned with them. Yeah. Okay, Victor. Well, let's welcome our first sponsor here for Friday. It is MyPatriotSupply. Winter storms have a way of exposing how quickly normal life can stop. The power goes out, the furnace stops, roads become dangerous, stores get picked over, and once the storm is already on top of you, your options shrink pretty fast. Our friends at MyPatriotSupply told us they saw this firsthand last winter when the major storms threatened their Vesta indoor heater and stove became one of the hottest preparedness items of the season. It sold out again and again as people rushed to prepare at the last minute. That's exactly why we created a winter prep bundle to help you get ahead of the storm this time. It includes 114 servings of emergency food with real meals you can count on. The Vesta indoor heater and stove became one of the hottest preparedness items of the season. It's a great way to save money for your family, friends, and friends. It's a great way to save money for your family and friends. find anything for 20 years. And then I found a book written in the 1970s that said Henry Ford was one of the first and largest supporters. From what I understand, he was an anti-Semite, so that would make sense. Do you have any insight on this theory? Thanks in advance if you find time to answer. Henry Ford was not shy about his anti-Semitism, and he was an isolationist, and he believed, to quote Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama's personal pastor, Dem Jews were getting the United States too close to, involved in European affairs, kind of the Tucker Carlson, Daryl Cooper conspiracy, and were getting us in a war. That's not true, but that's what Henry Ford felt. And if you look at Standard Oil helping Germany, with drilling techniques, we were the masters as we are today in petroleum engineering. So Standard Oil had two close ties with the Nazi government that came into power, not in 1939 or 40, but 1933, 40, and then they were forced to break off. And the Germans did not invent assembly line vehicle production, nor did the Russians. That was Henry Ford, and he sent a lot of engineers into Germany with profitable exchange contracts, and they helped the German economy. There's no doubt about that. And then during the lead-up to World War II, when things got really hot in 1939 after the invasion of Poland, there were a lot of outspoken Americans, Charles Lindbergh, Father Coughlin, Henry Ford, and so on. And then during the lead-up to World War II, there were a lot of outspoken Americans, Charles Lindbergh, Father Coughlin, Henry Ford, and so on. And then during the lead-up to World War II, when things got really hot in 1939 after the invasion of Poland, there were a lot of outspoken Americans, Charles Lindbergh, Father Coughlin, Henry Ford, that said, don't get into that war, and don't let the Jews, just because Hitler hates Jews, don't let him push us into that. So that's the, I don't know to what degree he directly funded the Nazi party, but he helped the German economy through trade and normalization, as did Standard Oil. Yeah. Oh, Standard Oil did, and then German companies as well. They had interlocking partnerships. Yeah. And the Germans learned a lot from us about mass production. They never realized, they never got away with their calibration obsessions to make everything so precise that they would be hard to maintain. They were more like craftsmen and artists than just, let's make it something that we can maintain, and it's easy to fix, and it's easy to use. They were more like the British Jaguar or Bentley. They were craftsmen. We weren't. So the Sherman tank, as I said many times, 10 hours on the road for one hour maintenance, a Panther or Tiger, one hour to one hour. Wow, that's brutal. Okay, let's turn to Robert Collins. He has three questions, so I'll just take each one and you can answer. Who was the greatest hero of World War II, Audie Murphy or Carl Timmerman? Do you know Carl Timmerman? I don't know Carl. I know Audie Murphy. He was the German. Well, let me just answer it this way. We were only in the war four years, and we were really only in the European theater three. We didn't invade North Africa until November of 42. So we were there from November until, then we occupied January, February. Then we didn't invade Sicily to summer of 42. So we didn't invade North Africa until November of 42. So we didn't invade Normandy until November of 43. And then we didn't invade Normandy until 44. And then it was only from June 6 to May 9. It was only 11 months. So obviously when you look at war heroes in terms of how long do they fight, how many people did they kill if they were infantrymen, how many tanks, like Whitman, for example, the tank master. There was a German dentist, and he. I'll recall his name because I'm doing this without prep. But there was a German dentist that took out reportedly 500 Soviet tanks. And there were German aces that shot down over 300 planes, mostly on the. They weren't fighting against British pilots and Spitfires. And they weren't fighting against Mustangs and Thunderbolts to rack up that great number. But if you look at the actual. The actual heroics of Audie Murphy in Italy, especially, it was pretty hard to match what he did. I mean, he was wounded. He saved. Killed, I don't know, 28 people. He held off. He was a genuine hero. And then he was. He wasn't a great actor by nature, but he really developed his acting skills. So when you watch those Westerns, The Unforgiven, for example, with Audrey Hepburn and Doug McClure, and. And Doug McClure, and. And Doug McClure, Burt Lancaster, and he's one of the brothers. He does a really good job. And it was tragic. He got killed in an accident. I think he was 40. I don't know how a person can go through that and be severely wounded and be the most decorated infantryman in World War II on the American side, and then die in an accident. Peace times. Yeah, that's so sad. So you're an Audie Murphy fan. I'm not sure who Carl Timmerman is. I saw Carl Timmerman on the show, and I was like, "Oh, my God. That's so sad." I was like, "Oh, my God. That's so sad." : called the Ludendorff Bridge. And it was part of the German rail plan in World War I. And the idea was that Germany was always prepared for a two-front war against countries whose assets were larger than their own. So they had a population at the maximum of about 70 to 80 million, depending on the borders of Germany. So the idea under the Kaiser and Ludendorff and Hindenburg was we have to have the most sophisticated rail laterals in the world. So if we need 200 divisions in the Eastern Front and 200 in the Western, they can be interchangeable. And that happened, of course, in 1918 and February of 1917 in the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, what took Russia out of the war. They had about a million men in Russia, and they got them within a week to, in World War I, War I, 400,000 of them. They should have taken them all over, but they added 400,000 to the Western Front. So that bridge then in World War II, they were blowing all the bridges on the Rhine to stop the Americans. But what the Germans didn't realize that with Bailey bridges and modern engineering, they could make at least temporary bridges across. So they ordered the bridge to be blown up. And the Americans, the 1st Division got there first, and they disabled a lot of the charges so that it was only partially blown up. And then for the next, I don't know what it was, 12 days or 14 or something, they tried everything. They tried jet bombers to blow it up. But by that time, everybody should remember that George Patton had already snuck over the Rhine with the 3rd Army by building his own bridge. And he said, we had this great extravaganza with paratroopers and artillery and press. But it was very valuable to get there first and get across very quickly. But the Germans didn't realize that ultimately, we were already across, I would say that 40 or 50% of the troops that needed to get into Germany were already across there when the bridge fell apart. There was a good movie, I think Robert Cope was in it, The Bridge at Remagen. The Bridge at Remagen, yeah, it was a good movie. Yeah, it was a really good movie. And I think that kind of made it famous. If you go there today, there's a modern, it's the older bridge, the modern one has been replaced. And you can still see the World War I and early World War II casements and where it was the foundation for the bridge that was blown up in World War II. And don't they have a museum there, just so people know? They do. A little one, a very little, but they have a. The significant pictures from the time. They have that picture of that GI looking down on the. It's a very famous picture, I think, in World War II. All right, looking down on the bridge. It was very brave of the Americans to go across there. A lot of them got killed when it finally fell apart. I don't know what it was, 15 or 16 fell into the Rhine with equipment and died. Is that right? So let's go to his last question. With favoring the Nimitz, the Nimitz people, would the Nimitz plan or MacArthur's plan have shortened the war? Have doing what now? Favoring either Nimitz plan or over MacArthur's plan, would it have shortened the war? What are the difference between those plans? Well, there was a lot of difference. The Navy, Nimitz favored island hopping. So the idea was to take Guadalcanal, that was the first one, and then to hop in the direction. of japan so there was pelelu tarawa um and iwo jima okinawa and the idea was you were gonna and they skipped a lot of places rabal and other places they never went into singapore so the idea was the navy with mostly marine divisions six five or six marine divisions would attack an island build an airport control the airspace and then bomb or disable or isolate the next island and jump over it island hopping and then get another one the problem and then nimitz would so the chain the name of the task force by 1944 the u.s navy was so large we built 125 carriers and i'm talking about fleet light and escort carriers that macarthur was wedded it to the philippines when you look at his course his operation cartwheel he went into new guinea and then he went around and took oh from new guinea he went through the what is the indonesian islands and then he went into the philippines but the philippines was no closer to japan wasn't that much closer but he had promised i shall return and he there was you know there were all these americans captured there wainwright had had to reserve he left wainwright there to surrender so there was a a strong american feeling that we had bailed out on the philippines and we were going to go there and then of course the japanese knew that and they dug in and manila it was a horrible battle a hundred thousand filipinos got killed and the the city was leveled by the japanese we hung he hanged the defender of the japanese commander and so huge new u.s navy would they were alternating so when there was a campaign of island hopping the navy put 70 of its ships in support of uh the marine corps and then when macarthur uh was taking and he was then replanning resupplying to take his next target in his cartwheel toward the philippines then the navy changed the designation from task for uh you know to the philippines and then the navy changed the designation from task for uh you know to the philippines and then the navy changed the designation from task for uh you know to the it changed its numbers but it was the same ship and then it went over and helped macarthur and then the marines and everybody recalibrated and planned for the next and it wasn't all marines with item hopping there i shouldn't say that there were army divisions especially at okinawa so they were complimentary but i think in retrospect given the success of curtis lemay when they took the philippine uh the mariana islands tinian saipan and guam and they were 1600 miles away from and once they got it down after march 9th and 10th the fire raids that's what broke the back of the japanese because they stopped industrial they mined the harbors they stopped all and then the submarines were absolutely essential they stopped they just blew apart the tanker fleet so it was a multi it was a very brilliant effort uh nimitz is vastly underrated he was a very prescient guy and he was not jealous of people he was not a showboat so he naturally attracted uh you know he he knew how to handle halsey he knew how how to handle spruance he knew how to handle all those guys they were all very talented talented and sometimes tough characters yes he he was he was a texan that's one of the weird thing about it was so many great american admirals were from inland places you know all right victor so let's welcome our second sponsor of this show ghost bed if you're like millions of other americans you have problems sleeping maybe your head's at the wrong angle maybe you get too hot maybe your mattress feels like it's made of concrete or you're sinking into it like it's made of quicksand stop suffering now take the first step toward a great night's sleep and try ghost bed ghost bed is engineered to help reduce the reasons your sleep gets interrupted it's designed to relieve pressure help regulate temperature with cooling technology technology built into every mattress and support your body better still ghost bed is made in the usa with ghost bed 101 night sleep trial that's a ghost bed 101 night sleep trial you can try it at home because the real test of a mattress is how you feel in the morning if you're waking up sore and tired before you go to bed you can try it at home because the real test of a mattress is how you feel in the morning if you're waking up sore and tired before you go to bed before the day even starts check out ghost bed and i know victor you have a ghost bed they're offering vdh's audience an extra 10 off their lowest prices of the season so go to ghostbed.com slash vdh that's ghostbed.com slash vdh and use promo code vdh that's ghostbed.com slash vdh with promo code vdh and i hope your ghost bed is making your night sleeps a lot better victor it does yeah especially if you have a lobectomy and half your side has been cut to pieces you can't lay flat because the fluids get you know they have to drain yeah and so i you can go on the other side easier and yeah so it has an automatic raise yes and i'm not propping up 20 pillows and the pillows are falling all over the floor all night long awesome all right so let's um go to this was a very interesting one but it's a little bit longer so hold on he has two points to make i think that you might want to address um one of them was on mass production and then one is on a fourth atomic bomb so this is from dr david r to spain the recent your recent article about the hiroshima and nagasaki bombings prompted me to write you in fredericksburg texas there's a museum of the pacific war i had read two versions of the bomb one of which was that the three bombs already exploded white sands hiroshima and nagasaki were the only ones available for many months the other was that we were in mass production and could send a bomb every two or three weeks for a long time the docent took me back to the last room where an atomic bomb hung from the ceiling she reached up and struck it gently with her fist and it rang like a giant gong she said she said quote nothing in this museum is a replica or a reproduction every item saw action in world war ii this was the fourth atomic bomb destined for japan close quote after a major expansion and remodeling their story has not changed is that true there was a fourth not quite most of it is true but i think it's true because there's a fourth atomic bomb that was true so there were two types of bombs they felt uh from prior research that the uranium bomb was going to work and um that was the one that they let off in new mexico and the plutonium plutonium bomb was in theory much more powerful but it was a bomb that was going to work and um that was the one that they let off in new mexico when they actually dropped them the landscape at nagasaki they missed the target by two miles so that the landscape had interior mountain ranges around the city and the actual uh damage through instrumentation was about 17 kilotons worth of tnt and the uh hiroshima bomb was the uranium bomb and that one was about 18 or 19 kiloton even though it had less energy than the uranium bomb it was about 18 or 19 kilotons even though it had less energy than the uranium bomb it was about 18 or 19 kilotons even though it had less energy than the uranium bomb initial power but because it was a flat it spread out much easier uh the other thing was so the problem was that they discovered that the trigger mechanism of the uranium bomb was very dangerous really dangerous they never they created uh they were making a uranium bomb and and another plutonium bomb but they wouldn't have had the first one probably till november and there's an argument that the uranium bomb was a very dangerous bomb and they were making a uranium bomb and another plutonium bomb and they were making a uranium bomb and there's an argument that maybe they would have had one or two of them before the first the year after the first the year they were talking i don't know if they were going to make one every two or three weeks but they could have surely made 10 or 12 more maybe one a month but they didn't have them ready after the two were all were dropped that's important to remember because a lot of people said why didn't you drop the bomb in uh tokyo bay the first thing is they didn't know whether the plutonium bomb was going to work and they were starting to get very worried about the trigger mechanism on the uranium bomb and then you add into the equation that the uss heavy cruiser indianapolis that delivered the components of the bomb the first one on uh tenyon got there dropped it off and then three days later went back to on the way to pearl harbor and it was sunk by a submarine in other words it was sunk by a submarine in other words if that had been three days earlier they would have lost that bomb because there were subs all there were still a lot of subs prowling around. And, you know, they lost 500 or 600 sailors. That was what Jaws was based on that story. So what I'm getting at is it was not a done deal. Yes, the bomb worked in New Mexico in the summer of 1945. And yes, they knew a lot more about the uranium bomb, but they didn't really know whether the plutonium bomb was safer, the trigger mechanism. But they didn't really know how it would work. They just thought it would be more powerful. And after they dropped the two bombs, they did not have a third bomb that they could have dropped the next day or week. It was coming. But they never, ever dropped, and people can correct me, they may have built a uranium trigger mechanism, but they found out very quickly that that was too dangerous to use. So then they were in kind of an holding pattern. They had to make a plutonium bomb or a new trigger for the uranium bomb. So that is why they did not use a. There was two reasons why they did not drop it in Tokyo Bay. Number one was they weren't sure that even after. The first one was on a platform, but they never dropped a bomb. They blew up the bomb in the New Mexico desert on a platform, and they were distant, as you saw. But they never had the same type. They never dropped it from a plane before. And they didn't know exactly what elevation they should use it at to explode. They didn't know if it would go off. So then they only had two of them, and they felt, well, if we drop this thing and it doesn't work, two bad things can happen. It can encourage the Japanese to resist even more fiercely, and they might get a hold of it. They might go down and pull it out. And they were working on it. So they had very sophisticated physicists. They thought, well, maybe they could pull it out and claim it and use it. How they would deliver it, I don't know. But the second thing was they didn't know much about the plutonium bomb. That research was newer. So they were really afraid that they would either announce, we're going to do this and look what's going to happen, or they would just drop it and be a dud. And then they wouldn't have any bomb. And then the Japanese. Even if it was after Hiroshima, they said. They had three days, and they said, we're not going to surrender. Then, even then, there was an attempted coup to kidnap the emperor by right-wing military cabal. And they still had somewhere around 7 to 15 million militia and soldiers on the major two islands. And they had over 3,000 to 5,000 kamikazes. So it would have been Okinawa 10 times worse. I don't think Tucker and Daryl Cooper and the people he brings on there fully realize that. But it's not, as he said, I said it was glorious. I never said that. But unfortunately, it was tragic that such a devastating weapon had to be used to stop more devastating killing. Yeah. It's a firebombing. Remember, on March. March 9th and 10th, the firebombing killed almost as much as the Nagasaki and Hiroshima bombs combined. It was over 100,000. And it keeps going up, according to Japanese government. Yeah. So you think that at Fredericksburg, Texas, the Museum of the Pacific War, that fourth bomb was the plutonium bomb? Is it? I'm not sure. I'll look at that up. I think it was probably. They'd had a uranium bomb assembled. But after Sweeney came back, and they had triggered it so it was live. And then he had to go to the secondary target. And it was, he almost ran out of gas. He had to make an emergency landing in Okinawa. He could not even get back to Iwo Jima, much less Tinian. And they just circled around. It was cloudy. And that thing was live. Yeah. And they just said, they were very. And then when you add in the. And then when you add in the Indianapolis, the parts were. They were very worried about the safety of the bomb. And they had seen the plutonium bomb work. So I think they were thinking that that was going to be the future of it. They did create more Hiroshima-like bombs, but they never used them, to my knowledge, with that same type of trigger mechanism. Had they already developed a process for mass production of the bomb by that time? Yes, they had. Okay, that's it. They had it. They had a plant to enrich uranium and plutonium in Washington and Tennessee. Yeah. What's that? And then they had to put them on rail. So it was scary. Yeah. What's that? I think everybody has a wrong idea. They have this idea that Einstein writes a letter, and then the army gets to Oppenheimer, and they spend a billion dollars and make a whole city out in the desert. And then they have all these brilliant. And then they have all these brilliant guys, you know. And they're all. One team is working on the fusion, fission part for the two bombs. One is working on the trigger mechanism. One's working on the weight, how big it. See, they had another problem. The B-29 could only hold 10 tons, 20,000 pounds. And the Lancaster, if they borrowed it from the British, could only hold about 15,000 pounds. And they had to have a special bomb bay built. And they weren't really sure. And the B-29s had a. Yeah. They were saying it was going to set off a chain atmospheric reaction. And they still didn't know. So they did know that if they didn't do it, they. You can't talk about the use of atomic bombs without the horror of Okinawa. Because remember, that started on April 1st, 1945, and it was not declared secure to late June 1945. That was July, August. That was only six weeks almost before the atomic bomb. Six weeks before the atomic bombs were dropped. Six weeks before the atomic bombs were up. The worst island campaign of the whole war was six weeks before Japan surrendered. And I remember from the family, my grandfather telling me that he. He just said, this was the Marine way, Victor. This was the Marine way. They just had to go. They had to go head on. They had to go. They were in the concrete. They were in coral. They all got killed. And they should have gone around the. He was. I don't want to talk about it. And I don't know. They had the bomb. They knew the bomb worked. Why did they go. They knew the bomb was going to work. Why did they go to Okinawa? Couldn't they have waited two or three months? That was what he said. He said they never used Okinawa. They never used the airfields to bomb Japan. He was really upset about it when Victor was killed. Yeah. My dad was too. Yeah. All right. So let's turn to the Iran war. And since everybody, as the midterms approach, were concerned about the price of gas, I know that you were just traveling. I'm sure the price of. $7 a gallon. Was it that much? Wow. Well, here's two different ones. Maybe I'll read one first. And then if you haven't addressed the other one, I'll give the other one. William Ray says, There's no doubt they would have already attacked Israel. What you expect a barrel of oil might cost with nuclear war in the Middle East. What do you expect that it might cost? $200? $300? I imagine U.S. stock market would crash. And then thank you for all you do. I think they would have threatened. You think he's right? I still. Somebody wrote me a letter. And he wasn't just. He was a person without expertise. He was in the military about a month ago. And he said he was very worried because he thought in Pickaxe Mountain, they were so close that they have a bomb. And he was saying. When I had said a radio, I said there's going to be an October surprise. That was his theory. That they wouldn't be. Not that they were going to fly it somewhere, but that they were going to put it on a transport plane or at night or over land. And they were going to get. And they were going to give it to Hezbollah. And they were going to put it on a truck or something and drive into Israel or drive into Saudi Arabia and blow it up. Because the price of oil would skyrocket if they had a nuclear weapon. They would just tell Saudi Arabia, you're going to cut your production. Kuwait, you're going to. We're going to control it. All of this makes the European attitude when you think that they let Iranian-English subjects that were surveying how to attack. 7B-1 bombers. There are 330 million, B2, excuse me, B1, excuse me. There are 330 million each, the B1. They're almost 40 years old. There's 11 of them. I think we only have 45. So they were going to destroy 25%. And the British didn't, I don't think they understand how they sound to people who are rational. They said, well, we're going to let them go. We're going to let them, not let them go, but we're going to let them out on bail. But we think this was engineered by Iran. If you've got three, you know, if you've got $3 billion almost of bombers there, and they're there primarily to protect NATO and the British Isle, and they can't be protected and they don't take it seriously. So then, and you're going to lose $3 billion if they do a, you quit. Ukrainian thing, like they did to Russia with, you know, I think they were going to scout it out and get a lot of drones and just send them in there to blow these planes up. So if you can't trust them, and then Spain says you can't use a base. France says you can't fly over our airspace. Italy says you can't land in, you can't land in Sicily. And then our neutral friends, Austria and Switzerland said, you can't go over, we're neutral now. We're neutral. And even Australia, our friends under that Albanese government and socialists, they said, we're not sending any, we're no one Australian ship is going to go help you patrol the Straits, none of the European. And then you think who's going to be the beneficiary in the long run. It's going to be Europe if this government falls and there's a pro-Western Iran. And the Iran is, the theocracy is out of the picture controlling the Straits. And we're going to do all the heavy. Lifting and the, the Yemenis have been, the Houthis have been interrupting the Red Sea for four years under Biden. They were doing it and we couldn't stop them. We get, we only have half of our Tomahawks we've spent in the last four years. I think we've spent 55% of these, they're 3 million bucks each. And that we were chasing $5,000 drones with them and the Yemeni. The Houthis, they're really clever people, the Houthis. They act like they're primitive and they're jihadists or like Al-Qaeda or been, they're not. They have all been trained in Iran. They've been trained in ballistics. They've been trained in launching. They have hidden their ballistic missiles and drones all over. They're in bunkers and the Chinese have given them sophisticated photo reconnaissance of American bases of Saudi airport or they know everything. They're. Probably much more sophisticated than Hamas. And now you just hear that, heard today, the Israelis went into that mountain in Lebanon and they found a whole city, a labyrinth city. It was more sophisticated than Hamas, four stories down and it had rockets. It had engineering equipment. It had sophisticated filtration, water, sewage, food, barracks, and it was impenetrable. So that's where they were coming out. Attack. And Israel going back in and, um, it's, it's a lot more daunting when all these leftists say, well, you lost the war. You haven't lost the war. You've lost 19 people. It's far less than the casualty rate per day for 210 days engaged in a war zone, a war zone. But, um, there's a lot of constraints on us because we don't want to blow up Karg Island. Apparently we do not want to blow up bridges. We do not want. Um, in our conference on Friday that I chaired at Hoover, it's closed to the public and we're not supposed to discuss things, but I can tell you that I was worried. I'm not speaking for the other attendants. Why are the rail links still open? At least some of them are overland. Why is the Caspian sea still being used for transport? Why are flights leaving Iran, Iranian airports to places like Yemen? If you're going to really crush that regime, you should take all their assets out so they cannot import any Chinese and Russian material period. No trucks. You should bomb the highways, the bridges, the rail links, and they can, nothing goes in that country. Nothing goes out. And once that, if that government were to flip, I guarantee you the first person in line would be the French. The second would be the Germans. The third would be the British. And the. Fourth would be the Spanish and Italian. And they'd all come in and say, you've got billions of dollars in oil, and here's what you need. Here's your, uh, engineer. We'll, we'll bring in engineers to build your roads and you're going to need computers and you're going to need all this, and we're going to do business and you send us all this oil and we'll all get wealthy and crazy. Uncle Sam, what a sucker. He spent all this time and money and Trump may have lost midterms for it, and we're going to reap the benefit. That's what they're doing. And that's what they're. Planning on, and they shouldn't mask it with all this false morality. We, we don't believe in, uh, aggressive attacks. We don't believe in preemptive action. Yeah, you do. You went into Congo, you went into attack, Serbia, you went into Libya, you went into the Falklands and that was a reactive attack, but don't give us that high false morality. They certainly didn't talk like that when Obama did his preemptive attacks. Obama, you know, another thing I was thinking. Hillary Clinton spoke out today and it's a little off topic, but Pete Hexeth said that he wanted to speed up the execution of Major Hassan. Yes, and so they're going to go because of the controversy about the injections that we had with the other person who survived it, they're going to go back to an old fashioned firing squad. We haven't executed a person by firing squad in a continental United States. I think since 1937, maybe on a military base outside. So you're talking about 90 years almost, you know what I mean? We haven't done, we haven't had a public execution of any type for about 80 years. So everybody's upset. And Trump said, I don't know. You know, that's the Pentagon. I may, may. I may or may not do allow it to be publicized. It sounds terrible, but then when you start looking at this guy, he said Allah Akbar as he shot and murdered 13 unarmed soldiers, then he wounded 32. Some are still crippled. And then he gave up, they shot him and he's crippled, but he gave up and he didn't go to trial. He, this happened. And in 2009, they didn't get it. They didn't convict him till 2013 and then he's had 13 and they sentenced him to death. But you know what? They didn't even charge him with terrorism. They said, he's only a murder. We, and then, and I look back at that the other day and Obama said, we don't, we don't want to rush to judgment. Nobody's rushing to judgment. This is probably the work of, uh, workplace violence. That's what the administration was saying. Workplace violence. Then you thought it couldn't be any worse. And they had a commission to investigate. It turned out two things about this palace at second generation, Palestinian number one, he had a whole history of saying how he hated the United States. He wanted to kill Americans. He was a jihadist. And then number two, he was a total incompetent. He wasn't like a PhD in psychiatry or MD in psychiatry, PhD in, uh, you know, psychoanalysis. Or a thoracic surgeon or something like that, huh? He didn't know he, he almost flunked out of every, the army paid for his tuition. They sent him to special medical training. He was a complete incompetent mediocrity. So then a question, why was he here? Why, when he had threatened, uh, people with jihadist sloganeering and they knew about it and why, when he was so incompetent, did they promote him to major and they wouldn't even. way or that people got angry, there would be prejudice. And that would be worse than a loss of his soldiers. And then I thought, that's why we lost in Iraq. And that was the same thinking when that general, when we were evacuating under that skedaddle from Afghanistan, I remember I watched that conference and one of the generals was trying to explain to the media that we have facilities ready for everybody and they're culturally appropriate food when they land. I'm thinking, you just humiliated the U.S. military. You just got 13 people killed. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs said this was a righteous kill when we just killed a bunch of civilians. And then we had people falling off the plane. You had no plan. You put all of our soldiers in danger. You got them a lot killed. A lot of these people are completely unarmed. Unvetted, unaudited. We had that Afghan refugee that killed people, you know, in Washington or New York. And he drove across the country to kill them. And all you can say is you're worried about culturally appropriate food. Something was wrong with the military top echelon under Biden. I guess it was they thought the more PC, the more DI I can sound under Obama or Biden. And so. The higher my rank. That's a long rant. But what I'm saying is it's not so simple. That these people, this guy should not face a firing squad. Whether it should be public or not, I don't know. We haven't done that in a long, long time. I remember my grandfather said that as a little boy, he saw a person hang in the court in the 20s, or maybe it was 1910 or so. And he said he never got over it. And the other thing is Hillary weighed in. And she said, this is barbaric. And it reflects poor. Trump is barbaric. And this is even thinking about it reflects badly on us. First thing I thought, you hypocrite, you hypocrite, you were secretary of state. And not only did people request additional security at the consulate and the CIA annex, and you didn't give it to them because you thought that that would reveal you were completely unprepared and you your laxity. What difference? Does it make? Remember that? And then most importantly, you were the one and Samantha Power and Susan Rice, who went to Obama and said, the French and the British are going to bomb Gaddafi out of power. And a lot of people, they said, well, Gaddafi is irrelevant now. He's got a whole five kids. They're in Oxford. They're in England. They own a soccer. They're all westernized. He's bringing in Italians to tap the natural gas. He's got cell phones. He's losing his grip. It's going to go into kind of a benign dictatorship. Why would you go in there and bomb everybody? Arab Spring. You remember what she said when that horrible picture when the mob got Gaddafi? I'm not defending him. He was a horrible man. But remember, they grabbed him. They sodomized him. They sodomized him with a broom handle. And she said, she was laughing. They said, well, what did you? It didn't work out. We came. We saw. And he died. Remember? He died. Yeah, he'll be. I'll tell you one thing. Being shot by a firing squad for murdering someone, someone, I shouldn't say murdering 13 people and crippling 32 and having them humanely dispatched, not with injection where they might wake up, not with a hanging that goes wrong a lot. But one thing, if you get 10 soldiers or 12 to shoot somebody in the heart, he's going to die quickly. So that is a lot more humane than laughing about Gaddafi, who was torn apart like an animal by a mob and sodomized. And you then you go on global TV and cackle that you, Hillary, we came, we saw and he died. That's a. Yeah. She was taking off Winnie Winnie Winkie. Caesar. Yeah. I came. I saw. I conquered. That was what Julius Caesar said when he enthroned or got rid of Mithridates in the Pontic kingdom. And he he that was a very famous phrase he used in the Mithridate Wars. So she thought she was a Latin scholar, I suppose. Can't say enough things critical of her. Yes. Well, Victor, let's welcome our third sponsor and Purience. They are our third sponsor. They're coming back and they had a deal and they wanted to make a note to everybody. A quick update about the Hydro Lift Volumizing Shampoo from Purience. And that's P-U-R-I-E-N-C-E. P-U-R-I-E-N-C-E. The discount code for the previous ads wasn't working because of a technical issue, but it has now been fixed. Use code Victor at Purience dot com to save 35 percent on your entire order. If you tried before, please come back and try again. Now, here's the original message from Purience about Hydro Lift. If you're tired of thin, lifeless hair, if you cringe every time you see another clump in the shower jar. If you're tired of thin, lifeless hair, if you cringe then your hair probably needs more protein. And like our muscles, muscles lose protein as we age in atrophy, our hair loses protein as well, leading to thin, dry and brittle strands. That's where Hydro Lift Volumizing Shampoo by Purience can help. Hydro Lift contains wheat protein that strengthens your hair follicles with from deep within. This transforms thin and lifeless hair into fuller, more resilient locks. It also contains betaine from sugar beets, which draws water into your strands, making your hair feel silky soft. Right now, you can try Hydro Lift Volumizing Shampoo risk-free and save 35 percent with discount code Victor. That's V-I-C-T-O-R. Head over to Purience dot com to shop and save. And by the way, Purience has many other fantastic products if you're looking to rejuvenate your skin, hair or nail appearance. These are USDA certified organic, so they're great for your body and the environment. Again, you can save 35 percent on your entire order with discount code Victor. Go to Purience, P-U-R-E-A-N-C-E dot com to shop and save today. Again, that's Purience, P-U-R-E-A-N-C-E dot com. And we'd like to thank Purience. For continued support of the Victor Davis Hanson Show. So, Victor, the second question on oil from our, it is Philip Marie, and he says, could you explain, VDH, why the media and government doesn't remove the smoke and mirrors from this issue, which is the gas prices? The internet tells me that no oil from the Strait of Hormuz comes to America, yet our petroleum prices skyrocket when we attacked Iran. President Trump declared America energy independent, yet the world market still controls our prices. Why can the Iranians pay 30 cents a liter for gasoline a year prior to the attack on Iran? And the poor people of Venezuela pay nine cents a gallon for gasoline. What gives? I'm not sure about that, those prices. I hope he's right on that. Well, there's probably a lot. They're multifaceted. And again, I'm just hearing this for the first time, but as a general rule, Westerners in Europe and the former British Commonwealth, New Zealand, they are maddened by green, by the new green deal type of Al Gore thinking. So, in their, their way of thinking, they tax gas and they let it go to as high as possible. I've gone to Europe every summer, I think for, until I got ill for 22 years, at least once or twice, sometimes three times. And it was about eight or $9 a gallon. And that was deliberate. They did not subsidize. It's just the opposite in the so-called third world of Africa, Asia, not so much Africa, but Latin America, Venezuela, and places that have oil, but especially in the Arab countries and Iran. When you have an autocratic government, the last thing you want to do when you're exporting oil is to have people paying a lot for gas, because that'll make them furious. So, what they do is they subsidize the price of gas. The government comes in and they take barrels out of the National Petroleum Company, and they refine it at a market loss. Not really a loss to them. The reader has a very good point because they control everything, the oil, the refinery. But they want the people to be happy. Now, his other point is, we produce around, I think we're getting up to 14 million barrels. And we import four from Canada, that's 18. And we're in the 20 something, depending how many barrels we consume. And we, if we wanted to, we could buy the Canadian oil and we could stop all exports, to Japan, all natural gas and oil, if to the degree it goes to Europe and just consume our own oil the price, but we're a free market economy. So you'd have to tell a Texas petroleum guy, a fracker, that was spending a lot of money and he's right there in Texas and you've got a big European or Japanese oil tanker right on the harbor at Houston. And you're going to say, you're an American and that costs you about 40 or 45 dollars to pump. So I want you to sell it to the U.S. government to be refined or private for no more than 55 dollars. And what would he say? He's going to say, I don't know what the price is going to be. It's going to collapse when the war is over and I'm going to lose a lot of money because I'm going to keep pumping and it might get down to 45 dollars. So I got to make the money where I can. So we allow that. And so what I'm getting at is all the private companies that produce oil in the United States at enormous amounts. And the more oil we import from Canada could be, it is basically valued at right now, I think it's 88 dollars a barrel, but their costs to produce it are probably around 40 dollars. So they're making a huge profit. They could make a profit and we could have four dollars. Right now it's 450 nationwide or something. They could make a profit and they could sell the oil for a price and the refinery that it would be about three dollars a gallon, 250 a gallon. But that's not how we operate with anything, food or anything. And, you know, when you had plums and Japan was offering for, I remember Fuyu apple pears, like 80 dollars for 20 pounds. And the price of that was, you know, it was a little bit more than that. And it was, you know, it wasn't a big deal, but it was a little bit more than that. And, you know, it was a little bit more than that. So you could get 80. And that drove up the price here because there were fewer of this, at that time, a boutique, exotic, everybody wanted, they don't care that much now for Asian pears. But we had about 10 acres of them. But I wish that the oil companies would give the consumer a break and take a little bit less profit. Trump is trying now to, he's, he's had it with Zelensky. He told Zelensky, do not hit the diesel refineries that make diesel fuel. Because if you do, Russia supplies ships diesel fuel, refined diesel fuel to China, to Asia, and that keeps the world price down. And we don't have enough refineries. So, but they know that. And Russia's making a killing. So Zelensky didn't listen to him. He just kept hitting. And that is driving diesel prices up. So Trump said today, I disagree with that. He's a terrible president. He wants them gone. Well, he's right in the middle of a war, existential war. You know, you don't, you don't quite say that. But I can see why he's frustrated. And Zelensky wants it both ways. He said, I want you to another 140 million dollars, excuse me, 140 billion we've given them over the last four years, five years. And, but I'm not going to listen to you. And Trump is saying, you're going to lose me the midterms along with Iran. So I don't want you, just hold off until the midterm. Do not hit there. So he bought diesel fuel the other day from Putin. And the other thing Zelensky doesn't understand, and the American, never Trump and left don't understand. Trump doesn't have any particular empathy for Putin or Russia. He got out of the missile deal. He destroyed the Wagner group. He told the Germans not to do the Nordstrom pipeline. He taxed the oligarchs. But he does believe in Kissinger triangulation. He wants to turn Russia with its 7000 nuclear weapons against and its oil against China and vice versa. They get leverage. And he can't do that as long as the Ukraine war is on. Because Putin is the bad guy. And you can't, you can't reward a guy that's the other thing that people don't realize very quickly about that war. And I've tried, I said that at the conference. But everybody said Putin, it was a terrible mistake. It was. And Putin has lost a million and a half casualties. Yes. And he's incompetent. Yes. And he's destroyed the economy. Yes. But what they don't say is he has 20% of Ukraine. I, and with Crimea, I think he's got some 6 or 7 million people that speak Russian. And his birth rate is 1.3. So in a very sick way, the way he thinks, I've lost maybe a million people, but I've gained 6000 soon to be transferred into loyal Russian citizens. And that's why that one of the reasons he did that is his birth rate is so low. And so he's only got 144 million people with this vast and at one time Ukraine was 41 million people. Had he been able to take Kiev, he would have had 185 million Russians plus the Ukrainian bread. That's why he was trying to do that. And I'm glad he stopped. I wish Ukraine, but I said to a Ukrainian person the other day, an expert in the Ukrainian war, I should say, I said, my gosh, they've lost 10 million people. They had 41 million. And he said, where did you get that figure, Victor? I thought, well, I read it and I prepped for the comment. He goes, it's not 10 million, it's 12 to 14 million. I thought he was saying I was exaggerating. He said they're below 30 million. They're 28 million. Wow. All right, Victor. So we're at the end of the show and I'm going to read some comments. We have more questions, but we'll save them for our Saturday show on the IRGC, on Israel, on culture, education, social services. So we've got a lot to do for our next show. But this comment is from Thomas Harris. Thomas, yeah. Yeah. And beautiful cursive and the perfect grammar and a beautiful greeting card. Yeah. And then a very human interest story about how they fought cancer heroically. It's really moving and I really appreciate it. Also the stories about their grandparents who were POWs or things like that are like, whoa. They're all very loyal, traditional Americans. And they're, like me, bewildered about what is going on. Yeah. Shooting police in Philadelphia, shooting people in Georgia, shooting people the whole time. Yep. It's just out of control. And breaking up lectures. They broke up Trump's lecture. Today in Powerline, the Powerline people had one of their conventions in Minnesota and they disrupted that. Yeah. Yes. Nope. Beating up people on the street, stealing purses. Did you see that woman? That guy beat down to the ground, all to steal her purse from her and she was trying to keep it. It was so sad. This whole, I know that if you, somebody sent me one and I understand how sick AI is. So if you, if somebody sends you a TikTok or an X of a woman berating police when they pull her over and you click on that, what's going to happen is every time you go on X, they're going to be those stories. Yes. But my gosh, when you see them, whether they're, even if they're online. Yeah. And maybe there's a racial component because they're usually African-American women, but a lot of times they're African officers too, African-American officers. But it's so hard to see how those guys survive. I mean, they go in there and then people shoot them and they scream at them and they, it's, after George Floyd, it was every officer takes his life in his hands. Yes. Absolutely. They shot two policemen in Philadelphia yesterday. Yeah. Yeah. You can't pay them enough. That's for sure. Well, we'd like to thank our audience for joining us on this Friday special episode. And thank you, Victor, for all the wisdom. Well, thanks everybody for watching and listening. All right. Come back and join us for the Saturday show. This is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis Hanson, and we're signing off. And subscribe for exclusive features in addition.