621. The Nazis at War: Blitzkrieg (Part 2)

Speaker 1 If you want more from the show, join the Rest is History Club. And with Christmas coming, you can also gift a whole year of access to the history lover in your life.

Speaker 1 Just head to therestishistory.com and click gifts.

Speaker 1 This episode is brought to you by the American Revolution on PBS.

Speaker 2 The American Revolution is usually staged like theater. Washington centre stage, red coats marching in step, Liberty delivering its lines on queue.

Speaker 1 In reality, it was messy and uncertain, shaped by arguments over what kind of country America might become.

Speaker 2 Ken Burns' new series shows it in that light, not as polished legend, but as lived experience.

Speaker 2 Rank-and-file soldiers, women, enslaved people and Native Americans may not have signed the Declaration, but their decisions carried weight in the struggle for independence.

Speaker 1 What makes this story gripping isn't only the speeches or the battles. It's how the questions that gave birth to the United States continue to shape American life two and a half centuries on.

Speaker 2 The revolution was never frozen in time. It was restless, conflicted, unfinished, which is precisely why it still matters.

Speaker 1 As the United States nears its 250th year, the revolution is not a relic under glass, but a mirror, still reflecting the soul of a country back at itself.

Speaker 2 The American Revolution premieres Sunday, November 16th on PBS and the PBS app.

Speaker 1 This episode is brought to you by Mint Mobile.

Speaker 2 If you're still overpaying for wireless, it's time to say yes to saying no. Admint Mobile, their favorite word is no.
No contracts, no monthly bills, no overages, no hidden fees, no BS.

Speaker 1 Just premium wireless service on the nation's largest 5G network. Make the switch at mintmobile.com/slash history.

Speaker 2 Upfront payment of $45 required, equivalent to $15 per month. Limited time, new customer offer for first three months only.
Speeds may slow above 35 gigabytes on unlimited plan. Taxes and fees extra.

Speaker 2 See Mint Mobile for details.

Speaker 3 Tis the season for all your holiday favorites. Like a very Jonas Christmas movie.
And home alone on Disney Plus.

Speaker 1 Did I burn down the joy?

Speaker 4 I don't think so.

Speaker 3 Then Hulu has National Lampoon's Christmas vacation. We're all in for a very big Christmas treat.
All of these and more streaming this holiday season.

Speaker 3 And right now, say big with our special Black Friday offer. Bubble Disney Plus in Hulu for just $4.99 a month for one year.
Savings compared to current regular monthly price. And it's $12.1.

Speaker 3 Offer for ad supported Disney Plus Hulu bundle only. Then $12.99 a month or then current regular monthly price.
18 plus terms apply.

Speaker 1 This episode is sponsored by Hive.

Speaker 2 History has always been a story of power. Who seeks it, who seizes it, and how easily it can all slip away.

Speaker 1 The Caesars, the Caliphs, the Tsars, they conquered vast swathes of the world, they proclaimed themselves the favourites of the gods, and yet their empires crumbled away.

Speaker 1 It is easier to conquer than it is to control.

Speaker 2 Hive takes a different approach. It puts power where it belongs, in your hands.
They started with smart thermostats and they've now gone much further.

Speaker 2 Solar panels, heat pumps, EV chargers, all working together so that you can power your home in your own way.

Speaker 1 That's genuine empowerment. Checking your phone, seeing the heating's on, the cars charging.
And the sun is quietly earning its keep on the roof.

Speaker 1 Caesar never had to charge his chariots, but I'm sure he would have admired the the efficiency.

Speaker 2 Visit HiveHome.com to find out more. Subject to survey and suitability, Hive compatible with selected technology.

Speaker 5 I speak to you for the first time as Prime Minister. in a solemn hour for the life of our country, of our Empire, of our allies,

Speaker 5 and above all, of the cause of freedom. A tremendous battle is raging in France and Flanders.

Speaker 5 The Germans, by a remarkable combination of air bombing and heavily armoured tanks, have broken through the French defences north of the Maginot Line.

Speaker 5 If this is one of the most awestriking periods in the long history of France and Britain.

Speaker 5 It is also beyond doubt the most sublime, side by side, unaided except by their kith and kin in the great dominions, and by the wide empires which rest beneath their shield.

Speaker 5 Side by side, the British and French peoples have advanced to rescue not only Europe but mankind

Speaker 5 from the foulest and most soul-destroying tyranny which has ever darkened and stained the pages of history.

Speaker 5 Behind them,

Speaker 5 behind us,

Speaker 5 behind the armies and fleets of Britain and France,

Speaker 5 gather a group of shattered states and bludgeoned races:

Speaker 5 the Czechs, the Poles,

Speaker 5 the Norwegians, the Danes,

Speaker 5 the Dutch,

Speaker 5 the Belgians, upon all of whom the long night of barbarism will descend, unbroken even by a star of hope,

Speaker 5 unless we conquer.

Speaker 2 As conquer we must.

Speaker 2 As conquer, we shall.

Speaker 1 So that Dominic, it will stun you to learn, was Winston Churchill. And it was his first radio address as British Prime Minister delivered on the 19th of May 1940.

Speaker 1 And when he gave that address, he had been prime minister for only nine days, but never in history had anybody taken office against quite such a bleak backdrop.

Speaker 1 So we ended our previous episode with Hitler preparing his great attack in the West, an attack that huge numbers of people in the German high command thought was a disastrous policy.

Speaker 1 But actually, in the short term, Hitler had been proved right because the blow fell on the Western armies on the 10th of May, the very day that Churchill became prime minister. And

Speaker 1 what happens next is one of the great duels, one of the great dramas, not just in European, but all world history.

Speaker 2 Yeah. So this week we're exploring the great turning point.
in the story of the Nazis, the events of 1940. But let's just remind ourselves where we ended last time.

Speaker 2 So Hitler in late 1939 crushed Poland, divided it with Stalin.

Speaker 2 He has escaped a possible coup by his own generals. He's also escaped a bomb attack in the Munich beer hall.

Speaker 2 And he has told his High Command to prepare an attack on France and England, as he calls it, at the earliest and most favourable moment.

Speaker 2 And that attack has been much postponed and timetabled for the spring of 1940. And we'll be coming to that attack and to Churchill's emergence as Britain's saviour later in this episode.
But first,

Speaker 2 somewhere we haven't discussed at all in the whole of this series on the Third Reich, going back four seasons, and that is the North.

Speaker 2 And the irony being that the Nazis were so obsessed with their northern inheritance and their kind of their Nordic roots and Norse myths, but they never gave much thought to Scandinavia, really.

Speaker 1 But we mentioned the iron ore in Sweden. which I'm very excited about.

Speaker 2 Yes, and that will come.

Speaker 1 But also you touched on Finland, didn't you? The fact that the Soviets were bogged down in the snows of that distant northern land.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's like listening to Winston Churchill.

Speaker 1 I know I'm kind of infected by it.

Speaker 5 Yeah, the brave people of Finland.

Speaker 2 So Finland, formerly the Grand Duchy of Finland, had been part of the Russian Empire, three and a half million people.

Speaker 2 And Stalin had attacked it at the end of November 1939 because he had given an ultimatum to the Finns to hand over a chunk of Karelia, the bit of Finland that is just above Leningrad, formerly formerly St.

Speaker 2 Petersburg. The Finns, to his great surprise, said no.
Stalin sent in the Red Army. But the Red Army was useless at this stage because Stalin had killed all their generals as part of the Great Terror.

Speaker 2 He had purged them. And they were completely unprepared.
We think of the Russians as supremely well equipped to fight in the winter.

Speaker 2 But they were very unprepared compared with the Finns, who were wearing these kind of white camouflage uniforms and were on skis. and were throwing Molotov cocktails at them.

Speaker 2 So that this is the war that gives us the Molotov cocktail. And basically, you know, Finland is clearly never going to completely win the war because it's tiny compared with the Soviet Union.

Speaker 2 Basically, the two sides had to agree a compromise. And in March 1940, the Finns handed over a chunk of Karelia.

Speaker 2 But Stalin then dropped his previous plan of basically turning Finland into a semi-absorbed client state. And he lets them keep their independence.

Speaker 2 And the result of this war, the Winter War, is that the Red Army have lost about 125,000 men killed and another 300,000 have been incapacitated by wounds or they've basically got disease or they've they've got frostbites and hitler's been watching this right yes and so he thinks ah this demonstrates that the soviet army is rubbish and therefore

Speaker 2 it will be easy for us to conquer it exactly it's it's really important actually in hitler's thinking this so-called winter war between finland and the ussr because hitler as he says to his top brass we have only to kick in the door and the whole rotten structure of the Soviet Union will come crashing down.

Speaker 2 And this is what everybody believes, having watched what happened in Finland. Now, Finland is therefore preserved as a buffer in the north between Scandinavia and the Soviet Union.

Speaker 2 And so now Hitler can work on a plan to bring Scandinavia into his empire. And the key thing here, which I know something that really excites you, is iron ore.

Speaker 1 There's nothing I enjoy more than a discussion about iron ore. Can I give you some stats?

Speaker 2 I'd love a iron ore statistic.

Speaker 1 So, Dominic, and listeners, here is some exciting iron ore stats, and they come from the war in the west by my brother James Holland.

Speaker 1 By December 1939, British intelligence deduced that of the 22 million tons of iron ore imported in 1938, the equivalent of nine and a half million tons of that supply had come from sources now close to it.

Speaker 1 And so, that is obviously a massive crisis for the Nazi war effort because without iron ore they can't build their planes and guns and all that kind of stuff and so that puts an absolute premium on the one remaining guaranteed source of iron ore and that is sweden so you can see why this is a huge kind of determinant in nazi war planning massive it's absolutely massive isn't that interesting i think that's interesting it's fascinating i think it's probably the most fascinating fact we've ever had on the rest of the history so um

Speaker 2 This iron ore is produced by mines in the north of Sweden. It comes out of Sweden through one port in particular, which is Narvik, across the border in northern Norway.

Speaker 1 Which I think is a great name. Narvik.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I've been to Narvik, actually. Have you? Kind of nondescript.

Speaker 1 But a good name.

Speaker 2 Yeah, but a good name. So Narvik is also ice-free in winter.
So you can bring iron ore all year round.

Speaker 2 Now, as soon as the war broke out in September 1939, Grand Admiral Rader of the Kriegsmarine, which is the Navy, went to Hitler and said, look, we have guarantee this flow of iron ore from northern Sweden.

Speaker 2 In other words, we have to establish ourselves in Norway, which is neutral, because if we don't, the Allies will. And if they get there first, we're in real trouble.

Speaker 2 And Rader said to Hitler, this business of the Winter War in Finland is a real issue, because the Allies, I think, will use that as a pretext.

Speaker 2 They will send troops to help Finland against Stalin, and on the way, they they will occupy Norway and northern Sweden.

Speaker 1 And the thing is, he's right, isn't he? Because actually the Allies do have exactly such a plan.

Speaker 2 They do. And this may surprise a lot of listeners.
The Allies absolutely had such a plan. Churchill, now running the Admiralty, the Navy in Britain, is especially keen on it.

Speaker 2 So under his aegis, Britain and France draw up a plan to invade Denmark and Norway. Basically, if you're invading Norway, you have to take Denmark as well because it's right next door.

Speaker 2 They would have landed troops at Narvik.

Speaker 2 They would have seized the Swedish iron mines and they would have then pushed troops further on into Finland to help the Finns against Stalin, who at this point they kind of perceive as Hitler's ally, his partner in crime.

Speaker 2 Now, they ended up scrapping this plan, basically in part because the Norwegians and the Swedes got wind of it and they said, what? You're planning to occupy us? Yeah, that's not good, is it?

Speaker 2 That's outrageous. But the threat is still there.

Speaker 2 So on the 20th of February, hitler summoned one of his generals who was called paul von falkenhorst and said i want you to come up with a plan to invade norway and denmark and this is a very good indication of the mad way that hitler does business it's so funny so he calls to this guy falkenhorst and says and by the way i need this plan you've got until five o'clock this afternoon i don't know what time it is like lunchtime or something yeah you've got kind of three hours and also you can't tell anyone about it and you can't get any help so he goes to a bookshop doesn't he?

Speaker 1 He gets a Beideker, a guide

Speaker 1 to Scandinavia.

Speaker 2 Yeah. And he books himself into a hotel, Falcon Horse, with this guidebook.
And sort of in desperation, he hasn't even got any maps or anything. He's just got a guidebook.

Speaker 2 Desperately scribbling, I don't know, in hotel notepaper or something, the plan to invade Norway and Denmark. Hitler is convinced this will be very easy.

Speaker 2 And by the end of March, Grand Admiral Rader has said, come on, we need to hurry up. They set the date for the 9th of April.

Speaker 2 Now, in the meantime, they obviously need a reason to go in, and ideally they will have a local collaborator. And Rader, the admiral, says to Hitler, look, I've got the perfect person.

Speaker 2 There's this bloke from Norway. He runs a fascist party called the Nationale Samling.
I think, I don't know how my Norwegian pronunciation is. And this bloke's name is Vidkun Quisling.

Speaker 2 And Quisling, you'll be delighted to hear this, Tom. He's the son of a Lutheran pastor.
Surely everybody in Norway is the son of a Lutheran pastor.

Speaker 1 At least 30%, I would guess.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 He'd got the highest marks in the history of the Norwegian military academy, despoke Quisling, and he'd worked very closely with the explorer-turned refugee campaigner Frityof Nansen.

Speaker 2 Anyway, there's only about 10 people in Norway. So if you've got those high marks from the academy, you can thrive in Norwegian politics.
So Quisling was defence minister very briefly.

Speaker 2 Then in the 1930s, he sort of got really into Nordic nationalism and he formed his own Nazi-style party and and he called himself the führer of this uh party spelt in an entertainingly norwegian way yeah so it's an oh with a dash through it exactly but he never did well they were very poor they they never got more than two and a half percent of the vote so that's what about six people voting for yeah and they never managed to elect a single norwegian mp

Speaker 2 anyway rader brings him to hitler and introduces him to hitler this guy quisling and hitler thinks that he's he's a bit useless however he's the only person they've got, so they decide to back him anyway.

Speaker 2 And Quisling does turn out to be genuinely useful to the Germans because he was defense minister, so he's able to give them details of all Norway's defences.

Speaker 1 So overt treason.

Speaker 2 Completely. I mean, he really is a Quisling.
And of course, that's where the name comes from.

Speaker 2 Now, in the meantime, the Allies finally, unbelievable, they've actually got their act together and decided to do something.

Speaker 2 So the French have finally got rid of their dithering prime minister who was Deladier, a socialist, and they've replaced him with somebody from the other end of the political spectrum, the centre-right Paul Renault.

Speaker 2 And Renault is a very clever man, kind of, you know, very impressive in many ways. He's extremely short, actually.
He's five foot three. So that's his defining characteristic.

Speaker 2 And he, Deladier, people used to say of Deladier, he made no decisions at all, but Raynaud makes a decision every five minutes. And a lot of them are mad.
So he's very like Churchill.

Speaker 1 He loves kind of mad invasions of remote, distant places. That's his vibe, isn't it? He loves all that.

Speaker 2 Right. A wheeze.
Yeah. So he's very keen on the idea of landing in Norway.
And he also wanted to attack Soviet oil fields in Baku in Azerbaijan.

Speaker 1 I mean, that seems mad.

Speaker 2 Indeed. Anyway.

Speaker 2 After a lot of dithering about this, the French and the British finally agree they will intervene in Norway. They will mine the waters around Narvik.

Speaker 2 That's the crucial port the Germans get their iron ore from. Now they know that if they mine these waters, there will be a German reaction.

Speaker 2 So they say we'll also have to send troops and occupy Norway's western ports. So that's Narvik, Stavanger, Bergen, places like that.

Speaker 1 And how do the Norwegians feel about this?

Speaker 2 Guttered, I think.

Speaker 1 Are they told? Or are they just going to turn up and occupy them?

Speaker 2 Yeah, as we shall see, the Norwegians, when the war breaks out, they don't know who started it, the Allies or the Germans. So that tells its own story, really.
Right.

Speaker 2 So at the beginning of April, Churchill, who is really responsible for all this and basically ought to carry the can when it goes horribly wrong.

Speaker 1 I mean, it's so Gallipoli, isn't it?

Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean, he never learns, really, does he?

Speaker 2 He decides he'll kick it off. He sends four destroyers to lay these mines.

Speaker 1 But I mean, I guess the reason that he doesn't end up carrying the can is because Chamberlain on the 3rd of April,

Speaker 1 he addresses the Conservative National Union and he makes a kind of fateful boast, doesn't he?

Speaker 1 Whatever reason Hitler had for not making an immediate endeavor to overwhelm us, one thing is certain. He has missed the bus.

Speaker 1 And that phrase, Hitler has missed the bus, will return to haunt Chamberlain.

Speaker 2 Indeed.

Speaker 2 Because actually, while the Allies have been messing around and dithering with their mad ideas, Hitler has made up his own mind and he has already sent the German fleet to begin the operation against Norway.

Speaker 2 Now, the British, this speaks volumes about the quality of Britain's decision-making at this point.

Speaker 2 The British have intelligence to say the Germans have put to sea, but they say, yeah, they're probably not going to Norway. I imagine they're going to try and break through into the Atlantic.

Speaker 2 So, you know, let's not overstress about that. Early on the 8th of April, the British start to lay their mines outside Narvik.
But the Germans are approaching all the time.

Speaker 1 My brother's brilliant on this, and he writes, it was incredible that after so much Allied vacillation over Norway, both sides should have been beginning their offensives at the same moment and both be ignorant of the other's plans.

Speaker 1 I mean, that is kind of mad, isn't it?

Speaker 2 It's crazy. So, midnight on the 8th, the Norwegians realize something is up.

Speaker 2 And the Norwegian side of the story is great actually. And I shall be referring listeners to some excellent films on this made in Norway.

Speaker 2 It's about 1.30 in the morning, an aide comes in to wake the king who is called Hawken VII.

Speaker 2 And he is a very sort of tall, gaunt man, if you google him. He's actually a Dane.
So they had to pick a new king when they broke away from Sweden. at the beginning of the 20th century.

Speaker 2 And they'd picked this Danish bloke. He's got an absolutely first-class moustache.
He sent his son to Balliol College, Oxford, which I think reflects very well on him.

Speaker 2 Anyway, there he is in bed, and his aide says, Majesty, we're at war. And the king says, with whom? You know, because they don't know whether it's going to be the Germans or the Allies.

Speaker 1 Exactly the same thing happens in Iceland, doesn't it?

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 1 The British do go and occupy Iceland.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 1 And they say, who is it? And they say, the British, and they go, few. Because better the British than the Germans, I guess.

Speaker 2 It's nice that people think that way about us.

Speaker 2 I'm sure everybody in the world thinks that way about when the British turn up, don't they? That's the impression I get from the history books I I read.

Speaker 2 Anyway,

Speaker 2 so there's a very comic side to the Norwegian resistance. So this is my favourite bit.
Norway's commander-in-chief was an elderly general called General Larker.

Speaker 2 I don't think Norwegians had ever really, not since Harold Hardrada really, had they extended themselves militarily. So General Larker is told, the Germans are coming up the Oslo Fjord.

Speaker 2 Ships are coming through the fog or whatever. And he says, right, call out the reserves.
Like, send out the letters. And someone said, but the letters? I mean,

Speaker 2 they're not going to get here for days. We're going to do it all by post.

Speaker 1 Yeah, you know what the post is like in Norway.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Anyway, staff officers remonstrated with him and he said, it's fine. Listen, there's no hurry.
Don't overthink this. Just write them letters.

Speaker 2 They'll turn up. And then he said, I need to go back to my farm.
This is my favorite detail to get my toilet dress.

Speaker 2 He basically has to get his wash bag from his farm just outside Oslo. He goes out to his farm and collects his like change of clothes, some underwear, you know, toothbrush, whatever.

Speaker 2 And then he calls a taxi. But because the invasion has begun, the taxi is very, very severely delayed.
It takes ages for this taxi to arrive.

Speaker 2 The taxi picks him up and takes him back to Oslo to Norwegian army headquarters. By the time he gets there with his wash bag,

Speaker 2 The general staff have evacuated and they haven't left any information to tell him where they've gone.

Speaker 1 This isn't the spirit of Harold Hardrada, is it?

Speaker 2 So he then he works out where they've gone. He gets a tram, a suburban tram, carrying his stuff as far as he can to the end of the line.

Speaker 2 And then he walked to the Norwegian Map Institute to see if they had a car that he could borrow to take him to meet his men. They don't have a car.

Speaker 2 So then he had to walk all the way back to the railway station. to get a train and it's hours and hours until he finally rejoins his stuff.

Speaker 1 So Blitzkrieg, it is not.

Speaker 2 Well, do you know what?

Speaker 2 what it sounds like i'm dissing the norwegians and i'm not because they put up some pretty stout resistance the germans have come up the oslo fjord in this cruiser the blücher with thousands of troops there's a whole film about this called blüka a norwegian film that came out in september you can see clips from it on youtube the norwegians have this fortress called the oskersbjorg and it has two 19th century antique cannons and basically this Blücher comes closer and closer and these guys wait at this fortress until it's really close.

Speaker 2 Then they fire with these antique cannons. They hit the Blucher's fuel store.
The Blucher explodes, bursts into flames and explodes, and 800 of the Germans were drowned.

Speaker 2 So it was a big win for the Norwegians. And because of scenes like this, this gave the king, King Holken and his ministers, time to get out of Oslo.

Speaker 1 They managed to smuggle out the gold reserves as well, don't they? Kind of pretty much under the noses of the Germans.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's a great story. I mean, as we'll see, it makes a great film.

Speaker 2 Because they head to this village called Elverum, which is about 40 miles north of oslo and they're being pursued the whole time by german paratroopers who've been basically told get the norwegian government and get the king like we'll need them the local rifle club the elverham rifle club put up a roadblock and basically drove back these German paratroopers.

Speaker 2 I mean, that's incredible. These blokes were like hunting rifles or whatever.
These ordinary Norwegians managed to drive them back. And that gave the king and his entourage time to get away.

Speaker 2 And they had a meeting. And basically, the king is told the Germans want Quisling to run a puppet government and you have to approve it.
And the king says it's a very sort of stirring scene.

Speaker 2 He says to his ministers, look, there's no way I'm going to accept this. No way whatsoever.
He says, if you want to accept it, fine, but I will abdicate.

Speaker 2 I will never ever preside over a Quisling government. And then he bursts into tears.
And it's a very stirring scene. And there's a Norwegian film of this called The King's Choice.

Speaker 2 I fell down a massive rabbit hole and ended up watching huge chunks of this film. It's really moving, actually.
It's a really moving story.

Speaker 2 Now, meanwhile, further south, the Germans have also invaded Denmark, which is the country that King Horgan had been born into, because he's from the Danish royal family originally.

Speaker 2 And there, the story is a bit different. And I mean that as no disrespect to the Danes, but the geography is just not in the Danes' favour.

Speaker 1 Yeah, well, also, they've got a land border with Germany, so the panzers presumably can just roll through Schleswig-Holstein.

Speaker 2 Which is exactly what they do. So they kick off at 4.15 in the morning.

Speaker 2 The panzers roll over, naval landings, paratroopers, and the Danes are completely nasty helpless. There's a bit of fighting around the royal palace in Copenhagen.

Speaker 2 But the king of Denmark, Christian X, who is actually the Norwegian king's older brother, he can see that this is totally pointless. There's no geographical barriers.

Speaker 2 The Germans are just sort of rolling into Denmark. And by breakfast, he has ordered a ceasefire, and they signed the capitulation at 10 o'clock in the morning.

Speaker 2 That was the shortest campaign of the entire war.

Speaker 1 So that's five and three-quarters hours.

Speaker 2 Yeah, from start to finish. Like, it's perfectly plausible that if you had a lion that day,

Speaker 2 you could wake up and not know that an invasion had happened and was finished.

Speaker 1 So, my brother goes so far as to say, surely the fastest conquest of a country in history.

Speaker 2 Yeah, quite possibly.

Speaker 2 And actually, I definitely don't want to disrespect the king of Denmark because King Christian, he didn't go into exile as many monarchs did, because his son's wife, Crown Princess Ingrid, who is, I think, think, Swedish, she was nine months pregnant and she couldn't travel.

Speaker 2 So he has to stay in Copenhagen.

Speaker 1 But he behaves tremendously well, doesn't he?

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Very moving and powerful symbol of resistance.

Speaker 2 Very moving. He rides every day through Copenhagen on his horse and the people gather and they cheer him and stuff.
Everyone knows he's not keen on the Nazis and all of this.

Speaker 2 And most famously, he said to the Germans, If you make the Danish Jews wear yellow stars, then I will wear one too. And basically all my people will wear them.

Speaker 2 I think it reflects tremendously well on him. You can see, again, you can see footage online of him riding through Copenhagen.
Good for him. Brilliant.

Speaker 2 But the Norwegians can hold out much longer because of the mountains and stuff.

Speaker 2 So by contrast, that campaign lasted for two months, longer than any other German invasion campaign except for the invasion of the Soviet Union. So fair play to the Norwegians.

Speaker 2 And they, you know, they were not a martial people, but about 40,000 of them immediately volunteered. They fought very bravely.

Speaker 2 They didn't have decent equipment, but they really acquitted themselves well.

Speaker 2 Now,

Speaker 2 we are a patriotic podcast, but unfortunately, this is not something that can be said of the British or our gallant allies, the French.

Speaker 1 Do they let themselves down?

Speaker 2 We absolutely disgraced ourselves. To quote Max Hastings in his book on the Second World War, our campaign was characterized by utter moral ignobility and military incompetence.
So that's a shame.

Speaker 2 Oh, dear. So basically, part part of this is because a lot of the best troops are stationed in France.

Speaker 2 So the British government sent some territorial reserve battalions and they were absolutely useless. They didn't have maps, a lot of them.
They didn't have radios. They didn't have heavy weapons.

Speaker 2 They had the wrong shoes, ironically.

Speaker 1 Oh, did they?

Speaker 2 They did. Oh, well, we like that.
They get into fights with local fishermen. My favorite moment, Admiral Lord Cork.

Speaker 2 who was a very short man, wants to inspire his men to get off their ships and advance on Narvik, and they're very reluctant to do so and he says i'll lead you ashore and he gets off the ship and because he's a very short man he falls into a snow drift and has to be dug out by the rest of the men so not the most glorious moment in british military history no so we did land in central norway we did capture narvik and then recapture it but basically Churchill is constantly coming up with schemes of various kinds, which end up being ditched.

Speaker 2 To quote Max Hastings again, Churchill shouted loudest, but his extravagant schemes were frustrated by the lack of means to fulfil them.

Speaker 1 Do you know what's even worse about that? In his office in the Admiralty, opposite his desk, who do you think Churchill has a portrait of?

Speaker 2 Surely Admiral Lord Nelson.

Speaker 1 It is Admiral Lord Nelson, whose record in Scandinavian conflict was a whole lot better.

Speaker 2 Yeah, but also Nelson was rubbish on land, to be fair. So landings in Norway were precisely the kind of thing that Nelson would have made a terrible hash of.

Speaker 1 Do you not think? Yeah, but not as big a hash as Churchill did.

Speaker 2 As Churchill made of Norway, no, I know, absolutely.

Speaker 2 And the worst thing is when the British and French decide to pull the plug and they're going to have to evacuate, they didn't have the decency to tell the Norwegians.

Speaker 2 So they were dishonest with them until the final moment.

Speaker 1 So what's it Max Hastings said? Moral ignobility.

Speaker 2 Yeah, moral ignobility and military incompetence.

Speaker 2 And actually when the British finally did pull the plug and the Norwegian commander-in-chief, a man called Otto Ruger, when he found out, he said very bitterly, so Norway is to share the fate of Czechoslovakia and Poland.

Speaker 2 And that's a crucial point.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 You keep promising to people that you will defend them and uphold their independence. And basically, the lesson of history is that Britain and France will let you down.

Speaker 1 Yeah, they'll cut and run.

Speaker 2 They'll cut and run.

Speaker 1 So you might be better off surrendering to the Germans.

Speaker 2 Exactly. Now, the Germans haven't completely had it their own way, and this is important.

Speaker 2 In the Norwegian campaign, they lost more than 20 cruisers and destroyers. lost or they were badly damaged.
Including the Blücher. Including the Blücher.
And the Luftwaffe have lost almost 250 planes.

Speaker 2 And that will really matter later on in the Battle of Britain when every ship and every plane counts. So that will matter.
But

Speaker 2 the big picture, once again, Hitler has rolled the dice. Once again, he's won.
He's got his iron ore. He's got Norway's naval bases.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 he's shown his men that the British and French are basically useless and can be beaten. So, you know, it's a series of wins for him.
The big consequence, of course, is political, because

Speaker 2 there is a general sense, I think, that has been gathering all through the phony war, first France and then in Britain, that the governments of peacetime are just not up to the challenge.

Speaker 2 So as Paul Reynaud said to one of his own colleagues, Britain's government is full of old men who do not know how to take a risk.

Speaker 1 But isn't the paradox that the one guy who doesn't love a risk is Churchill? And he's just completely goofed. So actually, they would have been better not invading Norway at all.

Speaker 2 I suppose so. Either making making up their minds and doing it early and doing it properly, or yeah, probably not doing it at all, I guess.

Speaker 2 And really, he more than anyone, Churchill more than anyone, deserves the blame for what went wrong in Norway. But the irony is that at the time, most people say, well, this is typical of Chamberlain.

Speaker 2 Chamberlain is cautious, he's petifogging.

Speaker 1 And also his whole Hitler missing the bus stuff.

Speaker 2 Hitler missing the bus, he's messing around with his umbrella when he should be invading Scandinavian countries. Useless.

Speaker 2 And so on the 7th of May, there is this famous debate in the House of Commons, the Norway debate, probably

Speaker 2 the most famous, most celebrated debate in British parliamentary history. Yeah, I'd thought so.
Got to be up there.

Speaker 2 And that evening of the 7th of May is when Leo Amory, a Conservative MP, famously points at Chamberlain and quotes Oliver Cromwell, in the name of God, go.

Speaker 2 And the next evening, the 8th of May, more than 100 Conservative MPs desert the government, and it's obvious that something has to change.

Speaker 2 So on the 9th, just to really simplify matters, cut a long story short, Chamberlain decides to resign. There's a question about whether the new Prime Minister will be Lord Halifax.

Speaker 1 Kind of very tall

Speaker 1 foreign secretary, isn't he?

Speaker 2 Not so warlike.

Speaker 1 Not so warlike, I think, would be a good way of describing him.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Or Churchill, who has made a terrible Horlicks of Norway.

Speaker 1 But does love a war.

Speaker 2 He loves a war.

Speaker 1 And had forecast that Hitler had to be resisted.

Speaker 2 Exactly. And that evening, Neville Chamberlain goes to Buckingham Palace to resign.
And he says to George VI, it's Churchill.

Speaker 2 send for churchill now meanwhile that very evening while that is happening on the outskirts of berlin a train which is called the amerika pulls out of a small isolated station on the edge of the capital and it's heading west and this is hitler's special armoured train and do you know what goering's train was called asia was it really called asia yeah Asia, I guess.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Surely decorated with hunting trophies.

Speaker 1 Yeah, apparently it was massively better decorated than Hitler's.

Speaker 2 You astound me. With looted art and a gigantic buffet car.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 1 And a very luxurious toilet, I imagine.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and a whole wardrobe full of white suits. Exactly.

Speaker 1 Because actually, Goering had a model train. He loved model trains.

Speaker 2 Like Will Disney. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Wow. Well, I mean, not in every aspect, but on the model train enthusiasm front.

Speaker 2 Right, Crikey. Disney didn't command an air force.
A beaten air force. No.
Anyway, so there he is on the America, and his secretaries think they're all going to Denmark to visit the troops.

Speaker 2 And Hitler seems in tremendous form. He's very excited, clearly.
And they think this is because he's going to be visiting the army in Denmark.

Speaker 2 But just after midnight, around Hanover, the train switches from the northbound to the westbound tracks, kind of quietly. It switches.
And they carry on rolling through the night.

Speaker 2 And the train grinds to a halt and dawn is breaking and they get out.

Speaker 2 There are no station signs, but actually they have arrived near the town of Oiskirchen, which is about 30 miles from the Belgian border.

Speaker 2 And here there are cars waiting to take them through the woods to the bunkers of the new Führer headquarters, the Felisen Nest, the Rock Erie.

Speaker 1 God, he did have ludicrously named headquarters, didn't he? I mean, he couldn't be more bonvillen if he tried.

Speaker 2 Very Bonvillen.

Speaker 2 And they gather in front of Hitler's newly built bunker, which he's going to be be sharing with his adjutant and with the head of the armed forces, Wilhelm Keitel.

Speaker 2 And far away through the woods, they can hear the tell-tale thump of shellfire. And Hitler looks around and he says to them, gentlemen, the offensive against the Western powers has begun.

Speaker 1 And so it begins. And it will be beginning after a break.

Speaker 2 And now it's time for a very special segment of today's episode, which we're calling the Great Guest of History, where we explore those moments where being the perfect or indeed the worst kind of host or guest changed the course of history.

Speaker 2 And it's brought to you by our friends at EE, who have the UK's best mobile network and broadband technology.

Speaker 1 And while EE have definitely got hosts and guests alike covered this Christmas, there have been a fair share of banquets, balls and feasts where hospitality has shaped the course course of history and the destiny of all those involved.

Speaker 2 Yeah, so when I'm thinking about connectivity and where it's gone wrong, I always think, Tom, of the great get-together in the early 1900s at the hunting lodge in Germany, where Kaiser Wilhelm II, a great friend of the rest of history, welcomed some of his top generals.

Speaker 2 And among them was Dietrich Graf von Hulsen-Haisler, who tried to entertain everybody at this feast by dressing up in a ballerina's tutu.

Speaker 2 And he did a series of capers and pirouettes but he unfortunately had a heart attack and died and precisely because they didn't have the connectivity they needed they weren't able to contact the emergency services in time.

Speaker 2 Dietrich Graf from Husenhaisler breathed his last.

Speaker 2 They found it very hard to get him out of his tutu because rigor morchis set in and as a result Europe was engulfed in the First World War.

Speaker 1 Goodness, if only they had had EE in the Kaiser's hunting lodge.

Speaker 1 And that is it for our special segment, The Great guest of history needless to say a lot of that drama might have been avoided with today's levels of connectivity so if you're hosting or guesting this festive season you can avoid any history shaping drama with the UK's best mobile network and broadband technology from EE now if you're hosting EE has full fiber the UK's very best broadband technology and that can handle all of your visitors streaming scrolling scrolling and gaming.

Speaker 2 And if you're guesting, EE has the very best mobile network to keep you connected to everything from music to maps so you can stay entertained and on time.

Speaker 6 Are your business expenses playing hide and seek? With Uber for Business, the small spends that slip through the cracks like rides and meals go right where you need them.

Speaker 6 Because it integrates with leading expense platforms. You can say goodbye to surprise costs, missing dollars, or chasing receipts.
Everything's tracked downable. Uber for business.

Speaker 6 Make small steps that make a big impact. Learn more at uber.com slash smallsteps.

Speaker 4 Tito's Handmade Vodka is America's favorite vodka for a reason.

Speaker 4 From the first legal distillery in Texas, Tito's is six times distilled till it's just right and naturally gluten-free, making it a high-quality spirit that mixes with just about anything.

Speaker 4 From the smoothest martinis to the best Bloody Marys, Tito's is known for giving back, teaming up with non-profits to serve its communities and do good for dogs.

Speaker 4 Make your next cocktail of Tito's, distilled and bottled by Fifth Generation Inc., Austin, Texas. 40% alcohol by volume, savor responsibly.

Speaker 4 Chronic spontaneous urticaria or chronic hives with no known cause. It's so unpredictable.
It's like playing pinball.

Speaker 4 Itchy red bumps start on my arm, then my back,

Speaker 4 sometimes my legs. Hives come out of of nowhere.

Speaker 4 And it comes and goes. But I just found out about a treatment option at treatmyhives.com.
Take that, chronic hives. Learn more at treatmyhives.com.

Speaker 1 Hello, and welcome back to The Rest of History. Dominic, we ended that first half with literal bombshells.
Hitler has finally launched his attack on the West. And how have we got here?

Speaker 1 Because the last time the the Nazis were invading places, it was in Scandinavia.

Speaker 2 Well, as we saw last time in the last episode, Hitler's always had this very clear idea that he wants to attack the West. He wants to launch a preemptive strike.
He's obsessed with a sense of urgency.

Speaker 2 He knows that his enemies have never been weaker. because the Soviet Union is bogged down in Finland.
The United States has got presidential elections and is very unlikely to intervene.

Speaker 2 So this is his chance. His priority is Britain.
He never wanted war with Britain in 1939. The whole point of this is to get them to negotiate.
So he has been thinking about this for weeks and months.

Speaker 2 Even during the Norway campaign, he had been discussing this with Goebbels. So they'd had a long talk about this on the 21st of April 1940.

Speaker 2 And Hitler said, you know, it's a shame in many ways we're fighting the British because they are our kind of racial cousins.

Speaker 2 But, you know, we knew that we'd have to do it at some point, probably in the next five years. So maybe it's better to do it now before the British are rearmed.

Speaker 2 And Goebbels wrote in his diary afterwards, the Führer would make peace today. He doesn't want at all to annihilate England nor destroy its empire.

Speaker 2 The condition, England out of Europe and our colonies back to us. But that is only possible if it's already received a knockout blow.

Speaker 1 So it there is England.

Speaker 2 Yes, and the knockout blow is to beat France, what Goebbels calls an act of historical justice against the French that will leave Britain friendless on the continent. So how are they going to do it?

Speaker 2 So if you look at the two sets of forces on paper, they're actually pretty well matched. The French have more tanks.
They have 3,000 tanks, the Germans 2,000, the French have much more artillery.

Speaker 2 The Germans have about 90 divisions. A division very roughly, about 15,000 men.
The French have got the same. And the British have got another 10 divisions, always much smaller on land, the British.

Speaker 2 But the Germans have got a couple of advantages. They've got slightly more fighters and bombers than the Allies do in the West.
And they have learned in Poland how they can use them.

Speaker 2 They can use them in cooperation with their ground troops to full effect, which the British and French have not learned how to do.

Speaker 1 That is true, that they do have some battle-hardened troops.

Speaker 1 However, because everyone knows what is going to come, and because Nazi propaganda has been harping on the ruthless, invincible, mechanized nature of the german war machine and so the success of the nazi troops in the invasion of france will kind of retrospectively burnish that propaganda i said in my brother's book the war in the west he he talks about this potemkin quality of nazi militarism so actually overall the allies do have more planes between them than the luftwaffe overall

Speaker 1 And actually, the German troops, only half of all of them have had more than a few weeks' training. More than a quarter are over 40.

Speaker 1 The artillery, the German artillery, it's designed to be drawn by horses.

Speaker 1 And of the 135 divisions that have been earmarked for the invasion of France, of those, only 10 are panzer and only six are fully mechanized. So the idea that the whole German army...

Speaker 1 is kind of the cutting edge of modern fighting forces simply isn't true. I really hadn't properly appreciated that.

Speaker 1 And I think it does kind of

Speaker 2 put

Speaker 1 the looming calamity for French and British arms into an even more sharper perspective, I think. They are not beaten by an overwhelmingly mechanised force.

Speaker 2 No, no, no, they're not at all. What I would say is the Germans do still win, though.
So, I mean, we shouldn't go to the other extreme and suggest that they're completely useless.

Speaker 1 No, they're not. I mean, as we'll see, they have good tactics, but I think it also reflects on the grotesque incompetence of the Allies in the test that is to come.

Speaker 2 Well, I mean, we've talked about how incompetent the Allies were in Norway. Their planning and their intelligence in the Western campaign, in this campaign, are unbelievably useless.

Speaker 2 They seem to have no sense of how quickly armoured divisions can move. The French are always fighting the last war.

Speaker 2 It's mad that in the First World War they were fighting the Franco-Prussian or the Napoleonic Wars. And now they think they're fighting the First World War.

Speaker 2 So they're all geared up for kind of trenches and all of that kind of thing. And it's as though tanks have not yet been invented.

Speaker 1 And actually, General Bégon, who takes command of the French armies on the 25th of may by which point it's obvious that france is completely defeated he said we've gone to war with a 1918 army against the german army of 1939 which in terms of equipment isn't true but in terms of attitude is clearly the case yes it is absolutely so let's get into a little bit of military strategy because an absolutely key french failure and british failure they completely fail to predict the germans line of attack So,

Speaker 2 as we saw last time, Hitler wanted to attack straight away in the autumn of 1939, but because there was a lot of dithering and mainly because of the weather, that was postponed.

Speaker 2 And that has given the Germans time to refine their plans.

Speaker 2 So people who listened to our First World War series will have heard a lot about things like the Schlieffen Plan and all the difficulties that the Germans faced in 1914.

Speaker 2 Their plan in 1939-1940 was initially very similar. They would go through Belgium and Holland.

Speaker 2 because they want to get around the Maginot Line, which are these forts the French had built to defend Alsace and Lorraine further south.

Speaker 2 The original German plan was to go through Belgium and Holland, very First World War, we push the French back to the Somme, and then we kind of grind them down there.

Speaker 2 And when that plan was presented to Hitler, he didn't like it. He said, I just think this feels very 1914s.

Speaker 1 Very unoriginal.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I want something, I want a decisive, exciting, original, you know, stroke, speed and surprise. That's what I'm all about.

Speaker 2 Now, meanwhile, two other generals, Erich von Manstein and a panzer commander, Heinz Guderian, had been working on a rival plan.

Speaker 2 And this plan, they said, look, why don't we just pretend effectively to go through Belgium and Holland, the Low Countries?

Speaker 2 Why don't we concentrate our tanks a little bit further south and go through the Ardennes forest? Because it's the forest.

Speaker 2 Everybody assumes it's kind of off limits and the French will leave it only lightly defended. And the high command of the army, the Wehrmacht, thought this plan was deranged.

Speaker 2 And they basically sent Manstein to East Prussia to shut him up, to get rid of him.

Speaker 1 But one person who doesn't is Guderian.

Speaker 1 He, two years before, had written

Speaker 1 the most German army titled book of all time because its title was Achtung Panzer, exclamation mark.

Speaker 2 That's surely a British comic from the 1970s, isn't it?

Speaker 1 No, it's such a great title. And he's Hitler's kind of man.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Because he's all about speed.

Speaker 1 He's about the idea that you separate the panzers off from the much more cumbersome, slower moving infantry divisions and the artillery with their horses and things, and you just go for broke speed.

Speaker 2 So here's now a mad thing that happens, right? The High Command wants to go with their original plan, despite Hitler's misgivings. And then on the 10th of January, a Luftwaffe plane got lost in fog.

Speaker 2 It accidentally flies into Belgium and it crashes in a field in Belgium. And the passenger on the plane is called Major Rheinberger, and he is carrying the plan.

Speaker 2 And after the crash, the pilot and this bloke, Major Rheinberger, were picked up by Belgian border guards who took them to a sort of hut. Don't forget, Belgium is neutral at this stage.

Speaker 2 Major Rheinberger tried to destroy the plans by stuffing them into a stove when the Belgian border guards' backs were turned.

Speaker 2 I think he madly burnt his hands in the process trying to get the lid off the stove. Anyway, the border guards managed to get the plans back out of the stove.

Speaker 2 Major Rheinberger at this point burst into tears and tried to shoot himself. Anyway, the upshot was the Allies say, oh, brilliant, we've got the German plans.

Speaker 2 So we know for sure they're going to come through Belgium and Holland, just as we thought. Brilliant.
We're laughing.

Speaker 1 So actually, it's like all those Allied plans to deceive the Germans about where D-Day landing is going to happen.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it is.

Speaker 1 Only they haven't actually fabricated it in this case.

Speaker 2 Exactly. Now, in the meantime, the problem for the Allies, the Germans have changed their entire plan.
Hitler never liked that blueprint anyway.

Speaker 2 He liked the idea of a surprise attack through the Ardennes as well. And on the 17th of February, so a month after this crash, his adjutant invited Manstein to the Reich Chancellery.

Speaker 2 He actually said to him, Come on, come and tell the Fuhrer about this mad idea of yours. He'll love it.
And Hitler doesn't like Mannstein.

Speaker 2 Manstein is a very kind of cold, arrogant Prussian aristocrat, the kind of person he's always distrustful of. But he listens to the plan.
He says, I've been gagging to hear a plan like this.

Speaker 2 Through the Ardennes, surprise attack, reckless. I love it.
I love the sound of it.

Speaker 1 Let's go for it.

Speaker 2 Brilliant. So this becomes the blueprint for Falgelb, Case Yellow, the German operation in the West.
Basically, there are two army groups. Army Group B is under Fedor von Bock.

Speaker 1 How large is the other two army groups?

Speaker 2 So Army Group B is 29 divisions, Tom. So how many men is that? Well, it's 15,000 men.
You can do the maths yourself.

Speaker 1 Could you?

Speaker 2 Yeah, but I just don't want to. I'd like to give you a bit of a workout.

Speaker 2 So anyway, they've got 29 divisions, 15,000 men each. Listeners can do the math.
They will go through Belgium and Holland.

Speaker 2 But this is a massive distraction exercise because the real action is going to come further south with Gert von Rudenstedt's Army Group A.

Speaker 2 And Army Group A has 44 divisions with loads of panzers and mechanized infantry. And they are going to sneak through the woods of the Ardennes.
And then this is the plan.

Speaker 2 When they're across, they'll get to the river Meurs and they'll cross the Meers. But at that point, they won't carry on towards Paris as the Allies will expect.

Speaker 2 They will turn sharply to their right, in other words turning north and they will head up towards the coast of the English Channel in a kind of what's called a sickle-cut maneuver.

Speaker 2 And what that means is that all the Allied French and British forces in Belgium will be trapped. between the two German armies and they'll be pinned against the sea.

Speaker 1 And so this is the Battle of Cannai.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 1 You know, the great victory that Hannibal won over the romans and which have haunted haunted the german military planning and so in a sense although this seems tactically radical strategically it is what the germans you know it's what they always come up with and so that being so you would think the french would have realized it i mean it's just so mind-blowingly incompetent that they haven't sussed this out i'll make two observations number one is i don't think there's ever been a battle in the rest of history that you haven't likened to the battle of cannai so that's the first point listen it's not me who's doing it it's the german high command.

Speaker 1 They are always doing it. They always want to fight the Battle of Canai.

Speaker 2 And secondly, the reason I think the French have not anticipated this, and nobody has anticipated this, is because this is not an operation that would have been possible in the First World War when you moved so much more slowly.

Speaker 2 It's only really possible because

Speaker 2 your panzers are game changers. They can move so quickly.
They can punch through an enemy line and get around you before you even know it.

Speaker 1 But Gudarian, who they know is in command, has written up this in aktung panzer so why haven't they read it it's hopeless they haven't done your level of research or your brother's level of research i should say um clearly i mean tell you look actually personally aggrieved that the french haven't uh been doing the reading well reading the war in the west my brother's book and listening to episodes on this in uh we have ways his podcast i am left

Speaker 1 you know, kind of stupefied by how hopeless the French are on this. And, you know, and the British are complicit in as well, because they're not pointing it out either.

Speaker 2 No, it's poor from the British. All right, so the date of the invasion was set for the early hours of Friday, the 10th of May, as we've seen.

Speaker 2 When the news broke in Berlin, the mood in Germany was very glum. So in his diary, the American journalist William L.

Speaker 2 Schoer notes there's no crowds on the streets, and the people that he meets seem sunk in depression because they think they're going to lose, you see.

Speaker 2 Now, Hitler at his rock eerie, the Felisennest,

Speaker 2 he is very calm and confident. And he says to his entourage, I think we'll beat France in six weeks.
And then we'll find the British coming to talk to us because they want to save their empire.

Speaker 1 So he's right about one of those prophecies and wrong about the second.

Speaker 2 Right. And actually, as the first reports kind of come into the Rock Erie, his optimism seems very well founded.

Speaker 2 So to begin with, the Low Countries, at half four that morning, the German paratroopers and special forces had begun their operation. They'd been dropped by gliders and things.

Speaker 2 They'd seized the key bridges and forts on the German and Dutch borders.

Speaker 2 By mid-morning, so within hours, the Dutch are falling back to the north and the German tanks are rolling through the fields of Holland.

Speaker 1 And the Dutch have no tanks, but they do have people on bicycles.

Speaker 2 They do, but they're not very useful, as we will find out. Now, the Allies have responded to this very sluggishly.
The French had heard rumours of a murmuring.

Speaker 2 in the German lines a couple of days before, but their commander said, no, there's always murmuring from the Germans, probably a false alarm.

Speaker 2 The Allied commander-in-chief is a Frenchman, of course, because the French have have by far the biggest troop contingent. He is General Maurice Gamelin.

Speaker 2 And he's a very, I think he's a very likable man in many ways, Gamelin. He's kind of jaunty and jolly.
He loves art. He loves philosophy.

Speaker 2 He had been the protégé of our old friend, General Joffre from 1914.

Speaker 1 Oh, yes. Loves a long lunch.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Long lunching.

Speaker 1 And imperturbable, isn't he?

Speaker 2 And imperturbable, right? And Gamelin has completely cut from the same cloth. He He says, listen, what I've learned from Joff is you never lose your cool.
Things will probably be fine.

Speaker 2 Don't overthink anything. You know, it'll be a long war.
Let's not stress about it. The Germans attack.
We shall advance calmly into Belgium to meet them.

Speaker 2 Of course, he doesn't know they're not going to come really through Belgium. So right from the start, the Allies are walking into the Germans' trap.
just as Manstein and Hitler had dreamed.

Speaker 2 Within four and a half days, the Germans have wiped the floor with the Dutch.

Speaker 1 The climax coming on the 14th when the luftwaffe bombed rotterdam and they destroyed the old city of rotterdam a massive story at the time yeah apparently this was a mistake yeah because the dutch had already begun negotiating their surrender that's right and so the orders went out to the bombers you know don't do it but it was too late the bombers had already left and so they you know as they say they obliterate it and actually i mean it works incredibly well for the nazis doesn't it because it again it compounds this sense that there can be no opposition that they are lethal.

Speaker 1 And they have the Stukas, they kind of have a siren, don't they? So that when they drop, this terrifying kind of scream.

Speaker 1 And the whole thing is just, you know, this sense that there is no resisting the Nazi war machine, even though, you know, it is quite an element of smoke and mirrors about it.

Speaker 1 Well, in the case of Rotterdam, a lot of smoke.

Speaker 2 Well, if you think the evasion starts on the 10th of May and what it must have been like.

Speaker 2 to live through the next couple of weeks, even if you're just following events in the newspapers, the sense of growing inevitability, of relentlessness and speed about the German advance.

Speaker 2 So the Dutch surrender four and a half days. The Queen, Wilhelmina, and her ministers escaped to London to become a government in exile.

Speaker 2 The Belgians held out for 18 days, but they too were overwhelmed by sheer weight of numbers and firepower. Interestingly, the Belgian king did not flee his country.

Speaker 2 He had taken personal command of the army and he said, I don't want to desert them. I should stay.
So he stays in Brussels.

Speaker 2 He becomes a prisoner of the Germans and he was painted by the Allied press as a traitor. The mirror, Daily Mirror, ran the headline about him.

Speaker 2 I think a headline that no man wishes to read about himself. The face that every woman now despises.
What's the basis for that contempt?

Speaker 1 I mean, it seems courageous that a commander-in-chief should stand.

Speaker 2 He was seen as a collaborator, and actually the Belgians got rid of him after the war.

Speaker 2 They saw him as tainted because he had not made the gestures of moral defiance, I guess, that King Christian had done in Denmark. Right, I see.

Speaker 2 Okay, you know, I think King Leopold had taken a very different approach. Right.

Speaker 2 So, within three weeks, both Holland and Belgium are under German military occupation, where they will remain for the next five years. But, of course, this isn't where the main action is happening.

Speaker 2 This really is Smoke and Mirrors because the real action for the Germans is happening further south in the Ardennes Forest. And here, you wanted numbers, Tom.

Speaker 2 Now, secretly, while I was talking, I was doing the maths. So, here,

Speaker 2 General von Kleist, because I'm multitasking, he's leading 134,000 soldiers, 1,200 tanks and 500 armoured vehicles through the kind of narrow roads that lead through the Ardennes Forest.

Speaker 1 And this means surely that they are now sitting ducks if the French air force attacks them. Totally.
Because there are only very few roads. They're quite narrow, long tailbacks.

Speaker 2 You know where they are.

Speaker 1 Send the French planes in. But the French don't.

Speaker 2 Yeah. It's very like when, you know, when Putin attacked Ukraine, that huge traffic jam as they were outside Kiev of kind of Russian tanks or whatever.
It's the same story.

Speaker 2 The Germans said at the time, it's the longest traffic jam in history. There's four columns, hundreds of miles long.

Speaker 2 There's tanks, yes, and there's armored cars, but there are wagons and there are horses and there are, you know, lines of troops.

Speaker 1 Because if the French Air Force had gone in, the war would have been over.

Speaker 2 But they didn't. And the Germans know it, right? So the Germans are in a great hurry.
They're told you can't stop for three days and they're issued with amphetamines to keep them going.

Speaker 2 You just have to keep going for three days. Can't stop.

Speaker 2 But after three days, on the afternoon of the 12th of May, they have reached the river Mers, their objective, without having been destroyed from above by the French.

Speaker 2 Now, when they get to the river, this is a crucial moment. If the French can hold them back at the river, then the sickle-cut scheme will have failed.

Speaker 2 But we said before, the Germans are much better at using air power. in tandem with ground troops because the Germans have learned how to do it in Poland.

Speaker 2 The next day, General von von Kleist calls up a thousand planes and they pound the French positions.

Speaker 2 For the French, who of course have not been through the experience of the war in Poland, this is a colossal shock.

Speaker 2 It's the first time they've come under air attack and there are all these stories about their troops sort of cowering in their trenches, sobbing, traumatized, you know, their morale ripped to pieces.

Speaker 2 And so by the evening of the 13th, so remember, we're just three or four days into the invasion, the Germans are already crossing the river on rubber dinghies.

Speaker 2 They're putting together pontoon bridges. The panzers are getting across.
They're still quite vulnerable. You know, they're still vulnerable to a counter-attack.

Speaker 2 But the amazing thing, the French are still so complacent. The commander of their second army was General Charles Untiger.

Speaker 2 And General Untiger is told the Germans are getting across the River Meuse. And he says, brilliant.
All the more prisoners for us.

Speaker 1 And presumably General Gamelin is emulating General Joffre and just sitting around having huge lunches and munching on chickens and things.

Speaker 2 I think there is an element of that. We'll have some amusing French military action of this kind, a bit with an omelette, which is good fun.

Speaker 2 So the next couple of days, things go from bad to worse for the French. They finally decide to launch a counter-attack on the Meuse, but it's half-hearted.
They don't dislodge the Germans.

Speaker 2 They take very heavy losses. And unlike in 1914,

Speaker 2 Their nerve begins to break quite early on. So that night, the 14th, there were reports of French troops streaming westwards in a panic, shouting, we've lost, we've been betrayed, and so on.

Speaker 2 And at their headquarters, their commanders are just completely stunned. They didn't expect the Germans to come through the Ardennes.
They didn't expect them to come in such speed or in such numbers.

Speaker 2 They didn't expect them to get across the river Meurs.

Speaker 2 And now they make another catastrophic mistake. They think now the Germans have got across the Meers.
They will head towards Paris. But they won't.

Speaker 2 They're going to turn sharp right at this point, turn north and race for the channel. This is the sickle-cut element of the plan, which will leave the Allied armies trapped.
And what is worse?

Speaker 2 As the French and the British are trying to react, Eastern France has descended into complete chaos because remembering what happened in the First World War and having read the reports of what happened in Poland, millions, literally millions of civilians say, God, I've got to get out of here.

Speaker 2 And they take to the streets.

Speaker 2 So by this point, we're feeling kind of mid-May 1940, there were probably about 8 million people on the roads of France with their possessions, with wagons, with bicycles, with livestock, you know, crying babies, all of that.

Speaker 2 And that makes it impossible for the French to move their armies around. You know, their communications networks are kind of breaking down, all of this.

Speaker 1 And then the Stukas start dive-bombing the crowds of refugees. So more terror.

Speaker 2 Total carnage.

Speaker 1 You know, a sense sense that these are just implacable opponents who can't be defeated.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Now remember how quickly this has happened.
The invasion began in the early hours of the 10th of May.

Speaker 2 On the 15th of May, so five days later at 7.30 in the morning, Winston Churchill, who's only been Prime Minister for five days, is woken up at home by a phone call from Paul Raynaud.

Speaker 2 And Rayno speaks to him in English. And Raynaud says, we have been defeated.
And Churchill doesn't say anything. And Rayno says again, we are beaten.
We have lost the battle.

Speaker 2 Churchill, surely it can't have happened so soon. But he replied, the front is broken near Sedon.
Sedon is exactly where they'd lost the Franco-Prussian War in 1870.

Speaker 2 So the next afternoon, the 16th, Churchill flies to Paris, and he is shocked when he gets there. They are burning their archives already.
They are preparing to evacuate the city.

Speaker 2 Utter dejection was written on every face.

Speaker 2 And General Gamelin is there. Gamelin says, not only have we taken this defeat defeat at Sedan, but we have actually fallen back a further 60 kilometres.

Speaker 2 The Germans have come 60 kilometres since we last spoke. Churchill says, this very famous exchange, where is your strategic reserve? And Gamelin says, Ekun.

Speaker 2 There isn't any.

Speaker 2 Churchill, why don't you counter-attack? And then Gamelin gives a hopeless shrug of the shoulders and says to him, inferiority of numbers, inferiority of equipment, inferiority of method.

Speaker 2 Gamelin's clearly got to go.

Speaker 1 I mean, the third of those is definitely right. Yeah.
But the first two at the beginning of the war...

Speaker 2 We're not right. Yeah.

Speaker 2 So three days later, on the 19th, Reynaud sacked Gamelin and he replaced him with General Vagon, Maxime Vegon, who is a veteran of the First World War, who is 73 and who has been retired for the last five years.

Speaker 1 Does he by any chance have emphysema?

Speaker 2 It's not the First World War anymore, so maybe not. I don't know.

Speaker 2 Vagon, you know, he's got all these schemes for a great counter-attack, a French counter-attack.

Speaker 2 But by now, I think the Allies are in such chaos that any counter-attack is going to be very, very difficult. The Germans, meanwhile, are rolling on.
They cannot believe how well this is going.

Speaker 2 I mean, even in their wildest dreams, Mannstein and Guderian could not have imagined the Allies would fall apart so quickly.

Speaker 1 And a famous name in command of one of the Panzer divisions, Erwin Rommel.

Speaker 2 Yeah, Erwin Rommel.

Speaker 1 Who will be featuring in due course later on in this story?

Speaker 2 Yes. So on the night of the 19th, you began, Tom, this episode with Churchill broadcasting for the first time to the British people after nine days as Prime Minister.

Speaker 2 That night, the first panzers reached the mouth of the River Somme on the Channel. And by the following night, they'd established themselves on the Channel coast properly.

Speaker 2 So at this point, the sickle cut has been carried off.

Speaker 2 The entire Allied force in Belgium, that's three French armies, it's the shattered remains of the Belgian army and the entire British expeditionary force.

Speaker 2 They are all encircled and surrounded, trapped against the sea in this shrinking pocket.

Speaker 2 And now, you know, if the French and British commanders were in a bit of a state before, they were in an absolute world-class funk. That's the word.
That is the word.

Speaker 2 The French commander in Belgium is General Gaston Henri Billot.

Speaker 2 And when he was told you need to coordinate the Allied response to all this, he burst into tears, which I don't think is ever a good sign in your commanding officer. That's not what you want.

Speaker 2 On the 20th of May, so that's the day the Allies are definitively cut off, the British sent the chief of their Imperial General Staff, Sir Edmund Ironside, to L'Once.

Speaker 1 That is a great name.

Speaker 2 Yeah, you've got to be called that. Good for him.

Speaker 2 So General Ironside is sent to Lance to see Bilotte and to find out what's going on. And Ironside said later, I found him in a state of complete depression.

Speaker 2 No plan, no thought of a plan, ready to be slaughtered. I lost my temper and shook Bilotte by the button of his tunic.
The man is completely beaten.

Speaker 2 So the next day, I promised you an omelette, the next day is the 21st of May, General Weigon, a new French supreme commander, decided to visit Bilot personally to steady his nerve.

Speaker 2 And he flew to a place called Betune on the Franco-Belgian border. Vagon got there.
He finds the airfield completely deserted. There's just a single soldier.

Speaker 2 And Vagon has to persuade the soldier to give him a lift to the local post office. And there he finally managed to ring Bilotte and said, send a car.
Like, I'm General Vagon.

Speaker 2 I'm the Supreme Commander.

Speaker 2 Send a car and get get me a car arrived Vagon got in the car and he said I need lunch like let's go and have omelettes he went for an omelette then he went and met Billot at Ypres town hall I mean talk about a place with a lot of history and Vagon said come on we've got a counter-attack like we've got to break out counter-attack whatever Bilot said fine Billot drove off his car immediately got involved in a massive car crash Bilot was badly injured, fell into a coma.

Speaker 2 Two days later, he died. And that was the end of him.
Do you know what the British Expeditionary Forces Chief of Staff, Sir Henry Pownall, he mourned General Billott? What did he say?

Speaker 2 He said, frankly, he's no loss.

Speaker 1 I mean, it's harsh, but it's not inaccurate.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 So Hitler's attack has been unfolding now. Less than two weeks.
Insane.

Speaker 1 So actually, it's going better than Hitler had said.

Speaker 2 Than even Hitler had said.

Speaker 1 Because he'd prophesied it would take six weeks, right? And already by two weeks, it's clear he's won.

Speaker 2 He's been going on for like 11 days or something. And it's pretty clear that the Allies have collapsed exactly.

Speaker 2 The amazing thing, I mean, he's this man who has gambled and gambled again and again, each one bigger and more ambitious and more reckless than the last.

Speaker 2 And this one is going to work out better than any of them. The Allies have completely fallen apart.
Their commanders aren't speaking to each other.

Speaker 2 Raynaud and his ministers are preparing to flee Paris. Surely France is beaten.
The entire British expeditionary force, 400,000 men are trapped in this pocket against the channel.

Speaker 2 The panzers panzers are closing in on the channel ports of Boulogne, Calais and Dunkirk. Surely within days, Hitler's tanks will finish the job and then Britain will be forced to sue for peace.

Speaker 2 Or Dominic,

Speaker 1 will Britain be forced to sue for peace?

Speaker 2 We will find out.

Speaker 1 In our next two episodes to come on the series, The Miracle of Dunkirk, The Fall of France, The Battle of Britain, and in the long run, Hitler's decision to turn on the Soviet Union.

Speaker 1 And members of the Rest is History Club can hear the next two episodes right now. And if you want to join them, go to therestishory.com.
But for now, thank you for listening.

Speaker 1 Thank you, Dominic, and au voir.

Speaker 2 Auvoir.

Speaker 1 Throughout time, celebration has meant giving. So the Romans at Saturnalia handed out all kinds of gifts.
The three Magi handed out gold, frankincense, and myrrh.

Speaker 1 And the Victorians absolutely loved wrapping things up in paper and then tying it up in string.

Speaker 2 Don't those are lovely gestures, but I wonder if they're a little bit too extravagant for the typical Christmas morning. So this year, here's my suggestion to our listeners and our viewers.

Speaker 2 Why not give something a little bit more enlightened? Why not give the gift of the Restis History Club membership? It's the discerning choice for anybody who prefers a Hannibal to a hamper.

Speaker 1 It's ad-free listening. You get a weekly bonus episode.
You get early access to live shows and you get exclusive deep dive series.

Speaker 2 Also, on top of that, this year's special gift edition. of Restis History Club membership comes with a sensational exclusive t-shirt.

Speaker 2 It will make you the envy of all your neighbors and all the cool people in your neighborhood if such people exist will admire you and want to spend more time with you so just head to therestishistory.com and click on gifts that is theresthistory.com and please click on gifts

Speaker 7 Hello there, I'm William Drimple. I am one of the hosts of Empire, the global history podcast from Goalhanger.

Speaker 7 You may remember my appearances on The Wrestler's History when we talked about Afghanistan and the East India Company.

Speaker 7 As the Ashes return down under, Anita Annan and I have launched a brand new Empire series on the history, politics and extraordinary cultural power of cricket.

Speaker 7 In the first episode, we dig into the origin of the ashes, England versus Australia, a rivalry born in the Age of Empires, and still shaping identity on both sides of the world.

Speaker 7 Then we traveled to India, where cricket began with an impromptu beach match and evolved into a sport that mirrored and sometimes magnified the country's communal divides.

Speaker 7 We also talk about the great Tiger Batordi who revolutionized Indian cricket in the 1960s.

Speaker 7 And for members of the Empire Club, we go still further from the great West Indian players who stood up to racism to the South African cricketers who challenged apartheid at real personal risk.

Speaker 7 If you want the full sweep of how cricket changed empires and how empires change cricket, just search for Empire wherever you get your podcast.