This is an I-Heart podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories,

the show where America is the star and the American people,

coming to you from the city where the west begins, Fort Worth, Texas.

Victor Davis Hansen is an historian and classicist who has written extensively about George S. Patton,

with the general being a key figure in his book, The Soul of Battle.

Hansen argues that the real immorality in war is not the use of great force to inflict punishment,

but the failure to exercise moral authority at all.

Here's Victor Davis-Hanson, and this came from a talk he gave at Hillsdale College, who

sponsor this show, all of our history stories are sponsored by the great folks at Hillsdale

College. George Patton was resented by most of his peers because he was from one of the wealthiest families in America.

Mount Wilson in L.A., that was his grandmother, the Wilson family.

His father was the city attorney of L.A. and owned a thousand acres in Pasadena.

He was fabulously rich on his own family side, and then he married in to the Air Pharmaceutical Company, Fedwick Air's

big empire.

So when the image of American officers was Omar Bradley and Eisenhower and Lucien Truscott

and Wade Haslip, all of these great people from the hinterland of America, here came Patton from California playing

polo with his own yacht and a stable of horses all during the Depression.

And he had been in the 1912 Olympics. He came in fourth. He might have won the Panathlone.

He claimed that he was such a good shot that each time he shot, he put the bullet right through the prior hole, and the judges

didn't understand that. And he may have been right. But if you follow his career through

...