Victor davis hanson world war ii book pdf download

Victor, welcome. Peter Robinson: All right. Let's begin at the beginning. Why is there a plural in the title? Victor Davis Hanson: I think for two reasons. One is that from , when Germany divided up Poland with the Soviet Union, until April of '41, there was a Polish war, there was Norwegian war, there was a Danish war, there was a low country war, there was a French war, there was The Blitz, there was the Yugoslavian War, there was a Greek war. They were seen as isolated, border blitzkriegs in which Germany, with the exception of The Blitz, won every one of them.

Then something weird happened. In , Germany preempted and invaded its de facto ally the Soviet Union on June 22nd of Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, the Philippines, and Malaysia and Singapore on the next day and brought Japan in the war, not just against us, but against Britain too.

Then nobody thought on December 11th, Italy and Germany would declare war on us. Suddenly, these border wars that nobody really knew what they were, were renamed the Second World War, and because it really was in Asia and North Africa, even in the Americas, in the sense of off the coast of South America and it was a submarine campaign.

Suddenly, they were plural. Then the other thing was, of course, nobody had ever fought a war where it was so disparate. Disparate, I mean, you're fighting in the desert in armor. You're under feet of water in the North Atlantic. You're 20, feet above Germany in a British Bomber.

You're fighting in Burma. You're one of the 15 million people that were probably killed in China. It was so disconnected.

What did somebody that was fighting in Bulgaria have to do with the Japanese fighting in China, yet nominally they were on the same Axis side. It was trying to capture that ambiguity. It's not a monolithic, easily comprehended war. Peter Robinson: Mm-hmm affirmative.

How it began. I'm quoting again from The Second World Wars. By the way, I have to say, one of the pleasures, pleasures is too small a word. I'm no military historian, but I've read a fair amount. There's an insight or a fresh perspective on every page. I come to this. I'm giving you a little more set up for this first question because it's so striking to me that if you've read what I've read and you're of my generation, you grew up thinking that the Germans were a military machine.

They were much to be feared. You say the Axis powers were completely ill-prepared to win the war. Hitler, from the get go, didn't know quite what he was doing. What's the argument there? Or if you're Germany and you have good roads and you have source of supplies, you can run over your neighbors, if you preempt. All of these were surprise attacks. If you want to fight a global war, which, as I said, , that's what their arrogance led them into.

It's going to be an existential war. That's a fancy term for just saying you have to destroy the enemy, not have an armistice like World War I, then you have to be able to reach the homeland of the enemy. Once the Soviets moved most of their industry across the world, Germany had no ability to get to them.

From the very get go, neither Japan nor Germany could reach Detroit. Even during The Blitz of late Victor Davis Hanson: Bombing of London. There was greater Spitfire production, their signature fighter plane, then there was Bf , Germany's best fighter plane.

What I'm getting at is if you want to start a global war, and they started it and attacked these countries, then you better have four engine bombers, or if you're Germany, you better have an aircraft carrier fleet. They had neither. Japan did not have a Where did they spend their money on?

The V-2 and the V-1, which in terms of how many marks were necessary to deliver a pound of explosive, were about 30 times more expensive than not only conventional bombing, which the Allies had four engine bombers when the war started, both Britain and the United Even the B program or the atomic bomb, they were as expensive or more expensive, and yet the latter really paid dividends.

They didn't spend their money wisely. They lived in a world of fantasy and romance. After , it caught up to them. I want to return to that fantasy and romance. That's the Axis powers.

Here are the Allies. Explain that. They had that ability, believe it or not, in , but even '40, if they had rearmed a bit in the '30s. Britain started to rearm in and ' They really got going. It was so successful that when the war started, Germany didn't realize that they were almost comparable in fighter production.

The deterrence doesn't do you any good unless the enemy knows that. Germany still thought that this was Britain of and not ' In the case of the Soviet Union, Hitler himself said had they told me they have already two thousand T tanks, which were better than every class of German tank, I wouldn't have invaded. What I'm getting at is something shouldn't have happened. By that, I mean, if you take the assets of Britain and France alone in , they were greater than Germany's.

When Germany invaded France, they had less tanks. Their air forces were no better and they had less, fewer men than the democracy. Had the United States had a nonaggression pact or even an alliance with France and delivered soldiers there, Germany would have never invaded.

Had Britain rearmed a little bit earlier and France a little bit earlier, they wouldn't have invaded. If the Soviet Union had not signed a nonaggression pact with Germany and assured it, there would be no Eastern front, as was true in World War I.

Germany would have never gone west. It took Soviet collusion, American indifference or isolation, and British and French appeasement in the '30s to convince Germany of something that should have never been convinced of, i. They were not only not stronger than the eventual Allies of the Soviet Union, the United States and Britain, they weren't even stronger than the two original Allies of Britain and France.

They had one thing going for them and that is they looked at World War I as a tragedy that could be replayed with different results. In other words, if you were growing up in Germany in the s and the word Great War came, it was, "We should have won that. We were on their soil. We were stabbed in the back," so the myth went. No Allied soldier ever set foot in Deutschland. We can't ever get back to the Verdun.

Victor Davis Hanson: We won. It was just so terrible. They were the brilliant war poets. If you were in the Netherlands, they renamed destroyers, they didn't use that term, to fleet leaders. They thought it was too bellicose.

If you were in France, you couldn't talk about they shall not pass at Verdun. The Germany bragging on their defeat and the Allies were ashamed of victory.

Peter Robinson: You quote Churchill, quote, this is Churchill now, "Germany rearmament could have been prevented without the loss of a single life. It was not time that was lacking. Peter Robinson: What is so, in the early chapters, as you describe how it began, it's so chilling and so hard to believe, but you argue it so compellingly, that the Second World War was a result of fantasy, willful fantasy, on both sides.

Victor Davis Hanson: It was. The Allies didn't realize their own capabilities. They were talking in , the United States, of maybe building a four-engine bomber, a B, which had been in production maybe once every two days. They didn't realize that within three years it could build a better B in one an hour. They built more airframes than all of the other Allies and enemies combined. They didn't understand fully their capability and their potential. They underestimated their power and they Axis always overestimated their capability.

War is a laboratory. What it does is it says these are realities. You have impressions about realities that are often false. War is unnecessary, because if everybody just had to turn and they knew exactly what everybody in this room, their relative capability is, you wouldn't fight.

Fights take place Victor Davis Hanson After 65 million people are killed, we come to the conclusion in , wow, the Soviet Union, the United States and Great Britain were much stronger than the Axis, which was clearly discoverable in and even ' Peter Robinson: Got it. You make the point, the Axis is dominant right up through or so and tides shift.

The Second World Wars , "At the beginning of the War, the Axis powers appeared resolute, determined and calculating under the leadership of strongmen. You must sign in to see if this title is available for request.

Sign In or Register Now. World War II was the most lethal conflict in human history. Never before had a war been fought on so many diverse landscapes and in so many different ways, from rocket attacks in London to jungle fighting in Burma to armor strikes in Libya. The Second World Wars examines how combat unfolded in the air, at sea, and on land to show how distinct conflicts among disparate combatants coalesced into one interconnected global war.

Drawing on 3, years of military history, bestselling author Victor Davis Hanson argues that despite its novel industrial barbarity, neither the war's origins nor its geography were unusual.

Nor was its ultimate outcome surprising. The Axis powers were well prepared to win limited border conflicts, but once they blundered into global war, they had no hope of victory. An authoritative new history of astonishing breadth, The Second World Wars offers a stunning reinterpretation of history's deadliest conflict.

Never before had a war been fought on so many diverse Read More Read More. Additional Information. Average rating from 8 members. See all member reviews. Click here to find the review. Now we learn from a whistleblower that the agency was allegedly investigating moms and.

If he is nominated, could the polarizing Trump still beat. The woke apparently do this out of some Freudian effort to square. VDH and cohost Sami Winc wish everyone a thankful holiday.

Victor Davis Hanson and cohost Jack Fowler talk about modern revolutionaries, their methods and assault on the middle-class, law-abiding citizen.