June 6, 2025 - Bannon's War Room
48:17
Participants
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| This is the primal scream of a dying regime. | ||
|
unidentified
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Pray for our enemies, because we're going medieval on these people. | |
| I got a free shot at all these networks lying about the people. | ||
|
unidentified
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The people have had a belly full of it. | |
| I know you don't like hearing that. | ||
| I know you try to do everything in the world to stop that, but you're not going to stop it. | ||
| It's going to happen. | ||
| And where do people like that go to share the big lie? | ||
| Mega Media. | ||
| I wish in my soul, I wish that any of these people had a conscience. | ||
|
unidentified
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Ask yourself, what is my task and what is my purpose? | |
| If that answer is to save my country, this country will be saved. | ||
|
unidentified
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War Room. | |
| Here's your host, Stephen K. Band. | ||
| War Room. | ||
| Here's your host, Stephen K. Band. | ||
| All right, everybody. | ||
| Dave Bratt sitting in with the great Stephen K. Bannon. | ||
| Just action-packed news all day today. | ||
| I'm sure you're just buried in the news like we are. | ||
| I started off the morning with a tribute to Carrick on the morning shows. | ||
| I was with Steve. | ||
| He wanted me to get into the economy a little bit. | ||
| We ran out of time. | ||
| But good economic news today, right? | ||
| Wages are up 3.8%. | ||
| Inflation is only 2.3%. | ||
| And so when the wage rate is higher than the inflation rate, you're getting a real wage raise. | ||
| That's great news. | ||
| The jobs were good, better than expected. | ||
| The good buried lead in there is government federal jobs were down. | ||
| And so you won't hear any of this reported anywhere, of course. | ||
| The stock market was up. | ||
| A bunch of good news coming in. | ||
| We don't pay attention to the stock market. | ||
| That's not our guiding light. | ||
| Guiding light is the fun. | ||
| And we want to get into that. | ||
| I, in particular, want to hit China today for a reason, right? | ||
| Ukraine, the never-ending war camp, the globalists, the Euro folks, the NATO folks, Lindsey Graham, Blumenthal, all of them, and a lot of the House and a lot of the Senate voting for these endless wars, continue to vote to fund it. | ||
| It's just stunning to us. | ||
| And so now Ukraine bombs the Russian triad. | ||
| The triad are the three ways that Russia can deliver nuclear warheads. | ||
| And, of course, we do not like Russian nuclear warheads in any way, shape, or form. | ||
| But taking out that triad with U.S. guidance, perhaps, we don't know that. | ||
| We don't have full reports on the CIA, any of that yet. | ||
| That makes us all think, and we have to ask the question, how big is China in the background? | ||
| Because our response to Russia should depend greatly on China, which is a much bigger, much more fierce enemy and a competitor, not competitor, enemy. | ||
| They've declared war on us. | ||
| They're taking every advantage of us. | ||
| So today's show is I've asked two experts to come on and help us answer that question. | ||
| you all have followed the war room, you know the basic China's got ghost cities. | ||
| Their GDP is down from 10 to 5, and that may be fake data, maybe 2%. | ||
| People are in the streets complaining about not getting their wage rates, not getting their checks. | ||
| The debt is 300% of GDP. | ||
| And I've been reading, you know, the manufacturing is kind of going down. | ||
| But now I've seen some other reports that say the advanced manufacturing They're shifting. | ||
| And they don't care about their people, right? | ||
| They just take money and park it wherever they want. | ||
| So they're going away from manufacturing, and that's linked to the wage rates of a lot of Chinese people. | ||
| So I don't know if this is sustainable. | ||
| And so I asked Rich Stern of the Heritage Foundation to come in with us. | ||
| Rich, why don't you take it away? | ||
| Give us... | ||
| Well, thank you for having me on, of course, to talk about this. | ||
| You know, I think we're all concerned about China. | ||
| It's a huge country. | ||
| They have four times their population. | ||
| But you know, some of the interesting facts of the matter here, right, is They moved more towards a market economy. | ||
| They brought in Western capital. | ||
| But frankly, they reduced taxes. | ||
| They got rid of punitive regulations. | ||
| They streamlined their processes. | ||
| They tried to clone, frankly, our economic model. | ||
| And what you had was massive success in China. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| That's right, Denver, did Rich freeze up on us? | ||
| All right, folks, I think I'll just follow up and continue, I think, where Rich was going with that, and then if we get Rich back in in a minute or so, we'll go back to him, and otherwise we'll switch over to Bradley Thayer. | ||
| But roughly speaking, the story I wanted to say is that, you know, Rich was saying they copied our model under Deng Xiaoping, and now under Xi Jinping. | ||
| He gave in his speech a year ago, he said, we're going to go full-on Marxist-Leninist, no more economic reforms. | ||
| And I think that's where Rich was going. | ||
| Market reforms, I mean, using markets. | ||
| So they're no longer going to use the price system, and they're no longer going to use free markets to guide themselves. | ||
| So they're going internal, and Rich is back with us. | ||
| And so, Rich, keep going where you were. | ||
| Thanks. | ||
| I'm going to blame the Chinese for obviously getting in the way of our connection here. | ||
| You're absolutely right. | ||
| That's where I was going to go. | ||
| It was just in the time that Xi Jinping has been in charge, their economic growth rates have been cut in half. | ||
| But more than that, prior to him coming in, virtually no Chinese firms were underwater. | ||
| Right now, close to a third of Chinese companies, including an enormous amount of manufacturing, are on life support, surviving on subsidies from the Chinese government. | ||
| Let me tell you one other statistic. | ||
| Now, we all know it's hard to believe any numbers coming out of China. | ||
| But the value of their industrial subsidies might be as high as $2 trillion a year. | ||
| That is close to the entire value added of the entire U.S. manufacturing industry. | ||
| And so you might be looking at China stealing from the future, running up the massive debts you're talking about. | ||
| And stealing from productive industries to throw more good money after bad into their manufacturing sector that's no longer globally competitive, where they're seeing their own industrial base being sent to India and Vietnam and Poland, of all places. | ||
| So, you know, when you look across the board, the move away from market fundamentals, a move back towards dictatorship and communism, it has neutered the economic growth in China to the point where they're now built on a house of debt. | ||
| Yeah, and I buy all of that. | ||
| And then recently, I've been stumbling on some fairly intelligent analysts out there. | ||
| They're not household names or whatever. | ||
| But they're talking about the shift over into these high-tech verticals with lasers and chips and all this. | ||
| Have you seen any of that? | ||
| Because that is worrisome, right? | ||
| I think your basic narrative is right. | ||
| At 60 Minutes this week, they're doing the Belt and Road, now around Australia. | ||
| Six island chains, they're paying for all this. | ||
| How in the world do you have that much money to be paying for? | ||
| The U.S. doesn't have that much money. | ||
| We can't be subsidizing. | ||
| We wish we could help around the world, but we can't anymore. | ||
| And that's the Trump strategy. | ||
| And so do you see China pivoting at all toward this high-tech strategy as a way of making up for the loss of basic manufacturing? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| And what I would say is there's really two components to that. | ||
| So one is there are real innovators in China. | ||
| It's a country of 1.4 billion people. | ||
| So there are real entrepreneurs, innovators, engineers in China who are trying to build the industry of the future. | ||
| And then there's the government. | ||
| And you and I both know whenever the government gets in, whether it's a good thing or not, the government ruins the party. | ||
| So, you know, part of what's happening here is that the government is trying to take over good industries. | ||
| They're, as I was talking about, you know, moving subsidies over from all these other sectors to prop up industries that the government's favoring. | ||
| So it's hard to know how much progress they're making. | ||
| It's one thing for the government to say, look, we want to switch industrial bases. | ||
| But can you do it in a way that's truly profitable? | ||
| And what we're seeing here is that as much as there's some real innovation, there's also theft. | ||
| They're trying to smuggle in NVIDIA chips so they can make server farms and build large language models that are competitive. | ||
| The government is pouring just an enormous amount of money in the propping up solar panel, EV production, chip production that probably is decades, not decades, but years behind where the state of the art is, that's behind in terms of efficiency. | ||
| Frankly, they're creating industries that wouldn't survive without the government subsidies. | ||
| Now to your question of where are they getting the money, they're stealing it from the four and a half decades of good economic growth they had before. | ||
| And you know, the U.S. has been stealing on two centuries of good economic growth over the last 50 and 60 years. | ||
| So China's got more room to steal from that. | ||
| But they're doing what all the developed countries are doing. | ||
| They're rejecting the methods that produced a robust economy and falling in prey to a large government that just shuffles deck chairs around the Titanic. | ||
| Yeah, one or two minutes on the close. | ||
| The reason, you know, we're interested in this is because of this Russia-Ukraine war, and we're supposed to be pivoting to the Pacific away from the Atlanticists, but the Atlanticists have a slush fund in the hundreds of billions paid for by the U.S. taxpayers, which is sickening. | ||
| And so when you're doing the geopolitics of this, as Steve would, what's your prognosis on the U.S. strategy moving forward with China? | ||
| Are they strong enough to take on a Taiwan? | ||
| Are they strong enough to be in a position to want to go after us? | ||
| And the part that was sickening to me this week is when I saw them negotiate And we care about our people, right? | ||
| So we are dependent. | ||
| We'll admit it. | ||
| Our government's transparent. | ||
| They're not. | ||
| And so it's like they get an advantage on us because of their corruption. | ||
| And the oppression of their people. | ||
| So in a minute or two, Rich, just close us out on the geopolitics and the best guesses as to how we approach China going forward. | ||
| So one of the key things about this is that in the U.S. and in Western governments, look, politics is corrupt. | ||
| And you have politicians who will steal from hardworking people and productive sectors to finance their friends and other industries. | ||
| The thing that's unique about China is that they do that, too. | ||
| They've got their friends. | ||
| They've got their political corruption. | ||
| But they channel it in a militarily strategic manner. | ||
| And I think we all know that's not what the West does. | ||
| It's not what the U.S. does. | ||
| Our governments waste the money on industries that politicians donors like. | ||
| In China, you can actually think of an enormous amount of those industrial subsidies as clauses. | ||
| They're really military spending. | ||
| They're masquerading as industrial subsidies, but it's really military spending. | ||
| Because what are they doing? | ||
| They're building up the critical mineral processing technologies. | ||
| They're building up car industries with the aim to destroy ours and Europe's car industries. | ||
| They've taken over nearly half the world's ship production. | ||
| And it's things like that where you can see that while they're inefficient, while they're sapping their future growth, And that has given them a strategic advantage. | ||
| And it just goes to show you that, you know, government corruption is bad all the way around. | ||
|
unidentified
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They're at least strategic with it. | |
| Yeah, and so that logic leads you to one basic question. | ||
| They got to feed 1.4 billion people on that strategy. | ||
| What do you make of that? | ||
| How many years they're eating off, they're parasitical on their past growth, like you said, and it's kind of like our analysis of our bond market. | ||
| I would have thought the bond market vigilantes would have come 10 years ago, and I've been wrong the whole time. | ||
| I'm just stunned at how undisciplined. | ||
| And we have no strategy. | ||
| I think that's the key point you just made. | ||
| We don't have a strategic vision as a Congress. | ||
| Trump kind of came in finally with some vision and some, you know, bullets that we ran on. | ||
| But the Chinese, is it, I'm kind of asking the same thing every time, but how many people are in the streets getting upset these days? | ||
| Oh, I mean millions. | ||
| Look, you know, again, the slowdown in manufacturing economic growth in China. | ||
| You now have labor union protests. | ||
| You have workers coming out. | ||
| But part of this is you also have people in China who are just tired of the oppression, who were following their government transitioning to more like, frankly, the transition out of a military dictatorship that South Korea made decades ago that many countries in Europe have made. | ||
| And so there's a real revolt against the reversion here, against the sapping of growth. | ||
| You know, the other country I'd tell you is, you know, the global bond market vigilantes, they're always looking for among governments the one-eyed man in the world of the blind. | ||
| And, you know, we talked in the 90s about Japan, and they came close to overtaking the U.S. economy. | ||
| Frankly, if China had committed 50, 60 years ago to the kind of economic system we have, we wouldn't even be close. | ||
| They would have triple our economy right now. | ||
| They'd have more people. | ||
| So at the end of the day, and you and I have both noticed we talk about this a lot, governments always find a way to screw it up. | ||
| Sometimes it's an advantage when it's a government like China's, but we've got to be on the lookout for it, both here and abroad. | ||
| Excellent, Richard. | ||
| Thank you for the analysis. | ||
| Always great having you on. | ||
| Heritage Foundation, the great Kevin Roberts up leading that ship. | ||
| Make sure you say hey to Kevin from the war room. | ||
| We love him. | ||
| Thanks, Rich. | ||
| Will do. | ||
| It was a pleasure. | ||
| Thank you for having me on. | ||
| All right. | ||
| You bet. | ||
| You bet. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Let's go to a couple reads. | ||
| We want to thank our friends at Birch Gold for their support. | ||
| And let me pull up Denver. | ||
| If you can pull up the Rio Reset, a new currency alliance that could wipe out your wealth. | ||
|
unidentified
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Birch Gold, this is what we're covering today, right? | |
| The assessment of risk in a very chaotic world. | ||
| The China threat. | ||
| The Russia threat. | ||
| The Ukraine bombing. | ||
| The Russian nuclear triad. | ||
| It's time to examine your portfolio, right? | ||
| We don't make sales. | ||
| We don't say it's investment. | ||
| But it is a way to obtain some stability in your portfolio. | ||
| So please reach out to Birch Gold, birchgold.com slash Bannon, birchgold.com slash Bannon, or text Bannon to 989898. | ||
| Text Bannon to 989898 for a free copy of The Ultimate Guide for Gold in the Trump Era. | ||
| And then also, Denver, before we close out, we better thank our friends at Home Title Lock. | ||
| Go there also. | ||
| HomeTitleLock.com, promo code Steve. | ||
| HomeTitleLock.com, promo Steve. | ||
| Check out their million-dollar triple lock protection, 14-day free trial. | ||
| You see them come on the show every day. | ||
| You could wake up in the middle of the night, be sent emails, texts, notifications that you have lost the title to your home. | ||
| When that happens, it's like going to the DMV and the dentist at the same time. | ||
| You do not want to be left in that predicament, right? | ||
| So call our good friends at Home Title Lock. | ||
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| Promo Steve. | ||
| All right, with that, we're going to bring on Bradley Thayer, our resident China expert. | ||
| And Brad, I'm not going to do any introductory remarks because you heard Rich and I discussing the China threat. | ||
| And I just want to get your comments and analysis of the same issue. | ||
| How strong is China right now? | ||
| Are they fading? | ||
| Are they pivoting toward a new strategy, and can they pull it off? | ||
| Bradley Thayer, thanks for being with us. | ||
| Hi, Dave. | ||
| Great to join you again. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| The People's Republic of China, the PRC is in economic crisis. | ||
| Millions have lost unemployment, as Rich mentioned. | ||
| Tens of thousands of businesses have closed. | ||
| The real estate market has collapsed. | ||
| The local Communist Party is stressed because their revenue is dependent, of course, on the real estate market. | ||
| And that adversely affects not just the party, of course, but the Chinese people for whom the value of their apartment is most of their wealth. | ||
| It also stresses the financial sector, which is known to be corrupt. | ||
| So when we're talking about the economy of the People's Republic of China and the numbers that the Chinese themselves are generating, we always want to keep in mind the manufacturing Mary McCarthy rule, right? | ||
| Every word is a lie, including and and the, when she famously dismissed Lillian Hellman and her writings. | ||
| So whatever the PRC is saying, we want to keep that in mind. | ||
| They're going to be lying about the numbers that they generate. | ||
| And finally, Dave, the Trump administration's tariff and investment denial policies are really hurting the economy. | ||
| So as Rich mentioned, There are really strategies that they're seeking to develop to get out of that. | ||
| First is investment. | ||
| That is internal investment, which doesn't seem to be working. | ||
| Second, as Rich stressed, there is the idea of new technologies to develop. | ||
| And I think that's certainly an element there. | ||
| But we also want to keep in mind, of course, that they're not reducing military spending. | ||
| So they certainly have prioritized the military, and that has not changed whatsoever. | ||
| So even when they're in economic crisis, they're still going to maintain utmost military spending against us. | ||
| The final point. | ||
| The Chinese Communist Party is talking about what they've announced as their two priorities. | ||
| And their two priorities, as they identify them, are first, the execution of key national strategies, and second, the enhancement of security capabilities in key sectors. | ||
| Now, both of those are ominous for us. | ||
| Think through really what they're conceiving, what they're thinking of when they talk about two priorities. | ||
| And Dave, we need to understand that power is relative in international politics. | ||
| So one thing that helps China and the Chinese economy is hurting us. | ||
| So if they can damage us, that actually is helping their economy, if you will, in a relative sense. | ||
| So when they're talking about two priorities, we want to keep in mind that a part of that is certainly going to be doing their utmost to damage our economy, either through attacks on Taiwan, or secondly, unhinging our alliances, as in South Korea, or direct economic attacks on our infrastructure, or cyber means, the salt vault typhoon. | ||
| Essentially, cyber attacks that have been unveiled, or through other means, Dave, to hurt our economy. | ||
| So that's very important to keep in mind. | ||
| Fundamentally, the Chinese Communist Party rules for itself, does not rule for the Chinese people, and the Chinese people will incur the costs, whatever the Chinese Communist Party rules. | ||
| Essentially imposes upon them. | ||
| And their targets remain us and our allies in the Indo-Pacific region. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Let me close it out in a minute or so. | ||
| You know, I am so angry at our policymakers. | ||
| We don't seem to have any strategic vision. | ||
| You know, 10 years out, 20 years out, 30. The Chinese are very good at that. | ||
| Even if their machinery is not working and their economic machines run out of energy, they still have a strategic vision. | ||
| Who should we be mad at in the United States for not having this strategic vision laid out where we miss China for 30 years, as you so brilliantly show in your book? | ||
| Well, Jim Fennell and I wrote a book on that, Embracing Communist China, America's Greatest Strategic Failure, where we look at this was decades in the making. | ||
| But it was really a product of the genius of the political warfare strategy of Deng Xiaoping to make the West his partner, to make American businesses and politicians his partner so that we helped the Chinese communists survive and thrive. | ||
| It's unreal. | ||
| We've got to blame our enemy, but we also have to blame those in the West, in the United States in particular, Wall Street, of course, and elsewhere. | ||
| Who's responsible, though? | ||
| Wall Street's responsible for making money. | ||
| 30 seconds. | ||
| Who's responsible for our national security? | ||
| Name names and offices. | ||
| Who blew it? | ||
| Well, every presidential administration, Bill Clinton's presidential administration, blew it by abandoning any type of human rights commitment to renewal of most favored nation status and putting them on the path to the World Trade Organization. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Hey, Bradley, I'm going to get you back on on this because I really want to drill. | ||
| This is absolutely crucial stuff, and you're the best at it. | ||
| So we thank you. | ||
| And then I also thank Natalie Winters, who called out this show from hers. | ||
| She's also a great China analyst. | ||
| And I want to thank everybody for watching the War Room all day long. | ||
| We get great comments from all of you every day. | ||
| Please share this platform, right? | ||
| Share this platform with everyone you know, because we want to help Steve. | ||
| Steve is the mastermind, right, that is the strategic thinker we all follow. | ||
| So share this. | ||
| And we want to give a special call-out and a special transition over to Bernie Carrick right now. | ||
| The War Room, we followed the funeral this morning, but what a great man. | ||
| And so here we go with War Room's tribute to Bernie Carrick. | ||
|
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Former NYPD Police Commissioner Bernie Carrick is dead. | |
| He passed away Thursday at New York's Presbyterian Hospital, surrounded by family and friends. | ||
| A new era begins for the New York City Police Department as Mayor Giuliani passes on the golden badge to a new top cop. | ||
| Today, Mayor Giuliani said he was simply overqualified for the job, citing the fact that he is a former police detective and a proven administrator. | ||
| He brings a quality of leadership that I believe can give us the opportunity to build on a record that is a very, very difficult one to match. | ||
| Congratulations. | ||
| This is something I never dreamed of. | ||
| I never thought would happen. | ||
| So important for Bernie Kerik, but it's also about the aspect of remembrance, the Christian faith, Catholicism, what ties us together as Christians, what ties us together in the Judeo-Christian West. | ||
| *music* | ||
| The remains of Bernie Kerik, our dear friend, have arrived. | ||
| With the Honor Guard. | ||
| Rudy Giuliani and Bernie Kerik are historic figures for all of New Yorkers. | ||
| These events where the community gets together to honor people, this is iconic. | ||
|
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He was a colleague and a friend, but also a major part of the MAGA movement and a major part of the history of just not New York City, but the entire country given the 9 /11 attack. | |
| Carrick was known as America's cop following the 9 /11 terror attacks. | ||
| Bernie Carrick is one of the most accomplished and effective leaders of law enforcement in America. | ||
| As police commissioner on September the 11th, 2001. | ||
| Bernie Carrick arrived at the World Trade Center minutes after the first plane hit. | ||
| A passenger flight ran into the north side of the World Trade Center. | ||
| He was there when the Twin Towers collapsed. | ||
|
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He knew the faces of the rescuers who rushed toward danger. | |
| He attended the funeral of the officers who didn't come back. | ||
| Bernie Kerrick understands the duties that came to America on September the 11th. | ||
| The resolve he felt that morning will guide him every day. | ||
| There isn't a day that has passed since the morning of September 11th that I haven't thought of the sacrifices of those heroes and the losses we all suffered. | ||
| I promise you, Mr. President, that both the memory of those courageous souls and the horrors I saw inflicted upon our proud nation will serve as permanent reminders of the awesome responsibility you place in my charge. | ||
| Bernie Carrick, dead at 69 years old. | ||
| Sailors and airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Force, you are about to embark upon the great crusade toward which we have striven these many months. | ||
| The eyes of the world are upon you. | ||
| The hopes and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you. | ||
| In company with our brave allies and brothers in arms on other fronts, you will bring about the destruction of the German war machine, the elimination of Nazi tyranny over the oppressed peoples of Europe. | ||
| And security for ourselves in a free world. | ||
| Your task will not be an easy one. | ||
| Your enemy is well-trained, well-equipped and battle-hardened. | ||
| He will fight savagely. | ||
| But this is the year 1944. | ||
| Much has happened since the Nazi triumphs of 1940-41. | ||
| The United Nations have inflicted upon the Germans great defeats in open battle, man to man. | ||
| Our air offensive has seriously reduced their strength in the air and their capacity to wage war on the ground. | ||
| Our home fronts have given us an overwhelming superiority in weapons and munitions of war and placed at our disposal great reserves of trained fighting men. | ||
| The tide has turned. | ||
| The free men of the world are marching together to victory. | ||
| I have full confidence in your courage, devotion to duty, and skill in battle. | ||
| We will accept nothing less than full victory. | ||
| Good luck, and let us all beseech the blessing of Almighty God upon this great and noble undertaking. | ||
| While we were walking, we came to a place where apparently they collected the bodies, and there was quite a few of them there. | ||
| Some of them look like probably a tank had run over them and stuff like that. | ||
| That gets your attention too. | ||
| My fellow Americans, last night when I spoke with you about the fall of Rome, I knew at that moment that troops of the United States and our allies were crossing the channel. | ||
| In another and greater operation. | ||
| It has come to pass with success thus far. | ||
| And so, in this poignant hour, I ask you to join with me in prayer. | ||
| Almighty God, our sons, pride of our nation, This day have set upon a mighty endeavor, a struggle to preserve our republic, our religion, and our civilization, and to set free a suffering humanity. | ||
| Lead them straight and true. | ||
| Give strength to their arms, stoutness to their hearts, steadfastness in their faith. | ||
| They will need thy blessings. | ||
| Their road will be long and hard. | ||
| For the enemy is strong. | ||
| He may hurl back our forces. | ||
| Success may not come with rushing speed, but we shall return again and again. | ||
| And we know that by thy grace and by the righteousness of our cause, Our sons will triumph. | ||
| Back in the war room. | ||
| Dave Brat with D-Day coverage today with, of course, America's greatest military historian, Patrick K. O'Donnell. | ||
| I'm surrounded by Irishmen up here in the war room. | ||
| And so always a privilege to get to speak with the... | ||
| the religion, our civilization, the young boys' faith, the treasure of our country, these young men. | ||
| We take a lot of this for granted today. | ||
| We don't even teach it in the schools. | ||
| We should be more thankful. | ||
| And so you can just feel the heartstrings, the greatness there. | ||
| And there's nobody better that's interviewed and has more friends among this great generation than Patrick O'Donnell. | ||
| So, Patrick, welcome to the show. | ||
| Thank you for being with us on this D-Day. | ||
| And why don't you just start framing it? | ||
| Let's start at the end, maybe. | ||
| Why don't you tell young people where can they go to follow your work, other work of major significance in history, and then lead them through what is D-Day and then the interviews and the work you do as a historian. | ||
| Thanks for being with us, Patrick. | ||
| It's an honor to be here, Dave. | ||
| You can find me at combat historian. | ||
| On Twitter and then also Getter. | ||
| All my books are at Barnes& Noble. | ||
| They're typically prominently displayed. | ||
| Or on Amazon.com. | ||
| It's really a great place to get the books. | ||
| You can always get them quickly. | ||
| Since 1992, Dave, I started interviewing World War II veterans. | ||
| It was a passion of mine. | ||
| I was there to preserve and collect their stories. | ||
| And, you know, these men entrusted me with stories that they had never told their families. | ||
| Most of them had buried these stories for decades, and they gave me the privilege of talking to them. | ||
| And it began with the 82nd Airborne and the 101st Airborne, and then it moved to the Rangers and the OSS and many others. | ||
| I've collected probably the largest private collection of oral histories on World War II elite units, thousands of them in private hands. | ||
| For me, I watched for the first time in about 20 years my first book signing. | ||
| Which was a reunion of these men, and I posted it on Getter and X and C-SPAN taped it. | ||
| We had hundreds of men from... | ||
| And they took us back in time, Dave, to their war. | ||
| And it was a powerful, powerful presentation where they told their stories live. | ||
| And one of the men in there was a Pathfinder with the 508 Parachute Infantry Regiment. | ||
| Pathfinders were some of the first troops into Normandy. | ||
| They guided the way. | ||
| They set up radar sets and lights and panels to guide the rest of the C-47s in. | ||
| And Francis Lamoureux was one of those early men. | ||
| Yeah, hey, before you dig right in there, for the young people watching who may not be educated, just give them a brief overview of what you're describing here. | ||
| World War II. | ||
| What we're describing today is the greatest invasion in history. | ||
| This is the invasion that will change the course of World War II. | ||
| It's June 6, 1944. | ||
| And, you know, for many, many years, the Axis had been on a run. | ||
| And now the Western Front in France is being opened up by the Allied forces. | ||
| 156,000 Allied troops will land in Normandy by air or by sea and begin the reconquest of Europe. | ||
| And this is a close-in thing. | ||
| Eisenhower even prepared a letter with the potential defeat of Allied forces. | ||
| That was a real scenario. | ||
| Much of it was based on surprise and the ability to trick the Germans into believing that we're going to land in a place called Calais, which was many miles away from Normandy. | ||
| And there were a number of deception operations to convince them that that was the case. | ||
| But nevertheless, the Germans still believed that we might land in Normandy. | ||
| And they moved an entire air division, air landing division, the 91st, in to deal with paratroopers in particular, men like Francis Lamoureux that were leading the way. | ||
| And at that reunion, you know, he told a story about how they came in that night. | ||
| There was flak hitting the, you know, his plane. | ||
| Planes went down around him. | ||
| He lands and they set up the, But the landings were, in many cases, way off. | ||
| Many of the paratroopers landed in different places. | ||
| They were scattered throughout Normandy. | ||
| And they had to sort of induct themselves, in many cases, in small groups or one-man teams to accomplish their missions, which they did very successfully. | ||
| Despite having been scattered very significantly. | ||
| And at the reunion, it was really, Francis had received the bronze star for his actions on Normandy that night of June 6th. | ||
| And he had never received it for over, you know, 55 years. | ||
| And I spoke with General Shelton, who was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and another gentleman, Dave Barry, who was the historian. | ||
| And we got Francis his bronze star, and it was presented at the reunion by his commanding officer, Colonel Luis Mendez. | ||
| And it's an amazing moment that's captured on film of these two men seeing each other for the first time in decades. | ||
| Unbelievable. | ||
| Hey, give the audience a sense of how massive this operation was. | ||
| You've interviewed kind of the top commands, the elite regiments. | ||
| What's the totality of the entire operation that you're describing here? | ||
| This is, I mean, the first phase of it is 156,000. | ||
| But then at sea, you have another 200,000 men. | ||
| And in the air, there's tens of thousands more men. | ||
| And then on the ground. | ||
| The Germans have tens of thousands of troops and are in some cases entrenched or in a position to quickly move towards the beachhead. | ||
| And it's, you know, here behind the lines, the OSS, the Office of Strategic Services, has been parachuted in in three-man groups called Jedbergs. | ||
| And these men help organize, train, and lead the resistance elements to slow down. | ||
| The German effort to reach the beachhead, and they're very successful at doing that. | ||
| Yeah, that's, and so you interviewed, give us a sense of who you interviewed. | ||
| And the story that you want us as Americans to understand and why is this story so important? | ||
| That you've spent the passion of your life working on this story. | ||
| And as you say, you've never worked a day in your life because you just love it because there's so much meaning attached to it. | ||
| What is that meaning to you? | ||
| The meaning is it's about average, ordinary Americans. | ||
| That did extraordinary things. | ||
| The men that I interviewed in Beyond Valor and the other books that I've written, Dog Company on the Rangers, these are all just regular guys in many cases. | ||
| The focus of my books have always been on the privates, the NCOs, the men that are actually at the tip of the spear doing the action. | ||
| There's a scene right there with Delbert Kuehl, who is a chaplain, wearing his original uniform. | ||
| You know, from World War II, he was a chaplain in the crossing of the wall at Nijmegen, the bridge too far. | ||
| He was in the movie saying the Lord's Prayer. | ||
| And then as he gets on the other side of the river at Nijmegen, he's a first aid man, receives the Silver Star. | ||
| Luis Mendez is seated, is the colonel that I mentioned. | ||
| Francis Lamoureux has the bronze star pinned on his... | ||
| And then Ed Jozworski, who's on the far left, was with the 507, and they were at a place called Lafayette Bridge, which was some of the hottest action in Normandy. | ||
| And it's at this bridgehead where the Germans are about to pierce the Allied defenses and potentially roll into the beachhead that the Airborne makes a stand first to hold the bridge, and then they have to take it. | ||
| And Ed was there. | ||
| On the assault, across the causeway, and I'll never forget him telling me what combat was like when the bullets whiz and snap next to your ear, and it's that close. | ||
| And I was in Iraq, in Fallujah, and I felt that I couldn't believe what he was telling me when I felt it myself, and I was crawling down a drainage ditch for hundreds of meters under direct sniper fire, and I knew exactly what it meant when he told me that in his story. | ||
| But these were, in my view, the men in that picture are all rock stars. | ||
| Incredible individuals. | ||
| And at the time, nobody was interviewing them. | ||
| This is before Tom Brokaw's Greatest Generation. | ||
| I was just trying to gather their stories to provide a means of what they had done, which is so amazing. | ||
| And it inspired a lot of other families to dig deeper into their own veterans' past and preserve their legacies. | ||
| That's what all my work has been about, really. | ||
| It's been preserving and sharing these stories of men in combat, which for me, those stories began interviewing some World War I veterans all the way to men and women in today's conflicts. | ||
| Yeah, well, thank you for your tremendous lift and huge life's work. | ||
| When you were describing the guys parachuting in and working almost alone in small units, how much were our American troops trained in for this? | ||
| The war for us was relatively new versus the Germans. | ||
| Was there some miraculous work going on here? | ||
| I mean, it just seems astounding. | ||
| How were these guys trained in when you talked to them? | ||
| What were they trained to do? | ||
| Or were they just such a matter of courage and valor that they knew what to do? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Punishing training, Dave, that was just unbelievable. | ||
| You know, for the Airborne, these guys were told that they could lick five guys. | ||
| That we're not airborne. | ||
| And they go over to places like Phoenix City in Alabama and try to pick fights. | ||
| Sometimes they won. | ||
| Most times they did. | ||
| But, you know, they believed in themselves. | ||
| And that belief in themselves carried through on the battlefield. | ||
| You know, an excellent example is Dog Company, which is a situation where one man or two men can change the course of the entire invasion. | ||
| These are the boys of Point the Hawk. | ||
| That scaled the 90-foot cliff under direct machine gun and rifle fire. | ||
| You know, being thrown potato masher grenades down. | ||
| You know, these guys do it. | ||
| Len Lamell, who's one of my great, great friends when he was alive, he was the one that urged me to write to a company on their unit. | ||
| He was hit by a German MG42 bullet on his side. | ||
| He still kept climbing up the rope. | ||
| Then they were on top of the cliffs. | ||
| Which was a complete maze of entrenchments and bunkers. | ||
| They fought their way through that. | ||
| And then Len, they were armed with thermite grenades and there were six guns on top of Pointe de Hoc. | ||
| 155mm guns that had a range of about 13 miles or so. | ||
| They could reach out to the sea as well as hit either beachhead. | ||
| And Pointe du Hoc is a cliff peninsula that is between Omaha and Utah Beach, and those guns had to be neutralized. | ||
| They threw everything at it, Dave. | ||
| Air, naval bombardment. | ||
| But it's Len Lamelle and his Thurne Mike grenades that they find five of those guns under nets in an apple grove, and he disables them. | ||
| It's an incredible story of how a single individual can change the course of history, and that's unbelievable. | ||
| Another aspect of my books that, you know, runs through each one of them. | ||
| Yeah, I hate to be a downer on this thing. | ||
| We got about three minutes left. | ||
| But, you know, on this show in the war room, Stephen K. Bannon, you know, has military life. | ||
| I do not. | ||
|
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I used to work for the Army a little bit in a technical aspect. | |
| But nothing like this. | ||
| But give us a sense of the losses. | ||
| And how these men have endured after, I mean, you describe it. | ||
| How many of their friends did they lose? | ||
| The magnitude of the loss of life of young, promising American lives, you know, men of faith, the highest character. | ||
| Describe that loss a little bit so we can comprehend how thankful we ought to be. | ||
| You know, on Point to Hawk, for instance, 225 men went in on the first wave, and only 90 were standing. | ||
| They had been hit by counterattack after counterattack and somehow destroyed the guns and even cut the road that went between the two beaches. | ||
| Just amazing stuff. | ||
| I mean, in Omaha Beach, where the 5th Rangers and elements of the 2nd Ranger Battalion land, there's 2,400 casualties. | ||
| Many of them are dead. | ||
| You know, this is a situation where, you know, men would tell me the stories about, you know, Roy Elm, for instance, who was from Chicago, 2nd Ranger Battalion, lands on Dog Green Beach, and there's literally blood in the water bodies. | ||
| It's a charnel house. | ||
| But the 5th Ranger Battalion lands on the White Beach, Dog White, and leads the breakout. | ||
| And, you know, the rest is history. | ||
| Man, at the right time and the right place. | ||
| You got a minute to go. | ||
| Close us out with the best story, the best news, the most uplifting piece to send us off on D-Day. | ||
| Thankful. | ||
| I would say that my favorite story is from Luis Mendez, who pins the Bronze Star on Francis Lamoureux. | ||
| And you know what he said to me when I first... | ||
| Love and respect. | ||
| Love your fellow man and respect them. | ||
| And at first I was a little bit, you know, he becomes one of the first Hispanic Americans, Mexican Americans to actually enter West Point. | ||
| And he becomes a commanding colonel. | ||
| Amazing man. | ||
| That holds with me every day in how I treat people. | ||
| Love and respect. | ||
| Unbelievable. | ||
| Patrick O'Donnell, thanks for being with us on D-Day. | ||
| do it like no one else can do America's preeminent God bless you. | ||
| Keep up the great work. | ||
| We can't wait to see you next time. |
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