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#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles Podcast Episode Description
James Holland is a historian specializing in World War II. He hosts a podcast called WW2 Pod: We Have Ways of Making You Talk.
Thank you for listening ❤ Check out our sponsors: https://lexfridman.com/sponsors/ep470-sc
See below for timestamps, and to give feedback, submit questions, contact Lex, etc.
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EPISODE LINKS:
James’s Books: https://amzn.to/4caapmt
James’s X: https://x.com/James1940
James’s Instagram: https://instagram.com/jamesholland1940
James’s Substack: https://james1940.substack.com
WW2 Pod (Podcast – Apple): https://apple.co/4l93Dl3
WW2 Pod (Podcast – YouTube): https://www.youtube.com/@wehaveways
WW2 Pod (Podcast – Spotify): https://open.spotify.com/show/34VlAepHmeloDD76RX4jtc
WW2 Pod (Podcast – X): https://x.com/WeHaveWaysPod
SPONSORS:
To support this podcast, check out our sponsors & get discounts:
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Notion: Note-taking and team collaboration.
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OUTLINE:
(00:00) – Introduction
(00:34) – Sponsors, Comments, and Reflections
(07:25) – World War II
(17:23) – Lebensraum and Hitler ideology
(24:36) – Operation Barbarossa
(40:49) – Hitler vs Europe
(1:02:35) – Joseph Goebbels
(1:12:29) – Hitler before WW2
(1:17:25) – Hitler vs Chamberlain
(1:39:31) – Invasion of Poland
(1:44:07) – Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact
(1:52:09) – Winston Churchill
(2:16:09) – Most powerful military in WW2
(2:38:31) – Tanks
(2:48:30) – Battle of Stalingrad
(3:01:21) – Concentration camps
(3:10:53) – Battle of Normandy
(3:24:45) – Lessons from WW2
PODCAST LINKS:
– Podcast Website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast
– Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr
– Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8
– RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/
– Podcast Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrAXtmErZgOdP_8GztsuKi9nrraNbKKp4
– Clips Channel: https://www.youtube.com/lexclips
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#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles Podcast Episode Summary
In this podcast episode, the host engages in a conversation with James Holland, a historian specializing in World War II. Holland is known for his detailed analysis of the Western Front and his ability to provide insights at various levels, including strategic, operational, tactical, and human perspectives. He co-hosts a podcast called “We Have Ways of Making You Talk,” which delves into World War II topics.
The episode covers several key themes, including the importance of understanding military conflicts through strategic, operational, and tactical lenses. Holland emphasizes that the operational aspect, often overlooked, is crucial as it involves logistics and the economic factors that sustain war efforts. He also discusses the human drama of war, highlighting the personal experiences and stories that emerge from such conflicts.
A recurring theme is the complexity and nuance of history. Holland argues against oversimplification, noting that history is filled with both pride and shame, and it’s essential to acknowledge this complexity. He also touches on the lessons from World War II that remain relevant today, such as the dangers of complacency and the importance of recognizing and responding to political unrest and financial crises.
The episode provides actionable insights, such as the value of long-form interviews to uncover deeper truths and the need to cherish and protect the freedoms enjoyed in the West. Holland also discusses the role of propaganda in shaping public perception and the importance of critical thinking in evaluating historical narratives.
Overall, the episode offers a rich exploration of World War II, providing listeners with a deeper understanding of the war’s multifaceted nature and its enduring lessons.
This summary was created automatically by Speak. Want to transcribe, analyze and summarize yourself? Sign up for Speak!
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles Podcast Episode Transcript (Unedited)
Speaker: 0
00:00
The following is a conversation with James Holland, a historian specializing in World War two, who has written a lot of amazing books on the subject, especially covering Western Front, often providing fascinating details at multiple levels of analysis, including strategic, operational, tactical, technological, and, of course, the human side, the personal accounts from the war. He also cohosts a great podcast on World War two called We Have Ways of Making You Talk. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor.
Speaker: 0
00:36
Check them out in the description or at lexfreeman.com/sponsors. It’s the best way to support this podcast. We’ve got Shopify for selling stuff, Element for electrolytes, Sai one for multivitamins, and Notion for team collaboration. Choose ai, my friends. And now onto the full ad reads.
Speaker: 0
00:54
I do them differently than most podcasts do. Usually, I barely talk about the sponsors. Instead, just take this moment to talk about the things I’m reading or thinking about. A little Bob Ross ai heart to heart between you and me. Also, unlike most podcasts, I don’t do ads in the middle.
Speaker: 0
01:11
So they all are bunched up here in one place. You can skip them if you like. But if you do, please still check out the sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. If you want to get in touch with me for whatever reason, go to lexfreeman.com/contact. Ai. Let’s go.
Speaker: 0
01:26
This episode is brought to you by Shopify, a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere with a great looking online store. Did you know that the legendary Silk Road was not actually a single road, but an extensive network of trade routes connecting east and west, spanning over 7,000 miles in the upcoming episode on Genghis Khan and the Mongol Ai?
Speaker: 0
01:51
We touch on this. But, of course, Silk Road speak much wider in time than the rise and the fall of the Mongol Empire. It facilitated trade and cultural exchange for over fifteen hundred years, roughly ram January. It was spices, tea, paper, gunpowder moving west, and gold, silver, glassware, and horses moving east.
Speaker: 0
02:19
But I think the fascinating thing again is the exchange of culture and the exchange of ideas. Anyway, sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com/lex, all lowercase. Go to shopify.com/lex to take your business to the next level today. This episode is also brought to you by LMNT, my daily zero sugar and delicious electrolyte mix.
Speaker: 0
02:42
Did you know that us humans can lose over two liters of sweat per hour during intense exercise, especially in hot conditions? I’ve gone to study this particular physiological process across many, many years of my life when I had to cut a lot of weight. Sweat is fascinating, isn’t it?
Speaker: 0
03:03
But as you sweat, you’re losing sodium, potassium, magnesium, and so you have to replenish it. I think about the ultra marathon runners and the events like the Badwater Ultra marathon. I think it’s a 35 miles from Death Valley. In my crazier moments, I think about doing an ultramarathon like that.
Speaker: 0
03:23
Some of the coolest people I know do ultra marathons, and some of the especially coolest people I know have done the Badwater Ultra meh. What is it about the human mind and the human heart that pulls towards a challenge like that? It’s absolutely nuts, isn’t it? Anyway, get a sample pack of LMNT for free without any purchase. Try it at drinkLMNT.com/Lex.
Speaker: 0
03:49
This episode is also brought to you by AG1, an all in one daily drink that supports better health and peak performance. Peak performance is such a fascinating concept to me because it doesn’t only entail the the physical, the physiological. It also entails the sai. Stress, lowering stress, optimizing the number of hours in a day that you spend in flow, focus doing something you’re passionate about. That’s a tricky one.
Speaker: 0
04:19
That’s hard to articulate explicitly. So we focus on things that are a little bit easier to articulate, like sleep and diet and exercise. But I think about Hunter s Thompson. And sometimes Sai think the top priority for health is hearing and accepting the call to adventure and figuring out the rest of the bullshit along the way.
Speaker: 0
04:43
That said, I think sleep is really important. It’s one of the puzzles I’ve been trying to figure out. But at the very least, it’s good to do the low hanging fruit of health. Just do the basic bullshit. I like a good multivitamin.
Speaker: 0
04:57
So that brings me to AG one. They’ll give you one month ai of fish oil when you sign up a drink at AG1.com/Lex. This episode is also brought to you by Notion, a note taking and team collaboration tool. They integrate AI into the note taking and, collaboration process incredibly well, probably better than any software service I’ve, used to date.
Speaker: 0
05:22
And it’s funny because I just got a notebook for some basic note taking, like a physical notebook with a physical meh, And it feels so limiting and not limiting in a good way. Like, the constraints are, catalyst for creativity. I mean, limiting, like, I I wanna run some algorithms to summarize stuff, to generate some more text, to give me ideas, all of that.
Speaker: 0
05:46
But I just need the notebook because sometimes I don’t have any electronic devices on me. And, specifically, that is one of the things I like to do for creativity is to remove, electronic devices from my life for long stretches of time for many hours in a day, sometimes multiple days.
Speaker: 0
06:02
And it just forces you to be creative in the way that, devices somehow suffocate. They too easily get you to be task switching, one task to the next to the next to the next, and that kills the kind of deep focus that’s ai, first of all, to be truly present for life, for thoughts, for ideas that you’re working through, and also to just focus on solving difficult puzzles, whether that creative puzzles or engineering puzzles.
Speaker: 0
06:31
So sometimes Ai wish I could just use Notion and have everything else removed. Yeah. This digital technological life that we’re thrust into is a real puzzle, isn’t it? Try Notion AI for free when you go to notion.com/lex. That’s all lowercase, notion.com/lex to try the power of Notion AI today. This is a Lexus bryden podcast.
Speaker: 0
06:57
To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description or at lexfreeman.com/sponsors. And now, dear friends, here’s James Holland. In volume one of the war in the West, your book series on World War two, you write, the second World War witnessed the deaths of more than 60,000,000 people from over 60 different countries.
Speaker: 0
07:39
Entire cities were laid waste. National borders were redrawn, and many millions more people found themselves displaced. Over the past couple of decades, many of those living in the Middle East or parts of Africa, the Balkans, Afghanistan, and even The United States may feel justifiably that these troubled times have already proved the most traumatic in their recent past.
Speaker: 0
08:05
Yet, globally, the second World War was and remains the single biggest catastrophe of modern history. In terms of human drama, it is unrivaled. No other war has affected so many lives in such a large number of countries. So what to you makes World War two the biggest catastrophe in human drama and modern history, and maybe ram a historian perspective, the most fascinating subject to study?
Speaker: 1
08:35
The thing about World War two is it really is truly global. You know, it’s fought in deserts. It’s fought in in in the Arctic. It’s fought across oceans. It’s fought in the air. It’s in jungle. It’s in the hills. It is on the beaches. It’s also on the Russian Steppe, and it’s also in Ukraine.
Speaker: 1
08:53
So it’s it’s it’s that global nature of it. And I just think, you know, where there’s where there’s war, there is always incredible human drama. And I think for most people, and certainly the ram in ai case, you get drawn to the human drama of it. It’s that thought that, you know, gosh, if I’d been 20 years old, how would I have dealt with it? You know, would I have been in the army?
Speaker: 1
09:12
Would I have been in the air force? Would I have been on a, you know, Royal Navy destroyer? Or, you know, how would I have coped with it? And how would I have dealt with that separation? I mean, I’ve interviewed people who were away for four years.
Speaker: 1
09:23
I remember talking to a tank man from, from Liverpool in England called Sam Bradshaw, And he went away for four years. And when he came home, he’d been twice wounded. He’d been very badly wounded in North Africa. And then he was shot in the neck in Italy, eventually got home.
Speaker: 1
09:39
When he came home, his mother had turned gray. His little baby sister who had been, you know, 13, but he left, was now a a young woman. His old school had been destroyed by Luftwaffe bombs. He didn’t recognize the place. And do you know what he did?
Speaker: 1
09:55
He joined up again, went back out of Europe, and was one of the first people in Belsen. Sai, you know
Speaker: 0
10:02
What was his justification for that, for joining right back?
Speaker: 1
10:04
He just felt completely disconnected to home. He felt that the the gulf of time, his experiences had separated him from all the normalities of ai, and he felt that the the the normalities of the life that he had known before he’d gone away to war had just been severed in a really ai of cruel way that he didn’t really feel he was able to confront at that particular point.
Speaker: 1
10:26
But he decided to rejoin, couldn’t go back to the third World Tank Regiment, so went back to a different unit and went from kind of the Italian campaign to European theater. Didn’t see so much action at the end, but, you know, like a lot of British troops, if you if you’re in a certain division at a certain time, you know, you ended up passing very close to Bryden and, you know, you suddenly ai, okay.
Speaker: 1
10:46
This was the right thing to do. You know, we did have to get rid of Nazism. We did have to do this because this is the consequences, not just the oppression. It’s just not just the secret police. It’s not just the expansionism of narcissism.
Speaker: 1
10:59
It is also, you know, the Holocaust, which hadn’t been given its name at that point, but but, you know, you’re witnessing this kind of untold cruelty. And I always, you know, I’ve always sort of I think a lot about Sam. I mean, he’s no longer with us, but, he was one of the ai of first people that I interviewed, and I interviewed him at great length.
Speaker: 1
11:16
And I know you like a a long interview, Meh, and, and I totally, totally get that. Because when you have a when you have a long interview, you really start getting to the nuts and bolts of it. One of the frustrations for me when I’m looking at at oral histories of of saloni world war vets is usually they’re kind of, you know, they put on YouTube or they put on a museum ai, they’re thirty minutes, you know, an hour if you’re lucky.
Speaker: 1
11:40
And there’s you’re just scratching the surface. You never you never really get to know it. You feel that they’re just repeating ai of stuff they’ve read in books themselves after the war and stuff. And, you know, I was kind of leave feeling frustrated that that I haven’t had a chance to kinda grill them on the kind of stuff that I would grill them on if I was put in front of them.
Speaker: 0
11:56
So Tank Meh, what shah was maybe the most epic, the most intense, or the most interesting story that he told you?
Speaker: 1
12:05
Well, I do remember him telling me, funny enough, it’s not really about about the conflict. I remember him telling me about the importance of letters. And there was this there was this guy who literally, every few weeks, you know, post would arrive intermittently. There was no kind of regular post.
Speaker: 1
12:24
So it was supposed to be regular, but it it didn’t come out regularly. So you might suddenly suddenly get a flurry of five all in one day. But he said there was this guy and, in his tank, a member of a different tank troop. Meh was a good friend of his in the in the same squadron. He had British half squadrons for for for their armor. And, which is, Americans without a company.
Speaker: 0
12:45
I should say that in your book, one of the wonderful things you do is you use the correct term in the language
Speaker: 1
12:50
Yeah.
Speaker: 0
12:51
For the particular army involved, whether it’s the German or the British or the American.
Speaker: 1
12:54
Well, that that’s not to be pretentious. That’s that’s really just to so so that because you’re you’re dealing with so many numbers Yeah. And different units, and it can go over your head, and you can get sort of consumed by the detail if you’re not careful. And as a reader, it can be very unsatisfying because you you just can’t keep pace of everything.
Speaker: 1
13:10
So one of the things about writing in the vernacular German or or in the American spelling, ram more rather than or ram more as we would Brits would, spell it. Is it just immediately tells the reader, okay, this is Meh. Yeah. Okay. I’ve got that. Or this is Ai. I’ve got that. Or Italian or whatever it might be.
Speaker: 1
13:29
But, yeah, to go back to Sam. So Sam, this there was this guy in in in his squadron, and he’d get his letters from his from his girlfriend, his wife. And he said it was like it was like a soap opera. He he said we all just waited for his letters to come in so we could find out, you know, whether his, you know, his daughter had, you know, got to school okay or something, you know, won the swimming contest or whatever it was.
Speaker: 1
13:52
You know, the sort of details of this sort of day to day kind of banal life was just absolute catnip to these guys. They absolutely loved it. And then the letter arrived, the Dear John letter, saying, sorry, I found someone else and and it’s over. And his friend was just absolutely devastated.
Speaker: 1
14:10
It was the only thing that was keeping him going, this sort of sense of this sort of continuity of of home, this sort of this this foundation of his life back at home. And Sam said he could see he was in a really, really bad way.
Speaker: 0
14:27
Mhmm.
Speaker: 1
14:27
And he thought, he’s gonna do something stupid. And he went up to him and he said, look, you know, I know it’s bryden, and I know it’s terrible, and I know you’re absolutely devastated, but you’ve got your mates here. Just don’t do anything silly. Just, you know, maybe you know, when it’s all over, you can patch things up or sort things out.
Speaker: 1
14:42
And he said, you know, you gotta understand it from her point of view. You know? It’s sai long way. I haven’t seen you for two years. This kind of stuff. You know? So just just don’t do anything rash. And, of course, the next next engagement, two days later, he was killed.
Speaker: 1
14:54
Meh said it was just a kind of he could he just knew that was gonna happen. So it was a sort of self fulfilling prophecy. That’s something I’ve never forgotten that story, and I just thought, you know, it’s about human drama. You know? That’s that’s that’s the truth of it.
Speaker: 1
15:11
And how people react to this totally alien situation, you know, for the most part, the second World War is fought by ordinary everyday people doing extraordinary things. And I think that’s something that’s so fascinating. I suspect that Sai I think I instinctively, I’m quite slapdash, I think. So I think I would’ve I’d’ve bought it literally.
Speaker: 1
15:33
I don’t think it would’ve bryden well for me. I just I’m just a bit careless.
Speaker: 0
15:37
Yeah. I think I also have an element in me where I can believe in the idea of nation and fight for a nation, especially when the conflict is as grand.
Speaker: 1
15:50
The things worse than death.
Speaker: 0
15:52
Yes. As as the propaganda would explain very clearly, but also in reality. Yes. So a nation, you know, France, Britain was, you know, maybe facing the prospect of being essentially enslaved. The Soviet Union was facing the prospect of being enslaved literally. I mean, it was very, very clearly stated what they’re going to do. They’re going to repopulate the land with Germanic people.
Speaker: 0
16:18
So
Speaker: 1
16:18
Well, they’re not just gonna do that. They’re also gonna starve lots and lots of, Soviet individuals to death. Ai the hunger plan, for example, which is planned, you know, really very casually and not by the you know, this is not SS units or anything like this. This is the Wehrmacht. This is the economic division of the Oberkommando de Wehrmacht, the German ai general staff. General Georg Thomas comes up, you know, and Hermann Bacher.
Speaker: 1
16:48
They come up with the, who’s the ai of minister for food. They come up, you know, what are we gonna sana? You know, we haven’t got enough food. You know, largely because German, farming is inefficient. And I think, well, we’ll get you know, this is part of Liebmann’s role. We’ll go in, and we’ll take the food.
Speaker: 1
17:04
And there’s been this colossal urbanization of the Soviet Union since the, revolution in 1917. So they’re just not gonna get their food, you know, these these people in these cities, because we’re gonna take it all. And that’s gonna lead to that’s gonna lead to a lot of deaths, you know. Umpteen millions is the phrase that Gail Thomas used.
Speaker: 0
17:24
So let let’s talk about the hunger plan. How important was the hunger plan and Lebensraum to Nazi ideology and to the whole Nazi war machine?
Speaker: 1
17:32
Essential to the whole thing. This is all about this notion that is embedded into Hitler’s mind and into the minds of the Nazi party ai from the word go is there is a big sort of global conspiracy, the Jewish Bolshevik plot. I mean, completely misplaced that Jews and Bolsheviks go hand in hand and sort of somehow dovetail. They don’t, obviously. And the whole ideology is to crush this.
Speaker: 1
18:00
You know, part of the way the Nazis think the way Hitler thinks is there is a them and there’s us. We are the ai Northern European Arya. We should be the master race. We’ve been we we we’ve been threatened by a global Jewish Bolshevik plot. We’ve been stabbed in the back in 1918 at the end of the first World War. We need to have to overcome. This is an existential battle for future survival.
Speaker: 1
18:30
It’s a terrible task that is befallen our generation, but we have to do this. We have to overcome this or else we have no future. We will be crushed. It’s absolutely cut and dry. And one of the things about Hitler is that he is a very kind of black and white them or us, either or ai of person.
Speaker: 1
18:47
It’s it’s always one thing or the other. It’s a thousand year Reich or it’s Armageddon. There is no there’s no middle ground. There’s no gray arrow. It’s just one or the other, and that’s how that’s his worldview.
Speaker: 1
18:57
And the reason he came to the fore was was because of the crystal clear clarity of his message, which is we’ve been stabbed in the back. There is a global plot. We have to overcome this. We are naturally the master race. We have to reassert ourselves. We have to get rid of global Jewry.
Speaker: 1
19:21
We have to get rid of global Bolshevism, and we have to prevail or else. But if we do prevail, what an amazing world it’s gonna be. So so he starts with this you know, every speech he does always starts with the same way, always starts from a kind of negative, and always ends with an incredible positive, rabble rousing crescendo of of of of, if you’re in the front row, spiffle halitosis and gesticulation.
Speaker: 1
19:46
I mean, you’ve seen pictures of him. I mean, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen pictures
Speaker: 0
19:49
of him.
Speaker: 1
19:50
Ai. You know, he’s he’s he’s almost he wants to grab the air and clutch it to him. You know, you could see the kind of the venom coming out of his mouth just in a single still photograph. I mean, it it it’s amazing. There’s, apps you can get now where where you can translate his speak.
Speaker: 1
20:07
That just and it just sounds, you know, by today’s standards, you just think, what a load of absolute wibble. I mean, just total nonsense. But but you have to kind of put yourself back in the the shoes of people listening to him in 1922 or ’23 or indeed 1933 and see how ai of captivating that is to a certain part of the part of the population.
Speaker: 1
20:27
So meh. So so the so to go back to your original point, Lebensraum is absolutely part of it. So what you do is you crush the Bolsheviks, you crush world Jewry, then you expand, you know, the Britain has had this incredible empire, global empire, you know, Germany needs that too.
Speaker: 1
20:44
Germany’s stuck in Europe. It doesn’t have access to the world’s oceans. So we’re not gonna be a maritime empire. We’re gonna be a we’re gonna be a land mass empire, the whole of land mass of Europe and into Asia. That’s gonna be us, and we’re gonna take that land. We’re gonna take the the breadbasket of of Ukraine. We’re gonna use that for our own own ends.
Speaker: 1
21:02
We’re gonna spread our our, we’re we’re sana make ourselves rich, but we’re also gonna spread our peoples. We’re gonna spread the Aryan northern master race throughout, throughout Europe and into the traditional Slavic arya, And and we will prevail and come out on top. And so you have to understand that that that everything about Operation Barbarossa, the planned invasion of The Soviet Union in June 1941, is totally wrapped up in the Nazi ideology.
Speaker: 1
21:32
And people, you know, I Sai I’ve read it that historians sort of go, if only Hitler had realized that, you know, the Ukrainians have been quite happy to kind of fight on his ai. You know, if only he’d he’d actually brought some of these Jewish scientists and and kind of into the Nazi fold, then Germany might have prevailed in World War two.
Speaker: 1
21:47
And you kind of think, well, you’re missing the entire point. That’s just never gonna happen because this is an ideological war. Yeah.
Speaker: 0
21:54
This is not a pragmatic, rational leader. No. I mean, part of his effectiveness, we should say, is probably the singular belief in this ideology. There’s pros and cons. For for an effective military machine, probably having that singular focus is effective.
Speaker: 1
22:16
Yes. Except that when you’re making military decisions, if those decisions are always being bracketed by an ideology which is fundamentally flawed from a pragmatic point of view as much as a kind of Ethical. You know, a kind of reasonable point of view. You’re you’re kind of opening yourselves up for for trouble.
Speaker: 1
22:36
I mean, this is this is a problem he has with Barbarossa. You know, they they ai very early on in 1941 when they’re when they’re wargaming this whole operation that it’s not gonna work. And so, you know, there’s very people like like general Paulus, who’s on the, general staff at the time.
Speaker: 1
22:52
You know, he’s he’s given a kind of you know, he’s in charge of kind of wargaming this. And he goes, this isn’t gonna work. And Ai, who is the, chief of the OKW, goes, no. No. No. No. No. Go back and make it work. He goes, okay.
Speaker: 1
23:07
So he comes back with a plan that does work, but it’s bogus. I mean, it’s just it doesn’t work because they don’t have enough. They don’t have enough motorization. You know, they go into the Barbarossa with 2,000 different types of vehicle. You know, every single one of those vehicles has to have, you know, different distributor caps and different leads and plugs and all sorts of different parts.
Speaker: 1
23:30
You know, there’s the the interoperability of the of the German mechanized arm is super inefficient. And so you’ve got huge problems because they ai think, well, you know, we we took France in 1940, and that’s kind of one of the most modern countries in the world with, you know, one of the greatest armies and armed forces in the world, and we did that in six weeks.
Speaker: 1
23:50
So, you know, Soviet Union. Look. They struggled against Finland for goodness sai. I mean, how hard can it be? You know?
Speaker: 1
23:57
But what you’re failing to understand is is that attacking the Soviet Union is over a geographical landmass 10 times the size of France just on the frontage. And you haven’t really got much more mechanization than you had in 09/1940 when they attacked the low countries in France, and you’ve actually got less Luftwaffe aircraft to support you.
Speaker: 1
24:17
And you just do not have the operational mechanics to make it work successfully. I mean, it is largely down to incompetence of the Red Army and the Soviet leadership in the summer of nineteen forty one that they get as far as they do. I mean, you know, Barbarossa should never come close to being a a a victory.
Speaker: 0
24:36
Let’s talk through it. So operation Barbarossa that you’re meh, and we’ll go back
Speaker: 1
24:40
Yes. To The United States. Into force Straight
Speaker: 0
24:42
into it. Ai I’ve I’ve eaten eaten off two years of war. So this is June, ai, Operation Barbarossa when Hitler invades the Soviet Union with, I think, the largest invading force in history up to that point. Collectively. Meh. And there’s three prongs, army group north, army group center, army group south. North is going to Leningrad. Center is going, it’s the strongest group going directly towards Moscow. Mhmm.
Speaker: 0
25:10
And South is going in targeting Ukraine and the caucus. So can you linger on that on the details of this plan? What was the thinking? What was the strategy? What was the tactics? What was the logistics?
Speaker: 0
25:23
You know, we should there’s so many things to say, but one of them is to say that you often emphasize the importance of three ways to analyze military conflict, the strategic, the operational, and the tactical. And the operational is often not given enough time, attention, and it’s the logistics that make the war machine really work
Speaker: 1
25:45
Yeah.
Speaker: 0
25:45
Successfully or fail.
Speaker: 1
25:47
Yeah. That’s absolutely, absolutely spot on. And it’s interesting because the vast majority of, general histories of World War two tend to focus on the strategic and the tactical. So what do I mean by that? Well, the strategic, just for the for those who don’t know, that’s your overall war aims. You know?
Speaker: 1
26:07
Get to Moscow, whatever it might be. Conquer the world. That’s your strategy. The tactical side of things is that’s the coalface of war. That’s the attritional bit.
Speaker: 1
26:16
That’s the following his Spitfire, the tank crew, the the soldier in his foxhole. It’s the actual kinetic fighting bit. The operational bit is the level of war that that links the strategic to the ai. So it is absolutely factories. It’s economics. It’s shipping. It’s supply chains.
Speaker: 1
26:36
It’s how you manage your war. And one of the things where I think people have been guilty in the past, historians have been guilty in the past, is by judging warfare all on the same level. But, obviously, every competent nation has a different approach to war because of the nation they are, the size they are, their geographical location.
Speaker: 1
26:56
So Britain, for example, is an island nation. Its priority is the Royal Navy, which is why the Royal Navy is known as the senior service. And, you know, in 1939, it’s easy to forget it now when you see how depleted Britain is today. But 1939, it has comfortably the world’s largest, navy.
Speaker: 1
27:14
There’s something like a 94 destroyers. I think it’s 15 battleships, seven aircraft carriers, and another kind of six on the way. America, it’s got Pacific Ocean. It’s got the Atlantic Ocean. It’s got two seaboard. You know, it has the second largest navy in the world, but a tiny army.
Speaker: 1
27:34
I mean, the army of the US arya in nineteen September nineteen thirty nine is the nineteenth largest in the in the world sandwiched between Portugal and Uruguay. And it’s just incredible. It’s, like, a 89,000 strong, which might seem reasonably large by today’s standards, but is absolutely tiny by 1939 standards.
Speaker: 1
27:51
You know, whereas, you know, Germany’s got an army of, you know, three and a half million in 1939. So, you know, these are big, big, big differences. But but Meh coming at it from a different perspective. Britain’s coming apart from a different perspective. You know, Britain’s Britain’s empire is all about you know, it’s it’s a shipping. It’s a it’s a it’s a seaborne empire.
Speaker: 1
28:10
Whereas there’s also another point, which which is having large armies is actually inherently impractical and inefficient because the larger arya, the more people you gotta feed, the more kind of barracks you’ve gotta have, the more space you’ve gotta 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 they’re tramping around with rifles.
Speaker: 1
28:32
You know? So there’s there’s there’s an argument saying, actually, it’s really not not a very good way of doing things. So, you know, very much the, the British way and and subsequently The United States way and way of Britain’s dominions and and and empire is to use kind of steel, not our flesh, as a as a principle.
Speaker: 1
28:50
This 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 the strategic air campaign. When we talk about the strategic air campaign, we’re talking about strategic air forces, which are operating in isolation from other armed forces.
Speaker: 1
29:07
Sana tactical air force, for example, is a 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 your b seventeen’s and b 24 fours of the eighth air force flying out of East England, bombing the rural industrial complex of Germany or whatever it might be.
Speaker: 1
29:29
So 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, is 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.
Speaker: 1
29:48
You know, you wanna get inside the head of your enemy, and, you know, he’s he’s sort of guilty of not doing that. So when you’re talking about operation Barbarossa, to go back 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.
Speaker: 1
30:08
Doesn’t matter how good your individual commanders are at the front. If you haven’t got the backup, it’s not gonna work. And the problem that the Germans have is, yes, they’ve got their kind of, you know, 3,000,000 men on the front, and they’ve got their kind of, you know, 3,000 aircraft and sana all the rest of it.
Speaker: 1
30:25
But actually, what you need to do is break it down, and who is doing the hard yards of that? And way the German war machine works is that the machine bit is only the spearhead. So what would people always talk about the Nazi war machine. In a way, it’s a kind of misnomer because you’re you’re sort of suggesting that it’s highly mechanized and industrialized and all the rest of it, and nothing could be further from the truth.
Speaker: 1
30:47
The spearhead is, but the rest of it is not. And this is the kind of fatal flaw of of the German armed forces in in the whole of World War two, really, but 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.
Speaker: 1
31:09
Well, 17, and vatsal Panzer division is not a division full of Panzers tanks. It is a combined arms motorized outfit. So scouts on BMWs with sidecars, armored cars, infantry, grenadiers, panzer grenadiers, which are infantry in half tracks and trucks mechanized. It is motorized artillery.
Speaker: 1
31:35
It is motorized anti aircraft artillery. It is motorized anti tank tyler, 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 of your attacking force are those spearhead forces. And inevitably, they are going to be treated as they go. You know, you are gonna take casualties. And not only that, you’re not sana just take battlefield casualties.
Speaker: 1
32:00
You’re also gonna 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 of operation Barbarossa, they surge forward. Red Army’s got absolutely no answers to anything. Stalin weirdly hasn’t heeded the all the warnings that that this this attack is brewing of and there have been plenty, incidentally.
Speaker: 1
32:21
Smolensk Falls on the July 15, you know, in less than four weeks. It’s just incredible. Three and a half weeks, Smolensk has gone. You know, they’ve done overwhelmed the rest of what had been Poland. They’ve surged into what is now Belarus, taken Smolenska, all of you know, this is arya group center.
Speaker: 1
32:37
Army group north is thrust up into the into the Baltic. It’s all going swimmingly well. But then the next several months, they better go a hundred miles, and that’s because they’re running out of steam. And and the sixteenth Panzer Division, for example, by the time it’s taken Smolensk involved in taking Smolensk on the 07/15/1941, the following date, it’s got 16 tanks left.
Speaker: 1
32:58
16 out of you know, should have a 80. So it’s just being a trigger. 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 tyler.
Speaker: 1
33:23
So every single mile, every yard, every foot, every meter of the they’re they’re capturing of of Russian railway has to be moved a couple of inches to the left to make it fit the German Kriegslock and the standard train of locomotive of the of of the Reichsparn. 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.
Speaker: 1
33:52
So they have to the Germans, when they come in their trains, their Kriegslock are smaller, so they have to be rewatered more often and recalled more often. So they have to I mean, just it’s it’s absolutely boggling ai how complicated it is and how badly planned it is because they haven’t reckoned on this.
Speaker: 1
34:08
They’re having to kind of think on their feet.
Speaker: 0
34:10
I love the the logistical details of all this because, yes, that’s a huge component of this, especially when you’re covering that much territory. But there is a notion that if Hitler didn’t stop, arya 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 is that a possibility?
Speaker: 0
34:32
Because it had so much success in the early days pushing forward. Do you 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?
Speaker: 1
34:50
Well, my my own view is that they should never have got close. You know, Meh Army has plenty of men to be able to see off anything that that the Germans can do. The capture of Kyiv, for example, in September 1941 was a catastrophe for for the Soviet Union. It should never have happened.
Speaker: 1
35:08
I mean, Zhukov is saying to saying to Stalin, we gotta pull back across the Dnieper. So I was going, no. I can’t can’t possibly do that. You can’t abandon Kyiv. It’s ai third city in Soviet Union. You can’t no way. No. Absolutely not.
Speaker: 1
35:23
And he goes, well, we just we we are just gonna be overwhelmed. You know, we’re we we can’t hold this. And and he says, you know, either back me or or fire me. Back me or sack me. So Stalin sacks him.
Speaker: 1
35:34
Obviously, as we know, Zhukov gets, rehabilitated ram pretty quick order. And Stalin does ai very quickly after thereafter to learn the lessons. But the opening phase of Alvaro Ross has been a catastrophe. And so as a consequence of Stalin refusing to let his men retreat back across the Dnieper, which is a substantial barrier and would be very difficult for the Germans to overwhelm had they not had they moved back in time.
Speaker: 1
36:03
You know, that’s another kind of 700,000 men put in the bag. I mean, that’s just staggering numbers. But, yeah, I mean, that you you there’s so many things wrong with the Barbarossa plan. You know, too much over. Yeah. It’s just such a vast area.
Speaker: 1
36:19
I mean, you’re talking about kind of, you know, 2,500 miles or something, you know, the of of of frontage. You know, maybe if you kinda put your your your Panzer Groups, which are these spearheads, and you put them all in one big thrust and just go hell for leather straight across on a kind of, you know, much more narrow front of, let’s say, kind of 400 miles rather than 1,200, then they might have got a got you know, they might have just sort of burnt away straight through to Moscow.
Speaker: 0
36:44
They really caught the Ai Army unprepared. Yep. Is there, something to be said about the the strategic genius of that, or was it just luck? No.
Speaker: 1
36:58
I don’t think so. I meh, I think think think what’s happened is you’ve had the you’ve had the the Soviet purges of the of the second half of the ai thirties where they’ve, you know, they have executed or imprisoned 22 and a half thousand officers of which, you know, three out of five marshals, you know, god knows how many army commanders, etcetera, etcetera.
Speaker: 1
37:19
So so, you know, you’ve completely decapitated the Red Army in terms of its command structure.
Speaker: 0
37:25
Sai before that, would it be fair to say it was one of, if not, the greatest army in the world?
Speaker: 1
37:30
Well, there was a lot of experience. There’s a lot of experience there.
Speaker: 0
37:33
That that type of technology material. Yeah. The size of the army and the number of people that are that are mobilized.
Speaker: 1
37:40
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 to say that. But the decapitation is is is absolutely brutal. If you’ve decapitated an army, you then gotta put new guys in charge. And someone who who looks on paper like a a half decent peacetime commander might not be a very good wartime commander. The the different disciplines and different skills.
Speaker: 1
38:04
And what comes to you don’t know that until you’re tested. It’s very hard to kinda judge. And, of course, you know, Stalin is existing in a sort of, you know, a a vacuum of of paranoia and suspicion all the time, which is unhelpful when you’re trying to develop a a strong armed forces.
Speaker: 1
38:18
So they go into Finland in in back end of nineteen thirty nine, and they get their you know, they they get really badly hammered. They do take about, you know, fifth to get the Karelia, Peninsula, and they do take some ground, but at huge cost. I mean, the casualties are five times as bad as those of the Finns, and it’s humiliation. So Hitler sees that and thinks, okay. They’re not up to much cop.
Speaker: 1
38:42
Then Hitler loses the Vatsal of Britain, and he thinks, I can’t afford to fight a war on two fronts. That’s one of the reasons why Germany loses the war in nineteen fourteen to eighteen is fighting on the Eastern Front, but also fighting on, you know, the Western Front at the same time.
Speaker: 1
38:56
We’ve gotta avoid that. But I’ve gotta 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 Vatsal of Britain. And so maybe I’ll go into Soviet Union now while the Meh Army is still weak. You know, we’re not a % ready ourselves, but but let’s hurry the whole thing forward. Because, originally, he’d been thinking of planning an operation in 1943 or 1944.
Speaker: 1
39:17
So the idea is you take Poland out, you take out France from the low countries, you conquer most of Western Europe, you you knock out Bryden. Sai, therefore, you don’t have to worry so much about The United States because they’re over the other side of the Atlantic. That then gives ai him the time to kind of rebuild up his strength for the all out thrust on the Soviet Union.
Speaker: 1
39:35
The failure to subdue Britain in 1940 changes all those plans and makes him think, actually, I’m gonna go in early. And he’s also been kind of you know, he’s hoisted by ai own petard because he he starts to believe his own genius. You know, he everyone told him that, you know, he wouldn’t be able to, you know, he wouldn’t be able to beat France and the low countries.
Speaker: 1
39:55
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 I’m the best at this. I’ve told you. I’ve shown you. I’m the genius.
Speaker: 1
40:09
I can do it. He starts to believe his own ai. And, of course, this is a problem. You know? He’s surrounded by sick events and people are constantly telling him this. He’s this incredible genius. So he he starts to believe it, and he thinks everything is possible.
Speaker: 1
40:20
And and he’s very much into this idea of of the will of the German people. You know, this is our destiny, and either will, as I say earlier on, you know, it’s a thousand year Ai or Armageddon, but momentum is with us, and we need to strike it. And only by by by gambling, only by being bold will will the Germans prevail and all this ai of nonsense.
Speaker: 1
40:38
And so that’s why he goes into into Soviet Union in June 1941 rather than a, you know, couple of or even three years later. Yeah. He really hated the Prussian generals. Yeah. He hated them.
Speaker: 0
40:49
Is there a case to be made that there he was indeed, at times, a military genius? No.
Speaker: 1
40:56
I don’t think so. Because none of the plan I mean, even the plan for the invasion of France in the low countries isn’t his. It’s, the the the concept is is von Manstein’s, and the execution is Guderian’s, Heinz Guderian. So Ai Guderian is is a kind of he’s the pioneer of of the of the Panzer Force, the the the Panzer thrust, this idea of the ultra mechanized combined arms, Panzer Ram Spearhead doing this kind of lightning fast thrust.
Speaker: 1
41:24
It’s not Hitler’s idea. He adopts it and and takes it as his own because, you know, he’s sai fury. He can do what he likes. But but it isn’t his. So it’s not you know?
Speaker: 1
41:37
But and and up until that point, until that comes into being, till that that plan is put forward to Franz Halder, who is the chief of staff of the German army at that ai, You know, Halder is just thinking, how do we get out of this mess? This is just a nightmare because they know that France has got a larger army. They know that France has got more tanks.
Speaker: 1
41:54
And then 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 Bryden. And that looks like a very, very tough nut to crack. I mean, the reason why France is subdued in 1940 is 50% brilliance of the Germans and their operational art in that particular instance and 50% French failure, really, and incompetence.
Speaker: 1
42:17
I mean, there is a kind of
Speaker: 0
42:21
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 Bryden, keep The United States out of it, just set up the world stage where you could just plow through everybody with no with very little resistance. I mean, there is a kind of Well, yes. It’s a geopolitical genius.
Speaker: 1
42:44
If it works, but it doesn’t. You know, that’s that’s sai problem. I mean, you know, Ai mean, he goes into Poland on the assumption that Britain and France will not declare war. You know, he he he is not prepared for Britain and France declaring war on Germany. Right. He thinks they won’t.
Speaker: 0
42:59
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.
Speaker: 1
43:13
It has a size, but one of the problems that France has is that it’s very, very top heavy. It’s it’s very cumbersome in the way it operates. There’s no question that that it’s got some brilliant young commanders, but but at the lot at the top, the commander’s very old. Most of them are first World War veterans, you know, whether, I mean, Weygan, Gamelin, general George. These people, they’re all well into their sixties.
Speaker: 1
43:40
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 kinda late forties, early fifties. And they’re too just consumed by conservatism and the old ways. And what what they assume is that any future war will be much like the first World War. It’ll be attritional, long, and drawn out, but static.
Speaker: 1
44:06
But, actually, they’re right on two parts of it. It is as it turns out, it is gonna be long and drawn out and attritional, but it’s gonna be mobile rather than static. And that’s a big miscalculation.
Speaker: 0
44:16
So here’s my here’s my question. I think you’re, you’re being too nice on France here. So when when when Germany invaded Poland Yep. It, correct me if I’m wrong, but it feels like France could have just went straight to Berlin.
Speaker: 1
44:31
Yeah. They absolutely could have.
Speaker: 0
44:32
And they and I know you said it’s very top heavy, and you’re saying all of these things, but they literally did basically nothing. Yeah.
Speaker: 1
44:40
They were appalling.
Speaker: 0
44:42
So, like, the 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 ai with the propaganda, creating this feeling that there’s this Nazi force that’s unstoppable. So their their France just didn’t want to, like, step into that. Maybe they were, like, legitimately I’m I I hesitate to say these words, but scared of war.
Speaker: 1
45:12
A % they are. That you know, because France has been totally traumatized Ai
Speaker: 0
45:17
all over. By the
Speaker: 1
45:17
first world war. It’s fought on their land. It’s fought in their industrial heartland. You know, they lose three times the amount of people killed that that Britain does. Britain’s traumatized by it, but but but not to the same degree that France is. France you know, there is just no stomach to do that again.
Speaker: 1
45:32
And so that makes them risk averse. And by being risk averse, you’re actually taking a far greater risk. That that that that’s the irony of it. And the truth is also there isn’t the political will. And, a a a successful military can only be successful if there is a political will at the top.
Speaker: 1
45:47
And the problem with France in the nineteen thirties is it’s very politically divided. It’s, it’s 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.
Speaker: 1
46:05
And, you know, this is not a coalition of of two parties. This is a coalition of multiple parties. No one can ever agree anything. I mean, that’s the problem. And it’s amazing that the Maginot Ai has even agreed, you know, this incredibly strong defensive position down the Western side of France of of border with, with Germany, which is kind of largely impregnable.
Speaker: 1
46:24
But the problem is is the bit that’s not impregnable, which is the hinge where the Maginot Ai ends, and it sort of basically starts turning kind of towards an in a kind of north northerly direction, and the border with Belgium. And, you know, what they should have done is built ai of border defenses all along the Northern Coast with Belgium because Belgium refused to kind of, allow any ai troops into into its territory.
Speaker: 1
46:48
It was neutral. And France should have said, okay. Fine. Well, then we’ll defend ai you know, we’re not gonna come to your rescue if you get invaded. That’s your that’s your well, that that’s that’s the payoff.
Speaker: 1
46:59
And and consequence of that, we are going to stop by leaving that, and we’re not gonna 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. And and that’s the problem.
Speaker: 1
47:15
So when the when you know, there is a Germany is so weakened by the invasion of Poland. There is literally nothing left. You know, the back door from into Western Germany is completely open. And so they do what they call the Arya offensive, but it’s not. It’s a kind of reconnaissance in force where they kind of go across the border, kind of pick their noses for for a few days, and then kind of trundle back again.
Speaker: 1
47:38
And it’s just it’s embarrassing. And 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 on the decision making process, and which is just consumed by military complacency.
Speaker: 1
47:57
And that’s the big problem. There is this you know, the the commanders at the very top of the French regime are are complacent. They they they haven’t bought into ai 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 Chateau De Vincennes, which is, you know, it’s the headquarters of the commander in chief of the French armed forces, which is general, arya, Morris Gamelin.
Speaker: 1
48:28
I mean, it’s just unbelievable. But but that is the case, and and there’s no getting away from that. And and it is all the more ironic when you consider that France is actually the most automotive society in Europe. It’s the second most automotive society in the world after Ai States. But at some margin, it has to be said as well.
Speaker: 1
48:47
You know, it has a fantastic transportation system. The railway network is superb. It’s it it there are 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 a hundred and six in Italy.
Speaker: 0
49:02
So France is very ai. Like
Speaker: 1
49:03
Very mechanized. So come on, guys. Pull your finger out. Get it together, and they just don’t. They’re 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 Ardennes.
Speaker: 1
49:19
That’s just it’s not possible, which is the hinge area between the end of the Maginot, the northern part of the Maginot Ai, which runs down the western sorry, the eastern border of of France and and the northern bit. And so what we’ll do with that hinge around the town of Sedan, we’ll we’ll move into into Belgium. We’ll meet the Germans before they get anywhere near France.
Speaker: 1
49:38
We’ll hold them. And while we’re holding them, we will bring up our reserves, and then we’ll we’ll counterattack and crush them. That 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, absolutely dreadful.
Speaker: 1
49:53
They’re dependent on conventional telephone lines, which, you know, dive bombers and whatever arya just kind of absolutely wrecking. Suddenly, the streets are clogged with refugees and people can’t move. So they’re then, you know, telephone lines are down. There’s no radios. So you’re then dependent on sending dispatch riders on little motorbikes.
Speaker: 1
50:11
You know, general, Maurice Gamelin sends out a a dispatch rider at 06:00 in the morning. By 12:00, he hasn’t come back, so you then send another one. Finally, the answer comes back at ai kinda 09:00 at night, by which time the kind of Germans advance another 15 ai, and and the original message that you sent at 06:00 that morning is completely redundant and has passed its sell by ai.
Speaker: 1
50:33
And that’s happening at every step of the way. You know? So you’ve got you’ve got overall commander, headquarters, then you’ve got army group, then you’ve got army, then you’ve got corps, then you’ve got division. So the consequence of all that is that French just can’t move. They’re just stuck.
Speaker: 1
50:47
They’re they’re rabbits in headlights, and the Germans are able to kinda move them, destroy them in isolation. Meanwhile, they’re able to use their excellent communications.
Speaker: 0
50:56
Mhmm.
Speaker: 1
50:58
It’s a very, very good effect. And you were talking about the genius of of war. It’s not Hitler that’s a genius. If anyone’s a genius, it’s Goebbels, the propaganda chief. And it is their ability to harness that they are the kings of meh. You know, they don’t have they don’t have x. They don’t have social media, but they do have new technology.
Speaker: 1
51:21
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. And 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.
Speaker: 1
51:41
So while it’s really behind the times in terms of mechanization, it is absolutely on top of its game in terms of comms. So 70% of households in Germany have radios by 1939, which is an unprecedented number. That that is only beaten by United States and only just. So it is it is greater than any other other nation in Europe.
Speaker: 1
52:03
And in terms of flooding the airwaves, it is the densest because even for those who the 30% who don’t have radios, that’s not a problem because we’ll put them in the stairwells of apartment blocks. We’ll put them in squares. We’ll put them in cafes and bars. And the same stuff, the state the the the Nazi state controls the radio airwaves as it does the movies, as it does newspapers.
Speaker: 1
52:25
All aspects of the media are controlled by by Goebbels and 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.
Speaker: 1
52:44
It it’s 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 and needs to be you know, that’s the existential threat to us. We have to overcome that. We’re the top dogs militarily. We’re the best.
Speaker: 1
53:00
We should feel really good about ourselves. We’re gonna absolutely win and be the greatest nation in the world ever, and Hitler’s a genius. And 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.
Speaker: 1
53:21
And so if you just repeat, repeat, repeat over and over again, people will believe it. You know, if you’re a if you’re a ai Trump supporter, you you want to believe that. You you believe everything he says. If you are a diehard Bernie Sanders man, you know, you’re from the left.
Speaker: 1
53:37
You’ll believe everything he says because it’s reinforcing what you already sana what what you already wanna believe.
Speaker: 0
53:42
But the scary thing is, you know, radio is the technology of the day. The technology of the day today, which is a terrifying one for me, is, Ai would say AI on social media, so bots. You can have basically bot farms, which I assume is used by Ukraine, by Russia, by US. I I ai love to read the history written about this era, about the information wars. Mhmm. Who has the biggest bot farms? Who has the biggest propaganda machines?
Speaker: 0
54:14
And when I say bot, I mean both automated AI bots and humans operating large number of smartphones with SIM cards shah are just able to boost messages enough to where they become ai. Yeah. And then real humans with real opinions get excited also. It’s like this vicious cycle. Mhmm.
Speaker: 0
54:36
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. Right. And now it’s the nineteen eighty four, two minutes of hate, and the message is clear. I mean, that’s what propaganda does, is it really clarifies the mind.
Speaker: 1
54:54
And that is exactly what what Hitler and the Nazis and Goebbels are doing in the nineteen thirties. Well, they’re doing it in the nineteen twenties as well, but more effectively once they come into power, of course. And Hitler is so fortunate that he comes he takes over the chancellorship in January 1933 at a time where the economy is just starting to turn, and he’s able to make the most of that.
Speaker: 1
55:18
And, you know, if you’re Germans and you’ve been through hyperinflation in the early nineteen twenties, you’ve been through the humiliation of Versailles Treaty, which was terrible error in in retrospect. And you’ve been through then having got through that, you’ve emerged into a kind of democratic Weimar Republic, which is based on manufacturing.
Speaker: 1
55:38
You know, Germany’s a traditional genius sai engineering and manufacturing and production of of high quality, ai. Emerged through that, then you have the Wall Street ram. And the loans that are coming in from America, which is propping up the entire German economy, suddenly get cut off, and you’ve suddenly got depression again and and massive unemployment.
Speaker: 1
56:02
And suddenly Hitler 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 we’re the greatest, we’re the best, we’re fantastic. You know, I was telling you earlier on about about kind of speeches starting with the dark starting dark and ending in in hope and light and the sun in the uplands.
Speaker: 1
56:25
You know, that’s what you’re getting. You’re suddenly getting this vision of hope. This is sort of, you know, my god. Actually, this is really working. You know? Okay.
Speaker: 1
56:32
So, you know, I’m not sure that I particularly buy into the kind of anti Semitic thing, but, you know, 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. You know? And then this is a genius about the radios, for example.
Speaker: 1
56:45
So they have the, they have the the the German receiver to start off with, the the Deutschefanger, and then they have the Ai Kleinenfanger, which is the German little receiver, little radio. These are genius. This is this is as outrageous as the arrival of the iPod. I mean, remember that.
Speaker: 1
57:02
You know, suddenly you don’t have to have a Sony Walkman anymore. You can have something really, really small in miniature and listen to thousands of thousands of thousands of songs all at once. What ai what an amazing thing. And the Deutsche Ai Fanger is nine inches by four inches by four inches. It’s made of Ai. And everyone can have one because it’s super cheap. It’s just incredible.
Speaker: 1
57:20
And no one ai has sai that because up until that point, radios, generally speaking, are aspirational. You know, they’ve got sort of a walnut 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 ai of, you know, affluent and well-to-do you are.
Speaker: 1
57:35
But suddenly, everyone can have one. And if everyone can have one, then everyone can receive the same meh. 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 they’re most impressionistic. They’re they’re least risk averse, so they’re most gung ho.
Speaker: 1
57:52
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 up. 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 sai in the back that happened in 1918, etcetera, etcetera.
Speaker: 1
58:19
And, you know, as a young 16, 17 year old German, you think, yeah, I want a piece of that. And and, hey, guess what? They’ve got really cool uniforms and and, you know, come and join the SS and, you know, get the throw line. You know, what’s not to like? You know, you can see why why it it’s so clever.
Speaker: 1
58:36
And what’s so interesting is propaganda today is is still using those those tenets that Goebbels was using back in the nineteen thirties. And this is ai I would say say that, you know, history doesn’t repeat itself. Of course, it doesn’t. It it it can’t possibly repeat itself because we’re always living in a a constantly evolving ai. But patterns of human behavior do.
Speaker: 1
58:56
And what you always get after economic crisis is political upheaval. Always. Always. Always. Because some people are in a worse off position than they were financially before.
Speaker: 1
59:04
They’re thinking, well, you know, the current system doesn’t work. What’s the alternative? So, you know, in the case of of of now, we in the West, you know, we face first of all, we face the the crisis of two thousand eight, financial crisis of two thousand eight, then we’ve had the kind of double whammy of COVID.
Speaker: 1
59:18
And that has been incredibly unsettling. And so we’re now in a a a situation of 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. And, you know, it sai you know, he he’s saying, the old ways don’t work. You ai, I’m gonna be I’m just gonna say what I think.
Speaker: 1
59:38
I’m just gonna I’m gonna come out. I’m not gonna bother with all the sheen of diplomacy and kind of, you know, mealy mouth words that politicians always use, you know, which where you can’t trust anyone. I’m just gonna tell you as it is. And, obviously, people respond to that. You know, you you you can understand why that has a has an appeal.
Speaker: 1
59:53
And if the country already feels broken and here’s someone who is going to be a disruptor and gonna change the the way you go about things, you could see why a a a reasonably large proportion of the population is gonna go, I’ll have a piece of that. Thank you very much.
Speaker: 0
01:00:08
And especially, when the country’s in the economic crisis like Germany was, I think you’ve written that the the Treaty of Versailles created Hitler, and the, the Wall Street crash and the Great Depression brought him to power. Yes. And, of course, the propaganda machine that you ai is the thing that got everybody else in Germany on board.
Speaker: 1
01:00:31
Yep. It’s it’s it’s amazing how he he because he comes in with 33% of the vote. He had 37 of the throw of the vote in July 1932. So, again, this is another period of 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.
Speaker: 0
01:00:49
So it’s very possible he he he wouldn’t have come to power.
Speaker: 1
01:00:53
Well, he said he ai, I will only, you know, the we will only take our seats if if if I can be chancellor. Otherwise, forget it. I’m not coming into any coalition. So then the, the government falls again in January 1933. They have the they have the election. The Nazi vote is down from where it was the previous summer. But this time, they go, okay. Heller can be chancellor, but we’ll manipulate him. Wrong they were.
Speaker: 1
01:01:19
You know, he’s manipulating everyone. And then Hindenburg, 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. There is just the Fuhrer, him.
Speaker: 1
01:01:33
And he gets rid of, he has a enacting enabling act, which is where all other few, political parties have, disbanded, and suddenly you’ve got a totalitarian state just like that.
Speaker: 0
01:01:43
I think there’s a lesson there. There’s many lessons there, but one of them is don’t let an extremist into government Yes. And assume you can control them.
Speaker: 1
01:01:54
Yes. The arrogance of the existing politicians Yeah. Who just completely screwed it up.
Speaker: 0
01:01:59
I mean, there is a real power to an extremist. Like, there’s a a person who sees the world in in black and white can really gain the attention and the support of the populace. Yes. Especially when there’s, resentment about, like, Treaty of Versailles, when there’s economic hardship, and if there’s effective modern technology that allows you to do propaganda and sell the message.
Speaker: 0
01:02:29
There’s something really compelling about the black and white message.
Speaker: 1
01:02:33
It is because it’s simple. And and what Hitler does throughout the nineteen twenties is he sticks to this. There there is actually when he comes out of prison in so he there’s the bit hall push in 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.
Speaker: 1
01:02:57
And he then gets let out after nine months. The Nazi party is is is is banned at that point, but then comes back into being. And the year that follows, there is then sai 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.
Speaker: 1
01:03:28
And Hitler goes, no. No. No. No. No. No. We we we’ve just gotta stick to this kind of Jewish Bolshevik thing.
Speaker: 1
01:03:35
This is this is how we’re gonna do it. This is how we’re gonna do it. Goebbels, for example, who is who is very open. He’s he’s very, very Joseph Goebels is a he’s a he’s a not very successful, journalist. He is, but he does have a PhD in German German literature.
Speaker: 1
01:03:50
He’s very disaffected because he was born with tallopes, which is, you know, what 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 about the state of Germany in the first part of the early nineteen twenties.
Speaker: 1
01:04:06
He’s looking for a, a a political messiah as as a quasi religious ai, thinks it’s Hitler, then discovers that Hitler is not open to any ideas at all, about any deviation, but then sees the light. Hitler recognizes that this guy is someone that he wants on his ai. And so then goes to makes a real special effort. Come ai. Come to dinner.
Speaker: 1
01:04:30
I think you’re great. You know, all this kind of stuff. Wins it about over, and Goebbels has this complete vault fast, discards his earlier kind of, yeah, you you know, Hitler’s ai. I was wrong. Hitler is the kind of messiah figure that that I want to follow. I want to follow the hero hero leader. And they come aboard, and they absolutely work out.
Speaker: 1
01:04:48
And Hitler completely wins out of all dissenters within the what had been the German Workers’ Party, drop becomes the German National Socialist Party, becomes the Nazis. He comes out, emerges as the absolute undisputed Fuhrer of that leader of that that party and what he says goes, and everyone toes him behind it.
Speaker: 1
01:05:08
And part of the genius of that, you know, Hitler does have some genius. I just don’t think it’s military, but he does have some genius. And a 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.
Speaker: 1
01:05:22
It’s the kind of either or. It’s kind of it’s my way or the highway. It’s kind of this is the only way. This is how we get to the sana the uplands. This is how we we create this amazing master race of the this unification of German peoples, which dominates the world, which is the preeminent power in the world for the next thousand years.
Speaker: 1
01:05:43
Or it’s decay and despair and being crushed by our enemies, and our enemies are the Jews and and the Bolsheviks, the communist. And what he taps into as well is frontgemeinschaft and Volksgemeinschaft. And these are there’s no direct English translation of Volksgemeinschaft or indeed Franzgemeinschaft, but but but in its most basic form, it’s communities. It’s people community or front veterans community.
Speaker: 1
01:06:13
So the frontgemeinschaft is we are the guys. 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. We we did our duty as proud Germans, but we were let down by the elites, and we were let down by the by this Jewish Bolshevik plot.
Speaker: 1
01:06:36
You know, we were stabbed in the back. The myth of the stabbing stabbing in the back is very, very strong. So we’re bound. We’re 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.
Speaker: 1
01:06:53
We were failed by our leaders, and by the elites. So that’s that’s Frontgemeinschaft. Volksgemeinschaft is this sense of national unity. It’s it’s it’s a cultural, ethnic bonding of people who speak Germany, who have a have a similar outlook on life. And, again, that just reinforces The Us and them.
Speaker: 0
01:07:17
Good and evil.
Speaker: 1
01:07:18
It reinforces the black and white worldview. And then you add that to this very simple meh, which Hitler is repeating over and over again. Communists are a big threat. Jews are a big threat. They’re the 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.
Speaker: 1
01:07:41
And and people just buy into it. They go, yeah. We’re together. We’re Germans. We’re we’re we’re, you know, we’re a brotherhood. We we’ve got our Volkske Mineshaft.
Speaker: 1
01:07:50
And he so he cleverly ties into that and and taps into that, but they’re an irrelevance by the late nineteen twenties. You know, by 1928, you know, the the he’s not gonna get a deal for Mein Kampf part two. You know? He he’s he’s he’s impoverished. The party’s impoverished.
Speaker: 1
01:08:07
The numbers are down. They’re they’re ai of, you know, a best and a sana irrelevant.
Speaker: 0
01:08:11
Would you say he wrote Mein Kampf at this time when he was in prison?
Speaker: 1
01:08:14
He writes he writes most of, Mein Kampf in prison, in Ai Bryden, and then he writes the rest of it in what becomes known as the Kampfhausen, which is this little wooden hut in the in the Obersalzberg. And you can still see the remnants of that, and, unfortunately, there’s still little candles there and stuff in the woods and, you know, by by neo Nazis and what what have you.
Speaker: 1
01:08:33
But that’s where he wrote wrote the rest of it. Ai mean, it was Jean Jacques Rousseau who says meh has his greatest thoughts when surrounded by nature. That was something that kind of Hitler took very much to heart. Mhmm. There’s a there was a mentor of his called Dietrich Eckhart.
Speaker: 1
01:08:47
Dietrich Eckhart introduced him to the Obersalzberg and the beauty of the Southwest, Southeast Bavarian Alps around Berchtesgaden. And, and that was his favorite place on the planet. And, that’s where he that’s where he eventually bought the, the, the Berghof with the royalties, it has to be said, from Mein Kampf, which went from being, you know, almost pulp to suddenly being a runaway bestseller, unfortunately.
Speaker: 0
01:09:15
Can you actually comment on that? It’s a shitty manifesto as far as manifestos 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.
Speaker: 1
01:09:30
I mean, you know, it’s banned in a number of countries. You don’t need to because no one’s gonna read it because it’s unreadable. You know? I mean, it’s it’s very untidy. It’s it’s very incoherent. It’s it’s got no, there’s no narrative arc to use a kind of, you know, ai a writer’s phrase.
Speaker: 1
01:09:45
I mean, it’s just it’s but but but it does give you a very clear you know, the overall impression you get at the end of it is is is the kind of communist and the Jews are to blame for everything.
Speaker: 0
01:09:55
Yeah. But there’s also the component of, you know, predicting basically World War two Yeah. There. So it’s not just the the
Speaker: 1
01:10:03
place further. He’s he’s hungry for war.
Speaker: 0
01:10:04
Right.
Speaker: 1
01:10:05
He he thinks that this is this is the natural state that we have to have this terrible conflict. And once the conflict’s over, Germany will emerge victorious, and then there will be the thousand year Reich. I mean, I I’m finding myself in in talking to you. I keep saying this kind of, you know, it’s it’s Armageddon or a thousand year Reich.
Speaker: 1
01:10:20
It’s because it comes it’s it’s 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.
Speaker: 0
01:10:29
It’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 ai speak that way. They just say, well, here’s good and evil. We’re the good ai, and, yeah, maybe we’ll destroy the evil a little bit. No.
Speaker: 0
01:10:55
Here is, 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 an irrelevance.
Speaker: 1
01:11:06
You know, we have to take it we have to take it. And if ai if that kills millions of them, fine. Then then they can sort of squish their way over to Siberia. Right.
Speaker: 0
01:11:12
Doesn’t matter whether they go
Speaker: 1
01:11:12
Or Kacaca, whatever they go. I can’t
Speaker: 0
01:11:14
need to populate this land Right. That belongs to the German people. Yeah. Because they’re the superior people.
Speaker: 1
01:11:20
There’s no question that he ai violence and war. You know, he’s absolutely chomping at the bit. And in a way, I think he’s a bit disappointed that that in the nineteen thirties, the the conquests that he does undertake are also peaceful. You know? March 1938 goes straight into Austria. There’s the Angelus. You know? Not a shot is fired. You know?
Speaker: 1
01:11:39
1936 goes into Rhineland, reconquers that, retakes that over that from from, from from the occupying allies. Not a shot is fired. You know, he takes a Sudetenland. Not a shot barely a shot is fired, and then goes into into the rest of Chekhovsvakka in 03/19/3039. And, again, barely a shot is ai.
Speaker: 1
01:11:58
And it’s a bit disappointing. You know, he wants to he wants to wants to be tested. He wants to kind of have the have the the wartime triumph. You could see him being frustrated about this in in the Munich crisis in 1938. He wants a fight. He’s absolutely spoiling for it. He’s desperate to go in.
Speaker: 1
01:12:13
He’s already in gung ho. He’s built his Luftwaffe. He’s he’s got his his his Panzers now. He’s got his his his massive armed forces. You know, he wants to test them. He wants to wants to get this show on the road, and prove it.
Speaker: 1
01:12:26
You know, he is a he’s an arch gambler, Tyler.
Speaker: 0
01:12:29
You you make it seem so clear, but, all the while to the rest of the world, to Chamberlain, to France, to Britain, to the rest of the world, he’s saying he doesn’t want that. He’s making agreements. Everything you just mentioned, you just went through it so quickly. But those are agreements that were made that he’s not going to do vatsal, and he does it over and over. He violates the Treaty of Versailles.
Speaker: 0
01:12:57
He violates every single treaty, but he still is doing the meeting. So may maybe can you go through it, the lead up to the war, 1939, September first? Like, what are the different agreements? What is the signaling he’s doing? You know? What is he doing secretly in terms of building up the military force?
Speaker: 1
01:13:18
Yes. So he you know, part of the Treaty of Versailles, 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 restrictions on the weapons you you can use. There are, you’re not allowed an air force, but he starts doing this all clandestinely.
Speaker: 1
01:13:41
You know, there are people in, Krupp has got, for example, which is in the Ruhr, a sort of big, armaments manufacturer. They are producing tanks in elsewhere and parts elsewhere in in, say, The Netherlands, for example, and then shipping them back into back into Germany. They’re doing Panzer training exercises actually in The Soviet Union at this time. There’s all sorts of things going on.
Speaker: 1
01:14:07
The Luftwaffe is being announced to the world in 1935, but it’s obviously been in the process of of developing long before that. The Messerschmitt one zero nine single engine fighter plane, for example, is created in 1934. So they’re they’re they’re doing all these things against it.
Speaker: 1
01:14:20
And and the and the truth is is he’s just constantly pushing. What what can I get away with here? What what what what will you know? And and, of course, Britain, France, the rest of the rest of the world, the rest of the allies, you know, they’re all reeling from from the Wall Street crash and the and the depression as well.
Speaker: 1
01:14:35
So have they got the stomach for this? Not really. You know? And perhaps actually on reflection, the terms of Versailles Treaty are a bit harsh anyway, so, you know, maybe we don’t need to worry about it. And there’s just there’s just no political will. There’s no political will to kind of fight against what Germany’s doing, then he gets away of it.
Speaker: 1
01:14:52
So he suddenly starts realizing that that that that that actually he can push this quite a long way because no one’s gonna stand up to him, which is why he makes sai decision in 1936 to go back into the, you know, into the Rhineland, you know, which has been occupied by by French, you know, ai troops at that point.
Speaker: 1
01:15:09
He just walks in just because do your worst, and no one’s gonna do anything because there isn’t a stomach to do anything.
Speaker: 0
01:15:15
That was a big step in 1936, remilitarizing the Rhineland. I mean, that that’s a huge, huge step ai, like, oh, I don’t have to follow anybody’s rules, and they’re gonna do nothing.
Speaker: 1
01:15:28
And he’s looking at his military, and he’s and and he’s also looking at response. So one of the things they do is they you know, it’s really very clever. So they get over the head of the, arya of the air, arya de l’air, which is the French air force. And they invite him over, and they, Erhard Milch, who is the, second command of the Luftwaffe, invites him over. So come and see what we’re what we’re up to.
Speaker: 1
01:15:50
You know, we wanna be you’re our European neighbors. We’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 Messerschmitt one zero ai all lined up, like sort of 50 of them.
Speaker: 1
01:16:02
And the the head of the army of the air sort of looks sai it and goes, that’s impressive. And Milt goes, well, let me go and take you to another airfield. And they they go for sort of the down the back route out of the airfield, and that’s saloni circuitous route in the Mercedes.
Speaker: 1
01:16:15
Meanwhile, all the Messerschmitts take off from that airfield, gonna land on the next airfield. Here’s another one. They’re all the same aircraft. And the commander in chief of the army of the airlift goes back to France and goes, we’re never gonna be able to reach Germany.
Speaker: 1
01:16:27
So you would earlier you were you were alluding to this earlier on. You know, how much is this sort of this this this justice chutzpah of of this ability to kind of portray the the the ai Moloch? 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.
Speaker: 1
01:16:56
And, you know, you look at, we might all think these military parades that the Nazis have looked rather silly by today’s standards, but you look what that looks like if you’re the rest of the world. You’re in Bryden, and you’re still reading from the depression, and you see the triumph of the will.
Speaker: 1
01:17:11
You see some of that footage, and you see these automatons in their steel helmets, and you see the swastikas, and you see hundreds of thousands of people all lined up and see Kyling and all the rest of it. You’re not gonna think again before you go to war with people like that.
Speaker: 0
01:17:25
It’s also hard to put yourself in the in the mind of those leaders now now that we have nuclear weapons. So nuclear weapons have created this kind of, cloak of a kind of safety from mutually shared destruction. Yes. They they you think, surely, you will not do, you know, a million or 2,000,000, soldier army invading another land. Right? Just full on, gigantic, hot war.
Speaker: 0
01:18:00
But at that time, that’s a real possibility. You you remember World War one. You remember all of that. So, you know, you’re 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.
Speaker: 0
01:18:20
So and, like you said, Treaty of Versailles wasn’t really fair, and you can start justifying all kinds of things yourself.
Speaker: 1
01:18:28
And maybe they got a point about the Danzig corridor. You know, they are mainly Germans German speaking people there, and, know, it’s disconnected from East Prussia, which is just saying, you know, I can I I sort of get it? You know? Maybe they’ve got a point. You know? And is Poland really a kind of thriving democracy anyway? Not really. By 1930 late nineteen thirties, it’s not.
Speaker: 1
01:18:45
It’s to all intents and purposes a dictatorship in Poland at that time. I mean, it it’s not right that you just go and take someone else’s country. Of course, you you can’t do that. But but you can see why in Germany, people are thinking they’ve got a point. You can also see why in France and Bryden, they’re thinking, well, you know, do we really care about the Poles?
Speaker: 1
01:19:06
I mean, you know, is it worth going to to war over? But there’s ai of bigger things at play by this point. That that’s the point.
Speaker: 0
01:19:14
Yeah. But before we get to Poland, there is this meeting, 09/09/1938. So Chamberlain made three trips to meet with Hitler Yeah. Which culminated in the Munich conference Yeah. On the September 30. Yeah. Where was Chamberlain, Hitler, Mussolini, and Daladier, prime minister of France.
Speaker: 0
01:19:36
They met to discuss essentially Czechoslovakia without any of the government officials of Czechoslovakia participating. And Hitler promised to make no more territorial conquest, and Chamberlain believed him. He chose to believe him, I think, is, I think, is the point.
Speaker: 1
01:19:54
Sai so it’s very interesting. So so Chamberlain gets a very bad press.
Speaker: 0
01:19:59
Uh-oh.
Speaker: 1
01:19:59
Well, no. I’m not no. It’s not really uh-oh. It’s it’s it’s I I just think there’s too much retrospective view on this. Right. And and that’s fine because we 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 that particular moment.
Speaker: 1
01:20:23
So I don’t think Chamberlain did trust Hitler, but he wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt. Britain was not obliged to Czechoslovakia at all. France was. France had signed a treaty with with Czechoslovakia in 1924. But but but but Britain had not. So there was no obligation at all for Britain to do this.
Speaker: 1
01:20:44
The only reason why Britain would go to war over Czechoslovakia is because of the threat of Nazism and what the ramifications of not going to war with him. But the problem is is that Chamberlain’s interesting because in 1935, he was he was chancellor’s checker. And when they started to sort of think, okay.
Speaker: 1
01:20:59
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. Mhmm. 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.
Speaker: 1
01:21:23
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 in barracks.
Speaker: 1
01:21:29
You’ve got to feed them all this kind of stuff. It’s there’s a kind of sort of impracticality about having a large arya. Whereas navy is great because you can keep them at sea sana they can be, you know, on the water. Air force is slightly different. Air power is viewed in very much the same way that that naval power is viewed, that this is we’re an island nation.
Speaker: 1
01:21:45
We have a global global assets, and air power gives us a flexibility that an army doesn’t. So he is all for backing the expansion of the of the army of the air force and the navy in 1930, then he subsequently becomes prime minister sana sticks with his guns on that. It is he that enables the air force and and the air ministry to develop the first fully coordinated air defense system anywhere in the world.
Speaker: 1
01:22:08
There is not an air defense system in Poland, nor Norway, nor Denmark, nor The Netherlands, nor Belgium, nor France. There isn’t Britain. Britain is the only one. And frankly, it pays off big time in the summer of nineteen forty. So you have to give him credit for that.
Speaker: 1
01:22:24
Bryden, interestingly, is also the world’s leading armaments exporter in the nineteen thirties, 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 and we were expanding that infrastructure dramatically I say we. I’m essentially saying that because I’m British.
Speaker: 1
01:22:42
So they were doing that. But in 1938, Britain wasn’t ready for war. Now you can argue that Germany wasn’t ready for war ai, but Chamberlain was prime minister in a democracy, a parliamentary democracy, where 92% of the population were against going to war in 1938. There is there is not a single democratic leader in the world that will go against the wishes of 92% of the population.
Speaker: 1
01:23:10
Now you could say, well, he should have just argued it better and presented his case better and all the rest of it. But at that point, there was no legal obligation to go to the defense of Czechoslovakia. You know, Czechoslovakia had been with a number of these new nations that have been created out of out of 1919 in the Versailles treaty.
Speaker: 1
01:23:27
You know, who was to say, you know, we in Britain arya able to judge the rights and wrongs of that, you know, how fantastic it would be to go to war with a nation a long way away for people whom we know very little, etcetera, etcetera. I’m paraphrasing his quote. But but I I’m not saying it was the right decision.
Speaker: 1
01:23:45
I’m just saying Ai can see why in September 1938, he is prepared to give him the chance. Now I do think he was a bit ai. And it and and what he also does is really interesting thing. Shah goes over to Hitler’s flat, completely ambushes him, goes to his flat on the afternoon of September 30, and says to says to Hitler, look.
Speaker: 1
01:24:07
I’ve got this I’ve drawn up this this agreement here, and this is to continue the the naval agreement that we’ve already made. And and by signing this, you are saying that Germany and Britain should never go to war with one another. And he goes, speak. Whatever. You know, signs it. Yeah.
Speaker: 1
01:24:23
Chamberlain comes back, lands at hand, and waves his waves his little piece of paper, you know, and piecing 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 that that when Hitler then subsequently goes and moves in, you know, that 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 handed over to Russia without consulting Ukraine a few weeks ago.
Speaker: 1
01:24:54
It is incredible, I think, that that France and and Britain and Italy with Germany are deciding that, yes, it’s fine for Germany to go in and take the sedate on that, you know, without really consulting the Czechs. It’s a sort of similar kind of scenario, really, and and it’s equally wrong.
Speaker: 1
01:25:12
But when Germany does then go and take over the whole of Czechoslovakia in March 1939, that is that’s the bottom line. That is that’s the point where Chamberlain goes, okay. I’ve given him the benefit of the doubt. No more benefits of the doubt. That’s it.
Speaker: 1
01:25:27
That that is he’s he’s crossed the line. And so you reinforce your agreement with Poland. You do a formal agreement. You go, okay. We will uphold your sovereignty.
Speaker: 1
01:25:36
You know, if you are invaded, we will go to war with you. You know, that is that is a a ratcheting up of diplomacy and politics in a very, very big way. And it is a it is that decision to make a a treaty with the polls is not heeded by Hitler, but it’s heeded by literally every one of his commanders.
Speaker: 1
01:26:00
And it’s also heeded ai Goring, who is his number two and who is obviously the commander in chief of the, of of the Luftwaffe and is, president of Prussia and, you know, and all the rest of it and, you know, is the second most senior Nazi. And, you know, he’s going, this is a catastrophe. This is the last thing we wanna be doing is going to war against Britain and to defraud.
Speaker: 0
01:26:25
The Munich conference is a pretty interesting moment, I would say, in all of human history because it got the leaders of these bigger than life nations and the most dramatic brewing conflict in human history. Yeah. Chamberlain, Hitler, Mussolini, and Dodger. It’s interesting when these bigger than life leaders are in a room together.
Speaker: 1
01:26:49
Mhmm.
Speaker: 0
01:26:51
Is there something that you know about about their interactions? Yeah. I think this I I think one of
Speaker: 1
01:26:57
the things that’s interesting is is that Hitler’s got home advantage because it’s on his turf. And, you know, to start off with the first meeting is at the Berghof, his beloved place in the Ai overlooking Berkersgarten in the Alps. So he’s pretty confident because this is my manner, this is my turf, you know, I’m not gonna be bossed around by these guys.
Speaker: 1
01:27:15
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. You know, I’m not gonna be kinda carried out by this this sort of, you know, Austrian upstart. So they’re both coming at it with a ai of sort of slight kind of superiority kind of complex.
Speaker: 1
01:27:34
Interestingly, when you get to the actual meetings of the Bernabeu in 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 Bernabeu. You know, there are cars cheering him, you know, waving Union Jacks, all this kind of stuff. Hitler does not like that at all. Not at all.
Speaker: 1
01:28:01
Puts him 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. The difference is that Hitler is a dictator and an autocrat and has the devotion of the people sai he can do what he wants in a way that Chamberlain can’t.
Speaker: 1
01:28:21
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 it is Hitler and Chamberlain that are the top dogs in this particular discussion. You know, D’Elhade takes a back speak.
Speaker: 1
01:28:38
Even Mussolini, although he’s there, he doesn’t want a war either. You know? He wants to be left alone to do his own thing without anyone getting in the way, but he doesn’t want he doesn’t sana sort of it’s not in his interest to have a European war, so he’s trying to avoid it.
Speaker: 1
01:28:50
So it is really you you you see that the kind of alpha males in the room are are Chamberlain and and Hitler, and it’s really interesting because Hitler’s got this sort of slightly garrulous voice and and, you know, very ai of pale blue eyes and such distinct features, quite a long nose.
Speaker: 1
01:29:07
And, you know, he always says this is why he has the mustache is to kind of, you know, disguise the big nose. You know? So I was saying to you earlier on before we started recording, he does have a sense of humor. It’s not ai not one that you and I would kind of tap into, but but he does have one.
Speaker: 1
01:29:21
Whereas Chamberlain is just sort of you know, he sounds like a sort of, you know, bit like an old man. You know, he’s sort of silver haired, and he he looks like a sort of archetypal kind of British gentleman with his rolled up umbrella and his, you know, and his Homburg hat and all the rest of it.
Speaker: 1
01:29:33
So they they’re both sort of caricatures in a funny sort of way. And yet the consequence of their these discussions, you know, these these great events happening, you know, you are you are absolutely going either which way the Munich crisis comes out, you’re taking a step closer to war.
Speaker: 1
01:29:51
It’s just whether the war is gonna happen kind of next week or whether it’s gonna happen a year hence, but it’s you know, the Munich crisis obviously doesn’t stem the inevitability of war at all. It it it just ai it.
Speaker: 0
01:30:01
Do you think, there are words that Chamberlain should have said could have said that, put more pressure on Hitler, intimidate Hitler more?
Speaker: 1
01:30:13
Yeah. 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 gonna be, and you don’t know what it’s gonna look like. There’s no question that that Europe and the rest of Europe is is is cowed by the kind of impression of military might that the Germans have put out.
Speaker: 1
01:30:35
The the they 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 world’s oceans. You know, it it’s it’s kind of, you know, it shouldn’t be able to win a war. And sai so they’re kind of contradicting themselves at the same ai.
Speaker: 1
01:30:53
You know? So one minute, they’re sort of like, oh god. I don’t sana take on the all those Nazis and all the swastikas and those automaton stormtroopers. But But on the other hand, they’re then saying, but, actually, Germany doesn’t have much in its kind of, you know, in its basket. You know?
Speaker: 1
01:31:05
It’s got it’s got actually quite a lot of weaknesses, and we should be able to kind of prevail blah blah blah. We’ll just impose an economic blockade, and then it’ll be stuffed. And Bryden is not ready to fight a war in in 1938, but nor is Hitler, you know, nor is Germany. So, you know, one is sort of striking out the other. But it’s very easy to say that in hindsight.
Speaker: 1
01:31:22
But at the time, you know, with people ai of digging trenches in Hyde Park in Central London and barrack balloons going up over London and, you know, children being evacuated from the cities and 92% of the population ai wanting to go to war, you could see why he takes the course he does.
Speaker: 1
01:31:37
I suppose that’s that’s what I’m saying. I’m not saying it’s necessarily the right decision, but I I could I think it’s an understandable decision.
Speaker: 0
01:31:42
Oh, but what about even just on the human level? If I go into a room with a British gentleman versus going to a room with Trump, it feels like it’s so much easier to read and manipulate the British gentleman because Trump is ai Trump like characters. It seems like Hitler is similar. Churchill is similar. It’s like this guy can do anything.
Speaker: 0
01:32:08
There’s something terrifying about
Speaker: 1
01:32:09
the Unpredictability. Yeah.
Speaker: 0
01:32:11
Yeah. It feels like there’s something very predictable about Chamberlain. Yes.
Speaker: 1
01:32:15
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. In 1938.
Speaker: 0
01:32:28
Forget that.
Speaker: 1
01:32:29
You know, blood of the world is pink, as 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. Yeah. And on top of that, it has lots of extra imperial territories as well. So, you know, if you look at there’s there’s this incredible map of global shipping in 1937, and there’s these little ant ai of of ships going out.
Speaker: 1
01:32:50
And and one of the strongest ant lines is going down to Argentina and South America from Bryden. 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 ranches. It owns the railway system. It owns many of the port facilities. So you don’t even need an empire.
Speaker: 1
01:33:10
You just need the the, you know, you need the the facilities that overseas trade and possessions can give you. And Britain not only has the largest navy, it also has the largest merchant navy. It has 33% of the world’s merchant shipping and access to a further 50%, you know, Greek, Norwegian, Canadian shipping that it can can access.
Speaker: 1
01:33:31
So if you’ve got 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, all sorts of other things have been going on. While they might not have been creating a huge army or ai enough Spitfires that they might want to up until this point, what they have also been doing is stockpiling bauxite and copper and tungsten and huge reserves.
Speaker: 1
01:33:54
And because Britain has this huge global reach, because it has its empire and its extra imperial assets, it can strike bargains that no one else can strike. 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.
Speaker: 1
01:34:11
I will pay over the over the asking price to secure that. And it’s doing that in the nineteen thirties. 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.
Speaker: 1
01:34:30
So it is with that mindset that Chamberlain is going into those talks and thinking, okay. Well, I’m not gonna meh a war over the Czechoslovak, and who cares about them? But but but I am gonna show Hitler that 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 at it from a completely different perspective.
Speaker: 1
01:34:50
And I think one of the things that’s so interesting 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. It’s the fact you’ve got two men, two alpha males who are going to those negotiations from totally different perspectives and vantage points.
Speaker: 1
01:35:13
And I think it’s very easy for people today to forget how elevated Britain was in the late late nineteen thirties. You you 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 and it just was.
Speaker: 1
01:35:32
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 two is that so much of it has been dictated by the shift in power that took place subsequent to 1945.
Speaker: 1
01:35:52
And when people were starting to write these sort of major narratives in the nineteen seventies and eighties and into the nineteen nineties is through a prism of a very, very different world. And so one of the reasons why you have this narrative that that, you know, Britain was a bit rubbish and hanging on the shirt tells of the Americans and, you know, all the blood was spelt in in Eastern Front and, you know, Germany had the best army in the world and was only defeated because Hitler was mad and blah blah blah.
Speaker: 1
01:36:16
You know, that that kind of sort of traditional narrative, it’s it’s that narrative emerges through the prism of of what was going on in the nineteen seventies and what was going on in the nineteen eighties and the changing world rather than looking at it through the prism of the late nineteen thirties or early nineteen forties.
Speaker: 0
01:36:31
So there is this moment of decision. When do you think what what lesson do 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,
Speaker: 1
01:36:49
attacking,
Speaker: 0
01:36:52
for military conflict? Where’s that where’s that line? Where’s that
Speaker: 1
01:36:57
Well, I kinda think it probably was when it was. Ai meh Poland. Yeah. Honestly, I I’m not sure it would have been the right decision to go to war in ai. I just I I think it would I I’m I can’t predict because you you can’t second guess how things are gonna play out because you just don’t know.
Speaker: 1
01:37:20
But but I I I’m not sure that Chamberlain made the wrong decision. I’m not saying he made the right decision. I’m just like, I’m not I’m being a bit washy washy about this.
Speaker: 0
01:37:29
You could have threatened it more. Imagine Churchill in those same meetings.
Speaker: 1
01:37:34
Yeah. But but Churchill also appeases. I mean, he appeases Stalin all the time. I meh, 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 he recognizes you can’t trust Hitler. He recognizes that Nazism is bad.
Speaker: 1
01:37:50
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. You know, so so Ai suppose what I’m saying is Chamberlain is better placed to make those decisions than than Churchill is, which again doesn’t mean that church that Chamberlain is right and Churchill is wrong.
Speaker: 1
01:38:14
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 Ai. You’ve got a handful of Hurricanes. You haven’t got enough you know, your air defense system isn’t properly properly sorted at this point. Your navy is strong.
Speaker: 1
01:38:30
But, you know, what’s that gonna look ai? I mean, if you do go to war. There’s not gonna be armies sweeping into Germany. It’s just it’s gonna be accelerated industrialization for a year. Sai, you know, even if you go to war in 1938 over Czechoslovakia, Czechoslovakia will not be saved.
Speaker: 1
01:38:50
The you know, France and Britain will not be going and invading Germany. That, you know, that is absolutely not gonna happen. So sort of what’s the point? I mean, you know, if you’re not gonna do that, why didn’t you accelerate your rearmament thereafter, get your ducks in a row? And then you can consider it.
Speaker: 1
01:39:07
I mean, after all, you know, even in September 1939, they don’t really do anything. I mean, we talked about the kind of the Sai offensive, which isn’t really an offensive at all. It’s firing one round of machine gun and scuttling back again. But, I mean, they don’t even do that then. They’re they’re still buying time in 1939.
Speaker: 1
01:39:26
And, you know, Britain is only just about ready to take on the onslaught of the Luftwaffe in summer of nineteen forty.
Speaker: 0
01:39:31
Well, nobody is ready for war.
Speaker: 1
01:39:34
No. And you always want more than you’ve got at any ai, even when you’re winning.
Speaker: 0
01:39:37
But, like, really not ready. Even, like like, you mentioned with, with with Barbarossa, Vatsal Germany is really not ready. Not ready. Nobody’s really except France. I swear. France Sana have radios. Fine. But come on. Come on. When when, when vatsal situation invades Poland, I mean
Speaker: 1
01:40:01
Yeah. It’s terrible. It’s terrible. Because I’m absolutely I I also do think that had France gone in in some force with some British troops as well, had they gone in, what would have happened is is that would have just that easily could have brought down Hitler because most of his commanders are his senior commanders are just thinking, what the hell is going on?
Speaker: 1
01:40:21
This is a catastrophe. I mean, to a man. I mean, even Goring is thinking this is a terrible idea. They are absolutely not convinced. And when Hitler does his big talk to his his, he asked all his senior commanders to come to the Berghof to brief them about the invasion of Poland, It’s just after the Ribbentrop Molotov pact of the August 22.
Speaker: 1
01:40:42
Go he he calls them all to Berghof and says, come in, you know, come in Mufti. Come in civilian suits. They all turn up, and he gives them this kind of huge, great speech and sai, this is the moment. This is this is the time. This is what we’re gonna do. And they’re all going, what? You’re kidding me. What? We’re going to Poland in you know, on the August 26? That’s the plan?
Speaker: 1
01:40:59
Like, two days’ time? Ai know, where’s the plan? Where’s the you know, the whole point is that, you know, they’re they’re emerging and growing militarily, but they were supposed to have all these exercises where they, you know, coordinating ground forces, the, you know, the Panzer spearhead with operations in the air with the Luftwaffe.
Speaker: 1
01:41:17
None 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 that are wrong. But but but, you know, it it’s flying in the face of all convention military convention that that they you know, he does this about any kind of warning.
Speaker: 1
01:41:33
And even by the September 1, where 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 and the Italians going, oh my god. Don’t do this. Don’t do this.
Speaker: 1
01:41:51
You know, there’s gotta be a solution.
Speaker: 0
01:41:53
Hitler’s absolutely jumping at the bit. Well, in that case, from a dark militaristic perspective, his bet paid off.
Speaker: 1
01:42:01
Well, except that it ended in ruins in May 1945 with the total collapse of Germany. So you could say the worst decision he ever made was going into Poland in September 1939. That’s the way you look at it. But, I mean, yes, you know, it’s successful in that the, you know, Poland’s overrun in eighteen days. And there’s there’s so many counterfactuals here.
Speaker: 1
01:42:20
But, I mean, if you would say to Hitler on the April 30, you know, as he’s sort of taking out the pistol from his holster on his sofa in the in the Fuhrerbunker and going, you know, so Adolf, first of September nineteen thirty nine. Still backing yourself on that one? I mean, he might might have a different view.
Speaker: 0
01:42:37
The the ai insane and full of blunders, so he probably would have said, yeah. Do it all over again.
Speaker: 1
01:42:41
Yeah. I’m sure he would have done as well. The
Speaker: 0
01:42:43
the conquest Poland was not a mistake, Soviet Union was not a mistake. No. It’s just some of the Other people
Speaker: 1
01:42:49
Ai was let down by by people not being strong enough.
Speaker: 0
01:42:51
Yeah. The Prussian generals are all
Speaker: 1
01:42:53
Yeah. Yeah. Of course. That’s exactly what he’d say. Wasn’t my fault.
Speaker: 0
01:42:57
He might have, quietly done some different decisions about Barbarossa. Maybe the timing would be different.
Speaker: 1
01:43:05
Maybe that all out central for us rather than kind of splitting it into three. Yep.
Speaker: 0
01:43:08
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.
Speaker: 1
01:43:18
Absolute he he was completely convinced by it. There was clearly a ai of sort of 10 to 15% level of doubt, but what the heck? I’m gonna do it anyway. He was just he’d ratcheted himself up into such a lava of 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 gotta do.
Speaker: 1
01:43:44
We’ve gotta get on with it now. There 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 and the spirit to be able to pull it off or, you know, I was wrong and and therefore, you know, we don’t deserve to be a thousand year right.
Speaker: 1
01:44:00
We don’t deserve to be the master race. Black or white. Us or them, either or. It’s sai all the time. So can you tell
Speaker: 0
01:44:09
the story of the Molotov Ribbentrop Pact in 1939? So they make an agreement, Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and that leads us, just like you mentioned, in a matter of days. Yeah. How compact everything is. Mhmm. It’s just really, really fascinating.
Speaker: 1
01:44:24
Ai sai beautiful summer in Europe, Summer Of 19 30 9. You know? It’s one of these sort of glorious summers that sort of never rains. It’s just sunshine sunny day after sunny day. It’s kind of, you know, it’s like that sort of golden summer of nineteen fourteen as well, you know, where sky always seems to be blue, fluffy white clouds, everyone’s sort of, you know but this sort of the storm clouds of war, to use that cliche, are kind of brewing.
Speaker: 1
01:44:50
The Russians have have reached out to Britain and France and said, come 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.
Speaker: 1
01:45:02
I I mean, if ever there is sai, I think, a mistake, that’s Britain and France should have been a bit more into real politics than they were. That it’s such an opportunity to to ensure that to snooker the third Ai, and and they don’t take it, because, you know, in many ways, they see the westward spread of communism in exactly the same way that the Nazis see the threat of the westward spread of communism as something that’s every bit as repellent as Nazism, and and they don’t wanna be getting into bed with these guys.
Speaker: 1
01:45:38
Of course, they kind of have to kind of change tack on that one in summer of nineteen forty one in, you know, in very quick order. And that’s the whole point about Churchill appeasing Stalin. I mean, you know, it’s all very well people saying, well, you know, Churchill wouldn’t have appeased Hitler in nineteen thirties, but he does appease. He appeases all the time.
Speaker: 1
01:45:57
And they miss that opportunity. And the and the the French and British delegation is third tier commanders, generals going over. It’s it’s a it’s a, yeah, it’s a shit show. I mean, it speak. Excuse my French.
Speaker: 1
01:46:11
But, I mean, it’s just it’s it’s it’s a nonsense that they’re not ready for it. They’re not prepared. The British guy, Abel Drax doesn’t have any authority. The whole thing’s a complete joke. It’s it’s never gonna get anywhere.
Speaker: 0
01:46:25
You tell the story of this quite beautifully, actually. Again, it’s such a human story. I mean, the it seems like the Stalin and Soviet
Speaker: 1
01:46:34
They’ve already made up their mind. But Well, I don’t think they have. I think what they Wait. Wait.
Speaker: 0
01:46:38
Wait. Ai mean, you described quite well that that they value in person meeting. Yes. So, like, Chamberlain should have just gone to Moscow.
Speaker: 1
01:46:47
Meh on a plane. Like, ai such a,
Speaker: 0
01:46:52
maybe it’s a simplistic notion, but that could have changed the trajectory of human history right there.
Speaker: 1
01:46:58
I really think it could have done. I think that was I think that’s I think that’s meh more grievous mistake than than than Munich.
Speaker: 0
01:47:04
Why are leaders so hesitant to meet? I I I’m told now by a bunch of diplomats that no. No. No. No. There’s a process. You know, at first, you have to have these diplomats meet, and they have to draft a bunch of stuff. I sometimes have the simplistic notion, like, why not why not meet? Why not meet? Like, I think there is a human element there.
Speaker: 0
01:47:29
Ai of of of of course, especially when there’s this force that is Hitler.
Speaker: 1
01:47:36
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 that’s why you always quite rightly insist on doing your podcast face to face because you wanna get the color of someone’s jib, and you wanna be able to see them, and and you wanna see the intonation in their expression and the whites of their eyes and all that kind of stuff.
Speaker: 1
01:47:58
And that that just does doesn’t make a difference, of course, because, you know, we’re fundamentally animals, and we kind of we we wanna 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.
Speaker: 0
01:48:14
Yeah. But there’s also just you see the the humanity in in others. It’s so much easier. This you see this in social media. It’s so much easier to talk shit about others when you’re not with them. Yes. And 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.
Speaker: 0
01:48:38
All these you can project onto them the worst possible, version of what of a human. But when you meet them, you’re like, oh. They are just a person. They’re just a person.
Speaker: 1
01:48:50
Well, it’s the world’s great tragedy that that that it’s only a few people that wanna go to war, and the vast majority sana 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 can’t ruin it for everybody else.
Speaker: 1
01:49:04
But but but, anyway, to go back to Leningrad, 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 would have probably come in.
Speaker: 1
01:49:26
I mean, the big thing is 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. Mhmm. But the British and the French just smell a massive ram there.
Speaker: 1
01:49:40
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 War properly.
Speaker: 0
01:49:55
They’re willing to appease Tyler, and they’re not willing to appease Stalin in that situation.
Speaker: 1
01:49:58
Well, they’re not willing to appease anybody by that stage. That’s the point.
Speaker: 0
01:50:01
Well, they appeased Hitler because They said to the other side.
Speaker: 1
01:50:04
There there’s a now caught there’s a bottom line, you know, which is which is Poland. You know? So it’s changed. That’s
Speaker: 0
01:50:10
why. Right.
Speaker: 1
01:50:11
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 they’re communists. They don’t like them, don’t trust them, worry about what they’re gonna do with Poland, and they’re gonna be, you know, jumping out of the fire into the ai of water.
Speaker: 1
01:50:29
And it doesn’t come off. And as a consequence of that, Soviet Union continued to pursue more hardly, you know, more ram 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,
Speaker: 0
01:50:52
and it doesn’t wanna go towards us yet. And the agreement that they won’t attack each other. Is that right? Yeah. Do you think Stalin actually believed that?
Speaker: 1
01:51:01
No. He believed it in the same way that Hitler believed it, that it was a cynical ai of, you know, convenient bit of realpolitik for now. I mean, I I think Soviet Union was as 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.
Speaker: 1
01:51:19
But I do think that from the moment that Hitler takes power in 1933, a conflict between Soviet Union and Nazi Germany is inevitable.
Speaker: 0
01:51:25
Meh. So either direction you think it’s inevitable. Yeah. I think I I think there’s, yeah, there’s a huge amount of evidence for that. Saloni probably wanted it, what, like in ’42, ’40 ‘3? Yeah. Something like that.
Speaker: 1
01:51:36
Yeah. And, you know, they’re doing exercises and stuff and building out it. He’s not ready yet because he knows he’s done the purges, and he’s gotta get his his army you know, he’s gotta get his armed forces back into shape and all the rest of it. But, you know so they have this incredibly cynical agreement, but at that point, you know, Hitler’s hands are untied.
Speaker: 1
01:51:52
You know, he no longer has to worry about about the threat from Soviet Union. He’s got carte blanche to go into Poland, and he doesn’t believe that France and Britain are gonna go to war over Poland. He’s wrong about that, obviously. But but but France France and Britain, despite going to war with him, still do nothing. So, you know, he’s got a way of it.
Speaker: 0
01:52:09
Who was Churchill, and how did Churchill come to power at this moment?
Speaker: 1
01:52:15
Well, Churchill is this absolutely towering figure in British politics, you know, who’s been, you know, his first minister in the kind of naughties of the twentieth century and the first years of of the twentieth century. First of the Liberals and the Conservatives, he’s a former chancellor, of this checker.
Speaker: 1
01:52:34
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 Chamberlain, but he is this towering figure, and he has been very outspoken as a backbencher, which basically means, you know, you’re not a minister.
Speaker: 1
01:52:53
You’re not on 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 this towering figure. So he’s listened to in a way that other backbenchers aren’t. And he has been saying, you know, we need to stand up to the dictators.
Speaker: 1
01:53:09
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, in charge of the navy, which is Britain’s senior service, and, suddenly, he’s there. And what happens is Britain doesn’t really do anything. It’s very difficult working with France because France is so politically fractured that they can’t make any decisions.
Speaker: 1
01:53:34
When you can’t make any decisions, you’re just impotent. And so Churchill first mentions going into Norway, mining, the leads. So, the idea is that you’re making life very difficult for the Germans to get ram ore out of Sweden. Their main 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.
Speaker: 1
01:54:00
So, Churchill suggests in September 1939, why don’t we mine the leads, which are the leads are these passageways, out of the fjords in the in the north into the, into the North Sai. Why don’t we mine those and stop the Germans from from from, taking this? Everyone goes, well, yeah, that’s quite a good idea, but they can’t decide.
Speaker: 1
01:54:19
And French are nervous that if they do that, the Germans retaliate and bomb France and all this kind of stuff. So no decision is made until kind of 04/19/1940. They go up to start mining the leads on exactly the same day that the Germans invade Denmark and and Norway, and and so they’re they’re caught off guard.
Speaker: 1
01:54:36
So 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 competent he was as a peacetime prime minister, he’s not a wartime prime minister. You know, he’s not served in the armed forces himself. He doesn’t really understand it. He needs a different set of hands. And, his government falls on the May 9.
Speaker: 1
01:54:57
It becomes inevitable that he’s gonna have to resign. And the obvious person to take his place is Lord Halifax, who is in the House of Lords, but you could still be a prime minister. And he is, without question, the most respected politician in the country. He’s, a former viceroy of India.
Speaker: 1
01:55:15
He’s seen as incredibly safe pair of hands, man of resolute sound judgment, etcetera, etcetera. But he doesn’t sana take it. He feels physically ill at the speak, doesn’t want this responsibility. He’s also not really a military man. He’s got a slightly sort of withered hand, which has prevented him from doing military service, and he just blanches at this moment.
Speaker: 1
01:55:39
And that really leaves only one other figure that could possibly take on this position, and that’s Churchill. So when Chamberlain resigns on the May 9 and Halifax says it’s, it’s not for me, the only person who’s gonna slip into that position is Churchill, and he becomes prime meh, and he accepts it gladly.
Speaker: 1
01:55:57
He feels like it is his mission in life. This is his moment. Come of the outcome of the man. But he comes with a huge amount of baggage. I mean, you know, he’s known as a man who drinks too much juice, whose judgment hasn’t always been great.
Speaker: 1
01:56:08
You know, he was chancellor during the time of the general strike nineteen twenty six. You know, he backed Edward the eighth over the, monarchy crisis when the king wanted to marry Wallis Simpson, the divorcee, Catholic divorcee, etcetera, etcetera. So, you know, his judgment has been brought into question.
Speaker: 1
01:56:23
You know, he is the man who was who came up with the idea of the Gallipoli campaign, which was, you know, an ignominious failure, blah blah blah. So there are issues over him. You know, he is seen as a hothead and a man who doesn’t have the kind of sound judgment of Halifax.
Speaker: 1
01:56:38
So the jury is 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 he was considered a ai politician, but he is seen also as a loose cannon and by no means the right person in this hour of darkness.
Speaker: 1
01:57:00
And it is coincidental that the 05/10/1940, 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 company government, but a nationalist cross party coalition government for the duration of the war, which includes, you know, members of of the Liberal Party and also the Labour Party, as well as conservatives.
Speaker: 1
01:57:26
That it is by no means certain that that he’s going to be able to deliver the goods. And it is also coincidentally the same day that the Germans launched Case Yellow, Operation Yellow, the invasion of the Low Countries in France. So these are tumultuous events, to put it mildly.
Speaker: 1
01:57:47
And it is also the case that, you know, only a couple of weeks before, Paul Reynaud has taken over as prime minister of yet another coalition government in France from from Daladier. So political turmoil is very much the watchword at this time for the, for the Western democracies just at the moment that the Germans are making their kind of, you know, their hammer strike into the West.
Speaker: 0
01:58:12
This might be a good moment to bring up this idea that has been circulating recently brought up by Daryl Cooper, who hyperbolically stated that Churchill was the, quote, chief villain of, the second World War. To give a good faith interpretation of that, Ai believe he meant that Churchill forced Hitler to escalate the expansion of Nazi Germany beyond Poland into a global war.
Speaker: 0
01:58:38
So Churchill is the one that turned this narrow war. Czechoslovakia, Austria, Poland into a global one. Is that accurate?
Speaker: 1
01:58:53
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 Ai don’t think so. I mean, again, I I go back to kind of Britain’s position in in the world in 1939.
Speaker: 1
01:59:11
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 carte blanche to dictators to just run a mock and take whatever territory they want.
Speaker: 1
01:59:31
You 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 of, freedoms of people. It’s just, you know, to to echo the words of Roosevelt in August 1941, you know, that they’re ai to a world, free of wanton fear.
Speaker: 1
01:59:57
Now, obviously, there’s still some issues with the form that democracy takes in the ai nineteen thirties. It’s not democratic for everyone. You know? Try saying that if you’re in Nigeria or, or or India or whatever, or if you’re, you know, in the black southern states of The United States.
Speaker: 1
02:00:17
But the aspirations are there, and I think that’s that’s that’s an important distinction. And I think by saying that that Churchill is the chief warmonger of the second World War, I think, is is ludicrous. You know, it’s the same thing about about the bombing. You know, the the the detractors of strategic air campaign always go, yeah.
Speaker: 1
02:00:34
But, you know, Germans had the Holocaust, but but weren’t the weren’t the allies just as bad just killing all those civilians? It’s ai, 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.
Speaker: 1
02:00:49
So the the thing you mentioned initially is this sort of the idealist perspective of, well, Britain can’t allow
Speaker: 0
02:00:59
sort of, this warmonger to break all these pacts and be undemocratic, you know, murder a large number of people and do conquest of territory. Okay. 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 fifty years?
Speaker: 0
02:01:28
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 Churchill’s presence and decisions. So we’re not talking about idealistic perspective. We’re talking about the realist, like, the the reality of the war, of Stalin, of of Hitler, of Churchill, of, of France and FDR, did Churchill drag Hitler into a world war?
Speaker: 0
02:02:05
Did he force Hitler to invade Soviet Union? Did he force Hitler to then in invade, attack Britain?
Speaker: 1
02:02:15
Well, no. Because because Hitler was always gonna invade the Soviet Union if unless unless the Soviet Union invaded Germany First. So that was always gonna happen. No one asked Hitler to invade the Low Countries and Norway and Denmark and attack Britain. He does that, of course, because he’s not given a free hand in Poland, but there’s no question that Tyler would also wanted to subdue France or certainly turn France from a democracy into a totalitarian state as well.
Speaker: 1
02:02:50
I’m absolutely certain about that.
Speaker: 0
02:02:51
Sai think there’s pretty definitive evidence, and it’s obvious ram everything he sai, 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.
Speaker: 1
02:03:08
He would have done a deal with Britain. Britain could’ve See? Existed. So, actually,
Speaker: 0
02:03:13
there is a is there there is a possible reality, I don’t know, maybe you can correct me on this, where Hitler basically takes all of Europe except Britain.
Speaker: 1
02:03:23
Yes. But then he would have got so strong that he would have then turned on Britain as well, you know, because he he would you know, the the fear is that if you let him do this, and then then he he gets greedy. He wants the next one, then he wants the next one, then he wants the next one, and, you know, then he wants to take over the whole world.
Speaker: 1
02:03:36
You know, that is 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.
Speaker: 1
02:04:05
It’s time for the Europeans to start on their own. It all sounds very familiar right now. And and suddenly, he’s got to do this gargantuan political vault fast, and prepare the nation for war because he also fears, like Churchill fears, like most like Chamberlain feared as well, that that Hitler’s designs are not purely on Eastern Europe and the Lebensraum there, but would get ever bigger.
Speaker: 1
02:04:32
And I don’t I I don’t doubt that they’re right. I think if he’d prevailed in the Soviet Union, you know, he’d he’d always wanted more, you know, because his whole concept is the master race. You know? Yeah.
Speaker: 0
02:04:42
I I think I think it should be said if we if we measure human suffering, if there is 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 Yes. And more enslaved Yeah.
Speaker: 0
02:05:02
And more tortured and all of this
Speaker: 1
02:05:05
Yes. And and ditto if you you know, if the if the ai hadn’t got involved against imperial Japan, you know, it would have been would have been catastrophic. I mean, 20 to 30,000,000 Chinese dead anyway, you know, with American and British intervention. And it wasn’t gonna be in China without that. I meh, and elsewhere.
Speaker: 1
02:05:24
You know, because because the reason why Japan invades French Indochina, now Vietnam, and Hong Kong, and, and Malaya, and Singapore, and and so on, and Burma, is because it’s not winning in Ai, 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 to get what it needs.
Speaker: 1
02:05:52
It’s rubber and oil and natural resources and ores, precious ores, and all the rest of it. And if it had been unchecked, it would have done sai, and then it would have absolutely built up its strength and overrun the whole of China with even more deaths. So, you know, I I I think there is I think the one of the interesting things about the second World War is is lots of wars and why people get involved in them are arya extremely questionable.
Speaker: 1
02:06:17
But I think there is a moral crusade to 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 ai are supposed to be on the force of the good, how come they’re doing so much bad?
Speaker: 1
02:06:36
And 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 ai, such as destruction of cities, destruction of monasteries on outcrops in Southern Italy, you know, destruction of killing a lot of civilians, etcetera, etcetera.
Speaker: 1
02:06:56
You know, these are these are difficult questions to 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 it’s kind of easy to have a a fairly, cut and dry, war in North Africa, in the deserts of North Africa where, you know, the only people getting in the way are a few sort of Bedouin tribesmen or something.
Speaker: 1
02:07:22
But But but once you start getting into Europe or getting into the kind of the 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 of political leaders, to look after and defend their own peoples first and foremost.
Speaker: 1
02:07:45
And so what you’re doing is you’re trying to protect your own sovereignty of Ram 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 protracting war is to try and minimize the number of deaths of their own young men as much as they possibly can ai at the same time winning the war.
Speaker: 1
02:08:08
And 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 ai and you don’t have a repeat of the slaughter of the first World War.
Speaker: 1
02:08:29
So, you know, it is really interesting that that in in our mind’s eye, when we’re thinking of, you know, the western allies in the in 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.
Speaker: 1
02:08:44
Those are infantrymen. They’re the front line. They are the coal face of they’re they’re the first people going into the into the fire of the enemy. And we tend to think about guys in tanks, meh with their garand rifles or, you know, machine guns or whatever. That’s that’s what springs to ai.
Speaker: 1
02:09:00
Yet, actually, they’re a comparatively small proportion of the army. So no more than 14 to 15% of any arya, allied arya, is infantry. Forty five percent are service corps, service troops driving trucks and cooks and bottle washers and people lugging great big boxes of stuff. You know?
Speaker: 1
02:09:17
And that’s because by that stage, you know, the allies have worked out 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 in first aid and meh care of troops, get getting them back onto the battlefield.
Speaker: 1
02:09:38
And 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 bomb and you can destroy infrastructure and civilians and households, that makes it much harder for for Krupp to make those Panther tanks and Ai tanks or whatever it might be and guns.
Speaker: 1
02:10:01
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 gonna be easier for those fifteen, fourteen, 15 percent of infantry when you’ve got to jump out of landing craft to do their job.
Speaker: 1
02:10:17
And you’re trying to keep that to a minimum, and you’d 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 Daryl Cooper’s driving at. But no one asked Hitler to invade Poland.
Speaker: 1
02:10:35
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.
Speaker: 0
02:10:42
Yeah. There’s complex ethical discussions here about, just like as you ai. Which are fascinating. Which are fascinating and, war is hell, and there’s many ways in which it is hell. Just for a little bit, the steel meh, what, Daryl is where he might be coming from is since World War two, 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.
Speaker: 0
02:11:27
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 ai neocons and warmongers 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.
Speaker: 1
02:11:55
Well, I I I do agree with that. I 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.
Speaker: 1
02:12:11
It doesn’t need to be black and ai. And, you know, life is not a straight line. And, of course, there’s the, you know, the ai make plenty of mistakes in in in World War two. Overall, I think they made the right calls. And I think one of the things that’s really interesting is I think that that the allies, for the most part, use their resources much more judiciously and sensibly than the Axis powers do.
Speaker: 1
02:12:36
And, you know, good, because that means they prevail. I think, you know, there are so many lessons, from World War two that could have been brought into the last the history of the last thirty 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.
Speaker: 1
02:12:57
And if you don’t have a solution for that power vacuum, lots of bad elements are gonna sweep into that in very quick order, which, of course, is exactly what happens in in in Iraq. So, you know, Donald Rumsfeld going, we don’t do reconstruction. Well, you freaking well should do. You know?
Speaker: 1
02:13:11
The the this if you’re gonna if you’re gonna take on this this particular challenge, you’ve gotta see it through. You know? That’s that’s simply not good enough. You know? It’s not good enough to go into Afghanistan and go, okay. We’re gonna change things around. It’s gonna be great. You know, all the women are gonna have education.
Speaker: 1
02:13:26
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 what what’s gonna happen? You’re gonna undo everything.
Speaker: 1
02:13:43
And and Ai remember being in, you know, this is a bit of a segue, Lex, but I I remember being in in Northern Helmand province back in, you know, when was it? January 2008. And, British troops had just taken over an an absolute dump of a town called Musa Sana. And I remember talking to this Afghan guy.
Speaker: 1
02:14:02
He’d he just had all his willow trees chopped down to make room for a helipad that the allies wanted, which said, you know, they put that kind of you know, those cages with kind of rubble in the protective wall. Is it called Heskam, I think it was called. Anyway, I said to him, what do you what do you think about about the British being there?
Speaker: 1
02:14:20
And he just went, which he shrugged at me and lifted up his hands and said, well, you know, if they stay, great. But they won’t. And and he said said, you know, if they stay, then brilliant. But he said, Ai tell you what. He said, Taliban weren’t great. They weren’t fantastic.
Speaker: 1
02:14:35
He said, but I could leave my purse on a wall and no one would touch it. I could leave it on a wall for a speak, no one would touch it. Sai said, will they bring that kind of order? You know? Will will we have will we have peace here? You know? They’ve just dropped down my my willow trees. You know, thanks a lot.
Speaker: 1
02:14:51
And you you know, you you 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 onto a onto a nation which isn’t isn’t ready for that. Now there are ways in which, you know, it looked like Afghanistan was starting to kind of emerge and there was a path.
Speaker: 1
02:15:18
And then just at the critical moment, the West moves out with catastrophic consequences. What you have to sai, 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 of all that destruction, all that turmoil was thriving, high producing democracies, which burst forth into the kind of second half of the ’20 twentieth century and into the twenty first century in pretty good order.
Speaker: 1
02:15:55
So the lessons of the previous generation for the first World War had had been had been learned even though the scale of destruction, the displacement of people is unprecedented in 1945.
Speaker: 0
02:16:09
In 1939, what was the state of the militaries? What were the most powerful militaries on the world stage at that time?
Speaker: 1
02:16:17
Well, in terms of naval power in Britain, as we’ve already discussed, and and 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 ai far arya away its most modern aspect of its three services, air, land, and speak.
Speaker: 1
02:16:33
But it doesn’t have any aircraft carriers and doesn’t have any radar. So, you know, it’s it’s they’ve got modern battleships and battle cruisers, but without key modern bits of technology.
Speaker: 0
02:16:44
So Italy is really not ready for
Speaker: 1
02:16:47
Oh, it’s so not. It’s so not. It’s just, again, both Hitler and Mussolini, they 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 prism, but they can’t see that bigger picture.
Speaker: 0
02:17:04
And we should say that Mussolini, maybe you can correct meh, but I don’t think at any point he wants sai war.
Speaker: 1
02:17:09
He doesn’t want a war. What he does want is he wants his own new kind of Roman Empire, which extends over the Mediterranean, the ai of certainly the eastern part of the meh half half of the Mediterranean, North Africa, all the way down to kind of East Africa controlling the Suez Canal.
Speaker: 1
02:17:23
That that that’s what he wants.
Speaker: 0
02:17:25
And I think he made clear that he was I mean, there’s always, like, this little brother jealous of Hitler kind of situation because he he wanted absolute power the way Hitler did But doesn’t have it. Doesn’t have it. And ai yeah. There’s
Speaker: 1
02:17:39
a Monarchy.
Speaker: 0
02:17:41
Often forgotten. It’s amazing. So there’s always this limit. And Hitler ai brilliantly, once he gets some power, he takes it all. Complete.
Speaker: 1
02:17:54
He completely emasculates Mussolini. And Yeah. He likes him, though. It’s really weird. Even when Mussolini’s about four in July 1943, he has a meeting at Feltre, just literally a few days before. Mussolini tumbles, and he does that because he likes Mussolini. He likes him as a man and thinks he’s been his friend, and, you know, he respects him to a certain extent even though he’s he he definitely views himself as top dog.
Speaker: 1
02:18:22
Hitler does, that is. So it’s kinda curious because I don’t think Hitler particularly likes anyone, really, but but but he does seem to like Mussolini. But anyway, the problem with Mussolini is Muslim Mussolini’s Italy is is very impoverished from the first World War, you know, and that, of course, leads to the rise of fascism and the overthrow of parliamentary democracy sana and why Mussolini takes place in the first place.
Speaker: 1
02:18:45
You know, again, it’s that kind of there’s been this terrible disruption. There’s been financial crisis that leads to kind of people looking at an alternative. You know, what’s the alternative? Well, Mussolini is going, you know, we can be proud Italians again, lots of chest thumping, you know, wearing great uniforms, all the rest of it.
Speaker: 1
02:19:02
And people kinda think, well, you know, I have a piece of that. It kinda works and, you know, preferably the trains work on time under him and and and so on and so forth. But he just gets ahead of himself. You know? And and, actually, the writing’s on the war in 1935 when he goes into Abyssinia and and, you know, again, sort of what effectively are kind of, by first world European standards, primitive ai in in in Abyssinia.
Speaker: 1
02:19:24
You know? They they have quite a tough fight there. You know, they they do prevail, but but it’s not a complete walkover, and they get a bit of a bloody nose at ai, and they shouldn’t have done. And they’re just not ready. They don’t have the industry. You know, they’re they’re tied up into the Mediterranean. They don’t have access to the world’s oceans.
Speaker: 1
02:19:42
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 nineteen thirties. So Britain’s approach to fascist Spain and approach to fascist Italy has been very much sort of speak and carrot.
Speaker: 1
02:20:03
It’s like, 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 it is that you need as long as you don’t kinda 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.
Speaker: 1
02:20:27
But Germany’s just, you know, they they ai the the Axis Pact of Steel in May 1939 where they become formal ai, this is Hitler and, Mussolini, Italy and Germany. But it’s always a very, very unequal partnership right from the word go. And 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.
Speaker: 1
02:20:49
We’re we’re you know, they’re our natural bedfellows. It’s so that he can what what it’s 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 kinda watch each other’s backs.
Speaker: 1
02:21:06
They have borders, you know, Austria and 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 but, basically, they won’t they’ll they’ll they’ll be their own it’s it’s a kind of marriage of convenience.
Speaker: 1
02:21:20
You know, they’re never expecting to be fighting alongside each other on the battlefield. Not really. There is a kind of obligation to do so, but but it’s it’s an obligation with no expectation of ever actually happening. And so from miss Mussolini’s point of view, the pact of steel is is kind of you know, it’s just sailing your flag to one particular mass and kind of trying to cover your cover your back.
Speaker: 1
02:21:41
And so long as he places 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? And the pact still doesn’t make any difference to that. The the problem for him is is that in June 1940, he thinks that France is about to be defeated and the Bryden will surely follow.
Speaker: 1
02:22:00
And so he thinks, ah, I’ve got some rich pickings. I can take Malta. I can take British possessions. I can overrun Egypt. And, you know, now is my tyler.
Speaker: 1
02:22:07
But I I also need to kinda 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.
Speaker: 1
02:22:19
So he does it what he thinks is the perfect ai, and it turns out to be a catastrophic timing because, of course, Britain doesn’t exit the fight. You know, Britain is still there. And, you know, by February 1941, a very, very tiny British arya in Egypt has overrun, you know, two entire Italian armies and taken a 33,000 prisoners in North Africa.
Speaker: 0
02:22:38
So you mentioned in the sea, who were the dominant armies. Who would who was dominant in the air?
Speaker: 1
02:22:45
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 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.
Speaker: 1
02:23:03
You know, you are going to your ai squadrons with at least five hundred hours in your logbook. To put that into some perspective, you know, a British RAF or Luftwaffe pilot would be joining their frontline squadrons with a hundred and fifty to a hundred and seventy hours in the logbook.
Speaker: 1
02:23:18
So it is these guys are disciplined 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 that there is a good number of them, but there’s not that many.
Speaker: 1
02:23:39
The Luftwaffe is is the largest air force in the world in 1939, but it is already at a parity when in in aircraft production with Britain. And the French have a kind of similar sai army, but they’re very, very badly organized. So they’re also they’re organized into different regions, and they one region doesn’t is not really talking to another.
Speaker: 1
02:24:00
And one of the problems that when Casiello, the invasion of German invasion of the West starts, France’s army of the air is spread throughout France and has its own little arya. So you have one bunch of, you know, fighters and bombers in that block in, you know, in the Marseille area.
Speaker: 1
02:24:14
You have another block in kind of, you know, on the Brittany Coast, and you have another block in around Bryden, and you have another of that. So so consequently, they’re never be they’re they’re never able to kind of bring their full strength to bear. So it’s although although they 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 and at when.
Speaker: 1
02:24:42
So in other words, you can send the Luftwaffe can send over overwhelming amounts of bombers and fighter planes and pulverize a French airfield and catch them napping. 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 stooge around the sky and hope they bump into some Luftwaffe.
Speaker: 1
02:25:00
And, of course, that’s inherently inefficient, and they get well, you know, they get destroyed. They get destroyed in in penny packets rather than en masse. Difference with the RAF is is the RAF is not done on an air force basis where you have each air corps or air fleet has a handful of bombers, a handful of, fighters, a handful of reconnaissance planes, they have different commands.
Speaker: 1
02:25:24
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, and because they see their role militarily in a in a in a different way.
Speaker: 1
02:25:41
And because the rearming that Britain has done in the nineteen thirties is all about defense. It is not about aggression at this point. Not about taking it to the enemy. It is it is showing you’re tough, but also first and foremost, getting your ducks in a row and making sure that you don’t get defeated.
Speaker: 1
02:25:55
So this is the principle behind the the first the world’s first fully coordinated air defense system, which is the radar chain. It is the observer corps. 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.
Speaker: 1
02:26:23
You can see weather maps. You can see see the cloud ceiling. You see all that at glass, then you’re on a ai, and then down in front of you is a massive great map of Southern England. You’ve got croupiers, 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 corps, you have overlapping observer corps stations all over Britain covering every single inch of airspace over Bryden, looking up into the air and seeing how many aircraft there are and at what height they arya.
Speaker: 1
02:26:55
And you have little, thing called a pantograph, which is a a piece of equipment which helps you judge, altitude. You 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, Ai Command headquarters, which is then being pushed straight back out to the sector stations.
Speaker: 1
02:27:16
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.
Speaker: 1
02:27:33
So you’re updating that, and that little figure is put on the on your little plot and moved across. And so 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 ram, and they’re saying, okay.
Speaker: 1
02:27:53
Well, if you proceed at, you know, angels eighteen, eighteen thousand feet, you know, on a vector of, you know, one five o 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 sai that all they’re doing is hitting a grass airfield, which you’ve already got bulldozers and diggers and graders and lots of scalpings and earth ready to fill in the potholes, and it means you’re good to go.
Speaker: 1
02:28:25
And it means as a consequence of all that, when the Germans do, launch their all out assault on Adlertarg, Eagle Day, on the 08/13/1940, 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.
Speaker: 1
02:28:44
And as a consequence of that, of the 38 airfields there are in, RAF airfields there are in Britain, Only one of them is knocked out for more than forty eight hours in the entire summer of nineteen forty, and that’s Manston on the tip of the Kent Coast, which is abandoned for the duration.
Speaker: 0
02:29:01
So these are the two biggest air forces?
Speaker: 1
02:29:03
So those are the two biggest air forces.
Speaker: 0
02:29:05
So Luftwaffe, we should sai, German. I mean, they’re they’re like the, the legendary, the terrifying air force. They are?
Speaker: 1
02:29:16
Maybe maybe They’re slightly believing their own hype. There’s no question about it.
Speaker: 0
02:29:20
Well, the rest of the world is also. Right?
Speaker: 1
02:29:22
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 in Germany because ai would you need an air defense system? We’re gonna be the aggressor. You know? There’s there’s no scenario where we’ll have to defend the airspace of the third Reich because we’re on the offensive. So they just haven’t prepared it.
Speaker: 0
02:29:39
So there’s that clash, the Battle of Britain, the clash of air forces. What explains the success of Britain in defending
Speaker: 1
02:29:48
Well, it’s I mean, you know, and everyone always says, you know, the 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. Saloni line of defense is the Royal Navy, which is the world’s largest, and there’s absolutely no chance on Earth that a a German invasion force made up of Rhine River barges, one of out of every three is motorized and the other two aren’t, is ever gonna get successfully across the English Channel.
Speaker: 1
02:30:18
And 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 Ram going over and bombing Germany. And one of the problems that the Germans have is is that these bombers need fighter protection.
Speaker: 1
02:30:35
You know, fighter planes are there to protect the bombers, and they don’t have much fuel. And the Messerschmitt one zero nine e, the Emil, as the model is of of 1940, is the mainstay of the German fighter force in the summer of nineteen forty. 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 Paducale, which is the closest point.
Speaker: 1
02:31:04
You know, that’s where the channel is its narrowest and all the rest of it and 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 a a bombing, which the British are in 1940, they haven’t developed those navigational aids that create untold accuracy by the end end of the war.
Speaker: 1
02:31:23
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 isle you know, over to the over to the Paducala. I mean, it’s literally it’s just like one huge great kind of hub of of fighter airfields.
Speaker: 1
02:31:36
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 airfields. And it’s really interesting when you look at kind of prisoner of war statements from from Luftwaffe crown crew that have been downed.
Speaker: 1
02:31:53
They’re all bugged vatsal holding place called Trent Park. You can see the transcripts of these conversations. They’re all going about how annoying it was that the RAF are over every night and they can’t sleep and, you know, when they if only they’d just shut up and leave them alone and not bomb them.
Speaker: 1
02:32:05
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. And it’s just it’s a complete misnomer. And by that time, aircraft production in Britain is massively outpacing the Germans.
Speaker: 1
02:32:21
And the best ratio that the Germans achieve in 1940 is July 1940 when the British produced 496 new Hurricanes and Ai 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 out producing the Germans two to one.
Speaker: 1
02:32:42
And what that means is by the 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 07/1950 or whatever it was in July. Whereas the British fighter force had been 650 or whatever. The July is now well over 750. And Britain is outproducing? Yeah. By by to a massive degree.
Speaker: 1
02:33:10
And that that continues. And, you know, that is a a ratio that just increases as the port progresses. I mean, Britain produces a 32 and a half thousand aircraft in the second World War. America produces 315,000.
Speaker: 0
02:33:25
So why is there this legend
Speaker: 1
02:33:27
of the Luftwaffe? Well, because it’s the spearhead of the blitzkrieg.
Speaker: 0
02:33:31
So it has to do with the blitzkrieg.
Speaker: 1
02:33:32
It’s all to do with the blitzkrieg. The the the the Luftwaffe becomes the kind of the the bogeyman of the Third Reich. You know, they’re blamed for everything, but that’s because they’re completely abused. They’re the only part of of the Third Reich’s armed services, the only part of the Wehrmacht, the Wehrmacht being the navy, the army, and the air force, that is in constant use the whole time or constant abuse, I should say.
Speaker: 1
02:33:57
In Britain and America, they rotate their their pilots really, really carefully. By the time that but the the the you know, you’ve got the, eighth Ai Command, for example, part of the mighty eighth, the eighth Air Force operating in Britain. By the end by by the end of 1943, you would have in a squadron that would have 60 you would never have more than 16 airborne from a squadron at any one time.
Speaker: 1
02:34:18
You would have 40 to 45 pilots for 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, a young fighter pilot coming to a to a Thunderbolt squadron or a Mustang squadron, for example, at the end of nineteen forty three, beginning of ’19 ’40 ‘4, he’d have three hundred and fifty hours of of consecutive flying.
Speaker: 1
02:34:42
And because you can train in in America, in Florida, or California, or Texas, or or wherever, you’ve got you you you can process many, many more people because the training is much more intense, because you’ve got clear skies. So you’re not it’s not a question of of, oh, we’d like to take you out out Fritz this morning, but, you know, it’s a bit cloudy and and, oh, the RAF are over or, you know, the air force is over, so we can’t fly today.
Speaker: 1
02:35:05
So in Germany, Pilot training is constant air crew training is constantly being interrupted by by the war, by shortage of fuel, by inclement weather, etcetera, etcetera. In America, you have none of those problems. And Britain, because of its global reach, also has training bases in in what was Rhodesia and Zimbabwe and South Africa, in Canada as well.
Speaker: 1
02:35:26
And so you’re able to process these these guys much better. You’re able to give them more training. So that when they come there, they’re absolutely the finished article as pilots. What they’re not the 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, and the old hands kinda take you up a few ai.
Speaker: 1
02:35:47
So you arrive at, I don’t know, let’s sai, some airfield in in Suffolk, in East Anglia in England, and, you know, you’ll have ten days to two weeks acclimatizing, getting used to it. The, you know, the old hands will put you through your paces, give you some trips tips. You can pick their brains during ai of while you’re having some chow and and listening on some briefings.
Speaker: 1
02:36:07
Then the first mission you do will be a milk run over to France where the danger is kind of pretty minimal. You know? And you and you can build up your experience. So that by the time you’re actually sent over on a mission to Berlin or or Bremen or, you know, the Ruhr or whatever, you’re absolutely the business.
Speaker: 1
02:36:23
So qualitatively and quantitatively, you are just vastly superior to anything the Luftwaffe’s got. Tyler Luftwaffe, by that stage, in contrast, 1940, new pilots coming to ai squadrons with, you know, a hundred and fifty, hundred and seventy hours on their in their logbooks, less than a hundred, hundred, ninety, ninety two hours, something like that.
Speaker: 1
02:36:43
It’s not enough. Mhmm. And and they’re just being flung straight into battle, and they’re getting absolutely slaughtered. And they’re also because their machines are quite complicated, there’s no two seaters really. So no two seater trainers.
Speaker: 1
02:36:56
So the first time you’re flying in your Focke Wulf one ninety or your Messerschmitt one zero nine, it’s this horrendous leap of faith for which you as a young, bright Luftwaffe fighter pilot know that you’re not ready for this. And it can bite you, something like a, a Messerschmitt one zero nine has a very high wing loading.
Speaker: 1
02:37:16
So it’s very maneuverable in the air, but it’s got these tiny wings. It’s got this incredible torque of this Daimler Benz DB six zero five engine with its huge amount of torque, and it 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 you could just crash.
Speaker: 1
02:37:31
So in the first couple of months of 1944, they lose something like 2,400 aircraft in the air and and ai, and about 3,400 are accidents.
Speaker: 0
02:37:42
So it has to do with training, really. Yeah. Not training enough.
Speaker: 1
02:37:46
It’s training and resources and supply. And the saloni World War, more than any other conflict, is a war of numbers. There are differences, the decisions that generals can make. There arya, moments where particular brilliance and bravery can seize the day, take the bridge, you know, hold the enemy at bay or whatever.
Speaker: 1
02:38:11
But ultimately, you know, 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 gonna win.
Speaker: 0
02:38:30
At. So in that sense, you could think of World War two as, as a battle of factories. Yes. What does it take to win in the battle of factories in out manufacturing military equipment
Speaker: 1
02:38:47
against the ai? It’s it’s efficiency, really. So I was kind of, you know, I I was think let’s take the example of the Sherman tank, for example, the main stay of the Western Ai Forces and a fair number of them sent to the Soviet Union as well for that matter.
Speaker: 0
02:39:01
I think you’ve said it doesn’t get the respect it deserves, maybe?
Speaker: 1
02:39:04
Doesn’t get the respect it deserves. So the Sherman tank, the 75 millimeter main battle gunner is a sort of medium velocity, far arya shell around kind of 2,000 feet per second compared to the notorious infamous German eighty eight millimeter, which can fire it kind of third fast again, like 3,000 feet per second.
Speaker: 1
02:39:21
But 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.
Speaker: 0
02:39:38
Mhmm.
Speaker: 1
02:39:38
Sherman tank doesn’t have as thick armor. It doesn’t have a gun that’s as as big. It should it should be an absolute walkover. And yet, at about 05:30PM on Monday, June 1944, a Sherman tank came around the corner of a road called a Ram Mesut, a little village called Fontenay Le Peznel in Normandy, came face to face of a Tyler tank and won.
Speaker: 1
02:39:58
How does this happen? Well, I’ll 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 armor piercing round already in the breech. Soon as he saw the the Tyler tank, he just said fire. That armor piercing round did not penetrate the Tiger tank. It was never going to.
Speaker: 1
02:40:16
But what it did do is it created a it 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 Tyler tank in the head.
Speaker: 1
02:40:32
And he was screaming, you know, gotten him or whatever, and and, you know, was we couldn’t really see. The moment they got hit, the commander of the Tiger tank retreated into the turret of the Tiger. The moment you retreat into the ai into a turret, you can’t see. You can see because you’ve got periscopes, but your visibility is nothing like as good as it is when you’ve got your head above the turret.
Speaker: 1
02:40:52
Immediately after that, the armor piercing round from the Sherman tank was replay was repeated by 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 and and in moments, in the first thirty seconds, ten rounds from that Sherman tank had hit the Tiger tank before the Tiger tank had unleashed a single round itself.
Speaker: 1
02:41:16
And 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 it’s a it’s a it’s just a chunk of metal that’s inoperable. So that’s all you need to do.
Speaker: 1
02:41:30
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 easy to manhandle, which means you can put more in a bryden 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.
Speaker: 1
02:41:49
There’s also an override switch on the underside of the turret so that the commander, if he just sees something out ai the corner of his eye, can immediately start moving the the turret before the gunner who is down in the belly of the turret can can react. There’s many different facts of it. But the main fact of all is of 1,347 Tigers built. There were 49,000 Shermans.
Speaker: 1
02:42:08
So that means there’s 36 Shermans to every single Tiger.
Speaker: 0
02:42:12
So you actually have an incredible, video. You talk about this a lot from different angles about the the top five tanks and and then then the bottom five tanks of World War two. I think was it the Tiger that made both the top five and the bottom five?
Speaker: 1
02:42:26
The problem with the Tiger tank is it’s really huge.
Speaker: 0
02:42:28
We should say that you keep saying the problem, but the one of the pros of the Tiger tank It’s very huge.
Speaker: 1
02:42:33
It it’s
Speaker: 0
02:42:34
I mean, the psychological warfare aspect of it is terrifying. Yes. So I I don’t know what the other pros I mean, I guess, yeah, the the 88 millimeter
Speaker: 1
02:42:43
Ai fossti and all the rest of it. You know, it’s it’s pretty fearsome, but but there are there are pragmatic problems. The the the big problems is is the Germans are are incapable of mass production on a scale that, yeah, Americans could do. Frankly, even the British could do.
Speaker: 1
02:42:56
I mean, they’re just they’re just not in that league. The reason they’re not in that league is because they’re in the middle 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 terribly well in the Soviet Union.
Speaker: 1
02:43:06
You know, they can’t process it, and they’re being bombed twenty four hours a day. And so all their factories arya, you know, having to split them all up, and that is inherently inefficient because, you know, they’re having to kinda move different parts around and, you know, you’re then having the whole process of having to travel from one place to another to get stuff.
Speaker: 1
02:43:23
You you haven’t got much fuel. So So the consequence of that is that what you do is you think, okay. 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.
Speaker: 1
02:43:42
But, actually, what conflict in World War two shows you is is that that you need more than that. You need ease of maintenance. You need reliability. And the problem with having it, the bigger the tank, the more complex the maintenance equipment is. You know, you need a bigger hoist, which then means you need a bigger truck, which then uses more fuel.
Speaker: 1
02:44:02
Sai, 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 onto the wagons that will then transport them from a to b, you know, take them from West Germany to Normandy, then they have to take them off, then they have to take off the tracks, put on combat tracks, then move them into into battle sana hope that they don’t break down.
Speaker: 1
02:44:25
The problem is when you have you start the war, there’s 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. You also means you haven’t got lots of garages and mechanics and gas stations and and and so on.
Speaker: 1
02:44:46
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 there’s three people for every automobile, you know, and that includes, you know, the old and children.
Speaker: 1
02:45:04
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. It’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 it literally couldn’t be easier.
Speaker: 1
02:45:22
Anyone who could drive a state car could drive a Sherman tank. Seriously. Not everyone can drive a Tiger tank. It’s incredibly complex. Really, really is.
Speaker: 1
02:45:31
And that comes with a whole host of of problems. And, of course, you don’t have the numbers. You don’t have the numbers. You know, you’ve got 1,347 of them. You’ve got 492 king tigers which are even bigger. And, you know, at a time where you are really short of fuel and you’re really short of absolutely everything.
Speaker: 1
02:45:49
And those shells are huge, and they’re harder to manhandle. And 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 nineteen twenties and nineteen teens and and thirties, children were taught to be right handed. You weren’t allowed to be left handed. So you were right handed.
Speaker: 1
02:46:08
So you wanna be on the right hand left left hand side of the gun so you can take the shell from your right and swivel it into the breach with your from your right side. But the loader in a in a yank Panther or a Panther or Ai is always on the on on the right hand side of the breach, which is ergonomically makes no sense whatsoever.
Speaker: 1
02:46:25
Why did they do this? I’ve never found an answer to this. But, you know, so there’s all these little things. And and as a soldier coming up against you know, you’re an American GI and you’re coming up against a a a Tiger tank. You don’t care about the fact that it’s difficult to maintain or the problems involved of trying to get it to the battlefield.
Speaker: 1
02:46:44
All you care about 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 understandably so. But but those who are protracting the war at a higher level and historians that come subsequently and and look at all this stuff, they do need to worry about all these things.
Speaker: 1
02:47:03
And I remember the same Georg Thomas, the architect of the hunger plan, I found this this this minutes of this meeting, which I think was either on the December 4 or the 12/05/1941. So it’s just before the Meh Army counterattacks outside Moscow in the winter of nineteen forty one. And it’s a meeting about weaponry.
Speaker: 1
02:47:22
And and I and this is a verbatim quote. He says, we have to stop making such complete anesthetic weapons. In other words, we’ve consciously been building over engineered and aesthetically pleasing weapons up until this point. And they sort of half manage it, but don’t quite.
Speaker: 0
02:47:43
We could probably talk for many hours about each of these topics. We could we could we could talk for ten hours about tanks. I encourage people to, to listen to your podcast, World War two pod, web
Speaker: 1
02:47:57
ways of making you talk. It’s great. Yeah. We also do. We got, got a new YouTube channel and, website called World War two headquarters. Mhmm. There are lots of walking the ground and videos of that and all sorts of stuff and little explainers of getting around tanks and stuff and the weaponry and documents and photographic archives.
Speaker: 1
02:48:20
So the idea is to sort of turn it into a kind of real hub of anyone who’s interested in the subject. It’s a place where they can go and find out just a whole load more.
Speaker: 0
02:48:29
I love it. So ai I said, we could probably talk for many hours at each of these topics, but let let’s look at some of the battles, and maybe you can tell me which jumps out at you. I wanna talk to you about, the Western Front and definitely talk about Normandy. But so there was the vatsal of Midway Yep. In, 1942, which is a naval battle.
Speaker: 0
02:48:50
There’s Eastern Front Stalingrad, probably the the deadliest battle in human history. Then there’s the Vatsal of Kursk Yep. Which is a tank vatsal, the largest tank battle in history, probably the largest battle period in history. 6,000 tanks, 2,000,000 troops, 4,000 aircraft. Mhmm.
Speaker: 0
02:49:12
And then that takes us also to the Vatsal of the Bulge in Normandy, the Italian 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? Is do you ai, as a historian, the Vatsal of Kursk or Battle of Stalingrad more interesting?
Speaker: 0
02:49:33
Stalingrad is often seen as the turning
Speaker: 1
02:49:35
Well, I I yeah. I think so. I I mean, it’s really interesting. Sai they get through they get through 1941. Barbarossa doesn’t happen as as the Germans hope it will. You know, the whole point is to completely destroy the Red Army in three months, and that just doesn’t happen.
Speaker: 1
02:49:51
And I think you can argue and argue convincingly that by, let’s say, December 1941, Germany is just not gonna win. It it it just can’t. And and and let me tell you what I mean by that. So if you take an arbitrary date, let’s sai, the 06/15/1941, Germany at that moment had one enemy, which is Great Britain, albeit Great Britain plus Dominion Empire.
Speaker: 1
02:50:16
Fast forward six months to, let’s say, the December 16. It’s got three enemies. It’s got Great Britain, Dominion Empire, USSR, and The USA. It is just not going to win. You know, for all the talks of wonder weapons and all the rest of it, it’s just not going to you know, it it has lost that that battle.
Speaker: 1
02:50:35
Having said that, Soviet Union is still in a really, really bad bad situation. It is being helped out a huge amount by, supplies from The United States and from Britain. You know, just unprecedented amounts of material being sent through the Arctic or across Alaska into into the Soviet Union at that time.
Speaker: 1
02:50:58
It is absolutely staggering how much is committed by Roosevelt and Churchill to to try and stem the flow in in the Soviet Union. Because for all the 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 are overrun intact by the Germans in the opening stages of Barbarossa.
Speaker: 1
02:51:23
I mean, really, you know, colossal losses. Huge amounts. So, you know, the grain is gone. Coal is gone. Entire factories have gone, steel production goes down by kind of, you know, 80% in The Soviet Union in 1941 and into 1942.
Speaker: 1
02:51:38
So in 1942, despite the vast amount of numbers of men that they have at their hands, I mean, they they create 80 new divisions in the second half of nineteen forty one, for example. I mean, Britain never has 80 divisions in the entire second world sai, division being about, rule of thumb, 15,000 men.
Speaker: 1
02:51:54
So, you know, despite that and that is because Stalin’s meddling, the woeful state of the Red Army in 1941, etcetera, etcetera, which we’ve already sort of touched upon. So 1942, it’s it’s still in a really bad way, but Germany’s in a really bad way too. It’s the the the attrition is it suffered in 1941.
Speaker: 1
02:52:14
It’s winning itself to death in 1941. So it’s having these huge great encirclements like the encirclement of Kyiv in September 1941, you know, capturing the further kind of best part of 700,000 Meh Army troops, etcetera, etcetera. But in the process of doing that, it is constantly being attrited, you know, both both in battle casualties, but in also mechanical casualties too. Just can’t cope.
Speaker: 1
02:52:35
It’s just too 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, you can say what you like about him, but he just hasn’t had the military training to do that. He might have amazing attention to detail.
Speaker: 1
02:53:01
He might be able to understand, you know, have 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. I mean, I’ve read lots of history, but that doesn’t mean to say I’d be a competent field marshal.
Speaker: 1
02:53:19
So he is not the right person for the job at all, and he micromanages and and he looks at the figures and and and figures and doesn’t understand what it’s like at the actual front, the coalface. So he’s 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.
Speaker: 1
02:53:42
So he’s basically making them go into battle with decreasing amounts of supplies and and firepower and with one hand behind their back in terms of decision making process, and that is not a good combination. The other problem is that he decides rather than going from Moscow in 1942, because, basically, there’s a kind of cooling off period in the in the winter because of the conditions.
Speaker: 1
02:54:02
But everyone knows the Soviet Union know the Red Army knows that the moment spring’s come, there’s gonna be another offensive, be another major offensive in the summer. That is absolutely as certain as, you know, day following night, etcetera. The problem that the Germans have is they just don’t have enough.
Speaker: 1
02:54:18
They have less than they had when they launched Barbarossa the previous year. The Soviet Union has more. It is better prepared. It knows what’s coming now. It’s kind of learning some of the lessons, starting to absorb the lessons.
Speaker: 1
02:54:30
Stalin, coincidentally, is pulling back from his very tight leash in the way that Hitler is doing the opposite and increasing his micromanagement and control freakery. And what Hitler decides is rather than going from Moscow, he’s gonna go for the oil fields. This is absolutely insane because what’s gonna happen when they get to the oil fields?
Speaker: 1
02:54:51
I mean, does he think really that Soviet Union are gonna let those oil fields come into German hands intact? Even if he does let them get in intact, what are they gonna do with oil? I mean, oil needs to be refined. Where are you gonna refine it? You know, they don’t have any oil they don’t have many oil refineries.
Speaker: 1
02:55:09
How are you gonna ship that oil to where you need it to be in the factories and the Third Reich and into your, you know, process into into into gasoline and then get it in diesel and get it to your U boats, get it to your tanks, get it to your armored units. How are you gonna do that? How do you transport it from from the, from the Caucasus, which is a long, long way away from from Berlin?
Speaker: 1
02:55:31
How are you gonna 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 euros, not forwards. They have no more rail capacity whatsoever. They just don’t have the oil tankers. So it’s just it’s it is absolute la la land.
Speaker: 1
02:55:49
It it is incredible that when you look at the detailed literature that the Germans have, no one is asking this question in the in the spring and early summer of nineteen forty two.
Speaker: 0
02:55:59
The logistics question in part.
Speaker: 1
02:56:00
No one is saying, okay. It’s great that we’re gonna go to the Caucasus and get all this oil, but then what? No one is asking that question.
Speaker: 0
02:56:07
Nor how do you provide resources and feed and the soldiers and all that kind of stuff. Right. I mean, it’s
Speaker: 1
02:56:13
So so the case blue first of all, they get distracted by going into the Crimea, and they go, well, we gotta do that first. So they have to get Sevastopol and the Crimea, which they do. And then they have to push on. And and and at this point, suddenly looming in front of them is Stalingrad on the banks of the Volga, this this city, this industrial city, which has Stalin’s name.
Speaker: 1
02:56:35
And Hitler goes, okay. What I’m gonna do now is I’m gonna split my forces sai half of you can go south towards the Caucasus and the rest of you can confront Stalingrad. And on Bock, just who’s the commando, just goes, that’s nuts. That makes no sense whatsoever. You know, you’re you’re you’re you’re splitting the mission. So he fires him.
Speaker: 1
02:56:54
So suddenly, they get get into this assault for Stalingrad, and it becomes this sort of street fight. Street fighting is the worst kind of fighting. I mean, the the reason why the Israelis have just blown everything up in in Gaza is because ai you can’t see. You know, you need a field of fire.
Speaker: 1
02:57:10
This is a fighting up in a fighting in a build up area is is horrendous. Yeah.
Speaker: 0
02:57:13
To clarify, we’re talking about urban warfare, door to door, building to building.
Speaker: 1
02:57:18
It’s incredibly difficult. And home advantage is colossal in this this instance. And, of course, it’s piping hot when they attack in kind of August into early September, and then it suddenly gets very, very cold. And at the same time, American mechanization and slightly a British mechanization, but ai, American trucks are enabling Zhukov to plan this great pincer movement.
Speaker: 1
02:57:40
So it is you know, and 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 farming. It is the encirclement, the subsequent encirclement. So they’ve the Germans have been sucked into this street battle in in Stalingrad. Cannot give up. We cannot give up. We cannot back down. We cannot pull out.
Speaker: 1
02:58:06
We’ve gotta we’ve gotta destroy this city. Meanwhile, while their backs are turned and while most of their forces are going off to the Caucasus on a wild goose chase for absolutely zero oil, incidentally, and they never get remotely close to Baku, this huge Great Pincer movement is is is being planned, and it is only possible through mechanization from The United States.
Speaker: 1
02:58:28
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 little small counterattacks. There is obviously the curse salient, for example, but it it it’s game over. You know, the the catastrophe of the surrender of ai final Sai mean, the riot is on the wall at the end of nineteen forty two, but by November 1942, when when the when the, the two Soviet fronts meet up, then then, you know, there is no possible chance of escape for sick farming.
Speaker: 1
02:59:02
They 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.
Speaker: 1
02:59:20
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 ai, 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 Western front, and this is the first time that the Americans have been on the ground against Axis forces, and they lose big time.
Speaker: 1
02:59:47
The allies become masters of the North African shores on the 05/13/1943, 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 1943.
Speaker: 1
03:00:11
Sai this is including the Kursk battle, which ai takes place in July 1943. In that period, the Luftwaffe loses 702 aircraft over the Eastern Front, but 3,704 aircraft over the Mediterranean. So 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 to boots on the ground.
Speaker: 1
03:00:34
It can be of great strategic importance, but not necessarily. You know, no one would argue, for example, that the Guadalcanal is not an absolutely game changing battle in the in the Pacific War, and yet the number of troops compared to, you know, what’s going on in the Eastern Front or even, you know, the Western Front is is is tiny in comparison.
Speaker: 1
03:00:53
So 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. It’s a bit it’s and it’s not saying that the Western Front is more strategic either. It’s just you have to kinda be balanced about this.
Speaker: 1
03:01:10
The psychological blow, though, of Stalingrad is immense, and you you cannot belittle that.
Speaker: 0
03:01:15
Ai 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. Because we’re humans.
Speaker: 1
03:01:40
And I also think that what’s interesting is the is the Nazi high command response to Stalingrad, which is not to go, we’re screwed. It’s to double down. It’s you know, then sai so Goebbels, for example, gives his infamous speech in the sports palace in third week of February ai forty three, where he goes, are you ready for this?
Speaker: 1
03:01:59
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.
Speaker: 1
03:02:07
You know, every single one, every single German is now this is a fight for survival, and we are now in total war. And and everyone is just so depressed by this. I mean Yeah. They ai that there is that they have they they will are going to reap what they have sown. You know?
Speaker: 1
03:02:25
Because everyone knows what’s been going on in the Eastern Front. Because first part of the war, Germans have loads and loads of cameras. They’re really into photographing everything, taking silly footage of everything. It’s all part of the recording, the greatness of the Reich and the triumphs sai right.
Speaker: 1
03:02:38
They want to record it. So all this stuff is a bit like the radios is made very, very cheap, so lots of have it. And people are sending it all back. And, you know, the people that are developing this stuff are all seeing it, and people are talking about it. And then it’s being sent to families, and they’re all seeing it.
Speaker: 1
03:02:51
And they’re seeing pictures of Jews being rounded up and bryden, and 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. They do know what’s going on.
Speaker: 1
03:03:13
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. Ai never read a newspaper. I never listen to the news. You know? So you you have that, of course.
Speaker: 1
03:03:25
But but but it is widely understood and widely known that really brutal things have been going on in the Eastern Speak and and troops are coming back utterly traumatized by what they have taken part in, what they have witnessed, the kind of unspeakable brutality. This is war on a completely different level to anything that’s been kind of seen in recent years. Yeah.
Speaker: 1
03:03:47
We we should mention that, you know, the Western Front
Speaker: 0
03:03:50
and Eastern Front are very different in this regard.
Speaker: 1
03:03:53
Yes. So
Speaker: 0
03:03:53
a lot of the holocaust by bullets, the holocaust with the concentration ram, with the extermination camps is not in Germany, is not in the Western Front. Is in Poland, is in it’s in the Soviet Union.
Speaker: 1
03:04:06
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 they’re concerned, this has now got you know, it’s now no longer got the Polish name. It’s now called Auschwitz, which is a German name.
Speaker: 1
03:04:21
It is part of Germany. And there are German people moving there into this, you know, airconer model town. And and they all know exactly what’s going on.
Speaker: 0
03:04:31
Yeah. You, by the way, have a nice podcast, series of four episodes on Auschwitz, the evolution of the dream world town that becomes a a camp, a work camp, then becomes an extermination camp.
Speaker: 1
03:04:48
And a big booner factory for IG Farben, which never produces a single bit of rubber.
Speaker: 0
03:04:54
So this for sure is something I Ai would have to dive deep in. There’s a book you meh, KL.
Speaker: 1
03:05:03
Yes. It’s just called KL. It’s about the the whole concentration camp system, because k is concentration, in German. Lager is a is a camp. It’s a it’s an exhaustive book, and I’m I’m full of admiration for him for for writing it just because, cheap as it must have been. So I mean, I I was very depressed doing that work on Auschwitz, that deep ai. I just found the whole thing utterly dispiriting.
Speaker: 1
03:05:28
And I’ve been there a few times, and it’s ghastly. So Harry wrote a whole book on it, I don’t know.
Speaker: 0
03:05:33
I think in the details, there’s there’s two ways, I think, to look at the holocaust. One is, man’s search for meaning by Viktor Frankl.
Speaker: 1
03:05:44
Mhmm.
Speaker: 0
03:05:45
Sort of this philosophical thing about how a human being can confront that and find meaning and what it meh what what does the human condition look like in the context of such, evil? Yeah. And then there’s the more sort of detailed okay. Well, how how do you actually implement something like the final solution? So you have this ideology of evil meh.
Speaker: 0
03:06:11
Yes. And at the fine detail of what 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 ram? Yep. Just get in the details. And in those details, I think there’s some deep, profound human truth that can emerge.
Speaker: 0
03:06:34
That the the the mundane, one step at a time is how you can achieve evil. Yep. So Yeah. And you can get lost in the mundane.
Speaker: 1
03:06:46
Meh. The banality of evil. It’s, it’s incredible. Ai I I think I think what what is so so completely horrific is is that, you know, you know, half the six million were killed by kind of bullets at the back of the head. And the reason they stopped doing that and they wanted to stop doing that was because the guys sai the perpetrators were finding it so traumatic.
Speaker: 1
03:07:06
You know, HEMNA goes and visits an execution in Ukraine and or maybe he’s in the Baltic States. I don’t know where he goes, but he but he he witnessed some in the, you know, in the summer of nineteen forty one. 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. Gotta find a more humane way of doing it.
Speaker: 1
03:07:22
When he’s talking about a more humane way of doing it, humane for the for the executors, executioners, not not for the victims because, trust me, Zyklon b is not a nice way to go. You know? It it basic basically, it’s bursting all the capillaries in your lungs. It’s extremely painful, and and you you can no longer breathe, and it can take up to twenty, twenty five minutes.
Speaker: 1
03:07:42
You know, some people, it 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 sudden realization of the that they’re not having a shower. They’re actually being gassed, and they’re all going to die.
Speaker: 1
03:07:58
Imagine what you’re thinking as that processes you because you might be the first, but you’re still gonna even the first person is gonna know that I can’t breathe and I’m I’m dying. Everyone else is gonna see the first few dying and then gonna realize that is what’s gonna happen to them.
Speaker: 1
03:08:12
And you’ve got those minutes, sometimes many minutes, where you’ve got to contemplate that vatsal. And and that’s 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.
Speaker: 1
03:08:31
And so the inverted commas, humanity of of 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.
Speaker: 1
03:08:58
If you go to Auschwitz now and you go to the collapse of blown up gas chambers, which the Germans destroyed before the Russians overrun them in January, you can still see some of the ash ponds. And there are bits of bone there. They’re still there from the ash. It’s just it is utterly repulsive.
Speaker: 1
03:09:14
And imagine arriving from that train on that incredibly long journey where you’ve had no comforts whatsoever. You’ve had again, you’ve had humiliations and privation you know, the privations you’ve had to suffer as a result of that, you know, having to come and defecate in a bucket in the corner in front of other people.
Speaker: 1
03:09:29
It’s just horrendous. And then you get there bewildered, and immediately your kids are taken away from you or your, you know, husband and wife who’ve been married twenty years, they’re separated just like that, sana off into different groups straight to the gas chambers. I mean, you know, it it is it the the the scale of cruelty is so immense. It’s it’s hard to fathom.
Speaker: 1
03:09:47
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 Goethe and incredible art and culture and and and some of the greatest engineers and scientists have ever lived.
Speaker: 1
03:10:13
And look how quickly it flipped into the descent of unspeakable inhumanity, which manifests itself in the Holocaust and the gas chambers, and those executions into pits and tiny places and creeks in Lithuania or Ukraine or whatever. I mean, it’s it’s it’s just horrendous. And, you know, this is from a nation which a decade earlier have been a democracy.
Speaker: 1
03:10:41
It seems like as a human civilization, we walk that solzhenitsyn line between good and evil. Yeah.
Speaker: 0
03:10:48
It’s it’s a thin ai, and we we have to walk it carefully. Yes. So I one of the great battles in, in World War two on the Western Front is Normandy. Yeah. I have to talk to you about Normandy. So D Day. The Normandy landings, the famous on 06/06/1944. This was a ai invasion of Nazi occupied Western Europe.
Speaker: 1
03:11:16
Yep.
Speaker: 0
03:11:16
What was the planning? And it was lengthy planning. What was the planning? What was the execution of the Normandy Landings?
Speaker: 1
03:11:22
Well, the decision to finally go I mean, the the when the Americans joined the war in December 1941, there’s the Arcadia Conference sai 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 a policy to scare American troops over to Europe as quickly as possible, get them over to Britain, get them training, and get them across the channel ASAP and and start the liberation of Europe.
Speaker: 1
03:11:49
But the reality is that that that in 1942, the Americans just aren’t ready. You know, they’ve come from this incredibly tiny army. They’re still growing. They’ve got no battlefield experience. The British are still recovering. The, you know, they’re they’re good on the naval power. They’re kind of increasingly good on air power.
Speaker: 1
03:12:04
But but but land power, they’ve had to kind of make up from the loss of their ally France and and expand as well. So kind of ground zero for both Meh and Britain has been kind of June 1940 when France is out, and suddenly that’s the strategic earthquake. And that’s the the issue that needs settling, and and they need to just completely realign everything that they’d they’d fought in 1939. They’ve got to start again.
Speaker: 1
03:12:29
But it’s also becomes clear that it’s they’re not really ready in 1943 either. And one of the problems is is that Molotov, who is the Soviet foreign minister, come over to Britain in May 1942 and said, you know, we need you to kind of do your bit and get on the get on the on the campaign trail against the Germans and fight on the ground.
Speaker: 1
03:12:46
And the British were going, well, yeah, but, you know, cross channel elevation is not really gonna happen. We know we’re doing that in North Africa at the moment. Then he goes over to Washington, and and, and the Americans go, you know, we are definitely gonna go and take on the attack to the, the Germans in 1942.
Speaker: 1
03:12:59
They’ve made this promise. So in the summer of nineteen forty two, it becomes clear that they can’t keep that. So Churchill says, well, look. I’ve got here’s an idea. You know, we’re in we’ve already got an army in in Egypt. Why don’t we land another one in Northwest Europe? We can Northwest Africa.
Speaker: 1
03:13:11
We can that’s run by Vichy France, which is pro Axis French, colonies. Why don’t we take vatsal? We can do that, and then we can meet in the middle. We can pince around. We can conquer the whole of North Africa.
Speaker: 1
03:13:23
You can kill with two birds with one stone, 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 ai, and then we can sort of see how it goes. So this is a kind of opportunistic strategy.
Speaker: 1
03:13:36
Whereas the Americans are very much sort of, you know, we we we wanna draw a straight line to Berlin, and that’s the quickest way, and let’s do do it that way. So so it’s kind of a different viewpoint. And but Roosevelt kinda gets that and agrees to that. So that’s where the whole North Africa Meh Campaign comes from.
Speaker: 1
03:13:52
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 nineteen forty three. They think, 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.
Speaker: 1
03:14:10
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 decision is made. The Americans go, okay. Enough of this opportunistic stuff. Let’s just, okay, we get it. We buy it, but no more faffing around. You know?
Speaker: 1
03:14:30
May 1944, ‘1 year hence, we are gonna cross the Atlantic. And the British go, okay, fair fair cop. We’ll we’ll do that. So so that is where Operation Overlord, as it becomes, gets given its code name, its operational name, that’s when the planning starts. Serious planning starts at the beginning of 1944.
Speaker: 1
03:14:48
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 with battlefield command that you can actually split it.
Speaker: 1
03:15:05
There are very good reasons for going into Italy, not least getting the Foggiera airfields so that you can further tighten the noose around around Nazi Germany. And one of the great prerequisites for the Normandy invasion is total control of air of the air of the airspace, not just over Normandy, but over a large swathe of Northwest Europe.
Speaker: 1
03:15:23
Why is that? Because the moment you land in Normandy, the cat is out of the bag, and it’s then a race between which side can build up meh and material quickest. Is it gonna be the ai who’ve gotta come from Southern England, which is a distance of a slow journey across seas and a distance between kind of 80 and a 30 miles away, or is it gonna be the Germans that are already on the continent?
Speaker: 1
03:15:45
Well, clearly, on paper, it’s the Germans, so you have to slow up the Germans. Well, how do you do that? We do that by destroying their means of getting there. So bridges destroy all the bridges over the Seine, destroy all the bridges over the, hit the marshalling yards. The German the glue that keeps the German war machine together is the Ai, the German railway network.
Speaker: 1
03:16:04
So destroy the railway as much as you possibly can and make it difficult for the Germans to reinforce the the 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 by twin engine, faster, smaller bombers going in low.
Speaker: 1
03:16:21
But the problem is is you can’t go low and and and destroy those bridges if you’ve got Focke Wulfs and Messerschmitts hovering above you. So you’ve got to destroy those, which is why you need to have air superiority over this large wave of Northwest Europe to do that. The problem is that while the industrial heartland of Nazi Germany is in the West, is in the Ruhr arya, which is very convenient for bombers coming out of Lincolnshire or East Anglia on the East Flat East Side of of Great Britain, the aircraft industry is much deeper into the ai, and it is beyond the the range of fighter escorts for the bombers.
Speaker: 1
03:16:54
And the American Ai bombers who are going over are discovering that despite being called flying fortresses, they’re not fortresses. 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.
Speaker: 1
03:17:11
First, infamously on the Ai Regenberts raid on the 08/17/1943, coincidentally, the same day that Sicily falls to the ai, 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 sana over to hit Schweinfurt and Regensburg, where there are a Meh plant and and also a ball bearing plant, which is essential for aircraft manufacturing.
Speaker: 1
03:17:37
They lose 60 shot down and a further 30 odd really, really badly damage. And even for the vast numbers of manpower and and bombers shah 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 gonna be able to escort them all the way to the into the Ai, and the race is on.
Speaker: 1
03:17:57
Because, basically, if they haven’t got one airspace by April 1944, it’s game over. You can’t do a cross channel invasion. You have to have that control of the airspace beforehand. So the race is on. Unfortunately, they come up with a solution, which is the p 51 Mustang, which has originally been commissioned in May 1940 by the British, developed from sketches to reality in a hundred and seventeen days.
Speaker: 1
03:18:17
It’s a work of absolute genius. But to start off, it’s harnessed with a really bad engine. The Allison engine is just not not right for that aircraft. And it’s not until a a Rolls Royce Merlin, which is the same one that powers the Lancaster, the Mosquito, and Spitfire, and Hurricane, is put into the p 50 one Mustang that suddenly you’ve got your solution because that means it can now fly with extra drop tanks and fuel tanks.
Speaker: 1
03:18:38
It can, it’s it’s so ai, and it’s so good the higher it goes with this engine. The more fuel efficient it becomes, it can actually fly, you know, over 1,400 miles, which gets you not just to Berlin and back, but to Warsaw and back. So suddenly you’ve got that solution. And, actually, by April 1944, they have cleared airspace.
Speaker: 1
03:18:54
And by the May 1944, just on the eve of the invasion, Operation Overlord, the closest German aircraft that is seen fighting, Ai aircraft is 500 miles from the beachhead. Sai it is absolutely job done. Meanwhile, new fighter comparatively new, ground attack fighter planes like Typhoons and Tempest and adapted, p 47 Thunderbolts are attacking the German radar stations all along the the coastline because they knew now do have an air defense system.
Speaker: 1
03:19:26
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 divided rule thing going on, so you have parallel command structures, which is not conducive to bringing together of intelligence.
Speaker: 1
03:19:45
Ai while much play has been 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 cryptanalysts do as just a cog. And that that those various cogs together from listening services to photo reconnaissance to agents on the ground to what I sai, the cogs collectively add up to more than some of their individual parts.
Speaker: 1
03:20:07
And so the intelligence picture is a broad picture rather than a than just code breaking. But, anyway, they 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. Mhmm.
Speaker: 1
03:20:33
And for until they’ve achieved that common goal, they’re gonna put differences to one side. You know, much play has been made about kind of anglophobia amongst American, commanders and and Meh Phobia amongst ai you know, British commanders, but, actually, it’s nothing. It’s a marriage made in heaven compared to the way Germany looks after its own allies, for example.
Speaker: 1
03:20:52
And what is remarkable about the, about the allies is they’re not actually ai. They’re coalition partners. There’s no formal alliance at all. And, and there is a subtle difference there, but what you see them is that you see them really, really pulling together, and you see that manifest itself on d day, I think, where you’ve got, you know, 6,939 vessels of which there are 1,213 warships, 4,127 assault craft, 12 and a half thousand aircraft, you know, a 55,000 men landed and dropped from the air in twenty four hour period.
Speaker: 1
03:21:30
It is phenomenal. It is absolutely phenomenal. And while it is still seen as a predominantly American show, all three service commanders are British. It is, most of the aircraft are two thirds of the aircraft are British. Two thirds of the men landed are are British in dominion.
Speaker: 1
03:21:48
You never forget the Canadians who consistently punch massively above their weight in the second World War, in all speak. It has to be said air, land, and sea. They’re key in the vatsal of the Atlantic. They’re key, in air power, their key at d day and indeed in the Battle of Ripley as well.
Speaker: 1
03:22:03
So the Canadians should never be forgotten. But but one of the reasons it is, the the the the is the British navy that dominates in in d day is because, of course, the the incredibly enormous strength of the Royal Navy in the first place, but partly because most of The US Navy is ai this stage in The Pacific ai its own own fight.
Speaker: 1
03:22:24
So it’s not slacking by any stretch of the imagination. It is it is because it’s elsewhere doing its bit for the kind of overall allied cause. But d day is just extraordinary, you know, and despite the terrible weather, which is a such a debilitating factor in the whole thing.
Speaker: 1
03:22:39
I mean, it puts people off course, means many more people get killed on Omaha Beach than they might have done and on other beaches ai, incidentally. And, actually, in terms of ai lost, proportionally, it is the Canadians that suffer the worst, more so than the Americans. It’s just there’s fewer of them, overall.
Speaker: 1
03:22:54
D day has to be seen as an unqualified success. I mean, it is absolutely extraordinary what they achieve. And while they don’t a % achieve their overall d day objectives, you know, the objectives are always gonna be the outer reach of what is is can be can be achieved, and you’d need absolutely perfect conditions for that to happen.
Speaker: 1
03:23:14
And they don’t get perfect conditions, but they’re so balanced. They’re so thought of absolutely everything, and and their logistics ai. And and, I mean, even things like the minesweeping operation. It’s the biggest single minesweeping operation of the entire war because there’s huge minefields off the Normandy Coast.
Speaker: 1
03:23:29
And ahead of the invasion force, the minesweepers, which amount to, I think, something like 242 different minesweepers in 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.
Speaker: 1
03:23:47
That is phenomenal and and 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. I mean, it is it is absolutely astonishing. There’s nothing. Ai mean, it is vatsal is absolutely astonishing, and the scale of it is just, frankly, mind boggling. Yeah.
Speaker: 1
03:24:03
And that was really the the
Speaker: 0
03:24:06
nail in the coffin, the beginning of the end Meh. For for Hitler, for the European theater.
Speaker: 1
03:24:13
Yeah. Once you get the 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 you know, there is there is no other way it’s gonna be because of the overwhelming amount of men and material that the ai have compared to the Germans at this stage of the war.
Speaker: 1
03:24:30
And, of course, you know, you’re being attacked on three fronts because there’s the Italian front to the south, and, of course, in a very major way, you’ve also got the Eastern Front. And Operation Bagration, which is launched that that summer as well, is enormous.
Speaker: 0
03:24:45
So let’s go to the very end. The Battle of Berlin. Yeah. Hitler sitting in his bunker, his suicide, Germany surrender. You actually said that downfall, the movie, was a very accurate representation. I think it is, really. Except the goebbels took cyanide sana shoot himself. Details.
Speaker: 0
03:25:06
But I think it’s probably it might be my favorite, World War two movie, which is strange to say because it’s not really about World War two. It’s about Hitler in a bunker. But
Speaker: 1
03:25:19
I think, what’s the name? Bruno Ganz, wasn’t it? I think he I think he he nailed him.
Speaker: 0
03:25:24
Yeah.
Speaker: 1
03:25:24
That’s 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. You know, there 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 ai by any other leader, really.
Speaker: 1
03:25:47
And so what has a very, very strong impression of what Hitler was like in the bunker in those last last days that that just 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 to me.
Speaker: 0
03:26:06
I mean, it’s a fascinating story of a evil maniac and then and this this certainty, you know, crumbling. Right? Like, realizing that this vision of the thousand year Reich is, And
Speaker: 1
03:26:24
Hitler says says, you know, my reputation won’t be good to start off with, but I hope in a few years’ time that people will start to realize that kind of all the good I was trying to bring.
Speaker: 0
03:26:31
Yeah. I
Speaker: 1
03:26:31
mean, that sort of.
Speaker: 0
03:26:33
They’re all the same, aren’t they? You always believe you’re doing good.
Speaker: 1
03:26:36
Yeah. And
Speaker: 0
03:26:37
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 into World War two as, the lessons we should take away?
Speaker: 1
03:26:54
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 of trouble when they arise.
Speaker: 1
03:27:11
So when there are financial crisis, you know that political unrest is gonna come, and you need to be prepared for that. You know? You need to be able to see the ai on the wall. You you can’t you can’t be complacent. You know, complacency is such a dirty word, isn’t it?
Speaker: 1
03:27:29
You know, you’ve got you’ve got to keep your wits, and and you can’t take things for granted. You’ve got to recognize, I think, that the freedoms we enjoy in the West arya, 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.
Speaker: 1
03:27:57
I mean, that’s the overriding thing. Because although I don’t think there’ll ever be a 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 if sort of knocked out Russian tanks and dead bodies, bloated bodies all over the place, put that into black and ai.
Speaker: 1
03:28:14
And, you know, it could be the road out of Falaise in 1944. It could be, you know, any number of German battlefields in in the in World War two. And and the similarities and the trenches and the ai of people hiding in foxholes and, you know, that that’s that’s horribly reminiscent as are the huge casualties that they’re suffering on both sides, whether they be Russian or Ukrainian.
Speaker: 1
03:28:36
And, you know, it’s a shock. It’s a shock to see vatsal. And it reminds you of just how quickly Ai think things can descend. I mean, that’s that’s, that’s the other thing. You know, 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.
Speaker: 1
03:28:58
I mean, life is fragile, and and peace is fragile. And, you know, it’s you take it for granted at your peril. And you
Speaker: 0
03:29:10
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? We’ve been talking about all of this darkness in the twentieth century. What’s the source of light?
Speaker: 1
03:29:32
The source of light is that I think the vast majority of people are good people who want to live peacefully and 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.
Speaker: 0
03:30:02
James, this is, I’m a big fan. This was an honor to talk to you, and please keep putting incredible history out there. Ai can’t wait to see what you do next. Thank you so much for talking today.
Speaker: 1
03:30:15
Well, thank you, Lex. It’s been a utter privilege to talk to you.
Speaker: 0
03:30:18
Thanks for listening to this conversation with James Holland. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description or at lexfreeman.com/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 ai.
