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June 13, 2019 - The Delingpod - James Delingpole
44:20
Delingpod 25: James Holland
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Welcome to the Dellingpod with me, James Dellingpod.
And to say I'm excited about this week's guest will be an understatement because I've been waiting, I think, almost two years to get you on the show, James Holland.
I've had your brother, Tom Holland, not Spider-Man, but the much more famous and distinguished historian.
Yes, king of tweets.
And now you're here and...
I just love your new book, which we're going to talk about.
Oh, thank you.
Honestly, when you told me that, it actually made my day.
I'm touched that you even care what I think.
I do, deeply.
That's good.
You also have just started in the podcasting game called We Have Ways.
We Have Ways.
It's enormously good fun.
With Al Murray.
Were you...
Headhunted.
I mean, because I know it's put out on one of those podcast companies, isn't it?
Well, it's put out by Goalhanger Films, which is owned by Tony Pastor and Gary Lineker.
And they mainly have been doing sort of sports stuff, as you would imagine.
Yeah.
And they do a lot of sports television stuff.
But they do a very successful one with Gary and Danny Baker.
Right.
And they've just started up another one with Stuart Broad and Stephen Fry on cricket.
Yeah.
And I've known Al for quite a long time, and I know how much he loves and interested in the Second World War.
Yeah, he does.
He's very interested in all that.
He's incredibly well-read.
You know, he's read more than I have, which is sometimes a bit embarrassing.
But, you know, it seems an obvious thing because, you know, I mean, both of us just love, you know, from time to time we sort of meet up, have lunch, have a few pints and kind of sort of chew the cud about World War II and really enjoy it.
So basically the podcast is just an extension of that.
We're quite good.
We don't drink lots of pints of lager, but we...
You get to do cool stuff like go to the Tank Museum.
Yeah, we do do that.
And actually, what we've realised, we're doing a bit more of that kind of stuff.
So we've got all sorts of things on the list, including, as it interests you, the 30-core trip to Market Garden.
They've got 300 vehicles.
Oh, fantastic.
Advancing on the top of a dike.
Yeah, all that kind of stuff, yeah.
And being taken out by Panzerfaust.
All that, yeah.
So we're going to sort of, you know, skip between, I don't know, Morris Commercials and Sherman Fireflies and Cromwells and things.
Can I just point out that you're doing the very thing I told you not to do, which is that you're moving your head from side to side, and...
It's only because I know people are going to complain.
Do you find this...
Just a technical question here.
When you do your podcast, do you have a team to help you with the sound?
Yes.
Are you bastards?
Yeah, we do, I'm afraid.
So we have Spike and John who come.
You see, I could do with a Spike and John.
And Tony, actually.
He owns Goalhanger.
Because I've got a secret team.
I've got somebody who irons out all the sound problems.
And he's very good.
He's called Jason.
And I've got a man who lives, called Richard, who lives in the backwoods of Canada.
Right.
And he just puts up all the stuff.
Amazing.
Like pro bono.
And so what happens?
He gets paid a little bit every month?
No, because it's not a revenue generating thing at the moment.
And actually, because I haven't got Gary Lineker backing me and promoting me, I used to have Breitbart.
And then they dropped the podcast because they said that no one listens to podcasts, they said.
What?
No, no, I know.
Everyone listens to podcasts.
It's a saturated market.
You can't monetize it.
No one cares.
We're dropping all our podcasts.
And unfortunately, I didn't get the feed, the old feed.
So I lost about 100,000 listeners, which I'm trying to claw back now.
But even today on Twitter, somebody said to me, just rediscovered your podcast.
I didn't realize that you were still doing it and that...
Hello?
I mean, if I'd love the Dunningpole podcast as much as everyone does, I mean, because it is kind of good, I think I would dedicate my life to ensuring, to tracking down the replacement, rather than...
You would have thought so.
Yeah, well, you'd have thought so.
Anyway, look, I loved your last book, which unfortunately we haven't got space to talk about, but it was about, just very briefly, because it was so good, it was about...
An ill-covered story of World War II. The Battle of the Admin Box is not much known about.
No, it's not at all.
And, you know, I kind of thought, is this going to be the death of my career, writing about this?
Because, you know, you do sort of, you know, you have to sort of remember that however much fun it is, this is also, you know, you're trying to put bread on the table, etc.
So you've got to kind of, you know, you've got to do the big hitters.
And Burma is not a well-trod subject, full stop.
And if you are going to go to Burma, you sort of really want to be heading straight towards Kohima and Infal, or the kind of sort of last 1945.
But Admin Box is completely forgotten about.
But I'd read about the Admin Box, and I thought, what an amazing story.
It's kind of sort of Rourke's Drift, but kind of sort of morally just a little bit more kind of less dubious.
Well, do you not think?
That the best stories, the stories that show the British Army at its very best in World War II are the ones from that theatre, the Forgotten Army.
Slim being the fantastic general working with very limited resources.
I mean...
Yeah, I think there is a big argument for that.
I mean...
But Burma is just such an incomparable place to get your, you know, just trying to sort of get your head around the logistics of it.
And as I'm sure you're aware, I'm quite interested on that operational side of things, that logistics of war and how you actually sort of make it happen.
Because there's so much, you know, in the narrative of the Second World War, there's so much assumed knowledge.
You know, they have tigers, they have really good machine guns, whatever it might be.
And, you know, they were in the jungle.
No one ever sort of thinks, well, actually, if you've got lots of sort of Maharathis and Punjabis and Gurkhas and Scousers and Yorkshiremen, you know, how do you feed them all?
And how do you get that to the jungle?
I think all that's really, really interesting.
And what is just so stunning about 14th Army's victory is how they overcome that.
And it's absolutely extraordinary.
I mean, 30 different ration scales a day is just insane.
You know, to build a road to get the supplies forward in the Arakan, just in the Arakan, which is comparatively a sideshow compared to what's going to come.
They build an entire new road made of bricks, and they create ovens, you know, brick furnaces, all the way down from kind of what was then Bengal, now Bangladesh, down to the Mayu Range in what is now Rocheen State.
I mean, it is just...
It just makes you wonder how on earth they ever managed it.
But also, isn't it what makes it so exciting?
I'm going to indulge you on the logistics in a moment when we talk about D-Day.
But isn't it also the reason that the Burma campaign is so exciting?
is it's probably the closest that our fighting men came to having the experience that the Germans and the Russians had at Stalingrad.
You know, it's that mano a mano, just really down and dirty fighting.
The kind of thing that when you're a schoolboy and you don't know much about war, you think that's what war is all about.
It's about Ben at charges, it's about last stands.
But that, I think, was probably the rawest experience any British soldiers had.
Yeah, and I think what's interesting about the admin box, I mean, for those who don't know, the 7th Indian Vision sort of basically got surrounded by the Japanese and just had to stand firm.
They had to hold out.
That's what they had to do.
Because the Japanese operated very lightly and they kind of fed off what they won.
So if you deny them food and ammunition, then obviously they're going to run out.
And there's one place you do not want to be running out of, Ivra, is in the jungle of the Arakan, now Rohingya State.
And the British and the Indians and Gurkhas manage to hold their nerve.
And there's an amazing description of a guy in a tank, in a British tank, and he's on sort of night watch properly.
With the leaguer of his squadron.
And, you know, there's these mists that come down every night.
And he's just nodding off.
He's not supposed to nod off, of course, because he's on sentry duty, but he is nodding off.
And suddenly he hears this little squeak.
And he goes, immediately, kind of sort of woken up in a flash.
And the squeak, his brain manages to compute it in its groggy state very quickly into, I know what that is.
That's the lever of a Japanese soldier's webbing.
No.
Yes.
And immediately he just goes, ding, he's wide awake.
And someone else hears the same thing.
And moments later, kind of, you know, everyone's, the firing starts, there's tracer across the area, you know, and they cut these Japanese down to shreds.
But, you know, these are people who are creeping up on you out of a strange jungle in the middle of the night through the mist with really sharp swords.
And it's just utterly terrible.
It's like a zombie attack.
I mean, you know, it's like something out of the dead or something.
When they get you, they're not going to take you prisoner.
No!
And if they do, it's even worse.
And if they do, they're then going to kind of sort of, you know, castrate you and chop off your knob and put it in your mouth and crucify you or something.
I mean, just really horrible end.
Yes, exactly.
There was that scene, wasn't there, at the beginning of Platoon, rather similar to that, where he's looking and Charlie's creeping in on the count.
God, I must see that film again.
It's been a while since I've watched it.
I was talking to my son about it, saying, you know, all Vietnam films, that's the one to watch.
I hope you're...
How many kids have you got?
I've got two.
I hope they're into war, like Dad.
They're not, actually.
No, Daisy, he's 11.
She's quite up for going on a ride on a tank or something.
Ned, who has literally just finished his A-levels, he can sort of take it or leave it, to be perfectly honest.
He did read history at A-levels.
Oh, did he?
That's something.
Funny you say that, because when my kids were growing up, my son was not remotely interested in war at all.
Whereas the girl, in that evil way girls do, she sensed an opportunity to steal her way into daddy's affections by becoming daddy's war girl.
So she came with me to endless trips to the Imperial War Museum, while boy just kind of...
And how old are they now?
20 and 18.
And I've got another older one who I think was more loyal with me on war.
I think the problem is, you and I, our generation, we grew up in the shadow of the war.
We were taught by people who'd actually served.
And it just doesn't mean the same now.
Not least because in the interim, we've had other proper shooting wars, which have sort of taken over.
If you're going to get excited about it, you get excited about Afghanistan and Iraq, don't you?
Yes, I suppose it's not quite in the sort of DNA as it once was, but I do think people, I mean, I sort of look back at myself when I was a teenager and sort of what a feckless, useless individual I was, you know, and okay, I did history O-level and A-level and everything, but, you know, I knew absolutely nothing about Second World War, really.
You know, I'd long got over action men and airfix models and commando comics.
So, you know, it just didn't have any resonance with me whatsoever.
I mean, I think one thing about history, unlike many other academic subjects, it is the one that one can return to in adult life, post-education life, and actually get really into.
And you can say, oh, if only I had a teacher like X when I was at school, I might have been interested.
You know, history was so boring at school, but I've just read this book, or I've seen this programme, or watched Band of Brothers, or whatever it might be.
And that's what gets interesting.
Of course, the thing about history is you're more interested in it as you get on in life because your own life is becoming history and because you're more conscious of your mortality.
You know, when you're 18, you know, what do you care about anything?
You just care about sort of, you know, cricket and parties and, you know, going on holiday and surfing or whatever it might be.
So I think your outlook is so narrow.
I think that's the fundamental change between being sort of early 20s and the kind of sort of age we are now.
I still look back at myself.
I still feel fundamentally exactly the same person.
A lot of my friends are friends from when I was at school or university.
They're still friends.
I still find the same things funny.
But my outlook has just got broader because I've seen stuff, read stuff, know more stuff, married, got kids, all that kind of stuff.
Do you worry that your audience is going to be somewhat finite?
You're mainly talking to people of our age and older.
No, I don't think so.
And I think that's one of the really interesting things is I think what I've really noticed is that through the television work I do, a lot of that's a much younger audience.
And again, what you find is a lot of those people that are watching that in their 20s and 30s, by the time they get to 40s and 50s, they're reading books.
Right, yes.
Well, let's hope so.
And it's really, really interesting.
I mean, you know, whenever I sort of enter my bubble, which is kind of D-Day 75 commemorations or air shows at Duxford or something like that, suddenly I get, you know, I get accosted quite a lot and that's, I mean, it's very nice.
That's good.
But most of them are younger people, not older people.
What is the most exciting thing you've ever got to do as a result of your military history career?
It's an old cliche, yeah, but it is a Spitfire.
I mean, it just was amazing.
It was amazing.
That's the two-seater Spitfire, yeah?
Yeah, it was two seats of Spitfire, and that was great, but I had control for a bit, you know.
So Matt Jones, who was flying me, said, OK, Jones, you now have control.
And I was like, what?
This is just insane.
Actually, the most special, that was really special, but funny enough, the actual most special moment of the whole trip, and I was up there, I was doing a sort of film for them, a little sort of promo video for this place at Goodwood, where they, well, at that time it was at Oxford, and they set up this school, the Boltbee Flight Academy, where you could actually, you know, if you've got some hours on your log, but you can actually train to fly a Spitfire.
Solo.
It's the only place in the world you can do it.
So I was doing a sort of promo for them when they were first starting up.
So actually, instead of kind of 20 minutes or 17 minutes or what you usually get, I actually had the best part of an hour, which was great.
But it was a lovely day.
It was one of those beautiful days where everything just all came together.
And there was lots of blue sky, but there was lots of fluffy white clouds as well.
So it was just perfect.
You know, so you could sort of, you know, dance the surly bonds or whatever it was.
And what was lovely was taking off and seeing the shadow of the iconic wing on the ground.
And of course, as you take off, it separates.
And that was really good.
But Matt, very sweetly, did a kind of, you know, in those days you could still do this.
He then did sort of beat up the airfield, as they used to call it.
So you sort of fly in down and low, do a really fast pass over the airfield, climb up and then do a victory roll.
And, you know, you just think, I can't believe I'm doing this.
Oh, I bet.
I know.
I bet.
So, okay.
But I've done lots of really exciting things.
So, you know, I am sticking that out.
But I've been really lucky.
And, you know, I don't want to sound mawkish, but actually all those...
I mean, it's been a real privilege meeting all these veterans that I've met over the years.
I mean, some of them...
I mean, it is a bit like all walks of life.
I mean, some you really, really like instantly and you become friends with and you keep in touch with and you see all the time.
Others you sort of think, well, he was all right.
And others you think, actually, he's completely bastarded.
You know, I just don't like you at all.
But I've got to say the latter very, very rarely.
But it's been really special, you know, to interview sort of Maori from New Zealand who fought in North Africa or Germans or, you know, there was a set of identical twins from Alabama who fought in North Africa, Sicily and landed on Omaha Beach on D-Day.
I was reading about them early last night.
Yeah, Tom and Dee Bowles, and they were amazing.
It was just, you know, you were conscious when you were meeting them that you were meeting someone very special.
And also, you know, relationship with people like Tom Neill and Jeff Wellham, I mean, they've been...
You know, I got to meet Roland Beaumont.
You know, I knew Winkle Brown.
I mean, you know, these are kind of legends and they're kind of, you know, the word hero is sort of banded about too readily these days.
But, you know, I'm still starstruck by sort of meeting kind of rock stars or if I ever met them.
But, you know, famous people because I'm shallow and cheap.
But those are the people that really count.
I mean, I'd much rather meet one of them than...
So you've sort of semi-answered my question, my question I was going to ask next, which is, if you'd been in World War II, what would you like to have done?
Well, I'd like to think I would have been a fighter pilot and joined 609 Squadron, you know, flown Spitfires and then rocket-firing Typhoons.
I think the sensible option, where you could go through, sort of having done your bit and really been at the sharp end, but chances are you'd get through okay, it's probably be a kind of junior officer on a destroyer.
That would be good, wouldn't it?
You know, the risk hasn't gone out.
There's plenty of destroyers that were sunk and lots of people drowned.
By and large, though, you're all right.
Because, you know, U-boats tend to concentrate on merchant vessels.
You don't want to be on a merchant ship.
Yeah, yeah.
Even though, actually, the number of merchant ships sunk was actually comparatively small as well.
But...
Was it now?
Well, Britain started the war with 10,000.
They lost 2,452, I think, in the entire war.
So you had a one in five chance, roughly?
Yeah, overall.
But it depends on...
Yes, I suppose you did.
But what is really interesting, there was something like 378,000 individual Allied shippings during World War II. Right.
Of which 7,000 were sunk.
So that works out, I think, at 0.4%.
Those are good odds, actually.
Compared to, I suppose, Bomber Command was the worst?
No, actually, in the RAF, it was being a torpedo pilot in the Mediterranean was really bad.
I think that was like 70%.
Very swordfish, that kind of thing.
No, bowfighters and things like that.
Bowfoots and stuff.
Really?
Yeah, you had like 17%.
Why was that so dangerous?
No.
I suppose because you're operating at low rates over the sea.
And no one even thinks of them now.
No.
No one thinks of Coastal Commander.
A thousand people had to guess what would be the worst branch of the services to be in.
Well, in the RAF, that is.
Right.
Oh, okay.
I mean, if you're in a tank, I mean, you had no chance of getting through unscathed.
Statistically, no.
Is that right?
Yeah.
Okay, well, let me give you an example.
In Normandy, for example, the Sherwood Rangers Yeomanry, in a tank regiment, you would have 800 men, roughly, of which 200 would be in tanks.
The rest would be kind of B-echelon, so those are sport troops.
Of those, 36 would be officers.
Just in the Normandy campaign alone, they lost 44 officers.
Out of how many?
36.
Yes, because they're being replaced.
Yes.
And other ranks, who were tank crews, was 175.
Right.
So, that's just in Normandy.
That's from 6th of June to, you know, 21st of August or whatever.
To get through to the end of the war, I mean, statistically, you just have no chance.
So, of the Sherwood Rangers Yomerie, there are two officers that leave in 1939 for Palestine that are still standing in 1945.
You presumably read my favourite Tank book, Tank Action.
Of course.
I mean, how good is that book?
It's amazing.
I can't...
I was reading it and I'm thinking, I cannot believe that this book is so good.
Yeah, and I can't believe it's so little known either.
It's just amazing.
What's his name remind me?
Kent Out.
It's amazing.
That whole sequence at Saint-Ion, where he's coming up against Wittmann and co.
And he has to go into, and I don't know if you remember, but there's a bit where one of the troops gets completely shot up.
So his squadron, he's in some woods in his 75-pounder Sherman.
Joe Eakins is further away in his firefly with the 17-pounder.
And they see the Tigers come across and take them out, which is Michael Vittman, the famous, infamous Panzerace.
But there's another sequence where this troop goes down into this gully, the size of a football, width of a football pitch.
And they go down to this gully.
And the guy who's leading that troop is the kind of sort of, you know, he's the squadron joker.
And he's grown a little hit on a moustache for a joke.
And everyone loves him.
And he's an orphan.
And he's got no family at all.
But everyone loves him.
His family is the regiment and the battalion.
And he goes in and they hear him over the net.
And it's clear that they've come up against something.
And actually, it is Kentow, who's the gunner in his crew, who actually sees the Panzer IV, Mark IV, and takes it out and destroys it.
But not long after that, they're told to go and investigate.
So they creep down into this gully, into this sort of low area beneath these woods.
And he and his Snowy, his commander, tank commander, get out and go and look.
And he goes towards this tank and he can see it's his friend.
I think he's called Jimmy.
And you can see Jimmy just looking at him, like you're looking at me now, staring at him, but his eyes are completely dead.
And he doesn't move.
And he's absolutely dead as a dodo.
And they all are.
Every single one of the tanks has been taken out.
And then he sees the...
The dead panzer commander that he shot up.
And it's just...
It's absolutely devastating.
I don't think I've ever read a memoir, particularly of guys on the ground, where I've noticed that my heart rate is quicker as I'm reading it.
It's absolutely amazing.
I just cannot believe it's not better known.
It is one of the great sequences of war writing, in my humble opinion.
And actually, when you then go there, and you walk that ground, and you go into that gully, it makes even more sense.
You just see, I get how this all worked.
One of the things that I really came across is that, however bad we had it, in your Normandy book this is, remind me what it's called?
It's called Normandy 44.
The Germans that you've interviewed have come up with the most horrific experiences.
I mean, the Germans inevitably had it worse than we did.
Because we had overwhelming air superiority.
We outnumbered them.
Your descriptions of the MG42 gunners and their barrels melting.
Where did you find these people?
Well, some of them are interviewed, and some of them are sort of long-forgotten memoirs.
Some of them are, you know, published memoirs.
Others you can find at...
So some of them came from the German military archives at Freiburg in the Schwarzwald.
Do you speak German?
I don't.
I can read bits of it.
I can read enough to know, ah, this is important.
So what I tend to do is I've got a great friend who...
Who do...
I set them off on a kind of preliminary kind of, can you check this out?
And they come back and go, okay, we've got this, this, this, this.
What do you think sounds interesting?
And I go, I'm coming over.
And we then spend a week going through stuff together.
So that's how it works.
It's not ideal, but, you know.
But that brings me to...
But they are amazing, these testimonies.
And I would say one of the most moving interviews I've ever done is with a German veteran who was telling me about his war and he just kept breaking down in tears.
And it was really interesting.
And I kept saying to him, you know, you don't have to tell me this.
No, no, no, I want to, I want to.
And at the end of it, having sort of recovered his composure, he then just said, I've never told anyone what I've just told you.
And I just thought, my God, you know, I mean, this guy was in his 80s by this point.
He's had to hold on to this all his life.
And it's obviously just completely chewed him up.
And our boys are kind of sort of venerated, quite rightly, and sort of patted on the back and they were able to march down Whitehall with their flags and their berets and, you know, we wear poppies and we kind of think they're all heroes in the golden generation, which, of course, they are.
But...
Is there any difference to a kind of 18-year-old recruit in Germany who is conscripted, who has no choice in what he's doing, who is fighting for, you know, his family, his friends, his village, and someone from, I don't know, Lincolnshire, who's kind of called up in exactly the same circumstances?
Of course, the answer is absolutely no.
I mean, there is a difference between a kind of sort of fanatical national socialist in a kind of hardcore Adolf Hitler, Leibstandarte kind of...
And I thought, how awful that you've got to sit there feeling guilty for kind of actually being incredibly brave and courageous and watching your mates get killed.
I'm really, really tough.
And then never talking about it and feeling ashamed about it.
Where'd your German been?
On the Eastern Front?
No, he'd been in Italy, actually.
But I became very good friends with a lovely old chap called Franz Marsen, who was a baker from Dusseldorf.
And he'd twice been on the Eastern Front, twice wounded, got away, eventually ended up in Italy.
And he was just amazing.
I mean, he was the most delightful fellow.
And actually, it's quite funny, when he started his training in 1941, he was still doing kind of amphibious landing practice.
I said, why were you doing that?
He goes, well, because we were going to invade Britain, of course.
I went, yeah, but it's spring of 1941, you're about to go into Russia.
Anyway, we didn't have an answer to that.
He said, but one thing I must say, well, this was really sweet, was he had lots of photos of him and his wife all over the place.
His wife had sadly passed away, but he said, I was away from my wife so long in the war, he said, when I got back, I vowed I would never spend a night apart from her ever again, and I never did until she died.
Which is really sweet.
But anyway, he says that after the war, my mother and I, we went on the cross-channel ferry and we went to England.
And she said, and I saw the White Cliffs and I said to myself, I said to my wife, we would never have successfully invaded.
Fair point.
They never would have done.
Earlier on, you mentioned about how you were excited about logistics.
And I remember when I got the press release for your book, and it said, this is going to tackle D-Day from a completely different angle.
And you thought, yeah, yeah.
No, logistics.
And I thought, oh, bloody hell, really?
And actually, you had converted me within a few pages.
Oh, good.
It is one of the best books I've read about D-Day.
And it completely transforms the way that I understand the campaign.
And I think anyone reading it will...
It will change their perspective on war.
Well, I hope so.
That's the whole idea.
Give us the reason why it matters.
Yes.
Okay.
So war is understood to be fought on three levels as our businesses run.
The strategic, operational and tactical.
So strategic is the big overview.
This is Winston Churchill, Adolf Hitler.
This is Eisenhower.
You know, it's a high command.
And what your overall aims are.
You know, let's go into Italy.
Let's not go into Italy.
Let's carry on pushing through the Po Valley or let's do an invasion of Southern France.
That's a strategic level.
The tactical level is the coal face of war.
So that is your guy, your bomber crew.
That is the guy and his foxhole or crew in their tank or whatever.
The coal face of war.
The actual fighting bit.
And then there is the operational level.
And that is the bit that links the strategic to the tactical.
It's the bit that enables the tactical fighting...
To achieve the strategic aims.
It is another way of putting it.
It's the nuts and bolts of war.
It's the economics of war.
It's supply.
It's Hershey bars.
It's cups of tea.
It's ammunition.
It's boots.
It's shipping.
It's all that stuff.
It's factories.
It's the Spitfire Fund.
It's all that kind of stuff.
Once you reinsert that operational level, then you can start to understand how and why nations are fighting in the way that they are fighting.
Once you understand that, everything starts to change.
Because the way we have told the narrative of the Second World War over the last 60 years, 50 years, has been almost entirely from the strategic and tactical levels only.
And there is this big missing bit in the middle which is never included.
And so everyone is judging tactical prowess with the same parameters.
Which is not the way to do it, because everyone is different.
So the Western Allies have a completely different approach to war from the Germans.
The Soviet Union has a completely different approach to the Germans or the Western Allies.
It's just a totally different way.
So you can't sort of say...
Yeah, the Germans are brilliant tactically and we're crap because it's just not like that.
Tell me the differences between those three you named, the Allies, the Russians and the...
Well, so in the case of the Soviet Union and the Germans, they're very kind of boots on the ground heavy, which I think you can argue and argue convincingly is an incredibly inefficient way of war because basically the more men you use, the more casualties you're going to have.
Whereas the Western Allies are using steel, not flesh, as far as they possibly can.
They're incredibly modern nations.
They have first world, they're superpowers, they have global reach.
And they're using that global reach, that technology, modernity, science, to limit the number of men actually having to do the hard yards at the coalface of war.
And that is an incredibly sensible way of going about things.
And it means you're not going to have a massive slaughter of an entire generation like you did for the British...
the Germans, the Americans have never experienced.
And they're better people for that.
And that is because fundamentally they're warfare states or Americans become a warfare state, but they're not militaristic states.
Militarism is all tied up with nationalism and is martial in its entire outlook.
Everything is about kind of military gains.
And so it's just a completely different way of doing it.
So the Germans are not particularly dependent on high levels of training.
What they're dependent on is high levels of discipline, which is not the same thing whatsoever.
Whereas the Allies are having to depend on morale much more than anyone else.
And they achieve that morale by having their men properly supplied and looked after and having penicillin and Hershey bars and cups of tea.
But the Germans could do some shit really well, couldn't they?
I mean, for example, was it called Mission Command, where you get...
Yeah, so this bit is actually, this is one of those things that's completely overstated.
There's a thing called Alstruck tactic, which in post-war we've become terribly obsessed with.
One of the reasons we were terribly obsessed with it is because in the Cold War...
Well, all the generals and all the people at the top of the army now, they all know about this stuff because when they were junior officers, the Cold War was still on.
And that's what they're fighting.
The only people to have fought the Russians were, of course, the Germans.
So after the war, there was this huge program of interrogating, you know, senior commanders, next tier down commanders and getting...
So, you know, how did you do it?
What did you do?
And of course, what the Germans are doing is they kind of...
You know, we never liked Hitler.
We were only obeying orders.
But the reason why we're so brilliant is because.
So they're putting this incredibly good gloss on their own military expertise.
But one of the things they talk about is initiative.
And actually, it's called Zellb Anzerhorekeit, which is the ability, it's not the ability, it's about giving people A junior subaltern, the tools of the job, and then making their own decision.
Right.
And that has become interpreted as Austria-Tactic.
But you will never meet a German veteran who's ever heard of the phrase Austria-Tactic.
It's kind of much higher up the level, and it's tactical theory rather than...
Right.
Whereas this sort of giving people the tools to do the job and then a minimum amount of orders, giving them a junior officer the ability to use his own initiative, is basically what we're talking about, is what we're talking about with Mission Command.
So the basic idea is, I want you to go and capture Vincent Square, just around the corner from here.
I'm going to give you this, this, this, this, this.
How you do it, when you do it, is entirely up to you, but I want it done by nightfall.
Very prescriptive orders would go, right, I want you to do this, I want you to attack from the south end, you know, come off Hyde Street and then go on to the kind of, you know, Vauxhall Bridge Road and then you attack from the kind of the west or whatever.
You know, that would be much more prescriptive.
The problem with that is that only works for people who are motivated in the first place.
Yes.
So that works fine with paratroopers or commandos or SAS, but it doesn't work with ordinary troops and it doesn't work in the German army with ordinary troops either.
So you've got to...
It is entirely connected to motivation.
So an American airborne soldier, for example.
I mean, Dick Winters, a break-all man of taking out his four guns.
He is doing that.
And the reason he's doing that is because he's volunteered to do it.
He's keen to get better.
He wants to do it.
He's happy to use his initiative.
And he is thinking on his feet.
That is a classic example of mission command.
It's like, Winters, right, get four men together, go and take out those four guns.
That is mission command.
That is what everyone calls astrotactic.
Yes.
There was no difference between that and the Germans at all.
Interesting.
But if you were talking to, you know, I mean, there was a very interesting guy called Lionel Wigram.
Lionel Wigram was a sort of pioneer of the battle schools.
So the battle schools were originally set up with General Alexander.
Yeah.
And this was the idea that, you know, you've got a conscript army, give them simple orders, give them training with live ammunition so they know what to expect.
But don't expect too much because they're conscripts and they don't want to be there.
And Lionel Rickman was very into this and he got a job as a seconded to frontline battalions during the Sicilian campaign to observe and kind of, you know, hone the battle schools a bit better.
And when he came back, he said, what's absolutely apparent is in a 36-man platoon, only six people will move forward.
Everyone else just wants to be led.
So you'll only have, you know, it'll be your section commanders, maybe your platoon sergeant.
You know, those are the guys, those are the backbone.
And those are the people that basically do all the hard yards.
Everyone else is just followers.
And if you can get them to actually be useful, then good luck.
And he did a speech about it.
Monty heard about it, thought it was absolutely catastrophic for morale if this got out, sacked him, made him demoted, dropped him down a rank from half colonel to major, sent him over to Italy where he was promptly killed.
His grandson, incidentally, is now a really successful film producer, works with Guy Ritchie.
But really, really interesting.
Do you think that's why?
Because you and I have both interviewed a few veterans in our time.
And one thing you often hear them say is that, no, I'm not a hero.
The ones that are heroes are the ones that never made it.
And I wonder whether it's partly that level of...
The people, those six in the platoon, tend to be the ones that get killed.
Yeah.
I suspect there's something of that in it.
I think there's kind of survivor's guilt.
Yeah.
So it's very interesting.
On last Thursday, on the D-Day anniversary, I was at Bayer, and we did the BBC coverage.
Then afterwards, I saw this guy in a wheelchair coming towards me.
And so this French historian I was with, and I went over and started to talk to him.
And he was called Frederick.
And he had just discovered a grave of a man he remembered being killed.
Right.
And he's about to be 100 in November.
He said, oh, I'm looking forward to that.
Which is great.
He was very game.
And he told me, he said, I remember this boy being killed.
And he was 20.
So it was 80 years this guy had had that this other guy hadn't had.
And we were all thinking the same thing.
We just suddenly thought, God, you know, this amazing passage of time that you've had that he hasn't.
And he said, you know, we were being shelled.
We were being shelled really, really heavily.
And he suddenly went a bit mad.
And he just got up and started charging towards the Germans.
They gunned him down.
So I can remember it really, really clearly.
And he was quite shaken by the fact that he'd suddenly seen the grave.
Yeah.
And it was just this big, deep moment that we were all...
All of us were conscious that...
The enormity of what had happened, the enormity of this passage of time, the enormity of the fact that this guy was now about to be 100 and, you know, was nearing his end, and all the extra time he'd got.
It was really profoundly moving, I've got to say.
I'm conscious that you've got to go any second now.
Before you go, I want to just draw attention, listeners' attention, special friend, as they're known, to the fact that, like your point about Mission Command...
Your book is very much about exploding myths and the received ideas that so many of us have got about the war.
And one of them you explode is that Montgomery was a bit of a bit shit.
Yeah, so I rather laid into Monty for his...
I don't think tactically he was particularly brilliant.
But I don't think that the Allied way of war that had been worked out by 1944 requires a massive tactical genius.
I don't think that's what it's about.
I think what it is about is about harnessing material wealth and solidly grinding down the Germans.
And that doesn't require tactical chutzpah.
You know, Carlo D'Este famously kind of wrote an entire book sort of rubbishing Monty's plan for D-Day.
Now, the first thing to point out is the plan isn't entirely Monty's.
Now, okay, he's overall land commander, and he might be overall architect, but the detail of it has nothing to do with him.
And actually, I just think it's the best plan that could possibly have been put into place with the resources they've got available.
And the limiting factor is shipping.
It's not men or guns or anything.
Although he was responsible for dreaming up Market Garden, wasn't he?
Yes, okay.
But he wasn't responsible for creating the Allied Airborne Army.
And you've got this huge airborne army.
And everyone's been slightly stunned by the rate of advance, which, after all, was faster in the two weeks that followed the Normandy campaign than the German advance across France back in 1940.
It was the quickest advance on any front anywhere in the Second World War.
And it looked like there was an opportunity to burst through, which is why they don't go for the shell.
You know, they go, right, let's get these earlier ports, let's back ourselves up, and we've got this huge airborne army.
This is not an airborne division.
This is an airborne army, absolutely bristling with testosterone, with the kind of ability to use their initiative that other ordinary troops don't.
They are among the best trained troops that America and Britain has, who are just absolutely itching to go.
And it seems like an opportunity to get in round the top of the incredibly strong West Wall, in what looks like a comparatively...
You know, there's risks involved, of course, but if that can burst through, then it's got to be worth a punch.
You're very forgiving.
Now, it wasn't the...
Well, I don't think it was the right decision, but I can understand the thought processes by which you might do it.
You know, if you've got all these forces, you've got to use them.
I think the failing is probably putting too much emphasis on airborne power without training up...
What you've basically got is the best trained troops delivered to the battlefront by the least trained aircrew.
And there's a sort of disparity there which has never been quite worked out in the Second World War.
And that's an issue.
But I don't think...
The general concept is quite so bad as everyone makes out.
And I think the original plan that Dempsey puts forward, which is a little further south, which would involve doing a little bit more kind of sort of on the side of the Americans, rather than kind of pushing north.
I think that sort of comes into it.
Just before we go, I want you to explain briefly your insight into Omaha Beach and the machine guns and the melting barrels.
Because traditionally we think of Omaha Beach as a thing that we almost didn't get ashore because of blah, blah, blah.
Yes, and Bradley thinking of turning back and, you know, the whole thing was sort of saving Private Ryan in the first 20 minutes across the board.
I mean, well, the interesting thing about it is it just it wasn't.
I mean, there were moments where it was absolutely terrible.
The initial waves, the Verville draw, which is on the kind of western side of it, of the five-mile, slightly concave Omaha Beach, and sort of the Colville draw, which is at sort of the other end.
The initial moments were pretty bad.
I mean, one of the reasons why two of the platoons were killed was because mortars landed in the landing craft.
So that's got nothing to do with machine guns.
And that was horrific.
But it's interesting, even in that first wave, if you got down a little bit further...
Further in the middle, there were plenty of people that were getting across kind of, you know, one wounded, kind of two dead or one dead and three wounded or no wounded at all.
I mean, you know, really got okay.
I mean, the key thing was to keep moving.
And I think the interesting thing is we tell that because of movies, because of Hollywood, because of the narrative of it, we kind of tend to kind of tell that purely through the experience of the Americans.
But just imagine being a German.
You know, you're really badly trained.
You're really badly equipped.
This is the first action you've ever seen for the vast majority of them.
You don't want to be there.
You're not motivated.
You're not a fanatical Nazi.
You just think you've got the kind of worst...
pulled the worst straw ever.
You wake up in the...
Haze, miserly haze of that morning.
And you look out and the sea is black with landing craft and warships.
And first of all, hundreds of bombers come over and bomb you.
Okay, not very accurately, but who cares?
The whole ground shakes.
The cacophony is absolutely enormous.
Dust and smoke and bits of concrete are shaking all over the place.
It's absolutely grim.
And then the warships open up.
And I think it's really important that we understand what we're talking about here.
So on the crust are 13 strong points.
And the strong point is sort of a collection of different bunkers, a mortar bunker, a little zigzag trench, a gun bunker, this sort of thing.
And they're all mutually supporting.
And total is about 350 men manning those against thousands of Americans.
What you've got is 15 field guns there, 20 anti-tank guns, of which there are only two 88mm calibre.
The calibre is the diameter of the shell they fire, so obviously the bigger the calibre, the bigger the shell that's coming towards you.
But most of those guns are 50mm and 75mm, which in the big scheme of things against warships is...
You know, diddly squad.
Against them are 183 guns of 90mm calibre and above.
And some of them are 240mm.
No!
You know, they're 15-inch guns.
I mean, you know, they're really seriously big.
And they're hurtling in towards you all the time.
And that doesn't include kind of, you know, Bofors guns and Ehrlichons and, not Ehrlichons, but, you know, cannons and things, quick-firing cannons and pom-poms and stuff like that, which, because there's no Luftwaffe, are turned 90 degrees to the horizontal.
Yeah.
And, you know, I mean, it's just an unbelievable way to fire.
And every time one of those shells comes in, even if it doesn't actually hit your bunker, it's going to make you duck.
And quite a lot of them are going to hit your bunker.
Now, quite a lot of them are not going to completely destroy your bunker.
But every time it hits, just imagine the sound of that.
You're in there.
You've got no earplugs.
You know, dust is coming around.
Smoke, grit, bits of concrete flying off and chipping off.
You know, what's going to happen when you're manning your machine gun?
Are you going to carry on...
Are you firing through the smoke?
Of course you're not.
You know, and very quickly the whole place is covered with smoke and dust and you can see absolutely diddly squat and you can see vague figures kind of coming off landing crafts and you keep firing and now it is verboten to fire one of these MG42s for more than 240 rounds.
But when you're firing at 23 rounds a second, it doesn't take very long.
It's like 11 seconds worth of firing.
Then you're supposed to pause, let it all cool down, change barrel or something.
But of course you're not going to.
You're going to keep firing until you're kind of blue in the face.
And what happens when every single one of those 23 bullets, there's a little explosion in the breach.
And when you do that 23 times a second, that is a heck of a lot of heat.
And what happens is very quickly it goes red hot, then it goes white hot.
the grass either side of you catches fire, and you're just spraying bullets everywhere.
And so all accuracy is gone.
And what that means is, if you're on the ground, as long as you keep moving, chances are most of you will be okay.
It's the initial ways, when the ramps come down, before all the shelling has really started, there's a pause in the naval gunfire because the troops are just landing.
So that's when they can see, and that is when the slaughter happens.
Total dead on Omaha Beach, Allied troops, and I say Allied divisively because a lot of the coxswains and crew coming in with the landing craft are British, because three quarters of the landing craft are British, and crewed by British Royal Navy, is 842, which is a lot.
But I suspect most people think it's kind of two or three times more than that.
Indeed.
And also, total casualties for D-Day were not as great as Operation Tiger.
No, they're especially, worst case, not only 40,000.
It's more like 10 or 11.
Casualties is not dead.
Didn't more die training for D-Day than actually killed on D-Day?
Yes.
But don't forget, training for two years.
So it's quite a long time rather than one day.
But it's just...
You know, the other thing that's absolutely clear is that Bradley had no intention of pulling them out at all because he didn't know what was going on until about one o'clock in the afternoon when his chief aide and chief of staff, who he sent to the coast, and you're not going to send your chief of staff, who's a general, unless you're pretty confident they're going to be okay.
So they come back and go, no, you know, it's all under control, which it was.
Frankly, it was all over by about 9.30.
I mean, it wasn't because the fighting went on until the afternoon, but the outcome was no longer in doubt.
And he's absolutely fine.
And what's really interesting is post-war, Bradley writes two autobiographies.
In the first one, he doesn't mention anything about, kind of, you know, considering pulling them out.
In the second one, which is written much later, he does, by which time the whole narrative of Bloody Omaha has kind of taken root.
Right.
I'm going to say to the listener, special friend, buy the book Normandy 44.
It's really, really good.
James, will you promise me you'll come on the podcast?
Yes, it'd be an utter pleasure.
It's been a joy.
Marvellous.
Thank you.
Listen to The Delling Pod with James Holland, author of several brilliant books, Normandy 44 being the latest.
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