British Sea Power, Canadian Riots, & Japanese Death Rockets

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Charlie Sheen is an icon of decadence.

I lit the fuse and my life turns into everything it wasn't supposed to be.

He's going the distance.

He was the highest paid TV star of all time.

When it started to change, it was quick.

He kept saying, no, no, no, I'm in the hospital now, but next week I'll be ready for the show.

No.

Charlie's sober.

He's going to tell you the truth.

How do I present this with any class?

I think we're past that, Charlie.

We're past that, yeah.

Somebody call action.

Aka Charlie Sheen, only on Netflix, September 10th.

Aktung, Aktung.

Welcome to We Have Ways of Making You Talk with me, Al Murray and James Holland, your Second World War podcast for all your second World War needs.

Now, this is one of our war waffle chats, isn't it, Jim?

And we we don't do that often these days.

There's lots to catch up about because we've been on our travels.

We've been reading, haven't we?

Yeah, reading a lot.

You've been to Italy.

I've been to Italy.

So I've gone all navy.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You've been reading Nan Rogers, haven't you?

Yeah, yeah, it's amazing.

It's an amazing book.

He is the doyen of the historian of the Royal Navy, isn't he?

Yeah, but what an undertaking.

A two-volume history of British naval power covering the last three centuries.

I mean, I recommend it to anyone.

Yes.

It's the most extraordinary thing, and it's set off lots of deep thoughts, Jim.

But we'll get to those in a bit.

And then the other thing I've been reading is the sketches for the Enter Show.

Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah.

They're just really funny, aren't they?

I haven't read the Roma ones yet.

No, I want to spill any beans.

Yeah, it's just too, too funny.

Yes, and the reason why I thought I was going to be late is because I've been putting stencils onto the Jeep all afternoon with Marcus.

Oh, tell us all about it.

It's looking great, and it's now anglified, which I'm very happy about.

Ah, brilliant.

So it's got side lights rather than an American ones.

They have a lone big lamp on the left-hand fender or the driver's seat.

Right.

But the British ones had two little side lights on the fender.

So we've put those on.

And just the star is now pointing away rather than two.

Right.

It's got the figure.

This is a weird figure of eight for the 21st Army Group.

And then it's got the actual 21st Army Group badge on it.

But the black base is down.

So I've now got to do the next one when it properly dries out.

So it's all very exciting.

It's looking really cool.

TAC HQ markings, essentially.

21st Army Group.

TAC HQ.

Oh,

Imagine.

So when you and I go to Normandy in a couple of weeks,

we can beefer around pretending we're Carol Mather and

someone else.

Yes, we can.

I was looking at Robin Nealon's book about Normandy.

He was such a good bloke.

Was he?

Fascinating bloke.

There's the bit about the phase lines and the actual conversation about the phase lines, which is basically just put them where you want.

They don't matter.

No, they don't matter.

That's the whole thing.

Monty saying that.

It's not Mather, but it's Kit Dornay.

And his account is Monty saying, oh they're not important you know that just put them on that they don't mean anything everyone knows that except amar bradley yeah so it's the 7th of april eight weeks before d-day dornay says where the phase line should be drawn between d-day and d day plus 90.

monty replied where does the medikit draw them where you like shall i draw them equally sir said tommy yes that'll do replied monty

Well, I think that that proves my point, doesn't it?

That it's very much just a guideline.

Yeah, the guidelines.

They're for logistics people.

Yeah.

Nothing more.

Nothing more.

Nothing guys.

So you've been in Italy.

Yes.

And, you know, inevitably, whenever you walk the ground, you always have different thoughts and different things occur to you.

I suppose one of the things that really, really occurred to me was, you know, just so much was expected of these young men.

I mean, we were there in kind of sort of, you know, May, it was beautiful and lovely and sunny.

And you could look from Monte Damiano over where 5th Division were crossing towards the Minterno Ridge.

You could see it.

There was your Senti Valley, you know, where they were up against 94th Division.

You know, you could see the whole thing.

It was all laid out.

And he just thought, God, you know, this is one thing seeing this in summer, but quite another doing this in January.

Yeah.

The rain pelting down, the kind of, you know, the river in spate, as they say, you know, mud on the ground, mines everywhere at night.

Yeah.

Looking again at John Strick, who was this guy who did this patrol into Castle 40 and kind of, you know, guy behind him hit a mine and he got flown eight feet into the air.

And the guy behind him who triggered the mine lost a foot and broke both legs.

And his sergeant went missing and

they heard some shooting and never recovered him.

So I thought, right, I'm going to, that was Sergeant Murphy.

I thought, oh, I'm going to go and visit Sergeant Murphy's grave.

So we did in the Minterno Cemetery.

And for once, it was, you know, the lawn was immaculate, you know, the umbrella pines were immaculate, the sun was shining, the sky was azure blue, all the rest of it.

The gravestones looked a little bit sort of down at heel.

It was a bit weathered.

It was a bit unloved.

And I think that's because it was kind of, what was it, kind of east-facing, north-east-facing, something like that.

Anyway, it looked a little bit sad.

I found Murphy's grave, and there he was.

So he'd obviously, you know, he had been shot and killed, and his body later recovered.

And then I was thinking about David Cole, and I was thinking about him trying to struggle across the Garrelliano.

And, you know, he's the first radio operator gets killed.

He has to kind of prize the radio off.

And then they get across the river eventually.

And they have to go through the minefields.

And then they kind of, you know, reach the kind of basically the foot of the Minterno Ridge.

And they've got to climb up.

Another shell comes in, and he's covered in blood.

And it's the adjutant that he's just been talking to a minute ago is now bits.

And then he looks at the replacement signaller, you know, the guy with the radio pack, and his whole front of his face has just been shorn off.

And he's got to prize the, you know, the radio off that.

And then he's sort of got to carry on.

And this is a guy who's kind of, you know, just never would have been in uniform had it not been for the war, you know, studying history at Cambridge when he decides he ought to do his bit.

No, he's a sort of gentle, nice, bookish type with round glasses and a rather feeble moustache.

Yeah.

You know, what are these people doing?

Yeah.

Scrambling over minefields in the middle of the night.

You know, the only illumination coming from star shells and flares and things and, you know, explosions.

How can you possibly make sense of this?

And, you know, I'm struck more and more that these people are no different from you or I or as we were at that age.

Yeah.

You know, they have the same thoughts, the same worries, anxieties.

It's just in a world that is fundamentally different, but has many similarities as well.

But the emotions of thoughts are the same.

You know, it's devastating, really.

I find the whole thing really upsetting, actually, this time.

Yeah.

I mean, usually you feel a bit kind of sad when you go into a cemetery.

But you don't feel depressed.

I feel depressed about it.

Well, but do you think that's because one of the things that's the shifting perspective now is that because there are wars going on, it's not 80 years ago anymore.

It's happening right this minute and it's happening, as you say, to people just like you and me.

Yeah, yeah, I think that's exactly what it is.

Kind of, it does, it does feel a little bit of sleepwalking.

And, you know.

I I mean the thing is though that I keep coming back to more and more, particularly when you talk about American soldiers in Italy fighting this war, the president that has sentenced this war was elected on an isolationist ticket only a couple of years before.

And here they are doing it in some of the reading I'm going to do.

Just some of the parallels at the end of the First World War and the end of the Second World War are very interesting.

At the end of the First World War, German opinion attempts to pivot to blaming the government, right?

And they succeed in doing that, exonerating their generals and the civilians in the end going, well, actually, we're victims of this entire process.

We didn't, it's nothing to do with our country or our government's aggression.

In the stuff we've looked at at the end of the Second World War, there is a definite attempt to do that ripple again, isn't there?

You look at Germans very, very quickly talking about, well, we were bombed horribly and, you know, and Yodel getting up at Rams and saying, no one's been through anything worse than us, by the way.

The things that have been demanded of the German people and done of the German people exceed anyone else's suffering.

So, you know, we hope you're going to be kind to us.

In other words, we're going back to our standard thing.

And the generals are also after the war saying, it's all Hitler being being useless and undermining us.

It's exactly the same thing.

It's the generals at the end of the First World War saying, the government undermined us.

And if we'd been allowed to fight the war properly, we'd have won it.

You know how you always say history doesn't repeat itself.

There are patterns of human behavior that repeat themselves.

In German culture, the end of both of those wars, there's a concerted effort to do the same thing.

For the masses to distance themselves from the hierarchy.

Exactly.

And then the soldiers to go, well, you know, if only we'd not been let down by the politicians.

Yeah.

It's all Hitler's fault.

Exactly.

Exactly.

And, you know, you immediately after the war, you get, you know, Little Hart talking to them all and publishing their book, The Other Side of the Hill, where they're all going, well, you know, if only Adolf had let us do Barbarossa our way, everything we'd have beaten the Soviets.

And of course, Little Hart is into these guys because they're panzer people who he used to like before the war, particularly, you know, and feels himself part of that kind of conversation.

How powerful that is as a historiographical idea.

It's embarrassing reading now, I think.

Yes, but it's rinse repeat for the end of the First World War.

That's what I'm so struck by.

But the other thing is, America's isolationist posture after the First World War.

It's not just, so you've got two things happen at once.

Wilson has his stroke when he's at Versailles, and then Congress won't back the Versailles Treaty, won't back the League of Nations, right?

That obviously means from then on, no one trusts the Americans anymore in diplomatic terms anyway.

Isolationist or not, no one trusts them in Europe because they've created this situation where they want self-determination and they've run away from it.

They've told Europe to redraw itself so that Americans don't have to get involved again and then basically refuse to back it.

Which is what makes NATO so significant in the years that follow the Second World War, is that the Europeans, the Americans know

that they've got to bind themselves to Europe to prevent this happening again, which is fascinating because there's no appetite at the end of the First World War.

No, there's a huge resentment at big business being the kind of sort of blood butchers.

Yeah, the British tricking America into the war and all this sort of stuff.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, all that.

Yeah.

Because there's tons.

I mean, I think the thing really got to remember is there's an awful lot of, there's a core body of American opinion that doesn't like Britain, that hates the British Empire, that has no appetite for it at all, and sees the First World War as our decadent former enemy needing rescuing.

So you can see all the recurrents that lead to, even when it's obvious what the Second World War amounts to in 1939, 1940, what's actually going on in Europe, and particularly after the strategic earthquake, that Roosevelt runs an isolationist ticket after the fall of France is absolutely amazing.

And it's even more incredible that three years later, there are people fighting.

Yes, and how well they've coalitioned with Britain.

I mean, it's just amazing, really.

It's absolutely incredible.

You know, because after all, you look at how actually how quickly things can change in modern politics, how quickly opinions can shift, how quickly the pendulum can swing against people.

If nothing else, we still don't know in the end which way America might jump in a whole load of options right now.

It's adopted an isolationist posture, but who's to say that that's the one it's going to stick with?

Because after all, look at

threatens Iran with war, yeah.

Well, exactly.

Exactly.

That's exactly my point, right?

And that, again,

it just makes all the stuff we've ever talked about all the more amazing.

And even the Americans fighting at the other end of the Pacific, there's their peculiar business in the late 30s where there are people in the Royal Navy saying it would be really great if the Americans would use Singapore as a harbor rather than Pearl Harbor.

That would be great.

And the American Navy going, you could forget it.

Even though, actually, in the strategic picture, if there's going to be a war with Japan, Singapore is a much better option for the Americans.

Much easier to protect the Philippines.

Because the problem with Pearl Harbor is how far away it is from America's actual interests.

It's thousands of miles from the Philippines rather than hundreds like Singapore.

But no one can agree on anything

in the American Navy in the interwar period.

Just so interesting, you know, how the different governments basically say, we're not getting involved again.

Although American money's in Europe, so American money isn't being isolationist.

They're trying to do it through capital rather than through security.

You know, there's elements in the U.S.

Navy who are basically...

As long as they can keep the British Navy down by limiting the numbers of ships, the better.

That's their win in the interwar years.

I mean, we were talking about this before we came on.

i've been reading price of victory by nam roger what's interesting is this there's the 19th century stuff there's basically not much other naval history in it but once you get to the mid 20th century the thing i was struck by more than anything else reading this in the 1930s 1920s and 1930s there's this endless diplomatic arm wrestling about how many ships you can build what speed they can go how they can be armed what their endurance is and all this sort of stuff right the americans can't make a torpedo which is why they opt for dive bombing they can't make a torpedo that works.

That's what drives them to dive bombing.

That's still a big problem for the US Navy submarines in the Pacific until 1944, I think.

And they've got these concepts of battle and the way that the idea is you have a big battle and defeat the other Navy and then carry on.

Even though the First World War has shown that that isn't really going to happen because Jutland, it's essentially inconclusive, right?

So there's all these treaties limiting battleship numbers.

1945, the atomic bomb, no one talks about limiting navies after that.

It's gone.

Yeah.

Isn't it?

You know, the massive shifts in the way the world works, that's one of them.

And obviously, naval power is still incredibly important because the world operates on maritime trade, right?

But it still is.

And it still is, but navies aren't how you calculate that anymore.

One of the points he makes that's absolutely fascinating.

As they go into the war, the American Navy and the American Army basically despise one another.

And there are periods during the war where the Navy refuses in the Pacific to share intelligence with the American Army.

It won't do it.

That's amazing, isn't it?

Whatever tensions between the British and Americans, the tensions within the American service establishment is completely crazy, right?

The things they won't do for each other, they're arguing over who should patrol the sea.

You know, should it be the US Army Air Force or should it be the US Navy?

Who does that job belong to?

And they can't agree.

And a big part of the bomber craze, the bomber people, is because they're trying to find a way to beat the Navy at their own game.

The flying people in the army who despise the Navy and are trying to find a way to snooker the Navy strategically.

And that's why they get so stuck into bombing as what the Air Force can do to win a war.

Because after all, the other thing that's that, you know, the British say it's the blockade that won the First World War.

The Royal Navy's saying that.

Everyone sort of agrees on that.

But after the First World War, no one wants to spend money on warships.

So whatever war you're going to fight next, you're not going to be able to win it with the blockade because no one wants to build ships and ships are totemic of the First World War.

But the British Navy is still the largest in 1939.

Well, and he makes a very interesting point about rearmament, where he says, you know, look at the state of the Royal Navy, you know, and its projects and what it's doing.

Ultimately, a navy that was outbuilding its potential friends and foes alike and rigging the system of global naval arms control for its own strategic purposes cannot be described as being in a state of decline.

That's very on message, isn't it?

I mean, I would agree with that entirely.

When you look at Plan Z in 1940, just absolutely love this, what the Germans plan to build.

And what they're planning to build.

Well, in 1939, it envisages 10 super battleships, eight aircraft carriers, 15 armoured ships, as they call them, which is the pocket battleships, or whatever you want to call them.

Yep.

Five heavy and 24 light cruisers, 68 destroyers and 249 U-boats, right?

And then in 1940, it's expanded to 80 battleships, 15 to 20 carriers, 100 cruisers, 500 submarines, right?

Yeah.

It's absolutely amazing.

And Halder says, these people dream incontinents.

It's just impossible.

You know, the 1939 plan requires 6 million tons of fuel oil and 2 million tons of diesel.

Although Germany's total consumption of all minion mineral oils is just over 6 million tonnes a year, less than half of that for domestic production.

It's total fantasy, isn't it?

It's a complete fantasy.

Whereas what they should have done, of course, is just build lots of U-boats.

Yeah, yeah, but within the Kriegsmarine opinion is it's the U-boats that lost Germany the First World War because when they went to unrestricted submarine warfare, it brought the Americans in.

So naval people, raider, those people, they don't believe in using U-boats.

They hate it.

And that's why they haven't built up a large U-boat for them.

Yeah.

And also that surface ships would be much more effective against convoys, which they would be if the Germans were prepared to engage them.

But they don't feel they've got a critical mass to do anything decisive in that way.

So they end up hiding them and, you know, not bringing them to battle.

Absolutely fascinating.

Isn't it?

But by the end of the war, air has completely supplanted naval power as your way of extending your, you know, of delivering force abroad.

And the air people, you can argue that the air people have won through the atomic bomb and through your super fortresses or whatever they've won and they've won the war and defeated naval power and from an REF that in the in-between war years doesn't really know what it wants it's Balden who gets RDF development going and one of the really interesting things that Roger says is that the BBC were told to develop their technology on the within the same frequency wavelengths and stuff as RDF as radar so that lo and behold they were working in the same essentially in the same field of you know electromagnetism and all that sort of stuff signal transmission so that there was was a cross-fertilization in the technology, and that their breakthroughs would then belong to the radar.

Well, that seems to me incredibly sensible.

Yeah, but that's Baldwin.

You know, that's not even Chamberlain.

You know, that's an even earlier sort of piece of prescience.

And he says, you know, the REF's terrified everyone with the prospect of bombers.

In trying to get their own bombers, they've scared the shit out of everyone about enemy bombers.

The bomb will always get through.

Because they know there's only so much money to go around.

They've resisted having proper fighters.

And it's the government that insists on ordering fighters because the REF doesn't want them.

The REF wants bombers because they want attack weapons, not defensive weapons, which is what fighters are.

They want an aggressive posture because Trenchard's whole thing is attack, not defense.

I mean, you know, you've got to weigh this all with everything else, but he's just so interesting.

If you view it all completely from a naval perspective, it all ends up looking quite different.

He's also a long Second World War guy that, you know, it starts in 1937 in China and ends in China in 49 with the end of the Chinese Civil War.

He says the longest army confrontation is Japanese-Chinese military confrontation of the whole conflict.

Yeah, I suppose it is.

12 years.

Exactly.

And the Japanese spend a long time trying to keep the Americans out of it and then can't help themselves and draw the Americans in because they're running out of road.

It's after all, the last half or whatever, depending on when you'd regard the Japanese war having started, it's at least the last quarter of their war rather than, you know, all of the American war.

Anyway, it's just looking at it through this naval prism and looking at the British, because they win the war and win the First World War, and there's all this demand to regulate the amount of shipping built, because basically everyone wants to not have to build ships because they're really, really expensive.

Everyone's trying to avoid it.

So that's all I've a mutual pattern, not to build any.

Yeah, exactly.

And the American Navy are able to sell that to Congress.

The American, just as long as the British aren't building battleships, brilliant.

That suits them because they hate the variable navy.

And the Congress are great, great, we haven't got to spend money on European entanglements.

It's just...

So fascinating, the sort of swirl of it all.

And then the other great thing is how much he loves the swordfish,

the string bag.

Well, you know, Roland, our friend Roland White, he's

doing Taranto next.

Oh, brilliant.

Yeah, and he's getting really, really into it in only a way that Roland can.

So that's exciting.

I mean, naval power clearly holds the key to the entire Second World War.

I mean, if you argue that

the Atlantic, the war in the Atlantic is the most important theater of the entire Second World War, then clearly it is.

You're a naval man.

And then just look at the Pacific.

You know, impossible without.

None of the Allied offensives are possible without our naval power.

That's the truth of it.

Also, his stuff about the Pacific Fleet is absolutely fascinating.

That they have to develop this fleet train thing, that they've got to come up with a way of a fleet, you know, keeping itself going

without a proper base.

How do you do it?

In the 30s, they were looking to develop a fleet train method out of Singapore, and then, of course, they can't.

And the real problem is where do you repair your ships?

There's one dry dock in Sydney at the start of the war that's big enough to take a smaller battleship or a cruise or whatever, but they have to build another dry dock in Sydney.

And that's still thousands of miles from anywhere.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, the distances are truly enormous.

Yeah, yeah.

I was sort of thinking about this earlier on today, actually.

The question was, how much was, you know, did Hitler, his military ineptitude, help us to win the war?

It was like, yeah, he definitely did on one level.

Well, on the other hand, he was the idiot who kept saying, no, we can't surrender, even when clearly they weren't going to win.

So it sort of cuts both ways, that whole kind of Hitler kind of advantage, disadvantage debate.

But the Nursing thinking you know could could the allies have won the war you know this is the thing could they have won by christmas yeah they could the only thing that was holding them back was not enough assault shipping yeah you know and if you think they've built you know what is it 8 713 assault craft between may 1942 and april 1943 that is their main concentrated effort the americans concentrated effort of building assault shipping They are still making it, but they've then got to build more liberty ships and they've got to build more warships and, you know, so the British.

You know, so there just isn't enough.

There's not enough because you would have landed in the southern France at the the same time as Overlord, you know, D-Day.

You know, you would have wrapped up Italy quicker because you could have easily outflanked it.

Well, and without the war in the Pacific, that's all completely possible.

Without the war in the Pacific, you would just wrapped up Europe so much quicker.

And, you know, it would have been over by Christmas.

So actually, everything about the Second World War hinges on naval power and shipping and supplies of shipping and how long it takes to get from A to B and how many assault craft you've got and how many landing ships you've got.

Landing ships are the most important thing of all.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And there's never enough.

there's only and you know even at the height of the pacific war there's only something like 148 landing ships sounds like a hell of a lot and it is a hell of a lot on one level on another level it's just not enough it's just not enough yeah what you want to do and of course the moment you get more you then your strategy then becomes more ambitious and you think okay well we'll do this we'll we'll do the philippines and we'll do pelaliu yeah yeah you know but as as my friend aaron young is is discovering the whole point about pelealu is to help the philippines you know it's another staging post it you know it absolutely is vital yeah should we take a quick break and then, well, just keep going because this is all great fun.

We hope you're enjoying this conversation as much as we are.

We'll see you in a second.

Welcome back to We Have Ways of Making You Talk with me, Al Murray and James Holliday.

I almost forgot who it was.

I was so much to say.

Well, and I think it's fair to say that if we weren't talking about this on a recorded podcast, we would be in a pub talking about it.

That's absolutely right.

There's a really great little anecdote because Fraser obviously is running the British Pacific Fleet.

Yeah, Bruce Fraser, yeah.

Yeah, Bruce Fraser, who's such a dude.

And his whole thing, he says, from a national point of view, it was of the utmost importance that the British fleet should engage in the most modern type of naval warfare yet evolved and to do so by fighting in company with its originators and prime exponents.

In no other way could we have learned the technical lessons which this type of warfare teaches.

He's saying there's the stuff to learn that we have to learn as a navy.

We can only learn on this job.

And then he says, finally, from a point of view of national prestige, it's been of the utmost importance that our Dominion should see the British Navy engaged, if not in equal numbers, at least on an equal footing, with the American forces in the Pacific.

And it would have been disastrous from this point of view if the British Pacific Fleet, after being sent to the Pacific, have been relegated as the Australians consider their own forces to have been relegated to a back area.

It's really, really interesting.

In political importance of the being present.

At Okinawa, at the end.

Yeah.

And yet, naval power is about to like be degraded.

And you kind of think of those images of the atomic bomb tests with those rings of old battleships being destroyed, you know, a bikini atoll or whatever, by the atomic bomb.

It's like symbolic.

I mean, it's not symbolic.

It's literally happening.

And they were being eclipsed by the atomic age.

It's right there.

Anyway, he tells a funny story as well about where they finally get their water distilling ship out to the Pacific.

But the water distilling ship runs on coal, so it has to have a collier moored to it alongside it.

And basically, the collier supplies the distilling ship and the collier needs water.

So they basically just feed each other.

No water gets to anyone else, basically.

Because

they're adapting to a kind of warfare they just haven't haven't considered.

That's just amazing.

So

is he arguing that naval power is redundant now?

I mean, surely not.

No, it's sheer strategic importance of how you held the balance of power, which is what it was always for, is not disappeared, but has been relegated.

Questions then become of mutually assured destruction in terms of the security of the world.

You know, all those relentless treaties, all that relentless bargaining.

I mean, in a way, it's a lot like strategic arms limitation talks, but it's battleships.

And when you can consider the difference, you know, in consequence of the battleships and how many cruise missiles you can have in Germany, it's just a completely different ballpark.

The shift that the atomic age brings in that regard in what strategic power is, how you can use it, and all that sort of stuff.

And it's the air people have won.

You know, you look at it now, you know, like Israel attacking Iran.

It's the air power.

Obviously,

you can't send cruisers to Tehran, can you?

Or battleships.

No, no, no.

And yet, of course, the Duncan Sands white paper, you know, relegated air power in favor of the Navy.

Yeah, I know.

You know, it's fascinating.

But they're now having an air capability for nuclear weapons again, aren't they?

That's what they're looking into.

Anyway, should we talk about July thereabouts in 1945?

Why not?

JR has assembled us an excellent set of events and things to talk about.

So it's the Battle of Balak Papan on the 1st of July, which is why we touched on the Aussies there that, you know, as as Bruce Faze saw it, relegated to the backyard, Australian and a small force of Dutch troops make an amphibious landing a few miles north of Balik Papan in Borneo as part of Operation Oboe to liberate Dutch and British Borneo from Japanese forces.

Amazing, isn't it?

The Japanese still fighting on these islands.

I mean, yeah, yeah.

Well, and that we're helping the Dutch Empire out.

You know, these are the parts of the world that after the war, you end up with Japanese soldiers, don't you, working against nationalists and insurrectionists, whoever's trying to hang on to their independence post-war.

There's very, very peculiar sort of twists in late 1945.

Then you get good news for everyone in Germany.

On the 1st of July, the inner German border is established as the boundary between the Western and Soviet occupations of Germany, and British forces formally withdraw from Magdeburg as it's part of the Soviet zone of occupation.

Ever been to Magdeburg?

I have not been to Magdeburg.

Have you?

Yes, I have, and I remember buying a pair of Adidas running shorts from there.

Which, of course, Adidas being a German firm.

So it was all entirely appropriate.

Absolutely.

No, I've not enough.

It's where, of course, Hitler's remains were having been disinterred.

Tossed into the river.

Tossed into the, not into the Elba, but a tribute to the Elba at Magdeburg.

I'll tell you what, after those episodes, I had a couple of very, very entertaining crackpots telling me that

there's one guy who was saying, well, you know, you know Hitler's nephew lived in New York State.

I said, yeah, I know.

Oh no, I saw that.

I just thought, resist the urge.

Don't get involved.

Al's doing it.

And he said, it's no coincidence he lived half away from a top secret nuclear research plant.

And I just said to him, where where he lived and how far from that place doesn't put Hitler's brains back in his skull, mate.

Honestly, how can people believe this?

How can people believe it?

And he said that the Americans had especially rescued Hitler in return for the atom secrets he had given them.

Right.

Yeah.

I mean, Hitler was many things, but an atomic scientist, he was not.

I think that's fairly safe to say.

How can people just believe this nonsense?

Well, and then eventually what happens, he started going, you know, these are the narratives that are foisted on us in order to get us to think this, that, and the other.

And you're just waiting for him to blame it on the Jews, basically.

You're just waiting.

It's absolutely.

You know, why do you need Hitler to be alive?

Why do you need him to be alive?

Yeah.

What does it demonstrate?

Does it show that he was

flawed after all if he doesn't escape?

You know what I mean?

I literally don't understand why anyone would think it.

But then I also, I don't understand why people would be against vaccines.

I mean, you know, last time I checked, you know, infant paralysis from Podo Podo was checked by vaccines.

So what's the big beef against vaccines?

They seem great to me.

Why would you feel the need to kind of believe in some crackpot theory, which has no basis on anything?

I mean, answers on a postcard, please.

I'm sure.

Answers on a postcard.

Someone's going to let us know.

Anyway, back to Magdeburg.

Oh,

dear.

Yeah.

Brilliant.

Anyway, so on the 3rd of July, James Jimmy Burns becomes U.S.

Secretary of State.

Of course, he was one of the people who was absolutely shoo-in for being Veep

Vice President in

nominated for vice president in July 1944 and then wasn't.

Yes.

And that was because of his sightly sort of fraught relationship with the South and America.

He was a kind of dyspeptic guy, wasn't he?

He quite capable of being quite vinegary, right?

Yes, he was a bit vinegary, but he was also, he could also be very charming and he was also very clever.

And actually, he was quite, he wasn't, he didn't do a bad job as secretary of state it's just that marshall was better yes it is interesting because i mean it's him that frames the reply to the japanese uh makusatsu you know where he says this is what we want japan to do actually it's his drafting that gives the emperor the out so he's he's no fool sort of in some ways he's one of his problems is he's cleverer than everyone else and he sort of knows it i think that's part of jimmy burns' character isn't it yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah also what's going on on the moment 4th of july 500 canadian troops riot in aldershot That's because they've been delayed in being sent home, but it might also just be because they're in Aldershot.

So Wednesday in Aldershot, that's what we're talking about here.

I mean, those who know and love Aldershot will probably not raise an eyebrow at that at all.

But if you're a Canadian who came here in 1940, right?

The war's over.

It's a long, long time.

The war's over, right?

You're thinking, you're looking at your watch, aren't you?

And you're also anxious that you're not going to get sent to the Pacific, right?

Sent to fight in Japan.

The Americans accept a division of Canadian troops, don't they, who are going to fight an American kit with American gear and American uniforms.

MacArthur will only let Canadians fight if they're

like the way the French do it, you know.

Well, it's also good because, you know, when the photos are taken, you know, everyone can just seem they're Americans.

On the subject of which, on the 5th of July, Big Mac MacArthur, Douglas MacArthur, announces the liberation of the Philippines.

Yeah.

And it's the day of the general election.

The first British general election in 10 years.

Which I think is, when you think of it like that, it's quite different, isn't it?

You could see after 10 years why you might get a swing against the status quo, whatever it was, can't you?

I was in um up in Scotland last week, and I was doing a thing with Andrew Moore about the wartime generation, and he started talking about the khaki election.

And he was saying, you know, what you've got to remember is that you know, Churchill was really unpopular with lots and lots of people.

And I really want to say, don't you think Churchill was popular, it was the Conservatives were unpopular, yeah, but I didn't really feel I could I could weigh in a bit, but I didn't want to get into a kind of you know political argument with the former BBC political correspondent.

Oh, no.

Well, it was just, it wasn't one of those.

It wasn't one of those kind of events, really.

John Curtin, the Australian PM, he dies in office and succeeded in the interview by Frank Ford, but only for one week because Ford

lost a party leadership ballot.

So he was the shortest serving PM in Australian history.

Liz Truss is an amateur, ladies and gentlemen.

Beaten by an Australian.

How much she feel?

Frank Ford there, holding the record for a week.

Yeah.

I mean, this is one of the things, though, in Australian politics, because Curtin's been not well towards the end of of the war.

There is this sort of lack of grip from the Australian government, and they're feeling very, very bruised about essentially being sidelined by MacArthur and his plans for.

We put you up, we look after you, we give you tea every night.

Yeah.

We don't want your soldiers.

He just wants it to all be American, doesn't he?

Yeah.

Then, on July the 7th, good news for fans of rocket-propelled gliders.

Some of you may have watched our WW2 headquarters video about the ME-163 comet.

Well, the Japanese didn't want to miss out on the thrills and spills on offer to them of a glider powered by T-Stoff, organic reactive material.

It's the Mitsubishi J8M.

And to be fair, it looks exactly like a comet.

Yeah, it's basically the same thing, isn't it?

It literally means autumn water.

Oh, that's nice.

Because words have different meanings in Japan, it can also mean sharpsword.

Oh, well, that's all right then.

Phew, they turned that around, didn't they?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, as you say, Jim, this is a like, it looks the same.

It is the same, really.

They only build seven.

They're offing their pilots anyway, but they don't need this to help.

It's got a range of two minutes, 30 seconds of power left.

And a range of seven minutes.

I mean, the thing is, there's little enough meaningful Axis cooperation, isn't there?

Particularly between Germany and Japan.

You know, there is between Germany and Italy, but in a kind of like Germans always think, oh, for Christ's sake, who have we got ourselves settled with here?

But there's very little meaningful stuff between Japan and Germany.

But there's this odd technological exchange, isn't there?

So there's this, don't they ship a tiger tank essentially to the Japanese kind of in part?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Something like that.

Or they try to.

I mean, it's all very helpful because I'm sure

Japan's going to be in a position to make lots of tiger tanks.

I mean,

holy moly.

I'll see bumpers.

Anyway, so that has its first try.

It doesn't go very well for the pilot.

Oh, God.

No, no.

I mean, it's this is just like the comet.

It gets 13,000 feet.

The engine stalls, yeah.

Pilot manages to glide it bad, but of course, because it's made of hydrogen peroxide, or whatever the fuel is hydrogen peroxide, then catches fire as he crash lands and he dies the next day.

Yeah.

So we'll just put it on hold until we can sort out and make some modifications.

Luckily, the war ends.

Luckily for everyone involved.

On the other hand, the Japanese are still trying to prosecute things really, really Caligong on the 7th of July, there's another massacre.

600 to 1,000 villagers in Burma are murdered.

I mean, they dump their bodies in the local wells after they, you know, supposedly have helped British forces in the area.

I mean, again, you've lost and you're still doing this.

You know, horrendous.

Yeah.

Then on the 8th of July, we've got the Midnight Massacre in Utah.

I mean, what a bizarre thing this is.

So a sentry machine gun sleeping German POWs in the camp.

Nine die and 19 are wounded.

And Private Clarence Bertucci isn't court-martialed, but found mentally unbalanced and sent to a psychiatric hospital.

And when he was asked for his motivation, he said, I hate Germans, so I have to kill Germans.

God.

Okay.

Yeah.

That's quite extreme, isn't it?

Anyway, he's in the guard tower.

It's his Browning and he's 30 caliber.

And he brasses up the tents where they're sleeping.

It's bizarre, isn't it?

Yeah.

Absolutely bizarre.

Horrible.

Yeah.

And not something I'd heard of.

No, me neither.

Anyway, on that note.

Yeah.

Well, Jim.

That was all good fun, wasn't it?

Yeah, it's great fun.

And there's much more to think about with the naval power stuff because

it's kind of the other way around when you start looking at it like that, the entire thing.

Yeah.

I think it's funny.

Well, obviously, once I've done my Ardenn book, I will be in full naval mode and saying very well.

Wow.

It's the fact that U.S.

Navy doesn't want anyone in convoy for all that time.

Yeah.

You know, the Germans have that happy time in the Caribbean.

What on earth is going on there?

What?

They won't go for convoy.

Why not?

What's King's problem?

Don't know.

Well, anyway, thanks everybody for listening.

We would just like to say, by the way, a huge thank you to you for for the recent loads more of you subscribing, loads more of you joining in the fun, loads more of you coming to the Patreon and the Officer Class channel on Apple.

And we'd just like to say thanks so much for being a part of this and making this job not a job and the sound of two people yakking the way we would if we were in a Saturn pub together

or in a beer garden on a summer's afternoon.

Yes, that's more like it, isn't it?

Yeah.

So thank you so much because a podcast is like the tree falling in the forest.

If there's no one there to hear it, does it make a sound?

This podcast makes a resounding noise of war waffle across the planet.

So, thanks all of you for joining us.

Don't forget, we do live casts on the Patreon where Jim and I get together.

And you can watch us in our offices as you can watch us chatting and talking, taking your questions, talking to other historians, talking to people we just want to chew the cud with.

And of course, there's our festival.

We have waysfest.co.uk.

Look that up and realize that that is the best weekend you could ever possibly have because it's basically this, but with pints in an agreeable place and lots of dirty big green vehicles driving around.

Anyway, thanks for listening.

We'll see you soon.

Cheerio.

Cheerio.