Recommends The Storm of War.

Transcript context

…In my house in London, I have an actual copy of one of Winston Churchill’s speeches with his handwritten annotations, and one of the sentences is that London fought street by street could engulf and devour an entire hostile army. And one hopes that doesn’t happen, obviously, to the IDF, but that’s the reality of house-to-house fighting. Actually, while we’re on the subject, I have a few other questions on World War II that I want to ask you before we return to future wars. You have this really interesting book, I think probably my favorite book about World War II, The Storm of War, which I highly recommend. And in it, you make the claim that were it not for the ideologically inspired blunders of Hitler and the Nazis, they could have won World War II, and then you detail a lot of the mistakes they made. But when we step back and look at after America joins the war, the overwhelming industrial output of America, even if they didn’t make these mistakes, is there really any chance that you have a country that has, like, twice the GNP and is outproducing the rest of the world combined in ships and planes, that you could have really stood up to that? Well, why did Hitler declare war against America? There wouldn’t have been a war if he hadn’t declared war against America. You’d have fought a war against the country that attacked you, Japan. And the reason is because he was a Nazi. Because he believed that Jews and blacks dominated the American decision-making process, which, by the way, is completely absurd. When one looks at the Roosevelt administration, it had very, very few Jews or blacks, but nonetheless, the Nazis didn’t do their factual accuracy; it wasn’t always their highest attribute. And they also thought that Americans were cowards and wouldn’t be able to fight very well, which is extraordinary considering that Americans had fought very well indeed in the First World War. Adolf Hitler told Molotov when they were in a bunker in 1940 in Berlin that if the Americans did come into the war, they wouldn’t be able to actually put any troops into the western theater until the year 1970. As it was, needless to say, by November 1942, you had a quarter of a million GIs storming ashore in North Africa. This sense of ideology. You see it also, of course, six months earlier, in June of 1941 where Hitler invades Russia in the belief that the Slavic people can’t stand up to the great German Aryan master race. And as Goebbels said to him, “We’ll kick in the door and the whole rotten edifice will come crashing down,” talking about the Bolshevik state. But that’s not what happened, of course. And the Russians, fighting on their own territory, i.e., when they’re not fighting a foreign adventure like in Poland or in Finland or now in Ukraine, are actually very good soldiers. So he got that wrong. Again and again, Hitler put his Nazi ideology before the strategic best interests of the German Reich.…

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