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

28:08It's a seaborn empire. Whereas there's also another point, which is having large armies. It's actually inherently impractical and inefficient because the larger army, the more people you've got to feed, the more kind of barracks you've got to have, the more space you've got to have for training, the more people you're taking out of your workforce to produce tanks and shells and all the rest of it because then, jumping around with rifles. You know, so there's an argument saying, saying, actually, it's really not very good way of doing things. So, you know, very much the British way and subsequently the United States way and where Britain's dominions and empire is to use kind of steel, not our flesh as a principle.

28:50This is the idea is that you use technology, mechanization, modernity, global reach to do a lot of your hard yards. That's the sort of basic principle behind the strategic air campaign. When we talk about the strategic air campaign, we talk about strategic air forces which are operating in isolation from other armed forces. So, a tactical air force, for example, is an air force which is offering close air support for ground operations. A strategic air force has got nothing to do with ground operations, it's just operating on its own. So, that's your bomber force or whatever. You know, that's your your B -17s and B -24s, fours of the airfare force flying out of East England, bombing the rear industrial complex of Germany or whatever it might be.

29:29So, it's important to understand that when you compare, you have to have the back of your mind that Britain compared to Germany for example, it's coming at it from a completely different perspective. And I would say one of the failures of Hitler is that he always views everybody through his own very narrow world view, which is not particularly helpful. You know, you want to get inside the head of your enemy. And, you know, he's sort of guilty of not doing that. So, when you're talking about Operation Barbarossa to go back to your original question next, you're dealing with an operation on such a vast scale that that operational level of war is absolutely vital to its chances of success or failure.

30:08Doesn't matter how good your individual commanders are at the front. If you haven't got the backup, it's not going to work. And the problem that the Germans have is, yes, they've got their kind of, you know, three million men on the front and they've got their kind of, you know, three thousand aircraft and on all the rest of it. But actually, what you need to do is break it down and who is doing the hard yards of that. And where the German war machine works is that the machine bit is only the spearhead. So, people always talk about the Nazi war machine in a way it's a kind of misnomer because you're sort of suggesting that it's highly mechanized and industrialized and all the rest of it.

30:45And nothing could be further from the truth. The spearhead is, but the rest of it is not. And this is the kind of fatal flaw of the German armed forces in, in the whole of but even in this early stage, because in Barbarossa, you're talking about 17 panzer divisions out of, you know, the hundred odd that are involved in the initial attack. Well, 17 and that panzer division is not a division full of panzer tanks. It is a combined arms motorized outfit. So, Scouts on BMWs with side cars, armored cars, infantry, grenadiers, panzer grenadiers, which are infantry in half tracks and trucks mechanized.

31:33It is motorized artillery. It is motorized anti -aircraft artillery. It is motorized anti -tank artillery. And of course, it is tanks as well, panzers. But those are a really, really small proportion of, you know, you're talking less than 20 % of your attacking force, of those spearhead forces. And inevitably, they are going to be attritted as they go. You know, you are going to take casualties. And not only that, you're not going to just take battlefield casualties. You're also going to have mechanical casualties because of the huge spaces involved. You just simply can't function. So, what you see is in the initial phases of Operation Barbarossa, they surge forward.

32:12Red Army's absolutely no answers to anything. Stalin weirdly hasn't heated all the warnings that this attack is brewing and there have been plenty incidentally. Smolensk falls on the 15th of July, you know, in just less than four weeks. It's just incredible. Three and a half weeks, Smolensk has gone, you know, they've done the overwhelm the rest of what had been polled and they've surged into what is now Belarus taking Smolensk. All of you know, this is Army Group Center. Army Group Norfolk is thrust up into the Baltic. It's all going swimmingly well. But then the next several months, they barely go 100 miles.

32:46And that's because they're running out of steam. And the 16th pounds of division, for example, by the time it's taken Smolensk, involved in taking Smolensk on the 15th of July 1941, the following day, it's got 16 tanks left. 16 out of, you know, should have 180. So it's just being a trip. They can't sustain it and they can't sustain it because as the Russians fall back, as the Soviet Red Army falls back, they do their own scorched earth policy. They also discover that the railway line is kind of a different loading gauge. So they've got to change it. So it's slightly the Russian loading gauge is slightly wider.

33:23So every single mile, every yard, every foot, every meter of the capturing of Russian railway has to be moved a couple of inches to the left to make it fit the German Kriegslock. In the standard train of locomotive of the Reichsbar. Just imagine what that's like. And also Soviet trains are bigger, so they can take more water, which means the water stops in between are fewer and far between. So they have to, the Germans, when they come in there, trains their Kriegslock are smaller. So they have to be rewarded more often and recalled more often. So they have to mean, it's absolutely boggling, just how complicated it is and how badly planned it is, because they haven't reckoned on this, they're having to kind of think on that feed.

34:10I love the logistical details of all of this, because yes, that's a huge component of this, especially when you come in that much territory. But there is a notion that if Hitler didn't stop Army Group Center, it could have pushed all the way to Moscow. It was, it was only maybe a hundred miles away from Moscow. Is that, is that a possibility? Because it had so much success in the early days, pushing forward. Do you think it's possible that if Hitler, as we mentioned from a military blunder perspective, didn't make that blunder that they could have defeated the Soviet Union right there. And then, well, my, my own view is that they should never have got close.

34:55Red Army has plenty of men to be able to see off anything that the Germans can do. The capture of Kiev, for example, in September 1941 was catastrophe for the Soviet Union. And should never have happened. I mean, Zukov is saying to, saying to Stalin, we've got to pull back across the Deneepa. So I was going, no, I can't possibly do that. You can't abandon Kiev. It's like third city in Soviet Union. You can't, no way. No, absolutely not. And he goes, well, we're just, we are just going to be overwhelmed. You know, we can't hold this. And he says, you know, I've backed me off, or far me, backed me off, backed me off, backed me.

35:32So Stalin sacks him. Obviously, as we know, Zukov gets rehabilitative in a pretty quick order. And Stalin does learn very quickly, after, thereafter, to learn the lessons. But the opening phase about Ross has been a catastrophe. And so as a consequence of Stalin refusing to let his men retreat back across the Deneepa, which is a substantial barrier and would be very difficult for the Germans to overwhelm, had they not, had they moved back in time. You know, that's another kind of 700 ,000 men put in the back. I mean, that's just staggering numbers. But yeah, I mean, there's so many things wrong with a barbarous plan, you know, too much over.

36:18It's just such a vast area. I mean, you're talking about kind of, you know, 2500 miles or something, you know, or frontage, you know, maybe if you kind of put your, your, your Panzer groups, which are these spearheads, and you put them all in one big frost, and just go hellful ever straight across on a kind of, you know, much more narrow front of, let's say, kind of 400 miles rather than 1200. Then they might have got, you know, they might have just sort of burnt away straight through to Moscow. They really caught the red army unprepared. Yep. Is there something to be said about the strategic genius of that?

36:56Or was it just luck? No, I don't think so. I mean, I think what's happened is you've had the, you've had the, the Soviet purges of the, of the second half of the 1930s, where they, you know, they have executed a imprisoned 22 ,500 officers of which, you know, three out of five marshals. Um, you know, God knows how many army commanders, um, et cetera, et cetera. So, so, you know, you've completely decapitated the red army in terms of its command structure. So before that, what did be fair to say was one of the greatest army in the world? What was a lot of experience, there's a lot of experience there.

37:34But also the technology and material, you know, the size of the army and the number of people that are, they're mobilized. Yeah. And they're the first people to kind of adapt, you know, create airborne troops, for example. So, yes, I think there is an argument say that. But the decapitation is, is, is absolutely brutal. If you've decapitated an army, you've then got to put new guys in charge. And someone who, who looks on paper like a half decent peacetime commander might not be a very good wartime commander, the different disciplines and different skills. And what comes to you, you don't know that until you're tested.

38:07It's very hard to kind of judge. And of course, you know, Stalin is existing in a sort of, you know, a vacuum of paranoia and suspicion all the time, which is unhelpful when you're trying to develop a strong armed forces. So they go into Finland in, in back end of 1939. And they get there, you know, they get really badly hammered. They do take about, you know, 50 get the Corellia, peninsula and they do take some ground, but a huge cost. I mean, the casualties are five times as those are the Finns and it's humiliation. So Hitler sees that and thinks, okay, then on up too much Cobb, then Hitler loses the Battle of Britain.

38:45Anything, I can't afford to fight a war in two fronts. That's one of the reasons why Germany loses the war in 1914 to 18 is fighting on the Eastern front, but also fighting on, you know, the Western front at the same time. We've got to avoid that. But I've got to get rid of Britain and Britain hasn't come out of the fight. Britain is still fighting in the back end of 1940, having won the Battle of Britain. And so maybe I'll go into the Soviet Union now while the Red Army is still weak. You know, we're not 100 % ready ourselves, but let's hurry the whole thing forward because originally he'd been thinking of planning on operation in 1943 on 1944.

39:17So the idea is, you take Poland out, you take out France and the low countries, you conquer most of Western Europe, you knock out Britain. So therefore you don't have to worry so much about the United States because they're over the side of the Atlantic. That then gives the advice and the time to kind of rebuild up his strength for the all -out thrust on the Soviet Union. The failure to subdue Britain in 1940 changes all those plans and makes him think, actually I'm going to go in early. And he's also been kind of, you know, he's hoisted by Zompetard because he starts to believe his own genius.

39:50You know, he, everyone told him that, you know, he wouldn't be able to beat France and the low countries. Everyone told him that, you know, it wouldn't work out when he went into Poland. Everyone was really nervous about it. You know, well, go hang you. You cautious, awful aristocratic, Prussian generals. You know, I'm the best at this. I've told you. I've shown you. I'm the genius. I can do it. He starts to believe his own hype. And of course, this is a problem. You know, he's surrounded by sick of ants and people who constantly telling him that he's this incredible genius. So he starts to believe it and he thinks everything is possible.

40:20And he's very much into this idea of the will of the German people. You know, this is our destiny. And I, the will, as I say earlier on, you know, it's the thousand year Reich or Armageddon, but momentum has with us and we need to strike it. And only by gambling, only by being bold, will the Germans prevail and all this kind of nonsense. And so that's why he goes into Soviet Union in June 1941 rather than a couple of, or even three years later. Yeah, he really hated the Prussian generals, huh? Yeah. He hated them. Is there a case we made that there he was indeed at times and military genius? No.

40:56I don't think so. Because none of the plan, I mean, even the plan for the invasion of France and the low countries isn't his. The concept is, is for manch dines and the execution is Guderian's, Heisguderian. So Heisguderian is the kind of, he's the pioneer of the Panzer Force, the Panzer Force, this idea of the ultra mechanized combined arms, Panzer Force spearhead doing this kind of lightning fast thrust. It's not Hitler's idea. He adopts it and takes it as his own because, you know, he's a fury and he do what he likes. But it isn't his. So it's not, you know, and up until that point, until that comes into being, until that, that plan is put forward to France Haldor, who is the chief of staff of the German army at that time, you know, Haldor's just thinking, how do we get out of this mess?

41:49This is just an nightmare because they know that France has got a larger army. They know that France has got more tanks and they're that France has got double the number of artillery pieces. It's got parity in terms of air forces. Then you add Holland, then you add Belgium, then you add Great Britain. And that looks like a very, very tough nut to crack. I mean, the reason why France is subdued in 1940 is 50 % of the Germans from their operational law and that particular instance and 50 % French failure, really, an incompetence. I mean, there is a kind of genius to be able to see and take advantage and set up the world stage in such a way that you have the appeasement from France and Britain, keep the United States out of it.

42:33Just set up the world stage where you could just plow through everybody with very little resistance. I mean, there is a kind of, well, yes, if you're political genius, it works, but it doesn't, you know, that's a problem. I mean, you know, he goes into Poland on the assumption that Britain and France will not declare war. You know, he is not prepared for Britain and France declaring war on Germany. Right. He thinks they won't. That's right. So miscalculation blunder. But then France does, right? And then that doesn't, you know, France does not successfully do anything with this incredible army that it has.

43:13It has a size, but one of the problems that France has is that it's very, very top heavy. It's very cumbersome and the way it operates. There's no question that it's got some brilliant young commanders, but the top, the commanders are very old. Most of them are first world war veterans, you know, whether you, I mean, Wagon, Gamaland, General George, these people, they're all well into their 60s. General George is the youngest army commander and he's 60. You know, it's too old to be an army commander. You need to be in your kind of late 40s, early 50s. And they're too just consumed by conservatism and the old ways.

43:56And what they assume is that any future war will be much like the first world war, it'll be a traditional long and drawn out, but static, but actually they're right on two parts of it. It is, as it turns out, it is going to be long and drawn out and a traditional, but it's going to be mobile, rather than static. And that's a big miscalculation. Here's my question. I think you're, you're being too nice on France here. So when, when, when Germany invaded Poland, it cracked me if I'm wrong, but it feels like France could have just went straight to Poland. Yeah, they absolutely could. And a day, and I know you said it's very top heavy, and you're saying all of these things, but they literally did basically nothing.

44:40Yeah, they were pulling. So like, and I think a part of that, and I think you described this well, maybe you could speak to that, is the insanity that is Hitler creating this psychological, with the propaganda, creating this feeling that there's this Nazi force that's unstoppable. So they're, France just didn't want to like step into that. Maybe they were like legitimately, I hesitate to say these words, but scared of war. 100 % they are. Because France has been totally traumatized by the First World War. It's fought on their land. It's fought in their industrial heartland. They lose three times the amount of people killed that that Britain does, Britain's traumatized by it, but not to say, in degree, the France is, there is just no stomach to do that again.

45:32And so that makes some risk averse. And by being risk averse, you're actually taking a far greater risk, that's the irony of it. And the truth is also there isn't the political will. And a successful military can only be successful if there is a political will at the top. And the problem with France in the 1930s is it's very politically divided. It's a time of multiple governments, multiple prime ministers, coalition governments, really a very extreme coalition governments from the sort of drawn from the left and the right as well as the center. And you know, this is not a coalition of two parties.

46:09This is a coalition of multiple parties, no one can ever agree anything. I mean, that's the problem. And it's amazing that the Magno line has even agreed, you know, this incredibly strong defensive position down the western side of France, of border with Germany, which is kind of largely impregnable. But the problem is, is the bit that's not impregnable, which is the hinge where the Magno line ends and it sort of basically starts turning kind of towards in a kind of normally direction. And the border with Belgium. And you know, what they should have done is build kind of border defenses all along the northern coast with Belgium, because Belgium refused to kind of allow any ally troops into into his territory.

46:48It was neutral. And France should have said, okay, fine. Well, then we'll defend, you know, we're not going to come to your rescue if you get invaded. That's your, that's your, that's, that's the payoff. And consequence of that, we are going to stop our living that and we're not going to be drawn into the neutral territory should Germany invade from the west. But they don't do that because of the psychological damage of having fought a war in exactly that area a generation earlier.

47:20And of Poland, there's literally nothing left, you know, the back door from into western Germany is completely open. And so they do what they call the Saur offensive, but it's not. It's a kind of reconnaissance and force where they kind of go across the border, kind of pick their noses for few days and then kind of trundle back again. And it's just, it's embarrassing. And that is, what you're seeing there is, is a nation which is just not ready for this, which is scared, which is politically divided, which is then having a knock on effect on the decision making process and which is just consumed by military complacency.

47:58And that's the big problem. There is this, you know, the commanders at the very top of the French regime are complacent. They haven't bought into kind of modern ways. They haven't looked at how contemporary technology could help them. I mean, it is absurd, for example, that there isn't a single radio in the Château de Vassan, which is, you know, it's the headquarters of the commandant chief of the French armed forces, to the general martial Maurice Gamelin. I mean, it's just unbelievable. But that is the case. And there's no getting away from that. And it is all the more ironic when you consider that France is actually the most automotive society in Europe.

48:40It's the second most automotive society in the world after the United States. But it's some margin. It has to be said as well. You know, it has a fantastic transportation system, rowing network is superb. There are eight people for every motorized vehicle in France, which is way above Germany, which is in 1939, that figure is 47, for example. It's 106 in Italy. So France is very mechanized. Very mechanized. So come on, guys. Pili Finger out, get it together. And they just don't. They're incredibly slow and cumbersome. And what they think is when what will happen is the Germans won't think of going, you know, they won't do a pincer movement because you can't possibly take motorized forces through through the Ardenne.

49:19That's just, it's not possible, which is the hinge area between the end of the Maginot, the northern part of the Maginot line, which runs down the West, and sorry, the eastern border of France and the northern bit. And so what we'll do with that hinge around the town of Sedan, we'll move into Belgium. We'll meet the Germans before they get anywhere near France. We'll hold them. And while we're holding them, we will bring up our reserves and then we'll countertack and crush them. That's the idea behind it. But the problem is, is they don't have a means of moving fast. And their communication systems are dreadful.

49:52Absolutely dreadful. They're dependent on conventional telephone lines, which, you know, diphammers and whatever are just kind of absolutely wrecking. Suddenly the streets are clogged with refugees and people can't move.

50:08So the, you're then dependent on sending dispatch riders on little motorbikes, you know, general Maurice Gamaland sends out a dispatch rider at six o 'clock in the morning. By 12 o 'clock, he hasn't come back. So you then send another one. Finally, the answer comes back at a kind of nine o 'clock at night by which time the kind of Germans advance another 15 miles. And the original message that you sent at six o 'clock that morning is completely redundant and has passed itself by day. And that's happening every step of the way. So you've got, you've got overall command, headquarters, then you've got army group, then you've got army, then you've got core, then you've got division.

50:43So consequence of all that is that French just can't move. They're just stuck. They're rabbits and headlights. And the Germans are able to kind of move them, destroy them in isolation. Meanwhile, they're able to use their excellent communications to very, very good effect. And you were talking about the genius of war. It's not Hitler that's a genius. If anyone's a genius, it's Gurbals, the propaganda chief. And it is their ability to harness that they are the kings of messaging. You know, they don't have, they don't have X. They don't have social media. But they do have new technology. And that new technology, that new approach is flooding the airwaves with their singular message, which is always the same and has been ever since the Nazis come into power.

51:31And it is using radios. And I think radios are really, really key to the whole story. Because there is no denser radio network anywhere in the world, including the United States and Germany in 1939. So while it's really behind the times and terms of mechanization, it is absolutely on top of its game in terms of cons. So 70 % of households in Germany have radios by 1939, which is an unprecedented number. That is only beaten by United States and only just. So it is greater than any other nation in Europe. And in terms of flooding the airwaves, it is the densest because even for those who, to 30 % who don't have radios, that's not a problem because we'll put them in the stairwells of apartment blocks.

52:12We'll put them in squares. We'll put them in cafes and bars. And the same stuff, the state, the Nazi state controls the radio airwaves as it does the movies, as it does newspapers, all aspects of the media are controlled by Gurbals. In propaganda ministry. And they are putting out the same message over and over again. It's not, it's not all Hitler's ranting. It's entertainment, light entertainment, some humorous shows. It is also Wagner, of course, and Richard Strauss. It's a mixture. But the subliminal message is the same. We're the best. We're the top dogs. Jewish Bolshevik plot is awful that needs to be, you know, that's the existential threat to us.

52:57We have to overcome that. We're the top dogs militarily. We're the best. We should feel really good about ourselves. We're going to absolutely win and be the greatest nation in the world ever and Hitler's the genius. And that is just repeated over and over and over and over again. And the, you know, for all the modernity of the world in which we live in today, most people believe what they're told repeatedly. Yeah, they still do. It's just repeat, repeat, repeat, over and over again. People will believe it. You know, if you're a, if you're a die -hard Trump supporter, you want to believe that.

53:30You'll believe everything he says. If you are a die -hard Bernie Sanders, man, you know, you're from the left. You'll believe everything he says because it's reinforcing what you already want to believe. But the scary thing is, you know, radio is the technology of the day, the technology of the day to day, which is a terrifying one for me is, I would say AI on social media. So bots, you have basically bot farms, which I assume is used by Ukraine, by Russia, by US. I would love to read the history written about this era, about the information wars. Who has the biggest bot farms? Who has the biggest propaganda issues?

54:14And when I say bot, I mean both automated AI bots and humans operating large number of smartphones with SIM cards, they're just able to boost messages enough to where they become viral. And then real humans with real opinions get excited also. It's like this vicious cycle. So if you support your nation, all you need is a little boost. And then everybody gets real excited. And then now you're chanting, and now you're in this mass hysteria. And now it's the 1984, two minutes of hate. And the messages clear. I mean, that's what propaganda does is really clarifies the mind. And that is exactly what Hitler and the Nazis and Goals are doing in the 1930s, while they're doing it in the 1920s as well, but more effectively once they come into power, of course.

55:03And Hillary is so fortunate that he comes, takes over the chance to chip in January 1933 at a time where the economy is just starting to turn. And he's able to make the most of that. And you know, if you're Germans and you've been through hyperinflation in the early 1920s, you've been through the emiliation of Versailles Treaty, which was terrible error in retrospect. And you've been through then having got through that, even merged into a kind of democratic, vimile republic, which is based on manufacturing, Germany's the traditional of genius, engineering, and manufacturing, and production of high quality items.

55:49Emerge if you do that, then you have the Wall Street crash. And the loans that are coming in from America, which is propping up the entire German economy, suddenly get cut off, and you've depression again, and massive unemployment. And suddenly here that comes in, and everyone's got jobs, and they're rebuilding, and they're growing their military, and the message that's coming out is with the greatest, with the best, with fantastic. You know, I was telling you earlier on about here the speeches starting with the dark, starting dark and ending in hope and light, and the sun, the uplands, that's what you're getting.

56:27You're suddenly getting this vision of hope, this is like, you know, my god, actually, this is really working. Okay, so I'm not sure that I particularly buy into the kind of anti -Semitic thing, but we'll sweep that under the carpet, because overall I've now got a job, I've got money, I've got my new radio. And then this is a genius about the radio, for example, so they have the German receiver to start off with, the Deutsche Fanger, and then they have the Deutsche Kleinemfanger, which is the German little receiver, little radio. These are geniuses. This is outrageous as the arrival of the iPod.

57:00I mean, remember that, you know, suddenly you don't have to have a Sony Walkman anymore, you can have something really, really small, a miniature, and listen to thousands of thousands of songs all at once. What an amazing thing. And the Deutsche Kleinemfanger is nine inches by four inches by four inches, it's made a light, and everyone can have one, because it's super cheap. It's just incredible. And no one has set up, because up until that point, radio is generally speaking, are aspirational. You know, they've got sort of a ballnut lacquer at the front, and you know, you have them if you're middle class, and you show them off to your neighbors to show how kind of, you know, affluent and well to do you are.

57:35But suddenly everyone can have one. And if everyone can have one, then everyone can receive the same message. And you can, and you can also, and this is the whole point about the Hitler youth as well, you know, the young guys, that's where they're most impressionistic, they're, they're least risk of us. So they're most gung -ho, they're, they're most full of excitement for the possibilities of life. And they're also, their minds are the most open to suggestion. So you get the youth, you hang on, you get them. And so a whole generation of young men are brought up thinking about the genius of Hitler and how he's delivering us this much better nation and returning our, over, overhauling the humiliations of the First World War, we're overcoming the back, the stab in the back that happened in 1918, et cetera, et cetera.

58:20And, you know, as a young 16, 17 year old German, you're thinking, yeah, I want a piece of that. And hey, guess what? They've got really cool uniforms and, and you know, come and join the SS and, you know, get the frontline. And what's not to like? You know, you can see why, why it's so clever. And what's so interesting is propaganda today is, is still using those, those tenets that girls was using back in the 1930s. And this is what I always say, say that, you know, history doesn't repeat itself. Of course, it doesn't. It can't possibly repeat itself because we're always living in a constantly evolving time.

58:55But patterns of human behavior do. And what you always get after economic crisis is political up people, always, always, always. Because some people are in a worse off position than they were financially before. And they're thinking, well, you know, the current system doesn't work, what's the alternative? So, you know, in the case of, of now, we in the West, you know, we face, first of all, we face the crisis of 2008, perhaps across 2008, then we've had the kind of double whammy of COVID. And that has been incredibly unsettling. And so we're now in a situation of political turmoil. And whether you're, whether you're, whether you're pro -Trump or anti -Trump, what he's offering is something completely different.

59:31And, you know, it's say, you know, he's saying, the other ways don't work, you know, I'm going to be, I'm just going to say what I think, I'm just going to, I'm going to come out, I'm not going to bother with all the sheen of diplomacy and kind of, you know, melee mouth words that politicians always use, you know, which, where you can't trust anyone, I'm just going to tell you how it is. And obviously, people respond to that, you know, you can understand why that has an appeal. And if the country already feels broken and his someone who is going to be a disruptor and going to change the way you go about things, you can see why a reasonably large proportion of the population is going to go, I'll have a piece of that.

1:00:06Thank you very much. And especially one of the countries in economic crisis like Germany was, I think you've written that the Treaty of Versailles created Hitler and the Wall Street crash and the Great Depression brought him to power. Yes. And of course, the propaganda machine that you describe is the thing that got everybody else in Germany on board. Yep. It's amazing how he, because he comes in with 33 % of the vote. He had 37 % of the vote in July, 1932. So again, this is another period of turmoil, just like it is in France where you're having constant different kind of coalitions and, you know, different chancellors leaders of Germany.

1:00:49It's very possible he, he wouldn't have come to power. Well, he said, I will only, you know, we will only take off seats if I can be charged. I've always, I'm not coming into any coalition. So then the government falls again in January, 1933, they have the election. The Nazi vote is down from where it was the previous summer. But this time they go, okay, Hitler can be a chancellor, but will manipulate him wrong they were. He's manipulating everyone. And then Hinderburg, who is the president, dies the following summer. And he's able to get rid of the presidency. There is no more president of Germany.

1:01:30There is just the fear of him. And he gets rid of, he has an in actually enabling act, which is where all other political parties have disbanded. And suddenly you've got a total of her and state, just like that. I think there's a lesson there. There's many lessons there, but one of them is don't let an extremist into government and assume he can control them. Yes, the arrogance of the existing politicians who just completely screwed it up. I mean, there's a real power to an extremist. Like there's a person who sees the world in black and white can really gain the attention in the support of the populace.

1:02:15Yes, especially when there's a resentment about like treaty of RSI, when there's economic hardship. And if there's effective, modern technology that allows you to do propaganda and sell the message, there's something really compelling about the black and white message. It is because it's simple. And what Hitler does throughout the 1920s, is he sticks to this. There is actually, when he comes out of prison, so he is the Bihl Purchan of November 1923. He gets charged with treason, which he has been, because he's attempting a coup. And he gets sentenced to five years, which is pretty lenient for what he's done.

1:02:58And he then gets let out after nine months. The Nazi Party is banned at that point, but then comes back into being. And the year that follows, there is then a substantial debate about where the party should go. And there are actually a large number of people who think that actually they should be looking at how the Soviets are doing things and taking some of the, some of the things that they consider to be positive out of the communist state and applying those to the Nazis. And here it goes, no, no, no, no, no, no, we've just got to stick to this kind of Jewish Boschery thing. This is how we're going to do it.

1:03:37This we're going to do it. Gubels, for example, who is very open, he's very, very, Joseph Gubels, he's not very successful journalist. But he does have a PhD in German literature. He's very disaffected because he was born with tallapies, which is more commonly known as a clubfoot. He's disabled. He can't fight in the First World War. He's very frustrated by that. He's in a deep despair about the state of Germany in the first part of the early 1920s. He's looking for a political Messiah, a sort of quasi religious Messiah. Thinks its Hitler, then discovers that Hitler's not open to any ideas at all about any deviation.

1:04:21But then sees the light. Hitler recognizes that this guy is someone that he wants on his side. And so then goes to him, makes a real special effort, come on, come to dinner, I think you're great, you know, all this kind of stuff. Windsor about over and Gubels has this complete vault fast. Disguards his earlier kind of, yeah, you know, Hitler's right, I was wrong. Hitler is the kind of Messiah figure that I want to follow. I want to follow the hero hero leader. And they come aboard and they absolutely work out and hit the completely winds out of all dissenters within the what had been the German Workers Party, drop becomes the German National Socialist Party, becomes the Nazis.

1:04:57He comes out, emerges as the absolute undisputed führer of that leader of that party and what he says goes and everyone toes him behind it. Part of the genius of that, you know, Hitler does have some genius. I just don't think is military, but he does have some genius. And the question about it is the simplicity of message. What he's doing is it's that kind of us and them thing that we were talking about earlier on is the kind of evil or it's kind of it's my way or the highway. It's kind of this is the only way for this is how we get to the Sun and the Uplands. This is how we we create this amazing master race of this unification of German peoples which dominates the world, which is the preeminent power in the world for the next thousand years.

1:05:43Or it's decay and despair and being crushed by our enemies and our enemies are the Jews and the Bolsheviks are communist. And what he taps into as well is front, command shaft and vox, command shaft. And these are there's no direct English translation of vox, command shaft or indeed, front, command shaft. But but but in his most basic form, its community is its people community or front veterans community. So the front command shaft is we are the guys that we're bonded because we were in the trenches. You know, we were in the first world war. We were the people who bravely stuck it out saw our friends being slaughtered and blown to pieces.

1:06:27We did our duty as proud Germans, but we were let down by the elites and we let down by the by this Jewish Bolshevik plot. You know, we were stabbed in the back. The myth of the stab it of stabbing in the back is very, very strong. So we're bound, we're bonded by our experience of the first world war and the fact that we did what we should and what we could and we would we didn't fail in what we were doing. We were failed by our leaders and by the elites. So that's that's front command shaft. Vox command shaft is this sense of national unity. It's it's a cultural ethnic bonding of people who speak Germany who have a have a similar outlook on life.

1:07:14And again, that just reinforces the us and them. Good and evil. It reinforces the black and white worldview. And then you add that to this very simple message which hit those repeating over and over again. Communists are a big threat. Jews are a big threat. They're they're the enemy. You have to have a you have to have an opposition in the them and us kind of process. And that's what he's doing. And people just buy into it. They go, yeah, we're together. We're Germans. We're a brotherhood. We've got our valska mind shaft. And so he cleverly ties into that and taps into that. But there are no relevance by the late 1920s.

1:07:58You know, by 1928, you know, the he's not going to get a deal for mind camp part two. You know, he's he's he's impoverished. The parties impoverished. You know, numbers are down there. They're kind of, you know, a best on a relevance. We should say he wrote mind camp at this time when he was in prison. We rise. We rise. Most of mind camp in prison in lands by prison. And then he writes the rest of it in what becomes known as the camp house, or which is this little wooden hut in the in the Oberts, Salzburg. And you can still see the remnants of that. And unfortunately, there's still little candles there and stuff in the woods.

1:08:31And you know, by by neo -Nazis and one at one, have you? But that's where he wrote the rest of it. I mean, it was John Jacques Rousseau who says man has his greatest thoughts. Runs surrounded by nature. That was something that kind of Hitler took very much to heart. There was a there was a mentor of his called Dietrich Eckhart. Dietrich Eckhart introduced him to the Oberts, Salzburg and the beauty of the Southwest. Tafi's Bavarian Alps around Berkesgaden. And that was his favorite place in the planet. And that's where he that's where he eventually bought the the the berkoff. With the royalties it has to be said from my camp, which went from being, you know, almost pulps suddenly being a runaway bestseller.

1:09:14Unfortunately, can you actually comment on that? It's a shitty manifesto as far as manifesto goes. I think there's a lot of values to understand from a first person perspective, the words of a dictator of a person like Hitler, but it just feels like that's just such a shitty. Yeah, I mean, you know, he's found a number of countries. You don't need to because no one's going to read it because it's unreadable. I mean, it's very untidy. It's very incoherent. It's got no there's no narrative arc to use the kind of, you know, right, a righteous phrase. I mean, it's just it's but it does give you a very clear, you know, the overall impression you get at the end of it is that kind of communist and the Jews are to blame for everything.

1:09:55Yeah, but there's also the component of, you know, predicting basically world or two there. So it's not just there to be a person. He's hungry for war, right? He thinks that this is the natural state that we have to have this terrible conflict. Once a conflict's over, Germany will emerge victorious and then there will be the thousand year right. I mean, I'm finding myself in talking to you. I keep saying this kind of, you know, it's all I'm getting all the thousand year right. It's because it comes up. It's unavoidable because that's how he's speaking the whole time. It's just the same message over and over and over and over again.

1:10:29It's a pretty unique way of speaking, sort of allowing violence as a tool in this picture that there's a hierarchy that there's a superior race and inferior races and it's okay to destroy the inferior ones. Yeah, usually politicians, I'll speak that way. They just say, well, here's good and evil. We're the good guys. And yeah, maybe we'll destroy the evil a little bit. Now here's like there's a complete certainty about a very large number of people, the Slavic people, they just need to be removed. Well, they need to be made into relevance. You know, we have to take it. We have to take it. And if that kills millions of them fine, then they can sort of squish that way if it's a Siberian or something.

1:11:12Okay, what do they get? Which just need to populate this land that belongs to the German people? Yeah, because they're the superior people. There's no question that he glorifies violence and war. He's absolutely chomping at the bit. And in a way, I think he's a bit disappointed that in the 1930s, the conquest that he does undertake are also peaceful. You know, much 90, 38 years goes straight into Austria. There's the Ansheles, not as shot as far as, you know, might face these goes into Ryan land. We conquer that. We take that over that from from from the occupying allies, not a shot is fired. You know, he takes the sedation of land, not a shot it barely a shot is fired.

1:11:53And then goes into into the rest of Czechoslovakia in March 1939. And again, barely a shot is fired. And you know, it's a bit disappointing. You know, he wants to be wants to be tested. He wants to kind of have the have the the wartime triumph. You can see him being frustrated about this in the in the Munich crisis in 1938. He wants to fight. He's absolutely spoiling for it. He's desperate to go in. He's already in Ganghau. He's built his Luftwaffe. He's he's got his his his his pants as now. He's got his his his massive armed forces. You know, he wants to test them. He wants to want to get the show on the road and prove it.

1:12:26You know, he is a he's an arch gambler. He'll you make it seem so clear. But all the while to the rest of the world to Chamberlain to France, the Britain to the rest of the world, he's saying he doesn't want that. He's making agreements. Everything he's just mentioned, you just went through it so quickly. But those are agreements that were made that he's not going to do that. And he does it over and over. He violates the treaty of Versailles. He violates every single treaty. But he still is doing the meeting. So maybe maybe can't go through it. The lead up to the war. 1939 September 1st. What are the different agreements?

1:13:11What is the signaling he's doing? You know, what is he doing secretly in terms of building up the military force? Yes. So he, you know, part of the treaty of that size, you're not, you know, you're allowed a very, very limited armed forces. There's restrictions on naval expansion. There's restrictions on the size of the army. There's just restrictions on the weapons you can use. There are, you're not allowed an air force. But he starts doing this all clandestinely. You know, there are people in Krupper's got, for example, which is in the Ruhr, sort of big armor, spani -factor, they are producing tanks and elsewhere and parts elsewhere and in the Netherlands, for example, and then shipping them back into Germany.

1:14:00They're doing Panzer training exercises actually in the Soviet Union at this time. There's all sorts of things going on. The Luftwaffe has been announced to the world in 1935, but it's obviously been in the process of developing long before that. The Mecher Smith 109 single engine fighter plane, for example, is pretty in 1934. So they're doing all these things against it. And the truth is, he's just constantly pushing. What can I get away with here? And of course, Britain, France, the rest of the world, the rest of the Allies, they're all reeling from the Wall Street crash and the Depression as well.

1:14:36So have they got the stomach for this? Not really. And perhaps actually on reflection, the terms of us, I treat it a bit harsh anyway. So maybe we don't need to worry about it. There's no political will. There's no political will to fight against what Germany's doing. Then he gets away of it. So he suddenly starts realizing that actually he can push this quite a long way because no one's going to stand up to him. Which is why he makes a decision in 1936 to go back into the Reinhand, which has been occupied by French, Allied troops. At that point, he just walks in, just goes, do you rest? And no one's going to do anything.

1:15:13Because there isn't a stomach to do anything. That was a big step in 1936, remilitarizing the Reinhand. I mean, that's a huge, huge step of like, oh, I don't have to follow any of these rules. And they're going to do nothing. And he's looking at his military and he's also looking at his response. So one of the things they do is they, you know, it's really clever. So they get over the head of the army of the army de laire, which is the French Air Force. And they invite him over and they air how milk who is the second round of the Luftwaffe invites him over. So come and see what we're up to. You know, we want to be, you're our European neighbors.

1:15:53We're all friends together. This kind of stuff. Come and see what we've got. And he takes him to this airfield. There's a row of measurement 109s all lined up like sort of 50 of them. And the head of the army of the air sort of looks at and gets, that's impressive. And milk goes, well, let me go and take you to another airfield. And they go off the sort of the back route out of the airfield and us long securities route in the Mercedes. Meanwhile, all the measurements take off from that airfield. Going to land on the next airfield. Here's another and they're all the same aircraft. And the command and chief of the army of the army of the air, and I go to France, it goes, we're never going to be able to eat Germany.

1:16:27So you were earlier, you were, you were looting to this earlier on. You know, how much is this sort of this, this, this justice huts part of this ability to kind of portray the, the, the, the mechanized molluck. Yeah, it absolutely cows the enemy. So, so then they're, they're increasing the effectiveness of their armed forces purely by propaganda and by, by mind games and by talking the talk. And you know, you look at, we might all think these military parades at the Nazis have look rather silly by today's standards, but you look what that looks like if you're the rest of the world. You're in Britain and you're still reading from the Depression and you see the triumph of the will.

1:17:11You see some of that footage and you see these automotons in their steel helmets and you see the swastikers and you see hundreds of thousands of people all lined up and see kiling and all the rest of it. You're going to think again for you going to war with people like that. It's also hard to put yourself in the, in the mind of those leaders now, not that we have nuclear weapons. So, nuclear weapons have created this kind of cloak of a kind of safety from mutually shared destruction. They, they, you think, surely you will not do a million or two million soldier army invading another land, right?

1:17:56Just full on gigantic hot war. But at that time, that's the real possibility. You remember World War I, you remember all of that. So, you know, you okay, there's a mad guy with a mustache. He's making statements that this land belongs to Germany anyway because it's mostly German populated. So, and like you said, Treaty of Versailles wasn't really fair and you can start justifying all kinds of things. Yeah, yeah. Maybe they got a point about the Danzig corridor. They are mainly Germans. German speaking people there and it's disconnected from East Prussia, which is just saying, I can, I can sort of get it.

1:18:37Maybe they got a point. When his Poland really kind of thriving democracy anyway, not really by 1930, late 1930s, it's not. It's tall and tense at purposes, a dictatorship in Poland at that time. I mean, it's not right that you just go and take someone else's country, of course. You can't do that. But you can see why in Germany, people are thinking they've got a point. You can also see why in France and Britain they're thinking, well, you know, do we really care about the polls? I mean, you know, is it worth going to wall over? But there's kind of bigger things that play by this point. That's the point.

1:19:14Yeah, but before we get to Poland, there is this meeting, September 1938. So Chamberlain made three trips to meet with Hitler, which culminated in the Munich conference. Yeah, on the 35th of September, yeah. Where was Chamberlain, Hitler, Mussolini, and L .J. Prime Minister of France, they met the discuss essentially check us a locket without any of the government officials who check us a locket participating. And Hitler promised to make no more territorial conquest in Chamberlain believed him. He chose to believe him, I think, is the point. So it's very interesting. So, well, no, it's not really, oh, it's, I just think there's too much retrospective view on this.

1:20:08And that's fine because the whole point of history is you can look back and you can judge decisions that were made at a certain point through the prism of what subsequently happened, which, of course, the people that are making the decisions at the time can't, because they're in trust, Hitler, but he wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt. Britain was not obliged to check us a locket at all. France was. France had signed a treaty with Czechoslovakia in 1924, but Britain had not. So there was no obligation at all for Britain to do this. The only reason why Britain would go to war over Czechoslovakia is because of the threat of narcissism and what the ramifications of not going to war with him.

1:20:52But the problem is that Chamberlain is interesting, because in 1935 he was, he was Chancellor's Czech, and when they started to sort of think, okay, we really do need to rearm. He was very much in favor of, of substantially expanding and rehabilitating the Navy, so updating existing battleships, and so on. And also developing the Air Force. There's not really much argument for having a large army, because if you have a large army, you've got to maintain it. Britain is a small place, where do you put them? You've also got to transport them. That's complicated. You've got to train them. You've got to put them at bar, you've got to feed them all this kind of stuff.

1:21:30There's a kind of of impracticality about having a large army, whereas Navy is great, because you can keep them at sea, and they can be on the water. Air Force is slightly different. Air power is viewed in very much the same way that the naval power is viewed. That this is we're an island nation. We have a global global assets, and air power gives us the flexibility that an army doesn't. So he is all for backing the expansion of the army, of the Air Force and the Navy in 1930. Then he subsequently becomes Prime Minister and Stixfist guns on that. It is he that enables the Air Force and the Air Ministry to develop the first fully coordinated air defense system anywhere in the world.

1:22:08There is not an air defense system in Poland, not Norway, not Denmark, nor the Netherlands, nor Belgium, nor France. The reason Britain is the only one. And frankly, it pays off big time in the summer of 1940. So you have to give him credit for that. Britain, interestingly, is also the world's leading armaments exporter in the 1930s, which is amazing really when you think everyone complains about the fact that we weren't rearming enough. Actually, we were. When we had all the infrastructure there and we were expanding that infrastructure dramatically, I say we, I'm not saying that because I'm British.

1:22:43So they were doing that. In 1938, Britain wasn't ready for war. Now you can argue that Germany wasn't ready for war either. But Chamberlain was Prime Minister in a democracy, parliamentary democracy, where 92 % of the population were against going to war in 1938. There is not a single democratic leader in the world that will go against the wishes of 92 % of the population. Now you can say, well, he should have just argued it better and presented his case better but at that point there was no legal obligation to go to the defensive Czechoslovakia. Czechoslovakia was another of these new nations that had been created out of 1919 and the Versailles Treaty, who was to say, we in Britain are able to judge the rights and wrongs of that, how fantastic it would be to go to war with a nation a long way away about for people who we know very little, etc., etc.

1:23:41I'm paraphrasing his quote. But I'm not saying it was the right decision. I'm just saying I can see why in September 1938 he is prepared to give him the chance. Now I do think he was a bit naive and what he also does is really interesting thing. He goes over to Hitler's flat completely ambushes him. Goes to his flat on the afternoon of 30th September and says to I've drawn up this agreement here and this is to continue the naval agreement that we've already made and by signing this you are saying that Germany and Britain should never go to war with one another. Here it goes, yeah, whatever, signs it.

1:24:24Chamberlain comes back, lands at hand and waves this little piece of paper and peace in our time and all the rest of it, which obviously comes back to bite him in a very big way. But it's interesting that when Hitler then subsequently goes and moves in that they France and Britain decide in rather the same way that there's been discussion about deciding that large portions of Ukraine should just be handed back to Russia without consulting Ukraine a few weeks ago. It is incredible, I think, that France and Britain Italy with Germany are deciding that yes, it's fine for Germany to go and take the Sudate on that without really consulting the Czechs.

1:25:08It's a similar kind of scenario, really. It's equally wrong. But when Germany does then go and take over the whole of Czechoslovakia in March 1939, that's the bottom line. That's the point where Germany goes, okay, I've given him the better of them doubt. No more benefits of doubt. That's it. That is, he's crossed the line. So you reinforce your agreement with Poland and you do a formal agreement. You go, okay, we will uphold your sovereignty. If you are invaded, we will go to war with you. That is a ratcheting up of diplomacy and politics in a very, very big way. It is that decision to make a treaty with the Poles is not heated by Hitler, but it's heated by literally every one of his commanders.

1:26:00And it's also heated by Gering, who is his number two and who is obviously the commander -in -chief of the Luftwaffe and is president of Prussia and in all the rest of it and is the second Mosinia Nazi. And he's going, this is a catastrophe. This is the last thing one of the things kind to war against Britain and to day France. The Munich Conference is a pretty interesting moment. I would say in all of human history because you got the leaders of these bigger than life nations and the most dramatic, brewing conflict in human history. I chamberlain Hitler, Mussolini, Dodje. It's interesting when these bigger than life leaders are in a room together.

1:26:50Is there something that you know about about their interactions? Yeah, I think one of the things that's interesting is that Hitler's got home advantage because it's on his turf. And it's the first meeting is at the Burkhoff, his beloved place in the Oberslabsberg, overlooking Burkis Garden in the Alps. So he's pretty confident because this is my manner, this is my turf. I'm not going to be bossed around by these guys. But Chamberlain, for example, is going there thinking, I've been around the blocks. No one can teach me anything. I've been a politician for ages. I'm not going to be kind of calved out by this sort of Austrian upstart.

1:27:28So they're both coming at it with a kind of sort of slight kind of superiority kind of complex. Interestingly, when you get to the actual meetings of the Bernabouin in Munich a couple of weeks later, Chamberlain is cheered by the crowds when his car comes in, when he goes to his hotel, when he's moving from his hotel to the Bernabouille, you know, there are cars cheering him, waving you in your jacks, all this kind of stuff. Hitler does not like that at all. Not at all. Put some on the back foot. And that's because the German people don't want war. In the same way that the British people don't want war, nor do the German people.

1:28:11The difference is that Hitler is a dictator and an autocrat and has the devotion of the people. So he can do what he wants in a way that Chamberlain can't. Chamberlain's hands are tied because he is an elected prime minister, an elected leader, political leader, and he's not head of state. So there is no question that it is Hitler and Chamberlain that are the top dogs in this particular discussion. You know, Delaidee takes a back seat, even Mussolini, although he's there, he doesn't want war either. He wants to be left alone to do his own thing without anyone getting in the way, but he doesn't want to sort of, it's not in his interest other European war.

1:28:49So he's trying to avoid it. So it is really, you see that the kind of Hitler's got this sort of, like, garalist voice and very pale blue eyes and such distinct features quite a long nose. You know, he always says this is why he has the moustache to kind of, you know, disguise the big nose. You know, so it's the same to you earlier on before we started recording. He does have a sense of humor. It's not even one that you and I would kind of tap into, but he does have one. Whereas Chamberlain, who's sort of, you know, he sounds like a sort of, you know, like an old man, you know, he sort of silvered and he looks like he has a archetypal kind of British gentleman, who's rolled up on Breller and is, you know, in his homeburg hat and all the rest of it.

1:29:33So they're both sort of caricatures in a funny sort of way. And yet, the consequence of these discussions, you know, these great events happening, you know, you are, you are absolutely going, even which way the Munich crisis comes out, you're taking a step closer to war. It's just whether the war is going to happen kind of next week or whether it's going to happen a year hence, but it's, you know, the Munich crisis obviously doesn't stem the inevitability of war at all. It just heightened that, do you think other words that Chamberlain should have said, good have said that put more pressure on Hitler, intimidate Hitler more?

1:30:13Yeah, it's a really tricky one. It's such a difficult one because you're always looking at it through, you know, the enemy has a vote and you don't know what that vote is going to be and you don't know what it's going to look like. There's no question that the rest of Europe is cowled by the kind of impression of military might that the Germans have put out. They certainly fear they are stronger than they actually are. And then on the other hand, they're also going, yeah, but you know, Germany doesn't have natural resources, doesn't have access to the world's oceans, you know, it's kind of, you know, it shouldn't be able to win a war.

1:30:49And so they're kind of contradicting themselves at the same time, you know, so in one minute, they're like, oh, God, you don't want to take on all those Nazis and all those swastikers and those automaton stormtroopers. But on the other hand, they're then saying, but actually Germany doesn't have much and it's kind of, you know, in its basket, you know, it's got actually quite a lot of weaknesses and we should be able to kind of prevail, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, just impose an economic blockade and then it'll be stuffed. And Britain is not ready to fight a war in in 1948, but nor is Hitler, you know, nor is Germany.

1:31:16So, you know, one is sort of striking out the other. But it's very easy to say that in hindsight, but at the time, you know, with people kind of digging trenches in high park in central London, and barrage balloons going up over London and, you know, children being evacuated from the cities, and 92 % of the population not wanting to go to war, you can see why he takes the course he does. I suppose that's, that's what I'm saying. I'm not saying it's the right decision, but I can, I think it's an understandable decision. But what about even just in the human level? If I go into a room with the British Jellman versus going to a room with Trump, it feels like it's so much easier to read and manipulate the British Jellman.

1:31:59Because Trump is like, Trump like characters, it seems like Hitler's similar Churchill is similar. It's like this guy can do anything. There's something terrifying about him. I'm predicting it. Yeah. It feels like there's something very predictable by Chamberlain. Yes, I think that's true. But also one has to take a step back and think about what Britain represents. So therefore what Chamberlain represents in 1938. Britain has the largest empire the world has ever known. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I didn't forget that. You know, God of the world is pink. There's the saying goes, you know, and that saying comes from the kind of Atlas of the world where all British territories are kind of colored pink.

1:32:36Yeah. And on top of that, it has lots of extra imperial territories as well. So, if you look at this, this is an incredible map of global shipping in 1937. And this is little ant lines of ships going out. And one of the strongest ant lines is going down to Argentina and South America from Britain. So down past West Africa and down the southern Atlantic and there it is. And that's because Britain owns most of Argentina. It owns huge, great farming estates and branches. It owns the railway system. It owns many of the port facilities. So you don't even need an empire. You just need the, you know, you need the facilities overseas trade and possessions can give you.

1:33:17And Britain not only has the largest navy also has the largest merchant navy has 33 % of the world's merchant shipping and access to a further 50 % Greek, Norwegian, Canadian shipping that it can access. So if you've got access to 80 more than an in excess of 80 % of the world shipping, that puts you in an incredibly strong position. And actually also some other things have been going on while they might not have been creating a huge army or quite producing the enough spitfires that they might want to up until this point. What they have also been doing is stop piling book site and copper and tungsten and huge reserves.

1:33:54And because Britain has this huge global reach, because it has its empire and its extra imperial assets, it can strike bargains at no one else's construct. So it can go into various countries around the world and can go, okay, I want you to guarantee me for the next five years every bit of your rubber supply. I will pay over the over the asking price to secure that. And it's doing that in the 1930s. So when war comes, it's got everything it possibly needs. Now, it always need more because it's suddenly turning into a kind of, you know, a proper global long drawn out war. But, but that is a huge advantage.

1:34:30So it is with that mindset that Chamberlain is going into those talks and thinking, okay, well, I'm not going to get a war over the Czechs about getting who cares about them. But, but, but I am going to show Hitler than I mean business. Hitler's going, who's this stuffy guy with his white hair? I don't give a toss about him, you know, and it's he's coming out from a completely different perspective. And I think one of the things that's so interesting from a dramatic point of view and from a from a historian's point of view, or even a novelist point of view in the case of Robert Harris writing his book about these negotiations, which I don't know if you've read it, but it's really it's terrifically good.

1:35:04It's the fact you've got two men, two alpha males who are going to those negotiations from totally different perspectives and vantage points. And I think is very easy for people today to forget how elevated Britain was in the late late 1930s. You know, the Gold standard was tied to the pound, not the dollar. And so Britain was the number one nation in the world at that time, and it just was. And it's so diminished by comparison today that it's hard to imagine it. And I think one of the interesting things about the historiography about the narrative of how we tell World War II is that so much of it has been dictated by the shift in power that took place subsequent to 1945.

1:35:53And when people were starting to write these sort of major narratives in the 1970s and 80s and into the 1990s is through a prism of a very, very different world. And so one of the reasons why you have this narrative that, you know, Britain was a bit rubbish and hanging on the shirt tells us Americans and, you know, all the blood was spelt and I'm in East and Front and, you know, Germany had the best army in the world and was only defeated because Hitler was mad and blah, blah, blah. You know, the traditional narrative, it's that narrative emerges through the prism of what was going on in the 1970s and what was going on in the 1980s and the changing world rather than looking at it through the prism of the late 1930s or early 1940s.

1:36:31So there is this moment of decision. When do you think, well, what lesson do you take from that? When is the right time for appeasement to negotiate for diplomacy? And when is the right time for military strength offensive attacking for military conflict? Where's that line? Where's that line? Well, I kind of think it probably was when it was. I mean, Poland. Yeah. Honestly, I'm not sure it would have been the right decision to go to war in 1938. I just, I think it would, I can't predict because you can't second guess how things are going to play out because you just don't know. But I'm not sure that Chamberlain made the wrong decision.

1:37:24I'm not saying he made the right decision. I'm just like, I'm not, I'm being a bit wortier wortier about this. You could have threatened it more. Imagine Churchill in those same meetings. Yeah, but Churchill also appeases. I mean, he appeases Stalin all the time. I mean, you know, so the idea that Churchill's this big strong man and never appeases and you know, he's gung over war. Churchill's out of the government at that time. He, he recognizes, you can't trust Hitler, he recognizes that Nazism is bad. But he, because he's out of the government, he doesn't have a window on exactly where Britain is at that particular time in a way that Chamberlain does.

1:38:01You know, so, so I suppose what I'm saying is Chamberlain is better placed to make those decisions than Churchill is, which again doesn't mean that the Chamberlain is right and Churchill is wrong. It's just that's a massive pump to go to war in 1938 when you still don't have, you know, you've got a handful of Spitfires, you've got a handful of hurricanes, you haven't got enough, you know, your Ed Defense system isn't properly sorted at this point. Your Navy is strong. But, you know, what's that kind of look like? I mean, if you do go to war, because it's not going to be army sweeping into Germany.

1:38:40It's just, it's going to be accelerated industrialization for a year. So, you know, even if you go to war in 1938 over Czechoslovakia, Czechoslovakia will not be saved. The, you know, France and Britain will not be going in invading Germany. That, you know, that is absolutely not going to happen. So, sort of what's the point? I mean, you know, if you're not going to do that, why didn't you accelerate your rearmament thereafter, get your ducks in a row? And then you can consider it. I mean, after all, you know, even in September 1939, they don't really do anything. I mean, we talked about the the SAR offensive, which isn't really an offensive at all.

1:39:17It's firing a one round of machine gun scuffling back again. But I mean, they don't even do that then. They're still buying time in 1939. And you know, Britain is only just about ready to take on the onslaught of the Luftwaffe in summer of 1940. Well, nobody is ready for... No, and you always want more than you've got at any time, even when you're winning. But like, really not ready. Even, like, you mentioned that with Barbarossa, the Assyjory is really not ready. Nobody's really... For instance, I swear. For instance, I've had radios. Fine. But come on, come on. When Assyjory invades Poland, I mean, yeah, it's terrible.

1:40:02It's terrible. Because I'm absolutely... I also do think that had France in some force with some British troops as well, had they gone in, what would have happened is that easy could have brought down Hitler. Because most of his commanders are... His senior commanders just thinking, what the hell is going on? This is a catastrophe. I mean, to a man. I mean, even going is thinking this is a terrible idea. They are absolutely not convinced. And when Hitler does his big talk to his... He asks all his senior commanders to come to the Berkhov to brief them about invasion of Poland. It's just after the Ribbon Trough, Molotov, packed to the 22nd of August.

1:40:42He calls them all to the Berkhov and says, come in, you know, come in Muffty, come in civilian suits. They all turn up and he gives them this kind of huge, great speech. And so this is the moment. This is the time. This is what we're going to do. And they're okay. What? You're kidding me. What we're going to Poland on the 26th of August. That's the plan. Like two days time. You know, where's the plan? Where's the... You know, the whole point is that they're emerging and growing militarily, but they were supposed to have all these exercises where they, you know, coordinating ground forces. The pans have spearheaded with operations in the air with the Luftwaffe.

1:41:17None of that happens. So Poland becomes the proving ground. And actually, they discover that there's lots of things that don't work and lots of things are wrong. But, you know, it's flying in the face of all convention, military convention that they, you know, he does this about any kind of warning. And even by the 1st of September, where there's been this kind of sort of five -day delay, at the last minute negotiations, the last minute negotiations are thrust upon Hitler by people like Goering and by Mussolini and the Italians going, oh my god, don't do this, don't do this. You know, there's got to be a solution.

1:41:53It is actually jumping at the bit. Well, in that case, from a dark, militaristic perspective, his bet paid off. Well, except that it ended in ruins in May 1945 with total collapse of Germany. So you could say it's the worst decision you ever made. It was going into Poland and so time for 1939. It's just right, you look at it. But I mean, yes, you know, it's successful. And that, you know, Poland's over on in 18 days. And there's so many counterfactuals here. But I mean, if you would say to Hitler on the 30th of April, you know, is he sort of taking out the pistol from his holster on his sofa in the in the furibunk and going, you know, so out of 1st of September 1939, still backing himself on that one.

1:42:34I mean, he might have a different view. The guy is insane and full of blunder. So he probably would have said, yeah, do it all over again. Yeah, I'm sure he would have done that well. It's a con question. Poland was not a mistake. So the union was not a mistake. It's just some of the tactic. Other people I was let down by by people not being strong enough. He had the Prussian generals or all. Yeah, of course. That's exactly what he'd say. Wasn't my fault. He might have quietly done some different decisions about Barbarossa. Maybe the timing would be different. Maybe that all out central for us rather than kind of spitting it through.

1:43:08Yeah. Yeah. But he was very sure. It seems like maybe you can correct me that Britain and France would still carry on with appeasement even after he invaded Poland. Absolutely. He was completely convinced by it. There was clearly a kind of sort of 10 to 15 % level of doubt. But what the heck I'm going to do it anyway. He was just, he ratcheted himself up into such a laver of kind of, this is the moment. I have to do it now. This is fate. I'm 50. And, and you know, I could be taken out by an assassin's bullet. I've got this important life work that I've got to do. We've got to get on with it now.

1:43:45There could be no more delay. This is my mission. You know, this is our mission of the German people. And either the German people have got the will and the spirit to be able to pull it off. Or, you know, I was wrong. And therefore, you know, we don't deserve to be a thousand year right. We don't deserve to be the master race. Black away. I saw them. Eeveral. That's the same all the time. So can you tell the story of the Marltov Roman Troop packed in 1939. So they make an agreement Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union. And that leads us just like you were mentioned in a matter of days. How compact everything is.

1:44:22It's just really, really fascinating. I'll put you beautiful summer in Europe, summer of 1939. You know, it's one of these so glorious summers that sort of never reigns. Sunshine sunny day after sunny day. It's kind of, you know, it's like that sort of golden summer of 1914 as well, you know, where Sky always seems to be blue, fluffy white clouds, everyone sort of, you know, but this sort of the storm clouds of war to use that cliche are kind of brewing. The Russians have reached out to Britain and France and said, come on over, let's negotiate, you know, let's see what we can do. And there is just no stomach for that at all.

1:45:03I mean, if ever there is a I think a mistake, that's Britain and France should have been a bit more into real politics. Then they were that it's such an opportunity to ensure that you to snooker the Third Reich and they don't take it. Because, you know, in many ways, they see the Westward spread of communism in his own case anyway, the Nazi see the threat of the Westward spread of communism as something that's every bit as repellent as Nazism and they don't want to be getting into bed with these guys. Of course, they kind of have to kind of change tack on that one in summer of 1941 in, you know, very quick order.

1:45:49And that's the whole point about Churchill appeasing Stalin. I mean, you know, it's all very well people saying, well, you know, Churchill would have appeased Hitler in 1930s, but he does appease. He appeases all the time. And they miss that opportunity. And the French and British delegation is third tier commanders generals going over. It's a it's a it's a it's a it's a shit show. I mean, it's, you know, excuse my French, but I mean, it's just it's a nonsense that they're not ready for it. They're not prepared. The British guy, I mean, Dracks doesn't have any authority. The whole thing's complete joke.

1:46:23It's never going to get anywhere. You tell the story of this quite beautifully actually. Again, it's such a human story. I mean, it seems like the Stalin and so they've already made up their mind, but I don't think they have. I mean, you describe quite well that they value in person meeting. Yes. So like, Chimble and shit have just gone to Moscow. Yeah, get on playing. Like it it's such a maybe it's a simplistic notion, but that could have changed the trajectory of human history right there. I already think it could have done. I think that was I think that's I think that's much more grievous mistake than the Munich.

1:47:04Why are leaders so hesitant to meet? I'm told now by a bunch of diplomats that no, no, no, no, there's a process. You know, first you have to have these diplomats meet and they have to draft a bunch of stuff. And sometimes they have this simplistic notion like why not why not meet? Why not meet? Like I think there is a human element there. And of course, especially when there's this force that is Hitler. Well, yes, and because we humans we like to interact. Yeah. And and you like to see people in three dimensions. And you know, I'm sure why you always quite rightly insist on doing your podcast face to face because you want to get the kind of someone's chip and you want to be able to see them and you want to see the intonation in their expression and the whites of their eyes and all that kind of stuff.

1:47:58And that just does make a difference of course because you know, but fundamentally animals. And we kind of we want to be sizing people up and it's much easier to do that when you're a few feet away from each other than it is on a video screen or through the prism of someone else. Yeah, but there's also just you see the humanity and others. It's so much easier. You see this as social media. It's so much easier to talk shit about others when you're not with them. Yes. And like military conflict is the extreme version of that. Yeah, you can construct these narratives that they're not human that they're evil that they're you can construct communist ideology.

1:48:38All these you can project onto them the worst possible version of a human. But when you meet them, you're like, oh, they are just a person. They're just a person. Well, it's a world's great tragedy that it's only a few people that want to get a war and the vast majority want to live happily contented lives getting on with their neighbors. I mean, it has been ever thus. It's just it is those few that kind of ruin it for everybody else. But anyway, to go back to the landing right back in August 1939, they go half -cock. They're disrespectful to Soviet Union as a result of that. It gets nowhere. Had they been able to put on a really, really firm offer there and then to the Soviet Union, Soviet Union would have probably come in.

1:49:26I mean, the big thing is that the Soviet Union said, this is a big stumbling block. The Soviet Union said, yeah, but we want to be able to march through Poland if we get threatened by Germany. But the British and French just smell a massive rant there. They're basically saying, you know, if they agree to that, what they're what they fear is that Soviet Union will just march into Poland and go, yeah, but you said we could and take it. Which they unquestionably would have done. But it would have stopped the world will probably. They're willing to be Hitler. They're not willing to be stolen in that situation.

1:49:58Well, they're not willing to appease anybody by that stage. That's the point. Well, they appeased Hitler because they did have to be up for a lot of that. There's a now cop. There's a bottom line, which is Poland. No, so it's changed. That's why. Right. But anyway, the bottom line is they don't, you know, there is a there is a a reluctance on the part of French and the British to negotiate with the Soviet Union because their communists don't like them. Don't trust them. Worry about what they're going to do with Poland and they're going to be, you know, jumping out of the fire into the kind of water.

1:50:29And it doesn't come off. And as a consequence of that, Soviet Union continue to pursue more hardly, you know, more more vociferously. The opportunities that the, that the Germans are offering, which is the split of Poland. Because Soviet Union wants that part of Poland back in its own sphere of influence. And it doesn't want to get award just yet. And the agreement that they won't attack each other, essentially. Yeah. Do you think Stalin actually believed that? No, he believed it in the same way that Hitler believed it. That it was a cynical kind of, you know, convenient, but a real politic for now.

1:51:08I mean, I think Soviet Union was determined to get rid of the Nazis as the Nazis were determined to get rid of the Soviet Union. I think whoever fired first was not, not decided at that point. But I do think that from the moment that Hitler takes power in 1943, a conflict between Soviet Union and Nazi Germany as inevitable. Yes. So either direction, you think it's inevitable. Yeah. I think there's, yeah, there's a huge amount of evidence for that. Stalin probably wanted it what like in 42, 43. Yeah. Something like that. Yeah. And you know, they're doing exercises and stuff and building out. He's not ready yet because he knows he's done the purges and he's got to get his army, you know, he's got to get his armed forces back into shape and all the rest of it.

1:51:45But, you know, so they have this incredible cynical agreement. But at that point, you know, Hitler's hands are untied. You know, he no longer has to worry about the threat from Soviet Union. He's got carplans to go into Poland and he doesn't believe that France and Britain are going to go to war over Poland. He's wrong about that. Obviously, but but but France and Britain, despite going to war, them still do nothing. So, you know, he's got a way of it. Who was Churchill? And how did Churchill come to power at this moment? Well, Churchill is this absolutely towering figure in British politics. You know, he's been, you know, his first minister in the kind of naughties of the 20th century and the first years of the 20th century.

1:52:27Class of the Liberals and the Conservatives, he's a former chancellor of his chequer. He's a towering figure. But he's been in the wilderness because he's out of favor with the Stanley Baldwin government. He's out of favor with with with with Chamberlain. But he is this towering figure and he has been very outspoken as a back venture, which basically means, you know, you're not a minister, you're not in the cabinet, you're just an ordinary member of parliament. But obviously, you're an ordinary member of parliament, but you're also an ordinary member of parliament who has had ministries of state and who is his towering figure.

1:53:04So he's listened to it in a way that other back benches aren't. And he has been saying, you know, we need to stand up to the dictators, we need to do this. We need to rearm more more heavily and blah, blah, blah. So when war is declared, he's brought back into the Admiralty and charge of the Navy, which is Britain's senior service and suddenly he's there. And what happens is Britain doesn't do anything. It's very difficult working with France because France is so politically fractured that they can't make any decisions. When you can't make any decisions, you're just impotent. And so Churchill first mentions going into Norway, mining the leads.

1:53:42So the idea is that you're making life very difficult for the Germans to get iron ore out of Sweden. Their main source of iron ore is up in the northern part of Sweden in the Arctic Circle. And then goes on a railway through northern tip of Norway and then gets shipped down the west coast of Norway into Germany, into the Baltic. So Churchill suggests in September 1950, why don't we mine the leads, which are the leads, are these passageways out of the fjords and the north into the into the north sea. Why don't we mine those and stop the Germans from taking this? Everyone goes, well, yeah, that's quite a good idea.

1:54:18But they can't decide and French and nervous. So if they do that, the Germans will retaliate in bomb France and all this kind of stuff. So no decision is made until kind of April 1940. They go up to start mining the leads on exactly the same day that the Germans invade Denmark and Norway. And so they're called off guards. And at that moment, really, it's seen as a failure of Chamberlain's government. And there is a kind of a mounting realization that no matter how good he was or competency was as a peacetime Prime Minister, he's not a wartime Prime Minister. He's not served in the armed forces himself, doesn't really understand it.

1:54:52He's a different set of hands. And his government falls on the ninth of May. It becomes inevitable that he's going to have to resign. And the obvious person to take his place is Lord Halifax, who is in the House of Lords, but you can still be a Prime Minister. He is without a question the most respected politician in the country. He's former vice -royer of India. He's seen as incredibly safe pair of hands, man of resolute sound judgment, etc., etc. But he doesn't want to take it. He feels physically ill at the prospect, doesn't want this responsibility. He's also not really a military man. He's got a slightly sort of withered hand, which is prevented him from doing military service.

1:55:36And he just takes on this position and that's Churchill. When Chamberlain resigns on the ninth of May and Halifax says it's not for me, the only person who's going to slip into that position is Churchill and he becomes Prime Minister and he accepts it. Gladly, he feels like his mission in life. This is his moment. Come with the hour, come with the man. But he comes with a huge amount of baggage. He's known as a man who drinks too much, whose judgment hasn't always been great. He's transferred to June the time of the General Strike in 1926. He backed Edward VIII over the monarchy crisis when the king wanted to marry Wallace Simpson, the Catholic divorcee, etc., etc.

1:56:21So his judgment has been brought into question. He is the man who came up with the idea of the Gallipoli campaign, which was an ignominious failure. There are issues over him. He is seen as a hothead and a man who doesn't have the kind of sound judgment of Halifax. So the jury is very much out. And I think it's again, it's one of those things where you have to put yourself in... You have to look at this through the prism of what people were thinking in May 1940. Yes, he was considered a tiring politician, but he is seen also as a loose cannon and by no means the right person in this hour of darkness.

1:57:01And it is coincidental that the 10th of May 1940, when he takes over as prime minister, becomes prime minister, not through an election, but by default, of a new nationalist government, so no longer a conservative government, but a nationalist cross -party coalition government for the duration of the war, which includes members of the liberal party and also the labor party, as well as conservatives. That it is by no means certain that he's going to be able to deliver the goods. And it is also coincidentally the same day that the Germans launched KCLO, Operation Yellow, the invasion of the low countries in France.

1:57:42So these are tumultuous events to put it mildly. And it is also the case that, you know, only a couple of weeks before Paul Reynault has taken over as prime minister of yet another coalition government in France from Daladier. So political turmoil is very much the watchword at this time for the Western democracies, just at the moment that the Germans are making their kind of, you know, their hammer strike into the West. This may be a good moment to bring up this idea that has been circulating recently, brought up by Darryl Cooper, who hyper -bolicly stated that Churchill was the quote, chief villain of the Second World War, to give a good faith interpretation of that.

1:58:32I believe he meant that Churchill forced Hitler to escalate the expansion of Nazi Germany beyond Poland into global war. So Churchill is the one that turned this narrow war, Chakraslava, Austria, Poland, into a global one.

1:58:52Is that accurate? No, I don't think it is. I mean, not least because the decisions over Poland were made by Chamberlain's government, not when Churchill was out of government. So, you know, Churchill wasn't even involved in that decision making process at the time. No, I don't think so. I mean, again, I go back to kind of Britain's position in the world in 1939. If you say we are going to defend the sovereignty of Poland and then you don't, that is, that looks really bad globally. You know, Britain's prestige would plummet, would lead to all sorts of problems. You are saying that you're giving car blanch to dictators to just run a mark and take whatever territory they want.

1:59:31You are risking a future upheaval of the global order, away from democracies into the hands of dictators. You know, in the West people believe in democracy and believe in advancement of freedoms of people. It's this, you know, to echo the words of Roosevelt in August 1931, you know, that they're responding to a world free of one to fear. Now, obviously, there's still some issues with the form that democracy takes in the 1930s. It's not democratic for everyone. You know, try saying that if you're in Nigeria or India or whatever, or if you're, you know, in the black southern states of the United States.

2:00:18But the aspirations are there. And I think that's an important distinction. And I think by saying that Churchill is the chief war monger of the Second World War, I think, is ludicrous. You know, it's the same thing about the bombing. You know, the detractors of strategic air campaign always go, yeah, but, you know, Germans had the Holocaust, but weren't the Allies just as bad just killing all those civilians? It's like, no, because the moment Hitler stopped the war, the bombing would stop. You know, the moment the war stopped in Hitler's favor, the killing would continue and be accelerated. So the thing you mentioned initially is the sort of the idealist perspective of, well, Britain can't allow sort of this warm monger to break all these packs and be under democratic, you know, murder a large number of people and do conquest of territory.

2:01:15Okay, that's idealistic, but if we look at the realist perspective, what decisions would minimize the amount of suffering on the continent in the next 50 years? So one of the arguments that he's making, I happen to disagree with it to put it mildly, is that Churchill increased the amount of suffering. So Churchill's presence and decisions. So we're not talking about idealistic perspective. We're talking about realists like the reality of the war, of Stalin, of Hitler, of Churchill, of France and of DR, did Churchill drag Hitler into a world war? Did he force Hitler to invade Soviet Union? Did he force Hitler to then invade attack Britain?

2:02:16Well, no, because because Hitler was always going to invade the Soviet Union, unless the Soviet Union invaded Germany first. So that was always going to happen. No one asked Hitler to invade the low countries and Norway and Denmark and attack Britain.

2:02:35He does that, of course, because he's not given a free hand in Poland, but there's no question that Hitler would also wanted to subdued France or suddenly turn France from a democracy into a totalitarian state as well. I'm absolutely certain about that. So I think there's pretty definitive evidence and he's obvious. From everything he said, from everything he's written, from everything, everywhere that he was going to invade the Soviet Union, no matter what. And France, most likely, yes, also. He would have done a deal with Britain. Britain could have been accessed. So actually, there is a, is there, there is a possible reality.

2:03:17I don't know, maybe you can correct me on this. Where Hitler basically takes all of Europe except Britain. Yes, but then he would have got so strong that he would have then turned on Britain as well, because he would, the fear is that if you let him do this and then he gets greedy, wants the next one, then he wants the next one, then he wants the next one, and then he wants to take it all well. That is the fear of the British, that is the fear of the Americans, that's the fear of President Roosevelt, who's got a very, we haven't even touched on this yet, but he has a very difficult case on his hands because he's come into power also in January 1933, as President of the United States, on an isolationist ticket with a retrenching, with a kind of sort of, you know, step away from the European Old Order.

2:04:05It's time for the Europeans to start on their own. It all sounds very familiar right now. And suddenly he's got to do this God Gantron political vault -fast and prepare the nation for war because he also fears, like Churchill fears, like Chamberlain Fed as well, that Hitler's designs are not purely on Eastern Europe and the Libans from there, but would get ever bigger. And I don't doubt that they're right. I think if he'd prevailed in the Soviet Union, you know, he'd always wanted more, you know, because his whole concept is the master race, you know. Yeah, I think I think he should be said, if we measure human suffering, if there was not Britain on the other side, if it was not a two front war, that the chances of Hitler succeeding in the Soviet Union is much higher or at least a more prolonged war, and there would be more dead, more enslaved, and more tortured in all of this.

2:05:05Yes, and Ditto, if you, you know, if the Allies hadn't gone involved against Imperial Japan, you know, it would have been, would have been catastrophic. I mean, 20 to 30 million Chinese dead anyway, you know, with American and British intervention. And it wasn't going to be in China without that. I mean, and elsewhere, you know, because the reason why Japan invades French Indochina, now Vietnam, and Hong Kong, and Malaya, and Singapore, and so on, and Burma, is because it's not winning in China, and it needs more resources because it's resource poor, and America has cut off the tap. So it's going into these countries to get what it needs, it's rubber and oil and natural resources and oil, precious oils and all the rest of it.

2:05:58And if it had been unchecked, it would have done so. And then it would have absolutely built up its strength and overrun the whole of China with even more deaths. So, you know, I think there is, I think one of the interesting things about the Second World War is, is lots of wars and why people can evolve than them are extremely questionable. But I think there is a moral crusade to the Allies and what they're doing that I think is entirely justified. What I think is interesting, also, is that as the war progresses, you know, if the Allies are supposed to be on the force of the good, how come they're doing so much bad?

2:06:36And at what point is doing bad, stopping you from doing good? And at what point are you doing good, but also doing bad at the same time? Such as destruction of cities, destruction of monasteries on outcrops and sovereign Italy, you know, destruction of killing a loss of civilians, etc, etc. You know, these are, these are difficult questions to answer sometimes. They're also incredibly interesting. And I think that moral component starts to blur a little bit by kind of middle of the war by 1943. You know, it's kind of easy to have a fairly cut and dry war in North Africa and the deserts of North Africa where, you know, the only people getting in the way are if you sort of bed with tribesmen or something.

2:07:23But once you start getting into Europe or getting into the kind of the meat of highly populated countries in the far east, for example, that's a different color fish because the scale of destruction is absolutely immense. But it is also the job of political leaders to look after and defend their own people's first and foremost. And so what you're doing is you're trying to protect your own sovereignty, your own people before you're protecting other people. And so that's what leads to, you know, the whole way in which the allies are, the Western allies are attracting war is to try and minimize the number of deaths of their own young men as much as they possibly can whilst at the same time winning the war.

2:08:08And that means bringing lots of destruction to your enemies, but also trying to minimize it. And the way you bring lots of destruction by to your enemies is by using immense firepower and this concept of still not our flesh, which I mentioned earlier on, and technology so that you don't have to bring to bear too many of your young men's eyes and you don't have a repeat of the slaughter of the First War war. So, you know, it is really interesting that in our minds are when we're thinking of, you know, the Western allies and the Second World War, probably the first thing that comes into mind is Americans jumping out of landing craft on Omaha Beach on D -Day, for example, those are infantrymen.

2:08:45They're the front line. They are the coal face of, they're the first people going into the, into the fire of the enemy. And we tend to think about guys in tanks, infantrymen with their garand rifles or, you know, machine guns or whatever. That's, that's what springs to mind. Yet actually they're comparatively small proportion of the army. So no more than 14 to 15 % of any army allied army is infantry. 45 % are service corps, service troops, driving trucks and cooks and bottle washers and people lugging great big boxes of stuff. You know, and that's because by that stage, you know, the allies have worked out of the way of war, which is, is to, is to use, is what I call big war, this concept of, of a very long tail logistics, the operational art, making sure that people have the absolute best you possibly can, great medical care, huge advances in, in, first aid and a medical care of troops, getting them back onto the battlefield.

2:09:39And you're using firepower and technology and mechanization to do a lot of your hard yards. So, you know, that's the principle behind strategic bombing. You know, if you can, if you go over and bombing, you can destroy infrastructure and civilians and households. That makes it much harder for, for, for crop to make those pamphor tanks and tiger tanks or whatever it might be and guns. And, you know, you're disrupting the transportation system in Germany. You know, you're making life difficult for them to do what they need to do. Then that means it's going to be easier for those 15, 14, 15 percent of infantry and you've got to jump out of land and craft to do their job.

2:10:17And you're trying to keep that to a minimum and you have to say broadly speaking, that's a very sensible policy that makes an awful lot of sense. Consequence of that is a huge amount of destruction. And maybe that's what Darryl Cooper's driving at. But no one asked Hitler to invade Poland. I mean, you know, that is the bottom line. No one asked Germany to go to war. No one asked Hitler to come up with these ludicrous ideology. Yeah, there's complex ethical discussions here about just as you describe which are fascinating, which are fascinating and wars how and there's many ways in which it is how.

2:11:00Just for a little bit to steal man what Darryl is where he might be coming from is since World War II, the simplistic veneration of Churchill, sort of saying Churchill good, Hitler bad has been used as a template to project under other conflicts to justify military intervention. And so his general, his and other people like libertarians, for example, resistance to that overly simplistic veneration of somebody like Churchill has to do with the fact that that seems to be by neocons of war mongers in the military industrial complex in the United States. And elsewhere, using Hitler way too much, using Churchill way too much to justify invading everywhere and anywhere.

2:11:55Well, I do agree with that. I think oversimplification of anything is a mistake. You know, life is nuanced. The past is nuanced. It's okay to be proud about certain things and it's okay to be disgusted by other things. That's absolutely fine. You know, we have a complicated relationship with our past. It doesn't need to be black and white. And life is not a straight line. And of course as the allies make plenty of mistakes in World War II, overall I think they made the right calls. And I think one of the things that's really interesting is I think that the allies for the most part use their resources much more judiciously and sensibly than the Axis powers do.

2:12:36And you know, good. Because that means they prevail. I think, you know, there are so many lessons from World War II that could have been brought into the history of the last 30 years, which weren't, you know, such as, you know, if you have, if you if you decapitate an incredibly strong leader, you get a power vacuum. And if you don't have a solution for that power vacuum, lots of bad elements are going to sweep into that in very quick order, which of course is exactly what happens in Iraq. So, you know, don't run some gang. We don't do reconstruction. Where you freaking well should do. You know, if you're going to take on this particular challenge, you've got to see it through.

2:13:17You know, that's simply not good enough. You know, it's not good enough to go into Afghanistan and go, okay, we're going to change things around. It's going to be great. You know, all the women are going to have education. They won't have to work kind of, you know, won't have to cover up their bodies anymore. Anything goes, we love liberalism. It's great. Let's make Kabul into a thriving city once more. And then suddenly bug out. You know, because what's going to happen? You're going to undo everything. And I remember being in, you know, this is a bit of a segue, Lex, but I remember being in in Northern Helmand province back in, you know, when it was January 2008.

2:13:53And British troops had just taken over an absolute dump of a town called Musaqala. And I remember talking to this Afghan guy, he just had all his willow trees chopped down to make room for a helipad that the Allies wanted, which said, you know, put that kind of, you know, those cages with kind of rubble in the protective wall. It's called Heskong, I think it was called. Anyway, I said to him, what do you think about the British being there? And he just shrugged at me and lifted up his hands and said, well, you know, if they stayed great, but they weren't. And he said, you know, if they stayed, then brilliant.

2:14:31He said, I tell you what, he said, Taliban weren't great. They weren't fantastic. He said, but I could leave my personal wall and no one would touch it. I could leave it on a wall for a week, no one would touch it. He said, well, they bring that kind of order. You know, well, we have, well, we have peace here. You know, they've just dropped down my willow trees. You know, thanks a lot. And you know, you're seeing a total lack of understanding of the culture, ethnic differences. You're trying to impose a kind of western -centric view onto something, which is just some, you know, onto a nation, which isn't ready for that.

2:15:11Now, there are ways in which, you know, look like Afghanistan was starting to kind of emerge and there was a path. And then just at the critical moment, the West moves out with catastrophic consequences. What you have to say, though, is that in the West, post -1945, the rehabilitation of Italy, of Japan, of Western Germany was really good. You know, the consequence of all that destruction, all that turmoil was thriving, high -producing democracies, which burst forth into the kind of second half of the 20th century and into the 21st century in pretty good order. So the lessons of the previous generation, for the First World War had been learned, even though the scale of destruction, the displacement of people, is unprecedented in 1945.

2:16:09In 1939, what was the state of the militaries? What were the most powerful militaries in the world stage at that time? Well, in terms of naval power, as we've already discussed, and the United States, France has a pretty large navy. Japan has a pretty large navy. Italy has a pretty large navy, but Italy's navy is, by far, in a way, it's most modern aspect of its free services, airline and sea, but it doesn't have any aircraft carriers, and it doesn't have any radar. So, you know, it's, they've got modern battleships and battle cruisers, but without key modern bits of technology. So Italy is really not ready for.

2:16:47Oh, it's so not. It's so not. It's just again, both Hitler and Mussolini, they lack geopolitical understanding. You know, that's because they're so kind of focused on their narrow world view, and they view everything through that prison, but they can't see that bigger picture. And we should say that Mussolini, maybe you can correct me, but I don't think at any point he wants to war. He doesn't want to war. What he does want is he wants his own new kind of Roman empire, which extends over the Mediterranean, that kind of certainly the eastern part of the half of the Mediterranean, North Africa, all the way down to kind of East Africa, controlling the Suez Canal, but that's what he wants.

2:17:25And I think you make clear that he was, I mean, there's always like this little brother jealous of Hitler kind of situation because he wanted absolute power the way Hitler did, but doesn't have it, doesn't have it. It's just right. Yeah, there's a monarchy. Often forgotten. It's amazing. So there's always this limit and Hitler quite brilliantly wants to get some power. He takes it all. Complete. He completely emersculates Mussolini. And he likes him, though. It's really weird. Even when Mussolini is about four in July 1943 as a meeting at Feltre, just literally a few days before, Mussolini tumbles and he does that because he likes Mussolini.

2:18:13He likes him as a man and thinks he's been his friend and he respects him to a certain extent. Even though he's he definitely views himself as top dog. Hitler does that is. So it's kind of curious because I don't think Hitler particularly likes anyone really, but he does seem to like Mussolini. But anyway, the problem with Mussolini is Mussolini is Italy is very impoverished from the First World War. And that of course leads to the rise of fascism and the overthrow of parliamentary democracy. And why Mussolini takes place in the first place? Again, there's been this terrible disruption. There's been financial crisis.

2:18:52That leads to people looking at an alternative. You know, what's the alternative? Well, Mussolini is going, we can be proud Italians again, lots of chess, bumping, Wayne Great Uniforms, all the rest of it. People think, well, I have a piece of that. It kind of works and reverberally the trains work on time under him and so on and so forth. But he just gets ahead of himself. And actually the writing's on the war in 1945 when he goes into Abyssinia and you know, against sort of what effectively are kind of by First World European standards, primitive tribesmen in Abyssinia, you know, they have quite a tough fight there.

2:19:27You know, they do prevail, but it's not a complete walkover. And they get a bit of a bloody nose at times. And they shouldn't have done. And they're just not ready. They don't have the industry. You know, they're tied up into the Mediterranean. They don't have access to the world's oceans. They do have some merchant shipping, but not a huge amount. You know, they just don't have what is required. They don't, they're dependent on Britain for coal. Britain is the leading coal exporter in the world in the 1930s. So Britain's approach to fascist Spain and approach to fascist Italy has been very much sort of stick in carrot.

2:20:03So you know, we'll let you do what you do as long as you kind of stay in your box. And, and you know, we'll continue to provide you with supplies and coal and whatever is you need as long as you don't kind of go too far. And so that's why Mussolini is very anxious in 1938. And again, in 1939, to kind of be the power broker and kind of not let Germany go to war. But Germany's just, you know, they sign the access pact of steel in May 1939, where they become formal allies. This is one of the reasons Mussolini signs it is because he fears that Germany has designs on Italy. Yeah. It's not because he thinks, oh, these guys are great.

2:20:49We're, you know, there are natural bedfellows. It's so that he can, what, what, it's a mutually convenient pact whereby Germany gets on with whatever it wants to do up in northern Europe and eastern Europe. Italy is given a free hand to do whatever it wants to do. They'll just kind of watch each other's backs. They have borders, you know, Austria and Italy, border one another. And they'll just do their own thing and they'll kind of help each other out with supplies and stuff. But basically, they won't, they'll, they'll be their own, it's a kind of marriage of convenience. You know, they're never expected to be fighting alongside each other on the matter of them.

2:21:24Not really. There is a kind of obligation to do so, but it's an obligation with no expectation of ever actually happening. And so from Mussolini's point of view, the pact is still is kind of, you know, it's just sailing your flag to one particular mast and kind of trying to cover your, cover your back. And so long as he plays its cards right, you know, he can, he can still get his coal supplies from Britain. He doesn't have to worry about that, you know, the pact is still doesn't make any difference to that. The problem for him is, is that in June 1940, he thinks that France is about to be defeated and the Britain will surely follow.

2:22:00And so he thinks, ah, I've got some rich pickings, I can take Malta or I can take British possessions, I can Rover Run Egypt. And you know, now is my time, but I, I also need to kind of join the fight before France is completely out of the fight. Otherwise, it looks like I'm a Johnny come lately and I won't, I won't get those spoils because the Germans will go, yeah, you can't have all this stuff. You've turned up too late, you need to be in the fight. So he does it, what, he thinks is the perfect timing. And it turns out to be a catastrophic timing because it's called Britain doesn't exit the fight.

2:22:26You know, Britain is still there. And you know, by February 1941, a very, very tiny British army in Egypt has overrun, you know, two entire Italian armies and taken 133 ,000 prisoners in North Africa. So you mentioned in the sea, who were the dominant armies, who was, who was dominant in the air? Well, in the air, it has to be the Luftwaffe. And it is also the Imperial Japanese, both in the Imperial Japanese Navy and the Imperial Japanese Army, they both have air forces. And one of the reasons that is because the quality of the pilots in Japan is extremely high because it's so difficult to get, to get to the top position.

2:23:04You know, you are going to your frontline squadrons with at least 500 hours in your logbook. To put that into some perspective, you know, a British RAF or Luftwaffe pilot will be joining their frontline squadrons with 150 to 170 hours in the logbook. So it is that these guys are just a plain to within an inch of their lives. They are, you know, there are academic tests as well as physical endurance tests. You know, they are the elite of the elite and they are extremely good. The problem they have is there is a good number of them, but there's not that many. The Luftwaffe is the largest Air Force in the world in 1939, but it is already at a parity in air -croft production with Britain.

2:23:49And the French have a kind of similar size army, but they are very, very badly organized. So they are also organized into different regions and one region is not really talking to another. And one of the problems that when KCLO, the German invasion of the West starts, France's army of the air is spread throughout France and has its own little areas. So you have one bunch of fighters and bombers in that block in the Marseille area. You have another block in kind of, you know, on the British and coast and you have another block in around Sedan and you have another that. So consequently, they're never able to kind of bring their full strength to bear.

2:24:25So it's, although they've both got about three and a half thousand aircraft on paper and about two and a half thousand that are fit to fly on any one given day, the Luftwaffe, because they're the aggressor, can choose how they mass their aircraft and where they attack and at when. So in other words, you can send, Luftwaffe can send over overwhelming amounts of bombers and fighter planes and pulverize a French airfield and catch them napping. And because the French don't have a defense system, they can't see whether they're coming. So their only hope is to kind of take off and just hope they stood around the sky and hope they bump into some Luftwaffe.

2:25:01And of course, that's inherently inefficient and they get, well, you know, they get destroyed and they get destroyed in penny packets rather than on mass. Difference with the RAF is the RAF is not done on an Air Force basis where you have each air core or air fleet has a handful of bombers, a handful of fighters, a handful of reconnaissance planes. They have different commands. So they have bomber command, fighter command, training command, coastal command, and they all have very specific roles. So they're, they're structured in a completely different way. And the other, and that's because they're an island nation.

2:25:36And because they see their role militarily in a different way. And because the rearming that Britain has done in the 1930s is all about defense. It is not about aggression at this point. Not about taking it to the enemy. It is, it is showing your tough, but also first and foremost, getting your ducks in a row and making sure that you don't get defeated. So this is the principle behind the first, the world's first fully coordinated air defense system, which is the radar chain. It is the observer core. It is control rooms. It is interesting technology such as identification friend or foe, IFF, which is where you have a little pulse, which so you have these control rooms and you have a map table and you have a tote board in front of you where you can see what squadrons are airborne, what state of readiness they're at, you know, whether they're engaging the enemy, little lights come on and show you can see weather maps.

2:26:24You can see the clouds ceiling. You see all that at glass. Then you're on a dius and then down in front of you is a massive great map of southern England. You've got croupiers, it's got a moving plots. So you can through a combination of radar, which picks up a kind of a rough idea of what's coming towards you combined with the observer core. You have overlapping observer core stations all over Britain covering every single inch of air space over Britain, looking up into the air and seeing how many aircraft there are and at what height they are and you have little, they've got a pantograph, which is a piece of equipment, which helps you judge altitude.

2:27:02You then ring through that. That all comes into the control room along with the information from the radar stations, which is going into a single filter room at fighter command headquarters, which is then being pushed straight back out to the sector stations. So this information is being updated all the time. So you have a plot and it looks like it might be, you know, enemy bombers 30 plus, for example, that's constantly being adapted. So as more information comes in, you will change that and then you can see that actually it's only 20 aircraft or 22 aircraft or whatever. So you're updating that and that little figure is put on your little plot and moved across.

2:27:39So you can see and then because you can identify your own aircraft, you can then see where they are moving. And you're also on the guys in the air are on the radio to ground controllers who are in these control rooms and they're saying, okay, well, if you proceed at, angels 18, 18 ,000 feet, you know, on a vector of, you know, 150 degrees, you should be seeing your enemy bombing formation any moment now. And what that means is that you're not on the ground when the enemy are coming towards you with their bombers to hit your airfield, which means you're in the air. So that all they're doing is hitting a grass airfield, which you've already got bulldozers and diggers and graders and loss of scalpings and earth ready to fill in the potholes.

2:28:24And means you're good to go. And it means as a consequence of all that, when the Germans do, launch their all out assault on Adler Tog, Eagle Day on the 13th of August 1940, the British are ready. You know, they're, they can see them coming. They know what to expect. And they can anticipate. And it means that they're not being caught with their trousers down on the ground. And as a consequence of that of the 138 airfields that are in, our airfields are are in Britain. Only one of them is knocked out for more than 48 hours in the entire summer of 1940. And that's Mansden on the tip of the Kent coast, which is abandoned for the duration.

2:29:01So these are the two biggest air forces. So those are the two biggest air forces. So La Fouafo, which is said, German, I mean, they're like the legendary, the terrifying air force. They are. Maybe, maybe they're slightly believing their own hype. There's no question about it. Well, the rest of the world is also right. They've just had it too easy. So they don't have, they don't have ground controllers. They don't have an air defense system in, in Germany, because why would you need an air defense system? Where it going to be the aggressor? You know, there's no scenario where we'll have to defend the airspace of the third right because we're on the offensive.

2:29:38So they just haven't prepared it. So there's that clash, the battle of Britain, the clash of air forces. What explains the success of Britain in defending? Well, it's, I mean, you know, in everyone else has, you know, the few were the last, you know, the last line of defense against the Nazi hordes and all this kind of stuff. And it's just, it's all rubbish. They're the first line of defense. Second line of defense is the Royal Navy, which is the world's largest. And there's absolutely no chance on Earth that a German invasion made up of Ryan Riverbudges, one of out of every three is motorized in the other two aren't, is ever going to get successfully across the English channel.

2:30:18And even if they did, they will be repulsed. I mean, they just, it's just no chance. And it is often forgotten that while the Luftwaffe is coming over and bombing Britain every single day, so is the RF going over and bombing Germany. And one of the problems that the Germans have is that these bombers need fighter protection, you know, fighter planes are there to protect the bombers. And they don't have much fuel. And I mentioned it, 109E, the Emil, as a model is of 1940 is the mainstay of the German fighter force in the summer of 1940. And they don't have much fuel. So they need to conserve their fuel, which means they need to be as close to Britain as they possibly can, which is why the majority of them are all in airfields, which are hastily created in July 1940, following the fall of France, in the Patacale, which is the closest point, you know, that's where the channel is, it's narrowest and all the rest of it.

2:31:08And also in the northern Normandy. And that's where they're flying from. But what that means is that even if you're completely rubbish, a bombing, which the British are in 1940, they haven't developed those navigational aids that create untold accuracy by the end of the war. 1940, they don't, they don't have that luxury. It's a target rich environment. I mean, you know, you can barely miss if you go over to the island, you know, over to the Patacale. I mean, it's literally, it's just like one huge, great kind of hub of fighter airfields. And consequently, that means that every single German squadron, which only is 12 airplanes strong on, on establishment and very often even fewer than that, always has to leave two airplanes behind to defend their own efforts.

2:31:48And it's really interesting when you look at kind of prisoner war statements from Luftwaffe Crown Creek that have been downed, they're all bugged in a holding place at called Trent Park. You can see the transcripts of these conversations. They're all going about how annoying it was that the RREF are over every night and they can't sleep. And you know, when they, if only they just shut up and leave them alone and not bomb them. And you know, this is just part of the narrative of the Battle of Britain that's completely left out. It's always the stocky, you know, the plucky few against the kind of the, you know, the Nazi hordes and all the rest of it.

2:32:15And it's just, it's a complete misnomer. And by that time, aircraft production in Britain is massively outpacing the Germans. And the best ratio that the Germans achieve in 1940 is July 1940, when the British produced 496 new hurricanes and Spitfires, single engine fighters. And the Germans only produced 240 single engine fighters. That's the best ratio. And of course, you know, that is the British outproducing the Germans two to one. And what that means is by the end of October 1940, when the Battle of Britain is sort of, you know, officially designated as being over, the single engine fighter force of Luftwaffe is less than 200 from 750 or whatever it was in beginning of July.

2:32:59Whereas the British fighter force had been 650 or whatever, at the beginning of July is now well over 750. And Britain is outproducing. Yeah, to a massive degree. And that continues. And you know, that is a ratio that just increases as the war progresses. I mean, Britain produces 132 and a half thousand aircraft in the Second World War. America produces 315 ,000. So why is there this legend of the Luftwaffe? Well, because it's the spearhead of the Blitzkrieg. So it has to do with the Blitzkrieg. It's all to do with the Blitzkrieg. The Luftwaffe becomes the kind of the bogeyman of the Third Reich.

2:33:38You know, they're blamed for everything. But that's because they're completely abused. They're the only part of the Third Reich's armed services. The only part of the Vermak, the Vermak being the Navy, the Army and the Air Force that is in constant use the whole time or constant abuse, I should say. In Britain and America, they rotate their pilots really, really carefully. By the time that you've got the eight fighter command, for example, part of the mighty eight, the eight Air Force operating in Britain. By the end of 1943, you would have inner squadron that would have 60, you would never have more than 16 airborne from a squadron at any one time.

2:34:19You would have 40 to 45 pilots to serve as 16 in the air and similar number of aircraft, which means you're not overusing these guys. And what would happen is by that stage of the war by 1943, you know, fighter pilot coming to a to a Thunderbolt squadron or a Mustang squadron, for example, at the end of 1943, beginning of 1944, he'd have 350 hours of consecutive flying. Because you can train in America, in Florida or California or Texas or wherever you've got, you can process many, many more people because the training is much more intense because you've got to play a skies. So you're not, it's not a question of, oh, we'd like to take you out for it this morning, but you know, it's a bit cloudy and the RAF are over or, you know, the Air Force is over, so we can't fly today.

2:35:06So in Germany, pilot training is constant, air crew training is constantly being interrupted by the war, by shortage of fuel, by inclement, weather, etc, etc. In America, you have none of those problems. And Britain, because of his global reach, also has training bases in what was redision as in Barbway and South Africa, in Canada as well. And so you're able to process these guys much better. You're able to give them more training. So when they come there, they're absolutely finished article as pilots. What they're not finished article as, is say, a bomber pilot or as a fighter pilot, but that's okay because you join your squadron of 40 other guys for 16 airborne.

2:35:44And the old hands kind of take you up a few times. So you arrive at, I don't know, let's say, some airfield in Suffolk in East Anglia in England. And you know, you'll have 10 days to two weeks, climateizing, getting used to air, the old hands will put you through your paces, give you some trips, tips. You can pick their brains during kind of while you're having some chow and listening on some briefings. Then the first mission you do will be a milk run over to France, where the danger is kind of pretty minimal. And you can build up your experience. So by the time you're actually sent over on a mission to Berlin or Bremen or the Rure or whatever, you're absolutely the business.

2:36:23So qualitatively and quantitatively, you are just vastly superior to anything that the Luftwaffe's got. The Luftwaffe by that stage in contrast, 1940, new pilots coming to frontline squadrons with me 150, 170 hours on their, in their logbooks, less than 100, 190, 92 hours, something like that. It's not enough. And they're just being flung straight into battle and they're getting absolutely slaughtered. And they're also because machines are quite complicated. There's no two seaters really. So no two -seater trainers. So the first time you're flying in your Fockelwolf 190 or your Meshersmith 109, it's this horrendously perfait for which you as a young bright Luftwaffe fighter pilot know that you're not ready for this.

2:37:09And it can bite you and something like a Meshersmith 109 has a very high wing loading. So it's very maneuverable in the air but it's got this tiny wings. It's got this incredible torque, this deep -la -benz DB605 engine with its huge amount of torque. And it's just wants to flip you over. So if you're not used to it and it's got a narrow undercarriage as well, if you're not used to it, you could just crash. So in the first couple of months of 1944, they lose something like 2 ,400 aircraft in the air and pilots. And about 3 ,400 accidents. So it has to do with training really. Yeah. Not training enough.

2:37:46It's training and resources and supply. And the Second World War, more than any other conflict, is a war of numbers. There are differences, the decisions that generals can make. There are moments where particular brilliance and bravery can seize the day, take the bridge, hold the enemy at bay or whatever. But ultimately, you're talking about differences which might make a month's difference, six months' difference, maybe even several years' difference. But ultimately, there's a certain point in the Second World War where the outcome is absolutely inevitable because the guys that lose can't compete with the numbers that the guys are going to win.

2:38:31So in that sense, you could think of World War II as a battle of factories. Yes. What does it take to win in the battle of factories, in out manufacturing, military equipment against the Allies? It's efficiency really. So I always kind of, let's take the example of the Sherman tank. For example, the mainstay of the Western Allied forces and a fair number of them sent to the Soviet Union as well for that matter. I think it doesn't get the respect it deserves, maybe. It doesn't get the respect it deserves. So the Sherman tank, the 75 millimeter main battle gun, it says, medium velocity, far a shell around 2 ,000 feet per second compared to the notorious infamous German 88 millimeter which can fire it kind of third -fast again, like 3 ,000 feet per second.

2:39:21But on paper, a tiger tank coming around the corner and a Sherman tank coming around the corner, it should be no match at all. Tiger tank is 58 tons, looks scary, is scary, it's got a massive gun, got really thick armor. Sherman tank doesn't have a thick armor, doesn't have a gun that's as big, it should be an absolute walk over and yet at about 5 .30 pm on Monday the 26th of June 1944, a came around the corner of a road called a Ruma Sioux, a little village called Fontanela Personal Enomity, came face to face of a tiger tank. And what? How does this happen? Well, I tell you how it happened because the commander of the Sherman tank was experienced, had one up the spout, so what I mean by that is he had an arm -appearsing round already in the breach.

2:40:09As soon as he saw the tiger tank, he just said, fire, that arm -appearsing round did not penetrate the tiger tank, it was never going to. But what it did do was it created a hit the gun mantlet, which is a bit of reinforced steel that you have just as the barrel is entering the turret. And that caused spalling, which is the little shards of little bits of molten metal, which then hit the driver of the tiger tank in the head. And he was screaming, you know, gotten him or whatever and you know, it couldn't really see. The moment they got hit, the commander of the tiger tank retreated into the turret of the tiger.

2:40:43The moment you retreat into the turret, you can't see, you can see, because you've got periscos, but your visibility is nothing like as good as it is when you've got your head above the turret. Meagerly after that, the arm -appearsing round from the Sherman tank was repeated by a number of high explosive rounds, which are rounds which kind of, you know, detonate, have a little minor charge, then there's a second charge which creates lots of smoke. And in moments, in the first 30 seconds, 10 rounds from that Sherman tank had hit the tiger tank for the tiger tank had unleashed a single round itself.

2:41:17And the crew then surrendered. So you didn't need to destroy the tiger tank. You just need to stop it operating. If it hasn't got a crew, it's just a chunk of metal that's inoperable. So that's all you need to do. And what that tells you is that experience counts, training counts. The agility of the Sherman tank also counts. It's a smaller shelf, therefore it's easier to manhandle, which means you can put more in a breech quicker. There's features on a Sherman tank, like it's the first tank to have a gun stabilizing gyro, which means it's more effective on the move. There's also an override switch on the underside of the turret so that the commander, if you just see something out the corner of his eye, can immediately start moving the turret before the gunner, who is down in the belly of the turret, can react.

2:42:01There's many different facts of it, but the main fact of all is a 1 ,347 tigers built. There were just every single tiger. So you actually have an incredible video. You talk about this a lot from different angles about the top five tanks and the bottom five tanks of World War II. I think was it the tiger that made both the top five and the bottom five? The problem with the tiger tank is really huge. We should say that you keep saying the problem, but one of the pros of the tiger tank, it's very huge. It's, I mean, the psychological warfare aspect of it, is terrifying. Yes. I don't know what the other pros, I mean, I guess, yeah, the 88 millimeter velocity and all that.

2:42:44You know, it's pretty fearsome, but there are pragmatic problems. The big problems is the Germans are incapable of mass production on a scale, but Americans can do. Frankly, even the British can do. They're just not in that league. The reason they're not in that league is because they're in a bit of Europe. They don't have access to the world's oceans, they don't have a merchant fleet. They can't get this stuff. It hasn't gone to everyone in the Soviet Union. They can't process it and they're being bombed 24 hours a day. And so all their factories are having to split them all up and that is inherently inefficient because then having to kind of move different parts around and then having the whole process of having to travel from one place to another to get stuff.

2:43:23You haven't got much fuel. So the consequence of that is that what you do is you think, well, we can't mass produce. So let's make really brilliant tanks, but they've lost sight of what really brilliant is. You know, really brilliant to their eyes is big, scary, big gun, lots of armor. But actually what conflict and world will to show to you is that you need more than that. You need ease of maintenance. You need reliability. And the problem with having the bigger the tank, the more complex the maintenance equipment is, you know, you need a bigger hoist, which that means you need a bigger truck, which then needs a small fuel.

2:44:03So for example, the Tiger Tank is so big that it doesn't fit on the loading gauge of the European railway system. So they have to have different tracks to roll on to the wagons that will then transport them from A to B, you know, take them from West Germany to Normandy. Then you have to take them off. Then you have to take off the tracks, put on combat tracks, then move them into battle and hope that they don't break down. The problem is when you have you start the war, it is not very automotive and you've only got 47 people for every motorized vehicle in Germany compared to three in the United States or eight in France is that you've got lots of people who don't know how to drive.

2:44:39You also means you haven't got lots of garages and mechanics and gas stations and so on. And so you're then creating an incredibly complex beast, but you want that complex thing to be as simple as you possibly can be. And that's the beauty of the Sherman tank. You know, all those guys in America, they're used to driving stick cars. You know, one of three people for every automobile, you know, and that includes, you know, the old and children. So almost, you know, every young man knows how to drive. And when you get into a Sherman tank, it's got a clutch, it's got a throttle, the brakes are the steering mechanism, the clutch is where you would expect the clutch to be.

2:45:14It's got a manual shift. You put your foot on the clutch and you shove it into second gear and off you go or reverse or whatever. And it literally can be easier. Anyone who can drive a stick car could drive a Sherman tank. Seriously, not everyone can drive a Tiger tank. It's incredibly complex. Really, really is. And that comes with a whole host of problems. And of course, you don't have the numbers. You don't have the numbers. You know, you've got one fossil free hundred forty seven of them. You've got 492 King Tigers. And you know, at a time where you are really short of fuel and you're really short of absolutely everything.

2:45:49And those shells are huge and they're harder to mount handle than weird little things that the Germans do. You know, for all their design genius, the loader is always on the right hand side. Now, in the 1920s and 19 teens and 30s, children were taught to be right handed. You weren't allowed to be left handed. So you were right handed. So you want to be on the right hand side of the gun. So you can take the shell from your right and swivel it into the breach from your right side. But the loader in a Yagpampfer or Pampfer or a Tiger is always on the on the right hand side of the breach, which is ergonomically makes no sense whatsoever.

2:46:26Why do they do this? I've never found an answer to this. But you know, so there's all these little things and as a soldier coming up against, you know, you're an American GI and you're coming up against a Tiger tank. You don't care about the fact that it's difficult to maintain or the problems of vault of trying to get it to the battlefield. All you care about this is this monster coming in front of you. It's squeaking and clanking away and it's incredibly scary and it's about to blow you to bits. That's all you care about and quite undisund every so. But those who are protracting the war at a higher level and historians that come subsequently and look at all this stuff, they do need to worry about all these things.

2:47:03And remember the same Georg Thomas, the architect of the hunger plan. I found this, there's, there's minutes of this meeting, which I think was I've run the fourth of December of the fifth of December 1941. So it's just before the Red Army countertax outside Moscow and the winter of 1941 and it's a meeting about weaponry and and this is a verbatim quote. He says, we have to stop making such complete and ascetic weapons. In other words, we've conscious to be building over engineered and aesthetically pleasing weapons up until this point. And they sort of half manage it, but don't quite. We could probably talk for many hours about each of these topics.

2:47:47We could talk for 10 hours about tanks and encourage people to listen to your podcast. World War II pod, web ways of making you talk. It's great. Yeah, we also do. We've got a got a new YouTube channel and website called World War II headquarters. There are lots of walking the ground and videos of that and all sorts of stuff and little explainers of going around tanks and stuff and the weaponry and documents and photographic archives. So the idea is to sort of turn it into a real hub of anyone who's interested in this subject. It's a place where they can go and find out just a whole load more.

2:48:29I love it. So like I said, we could probably talk for many hours at each of these topics, but let's look at some of the battles. Maybe you can tell me which jumps out of you. I want to talk to you about the Western Front and definitely talk about Normandy. But so there was the battle in midway. Yeah. In 1942, which is a naval battle, there's Eastern Front, Stalingrad, probably the deadliest battle in human history. Then there's the battle of Kursk, which is a tank battle, the largest tank battle in history, probably the largest battle period in history, 6000 tanks, 2 million troops, 4 ,000 aircraft.

2:49:12And then that takes us also to the battle of the balls in Normandy. They tell you and campaign that you talk a lot about. So what do you think is interesting to try to extract some wisdom from before we get to Normandy? Do you find, does the story in the battle of Kursk or the battle of Stalingrad more interesting? Stalingrad is often seen as the turning. Yeah. I think so. I mean, it's really interesting. They get through 1941. Bob Ross doesn't happen as the Germans hope it will. The whole point is to completely destroy the Red Army in three months. That just doesn't happen. I think you can argue and argue convincingly that by, let's say, beginning of December 1941, Germany is just not going to win.

2:50:02It just can't. And let me tell you what I mean by that. So if you take an arbitrary date, let's say the 15th of June 1941, Germany at that moment has one enemy, which is Great Britain, albeit Great Britain plus Dominion Empire. Fast forward six months to, let's say, the 16th of December. It's got three enemies. It's got Great Britain, Dominion Empire, USSR and the USA. It is just not going to win. For you, all the talks of Wonder weapons on the rest of it, it's not going to. It is lost that battle. Having said that, Soviet Union is still in a really, really bad situation. It is being helped out, a huge amount by supplies from the United States and from Britain.

2:50:50Just unprecedented amounts of material being through the Arctic or across Alaska into the Soviet Union at that time. It is absolutely staggering how much it's committed by Roosevelt and Churchill to try and stem the flow in the Soviet Union. Because for all the announcements and the pride that the Soviet Union has about moving factories to the other side of the Urals and stuff, which they do in 1941, huge amounts overrun intact by the Germans in the opening stages of Barbarossa. Really colossal losses. Huge amounts. The grain has gone, coal has gone, entire factories have gone, steel production goes down by 80 % in the Soviet Union in 1941 and in 1942.

2:51:38In 1942, despite the vast amount of numbers of men that they create 18 new divisions in the second half of 1941, for example. 80 divisions in the entire second half of the war. Division being about brutal fun, 15 ,000 men. So, despite that, and that is because Stalin's meddling, the woeful state of the Red Army in 1941, etc., etc., which we've already touched upon. So in 1942, it's still in a really bad way, but Germany is in a really bad way too. The treason is suffered in 1941. It's winning itself to death in 1941. So it's having these huge great encirclements, like the encirclement of Kiev in September 1941, you know, capturing the further kind of best part of 700 ,000 Red Army troops, etc., etc., but in the process of doing that, it is constantly being attritted, you know, both in battle casualties, but in also mechanical casualties too.

2:52:34Just can't cope. The scale is just too big. And what happens is, with every moment that the German forces that ultimate victory slips away, so Hitler's personal handling of the battle increases. And, you know, so what you like about him, but he just hasn't had them a luxury train to do that. He might have amazing attention to detail. He might be on a land of understand, you know, having an enormous capacity to remember units and where they are on a map, but he was only a half corporal in the First World War. He's never been to Staff College, you know, he might have read lots about Frederick the Great.

2:53:16I mean, I've read lots of history, but that doesn't mean say I'd be a competent film -assure. So he is not the right person for the job at all, and he micro -manages, and he looks at Städegas and figures, and doesn't understand what it's like at their actual front, the culface. So he's stifling the very thing that made the German army effective, which is the ability to give commanders at the front the freedom on their leash to be able to make decisions and battle command decisions, and he's taken that away from them. So he's basically making them go into battle with decreasing amounts of supplies and firepower, and with one hand behind their back in terms of decision -making process.

2:53:53And that is not a good combination. The other problem is that he decides rather than going for Moscow in 1942, because basically there's a kind of cooling off period in the winter because of the conditions. But everyone knows the Soviet Union, no, the Red Army knows that the moment springs calms is going to be another offensive, a bit another major offensive in the summer. That is absolutely as certain as, you know, day following night, etc. The problem that the Germans have is they just don't have enough. They have less than they had when they launched Barbarossa, the previous year, the Soviet Union has more.

2:54:24It is better prepared. It knows what's coming now. It's kind of learning some of the lessons, starting to absorb the lessons. Stalin, coincidentally, is pulling back from his very tight leash and the way that Hitler was doing the opposite, increasing his micromanagement and control free -create. And what Hitler decides is, rather than going for Moscow, he's going to go for the oilfields. This is absolutely insane, because what's going to happen when they get to the oilfields? I mean, does he think really that the Soviet Union is going to let those oilfields come into German hands intact? Even if he does let them get in intact, what are they going to do with that oil?

2:55:03I mean, oil needs to be refined. Where are you going to refine it? You know, they don't have many oil, they don't have many oil refineries. How are you going to ship that oil to where you need it to be in the factories and the ferdry can into your process into gasoline and then get it and diesel and get it to your U -boats, get it to your tanks, get it to your armored units. How are you going to do that? How do you transport it from the Caucasus, which is a long, long way away from Berlin? How are you going to do that? There's no pipelines. There's only some pipelines, they've been built by American money and American engineering and they're going backwards towards the Urales, not forwards.

2:55:40They have no more rail capacity whatsoever. They just don't have the oil tankers. So it's just, it is absolute la la land. It is incredible that when you look at the detailed literature that the Germans have, no one is asking this question in the spring and early summer of 1942. The logistics question in part. No one is saying, okay, it's great that we're going to go to the Caucasus and get all this oil, but then what? No one is asking that question. Nor are how do you provide resources and feed and disolvings and all that kind of stuff. I mean, so the case proof, first of all, they get distracted by going into Crimea and they'll get, why we got to do that first?

2:56:18So they have to get Sevastopol and the Crimea, which they do. And then they have to push on. And at this point, suddenly looming in front of them is Stalin Greud on the banks of the Volga, this city, this industrial city, which has Stalin's name. And Hitler goes, okay, what I'm going to do now is I'm going to split my forces. So half of you can go south towards the Caucasus and the rest of you can confront Stalin Greud. And on box, just who's the commando just goes, that's nuts. That makes no sense whatsoever. You know, you're you're splitting the mission. So Hitler fires him. So suddenly they get get into this assault for Stalin Greud.

2:57:00And it becomes this sort of street fight. Street fighting is the worst kind of fighting. I mean, the reason why these redis have just blown everything up in in Gaza is because otherwise you can't see. You know, you need a field of fire. This is a fighting up in a fighting in a build up area is horrendous. Yeah, to clarify, we're talking about urban warfare, door to door, highly into building. It's great to be difficult. And home of entities colossal in this instance. And of course, it's piping hot when they attack in kind of August into early September. Then it's sunny gets very, very cold. And at the same time, American mechanization and slightly a British mechanization, but primarily American trucks are enabling Zoukov to plan this great Pensa movement.

2:57:41So it is, you know, and Russians will hate me for saying this. And I probably will get a whole load of bots on the back of it. But but but the truth is is it is not the street fighting that destroys sick army. It is in circlement, the subsequent in circlement. So they've the Germans sucked into this street battle and the installing grad cannot give up. We cannot give up. We cannot back down. We cannot pull out. We've got to we've got to destroy the city. Meanwhile, while they're back to turn and while most of their forces are going off to the Caucasus on a wild goose chase for absolutely zero oil instantly.

2:58:17And they never get remotely close to Baku. This huge great Pensa movement has has been planned. And it is only possible through mechanization for the United States. And that is the big turning point because from that moment onwards, the Germans are on the back foot. They're basically going backwards. There are a little small character taxer is obviously the curse salient, for example. But it's game over. You know, the catastrophe of the surrender of the final sir. I mean, the right is on the wall at the end of 1942. By November, 1940, when the when the the two Soviet fronts meet up, then, then, you know, there was no possible chance of escape for sick farming.

2:59:02They are consigned. They are toast. And their final surrender obviously happens at the very beginning of February, 1943. But that's all over. And then at the same time that that is happening, disaster is unfolding in North Africa because Hitler has insisted on massively resupplying the Mediterranean theater. And the problem there is the amount of equipment that is lost in North Africa is greater than it is at Stalingrad. I don't think you could argue that psychologically, Tunisia is a greater loss than Stalingrad. It absolutely isn't. But you have to see them in tandem. As this is two fronts. This is Eastern Front, Southern West and Front.

2:59:41And this is the first time that the Americans have been on the ground against access forces. And they lose big time. The Allies become masters of the North African shores on the 13th of May 1943. And it is a catastrophe. And in that time, 2 ,700 aircraft have been Luftwaffe aircraft have been destroyed over North Africa between November 1942 and May 1943. And overall, there's a subsequent that summer as well. It's really interesting. The Luftwaffe loses between June and October 1943. So this is including the Cursk battle, which takes place in July 1943. In that period, the Luftwaffe loses 702 aircraft over the Eastern Front, but 3 ,704 aircraft over the Mediterranean.

3:00:26So I think one has to also, one of the lessons about studying the Second World War is one has to be careful not to assign strategic importance to boots on the ground. It can be of great strategic importance, but not necessarily. You know, you know, no one would argue, for example, that the Guadalcanal is not an absolutely game -changing battle in the Pacific War. And yet the number of troops compared to what's going on in the Eastern Front or even the Western Front is tiny in comparison. It is absolutely true that the most German blood is lost on the Eastern Front, but that doesn't mean to say that it's more strategically important than the Western Front.

3:01:04It's not saying that the Western Front is more strategic either. It's just you have to kind of be balanced about this. The psychological blow -over of Stalingrad is immense and you cannot belittle that. I mean, there's the, we went over it really fast, but there is a human drama element. Yes. But yes, when we're talking about the operational side, the material loss of a battle is also extremely important to the big picture of the war. And we often don't talk about that, because of course, with war, the thing to focus on is the human drama of it. Yes. And the human's. And I also think that what's interesting is that is the Nazi high command response to Stalingrad, which is not to go where screwed.

3:01:48It's to double down. It's, you know, then so, so, Gervels for example gives us infamous speech in the Sports Palace in 3rd -week of February in 1943, where he goes, are you ready for this? You know, this is now Total War. The war is coming. This is a fight for survival. We're all in it together. You are in this as well. You know, every single one, every single German is now. This is a fight for survival. And we are now in Total War. And everyone is just so depressed by this. I mean, yeah, they realize that there is, that they have, they, they will are going to reap what they have sewn. You know, because everyone knows what's being going on in the Eastern Front.

3:02:28Because first part of the war, Germans have loads and loads of cameras. They're really into photographing everything, taking city footage, or everything. So part of the recording, the greatness of the Reich and the triumphs of the Reich, they want to record it. So all this stuff is a bit like the radios is made very, very cheap. So lots of having, and people are sending it all back. And you know, the people are developing this stuff. We're all seeing it and people are talking about it. And then it's been sent to families and they're all seeing it. And they're seeing pictures of Jews being rounded up and beaten.

3:02:55And they're seeing Ukrainian partisans being executed and they're seeing villages being torched. And everyone knows. They all know. Yeah. This whole idea is, you know, do they really know what was going on? Yeah, they do. I do know what's going on. You know, to lesser or greater detail, of course, you know, there's some people who don't, you know, and a bit like people know about the news today, some people do, some people don't. I never read the newspaper. I never listen to the news. You know, so you have that, of course, but, but, but it is widely understood and widely known that really brutal things have been going on in the Eastern, and troops coming back utterly traumatized by what they have taken part in, what they have witnessed, the kind of unspeakable brutality.

3:03:42This is war on a completely different level. Do anything that's been kind of seen in recent years. Yeah, we should mention that, you know, the Western Front, these in front are very different in this regard. Yes. So a lot of the Holocaust by Bullets, the Holocaust with the concentration camps, and the extermination camps, is not in Germany, is not in the Western Front, is in Poland, is in the Soviet Union. Yeah, but don't forget that even Auschwitz, for example, is part of the new Reich. It is part of, you know, it is part of an area which has been absorbed into Germany. So as far as that concern, this is now got, you know, it's now no longer got the Polish name, it's now called Auschwitz, which is a German name.

3:04:21It is part of Germany, and there are German people moving there into this, you know, a Comma model town. And they all know exactly what's going on. Yeah, you by the way, having this podcast, the series of four episodes on Auschwitz, the evolution of the dream world town that becomes a camp, a work camp, then becomes an extermination camp, and a big Boon of Factory for IGFARB, which never produces a single bit of so this for sure is something I would have to dive deep in. There's a book you recommended, KL. Yes, it's just called KL, it's about the whole concentration camp system, because KL is concentrated soon in German.

3:05:11Lager is a camp. It's an exhaustive book, and I'm full of admiration for writing it just because it must have been so, I mean, I was very depressed doing that work on Auschwitz, that deep diver, I just found the whole thing utterly disparaging, and I've been there a few times and it's ghastly. So how you read a whole book on it, I don't know. I think in the details, there's two ways I think to look at the Holocaust. One is, man search for meaning, but Victor Franco, sort of this philosophical thing, about how a human being can confront that and find meaning, and what is the human condition look like in the context of such evil?

3:05:58And then there is the more sort of detailed, okay, well, how do you actually implement something like the final solution? So you have this ideology of implemented. Yes. And at the fine detail of what are the different technologies used, what are the different humans and the hierarchy of humans in a camp? How do they, what's the actual experience of the individual person who shows up at a camp? Just get in the details, and in those details, I think there's some deep profound human truth that can emerge. The mundane, I mean, once they put a time, it's how you can achieve evil. So you can get lost in the mind.

3:06:45Yes, the banality of evil. It's incredible. I think what is so completely horrific is that, you know, half the six million were killed by kind of bullets in the back of the head. And the reason they stopped doing that and they wanted to stop doing that was because the guys, the perpetrators were finding it so traumatic. You know, him and the girls in visits are an execution in Ukraine and or maybe he's in the Baltic States, I can't where he goes, but he went into some in the summer of 1941, he thinks, oh, that's horrible. You know, they don't have to do that. I don't want my men having to do that.

3:07:20I've got to find out more humane way of doing it. When he talk about more humane way of doing it, humane for the executors, executioners, not for victims, because just me, Zuckman B is not a nice way to go. You know, it basically is bursting all the capillaries in your lungs. It's extremely painful and you can no longer breathe and it can take up to 20, 25 minutes. You know, some people can take a couple of minutes, but all of those who are standing naked in that gas chamber, first of all, extremely humiliated by this process in the first place, then there's a sun realization of that they're not having a shower.

3:07:55They're actually being gas and they're all going to die. Imagine what you're thinking as that process is, because you might be the first, but you're still going to, even the first person is going to know that I can't breathe and I'm dying. Everyone else is going to see the first few dying and then going to realize that is what's going to happen to them. And you've got those minutes, sometimes many minutes where you've got to contemplate that, that, and that's in extreme pain and panic. And just think about how cruel that is while being humiliated all the way through, while being humiliated all the way through.

3:08:32And so, the invertechomas humanity of the gas chambers is anything but it's disgusting. And the fact that people could do this is just beyond terrific. And then the fact that you are taking your Jewish prisoners and getting them to cut off all the hair, pull out the teeth of the dead before you put them on a lift and incinerate them. If you go to Auschwitz now and you go to the collapse, the blown up gas chambers, which is a gem is destroyed before the Russians overrun them in January 45, you can still see some of the ash ponds. And there are bits of bone there, but still there from the ash. It's just, it is utterly repulsive.

3:09:15And imagine arriving from that train on that incredibly long journey where you've had no comfort whatsoever. You've had again, you've had humiliations and privations, you know, the privations you've had to suffer as a result of that, you know, having to kind of defy and abuck it in the corner in front of other people, just to rend us. And then you get there, but Wildard and immediately your kids are taken away from you or your husband and wife who'd been married 20 years, they're separated just like that, sent off into different groups straight to the gas chambers. I mean, you know, it is, the scale of cruelty is so immense.

3:09:46It's hard to fathom and the thing that I find really difficult to reconcile. And this is where I think the, you know, the warning from history is important is that Germany is such an amazing nation. You know, it's, it's, it's the, it's the country of Beethoven and Strauss and, and of Gerta and incredible art and culture and, and, and some of the greatest engineers and scientists have ever lived. And look how quickly it flipped into the descent of unspeakable inhumanity, which manifested itself in the Holocaust and the gas chambers and the executions into pits and tiny places and creeks and lifuania or Ukraine or whatever.

3:10:34I mean, it's, it's, it's just to rend us. And, you know, this is from a nation which a decade earlier had been a democracy. It seems like as a human civilization, we walk that soldier in its own line between good and evil. It's, it's the thin line. We have to walk it carefully. Yes. So I, one of the great battles in World War II on the Western Front is Normandy. I have to talk to you about Normandy. D -Day. The Normandy landings, the famous on June 6, 1944. This was allied invasion of Nazi Occupy, Western Europe. What was the planning and was lengthy planning? What was the planning? What was the execution of the Normandy landings?

3:11:22Well, the decision to finally go. When the Americans joined the war in, to 741, there's the Arcadia conference, a few days later, a week later, between the British Chiefs of Staff and political leaders in Churchill and Roosevelt and his own Chiefs of Staff about what the policy should be. And the policies to get American troops over to Europe as quick as possible get them over to Britain, get them training, and get them across the Channel ASAP and start the liberation of Europe. The reality is that, that in 1942, the Americans just aren't ready. They've come from this in front of the Tony Army.

3:11:56They're still growing. They've got no battlefield experience. The British are still recovering. They're good on the naval power. They're increasingly good on air power. But land power, they've had to make up from the loss of their ally France and expand as well. So ground zero for America and Britain has been June 1940, 1940, when France is out. And suddenly that's the Gigi earthquake. And that's the issue that needs settling. And they need to just completely rely on everything that they fought in 1939. They've got to start again. But it also becomes clear that they're not really ready in 1943 either.

3:12:34And one of the problems is that Molotov, who is the Soviet Foreign Minister, has come over to Britain in May 1942 and said, we need you to kind of do your bit and get on the campaign trail against the Germans to fight on the ground. And the British will go, well, yeah, but, you know, cross -analytes is not really going to happen. We know we're doing that in North Africa at the moment. And then he goes over to Washington. And the Americans go, you know, we are definitely going to go and take on the attack to the the Germans in 1942. They've made this promise. So in summer of 1942, it becomes clear that they can't keep that.

3:13:03So Churchill says, well, look, I've got here's an idea. You know, we're in, we've already got an army in Egypt. Why don't we land another one in North West Africa? We can North West Africa. We can, that's run by Vichy France, which is pro -Axis French colonies. Why don't we take that? We can do that. And then we can meet in the middle. We can pence around. We can conquer the whole of North Africa. You can kill with two birds of one stones because you can get some experience fighting against Axis troops, you know, test some of your, your, your, your equipment and commanders, you know, what's not to like.

3:13:33And then we can sort of see how it goes. So this is a kind of opportunistic strategy. Whereas the Americans are very much sort of, you know, we want to draw straight line to Berlin. And that's the quickest way. And let's do that way. So it's kind of a different viewpoint. And, but Roosevelt kind of gets that and agrees to that. So that's where the whole North Africa Mediterranean campaign comes from. And as a consequence of the huge commitment to Tunisia, you know, three and a half thousand aircraft, huge navies, you know, two army allied armies in North Africa by the time Tunisia is won in mid -May 1943.

3:14:05I mean, well, we got all this here. We might as well kind of really try and get put the nail into the coffin of Italy's war, get them out of the battle. You know, Sicily is an obvious one. Let's go in there. And then we can take a view. But between Sicily happening and the fall of North Africa is the Trident Conference in Washington. And that is where the decisions made the Americans go. Okay, enough of this opportunistic stuff. Let's just, okay, we get it. We buy it, but no more fapping around. You know, May 1944, one year hence, we are going to cross the Atlantic. And the British go, okay, fair cop, we'll do that.

3:14:37So that is where operation overlordes. It becomes, gets given its code name, its operational name. That's when the planning starts. Sirius planning starts at the beginning of 1944. And one of the lessons from Sicily to Normandy is that you can't have commanders fighting one battle whilst preparing for the next one. So you have to have a separate command structure. And that's okay, because by this time, we've got enough people that have got experience about a little command that you can actually split it. There are very good reasons for going into Italy, not least getting the Fodger airfields, so that you can further tighten the news around Nazi Germany.

3:15:13And one of the great prerequisites for the Normandy invasion is total control of air part of the airspace, not just over Normandy, but over large swath of North West Europe. Why is that? Because the moment you land in Normandy, the cad is out of the bag. And it's then a race between which side can build up minimum material quickest. Is it going to be the Allies who've got to come from southern England, which is a distance of a slow journey across seas and a distance between kind of 18, 130 miles away? Or is it going to be the Germans that are already on the continent? Well, clearly on paper it's the Germans, so you have to slow up the Germans.

3:15:49Well, how do you do that? We do that by destroying their means of getting there. So bridges, destroy all the bridges of the same, destroy all the bridges of the Riveloir, hit the marshaling yards, the German, the glue that keeps the German war machine together is the Reichsbahn, the German railway network. So destroy the railway as much as you possibly can and make it difficult for the Germans to reinforce the Normandy British head as and when it comes. But the way you do that in turn is by very low level precision bombing and that has to be done by twin engine faster, smaller bombers going in low.

3:16:21But the problem is, as you can't go low and destroy those bridges, if you've got fockelwalls from Eschlussmiths hovering above you. So you've got to destroy those, which is why you need to have air superiority over this large swath of North West Europe to do that. The problem is that while the industrial heartland of Nazi Germany is in the West is in the rural area, which is very convenient for bombers coming out of Lincolnshire or East Anglia on the east flat east side of Great Britain, the aircraft industry is much deeper into the Reich and is beyond the range of fighter Eskorts for the bombers.

3:16:55The American daylight bombers who are going over are discovering that despite being called flying fortresses, they're not fortresses and they're actually getting decimated. And whenever their bombers go in strength over to try and hit the aircraft industry in Germany, beyond fighter range, they get decimated first, infamously on the Shreinberg Regenberg's raid on the 17th of August 1943, coincidentally the same day that Sicily falls to the Allies, and also coincidentally the same day that face -to -face negotiations begin with the Italians for an armistice in Lisbon. But on that day of the 324 heavy bombers that the Americans send over to Hitchhrein, Fert and Regenberg, whether are Messerschemitz plant and also a bull bearing plant, which is essential for aircraft manufacturing.

3:17:38They lose 60, shot down and a further 130 odd, really, really badly damaged, and even for the vast numbers of manpower and bombers are coming out of America, this is too much. So they can't sustain it. So they've got to find a fighter escort that's going to be able to escort them all the way into the Reich and the race is on, because basically if they haven't got one airspace by April 1944, it's game over, you can't do it across the channel invasion, you have to have that control of the airspace beforehand. So the race is on, unfortunately they come out of the solution, which is the P -51 Mustang, which has originally been commissioned in May 1940 by the British developed from sketches to reality in 117 days.

3:18:17It's a work of absolute genius, but Stolf its harness with a really bad engine. The Allison engine is just not right for that aircraft, and it's not until a Rolls Royce Merlin, which is the same one that powers the Lancaster, the Mosquito, and it's a bit far in hurricane, is put into the P -51 Mustang that suddenly you've got your solution, because that means it can now fly with extra drop tanks and fuel tanks. It's so aerodynamic, and it's so good the higher it goes with this engine, the more fuel efficient it becomes, it can actually fly over 1400 miles, which gets you not just a Berlin back, but to Warsaw and back.

3:18:50So suddenly you've got that solution. And actually by April 1944 they have cleared airspace, and by the end of May 1944 just on the eve of the invasion operation overlord, the closest German aircraft that is seen fighting Allied aircraft is 500 miles from the beach, so it is absolutely job done. Meanwhile, new fighter comparatively new ground attack fighter planes like typhoons and tempers and adapted P -47 Thunderbolts are attacking the German radar stations all along the coastline, because they now do have an air defense system, they're destroying kind of 90 % of their effectiveness. And in the intelligence game they're winning that one as well, they're just much better because in Germany intelligence is power, so people tend to, you know, and Hitler always has this kind of divide and rule thing going on, so you have power, like a monstroscher, which is not conducive to bringing together of intelligence.

3:19:45And while much players be made about the successes of bletchley and code breaking and all the rest of it, actually what you have to do is you have to see the kind of the decrypts that the bletchley crypt analysts do as just a cog and that those various cogs together from listening services to photo reconnaissance to agents on the ground or also the cogs collectively add up to more than some of their individual parts. And so the intelligence picture is a broad picture rather than the just code breaking. But anyway, they win that particular battle as well. And what you see really with D -Day is I think is the zenith of coalition warfare, what you've got is you've got multiple nations who have different overall aims, different cultures, different attitudes, different start points, but they have all coalesced into one common goal.

3:20:33And until they've achieved that common goal, they're going to put differences to one side. You know, much players be made about kind of anglophobium amongst American commanders and an American phobia amongst Alec, you know, British commanders, but actually it's nothing. It's teats it looks after its own allies, for example. And what is remarkable about the allies is they're not actually allies, they're coalition partners. There's no formal alliance at all. And there is a subtle difference there, but what you see them is you see them really, really pulling together and you see that manifest itself on D -Day, I think, where you've got 6 ,939 vessels of which there are 1 ,213 warships, 4 ,127 assault craft, 12 ,500 aircraft, you know, 155 ,000 men landed and dropped from the air in 24 -hour period.

3:21:31It is phenomenal. It is absolutely phenomenal. And while it is still seen as a predominantly American show, all three service commanders of British, it is most of the aircraft, two fuzz of the aircraft of British, two fuzz of the men landed, a British and a dominion, you never forget the Canadians who consistently punch massively above their weight in the Second World War. In all aspects, it has to be said, air land and sea, they're key in the battle of the Atlantic, they're key in air power, they're key D -Day and indeed in the battle for Italy as well. So the Canadian should never be forgotten.

3:22:07But one of the reasons it is the British Navy that dominates in D -Day is because of course the, I'm incredibly enormous strength for the Royal Navy in the first place, but partly because most of the US Navy is by the stage in the Pacific fighting its own fight. So it's not slacking by any stretch of the imagination, it is because it's elsewhere, doing its bit for the kind of overall ally cause. But D -Day is just extraordinary, you know, and despite the terrible weather, which is such a debilitating factor in the whole thing, I mean it puts people off course, it means many more people get killed on Omaha Beach and they might have done an on other beaches besides incidentally.

3:22:45And actually in terms of lies lost, proportionately it is a Canadian's that suffer the worst. More so than the Americans, it's just as fewer of them overall. And D -Day has to be seen as an unqualified success. I mean it is absolutely extraordinary what they achieve and while they don't 100 % achieve their overall D -Day objectives, you know, the objectives are always going to be the outer reach of what is is can be achieved and you'd need absolutely perfect conditions for that to happen. And they don't get perfect conditions, but they're so balanced, they're so thought of absolutely everything.

3:23:19And they're logistic supply and I mean even things like the minesweeping operations, the biggest single minesweaving operation of the entire war because this huge minefields normally coast. And ahead of the invasion force, the minesweepers, which amount to I think something like 242 different minesweepers in five different operations of opposite every single beach, creating lanes through these minefields through which the invasion force can go, not a single ship is lost to a mine in the actual invasion. That is phenomenal and can only be done with the greatest of skill and planning. And all in a period where you know there are no computers, there's no GPS, there's nothing.

3:23:56I mean it is, it is absolutely astonishing and the scale of it is just frankly mind -boggling. Yeah, and that was really the nail and the coffin, the beginning of the end for Hitler, for the European theater. Yeah, once you get the only cause for doubt is will they be able to secure that bridgehead? The moment they get that bridgehead, it is game over. There's only, there is no other way it's going to be because of the overwhelming amount of men and material that the Allies have compared to the Germans at this stage of the war. And of course you know you're being attacked on three fronts because there's the Italian front of the south and of course in a very major way you've also got the Eastern Front and Operation Pagratchin which has launched that summer as well is enormous.

3:24:45So let's go to the very end, the battle Berlin, yeah. Hitler sitting in his bunker, his suicide, Germany's surrender, you actually said that downfall, the movie was a very accurate representation. I think it is ready. Except the Gubbles took son, I should have said. Oh, details. But I think it's probably, it might be my favorite World War II movie which is strange to say because it's not really about World War II, it's about Hitler in a bunker but I think it was in a Bruno Gantz, wasn't it? I think he nailed him. There's so many accounts of that. There's so much written about Hitler, there's so many of, there's millions and millions of Hitler's words that you can read.

3:25:35You know, there are translations of many of his conferences. You can see what he's saying, you can get inside his head in a very clear way and much more clearly than you can Stalin or just by any other leader really. And so what has a very, very strong impression of what Hitler was like in the bunker in those last last days, there's so many accounts of it and it just feels like they nailed it. It just feels like they've got it spot on. I mean, it's a fascinating story of evil, many act and then in this certainty, you know, crumbling, right? Like realizing that this vision of the third thousand year Reich is, and Hitler says, you know, my reputation won't be good start off with but I hope in a few years time that people start to realize that kind of all the good I was trying to bring.

3:26:31Yeah, not sort of they're all the same, aren't they? You always believe you're doing good. Yeah, and there's so many deep lessons there. So now you have written so much, you have said so much, you have studied this so much. What do you look in a world where to is the lessons we should take away? Well, I suppose it's, it's, it's what happens when you allow these individuals to take hold of great power and great authority and make these terrible decisions if you allow that to happen. You know, there are consequences and you have to be, you have to recognize the moments of trouble when they arise.

3:27:11So when there are financial crisis, you know, that political unrest is going to come and you need to be prepared for that. You know, you need to be able to see the writing on the wall. You can't, you can't be complacent. You know, complacency is such a dirty word, isn't it? You know, you've got to keep your wets in and you can't take things for granted. You've got to recognize, I think, that the freedoms we enjoy in the West are, you know, they're not necessarily permanent and you need to make the most of them while you've got them and cherish them and consider what happens if the milk turns sour and what the consequences of that are.

3:27:57I mean, not to be overriding, I think because although I don't think it'll ever be a war on the scale of the Second World War, you've only got to look at pictures of those opening days of the war in Ukraine and see sort of knocked out Russian tanks and dead bodies, bloated bodies all over the place, put that into black and white and you know, it could be the road out of Faleis in 1944 or it could be, you know, any number of German battlefields in World War II and the similarities and the trenches and the kind of people hiding in foxholes and you know, that's horribly reminiscent as are the huge casualties that they're suffering on both sides whether they'd be Russian or Ukrainian.

3:28:37And you know, it's a shock, it's a shock to see that and it reminds you of just how quickly I think things can descend. That's the other thing, you know, at that point I was making about how quickly Germany descended from this amazing nation of arts and culture and science and development and engineering into one of the holocaust. I mean, life is fragile and and pieces fragile and you know, it's you take it for granted at your peril. And you take for granted at our peril that nobody will use nuclear weapons ever again and that's not a thing we should take for granted. No sir, what gives you hope about the future of human civilization?

3:29:25We've been talking about all this darkness in the 20th century. What's the source of light? The source of light is that I think the vast majority of people are good people who want to live peacefully, I want to live happily and are not filled with hate. And there are some brilliant minds out there. And I think the capacity for the human brain to come up with new developments and new answers to problems and challenges is infinite. And I think that's what gives me hope. James, this is a big fan. This was an honor to talk to you and please keep putting incredible history out there. I can't wait to see what you do next.

3:30:13Thank you so much for talking today. Well, thank you, Lexus. It's been a also privilege to talk to you. Thanks for listening to this conversation with James Holland. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description or at lexframing .com slash sponsors. And now let me leave you some words from Winston Churchill. If you're going through hell, keep going. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.