May 31, 2021 - Bannon's War Room
45:18
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Well the virus has now killed more than a hundred people in China and new cases have been confirmed around the world. | |
| So you don't want to frighten the American public. | ||
| France and South Korea have also got evacuation plans. | ||
| But you need to prepare for and assume. | ||
| Broadly warning Americans to avoid all non-essential travel to China. | ||
| That this is going to be a real serious problem. | ||
| France, Australia, Canada, the US, Singapore, Cambodia, Vietnam, the list goes on. | ||
| Health officials are investigating more than a hundred possible cases in the US. | ||
| Germany, a man has contracted the virus. | ||
| The epidemic is a demon and we cannot let this demon hide. | ||
| Japan, where a bus driver contracted the virus. | ||
| Coronavirus has killed more than 100 people there and infected more than 4,500. | ||
| We have to prepare for the worst, always, because if you don't and the worst happens, War Room. | ||
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Pandemic. | |
| Here's your host, Stephen K. Banham. | ||
| Welcome to the War Room. | ||
| It is Memorial Day, the Year of Our Lord 2021. | ||
| It's August 31st. | ||
| Very rare now that actually Memorial Day falls on this traditional day. | ||
| I want to welcome all of our audience. | ||
| This is a Memorial Day special. | ||
| I really want to thank The team at Real America's Voice and the John Frederick Radio Network that helped us put this on and to do this special. | ||
| Very honored to be joined today by Patrick K. O'Donnell, the finest combat historian of his generation, to help come in here today and honor our war dead and also Captain Mo Bannon, U.S. | ||
| Army, joins us. | ||
| So we've got a lot to get through today. | ||
| Very special day. | ||
| I think one thing I want to get both of you from the beginning, and welcome the War Room Posse, and really want folks, we try to do these specials on Christmas and Memorial Day, Veterans Day, to really talk about the sacrifice of our brave men and women in the Armed Forces. | ||
| A little bit. | ||
| I know Memorial Day has gotten to be like the start of summer and it's the barbecues and the cookouts and everything like that. | ||
| And then even in regards to the military, it's a lot of people, hey, thank you for your service. | ||
| It's almost become like a mega Veterans Day. | ||
| That's not the purpose of this is not is not Veterans Day. | ||
| There is a very special, very specifically set up To honor the war dead. | ||
| Those who gave the ultimate sacrifice. | ||
| Obviously, all veterans have sacrificed. | ||
| You read your books. | ||
| Some sacrifice more than others. | ||
| Some are in horrific conditions. | ||
| But, we have a special place. | ||
| And this is why, in the high church of our civic institutions, to me Memorial Day has always been the most important. | ||
| Because this is where we honor the war dead. | ||
| The people who gave the ultimate sacrifice. | ||
| And I know, Patrick, you've spent so many years actually documenting The combat of the toughest and top units, and particularly those of these just incredible individuals that sacrificed everything for this country. | ||
| And I think it's most important today, as the nation's kind of in this conundrum, and I keep saying it's not just about those generations to come, obviously we're fighting for that, but it's to make sure that all those that sacrificed In all those decades before us, you know, it's Burke's dictum. | ||
| We owe just as much to those who came before us as we owe to those who come ahead. | ||
| So, Patrick, I'd like to start with you with your thoughts and then Mo Bannon. | ||
| Liberty and freedom isn't free. | ||
| I mean, it's a saying we've heard over and over, but in this digital age it's more true than ever when you can be cancelled in an instant. | ||
| And it's that sacrifice that these individuals made over the years, beginning with the American Revolution, Where we really owe these individuals a debt that is, you know, extraordinary. | ||
| Their sacrifice is extraordinary, especially with the American Revolution, where you have men like Washington's immortals, which are buried in a mass grave. | ||
| We don't even know where, which we'll get to later, but I mean, enormous amounts of sacrifice. | ||
| With these individuals. | ||
| Omaha Beach, for instance. | ||
| I wrote about a dog company where men... enormous casualties on Dog Green Beach, for instance. | ||
| The scene from Saving Private Ryan, Steve. | ||
| And there's that incredible cemetery at Omaha Beach to honor those men. | ||
| Powerful. | ||
| Mo, you graduate, you're an Academy West Point grad of 2010. | ||
| How many classmates of yours have already given the ultimate sacrifice? | ||
| I have three classmates that have given the ultimate sacrifice, and it was a rough summer of 2012. | ||
| All three of them died that summer. | ||
| One of them died June 27th, the other one died July 26th, and the third one died August 1st of 2012. | ||
| And who were the three? | ||
| The first one was Stephen Chase Prasnicki. | ||
| They were all second lieutenants at the time? | ||
| They were all first lieutenants. | ||
| They had just been promoted to first lieutenants. | ||
| Just been promoted. | ||
| You guys were about two years out of the academy? | ||
| Correct. | ||
| Stephen Chase Prasnicki. | ||
| He was a football player. | ||
| We had classes together. | ||
| I knew Chase really well. | ||
| The second one was Sean Jacobs and the third one was Todd Lamka and I knew Todd really well also. | ||
| So that was a tough summer of 2012. | ||
| You'd already been to Iraq. | ||
| And come home. | ||
| And come home. | ||
| You'd been to Iraq. | ||
| Were these all Afghanistan? | ||
| These were. | ||
| These were all Afghanistan. | ||
| And the one to note, Stephen Chase Prasnicki, his unit had actually just deployed, and they were doing that left seat, right seat, where they ride along with the outgoing unit on missions. | ||
| And it was his first or second mission. | ||
| And they rolled over an IED. | ||
| And he was killed on impact. | ||
| The second hour we're going to have as our co-host, we're going to have Chief Warrant Officer Joe Kent. | ||
| He's actually running for Congress out in Washington. | ||
| Correct. | ||
| A very unique individual. | ||
| Was it 11 combat tours? | ||
| 11 combat tours, most of them with the 5th Special Forces Group. | ||
| And he also, he's a gold star husband. | ||
| He lost his wife in combat. | ||
| Sergeant Kent died in combat. | ||
| We're going to talk all about that in the second hour. | ||
| We're going to get to the Revolution. | ||
| We're going to talk about the Unknown Soldiers, the great cemeteries. | ||
| People should understand it's the 100th anniversary of the Tomb of the Unknown, right? | ||
| And that'll be on Veterans Day. | ||
| We'll do a special about that. | ||
| But obviously, there'll be a ceremony today on Memorial Day at Arlington National Cemetery of the Tomb of the Unknown. | ||
| You've done Patrick, probably more oral history interviews with the greatest generation and also Korea, etc. | ||
| You have how many thousands of individuals? | ||
| About 4,000 beginning with World War I. I actually interviewed some World War I veterans when they were alive and then spanning the the World War II generation in particular, thousands, hundreds, all in the elite units of the of our armed forces, as well as elite units in the Axis forces. I interviewed them too. | ||
| And then going into the Korean War, Vietnam, and then in Iraq too. I was in Iraq. | ||
| Well, that's where I want to get to. The elite units, and Mo, you were at the 101st, the elite units always have the highest casualty ratios because they're normally, and they're elite units for a reason. They're normally in the mix, and they have a history of being in the mix. That's why they're elite. And so you have always not just more combat casualties and wounds and stuff like that, but you have more actual deaths. | ||
| These are the individuals have to deal with death more often. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| They're in the inflection points, in many cases, of war, Steve, and they can make the difference between victory and defeat, in many cases. | ||
| Your journey from someone who was doing the oral histories, and you've been doing this for 30 years, basically since you got out of college in 1992, to somebody actually, you were an embed and deployed And I made a film called The Last 600 Meters about the Battle of Fallujah. | ||
| People do not understand the intensity of that battle. | ||
| You were actually in bed with one of the Marine units, a rifle platoon in the battle? | ||
| Yeah, I was with 3-1 Lima Company, and I went house to house with them. | ||
| And Lima Company sustained, for that platoon, sustained the highest number of casualties during the entire battle. | ||
| I wrote a book called We Were One on the experience. | ||
| Got that. | ||
| Let's see that. | ||
| Which is on the Combinance reading list. | ||
| It's required reading from the ReCore. | ||
| And this is about eight best friends. | ||
| And it's in their own words. | ||
| This is a relic of the Battle of Fallujah because their oral histories were gathered at night after we went firm in a house. | ||
| They were houses, I should say. | ||
| We were always looking for like a solid concrete wall because we were getting RPG'd at night and everything else and attacked. | ||
| And you know I'd asked some people what happened and then I also went and then about a month later I was there again and we did diagrams of every single action in this book and it's it's incredibly raw. | ||
| It's pure emotion. | ||
| It's it's what we felt they felt as people were dying and we had a lot of casualties. | ||
| That book, if you want to get the upfront on Fallujah, We Are One, is the thing. | ||
| You go online, we made a film, I produced it, executive produced it, called The Last 600 Meters, and we went and showed this. | ||
| General Kelly was out, I think, in on the West Coast and actually had us come out in General Mattis and show this film to Marines. | ||
| This has got to be back in, I think, 2006, 2008, something like that. | ||
| We showed it to, I wasn't there, but they showed it to a Marine Force Recon group of veterans of World War II. | ||
| And the director told me later he went, and this is like the tip of the spear of the bravest of the Marines. | ||
| Tarawa, Peleliu, I mean the guys going in first, right? | ||
| Because Marines don't really have special forces, but they get the force recon. | ||
| At the end of the film, and this was all combat footage taken by these Marine rifle platoons on Fallujah. | ||
| Some of it was mine, and I remember that. | ||
| You came to the premiere. | ||
| You were a very important part of this. | ||
| But these veterans of World War II, the greatest generations, turn around to the director and say, man, we can't believe, you know, the intensity of what these kids did. | ||
| And this guy goes, look, I understand it, and I'm very proud of this film, but you're the greatest generation. | ||
| In fact, you're the tip of the spear of some of the hardest combat American troops ever had, Terrell and Peleliu. | ||
| And they go, you don't understand. | ||
| In our generation, we hit the beach, you went forward, everything in front of you was just completely obliterated, you did not give up an inch and you moved on and there was no – they said for those kids to have to go door to door, it kicked down – it was a million doors or something you had to have. | ||
| Flush is a city of 250,000 people that you encircle but they go street by street and you had to go to every door in every room. | ||
| They said the psychological pressure of that and to know that you couldn't shoot a civilian, they would pop out. | ||
| These veterans said, I don't know if we could take this. | ||
| And this is the bravest of the greatest generation sitting there going, this young generation is fighting a war that people don't know how intense and how out of the ordinary it has been, particularly looking at civilian casualties. | ||
| Well, I was just going to say, compared to World War I and World War II, you have to think this generation is going on deployment after deployment after deployment. | ||
| So they come home, they rest for a little bit, maybe a couple months, and then they're sent right back over to the same environment that they just came from. | ||
| That's part of the intensity of World War I and World War II. | ||
| Here in Afghanistan, we're going to have Chief Warrant Officer Joe Kennan on here. | ||
| 10, 11 deployments. | ||
| We had, Sean Parnell went on a deployment that lasted 450 days, and his guys, and you know your enlisted guys, you took command at Fort Lee. | ||
| The non-commissioned officers, which are the backbone of the military, the chief petty officers and the sergeants, 9, 10, 11 deployments over and over again, and the number of friends and colleagues they have lost in these wars, it's just incredible. | ||
| And I think that's on this Memorial Day. | ||
| as a country we have to start to come and start to understand the sacrifice that has come before us. Patrick. It's that resilience that I don't think people really understand in that endurance because that is just over time. | ||
| It's extraordinary. | ||
| One deployment after another and that's certainly the case with the the Marines that I was with. They went over multiple times and nobody but their families really understood that. | ||
| I had one Marine, Private Sean Stokes. | ||
| He was a Private because he had busted in Fallujah, but he was the Lion of Fallujah. | ||
| He was kicking the doors down constantly, and it was amazing. | ||
| I was in awe by him. | ||
| He's in this book, and he's one of those best friends. | ||
| And then Sean, I found out, was a Private because Uh, he had some AWOL issues, et cetera, and, uh, they busted him down and they were going to kick him out of the Marine Corps, uh, for, for those infractions. | ||
| And he literally begged to go back to another deployment and he, he got his way. | ||
| Um, but it also cost him his life and he was killed protecting the battalion commander. | ||
| Cause he, and he even knew that he was probably going to get kicked out within weeks. | ||
| I knew he was going to get kicked out of the Corps. | ||
| But he wanted to be a Marine. | ||
| That was his goal in life. | ||
| But that's an example of this generation, which is really quite extraordinary. | ||
| This generation, I'm telling you, it's the new greatest generation. | ||
| Your generation and the way they fought these wars is incredible. | ||
| Okay, we're going to come back. | ||
| We're going to talk about maybe some parts of history you don't know. | ||
| We're going to talk about the American Thermopylae and a mass grave of unknown heroes that saved this country during the Revolution. | ||
| We're going to talk about the American Dunkirk. | ||
| War Room. | ||
| the up on New York City on the East River. We're going to talk about we're going to talk about the tomb of the unknown soldiers a lot more West Point's military cemetery. We've got a lot to get to today. We're taking short commercial break on this very special Memorial Day special put on real America's voice in the war room. Thank you. We'll be back in a moment. | ||
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Pandemic. | |
| War room pandemic with Stephen K. Bannon. The epidemic is a demon and we can't let this demon hide. | ||
| War Room. | ||
| Pandemic. | ||
| Here's your host, Stephen K. Bannon. | ||
| Okay, welcome back to the War Room. | ||
| Welcome back to our Memorial Day Special. | ||
| I want to thank our sponsors for making this happen. | ||
| MyPillow.com. | ||
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| These sales are not going to last forever, so make sure you go there today. | ||
| MyPillow.com. | ||
| PROMOCODEWARROOM. | ||
| Sales all over the place. | ||
| I want to thank them for sponsoring. | ||
| Our Memorial Day special, which we're very honored to do. | ||
| It's the 100th year, 100th anniversary on Veterans Day this year of the Tomb of the Unknown. | ||
| We're going to get to all of that with Patrick K. O'Donnell, a combat historian and Captain Bennett. | ||
| You have a correction on Chief Warrant Officer Kent? | ||
| I do. | ||
| His wife Shannon was a U.S. | ||
| Navy Senior Chief Petty Officer. | ||
| See, you have a chief one and a senior chief. | ||
| That's pretty powerful. | ||
| And tell me about Stokes. | ||
| Sean Stokes was, I think, Lion of Fallujah. | ||
| That's what we called him in the platoon that I was embedded with. | ||
| And he was constantly the first man through the door and just incredibly brave. | ||
| He was a private because he had been Busted in rank for an AWOL infraction. | ||
| He had to protect somebody for domestic abuse and in the process he also smoked some pot and was busted down to private and his enlistment was going to end in four years. | ||
| He knew that. | ||
| But literally, all he wanted to do was be a Marine, and he begged to stay on. | ||
| The commanding officer asked me to write what I saw in Fallujah on Sean, which was a Silver Star recommendation, which was extraordinary. | ||
| Sean didn't know that. | ||
| He basically asked me if I could talk to some people to keep him on, and they said, OK, you can have a six-month extension to go to Iraq. | ||
| And he begged for that, and his job was personal security, and he was killed protecting the battalion commander. | ||
| Was he awarded the Silver Star? | ||
| He was posthumously awarded the Silver Star, the first private since the Vietnam War. | ||
| Wow, incredible. | ||
| I want to go now to the American Thermopylae, right? | ||
| Tell us about what's the Thermopylae, why is this the American Thermopylae, and why a Memorial Day about the honored dead here? | ||
| Let's take us back in time to August 1776. | ||
| The British Army had just dealt us a crushing defeat at the Battle of Brooklyn. | ||
| About 400 Marylanders literally saved the day with an epic stand, an American Thermopylae if you will, where they charged several times into British lines to allow the army to escape utter destruction. | ||
| And this is an American Thermopylae because, as one historian put it, it was an hour more precious in our history than any other. | ||
| And I came across this story. | ||
| All the books I've ever written have found me in one way or another. | ||
| This is certainly the case. | ||
| I was with the battalion commander. | ||
| This is Washington's Immortals, correct? | ||
| This is Washington's Immortals. | ||
| And he said, hey, do you want to go visit the Met up in New York City? | ||
| I said, no, let's do a battlefield tour. | ||
| Of Brooklyn. | ||
| You know, it's so cool to be able to be in battle with someone. | ||
| A battlefield tour of Brooklyn. | ||
| How's that? | ||
| What we did is... You're a Brooklyn kid. | ||
| You were born in Brooklyn. | ||
| Did you know that there was battlefield tours to have? | ||
| I did not know there were battlefield tours to have. | ||
| It was a battlefield tour that I created, and we started out in Greenwood Cemetery, where the battle begins. | ||
| And this place is epic, Steve. | ||
| It's one of the greatest cemeteries in America. | ||
| Boss Tweed's buried there, all the notables of New York City, but it was also the scene of one of the largest Revolutionary War battles, and it begins at Greenwood Cemetery, where we're holding the line against this massive British Army. | ||
| But that's just a feint, basically, because the bulk of the British Army is going around | ||
| The American Army encircling it, and it's the Marylanders that are fighting on the hills of Greenwood Cemetery, then they fall back after they realize what's going on, and they fall back to a crucial position where they have to put a hole through the British lines that allow the army to escape, and they make a series of near suicidal charges. | ||
| And it cost them dearly. | ||
| Wasn't there a farmhouse or there was something in the center of this they kept charging? | ||
| There's a number of things in the center. | ||
| There's a series of mills and then there's also a stone house. | ||
| Some of the stones for that house still exist to this day. | ||
| The British cannon were positioned in and around that house according to Joseph Plumb Martin, one of the Revolutionary War soldiers there. | ||
| And these cannon were firing upon the men as they were charging at in near the house with fixed bayonets and they were being vaporized in many cases uh... by canister vaporized by the canister fire it was very it was it was horrendous casualties these are direct charges into cannon fire into cannon fire and into musket fire so you know when you're on that charge your last minutes on earth are before you right Exactly. | ||
| There's no doubt about that. | ||
| And this is, as one poet put it, the flower of the South is being turned into atoms by this British fire. | ||
| But they're still making this sacrifice. | ||
| And we found, you know, I found this rusted old sign that said, Here Lie 256 Continental Soldiers. | ||
| It was the reason why I wrote Washington's Immorals. | ||
| I wanted to know who these men were, and then why is there still potentially a mass grave somewhere? | ||
| Where did you see a rusted old sign? | ||
| It's in Brooklyn? | ||
| It's in Brooklyn, and it's near an American Legion post, and the mass grave is still one of the greatest unsolved mysteries of American Revolutionary War. | ||
| It's suspected that many of these men were buried where they fell, where they fought, or somewhere in a mass grave. | ||
| It's not known. | ||
| I mean, there's a lot of documentary evidence. | ||
| There's archaeology, but a lot of the area has been disturbed by urban development. | ||
| But it's an extraordinary story of incredible sacrifice on Memorial Day that we literally wouldn't be here. | ||
| I mean, Gettysburg's important, but their sacrifice in the Battle of Brooklyn has an incredible importance because the war literally hung in the balance. | ||
| There's an unmarked mass grave somewhere in Brooklyn. | ||
| That has the remains of this regiment that basically charged into this incredible British fire of canister, shot canister muskets to give time for Washington's army to continue its retreat to basically to Brooklyn Heights and to the East River, correct? | ||
| That's correct. | ||
| If they had not done this, that's why it's Thermopylae, if they had not taken this stand at that time, Washington's army, the Continental Army, would have probably been destroyed by this British expeditionary force. | ||
| It's very likely, because if they didn't, what they did is they bought an hour more precious in their history than any other, because if Lord Howe would have been able to unite his forces and then make a strong attack against the fortifications, they probably would have overwhelmed it right then and there. | ||
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What is it? | |
| The country has a history that after wars are over, they forget, you know, you see the movie The Best Years of Their Lives after World War II, but the issues after the revolution about pay that led to, I think, the whiskey, some of the different problems up in Newburgh. | ||
| There were problems about payment. | ||
| Shays' Rebellion. | ||
| Shays' Rebellion thing. | ||
| Shays' Rebellion. | ||
| You had problems with the Bonus Army at World War I. You had problems with some veterans after the Civil War. | ||
| You've always had, you've got it, but how Did something this important, kind of in the midst of time we forget about, since it was obviously such a crucial moment, and you had people like Burr and Hamilton who were both, at least Burr at one time, but Hamilton the entire time, close to Washington. | ||
| They were part of his staff. | ||
| How did this get forgotten? | ||
| I think a lot of it has to do with America doesn't like to remember defeat and this was a defeat even though it was a victory in the sense that we were able to extract the army and we weren't we didn't lose the war which was this is one of those points in history where all could have been lost and I can get into that a little bit more with the Indispensables and how they rode across the East River. | ||
| Well, we're going to get to the American Dunker next. | ||
| I want to turn to Mo. | ||
| You talk about people that Alonzo Cushing, a young, I think, lieutenant from West Point, at the absolute critical moment in Pickett's Charge, he is the officer that has that angle. | ||
| He's right there at Gettysburg, at the pinnacle where Armistead comes across with his sword on the hat, the gunfire is intense. | ||
| It is Alonzo Cushing, the West Point grad that stops him. | ||
| He dies in combat there. | ||
| Eventually awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor during President Obama's administration. | ||
| Hundreds and so years afterwards by a really brave woman who made it her life's mission to make sure that he was properly remembered. | ||
| I think from Wisconsin, where the Cushing's were. | ||
| But he's buried at West Point Cemetery. | ||
| A lot of people don't know that West Point, there's actually a military cemetery at the Academy. | ||
| Tell us about that. | ||
| Correct. | ||
| It's in the middle of the installation and there were people buried from around West Point long before it became a military cemetery, but it did not become a military cemetery until 1817. | ||
| There are many Notable West Point grads, people that worked at West Point that are buried in there, and they have now started in the back Iraq and Afghanistan. | ||
| So Global War on Terror and Operation New Dawn casualties are now buried in the West Point Cemetery. | ||
| Like you have Section 60 at Arlington National Cemetery for the Iraq and Afghan War. | ||
| You now have a special section. | ||
| By the way, Cushing's buried there. | ||
| George Armstrong Custer, I think, is buried at West Point. | ||
| General Schwarzkopf? | ||
| General Schwarzkopf is also buried at West Point. | ||
| If you ever get a chance to go to West Point and tour, you must go by the cemetery. | ||
| And there's the old cadet chapel that is at the entrance to the cemetery, and there's also where the cemetery guard used to live is now officer housing or instructor housing, but it is still standing there. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| In fact, if you go to see the main chapel at West Point, so impressive up on the hill, but if you go to the old chapel right there at the cemetery, very, very, very impressive. | ||
| Okay, we're going to take a short commercial break. | ||
| When we return, you've heard about in the Revolutionary War, American Thermopylae. | ||
| You're about to hear about the American Dunkirk, the second time that the Continental Army We're going to get to the American Dunkirk with Patrick K. O'Donnell, Captain Maureen Bannon. | ||
| It's the War Room Memorial Day Special. | ||
| I want to thank everybody for listening in. | ||
| We will be back in just a second. | ||
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War Room. | |
| Pandemic. | ||
| With Stephen K. Banham. | ||
| The epidemic is a demon and we cannot let this demon hide. | ||
| War Room. | ||
| Pandemic. | ||
| Here's your host, Stephen K. Banham. | ||
| Okay, it's Monday, the 31st of May, the year of our Lord, 2021. | ||
| This is the War Room Memorial Day Special, something we try to do on an annual basis. | ||
| We're always honored to be joined by Patrick K. O'Donnell, the great combat historian, to talk about sacrifice. | ||
| This is not about service, this is about sacrifice. | ||
| We honor the war dead of our country, the Republic, and discuss the battles of what they fought and gave their lives for. | ||
| Mo, you've got another story you told me about the West Point Cemetery? | ||
| I do. | ||
| So someone that I know that is buried in the West Point Cemetery is Dimitri de Castillo. | ||
| He and his wife met at West Point. | ||
| They were a year ahead of me. | ||
| They were both deployed in Afghanistan and they saw each other June 9th and on June 25th, Katie's A battalion commander and chaplain showed up at her door and let her know that her husband had been killed. | ||
| She knew that there was an incident that had happened and that there were 28 wounded and one casualty, but she was notified that that one casualty was her husband. | ||
| Her husband was hit with small arms fire while calling for help on the radio. | ||
| He was hit in the neck and then he died holding that radio, still calling for support. | ||
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Wow. | |
| And he's buried at West Point? | ||
| He is. | ||
| She was at West Point at the time? | ||
| No, they were both stationed actually out in Hawaii. | ||
| In Hawaii? | ||
| At Schofield Barracks? | ||
| Correct. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I want to go to, we're going to talk about cemeteries, we're going to talk about other places where our sacred dead are buried. | ||
| I don't want people to forget that the Army Air Corps, I think there's 12,000. | ||
| Missing, presumed dead from World War II that have never been recovered. | ||
| Their remains have never been recovered over the battlefields of Europe from the great daylight precision bombing that took place that really brought the Nazis to their knees. | ||
| I think thousands of dead from the United States Navy on the unrestricted submarine warfare and with the fleet in the Pacific and obviously in the in the North Atlantic also so the sacrifice not all of our heroes are actually buried in these great cemeteries if you've ever had a chance Overseas to go visit these cemeteries is absolutely, absolutely incredible. | ||
| The power from the Philippines, the Great Cemetery of the Philippines. | ||
| One that I know a lot of people try to make is Toa Omaha Beach that really brings together everybody that died on D-Day. | ||
| It's just absolutely incredible. | ||
| I did a little research on that, and as of 2016, there are 25 American military cemeteries located in 10 foreign countries. | ||
| In France, Belgium, UK, Philippines, Panama, Italy, Luxembourg, Mexico, Netherlands, and Tunisia. | ||
| And approximately, as of 2016, 130,000 soldiers are buried in those cemeteries. | ||
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130,000. | |
| 130,000 soldiers are buried in those cemeteries. | ||
| 130,000. | ||
| What other country in the history of the earth has their war dead buried in defense of liberty throughout the world? | ||
| It's absolutely incredible. | ||
| And Tunisia is the oldest with the Barbary pirates is the cemetery in Tunisia, which has always been quite controversial. | ||
| Let's go to, I want to go back to the Revolutionary War. | ||
| Here's the thing. | ||
| A nation that can forget these stories, right, is a nation that's not going to exist, right? | ||
| And I think it's one of the issues we have before us today in Critical Race Theory and all these issues that we addressed on the Saturday Show with the flag officers. | ||
| You have to remember your history. | ||
| Right? | ||
| You have to remember those that sacrificed that got you here today. | ||
| Let's talk about, we just talked about the American Thermopylae and people forget, this is the other thing I want to bring up. | ||
| Fourth of July is obviously incredibly important and it's one of the most important dates in world history of what we did then. | ||
| But that was patriots, but essentially lawyers, arguing in Philadelphia of this document that eventually the Constitution came later. | ||
| Very important. | ||
| But immediately after, The British sent an expeditionary force, the most powerful expeditionary force I think really even in the wars in France that it ever kind of sent, a fleet and an expeditionary army. | ||
| That army landed on Long Island in a sweeping move to basically crush, they controlled the harbor, but basically to crush the American rebellion. | ||
| In 90 days. | ||
| That was their attempt was, hey, these guys talked a big game. | ||
| They signed this document. | ||
| This is what the Crown thought this document to send it. | ||
| And it was the American Thermopylae to stop, at least slow down. | ||
| And it was a disorganized retreat. | ||
| It was not a strategic retreat. | ||
| It was a mad rush for safety. | ||
| Once they get to Brooklyn Heights, right across the tip of Manhattan from Wall Street is the Brooklyn Heights and the Promenade and all that, that became a battlefield, right at the base, essentially where the Brooklyn Bridge is. | ||
| And this is where another unknown story, the American Dunkirk, takes place. | ||
| And if this had not happened, we would be British subjects today. | ||
| Patrick K. O'Donnell. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| What happens next, Steve, is the siege lines begin. | ||
| The British start digging around Brooklyn Heights, and they prepare to assault the American bastion there. | ||
| A nor'easter hits, so there's rain, sleet, hail, etc. | ||
| It's horrendous. | ||
| Washington has a decision to make. | ||
| Does he stand and fight, or does he retreat? | ||
| He wisely decides to retreat, but he tells his army that the night of August 29th, | ||
| In this massive storm that they're going to attack the British but instead they move towards the East River to retreat and it's my Next book the best-selling book The Indispensables that that tells the story of the men that made that all happen It was on the shoulders of the Marblehead men that the revolution now rested It was all they had to transport nearly 10,000 men across the East River and this was a swirling river It was a it was a nightmare Steve | ||
| It was mission impossible. | ||
| It was only because these men were the most skilled mariners in the colonies that they were able to make it happen because they spent years fishing in the most treacherous waters in the world, the Grand Banks. | ||
| Fishing led to this sort of teamwork and these iron bonds of being able to do things immediately. | ||
| And they were able to take all kinds of rinky-dink boats from all over Manhattan and converted into a miniature Navy and transport 10,000 men across the the river. | ||
| It didn't go right initially. | ||
| The tides weren't right. | ||
| Nothing was working. | ||
| They had cloth on the oars, but it wasn't working. | ||
| And the man that was in charge of the operation tried to find Washington to call it off. | ||
| But they couldn't find Washington that night. | ||
| Loyalists even tried to tip off the British that they were coming and that we were leaving. | ||
| Didn't work. | ||
| But the operation luckily went forward and we were against all odds. | ||
| These men made nearly Well, I want to talk about that. | ||
| You had to make tough decisions. | ||
| Washington had to make tough decisions, right? | ||
| The misdirection play, we're going to attack, but we're actually getting people off. | ||
| Divine Providence had a hand in this. | ||
| This is huge, Steve. | ||
| If you didn't have that kind of fog that came in, you would not have been able to get as many of the troops off and make as many trips as possible. | ||
| Dawn is setting in. | ||
| There's panic at the embarkation area. | ||
| And it's interesting, Washington himself is down there. | ||
| He's one of the last people to leave. | ||
| And he has this massive amount of strength. | ||
| He puts a boulder, a huge boulder, above his head and says, I'll sink the ship to hell if there's not order. | ||
| And the men have order. | ||
| They continue to cross. | ||
| And at that point, miraculously, this fog sets in and screams the movement of the rest of the boat. | ||
| People forget Washington's size, and his physical courage, and his ability to intimidate. | ||
| Because many times in a chaotic situation, his physicality, his moral courage, and his ability to just say, look, this is what we're going to do, and don't cross me. | ||
| He was so big at 6'3". | ||
| One of my favorite scenes in The Indispensables is a snowball fight in Harbor Yard. | ||
| The Marbleheaders have many African Americans in there, and there's some Virginians, and they get into a melee, and they're throwing snowballs and everything else, and it's Washington that goes into the field, rides into the field, gets off his horse, and then he picks up one of the ringleaders with his hand, and it's the whole thing. | ||
| The Commander-in-Chief had presence. | ||
| I want to go back to decisions that have been made. | ||
| When this Dunkirk's happening, they can't get off all the wounded. | ||
| They have to make a tough decision. | ||
| If we don't get this army off, we're not going to survive. | ||
| If we don't get the army from Brooklyn Heights to Manhattan, we're not going to survive. | ||
| The British will have won. | ||
| So we've got to do a Dunkirk. | ||
| We need every craft possible, and we've got to get as many of the people that can continue to fight off. | ||
| There's decisions made. | ||
| That's why there are wounded people who would die that's left. | ||
| So many of those people, one of the most horrific aspects of all military history is the prison ships in Brooklyn Yard. | ||
| Such a great point Steve. | ||
| That are made up by many of the people that had to get left behind because you didn't have the capacity. | ||
| People were making brutally tough decisions about who goes and who stays. | ||
| And staying, just because they consider you a British subject, they consider you guilty of treason. | ||
| And that's why they have these prison ships. | ||
| One of the worst things that happened in the Civil War, in the Revolutionary War, that nobody wants to talk about is the prison ships in the Brooklyn Navy Yard by the British with many of the people that had to be left behind at the American Dunkerque. | ||
| These are floating concentration camps. | ||
| And anybody that was captured... | ||
| Many of the men that were Washington's immortals, many were killed, but many were captured. | ||
| They were put on the prison ships and that is a death sentence. | ||
| They were starved to death. | ||
| They were floating concentration camps and there was no way of escaping for the most part. | ||
| We're lucky enough to escape it. | ||
| That was a one in a thousand or two thousand. | ||
| It was an insane number of odds. | ||
| But most of these men died. | ||
| And then there's even some incredible stories of how the British, in one case, poisoned some of our men. | ||
| They starved them to death. | ||
| They let disease run rampant. | ||
| Literally thousands of Americans died on board these ships. | ||
| But they didn't look at them as Americans. | ||
| They looked at them as British subjects. | ||
| They looked at them as traitors. | ||
| Traitors. | ||
| They were looked at as traitors and they were treated as traitors. | ||
| Yes they were. | ||
| And correct me if I'm wrong, there's almost no records of where they're buried. | ||
| So you talk about American heroes on Memorial Day and we have these beautiful cemeteries with the sacrifice and I know so much focus on that as it should be. | ||
| But between the US Army Air Corps over Europe, in the oceans at the bottom of the Pacific and the Atlantic, So many places that they have died and we don't know where they're buried, they don't know where the remains are, but the Brooklyn Navy has another existence of horrific, horrific sacrifice and today I don't think we know where those men are buried. | ||
| Many of the men were just, they were starved to death and then their bodies were just They were unceremoniously thrown overboard the ship and their bones were washing ashore for 50, 70 years. | ||
| Many of those bones have been collected in a ship memorial, if you will, in Brooklyn. | ||
| Tell us about that. | ||
| It's a large memorial and it's an ossuary in a sense. | ||
| It contains many of the bones that had washed ashore or were found of these brave American heroes. | ||
| It's incredible. | ||
| And I've got to tell you, one of the things I really admire about you, because I know that you've done so much of World War II, you did so much of the Iraq War with Fallujah, you've done these oral histories, but you take now five years | ||
| These two books have taken you years to do the research, to go back to the Revolutionary War, and to tell the combat histories, to put us where these soldiers actually were, so you understand the sacrifice, and you understand like American Thermopylae, American Dunkirk, that may get lost in the midst of time. | ||
| In this book alone, there's over a thousand endnotes. | ||
| It's all in their own words, Steve. | ||
| It's the pension application files, it's the letters and diaries. | ||
| So these men speak, even though they've been dead for, you know, over two centuries. | ||
| Okay, we're going to take a short commercial break. | ||
| We're going to come back. | ||
| Known but to God, that's the Tomb of the Unknown. | ||
| Patrick K. O'Donnell has written an amazing book about that. | ||
| He's going to talk about the entire process. | ||
| The honored living that honor the dead, the tomb of the unknown, next when we return on a Memorial Day special in the War Room. | ||
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War Room Pandemic with Stephen K. Bannon. | |
| The epidemic is a demon and we cannot let this demon hide. | ||
| War Room Pandemic. | ||
| Here's your host, Stephen K. Bannon. | ||
| Okay, welcome back to our Memorial Day Special 2021. | ||
| I want to thank Patrick K. O'Donnell, the combat historian, and Captain Maureen Bannon. | ||
| We're joined in the next hour by Chief Warrant Officer Joe Kent. | ||
| He's now running for Congress out in Washington, but he's got, what, 10, 11 combat tours in service to his nation, and we're going to have him as our co-host for the second hour. | ||
| I want to thank our sponsors, MyPillow.com. | ||
| Go there today. | ||
| You've got the toppers 30% off. | ||
| You've got $29.98 for the pillows. | ||
| And also, WormDefense.com. | ||
| This is about your immune system. | ||
| You know you've got to boost it. | ||
| It's your responsibility. | ||
| We've got the free vitamin D3 in the zinc. | ||
| Go to WormDefense.com today. | ||
| You've got to pay shipping and handling because you get more access to information about your immune system. | ||
| Okay, I want to pivot now. | ||
| I want to talk about the Tomb of the Unknown as a small boy. | ||
| I think I was three years old. | ||
| Was it 56 or 57? | ||
| It was later 50s, you're right. | ||
| It was in the Eisenhower administration. | ||
| I was a little boy. | ||
| We'd just moved from Richmond to, or from Norfolk to Washington. | ||
| My dad came up here for work. | ||
| He took my brother and I to the Memorial, whatever the, I think it was Memorial Day. | ||
| It felt like it was 100 degrees. | ||
| I just have the memories I have of us sitting up where the Navy thing, with the anchor, to kind of see what was going on because it was so crowded. | ||
| But we started By the Capitol, and all I remember is the Howitzers. | ||
| The Howitzers went off and it seemed like forever in honor as they marched the, I think it was the Korean, was this the Korean War? | ||
| It's the Korean War soldier. | ||
| That was buried at the Tomb of the Unknown. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And we're in the 100th anniversary of the beginning. | ||
| Talk to us about the Tomb of the Unknown. | ||
| Talk to us about the honored guards and all this. | ||
| The Tomb of the Unknown soldier is our most sacred monument. | ||
| It honors all of our war dead. | ||
| from the beginning of our wars. | ||
| And this story really begins in World War I where France was the first to honor its war dead, its unknown dead. | ||
| Because the Great War mutilated many of the bodies and made them unknown. | ||
| America had over 3,000 unknown dead. | ||
| It was followed by Britain, and then there was a movement in the United States to honor those that we didn't know. | ||
| Initially, the War Department said, yeah, we'll bring them all back, we'll find them. | ||
| And there was a movement in the United States to create our own unknown soldier, and that was a hundred years ago. | ||
| And it's really an extraordinary story of how that individual was selected and how that individual was brought home. | ||
| It was an untold story until I wrote this book, The Unknowns, and all the books I've ever written have found me, and that was certainly the case of The Unknowns. | ||
| I was in the Marine Corps' most sacred battleground, Belleau Wood. | ||
| And here, this is where the Marine Corps halted the Kaiser's armies at the gates of Paris. | ||
| And the fighting was hand-to-hand. | ||
| It was brutal. | ||
| There are still trees that contain mustard gas shells that are embedded in the trees. | ||
| And I walked this ground. | ||
| I was a guide to the Marines that I was with in Fallujah, as well as the Wounded Warrior Regiment. | ||
| So I knew many of the men that I was with there. | ||
| And as we walked this ground, there was another guide who was the Belleau Wood expert, if I was in the Normandy guy. | ||
| And he said, here at Hill 142, this is where the first Marine Medal of Honor recipient, Ernest A. Jansen, made an epic stand. | ||
| He literally bayoneted several German machine guns, Maxims, that were being set up on the side of Hill 142. | ||
| And the Germans were counterattacking and about to overrun the hill, but he makes this incredible charge and disables the guns and kills many of the crews. | ||
| He's heavily wounded in the process, but he receives the Medal of Honor. | ||
| Interestingly, he receives two Medals of Honor, one from the Navy and one from the Army because he was in The Marines, but they were part of the 2nd Division as the 4th Brigade. | ||
| And Jansen has an amazing story. | ||
| He lied about his name. | ||
| He actually deserted from the Army and joined the Marine Corps and changed his name. | ||
| And that's in the book. | ||
| But what I found interesting is I found out that Jansen was what was known as a body bearer for the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. | ||
| And that's where the story found me. | ||
| I immediately wanted to know who the other eight men were, and they were selected by General Pershing personally, but they were selected to tell the story of World War I through their eyes because these were the most decorated men of the war, but they were in the Army, the Marine Corps, and the Navy, and they all had different specializations, different parts of the story. | ||
| When they were put together, they tell the story of And they were supposed to be the honor guard to bring the body back from the battlefield in France, back to Washington, where it would be buried in Arlington National Cemetery. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| But the story of how that body was selected is also exceptionally interesting. | ||
| Because you had what, at that time, we took thousands and thousands of casualties. | ||
| People don't realize how brutal, particularly for the time frame of World War I, the compressed time frame. | ||
| We came in, basically in 18, with such a fresh force, but we threw so many bodies at it, the Germans realized, I think, pretty quickly they couldn't take this. | ||
| It was a meat grinder, and the largest battle of World War I is at a place called the Meuse-Argonne. | ||
| It's the largest battle in American history. | ||
| We're going to hold that for the second hour. | ||
| We're going to get the Patrick A. O'Donnell Moe Bandit. | ||
| We're going to be joined, take a short commercial break. | ||
| We're going to get a second hour of our Memorial Day special. | ||
| Chief Warrant Officer Joe Kent, now running for Congress, a veteran of 10-11 combat tours in Afghanistan and Iraq. | ||
| We're going to take a short commercial break. | ||
| We'll be back in a moment. | ||
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