Communist Postmen, Spam, & the BEST Museums

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Aktung, Aktung!

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

And for those of you who've been grappling with our lengthy series, this is not one of those episodes.

This is this is woo waffle, isn't it?

Yeah, war waffle.

Straight up Worwaffel.

Verweffel.

Waffenkrieg.

The Waffle Waffer.

That's what I was.

That's what I was groping.

From the Waffle Waffer.

Now, you've been on, well, I mean, archival and geographical adventures.

Oh, my God.

I had such a good week last week.

So the German archives, military archives, there's various archives.

all over the place but the military archives are in freiburg in breslau uh which is in the schwarsfald freiburg is a sort of cathedral university town so it's very very lovely it's a lovely place to go and visit there's a really good tram network so you can quite a big quite a big city what would you say like a worcester what we're talking a chichester yes a worcester bar

okay right okay it's very nice it's lovely it's got this great big cathedral in the middle and it's got lots of little sort of cobbly windy streets it's got trams it's got you know it's it's really nice and it was fast knacked which is a big thing before you know the run up to lent and everyone goes mad for like six days beforehand they just have party night every night and everyone wears these really outrageous costumes and they have umpar par bands playing and stuff.

Sounds like a great place to visit.

It's a really great place to visit.

But the archives is down in an old area which used to be the French Army of Occupation barracks.

Right.

Okay.

Back in the day, you know, late 1940s, early 50s where that.

And all these barracks have been converted into kind of really quiet hip apartment blocks.

And people have built sort of verandas on and put climbing plants up the outside.

And it's got a slight sort of hippie vibe to the whole thing.

Down in the kind of courtyards below the sort of old Mercedes trucks, which are clearly used to be taken on hippie jaunts and things like this.

So it's a bit groovy.

It's a bit groovy.

It's a bit groovy.

Exactly that.

And I stayed in the Hotel Elements Pure, which was a Shen Fui

hotel, which to me just looked like a perfectly ordinary

hotel room.

Just a bit more sparse than most.

But anyway, so you go there, and it's quite chaotic.

We got chatting to an ex-German Bundeswehr soldier who then became a war correspondent and then became obsessed with history and back in the day met loads of people.

So he met Ribbentrop's son and things like this.

But the main thing was was, you know, what I was looking for was

Ardennen offensive material.

All Model's papers are there.

There's files and files and files of Field Marshal Model.

Wow.

Diaries of his wife, of documents, stuff that I sent you over a couple of things.

There was a description of his character.

You know, Moodle is a very dynamic kind of person.

And they also

had a description of his suicide by the guy who was there to win.

That's amazing.

That's absolutely amazing.

Lots of, so the area where you get, tend to get sort of personal accounts is called MSG.

There's MSG1 and there's MSG2.

And there were quite a lot in that, including three separate accounts for the 277 Volts Grenadier Division, which is really exciting.

So those were the guys up in the north from the Krinkelton Valdez.

So they were up there.

And various people, there's some 7th Army stuff.

There There were some others and there was the entire file on the Führer

Brigade.

What?

Rehmers lot.

Yeah.

And including Rehmer's personal diary and the personal diary of a guy called Oberloitnen Army.

Wow.

Yeah.

So it's really cool.

There's loads of stuff.

So anyway, I was very happy about that.

Then I parted company with my friend Dorothy, who lives in Bonn and who does a lot of...

She's an art historian, really, but and she works for Robert Edsel.

And I drove on up and stayed in Badenauheim and then went to see the Adlerhorst.

And no one goes there.

The Adlerhorst was a big complex.

So So you've got the Schloss Siegenberg, and you go down this, you go down this sort of valley, it gets narrow, narrow, narrower.

There's sort of wooded slipes, slopes either side.

There's a sort of valley floor, and then there's little offshoots from this valley into a kind of even narrower, kind of sort of little wooded gorge kind of thing.

And at the corner of the main valley and then the offshoot valley, there is a Schloss Ziegenberg, which is a sort of great big kind of white bastion with a rounded tower that looks all very kind of, you know, brothers grim.

And this was where von Rundstedt had his headquarters of OB West.

It was also where Speer in 1939 set up an advance headquarters for Hitler.

It's a network dug underneath the Schloss Siegenberg.

And it has to be said.

Also by the Schloss Kransberg, which is about five or six miles away.

And into the side of these woods.

And after the war, this whole complex was taken over by the Americans, I think, and used.

And I think it was used by Fifth Corps.

Right.

Okay.

So no, I saw, so I was sort of wandering around.

There's no one around, really.

And, but just, I didn't see a soul.

I just didn't see a single.

It's a couple eight Euros a turnstile in a gift shop, right?

It's just there.

It's absolutely not.

It's just there.

It's private.

No one knows about it.

There's nothing to say, you know, this was the Fuhrer headquarters.

There's nothing that says Adler Horst or anything like this.

Anyway, you then go back down onto the kind of sort of valley floor and take the kind of offshoot valley.

There on the left is this, what looks like an agricultural barn covered in ivy, but it is.

It's a great big concrete box.

It's a concrete bunker.

Absolutely.

It's a great big concrete bunker with a concrete pitched roof.

And it's got this sort of, it's got like a stone wall outside it, but some of it's crumbled away to reveal the Nazi concrete underneath.

It's just, it's just amazing.

But you could see why you'd have it as a headquarters there because it's really hidden.

It's very secluded, out of the way.

And I also went to Giessen, which is the train station where Hitler arrived into on the morning, you know, at 5 a.m.

on the morning of the 11th of December, 1944.

And the cavalcade of Mercedes was waiting for him outside.

And it's completely unchanged in terms of kind of layout and everything at the main main building so I went there and kind of imagined the Fuhrer arriving.

Wow.

Yeah yeah yeah it was great and then and then drove down to the to the Adlerhorst and then I spent the next few days just sort of beetling around the Ardennes and doing sort of catching up on stuff that we just didn't have quite time to do the other day and finding foxholes and I went to the Verden Pocket which was where the 84th rail splitters were and I'm quite big on the rail splitters because of course they were with the Sherwood Rangers at Gilenkirken in November.

I had another look around La Glaise, went to that amazing museum.

Oh my god, it was good.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, you remember because you shut up.

Well, you sent all those pictures over, like endless stuff.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And again, it was just no one else there.

So it was, so it was great.

And we had a little film as well.

There was a little film to really.

So that was quite fun.

The other museum, though, Gemma J-Mack was saying that we should definitely go and see this incredible museum at D-Turk.

So I went to see that.

That was insane.

It was so good.

Quite realistic, sort of dioramas of various scenarios of sort of, you know, men huddled around in a kind of bust-up barn or whatever, and sort of, you know, first aid post and things.

And you go up these sort of stone steps and you open a door, and there's a sudden absolutely massive hangar just crammed full of stuff.

I mean, you've never seen anything like it.

I mean, there's literally not a spare inch anyway.

And hardware from absolutely everything you could possibly imagine.

Everything you could possibly imagine.

From, you know, chainsaws, you know, you know, petrol-driven chainsaws to huge giant welding machines to medical kit, to just every vehicle under the sun vast amounts of shells and stacks of ammunition boxes and wow and and in the rafters they've got some guys doing signal core guys sort of or engineers mending the the wire oh that's cool i i didn't notice them on my first trip around

and there was not a single person in the museum so i had the whole place

just amazing it does make me wonder you know when you say that though what the future of a museum like that is really because i suppose it's february it was march wasn't it it's just not the season.

But, you know, places like that is it.

The reason I think of it is I went to Graceland about 10 years ago and it was empty.

And you got the feeling, oh, Elvis, Elvis is over, you know, or maybe Elvis is dead.

Exactly.

Elvis is finally dead.

And we had kind of had the place to ourselves.

Certainly had the museums the other side of the road in Memphis to ourselves.

Yes, yes, that's right.

And you get in the little mini bus.

That's right.

And it felt really fantastic.

to have the place yourself, but it also made you think, how long has this got?

With the anniversary of the end of the war, the 80th anniversary coming and veterans passing on you know you do wonder don't you you know how long is how long is a it's like the you know copperton combat collection yeah which is essentially i mean it's fantastic but it's also basically you could look at it the other way and call it a scrapyard you know what i mean you wonder how long these things have got now now it's sort of fading a bit more basically whether we have ways listeners can keep the museums of the planet of this kind going

i just i don't know I mean, I think what you really need is you need a TV series about whatever bit you want to do because I mean, the interesting thing is, Deekirk is a hop and a skip from Bastonia, as we now have to call it.

Bastonia.

Then why wouldn't you go to Deekirk?

It can't be more than 20, 30 minutes in a car.

And it's, you know, Deekirk's not a big place, easy to get into.

But that was the thing once we started touring the battlefield, what was interesting is it is a large area, but it breaks down into those sort of five-mile hops, doesn't it?

From village to village, settlement to settlement, actually.

And it starts to not feel quite so enormous when you break it down like they crumble it down a bit.

Well, yeah, and i went i went back to bastonia and i had a good look around and i did i did some some really good walking oh god i had such a fantastic walk so i thought well what i'll do is i'll you know what's the scale of all this and what you know why did they put these blocking so so de zobri sends out these three different blocking forces on these three roads one going straight toward north towards the hoofalies the one going east towards borsey and the other one going northwest towards forks so i thought well i'll go and walk i'll go and water them that'd be fun so i went along this track found the kind of blocking position on the road to bourseee again you can see exactly why they've done it because it's just on a rise, it's on the high ground coming out of, you know, it's not a big ridge, but it's significant.

You can see it's important.

Then I crossed that road and

I walked across a field.

I found another track and I pushed on.

And that's where that day, the 19th of December, what happened was that the 506th Parish Infantry Regiment had moved up and the first battalion

had gone to join Team DeSobri.

What was he called?

Lagarde, I think was the name.

Major James Legarde.

And he immediately said that these were the guys who were kind of picking up weapons and stuff on their way up to Neuville.

There were sort of ammo dumps and stuff of grenades and things and extra kind of coats and whatnot.

And they took on the high ground to the northeast of Neuville.

So between the Hoofales Road and the Boursey Road.

And again, you could see why they'd done that and why they'd gone onto this bit because there is this quite pronounced ridge that comes out and this high ground and the Germans were attacking from the other side.

Anyway, the paratroopers got, you know, these first battalion guys got really badly mauled in this attack.

But it was enough to stop stop the Germans in their track and they pulled back.

And again, it was that crucial delaying action.

Anyway, I walked on round, hit the Tufalese road, could see why they'd done the stopping position on that.

Then walked into Vaux, then walked back out from Vaux to where the blocking position was just above it.

And again, Vaux is in a little hollow and land rises up.

So again, you kind of think, well, that makes perfect sense.

And I kind of set the old strava and kind of thought, well, I wonder how long it'd take me to walk back into the center of Neuville.

22 minutes.

You know, you suddenly got a sense of how it all fitted together and the scale of it and everything.

So that was fascinating.

And then I went into Bastogne and I went to the McAuliffe's headquarters place, which is in the old army barracks, which were built in the 1930s, then used by the Gestapo, then taken over by the Americans.

And in one of the blocks in the kind of basements, there's some cellars.

And that's where McAuliffe had his

headquarters during a battle.

But it was fascinating going there because I just want to, again, I just want to sort of see what it was like and how they've done it.

It's very much the kind of sort of the awful sacrifice, the terrors of war, you know, this sort of stuff.

You know, you are now going down into the cellars of, you know, of the, of McCullough's headquarters here in Bastonia.

It was all this kind of stuff.

And you go down and the kind of lights flicker and,

you know, and you hear sort of, you know, the sort of audio of sort of, you know, chit-chat and scraping of chairs and

little dioramas of people sort of going, God, do you think we'll get out, we'll ever see another Christmas?

Really?

I thought it was beautifully put together, but I thought the kind of the commentary in the audio was just absolutely just awful and just unspeakably mawkish.

But obviously, you know, it's not, it's not, it's not directed to me.

You know, you had an audio tour with, you know, with your headphones and everything.

I mean, I think I went around the whole thing in nine minutes.

I think you're supposed to be there for three hours.

Unbelievable.

But then I went into the 101st Airborne Museum, which is in this house.

And

it's absolutely tremendous.

It's got this incredible basement, which is a bomb shelter.

And you just push the door and go to the bomb shelter to sit in the bomb shelter.

And first of all, you hear sort of.

Yeah.

Like sort of, you know, bitter winter wind.

And you're already sort of starting to kind of shuffle your shoulders just out of sort of sympathy.

Lights flicker flicker and there's a kind of, you know, through a sort of shattered window, you can see a sort of a room with some Belgian civilians sort of looking chilly and kind of worried.

Suddenly you hear this sort of

drone of aircraft and bombs falling and the sort of clack, clack, crack of tanks and machine guns and everything shakes and the lamp above you starts flickering and moving around and stuff.

It was absolutely brilliant.

Yeah.

It was completely fantastic.

And then there was this other diorama of these Americans going into this room and attacking these Germans and one of the Germans is very badly wounded.

The other one's getting stabbed in the stomach with a bayonet pulling your face.

And there's a sort of, there's a stain in his shirt.

Have they really gone for it there with a...

They've gone for it big time.

But my point I was going to say, this is what I'm saying all this.

In the McCullough's basement in Bastonia and also the 101st Airborne Museum, there were loads of people.

Bastonia was here.

But Deekirk,

frankly, might have been.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, yeah, it's strange, isn't it?

Although it did, you know, didn't have people being stabbed.

But it's the complete distortion, isn't it, via the movies and the telly, isn't it, of where the centre of gravity in the story is, really.

Unbelievable.

Yeah, because there's so much cool stuff.

And even in our, even in our eight parts, we didn't talk about the second phase of the battle, really, where the Americans crush the Germans back into position, do they?

I mean, we didn't.

No, we go and played ellipsoids.

We played ellipsoids because although it's like the...

And John, we talked about this with J-Mac, you know, that's the hard slog bit.

There's none of the sort of thrill of the German breakout and jeopardy, as it were, of the German breakout.

You just...

And Sick Fairborn, who we didn't even mention.

No, no, no.

Yeah, well, yeah, yeah, dad sent over that.

Um, the ox and bucks wadar, didn't he, for us to look at.

Yeah, I mean, I found I thought the stuff you sent over was really, really brilliant.

That thing about Dietrich is really, really funny.

Yeah.

General Dietrich is regarded with low esteem by his fellow officers.

He did not seem to have a grasp of the operations of his army in the Ardennes and was unable to present a comprehensive picture of the happenings, even in the most general terms.

Much of the material in the following pages must be regarded in the light of this situation.

Furthermore, there are a number of obvious errors in the answers provided by this former former chauffeur.

I know.

I mean, that's just

about how damning is it?

But there's also quite a lot of stuff on Kramer.

Well, should we take a break?

And then we've some questions too in the style of...

And I must tell you about my strange encounter in our hospital waiting room as well.

Yes, please do.

We'll see you in a tick.

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Welcome back to We Have Ways of Making You Waffle.

Waffle Waffle.

Waffle Waffer.

James Holland and me, Al Murray.

Now, Jim, we bumped into each other yesterday, actually, at the Goal Hanger event, didn't we?

Which was a

great fun.

And really interesting to me.

Sat next to the brilliant Catty Kay, sat opposite Gary, which is fantastic.

I was sat next to David Olishoga, who was telling me he's doing a little bit.

He's so nice.

I spoke, but his next lecture series that he's going to take out is about the social history of the machine gun.

What?

Yeah.

Because he said, I'll be honest with you, I came into history via the, you know, I started off with the Second World War, and then I became a historian and I'm trying to claw my way back

what did you say you can run but exactly but we you know and he was very interesting about the you know the the marketing around the tommy gun the tommy gun basically the marketing around it in the 1920s is all about for bandits basically essentially to the mob they knew who their core audience was and then and then it's basically this is a gun for getting bandits you know it's how they they then market it back to the cops or whatever once the war starts the ordnance the us audience going this is this gun's too expensive it's too heavy You need to get the price down.

Blah, blah, blah.

And they get into a tussle about it.

And that's how you end up with the Greece gun.

How amazing.

Because the US audience are like, we're spending too much money on this.

Absolutely fascinating.

How amazing.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And then I got a hard yes from Dominic Sambrook about coming to We Have Ways Fest.

Yeah.

He's very excited about that prospect, actually, talking about the politics.

I had a really good chat with him about that.

He was very much up for it.

And I think his son is fascinated by the subject as well.

So he'll score some brownie points too.

He loves tanks.

He said he loves.

He said he loves tanks.

Well, he's going to do church on on that.

Yeah, but it was very sweet as well to see the original four because now Goalhang has this sort of extraordinary,

like a beehive now.

There's that photo of the four of them.

Well, Tony's the queen.

Exactly.

But of Tony and Harry and Joey and John in their jump jackets that we bought them all those years ago when we first got Goalhang.

Yes, yes, yes.

Looking very, very pleased with themselves.

Anyway, no, you, but you told me this absolutely amazing thing yesterday that,

to be honest,

it was completely amazing, but also in its own strange way, not at all surprising.

So background to story is, when we were in the bulge, I woke up one morning

with a really, really sore neck, which hasn't gone away.

And it turns out.

So

I was in the hospital having an MRI scan on my neck.

Turns out I've got a herniated disc in my neck and it's really bad.

Anyway, so I was in the waiting room.

This chap is sort of sort of, I don't know, he's probably in his 70s, late 60s, 70s, something like that.

He said, oh, are you James Holland?

I said, yes.

He said, oh, I've read your books and, you know, blah, blah, blah.

I said, Oh, thank you very much.

Um, anyway, we got chatting.

He said, Oh, what are you up to at the moment?

I said, Well, you know, doing sort of bold stuff.

He said, Ah, I went, I was in Scotts Garz, and he said, I went in a BOAR battlefield tour of the Ardennes in 1972.

And I said, Amazing.

He said, Yes, we had a curious German fellow with us, a chap called Joachim Piper.

I literally nearly fell off my chair.

I mean, like, what

he said, yes, I said, What?

Joachim Piper, as in Waffen-SS, Kampfgruber, as in Jochen Piper.

And he said, yes.

I said, what was he not?

He said, well, his English was superb.

Very good.

Totally unrepentant.

Said that the Malmody accident, he had nothing to do with him whatsoever.

I said, but was he all right?

I mean, was he a good bloke or whatever?

And he said, well, you know, he said he was,

he was, you know, he was very interesting.

That was absolutely amazing.

That is absolutely incredible.

We got chatting a bit more about it.

I said, how on earth did you get a get Joch and Piper, Waffen-SS,

war criminal

to come on this?

He said, Well, I don't think it'll ever happen again.

He says, I think quite a few knuckles are wrapped on that one.

God, it's just amazing.

I know, but I really want to find the documents that went with it.

Well, they'll be out there somewhere, won't they?

I mean, Sandhurst, probably, or even, or even, I mean, they may even, I don't know, where would they be?

Um, I don't, well, I don't know.

But then, but then when you look, you go, you know, fast forward to the 1980s, Hans von Look is on, you know, Goodwood staff, right?

Isn't he?

He became.

Oh, oh, well, he mentioned that.

He mentioned that, he and and he's he said, uh, well, Hans was a sort of safer bet.

And you know, he said, I think that you know, with every one, the tails got better, and

and so on.

Yeah,

um, conversations you have in hospital waiting rooms, well, absolutely, you know, but but I was almost quite grateful for my MRI scan for

that little nut.

Yeah, well, I mean, the thing is, the shock of it, might you might have popped another disc, though.

That's the end of this.

That's

a worry,

I mean, Piper was murdered, wasn't he?

He moved to France.

Murdered in 1976.

Yes, so this is the other thing, thing, that I think he was called John Targills was his name.

And John said, he said, yes, he said, the thing I can't understand is why on earth he was working, why he was living in France.

I said, he just, I think he just liked it.

I think he wanted the sort of the quiet life.

I mean, he ended up translating for Mercedes, didn't he?

And Porsche.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Translating technical manuals.

I mean, from

commanding sort of 5,000 men and 115 tanks and 800 vehicles age 29 to translating technical manuals for Portion, yeah, it's a bit of a well, yeah, but maybe he was better at the technical manuals than he was at commanding.

I mean, he didn't, he didn't do a gleaming job, did he?

I mean, he was given something terrible to do, but anyway, he was murdered.

Basically, the postman changed that

in his little village in Provence.

It was called something like Sèvre or something like that, or Troyes.

Troyes, something like that.

Anyway, wherever he was, he lived.

And

he lived in these woods, and he had

quite a simple kind of old, old stone building.

And it was just a little place he could call home, not think too much about his war crimes.

And he had, yeah, kids, didn't he?

And his wife and stuff.

His wife stood by him.

She's probably a Nazi as well.

I don't know.

But anyway.

The postman changed.

And the new postman was a communist and worked out who he was.

And they started a sort of hate campaign.

They started daubing stuff on walls in the village.

And then on the main road, someone just wrote, you know, Piper, you know, war criminal

on the road in big paint and he started getting you know anonymous letters and stuff and then one night a whole bunch of them attacked him with kind of molotov cross cocktails chucking him through the through the glass and whatever and i think he'd have been okay had he not tried to save his papers and stuff but but there were loads of stories about you know four four french communists were murdered and when they discovered his body he had a gun by his side and you know empty cartridges and he'd taken them down with him and all this sort of stuff all of which is a complete lie nothing didn't happen at all wow he wouldn't i mean he wouldn't have done an american staff ride would he that's the thing thing.

He'd have said yes to a PAOR staff ride, wouldn't he?

But he's not going to be able to.

Well, yeah, and then he could have told them

how it really was, and it would have been his chance to get his word across.

And he could dazzle them with his English and talk about the old days where, you know, he was actually really important and much, much more important than any of them.

Yeah, god, amazing, isn't it?

Should we do some questions?

We've got some quite interesting ones.

This is actually something I've often sort of scratched my head wondering about.

Trevor asks: Given Spain, Switzerland, and Sweden were neutral, was there much in the way of civil aviation through the skies in Europe 39 to 45?

And if so, how did it work in terms of who was allowed to fly?

You know, assume Mrs.

Miggins' flight to Madrid may have been looked at askance.

And how would they avoid being shot down?

Well, the truth is they didn't always avoid being shot down.

You know, I reference General Sikorsky, who was shot down, Leslie Howard, who was shot down over the Bay of Biscay and killed.

So lots of people did.

I mean, you know, that was the whole point of having rondles and markings, was to do this.

So people did.

There was a lot of flying around.

You know, Churchill and Roosevelt and stuff were flying.

And you had to do so with a huge amount of care and caution.

It was very, very fraught.

Harold Macmillan crashing on takeoff and having to rescue the French.

It's not civil aviation as such, is it?

No, it's not.

So when it's not, it's not as much,

but there was a lot of flying.

So civil aviation in Switzerland and stuff, yes, within Switzerland, you can fly.

Yes, you know, yes, it did happen.

And ditto quite a lot in Sweden.

There was no issue about it at all.

If you're flying over Sweden and you Swedish markings, you're sort of okay.

But obviously it's not a lot of commercial flying because there's no reason to.

There wasn't much commercial flying then, anyway.

You know, fuel was expensive.

It was forked with risk on so many levels.

So there wasn't a lot, but I mean, it did happen, but obviously.

Nice diplomatic bag back from Sweden and that sort of thing, isn't it?

In Mosquitoes, that's that sort of stuff.

Yeah, it's all that kind of stuff.

And yeah, there's lots of people flying in and out of Lisbon.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Spy capital of Europe, etc.

I mean, it is important.

I mean, we've talked about this before.

We've touched on it before in the podcast.

Flying is different then to it is now.

It's much, much more dangerous full stop.

Yes.

It is still novel.

You know, there are airlines, there are internal airlines in the US, aren't there?

Which is where a lot of transport pilots come from.

You've sort of got to unimagine the world as it is now, haven't you, to think about aviation in the 1940s?

I just think of all the people that were killed.

What's his name?

Mulders is killed in a flying accident.

General Weva is killed in a flying accident.

Bertrand Ramsey.

Fritz Todd is killed in a flying accident.

Bertram Ramsey is killed in a flying accident.

Aforementioned Desley Howard, the film star, is shot down of the best.

Bord Ringate.

Mary Cunningham is killed just after the war in the Bermuda Triangle.

You know, so it happens a lot.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I mean, you know, every time you fly.

I mean, this is why, really, those, you know, the Yalta conference at that end of the war is just astonishing that they did this.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And again, I'm afraid that's the Russians sort of going, well, you've got to come back to the...

That's the Russians wanting to be in charge, isn't it?

And making, making...

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But I find it absolutely incredible that they did.

You know, Rusev, ill, really, really ill, traveling all the way from the US to the Black Sea.

It is truly extraordinary.

You know, it comes of all sorts of kind of risks.

Well, and not least,

he's not very well.

It kind of kills him, doesn't it?

Really?

Yeah, basically, yeah.

Yeah, I mean, it's interesting, isn't it?

Around now, I mean, we have these questions, but we've also got a little summary of what's happening now in March 1945, which I think is really interesting.

So, this is Hitler's last visit to the front is on March the 11th.

He goes to Bad Freinwalder on the Oda and of course says the wonder weapons, if you could just hold on, the wonder weapons are on offer and

they will be ready.

Don't worry.

I mean imagine, does he believe it?

Does he know?

No, he can't, can he?

I mean, the thing is, is

he knows he can look at a map.

But he's also sort of refusing to admit it to himself.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, but he can look at a map as well as anyone else, can't he?

He can see where the front lines have fallen to.

I mean, this is a thing I didn't know about santa fe riots on the 12th of march uh the japanese internment camp prisoners are wounded by border patrol agents using tear gas and batons well is that the seven japanese prisoners that have been captured in the war

no it's just people who've been interned so oh they're interned so they're not

no you've the battle of kianuleskis kianuleskiskis which is um

lithuanians uh partisans holding out against the red army against conscription and occupation so there's there's a there's a taste of of, you know, the actual feeling in the Baltic about the Soviet Union and about the Russians.

Yeah, well, this is an interesting one.

16th of March's FDR,

Roosevelt, asked American people to tighten their belts as a matter of decency so the U.S.

could send more food to war-ravaged Europe and stuff.

And really, I had such an interesting conversation with Katie Kaye.

We were talking about this, and I was talking about all the things that Roosevelt had done, the sort of executive presidential orders, the changing of removing of a whole load of responsibility for rearmament from the hands of Congress into his own personal hands.

And she was saying, well, yes, you know, so is that so very different from Trump?

And I said, well, yes, two big differences.

The first thing is that Roosevelt, for all his Machiavellianism, was fundamentally a really good man who absolutely believed in world peace and world prosperity and wanted to, you know, wanted to create a world free of fear and want, you know, as per the Atlantic Charter of August 1941, et cetera.

You know, Trump isn't.

You can be a MAGA supporter.

You can think the sun shines out of his ass, but he is a completely selfish, narcissistic individual.

There's just no question about that.

It's completely different.

And there is a mission.

You know, America, United States in the 1940s is clearly imperfect.

You know, you have Jim Crow laws and all the rest of it and racism,

all of that,

but it is on a mission for global betterment.

And it wants to be the beacon of that betterment.

You know, it is on that path.

And Roosevelt is very much championing that.

Yeah.

Well, I mean, it's interesting him talking about tightening belts because, I mean, send more food to war-ravaged nations because this is one of the big things in Lendlis.

The butter going to the Soviet Union, butter and crab going to the Soviet Union.

And there's actually a butter shortage in the US as a result of Lend-Lease because they're sending so much butter east, you know, to the Soviets.

You know, to the point where you've questions asked in Congress about it because American families are saying, well, hold on a minute.

Why are we going short on butter?

And, you know, and you've got pork in 1943, the American pork canning industry, spam industries, is jigged to deal with the Soviet demand for canned meat.

So it's not surprising that, you know, in early 1945, you know, in the first quarter of 1945, FDR is saying this.

There's still, this is carrying on.

We're going to have and also,

Docinawa, April is.

And if you're looking at, if your eye is turning to the Pacific now, as the Americans inevitably must be, once you're over the Rhine, you're thinking, well, there's another, maybe another year and a half of this, maybe another year and a half of sending bus to the Soviets or whatever.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Before you even get into doing a blood drive for the invasion of the Japanese mainland.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I like this question from Jan, who says, with the 80 years of a VE victory in Europe commemoration this year in mind, do you think the current war in Ukraine will somehow affect the historiography of World War II?

Well, you've been talking about this to me the other day.

Yes, absolutely.

And in lots of different directions, isn't it?

Because I think Woody and I talked about this, that one of the changes...

Woody Woodage.

Yeah Woody Woodage, who does the World War II TV channel, one of the things that's definitely happened is because the Russians performed so sort of, well, not badly, but beneath the expectations that they had sought to project.

You know, people talked about the Russian army, the current Russian army being the second army in the world after the U.S.

army before the invasion of Ukraine.

And now I don't think anyone thinks that.

No, everyone thinks that.

No, and all the jokes about they're the second best army in Ukraine.

That sort of stuff.

I think it's, we were just talking about Lend-Lease.

And I think, you know, Sean McMeekin's book, which states without Lend-Lease, the Soviet Union will have got nowhere in the Second World War.

You know, there are jeeps in Stalingrad within a year of the American.

Yes, well, Jamie remembers

that.

Within a year of entering the war,

the Americans entering the war.

And it's amazing because it's quite interesting, because Adam II's...

480,000 miles of...

That's it.

Yes, and locomotives and tube allies in the end.

And before this, Adam II's had kind of argued that the Soviet Union was able to win its part of the Second World War because it had industrialized, because it had had its revolution.

Whereas the Germans are essentially, they're putting their revolution off until after the war, when that's when they'll sort things out.

They need to get the war done now.

And so he argues, you know, that the Soviets are able to win and because of the revolution, because Tuz is left-leaning, you know, one way or another.

Yeah.

But now you look at it and you think, well, it's American stuff, but that might also be because the prism of the Ukraine war is American stuff has kept Ukraine going.

So we're seeing another version of Lend-Lease, another way of looking at

the effect of...

Well, I think the main thing is it makes you slightly think again that despite the kind of revolution that takes place in the kind of second half of 1942, the sort of growth of professionalism within the Red Army, which I suppose reaches a high watermark at Kursk under Rokozovsky and co.

This development of the deep battle, but the deep battle is spectacularly wasteful.

So for those who don't know, and we have talked about it in the past, but the idea of the deep battle is that what you do is you have this incredible build-up of forces and that your echelons, you basically swing back this huge battering ram of your kind of assault divisions, but the echelons come through with you.

So you just go in this huge great surge, this sort of tidal wave of violence.

The problem is, is that

it's like a monocellular organism that the army travels with everything in it.

Everything.

You know, those pictures of a cell that you draw for GCSE or O-level biology, where there's the cell with all the parts in it, the army moves as a sort of contiguous blob with everything in it that it needs.

But the problem with that is that it's incredibly wasteful.

Yeah.

Because, and the truth is that, you know, the speed with which they're developing these new divisions is so fast that they can't possibly be trained.

There's none of this kind of sort of two years training in in Northern Ireland that you have before D-Day or anything like that.

These guys, as old, they're given basic, basic training.

They are considered entirely expendable and they are.

Well, Pokrohovka, I mean, you talk about Kursk and Rokosovsky's operational off.

Pokrohovka is an absolute disaster if you're a Soviet tanker, but they still win.

I mean, you know.

So they use overwhelming violence and power and numbers to do the hard yards, but it's incredibly wasteful.

And I think what you're seeing with the Russian army in Ukraine is one that is also incredibly wasteful, incredibly kind of callous and cruel with regard to the lives of their own men.

They just don't care.

They're expecting, you know, high attrition.

And you also see a sort of lack of coordination and lack of decent training.

And, you know, that's what happens when you're burning through a lot of people very, very quickly because you haven't got time to train them.

It's funny.

When we've been to the Ardennel, I was talking to Andy Aitchison about this, a 52nd Lowland Division specialist listener of ours, fantastic bloke, ex sapper, so clearly right sort of person.

And he was saying, obviously, here's one at a glance takeaway from the bulge is operational art is much easier in the East than it is in the West to fuel the Germans.

If you bring, you know, because

a lot of the people who are fighting on the German side in the Ardennes are used to fighting on the Soviet, the Eastern Front, with lots of Eastern Front experience.

They come West.

It's just that much more difficult.

The West have...

Because of the train, but also because they're up against the Americans who go.

Well, and because of, you know, tactical air is completely, they're conjoined twins.

You know, there's the way the Phillips Pace and O'Brien describes the Battle of the Bulge.

You know, there's this small land kerfuffle, and then the actual battle begins, which is the big aerial component.

There's the pause when they can't when the ally when no one can use their aircraft and then the aircraft show up and then that's kind of that's that really and i i think there's there's an interesting point you know the opera the operational side of things it is that much easier if you're the germans fighting the soviet you're still being absolutely smashed to pieces by these gigantic armies but it's still a you can still make ground if you need to on the eastern front in a way that on the western front it's just a different a different ball game operationally i mean i think the other thing we're going to see to come back to the question about

of the surrenders and everything, is the Russian approach to negotiation, which is a completely maximalist demand and no bending.

Well, it'll be interesting to see what happens.

By the time this comes out, it might happen.

It might have happened.

Yeah.

But whatever's going to happen, there's this ceasefire that means that an end to the war can be credited.

But I don't think things are.

It's completely unit, it feels to me like completely unfinished business in the East, in Ukraine.

I mean, whatever happens in the next six weeks.

Anyway, should we do one last question?

Denny, I like this.

My question is: how on earth was anything even running in Germany in late 1945?

I mean,

what was life like in Berlin?

It was rough.

It was awful.

Awful.

It was terrible.

Everything is

bad.

Everything indicates.

You're making ends meet by not very much.

Dependent on dole-outs by the Allies.

Yeah.

I mean, yeah, cities and ruins.

I mean, it's just absolutely ruins.

It's just everything's gone to pop.

And you will have lost someone, you know.

So everyone's in a state.

Does he mean, does he mean late 1945?

He means means late 1944

but i mean well all of us if he does mean late 1944 the the the the real collapse happens in february 1945 because that's when the reichsbahn ceases to exist properly and everything falls in he just it's been so hammered that they just they can't function anymore and the reichsbahn is very much the glue that keeps all things going i mean there is this thing as well the whole country would have been in grief everyone will have lost someone so everyone is dealing with grief you know imagine what an emotional or or a suppressed emotionally place it must have been absolutely just unbelievable Right.

Well, thanks very much for listening.

We've got stuff to come.

The end of the war in Europe, we've got to look at.

New mega series.

The new mega series.

We'll be looking further into the year.

Visions of peace.

Bridget Remigan.

God, that's great.

I interviewed the bloke whose dad had been the stationmaster who they shot, who they thought was in the SS, because he was wearing a black railway uniform.

Poor sod.

And then an American soldier who said, We shot this SS guy.

It's like, oh no.

That's why I'm laughing at it.

It's horrible.

Horrible, horrible ironies of maybe.

Shit.

We've got Hiroshima, the beginning of the Atomic Age, the Nuremberg Trials, hopefully.

And, you know, at some point, we'll get around to some of the other years of the Second World War.

Members, of course, get early and ad-free access to all series if you become an officer-class member on our Apple channel or become a We Have Ways and Make You Talk Patreon.

We have some events, not the

dim and distant, but in September, of course, for the 12th to the 14th is We Have Ways Festival.

Fee for Victory, putting the fun into Funf.

On the 12th of April, so we have Fighting for finlay which is a war gaming event in chiswick in west london where on that saturday we'll be fighting nijmegon and arnham on big tables try and end the war before christmas is the idea isn't it jim let's see if we can do that yeah something like that something like that and if you missed it we have a member exclusive live stream in march talking about morale and psychology in the war with john mcmellison and dr luke hughes which was just absolutely fantastic um uh yeah things

chat to talk yeah really really fascinating yeah really really interesting burden of command very thought-provoking really thought-provoking anyway we will see you all soon thanks Thanks very much for listening and cheerio.

Cheerio.