James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles

00:00:00.000 | and you see that manifest itself on D-Day, where you've got 6,939 vessels, of which there are 1,213

00:00:08.380 | warships, 4,127 assault craft, 12,500 aircraft, you know, 155,000 men landed and dropped from the

00:00:18.480 | air in a 24-hour period. It is phenomenal. It is absolutely phenomenal. The following is a

00:00:27.700 | conversation with James Holland, a historian specializing in World War II, who has written

00:00:33.960 | a lot of amazing books on the subject, especially covering the Western Front, often providing

00:00:39.380 | fascinating details at multiple levels of analysis, including strategic, operational, tactical,

00:00:46.120 | technological, and of course, the human side, the personal accounts from the war. He also co-hosts a

00:00:53.820 | great podcast on World War II called We Have Ways of Making You Talk. This is a Lex Freeman

00:01:01.320 | podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description or at lexfreedman.com

00:01:06.940 | slash sponsors. And now, dear friends, here's James Holland. In Volume 1 of The War in the West,

00:01:16.600 | your book series on World War II, you write, the Second World War witnessed the deaths of more

00:01:22.700 | than 60 million people from over 60 different countries. Entire cities were laid waste. National

00:01:31.200 | borders were redrawn, and many millions more people found themselves displaced. Over the past couple of

00:01:37.900 | decades, many of those living in the Middle East or parts of Africa, the Balkans, Afghanistan, and even the

00:01:44.500 | United States may feel justifiably that these troubled times have already proved the most traumatic in their

00:01:51.700 | recent past. Yet, globally, the Second World War was and remains the single biggest catastrophe of modern

00:02:00.780 | history. In terms of human drama, it is unrivaled. No other war has affected so many lives in such a large

00:02:09.960 | number of countries. So, what to you makes World War II the biggest catastrophe in human drama in modern

00:02:16.700 | history? And maybe from a historian perspective, the most fascinating subject to study?

00:02:22.220 | The thing about World War II is it really is truly global. You know, it's fought in deserts, it's fought

00:02:26.920 | in the Arctic, it's fought across oceans, it's fought in the air, it's in jungle, it's in the hills,

00:02:35.160 | it is on the beaches. It's also on the Russian steppe, and it's also in Ukraine. So, it's that

00:02:43.420 | global nature of it. And I just think, you know, where there's war, there is always incredible human

00:02:48.860 | drama. And I think for most people, and certainly the true in my case, you get drawn to the human

00:02:54.240 | drama of it. It's that thought that, you know, gosh, if I'd been 20 years old, how would I have dealt with it?

00:02:59.300 | You know, would I have been in the Army? Would I have been in the Air Force? Would I have been on a,

00:03:02.880 | you know, Royal Navy destroyer? Or, you know, how would I have coped with it? And how would I have

00:03:07.040 | dealt with that separation? I mean, I've interviewed people who were away for four years. I remember

00:03:11.720 | talking to a tank man from Liverpool in England called Sam Bradshaw. And he went away for four

00:03:18.980 | years. And when he came home, he'd been twice wounded. He'd been very badly wounded in North Africa.

00:03:23.620 | And then he was shot in the neck in Italy, eventually got home. And when he came home,

00:03:27.860 | his mother had turned gray. His little baby sister, who had been, you know, 13 when he left,

00:03:34.860 | was now a young woman. His old school had been destroyed by Luftwaffe bombs. He didn't recognize

00:03:41.000 | the place. And do you know what he did? He joined up again, went back out of Europe and was one of the

00:03:47.340 | first people in Belsen. So, you know.

00:03:48.900 | What was his justification for that, for joining right back?

00:03:52.420 | He just felt completely disconnected to home. He felt that the gulf of time, his experiences

00:03:58.620 | had separated him from all the normalities of life. And he felt that the normalities of the life

00:04:04.220 | that he had known before he'd gone away to war had just been severed in a really kind of cruel way that

00:04:11.000 | he didn't really feel he was able to confront at that particular point. But he decided to rejoin,

00:04:15.800 | couldn't go back to the 3rd Royal Tank Regiment, so went back to a different unit. Went from kind of the

00:04:20.160 | Italian campaign to European theatre. Didn't see so much action at the end. But, you know,

00:04:25.960 | like a lot of British troops, if you were in a certain division at a certain time, you know,

00:04:29.920 | you ended up passing very close to Belsen. And, you know, you suddenly realized, okay,

00:04:34.020 | this was the right thing to do. You know, we did have to get rid of Nazism. We did have to do this

00:04:38.760 | because this is the consequence. It's not just the oppression. It's just not just the secret police. It's not

00:04:44.000 | just the expansionism of Nazism. It is also, you know, the Holocaust, which hadn't been given its

00:04:49.440 | name at that point. But, you know, you're witnessing this kind of untold cruelty. And I always, you know,

00:04:56.200 | I've always sort of, I think a lot about Sam. I mean, he's no longer with us, but he was one of the

00:05:01.440 | kind of first people that I interviewed. And I interviewed him at great length. And I know you like

00:05:05.580 | a long interview, Lex. And I totally, totally get that. Because when you have a long interview,

00:05:12.080 | you really start getting to the nuts and bolts of it. One of the frustrations for me when I'm looking

00:05:16.540 | at oral histories of Second World War vets is usually they're kind of, you know, they're put

00:05:22.500 | on YouTube or they're put on a museum website. They're 30 minutes, you know, an hour if you're

00:05:27.600 | lucky. And they're just scratching the surface. You never really get to know it. You feel that they're

00:05:32.400 | just repeating kind of stuff they've read in books themselves after the war and stuff.

00:05:36.300 | And, you know, I was kind of leave feeling frustrated that I haven't had a chance to kind

00:05:40.940 | of grill them on the kind of stuff that I would grill them on if I was put in front of them.

00:05:44.200 | So Tank Man, what was maybe the most epic, the most intense, or the most interesting story

00:05:51.440 | that he told you?

00:05:52.340 | Well, I do remember him telling me, funny enough, it's not really about the conflict. I remember

00:05:59.040 | him telling me about the importance of letters. And there was this guy who literally every few

00:06:07.900 | weeks, you know, post would arrive intermittently. There was no kind of sort of regular post. So it

00:06:12.440 | was supposed to be regular, but it didn't come out regularly. So you might suddenly get a flurry

00:06:15.880 | of five all in one day. But he said there was this guy and his tank, a member of a different tank

00:06:22.920 | group. He was a good friend of his in the same squadron. He had British have squadrons for their

00:06:29.080 | armor. And which is Americans would have a company.

00:06:32.520 | I should say that in your book, one of the wonderful things you do is you use the correct

00:06:36.780 | term in the language for the particular army involved, whether it's the German or the British

00:06:41.420 | or the American.

00:06:42.360 | Well, that's not to be pretentious. That's really just because you're dealing with so

00:06:46.820 | many numbers and different units, and it can go over your head and you can get sort of consumed

00:06:51.280 | by the detail if you're not careful. And as a reader, it can be very unsatisfying because

00:06:55.160 | you just can't keep pace with everything. So one of the things about writing in the vernacular

00:07:02.220 | German or in the American spelling, our more rather than our Mauer, as we Brits would spell

00:07:09.760 | it, is it just immediately tells the reader, okay, this is American. Okay, I've got that.

00:07:14.480 | Or this is German. I've got that. Or Italian or whatever it might be. But yeah, to go back

00:07:17.580 | to Sam. So Sam, there was this guy in his squadron and he'd get his letters from his girlfriend,

00:07:24.080 | his wife. And he said it was like a soap opera. He said, we all just waited for his letters

00:07:30.660 | to come in so we could find out whether his daughter got to school okay or won the swimming

00:07:38.200 | contest or whatever it was. The sort of details of this day-to-day kind of banal life was just

00:07:45.520 | absolute catnip to these guys. They absolutely loved it. And then the letter arrived, the Dear

00:07:51.100 | John letter, saying, sorry, I found someone else and it's over. And his friend was just

00:07:56.880 | absolutely devastated. It was the only thing that was keeping him going, this sort of sense of

00:08:01.200 | continuity of home, this foundation of his life back at home. And Sam said he could see he was in a

00:08:13.780 | really, really bad way. And he thought, uh-uh, he's going to do something stupid. And he went up to him

00:08:19.780 | and he said, look, you know, I know it's bad and I know it's terrible and I know you're absolutely

00:08:22.840 | devastated, but you've got your mates here. Just don't do anything silly. Just, you know, maybe,

00:08:26.580 | you know, when it's all over, you can patch things up or sort things out. And he said, you know,

00:08:30.800 | you've got to understand it from her point of view, you know, it's a long way. I haven't seen you for two

00:08:34.200 | years, this kind of stuff, you know, so just, just don't do anything rash. And of course, the next,

00:08:38.760 | next engagement, two days later, he was killed. And he said it was just a kind of, he could,

00:08:44.400 | he just knew that was going to happen. So it was a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy.

00:08:48.500 | That's something I've never forgotten that story. And I just thought, you know,

00:08:52.040 | it's about human drama. That's, that's, that's the truth of it. And how people react to this

00:09:01.380 | totally alien situation, you know, for the most part, the second world war is fought by ordinary,

00:09:07.740 | everyday people doing extra ordinary things. And I think that's something that's so fascinating.

00:09:13.340 | I suspect, I think I, instinctively, I'm quite slapdash, I think. So I think I would have,

00:09:19.260 | I'd have bought it literally. I don't think it would have ended well for me. I just, I'm just a bit

00:09:24.440 | careless.

00:09:24.780 | Yeah. I think I also have an element in me where I can believe in the idea of nation

00:09:32.640 | and fight for a nation, especially when the conflict is as grand.

00:09:37.700 | The thing's worse than death.

00:09:39.140 | Yes. As, as the propaganda would explain very clearly, but also in reality, yes. So a nation,

00:09:46.200 | you know, France, Britain was, you know, maybe facing the prospect of being essentially enslaved.

00:09:53.500 | The Soviet union was facing the prospect of being enslaved. Literally. I mean, it was very,

00:09:59.840 | very clearly stated what they're going to do. They're going to repopulate the land with Germanic

00:10:05.280 | people. So, well, they're not just going to do that. They're also going to starve lots and lots of,

00:10:09.540 | um, Soviet individuals to death by the hunger plan, for example, which is planned, you know,

00:10:16.560 | really very casually and not by the, you know, this is not SS units or anything like this. This is the

00:10:22.060 | Wehrmacht. This is the economic division of the Oberkommando de Wehrmacht, the German combined

00:10:29.180 | general staff, General Georg Thomas comes up, you know, and Hermann Backer, they come up with the,

00:10:37.780 | who's the kind of minister for food. They come up, you know, what are we going to do? You know,

00:10:41.180 | we haven't got enough food, you know, largely because German, um, farming is inefficient and

00:10:47.260 | they think, well, we'll get, you know, this is part of Liebenstrom. We'll go in and we'll take

00:10:50.560 | the food. And there's been this colossal urbanization of the Soviet union since the revolution in 1917.

00:10:55.920 | So they're just not going to get their food. You know, these, these people in these cities,

00:11:01.400 | because we're going to take it all. And that's going to leave to, that's going to lead to a lot

00:11:04.580 | of deaths, you know, umpteen millions is the phrase that Georg Thomas used.

00:11:11.880 | Well, let's talk about the hunger plan. How important was the hunger plan and Liebenstrom

00:11:15.900 | to Nazi ideology and to the whole Nazi war machine?

00:11:20.100 | It's central to the whole thing. This is all about this notion that is embedded into Hitler's

00:11:27.600 | mind and into the minds of the Nazi party, right from the word go is there is a big sort of global

00:11:35.400 | conspiracy, the Jewish Bolshevik plot. I mean, completely misplaced that Jews and Bolsheviks go

00:11:40.960 | hand in hand and somehow dovetail. They don't obviously. And the whole ideology is to crush

00:11:47.460 | this, you know, part of the way the Nazis think, the way Hitler thinks is there is a them and there's

00:11:53.440 | us. We are the whites, Northern European Aryans. We should be the master race. We've been, we've been

00:12:02.180 | threatened by a global Jewish Bolshevik plot. We've been stabbed in the back in 1918 at the end of the

00:12:10.940 | the first world war. We need to have to overcome. This is an existential battle for future survival.

00:12:17.560 | It's a terrible task that has befallen our generation, but we have to do this. We have to

00:12:22.600 | overcome this or else we have no future. We will be crushed. It's absolutely cut and dry. And one of the

00:12:28.300 | things about Hitler is that he is a very kind of black and white, them or us, either or kind of person.

00:12:35.220 | It's always one thing or the other. It's a thousand year Reich or it's Armageddon. There is no, there's no

00:12:40.540 | middle ground. There's no gray area. It's just one or the other. And that's how, that's his worldview.

00:12:45.800 | And the reason he came to the fore was, was because of the crystal clear clarity of his message, which is we've

00:12:57.460 | been stabbed in the back. There is a global plot. We have to overcome this. We are naturally the master

00:13:04.420 | race. We have to reassert ourselves. We have to get rid of global Jewry. We have to get rid of global

00:13:10.060 | Bolshevism and we have to prevail or else. But if we do prevail, what an amazing world it's going to be.

00:13:16.760 | So, so he starts with this, you know, every speech he does always starts in the same way, always starts

00:13:22.720 | from a kind of negative and always ends with an incredible positive, a sort of rabble rousing,

00:13:28.420 | endo of, of, of, of, of, if you're in the front row, spittle, halitosis and gesticulation. I mean, you've seen

00:13:35.360 | pictures of him. I mean, I don't know if you've ever seen pictures of him. He's almost, he wants to grab the air and

00:13:41.240 | clutch it to him. Um, you know, you can see the kind of the venom coming out of his mouth just in a single still

00:13:47.760 | photograph. I mean, it, it, it's amazing. There's, um, apps you can get now where, where you can translate his

00:13:54.640 | speeches and they're just, and it's just sounds, you know, by today's standards, you would just think

00:13:59.460 | what a load of absolute wibble. I mean, just total nonsense, but, but you have to kind of put yourself

00:14:04.480 | back in the shoes of people listening to him in 1922 or 23 or indeed 1933 and see how kind of captivating

00:14:12.280 | that is to a certain part of the, part of the population. So, yeah. So, so, so the, so to go back

00:14:17.480 | to your original point, Lieben's Rome is absolutely part of it. So what you do is you crush the Bolsheviks,

00:14:22.940 | you crush world Jewry, then you expand, you know, the Britain has had this incredible empire,

00:14:29.460 | global empire, you know, Germany needs that too. Germany is stuck in Europe. It doesn't have access

00:14:34.200 | to the world's oceans. So we're not going to be a maritime empire. We're going to be, we're going

00:14:38.160 | to be a landmass empire, the whole of landmass of Europe and into Asia. That's going to be us.

00:14:43.260 | And we're going to take that land. We're going to take the, the bread basket of, of Ukraine.

00:14:47.720 | We're going to use that for our own, own ends. We're going to spread our, our, uh, we're,

00:14:53.240 | we're going to make ourselves rich, but we're also going to spread our peoples. We're going to spread

00:14:56.800 | the Aryan Northern master race throughout, um, throughout Europe and into the traditional Slavic

00:15:02.780 | areas. And we will prevail and come out on top. And so you have to understand that, that, that everything

00:15:08.720 | about operation Barbarossa, the planned invasion of the Soviet union in June, 1941 is totally wrapped

00:15:16.940 | up in the Nazi ideology and people, you know, I've read it that historians sort of go, if only Hitler

00:15:24.920 | had realized that, you know, the Ukrainians had been quite happy to kind of fight on his side, you know,

00:15:28.440 | if only he'd, he'd actually brought some of these Jewish scientists and kind of into the Nazi fold,

00:15:33.540 | then Germany might've prevailed in world war two. And you kind of think, well, you're missing the

00:15:36.360 | entire point. That's just never going to happen because this is an ideological war.

00:15:40.900 | Yeah. This is not a pragmatic, rational leader. No. I mean, part of his effectiveness,

00:15:48.760 | we should say it's probably the singular belief in this ideology. There's pros and cons

00:15:54.660 | for, for an effective military machine, probably having that singular focus is effective.

00:16:03.840 | Yes. Except that when you're making military decisions,

00:16:07.080 | if those decisions are always being bracketed by an ideology, which is fundamentally flawed

00:16:14.360 | from a pragmatic point of view, as much as a kind of, you know, a kind of reasonable point

00:16:20.240 | of view, um, you're, you're kind of opening yourselves up for trouble. I mean, this is,

00:16:24.560 | this is a problem he has with Barbarossa, you know, that they realized very early on in 1941,

00:16:28.880 | when they're, when they're wargaming this whole operation, that it's not going to work. And so,

00:16:35.200 | you know, there's people like general Paulus, who's on the general staff at the time, you know,

00:16:40.340 | he's, he's given a kind of, you know, he's in charge of kind of wargaming this and he goes,

00:16:44.640 | this isn't going to work. And Keitel, who is the chief of the OKW goes, no, no, no, no, no,

00:16:51.680 | go back and make it work. He goes, okay. So he comes back with a plan that does work,

00:16:56.840 | but it's bogus. I mean, it's just, it doesn't work because they don't have enough. They don't

00:17:02.940 | have enough motorization. You know, they go into the Barbarossa with 2000 different types of vehicle,

00:17:07.740 | you know, every single one of those vehicles has to have, you know, different distributor caps and

00:17:13.560 | different leads and plugs and all sorts of different parts. You know, there's the interoperability

00:17:20.140 | of the, of the German mechanized arm is super inefficient. And so you've got huge problems

00:17:27.520 | because they kind of think, well, you know, we, we took France in 1940 and that's kind of one of the

00:17:32.880 | most modern countries in the world with, you know, one of the greatest armies and armed forces in the

00:17:36.680 | world. And we did that in six weeks. So, you know, Soviet union, look, they struggled against

00:17:41.920 | Finland for goodness sake. I mean, how hard can it be? You know, but what you're failing to understand is,

00:17:46.740 | is that attacking the Soviet union is over a geographical landmass, 10 times the size of

00:17:52.440 | France, just on the frontage. And you haven't really got much more mechanization than you had

00:17:58.480 | in May, 1940, when they attacked the low countries in France. And you've actually got less Luftwaffe

00:18:03.540 | aircraft to support you. And you just do not have the operational mechanics to make it work successfully.

00:18:10.120 | I mean, it is largely down to incompetence of the red army and the Soviet leadership in the summer

00:18:16.460 | of 1941 that they get as far as they do. I mean, you know, Barbarossa should never have come close

00:18:22.000 | to being a victory.

00:18:24.160 | Let's talk through it. So Operation Barbarossa that you're mentioning, and we'll go back.

00:18:27.940 | Yes. We've jumped straight into 41.

00:18:29.860 | Straight into it.

00:18:30.740 | I've eaten off two years of war.

00:18:33.040 | So this is June 1941, Operation Barbarossa, when Hitler invades the Soviet Union with, I think,

00:18:42.640 | the largest invading force in history up to that point.

00:18:44.860 | Collectively. Yeah.

00:18:45.860 | And there's three prongs, Army Group North, Army Group Center, Army Group South. North is going to

00:18:52.300 | Leningrad. Center is going, it's the strongest group going directly towards Moscow. And South is

00:18:58.860 | going and targeting Ukraine and the caucus. So can you linger on that, on the details of this plan? What

00:19:06.140 | was the thinking? What was the strategy? What was the tactics? What was the logistics? There's so many

00:19:12.300 | things to say, but one of them is to say that you often emphasize the importance of three ways to

00:19:18.300 | analyze military conflict, the strategic, the operational, and the tactical. And the operational

00:19:25.020 | is often not given enough time, attention. And it's the logistics that make the war machine really work,

00:19:33.100 | successfully or fail.

00:19:34.380 | Yeah. That's absolutely, absolutely spot on. And it's interesting because the vast majority

00:19:40.940 | of general histories of World War II tend to focus on the strategic and the tactical. So what do I mean

00:19:49.980 | by that? Well, the strategic, just for the, for those who don't know, that's your overall war aims,

00:19:54.460 | you know, get to Moscow, whatever it might be, conquer the world. That's your strategy. The tactical

00:20:00.380 | side of things is that's the cold face of war. That's the attritional bit. That's the following his

00:20:05.340 | spitfire, the tank crew, the soldier in his foxhole. It's the actual kinetic fighting bit. The

00:20:11.900 | operational bit is the level of war that links the strategic to the tactical. So it is absolutely

00:20:19.580 | factories. It's economics, it's shipping, it's supply chains, it's how you manage your war. And

00:20:27.500 | one of the things where I think people have been guilty in the past, historians have been guilty in

00:20:31.180 | the past, is by judging warfare all on the same level. But obviously every competent nation has a

00:20:38.780 | different approach to war because of the nation they are, the size they are, their geographical location.

00:20:43.980 | So Britain, for example, is an island nation. Its priority is the Royal Navy, which is why the Royal

00:20:50.460 | Navy is known as the Senior Service. And you know, in 1939, it's easy to forget it now when you see

00:20:55.420 | how depleted Britain is today. But in 1939, it has comfortably the world's largest

00:21:00.540 | navy. There's something like 194 destroyers. I think it's 15 battleships, seven aircraft carriers,

00:21:10.700 | and another kind of six on the way. America, it's got the Pacific Ocean, it's got the Atlantic Ocean,

00:21:16.860 | it's got two seaboard. It has the second largest navy in the world, but a tiny army. I mean,

00:21:21.900 | the US army in September 1939 is the 19th largest in the world, sandwiched between Portugal and Uruguay.

00:21:29.740 | It's just incredible. It's like 189,000 strong, which might seem reasonably large by today's standards,

00:21:35.980 | but it's absolutely tiny by 1939 standards. Whereas, you know, Germany's got an army of

00:21:41.980 | three and a half million in 1939. So, you know, these are big, big, big differences, but America's

00:21:49.020 | coming at it from a different perspective. Britain's coming at it from a different perspective. You know,

00:21:52.380 | Britain's empire is all about, you know, it's a shipping, it's a seaborne empire.

00:21:57.740 | Whereas, there's also another point, which is having large armies is actually inherently impractical

00:22:04.860 | and inefficient. Because the larger army, the more people you've got to feed, the more kind of barracks

00:22:10.620 | you've got to have, the more space you've got to have for training, the more people you're taking out

00:22:14.700 | of your workforce to produce tanks and shells and all the rest of it, because they're tramping around

00:22:19.420 | with rifles. You know, so there's an argument saying, actually, it's really not a very good way of doing

00:22:24.540 | things. So, you know, very much the British way, and subsequently, the United States way, and

00:22:30.300 | the way of Britain's dominions and empire, is to use kind of steel, not our flesh, as a principle.

00:22:37.820 | The idea is that you use technology, mechanization, modernity, global reach, to do a lot of your

00:22:44.380 | hard yards. That's the sort of basic principle behind the strategic air campaign. When we talk about

00:22:49.020 | the strategic air campaign, we talk about strategic air forces which are operating in isolation from

00:22:53.580 | other armed forces. So a tactical air force, for example, is an air force which is offering close

00:22:58.540 | air support for ground operations. A strategic air force has got nothing to do with ground operations,

00:23:04.860 | it's just operating on its own. So that's your bomber force or whatever. You know, that's your B-17s and

00:23:09.900 | B-24s of the 8th Air Force flying out of East England, bombing the rural industrial complex of

00:23:15.500 | Germany or whatever it might be. So it's important to understand that when you compare, you have to have

00:23:20.540 | the back of your mind that Britain, compared to Germany, for example, is coming at it from a

00:23:25.020 | completely different perspective. And I would say one of the failures of Hitler is that he always

00:23:30.620 | views everybody through his own very narrow world view, which is not particularly helpful. You know,

00:23:35.660 | you want to get inside the head of your enemy. And, you know, he's sort of guilty of not doing that.

00:23:40.460 | So when you're talking about Operation Barbarossa, to go back to your original question, you're dealing

00:23:46.940 | with an operation on such a vast scale that that operational level of war is absolutely vital to its

00:23:54.460 | chances of success or failure. It doesn't matter how good your individual commanders are at the front.

00:23:58.940 | If you haven't got the backup, it's not going to work. And the problem that the Germans have is,

00:24:04.540 | yes, they've got their kind of, you know, three million men on the front, and they've got their

00:24:09.340 | kind of, you know, 3000 aircraft and all the rest of it. But actually, what you need to do is break it

00:24:15.020 | down. And who is doing the hard yards of that? And the way the German war machine works is that the

00:24:20.700 | machine bit is only the spearhead. So people always talk about the Nazi war machine. In a way,

00:24:26.780 | it's a kind of misnomer because you're sort of suggesting that it's highly mechanized and

00:24:31.660 | industrialized and all the rest of it. And nothing could be further from the truth. The spearhead is,

00:24:35.740 | but the rest of it is not. And this is the kind of fatal flaw of the German armed forces in

00:24:42.620 | the whole of World War II, really. But even in this early stage, because in Barbarossa,

00:24:49.020 | you're talking about 17 panzer divisions out of, you know, the hundred odd that are involved in the

00:24:55.660 | initial attack. Well, 17, and that panzer division is not a division full of panzers,

00:25:01.820 | tanks. It is a combined arms, motorized outfit. So

00:25:07.580 | scouts on BMWs with sidecars, armored cars, infantry, grenadiers, panzer grenadiers,

00:25:16.940 | which are infantry in half tracks and trucks mechanized. It is motorized artillery. It is motorized

00:25:24.140 | anti-aircraft artillery. It is motorized anti-tank artillery. And of course, it is tanks as well,

00:25:29.340 | panzers. But those are a really, really small proportion of, you know, you're talking less than

00:25:35.900 | 20% of your attacking force are those spearhead forces. And inevitably, they are going to be

00:25:42.940 | attrited as they go. You know, you are going to take casualties. And not only that, you're not going

00:25:47.020 | to just take battlefield casualties. You're also going to have mechanical casualties because of the huge

00:25:51.180 | spaces involved. You just simply can't function. So what you see is in the initial phases of

00:25:55.740 | of Operation Barbarossa, they surge forward. Red Army's got absolutely no answers to anything.

00:26:02.060 | Stalin weirdly hasn't heeded all the warnings that this attack is brewing. And there have been plenty,

00:26:08.220 | incidentally. Smolensk falls on the 15th of July, you know, in less than four weeks. It's just incredible.

00:26:14.220 | Three and a half weeks, Smolensk has gone. You know, they've overwhelmed the rest of what had

00:26:18.300 | been Poland. They surged into what is now Belarus, taken Smolensk. You know, this is Army Group Center.

00:26:24.300 | Army Group North is thrust up into the Baltic. It's all going swimmingly well. But then,

00:26:30.060 | the next several months, they barely go 100 miles. And that's because they're running out of steam.

00:26:35.500 | And the 16th Panzer Division, for example, by the time it's taken Smolensk, involved in taking

00:26:41.580 | Smolensk on the 15th of July, 1941, the following day, it's got 16 tanks left. 16. Out of, you know,

00:26:50.060 | should have 180. So it's just being a trigger. They can't sustain it. And they can't sustain it because

00:26:57.260 | as the Russians fall back, as the Soviet Red Army falls back, they do their own scorched earth policy.

00:27:02.780 | They also discover that the railway line is kind of a different loading gauge. So they've got to

00:27:06.460 | change it. So it's slightly, the Russian loading gauge is slightly wider. So every single mile,

00:27:13.500 | every yard, every foot, every meter that they're capturing of a Russian railway has to be moved

00:27:19.900 | a couple of inches to the left to make it fit the German Kriegsloch in the standard train of locomotive

00:27:28.460 | of the, of the, of the Reichsbahn. Just imagine what that's like. And also Soviet trains are bigger,

00:27:33.580 | so they can take more water, which means the water stops in between are fewer and far between. So they

00:27:39.980 | have to, the Germans, when they come in, their trains, their Kriegsloch are smaller. So they have to have,

00:27:43.900 | be re-watered more often and re-coaled more often. So they have to, I mean, it's, it's absolutely

00:27:50.060 | boggling just how complicated it is and how badly planned it is because they haven't reckoned on this.

00:27:55.580 | They're having to kind of think on their feet. I love the, the logistical details of all of this,

00:28:00.460 | because yes, that's a huge component of this, especially when you're covering that much territory.

00:28:04.620 | But there is a notion that if Hitler didn't stop, uh, army group center, it could have pushed all the

00:28:13.580 | way to Moscow. It was, it was only maybe a hundred miles away from Moscow. Is that, is that, is that a

00:28:19.660 | possibility because it had so much success in the early days pushing forward? Do you think it's

00:28:25.740 | possible that if Hitler, as we mentioned from a military blunder perspective, didn't make that blunder,

00:28:33.500 | that, uh, they could have defeated the Soviet Union right there and then?

00:28:38.540 | Well, my, my own view is that they should never have got close. You know,

00:28:43.180 | Red Army has plenty of men to be able to see off anything that the Germans can do. The capture of

00:28:48.780 | Kyiv, for example, in September, 1941 was a catastrophe for, for the Soviet Union and should

00:28:55.180 | never have happened. I mean, Zukov is saying to, saying to Stalin, we've got to pull back across the

00:29:01.500 | Dnieper. So I was going, no, I can't possibly do that. You can't abandon Kyiv. It's like third city in

00:29:07.660 | the Soviet Union. No way. No, absolutely not. And he goes, well, we're just, we are just going to be

00:29:13.100 | overwhelmed. You know, we, we, we can't hold this. And, and he says, you know, either back me or far me,

00:29:19.260 | back me or sack me. So Stalin sacks him. Uh, uh, yeah, obviously, as we know, Zukov gets, um,

00:29:24.860 | rehabilitated from pretty quick order. Uh, and Stalin does learn very quickly after, thereafter to learn

00:29:31.500 | the lessons. But the opening phase of Barbarossa has been a catastrophe. And so,

00:29:36.780 | so as a consequence of Stalin refusing to let his men retreat back across the Dnieper,

00:29:42.460 | which is a substantial barrier and would be very difficult for the Germans to overwhelm had they

00:29:48.380 | not, had they moved back in time. Um, you know, that's another kind of 700,000 men put in the bag. I

00:29:55.420 | I mean, that's just staggering numbers. Um, but yeah, I mean, there's so many things wrong with the

00:30:03.100 | Barbarossa plan, you know, too much over, it's just such a vast area. I mean, you're talking about kind

00:30:08.660 | of, you know, 2,500 miles or something, you know, of, of frontage, you know, maybe if you kind of put

00:30:14.700 | your, your, your Panzer groups, which are these spearheads and you put them all in one big thrust and

00:30:19.500 | just go hell for leather straight across on a kind of, you know, much more narrow front of,

00:30:23.180 | let's say kind of 400 miles rather than

00:30:25.180 | 1200. Then they might've got, you know, they might've just sort of burnt away straight through to

00:30:31.420 | Moscow. They really caught the red army unprepared. Yeah. Is there, um, something to be said about the,

00:30:39.820 | the strategic genius of that or was it just luck? No, I don't think so. I mean, I think, I think,

00:30:47.820 | I think what's happened is you've had the, you've had the, the Soviet purges of the, of the second

00:30:51.820 | after the 1930s where they've, you know, they have executed or imprisoned 22 and a half thousand

00:30:57.180 | officers of which, you know, three out of five marshals, um, you know, God knows how many army

00:31:04.780 | commanders, um, et cetera, et cetera. So, so, you know, you've completely decapitated the red army

00:31:11.260 | in terms of its command structure. So before that, would it be fair to say it was one of,

00:31:15.180 | if not the greatest army in the world? Well, there was a lot of experience.

00:31:19.500 | There's, there's a lot of experience there. But also technology material,

00:31:23.820 | Yeah. The size of the army and the number of people that are, they're mobilized.

00:31:27.900 | Yeah. And they're the first people to kind of adapt, you know, create airborne troops, for example.

00:31:31.820 | So yes, I think there is an argument to say that, but the decapitation is, is, is absolutely brutal.

00:31:38.620 | If you've decapitated an army, you then got to put new guys in charge. And someone who, who looks on

00:31:44.060 | paper like a half decent peacetime commander might not be a very good wartime commander. The,

00:31:49.340 | the different disciplines and different skills and what comes to it, you don't know that until you're

00:31:54.540 | tested. It's very hard to kind of judge. And of course, you know, Stalin is existing in a sort of,

00:31:59.180 | you know, a vacuum of, of paranoia and suspicion all the time, which is unhelpful when you're trying

00:32:04.540 | to develop a strong armed forces. So they go into Finland in, in back end of 1939 and they get there,

00:32:12.220 | you know, they get really badly hammered. They do take about, you know, 50, get the Corellia

00:32:16.220 | Peninsula and they do take some ground, but a huge cost. I mean, the casualties are five times as bad as

00:32:22.140 | those are the Finns and it's humiliation. So Hitler sees that and thinks, okay, they're not up to much

00:32:29.580 | cop. Then Hitler loses the battle of Britain. And he thinks I can't afford to fight a war on two fronts.

00:32:35.740 | That's one of the reasons why Germany loses the war in 1914 to 18 is fighting on the Eastern front,

00:32:40.860 | but also fighting on, you know, the Western front at the same time. We've got to avoid that,

00:32:44.780 | but I've got to get rid of Britain and Britain hasn't come out of the fight. Britain is still fighting

00:32:48.860 | in the back end of 1940, having won the battle of Britain. And so maybe I'll go into the Soviet

00:32:55.260 | Union now while the red army is still weak. You know, we're not a hundred percent ready ourselves,

00:32:59.100 | but, but let's hurry the whole thing forward. Because originally he'd been thinking of planning

00:33:02.220 | an operation in 1943 or 1944. So the idea is you take Poland out, you take out France and the low

00:33:09.340 | countries, you conquer most of Western Europe, you knock out Britain. So therefore you don't have to

00:33:13.660 | worry so much about the United States because they're over the other side of the Atlantic.

00:33:17.020 | That then gives him, buys him the time to kind of rebuild up his strength for the all out thrust

00:33:22.060 | on the Soviet Union. The failure to subdue Britain in 1940 changes all those plans and makes him think,

00:33:29.340 | actually, I'm going to go in early. And he's also been kind of, you know, he's hoisted by his own

00:33:33.260 | petard because he, he starts to believe his own genius. You know, he, everyone told him that,

00:33:39.740 | you know, he wouldn't be able to, you know, he wouldn't be able to beat France and the low countries.

00:33:43.100 | Everyone told him that, you know, it wouldn't work out when he went into Poland. Everyone was

00:33:46.540 | really nervous about it. You know, well, go hang you, you cautious, awful, aristocratic Prussian

00:33:52.060 | generals. You know, I'm, I'm the best at this. I've told you, I've shown you, I'm the genius.

00:33:56.540 | I can do it. He starts to believe his own hype. And of course, this is a problem. You know,

00:34:00.060 | he's surrounded by sick events and people are constantly telling him that he's this incredible

00:34:03.900 | genius. So he, he starts to believe it and he thinks everything is possible. And, and he's very

00:34:09.180 | much into this idea of, of the will of the German people. You know, this is our destiny. And either

00:34:14.380 | will, as I say earlier on, you know, it's the thousand year Reich or Armageddon, but momentum is

00:34:18.460 | with us and we need to strike it. And only by, by, by gambling, only by being bold will,

00:34:22.860 | will the Germans prevail and all this kind of nonsense. And so that's why he goes into, into

00:34:27.660 | Soviet Union in June, 1941, rather than, you know, a couple of, or even three years later.

00:34:32.380 | Yeah. He really hated the Prussian generals, huh?

00:34:35.020 | Yeah. He hated them.

00:34:36.780 | Is there a case to be made that there, he was indeed at times a military genius?

00:34:42.220 | No, I don't think so. Cause none of the plan, I mean, even the plan for the invasion of France

00:34:47.900 | and the low countries, isn't his. It's a, the, the, the concept is, is from Manstein's and the

00:34:54.140 | execution is Guderian's Heinz Guderian. So he, Heinz Guderian is, is the kind of, he's the pioneer of,

00:35:00.620 | of, of, of the, of the panzer force, the panzer thrust, this idea of the ultra mechanized combined

00:35:06.940 | arms, panzer arms, spearhead doing this kind of lightning fast thrust. Um, it's not Hitler's idea.

00:35:13.980 | He adopts it and, and takes it as his own because, you know, he's a fury. He can do what he likes.

00:35:20.220 | Um, but, but it isn't his. So it's not, you know, and up until that point, until that comes into being,

00:35:27.500 | till that, that plan is put forward to Franz Halder, who is the chief of staff of the German army at that time,

00:35:34.220 | you know, how does just thinking, how do we get out of this mess? This is just a nightmare because

00:35:38.700 | they know that France has got a larger army. They know that France has got more tanks and then the France

00:35:42.460 | has got double the number of artillery pieces. It's got parity in terms of air forces. Then you add Holland,

00:35:47.500 | then you add Belgium, then you add great Britain. And that looks like a very, very tough nut to crack.

00:35:53.260 | I mean, the reason why France is subdued in 1940 is 50% of the Germans and their operational art and

00:36:00.620 | that particular instance, and 50% French failure, really an incompetence. I mean, there is a kind of

00:36:07.340 | genius to be able to see and take advantage and set up the world stage in such a way that

00:36:15.500 | you have the appeasement from France and Britain, keep the United States out of it, just set up the

00:36:22.060 | world stage where you could just plow through everybody with not, with very little resistance.

00:36:27.900 | I mean, there is a kind of, well, yes, if it works, if it works, but it doesn't, you know, that's,

00:36:33.900 | that's a problem. I mean, you know, I mean, he goes into Poland on the assumption that Britain

00:36:37.740 | and France will not declare war. You know, he, he, he is not prepared for Britain and France declaring war on

00:36:44.860 | Germany, right? He thinks they won't. That's right. So miscalculation blunder, but then

00:36:49.260 | France does. Right. And then that doesn't, you know, France does not successfully do anything with

00:36:58.940 | this incredible army that it has. It has the size, but one of the problems that France has is that it's

00:37:03.820 | very, very top heavy. It's, it's very cumbersome in the way it operates. Um, there's no question that,

00:37:11.340 | that it's got some brilliant young commanders, but, but at the lot, at the top, the commanders are very

00:37:17.100 | old. Most of them are first world war veterans, you know, whether he, I mean, Wegan, Gamelan,

00:37:23.260 | general George, um, these people, they're all well into their sixties. Um, general George is the

00:37:30.220 | youngest army commander and he's 60. You know, it's too old to be a, an army commander. You need to be in

00:37:35.740 | your kind of late forties, early fifties. And they're too just consumed by conservatism and

00:37:42.060 | the old ways. And what, what they assume is that any future war will be much like the first world war.

00:37:48.220 | It'll be attritional long and drawn out, but static, but actually they're right on two parts of it. It is,

00:37:56.380 | as it turns out, it is going to be long and drawn out and attritional, but it's going to be mobile

00:38:01.420 | rather than static. And that's a big miscalculation. So here's my, here's my question. I think you're,

00:38:05.420 | you're being too nice on France here. So when, when, when Germany invaded Poland,

00:38:11.420 | it correct me if I'm wrong, but it feels like France could have just went straight to Berlin.

00:38:18.540 | Yeah, they absolutely could. And they, and I know you said it's very top heavy and you're saying all of

00:38:24.620 | these things, but they literally did basically nothing.

00:38:27.980 | Yeah. They were pulling.

00:38:29.100 | So like, uh, and I think a part of that, and I think you described this well, maybe you can speak

00:38:37.100 | to that is the insanity that is Hitler creating the psychological with the propaganda, creating this

00:38:44.460 | feeling that there's this Nazi force that's unstoppable. So their, their France just didn't

00:38:51.660 | want to like step into that. Maybe there were like legitimately, um, I, I hesitate to say these

00:38:56.700 | words, but scared of war a hundred percent. They are that, you know, because France has been totally

00:39:03.340 | traumatized by the first world war. It's fought on their land. It's fought in their industrial heartland.

00:39:08.860 | You know, they lose three times the amount of people killed that, that Britain does. Britain's

00:39:13.420 | traumatized by it, but, but, but not to the same degree that France is front. And you know,

00:39:17.260 | there is just no stomach to do that again. And so that makes them risk averse. And by being

00:39:22.940 | risk averse, you're actually taking a far greater risk that that that's the irony of it. And the

00:39:27.580 | truth is also there isn't the political will and, uh, uh, a successful military can only be successful

00:39:33.100 | if there is a political will at the top. And the problem with France in the 1930s is it's very politically

00:39:37.420 | divided. It's, uh, it's, it's a time of multiple governments, multiple prime ministers, um, uh, coalition

00:39:44.860 | governments, really very extreme coalition governments from the sort of drawn from the left

00:39:51.180 | and the right, as well as the center. And, you know, this is not a coalition of, of two parties. This is

00:39:57.260 | a coalition of multiple parties. No one can ever agree anything. And that's the problem. It's amazing that

00:40:02.380 | the Magno line has even agreed, you know, this incredibly strong defensive position down the

00:40:06.540 | western side of France of border with, um, with Germany, which is kind of largely impregnable.

00:40:11.900 | But the problem is, is the bit that's not impregnable, which is the hinge where the Magno line ends and

00:40:17.180 | it sort of basically starts turning kind of towards and in a kind of north northerly direction and the

00:40:23.180 | border with Belgium. And, you know, what they should have done is built kind of border defenses all

00:40:29.100 | along the northern coast of Belgium because Belgium refused to kind of, uh, allow any allied troops into,

00:40:34.380 | into its territory. It was neutral. And France should have said, okay, fine. Well, then we'll defend our,

00:40:41.900 | you know, we're not going to come to your rescue. If you get invaded, that's your, that's your, well, that's,

00:40:46.220 | that's the payoff. And the consequence of that, we are going to stockpile everything that and we're not

00:40:50.220 | going to be drawn into the neutral territory should Germany invade from the west. But they don't do that

00:40:55.420 | because of the psychological damage of having fought a war in exactly that area a generation

00:41:01.100 | earlier. And that's the problem. So when they went, you know, there is, uh, Germany is so weakened by the

00:41:07.660 | invasion of Poland. There was literally nothing left, you know, the back door from into Western

00:41:12.700 | Germany is completely open. And so they do what they call the SAR offensive, but it's not, it's a kind of

00:41:18.140 | reconnaissance in force where they kind of go across the border, kind of pick their noses for,

00:41:23.260 | for a few days and then kind of trundle back again. And it's just, it's embarrassing. And that is,

00:41:28.140 | what you're seeing there is, is a nation, which is just not ready for this, which is scared,

00:41:34.860 | which is politically divided, which is then having a knock on effect on, on the decision-making process,

00:41:41.260 | and which is just consumed by military complacency. And that's the big problem. There is this, you know,

00:41:48.540 | that the commanders at the very top of the French regime are, are complacent. They, they,

00:41:54.460 | they haven't bought into kind of modern ways. They haven't looked at how contemporary technology

00:42:01.260 | could help them. I mean, it is absurd, for example, that there isn't a single radio in the Chateau de

00:42:07.020 | Vincennes, which is, you know, it's the headquarters of the commander in chief of the French armed forces,

00:42:12.060 | which is General Marshal Maurice Gamelan. I mean, it's just unbelievable. But, but that is the case.

00:42:20.620 | And, and there's no getting away from that. And, and it is all the more ironic when you consider that

00:42:24.540 | France is actually the most automotive society in Europe. It's the second most automotive society in

00:42:29.580 | the world after the United States. By some margin, it has to be said as well, you know,

00:42:34.860 | it has a fantastic transportation system. Railway network is superb. It's, it, it, there are,

00:42:39.500 | there are eight people for every motorized vehicle in France, which is way above Germany, which is in

00:42:44.700 | 1949, that figure is 47. For example, it's 106 in Italy.

00:42:49.660 | So France is very mechanized, very mechanized. So come on guys,

00:42:52.940 | pull your finger out, get it together. And they just don't, they're, they're incredibly slow and

00:42:57.740 | cumbersome. And what they think is when, what will happen is the Germans won't think of going, you know,

00:43:03.020 | they won't do a pincer movement because you can't possibly take motorized forces through, through the

00:43:06.700 | Ardennes. That's just, it's not possible, which is the hinge area between the end of the Maginot,

00:43:11.420 | the Northern part of the Maginot line, which runs down the Western, sorry, the Eastern border of France

00:43:16.220 | and the Northern bit. And so what we'll do with that hinge around the town of Sedan,

00:43:20.860 | we'll, we'll move into, into Belgium. We'll meet the Germans before they get anywhere near France.

00:43:25.980 | We'll hold them. And while we're holding them, we will bring up our reserves and then we'll,

00:43:30.940 | we'll counterattack and crush them. That that's the idea behind it. But the problem is, is they don't

00:43:35.340 | have a means of moving fast and their communication systems are dreadful, absolutely dreadful.

00:43:40.860 | They're dependent on conventional telephone lines, which, you know,

00:43:44.140 | dive bombers and whatever are just kind of absolutely wrecking. Suddenly the streets are

00:43:49.820 | clogged with refugees and people can't move. So they're then, you know, telephone lines are down.

00:43:54.460 | There's no radios. So you're then dependent on sending dispatch riders on little motorbikes,

00:43:59.740 | you know, general, uh, um, Maurice Gamelan sends out a dispatch rider at six o'clock in the morning.

00:44:06.060 | Um, by 12 o'clock, he hasn't come back. So you then send another one. Finally, the answer comes back,

00:44:11.580 | uh, kind of nine o'clock at night, by which time the kind of Germans advance another 15 miles.

00:44:15.820 | And the original message that you sent at six o'clock that morning is completely redundant and

00:44:19.660 | has passed itself by date. And that's happening every step of the way, you know, so you've got,

00:44:23.820 | you've got overall commander, um, headquarters, then you've got army group, then you've got army,

00:44:28.620 | then you've got core, then you've got division. So the consequence of all that is that French just

00:44:33.500 | can't move. They're just stuck there. They're rabbits in headlights and the Germans are able to

00:44:37.740 | kind of move them, uh, destroy them in isolation. Meanwhile, they're able to use their excellent

00:44:43.340 | communications. Um, it's a very, very good effect. And you were talking about the genius of war.

00:44:49.180 | It's not Hitler. That's a genius. If anyone's a genius, it's Goebbels, the propaganda chief,

00:44:53.660 | and it is their ability to harness that they are the Kings of messaging. You know, they don't have,

00:45:02.860 | they don't have X, they don't have social media. Um, but they do have new technology and that new

00:45:09.500 | technology, that new approach is flooding the airwaves with their singular message, which is always the

00:45:15.500 | same and has been ever since the Nazis come into power and it is using radios. And I think radios

00:45:20.140 | are really, really key to the whole story because there is no denser radio network anywhere in the

00:45:25.500 | world, including the United States and Germany in 1939. So while it's really behind the times in terms

00:45:30.700 | of mechanization, it is absolutely on top of its game in terms of comms. So 70% of households in

00:45:38.540 | Germany have radios by 1939, which is an unprecedented number that, that is only beaten by United States

00:45:45.820 | and only just. So it is, it is greater than any other, other nation in Europe. And in terms of flooding

00:45:51.820 | the airwaves, it is the densest because even for those who the 30% who don't have radios, that's not a

00:45:57.580 | problem because we'll put them in the stairwells of apartment blocks. We'll put them in squares.

00:46:01.740 | We'll put them in cafes and bars and the same stuff, the state, the, the, the Nazi state controls the

00:46:08.700 | radio airwaves as it does the movies, as it does newspapers, all aspects of the media are controlled

00:46:15.260 | by, by Goebbels and propaganda ministry. And they are putting out the same message over and over again.

00:46:22.460 | It's not, it's not all Hitler's ranting. It's entertainment, light entertainment, some humorous

00:46:27.820 | shows. Um, it is also Wagner of course, and Richard Strauss. Um, it's, it's a mixture, but the subliminal

00:46:35.900 | message is the same. We're the best. We're the top dogs. Jewish Bolshevik plot is awful. That needs

00:46:42.140 | to be, you know, that's the existential threat to us. We have to overcome that. We're the top dogs

00:46:46.380 | militarily. We're the best. We should feel really good about ourselves. We're going to absolutely win and be

00:46:51.180 | the greatest nation in the world ever. And Hitler's the genius. And that is just repeated over and over

00:46:57.500 | and over and over again. And the, you know, for all the modernity of the world in which we live in

00:47:03.580 | today, most people believe what they're told repeatedly. Yeah, they still do. It's if you just

00:47:09.340 | repeat, repeat, repeat over and over again, people will believe it. You know, if you're a, if you're a

00:47:13.900 | diehard Trump supporter, you want to believe that you'll believe everything he says. If you are a

00:47:20.780 | diehard Bernie Sanders, man, you know, you're from the left, you'll believe everything he says,

00:47:26.300 | because it's reinforcing what you already want to, what you, what you already want to believe.

00:47:30.220 | But the scary thing is, uh, you know, radio is the technology of the day, the technology of the day

00:47:35.820 | today, which is a terrifying one for me is, uh, uh, I would say AI on social media. So bots,

00:47:43.740 | you can have basically bot farms, which I assume is used by Ukraine, by Russia, by us.

00:47:51.100 | I would love to read the history written about this era, about the information wars,

00:47:56.860 | who has the biggest bot farms, who has the biggest propaganda machines. And when I say bot, I mean,

00:48:03.260 | both automated AI bots and humans operating large number of smartphones with SIM cards. They're just

00:48:13.260 | able to boost messages enough to where they become viral. And then real humans with real opinions get

00:48:20.460 | excited also. It's like this vicious cycle. So if you support your nation, all you need is a little

00:48:26.780 | boost and then everybody gets real excited. And then now you're chanting and now you're in this mass

00:48:32.700 | hysteria and now it's the 1984, two minutes of hate. And the message is clear. I mean, that's what

00:48:38.700 | propaganda does is it really clarifies the mind. And that is exactly what, what Hitler and the Nazis

00:48:45.260 | and Goebbels are doing in the 1930s while they're doing it in the 1920s as well, but more effectively

00:48:49.180 | once they come into power, of course. And Hitler is so fortunate that he comes,

00:48:55.660 | he takes over the chancellorship in January, 1933 at a time where the economy is just starting to turn.

00:49:02.700 | And he's able to make the most of that. And you know, if you're Germans and you've been through

00:49:07.820 | hyperinflation in the early 1920s, you've been through the humiliation of the Versailles Treaty,

00:49:11.820 | which was terrible error in retrospect. And you've been through then having got through that,

00:49:20.700 | you've emerged into a kind of democratic Weimar Republic, which is based on manufacturing.

00:49:26.300 | You know, Germany's a traditional genius at engineering and manufacturing and production

00:49:32.780 | of high quality items. They're merging through that. Then you have the Wall Street crash

00:49:39.020 | and the loans that are coming in from America, which is propping up the entire German economy,

00:49:45.020 | suddenly get cut off and you've suddenly got depression again and massive unemployment.

00:49:50.380 | And suddenly Hitler comes in and everyone's got jobs and they're rebuilding and they're growing

00:49:57.580 | their military. And the message that's coming out is we're the greatest, we're the best, we're fantastic.

00:50:04.940 | You know, I was telling you earlier on about Hitler's speeches, starting with the dark,

00:50:09.020 | starting dark and ending in hope and light and the sunlight uplands, you know, that's what you're

00:50:14.140 | getting. You're suddenly getting this vision of hope. This is sort of, you know, my God, actually,

00:50:17.420 | this is really working, you know? Okay. So, you know, I'm not sure that I particularly buy into the

00:50:23.740 | kind of anti-Semitic thing, but you know, we'll sweep that under the carpet because overall,

00:50:27.660 | I've now got a job, I've got money, I've got my new radio, you know, and then this is a genius

00:50:31.740 | about the radios, for example. So they have the German receiver to start off with, the Deutsche

00:50:37.340 | Fanger, and then they have the Deutsche Kleinem Fanger, which is the German little receiver, little

00:50:42.300 | radio. This is genius. This is as outrageous as the arrival of the iPod. I mean, remember that,

00:50:49.980 | you know, suddenly you don't have to have a Sony Walkman anymore. You can have something really,

00:50:53.180 | really small and miniature and listen to thousands of thousands of thousands of songs all at once.

00:50:57.020 | What an amazing thing. And the Deutsche Kleinem Fanger is nine inches by four inches by four

00:51:02.460 | inches. It's made of Bakelite and everyone can have one because it's super cheap. It's just incredible.

00:51:08.380 | And no one else has said that because up until that point, radios, generally speaking, are aspirational.

00:51:13.500 | You know, they've got sort of a walnut lacquer at the front and, you know, you have them if you're

00:51:16.700 | middle class and you show them off to your neighbors to show how kind of, you know, affluent and

00:51:21.580 | well to do you are. But suddenly everyone can have one. And if everyone can have one, then everyone can

00:51:27.900 | receive the same message. And you can, and you can also, and this is the whole point about the Hitley youth

00:51:31.500 | as well, you know, the young guys, that's where they're, they're most impressionistic. They're, they're

00:51:36.380 | least risk averse. So they're most gung ho. They're, they're most full of excitement for the possibilities

00:51:42.140 | of life. And they're also, their minds are the most open to suggestion. So you get the youth, you hang on,

00:51:49.420 | you get them. And so a whole generation of young men are brought up thinking about the

00:51:53.900 | genius of Hitler and how he's delivering us this much better nation and returning our, um, over,

00:51:58.860 | overhauling the humiliations of the first world war where overcoming the back, uh, the stab in the back

00:52:04.380 | that happened in 1918, et cetera, et cetera. And, you know, as a young 16, 17 year old German, you're

00:52:12.140 | thinking, yeah, I want a piece of that. And Hey, guess what? They've got really cool uniforms and,

00:52:16.380 | and, and, you know, come and join the SS and, you know, get the fro line. You know,

00:52:20.300 | what's not to like, you know, you can see why, why it's so clever. Uh, and what's so interesting is

00:52:26.140 | propaganda today is, is still using those, those tenets that Goebbels was using back in the 1930s.

00:52:34.540 | And this is why I would say, say that, you know, history doesn't repeat itself. Of course it doesn't,

00:52:37.580 | it can't possibly repeat itself because we're always living in a constantly evolving time,

00:52:42.140 | but patterns of human behavior do. And what you always get after economic crisis is political

00:52:47.020 | upheaval. Always, always, always, because some people are in a worse off position than they were

00:52:51.580 | financially before. And they're thinking, well, you know, the current system doesn't work. What's the

00:52:54.780 | alternative? So, you know, in the case of, of, of now we in the West, you know, we face, first of all,

00:53:00.780 | we face the crisis of 2008, finance crisis, 2008. Then we've had the kind of double whammy of COVID.

00:53:05.820 | And that has been incredibly unsettling. And so we're now in a, a, a situation of, of political

00:53:12.300 | turmoil. And whether you're, whether you're, uh, whether you're pro-Trump or anti-Trump,

00:53:16.220 | what he's offering is something completely different. And, you know, it's say, you know,

00:53:22.060 | he, he's saying the old ways don't work. You know, I'm going to be, I'm just going to say what I think.

00:53:25.940 | I'm just going to, I'm going to come out. I'm not going to bother with all the sheen of diplomacy and

00:53:29.580 | kind of, you know, mealy mouth words that politicians always use, you know, which way you can't trust

00:53:34.540 | to anyone. I'm just going to tell you as it is. And obviously people respond to that. You know,

00:53:37.980 | you, you, you can understand why that has a, has an appeal. And if the country already feels broken

00:53:43.100 | and here's someone who is going to be a disruptor and going to change the, the way you go about things,

00:53:48.060 | you can see why a, a, a reasonably large proportion of the population is going to go,

00:53:52.620 | I'll have a piece of that. Thank you very much.

00:53:54.680 | And especially, uh, when the country is in the economic crisis, like Germany was,

00:54:00.440 | I think you've written that, uh, the treaty of Versailles created Hitler and the, uh, the

00:54:06.860 | wall street crash and the great depression brought him to power.

00:54:10.580 | And of course the propaganda machine that you describe is the thing that got everybody else

00:54:16.960 | in Germany on board.

00:54:18.120 | Yeah. It's, it's, it's amazing how he, he, cause he comes in with 33% of the vote.

00:54:24.440 | He had 37% of the vote of the vote in July, 1932. So again, this is another period of,

00:54:30.020 | of turmoil, just like it is in France where you're having constant different kind of coalitions and,

00:54:34.240 | you know, different chancellors, leaders of Germany.

00:54:36.880 | So it's very possible he, he, he wouldn't have come to power.

00:54:40.540 | Well, he said, he said, I will only, uh, you know, the, we will only take our seats if, if,

00:54:44.760 | if I can be chancellor, otherwise forget it. I'm not coming into any coalition.

00:54:48.580 | So then the, uh, the government falls again in January, 1933, they have the,

00:54:54.080 | they have the election. The Nazi vote is down from where it was the previous summer,

00:55:00.440 | but this time they go, okay, Hitler can be chancellor, but we'll manipulate him.

00:55:05.260 | Oh, how wrong they were. You know, he's manipulating everyone. And then Hindenburg,

00:55:09.620 | who is the president dies the following summer. And, uh, he's able to get rid of the presidency.

00:55:16.760 | There is no more president of Germany. There is just the Fuhrer him. And he gets rid of,

00:55:21.900 | uh, he has a, in actually enabling act, which is where all other, uh, political parties are,

00:55:26.760 | uh, disbanded. And suddenly you've got a totalitarian state just like that.

00:55:30.380 | I think there's a lesson there. Uh, there's many lessons there, but one of them is don't let an

00:55:37.080 | extremist into government and assume you can control them.

00:55:41.740 | Yes. The arrogance of the existing politicians who just completely screwed it up.

00:55:45.980 | I mean, there is a real power to an extremist. Like there's, uh, a person who sees the world in,

00:55:53.860 | in black and white can really gain the attention and the support of the populace.

00:56:02.600 | Yes.

00:56:03.940 | Especially when there's a resentment about like treaty of Versailles, when there's economic hardship,

00:56:09.180 | and if there's effective modern technology that allows you to do propaganda and sell the message,

00:56:17.160 | there's something really compelling about the black and white message.

00:56:20.940 | It is because it's simple. Uh, and what Hitler does throughout the 1920s is he sticks to this.

00:56:27.580 | There, there is actually, when he comes out of prison in, so he is the Bihl putsch in November, 1923.

00:56:33.040 | He gets, uh, charged with treason, which he has been because he's attempting a coup and he gets

00:56:41.160 | sentenced to five years, which is pretty lenient for what he's done. And he then gets let out after nine

00:56:47.840 | months. Nazi party is, is, is, is banned at that point, but then comes back into being.

00:56:54.640 | And the year that follows, there is then a substantial debate about where the party should

00:57:00.960 | go. And there are actually a large number of people who think that actually they should be

00:57:06.140 | looking at how the Soviets are doing things and taking some of the, some of the things that they

00:57:11.140 | consider to be positive out of the communist state and applying those to the Nazis. And Hitler goes,

00:57:16.660 | no, no, no, no, no, no, no. We, we, we've just got to stick to this kind of Jewish Bolshevik thing.

00:57:22.580 | This is, this is how we're going to do it. This is how we're going to do it. Goebbels, for example,

00:57:26.500 | who is, who is very open. He's, he's very, very, Joseph Goebbels is, uh, he's a, he's a not very

00:57:32.620 | successful, um, uh, journalist. He is, uh, but he does have a PhD in German, German literature.

00:57:38.180 | He's very disaffected because he was born with Talapes, which is, you know, more commonly known

00:57:43.320 | as a club foot. He's disabled. He can't fight in the first world war. He's very frustrated by that.

00:57:47.940 | He's in a deep despair about, about the state of Germany in the first part of the early 1920s.

00:57:53.260 | He's looking for a, uh, um, uh, uh, uh, political messiah as a quasi religious messiah thinks it's

00:58:01.540 | Hitler, then discovers that Hitler is not open to any ideas at all, uh, about any deviation,

00:58:07.600 | but then sees the light. Hitler recognizes that this guy is someone that he wants on his side.

00:58:13.680 | And so then goes to make a real special effort. Come on, come to dinner. I think you're great.

00:58:19.020 | You know, all this kind of stuff wins about over and Goebbels has this complete vault fast,

00:58:23.340 | discards his earlier kind of, yeah, you know, Hitler's right. I was wrong. Hitler is the kind

00:58:28.760 | of messiah figure that, that I want to follow. I want to follow the hero, hero leader. And they

00:58:34.400 | come on board and they absolutely work out and Hitler completely wins out of all dissenters within the,

00:58:39.720 | what had been the German workers party to what becomes the German national socialist party,

00:58:43.620 | becomes the Nazis. Um, he comes out, emerges as the absolute undisputed Fuhrer of that leader of

00:58:51.620 | that, that party and what he says goes and everyone toes him behind it. And part of the genius of that,

00:58:57.200 | you know, Hitler does have some genius. I just don't think it's military, but he does have some

00:59:01.780 | genius. And a question about it is the simplicity of message of what he's doing. It's that kind of us

00:59:07.760 | and them thing that we were talking about earlier on. It's the kind of either, or it's kind of,

00:59:11.720 | it's my way or the highway. It's kind of, this is the only way. This is how we get to the sunlit

00:59:16.640 | uplands. This is how we, we create this amazing master race of the, this unification of German

00:59:25.000 | peoples, which dominates the world, which is the preeminent power in the world for the next thousand

00:59:30.000 | years, or it's decay and despair and being crushed by our enemies. And our enemies are the Jews and the

00:59:37.400 | Bolsheviks, the communists. And what he taps into as well is Front Gemeinschaft and Volksgemeinschaft.

00:59:46.460 | And these are, there's no direct English translation of Volksgemeinschaft or indeed Front Gemeinschaft,

00:59:52.680 | but, but, but in its most basic form, it's communities, it's people community or Front

00:59:59.060 | Veterans community. So the Front Gemeinschaft is we are the guys, we're bonded because we were in the

01:00:06.560 | trenches. You know, we were in the first world war. We were the people who bravely stuck it out,

01:00:11.880 | saw our friends being slaughtered and blown to pieces. We, we did our duty as proud Germans,

01:00:17.680 | Germans, but we were let down by the elites and we were let down by the, by this Jewish

01:00:22.620 | Bolshevik plot. You know, we were stabbed in the back. The myth of the stabbing, stabbing in the back

01:00:28.880 | is very, very strong. So we're bound, we're, we're bonded by our experience of the first world war and

01:00:35.140 | the fact that we did what we should and what we could, and we would, we didn't fail in what we were

01:00:40.240 | doing. We were failed by our leaders, um, and by the elites. So that's, that's Front Gemeinschaft.

01:00:47.640 | Volksgemeinschaft is this sense of national unity. It's, it's, it's a cultural, ethnic bonding of

01:00:57.440 | people who speak German, who have a, have a similar outlook on life. And again, that just reinforces the

01:01:04.320 | us and them good and evil, it reinforces the black and white worldview. And then you add that

01:01:10.200 | to this very simple message, which Hitler is repeating over and over again. Communists are a

01:01:17.960 | big threat. Jews are a big threat. They're the, they're the enemy. You have to have a, you have

01:01:22.080 | to have an opposition in the them and us kind of process. And that's what he's doing. And people just

01:01:30.320 | buy into it. They go, yeah, we're together. We're Germans. We're, we're, we're, you know,

01:01:33.900 | we're a brotherhood. We've got our Volksgemeinschaft. And so he cleverly ties into that and taps into

01:01:42.140 | that, but they're an irrelevance by the late 1920s, you know, by 1928, you know, the, the,

01:01:48.020 | he's not going to get a deal for Mein Kampf part two. You know, he he's, he's, he's impoverished.

01:01:53.880 | The party's impoverished. Numbers are down there. They're kind of, you know, a best and a,

01:01:58.200 | an irrelevance. We should say he wrote Mein Kampf at this time when he was in prison.

01:02:02.200 | Well, he writes, he writes most of Mein Kampf in prison, in Landsberg prison. And then he writes

01:02:06.820 | the rest of it in what becomes known as the Kampfhausel, which is this little wooden hut in the,

01:02:11.980 | in the Ober Salzburg. And you can still see the remnants of that. And unfortunately there's still

01:02:16.480 | little candles there and stuff in the woods and, you know, by, by neo-Nazis and whatnot, what have you.

01:02:21.020 | But that's where he wrote, wrote the rest of it. Um, I mean, it was Jean-Jacques Rousseau who says,

01:02:25.840 | man has his greatest force when surrounded by nature. That was something that kind of Hitler

01:02:29.460 | took very much to heart. Um, there was a, there was a mentor of his called Dietrich Eckart. Dietrich

01:02:35.200 | Eckart introduced him to the Ober Salzburg and the beauty of the Southwest, Southeast Bavarian

01:02:40.000 | Alps around Berkusgaden. And, um, uh, and that was his favorite place on the planet. And, um,

01:02:47.800 | that's where he, that's where he eventually bought the, um, the, uh, the Berghof with the royalties,

01:02:53.520 | it has to be said from Mein Kampf, which went from being, you know, almost pulp to suddenly being a

01:02:59.660 | runaway bestseller, unfortunately.

01:03:02.320 | Can you actually comment on that? It's a shitty manifesto as far as manifestos goes. I think there's

01:03:07.180 | a lot of values to understand, uh, from a first person perspective, the words of a dictator,

01:03:13.160 | of a person like Hitler, but it just feels like that's just such a shitty.

01:03:17.840 | Yeah. I mean, you know, it's banned in a number of countries. You don't need to,

01:03:20.300 | cause no one's going to read it because it's unreadable. Um, I mean, it's, it's very untidy.

01:03:25.700 | It's, it's very incoherent. It's, it's got no, um, there's no narrative arc to use the kind of,

01:03:32.180 | you know, right, a writer's phrase. I mean, it's just, it's, but, but, but it does give you a very

01:03:35.700 | clear, you know, the overall impression you get at the end of it is, is, is,

01:03:39.040 | is the kind of communists and the Jews are to blame for everything.

01:03:42.980 | Yeah. But there's also the component of, you know, predicting basically world war two

01:03:47.480 | there. So it's not just there to play. He's, he's hungry for war, right? He, he thinks that this is,

01:03:53.960 | this is the natural state that we have to have this terrible conflict. And once the conflict's over,

01:03:58.700 | Germany will emerge victorious. And then there will be the thousand year, right? I mean,

01:04:02.480 | I'm finding myself in, in talking to you. I keep saying this kind of, you know,

01:04:06.520 | it's Armageddon, all the thousand year, right. It's because it comes up. It's, it's, it's,

01:04:09.780 | it's unavoidable because that's how he's speaking the whole time. It's just the same message over and

01:04:16.060 | over and over and over again. It's a pretty unique way of speaking sort of allowing a violence as a

01:04:22.440 | tool in this picture, that there's a hierarchy, that there's a superior race and inferior races,

01:04:28.700 | and it's okay to destroy the inferior ones. Yeah. Usually politicians don't speak that way.

01:04:34.440 | They just say, well, here's good and evil. We're the good guys. And yeah, maybe we'll destroy the

01:04:41.760 | evil a little bit. No, here is like, there's a complete certainty about a very large number of

01:04:48.820 | people, the Slavic people. They just need to be removed. Well, they need to be made an irrelevance.

01:04:54.280 | You know, we have to take it, we have to take it. And if that, if that kills millions of them,

01:04:57.240 | fine, then they can sort of squish that way over to Siberia. It doesn't matter where they go.

01:05:00.520 | We just need to populate this land that belongs to the German people because they're the superior

01:05:07.260 | people. There's no question that he glorifies violence and war. You know, he's absolutely

01:05:11.340 | chomping at the bit. And in a way, I think he's a bit disappointed that in the 1930s,

01:05:17.080 | the conquests that he does undertake are also peaceful. You know, March, 1938 goes straight

01:05:23.400 | into Austria. There's the Anschluss, you know, not a shot is fired. You know, 1936 goes into the

01:05:27.940 | Rhineland, reconquers that, retakes that over that from, from, uh, from, from the occupying allies,

01:05:34.600 | not a shot is fired. You know, he takes a sedation land, not a shot, barely a shot is fired.

01:05:40.320 | Um, and then goes into, into the rest of Czechoslovakia in March, 1930, 39. And again,

01:05:45.380 | barely a shot is fired. And, you know, it's a bit disappointing. You know, he wants to be,

01:05:48.520 | wants to, wants to be tested. He wants to kind of have the, have the, the wartime triumph.

01:05:52.700 | You can see him being frustrated about this in, in the Munich crisis in 1938. He wants to fight.

01:05:57.700 | He's absolutely spoiling for it. He's desperate to go in. He's already in gung ho. He's built his

01:06:02.760 | Luftwaffe. He's, he's got his, his, his panzers. Now he's got his, his, his massive armed forces.

01:06:09.420 | You know, he wants to test them. He wants to, wants to get this show on the road, uh, and prove it.

01:06:14.300 | You know, he is a, he's an arch gambler, Hitler. You, you make it seem so clear, but, uh, all the

01:06:23.600 | while to the rest of the world, to Chamberlain, to France, to Britain, to the rest of the world,

01:06:29.160 | he's saying he doesn't want that. He's making agreements. Everything you just mentioned,

01:06:35.080 | you just went through it so quickly, but those are agreements that were made that he's not going

01:06:40.060 | to do that. Uh, and he does it over and over. He violates the Treaty of Versailles. He violates

01:06:45.940 | every single treaty, but he still isn't doing the meeting. So maybe, maybe can you go through it,

01:06:52.220 | the lead up to the war, 1939, September 1st, like what are the different agreements? What is the

01:06:59.520 | signaling he's doing? Yeah. Well, and what is he doing secretly in terms of building up the military

01:07:05.140 | force? Yes. So he, you know, part of the Treaty of Versailles, you're not, you know, you're allowed

01:07:09.700 | to very, very limited, um, uh, armed forces. There's restrictions on naval expansion. There's

01:07:16.880 | restrictions on the size of the army. There's restrictions on the weapons you can use. There

01:07:23.260 | are, um, you're not allowed an air force, but he starts doing this all clandestinely. Um, you know,

01:07:30.520 | there are people in, um, Krupp has got, for example, which is in the Ruhr, a sort of big, um, armaments

01:07:38.320 | manufacturer. They are producing tanks and elsewhere and parts elsewhere in, in the Netherlands, for

01:07:45.440 | example, and then shipping them back into, back into Germany. They're doing panzer training exercises

01:07:50.280 | actually in the Soviet Union at this time. There's all sorts of things going on. The Luftwaffe is being

01:07:55.620 | announced to the world in 1935, but it's obviously been in the process of, of developing long before

01:08:01.140 | that. The Messerschmitt 109 single engine fighter plane, for example, is created in 1934. So they're doing

01:08:07.100 | all these things against it. And the, and the truth is, is he's just constantly pushing. What,

01:08:12.940 | what can I get away with here? What, what, what, what will probably, you know, and, and of course,

01:08:16.440 | Britain, France, the rest of the rest of the world, rest of the allies, you know, they're all reeling

01:08:20.360 | from, from the wall street crash and the depression as well. So have they got the stomach for this? Not

01:08:25.860 | really, you know, and perhaps actually on reflection, the terms of us, I treat you a bit harsh anyway.

01:08:31.220 | So, you know, maybe we don't need to worry about it. And this is, this is no political will.

01:08:35.280 | There's no political will to kind of fight against what Germany's doing. Then he gets

01:08:39.940 | away of it. So he suddenly starts realizing that, that, that, that actually he can push

01:08:43.860 | this quite a long way because no one's going to stand up to him, which is why he makes a

01:08:47.660 | decision in 1936 to go back into the, you know, into the Rhineland, you know, which has been

01:08:51.820 | occupied by, by French, you know, um, um, allied troops. At that point, he just walks in,

01:08:57.980 | just goes, do your worst. And no one's going to do anything because there isn't the stomach

01:09:02.060 | to do anything. That was a big step in 1936, remilitarizing the Rhineland. I mean, that,

01:09:07.800 | that's a huge, huge step of like, oh, I don't have to follow anybody's rules and they're going to do

01:09:14.680 | nothing. And he's looking at his military and he's, and, and he's also looking at response. So one of the

01:09:19.720 | things they do is they, you know, it's really, it's very clever. So they get over the head of the,

01:09:24.840 | uh, army of the air, army de l'air, which is the, um, French air force. And they invite him over and

01:09:31.000 | they, uh, uh, milk, who is the, uh, second command of the Luftwaffe invites him over. So come and see

01:09:37.260 | what we're, what we're up to. You know, we want to be, you're our European neighbors. We're all friends

01:09:41.260 | together, this kind of stuff. Come and see what we've got. And he takes him to this airfield.

01:09:45.480 | There's a row of Messerschmitt 109s all lined up like sort of 50 of them. And the head of the army

01:09:51.520 | of the air sort of looks at him and goes, correct, that's impressive. And milk goes, well, let me go

01:09:55.780 | and take you to another airfield. And they, they go off the sort of the, uh, the back route out of the

01:10:00.080 | airfield and a long circuitous route in the Mercedes. Meanwhile, all the Messerschmitts take off

01:10:04.860 | from that airfield, going to land on the next airfield. Here's another, and they're all the

01:10:08.260 | same aircraft. And the commander in chief of the army of the air goes back to France and goes,

01:10:13.180 | we're never going to be able to eat Germany. So you would earlier, you were, you were alluding

01:10:17.080 | to this earlier on, you know, how much is this sort of this, this, this justice chutzpah of,

01:10:21.260 | of this ability to kind of portray the, the, the, the mechanized moloch. Um, yeah, it absolutely

01:10:30.980 | cows, the enemy. So, so then they're, they're increasing the effectiveness of their armed forces

01:10:38.300 | purely by propaganda and by, by mind games and by talking the talk. And, you know, you look at,

01:10:45.220 | we might all think these military parades that the Nazis have look rather silly by today's standards,

01:10:50.800 | but you look what that looks like. If you're the rest of the world, you're in Britain and you're

01:10:55.060 | still reeling from the depression and you see the triumph of the will. You see some of that footage

01:11:00.460 | and you see these automatons in their steel helmets and you see the swastikas and you see

01:11:05.240 | hundreds of thousands of people all lined up and see Kylie and all the rest of it. You're going to

01:11:10.060 | think again before you go into war with people like that. It's also hard to put yourself in the,

01:11:15.640 | in the mind of those leaders. Now, now that we have nuclear weapons, so nuclear weapons have

01:11:23.340 | created this kind of cloak of a kind of safety from mutually shared destruction that you think surely

01:11:34.560 | you will not do, you know, a million or two million, uh, soldier army invading another land,

01:11:43.480 | right? Just full on gigantic hot war. Uh, but at that time, that's the real possibility. You remember,

01:11:51.340 | you remember world war one, you remember all of that. So, you know, you're okay. There's a mad,

01:11:57.680 | uh, guy with a mustache. Uh, he's making statements that this land belongs to Germany anyway,

01:12:05.280 | cause it's mostly German, uh, populated. So, and like you said, Treaty of Versailles wasn't really

01:12:12.340 | fair and you can start justifying all kinds of things. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And maybe they got a point

01:12:16.480 | about the Danzig corridor, you know, they are mainly Germans, German speaking people there. And, you know,

01:12:20.960 | it's disconnected from East Prussia, which is this thing, you know, I can, I sort of get it, you know,

01:12:25.380 | maybe they've got a point, you know, and is Poland really a kind of thriving democracy anyway? Not

01:12:30.020 | really by 1930, late 1930s. It's not, it's to all intents and purposes, a dictatorship in Poland

01:12:35.440 | at that time. I mean, it's not right that you just go and take someone else's country. Of course you

01:12:41.840 | you can't do that, but, but you can see why in Germany people are thinking they've got a point.

01:12:48.660 | You can also see why in France and Britain, they're thinking, well, you know, do we really care about

01:12:53.320 | the Poles? I mean, you know, is it worth going to, to war over? Um, but there's kind of bigger things

01:13:00.020 | at play by this point. That that's the point. Yeah. But before we get to Poland, there is

01:13:05.540 | this meeting, September 1938. Uh, so Chamberlain made three trips to meet with Hitler. Yeah. Uh,

01:13:14.860 | which culminated in the Munich conference. Yeah. On the 30th of September. Yeah. Where was Chamberlain,

01:13:19.800 | Hitler, Mussolini and Delagier, prime minister of France. They met to discuss essentially Czechoslovakia

01:13:26.560 | without any of the government officials of Czechoslovakia participating. And Hitler promised to make

01:13:33.780 | no more territorial conquest and Chamberlain believed him. He chose to believe him. I think

01:13:40.540 | is the thing. It's the point. So, so it's very interesting. So, so Chamberlain gets a very bad

01:13:44.340 | press. Um, uh, well, no, I'm not, no, it's not really. Oh, it's, it's, it's, I, I just think there's

01:13:53.400 | too much retrospective view on this. And that's fine because we, the whole point of history is you can look

01:14:00.780 | back and you can judge decisions that were made at a certain point through the prism of what

01:14:05.500 | subsequently happened, which of course the people that are making the decisions at the time can't

01:14:09.180 | because they're in that particular moment. So I don't think Chamberlain did trust Hitler, but he

01:14:17.720 | wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt. Britain was not obliged to Czechoslovakia at all. France was.

01:14:23.540 | France had signed a treaty with, with Czechoslovakia in 1924, but, but, but, but Britain had not. So

01:14:28.880 | there was no obligation at all for Britain to do this. The only reason why Britain would go to war

01:14:33.540 | over Czechoslovakia is because of the threat of Nazism and what the ramifications of not going to war with

01:14:39.440 | him. But the problem is, is that Chamberlain is interesting because in 1935, he was, he was

01:14:44.320 | chancellor of his checker. And when they started to sort of think, okay, we really do need to rearm.

01:14:47.640 | He was very much in favor of, of substantially expanding and rehabilitating the Navy. So updating

01:14:57.580 | existing battleships and so on. And also developing the air force. There's not really much argument for

01:15:06.740 | having a large army because if you have a large army, you've got to maintain it. Britain is a small

01:15:10.740 | place. Where do you put them? You've also got to transport them. That's complicated. You've got to

01:15:15.460 | train them. You've got to put them in barracks. You've got to feed them all this kind of stuff.

01:15:17.600 | There's a kind of sort of impracticality about having a large army. Whereas Navy is great because

01:15:22.260 | you can keep them at sea and they can be, you know, on the water. Air force is slightly different.

01:15:26.520 | Air power is viewed in very much the same way that, that naval power is viewed. That this is,

01:15:31.640 | we're an island nation. We have a global, global assets and air power gives us the flexibility that an

01:15:37.640 | army doesn't. So he is all for backing the expansion of the, of the army, of the air force and the

01:15:43.920 | navy in 1930. Then he subsequently becomes prime minister and sticks to his guns on that. It is he

01:15:48.140 | that enables the air force and the air ministry to develop the first fully coordinated air defense

01:15:55.040 | system anywhere in the world. There is not an air defense system in Poland, nor Norway, nor Denmark,

01:15:59.700 | nor the Netherlands, nor Belgium, nor France. There is in Britain. Britain is the only one. And frankly,

01:16:05.020 | it pays off big time in the summer of 1940. So you have to give him credit for that. Britain,

01:16:12.300 | interestingly, is also the world's leading armaments exporter in the 1930s, which is amazing,

01:16:18.740 | really, when you think everyone complains about the fact that we weren't rearming enough.

01:16:21.880 | Actually, we were. When we had all the infrastructure there and we were expanding that infrastructure

01:16:26.260 | dramatically. I say we, I'm only saying that because I'm British. So they were doing that.

01:16:32.380 | But in 1938, Britain wasn't ready for war. Now, you can argue that Germany wasn't ready for war either,

01:16:38.520 | but Chamberlain was prime minister in a democracy, parliamentary democracy,

01:16:44.500 | when 92% of the population were against going to war in 1938. There is, there is not a single

01:16:51.340 | democratic leader in the world that will go against the wishes of 92% of the population.

01:16:58.960 | Now, you could say, well, he should have just argued it better and presented his case better

01:17:02.820 | and all the rest of it. But at that point, there was no legal obligation to go to the defense of

01:17:07.200 | Czechoslovakia. You know, Czechoslovakia was another of these new nations that had been created out of

01:17:12.440 | 1919 and the Versailles Treaty. You know, who was to say, you know, we in Britain are able to judge the

01:17:19.140 | rights and rights and wrongs of that, you know, how fantastic it would be to go to war with a nation a

01:17:25.440 | long way away for people whom we know very little, et cetera, et cetera. I'm paraphrasing his quote.

01:17:30.440 | But, but I'm not saying it was the right decision. I'm just saying I can see why in September 1938,

01:17:37.480 | he is prepared to give him the chance. Now, I do think he was a bit naive. And it, and what he also

01:17:44.000 | does is really interesting thing. So he goes over to Hitler's flat, completely ambushes him,

01:17:50.760 | goes to his flat on the afternoon of 30th of September and says to Hitler, look, I've got this,

01:17:55.820 | I've drawn up this, this agreement here. Um, and this is to continue the, um, the naval agreement

01:18:01.600 | that we've already made. And, and by signing this, you are saying that Germany and Britain should never

01:18:06.400 | go to war with one another. And he goes, yeah, whatever, you know, signs it. Chamberlain comes

01:18:12.780 | back, lands at Henn and waves his, waves his little piece of paper, you know, and peace in our time and

01:18:17.720 | all the rest of it, which obviously comes back to bite him in a very big way. But it's interesting

01:18:21.500 | that, that, that when Hitler then subsequently goes and moves in, you know, that they, France and Britain

01:18:28.360 | decide in rather the same way that there's been discussion about deciding that large portions of

01:18:34.580 | Ukraine should just be handed back to, handed over to Russia without consulting Ukraine a few weeks ago.

01:18:41.700 | Um, it is incredible. I think that, that France and, and Britain and Italy with Germany are deciding

01:18:50.740 | that, yes, it's fine for Germany to go in and take the Sudetenland, you know, about really consulting

01:18:55.260 | the Czechs. It's a sort of similar kind of scenario really. And, and it's equally wrong. Um, but when

01:19:02.180 | Germany does then go and take over the whole of Czechoslovakia in March, 1939, that is, that's the

01:19:08.380 | bottom line. That is, that's the point where Chamberlain goes, okay, I've given him the

01:19:12.240 | benefit of the doubt, no more benefits of the doubt. That's it. That is, he's, he's crossed

01:19:17.420 | the line. And so you reinforce your agreement with Poland and you do a formal agreement. You

01:19:21.380 | go, okay, we will uphold your sovereignty. You know, if you are invaded, we will go to war

01:19:26.880 | with you. You know, that is, that is a ratcheting up of diplomacy and politics in a very, very big

01:19:35.200 | way. And it is a, it is that decision to make a treaty with the Poles is not heeded by Hitler,

01:19:44.640 | but it's heeded by literally every one of his commanders. And it's also heeded by Goering,

01:19:50.320 | who is his number two and who is obviously the commander in chief of the, um, of, of the Luftwaffe

01:19:56.980 | and is, uh, president of Prussia and, you know, and all the rest of it. And, you know,

01:20:02.580 | is the second most senior Nazi. And, you know, he's going, this is a catastrophe. This is the

01:20:07.800 | last thing we want to be doing is going to war against Britain and indeed France.

01:20:11.680 | The Munich conference is a pretty interesting moment. I would say in all of human history,

01:20:18.440 | because you got the leaders of these bigger than life nations and the most dramatic brewing

01:20:27.740 | conflict in human history, that Chamberlain, Hitler, Mussolini, Dodger. It's interesting when

01:20:33.820 | these bigger than life leaders are in a room together, uh, is there something that you know

01:20:40.180 | about, about their interactions? Yeah, I think there's, I think one of the things that's interesting

01:20:45.760 | is, is that Hitler's got home advantage because it's on his turf and, you know, to start off with

01:20:50.220 | the first meeting is at the Berghof, his beloved place in the Obersalzberg overlooking Berkusgaden

01:20:54.320 | in the Alps. So he's pretty confident because this is my manner. This is my turf. You know,

01:21:00.380 | uh, I'm not going to be bossed around by these guys, but Chamberlain, for example, is going there

01:21:05.540 | thinking I've been around the blocks. No one can teach me anything. I've been a politician for ages.

01:21:10.540 | You know, I'm not going to be kind of capped out by this, this sort of, you know, Austrian upstart.

01:21:15.380 | So they're both coming at it with a kind of sort of

01:21:17.800 | slight kind of superiority kind of complex. Um, interestingly, when you get to the actual

01:21:26.160 | meetings of the Bernabeu in, in Munich, um, a couple of weeks later, Chamberlain is cheered

01:21:32.900 | by the crowds when his car comes in, when he goes to his hotel, when he's moving from his hotel to

01:21:39.560 | the Bernabeu, you know, there are cars cheering him, you know, waving union jacks, all this kind of stuff.

01:21:44.060 | Hitler does not like that at all. Not at all. Puts him on the back foot. And that's because

01:21:50.940 | the German people don't want war. In the same way that the British people don't want war,

01:21:56.660 | nor do the German people. The difference is that Hitler is a dictator and an autocrat and

01:22:03.880 | has the devotion of the people. So he can do what he wants in a way that Chamberlain can't.

01:22:09.420 | Chamberlain's hands are tied because he is an elected prime minister, an elected leader,

01:22:14.700 | political leader, and he's not head of state. So there is no question that it is Hitler and

01:22:20.580 | Chamberlain that are the top dogs in this particular discussion. You know, Deladier takes a backseat,

01:22:25.640 | even Mussolini, although he's there, he doesn't want war either. You know, he wants to be left alone

01:22:30.860 | to do his own thing without anyone getting in the way, but he doesn't want, he doesn't want to sort of,

01:22:34.760 | it's not in his interest to have a European war. So he's trying to avoid it. So it is really,

01:22:38.680 | you see that the kind of alpha males in the room are Chamberlain and, and Hitler. And it's really

01:22:44.140 | interesting because Hitler's got this sort of slightly garrulous voice and, and yeah, very kind

01:22:50.700 | of pale blue eyes and such distinct features, quite a long nose. And, you know, he always says,

01:22:56.320 | this is why he has the moustaches to kind of, you know, disguise the big nose, you know, so I was

01:23:01.360 | saying to you earlier on before we started recording, he does have a sense of humor. It's not maybe not

01:23:05.000 | one that you and I would kind of tap into, but, but he does have one. Whereas Chamberlain is just sort

01:23:10.880 | of, you know, he sounds like a sort of, you know, a bit like an old man, you know, he's sort of silver

01:23:14.220 | haired and he looks like you're sort of archetypal kind of British gentleman who's rolled up umbrella and

01:23:18.900 | his, you know, and his Homburg hat and all the rest of it. So they're both sort of caricatures in a funny

01:23:23.580 | sort of way. And yet the consequence of these discussions, you know, these, these great

01:23:28.920 | events happening, you know, you are, you're absolutely going, even which way the Munich crisis

01:23:35.760 | comes out, you're taking a step closer to war. It's just whether the war is going to happen kind

01:23:40.800 | of next week or whether it's going to happen a year hence, but it's, you know, the Munich crisis

01:23:44.300 | obviously doesn't stem the inevitability of war at all. It just heightens it.

01:23:49.020 | Do you think there are words that Chamberlain should have said, could have said,

01:23:53.340 | that, uh, put more pressure on Hitler, intimidate Hitler more?

01:23:59.100 | Yeah, it's a really tricky one. It's such a difficult one because you're always looking at it

01:24:04.760 | through, you know, the enemy has a vote and you don't know what that vote is going to be. And you

01:24:10.100 | don't know what it's going to look like. There's no question that the Europe, the rest of Europe is,

01:24:14.520 | is, is, is cowed by the, um, kind of impression of military might that the Germans have put out.

01:24:22.900 | They, they, they certainly fear they are stronger than they actually are. And then on the other hand,

01:24:28.180 | they're also going, yeah, but you know, Germany doesn't have natural resources, doesn't have access

01:24:32.220 | to the world's oceans. You know, it's, it's, it's kind of, you know, it shouldn't be able to win a

01:24:36.900 | war. And so, so they're kind of contradicting themselves at the same time, you know, so one

01:24:42.420 | minute they're sort of like, Oh God, you don't want to take on those, all those Nazis and all those

01:24:45.520 | swastikas and those automaton stormtroopers. But on the other hand, they're then saying, but actually

01:24:50.140 | Germany doesn't have much and it's kind of, you know, in its basket, you know, it's got,

01:24:53.180 | it's got actually quite a lot of weaknesses and we should be able to kind of prevail, blah, blah,

01:24:56.240 | blah. We'll just impose an economic blockade and then it'll be stuffed. And Britain is not ready to

01:25:00.500 | fight a war in 1948, but nor is Hitler, you know, nor is Germany. So, you know, one is sort of striking

01:25:05.880 | out the other, but it's very easy to say that in hindsight, but at the time, you know, with people

01:25:11.640 | kind of digging trenches in Hyde Park in the center of London and barrage balloons going up over

01:25:15.240 | London and, you know, children being evacuated from the cities and 92% of the population not

01:25:20.600 | wanting to go to war, you can see why he takes the course he does. I suppose that's, that's what I'm

01:25:25.940 | saying. I'm not saying it's necessarily the right decision, but I could, I think it's an understandable

01:25:29.320 | decision. But what about even just on the human level? If I go into a room with a British gentleman

01:25:35.500 | versus going to a room with Trump, it feels like it's so much easier to read and manipulate

01:25:45.140 | the British gentleman because Trump is like Trump-like characters. It seems like Hitler's

01:25:50.840 | similar. Churchill is similar. It's like this guy can do anything. There's something terrifying

01:25:56.720 | about the unpredictability. Yeah. It feels like there's something very predictable about

01:26:01.860 | Chamberlain. Yes, I think that's true. But also one has to take a step back and think about

01:26:06.600 | what Britain represents. So therefore what Chamberlain represents in 1938, Britain has the largest empire

01:26:13.640 | the world has ever known in 1938. We shouldn't forget that. You know, the world of the world is

01:26:17.880 | pink, as the saying goes, you know, and that saying comes from the kind of atlas of the world where all

01:26:22.380 | British territories are kind of colored pink. Yeah. And on top of that, it has lots of extra imperial

01:26:27.960 | territories as well. So, you know, if you look at this, there's this incredible map of global shipping

01:26:33.480 | in 1937. And there's these little antlines of ships going out. And one of the strongest antlines is going

01:26:39.500 | down to Argentina and South America from Britain. So down past West Africa and down the Southern

01:26:46.160 | Atlantic and there it is. And that's because Britain owns most of Argentina. It owns huge, great farming

01:26:52.240 | estates and ranches. It owns the railway system. It owns many of the port facilities. So you don't even

01:26:57.300 | need an empire. You just need the, you know, you need the facilities that overseas trade and possessions

01:27:03.160 | can give you. And Britain not only has the largest navy, it also has the largest merchant navy, has 33% of

01:27:11.120 | the world's merchant shipping and access to a further 50%, you know, Greek, Norwegian, Canadian shipping that

01:27:18.200 | it can access. So if you've got access to 80, more than, in excess of 80% of the world shipping, that puts you

01:27:25.240 | in an incredibly strong position. And actually all sorts of other things have been going on. While

01:27:29.840 | they might not have been creating a huge army or producing enough spitfires that they might want to

01:27:35.160 | up until this point, what they have also been doing is stockpiling bauxite and copper and tungsten

01:27:40.720 | and huge reserves. And because Britain has this huge global reach and because it has its empire and its

01:27:46.720 | extra imperial assets, it can strike bargains that no one else can strike. So it can go into various

01:27:51.740 | countries around the world and can go, okay, I want you to guarantee me for the next five years,

01:27:56.760 | every bit of your rubber supply. I will pay over the asking price to secure that. And it's doing that

01:28:04.480 | in the 1930s. So when war comes, it's got everything it possibly needs. Now, you always need more because

01:28:11.360 | it's suddenly turning into a kind of, you know, a proper global long drawn out war. But that is a huge

01:28:17.080 | advantage. So it is with that mindset that Chamberlain is going into those talks and thinking,

01:28:23.060 | okay, well, I'm not going to get a war over the Czechoslovakian. Who cares about them?

01:28:26.040 | But I am going to show Hitler that I mean business. Hitler's going, who's this stuffy guy with his

01:28:33.180 | white hair? I don't give a toss about him. You know, and he's coming at it from a completely different

01:28:37.120 | perspective. And I think one of the things that's so interesting from a dramatic point of view and from

01:28:42.240 | a historian's point of view, or even a novelist point of view, in the case of Robert Harris writing

01:28:46.380 | his book about these negotiations, which I don't know if you've read it, but it's really, it's

01:28:49.880 | terrifically good. It's the fact you've got two men, two alpha males who are going to those

01:28:56.160 | negotiations from totally different perspectives and vantage points. And I think it's very easy for

01:29:03.280 | people today to forget how elevated Britain was in the late 1930s. You know, the gold standard was tied

01:29:11.260 | to the pound, not the dollar. And so Britain was the number one nation in the world at that time.

01:29:18.300 | And it just was. And it's so diminished by comparison today that it's hard to imagine it.

01:29:26.280 | And I think one of the interesting things about the historiography, about the narrative of how we tell

01:29:30.880 | World War II is that so much of it has been dictated by the shift in power that took place

01:29:37.760 | subsequent to 1945. And when people were starting to write these sort of major narratives in the 1970s

01:29:44.360 | and 80s and into the 1990s is through a prism of a very, very different world. And so one of the

01:29:49.920 | reasons why you have this narrative that, you know, Britain was a bit rubbish and hanging on the shirt

01:29:54.580 | tails of the Americans and, you know, all the blood was spelt in Eastern front. And, you know,

01:29:59.540 | Germany had the best army in the world and was only defeated because Hitler was mad and blah,

01:30:03.500 | blah, blah. You know, that, that kind of traditional narrative, it's, it's that narrative emerges through

01:30:09.100 | the prism of, of what was going on in the 1970s and what was going on in the 1980s and the changing

01:30:14.280 | world, rather than looking at it through the prism of the late 1930s or early 1940s.

01:30:18.620 | So there is this moment of decision. When do you think, what lesson do you take from that?

01:30:24.920 | When is the right time for appeasement to negotiate for diplomacy? And when is the right time for

01:30:32.260 | military strength, offensive, attacking, uh, for military conflict? Where's that, where's that line?

01:30:44.580 | Well, I kind of think it probably was when it was, I mean, Poland. Yeah. Honestly, I,

01:30:53.800 | I'm not sure it would have been the right decision to go to war in 1938. I just, I think it would,

01:31:00.980 | I, I'm, I can't predict because you can't second guess how things are going to play out because you

01:31:06.240 | just don't know. But, but I, I, I'm not sure that Chamberlain made the wrong decision. I'm not saying

01:31:12.860 | he made the right decision. I'm just like, I'm not, I'm being a bit wishy-washy about this.

01:31:16.460 | You could have threatened it more. Imagine Churchill in those same meetings.

01:31:21.940 | Yeah. But, but Churchill also appeases. I mean, he appeases Stalin all the time. I mean, you know,

01:31:26.800 | so the idea that Churchill's this big, strong man and never appeases, and you know, he's gung over war.

01:31:30.980 | Churchill's out of the government at that time. He, he, he recognizes you can't trust Hitler. He

01:31:36.040 | recognizes that narcissism is bad, but he, because he's out of the government, he doesn't have a window

01:31:42.680 | on exactly where Britain is at that particular time in a way that Chamberlain does. You know,

01:31:48.840 | so, so I suppose what I'm saying is Chamberlain is better placed to make those decisions than,

01:31:56.920 | than Churchill is, which again, doesn't mean that church, that Chamberlain is right. And Churchill is

01:32:00.940 | wrong. It's just, that's a massive pump to go to war in 1938 when you still don't have,

01:32:07.000 | you know, you've got a handful of spitfires, you've got a handful of hurricanes, you haven't got enough,

01:32:11.740 | you know, your air defense system isn't properly, properly sorted at this point. Um, your Navy is

01:32:17.100 | strong, but you know, what's that kind of look like? I mean, if you do go to war, because it's not

01:32:25.140 | going to be armies sweeping into Germany, it's just, it's going to be accelerated industrialization

01:32:31.380 | for a year. So no, you know, even if you go to war in 1938 over Czechoslovakia, Czechoslovakia will

01:32:37.260 | not be saved. That, you know, France and Britain will not be going and invading Germany that, you know,

01:32:42.400 | that is absolutely not going to happen. So sort of what's the point? I mean, you know, if you're not

01:32:47.420 | going to do that, why didn't you accelerate your rearmament thereafter, get your ducks in a row.

01:32:53.300 | And then you can consider it. I mean, after all, you know, even in September, 1939, they don't really

01:32:58.040 | do anything. I mean, we talked about the kind of the SAR offensive, which isn't really an offensive at

01:33:04.820 | all. It's firing one round of machine gun and scuttling back again. But I mean, they don't even do

01:33:10.880 | that then though. They're still buying time in 1939. And, you know, Britain is only just about ready to

01:33:15.840 | take on the onslaught of the Luftwaffe in summer of 1940.

01:33:18.260 | Well, nobody's ready for war.

01:33:21.400 | No. And you always want more than you've got at any time, even when you're winning.

01:33:24.920 | But like, really not ready. Even like you mentioned with Barbarossa,

01:33:31.380 | Nazi Germany is really not ready.

01:33:34.520 | Not ready.

01:33:34.880 | Nobody's really, except France. I swear.

01:33:38.660 | France?

01:33:40.040 | I think France had radios.

01:33:40.920 | Fine. But come on. Come on.

01:33:44.680 | When Nazi Germany invades Poland, I mean.

01:33:48.740 | Yeah, it's terrible. It's terrible. Because I'm absolutely, I also do think that had France

01:33:54.580 | gone in, in some force, with some British troops as well, had they gone in, what would have

01:33:59.980 | happened is that would have, that easily could have brought down Hitler. Because most of his

01:34:05.280 | commanders are, his senior commanders are just thinking, what the hell is going on? This

01:34:08.880 | is a catastrophe. I mean, to a man. I mean, even Goering is thinking, this is a terrible idea.

01:34:14.380 | But they are absolutely not convinced. And when Hitler does his big talk to his,

01:34:19.060 | he asks all his senior commanders to come to the Berghof to brief them about the invasion of Poland.

01:34:24.200 | It's just after the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact of the 22nd of August. He calls them all to the Berghof

01:34:31.560 | and says, come in, you know, come in mufti, come in civilian suits. They all turn up and he gives

01:34:35.620 | them this kind of huge, great speech. And says, this is the moment. This is, this is the time. This is

01:34:40.440 | what we're going to do. And they're all going, what? You're kidding me. What, we're going to Poland and,

01:34:44.900 | you know, on the 26th of August, that's the plan. Like two days time. You know, where's the plan?

01:34:50.100 | Well, you know, the whole point is that, you know, they're emerging and growing militarily,

01:34:55.560 | but they were supposed to have all these exercises where they, you know, coordinating ground forces,

01:34:59.720 | you know, the panzer spearhead with operations in the air with the Luftwaffe. None of that happens.

01:35:05.520 | So Poland becomes the proving ground. And actually, they discover that there's lots of things that don't

01:35:10.140 | work and lots of things that are wrong. But, you know, it's flying in the face of all convention,

01:35:16.860 | military convention that, that they, you know, he does this without any kind of warning.

01:35:20.200 | And even by the 1st of September, where there's been this kind of sort of five-day delay

01:35:25.480 | at those last minute negotiations, the last minute negotiations are thrust upon Hitler by

01:35:31.860 | people like Goering and by Mussolini and, and the Italians going, God, oh my God, don't do this.

01:35:37.820 | Don't do this. You know, there's got to be a solution. Hitler's absolutely jumping at the bit.

01:35:42.380 | Well, in that case, from a dark militaristic perspective, his bet paid off.

01:35:49.040 | Well, except that it ended in ruins in May, 1945 with the total collapse of Germany. So you could

01:35:55.040 | say the worst decision he ever made was going into Poland in September, 1939. Depends the way you look

01:36:00.060 | at it. But I mean, yes, you know, it's successful in that the, you know, Poland's overrun in 18 days.

01:36:05.000 | And there's, there's so many counterfactuals here, but I mean, if you would say to Hitler on the 30th

01:36:10.120 | of April, you know, as he's sort of taking out the pistol from his holster on his sofa in the,

01:36:15.040 | in the Führer bunk and going, you know, so out of 1st of September, 1939, still backing yourself on

01:36:21.380 | that one. I mean, he might have a different view. The guy's insane and full of blunder. So he probably

01:36:27.280 | would have said, yeah, do it all over again.

01:36:28.960 | Yeah. I'm sure he would have done it as well.

01:36:30.220 | Conquest. Poland was not a mistake. So the union was not a mistake.

01:36:35.480 | No.

01:36:35.780 | It's just some of the tactics.

01:36:36.920 | Other people I was let down by, by people not being strong enough.

01:36:39.260 | Yeah. The Prussian generals are all.

01:36:41.120 | Yeah. Yeah. Of course. That's exactly what he'd say. It wasn't my fault.

01:36:44.660 | He might have quietly done some different decisions about Barbarossa. Maybe the timing would be

01:36:52.100 | different.

01:36:52.960 | Maybe that all out central for us rather than kind of splitting it through.

01:36:55.820 | Yeah. Yeah.

01:36:56.260 | But he was very sure. It seems like maybe you can correct me that Britain and France would still

01:37:02.480 | carry on with appeasement even after he invaded Poland.

01:37:05.800 | Absolutely. He, he was completely convinced by it. There was clearly a kind of sort of 10 to 15%

01:37:12.580 | level of doubt, but what the heck I'm going to do it anyway. He was just, he ratcheted himself up

01:37:20.240 | into such a laver of, of kind of, this is the moment I have to do it now. This is fate. I'm 50.

01:37:26.380 | And, and, you know, I could be taken out by an assassin's bullet. I've got this important life

01:37:31.180 | work that I've got to do. We've got to get on with it now. There could be no more delay. This is

01:37:35.200 | my mission. You know, this is our mission of the German people and either the German people have got

01:37:39.560 | the will and the, and the spirit to be able to pull it off. Or, you know, I was wrong. And, and

01:37:45.120 | therefore, you know, we don't deserve to be a thousand year, right? We don't deserve to be the

01:37:49.480 | master race. Black or white. I saw them either or that's same all the time.

01:37:54.600 | So can you tell the story of the Molotov ribbon trope packed in 1939? So they make an agreement,

01:38:00.840 | Nazi Germany, the Soviet union. And that leads us just like you mentioned in a matter of days,

01:38:07.220 | how compact everything is. It's just really, really fascinating.

01:38:11.580 | It's a beautiful summer in Europe, summer of 1939, you know, it's one of these glorious summers that

01:38:17.380 | sort of never rains. It's just sunshine, sunny day after sunny day. It's kind of, you know,

01:38:23.700 | it's like that sort of golden summer of 1914 as well, you know, where sky always seems to be blue,

01:38:30.700 | fluffy white clouds, everyone's sort of, you know, but this sort of the storm clouds of war to use that

01:38:36.240 | cliche are kind of brewing. The Russians have, have reached out to Britain and France and said,

01:38:42.800 | come on, come on over, let's negotiate, you know, let's see what we can do. Um, and there is just

01:38:48.160 | no stomach for that at all. I mean, if ever there is a, I think a mistake that's Britain and France

01:38:55.980 | should have been a bit more into real politics and than they were that it's such an opportunity

01:39:03.640 | to, to, to ensure that you, to snooker the third Reich and, and they don't take it. Um, because,

01:39:10.840 | you know, in many ways they see the westward spread of communism in exactly the same way that the Nazis

01:39:16.820 | see the threat of the westward spread of communism as something that's every bit as repellent as

01:39:22.280 | Nazism and, and they don't want to be getting into bed with these guys. Um, of course they kind of have

01:39:29.760 | to kind of change tack on that one in summer of 1941 and, you know, in very quick order. Um, and that's

01:39:37.240 | the whole point about Churchill appeasing Stalin. I mean, you know, it's all very well people saying,

01:39:40.660 | well, you know, Churchill wouldn't have appeased Hitler in 1930s, but he does appease, he appeases all

01:39:44.580 | the time. Um, and they miss that opportunity and the, and the, the French and British delegation is

01:39:51.840 | third tier commanders generals going over. It's, it's a, it's a, yeah, it's a shit show. I mean,

01:39:58.360 | yeah, excuse my French, but I mean, it's just, it's, it's, it's a nonsense that they're not ready for it.

01:40:03.420 | They're not prepared. The British guy, um, Admiral Drax doesn't have any authority. Um, the whole thing's

01:40:10.320 | a complete joke. It's not, it's never going to get anywhere. You tell the story of this quite

01:40:13.880 | beautifully, actually. Uh, again, it's such a human story. I mean, the, it seems like the Stalin and

01:40:20.960 | Soviet, they've already made up their mind, but I don't think they have. I think what they, I mean,

01:40:27.100 | you described quite well that they value in-person meeting. Yes. So like Chamberlain should have just

01:40:33.560 | gone to Moscow. Yeah. Get on a plane. Like it, I, it's such a, uh, maybe it's a simplistic notion,

01:40:42.000 | but that could have changed the trajectory of human history right there. I really think it could have

01:40:46.860 | done. I think that was, I think that's, I think that's much more grievous mistake than, than the

01:40:51.420 | Munich. Why are leaders so hesitant to meet? I, I I'm told now by a bunch of diplomats that no,

01:41:00.240 | no, no, no, no, no. There's a process, you know, at first you have to have these diplomats meet and

01:41:05.360 | they have to draft a bunch of stuff. And I sometimes have the simplistic notion, like why not, why not

01:41:12.580 | meet? Why not meet? Like, I think there is a human element there. Um, of course, especially when there's

01:41:20.400 | this force that is Hitler. Well, yes. And because we humans, we like to interact and, and you like to

01:41:29.260 | see people in three dimensions and, you know, I'm sure it's why you always quite rightly insist on

01:41:35.660 | doing your podcast face-to-face because you want to get the cut of someone's jib and you want to be

01:41:40.000 | able to see them and you want to see the intonation in their expression and the whites of their eyes and

01:41:45.540 | all that kind of stuff. And that just does, does make a difference of course, because you know,

01:41:49.140 | we're fundamentally animals and we kind of, we, we want to be sizing people up and it's much easier

01:41:53.800 | to do that when you're a few feet away from each other than it is on a video screen or through the

01:42:00.420 | prism of someone else. Yeah. But there's also just, you see the, the humanity in, in others. It's so

01:42:06.540 | much easier. You see this in social media. It's so much easier to talk shit about others

01:42:11.100 | when you're not with them. Yes. And like military conflict is the extreme version of that. Yeah.

01:42:17.720 | You can construct these narratives that they're not human, that they're evil, that they're, you can

01:42:23.020 | construct a communist ideology, all of these, you can project onto them the worst possible

01:42:29.680 | version of what, uh, of a human. But when you meet them, you're like, Oh,

01:42:35.580 | they are just a person. They're just a person. Well, it's the world's great tragedy that, that,

01:42:39.900 | that it's only a few people that want to go to war and the vast majority want to live happily,

01:42:43.060 | contented lives, getting on with their neighbors. I mean, it has been ever thus. It's just,

01:42:47.900 | it is those few that kind of ruin it for everybody else. But, but, but anyway, to go back to Leningrad,

01:42:53.880 | um, back in August, 1939, they go half cock. They're disrespectful to Soviet Union as a result of

01:43:02.180 | that. Um, it gets nowhere. Had they been able to put on a really, really firm offer there and then

01:43:07.980 | to the Soviet Union, Soviet Union would have, would have probably come in. I mean, the big thing is,

01:43:14.620 | is that the Soviet Union said, this is a big stumbling block. The Soviet Union said, yeah,

01:43:19.820 | but we want to be able to march through Poland if we get threatened by Germany.

01:43:25.660 | Both the British and the French just smell a massive rat there. They're basically saying,

01:43:28.820 | you know, if they agree to that, what they're, what they fear is that Soviet Union will just march

01:43:34.220 | into Poland and go, yeah, but you said we could and take it, which they unquestionably would have

01:43:38.860 | done, but it would have stopped the world war properly. They're willing to appease Hitler.

01:43:43.740 | They're not willing to appease Stalin in that situation. Well, they're not willing to appease

01:43:47.280 | anybody by that stage. That's the point. Well, they appeased Hitler.

01:43:51.360 | There's a now, there's a bottom line, you know, which is, which is Poland, you know,

01:43:56.200 | so it's changed. That's right. Right. But anyway, the bottom line is they don't,

01:44:00.440 | you know, there is a, there is a, a reluctance on the part of French and British to negotiate

01:44:05.560 | with the Soviet Union because they're communists. Don't like them. Don't trust them. Worry about

01:44:11.160 | what they're going to do with Poland and they're going to be, you know, jumping out of the fire into

01:44:15.580 | the kind of water and it doesn't come off. And as a consequence of that, Soviet Union

01:44:20.660 | continued to pursue more hardly, you know, um, more, more vociferously the opportunities that the, um,

01:44:28.620 | that the Germans are offering, which is the split of Poland because Soviet Union wants that part of

01:44:37.340 | Poland back in its own sphere of influence and it doesn't want to go to war just yet.

01:44:42.500 | And the agreement that they won't attack each other, essentially. Yeah. Do you think Stalin

01:44:47.540 | actually believed that?

01:44:48.740 | No, he believed it in the same way that Hitler believed it, that it was a cynical kind of,

01:44:52.400 | you know, convenient bit of real politic for now. I mean, I think, I think Soviet Union was as

01:44:58.820 | determined to get rid of the Nazis as the Nazis were determined to get rid of the Soviet Union. I think

01:45:02.560 | whoever fired first was not, not decided at that point, but I do think that from the moment that

01:45:08.740 | Hitler takes power in 1933, a conflict between Soviet Union and Nazi Germany is inevitable.

01:45:12.520 | Yeah. So you, either direction you think it's inevitable. Yeah. I think, I think there's,

01:45:17.140 | yeah, there's a huge amount of evidence for that. Stalin probably wanted it, what, like in 42, 43?

01:45:22.540 | Yeah.

01:45:23.060 | Something like that.

01:45:24.400 | Yeah. And, you know, they're doing exercises and stuff and building out. He's not ready yet

01:45:27.480 | because he knows he's done the purges and he's got to get his, his army, you know, he's got to get his

01:45:31.300 | armed forces back into shape and all the rest of it. But, you know, so they have this incredibly

01:45:35.540 | cynical agreement, but at that point, you know, Hitler's hands are untied. You know, he no longer

01:45:40.780 | has to worry about, about the threat from Soviet Union. Um, he's got carte blanche to go into Poland and

01:45:46.700 | he doesn't believe that France and Britain are going to go to war over Poland. He's wrong about that,

01:45:50.220 | obviously, but, but, but France and Britain, despite going to war with him, still do nothing.

01:45:54.260 | So, you know, he's got a way of it.

01:45:56.560 | Who was Churchill and how did Churchill come to power at this moment?

01:46:01.940 | Well, Churchill is this absolutely towering figure in British politics. You know, he's been,

01:46:07.700 | you know, he's first a minister in the kind of noughties of the 20th century and the first years

01:46:12.800 | of, of the 20th century. Um, first of the liberals, then of the conservatives. He's a former chancellor,

01:46:18.520 | um, um, of this checker. Um, he's a towering figure, but he's been in the wilderness because

01:46:27.740 | he's out of favor with the Stanley Baldwin government. Um, he's out of favor with, with,

01:46:33.540 | with Chamberlain, but he is this towering figure and he has been very outspoken as a backbencher,

01:46:39.300 | which basically means, you know, you're not a minister. You're not in the cabinet. You're just

01:46:42.100 | an ordinary member of parliament, but obviously you're an ordinary member of parliament, but you're

01:46:46.200 | also an ordinary member of parliament who has had ministries of state, uh, and who is this

01:46:50.940 | towering figure. So he's listened to in a way that other backbenchers aren't. Um, and he has been

01:46:55.400 | saying, you know, we need to stand up to the dictators. We need to do this. Um, we need to

01:46:59.660 | rearm more, more heavily, uh, and blah, blah, blah. So when war is declared, he's brought back into

01:47:05.260 | the Admiralty, um, and charge of the Navy, which is Britain's senior service. And, um, suddenly he's

01:47:12.640 | there. And what happens is Britain doesn't really do anything. It's very difficult working with France

01:47:18.740 | because France is so politically fractured that they can't make any decisions when you can't make

01:47:22.580 | any decisions. You're just impotent. Um, and so Churchill first mentions going into Norway,

01:47:28.380 | mining the leads. So, um, the idea is that you're making life very difficult for the Germans to get

01:47:32.860 | iron ore out of Sweden. Their main, their main source of iron ore is up in the Northern part of Sweden

01:47:37.340 | in the Arctic circle and then goes on a railway through Northern tip of Norway and then gets

01:47:42.400 | shipped down the, um, West coast of Norway into Germany, into the Baltic. So, uh, Churchill suggests

01:47:50.480 | in September, 1939, why don't we mine the leads, which are the leads are these passageways, um, out of

01:47:56.340 | the fjords and the, in the North into the, uh, into the North sea. Why don't we mine those and stop the

01:48:01.940 | Germans from, from, from, um, um, taking this? Everyone goes, well, yeah, that's quite a good idea, but they

01:48:06.280 | can't decide. And French are nervous that if they do that, the Germans will retaliate and bomb France and

01:48:11.020 | all this kind of stuff. So no decision is made until kind of April, 19, 1940. They go up to start mining the

01:48:17.700 | leads on exactly the same day that the Germans invade Denmark and Norway. And so they're, they're

01:48:23.060 | caught off guards. And at that moment, really, it's seen as a failure of Chamberlain's government. And there is a

01:48:28.660 | kind of, uh, a mounting realization that no matter how good he was or competent he was as a peacetime

01:48:34.040 | prime minister, he's not a wartime prime minister. You know, he's not served in the armed forces

01:48:37.640 | himself. He doesn't really understand it. It needs a different set of hands. And, um, his government

01:48:43.140 | falls on the 9th of May. It becomes inevitable that he's going to have to resign. And the obvious

01:48:49.360 | person to take his place is Lord Halifax, who is in the house of Lords, but you can still be a prime

01:48:53.480 | minister. And, um, he is without question, the most respected politician in the country. He's,

01:48:59.700 | um, uh, former Viceroy of India. He's seen as incredibly safe pair of hands, man of resolute

01:49:08.040 | sound judgment, et cetera, et cetera. Um, but he doesn't want to take it. He feels physically ill at

01:49:15.300 | the prospect. Doesn't want this responsibility. He's also not really a military man. He's got a slightly

01:49:19.940 | sort of withered hand, which has prevented him from doing military service. And he just blanches

01:49:25.540 | at this moment. And that really leaves only one other figure that could possibly take on this

01:49:30.320 | position and that's Churchill. So when Chamberlain resigns on the 9th of May and Halifax says,

01:49:37.800 | it's, it's not for me. Um, the only person who's going to slip into that position is Churchill and he

01:49:42.620 | becomes prime minister and he accepts it gladly. He feels like it is his mission in life. This is his

01:49:48.360 | moment. Come of the outcome of the man, but he comes with a huge amount of baggage. I mean,

01:49:52.180 | you know, he's known as a man who drinks too much, who's whose judgment hasn't always been great. You

01:49:56.500 | know, he was chancellor during the time of the general strike 1926, you know, he backed Edward

01:50:01.780 | the eighth over the, uh, monarchy crisis when the King wanted to marry Wallace Simpson, the divorcee

01:50:06.960 | Catholic divorcee, et cetera, et cetera. So, you know, his judgment has been brought into question.

01:50:11.160 | You know, he is the man who was, he came up with the idea of the Gallipoli campaign, which was,

01:50:15.960 | you know, an ignominious failure, blah, blah, blah. So there are issues over him. You know,

01:50:20.340 | he is seen as a hothead and a man who doesn't have the kind of sound judgment of Halifax. So the jury is,

01:50:26.340 | is very much out. And I think it's, again, it's one of those things where you have to put yourself

01:50:31.000 | in, you have to look at this through the prism of what people were thinking in May, 1940. Yes,

01:50:36.820 | he, he was considered a towering politician, but he is seen also as a loose cannon and by no means the

01:50:44.940 | right person in this hour of darkness. And it is coincidental that the 10th of May, 1940, when he

01:50:52.700 | takes over as prime minister, becomes prime minister, not for an election, but by default of a new

01:50:57.940 | nationalist government. So no longer a conservative company government, but a nationalist cross-party

01:51:03.600 | coalition government for the duration of the war, which includes, you know, members of the Liberal

01:51:10.560 | Party and also the Labour Party, as well as conservatives, that it is by no means certain

01:51:17.920 | that he's going to be able to deliver the goods. And it is also coincidentally the same day that the

01:51:23.320 | Germans launched Case Yellow, Operation Yellow, the invasion of the low countries in France.

01:51:28.720 | Democrats. So these are tumultuous events to put it mildly. And it is also the case that,

01:51:36.560 | you know, only a couple of weeks before, um, Paul Reynaud has taken over as prime minister of yet

01:51:43.280 | another coalition government in France from, from Deladier. So political turmoil is very much the watchword

01:51:51.680 | at this time for the, uh, for the Western democracies, just at the moment that the Germans are making their

01:51:57.280 | kind of, you know, their hammer strike into the West, this might be a good moment to bring up

01:52:02.080 | this idea that has been circulating recently brought up by Daryl Cooper, who hyperbolically

01:52:11.600 | stated that Churchill was the quote, chief villain of, uh, the second world war to give a good faith

01:52:18.480 | interpretation of that. I believe he meant that Churchill forced Hitler to escalate the expansion

01:52:23.200 | of Nazi Germany beyond Poland into a global war. So Churchill is the one that turned

01:52:28.720 | this narrow war, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Poland into a global one. Um,

01:52:38.160 | is that accurate? No, I don't think it is. I mean, not least because the decisions over

01:52:44.000 | Poland were made by Chamberlain's government, not when Churchill was out of government. So, you know,

01:52:48.240 | Churchill wasn't even involved in that decision making process at the time. No, I don't think so.

01:52:53.120 | I mean, again, I go back to kind of Britain's position in the world in 1939.

01:52:58.640 | If you say we are going to defend the sovereignty of Poland and then you don't,

01:53:04.560 | that is, that looks really bad globally. You know, Britain's prestige would plummet,

01:53:10.640 | would lead to all sorts of problems. Um, you are saying that you're giving carte blanche to dictators to

01:53:16.640 | just run amok and take whatever territory they want. You are risking the future upheaval of the global

01:53:22.400 | order, um, away from democracies into the hands of dictators. You know, in the West, people believe

01:53:30.480 | in democracy and believe in advancement of, of, um, freedoms of people. It's just, you know, to, uh,

01:53:37.040 | to echo the words of Roosevelt in August, 1941, you know, that they're aspiring to world, um,

01:53:43.360 | free of want and fear. Now, obviously there's still some issues with the form that, uh, democracy takes

01:53:52.880 | in the night, 1930s. It's not democratic for everyone. You know, try saying that if you're in

01:53:57.040 | Nigeria or, uh, or, or India or whatever. Um, or if you're, uh, you know, in the black Southern states

01:54:03.760 | of United States, but the aspirations are there. And I think that's, that's, that's an important

01:54:09.440 | distinction. And I think by saying that, that Churchill is the chief warmonger of the second

01:54:14.320 | world war, I think is, is ludicrous. You know, it's the same thing about, about the bombing,

01:54:18.640 | you know, the, the, the detractors of strategic air campaign always go, yeah, but you know,

01:54:22.720 | Germans had the Holocaust, but, but weren't the, weren't the allies just as bad to killing all

01:54:27.360 | those civilians? It's like, no, because the moment Hitler stopped the war, the bombing would stop.

01:54:31.760 | You know, the moment the war stopped in Hitler's favor, the killing would continue and be accelerated.

01:54:36.640 | So the, the thing you mentioned initially is this sort of the idealist perspective of,

01:54:42.160 | well, Britain can't allow sort of, uh, this warmonger to break all these pacts and be undemocratic,

01:54:52.960 | you know, um, murder a large number of people and do

01:55:00.880 | conquest of territory. Okay. That's idealistic. But if we look at the realist perspective,

01:55:07.680 | what decisions would minimize the amount of suffering on the continent in the next 50 years?

01:55:16.160 | So one of the arguments that he's making, I happen to disagree with it, to put it mildly, is that

01:55:26.080 | Churchill increased the amount of suffering. So Churchill, Churchill's presence and decisions.

01:55:33.600 | So we're not talking about idealistic perspective. We're talking about realists, like the reality of

01:55:38.800 | the war, of Stalin, of, of Hitler, of Churchill, of, uh, of France and FDR.

01:55:48.240 | Did Churchill drag Hitler into a world war? Did he force Hitler to invade Soviet Union? Did he force

01:55:57.280 | Hitler to then invade, uh, attack Britain?

01:56:02.960 | Well, no, because, because Hitler was always going to invade the Soviet Union if, unless, unless the

01:56:07.840 | Soviet Union invaded Germany first. So that was always going to happen. Um, no one asked Hitler to

01:56:15.200 | invade the low countries and Norway and Denmark and attack Britain. Um,

01:56:23.520 | he does that of course, because he's not given a free hand in Poland, but there's no question that

01:56:30.080 | Hitler would have also wanted to subdue France or certainly turn France from a democracy into a

01:56:35.920 | totalitarian state as well. I'm absolutely certain about that.

01:56:39.200 | So I think there's pretty definitive evidence. I mean, it's obvious from everything he said,

01:56:43.600 | from everything he's written, from everything, everywhere that he was going to invade the Soviet

01:56:48.400 | Union, uh, no matter what. Yeah. And France, most likely. Yes. Also, he would have done a deal with

01:56:56.480 | Britain. Britain could have existed. So actually there is a, is there, there is a possible reality.

01:57:05.200 | I don't know. Maybe you can correct me on this where Hitler basically takes all of Europe except

01:57:10.080 | Britain. Yes. But then he would have got so strong that he would have then turned on Britain as well,

01:57:13.600 | you know, because he would, you know, the fear is that if you let him do this and then,

01:57:18.400 | then he gets greedy. He wants the next one. Then he wants the next one. Then he wants the next one.

01:57:22.240 | And you know, then he wants to take over the whole world. And you know, that is, that is the fear of

01:57:26.880 | the British. That is the fear of the Americans. That's the fear of President Roosevelt. He's got a

01:57:31.920 | very, we haven't even touched on this yet, but he has a very difficult, uh, um, case on his hands because

01:57:39.200 | he's come into power also in January, 1933, um, as president of the United States on an isolationist

01:57:47.760 | ticket with a retrenching, with a kind of sort of, you know, step away from the European old order.

01:57:52.800 | It's time for the Europeans sat on their own. Um, it all sounds very familiar right now. Um, and,

01:57:58.080 | and suddenly he's got to do this gargantuan political vault fast, um, and prepare the nation for

01:58:05.440 | war because he also fears like Churchill fears like most like Chamberlain feared as well.

01:58:09.840 | Um, the, that Hitler's designs are not purely on Eastern Europe and the Liebens from there,

01:58:17.600 | but would get ever bigger. And I don't, I don't doubt that they're right. I think if he'd prevailed

01:58:22.960 | in the Soviet Union, you know, he'd always wanted more, you know, because his whole concept is the

01:58:28.080 | master race, you know? Yeah. I think, I think it should be said if we measure human suffering,

01:58:35.040 | if there was not Britain on the other side, if it was not a two front war,

01:58:39.280 | that the chances of Hitler succeeding in the Soviet Union is much higher or at least a more

01:58:45.040 | prolonged war and there would be more dead and more enslaved and more tortured and all of this.

01:58:52.320 | Yes. And, and ditto if you, you know, if the, if the allies hadn't gone involved against Imperial

01:58:56.480 | Japan, you know, it would have been, would have been catastrophic. I mean, 20 to 30 million Chinese dead

01:59:03.440 | anyway, you know, with American and British intervention and it wasn't going to be in China

01:59:09.200 | without that. I mean, and elsewhere, you know, because, because the reason why Japan invades

01:59:15.360 | French Indochina now Vietnam, um, and Hong Kong and, um, and Malaya and Singapore and, uh, and so on

01:59:25.920 | and Burma is because it's not winning in China and it needs more resources because it's resource poor

01:59:32.720 | and America has cut off the tap. So it's going into these countries to, to get what it needs.

01:59:40.240 | It's rubber and oil and natural resources and oils, precious oils and all the rest of it.

01:59:46.000 | And if it had been unchecked, it would have done so. And then it would have absolutely

01:59:50.320 | built up its strength and overrun the whole of China with even more deaths. So,

01:59:55.600 | you know, I, I, I think there is, I think the, one of the interesting things about the second world war

02:00:00.640 | is, is lots of wars and why people get involved in them are extremely questionable. But I think there is

02:00:06.480 | a moral crusade to, to the allies and what they're doing that I think is entirely justified.

02:00:14.000 | What I think is interesting also is that as the war progresses,

02:00:18.240 | you know, if the allies are supposed to be on the force of the good, how come they're doing so much bad?

02:00:23.600 | And at what point is doing bad stopping you from doing good? And at what point are you doing good,

02:00:29.520 | but also doing bad at the same time, such as destruction of cities, um, destruction of

02:00:35.680 | monasteries on outcrops in Southern Italy, you know, destruction of killing of lots of civilians,

02:00:42.480 | et cetera, et cetera. You know, these are, these are difficult questions to, to answer sometimes.

02:00:49.840 | They're also incredibly interesting. And I think that moral component starts to blur a little bit by

02:00:56.320 | kind of middle of the war by 1943. You know, it's, it's kind of easy to have a, a fairly, uh,

02:01:01.840 | cut and dry, um, war in North Africa, in the deserts of North Africa, where, you know,

02:01:06.720 | the only people getting in the way are, are a few sort of Bedouin tribesmen or something.

02:01:10.400 | But, but once you start getting into Europe or getting into the kind of the, the meat of highly

02:01:15.280 | populated countries in the far East, um, for example, that's a different kettle of fish

02:01:20.560 | because the scale of destruction is absolutely immense, but it is also the job of, of political

02:01:26.800 | leaders, um, to look after and defend their own peoples first and foremost. And so what you're

02:01:33.520 | doing is you're trying to protect your own sovereignty, your own people before you're

02:01:37.600 | protecting other people. And so that's what leads to, you know, the whole way in which the allies are,

02:01:45.680 | the Western allies are protracting war is to try and minimize the number of deaths of their own young

02:01:51.040 | men as much as they possibly can whilst at the same time winning the war. And that means bringing lots

02:01:57.520 | of destruction to your enemies, but also trying to minimize it. And the way you bring lots of destruction

02:02:01.760 | by to your enemies is by using immense firepower and this concept of steel, not our flesh, which I

02:02:06.560 | mentioned earlier on and technology, um, so that you don't have to bring to bear too many of your

02:02:13.040 | young men's eyes. You don't have a repeat of the slaughter of the first world war. So, you know,

02:02:18.160 | it is really interesting that, that in, in our mind's eye, when we're thinking of, you know,

02:02:22.640 | the Western allies and the second world war, probably the first thing that comes into mind is Americans

02:02:28.080 | jumping out of landing craft on Omaha beach on D day, for example, those are infantrymen. They're the

02:02:33.600 | front line. They are the coal face of that. They're the first people going into the, into the fire of

02:02:38.160 | the enemy. And we tend to think about guys in tanks, um, infantrymen with their Garand rifles or,

02:02:44.960 | you know, machine guns or whatever. That's, that's what springs to mind. Yet actually they're a

02:02:49.200 | comparatively small proportion of the army. So no more than 14 to 15% of any army allied army is

02:02:56.000 | infantry. 45% are service corps, service troops, driving trucks and cooks and bottle washers and

02:03:02.560 | people lugging great big boxes of stuff, you know, and that's because by that stage, you know,

02:03:06.800 | the allies have worked out of the way of war, which is, is to, is to use is what I call big war,

02:03:11.520 | this concept of, of a very long tail logistics, the operational art, making sure that people have

02:03:17.680 | the absolute best you possibly can. Great medical care, huge advances in, in, in first aid and a

02:03:23.200 | medical care of troops, getting them back onto the battlefield and you're using firepower and

02:03:29.360 | technology and mechanization to do a lot of your hard yards. So, you know, that's the principle

02:03:35.520 | behind strategic bombing. You know, if you can, if you go over and bomb and you can destroy

02:03:39.520 | infrastructure and civilians and households, that makes it much harder for, for Krupp to make those

02:03:46.080 | panther tanks and tiger tanks or whatever it might be and guns. Uh, and you know, you're disrupting the

02:03:52.080 | transportation system in Germany, you know, you're making life difficult for them to do what they need

02:03:57.280 | to do. Then that means it's going to be easier for those 15, 14, 15% of infantry. And you've got to

02:04:02.240 | jump out of landing craft to do their job. And you're trying to keep that to a minimum. And you'd have to

02:04:07.040 | say, broadly speaking, that's a very sensible policy that makes an awful lot of sense. Um,

02:04:13.360 | consequence of that is a huge amount of destruction. And maybe that's what Daryl Cooper's driving at,

02:04:19.440 | but no one asked Hitler to invade Poland. I mean, you know, that is the bottom line. No one asked Germany

02:04:26.480 | to go to war. No one asked Hitler to come up with these ludicrous ideology. Yeah. There's complex ethical

02:04:32.240 | discussions here about, uh, uh, uh, just like, as you described, which are fascinating, which are

02:04:38.400 | fascinating and, uh, war is hell. And there's many ways in which it is hell. Uh, just for a little bit,

02:04:48.640 | the steel man, what, uh, Daryl is where he might be coming from is since world war II,

02:04:56.720 | the simplistic veneration of Churchill. So saying Churchill, good Hitler, bad has been used as a

02:05:07.040 | template to project under other conflicts to justify military, uh, intervention. And so his general,

02:05:16.720 | his and other people like libertarians, for example, resistance to that overly simplistic veneration of

02:05:24.720 | somebody like Churchill has to do with the fact that that seems to be by neocons and warmongers

02:05:31.360 | in the military industrial complex in the United States and elsewhere using Hitler way too much using

02:05:37.760 | Churchill way too much to justify invading everywhere and anywhere. Well, I do agree with that. I think

02:05:45.040 | oversimplification of anything is a mistake. You know, life is nuanced. The past is nuanced. It's okay to be

02:05:52.640 | proud about certain things and it's okay to be disgusted by other things. That's absolutely fine.

02:05:56.400 | You know, we have a complicated relationship with our past. It doesn't need to be black and white.

02:06:00.480 | And, um, you know, life is not a straight line. And of course there's the, you know,

02:06:05.040 | the allies make plenty of mistakes in, in, in world war II. Overall, I think they made the right calls.

02:06:10.240 | And I think one of the things that's really interesting is I think that the allies for the most part

02:06:15.840 | use their resources much more judiciously and sensibly than the axis powers do and, you know, good, um,

02:06:26.240 | because that means they prevail. I think, you know, there are so many lessons, um, from

02:06:31.280 | world war II that could have been brought into the last history of the last 30 years, which weren't,

02:06:37.040 | you know, such as, you know, if you have, if you, if you decapitate an incredibly strong leader,

02:06:43.760 | you get a power vacuum. And if you don't have a solution for that power vacuum,

02:06:47.280 | lots of bad elements are going to sweep into that in very quick order, which of course is exactly what

02:06:50.720 | happens in, in, in Iraq. So, you know, don't run. So I'm going, we don't do reconstruction where you

02:06:57.200 | freaking well should do, you know, this, this, if you're going to, if you're going to take on this,

02:07:02.000 | this particular challenge, you've got to see it through, you know, that's, that's simply not good

02:07:06.400 | enough. You know, it's not good enough to go into Afghanistan and go, okay, we're going to change

02:07:10.240 | things around. It's going to be great. You know, all the women are going to have education. They won't

02:07:13.840 | have to wear kind of, you know, uh, um, won't have to cover up their bodies anymore. Um, anything goes,

02:07:21.520 | we love liberalism. It's great. Um, let's make Kabul into a thriving city once more and then suddenly bug out.

02:07:27.760 | you know, cause what, what, what's going to happen? You're going to undo everything.

02:07:31.600 | And, uh, and I remember being in, you know, this is a bit of a segue legs, but I remember being in,

02:07:36.160 | in Northern Helmand province back in, you know, when it was January, 2008 and, uh, British troops had

02:07:42.720 | just taken over an absolute dump of a town called, um, Musakala. And I remember talking to this Afghan

02:07:50.080 | guy. He just had all his willow trees chopped down to make room for a helipad that the allies wanted,

02:07:55.120 | which said, you know, put that kind of surround, you know, those cages with kind of rubble in the

02:08:01.200 | protective wall. It's called Hescombe. I think it was called. Anyway, I said to him, what do you,

02:08:06.160 | what do you think about, about the British being there? And he just went, he shrugged at me and

02:08:09.680 | lifted up his hands and said, well, you know, if they stay great, but they won't. And, and he said,

02:08:16.320 | said, you know, if they stay, then brilliant. But he said, I'll tell you what, he said,

02:08:23.840 | leave my purse on a wall and no one would touch it. I could leave it on a wall for a week. No one

02:08:27.120 | would touch it. He said, said, will they bring that kind of order? You know, will, will we have,

02:08:32.480 | will we have peace here? You know, they've just chopped down my, my willow trees. You know,

02:08:37.520 | thanks a lot. And you, you know, you, you, you're seeing a total lack of understanding of the culture,

02:08:48.640 | ethnic differences. You're trying to impose a kind of Western centric view onto something,

02:08:54.480 | which is just some, you know, onto, onto, onto a, onto a nation, which isn't, isn't ready for that.

02:08:58.560 | Now, there are ways in which, you know, it looked like Afghanistan was starting to kind of emerge and

02:09:04.640 | there was a path. And then just at the critical moment, the West moves out with catastrophic

02:09:11.440 | consequences. What you have to say though, is that in the West post 1945, the rehabilitation of Italy,

02:09:21.200 | of Japan, of Western Germany was really good. You know, the consequence of, of all that destruction,

02:09:28.240 | all that turmoil was thriving, high producing democracies, which burst forth into the kind

02:09:38.160 | of second half of the 20, 20th century and into the 21st century in pretty good order. Um,

02:09:43.920 | so the lessons of the previous generation for the first world war had, had been, had been learned,

02:09:50.400 | even though the scale of destruction, the displacement of people is unprecedented in 1945.

02:09:56.080 | In 1939, what was the state of the militaries? What were the most powerful militaries on the

02:10:02.480 | world stage at that time? Well, um, in terms of naval power, it's Britain, as we've already

02:10:07.920 | discussed and, and, and the United States, uh, France has a pretty large Navy. Uh, Japan has a pretty large

02:10:13.120 | Navy. Italy has a pretty large Navy, but Italy's Navy is by far and away, it's most modern aspect of

02:10:18.480 | its three services, air, land and sea. Um, but it doesn't have any aircraft carriers and it doesn't have any

02:10:23.440 | radar. So, you know, it's, it's, it's, they've got modern battleships and battle cruisers, but without

02:10:29.200 | key modern bits of technology. So Italy is really not ready for. Oh, it's so not.

02:10:35.600 | It's so not. It's just, again, both Hitler and Mussolini, they, they lack geopolitical understanding.

02:10:43.120 | You know, that's because they're so kind of focused on their narrow worldview and they view everything

02:10:48.640 | through that prism, but they can't see that bigger picture.

02:10:51.520 | And we should say that Mussolini, maybe you can correct me, but I don't think at any point he wants

02:10:56.400 | a war. He doesn't want a war. What he does want is he wants his own new kind of Roman empire,

02:11:00.640 | which extends over the Mediterranean, the kind of certainly the Eastern part of the matter of half

02:11:06.080 | of the Mediterranean, North Africa, all the way down to kind of East Africa controlling the Suez

02:11:10.800 | Canal. That that's, that's what he wants. And I think you made clear that he was, I mean,

02:11:15.600 | there's always like this little brother jealous of Hitler kind of situation because

02:11:19.520 | he, he wanted absolute power the way Hitler did, but doesn't have it, doesn't have it.

02:11:25.520 | It's described. Yeah. There's a monarchy often forgotten. It's amazing.

02:11:31.680 | So there's always this limit and Hitler quite brilliantly. Once he gets some power, he takes it all

02:11:40.960 | complete. He completely emasculates Mussolini and yeah, he likes him though. It's really weird. Even

02:11:48.000 | when Mussolini is about to fall in July, 1943, he has a meeting at Feltre, um, just literally a few

02:11:55.760 | days before Mussolini tumbles. And he does that because he likes Mussolini. He likes him as a man and

02:12:02.240 | thinks he's been his friend. And, you know, he respects him to a certain extent, even though he's,

02:12:06.720 | he, he definitely views himself as top dog. Hitler does that is. Um, so it's kind of curious

02:12:12.800 | because I don't think Hitler particularly likes anyone really, but, but, but he does seem to like

02:12:17.200 | Mussolini. But anyway, the problem with Mussolini is Mussolini, Mussolini's Italy is, is very impoverished

02:12:22.400 | from the first world war, you know, and that of course leads to the rise of fascism and the overthrow of

02:12:27.440 | parliamentary democracy and, and why Mussolini takes place in the first place. You know, again,

02:12:33.760 | it's that kind of, there's been this terrible disruption. There's been financial crisis

02:12:37.280 | that leads to kind of people looking at an alternative, you know, what's the alternative?

02:12:43.600 | Well, Mussolini is going, you know, we can be proud Italians again, lots of chest thumping,

02:12:47.920 | you know, wearing great uniforms, all the rest of it. And people kind of think, well, you know,

02:12:51.120 | I'll have a piece of that and it kind of works and, you know, proverbially the trains work on time

02:12:56.000 | under him and, and so on and so forth, but he just gets ahead of himself, you know, and, and actually

02:13:00.320 | the writings on the war in 1935, when he goes into Abyssinia and, and, you know, again, sort of what

02:13:04.560 | effectively are kind of by first world European standards, privative tribesmen in, in, in Abyssinia,

02:13:12.400 | you know, they, they have quite a tough fight there. You know, they, they do prevail, but, but it's not

02:13:16.880 | a complete walkover and they get a bit of a bloody nose at times and they shouldn't have done. And

02:13:22.880 | they're just not ready. They don't have the industry. You know, they're, they're tied up into

02:13:27.360 | the Mediterranean. They don't have access to the world's oceans. They do have some merchant shipping,

02:13:31.200 | but not a huge amount. Um, you know, they just don't have what is required. They don't,

02:13:36.000 | they're dependent on Britain for coal. Britain is the leading coal exporter in the world in the 1930s.

02:13:41.680 | So Britain's approach to fascist Spain and approach to fascist Italy has been very much

02:13:49.360 | sort of stick and carrot. It's like, you know, we'll let you do what you do as long as you kind of

02:13:53.840 | stay in your box and, and, and, you know, we'll continue to provide you with supplies and coal and

02:13:59.680 | whatever it is you need, as long as you don't

02:14:04.320 | kind of go too far. And so that's why Mussolini is very anxious in 1938. And again, in 1939,

02:14:11.760 | to kind of be the power broker and kind of not let Germany go to war. But Germany's just, you know,

02:14:16.160 | they, they, they signed the, the axis pact of steel in May, 1939, where they become formal allies.

02:14:21.760 | This is Hitler and Mussolini, Italy and Germany, but it's always a very, very unequal partnership,

02:14:26.960 | right from the word go. And one of the reasons Mussolini signs it is because he fears that Germany has

02:14:32.320 | designs on Italy. Yeah.

02:14:34.800 | It's not because he thinks, oh, these guys are great. We, you know, there are natural bedfellows.

02:14:39.360 | It's so that he can, what, what it's a mutually convenient pact whereby Germany gets on with whatever

02:14:46.320 | it wants to do up in Northern Europe and Eastern Europe. Italy is given a free hand to do whatever

02:14:50.960 | it wants to do. They'll just kind of watch each other's backs. They have borders, you know,

02:14:54.960 | Austria and Italy border one another, um, and they'll just do their own thing and they'll kind of help

02:15:00.000 | each other out with supplies and stuff. Um, but, but basically they won't, they'll, they'll,

02:15:04.480 | they'll be their own. It's, it's a kind of marriage of convenience. You know, they're never expected to

02:15:10.160 | be fighting alongside each other on the battlefield. Not really. There is a kind of obligation to do so,

02:15:15.360 | but, but it's, it's, it's an obligation with no expectation of ever actually happening.

02:15:19.520 | And so from Miss Mussolini's point of view, the pact of steel is, is kind of, you know,

02:15:23.520 | it's just sailing your flag to one particular mass and kind of trying to cover your, cover your back.

02:15:28.640 | And so long as he plays his cards, right, you know, he can, he can still get his coal supplies from

02:15:34.240 | Britain. He doesn't have to worry about that. You know, the pact of steel doesn't make any difference to

02:15:37.840 | that. The problem for him is, is that in June, 1940, he thinks that France is about to be defeated

02:15:45.840 | and the Britain will surely follow. And so he thinks, ah, I've got some rich pickings. I can take Malta,

02:15:50.560 | or I can take British possessions. I can overrun Egypt. And, you know, now is my time, but I, I also

02:15:56.160 | need to kind of join the fight before France is completely out of the fight. Otherwise it looks like

02:16:00.240 | I'm a Johnny come lately. And I won't, I won't get those spoils because the Germans will go, yeah,

02:16:03.920 | you can't have all this stuff. You've turned up too late. You need to be in the fight. So he does it.

02:16:07.840 | What he thinks is the perfect timing. And it turns out to be a catastrophic timing because of course,

02:16:11.760 | Britain doesn't exit the fight. You know, Britain is still there. And, you know, by February, 1941,

02:16:17.440 | a very, very tiny British army in Egypt has overrun, you know, two entire Italian armies and taken 133,000

02:16:24.400 | prisoners in North Africa. - So you mentioned in the sea, uh, who were the dominant armies who were,

02:16:31.120 | who was dominant in the air? - Well, in the air, it has to be the Luftwaffe. Uh, and it is also the

02:16:36.320 | Imperial Japanese, both in the Imperial Japanese Navy and the Imperial Japanese army that they both have

02:16:41.760 | air forces. And one of the reasons that is because the quality of the pilots in Japan is extremely high

02:16:47.600 | because it's so difficult to get, to get to the top position. You know, you are going to your frontline

02:16:53.680 | squadrons with at least 500 hours in your logbook. To put that into some perspective, you know,

02:16:58.640 | a British RAF or Luftwaffe pilot would be joining their frontline squadrons with 150 to 170 hours in

02:17:04.960 | the logbook. So it is that these guys are disciplined within an inch of their lives. Um, they are, you know,

02:17:13.520 | there are academic tests as well as physical endurance tests. You know, they are the elite of the elite and

02:17:19.360 | they are extremely good. The problem they have is that there is a good number of them,

02:17:24.080 | but there's not that many. The Luftwaffe is, is the largest air force in the world in 1939,

02:17:31.360 | but it is already at a parity when in, in aircraft production with Britain. Um, and

02:17:37.280 | the French have a kind of similar size army, but they're very, very badly organized. So they're also,

02:17:42.320 | they're organized into different regions and they, one region doesn't re is not really talking to

02:17:46.960 | another. And one of the problems that when case yellow, the invasion of German invasion of the

02:17:51.200 | West starts, France's army of the air is spread throughout France and has its own little area.

02:17:56.320 | So you have one bunch of, you know, fighters and bombers in that block in, you know, in the Marseille

02:18:01.600 | area, you have another block in kind of, you know, on the Brittany coast, and you have another block in

02:18:06.080 | around Sudan and you have another that. So, so consequently, they're never be there. They're

02:18:10.160 | never able to kind of bring their full strength to bear. So it's, although, although they've both got

02:18:14.640 | about three and a half thousand aircraft on paper and about two and a half thousand that are fit to

02:18:20.240 | fly on any one given day, the Luftwaffe, because they're the aggressor can choose how they mass their

02:18:27.520 | aircraft and where they attack and at when. So in other words, you can send, the Luftwaffe can send

02:18:32.560 | over overwhelming amounts of bombers and fighter planes and pulverize a French airfield and catch

02:18:38.080 | them napping. And because the French don't have a defense system, they can't see whether they're

02:18:42.720 | coming. So their only hope is to kind of take off and just hope they stooge around the sky and hope

02:18:46.880 | they bump into some Luftwaffe. And of course that's inherently inefficient and they get, you know,

02:18:51.520 | they get destroyed and they get destroyed in, in penny packets rather than on mass difference with

02:18:57.360 | the RAF is, is the RAF is not done on an air force basis where you have each air corps or air fleet

02:19:04.800 | has a handful of bombers, a handful of fighters, a handful of reconnaissance planes. They have different

02:19:11.600 | commands. So they have bomber command, fighter command, training command, cursor command, and they

02:19:15.760 | all have very specific roles. So they're, they're structured in a completely different way.

02:19:19.920 | And the other different, and that's because they're an island nation and because they see

02:19:25.360 | their role militarily in a, in a, in a different way. And because the rearming that Britain has done

02:19:30.400 | in the 1930s is all about defense. It is not about aggression at this point, not about taking it to

02:19:36.080 | the enemy. It is, it is showing you're tough, but also first and foremost, getting your ducks in a row

02:19:41.200 | and making sure that you don't get defeated. So this is the principle behind the, the first,

02:19:46.080 | the world's first fully coordinated air defense system, which is the radar chain. It is the observer

02:19:50.400 | core. It is control rooms. It is interesting technology, such as identification friend or foe,

02:19:56.560 | IFF, which is where you have a little pulse, which, so you have these control rooms and you have a map

02:20:02.240 | table and you have a tote board in front of you where you can see what squadrons are airborne,

02:20:06.720 | what state of readiness they're at, you know, whether they're engaging the enemy, little lights come on

02:20:10.560 | and show you can see weather maps. You can see, see the cloud ceiling. You see all that at glance,

02:20:15.200 | then you're on a dais. And then down in front of you is a massive, great map of Southern England.

02:20:19.840 | You've got croupiers, got a moving plots. So you can, through a combination of radar,

02:20:25.040 | which picks up a kind of a rough idea of what's coming towards you, combined with the observer core,

02:20:31.280 | you have overlapping observer core stations all over Britain, covering every single inch of air space

02:20:36.560 | over Britain, looking up into the air and seeing how many aircraft there are and at what height they

02:20:42.880 | are. And you have a little thing called a pantograph, which is a piece of equipment which helps you judge

02:20:47.360 | altitude. You then ring through that. That all comes into the control room, along with the information

02:20:54.880 | from the radar stations, which is going into a single filter room at Fighter Command headquarters,

02:20:59.840 | which is then being pushed straight back out to the sector stations. So this information is being

02:21:05.040 | updated all the time. So you have a plot and it looks like it might be, you know,

02:21:08.640 | enemy bombers, 30 plus, for example. That's constantly being adapted. So as more information

02:21:16.240 | comes in, you will change that. And then you can see that actually it's only 20 aircraft or 22 aircraft

02:21:20.880 | or whatever. So you're updating that and that little figure is put on the, on your little plot and moved

02:21:25.840 | across. And so you can see, and then because you can identify your own aircraft, you can then see where

02:21:31.840 | they are moving. And you're also on, um, the guys in the air are on the radio to ground controllers who

02:21:38.560 | were in these control rooms and they're saying, okay, well, if you proceed at, you know, angels,

02:21:43.360 | 18, 18,000 feet, you know, on a vector of, you know, 150 degrees, you should be seeing your enemy bombing

02:21:51.440 | formation any moment now. And what that means is that you're not on the ground when the enemy are coming

02:21:57.440 | towards you with their bombers to hit your airfield, which means you're in the air so that all they're

02:22:01.600 | doing is hitting a grass airfield, which you've already got bulldozers and diggers and graders

02:22:08.000 | and lots of scalpings and earth ready to fill in the potholes. And it means you're good to go.

02:22:13.360 | And it means as a consequence of all that, when the Germans do, um, launch their all out assault on

02:22:18.880 | Adler tag Eagle day on the 13th of August, 1940, the British are ready. You know, they're,

02:22:24.480 | they can see them coming. They know what to expect and they can anticipate. And it means

02:22:28.800 | that they're not being caught with their trousers down on the ground. And as a consequence of that,

02:22:33.600 | of the 138 airfields that are in, um, RAF airfields that are in Britain, only one of them is knocked

02:22:39.040 | out for more than 48 hours in the entire summer of 1940. And that's Manston on the tip of the Kent coast,

02:22:45.680 | uh, which is abandoned for the duration.

02:22:48.080 | So these are the two biggest air forces.

02:22:50.800 | So those are the two biggest efforts.

02:22:52.160 | So Luftwaffe, we should say German. I mean, they're like the, uh, the legendary, the terrifying

02:23:00.240 | air force.

02:23:01.600 | They are maybe, maybe they're slightly believing their own hype. There's no question about it.

02:23:07.920 | Well, the rest of the world is also right.

02:23:09.520 | They've just had it too easy. So they don't have, they don't have ground controllers. They don't have

02:23:12.800 | an air defense system in, in, in Germany, because why would you need an air defense system? We're

02:23:16.960 | going to be the aggressor. You know, there's, there's no scenario where we'll have to defend

02:23:21.280 | the airspace of the third Reich because we're on the offensive. So they just haven't prepared it.

02:23:27.200 | So there's that clash, the battle of Britain, the clash of air forces.

02:23:30.880 | What explains the success of Britain in defending?

02:23:35.760 | Well, it's, I mean, you know, and everyone always says, you know, the, the few were the last,

02:23:39.920 | you know, the last line of defense against the Nazi hordes and all this kind of stuff. And it's just,

02:23:43.840 | it's all rubbish. Uh, they're the first line of defense. Second line of defense is the Royal Navy,

02:23:49.520 | which is the world's largest. And there is absolutely no chance on earth that a German

02:23:54.880 | invasion force made up of Rhine river barges. One of, out of every three is motorized and the

02:24:01.440 | other two aren't is ever going to get successfully across the English channel. And even if they did,

02:24:06.480 | they will be repulsed. I mean, they just, it's just no chance. And it is often forgotten that while the

02:24:12.240 | the Luftwaffe is coming over and bombing Britain every single day, so is the RAF going over and

02:24:16.560 | bombing Germany. And one of the problems that the Germans have is, is that these bombers need

02:24:22.240 | fighter protection. You know, fighter planes are there to protect the bombers and they don't have

02:24:27.760 | much fuel. And the Messerschmitt 109E, the MEL as a model is of 1940 is the mainstay of the German

02:24:34.160 | fighter force in the summer of 1940. And they don't have much fuel. So they need to conserve their fuel,

02:24:41.840 | which means they need to be as close to Britain as they possibly can, which is why the majority of

02:24:45.520 | them are all in airfields, which are hastily created in July, 1940, following the fall of

02:24:49.600 | France in the Pas de Calais, which is the closest point. You know, that's where the channel is,

02:24:53.520 | it's narrowest and all the rest of it. And also in the Northern Normandy. And that's where they're

02:24:58.400 | flying from. But what that means is that even if you're completely rubbish at bombing, which the British

02:25:03.680 | are in 1940, they haven't developed those navigational aids that create untold accuracy by the end of the

02:25:10.240 | war. In 1940, they don't, they don't have that luxury. It's a target rich environment. I mean, you know,

02:25:15.840 | you can barely miss if you go over to the, you know, over to the, over to the Palakala. I mean,

02:25:19.760 | it's literally, it's just like one huge, great kind of hub of, of fighter airfields. And consequently,

02:25:24.400 | that means that every single German squadron, which only is 12 airplanes strong on, on establishment,

02:25:29.920 | and very often even fewer than that, always has to leave two airplanes behind to defend their own

02:25:35.040 | airfields. And it's really interesting when you look at kind of prisoner of war statements from,

02:25:38.480 | from Luftwaffe crown crew that have been downed, they're all bugs at a holding place called Trent

02:25:42.960 | Park. You can see the transcripts of these conversations. They're all going about how

02:25:46.000 | annoying it was that the ROF were over every night and they can't sleep. And you know, when they,

02:25:50.240 | if only they just shut up and leave them alone and not bomb them. And you know, this is just part of

02:25:54.400 | the narrative of the Battle of Breton that's completely left out. It's always the stocky,

02:25:58.400 | you know, the plucky few against the kind of the, you know, the Nazi hordes and all the rest of it.

02:26:02.480 | And it's just, it's a complete misnomer. And by that time, aircraft production in Britain is

02:26:06.880 | massively outpacing the Germans. And the best ratio that the Germans achieve in 1940 is July 1940,

02:26:15.440 | when the British produced 496 new Hurricanes and Spitfires single engine fighters, and the Germans only

02:26:23.120 | produced 240 single engine fighters. That's the best ratio. And of course, you know,

02:26:27.040 | that is the British outproducing the Germans two to one. And what that means is by the end of October,

02:26:33.360 | 1940, when the Battle of Britain is sort of, you know, officially designated as being over,

02:26:39.360 | the single engine fighter force of the Luftwaffe is less than 200 from 750 or whatever it was in

02:26:45.040 | the beginning of July. Whereas the British fighter force had been 650 or whatever at the beginning of

02:26:51.280 | July is now well over 750.

02:26:53.120 | And Britain is outproducing.

02:26:54.960 | Yeah, to a massive degree. And that continues. And you know, that is a ratio that just increases as the

02:27:02.960 | war progresses. I mean, Britain produces 132,500 aircraft in the Second World War. America produces 315,000.

02:27:12.320 | So why is there this legend of the Luftwaffe?

02:27:15.920 | Well, because it's the spearhead of the Blitzkrieg.

02:27:18.880 | So it has to do with the Blitzkrieg.

02:27:20.320 | It's all to do with the Blitzkrieg. The Luftwaffe becomes the kind of the bogeyman

02:27:25.200 | of the Third Reich. You know, they're blamed for everything, but that's because they're completely abused.

02:27:29.440 | They're the only part of the Third Reich's armed services, the only part of the Wehrmacht,

02:27:34.160 | the Wehrmacht being the Navy, the Army and the Air Force, that is in constant use the whole time,

02:27:43.200 | or constant abuse, I should say. In Britain and America, they rotate their pilots really,

02:27:49.520 | really carefully. By the time that, you know, you've got the Eight Fighter Command, for example,

02:27:55.200 | part of the Mighty Eighth, the Eighth Air Force operating in Britain. By the end of 1943,

02:28:00.080 | you would have in a squadron that would have 16, you would never have more than 16 airborne from

02:28:04.640 | a squadron at any one time. You would have 40 to 45 pilots to service 16 in the air and similar

02:28:12.080 | number of aircraft, which means you're not overusing these guys. And what would happen is by that stage

02:28:17.120 | of the war, by 1943, you know, a young fighter pilot coming to a Thunderbolt squadron or a Mustang

02:28:22.640 | squadron, for example, at the end of 1943, beginning of 1944, he'd have 350 hours of consecutive

02:28:29.920 | flying. And because you can train in America, in Florida, or California, or Texas, or wherever,

02:28:36.480 | you can process many, many more people because the training is much more intense, because you've got

02:28:41.680 | clear skies. So, you know, it's not a question of, oh, we'd like to take you out, Fritz, this morning,

02:28:47.040 | but, you know, it's a bit cloudy, and oh, the RAF are over, or, you know, the Air Force are over,

02:28:52.000 | so we can't fly today. So, in Germany, pilot training is constant, air crew training is constantly being

02:28:58.240 | interrupted by the war, by shortage of fuel, by inclement weather, et cetera, et cetera.

02:29:03.920 | In America, you have none of those problems. And Britain, because of its global reach, also has

02:29:08.320 | training bases in what was Rhodesia and Zimbabwe and South Africa, in Canada as well. And so you're

02:29:14.880 | able to process these guys much better. You're able to give them more training. So that when they come,

02:29:19.360 | they're absolutely the finished article as pilots. What they're not the finished article as is, say,

02:29:23.360 | a bomber pilot or as a fighter pilot. But that's okay, because you join your squadron of 40 other guys,

02:29:30.400 | for 16 airborne. And the old hands kind of take you up a few times. So you arrive at,

02:29:35.680 | I don't know, let's say, some airfield in Suffolk, in East Anglia, in England. And, you know,

02:29:42.320 | you'll have 10 days to two weeks acclimatizing, getting used to it. You know, the old hands will

02:29:47.040 | put you through your paces, give you some tips. You can pick their brains during kind of while you're

02:29:52.080 | having some chow and listening on some briefings. Then the first mission you do will be a milk run over

02:29:58.000 | to France, where the danger is kind of pretty minimal, you know, and you can build up your

02:30:02.480 | experience. So by the time you're actually sent over on a mission to Berlin or Bremen or, you know,

02:30:08.400 | the Ruhr or whatever, you're absolutely the business. So qualitatively and quantitatively,

02:30:14.080 | you are just vastly superior to anything the Luftwaffe's got. The Luftwaffe, by that stage, in contrast,

02:30:20.960 | 1940, new pilots coming to frontline squadrons with 150, 170 hours in their log books. Less than 100,

02:30:28.640 | 100, 90, 92 hours, something like that. It's not enough. And they're just being flung straight into

02:30:34.320 | battle and they're getting absolutely slaughtered. And they're also, because their machines are quite

02:30:38.800 | complicated. There's no two-seaters really. So no two-seater trainers. So the first time you're flying

02:30:44.720 | in your Focke-Wulf 190 or your Messerschmitt 109, it's this horrendous leap of faith for which you as a

02:30:52.000 | young, bright Luftwaffe fighter pilot know that you're not ready for this. And it can bite you. And

02:30:58.560 | something like a Messerschmitt 109 has a very high wing loading. So it's very maneuverable in the air,

02:31:05.280 | but it's got this tiny wings. It's got this incredible torque, this Daebler-Benz DB605 engine

02:31:10.400 | with its huge amount of torque. And it just wants to flip you over. So if you're not used to it,

02:31:14.640 | and it's got a narrow undercarriage as well, if you're not used to it, you could just crash. So

02:31:19.120 | in the first couple of months of 1944, they lose something like 2,400 aircraft in the air and pilots,

02:31:26.880 | and about 3,400 accidents. So it has to do with training, really?

02:31:32.000 | Yeah. Not training enough.

02:31:33.680 | It's training and resources and supply. And the Second World War, more than any other conflict,

02:31:41.600 | is a war of numbers. There are differences, the decisions that generals can make. There are

02:31:48.240 | moments where particular brilliance and bravery can seize the day, take the bridge,

02:31:56.880 | hold the enemy at bay or whatever. But ultimately, you're talking about differences which might make

02:32:03.040 | a month's difference, six months difference, maybe even several years difference. But ultimately,

02:32:08.000 | there's a certain point in the Second World War where the outcome is absolutely inevitable because

02:32:14.480 | the guys that lose can't compete with the numbers that the guys are going to win at half.

02:32:18.720 | So in that sense, you could think of World War II as a battle of factories.

02:32:24.800 | What does it take to win in the battle of factories and out-manufacturing military equipment

02:32:34.000 | against the Allies?

02:32:36.080 | It's efficiency, really. So I was kind of, you know, I was thinking, let's take the example of

02:32:41.120 | the Sherman tank, for example, the mainstay of the Western Allied forces and a fair number of them sent

02:32:46.400 | to the Soviet Union as well, for that matter.

02:32:48.320 | I think you've said it doesn't get the respect it deserves, maybe.

02:32:52.160 | It doesn't get the respect it deserves. So the Sherman tank, the 75-millimeter main battle gun,

02:32:56.880 | which is a sort of medium velocity, can fire a shell around kind of 2,000 feet per second,

02:33:01.280 | compared to the notorious, infamous German 88-millimeter, which can fire at kind of third

02:33:06.720 | fast again, like 3,000 feet per second. But on paper, a Tiger tank coming around the corner

02:33:14.560 | and a Sherman tank coming around the corner, it should be no match at all. Tiger tank is 58 tons,

02:33:21.920 | looks scary, is scary. It's got a massive gun, got really thick armor. Sherman tank doesn't have

02:33:27.040 | as thick armor. It doesn't have a gun that's as big. It should be an absolute walkover. And yet,

02:33:32.400 | at about 5:30 PM on Monday, the 26th of June, 1944, a Sherman tank came around the corner of a road

02:33:39.280 | called a Rue Monsieur, a little village called Fontenay-la-Pesnel in Normandy, came face-to-face

02:33:44.000 | with a Tiger tank and won. How does this happen? Well, I'll tell you how it happened, because the

02:33:50.240 | commander of the Sherman tank was experienced, had one up the spout. So what I mean by that is he had

02:33:55.040 | an armor-piercing round already in the breach. As soon as he saw the Tiger tank, he just said fire.

02:33:59.760 | That armor-piercing round did not penetrate the Tiger tank. It was never going to. But what it did do

02:34:04.800 | was it hit the gun mantlet, which is a bit of reinforced steel that you have just as the barrel

02:34:10.160 | is entering the turret. And that caused spalling, which is the little shards of little bits of molten

02:34:15.680 | metal, which then hit the driver of the Tiger tank in the head. And he was screaming, you know,

02:34:21.040 | "Gotton Himmel" or whatever, and couldn't really see. The moment they got hit, the commander of the Tiger

02:34:27.440 | tank retreated into the turret of the Tiger. The moment you retreat into a turret, you can't see.

02:34:33.520 | You can see because you've got periscopes, but your visibility is nothing like as good as it is

02:34:38.400 | when you've got your head above the turret. Immediately after that, the armor-piercing round

02:34:44.400 | from the Sherman tank was repeated by a number of high explosive rounds, which are rounds which kind

02:34:49.840 | of, you know, detonate, have a little minor charge. Then there's a second charge, which creates lots of

02:34:53.760 | smoke. And in moments, in the first 30 seconds, 10 rounds from that Sherman tank had hit the Tiger tank

02:34:59.920 | before the Tiger tank had unleashed a single round itself. And the crew then surrendered.

02:35:08.160 | So you didn't need to destroy the Tiger tank, you just need to stop it operating. If it hasn't got a

02:35:11.680 | crew, it's just a chunk of metal that's inoperable. So that's all you need to do. And what that tells

02:35:18.800 | you is that experience counts, training counts. The agility of the Sherman tank also counts.

02:35:26.000 | It's a smaller shelf, therefore it's easier to manhandle, which means you can put more in a breach quicker.

02:35:30.720 | There's features on a Sherman tank, like it's the first tank to have a gun stabilizing gyro,

02:35:35.440 | which means it's more effective on the move. There's also an override switch on the underside

02:35:39.200 | of the turret so that the commander, if he just sees something out of the corner of his eye,

02:35:42.080 | can immediately start moving the turret before the gunner, who is down in the belly of the turret,

02:35:46.240 | can react. There's many different facts of it. But the main fact of all is of 1,347 Tigers built,

02:35:54.480 | there were 49,000 Shermans. So that means there's 36 Shermans to every single Tiger.

02:35:58.720 | Marc Thiessen: So you actually have an incredible video, you talk about this a lot from different angles,

02:36:04.800 | about the top five tanks and the bottom five tanks of World War II. I think,

02:36:10.720 | was it the Tiger that made both the top five and the bottom five?

02:36:13.600 | Marc Thiessen: The problem with the Tiger tanks is it's really huge.

02:36:15.360 | Marc Thiessen: We should say that you keep saying the problem, but one of the pros of the Tiger tank

02:36:20.240 | Marc Thiessen: It's very huge.

02:36:20.960 | Marc Thiessen: It's, I mean, the psychological warfare aspect of it is terrifying.

02:36:25.120 | Marc Thiessen: Yes.

02:36:25.520 | Marc Thiessen: So I don't know what the other pros, I mean, I guess, yeah, the 88 millimeter.

02:36:30.720 | Marc Thiessen: 5 plus D and all the rest of it. You know, it's pretty fearsome, but there are,

02:36:34.480 | there are pragmatic problems. The big problem is that the Germans are incapable of mass production

02:36:40.400 | on a scale that Americans can do. Frankly, even the British can do. I mean, they're just not in that

02:36:44.960 | league. The reason they're not in that league is because they're in the middle of Europe. They

02:36:48.560 | don't have access to the world's oceans. They don't have a merchant fleet. They can't get this stuff.

02:36:52.320 | Marc Thiessen: It hasn't gone terribly well in the Soviet Union. They can't process it and they're

02:36:56.320 | being bombed 24 hours a day. And so all their factories are having to split them all up. And

02:37:02.480 | that is inherently inefficient because then having to kind of move different parts around and then

02:37:07.680 | having the whole process of having to travel from one place to another to get stuff. You haven't got

02:37:12.080 | much fuel. So the consequence of that is that what you do is you think, okay, we can't mass produce,

02:37:17.440 | so let's make really brilliant tanks. But they've lost sight of what really brilliant is. You know,

02:37:23.760 | really brilliant to their eyes is big, scary, big gun, lots of armor. But actually, what conflict

02:37:32.560 | in World War Two shows you is that you need more than that. You need ease of maintenance. You need

02:37:38.560 | reliability. And the problem with having it, the bigger the tank, the more complex the maintenance

02:37:45.520 | equipment is. You know, you need a bigger hoist, which then means you need a bigger truck, which then

02:37:49.200 | needs more fuel. So for example, the Tiger tank is so big that it doesn't fit on the loading gauge of

02:37:54.720 | the European railway system. So they have to have different tracks to roll onto the wagons that will

02:38:01.200 | then transport them from A to B, you know, take them from West Germany to Normandy. Then they have to take

02:38:06.560 | them off. Then they have to take off the tracks, put on combat tracks, then move them into battle and

02:38:11.200 | hope that they don't break down. The problem is when you have, you start the war, it's not very

02:38:16.880 | automotive and you've only got 47 people for every motorized vehicle in Germany compared to three in

02:38:21.840 | the United States or eight in France, is that you've got lots of people who don't know how to drive. You

02:38:26.720 | also means you haven't got lots of garages and mechanics and gas stations and so on. And so you're

02:38:35.440 | then creating an incredibly complex beast, but you want that complex thing to be as simple as you possibly

02:38:40.560 | can be. And that's the beauty of the Sherman tank. You know, all those guys in America, they're used to

02:38:45.200 | driving stick cars, you know, one of three people for every automobile, you know, and that includes,

02:38:50.000 | you know, the old and children. So almost, you know, every young man knows how to drive.

02:38:54.400 | And when you get into a Sherman tank, it's got a clutch, it's got a throttle, the brakes are the

02:38:58.320 | steering mechanism. The clutch is where you would expect the clutch to be. It's got a manual shift.

02:39:03.920 | You put your foot on the clutch and you shove it into second gear and off you go or reverse or

02:39:08.240 | whatever. And it literally can be easier. Anyone who could drive a stick car could drive a Sherman tank.

02:39:12.160 | Seriously. Not everyone can drive a Tiger tank. It's incredibly complex. Really, really is. That comes

02:39:19.120 | with a whole host of problems. And of course, you don't have the numbers. You don't have the numbers.

02:39:26.400 | You know, you've got 1,347 of them. You've got 492 King Tigers, which are even bigger. And, you know,

02:39:33.120 | at a time where you are really short of fuel, you're really short of absolutely everything.

02:39:37.360 | And those shells are huge and they're harder to manhandle. And weird little things that the Germans

02:39:42.240 | do, you know, for all their design genius, the loader is always on the right-hand side. Now,

02:39:46.720 | in the 1920s and 19-teens and 30s, children were taught to be right-handed. You weren't allowed to be

02:39:53.440 | left-handed. So you were right-handed. So you want to be on the right-hand, left-hand side of the gun.

02:39:59.040 | So you can take the shell from your right and swivel it into the breech from your right side.

02:40:05.040 | But the loader in a yak pamphlet or pamphlet or tiger is always on the right-hand side of the

02:40:10.720 | breech, which is ergonomically makes no sense whatsoever. Why do they do this? I've never found

02:40:16.080 | an answer to this. But, you know, so there's all these little things. And as a soldier coming up

02:40:21.280 | against, you know, you're an American GI and you're coming up against a tiger tank. You don't care about

02:40:26.800 | the fact that it's difficult to maintain or the problems involved of trying to get it to the

02:40:31.120 | battlefield. All you care about is this monster coming in front of you.

02:40:34.720 | It's squeaking and clanking away and it's incredibly scary and it's about to blow you to bits.

02:40:39.120 | That's all you care about and quite understandably so. But those who are protracting the war at a higher

02:40:44.480 | level and historians that come subsequently and look at all this stuff, they do need to worry about all

02:40:49.840 | these things. And I remember the same Georg Thomas, the architect of the hunger plan.

02:40:54.800 | I found this minutes of this meeting, which I think was either on the 4th of December or the 5th of

02:41:00.880 | December 1941. So it's just before the Red Army counterattacks outside Moscow in the winter of 1941.

02:41:07.680 | And it's a meeting about weaponry. And this is a verbatim quote. He says, "We have to stop making

02:41:15.520 | such complete and ascetic weapons." In other words, we've consciously be building over-engineered and

02:41:23.680 | aesthetically pleasing weapons up until this point. And they sort of half manage it, but don't quite.

02:41:30.880 | We could probably talk for many hours about each of these topics. We could talk for 10 hours about tanks.

02:41:37.680 | I encourage people to listen to your podcast, World War II Pod. We have ways of making you talk. It's great.

02:41:47.360 | Yeah, we also do. We've got a new YouTube channel and website called World War II Headquarters.

02:41:53.360 | There are lots of walking the ground and videos of that and all sorts of stuff and little explainers of

02:42:01.440 | going around tanks and stuff and the weaponry and documents and photographic archives.

02:42:08.000 | So the idea is to sort of turn it into a kind of real hub of anyone who's interested in this subject.

02:42:13.120 | It's a place where they can go and find out just a whole load more.

02:42:16.880 | I love it. So like I said, we could probably talk for many hours on each of these topics,

02:42:20.880 | but let's look at some of the battles and maybe you can tell me which jumps out at you. I want to talk to you about

02:42:27.040 | the Western Front and definitely talk about Normandy.

02:42:32.880 | So there's the Battle of Midway in 1942, which is a naval battle. There's Eastern Front, Stalingrad,

02:42:40.400 | probably the deadliest battle in human history. Then there's the Battle of Kursk, which is a tank

02:42:48.320 | battle, the largest tank battle in history, probably the largest battle period in history. 6,000 tanks,

02:42:56.720 | 2 million troops, 4,000 aircraft. And then that takes us also to the Battle of the Bulge,

02:43:02.400 | and Normandy, the Italian campaign that you talk a lot about. So what do you think is interesting to

02:43:07.680 | try to extract some wisdom from? Before we get to Normandy, do you find as a historian the Battle of

02:43:17.840 | Kursk or the Battle of Stalingrad more interesting? Stalingrad is often seen as the turner.

02:43:23.120 | Well, yeah, I think so. I mean, it's really interesting. So they get through 1941. Barbarossa

02:43:32.000 | doesn't happen as the Germans hope it will. The whole point is to completely destroy the Red Army

02:43:37.280 | in three months, and that just doesn't happen. And I think you can argue and argue convincingly that by,

02:43:42.720 | let's say, the beginning of December 1941, Germany is just not going to win. It just can't.

02:43:51.200 | And let me tell you what I mean by that. So if you take an arbitrary date, let's say the 15th of June,

02:43:56.240 | 1941, Germany at that moment has one enemy, which is Great Britain, albeit Great Britain plus Dominion

02:44:02.800 | Empire. Fast forward six months to, let's say, the 16th of December. It's got three enemies. It's got

02:44:10.480 | Great Britain, Dominion Empire, USSR, and the USA. It is just not going to win. For all the talks of

02:44:19.360 | wonder weapons and all the rest of it, it's just not going to. It has lost that battle. Having said that,

02:44:25.040 | the Soviet Union is still in a really, really bad situation. It is being helped out a huge amount by

02:44:35.600 | supplies from the United States and from Britain. You know, just unprecedented amounts of material

02:44:40.480 | being sent through the Arctic or across Alaska into the Soviet Union at that time. It is absolutely

02:44:47.840 | staggering how much it's committed by Roosevelt and Churchill to try and stem the flow in the Soviet

02:44:56.160 | Union. Because for all the announcements and the pride that the Soviet Union has about moving factories to

02:45:02.720 | the other side of the Urals and stuff, which they do in 1941, huge amounts are overrun intact by the

02:45:09.520 | Germans in the opening stages of Barbarossa. I mean, really, you know, colossal losses. Huge amounts.

02:45:15.280 | So, you know, the grain has gone, coal has gone, entire factories have gone, steel production goes

02:45:20.880 | down by kind of, you know, 80% in the Soviet Union in 1941 and into 1942. So in 1942, despite the vast

02:45:27.840 | amount of numbers of men that they have at their hands, I mean, they create 80 new divisions in the

02:45:33.200 | second half of 1941, for example. I mean, Britain never has 80 divisions in the entire Second World War,

02:45:38.560 | division being about rule of thumb, 15,000 men. So, you know, despite that, and that is because

02:45:45.680 | Stalin's meddling, the woeful state of the Red Army in 1941, et cetera, et cetera, which we've already sort

02:45:52.240 | of touched upon. So 1942, it's still in a really bad way, but Germany's in a really bad way too.

02:45:57.840 | It's the attrition it's suffered in 1941. It's winning itself to death in 1941. So it's having

02:46:05.440 | these huge great encirclements like the encirclement of Kyiv in September 1941, you know, capturing the

02:46:10.560 | further kind of best part of 700,000 Red Army troops, et cetera, et cetera. But in the process of doing that,

02:46:16.000 | it is constantly being attrited, you know, both in battle casualties, but in also mechanical casualties

02:46:21.520 | too. Just can't cope. The scale is just too big. And what happens is, with every moment that the

02:46:31.440 | German forces, that ultimate victory slips away, so Hitler's personal handling of the battle increases.

02:46:39.920 | And, you know, you can say what you like about him, but he just hasn't had the military training to do

02:46:46.320 | that. He might have amazing attention to detail. He might be able to understand, you know, have an

02:46:50.880 | enormous capacity to remember units and where they are on a map, but he was only a half corporal in the

02:46:57.680 | First World War. He's never been to staff college. You know, he might have read lots about Frederick

02:47:02.400 | the Great. I mean, I've read lots of history, but that doesn't mean to say I'd be a competent

02:47:05.760 | field marshal. So he is not the right person for the job at all. And he micromanages and he looks at

02:47:12.240 | diggers and figures and doesn't understand what it's like at the actual front, the coal face.

02:47:16.560 | So he's stifling the very thing that made the German army effective, which is the ability to give

02:47:23.440 | commanders at the front the freedom on their leash to be able to make decisions and battle command

02:47:28.080 | decisions. And he's taken that away from them. So he's basically making them go into battle

02:47:32.320 | with decreasing amounts of supplies and firepower and with one hand behind their back in terms of

02:47:39.920 | decision-making process. And that is not a good combination. The other problem is that he decides,

02:47:44.080 | rather than going for Moscow in 1942, because basically there's a kind of cooling off period

02:47:48.000 | in the, in the winter because of the conditions, but everyone knows the Soviet Union. No, the Red

02:47:52.240 | Army knows that the moment springs come, there's going to be another offensive, but another major

02:47:56.560 | offensive in the summer. That is absolutely as certain as, you know, day following night, et cetera.

02:48:02.160 | The problem that the Germans have is they just don't have enough. They have less than they had

02:48:06.960 | when they launched Barbarossa the previous year. The Soviet Union has more. It is better prepared. It

02:48:13.040 | knows what's coming now. It's kind of learning some of the lessons, starting to absorb the lessons.

02:48:17.840 | Stalin, coincidentally, is pulling back from his very tight leash and the way that Hitler is doing the

02:48:24.160 | the opposite and increasing his micromanagement and control for recovery. And what Hitler decides is

02:48:30.720 | rather than going for Moscow, he's going to go for the oil fields. And this is absolutely insane because

02:48:35.760 | what's going to happen when they get to the oil fields? I mean, does he think really that the Soviet

02:48:41.360 | Union are going to let those oil fields come into German hands intact? Even if he does let them get in

02:48:47.600 | intact, what are they going to do with that oil? I mean, oil needs to be refined. Where are you going

02:48:53.760 | to refine it? You know, they don't have any oil. They don't have many oil refineries. How are you going

02:48:58.480 | to ship that oil to where you need it to be in the factories and the Third Reich and into your, you know,

02:49:04.480 | process it into gasoline and then get it and diesel and get it to your U-boats, get it to your tanks,

02:49:10.960 | get it to your armored units? How are you going to do that? How do you transport it from the

02:49:14.800 | from the Caucasus, which is a long, long way away from, from Berlin? How are you going to do that?

02:49:20.160 | There's no pipelines. There's only some pipelines. They've been built by American money and American

02:49:24.720 | engineering, and they're going backwards towards the Urals, not forwards. They have no more rail

02:49:29.520 | capacity whatsoever. They just don't have the oil tankers. So it's just, it's, it is absolute la la

02:49:36.400 | land. It is incredible that when you look at the detailed literature that the Germans have, no one is

02:49:42.480 | asking this question in the, in the spring and early summer of 1942.

02:49:46.320 | The logistics question in part.

02:49:47.840 | No one is saying, okay, it's great that we're going to go to the Caucasus and get all this oil,

02:49:51.760 | but then what? No one is asking that question.

02:49:54.800 | Nor how do you provide resources and feed and the soldiers and all that kind of stuff.

02:49:59.120 | Right. I mean, it's...

02:49:59.840 | So, so the case blew, first of all, they get distracted by going into the Crimea and they go,

02:50:04.080 | well, we've got to do that first. So they have to get Sevastopol and the Crimea, which they do.

02:50:09.920 | And then they have to push on. And at this point, suddenly looming in front of them is Stalingrad,

02:50:16.400 | on the banks of the Volga, this, this city, this industrial city, which has Stalin's name.

02:50:22.320 | And Hitler goes, okay, what I'm going to do now is I'm going to split my forces. So half of you can

02:50:27.520 | go south towards the Caucasus and the rest of you can confront Stalingrad.

02:50:30.560 | And on box, just to see who's the commando just goes, that's nuts. That makes no sense whatsoever.

02:50:36.800 | You know, you're, you're, you're splitting the mission. So he fires him. So suddenly they get,

02:50:43.440 | get into this assault for Stalingrad and it becomes this sort of street fight. Street fighting is the

02:50:49.920 | worst kind of fighting. I mean, the reason why the Israelis have just blown everything up in,

02:50:53.920 | in Gaza is because otherwise you can't see, you know, you need a field of fire. This is a fighting up in a,

02:50:58.720 | fighting in a buildup area is, is horrendous. Yeah. To clarify, we're talking about urban

02:51:02.960 | warfare, door to door, building to building. It's incredibly difficult. And home advantage

02:51:07.680 | is colossal in this, this instance. And of course it's piping hot when they attack in kind of August

02:51:12.960 | into early September, and then it suddenly gets very, very cold. And at the same time, American

02:51:18.000 | mechanization and slightly a British mechanization, but primarily American trucks are enabling Zoukov to

02:51:25.600 | to plan this great pincer movement. So it is, you know, and, and Russians will hate me for saying

02:51:31.280 | this. Um, and I probably will get a whole load of bots on the back of it, but, but, but the truth is,

02:51:36.720 | is it is not the street fighting that destroys sixth army. It is the encirclement, the subsequent

02:51:44.640 | encirclement. So they've, the Germans have been sucked into this street battle in Stalingrad.

02:51:49.520 | We cannot give up. We cannot give up. We cannot give up. We cannot back down. We cannot pull out.

02:51:53.520 | We've got to, we've got to destroy this city. Meanwhile, while their backs are turned and while

02:51:58.080 | most of their forces are going off to the Caucasus on a wild goose chase for absolutely zero oil,

02:52:03.600 | instantly, um, and they never get remotely close to Baku, this huge great pincer movement is, is,

02:52:10.080 | is being planned and it is only possible through mechanization from the United States.

02:52:16.160 | And that is the big turning point because from that moment onwards, the Germans are on the back foot.

02:52:23.760 | They're basically going backwards. There are little small counterattacks. There is obviously the curse

02:52:28.560 | salient, for example. Um, but it's, it's, it's game over. You know, the, the catastrophe of the

02:52:35.280 | surrender of the final. So I mean, the writings on the wall at the end of 1942, but by November 1942,

02:52:40.320 | when the, when the, when the, uh, the two, um, Soviet fronts meet up, then, then, you know,

02:52:45.840 | there is no possible chance of escape for sixth army. They are consigned. They are toast.

02:52:52.480 | And their final surrender obviously happens at the very beginning of February, 1943,

02:52:56.080 | but that's all over. And then at the same time that that is happening, disaster is unfolding in North

02:53:01.520 | Africa because Hitler has insisted on massively resupplying the Mediterranean theater. And the

02:53:08.880 | problem there is the amount of equipment that is lost in North Africa is greater than it is at

02:53:13.520 | Stalingrad. I don't think you could argue that psychologically Tunisia is a greater loss than

02:53:20.640 | Stalingrad. It absolutely isn't, but you have to see them in tandem as this is two fronts. This is

02:53:25.760 | Eastern front, Southern Western front. And this is the first time that the Americans have been on the

02:53:31.440 | ground against access forces and they lose big time. The allies become masters of the North African

02:53:37.360 | shores on the 13th of May, 1943. And it is a catastrophe. And in that time, 2,700 aircraft have

02:53:43.440 | been Luftwaffe aircraft have been destroyed over North Africa between November, 1942 and May, 1943.

02:53:50.640 | And overall, there's subsequent that summer as well. It's really interesting. The Luftwaffe loses between

02:53:56.080 | June and October, 1943. So this is including the Kursk battle, which takes place in July, 1943.

02:54:03.040 | In that period, the Luftwaffe loses 702 aircraft over the Eastern front, but 3,704 aircraft over the

02:54:12.000 | Mediterranean. So I think one has to also, one of the lessons about studying the Second World War is

02:54:17.120 | one has to be careful not to assign strategic importance to boots on the ground. It can be of

02:54:23.600 | great strategic importance, but not necessarily. You know, no one would argue, for example, that the

02:54:28.480 | Guadalcanal is not an absolutely game-changing battle in the Pacific War. And yet the number of

02:54:34.880 | troops compared to, you know, what's going on in the Eastern front or even, you know,

02:54:37.840 | the Western front is tiny in comparison. So it is absolutely true that the most German blood is lost

02:54:46.080 | on the Eastern front, but that doesn't mean to say that it's more strategically important than the

02:54:50.560 | Western front. And it's not saying that the Western front is more strategic either. It's just,

02:54:55.440 | you have to kind of be balanced about this. The psychological blovo of Stalingrad is immense

02:55:00.320 | and you, you cannot belittle that.

02:55:02.160 | I mean, there's the, we went over it really fast, but there is a human drama element.

02:55:06.800 | Yes.

02:55:08.240 | But yes, when we're talking about the operational side, the material loss of a battle is also

02:55:14.880 | extremely important to the big picture of the war. And we often don't talk about that

02:55:20.800 | because of course with war, the thing to focus on is the human drama of it.

02:55:25.360 | And I also think that what's interesting is the, is the Nazi high command's response to Stalingrad,

02:55:33.040 | which is not to go, we're screwed. It's to double down. It's, you know, then, so, so Goebbels,

02:55:39.040 | for example, gives his infamous speech in the sports palace and third week of February, 1943, where he

02:55:44.800 | goes, are you ready for this? You know, this is now total war. The war is coming. This is a fight for

02:55:50.960 | survival. We're all in it together. You are in this as well. You know, every single one, every single

02:55:56.640 | German is now, this is a fight for survival. And we are now in total war. And, and everyone is just so

02:56:05.040 | depressed by this. I mean, they realize that there is, that they have, they, they will, are going to

02:56:11.440 | reap what they have sown, you know, because everyone knows what's been going on in the Eastern front,

02:56:15.760 | because first part of the war, Germans have loads and loads of cameras. They're really into photographing

02:56:20.320 | everything, taking Sydney footage of everything. So part of recording the greatness of the Reich and the

02:56:24.640 | triumphs of the Reich, they want it recorded. So all this stuff is a bit like the radios is made very,

02:56:28.480 | very cheap. So lots of having, and people are sending it all back. And, you know, the people that are

02:56:33.280 | developing this stuff are all seeing it and people are talking about it. And then it's been sent to

02:56:36.480 | families and they're all seeing it and they're seeing pictures of Jews being rounded up and beaten.

02:56:42.560 | And they're seeing, um, Ukrainian partisans being executed and they're seeing villages being torched.

02:56:50.240 | And everyone knows they all know. Yeah. This whole idea is, you know, do they really know what was going

02:56:57.280 | on? Yeah, they do. They do know what's going on, you know, to lesser or greater detail.

02:57:03.120 | Well, of course, you know, there's some people who don't. And, you know, and a bit like people know about the news today.

02:57:07.680 | Some people do, some people don't. Oh, I never read the newspaper. I never listen to the news.

02:57:10.880 | You know, so you, you have that of course, but, but, but it is widely understood and widely known that

02:57:17.760 | really brutal things have been going on in the Eastern and troops coming back utterly traumatized by what they have

02:57:25.120 | taken part in, what they have witnessed, the kind of unspeakable brutality. This is war on a completely different level to anything

02:57:32.320 | that's been kind of seen in recent years. Yeah. We should, we should mention that,

02:57:36.480 | you know, the Western front and the Eastern front are very different in this regard.

02:57:40.560 | Yes. So a lot of the Holocaust by bullets, the Holocaust with the concentration camps and

02:57:44.880 | extermination camps is not in Germany. It's not in the Western front. It's in Poland. It's in the Soviet

02:57:52.960 | Union. Yeah. But don't forget that even Auschwitz, for example, is part of the new Reich. It is part of,

02:57:59.760 | you know, it is part of an area which has been absorbed into Germany. So as far as they're

02:58:03.920 | concerned, this has now got, you know, it's now no longer got the Polish name. It's now called

02:58:08.000 | Auschwitz, which is a German name. It is part of Germany. And there are German people moving there

02:58:12.480 | into this, you know, air comma model town and they all know exactly what's going on.

02:58:18.480 | Yeah. You, by the way, have a nice podcast series of four episodes on Auschwitz,

02:58:24.080 | um, the evolution of the dream world town that becomes a camp, a work camp,

02:58:33.840 | then becomes an extermination camp and a big Boona factory for IG Farben, which never produces a single

02:58:40.240 | bit of rubber. So this for sure is, uh, something I would have to dive deep in. There's a book you

02:58:48.480 | recommended KL. Yes. It's just called KL. It's about the, the whole concentration camp system. Um,

02:58:55.200 | cause K is concentration, um, in German Lager is a, is a camp. Um, it's a, it's an exhaustive book and

02:59:03.360 | I'm, I'm full of admiration for him for, for writing it just because jeepers, it must have been sort of,

02:59:09.360 | I mean, I, I was very depressed doing that work on Auschwitz, that deep dive. I just found the whole

02:59:14.320 | thing utterly dispiriting. Um, and I've been there a few times and it's ghastly. Um, so how he wrote a whole

02:59:20.080 | book on it. I don't know. I think in the details, there's a, there's two ways, I think, to look at

02:59:26.560 | the Holocaust. One is, uh, man's search for meaning, but Viktor Frankl sort of this philosophical thing

02:59:34.000 | about how a human being can confront that and find meaning and what it means. What,

02:59:39.680 | what does the human condition look like in the context of such, uh, evil? And then there is the

02:59:47.040 | the more sort of detailed, okay, well, how, how do you actually implement something like the final

02:59:54.560 | solution? So you have this ideology of evil implemented. Yes. And at the fine detail of what,

03:00:03.280 | what are the different technologies used? What are the different humans and the hierarchy of humans in

03:00:09.600 | a camp? How do they, what's the actual experience of the individual person who shows up at a camp?

03:00:15.520 | Yeah. Just get in the details. And in those details, I think there's some deep,

03:00:20.240 | profound human truth that can emerge that the, the mundane, um, one step at a time is how you can

03:00:27.920 | achieve evil. Yep. So you can get lost in the mundane. It's yes. The banality of evil. It's, um,

03:00:35.920 | it's incredible. I, I think, I think what, what is so,

03:00:40.320 | so completely horrific is, is that, you know, you know, half the 6 million were killed by kind

03:00:45.680 | of bullets to the back of the head. And the reason they stopped doing that and they wanted to stop

03:00:50.400 | doing that was because the guys, the perpetrators were finding it so traumatic, you know, Himmler goes

03:00:55.760 | and visits, uh, um, uh, an execution in Ukraine and, or maybe he's in the Baltic States. I can't

03:01:00.880 | remember where he goes, but he, but he, we witnessed some in the, you know, in the summer of 1941, he

03:01:04.400 | thinks, oh, that's horrible. You know, they don't have to do that. I don't want my men having to do

03:01:07.680 | that. I've got to find a more humane way of doing it. When he's talking about more humane way of doing

03:01:11.120 | it, humane for the, for the executors, executioners, not, not for the victims because

03:01:17.920 | trust me, cyclone B is not a nice way to go. You know, it basically, basically it's bursting all

03:01:22.720 | the capillaries in your lungs. It's extremely painful and, and you, you can no longer breathe

03:01:27.360 | and it can take up to 20, 25 minutes. You know, some people that can take a couple of minutes,

03:01:31.920 | but all of those who are standing naked in that gas chamber, first of all, extremely humiliated by

03:01:37.520 | this process in the first place. Then there's a sudden realization of the, that they're not having

03:01:42.560 | a shower. They're actually being gas and they're all going to die. Imagine what you're thinking.

03:01:47.440 | as that processes you, because you might be the first, but you're still going to,

03:01:51.040 | even the first person is going to know that I can't breathe and I'm, I'm dying. Everyone else

03:01:55.360 | is going to see the first few dying and then going to realize that is what's going to happen to them.

03:01:59.600 | And you've got those minutes, sometimes many minutes where you've got to contemplate that,

03:02:05.840 | that, and that's, that's in extreme pain and panic. And just think about how cruel that is.

03:02:13.440 | : While being humiliated all the way through.

03:02:17.040 | : While being humiliated all the way through. And so the inverted commas, humanity of, of,

03:02:24.320 | of the gas chambers is anything, but it's disgusting. And the fact that people could do this is just

03:02:31.280 | beyond horrific. And then the fact that you are taking your Jewish prisoners and getting them to cut off all

03:02:38.160 | the hair, pull out the teeth of the dead before you put them on a lift and incinerate them. If you go to

03:02:45.920 | Auschwitz now and you go to the collapse of the blown up gas chambers, which the Germans destroyed before

03:02:50.080 | the Russians overran them in January 45, you can still see some of the ash ponds and there are bits

03:02:56.480 | of bone there, but still there from the ash. It's just, it is utterly repulsive. And imagine arriving

03:03:04.800 | from that train on that incredibly long journey where you've had no comforts whatsoever. You've had,

03:03:08.240 | again, you've had humiliations and privations that, you know, the privations you've had to suffer

03:03:12.400 | as a result of that, you know, having to kind of defecate in a bucket in the corner in front of other

03:03:16.640 | people. It's just horrendous. And then you get there bewildered and immediately your kids are

03:03:21.360 | taken away from you or your, you know, husband and wife who've been married 20 years. They're

03:03:24.800 | separated just like that, sent off into different groups, straight to the gas chambers. I mean,

03:03:29.200 | you know, it is, the scale of cruelty is so immense. It's hard to fathom. And the thing that I find really

03:03:36.400 | difficult to reconcile, and this is where I think that, you know, the warning from history is important,

03:03:42.400 | is that Germany is such an amazing nation. You know, it's, it's, it's the, it's the country of

03:03:47.920 | Beethoven and Strauss and, and of Goethe and incredible art and culture and, and, and some of the greatest

03:03:58.160 | engineers and scientists have ever lived. And look how quickly it flipped into the descent of

03:04:05.680 | unspeakable inhumanity, which manifests itself in the Holocaust and the gas chambers and the executions

03:04:14.000 | into pits and tiny places and creeks in Lithuania or Ukraine or whatever. I mean, it's, it's, it's just

03:04:23.840 | horrendous. And, you know, this is from a nation, which a decade earlier had been a democracy.

03:04:29.440 | It seems like as a human civilization, we walked that soldier in instant line between good and evil.

03:04:33.920 | Yeah.

03:04:34.320 | Uh, it's, it's a thin line and we have to walk it carefully.

03:04:39.360 | Yes.

03:04:39.760 | So I, one of the great battles in, uh, in World War II on the Western front is Normandy.

03:04:50.240 | I have to talk to you about Normandy, uh, D-Day, the Normandy landings, the famous on June 6th,

03:04:57.680 | 1944. This was a allied invasion of Nazi occupied Western Europe. What was the planning and those

03:05:05.360 | lengthy planning? What was the planning? What was the execution of the Normandy landings?

03:05:09.360 | Well, the decision to finally go into the, when the Americans joined the war in December 1941,

03:05:15.280 | there's the Arcadia conference a few days later, a week later between the British chiefs of staff

03:05:20.160 | and political leaders in Churchill and Roosevelt and his own chiefs of staff about what the policy

03:05:25.680 | should be. And the policy is to get American troops over to Europe as quickly as possible,

03:05:29.680 | get them over to Britain, get them training, um, and get them across the channel ASAP

03:05:34.320 | and, and start the liberation of Europe. But the reality is that, that, that in 1942,

03:05:40.640 | the Americans just aren't ready. You know, they've gone from this incredibly tiny army. They're still

03:05:43.680 | growing. They've got no battlefield experience. The British are still recovering the, you know,

03:05:48.320 | they're, they're good on the naval power. They're kind of increasingly good on air power. Um, but, but,

03:05:53.040 | but land power, they've had to kind of make up from the loss of their ally France and, and expand as

03:05:59.360 | well. So kind of ground zero for both America and Britain has been kind of June 1942.

03:06:04.240 | 1940 when France is out and suddenly that's the strategic earthquake. And that's the,

03:06:09.840 | the issue that needs settling. And they need to just completely realign everything that they'd,

03:06:14.400 | they'd fought in 1939. They've got to start again, but it's also becomes clear that it's,

03:06:18.800 | they're not really ready in 1943 either. And one of the problems is, is that Molotov, who is the

03:06:24.560 | Soviet foreign minister has come over to Britain in May, 1942 and said, you know, we need you to kind

03:06:28.880 | of do your bit and get on the, get on the, on the campaign trail against the Germans and fight on the

03:06:33.440 | ground. And the British sort of go, well, yeah, but you know, cross-trail elevation is not really

03:06:36.480 | going to happen. We know we're doing that in North Africa at the moment. And then he goes over to

03:06:40.240 | Washington and, and, um, and the Americans go, you know, we are definitely going to go and take on the

03:06:44.880 | attack to the, uh, the Germans in 1942. They've made this promise. So the summer of 1942, it becomes

03:06:49.600 | clear that they can't keep that. So Churchill says, well, look, I've got, here's an idea. You know,

03:06:53.600 | we're in, we've got already got an army in, in Egypt. Why don't we land another one in

03:06:57.360 | Northwest Europe? We can Northwest Africa. We can, that's run by Vichy France, which is pro

03:07:02.000 | Axis French, um, colonies. Um, why don't we take that and we can do that. And then we can meet in

03:07:08.560 | the middle. We can pincer out and we can conquer the whole of North Africa. You can kill with two

03:07:12.240 | birds with one stone because you can get some experience fighting against Axis troops, you know,

03:07:16.240 | test some of your, your, your, your equipment and commanders, you know, what's not to like, and then

03:07:21.120 | we can sort of see how it goes. So this is a kind of opportunistic strategy. Whereas Americans are very much

03:07:25.760 | sort of, you know, we, we want to draw a straight line to Berlin and that's the quickest way. And

03:07:29.280 | let's do, do it that way. So it's kind of a different viewpoint and, but Roosevelt kind of

03:07:34.480 | gets that and agrees to that. So that's where the whole North Africa Mediterranean campaign comes from.

03:07:39.680 | And as a consequence of the huge commitment to Tunisia, you know, three and a half thousand aircraft,

03:07:44.400 | huge navies, you know, two army allied armies, um, in North Africa, by the time Tunisia is one in

03:07:50.800 | mid May, 1943, they think, well, we've got all this here. We might as well kind of really try

03:07:54.560 | and get put the nail into the coffin of Italy's war, get them out of the battle.

03:07:57.920 | You know, Sicily is an obvious one. Let's go in there and then we can take a view.

03:08:00.960 | But between Sicily happening and the fall of North Africa is the Trident conference in Washington. And

03:08:06.960 | that is where the decision is made. The Americans go, okay, enough of this opportunistic stuff.

03:08:12.080 | let's just, okay, we get it. We buy it, but no more faffing around, you know, May, 1944,

03:08:19.360 | one year hence, we are going to cross the Atlantic and the British go, okay, fair cop, we'll do that.

03:08:24.320 | So, so that is where Operation Overlord, as it becomes, gets given its code name,

03:08:29.600 | its operational name. That's when the planning starts. Serious planning starts at the beginning

03:08:34.320 | of 1944. And one of the lessons from Sicily to Normandy is that you can't have commanders fighting

03:08:41.680 | one battle whilst preparing for the next one. So you have to have a separate, um, uh, command structure.

03:08:46.880 | And that's okay because by this time we've got enough people that have got experience of battlefield

03:08:51.040 | command that you can actually split it. There are very good reasons for going into Italy,

03:08:54.960 | not least getting the Foggia airfields so that you can further tighten the noose around Nazi Germany.

03:09:00.560 | And one of the great prerequisites for the Normandy invasion is total control of air power of the air,

03:09:05.680 | of the airspace, not just over Normandy, but over a large swathe of Northwest Europe.

03:09:10.960 | Why is that? Because the moment you land in Normandy, the cat is out of the bag

03:09:16.160 | and it's then a race between which side can build up men and material quickest.

03:09:20.560 | Is it going to be the allies who've got to come from Southern England, which is a distance of

03:09:24.560 | a slow journey across seas and the distance between kind of 80 and 130 miles away?

03:09:30.560 | Or is it going to be the Germans that are already on the continent?

03:09:33.520 | Well, clearly on paper, it's the Germans. So you have to slow up the Germans. Well, how do you do that?

03:09:37.600 | We do that by destroying their means of getting there. So bridges, destroy the bridges over the Seine,

03:09:43.680 | destroy all the bridges over the Lavoie, hit the marshaling yards. The German, the glue that keeps

03:09:48.080 | the German war machine together is the Reichsbahn, the German railway network. So destroy the railway as

03:09:53.440 | much as you possibly can and make it difficult for the Germans to reinforce the Normandy British head

03:09:58.480 | as and when it comes. But the way you do that in turn is by very low level precision bombing,

03:10:03.360 | and that has to be done by twin engine, faster, smaller bombers going in low. But the problem is,

03:10:09.200 | is you can't go low and destroy those bridges if you've got Fockelwolves and Messerschmitts hovering

03:10:14.160 | above you. So you've got to destroy those, which is why you need to have air superiority over this large

03:10:19.200 | wave of Northwest Europe to do that. The problem is that while the industrial heartland of Nazi Germany is

03:10:25.840 | in the West is in the Ruhr era, which is very convenient for bombers coming out of Lincolnshire

03:10:30.880 | or East Anglia on the east flat, east side of, of Great Britain, the aircraft industry is much deeper

03:10:37.760 | into the Reich and it is beyond the range of fighter escorts for the bombers. And the American daylight

03:10:43.840 | bombers who are going over are discovering that despite being called flying fortresses, they're not fortresses,

03:10:49.200 | they're actually getting decimated. And whenever their bombers go in strength over to try and hit the

03:10:55.120 | aircraft industry in Germany, beyond fighter range, they get decimated. First, infamously on the Schweinfurt

03:11:01.040 | Regenburg's raid on the 17th of August 1943, coincidentally the same day that Sicily falls to the Allies,

03:11:06.800 | and also coincidentally the same day that face-to-face negotiations begin with the Italians for an armistice in

03:11:12.640 | Lisbon. But on that day of the 324 heavy bombers that the Americans send over to hit Schweinfurt and Regensburg,

03:11:19.040 | whether a Messerschmitt plant and also a ball bearing plant, which is essential for aircraft manufacturing,

03:11:24.880 | they lose 60 shot down and a further 130-odd, really, really badly damaged. And even for the vast

03:11:31.200 | numbers of manpower and bombers that are coming out of America, this is too much. So they can't sustain

03:11:38.880 | it. So they've got to find a fighter escort that's going to be able to escort them all the way into the

03:11:42.880 | into the Reich, and the race is on. Because basically, if they haven't got one airspace by April 1944,

03:11:48.560 | it's game over. You can't do a cross-channel invasion. You have to have that control of the

03:11:53.440 | airspace beforehand. So the race is on. Unfortunately, they come up with a solution, which is the P-51 Mustang,

03:11:58.640 | which has originally been commissioned in May 1940 by the British, developed from sketches to reality in

03:12:04.160 | 117 days. It's a work of absolute genius. But start off its harness with a really bad engine.

03:12:09.040 | The Allison engine is just not right for that aircraft. And it's not until a Rolls-Royce Merlin,

03:12:14.480 | which is the same one that powers the Lancaster, the Mosquito and Spitfire and Hurricane, is put into the

03:12:19.040 | P-51 Mustang that suddenly you've got your solution. Because that means it can now fly with extra drop

03:12:24.720 | tanks and fuel tanks. It's so aerodynamic and it's so good, the higher it goes with this engine,

03:12:30.880 | the more fuel efficient it becomes. It can actually fly over 1,400 miles, which gets you not just to

03:12:35.520 | Berlin and back, but to Warsaw and back. So suddenly, you've got that solution. And actually, by April 1944,

03:12:41.280 | they have cleared airspace. And by the end of May 1944, just on the eve of the invasion,

03:12:45.600 | Operation Overlord, the closest German aircraft that is seen fighting allied aircraft is 500 miles.

03:12:54.560 | from the beachhead. So it is absolutely job done. Meanwhile, new fighter, comparatively new

03:13:00.720 | ground attack fighter planes like Typhoons and Tempests and adapted P-47 Thunderbolts are attacking

03:13:08.720 | the German radar stations all along the coastline, because they now do have an air defense system.

03:13:13.280 | They're destroying kind of 90% of their effectiveness. And in the intelligence game,

03:13:20.160 | they're winning that one as well. They're just much better because in Germany, intelligence is

03:13:24.400 | power. So Hitler always has this kind of divide and rule thing going on. So you have parallel command

03:13:29.680 | structures, which is not conducive to bringing together of intelligence. And while much play

03:13:34.240 | has been made about the successes of Bletchley and code-breaking and all the rest of it, actually,

03:13:38.720 | what you have to do is you have to see the kind of the decrypts that the Bletchley cryptanalysts do

03:13:43.440 | as just a cog. And those various cogs together from listening services to photo reconnaissance to agents

03:13:50.640 | on the ground, the cogs collectively add up to more than some of their individual parts.

03:13:55.440 | And so the intelligence picture is a broad picture rather than just code-breaking. But anyway, they win

03:14:00.720 | that particular battle as well. And what you see really with D-Day is, I think, is the zenith of

03:14:06.240 | coalition warfare. What you've got is you've got multiple nations who have different overall aims,

03:14:12.720 | different cultures, different attitudes, different start points, but they have all coalesced into one

03:14:19.600 | common goal. And until they've achieved that common goal, they're going to put differences to one side.

03:14:25.440 | You know, much play has been made about kind of anglophobia amongst American commanders and

03:14:30.800 | Americophobia amongst British commanders, but actually it's nothing. It's a marriage made in

03:14:35.840 | heaven compared to the way Germany looks after its own allies, for example. And what is remarkable

03:14:42.000 | about the allies is they're not actually allies, they're coalition partners. So there's no formal

03:14:47.520 | alliance at all. And there is a subtle difference there. But what you see them is that you see them

03:14:54.960 | really, really pulling together. And you see that manifest itself on D-Day, I think, where you've got,

03:15:00.960 | you know, 6,939 vessels, of which there are 1,213 warships, 4,127 assault craft, 12,500 aircraft,

03:15:12.080 | you know, 155,000 men landed and dropped from the air in a 24-hour period. It is phenomenal. It is

03:15:21.040 | absolutely phenomenal. And while it is still seen as a predominantly American show, all three service

03:15:26.640 | commanders are British. It is most of the aircraft, two-thirds of the aircraft are British. Two-thirds

03:15:33.840 | of the men landed are British in Dominion. You'll never forget the Canadians who consistently punch

03:15:38.640 | massively above their weight in the Second World War. In all aspects, it has to be said, air, land,

03:15:43.280 | sea. They're key in the Battle of the Atlantic. They're key in air power. They're key at D-Day,

03:15:49.200 | and indeed in the Battle for Italy as well. So the Canadians should never be forgotten.

03:15:53.200 | But one of the reasons it is the British Navy that dominates in D-Day is because, of course,

03:16:02.080 | the incredibly enormous strength of the Royal Navy in the first place, but partly because most of the

03:16:08.160 | US Navy is by this stage in the Pacific fighting its own fight. So it's not slacking by any stretch

03:16:12.880 | of the imagination. It is because it's elsewhere doing its bit for the kind of overall ally cause.

03:16:18.480 | But D-Day is just extraordinary, you know, and despite the terrible weather,

03:16:22.640 | which is such a debilitating factor in the whole thing. I mean, it puts people off course. It means

03:16:28.160 | many more people get killed on Omaha Beach than they might have done and on other beaches besides,

03:16:32.240 | incidentally. And actually, in terms of lives lost, proportionally, it is the Canadians that

03:16:36.560 | suffer the worst, more so than the Americans. It's just there's fewer of them overall.

03:16:41.520 | D-Day has to be seen as an unqualified success. I mean, it is absolutely extraordinary what they

03:16:47.920 | achieve. And while they don't 100% achieve their overall D-Day objectives, you know, the objectives

03:16:53.360 | are always going to be the outer reach of what is, is, can be, can be achieved. And you'd need

03:16:58.720 | absolutely perfect conditions for that to happen. And they don't get perfect conditions, but they're

03:17:03.760 | so balanced. They're so thought of absolutely everything and their logistics supply. And I mean,

03:17:09.280 | even things like the minesweeping operation is the biggest single minesweeping operation of the entire

03:17:13.200 | war, because there's huge minefields off the Normandy coast and ahead of the invasion force,

03:17:18.560 | the minesweepers, which amount to I think something like 242 different minesweepers in five different

03:17:24.240 | operations opposite every single beach, creating lanes through these minefields through which the

03:17:29.680 | invasion force can go. Not a single ship is lost to a mine in the actual invasion. That is phenomenal

03:17:35.840 | and can only be done with the greatest of skill and planning. And all in a period where, you know,

03:17:41.600 | there are no computers, there's no GPS, there's nothing. I mean, it is, it is absolutely astonishing.

03:17:46.320 | And the scale of it is just frankly, mind boggling.

03:17:49.600 | Yeah. And that was really the, the nail in the coffin, the beginning of the end for, for Hitler,

03:17:57.680 | for the European theater.

03:18:00.240 | Yeah. Once you get the, the only cause for doubt is will they be able to secure that bridgehead?

03:18:05.360 | The moment they get that bridgehead, it is game over. There's only, you know, there is,

03:18:10.720 | there is no other way it's going to be because of the overwhelming amount of men and material that

03:18:15.520 | the allies have compared to the Germans at this stage of the war. And of course, you know,

03:18:19.280 | you're being attacked on three fronts because there's the Italian front to the south. And of course,

03:18:22.960 | in a very major way, you've also got the Eastern front and operation for Gratian,

03:18:26.960 | which has launched that, that summer as well is enormous.

03:18:32.080 | So let's go to the very end. Uh, the battle of Berlin. Yeah. Uh, Hitler sitting in his bunker,

03:18:40.480 | his suicide, Germany surrender. You actually said that downfall, the movie was a very accurate

03:18:48.400 | representation. I think it is really, except the Goebbels took sign. I didn't shoot himself.

03:18:52.320 | I don't know details, but I think it's probably, it might be my favorite, uh, World War II movie,

03:19:00.560 | which is strange to say, cause it's not really about World War II. It's about Hitler in a bunker,

03:19:05.920 | but I think, uh, it was in a Bruno Gantz, wasn't it? I think, I think he, he nailed him. Yeah.

03:19:12.160 | That's there's so many accounts of that. There's so much written about Hitler. There's so many of,

03:19:18.880 | of, there's millions and millions of Hitler's words that you can read. You know, there's,

03:19:22.800 | there are translations of many of his conferences. You can see what he's saying. You can get inside

03:19:28.720 | his head in a very clear way and much more clearly than you can Stalin or just about any other leader,

03:19:34.000 | really. And so one has a very, very strong impression of what Hitler was like in the bunker in those last,

03:19:43.520 | last days that just, there's so many accounts of it and it just feels like they nailed it. It just feels

03:19:52.480 | like they've got it spot on. I mean, it's a fascinating story of, uh, evil maniac and then,

03:20:00.400 | and this, this certainty, you know, crumbling, right? Like realizing that this vision of the

03:20:09.360 | thousand year Reich is, uh, and Hitler says, says, you know, my reputation won't be good to start off

03:20:14.320 | with, but I hope in a few years time that people will start to realize that kind of all the good I was

03:20:17.440 | trying to bring. Yeah. And that sort of, they're all the same, aren't they? You always believe

03:20:22.800 | you're doing good and there's so many deep lessons there. So now you have written so much, you have

03:20:30.640 | said so much, you have studied this so much. What do you look in at World War II is, uh, the lessons we

03:20:38.800 | should take away? Well, I suppose it's, it's, it's what happens when you allow these individuals

03:20:47.040 | to take hold of great power and great authority and make these terrible decisions. If you allow

03:20:51.280 | that to happen, you know, there are consequences and you have to be, you have to recognize the moments

03:20:56.720 | of, of trouble when they arise. So when there are financial crisis, you know, that political unrest

03:21:03.280 | is going to come and you need to be prepared for that. You know, you need to be able to see the writing

03:21:08.640 | on the wall. You can't, you can't be complacent. You know, complacency is such a dirty word, isn't

03:21:16.640 | it? You know, you've got, you've got to keep your wits and you can't take things for granted.

03:21:21.840 | You've got to recognize, I think, um, that the freedoms we enjoy in the West are, you know,

03:21:29.360 | they're not necessarily permanent and you need to make the most of them while you've got them and

03:21:36.560 | cherish them and consider what happens if the milk turns sour and what the consequences of that are.

03:21:44.640 | I mean, that's the overriding thing, because although I don't think there'll ever be a war

03:21:49.280 | on the scale of the second world war, you've only got to look up pictures of those opening days of the

03:21:54.080 | war in Ukraine and see sort of knocked out Russian tanks and dead bodies, bloated bodies all over the

03:22:00.080 | place, put that into black and white. And, you know, it could be the road out of fallets in 1944.

03:22:06.240 | It could be, you know, any number of German battlefields and in the, in World War II and,

03:22:12.480 | and the similarities and the trenches and the kind of people hiding in foxholes. And, you know, that,

03:22:17.440 | that's, that's horribly reminiscent as are the huge casualties that they're suffering on both sides,

03:22:22.400 | whether they'd be Russian or Ukrainian. And, you know, it's a shock. It's a shock to see that.

03:22:26.880 | And it reminds you of just how quickly I think things can descend. I mean, that's, that's,

03:22:34.000 | that's the other thing, you know, at that point I was making about how quickly Germany descended from

03:22:38.160 | this amazing nation of arts and culture and science and development and engineering into one of the

03:22:45.280 | Holocaust. I mean, life is fragile and, and peace is fragile. And, you know, it's,

03:22:55.200 | you take it for granted at your peril and you take for granted at our peril that nobody will use nuclear

03:23:02.160 | weapons ever again. And that's not a thing we should take for granted.

03:23:07.440 | No, sir. What gives you hope about the future of human civilization? We've been talking about all of

03:23:14.240 | this darkness in the 20th century. What's the source of light?

03:23:19.920 | The source of light is that I think the vast majority of people are good people who want to live peacefully

03:23:27.360 | and want to live happily and are not filled with hate. And there are some brilliant minds out there.

03:23:33.920 | And I think the capacity for the human brain to come up with new developments and new answers to problems

03:23:42.080 | and challenges is infinite. And I think that's what gives me hope.

03:23:48.320 | James, this is a, I'm a big fan. This was an honor to talk to you and please keep putting incredible history out there.

03:23:57.840 | Um, I can't wait to see what you do next. Thank you so much for talking today.

03:24:02.320 | Well, thank you, Lex. It's been an awesome privilege to talk to you.

03:24:05.200 | Thanks for listening to this conversation with James Holland. To support this podcast,

03:24:10.160 | please check out our sponsors in the description or at lexfreedman.com/sponsors.

03:24:15.440 | And now let me leave you some words from Winston Churchill. If you're going through hell, keep going.

03:24:22.320 | Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

03:24:27.840 | Bye.

03:24:29.840 | Bye.

03:24:31.840 | Thank you.

James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles | Lex Fridman Podcast #470

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