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Dec. 3, 2025 - Dennis Prager Show
34:32
Timeless Wisdom - America's Military Role in Winning WWI
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Welcome to Timeless Wisdom with Dennis Prager.
Here are thousands of hours of Dennis' lectures, courses, and classic radio programs.
And to purchase Dennis Prager's Rational Bibles, go to DennisPrager.com.
So we have a, periodically we have a history hour.
The book that I feature is always a recently published book on history.
This one is titled, it's just published, The Yanks Are Coming, A Military History of the United States in World War I.
I might just note for my author's sake, and I will introduce him, of course, momentarily, I am somewhat obsessed with World War I because that is what ruined the world for the next hundred years.
If it weren't for World War I, there wouldn't have been a World War II.
There wouldn't have been Nazism.
There wouldn't have been communism.
There wouldn't have been a Holocaust.
There wouldn't have been the genocides that took place under communist rule.
The world would have been completely different.
World War I was the catastrophe that set everything in motion.
So I am transfixed by it.
Also, it's the most complex.
It's very easy to understand how World War II started.
People are still not in full agreement with how World War I did.
So this is a very important and fascinating subject.
The author is H.W. Crocker III, and he is a best-selling author.
He's written quite a number of books, such as Robert E. Lee on Leadership and Triumph.
Let's see.
Triumph is another one of his books.
Don't Tread on Me, The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Civil War, The Politically Incorrect Guide to the British Empire, which will be a pretty university course, as it happens, the British Empire.
So I respect this man's work, so I'll call you H.W. If that's okay with you.
It's fine by me.
And welcome to the show.
And let's set the historical agenda first for my listeners.
And that is, would you explain in a nutshell how it is that the United States ever got into World War I?
Well, actually, it mystifies a great many people how we got involved.
And if there was ever any president who did not want to get involved in a war like this, it was Woodrow Wilson, who was then President of the United States.
Woodrow Wilson came into office saying, I know nothing about foreign policy.
It would be an irony of history if I had to deal with foreign affairs.
He appointed as his first Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan, who was a near pacifist and who was appointed not because he had any foreign policy experience or expertise, but because he was a political appointment.
Woodrow Wilson needed a place to stick him.
He stuck him there, a place he thought would not be of any great importance.
His first choice for Secretary of War, as it was called then, was a Quaker who declined, saying, as a Quaker, I don't think I could actually serve you as Secretary of War.
His eventual Secretary of War, the one that came with us into the war, was a near-pacifist.
His Secretary of the Navy was a near-pacifist.
Woodrow Wilson even claimed in 1916, that's two years into the war, in a speech he gave, he said that he had no idea what this war was all about.
And from the outset, when war erupts in 1914, Woodrow Wilson rushes out and claims repeatedly, we are neutral, we are neutral, we are neutral.
And like Barack Obama, who is his fellow in this regard, that they are the only two presidents who were ever professors, Woodrow Wilson loved to lecture the world.
But his platform for lecturing the world, his platform of moral superiority, was entirely dependent on our staying out of the war, that we were the calm, cool, collected one that had not fallen prey to this madness.
And he stayed loyal to that even through every provocation, even through the sinking of Lusitania, which is a British ship that had American passengers on board sunk by a German submarine.
But what finally made it so much that even Woodrow Wilson could not stay out of the war was in early 1917, the Germans decide to lift all restrictions on their submarine warfare, which means that American shipping, which had already been targeted occasionally, was now an overt target of German submarines.
Moreover, there was the famous Zimmermann telegram.
The Zimmermann telegram is a telegram telling the Mexican government that if it comes to blows between the German Empire, the Second Reich, and the United States, we invite you to become our allies and invade the southwestern United States and try to regain those parts that you had lost in the Mexican War.
This is too much even for Woodrow Wilson, a man who is famously too proud to fight, to swallow.
And in April of 1917, he asks Congress for a declaration of war.
Now, on the first one, the shipping, were American ships sunk?
Yes.
Oh, yes.
Not only were American ships sunk, but the Germans had committed an estimated 100 acts of sabotage on the American mainland, which gets very little play in the history books, and very few people know about it, but it's true.
And in fact, Teddy Roosevelt, who throughout this period before we get involved in the war, Teddy Roosevelt is the great counterpoint to Woodrow Wilson.
Teddy Roosevelt knows exactly why this war started.
He, at the outset, says we do not need to be involved.
I can see the realpolitik reasons why all these different countries are fighting.
But what shifts Woodrow, or rather, Teddy Roosevelt's opinion is A, the way the Germans occupy neutral Belgium.
They invade neutral Belgium and they occupied in a very harsh way, lining up priests, women, children to be executed to subdue any sense, any thought that the Belgians might have of fighting back.
And this is a bit too much for Theodore Roosevelt.
Theodore Roosevelt also makes the point.
He makes the point saying, look, the Germans have committed, this is later in the war, this is like 1916, 17, the Germans have slaughtered more Americans than were killed at Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill.
But unlike the British who fought armed men, the Germans are waging war on American businessmen going about their lawful business and women and children traveling on these ships.
And he thought it was outrageous that Woodrow Wilson stomached this.
He thought it was outrageous that Woodrow Wilson refused to protest German atrocities in Belgium.
He thought it was outrageous that Woodrow Wilson would go so far as to dictate that Americans in their private lives, from their pulpits, from their editorial boards, wherever, should be neutral in thought, word, and deed.
And as a dictator from the White House political correctness, we are so neutral we can take no sides, even in our private personal opinions, was Wilson's thought.
And Theodore Roosevelt thought this was absolutely outrageous.
And personally, I think Theodore Roosevelt was right.
Oh, okay.
That's a separate issue.
Let me just ask, from the German perspective, why would they so stupidly Not deliberately avoid the Americans so as not to provoke America to get into World War I.
Well, this is an interesting point because the Germans had certain things going for them.
I mean, one is that they had there were lots of Irish Americans, obviously, and the Irish Americans had no great desire to fight for the British Empire.
And a lot of German Americans, of course, who had no great desire to fight against their old homeland.
But the Germans were, and I should say, the book is not anti-German in any way, but the Germans were blundering in their diplomacy and had been ever since Kaiser Wilhelm had ascended the throne in Germany as leader of the Second Reich.
He believed in this sort of belligerent, forceful diplomacy.
And he upset many apple carts along the way, but part of it, part of that, was that the Germans were utterly contemptuous of the United States.
And they were contemptuous for at least these reasons.
One, the experience of dealing with Woodrow Wilson.
Woodrow Wilson had been a patsy.
Two, the American military, the American army, was estimated at being the size of Portugal's.
It was a non-factor.
And General Ludendorff, Eric Ludendorff, who was the second in command, second highest ranking general in the German army, and frankly, second in control of the Second Reich, said, This is a quote he issued: look, I don't give a darn about the Americans.
They can't get here in time.
They can't do anything.
The Germans rolled the dice and figured, look, if we practice unrestricted submarine warfare, we can cut Britain off from her trade routes, from her lifelines, and we will strangle Britain and she will lose.
Concomitant with this unrestricted submarine warfare was a massive land offensive where Ludendorff and the Germans thought they'd win the war and almost did.
When the Americans, after America's.
All right, all right.
Hold that thought because I want to remind everybody: the Yanks are coming, a military history of the United States in World War I. H.W. Crocker, back in a moment, the history hour.
Hi, everybody.
Dennis Prager here.
We continue with a history hour.
Periodically, I have an hour devoted to a recent wonderful book on history.
I have been obsessed with the importance of World War I.
And this is about America in World War I.
The Yanks are coming.
He writes terrifically and very accessibly.
H.W. Crocker has written a number of bestsellers.
This one is The Yanks Are Coming, a military history of the United States in World War I.
We were discussing how it is that the U.S. got into the war to begin with.
I mean, World War II is a lot easier, at least with regard to the Japanese.
They attack Pearl Harbor, we declare war.
That's the easiest and the most obvious.
World War II with the Germans is more complex, and World War I, obviously also with the Germans, was also complex.
And I think I did a fine job of explaining it.
And so unless there was a point that you wished to make, I'll just jump off from there with more questions.
Sure, far away.
Okay, terrific.
Okay, so we enter the war.
What year is it we enter the war?
1917.
The war has been on since 1914.
What was the state of the war then?
Who was winning, or was it, as usual, nobody?
Well, nobody except that the Germans were making terrific gains in this regard.
They were soon to knock Russia out of the war.
The Tsar had already abdicated in Russia.
So they were soon to be freed from having to fight on this Eastern Front.
And they're going to turn all those German divisions towards the West.
Now, in the West, you had the famous Western Front, that line that divides Europe cutting through Belgium and France down to the Swiss border.
And that had been pretty much static, famously static, static with millions being slaughtered on both sides.
But the French were no longer able to launch any offensives.
They were sort of blood white.
And the British were in somewhat better shape, but if we had not entered the war when we had, the British Admiralty was greatly afeared that the German submarine warfare was going to sink so much tonnage that Britain would have to capitulate.
Britain would no longer have its access to the seas, and it was entirely dependent on trade for many of its necessary supplies.
So your take is, and I assume it's the normative historical take, that if the U.S. had not entered World War I, Germany would have won?
Well, here, I think many Americans are misguided about this.
I think if we had not entered the war, there would have been some sort of settlement that would have been equal to all parties.
This is not true.
We know this is not true for a couple reasons.
One is we can look at how the Germans treated other occupied territories.
As I mentioned at the beginning of the interview, Belgium was treated abysmally.
But also, the treaty that's eventually negotiated between the German Empire and Bolshevik Russia is extremely incredible.
Forgive me, I just want to say for my listeners, anybody who listens to the argument, oh, how poorly the Germans were treated after World War I because of the Treaty of Versailles should know how the Germans treated the Russians when they left the war before World War I was over.
They were far more draconian demands for land and money, both from Russia, than were made of Germany after World War I. Absolutely true.
There's something else I think is often swept under the rug here, which is that people think of the First World War as pointless slaughter.
It's sort of the bad war compared to the Second World War, where the moral issues are better defined.
I think that's not true.
A lot of what was at stake in World War I was precisely what was at stake in World War II.
Both in geopolitical terms within Europe, the question was really the same.
Should Germany be allowed to militarily subjugate the continent of Europe?
I mean, it's Laban's problem to the East.
It's smashing the French and the Belgians in the West.
But also, there's something else, and that is that the Second Reich, of course, was not nearly as evil as the Third Reich, but a lot of the seeds that came to fruition in the Third Reich were already well planted in Germany, especially its higher levels in the Second Reich.
There's a great story about an American biologist and pacifist named Vernon Kellogg, who was involved with Belgium war relief before we got involved in the war.
In this position, he was allowed to have dinner with the German high command in Brussels.
And many of these men, or all these men, were extremely well educated.
Many of them had been scientists in civilian life.
And yet this biologist, evolutionist, Darwinist pacifist, was appalled about the way that the German intelligentsia, including all these officers, had appropriated Darwinian social Darwinism and applied it to global affairs, where whatever the Belgians got, they deserved.
Because they were weaker.
Because they were weaker.
And he came back, he actually wrote a book, which had an introduction by Theodore Roosevelt, saying, look, I am not in favor of war, but I am in favor of this war because this mentality is so noxious, it must be stopped.
You need, I want to tell you a book you need to write.
And I'm very serious because, as I say, I've been somewhat obsessed with World War I, and that is why World War I was necessary.
Everybody knows, as you point out, why World War II was.
Yes.
Yeah, no, that may be true.
But I could tell you another little anecdote which helps illustrate the point.
I've mentioned Eric Ludendorff, second in command in Germany, de facto the second most powerful man in the country during the war.
After the war, he is an early political supporter of guess who? Adolf Hitler.
Because he already believed essentially what Adolf Hitler believed.
They later had the falling out, as extremists often do.
But it just goes to show that Adolf Hitler and his ideology was not so very foreign to that of many of the leaders of the Second Reich.
Wow.
All right.
So let's establish here.
I got to go back to the question I asked at the beginning.
Had the U.S. not entered World War I, what would have happened?
What would have happened was I believe Germany would have won.
They would have crushed, Britain would have fallen out of the war temporarily, but they would have crushed the continent.
And then there would have been a gigantic naval war between the British Empire, which maintained a large navy, and the German Navy, which had meant to be its rival.
Whether they could have conquered Britain is very debatable, but they could easily have taken over Europe.
And we, this is, I think, maybe also a neglected aspect.
It's often thought, well, we came in too little, too late to really do much.
Au contrary, we have it from General Hindenburg, the top German general, that the war was lost when the American infantry invaded the Ardennes Forest during the Musargonne campaign, or in the Argonne Forest in the Musargon campaign.
It was the American infantry that turned the tide of the war.
It was the American infantry that defeated the Second Reich.
Wow.
The Yanks are coming, a military history of the United States in World War I. H.W. Crocker is the author.
And it's a very important subject.
Terrific book.
Up at DennisPrager.com.
We return in a moment.
A History Hour on the Dennis Prager Show.
Hello, my friends, and welcome back.
I'm Dennis Prager, and periodically I broadcast A History Hour, No Fixed Time, just when the inspiration and the right book come along.
The right book certainly came along.
The Yanks Are Coming, A Military History of the United States in World War I. H.W. Crocker is the author.
He's a best-selling author, and rightfully so, and he has his moral compass functioning, which to me is a very big deal.
The book is up at dennisprager.com.
We've discussed how it is that the U.S. entered the war, that it is the general consensus, and certainly his, that the United States turned the tide of World War I.
And how many, ultimately, how many Americans died in World War I?
Well, all these estimates are subject to debate, but it was about 4 million Americans were activated for the war.
And about 2 million served in France.
Casualty ratio.
I mean, you have to remember there was also the flu swept through the forces too, but probably 100,000, I think would be a fair.
Which is a huge, huge number given the American population at that time.
It's a huge number in any event.
So first, let me ask you, were they drafted?
Yes.
The American ⁇ Yes.
The draft was instituted fairly early on.
Okay.
Was there, as there was between the wars later, was there a large we have no business going there movement in the U.S.?
There was a huge one before the war.
Once we got in, no, a lot of the opposition to the war completely fell away.
Because?
Because it was the Germans had painted themselves in this corner where it became very hard to defend them.
I mean, there were those who actually said doing like the sinking of Lusitania that, look, the Germans told us they're going to sink this ship, and we had no right, putting American civilians at risk there.
But for most Americans, certainly after 1917, after the declaration of unrestricted submarine warfare, it just seemed this is intolerable.
You can't wage war on American shipping, on American women and children, and you certainly can't invite our neighbors of South Mexico to invade us.
I mean, Woodrow Wilson had no choice but to declare war because war had de facto been declared on us by the Germans.
And most all the American people at that point agreed with him.
Is there a book on the Zimmermann telegram that Barbara Tuchman wrote or reminded me of the public?
Okay, there is one.
Yes.
How did that strike the American people?
Was that like a bombshell?
Absolutely.
It was the smoking gun that started us off onto the race to enter World War I. Right.
So again, for my listeners, Just, this is a telegram sent by the Germans to the Mexican government that if we end up with a war with the U.S., we will happily, if you join us, give you land back that you think you should have.
Is that right?
Yes, absolutely.
How did the Mexicans react?
I'm just curious.
Did they think they kind of ignored it?
Yeah.
Exactly.
It was not seen as practicable.
Yeah, Mañana.
Mañana.
We'll deal with it tomorrow.
But, you know, right now I'd rather have dinner.
Okay.
So the amazing story was the last major military campaign by the United States had actually been in Mexico.
I mean, John Pershing, General Pershing, who commanded the American Expeditionary Force to France, his last major engagement had been fighting Poncho Villa on the border.
And that's what the Germans sort of viewed the American military as good for, was patrolling the border.
It wasn't going to be this modern army that could compete with these massive armies of Europe.
But in fact, it did.
As I said, it went from the size of Portugal to 4 million men being activated, 2 million going to France.
Who or what is responsible for having America prepared in such numbers to fight?
Well, it's interesting because Woodrow Wilson had zero interest in military affairs.
All right, answer this question when we come back because I don't want to interrupt that answer.
I am very curious.
How did we go from fighting Pancho Villa to sending 4 million troops over and doing well in Europe?
The Yanks are coming.
A military history of the United States in World War I. You understand that war.
You understand the 20th century.
The author is H.W. Crocker, and I love his moral compass, and he writes terrifically.
It's a pretty good combination.
Book us up at DennisPrager.com.
This is a history hour on the Dennis Prager Show, and we return in a moment.
Hello, my friends.
Dennis Prager here.
This is a history hour.
Periodically, I have an hour devoted to a recently published book on history, my all-time favorite subject, not just because I find it fascinating, but because it's so important.
Ah, so that's how we got where we are.
Oh, now I understand.
That's what every history book should tell you.
Now I understand.
The Yanks Are Coming is the name of the book I'm featuring this History Hour.
A Military History of the United States in World War I.
The whole point is that it's World War I. H.W. Crocker, the third, is the author.
And you were explaining, you were answering my question.
How did we go from fighting Mexicans to being able to have four million men fight well in Europe?
Well, I suppose, you know, hats off, should go to many people.
Woodrow Wilson only to the extent that he stayed out of the way.
But actually, maybe I should say this.
About two-thirds of the book, the way it's written, is devoted to biographies of American generals or American heroes of the war.
It's a very personal sort of take on thing, American heroes.
And one of those who is profiled, it's not just General Pershing, who commanded the forces, but General Peyton C. March, who was responsible for actually organizing the American Army, building up these numbers and training them.
And the interesting thing about both how we go from being this fighting pancho via to mobilizing 4 million men, sending 2 million of them to France, is thinking about people like Peyton C. March.
Peyton C. March was born during the Civil War, and he lived to see the end of the Korean War.
A man like Douglas MacArthur, who was a brigadier general in the First World War, won seven Silver Stars, which was a record.
He grew up following his father.
His father traveled to the Wild West, and MacArthur remembered the West as being sort of like a John Ford John Wayne Cavalry movie.
He grew up from that to go through World War I to command troops in Korea into an atomic age.
And so something else I try to bring out in the book is not just how we mobilized our men, how we fought the war, which is in its own way interesting because the American experience is not one of leaping over the trenches and being shot down by machine gun bullets, but a lot of individual combat.
A lot of the men, including MacArthur, compared to Indian fighting, except that the Indians in this case are armed with machine guns and grenades, have better discipline.
But it's also a sense of how America goes from the Civil War to the first World War to this position of global power.
Because among the men profiled, are men like Patton and Marshall Plan.
The men who forged this country, I mean, we think of the greatest generation as being the World War II generation.
But a lot of the men who led our armies in World War II actually got their first taste of combat or an early taste of combat in World War I. In Europe, World War I devastated everything.
It rendered the continent cynical.
People went from religion to agnosticism and non-church attendance.
They went from nationalism to ridiculing patriotism.
Why didn't it have any such negative effect on Americans?
Well, it did have some effect, and it had some effect largely from Americans who were living overseas.
In part.
It was men like the lost generation, the Hemingways, getting souzzled in Spain or Fitzgerald in France.
But it led to the sort of, there was no great rush to war for us in World War II either.
The religious falling out was, yes, much less marked in America than it was in Europe.
And the nationalist falling out.
Yes, yes.
I mean, there's a famous incident during the war in 1914.
British troops look up and they believe they see these angelic archers supporting them.
You had a sort of stained glass imagination, which could exist in 1914.
By 1918, that is utterly crushed and gone away.
But the American experience is both briefer, it's broad, and it's just, maybe I put it this way: when the Americans arrived, both the Germans, well, I think the German reaction might be the most important.
The Germans reacted, regarded the normal American infantry as shock troops.
And the reason they did so was three years in the war, the Germans were still at a very good army, the British had a good army, the French to a degree had a good army, but they were all exhausted.
European civilization had exhausted, had bled itself away in this terrible calamity.
The Americans came over with this go-get-em spirit, which persisted throughout the entire war.
And which included, I should say, men like Eddie Rickenbacher, who was our air ace, who had been a race car driver beforehand.
If you ever see a picture of Eddie Rickenbacher both before and after the war, he's this cocky-looking guy.
Or, you know, Douglas MacArthur has these poses of himself with his, they called him the dude, or because he went into combat wearing a muff around his neck and this soft cap.
Our guys maintained this sort of dashing spirit which had been lost by the European powers in the trenches.
Well, who was the biggest heroic names to come out of the World War I?
Well, one that had huge reverberations was Sergeant York.
Sergeant York was a mountain man sharpshooter, pacifist who had to be convinced that the war was right, which he eventually became, and rounded up 132 Germans virtually single-handedly and became the subject of an Academy Award-winning movie in 1941 called Sergeant York Starring Gary Cooper,
which was really kind of a prelude to getting Americans to accept the fact that he might be going to war in Europe again.
So he was a great hero.
Eddie Rickenbacher, as I mentioned, was our air ace.
All four of Teddy Roosevelt's sons served in the First World War.
His youngest son, Quentin, was killed.
He was a pilot.
His other sons were all badly wounded.
Three of his sons, the three surviving sons, went on to fight in World War II.
One became the only general to land at Normandy with the troops on D-Day and actually died during World War II.
So actually, two of his sons died in World War II.
So it's a great heroic American story that spans what we can call the American century.
Final segment coming up with H.W. Crocker.
The Yanks are coming.
The book is up at DennisPrager.com, a military history of the United States in the war that caused it all, World War I. Hi, everybody.
Dennis Prager here.
Final segment of this another in my history hours, which I periodically broadcast to bring to your attention some great new work of history.
This is The Yanks Are Coming by H.W. Crocker, a military history of the United States in World War I, and it's done through the lives of various major figures who fought in the war, plus an overall description.
It's wonderful, and the subject is of tremendous importance.
When the troops came home, did they get a hero's reaction?
Hero's reception?
Oh, let me put you on.
You can't answer if you're not on.
Yes.
Yes, the troops did get a heroic reception, a hero's welcome.
The sort of disillusion with the war that we touched on earlier was certainly not apparent in the fall of 1918, November 1918, when the war ends.
It was not apparent for actually well after that.
So, no, they came home conquering heroes, were garlanded with roses and kisses.
What about the attitude toward Germans?
Was that a factor?
Well, I mean, once the war was declared, yes, I mean, there were movements, sort of know-nothing movements to remove Germans teaching from public schools.
There were atrocities against dachshunds and that sort of thing.
But yes, there was some German anti-German sentiment, but it also, after the war, dissipated pretty rapidly.
And German Americans participated in the war.
Oh, absolutely.
No, no, no.
Yeah, there were no conflicts of, and this is something that Woodward Wilson actually worried about.
He had worried about ethnic Americans having ethnic loyalties.
Once push came to shove, that was not the case.
And in fact, the bigger problem was not so much German Americans as Irish Americans.
Because they didn't want to fight on behalf of the British.
Right.
And I wanted to talk a bit in the book about the Fighting 69th, this famous Irish National Guard regiment from New York.
And when they were issued uniforms, a lot of our supplies came from Britain or from France.
They noticed these buttons were British Imperial buttons.
They ripped them off the uniforms and insisted on other buttons being sewed on.
But in fact, one of the men profiled in the book is the chaplain of the Fighting 69th, who became the most decorated chaplain in American history.
That's Father Francis Duffy.
And part of his pitch to this Irish regiment was, look, we are, let's prove yet again that we are good Americans.
That's great.
And they certainly did.
Well, thank you for the book.
Thank you for the hour.
The Yanks are coming, a military history of the United States in World War I, H.W. Crocker.
The book is up at my website, dennisprager.com.
You write well, you speak well.
It is a joy to have you on the show.
Thank you so much.
You're very welcome.
History Hour, I'm Dennis Prager.
This has been Timeless Wisdom with Dennis Prager.
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