Soviet Bloodthirst, Forgotten Fleets, & Top Hitler Books

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Achtung Akhtung.

Welcome to We We Have Ways of Making You Talk with Me Al Murray and James Holland, your Second World War podcast.

Jim, we've just miraculously between us brought the war to an end in Western Europe, haven't we?

And I feel like we're basking in the aftermath.

Yeah, exactly.

And I should also say that if my audio quality sounds a little bit off, it's because I'm in my brother's study in London.

He is off gallivanting around Ireland doing his Irish stuff.

And although he's got the most sophisticated audio audio equipment known to man, I can't get it to work.

So apologies for everyone.

But yes, yes, we have.

We've got through the other side, haven't we?

VE Day has been and gone.

And now, of course, that's great news because it means we can go back to 1940 and start all over again.

Well, now there's a bit of mopping up to do.

And of course, as everyone knows, and I mean, there's been one too many messages on social media that I've had saying, you know, the war in Japan's still going on, don't you?

Yes, I believe.

Yes.

Yes, I do.

Yes.

And in fact, the thing we've made a point of making a point about actually and certainly actually certainly yeah and on all the on all the coverage we did we went on about how the war with japan was still hanging heavy and all that stuff i got comments to that effect saying very glad that you mentioned that exactly exactly so all right you know all these people going off early on us i think it's worth bearing i mean what we might do I think we'll do today, there's stuff to talk about too, is trot through what is still kind of going on.

Because first of all, in Europe, there's a lot happening in the sort of fallout of the end of the war.

Because the fighting hasn't stopped and the sort of political realignment is now underway.

Don't forget, there was that huge showdown going on in Prague.

Yes, yes, yes.

But until 10th 11th of May, didn't it?

Went on beyond V-Day.

Exactly, last capital to be liberated and so on.

Because our friend Martin Davidson's grandfather narrowly escaped being murdered by Czechs at the end of the war because he was a Gestapo agent in Prague.

Oh, yes, of course he was.

And he managed to get away with it.

Blimey.

Live out his life and then try and try and recruit Martin as a teenager in Edinburgh from the 1970s.

Just amazing.

I think absolutely incredible, isn't it?

Yeah, I mean, yeah, so Prague, it's the 9th of May, isn't it, that Prague is liberated.

And then there's still other stuff rumbling on.

One of the things that's really, I think, really interesting is on the 14th of May, the provisional government of Austria nullifies the 1938 Angelus.

I always find it

not funny or comical, but they actually have to do this, that they actually have to put pen to paper and go oh you know we're it was all a big mistake we didn't mean it yeah and the other way of looking at it and i think um what we've been talking about of late about thinking of the soviet union as as russia russian in its sort of character if you want you know that what are the continuities in russian power there's czarist russia there's soviet russia and we've modern russia now well the soviet union is imperial russia isn't it in a in a communist form well yeah which i think makes it what makes it really interesting the soviets are in austria aren't they they've taken vienna You know, if that's the 19th century, if that's your 19th century geopolitical outcome, the way Stalin might well be viewing it, you know, that's a massive thing, isn't it?

Taken the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, even though that doesn't exist.

It's just

sort of the flagposts of it all.

And there is a moment, isn't there?

The symbolism of this.

I mean, you know, Vienna is Vienna.

It's the center of, as you say, the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

This is the Habsburgs.

This is Emperor Charles V, etc.

Precisely.

And I think if you start thinking about things in in that context,

it starts to look different.

And also, you can see it's not just about a buffer zone for the Soviet at the end of the war.

It's about redrawing the map in a Russian imperial form that's a response to centuries of Austrian imperialism.

It's in that context.

Yes, and let's not forget that

until 1919, Poland was split between Prussia, Austria and Russia.

And let's not also forget that Lviv was called something completely different.

Lemberg, I think it was, under Austria when it was Austria.

Well, and then it's Lvov for a bit, and then it's Lviv.

I mean, the point is, though, if you put the Russians in that context, the Soviets in that context, Stalin's concerns, although

they're framed in the language of class war and post-Bolshevist Stalinist Marxism.

I mean, even these labels start to sound like Judean People's Front, don't they?

They start to sound Python-esque.

But even though his language is framed in those terms, what he's doing is very much in the context of a sort of 19th century redrawing balance of power thing.

There is that suggested as he said, the emperor got to Paris in 1815.

There were Russia.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Do you know, I just do not in any way buy the kind of, oh, you know, it's just paranoia and they want to buffer zone against Europe and all the rest of it.

Well, they might want that, but basically he just wants to control Europe.

Yeah.

And you might, you can again for this point.

I mean, let's not be about the bush.

That's the ambition for the Soviet Union, for Russia.

Yes, for Russia, the Soviet Union, whichever whichever you look at it.

Because after all, the Soviet Union inherits Russia's interests, doesn't it?

So, which seemed to be to want to to control Europe.

That seems to be Russia's interest.

Well, the point about the Soviet Union is

it is a union of Soviet states.

But let's not beat around the bush.

The daddy figure in this is Russia, mother Russia.

And it's been a great patriotic war rather than a Bolshevist war or whatever.

You know, Stalin is prepared to completely reframe it as a patriotic effort, which I think then for all the sub-countries within within the soviet union who are they being patriotic to if you're ukrainian who who are you fighting for actually or belarusian or kazakh you know well most ukrainians aren't any friend of stalin that's for sure well well see this is what's interesting it's so interesting isn't it no not not

after the you know the holodomor yeah no yeah exactly but there's so many things 1930s and the and the

i mean so many things though that are expedient in the situation where you're attacked you know that it's really really interesting but i think it's stalin's post-war settlement isn't it the cold war that the idea that, you know, he redraws all the ethnic boundaries in Eastern Europe.

He builds a new empire around those new ethnic boundaries.

He moves Poland west.

He evacuates millions of Germans.

So he's obviously just trying to tidy things up because obviously the multi-ethnic legacy of the Austro-Hungarian Empire is something he's just simply not interested in entertaining ever again, isn't it?

It's it's no.

And deaths in the Soviet Union are amount to around 26.5 million.

Yeah.

And Stalin settles on 7.5 million, which I think is really, really interesting.

So enough to seem heroic, but not so big that it seems wasteful.

I mean, it's just astonishing, isn't it?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Anyway, meanwhile, on the 16th of May, there's the Battle of Malaka Strait, or the Battle of Penang.

Now, this is the Royal Navy.

Let's not forget, people, that the Royal Navy Specific Fleet was formed in August 1944, at the height of the Normandy battle.

This extra force, this extra huge naval effort was created and played a full part right through to the end of the war.

So we might not have had troops landing on Japanese, you know, on Japanese islands and what have you, but we certainly played our part out there.

And that, of course, includes aircraft carriers and naval aviators and so on.

Yeah.

The Battle of Australia is part of this.

How big is the Navy, the Pacific Fleet?

It's substantial.

The Royal Navy ships are very different to American ships, aren't they?

So they're sort of shorter range prospects.

So kind of have to operate by themselves, don't they?

Integrating with the Americans is more difficult, isn't it?

That's one of the sort of challenges that arises.

But this battle, Malaka Strait, it's five British destroyers attacking at night against the Japanese heavy cruiser Harugo and a destroyer called Kamikaze.

Imagine that.

Dear mum, dear dad, I've been posted to a ship called Kamikaze.

I mean, I don't know if it's quite taken on that meaning at that point.

Things are going very and JR, our producer, his grandfather served in the Pacific Fleet on a carrier.

How about that?

Well, what the Pacific Fleet did have was 134 support vessels because it had to be self-sufficient.

There we are.

And guess who is Commander-in-Chief of the BPF?

I don't know, Jim.

Admiral Sir Bruce Fraser.

Oh!

Bruce Fraser, our old friend.

Fantastic.

So it's six fleet carriers, four light carriers, two aircraft maintenance carriers, nine escort carriers, with a total of more than 750 aircraft.

Five battleships, 11 cruisers.

35 destroyers, 14 fruits.

That is not a small fleet.

No, it's not.

I mean, it's considerably larger than the current British Navy.

I just want to, any Matlows out there listening, we're not.

That's 19 aircraft carriers.

Five battleships as well.

That's a massive force.

It is, isn't it?

Yeah, it really is.

Unbelievable.

Well, you know, we should do a whole thing on the Pacific fleet, shouldn't we?

31 submarines.

Get in there.

That suggests, doesn't it, that you've won the Battle of the Atlantic.

And you could afford to spread your wings a little bit.

The channel, you could afford to send stuff east.

I mean, that is really quite something.

Well, for those who are interested, by the way, Steve Prince, our great friend of the show, head of the Naval Historical Branch down in Portsmouth, he is doing a talk on the Pacific Fleet at We Have Waste Fest this year.

Oh, wonderful.

And he has very interesting things to say about it.

And I can't wait.

I'm fascinated by it, aren't you?

I'm certainly intrigued because that's a whole chunk of heavy metal, isn't it?

That isn't on.

I don't think anyone's thinking about ever.

No.

there's that great um memoir called Carrier Pilot, and absolutely just terrific accounts of the aerial action and yeah, taking off and landing from aircraft carriers and stuff.

And he was in a Corsair, Norman Hanson.

That's it, Norman Hanson.

Yeah, so that battle is a British force led by Captain Manly Power.

I mean, honestly, what a great name.

If you're the power family and you call this, you call this a manly power.

What's his, it's it's on that, he's full voltage, manly power.

Let's put it that way.

Yeah,

Kamikaze escapes rather than sinking, ironically.

This is interesting, isn't it?

Because I think, I know people say to us, oh, you've got to keep, you know, don't forget the war with Japan still going.

They tend to mean Burma.

They don't mean the Battle of the Malacca Strait.

No.

Forgotten Army are relatively well remembered compared to the Pacific Fleet.

Compared to the British Pacific Fleet.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Also, the other thing that's going on is Okinawa is happening at this point.

Yes.

Which is, I mean, I think, and

we have talked an awful lot about how you have to bear in mind that Okinawa is going on.

This is what's on the American minds, is that the kind of fighting that there is in Okinawa and what's to come if they find themselves having to invade the home islands.

Yeah, you know, we did that series, didn't we, on Iwo Jima?

Yeah.

You know, that was obviously unspeakably brutal and awful and grim.

But I think, you know, it's generally held that Okinawa surpassed even that.

And we are going to be coming onto Okinawa.

We're going to be doing a little two-parter on that one.

But it's absolutely horrific.

And a number of civilian casualties caught up with the Japanese using them as bait.

That's the other thing.

So they send civilians out at night to trigger the uh because the Americans would have these little sort of tin cans on wires ahead of their lines.

And if they sort of tinkled during the night, they'd just open fire.

And the Japanese used to send civilians over.

Yeah.

And the next morning, the Americans wake up and they're going to realize there was a whole load of dead civvies in front of them.

200,000 killed.

200,000.

200,000.

Not wounded, killed.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's just horrendous.

You've really got to think about those battles before you go, ah, they've lost anyway, or the bombing's working anyway.

You've just got to look at those battles and think that's what you've got to go on, isn't it?

If you're the Americans, not actually thinking, well, our bombing campaign will work anyway.

Because after all, the bombing campaign is the thing that contributes to the defeat of Germany, but isn't the thing that makes the Germans throw in the towel.

You know, they have to be defeated politically.

They have to be defeated in their capital before they can give up.

You've also got on the 20th, the Georgian uprising on Texel.

Yes.

This is up now I've been to Texel.

Have you?

Yeah, I did a tiny little island, a strip of land in the sort of top right-hand corner of the Netherlands.

I did some parachute training there.

It's very nice, very nice place.

Very agreeable.

This is pronounced Tessel in Dutch.

This is an uprising by Georgians who've been in the Georgian Legion of the German army, who obviously think.

So they're Wehrmacht or are they SS?

They're Wehrmacht, 882nd infantry battalion koenigan tamara queen tamara of the georgian legion of the german army and they basically think no we've had enough of this starts in april 5th to 6th of april they rise up and take control of the whole island and they kill they kill a load of germans and then the and i mean i just think why bother yeah germans send in um 2 000 marines to retake the island why bother what's the point it's just extraordinary isn't it just let everyone and everyone surrender i mean what's the this just it's very weird and And finally, they're mopped up by the Canadians who arrive on the 20th to enforce the German surrender and disarm what's left of the German force there.

But, I mean, it's

565 Georgians are killed, 800 Germans, something like that.

And, of course,

as ever, the locals are caught up in the destruction.

Of course.

Yeah, when it's all supposed to be over.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, really, really, really frustrating.

And then on the 23rd, you've got the Flensburg government is finally dissolved.

This is Dernitz and Co.

Because there was this really weird thing that, you know, Wilhelm Keitel gets flown down by the British from Flensburg to Berlin for the surrender.

And then, you know, having had his nice meal and all the rest of them got irritated by being kept waiting, he's then flown back to Flensberg.

And they're all kind of sort of hanging out.

It's a bit like Karl Wolf staying in his place in

Bolzano, you know, thinking, well, I might as well have a birthday party then, you know, just waiting for something to happen.

And it's the same.

And von Frederg, you know, who keeps blubbing the whole time, finally realizes that there's no hope hope and so takes his own life, as does Himmler, of course, who's on the run and takes cyanide.

And on that same day, Churchill resigns as Prime Minister.

Yeah.

Well, I think it's very interesting, isn't it?

Because one of the things about the Flensburg government is strictly speaking, and Monty points this out at one point, is strictly speaking, because they fall within the area that surrendered to him, and because they're service personnel, because they're all officers, they're actually prisoners of war.

And there is no government.

There's no thing with no authority.

And, you know, IC hasn't recognized the Flensberg government either.

So there's a kind of, it's a weird place in a strange flux.

I also think when people say, oh, Hitler got away, well, how well did Himmler do in escaping?

He was recognised immediately, wasn't he?

I mean, the idea is...

He's got a chin and he's so obvious.

Yeah, and he's been on so many newspaper front pages and in newsreel that everyone knows who he is.

Little wonder he got caught up with.

So which always suggests to me that the most famous man in the world would have had a problem trying to escape.

You know, yes.

Simler says, no, I am merely a sergeant, doesn't he?

No one's fooled for a moment.

No.

And then I think what's interesting is the political situation in London.

What happens is there's the Labour Party conference in May, immediately following the PE Day.

And the Labour government says, the Labour part of the government, the national government, says, the war in Europe's over.

We can't support the national government anymore.

We've got to pull the plug on it.

And Churchill offers a referendum on the idea that they should carry on with a national government to labor.

Attlee says, referenda, I'm afraid, have only too often been the instrument of Nazism and fascism and says, no, absolutely puts his foot down.

Wow, ain't that ever true.

Well, but isn't it interesting, though?

Because I think one of the things people definitely know about the Khaki election, and we're going to do an episode about it, is that Churchill famously says that socialism will require a new Gestapo, right?

And that he's widely abored for the use of such language.

And that people are shocked and disgusted by but there's Attlee doing flinging the same snowball with gravel at Churchill in the opposite direction and no one seems to mind it's Labour who insist on the election beaverbrook at one point because Churchill's basically talking to Beaverbrook mainly in the 45 election who says personally I think you shouldn't there shouldn't be an election and you should carry on and we shouldn't bother with one which I think is amazing absolutely extremely yeah isn't it and even churchill has to say and churchill says well no we can't do that i'm afraid but we'll be talking about the khaki election.

But it's, yeah, it's Labour who say, no, now's the time.

And what's quite interesting is you have servicemen who then, because it's difficult to organise the vote for everyone overseas, servicemen who are annoyed and they wish that Labour had waited until the autumn because it's all a bit of a scramble to get their votes registered and stuff.

Quite clearly, the people.

Yeah, he's got a point, but at least people have had enough.

They're done.

And the politics around that is quite interesting.

Well, I'm looking forward to chatting about that one.

Kharki elections.

What else have we got?

Berlin Philharmonic performs its first post-war concert.

You know, I mean, the Berlin Philharmonic is still an incredibly internationally famous symphony orchestra and was before the war.

And, you know, it's amazing that it performs on the 26th of May, I think, in the Titania Palace.

And it's conducted by Leo Borchard.

Yes.

And Leo Borchard, of course, is the husband of Ruf Andreas Friedrich, who we talked about, well, we wrote about in Victory 45 and who we talked about in our V-Day 45 series.

And he was living under a different name, under a sort of Russian name.

And it's a terrible story because just after this, he is being driven by

a British major.

He and Roof are being driven by a British major in an open top car through Berlin.

And the major doesn't stop at a British barrier.

And so the British soldier, the guard, opens fire and he gets killed.

Oh, my God.

Yeah, so they've survived the war.

you know doing this incredibly dangerous stuff being resisters to the regime throughout the war they've lived through this, survived the whole thing, and then he gets shot by a British sentry.

Oh, god, I don't believe it.

After a concert, after a concert.

Oh, my God.

But he's conducted a concert and is killed afterwards.

Yeah, no, it's August.

He's got another couple of months.

It's a couple of months later.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Do we know what they played?

There must be a way of finding out the concert programme.

I think you can safely say it's probably not Wagner.

I mean, have these people all got their violins, if they all buried their violins, and is he's bat on in the loft, you know what I mean?

Yeah.

Oh, so apparently, it's an overture to Mendelson's A Midsummer Night's Dream, Mozart's violin concerto in A major, and Tchaikovsky's symphony number four.

So, some Russian music.

That's politic, isn't it?

Well, there you go.

So, there's quite a lot going on in May, isn't there still?

You know, the war might be over, but there's no shortage of events.

You just can't get to the end of a sort of the most cataclysmic global conflict of all time and just it'll neatly just resolve itself.

No, no, no, no, no, no.

Should we take a break and then afterwards, we'll do some questions from our listeners?

We'll see you in a moment.

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Welcome back to We Have Ways of Making You Talk with me, Armorie and James Holland.

We've been talking about, because the point we made just there, or you just made, Jim, is that yes, you can't expect it to all just wind down immediately, but it is, of course, going full tilt still in the war against Japan.

And I just want to make sure that everyone gets that message.

Not for one second.

It was not three weeks ago, but they didn't know that then.

They didn't know that then.

We may know that now, but they didn't know that then.

No.

Right.

Now we've some questions.

Tom Bonfield on our Patreon.

Thanks for that, Tom, for joining our Patreon, asks, what books about Hitler would the podcast recommend, please?

Other than the obvious Kershaw, McDonough and Ulrich?

Well, I would recommend those.

Yeah.

They're really good.

I mean, if you want something incredibly dense and authoritative.

Richard Evans?

Yeah, well, there's Richard Evans, who hasn't written specifically about Hitler, but you can't sort of disengage the Nazis from Hitler.

And he has written extensively about the Nazis.

And Richard Evans is widely considered to be the great academic on this subject.

I would slightly question his understanding of the military aspect of the war, but you know, he is the top dog on this really and so it's worth looking at.

If you want a little bit of sort of lighter reading, I would recommend the novel Look Who's Back, which is unspeakably funny.

And I think it was published in 2013, if I remember rightly.

And the concept of this is that Hitler wakes up in a parking lot in Berlin in 2012 or something.

And it's a sort of, well, it's just very, very, very funny because it's all written in first.

With his voice.

So it's written by Hitler with his voice.

And he just absolutely nails it.

It's just, it's uncomfortably funny.

But if you want to read about the death of Hitler, there is a book called The Death of Hitler, and it's really, really good.

And there's

Luke Daly Graves' book as well about the end and the conspiracy theories and stuff.

Oh, that's quite interesting.

I would recommend it's a book from quite a while ago now, it's quite old now, called The Hitler of History by John Lukash.

And people might know John Lukasz from his book, Five Days in London, May 1940.

Yeah, yeah, Five Days of May, yeah.

Yeah, which is about Churchill and Halifax and that cabinet deciding to fight on.

Because Lukash, he says that's the most important five days in world history and all this sort of thing.

But he wrote a book called The Hitler of History, which is about it's from the late 90s.

So, like, as I said, it would be great if someone were to do this again now.

It's a really, really good book.

It's really clever, and he parses all the different ways that people have tried to deal with Hitler as history.

Like, where do you put him?

How do you place him in the continuity?

What is he?

Is he an aberration?

Is he an intentionalist?

Is he the Germanid, the German ego?

What on earth is he?

And how do we fit him into history?

And if I remember rightly, I think that he kind of concludes that what Hitler is, is a warning about democracy.

about giving people what they want, you know, offering people something terrible and them saying, yes, please.

I would recommend

enormously because

it's just so thought-provoking.

And about how so often with historiography, you don't, sometimes you're not aware of it because the way history is written, it fits the time it's written.

And it just doesn't occur to you that there's a like a ghost of the historiography in what you're reading or what you're experiencing.

And he's just absolutely brilliant at it.

I think that's a great recommendation.

I haven't thought about that book for a decade.

And I've got it somewhere and I must dig it out because you're right.

It's an absolutely brilliant book.

I'm pretty certain it's out of print, but you can pick it up.

You'll be at it on AB books, won't you?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Seriously, I would recommend it to absolutely anybody because it's getting you to think and to be thought-provoking about kind of a thing we think we have got a place for.

And the fact that, obviously, he's saying, Look, if you're German, how on earth do you digest the events and the man who represents those events?

And I think I'd recommend that rather than a biography, because Tom's question, in a way, is asking for something other than the obvious, other than the obvious Kershaw, McDonough, Ulrichs.

Yeah,

that's a really great shout.

And I would recommend the death of Hitler Hitler as well.

Yeah, yeah, oh, absolutely.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Now I've got the name of the authors.

It's Jean-Christophe Brizar, B-R-I-S-A-R-D, and Lana Pashina, P-A-R-S-H-I-N-A.

It's an absolute rom.

And of course, there's Luke Daly Groves' book as well, which is a case of

conspiracy.

Yeah.

And it's really funny.

It's funny, Luke's book, too, because

it's got that element of complete farce and the poor sods, you know, in the various secret services or FBI, whatever, just having to deal with yet another guy going I saw Hitler I know where he is

really okay yeah fantastic yeah yeah now this next one a question from Liabel Liabal this is right up your current strategy I would say

and again this is on Patreon before listening to this I watched a piece about Russia's military and population crisis exacerbated by the missing generation of World War II I wonder if the Soviet generals particularly Zukov would have been more careful if they'd known what a massive decades-long crisis the butcher's bill would cause.

No, I don't think they'd have been any more careful.

I think it's just built into their DNA that they can just be incredibly profligate with people's lives.

I mean, the inherent cruelty of the Russian war machine really has to be.

We're so hardwired now, the terrible sacrifice of the Red Army, and this is where the blood, you know, the blood was, the most blood was spilt in the Second World War and blah, blah, blah, and the Great Patriotic War and all the rest of it.

What hasn't happened, there hasn't been a reckoning on why it was so bloody.

Okay, now part of it is because the Nazis came in and, you know, torched villages and all the rest of it.

But a very large part of it was down to the Soviet leadership, both military and political.

Woefully abject command, military command in 1941 and into 1942.

I mean, really just unbelievably bad.

I mean, why don't you just sort of send an idiot to command these battles, these armies?

I mean, just terrible.

The scorched earth policy during retreat, which all that did was just kill even more people.

I mean, what one has to appreciate is that, you know, when you're getting to kind of some 25 million people in the Soviet Union killed during World War II, a large number of those are killed through disease and starvation.

Yeah.

And that is a direct consequence of the actions both of the German armed forces and the Red Army.

It's not just the Germans.

I mean, the Germans, as we know, were unspeakably cruel and ideologically driven and all the rest of it.

But, you know,

the Soviet leadership has blood on its hands as well.

Then when it comes to military losses, the military losses are out of all proportion to the scales of the battles they were fighting, which were admittedly large.

And, you know, I've said it before, but let's just reiterate again.

You know, the final battle, 16th of April 1945, when it's launched, you know, the Red Army has...

three army groups, three groups of armies, the first Belarusian front, the second Belarusian front, the first Ukrainian front.

It has overwhelming numbers.

It has 41,000 artillery pieces, you know, thousands of tanks, thousands of aircraft, every bit of equipment and, you know, and millions of shells stockpiled.

And they are fighting against a totally defeated German army.

Yes, there are some veterans there.

Yes, there are some Waffen-SS units, but as we've already proved in many discussions, these are no longer brilliantly trained troops.

And a large number of the troops they're facing are Volkssturm.

And these are troops that have had, you know one two three days a week's training we gave that example of helmut altner a kind of 17 year old who's who basically three days training and then off to the front so there is no excuse for a butcher's bill of 900 000 casualties in a little over two two weeks i mean that's you know you can you can only conclude that the reason there were that many casualties in the red army in the final battles for berlin was through extreme recklessness on the part of the commanders of which Zhukov was the number one villain.

But there's definitely that within the Stavka, there's definitely this sense that if you're not taking casualties, you aren't trying hard enough, isn't there?

There is no steel flesh mentality at all.

And

I think we've talked about that.

If you're a regular listener to this podcast, you've heard steel not flesh more often than you've heard big mac and cheese, I think, in your life.

I mean, we have reiterated that point over and over and over again.

And that policy works on the Germans, comprehensively defeats the Germans.

You don't need to defeat the Germans any other way.

And obviously, air is a huge part of the way the Allies approach things.

The Soviets are only really able to achieve tactical air superiorities because of the Western Allied effort to dominate the skies wherever they're present.

The strategic bombing campaign isn't just...

It's often framed, isn't it, as it's showing Stalin that we're in the war.

Well, actually, what it's doing is destroying the Luftwaffe.

Thanks very much.

It's not just a G.

In the same time, in the summer of between June and October 1943, the Luftwaffe loses 3,405 aircraft in the Mediterranean and 702 on the Soviet Union, on the Eastern Front.

Yeah.

The Soviets are being offered advantage by the way the Western Allies are fighting, by drawing planes.

You know, Stalingrad, the Soviets, the Soviets are able to command the sky there because basically the Luftwaffe has had to go and deal with what else is going on.

in North Africa, for instance.

And even then, even with that sort of aerial advantage, the way they fight there.

I mean, it's 800,000 casualties in Operation Bogracia.

It's 640,000 casualties for the Oda-Vistula campaign at the beginning of the year.

Then 900,000 casualties in the final battle for Berlin.

You know, let's not face it, okay, that is the 16th of April to the 2nd of May, and nearly a million troops become casualties in a little over two weeks.

I mean,

it's just phenomenal.

And what I find absolutely amazing is why historians haven't questioned this it's just always turned it's always it's always written in terms of the kind of huge sacrifice of the red armies why isn't someone saying do you know what maybe maybe the red army was just extremely incompetent and careless and reckless and cruel really appallingly led appallingly led yeah you know if you want to ascribe responsibility it goes all the way to the top doesn't it and i i think what's really interesting though on top of this there is a missing generation of world war ii russia's military population crisis and one of the things that happens in the 70s in the soviet Union is because communism plainly hasn't delivered.

The Brezhnev government re-centers the great patriarchy war in Soviet culture, kind of as the reason we may not have achieved the workers' paradise yet.

But look, communism was good for defeating the Nazis.

It defeated Nazism.

And so it is worth it.

But when you look at what that defeat took and the recklessness of and the sheer expenditure of life to get there, obviously it was worth defeating the Nazis.

I mean, again, you end up

having to say these things that are sort of horrible truisms, don't you?

And I saw enough of it online on social media last week going, well, what did Britain ever do?

You know, that sort of, what did Britain ever do?

The Soviets lost far more people.

Well, is that necessarily a good thing?

Because after all, and I think I've said it before when we've talked about this in the past, if they'd had their act together, they'd have been in Paris by the spring of 1944.

If they'd found a steel-knot-flesh way of fighting the Germans, the Soviets, they'd be at Calais, wouldn't they?

Possibly, yeah.

But they were never going to fight that way because they're just...

No, no,

I mean, that's like saying, well, if only Hitler had gone into the Soviet Union without his ideology, I mean, it's just exactly

war in the first place because they wouldn't have been those people.

No, no, of course, of course.

Anyway, but yes, it is a ball worth kicking around.

That'd be interesting to know what people think, actually, other opinions on that.

And I'm sure there's some, there might be a Russian listener going, oh, listen to you, two Western idiots.

How dare you?

Jeff from Patreon asks,

Does that make a widgeon a fleet air arm asset or coastal command?

Well, we were talking about widgeons.

Widgeon's a kind of water pigeon, isn't it?

Yeah, it's a coastal command, I think.

It's not fleet air arm.

Landbound.

Sometimes, I mean, we've made many of these podcasts, and there's things I forgot we've ever covered and said and done.

And the widgeon.

I forgot we had a debate over a widget, I have to say.

Operation Widgeon, wasn't it?

It was some part of the plunder stuff.

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, that's all coming back now.

Yeah.

I feel a widgeon's a type of duck.

That's right.

It's a type of duck.

Yeah, but it's not like an aqua pigeon.

Well, it sounds like it is.

Well, what a, it might sound like it, but it isn't.

A water dove.

Yeah.

The dove from

Richard Stott asks, any recommendations for a Truman biography?

Yes, 100%.

David McCulloch, he's a legendary American writer, and he wrote a biography simply called Truman, and it won the Pulitzer Prize.

It's magnificent, it's big and chunky.

So, um, my recommendation would be to read up about his early life on Wikipedia and then cut to the his nomination as VP and stuff in the summer of 1944.

It's absolutely fascinating.

The road to the end of the war, him coming over, being taking over as president, and then the whole stuff from kind of 1946 is just amazing because you know he had his popularity dipped massively.

Um, and there were huge strikes in it in the United States, just as there had been in 1943, incidentally.

People always forget about these.

There was a huge strike on the railroads, and it was absolutely catastrophic for him.

And then he had this, and then he had a shift of, he sort of changed his cabinet round.

And actually, Jimmy Burns was moved on as Secretary of State.

And that's when he brings in General Marshall as the Secretary of State.

And it's one of the best moves he makes.

And General Marshall proves to be every bit as brilliant as a Secretary of State, even if not even better, than he is as Chief of Staff of the U.S.

Armed Forces during the Second World War.

You know, it is because he commands so much respect

and because he just had, Marshall just has this quiet persona that just oozes authority, moral probity, sagacity.

No one will quibble with him.

And he's cross-party.

So he has no political party allegiance, even though he's Secretary of State under a Democratic president.

Every time he emphasizes, everyone just agrees with him, which if you're present is very useful.

And, you know, he's exceptional.

he's exceptional what he does before he becomes secretary of state.

He's been sent to try and sort out China, makes an absolute hash of it, doesn't work at all.

So, in a way, it's quite a bold move to then make him secretary of state.

But what he can't achieve in China, you know, no one could.

So, he comes back kind of sort of humbled by this and sort of, you know, confidence shaken.

But then, um, Truman makes him secretary of state, and it's just a genius decision, and they are kind of wedded to the hip thereafter.

And out of that comes all sorts of amazing things.

Yeah, a ton of Roosevelt's effort is trying to make sure stuff's cross-party, though, isn't it?

So, Marshall, because he has no allegiance, he's a much easier conduit for trying to pull that off, isn't he?

Yeah.

Easier sell, I suppose.

But the David McCullough biography is amazing.

It's very, very readable, very authoritative.

And, you know, it was reading this that made me kind of think, oh, what an amazing guy he was.

Let's wrap up because we've got lots to tease, as we say.

We've got some stuff to come.

Episodes around the ideas of visions of peace.

What's the Attlee government in the post-war world going to be like?

We want to look at that.

We're going to look at the khaki election, of course, as we've said.

What's happening in Burma, where the greatest combined operations, British-led combined arms operations of the war, I think you could argue happen.

Because they're not necessarily British, after all.

You've got lots of African soldiers and Indian soldiers and all sorts.

Hiroshima, VJ Day.

And we're going to look at Nuremberg, I think.

We're going to try and look at justice at Nuremberg.

Yeah.

At some point.

There's the Winter War to look at.

We also, of course, because let's be honest now, the Second World War is this giant anniversary machine.

It's an ever-turning clock of anniversaries.

And it's Dunkirk again soon.

And the Battle of Britain.

So we thought what we'd do is have another look at those.

Well, I was kind of keen.

Yeah, I was very keen to do a home in on the week of the 7th to the 15th of September.

Particularly if you go into very forensic detail on Sunday, the 15th of September, 1940.

I think that'd be interesting for people because I know we've done the Battle of Britain before, but we haven't done it in quite that kind of forensic level.

We're going through a bit like we did with the Battle of the North Cape, where it was like, you know, minute by minute, hour by hour, kind of what is happening and what's going on.

I think that would be fun.

So we're going to do that.

We've got some live streams to come.

We've also, we're going to be running a series up to coincide with the festival in September called Best in the West.

The Generals.

The Generals.

And what we're going to do is a sort of World Cup of Generals in the West.

Why in the West?

Mainly to avoid you all voting for Slim, obviously.

Well, we can do the best in the East as well at another time.

We'll get around to that, but we were trying to avoid such a calamity.

Because basically, James wants Monty to win.

I want Alex to win.

Did I get that right?

Or is that the wrong way around, ladies and gentlemen?

And what we're going to do is a kind of World Cup of generals, present the case, argue them.

You can vote, and we'll see who comes out tops when we get to the festival in September.

And that does include Germans, by the way.

That does include Germans, yes.

But bear in mind, they're always marked down on the grounds of having lost.

They can have as much tactical flair as you like, but they are on the losing side.

Yeah, but we can still vote for the best German general in the West.

And it can't be Rommel.

And it certainly won't be Kesselring.

See,

he's started already, ladies and gentlemen.

Anyway, thanks very much for listening, everybody.

We will see you all very soon.

Thanks for listening and Cheerio.

Cheerio.