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Hear that? That's what it sounds like when you plant more trees than you harvest. Work done by thousands of working forest professionals like Adam, a district forest manager who works to protect our forests from fires. Keeping the forest fire-resistant synonymous with keeping the forest healthy. And we do that through planting more than we harvest and mitigate those risks through active management.
It's a long-term commitment. Visit WorkingForestsInitiative.com to learn more. This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people coming to you from the city where the West begins. Fort Worth, Texas. Victor Davis Hansen is an historian and classicist who has written extensively about George S.
Patton. with the general being a key figure in his book the soul of battle. Hansen argues that the real immorality in war is not the use of great force to inflict punishment. but the failure to exercise moral authority at all. Here's Victor Davis Hansen, and this came from a talk he gave at Hillsdale College.
Who sponsor this show? All of our history stories are sponsored by the great folks. at Hillsdale College. George Patton. resented by most of his peers because He was from one of the wealthiest families in America, Mount Wilson in L.A., that was his grandmother, the Wilson family.
His father was a city attorney of L.A. and owned 1,000 acres in Pasadena. He was fabulously rich on his own family side, and then he married into the Ayer Pharmaceutical Company, Federic Ayr's big empire.
So when The image of American officers was Omar Bradley and Eisenhower and Lucian Truscott. And Wade Haslip, all of these great people from the hinterland of America, here came. Patton. From California playing polo with his own yacht and a stable of horses all during the Depression. and he had been in the 1912 Olympics.
He came in fourth. He might have won the panathlo, and he claimed that he was such a good shot that each time he shot, he put the bullet right through the prior hole, and the judges didn't understand that. And he may have been right. But if you follow his career through the twenties and thirties, Up until 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 the Americans should go for it. And yet we didn't do it, and that was the model that the T-34 Russian tank adopted. He designed the US Cavalry Sabre. And in this entire process, he developed U.S. armor tactics.
1940 in war games in Louisiana, he captured the senior general Ew Drum. You may have seen the Dirty Doesn't, that movie, that old movie about capture, how they played dirty. That was basically based on Patton's war maneuvers, how he went on a 400-mile goose chase, they thought, and ended up capturing the red general. He was on the blue team. And he did that two times.
Then he went down and got. Into Indio out in the middle of nowhere and set up an entire desert warfare. Complex and taught Americans with inferior lee tanks the elements of armor, pursuit, and breakthroughs. The point I'm making is that when Pearl, and he was 55 and he was still not a brigadier general. People hated him because he was drank too much.
There were periods in his life when he womanized He played polo, as I said. He was accident-prone. He uh lit a gas lamp to look at his eye and it blew up and burned his face. He accidentally stabbed himself. He would...
He broke in a horse accident, he broke his leg, he got phlebitis. He was always, and of course he died in a freak accident as well.
So he was known as injury-prone, reckless, rich, ostentatious, loud. And yet he spoke French, read German, and was highly educated. The point I'm getting at is that he enunciated or he articulated a worldview of war, and it was similar to his contemporaries. Like LeMay and Ridgway, and also very Sherman-esque. He was a big admirer of.
William Decumps of Sherman. And he basically said that democracies are therapeutic societies and we don't train people, thank God, to kill people. but there are people in the world who do. And when they do, they need people like George Patton. Who's part of and yet not part of a democracy that understands The evil mind and can make soldiers for brief periods of time.
have the training and the courage and the fortitude to stand up to the Hermann Gring division. or Fockworth 190 pilots. or U-boats. And that was his principle. And then you would kill these evil people and you protect the innocent.
And he said that. And we don't like people to say that. When Colin Powell said, What's your strategy? for the first Gulf Wars that we're going to find The Saddam's army were going to Cut it off, and then we're going to kill it. And people got very angry.
Why did he have to say kill it at the end? That therapeutic alternative is deeply ingrained, and it's very hard for societies like us to mobilize against these perceived threats without these types of people.
So when We were ready after Pearl Harbor to fight. The obvious choice for our first engagement was George S. Patt. Right before Pearl Harbor in October, he was promoted to Major General, two-star general. And yet, when we had Operation Torch, the November 1942 landings in Northwest Africa, he was not chosen to lead the entire project of Torch.
He was given just the Western Command, 30,000 troops. The most incompetent. useless general in American history Lloyd Frydenhall was. And Eisenhower wrote a report and said, he looks like a general, he breathes fire, he's our man, I've never been more impressed. He would swagger around, he would pound his fist, and he didn't know anything.
And the result was, as you know, the worst defeat in American history, really, or at least the most humiliating that Kaiser in past. where Rommel destroyed an entire uh brigade 3,000 missing, 400 dead, 600 tanks, just Friedenhole, where was he? 50 miles back, dug in in a bunker. Probably drunk. When it was time to take over Second Corps Everybody thought Patton will get his chance, and yet Eisenhower asked General Harmon to do it, who turned down and said, This is pretty embarrassing.
Patton deserves it.
So patent took over immediately. At the Battle of El Ghazar, he won the first battle Americans had won in World War II. And you've been listening to Victor Davis Hansen tell the story not just of General George S. Patton. but about how democracies continue to be able to defend themselves against evil.
while enjoying the fruits. Of Western civilization. When we come back, More of Victor Davis Hansen. Here on Our American Stories. Yeah.
Lee Habib here. As we approach our nation's 250th anniversary, I'd like to remind you that all the history stories you hear on this show are brought to you by the great folks at Hillsdale College. And Hillsdale isn't just a great school for your kids or grandkids to attend, but for you as well. Go to hillsdale.edu to find out about their terrific free online courses. Their series on communism is one of the finest I've ever seen.
Again, go to hillsdale.edu and sign up for their free and terrific online courses. Is that good? Shh! You won't believe what my new friend just told me about dinosaurs! Is your child having conversations you never imagined?
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And we continue with Our American Stories and with Victor Davis Hansen. Telling the story of not just George S. Patton. But well, the soul of battle, and particularly How a genteel society and Western democracies themselves. can survive and thrive when life and death are on the line.
Let's continue. with Victor Davis Hansen. He wanted to continue ahead of II Corps. You would thought that too many people had died in North Africa needlessly without giving Patton the main responsibility for the invasion. of Sicily, Operation Husky, and yet We deferred to General Montgomery.
Monty was a great general in a set piece, but he was not a pursuer, and he didn't pursue.
So what did Patton do? He went all the way to northwest to Palermo, then made another right turn, broke orders, and got to Messinia before Montgomery. And of course didn't well didn't get there in time to trap the Germans. He became very famous after that. And you'd think that at that point...
Everybody knew that Overlord was being planned in conjunction with the Italian invasion, that he would get a supreme command. He slapped two soldiers. Quite despicably, he went into a hospital. He was mad because the absentee rate of soldiers for what we would call post-traumatic. Stress syndrome, what was known then as shell shock.
There were three officers who watched the first Slapping incident, the person had malaria when he was slapped. Second one, two weeks later. He had some ailment, whether it was a fever or it was just stress, we don't know, but he slapped him. In this period, one of his armored Companies were on a bridge. There was an Italian farmer with two mules.
They were being strafed. They didn't want to. run over the mules. It was very narrow bridge. Patton went up, put Took out his 357 and it's right on.
Right hand, and he had a 45-quote, and shot these two mules and had them thrown over the bridge. And this was considered terrible. Think of this therapeutic mindset. Here you have a whole column stopped, and the papers and journalists are angry that Patton shot two mules and threw them over the bridge to facilitate the company getting out of a strafing attack. But in that case, that was a very important point, though, because he obviously should have been given one of.
three possible appointments. What I'm getting at is that there's a pattern here of somebody that has undeniable experience, preparation, and natural genius who understands the horrific nature of war. and bothers the people that command him. And yet Sequentially, or time and time again, when he is not given a billet or an appointment. or a promotion befitting What he's earned on the battlefield, people die.
And yet The way that the system or the therapeutic society justifies that is that he slapped a soldier. Germans, of course, were bewildered by this. I mean, it is a little mythical that Germans knew of Pat, and I don't think the movie is quite right that he was. Cannonized by the Germans. Mostly after the war, they sort of changed their views.
They called him a cowboy and kind of reckless. But the point I'm making is that it is true that a number of German intelligence officers wouldn't believe that somebody of his talent would be relieved for slapping a couple of soldiers when German officers killed 25,000 soldiers in World War II, shot them for cowardice, or had them ordered shot. And so Patent is symbolic of a problem that all Western societies deal with. Since the Greeks, that the advent of civilization is a wonderful thing. It creates leisure.
It creates material wealth, luxury. It's civilization. It's not tribalism. It's not barbarism. But in that process, we become tame.
And yet the world around us is not tame. And we don't quite know how to justify Using violence against people who want to kill us. And so from time to time we see these fossilized memories of our past and we bring them out of the proverbial closet and we say, help us. Curtis will make the B29 program doesn't work. I know it's safe for our flyers at 30,000 feet, but the bombs are falling off top.
Well, you go down 5,000 with napalm, that'll cure it. Oh my god, you're going to burn people alive? I'll get rid of the industry. or Matthew Ridgwick. I'm going to let them come in and then I'm going to surround them with napalm and I'm going to blast them and it's going to be winter and they're going to regret they ever went into Korea.
Our Sherman This is the plantation of Hal Cobb. This is the guy who said that 250,000 Confederate soldiers were superior to us. Burn his plantation. Oh Mao, he burned He burned a southern plantation. And so we When we see somebody like Patton, and you can see it throughout our culture, it's just not military.
That was what made John Ford famous. That if you're Ethan Edwards in the searchers and you want to find a small girl and you're dealing with some pretty tough. Native American tribes, you want somebody with a dubious past. We're not quite told what he was, maybe a Quantrell raider, John Wayne, and you don't know whether he's going to kill. Natalie would or not.
But he has the skills that both ensure that he's going to bring her back. But as you remember, once she's back, he opens the door and walks out. You don't want a guy like that there any more than you want Gary Cooper in high noon to stay around. after he's done what you have to do, shoot four people in the street. You don't want the magnificent seven in the village anymore.
I remember that famous Jule Brenner and And uh Steve McQueen said, well I guess um They're happy and he said they'll even be happier when we leave. And I'll just finish by saying that this is not a new phenomenon that we We sometimes misdiagnose talent Throughout all aspects of American society, Uh when Pre-civilized Greece was making this transition. to the city-state and especially to radical democracy. There were people who saw the same phenomenon. One of the great minds of the Western Literary canon Sophocles.
In a series of plays, he looked at this archetype of the oligarchic, aristocratic class that had all of these anti-democratic skills. And by every measure of talent and courage and bravery they They excel. And yet they all end up badly because to reward them for those very characteristics. Would be a referendum on your own society. And I think that's a dilemma we all have to appreciate.
not asking us to change our views but to Every once in a while, look in the corners, and when we see dark people, maybe they're not so dark after all.
So it's hard. It's very hard. to to see that It's not the generals. The generals are representations of us. And there were people coming out of the Depression who were impoverished.
That didn't have the luxury to be therapeutic, and so Patton was the most popular general. The reason he was so successful was he had broad public support. The parents of the soldier he slapped wrote a letter and said that I think it was wrong what you did, but boy, we're not going to criticize you. You're saving lives. I just don't think that would happen again.
The general today, and I think General Petraeus was a very good general, but it's more of an intellectual with a PhD. rather than a blood and guts type of person.
Now I'm quoting the 7th century BC poet Hesiod: the most powerful of all human emotions is envy. what they call Thanos. And it's true that the more successful person, that's what Greek ostracism and the democratic culture created: ostracize somebody not because he did something wrong, because everybody knows who he is.
So we don't like people who do things that we can't in a democratic place. And so these people who show us and remind us of that. They're pretty scary people. But you can see that this person has certain obnoxious characteristics and certain skill sets that bring results, and you can guarantee that after we are the beneficiaries of the results. It's going to be persona nombrada.
And a terrific job on the editing and production by Greg Hengler. And a very special thanks to Hillsdale College for providing the audio of this remarkable talk of Victor Davis Hansen's, which is not just about General Patton, but how, in the end, Let's face it, we need our bad guys. who can inflict harm on enemies trying to kill us. And nobody does a finer job of this than Victor. And also Hillsdale College.
Again, sponsors of this show, you hear the name again and again. Go to their website and sign up for any and all of Victor Davis Hanson's classes, they're terrific. His lectures on just about everything. And their latest on communism is a tour de force, as much a course as it is a mini-documentary. I took it with my daughter, and it was fabulous.
Go to Hillsdale.edu. to learn more again that story and history of communism. simply terrific. The story of General George S. Patton.
and the need for bad guys to fight the fight against other nations bad guys here on Our American Stories. This message comes from the International Rescue Committee. The IRC has been providing humanitarian aid for more than 90 years. The International Rescue Committee helps refugees whose lives are disrupted by conflict and disaster, supporting recovery efforts in places like Gaza and Ukraine, and responding within 72 hours of crisis. Donate today by visiting rescue.org slash rebuild.
That's rescue.org/slash rebuild to learn more and donate today. Okay. Shh. You won't believe what my new friend just told me about dinosaurs. Is your child having conversations you never imagined?
Are they learning without realizing it? It's not a tablet. It's not a toy. It's Miko Mini Plus, the AI-powered companion that turns curiosity into endless learning. Hear the future of playtime.
Meet the extraordinary Miko Mini Plus. Only at Costco. With their moustache, a taco in one hand, and ordering a rod in the other. Means you're stacking cash back. Nice.
Get up to 5% cash back with Venmo Stash on your favorite brands when you pay with your Venmo debit card. From takeout to ride shares, entertainment, and more, pick a bundle with your go-to's and start earning cash back at those brands. Earn more cash when you do more with Stash. Venmo Stash terms and exclusions apply. Max $100 cash back per month?
See terms at venmo.me/slash stash terms. What a matchup we got, y'all. This is that classic HBCU vibe. Non-stop action, the bed is rocking and the crowd lit, chants echo, drum beat, everybody showing that school pride. Game like this?
Yeah, it calls for an ice cold Coca-Cola. Ah, crisp and refreshing. That's a game changer right there. Mmm, yeah. That taste always hits the right note, just like the band at halftime.
And just like that, we're back at it. Passionate fans, school colors everywhere, and an ice cold Coca-Cola, that's a winning combo. No matter the sport, no matter the yard, everybody knows. Fan work is thirsty work, so grab a Coca-Cola and keep that HBCU pride going. Every We finally switched to T-Mobile because with them, we can be connected here and there.
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