The Michael Berry Show

This coming Thursday will be the 80th anniversary of D-Day

And many of us have dads, uncles, grandpaws who fought in World War II.

And we know the importance of the defeat by these great men of the Nazis and Japan.

But do you know how much that war mattered in the context of history?

Not just the aftermath of that war, but how that war was different than any war before it and any war since. One of our favorites Victor Davis Hanson gave a public lecture at

Hillsdale College on why World War II matters. I hope you enjoy this. I hope you learn from it I hope you go to Hillsdale College

and support them financially and I hope you'll follow Victor Davis Hanson because he's one of the great historians, thinkers, critics, commentators of our day.

Thank you very much. This is my 13th year that I visited Hillsdale to teach. It's been 14 years since your president Larry Arne came to my farm, called me up and said,

I'd like to talk to you about coming to Hillsdale.

And I said, where is it?

And he said, Michigan.

I knew where it was, but I acted as if I didn't.

And I said, God, I can't go to Michigan and he said when I'm done with

breakfast you'll be coming to Hillsdale and he was right so I'd like to talk for

about 35 minutes about World War II. That's what we call it. In Britain,

it's known as the Second World War. And then I'd like to entertain questions. I have a book that's coming out from basic books called the Second World Wars Plural because

this idea of a holistic single war was a very late concept not until about 1941 and we'll get to that minute. But I was always

confused as a little boy growing up in the late 1950s and early 1960s. We would go

to these family dinners on the farm and I had one uncle who fought in the Aleutians and he'd say he fought the Japanese and it was cold and he tended plane tendered.

I had a first cousin who fought in Iran and his job was to be at Basra and convey Dodge trucks to the Russians to fight Army Group South on the Eastern

Front in 1942 and 3. I had a father who was the loudest of everybody who flew 39 missions in a B-29.

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