transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:04] Every week, Hillsdale College President Larry Arnn joins Hugh Hewitt to discuss Great Books, Great Men and Great Ideas. This is Hillsdale Dialogues, part of the Hillsdale College Podcast Network. More episodes at podcast.hillsdale.edu or wherever you find your audio.

Speaker 2:
[00:30] Morning, glory and evening grace, America. I'm Hugh Hewitt. That music means the Hillsdale Dialogues, the last broadcast hour of the week has upon us. All things Hillsdale at hillsdale.edu and everything about our dialogues contained at Hugh for hillsdale.com. There are hundreds of them. For the last year and a half, Dr. Arnn, my guest, Dr. Larry Arnn, President of Hillsdale College, and Churchill biographer extraordinaire, the Equal Any Churchill Scholar out there. We have been working our way through, and this is the penultimate episode about this book, The Gathering Storm, Winston Churchill, throughout the 30s through his time in the Neville Chamberlain government after the beginning of World War II on September 1, 1939. And Dr. Arnn, as we come close to the end, we're going to do a big gulp of chapters today, chapters 31 through 36 in The Gathering Storm. That covers so much ground, but a lot of it is way up north in Norway and Sweden and Denmark and the Baltic and the reaches of the fjords of Norway that it gets complicated. I wanted you to begin though, by talking about the Phoney War and the Dark New Year Chapter where Churchill says, he's writing a Christmas card to a friend saying, the Kaiser's Germany was a much tougher customer than Nazi Germany. That wasn't right. Churchill was wrong about that. So I guess even great men sometimes underestimate their adversaries.

Speaker 3:
[01:57] Well, yeah, that's true. People keep their daubereub. The Kaiser's Germany was very tough, very, very tough. And probably German society was healthier back then than it was by the time of Hitler, because Hitler was kind of crazy. And the German people had suffered so much by because of their own aggressions, by the way. So what he was thinking probably, because he said things like this about the same time, was this new thing. During the war, he once described the Germans. He said, those brave, loyal German people at your throat or at your feet. He thought that the Germans were guilty of putting up with too much out of their government. And I have sometimes feared that maybe the Chinese will prove to be like that, but I very much hope not. And so it's, yeah, and, and, and, you know, remember the astonishing events that we're going to get to in the next volume of, you know, May 1940 to June 1940, when they conquered all of Western Europe in six or eight weeks. Nobody expected that could be done. And the Germans did that in part by daring and dash and partly by innovation. Not simply because their soldiers were more resolute than the German soldiers of the First World War. I don't know that they were, but they were resolute. But they were, you know, I mean, they conquered Western Europe in a hurry with the tank and the airplane, but especially the tank. And, and Churchill didn't see that coming.

Speaker 2:
[03:35] There is a, I always learned something that I didn't think I would learn on page 501 of The Gathering Storm. I learned that a German staff officer had overflown the border with France and Belgium. Actually, he crashes in Belgium, and he has all the Case Yellow plans, quote, these contain the entire and actual scheme for the invasion of Belgium, Holland and France. But the, the allies talked themselves into not believing it. I'd never known that before. Do you recall that from your work on the biography?

Speaker 3:
[04:08] Yeah, sure. Yeah. And you know, I mean, first of all, it's, that's crazy because if Hitler had proved anything, it would be, he might do anything, right? I mean, Lord, look what he'd done. Taken the Rhineland, taken Austria, taken Czechoslovakia, attacked Poland, all on promises not to do those things. So yeah, why didn't they believe it? Why wouldn't this, in Belgium, they didn't believe it? And heck, the Germans had already invaded them once in 1914. So why wouldn't they believe it? Well, they didn't believe it. It's a plant.

Speaker 2:
[04:56] Yeah, that's what they said. They were afraid it was a plant.

Speaker 3:
[04:59] You know, it, but see, another thing was everybody was trembling with fear and right to, but that compromised their judgment, right? So like the Belgians and the French, and some in the British, not Churchill, were afraid to take steps against Germany for fear of provoking them. And the French and the British were at war with Germany. And they did, you know, the French kept saying, Churchill came up with many plans to attack them. Some of them were implemented, and when they were implemented, they were tardy. And you know, two months late, seven weeks late, that's a long time, you could say, in the war. And the French, and some of them never happened. And the French would say, we don't want to do that now. We're not ready for him to attack us. Give us a few more months, and then we'll be ready. Churchill writes in this volume that he thinks the French army actually decayed during the long phony war, which from September 3rd, 1939, until May the 10th of 1940. And so that's...

Speaker 2:
[06:18] Almost nine months.

Speaker 3:
[06:20] 11 months. Yeah. Yeah. And they... So he thinks that they didn't train very hard. He thinks they lost their physical fitness. And that means that their heart was not in it. And also he comments that the Soviet Union was on the side of Hitler at the time. And that meant the left in many countries, including our own and including France and Britain, were agitating against entry into the war. There's a publication in Britain still published called The Daily Worker. I think it's still published. And they were very anti-Britain entering the war or launching an attack after they were in the war until the day in June 1941, when Hitler attacked Soviet Union. And the next day, they were all over the world. Let's go get them.

Speaker 2:
[07:16] You know, I want to emphasize something you said, something you said earlier about the Germans used tanks. Churchill invented the tank. If you've listened to the show long enough, you know that. Invented the tank in World War One, Minister of Munitions, and thought it had great potential. I'm stunned to read on page 503, quote, When the hour of trial arrived, the first army tank brigade, comprising 17 light tanks and 100 infantry tanks. It's all they had. It's all they had when the war came. 117 tanks. What were they doing for a decade?

Speaker 3:
[07:51] Well, there's a kind of insight into Churchill that's apparent here. Churchill spent much of the 1930s calling for a Ministry of Supply, a new name for what he ran at the end of the First World War, the Ministry of Munitions, to get more weapons of every kind. But what he focused on was airplanes. The reason was, the first step is, get yourself in a place where they cannot attack us directly here. So he thought that the emergency was so great, that he focused his own rhetoric on getting more planes. That's the big thing. Because if they get air superiority, they're going to be all over. It's right here in England, which eventually they were, by the way. They did get more airplanes, and it proved barely enough, in part because of a German mistake. But they didn't have tanks. Now they're going to send a field army to Europe, and the Germans had figured out about the tank. And they, you know, their two greatest commanders were Rommel and Guderian. And I think I've said this before, but Hitler made a rare, happy or effective intervention into British strategy. Because they were, the Germans were getting ready to repeat the wheel to the right through Belgium, and then down into France. And Hitler thought that was predictable. And so Guderian and Rommel worked out a plan to go farther south through the Ardane forest with the tank army. And they emerged behind the main British and French lines, and between them and their lines of communication and supply. And they just tore those armies to heck being behind them. And the tanks could go really fast. And that was, you know, one of the greatest military disasters in all of history.

Speaker 2:
[09:59] And it would be repeated in the Battle of the Bulge. They would use the Ardane the second time to the surprise of the Allies. And we should always remember, look where we aren't looking, because that's where the surprise is going to. Don't go anywhere. I'll be right back with Dr. Larry Arnn. Hillsdale Dialogues continues. They have a brand new course at hillsdale.edu, by the way, on rhetoric and logic, which you ought to go sign up for at hillsdale.edu, completely free, as is in Primus. All the video courses are for free. Of course, all the prior Hillsdale Dialogues, especially on Churchill and his World War II memoir, are at Q for hillsdale.com. Stay tuned. Welcome back, America. I'm Hugh Hewitt. The Hillsdale Dialogue is underway with Dr. Larry Arnn, president of Hillsdale College. We are getting close to the end of our study of the first volume of Winston Churchill's World War II memoirs. And not surprisingly, it's just got a lot of Navy in it. Let me ask you about something Churchill does that I found unique at the end of this book. He stops to tell stories of individual ships, the Cossack, the HMS Cossack, the HMS Glow Worm. And he talks about the individual captain, Captain Vian, who runs the Cossack and runs the Altmark to ground and frees 300 Germans, 300 Brits who are in the hold. And they say, the Navy is here, which passed from lip to lip throughout the country. He's very intent on making sure that individual heroes get their paragraphs or pages in this memoir. I hadn't noticed that before now, but we haven't been at war yet. But is that going to carry on for the rest of the volumes? A pause here and there to highlight someone who's maybe forgotten the history, but not to Churchill?

Speaker 3:
[11:40] People, you know, wars are won by people and they have to be brave. And so there's your fundamental condition, right? And when the British are brave, one of those two that you just named, they were outgunned and outmatched, and he eventually damaged the German ship by ramming it. And he later got the Victoria Cross, which is their highest declaration. And Churchill loved things like that. And he thought we're going to have to fight. And that's going to, a lot of us going to get killed. And we're going to have to be brave. Are we going to be? And the British were very brave. We were very brave. I'll inject a story. I've been thinking some about some we'll get to later, which is the war in Asia. And, you know, we, by the end of the Second World War, we simply overwhelmed the Japanese. We had many more ships and planes. And at one point we pulled up 27 carrier groups off the coast of Japan and had air superiority over Japan, the Homa Islands, from the sea. Amazing. Well, the last big battle before that was the Battle of Lady Golf. And the Japanese did something very clever. They managed to divide our fleet by keeping their one big remaining carrier up north, took all the planes off of it, and tempted our carriers up there to fight the carriers because everybody knew that the carriers were most important. And what they left down by the Philippines was the force of bigger ships meant to disrupt the invasion of the Philippines that was underway at the time. And so what we had to contest that bigger force was a bunch of light ships. And there's a guy named Cunningham who won the Medal of Honor for this. He's exactly what the captain of the Glowarm did. He actually did this against orders. They all knew that the invasion was on and those ships were going to go to disrupt the invasion and kill a lot of American troops. And he saw those black and big eyes of the destroyer captain, smallest of the warships. And he sees that Japanese Flotilla was two battleships and many cruisers much larger than his. And darned if he didn't charge them and sink two of them before he was sunk. And you learn when you read about this, you learn that back then, probably now, but you know, because of your son-in-law. The word in the Navy, if you might lose your ship is, we may have to swim here. Yeah. And he announced as they began their charge.

Speaker 2:
[14:21] The charge of the 10th Gate. They were called the 10th Gate.

Speaker 3:
[14:24] That's right. And he went after him, right? And he made an announcement, men, we may have to swim today, but we're going out.

Speaker 2:
[14:34] Well, that's, you know, it's it's inspiring to read these stories. And these stories are not often told. And there are three of them. I've just mentioned two of them, but they're throughout. Now I got to ask you about the downside. Plans made and abandoned committee upon committee upon committee. Finland falls and then they take everything that they've been planning to do in Norway and Sweden and they they bench it and they redo it. And then the committee at the armed services redoes it. And Churchill's pulling his hair out at the Admiralty. And that he has no power. I think it does impact how he becomes Prime Minister and makes himself Defense Secretary. He told that again, but he hates this war by committee. It drives him nuts. Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[15:19] Well, Churchill was a great defender of the British Constitution and the American Constitution and almost always regarded the British Constitution as superior to ours. He thought ours was too formal and strict in some ways. He rather changed his opinion about that as time went on. But what he really admired about it all along was that the elected Chief Executive is the Commander-in-Chief, and that means, and that's defended in the Federalist Papers, because first of all, the essence of executive action is you got to act, you have to execute, it's cognate, but the word execute, and also, you know who to blame. There's more accountability, and Churchill admired that about the British government, the American government, and managed to create the conditions of that that we will see in the next volume. Well, right now in America, there's an argument going on about Trump's support of the unitary executive. What they mean by that is he's taken over the powers of the legislature and the judicial branch. I think that's not true, and that's a detailed argument, but it's an interesting way to put the point, because it's very clear that one of the features of the American Constitution, and one of the best defendants in the Federalist Papers, is that we have a unitary executive.

Speaker 2:
[16:44] And you know, I love to tell Dr. Arnn, I'll intercede here. Whenever anyone says no kings, no kings, no tyrant, the military executive, I point out that Donald Trump loves nothing so much as tariffs, the Supreme Court took that away from him, and he conceded the point and abandoned the case. He's looking for a different way to do it, but he abides by the ruling of the independent judiciary. He's no more a king than you are a king of Hillsdale. And you are kind of closer to being a king of Hillsdale than the president is. It's just silly.

Speaker 3:
[17:14] And I think that's true. And I also think that in a certain way, his loyalty on that particular respect is at the peak. Because a lot of these injections from these lower courts, there never been so many of them. And the Supreme Court has curtailed that now, thank God for it. But the idea that a single judge and a judge shopping operation can shut down a national policy on an ordinary case in his district, that's just not good American law. And Trump has obeyed those. And that's going the second mile.

Speaker 2:
[17:54] Now, I want to turn to Norway and Sweden. And I want to give you a good 10 minutes here, because I slogged through chapters 32 through 36. And I got my maps out and look at where Narvik is and where Trondheim is and where Sweden is, and the railroad they're going to go across, and the fact that this freezes and that doesn't free. And they're spending his entire admiralty campaign, is do we mine the Rhine, and no one will let him mine the Rhine, and no one will let him send troops to Narvik. And he wants to do something, but they're just caught in this inertia during the phony war. And the phony war goes on for eight months. We'll talk about that all. And then it goes on for eight months, and then there's a disaster in Norway, and then there's a disaster in France. We'll come back and we'll talk about that with Dr. Larry Arnn. I remind you, all things Hillsdale, including an application. If you are going to be, maybe it's a little bit late for next year, or this fall, but if you're thinking ahead, go get the application at hillsdale.edu. You want Imprimus for free, their monthly speech digest, mail mail, old fashioned style. It's right there at hillsdale.edu, and all of the dialogues, all of them, hundreds of them, at Hugh for hillsdale.com. Stay tuned. Welcome back America, I'm Hugh Hewitt, talking with Dr. Larry Arnn, president of Hillsdale College, about Winston Churchill's World War II memoirs. We're almost at the end of the gathering storm. Now we have to go up north. What do people need to know about the Norway campaign? Because it almost took out Churchill too, because he was in charge of the Admiralty for eight months.

Speaker 3:
[19:30] Yeah. Well, first of all, the strategic fact is, Germany was getting vital supplies, iron ore, and some oil across the Baltic Sea. And that's sea, right? It's hard for the British to get in there because of the choke points. And that was a big problem in the First World War II. But still, it's a sea connection and the British have superiority when they can get their ships on the water. So, of course, it's obvious that they want to disrupt that, because German steel production and oil are definite factors of war production. And Germany needed that, right? And so, you got to think the Germans are going to try to do that. So, Churchill saw that early. Basically, let's invade Norway and seize those supplies. So, Hitler doesn't get them. Well, they studied it to death for months and months. And by the time they, if they had done it in a week, which Churchill was ready to do, and he thought the Navy was ready to do, there wouldn't have been any Germans around. But they did it at about the same time the Germans did, and they planned their operation much quicker. They pursued it much more effectively and expeditiously. And the Germans and the British met there in Norway some. And the Germans had undermined Norway through a man named Quisling, who's now famous. There's a noun or an adjective now here, Quisling. It's somebody who betrays your country for another country. And the Germans beat them back. And the British had people there, but they had to pull them out, and they didn't win, they lost. And that was, I don't know if you'd say it was chiefly an Admiralty operation, but it was primarily an Admiralty operation. The first step was the Navy had to get them over there, and they did, but it didn't work, right? And it was that committee thing again. It just thought it to death, worried it to death, and then no action, which is sure defeat. And so it went south.

Speaker 2:
[21:39] For the audience, the British put a shore in Norway, two forces, Sickle Force and Maurice Force. One is north, Maurice Force, I believe, and the other is Sickle Force down there, Trondheim. And the Allies are there. I mean, the Poles were involved, and the French should go. But the Germans beat the Daylights out, because the Germans got the jump. And there's an army general, General MacCasey. He won't do anything that Churchill wants him to do. He's just basically refusing to fight for Narvik before the Germans arrive. I just learned how Churchill is going to demand to be the Tsar of the war, because he's not going to put up with this. He's going to want to be like Lincoln firing Meade and firing Hooker and firing McClelland. He's going to want to fire generals after this. And the Admirals did what he wanted, but the general didn't.

Speaker 3:
[22:34] He's running the Navy and not the War Department, it was called then, to whom the generals report, right? So the general was slow, which is not a great quality in a general. But then, the orders he's getting to go fast are coming from the guys around the Navy and he didn't do it. I think Churchill writes in here, doesn't he? Didn't matter what we said to him, we couldn't move him.

Speaker 2:
[22:59] Yes, he said he was different. Nothing I said could move him.

Speaker 3:
[23:04] Yeah, you know, when I was a boy, we had hunting dogs, we used to hunt quail. And my dad always said, there's a kind of dog that might run away from you, there's a kind of dog that won't leave your heel. It's the ones that might run away from you that can get something done. So you're always trying to keep them in there. So I think that general was not a dog that would hunt.

Speaker 2:
[23:29] No, not a dog that would hunt. I don't have any dogs, but I get that. The dog that run away from you is something that can get done. I understand that. If you're not overwhelmed by Norwegian names and the archaicness of the campaign that you don't know much about, I'm back with more with Dr. Larry Arnn on the Hillsdale Dialogue. Churchill sums up at the end of this long campaign. He says, of course, it may be said that all the Norwegian enterprises, however locally successful, to which we might have committed ourselves, all would have been swept away by the results of the fearful battle in France, which was now so near. Within a month, the main allied armies would be shattered or driven into the sea. The veils of the future are lifted one by one, and mortals must act day by day. So that whole phony war, Hitler is at work, Guderian, Rommel is at work, they're not having committees. In wartime, whether you're an ally and a good guy or a bad guy, you really can't have committees.

Speaker 3:
[24:35] No, and say Chamberlain fell in part because he gave a speech to which there was a very negative reaction. Chamberlain, whom we've talked about quite a lot, and it was not a bad man at all. On the contrary, he didn't understand war very well. And he gave a speech, he felt better about the war, you know, come May of 1940. The war is months old, they have done much, but he felt better about it. He got his mind around it, and they'd organized a bunch of stuff that wasn't properly organized. And in the speech, he said, Hitler missed the bus. Well, ordinary people knew that Hitler hadn't missed anything yet, right? We haven't done anything to get ourselves more ready. And so I think Chamberlain might have mistaken an improvement in his own understanding and grasp for an improvement in the situation. And Churchill had a larger understanding and grasp, including of the situation. And so he wrote that thing that I've quoted before to Lord Halifax, the foreign minister and the closest single politician to Chamberlain, Hello, the Peser. He said, you know, the day's pan is, I'm paraphrasing, with the interesting work. But what have we accomplished? We must live under the same conditions of stress of soul as the soldiers at the front. So Churchill took a much more urgent attitude to war than to Chamberlain.

Speaker 2:
[26:04] There is a quote at the end, though. Again, something I didn't know until I read this book on page 592 of my edition, that I had not thought about in the overall. Every battle occurs within the strategic context of a war. Quote, in their desperate grapple with the British Navy, the Germans ruined their own such as it was for the impending climax. The Allies lost a carrier, two cruisers, one sloop and nine destroyers. The Germans, by contrast, by end of June were left with one eight inch gun cruiser, two light cruisers and four destroyers. Because they've been running naval battles up and down the coast of Norway, and there are lots of clashes about which I did not know. And at the end of it, a lot of the Germans are sunk and then Churchill puts the point under it. So they could not help in the invasion of Britain Operation Sea Lion that would immediately be what Hitler turned to. He didn't have a Navy to help clear the channel.

Speaker 3:
[27:01] That's right. That's right. So he, that's right. You can see the, you know, we know now, we learn in the opening months of the Second World War, that there's been a revolution and that airplanes are very dangerous. And, you know, we're not there yet, but we will see that the Japanese almost cleared our Navy of the Pacific and they did it with aircraft carriers. And they sunk some big British ships that were, you know, hundreds of people on them and major investments over decades. And they did that with two, three, four, five fighter planes and some torpedoes. Well, it's still true that you can have air superiority, but if you're going to put a bunch of soldiers and take them 20-some miles over the English Channel on the boats, you need them not to be able to sink those boats. And so it changes things. It may or may not change them decisively, because if Germany had gotten complete air superiority, which they never did over Britain, then they might have swept the British fleet with airplanes from the English Channel. But they would have to do all of that unless they had a Navy to protect the ships in order to get rid of every British ship. Because you put 2,000 troops on a ship, sink 6 of them, and there's an army gone. So that's right, that mattered. The naval war went pretty well, except for the invasion of Scapa Flow and the sinking of a ship there, between in the Twilight War. Churchill was proud about that.

Speaker 2:
[28:47] And a comment, because we'll turn to the collapse of the government and the rise of Churchill in the last episode next week. But I did want to talk about the British Navy, the fleet, is so vast, it's got to be in so many places. It is a lesson to the superpower of the time, which was Great Britain at the time. And our Navy would come up, we'd eventually have 5,000 ships at full fleet, full tide, the Navy at full tide, fascinating book. But they would have to convoy, and the folks are concerned about the Strait of Hormuz in the last few weeks. That's 20% of the world's oil. Britain was starving to death without, the Battle of the Atlantic was about feeding Great Britain. It was a, it wasn't a dollar an gallon of gas, it was not living. The stakes were just so much higher. I'll come back and talk about that with Dr. Larry Arnn in a moment with the last segment of this week's Hillsdale Dialogue. All Hillsdale Dialogues are found at Hugh for hillsdale.com, Hugh for hillsdale.com. All things Hillsdale at hillsdale.edu. Welcome back, America. Wrapping up today's Hillsdale Dialogue with Dr. Larry Arnn. I'm not laughing at the price of gas. It really does crunch many people's budget. I do understand that, Dr. Arnn. And I find it not amusing, because it's a serious problem for people who have to pay more for gasoline. But a lack of history on the part of our commentators, when they talk about the Strait of Hormuz versus the Battle of the Atlantic, it's astonishing to me.

Speaker 3:
[30:37] Yeah. Well, the ships that need to go through the Straits of Hormuz are very vulnerable, right? Doesn't take much to blow them up. And they're very expensive. And the owners can't afford to lose them. And so it's very hard to keep the strait open. And that is one of the two reasons for the importance of Iran, that they can threaten that thing. And they do it, by the way, the way that they've mined it, right? And those are, there are two miles, at least, what are they? There are several miles, but they're two passable miles of international waters through the Choke Point in the Strait of Hormuz. And you're not supposed to mine those. And you're not supposed to attack neutral ships in the middle of those, absent a declaration of war. But they've been doing that systematically and in the Red Sea as well. And as I said earlier last week, we have a smaller stake in that than most countries. And, you know, I myself, I'm not sure how far we should go to try to open those straits. I think we should let them do it. I think we, because I said earlier, I think because I think the Gulf States may be becoming very valuable. I think that we should be helping them to do it. But they should do it.

Speaker 2:
[32:02] Yeah. 12 days ago, we'll come back to this next week. 12 days ago, President Trump was asked about the Allies and he said, Great Britain, they don't need another Neville Chamberlain. They've been a great disappointment. A minute to the end of this program, Dr. Arnn. They don't need another Neville Chamberlain. They certainly don't need Keir Starmer. They're not doing anything.

Speaker 3:
[32:26] No, and one wonders why. We know that their Navy is very limited. I read a long article back when the Red Sea heated up one of the times and the Houthis were attacking people down there. How many ships capable of fighting down there did the British have? And the answer was three, which means that they might be able to keep one on station at any given time. And that means they, you know, what can they do? They have denuded their nation of weapons. And that's because they have other priorities, I guess. The welfare staff.

Speaker 2:
[33:13] We will be back next week with the last chapter of The Gathering Storm, which is truly as dramatic as any in the books, so do not miss that. All things Hillsdale at hillsdale.edu. And of course, all of the dialogues at hugh4hillsdale.com.

Speaker 1:
[33:36] Thanks for listening to the Hillsdale Dialogues, part of the Hillsdale College Podcast Network. More episodes at podcast.hillsdale.edu, or wherever you find your audio. For more information about Hillsdale College, head to hillsdale.edu.