Victor Davis Hanson | George S. Patton: American Ajax

Good evening, my name is Lukas and I am a senior medical student from Phoenix, Arizona, and it is my pleasure to introduce you to tonight's speaker, Victor Davis, Hanson Dewayne, and Marcia, a distinguished fellow in history at Hillsdale College who is also a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a professor of classics at an oppressed professor emeritus of classics at California State University Fresno earned his bachelor's degree from the University of California Santa Cruz and his PhD in classics from Stanford University in 2007. the National Humanities Medal and in 2008 he received the Bradley Award from Lynde and the Harry Bradley Foundation.

He has written for numerous publications, including Claremont Review of Books, The New Criterion, and The Wall Street Journal. He is the author of several books, including A War Fighted, A War Like No Other, How the The Athenians and the Spartans Fought in the Peloponnesian War, the Second World War, and How the First Global Conflict was Fought and Won. Could you all welcome me and join Victor Davis Hanson on stage? Thank you very much when the doctor is not mentioned. stitches in my face I get a lot of emails from people saying I think you need some work on your face and I said I already had it but Al Phillip and I were supposed to go on a trip seven days later so I had a shock brain, a spinal injury and I had 170 stitches and I asked everyone how much money we would lose if with all the cancellations so suddenly I was cured and I wanted to tell Larry when he mentioned all these disasters I thought, I hope Hillsdale isn't. the common denominator but it has not been for me it has been a wonderful experience 15 years coming here I would like to talk for about 35 minutes not only about George Patton in the tragic vision but about our strange and ambiguous relationship in the United States between generals and politics, You know, we've had 12 presidents who were generals, but none of us really know any of them and who cares if Chester or Arthur were generals, we remember Harrison and his grandson or his companions or Taylor, but most generals Doesn't Andrew Johnson care that he was a Brevet Brigadier General?

We have four who became presidents, with the exception of Jackson, they were more or less politicians; By that I mean, Grant was a Unionist rather than a radical Republican and I think both Democrats and Republicans reached out to Eisenhower and no one was quite sure which side he was on in Washington, of course, he was the father of our country, but he we have had, if we haven't, and by the way, we had three generals who remember working for Donald Trump at one point, General Kelley, the chief of staff, General Mattis, the Secretary of Defense, and H.R.

McMaster, Lt. Generally, it was a national security device. I have a feeling two of the three didn't vote for Trump or won't. Vote for it next time, so I guess they're called bipartisan or apolitical, but we've had ideological generals. I don't know if ideology is the right word to describe it, but we have had generals who connected what they did on the battlefield to a broader view of human nature and I guess we would call it the tragic or pessimistic view that we are born into this world. quite despicable or evil and religion, culture and civilizations save us, but it does not always reach everyone and there will always be people who want to take things that are not theirs, whether on a personal or national level or their psychopaths and they like to kill people and it is the duty of certain people among us to have this vision, I believe that some generals have certain talents and they detect these people and are willing to do whatever is necessary to protect the innocent from them and from that ideology they also develop a conservative political vision and reactionary and you think of MacArthur but in our own history you think of William Tecumseh Sherman Curtis LeMay and you know Matthew Ridgway and they don't end well, I mean, they have a dark view of human nature and we are a sunny therapeutic society, a society optimistic and when we are done with them, they provide us with a useful service Sherman said I will not run for office if I am nominated I will not accept the nomination if I am elected I will not enter the presidency and people to this day thought that he was an arsonist who It was a teardrop I see the word terrorist and Sherman Sherman had a philosophical view, a tragic view that they were in an existential war and that they were killing a lot of innocent people and that the people who had precipitated that war (he called it the kind of ear of shovel in the South) should not run with impunity at home and So when he went to Atlanta and the March, he saw in the Carolina March, if you really do the terrible arithmetic of how many people he killed, visa vie that summer of the Army of the Potomac with Grant locked up with Lee, there were far fewer deaths, but he did something that was unspeakable, he destroyed property and humiliated an entire class and he developed an ideology and an explanation for what he was doing and why they deserved it and now that was intolerable and even today when Grant may have been responsible for some of the bloodiest battles in the history of American wars, but Sherman has an asterisk next to his name, so does another general and we all love how Arnold listens talk about Tooey Spaatz Doolittle, but when we say Curtis LeMay we stop some of you.

I think the cigar we never heard he had Bell's palsy on a record flight set the distance record in 1937 and a B-17 on the wait in the flight got Bell's palsy stuck a cigar there to stop the drill absorb the drip of saliva, so it wasn't a Hollywood stunt to be harsh, it was a way of trying to disguise a disfiguring ailment, but it ended after the war (remember how the Buck Turgeon s'en model and Dr. Strangelove and then during the Cuban missile crisis people caricatured him because he wanted to be pretty tough on the Soviet Union and he tragically ended up running with George Wallace as his vice presidential candidate third party American independent party 1968 we forget that he actually tried to convince Wallace didn't run with a segregationist or racist candidacy and he was one of the first green candidates we have had, but we had this image that LeMay said that it would be inhumane for a million people to die invading the mainland of Japan and he could do it through bombings and he inherited the billion-dollar b-29 probe, a billion dollars bigger than the Manhattan Project and they got no results from China or India or the Marianas and took this wonderful high-precision, high-altitude bomber that could fly up to 28,000 feet and lowered it to 5,000 feet and basically created a four-engine dive bomber and filled it with 20,000 pounds of napalm and in 90 days it burned down 65% of Japan's urban industrial area and was adamantly opposed to the composite bombing group. 509 because he did not believe the atomic bomb was necessary, in other words, he thought he could, as he said, the lender Japan pre to a pre-modern state if the war had continued, he had plans to use it for airfields. from Okinawa and to remember that the war in Europe had ended in May and there were 10,000 for the bombers with be 24 and b-17 engines and the Lancaster bombers that were inactive another 8,000 for the bombers with be 26,000 b25 engines, I was going to add them With 2,500 B-29s in the Marianas, they triple the mission's capacity because Okinawa was 1/3 of the distance and wiped out the rest of the Japanese industrial sector.

It's a pretty nightmarish scenario, but the idea that he was behind all of that and remember he said if we lose a war. I will be tried as a war criminal because we are not going to send people who had nothing to do with this war from Nebraska and Missouri and invade the continent when people who are actively killing 15 million people in China are going to escape. a date with judgment, that's what he said Matthew Ridgway inherited at the end of December 1950 a losing Korea, the Korean War, remember the Chinese across the Yalu, we had risen in November, MacArthur had and General Walton Walker, as you go north, you know the peninsula widens.

In November the weather gets worse and the proximity to China decreases and the F80 couldn't provide air support against a MIG 15 for the B-29, so we essentially sent one hundred and fifty thousand people increasingly further away from their supplies and nearly a million Chinese. soldiers and we didn't have adequate air cover in the middle of winter and when they broke in it was the longest military withdrawal in American history and MacArthur was relieved and Ridgeway, who had never been to Asia, was an expert on Central America and of course, he was commander of the 82nd Airborne Force. he basically created the 82nd. airborne in World War II.

We were fifty years old. He parachuted into Normandy. Distinguished record in World War II. I suggest that if any of you have heart problems, do not despair. He had a heart attack and was told he had to be discharged and return to civil service at age 54 at the end of the war and lived to be 98, so don't despair, but in any case he carried a small medical kit here and a hand grenade here, it was called his old iron tits and he walked around the battlefield, he said find them, fix them and kill them and he said don't despair, we're going to take back Seoul.

They recaptured Seoul in March. Napalm B-29 and artillery were killed as we heard today. He very correctly killed about a million Chinese, one of the reasons why China did not want to invade Vietnam and is because of the terrible losses that they hid from historians and the West that they and those that Ridgeway suffered in that counteroffensive and then Ridgeway got After basically saving and recouping, then what was the reward for Eisenhower when he wrote his memoirs? He said that Matthew Ridgway didn't take the only crusade in Europe, that's where he didn't even get, he hated it so much and when Johnston wanted to go. with Eisenhower he wanted to go to Vietnam he called Ridgeway said don't do it, you can't win the land war in Asia Johnson went to Vietnam and thought it was time to get out.

I'll get that old Ridgeway he'll give me. the same advice and he said I have to get out where she just can't get out he said why can't I get out he said there's only one thing worse than losing him only one thing worse than getting into a bad war and that's losing control, so he told her. He gave people advice and spoke a certain way, he was married three times, which is a no-no at that time in the top echelon of the American general and it didn't end well, he didn't get the kind of credit he should have in the way LeMay didn't do it the way Sherman did, which brings us to George Patton.

I wish I could say that he was excellent, he had excellent character, he did it in many ways, but I think in many ways, he was Trumpian if I couldn't and that's not gratuitous criticism. I mean he could be gratuitously cruel to people. He, as you know, slapped two soldiers and Sicily, one of whom probably had malaria, we know. he had a high temperature, most of his classmates picked on him because he was from one of the richest families in the United States, Mount Wilson in Los Angeles, which was his grandmother, while the Wilson family, his father was the city attorney of Los Angeles and owned one thousand acres in Pasadena.

He was fabulously rich from his own family and then he married into the air pharmaceutical company, the great Empire, so when the image of American officers was Omar Bradley, Eisenhower, Lucien Truscott and Wade Haslip, all these great people of the Into the United States Patton came from California playing polo with his own yacht and a stable of horses throughout the Depression and had been in the 1912 Olympics, came fourth, could have won the panathlon and claimed he was as good shooter that every When he fired, he put the bullet through the previous hole and the judges didn't understand that and they may have been right, but if you follow his career through the '20s and '30s up to Pearl Harbor, it was characterized by absolute brilliance.

He was the first person to see that the Christie tank in 1919 had the best suspension and that the Americans should try it and yet we didn't and that was the model that the Russian t-34 tank adopted under which he designed the tank US. The Calvary saber was also designed by the first American saber. tanks who called him, you know, I think he was called Green Arrow or Green Lantern, it was a little silly. He had a gold helmet, green pads and flashy boots, but he was designed to be comfortable with the monkey, he and in this whole process that he learned or I shouldn't say he learned, he developed us. armor tactics 1940 in war games in louisiana captured the high ranking general you got hit you may have seen the dirty isn't that movie that old movie about how they played dirty that was basically based on war maneuvers Patton?

Well, how was it in a They thought about a 400 mile wild goose chase and ended up capturing the red general who was on the blue team and he did it twice, then he went down and entered Indio from the middle of nowhere and set up a whole complexof desert warfare and taught the Americans with The lower tanks speak like the Chaffee tanks or the lower Lee tanks, armored pursuit elements and advances. What I mean is that when Pearl and he was 55 and not yet a brigadier general, people hated him because he drank too much. There were periods in his life when he was a womanizer he played polo like I said he was accident prone he lit a gas lamp to look in his eye and it exploded and burned his face he accidentally stabbed himself he would break on a horse accident he broke his leg he had phlebitis , he always was and of course he also died in a freak accident so he was known as injury prone, reckless, rich, ostentatious, loud and yet he spoke French, read German and was highly educated .

That is that he enunciated or articulated a world view of war and it was similar to his contemporaries like LeMay and Ridgeway and also very sure that Mineski was a great admirer of William Tecumseh.Sherman and he basically said that democracies or therapeutic societies and we we don't train people, thank God to kill people, but there are people in the world who do it and when they do it they need people like George Patton who is part and not part of a democracy that understands the evil mind and can make soldiers for short periods of time have the training, courage and strength to face the Hermann Goering division or the Focke-Wulf 190 pilots, you are ships and that was your principle and then you would do it. kill these evil people and protect the innocent and he said that and we don't like people saying that when Colin Powell said what his strategy is for the first Gulf War, he said we're going to find Saddam's army.

We're going to cut him down and then we're going to kill him. If people got really angry, why did they have to say kill him at the end? Remember when we killed daddy bag Nancy Pelosi, it was bad for Trump to say that, why did he kill everyone? then when Trump said we would get rid of these monsters and these animals m13, she said that they are all creatures of God, so that therapeutic alternative is deeply rooted and it is very difficult for societies like ours to mobilize against each of these threats perceived without These types of people, so when we were ready after Pearl Harbor to fight, the obvious choice for our first commitment was George S.

Patton, he had just been appointed just before Pearl Harbor in October, he was promoted to Major General two-star general and yet when he had Operation Torch the November 1942 landings in northwest Africa he was not chosen to lead the entire torch project he was given only Western Command 30,000 troops the most incompetent useless general in the history of the United States Lloyd Freightin Hall was a Eisenhower wrote a report and said he looks like a general, he breathes fire, he's our man. I've never been more impressed with him than he strutted around and fist pumped and didn't know anything and the result was, as you know, that the worst loss in American history was actually wiped out. or at least the most humiliating one: the Kaiser impasse where Rommel destroyed an entire brigade 3,000 missing 400 dead 600 tanks scared high where he was 50 miles back entrenched and a bunker probably drunk when the time came to take charge of the second corps everyone thought Patton He will have his chance and yet Eisenhower asked General Harmon to do it, who refused and said it was quite embarrassing.

Patton deserves it, so Patton immediately took over in the Battle of L. Gazzara Guitar. He won the first battle the Americans won in World War II. He wanted to continue to lead the Second Corps and then Omar Bradley had a very strange relationship with Bradley and the movie was quite, I think, I think it was quite misleading about Bradley's attitude towards Patten, but then Bradley was given command of the Second Body and Patton was supposed to plan Sicily. One might think that too many people had died in North Africa unnecessarily without giving primary responsibility for the invasion of Sicily, Operation Husky, and yet we referred both the Seventh Army and the British 1st Army to General Montgomery. .

They landed in southern Sicily, everyone knew what the objective was: to reach Messina, two miles from the Italian coast, they could isolate it and cut off 400,000 soldiers and Patton looked at his task: stay to the left or west of Montgomery and protect his flank and remain stationary basically and give Montgomery the opportunity to accelerate straight to Messina and then trap all the Italians and Germans, of course I knew Monte wouldn't make that money, he was a great general and a set piece, but he wasn't a chaser, he didn't chase him, so what did he do in Patton?

He went all the way northwest to Pilar Merle, then made another right turn, breaking orders and arriving at Messina before Montgomery and, of course, not arriving in time to catch. the Germans, but he became very famous after that, you think at that time everyone knew that the orbital Overlord was being planned along with the Italian invasion, that he would get supreme command, he slapped two soldiers in a rather despicable way, he went to a hospital, I was crazy. Due to the rate of absenteeism of soldiers from what we would call post-traumatic stress syndrome, which was then known as shock, one officer had a There were three officers who observed the first slap incident, the person had malaria when he received the second slap Two weeks later he had some ailment, whether it was fever or just stress, we don't know, but it hit him in this period.

One of his armored companies was on a bridge. There was an Italian farmer with two mules. They were being machine-gunned. He didn't want to run over the Mules, it was a very narrow bridge. Patton came out with the hook, he pulled his .357 on his right in his right hand and he had a .45 colt in the other and he shot these two mules and threw them over the bridge and this was considered. It's terrible to think about this therapeutic mentality. Here you have a whole column stopped and the newspapers and journalists are angry because Chuck Patton shot two mules and threw them off the bridge to make it easier for the company to get out of a strafing attack, but on that team that was a very important point, without However, because obviously he should have been given one of three possible appointments: one would have been commanding general in Italy and that went to Mark Clark, who we know mainly for having fallen for the German tactic where Germany basically, the German forces under Kesling have basically allowed us to take Rome as a way to escape an encirclement and they knew that Mark Clark, of all the newspapers, would want to go to Rome, especially during the D-Day operations, and get some glory, and that would give them the opportunity to escape the encirclement and they perfectly predicted that Patton would not have done that on the Anzio in early January, that was very complicated, remember, it was a complicated operation in Fibia Sam to land in the main port or near the main port of Rome, people didn't know if we might be surprised that we had a beachhead.

There was only one German battalion there for about 24 hours. General John Lucas remained there for five days until the Germans formed a full semicircle of heavy artillery and armor against Patton. He wouldn't have done it. He wasn't. Given either appointment because he was under suspicion for slapping two soldiers, he was not saved, as often seen in film and popular literature, by Omar Bradley, who wanted him sent home, he was not necessarily saved by Eisenhower, his letters of support were post facto. It wasn't even George Marshall, it was Henry Stimson, Secretary of War, who said we can win the war without this man or at least we can't win it at a cost we can afford, so we come to the grand command decision: the planning of the invasion of Normandy which had been talked about since 1942, the Americans under Marshall told the British that we wanted to invade not even in November 1942, even they, after admitting what had happened in North Africa, thought which was a mistake, so we wanted to go in 43 and then after our problems in Sicily they said it was prudent, so we wanted to go in January in 44, then they said they were right about the British, we had problems in Italy.

Patton had said that the entire time he was completely excluded from any planning for In fact, Overlord was to add insult to injury when he was in command of a shadow army, what the Germans called Army Group Patton, where he would simply race around in a car. all over Scotland, although that way Wales with the horn blaring, so everyone thought. He was going to invade Calais and then the Panzer divisions would be held in reserve waiting for Patton's invasion, which would never come and then the Panzers would not be released to cut off the American beachhead, so he did not participate in Normandy.

Remember after that. Brilliant landing, at least we made it off Omaha Beach, we were ossified and calcified for about 40 days, we lost more in the next two weeks and we did so on the landing and finally we had 80,000 casualties before we left the book cause in July. 28 with Operation Cobra, even then, when Patton's Third Army was operational, Bradley tried to stop publicity from publishing news about it. I'm not suggesting that he was nice and polite and polite about it, he said things that were absolutely crazy, I mean. Brad said, just point me in the right direction and smoke you won't even see me when I'm gone all the way to the Rhine.

He said things like that all the time, but again the point was to take. a bunch of young civilian recruits and turn them into an army that could pit people who had been fighting on the Eastern Front for years against the toughest soldiers in the world when you start looking at some of those German Panzer Lehr armored divisions. division and you see the type of equipment 88 millimeter Panther and Tiger 1 and 2 tanks it is incredible that we could confront them and that was Patton's I did it so they assigned him the southernmost position in the advance towards Germany and that would be if he takes a map and draw a line, he would go to Czechoslovakia and not Germany, that was intentionally, but the most important thing is that they asked him to take breasts, that is, if you look at the map of Normandy, he would have to turn around and go in the right direction. contrary. direction and he wasn't designated to actually go in the first month to the east, of course, you know Patton, what he did: he took 1/3 of his army and went north and said he went west and then he headed to the east and in a series of orders that were overturned, he told General John Wooden to grow up, take Brest now and there was one day left and Bradley stopped him and of course you know what happened after Brest was heavily fortified , it took us about two months, we had around 40,000. casualties and the port was never used until October is a complete waste of time when he headed east, he was soon able, after the escape, to cover about 40 miles a day.

He covered 400 miles in the middle of the first week of September when we arrived. Argentina in the Falaise pocket was the entire Western Army Group, 300,000 Germans were advancing towards the Atlantic while Patton approached their rear in the hope of meeting the Canadians and Hitler did not allow von Kluge to withdraw and it seemed that the war would end. Mostly all we had to do was close Falaise's pocket and Omar Bradley said you're not going to do that because I'd rather have a round shoulder than a connection, we have to have an escape route for some of them and Patton said oh.

Hell, I'll meet the Canadians, I'll meet the Brits, and the Brits will get in my way. I'll push them all the way to make a dunk. Well, you can, you can't say that, so money will never close it. Well, it was never like that. closed for seven days it was heavily bombed ten thousand Germans were killed most of the equipment was lost but about one hundred and fifty-five thousand Germans escaped about ten divisions two of which were rearmed and we dropped Montgomery in the one hundred and first the 82nd. and the first British parachute division right above them basically in Arnheim Market Garden, so when General Modal was ready he defeated us and destroyed Monty's plan to jump in, most of those troops had been in the Falaise pocket when Paris passed , he begged to close another gap or another siege on the east side of the Sand River, they did not listen to him, he said that he had very few troops and then he returned to Lorraine and on September 2, his daily allotment, think of these four hundred thousand gallons of gasoline, he obtained 15,000 gallons, Partly it was because the operation was conceptually flawed, there were not enough supplies to get from the beaches three or four hundred miles to Germany and support some seven hundred thousand Canadian, American and British troops, partly it was because Eisenhower had I think he made a decision. disastrous by redirecting most of the supplies of the US 3rd and 1st Army in the month of September 1944 to Montgomery to make this part of Market Garden when it did not close the estuaries in the Harbor ports in AntwerpIf we had gotten to work, no one would have had any problems with supplies, the net result is that Patton remained 45 days without fuel and ended up in a fight in World War I, which was not his forte in Metz and finally in March , when he crossed the Rhine with the First Army Northward, the rest is practically history, he captured some three hundred and fifty thousand prisoners and, although he covered three hundred miles in two weeks and that was the end of the war, he told Eisenhower: "I can take Berlin and he said we're not going to lose three hundred thousand, that's what we think the Russians will lose, they lost one hundred and seventy thousand men and he said something that was very compelling, he said they would lose that many, but when the Germans see the Americans coming, He will be very happy to surrender to us and not go to gulags or be killed and he was not allowed to take Berlin and I think that had repercussions, so all these decisions that I talked about and that I think he was right about had repercussions: we lost . a disproportionate amount of people in Italy never made it to Austria the idea of ​​Churchill's weak point entering Europe or crossing the Ljubljana gap was a failure that we didn't do when the war ended American troops were still in Italy I don't know which The purpose of the Sicilian campaign was to be a stepping stone to Italy.

You go back through history to Hannibal and no army has invaded Sicily and entered northern Italy, invaded and entered northern Europe successfully by taking Sicily. Usually I have to go to Sardinia or Corsica and cross or cut someone or go from the north to the south, so all those campaigns I think were flawed. The Normandy campaign would have been. I think we could have said that it could have ended in September 1944. Whether we had closed the gap or tried to close it again at the same time, its best moment, of course, was during the Battle of the Bulge.

Patton finally got the gas, he was on the offensive and von Rundstedt didn't call von Rundstedt's offensive. but it wasn't really his idea it was Hitler's crazy idea that we had two green divisions in the 1st Army and that if he took a salient of 250,000 men and pushed his way through, he could separate the Americans from the British, there would be no command general, I could go to the Meuse River and then maybe just go to Antwerp and then have some kind of private agreement with the British or the US and say just cancel it, but it used up most of the reserves, the problem was if you were one of the fifty thousand American soldiers on that road and you woke up for ten days every morning and it was snowing and you had no air support when 90 percent of the planes in the sky for the last sixty days had been American or British and from suddenly you were looking at battle-hardened veterans and they had, like I said, tigers and panthers, you'll die or you'll be captured, eighty thousand Americans.

Patton saw that happening and when he went to the meeting with Eisenhower Verdun he knew what was going to happen, that someone had to cut the ledge. He had already told his staff that we had to change three entire divisions, I mean, it's 45,000 men and turn it in the opposite direction in 24 hours, so it was his greatest moment, it was very theatrical. He went to the meeting and, aizen, hell no! I don't know how we're going to stop these guys, they're going to get a bus rock, they're going to get to the moose, and they told me to announce Bradley, Montgomery, and Eisenhower.

I can rotate three divisions and I can cut them. He said Georgia will take two weeks and he said, "I'll go out and give this signal on the phone and they'll start in 24 hours and that's exactly what they did, the tragedy of that is of course, he argued vehemently that the way to stop a lump is not is to go diagonally and push the nose back, is to take a risk and cut it off at the base and allow a few more casualties at the tip, but thereby destroy the entire invasion, of course, that was considered too reckless and we didn't do that and that The battle lasted until February and we lost more men after Bastogne than before.

What I mean is that here is a pattern of someone who has undeniable experience, preparation and a natural genius who understands the horrible and annoying nature of war. to the people who run it and yet sequentially, time and time again, when not given a position or an appointment or a promotion commensurate with what was earned on the battlefield, people die and yet , the way the system or the therapeutic system society justifies it is that he slapped a soldier. The Germans, of course, were baffled by this. I mean, it's a bit mythical that the Germans knew a clap and I don't think the movie is entirely correct that it was canonized by the Germans primarily after the war.

They somewhat changed their views, calling him a cowboy and somewhat reckless, but what I mean is that it is true that several German intelligence officers would not believe that someone of his talent would be relieved for slapping a couple of soldiers when the German officers killed 25,000 soldiers in World War II, shot them out of cowardice or ordered them to be shot, so we finally come to the conclusion. I titled this talk Tragic Nature and I think Patton is a symbol of a problem that all Western societies face. Since the Greeks we have said that the advent of civilization is something wonderful, it creates leisure, it creates material wealth, luxury, it is civilization, it is not tribalism, it is not barbarism, but in that process we become meek and, nevertheless, the world that surrounds us is not meek and we are not.

I don't really know how to justify the use of violence against people who want to kill us. This sounds very relevant today. I think you all know that in that war on terrorism, so from time to time we see these fossilized memories of our past and we bring them to light. out of the proverbial closet and we say help us Curtis will make the b-29 program not work. I know it's safe for our flyers at 30,000 feet, but there bombs explode and fall. Well, get down to 5,000 with napalm. that will cure it, oh my god, you are going to burn people alive.

I will get rid of the industry or Matthew Ridgway. I'll let them in and then I'll surround them with napalm and explode. them and it will be winter and there they will regret going to Korea or Sherman this is Howell Cobb's plantation this is the guy who said that 250,000 Confederate soldiers were superior to us burn down his plantation Oh Mao, he burned we burned down a plantation in the south and for that, when we see someone like Patton and you can see him in our culture throughout our culture, he's just not military, that's what made John Ford famous, if you're Ethan our and Alan Ethan Edwards, excuse Me in the search engines and You want to find a little girl and you're dealing with some pretty tough Native American tribes.

You want someone with a dubious past. We haven't been told very well what he was, maybe a Quantrell Raider John Wayne and he's you. I don't know if he's going to kill Natalie Wood or not, but he has the skills that guarantee that he will bring her back, but as you remember, once she comes back, he opens the door and walks out of it. You don't want a guy like that there. Just like you don't want Gary Cooper in High Noon to stick around after you've done what you need to do, shoot four people in the street, you don't want the Magnificent Seven in town anymore.

I remember the famous Yul Brynner and Steve McQueen saying: well. I guess they're happy and you said they'll be even happier when we leave and I'll end by saying this is not a new phenomenon that we sometimes misdiagnose talent in all aspects of American society. I made a promise. I just want to interject that I was not going to mention Donald Trump's name in this talk, but you can see that this person has certain unpleasant characteristics and certain abilities that bring results and can guarantee that later we will be the beneficiaries of the results. He is not going to be on PBS. and ten years of ex-presidents joking around, it's just not going to happen, it will be persona non grata and I'll end up when pre-civilized Greece was making this transition to the city. -State, especially for radical democracy, there were people who saw the same phenomenon.

One of the great minds of the Western literary canon. Sophocles in one series wrote one hundred and thirteen works, we have seven extant, but in a series of works he analyzed this archetype. of the oligarchic aristocratic class that we had all these undemocratic skills and needed them was right in the middle of some of the plays the latter plays with the Peloponnesian Wars. I'm thinking here of Philip Tdys Ajax Antigone, but he does These characters come out and in every measure of talent, courage and bravery they excel and yet they all end badly because rewarding them for those key characteristics would be a referendum on their own society and I think which is a dilemma we all have to face.

I am grateful not to ask us to change our views, but to look around corners from time to time and when we see dark people, maybe they are not so dark after all. Thank you so much. Thank you, Dr. Hansen, now we have time for some questions. If you have any questions, please come to the microphone, dr. Hansen, thank you very much, excellent presentation, the only element of the patent that I always wanted to know more about is that just before his death he got into more trouble because he wanted to invade Russia and he wanted to arm the Germans and the camps and push. all the way to Moscow because he said we would avoid problems in the future.

Can you comment on it? Well, we remember that I think his name was. They called it Jeep Sansa. His regular driver had been transferred home after the war so he had a new driver and the new driver was not a skill and the three people who were with the driver there were Patton and two others had superficial injuries so the fact that he hit that glass partition was some kind of freak accident and he was on his way home, the reason these conspiracy theories came up was because Eisenhower had relieved him for two things because of a phone call he had with Walter Bedell Smith and in it he said my God, we have the people here, they are everywhere. here and the Russians are natural killers and we went to war supposedly to free Eastern Europe from the Nazis and now we're going to enslave it so when he said things I don't know how serious he was but that helped get him caught and then he said Another thing they said you have too many Nazis working for you says you know like Democrats or Republicans when the Republicans come in they can't get rid of all the civil service Democrats how can I get rid of these guys? and he said it in a way that was insensitive, so his main argument was that Bolshevik communism after the war would be as much of an existential threat to the United States as Nazi Germany, but he had greater respect not out of admiration but out of Russian military prowess. and capability than Germany due to its population and industry, so he was terrified of the T-34 tanks and the cruelty of the Soviet army.

They remembered having lost 11 million soldiers and nine million civilians, 20 million people and they thought that any lord, any regime could survive. That was terrifying, so I don't think he was right in the diagnosis, but the United States was not in a psychological position in May, when we were still fighting the Japanese and we were still a nominal ally of Russia and we were trying to flatter the Japanese . The Russians would do it, we didn't know if the bomb was going to work or if it worked it would trigger the surrender and we didn't think Millay LeMay could end this with air power, so we thought we were going to have to get the Soviet Union to help us dr .

Hansen, you talked a little bit about the therapeutic society we live in and gave some examples and, more recently, how it seems to have moved on a bit. Do you think I could get to the point? I mean Patton himself, you gave a lot of examples. in which he was ridiculed and attacked, do you think we could ever get to the point where we would turn to someone like him again? Well, I mean, in the first Gulf War you could see that Arnold, I mean, General Schwarzenegger, thought he was going to play that role. Do you remember the worst man I've ever been with with Al Phillip in my Austria, but there were people in the First Gulf War and the Second Gulf War who wanted to play that role, but if you look at both wars, I mean after the like this? so called highway of death it was not really a highway of death as the media said and then during the so called armistice with Saddam we allowed them to have helicopters that they massacred it was a disaster we had no one to say the more imperial the guard is given a respite the more innocent people are going to be killed and therefore we have to destroy them, we just didn't do it, so it is becoming more difficult as a society becomes more relaxed and more materially rich to find people of our pre-civilized ways because that's the pre-established civilized war, so I'm a little worried about that and we're all experiencing a war that started in 2001, it's been 19 years in Afghanistan, this whole group of experts told us, but all the reasons we have I and I supported the initial war but I think I counted them, it would be an art, but once there were 23 different reasons,They told me we had to be in Afghanistan, no one said we were going to win the war and/or there is no substitute for

victor

y so I don't know what it was about Libya I don't know what the Syria thing was Iraq we won the war but then we retired so it's difficult, it's very difficult to see that it's not the generals who The generals are representations of us and there were people who came out of depression and were impoverished, they didn't have the luxury of being therapeutic, so Patton was the most popular general, the reason he was so successful was that he had wide public support, the parents of the soldier he slapped wrote a letter and said I think what you did was wrong but boy we are not going to criticize you. saving lives I just don't think that will happen again so the general today and I think General Petraeus was a very good general, but he is more of an intellectual with a PhD than a blood and guts type of person or I don't think you will see again to people like Grant or Sherman orally, I don't think if a general said the new thing today, imagine, the new theater commander at CENTCOM went to Afghanistan, had a press conference, oh, I'm going to win, beat those sons of, they say, the children of the Taliban, that is too simplistic, so I don't think what dr.

Anson, thank you for coming, yes, ask and I would also like to say it on behalf of my father, who specifically told me to tell you that he has read almost every word you have written, but he specifically wanted to ask you how you spoke. about how Patton was clearly, you know strategically sound and a lot of his thinking and you know like seeing what was happening on the Eastern Front, just the brutality of the Nazis is that we have to go in and you know, make the other poor bastard die. for your country, what you're talking about is just feeling that democratic democratic societies are becoming a little bit soft, you know, it was something so ingrained and something like the Allied High Command had to play all the politics of the reasons for you know and the The fact that it was abrasive, you know them all, yes sir, so why exactly was the fact that it was clearly strategically sound enough to save it, so it was really just the fact that people made people feel a little uncomfortable because You know, he recognized that we were going to have to be violent to win the war.

Well, we know from his own war, as I knew it, that he made faces in the mirror, many of which were spectacle and were not. Inside out, they were Don's with ivory handles. He had this weird horn on his Jeep with the posters polishing his helmet, that was all an image to show people who he was, you know he would give these speeches, you know, no one died for them, no one won a war by dying for your country. , you kill the son of a bitch. He didn't die and he gave a terrible speech about how it can be effective, but he was terrifying when he said that all of you hurt people should be very hurt.

This was in Boston of all places after all, they should be very happy they didn't get killed. He never killed anyone. You know, he's just trying to create this image of himself and the American military as the battlefield equivalent of the Germans and the Russians, and he had a lot of clear disadvantages in doing that in a society and then when he went. out of place in the Lorraine and Metz campaign, he was out of fuel and he had, like I said, a stalled objective in World War I, he didn't do very well, so his idea was that Americans are growing up, they're all young. works on a car Not the Germans, not the Russians 1942 they all knew how to take a part from the Model A or Chevy they like their frontier means they are horsemen they like to move so you have to adopt those natural tendencies and they have armor to flank with support aerial forget the flanks surround confuse the enemy don't lose too many people bamm-bamm and that was what he tried to develop a strategic war doctrine that he felt was compatible with the American character up to that point.

Since he was able to do it, I think he did a pretty good job compared to people who had no idea about this. Hodges had no idea about this. Mark Clark would never think like that. Bradley would never think that Eisenhower's cheap concern is how to keep the coalition together. he did a good job but they always said you know when Patton said I can move three divisions and save the best stone and Eisenhower said watch out, now Patton your reputation hasn't been very good lately he said I think it's pretty good, how can you imagine? ? the supreme commander saying that to someone who just offered a way to save an entire division, so it was constant and it wore him down, it was a constant bureaucratic deep state biting at his ankles and he himself was a throwback to a pre-civilized mentality, a aristocratic mentality. where I felt that rich people who were well educated and knew how to ride horses and play polo and sail should be given certain cartoons and that was an ad for a guy who grew up very poor like Omar Bradley, you know, thanks for join. us again on campus dr.

Hanson throughout this series I can't help but wonder how the same quality seemed to make a person famous and infamous. I'm curious to know if this is perhaps a curse of success or simply a factor of human nature. Well, I think you are quite correct in your general observation of him, now I am quoting the 7th century BC poet. C., Hesiod, the most powerful of all human emotions is envy, what they called Thawne Oz and it is true that the most successful person, that is what created Greek ostracism, democratic culture, excludes someone, not because He did something wrong because everyone knows who he is, so we don't like people who do things that we can do in a pluralistic democratic society, but I think in this case we have the feeling of being a rich 21st century democratic, like I think Barack Obama summed it up. it's better the arc that always uses the term the arc of history is bending and it was always like things are getting better, better, better, and we will become more human and UMaine and we are changing the human nation, we have more universities, there are further.

Us Ivy League kids have all this technology and we're getting better and better and we're going to kill people off like a patent and I don't think we're getting better. I don't think there is any proof. in the story that we are all different from technology, even that has ups and downs, that we are getting into a moral human nature, human nature, and that's why these people who show us and remind us that are pretty scary people, I think when I broke I won't break my promise when that person who starts with tea said we don't want these animals there, the people in the neighborhood were relieved, but the people who had private property or gates were shocked, like Nancy Pelosi who has a nice wall to the state and Napo, so we have created in our own society people who have I don't want to be too epic Ettore but have pretensions about human nature but are never subject to the ramifications of their own ideology.

I'm going to try to get you to break your promise because I'm sure you heard that there was a recent report that Rex Tillerson and General Mattis took President Trump to the Pentagon to brief him and educate him on the importance of US alliances and so on. Then the report came out that at one point Trump got so angry that he yelled at the generals who said you're a bunch of losers or something and you know, and lo and behold, after he came in he changed the rules. of compromise and we defeated Isis and so on, but I just warn that it is another example of what you are describing, we know that this Hoover Institution was not allowed to speak publicly about another senior official, so I have great respect for General Mattis, but in a broader sense, I think what Trump was trying to say is that he values ​​optics, they are real reality shows and the ratings remember every time he gets mad at CNN, he doesn't just say CNN is fake news, he always It said low ratings or it says "you." Have you seen that guy?

He looks really bad on TV, so in his way of thinking he is practical and when he looks at Afghanistan he has bad grades and bad optics, but he also has pre-civilizational animal cunning and how could you possibly succeed? the Manhattan real estate market dealing with corrupt unions corrupt politician nutcase a corrupt community you have a hat you have the Builders Union you have Al Sharpton you have Bill DeBlasio how do you deal with everything and build skyscrapers so he has certain skills and stuff? skill sets are not compatible with the administrative language, whether civil or military, and the way problems are solved, and I suppose the only way we could reconcile that paradox is that you wouldn't want a government of trumps or patents or those types of people, but you might want one or two of them at times when the system finds itself unable to do things, so if you haven't had wage increases for workers in 12 years or you haven't had unemployment of the three point five percent in 50 years or an African American. unemployment 7 years, so maybe people in half the country decided that I'm willing to put up with the president's saying that Jerry Naggy Nadler is a sleazeball and he and then I was very surprised, as an encouragement to that.

I was very surprised when I heard people talk that voted for him, that talked about him, it reminds me a lot of what I read when I was researching a book on patterns, news reports on patterns because it usually sounds good. I really like what he did. I just wish he wouldn't say that. I just wish they wouldn't tweet and say things about the boss. Wow, I really like the idea that he beat Montgomery at Messina, but why do you have to do that? And the same with LeMay, why did he do that? and Curtis LeMay created the Strategic Air Command he essentially inherited it, but it was nothing and when he left it it had 200,000 people, it was the most sophisticated deadly Air Force in the world and the reward for that was being played by George C Scott or resisting the urge. and both characters in dr.

Strangelove was a madman and he was anything but a madman. He is an educated and very sophisticated person. Omar Bradley couldn't speak a word of French, he would never know it and he had a very beautiful upholstered cabin that he towed onto the battlefield. His personal Patton was sleeping on the floor. Patton walked around, he made sure everyone had dry socks so they wouldn't get trench foot, but it didn't fit the image that Bradley was, but it was actually him when people went on leave to England and they were from Hodges' First Army of the Army. they would lie and say they were the Third Army because they thought they would get better dates from the nurses.

We have time for one more question, first of all, thank you again, dr. Hinson, to speak, you were talking about patent strategies and approach to things and how different he was from almost every other general in World War II, what would you say was the reason for that? Do you think he was educated at VMI like most of our other leaders were, but was there anything similar to his early days in the military or do you think it was just the way he was as a person that made him approach things? so differently? His preeminent biographer Carl TST said that he suffered a series of serious concussions and traumatic disputes. he used it in context because there was a period in his life where he did some despicable things like dating his Stepney or I shouldn't say dating just he was married, he had a wonderful wife, but there were certain elements that he did believe in. in reincarnation and he believed that the patented family is because his grandfather died in the civil war, so he had the idea that he had a destiny and he kept saying: "They are not going to steal my destiny away from me" and he went into severe depression when he was not allowed to fight in the Pacific, so he got the idea that he was exceptional in his knowledge of war and he said it over and over again when they talked about closing the Falaise gap or taking Palermo and then taking a correct path . turn or have an affair, but he always told his staff I don't know where I got this idea.

I woke up at 2:00 in the morning with this idea and yes, I wrote it down and then he gave me meticulous information. diagrams of which battalions in particular, which brigades he would move and so he believed that at least he had some kind of artistic inspiration about the war. I think that's why I think he was meant to point the patent at him. A genius for war. There was something mystical about him and the film tried. Saying that may be an exaggeration, but people around him thought that he was not mentally stable and that he was flying around.

He wasn't fully aware of the effect he sometimes had on the people who had control over his destiny, so he was on the right track. in front of Eisenhower and Bradley walked up and yelled at a lieutenant colonel said you son of a bitch, you did this, you're going to get the men killed, you're not going to do it and then he walked by and smiled back and thought Eisenhower I was impressed and Eisenhower would later say that this guy is not fit for high command, so he was very generous. We have not seen anyone, we saw a Sherman like him and I think there were elements like him, as we heard today in MacArthur MacArthur. he had more or less the same, some of the same traits, although he ismuch more institutionalized than proprietary and much more politically intelligent.

I think at least sometimes it is like that or one more thank you, dr.

hanson