What Victor Davis Hanson Doesn’t Say About World War II

2999 Words

Last month Tucker Carlson had chemistry professor David Collum on his podcast to discuss Collum’s original takes on a host of topics. These include the Hunter Biden laptop, the origin of COVID, the 2017 Las Vegas shooting, the Diddy Trial, Q-Anon, and many others. A fascinating discussion. Fairly soon, however, a theme emerged—all is not as it seems, and if you dig deeper you’ll likely find cynical actors doing nasty things in the name of some ideal. A pretty safe bet, it would seem. Then, in the middle of the interview, after an amusing anecdote about bass fishing, the pair briefly ventured into the ultimate taboo, World War II (~1:04)

COLLUM: Well, you know, now, first of all what is the truth right? The truth is now becoming very ambiguous. Last year I wrote about the history of World War II. I did a mini Daryl Cooper.[1]

CARLSON: Yes.

COLLUM: And it started when I read a book by Diana West[2], who would be good if you interviewed her. And it was a revisionist history of World War II. And you go, “Well, why would you want to read that?” Well, it turns out I think the story we got about World War II is all wrong.

CARLSON: Actually, I think that’s right.

COLLUM: And then I read about FDR and FDR’s right-hand man was a Soviet spy.[3]

CARLSON: Certainly was. Confirmed, confirmed, by the way.

COLLUM: One can make the argument we should have sided with Hitler and fought Stalin. Patton said that. And maybe there wouldn’t have been a Holocaust, right? But Stalin was awful by any metric and we weren’t his ally. The story is that there were a few missing American soldiers at the end of World War II in Russian territory.

CARLSON: No!

COLLUM: 15 to 20,000 were missing and we left them there. And then you read about Pearl Harbor. We all sort of know the Pearl Harbor story’s not what we’re told. But I dug into that, and you find out that we knew to the morning that Pearl Harbor was going to get attacked. Stalin knew it was going to be attacked. He wanted us to take the Japanese off his flank. And FDR’s right-hand man was okay with that because he was a Soviet spy, right?

By refusing to demonize Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, Collum enters the sometimes murky and always dangerous territory of Second World War revisionism. As the traditional narrative justifying America’s role in it grows ever shakier, Collum asks whether America should have sided with Hitler rather than Stalin. Not only have we uncovered historical evidence which counters this narrative, but Collum seems to imply that the Nazis were in higher moral ground than the Soviets. And this comes while the West begins to succumb to forces the Nazis would never have tolerated, namely, cultural Marzism, mass-immigration, and Islam.

In response to Collum’s broad-brush analysis, historian Victor Davis Hanson offers a fine-point rebuttal. Only, he fails to answer Collum’s main question directly. Hanson seems to assume that if he can refute the four points which Collum offhandedly produces to bolster his argument, he can discredit the question entirely. (Here he discusses the topic at greater length.)

This is a false assumption. First, there could have been more to the story. Collum and Carlson spent less than two minutes discussing the Second World War, while Hanson, in his Daily Signal piece, refutes it in seven (seventeen in the longer video linked above). Clearly Collum wasn’t prepared to revise the war on Carlson’s show, and likely would have shored up his arguments in a more formal setting. Perhaps a more fair-minded response from Hanson would have been either to read what Collum has already written on the subject before commenting, or invite him on his show to discuss it further. Unfortunately, he did neither. Second, VDH does not offer affirmative reasons why America should have sided with Stalin rather than Hitler. Instead, he nitpicks the bark off the trees, while missing the forest entirely. Finally, by casually mentioning that Stalin was a “monster” who had “killed twenty million people” before the war, Hanson invalidates his own position and doesn’t seem to realize it.

Hanson:

Number one, he said the Soviets had killed 15 to 20,000 POWs when they inherited them after freeing the American POWS from German prisoner of war camps in the east. That’s not true. There was a joint Soviet American commission. There were agreements that the Soviets would return American prisoners. There were disagreements about whether the allies would return Russian prisoners to Russia because some of them had been captured fighting, most of them, for Germany. And Stalin wanted to kill them or work them to death, and they wanted asylum. But other than that, eventually most of the Americans found their way back to Allied lines and were repatriated. Were there some that we don’t know about today? Yes. But over a four-year period, there were a lot of Americans that were captured and held in German prisoner war camps, were shot on the battlefield, were blown—We didn’t know what happened to them. But the idea that we would allow 15 to 20,000 American POWS in Russian hands to die is not true. It can’t be substantiated.

First of all, since all this happened well after the war started, it has little bearing on the comparative moral status of the belligerents in 1939, which, presumably, would have helped the United States determine a side to favor. So it’s a bit of a red herring. In any event, after Stalin’s atrocities in the 1920s and 1930s, 20,000 unaccounted Allied POWs is a drop in the bucket (0.1%). Still, by dismissing Collum’s claim that the US abandoned so many POWs, VDH runs into the research of James Sanders in his 1992 work Soldiers of Misfortune. Subtitle: “Washington’s Secret Betrayal of American POWs in the Soviet Union.” Also standing in his way is John M.G. Brown who, in a 1990 Veteran Views article, stated that Stalin used tens of thousands of Allied POWs as pawns to blackmail the Allies into returning millions of captured Soviets for him to kill or enslave. Brown reports that while some Allied POWs were returned, “Stalin reneged on full reciprocation and most of the Allied POWs disappeared into secret, special camps.” To save face, the Allies then scaled down the number of soldiers lost to the Soviets.

I’m sure Hanson is aware of these sources, which were possibly also Collum’s. In any event, either Hanson is right, or Sanders and Brown are. There is no middle ground. If it’s the former, then Hanson needs to state categorically that the work of Sanders and Brown have been debunked since their publication dates. But even if he could do that, it does not refute Collum’s main thesis that Stalin was worse than Hitler. After all, Stalin was cold-blooded enough to hold tens of thousands of his allies hostage in order to murder a much larger number of expat or captured Russians after the war ended— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn places it at over 1.5 million in his 1975 volume Warning to the West. Doesn’t such grotesque behavior make Stalin worse than Hitler, who at least waited until war was declared before doing his killing?

VDH then takes on Collum’s claim that General George Patton believed that America “should have sided with Hitler and fought Stalin.” Here he sets up a strawman and slaps it down. As pro-consul of Bavaria, Patton was not above enlisting former Nazis—rehabilitated or not—to help administer the region since postwar conditions were dire and manpower limited.

Hanson explains:

That led to further statements, he said, as the Red Army violated the Yalta agreements and the Potsdam agreements and did not hold free elections or free communications and transportation and intercourse between occupied Russian territory and occupied Allied territory. A new proto-, I guess you would call it, a proto-iron curtain had already emerged. And Patton at one point said to Eisenhower and others, “I know we’re going to be in a war cold or hot with the Soviet Union and we’re here. Let’s not go back to the United States. Let’s confront them militarily to make them honor their agreements, and if we don’t have the manpower, the wherewithal . . . ”—Russia had 500 divisions; the allies had about 200— “. . . we can always use veterans from the German army.” That’s about as close to lunacy as he said. It was an unfortunate remark, but he didn’t say while Hitler was alive, we should have joined the Nazis to fight Stalin.

VDH fails to note that Collum’s claim about Patton implies looking back in time. According to Collum, it seems, Patton felt this way after the war ended, and not while the Wehrmacht was raining down lethal fire upon his beloved Third Army. So VDH’s possibly true claim that Patton never said such outlandish things “while Hitler was alive” is a completely useless point. Sophistry, if you will.

Further, it flies in the face of evidence revealing that Patton did say after the war that the US had fought the wrong enemy. If not, then Hanson must contend with research and reminiscences by Anthony Cave Brown in his 1975 work Bodyguard of Lies Volume II, Phillip Coleman in his 1987 work Cannon Fodder: Growing up for Vietnam, and Betty South in her 1953 National Guardsman article “We Called Him Uncle Georgie,” all of which cite how Patton stated that the US had faced the wrong enemy all along.

Finally, why was the remark unfortunate? Because it put General Eisenhower in the hot seat? Because it offended the “monster” Josef Stalin? Because it caused Patton to be sacked from Third Army command? Eighty years after the fact, are these really good reasons? Were they ever? This would be like calling Galileo’s claims of planetary motion “unfortunate” because they put him under house arrest by the Pope. The only good reason to consider Patton’s remark unfortunate today would be if they were wrong. And VDH has yet to prove that they were.

Although Hanson does not list this as one of Collum’s three main points, in the longer piece I link above he also addresses Colllum’s claim that the Pearl Harbor attack was a set up. Basically, President Roosevelt wanted to enter the war against Germany and did everything he could to provoke the militaristic Japan, Germany’s ally, into attacking US forces which were conveniently placed at Pearl Harbor. Hanson respects this position up to a point, but doesn’t seem to realize that he respects it enough to validate Collum.

I do know that FDR ordered in May of 1940, Admiral Richardson, the head of the Seventh Fleet, to move the base in San Diego all the way to Pearl Harbor. And he said, “I’m putting my head in a noose. The Seventh Fleet is not able to deter the Japanese Imperial Fleet in the Pacific. If you put me way out in the middle of nowhere in Hawaii, I will not have the infrastructure, the air support that I would have in San Diego.” And he kept complaining and they relieved him. Then Admiral Kimmel took over and he was relieved of command. I think 3 weeks afterwards, he was the fall guy. And out of that came a conspiracy that Roosevelt was doing anything he could to provoke the Japanese with sanctions, putting us out very vulnerable so we would be attacked. There may be some truth to that, but the idea that there’s a big untold story of Pearl Harbor is not true. We pretty much know that Roosevelt wanted to get in the war sooner or later. He felt that Europe would fall and he underestimated the ability of the Japanese to harm the US Navy, but he didn’t plan to have Pearl Harbor attacked.

This seems like a distinction without a difference. How could there be “some truth” to this conspiracy, but not enough to validate Collum’s claim that “the Pearl Harbor story’s not what we’re told?” Also, if FDR really “underestimated the ability of the Japanese to harm the US Navy” wouldn’t that support the idea that he deliberately made the Pacific fleet vulnerable to an attack by a not-so-harmful enemy? Unfortunately, Hanson does not bring up evidence discovered by Robert Stinnett in his 1999 work Day of Deceit which all but proves that FDR wanted Japan to attack Pearl Harbor. This evidence includes:

1. The Eight-Point McCollum Memorandum, written in October 1940, which outlines the strategy the US employed during the 14-month lead up to the attack;
2. The sophistication of US cryptoanalysis, which had broken Japanese codes and reveals that US forces knew the attack was coming and did nothing to stop it;
3. The fact that Kimmel had been kept in the dark regarding this cryptoanalysis;
4. The myth of Japanese “radio silence” as their ships sailed towards Pearl Harbor;
5. There is also all the suspicious secrecy which still surrounds the Pearl Harbor attack, such as logs and encrypted messages which have disappeared from the National Archives.

Hanson’s strongest point comes in response to Collum’s weakest claim—that maybe the Jewish Holocaust wouldn’t have happened if the US had sided with Germany. In staking this claim so delicately, I’m sure Collum would be the first to switch that “maybe” into a “maybe not.” Regardless, Hanson delves into German anti-Jewish atrocities which he says commenced on the very day of the invasion of Poland in 1939, and then suggests that the industrialized Jewish Holocaust would have happened one way or the other. Maybe that’s true. That the Germans killed large numbers of Jews during the war—perhaps up to the high end of four million as cited by David Cole in this 2013 Guardian article—won’t be contested here. At the time, Eastern European Jews (or Ostjuden) were notorious for their left-wing radicalism. Any Jew captured in enemy territory would have been more likely than anyone else to cause problems for the Reich as partisans. And this says nothing of all the atrocities that Soviet Jews had committed during the interwar period, which the Nazis were fully aware of and rightly feared.

Since the Nazis were in effect fighting Ragnarök against an evil enemy in the Soviets, as well as deceitful ones in the United States (according to Stinnett) and England (according to David Hoggan in his 1961 work The Forced War) they had little reason to keep Jews around once they got their mitts on them. Cruel? Yes. And did a goodly number of Germans overdo it on the cruelty? I’m sure they did. But VDH has his work cut out for him persuading us that Hitler deserved to be America’s enemy more than Stalin when Stalin with his twenty million victims had been worse on the Russians than Hitler was. According to numbers compiled by Louis Rapoport in his 1990 work Stalin’s War Against the Jews, Stalin may even have approached Hitler’s numbers when it came to killing Jews.

Hanson also does not step far enough into Collum’s thought experiment. Yes, it is absurd that FDR and his disproportionately Jewish Brain Trust would have sided with the anti-Semitic Hitler against the disproportionately Jewish-led Soviet Union. But if, in Bizarro world, this had happened, the star-spangled Axis would have smashed the Anglo-Soviet alliance in less than a year. As such, the Germans, now on the winning side, would have had less reason to commit such a cruel and desperate act as the Jewish Holocaust, and, more importantly, less time. So Collum is on firm ground proposing the Jewish Holocaust as it known today might have not happened had FDR plopped for the Axis, despite Hanson’s presentation of Germany’s violent anti-Semitic bona fides.[4]

Most importantly, Hanson neglects to recognize how he himself immolates his own argument. By August 1939, Stalin had killed twenty million people during peacetime, whereas the Nazis had bumped off a microscopic fraction of that. Further, all Nazi atrocities occurred during wartime, after the British and French had declared war on them. Isn’t that enough to prove David Collum correct? If not, then what reason could there possibly have been for Roosevelt to see the Nazis as the more deserving enemy?

Despite Hanson’s best efforts, there isn’t one. Instead, he notes both astutely and regrettably a recent theme in Tucker Carlson’s podcasts, that “the Jews are at the problem of all these things.”

Victor Davis Hanson may be wrong in his assessment of David Collum, but he is certainly right about that.

[1] “[M]ini-Darryl Cooper,” refers to Tucker Carlson’s 2024 interview with podcaster and historian Darryl Cooper, who shares much of Collum’s Second World War skepticism. The internet pretty much exploded as a result, with the Left denouncing Cooper as a Nazi apologist, and the mainstream Right—Hanson included—taking Cooper to task over the facts.

[2]The Diana West book Collum refers to refers to is American Betrayal, published in 2013. “Read her lively response to Collum here in which she rejects both Collum’s and Hanson’s characterizations of her work.

[3]The “right-hand man” of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt may have been his advisor Harry Hopkins, whom historian Sean McMeekin claims in chapter 29 of his 2021 work Stalin’s War had passed American nuclear secrets and fissile material to his Soviet spymasters as part of the Lend-Lease program. More likely, however, the Soviet mole in the White House was the Jewish Assistant Treasury Secretary Harry Dexter White, whom McMeekin bluntly describes as an “NKVD asset.” Former Soviet agent Whittaker Chambers said as much in chapter ten of his famous 1952 work Witness.

[4] Surprisingly, former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir shared a similar opinion, as revealed by Gordon Thomas in his 1999 history of the Mossad Gideon’s Spies. Shamir felt a rapprochement between Roosevelt and Hitler would have allowed Hitler to complete his repatriation of Jews to Palestine as part of his “Transfer Agreement,” thus preventing the Jewish Holocaust from ever happening.