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Nov. 15, 2019 - The Delingpod - James Delingpole
01:10:16
Delingpod 45: Roger Moorhouse
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Welcome to the Dellingpot with me, James Dellingpole, and my...
Well, I know I always say this, but I really am excited about this week's guest.
And he's been a long time coming.
I think, was it a year ago or two years ago that I was going to have you on the podcast?
I think it was two years ago.
Oh my God.
Okay.
Roger Morehouse, who really should have been on this podcast two years ago, is the author of the book that you've got to buy your dad for Christmas.
And we'll talk about that in a moment.
I mean, it's a war book and he's a great war historian.
Yeah.
But let's talk about first the book that we were originally going to talk about, which was called?
The Third Reich in 100 Objects.
Third Reich in 100 Objects.
And I think you're slightly younger than me, Roger, probably.
68, as in year of birth.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
So you're three years younger than me.
So you're a mere child.
But you and I both grew up in a world where we can remember a time where you could be interested in the Nazis without being accused of being a Nazi.
I mean...
Isn't this one of the weirdest developments of our lifetime?
When I was a child, actually, there was a big Christmas dispute over this.
One Christmas, my aunt gave my brother a book called Hitler's War Machine, and she gave me a book on pond life.
Literally, it was about microscopic pond life.
And I was just absolutely, I couldn't think of any greater insult.
Why did Dick get the bloody Nazi book?
And I got these, I don't know what they were, amoeba or paramecium or...
Marvellous.
Pond skaters.
I was, yeah, he got tanks, you know, with their black pantser uniforms and...
And you got pond skaters.
Yeah, yeah.
But...
The reason I mention this is that you sent me the book through the post, and I tweeted out a photograph of me, this is going to make my Christmas, or eagerly...
Yes, I remember that.
I thought, A, I'm helping out to promote his book, which I've failed to promote on my podcast so far, and B, it's going to be interesting anyway, because, you know, Nazis are fascinating, and...
And I got attacked from it.
Indeed.
By some random person on Twitter.
We live in hysterical times, don't we, is the simple answer.
And you can't sort of separate the subject from that.
To some people's minds today, that suggests that you support everything the Nazis stood for, which is a ridiculous position to take.
Yeah, exactly.
I mean, so it would be pretty odd, wouldn't it, if you and I were into Einsatzgruppen and what they did, you know, the brutalities, and if we were into the final solution.
It's a ludicrous idea.
It is, rather.
Yeah.
I mean, as I say, I think it's kind of symptomatic of where particularly social media has brought us in terms of where the politics is at the moment.
It's hysterical and it's completely polarised.
What worries me about social media, since you mentioned it, Twitter particularly, is that it enables to get together and form a cohesive unit the kind of people who would previously have been at home in their bedsits writing letters in crayon.
Or green ink.
In green ink.
And suddenly they've got...
they discover their mates and there are people who think like them and they form...
A sort of groupal skill and they attack people like us.
And they make a lot of noise and they give the impression of being more numerous than they actually are.
Yes, I think that it does give a voice to those who, I mean for good or ill, it gives a voice to those who are previously voiceless in a way.
Yeah.
But some people are voiceless for good reason.
Yes, I think you're right.
So what do you think it is that That draws so many of us to the Nazis.
I mean, it's a cliche, but it does seem to be the main subject taught in schools and history classes.
And show me a boy that isn't interested in Nazis, of our generation at least, and I'll show you a bloody weirdo.
You're right.
I mean, there is a sort of, I suppose there's a nefarious glamour to the Nazis, you know, in all senses, in terms of their uniforms.
And you look at even the weaponry.
I mean, for those, again, our generation that, you know, as anyone that's a fan of Star Wars, you will see essentially Third Reich weaponry being reproduced in Star Wars, for example.
So there is a tremendous kind of appeal there.
It's almost an aesthetic which is very appealing on one level.
And then sort of philosophically, I suppose, in a deeper sense that this is...
I mean, evil is not enough.
You can't just talk about evil because there have been lots of evil regimes.
But I think what's peculiarly fascinating about the Third Reich is evil perpetrated...
By an otherwise civilised people.
Yeah, that's it.
They listened to Schubert.
Exactly.
And yet they...
So that, to me, is that...
And that's the key fascination for me, is how...
It's the old line.
I think it came from Golloman, who said, you know, how did the nation of writers and thinkers turn into a nation of hangmen?
And that, to me, is the key question behind The Third Reich.
But also, it's that...
They had really cool uniforms and really cool weaponry.
It's a bit...
The country that we still want to drive their cars today, and there's a reason for that.
The reason why everyone wants a Porsche.
And it's that design genius and that sort of style which also gave us the Tiger Tank.
Absolutely.
I mean, you have to admit, you know, the Tiger Tank...
It's an absolute work of art.
You know, look at things like...
Even to go down to things like the MG34, MG42, the machine guns they use, they're stunning in terms of design.
You know, they would stand muster with any sort of modern weapon in terms of, you know, simply a stunningly beautiful design, which is a strange thing to say, but it's true.
And didn't they...
James Holland is quite interesting on this, where he points out that actually the Germans' weapons were slightly overrated, or ours were underrated, that some of our tanks were actually pretty good, and that the Tiger required so much fuel that it kept breaking down and so on.
But some of the...
The Sturmgewehr.
That was the best gun of the war, wasn't it?
The best infantry weapon?
I mean, this is probably something...
I think...
Actually, the MP40, I think, was very good.
Was it?
The Schmeisser.
The Schmeisser.
And that was used much...
I mean, the Sturmgewehr only comes in really 44.
It's very late.
In terms of design, yes, it's absolutely...
It's almost prefacing what's coming next in terms of assault weapons.
It's the first of those.
Whether or not it has a lineage to the AK-47 is still disputed, but certainly it looks very, very similar.
Kalashnikov himself always used to say that, no, he didn't take any design cues from the Sturmgewehr.
But whether we can believe that or not, I don't know.
It looks very, very similar.
Exactly, with the curved magazine.
Exactly, with the curved magazine.
But I think certainly the MP40 is...
I think that's a bit of a game-changer, actually, in terms of weaponry, because it's very light, it's very easy to use.
And again, you compare that with British soldiers with their Lee Enfields in 1939-40, you can see who's got the advantage.
Yeah.
Well, we can come now to your amazing book, First to Fight, subtitled The Polish War 1939.
And it explodes lots of myths, and not least about Polish cavalry charges against armoured cars.
Mm-hmm.
But it also opens a window on a part of the war which, weirdly enough, has hardly been covered at all by historians.
You'd think that, first a fight gives it away.
When the Germans went into Poland, that really was the first fighting moment of World War II, wasn't it?
Exactly, yeah.
Again, this is disputed, but in the conventional narrative...
1st of September is the beginning of the war, certainly the beginning of the European war.
There's this sort of counter-narrative which suggests that the Asian war is already going on since 1937 between China and Japan, but let's leave that out.
We're talking about the European war, 1st of September.
So yes, the Polish campaign kicks the war off.
It's the campaign that brings Britain and France into the war and effectively makes it a world war.
Had we not declared war on the 3rd of September, that would have been effectively another sort of East European squabble between the Germans and the Poles.
Let me just get rid of that quote.
Do we go back?
That was a really annoying interruption.
No, not bloody John Lewis.
John Lewis are good, but they're delivering a mattress, and that was an automated message.
I mean, what a kind of undignified thing.
We were talking about Poland being invaded.
One of the things I learned from your excellent book...
outbreak of World War Two, Poland had the fifth largest army in the world.
Yeah.
And France had the biggest, no, no, sorry, the Soviets had the biggest army, I think.
France had the second biggest army.
But it makes me think, and I was thinking about this throughout your book, the sort of the counterfactual.
Could?
I mean, the Germans were outnumbered quite heavily.
Well, in terms of sort of pure numbers, in terms of what they actually put into the field, they're not.
You know, the Poles unfortunately couldn't or weren't allowed to mobilize like they wanted to.
Because the British and the French were saying, don't mobilize because it might make the Germans attackers.
So we were trying to stop them from provoking the Germans, which is just a ridiculous concept.
So in terms of manpower, you know, it's substantial, absolutely, the Polish army.
And this is one of the myths that I wanted to try and sort of knock down, was this idea of essentially Polish incompetence.
Which is something that is sort of, is right from, well first of all it's right from the pages of, you know, Goebbels' propaganda machine.
Yeah.
You know, so if you can portray your enemy as incompetent and ridiculous and then by extension racially inferior to you, then that's all grist to the mill as far as the Nazis were concerned.
But I think it's also a bit more than that.
In a sense, we, in our affluent, comfortable West, and this is going back to the 30s, and it's almost the same now.
I think we traditionally look down on Eastern Europe, this sort of Orientalist attitude.
We look down on Eastern Europe as somewhere that's not quite on the same page as we are and is fundamentally inferior, and we don't really need to take it seriously.
And that's certainly the case in 1939.
Yes, that comes across very strongly in the book, as of course it would, given it was such a horrible, horrible conflict.
The Germans, one gets the impression, atrocities weren't the result of Germans being brutalised by war.
They were brutalised from the off.
They were doing really nasty, nasty things, killing Boy Scouts, killing 11-year-old kids, massacring Jews.
Yeah.
Just kidding anyone, you gave one example of a man who was killed because an axe was found in his pig shed or something.
Yes, yes.
I think that's remarkable.
You always have this sort of question when you write a book, well, what surprised you in your research?
And this is what I always come back with, that I think the assumption is, particularly, again, it's that rather comfortable Western narrative, Is that the sort of barbarisation of World War II is something that develops as it goes along, you know, with a step change in 1941, and then you've got, you know, all out sort of, you know, race war on the Eastern Front and so on.
And I think that's quite a lazy assumption, but it's one that we probably all make.
And then the corollary of that is that the opening phase of the war is perhaps in some way vaguely chivalrous.
And maybe our perception of the French campaign supports that because it is vaguely chivalrous.
There isn't much in the way of massacres.
There are two massacres, famous massacres of POWs in 1940 at Paradis and Vormhout.
And there's another massacre of Belgian civilians.
But there's not much in the way of atrocities in 1940.
Yeah.
But the problem here is that there's...
Essentially, there's an Eastern War and there's a Western War.
And the Western War is very, very different in its character to the Eastern War.
And the Eastern War is brutal, is exterminatory right from the very beginning.
So from day one, literally from the 1st of September, you know, as an example, I'll give you the book of the German action in Danzig, in the free state of Danzig, There were a number of sites in Danzig which were sort of very Polish, you know, were Polish institutions.
And one of them was a Polish post office.
And the Polish post office had been, you know, very roughly fortified.
The Poles knew that something was coming.
So they'd sort of sent in a few reservist soldiers to act as auxiliary postmen and things like that.
And they'd sent in a captain in the engineers to do rudimentary fortification of the building, which he did.
And then it's attacked at dawn on the 1st of September by the Germans.
And very quickly you see this descends into absolute barbarism.
So it's not something that develops as the war goes on.
From day one to hour one.
Literally day one.
So the Germans go in, they shell the building, they try and storm the building, the Poles resist.
And there's a sort of a Mexican standoff, effectively, where both sides, you know, the Germans pull back and say, oh dear, this is going to be a bit harder than we thought.
And say, well, you need to surrender by, you know, you've got two hours to surrender.
And the Poles say, basically, no, we're not doing that.
And then the next thing to do is bring up a petrol tanker and flood the building with petrol and set it on fire.
And this has got civilians.
There's an 11-year-old girl there who's the daughter of the postmaster.
And this is the German method of warfare on day one of World War II. Yes.
There is, that also comes through, the sort of German indignation that these vile untervention would resist the Germans.
Yeah.
Even fighting back is itself considered a war crime.
Absolutely.
That's exactly the case.
Yeah.
And there's a great example of one of these massacres.
There's a place called Cepiolow, which is where a German colonel with his unit, you know, he's advancing and he's engaged by Polish infantry.
And they quickly sort of, you know, take the town and, you know, defeat the Poles.
And then they have about 300 POWs who are basically, he's absolutely indignant.
And you get this from an eyewitness.
He says he's furious that they actually dared to resist.
He finds this an affront to his, you know, sense of his racial dignity or whatever it is.
And he has all of his POWs, he has them stripped of their uniform jackets so that they're effectively, you know, no longer soldiers in that sense.
He's stripped of their uniform jackets and sent to the rear.
And on the way they're shot.
So 300 people, 300 POWs are massacred.
And it is exactly what you say, that the mere act of military resistance was seen as an affront.
So obviously the Germans considered the French like equivalent a civilisation.
Right.
Whereas they clearly considered the Poles not to be.
Was this the result of seeing how Polish peasants lived and being disgusted by their kind of rudimentary cottages or whatever?
Or was it the result of indoctrination by the German schools and...
It's a bit of everything.
You've got a lot of rather ingrained anti-Polish sentiment that goes right back into the 19th century.
You know, sort of Prussianism has within it a sort of sense of looking down on the Poles.
Right.
In the 19th century, as Prussia sort of merges essentially with German identity, part of that is this Orientalist attitude that the Poles are, first of all, they're Catholic, which for a Protestant is seen as something that's vaguely inferior and, you know, obscurantist and all of that stuff, culturally inferior.
You know, their standard of living generally in the 19th century was poorer.
You know, if you're a rural Polish peasant in occupied in the, you know, like the Prussian partition of Poland, then your living standards were vastly lower than they were in the rest of Germany, for example.
So there's a rather inbuilt anti-Polish sentiment within German society anyway, long before Hitler's even on the scene.
In that sense, it's a bit like the old-fashioned British or English prejudice against the Irish in the same sense.
They're just seen as people that live on this island and they have a primitive life and they're very Catholic and all of that.
And it has a lot of the same features in that sense.
But then what Hitler brings to the party...
Well, first of all, I mean, Hitler brings the anti-Semitism much more to the fore.
Of course, that's there in the 19th century as well.
That comes to the fore.
And Poland has a huge Jewish population.
Three million?
About three million, yeah.
Not many, I imagine, survived the war.
Not many at all, no.
So about half of the total death toll in the Holocaust are Polish Jews, are those three million.
Right.
Right.
So that, to the Nazi mind, that's another reason to sort of despise the Poles, because this is a hotbed of Jewishness, you know.
And the Jews, again, to the Nazi mind, the Jews have kind of intermingled.
They've, in a sense, contaminated the Polish bloodstock, which is already not great because it's Slavic, right?
So there's various reasons in the Nazi mind.
Why the Poles are sort of, you know, racially damned.
And then, of course, you know, the big thing that the Nazis bring to the party, and particularly Hitler, is that their racism is biological.
It's biological.
You know, it's the sense that...
You know, these people aren't.
It's not just a xenophobia or a traditional kind of, well, I don't particularly like those people because.
It's, I don't like those people, and by the way, they have to be removed from the face of the earth.
Right.
It's that aspect.
So there's this sort of biological racism that you are simply damned by who you are, and that doesn't mean that you get sort of pushed to the fringes.
You will actually be exterminated.
So for all these reasons, the Polish campaign was one of the ugliest of the war.
Absolutely, I would say so, yeah.
And I'm only halfway through the book.
Can you tell me, does it have a happy ending?
Unfortunately not, no.
It rather sort of stumbles from catastrophe to disaster and back.
No, and the Soviets didn't.
And that's another of the great sort of myths, if you like.
I mean, you've got the myth of the cavalry against tanks.
I mean, incidentally, we should probably talk about that.
We've got to talk about that.
Because, actually, Roger, if there's one thing everyone knows about Poland, the only thing that they know about Poland in 1939 is that...
The Gallant Poles charged the German armour with their horses.
Yes.
It ain't true, is it?
It ain't true, unfortunately.
How did this come about?
Well, it's another piece of Nazi propaganda, effectively.
This is straight from Goebbels.
I mean, bear in mind, of course, the stereotypical image, and this is another thing that Nazis tried to sort of project, is of the Germans all in tanks, you know, blonde-haired, blue-eyed boys all in tanks, and the Poles are all on horseback or infantry.
And that's just a nonsense for a start.
I mean, the Germans did have many more tanks than the Poles did.
But the Poles had tanks too, right?
So they had something like, I think, four times the tanks, a four to one difference.
And on the main lines of attack, you know, you can sort of, that disparity is even greater.
So it'd be up to about sort of eight or nine or ten to one.
Poles had tanks, just not enough of them, and the best of their tanks were good enough to stand toe-to-toe with the German tanks at the time.
Bear in mind, you know, I always say this, these are not the sort of 60-ton monsters of, you know, the Tiger tanks of later in the war.
These are actually rather primitive German tanks in 1939.
So Polish tanks, the best of them would stand toe-to-toe with them, but they just didn't have enough.
That was the problem.
Of course, the Germans had cavalry as well.
So the cavalry, Polish cavalry is very much the creme de la creme of the Polish military, and they're actually quite effective.
They're very good at what they do.
They generally don't use the traditional cavalry charge, certainly not against armour.
That would be ridiculous.
There are a couple of instances to see where this myth comes from, and it's not just a complete sort of invention.
There's a couple of instances where the Polish cavalry had charged infantry very effectively and then been counterattacked by armour with predictable results.
So there's one particular...
I thought it was quite interesting to try and work out precisely where that myth came from.
And it comes from an engagement during the Battle of the Bzura, which is the big Polish counterattack against the Germans.
Which that battle, the Buzura battle alone, lasts about 10 days.
It's quite remarkable.
And in one of those engagements, an Italian journalist who was embedded with German forces wrote about the aftermath of that battle and talking about, you know, the sort of the bodies of men and the bodies of horses intermingled on the field and so on.
And it's a relatively sympathetic article because he's kind of saying that the Poles are just being, you know, gallant but they're being slaughtered.
But the way it was then, the article appeared in the Corriera de la Serra and obviously the sub-editor decided to, you know, title it in the way that he saw fit.
So it became cavalry against tanks, which is actually not what the article said.
So that's essentially where the myth comes from.
Now, the Polish cavalry was very effective, even in, you know, particularly they would use a charge against infantry.
There's a couple of instances of cavalry on cavalry engagements in the Polish campaign, which is interesting, because that's straight out of, you know, the Napoleonic rules effectively.
Yeah, quite.
So they're still doing that.
What were the outcomes?
And actually the Poles win.
I mean, I think there are two instances off the top of my head.
One at a place called Krasnobrud down in the southeast where they engage German cavalry and win, which is remarkable.
That's a good counterpoint to this sort of myth of Polish incompetence.
That's very late in history, isn't it?
It is, absolutely.
When would, after that, would there have been cavalry charges?
I mean, cavalry on cavalry?
Yeah.
I can't think of anything else.
I can't think of anything.
They could be the last cavalry charges.
It could be the last cavalry on cavalry engagement in history.
How interesting.
One point you also make is that that Italian correspondent perpetrated this lie, this myth that the Germans were so chivalrous that they fired low or something.
Yes.
Yes, he did.
Again, it's a lie.
A complete lie.
Because I'm putting myself in the position of that Italian correspondent.
You're embedded with these Germans.
And you're kind of thinking, oh, what they're doing is pretty horrible.
And I feel a bit awkward about this.
How do I kind of...
You know, these guys are on my side.
How do I make it all a bit nicer?
Another example.
You mentioned Leni Riefenstahl.
Leni Riefenstahl coming to report on this kind of glamorous war...
And accidentally discovering how horrible it really is.
So tell me just a bit about that.
Yes, it's a fabulous scene.
And there's a photograph that some listeners might be familiar with of Leni Riefenstahl, her very anguished face in amongst a crowd of German soldiers.
And she'd been engaged as a war correspondent by Goebbels in 1939 to go and sort of cover the war, and presumably they thought to cover the war in the same glamorous, glossy way that she'd covered the rise of Nazism with her films, you know, The Triumph of the Will and Olympia.
Where she'd really given the public face of Nazism to be something that was very new and glamorous and rippling muscles and all of that stuff.
Again, the aesthetic we talked about earlier.
She created that, or did a lot to create that glamorous aesthetic.
Now what she saw in 1939 was anything but glamorous.
So her first arrived, she arrived at a place called Konskia, which is just sort of south-west of Warsaw.
And it's about the 12th of September from memory.
And she was there to interview the local general who had actually already moved on.
So she sort of left.
Hang on.
That was John Lewis again, and it so annoys me.
Thank you.
You get these automated calls, and they think that you're happy about this.
I'm not happy about this.
I'm really angry.
I'm really angry.
It's putting me off, John Nurse.
You were telling Lenny Riefenstahl...
Yes, so Lenny Riefenstahl arrives, 12th of September, extensively to interview the local general, who's actually moved on.
But then she becomes...
She sort of is witness to a massacre.
And it's actually one of the comparatively few...
This might sound odd but it's one of the comparatively few massacres of Jews.
Because in the opening phase of the war, most of the vast majority of German massacres instantly are carried out by the Wehrmacht rather than the SS. And they're almost always directed primarily at the Poles.
The Poles are, you know, they are the local population.
Almost any excuse will do.
I mean, there's an example you mentioned earlier on.
Someone had an axe in their sort of pigsty and that's enough, you know, because it's considered a weapon.
There's another example, probably the most ridiculous one, where the inhabitants of a Polish village are massacred because two Wehrmacht horses were killed in a friendly fire incident.
So they're so enraged that they massacre the population of the village, which is just mad.
But that's indicative of the mentality that they're going in with.
These people are dispensable.
Anyway, so Lenny Riefenstahl goes to Konskje and there are a number of Germans who are killed in the battle for Konskje.
And of course they round up the Jews of the town because they're obviously responsible for everything.
So they round up the Jews and they make the Jews dig the graves for these soldiers.
At gunpoint, you know, with, you know, rifle butts being rained down on them and so on.
With their bare hands, in many cases.
With bare hands, of course.
They're not given any tools to do this.
And then, at some point, you know, this almost becomes a sort of a pogrom, that these poor Jews, they bolt, they basically try and escape, at which point they're all shot.
They're gunned down by the Wehrmacht.
And I think, from memory, again, 22 Jews are killed at Konsker.
And Leni Riefenstahl was witness to all of this.
And this wonderful image of her, amazing image of her, anguished face, tears running down her cheeks.
And I think as much as anything, she sees this all happen.
I think as much as anything, she's kind of realizing the brutal reality of the regime that she's helped to create.
Yes.
I think that if you can put words into her mouth or thoughts into her brain, I think that's almost what it would be.
Yeah.
My God, this is the reality.
Do you deal with, or is this much later, the Katyn massacre?
No, Katyn is in the spring of 1940, which I dealt with in a previous book, The Devil's Alliance, which is about the Nazi-Soviet pact.
But in this book, there are a few...
I mean, I basically deal with the military campaign, so essentially it's the 1st of September to the 6th of October, with a short introduction, or one chapter that goes into the 19th century and beyond to give the historical roots, and then another concluding chapter which sort of ties things up, but it essentially concentrates on that five-week campaign.
But there are a few of the characters or the voices that I bring through the book end up at Katyn, being killed at Katyn.
So, I mean, it's a little bit ever-present, actually.
Certainly in Polish wartime history, it sort of overshadows everything, Katyn, because it's so catastrophic.
I mean, that's basically Poland's officer corps, it's Poland's elite, you know, being...
22,000 is the last count being taken out and shot by the Soviets.
That is an awful lot of people to shoot, isn't it?
It is, absolutely.
It's extraordinary.
I mean, I don't know what...
It's classicide, isn't it?
It is, absolutely.
I mean, that's an interesting point as well that leads us into another of the aspects I wanted to bring into the book, which is to talk about the Soviet invasion, because that's been very cleverly whitewashed completely.
I mean, it's very interesting that, you know, until even recently, I think it was 2016, A Russian blogger was prosecuted by his local court for sharing online an article about the Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939.
And he was prosecuted and had to pay whatever it was, two and a half thousand rubles.
And he thought, no, I'm right.
This is true.
So he took it to the Supreme Court in Moscow.
And his sentence was upheld.
And the sentence was for the falsification of history, which is absurd.
Who's falsifying history here?
It's absolutely mad.
So, yeah, you know, we have to get away from this narrative where the September campaign is talked about at all, which is pretty rarely, as you said at the beginning.
We have to get away from just saying, oh, the Germans, it was just a German invasion.
Because it's not.
You know, the Germans and the Soviets are effectively in alliance at this point.
And that's a good point to mention, actually.
Because one of the things we're...
In this culture we live in now, insane culture, where everything that is bad is Nazi.
And you've got people like Ash Sarka boasting about being communist.
Mm-hmm.
And yet, here you have, even in 1939, the Soviets behaving, being just as disgusting as the Nazis.
Absolutely.
I mean, the way communism has engineered itself a free ride in our popular culture is, I find, beyond belief.
But that's another question.
Yeah.
But yeah, you can see it in 1939.
You know, they invade on the 17th of September.
Very much in collusion with the Germans.
I sort of recreate the paper trail of the two sides.
You know, the Germans saying to the Soviets after the first few days of the campaign, by the way, when are you coming in?
When's your invasion happening?
We're very civilized.
That's what we agreed, you remember?
Yeah.
And, you know, the Kremlin is sort of saying, well, we'll just wait because they don't want to be, you know...
Seen to be too openly on the side of the Nazis.
So they're aware of that propaganda aspect already at the beginning.
So they say, basically, well, let us know when Warsaw's about to fall and then we'll come in.
And they create this propaganda narrative of saying that Poland has collapsed, the place is in chaos, we have to come in to keep order because this, as the Germans used to call it, the seasonal state, Poland, because it...
It erupts for a season and then disappears again because it's so incompetent, right?
That was the narrative.
So they're kind of playing on the same narrative that this is an incompetent country and we have to come in and sort things out like always, you know.
Yes.
So they give that narrative and then they come in on the 17th of September.
The Poles are still fighting them on the 17th of September.
There's a number of, you know, pitch battles, particularly urban battles.
They resist very hard against the Soviets.
And it is very obviously a military invasion.
It's dressed up as a humanitarian intervention, very much like Russia did in 2016 against Ukraine.
Yes.
You remember the white buses and all that stuff?
Right, yes.
The humanitarian aid.
Of course it wasn't.
It was rifles and grenade launchers.
But they do the same thing in 1939.
So it's the same playbook is being played out.
That's why it's useful to study history, isn't it?
Absolutely.
We learn so much about the present.
Just briefly, what was the rationale of Stalin's pact with Hitler?
Was it that he thought that...
I mean, given that Hitler had made it clear that Bolshevism was his real enemy and the Slavic, unto mention, were ripe for conquest, Stalin must have been aware of this.
Did he think, well...
If we make a pact now, maybe Hitler will destroy himself fighting Western Europe.
Broadly.
I mean, Hitler's rationale on one side, I know you asked about Stalin, but Hitler's rationale with the Nazi-Soviet pact is much more short-term.
So he's getting himself out of a hole.
He's painted himself into a corner with the Polish campaign.
He's been saber-rattling against the Poles, basically from early 1939 onwards.
of his threats and blandishments and various offers that he made because they they have a fundamental policy of not allying with each side they know both both of their neighbors are dreadful yeah and they're basically trying to keep away from any sort of alliance with each side um so hitler is basically frustrated he He risks everything on an attack and expecting that the British and the French will back down.
We weren't meant to go in when Germany invaded Poland.
He was expecting us to back down.
Nothing would happen.
So Hitler's Nazi-Soviet pact is basically getting him out of that diplomatic hole.
It's getting the Soviets on side for that temporary invasion, division of Poland.
So they both have, both Moscow and Berlin, have in common a profound animus against Poland.
It's a revisionist state.
You know, they're both, sorry, they're both revisionist states.
Poland is a Versailles state.
You know, it's the personification of their humiliation, effectively.
Yes.
So they're quite happy to wipe it from the map.
So there's that aspect for Stalin as well.
Territorial.
He gets lots of territory back.
Gifted by Hitler, which wasn't Hitler's to give, of course.
But in the broader sense, in the sort of broader strategic and geo-strategic sense, Stalin is basically using the old idea that comes from Lenin of revolutionary defeatism, effectively.
So Lenin wanted to use the Russian defeat in the First World War.
As the springboard for him coming to power.
So the more chaos, the better.
So he said that, you know, we will come to power on the back of a Russian defeat in the First World War.
And they did.
And then that idea is modified under Stalin to the idea of, you know, warfare is...
But, you know, if war erupts in Europe, it's got to be a good thing.
This could...
Again, so is the chaos, political chaos, economic chaos.
And from that, we will take power in Europe.
Oh, okay.
Right?
So there's that in the back of their minds as an ideological justification.
And they say as much.
So I quote it in this book as well, but I quoted it in the previous book.
That is the sort of geostrategic justification.
So he knows that Hitler doesn't like him and Hitler doesn't like communism, but he's willing to bet that Hitler will fall into a war with the British and the French, which happens.
And that will be as destructive economically, socially, politically as the First World War was.
And in the aftermath of all of that chaos, the whole place can go communist.
A couple of things before I forget them.
One is the performance of the French army.
I mean, my brother, Dick...
The one with the tank books.
The one with the tank books and the moustache.
He does reenactment as a poilu from the First World War when the French acquitted themselves heroically and lost a lot of men.
I hadn't quite realised how pitiably...
The...
pitifully, the French acquitted themselves in the first months of the second...
I mean, they were crap, weren't they?
It is shocking.
Embarrassing.
They had the second largest army in the world, the kind of the yin to the yang of the English, the British, who had a huge navy and small armed forces.
So together we should have been unbeatable.
And...
Yeah.
What should they do instead?
There's no will.
I mean, it's amazing how...
I mean, the Poles did everything that they could do.
They knew they couldn't fight the Germans alone.
So they had to get foreign allies, which they do.
So, you know, there's the Anglo-Polish military agreement, 25th of August.
They have those foreign allies that they say they're all going to come to your aid when you're attacked.
Brilliant.
So from the Polish perspective...
We've done everything we can, right?
Unfortunately, the British and the French, they declare war on the 3rd of September, and they then do pretty much bugger all in defence of the Poles.
Now, we have to temper this by saying, well, there's an assumption often that we should have, you know, somehow projected our power to Eastern Europe and intervened directly in Poland.
That was not possible.
That's not logistically possible.
But what was expected was that the French would invade Western Germany with some vigour and that the British would bomb Western Germany because that was our capability.
The French at that time had the best tanks in the world.
Absolutely.
The B1 was the best tank in the world.
So what were they playing at?
Well, you've got, I mean, it is, I mean, the B1's a very good tank, better than the German tanks, better armour, all the rest of it, but it is not being used really in an offensive capacity.
It's used as infantry support versus the German, you know, this is pre-saging 1940, but the German sort of doctrine of Blitzkrieg, which is vastly different in terms of use of tanks, it's much more effective.
So there is that.
They've got good material, but they're not using it in a very effective way.
But the fundamental problem for both...
You know, we've got good aircraft.
We could have bombed Western Germany.
Well within range.
We had the capacity to do so.
But the problem on both sides...
Is that there's no political will to do it.
So the French have a sort of very defeatist mindset.
You know, they're politically riven at that point anyway.
They've got a defeatist mindset.
They sit behind the Maginot line.
They've got this Maginot mentality where you've spent however many millions of francs or billions of francs creating this defensive line.
And then you're rather loathe to push beyond it because then what's the point of the defensive line?
So there's all sorts.
And then, you know, the losses of the First World War are enormous.
They fundamentally don't want to go to war.
Well, this brings me to the second point, which is that because it is the first month of the war, there is this air of, this isn't really happening.
We can't quite...
You mentioned Germany, for example.
The mood in Germany when the German army, when the Wehrmacht moves into Poland...
Yes, this is our Lenny Riefenstahl moment.
We're going to conquer that.
They think this is just a bit of cleaning up, which is going to be over in a week or two.
The public attitude is very much that, yeah.
No one wants war, not even the Germans.
No, it's true, not even the Germans.
And that's something I was questioned on that when I was promoting the book in Poland.
And again, the Polish stereotype is that the German people were all sort of bloodthirsty and raving for war and all of that.
And they picked up on that and said, you know, is that right?
Can you prove it sort of thing?
And I think it's absolutely true.
You know, the Germans, I mean, Hitler is massively popular in 1939.
He's at the very height of his popularity.
I would say actually at the height of his popularity is probably his birthday in 1939, his 50th birthday, which is this enormous event, huge military parade in Berlin and so on.
And at that point, if you look at the world through the eyes of the ordinary German, you can see why he's so popular.
So all of that political and economic chaos that was very easily within memory, going back to the crash of 1939, the street fights between left and right, all of that stuff, that's gone, right?
It's stable.
Society is stable.
The economy is booming.
Germany has been restored to its place in the world, rightful place, as they would have put it.
You know, it's back where it should be on the top table and all the rest of it.
All of that stuff about restoring German honor.
And crucially for the German people, he'd given people work and he'd put bread on the table.
It is as fundamental as that.
So in the summer of 1939, Hitler's absolutely at the peak of his power and peak of his support.
But saying all that doesn't mean that the German people wanted to go to war.
It's actually the last thing they wanted to do.
Because they all had the same memories of the First World War, of losing fathers and brothers and sons, and they don't want to go back there.
So this is why, in a sense, the war in 1939, the Polish campaign, has to be dressed up, even for a German audience, had to be dressed up as something less than war.
Yes.
As a necessary incursion, first of all.
So they have all of these various efforts to put the onus on the polls, the blame onto the polls for starting this conflict.
And then, of course, they're just retaliating when Hitler declares war in the Reichstag on the morning of the war.
He doesn't actually declare war.
He says, we have been fighting back since 5.45 this morning.
So again, he paints it as a retaliation.
And he scrupulously avoids using the word war as well.
So it's very interesting how it's even dressed up for the German people.
This is very naughty of me, but you know in your heart it's true.
I was reading your descriptions of the kind of British cabinet discussing what to do in the run-up to the declaration of war, the run-up to September the 3rd.
And I was really struck by the fact that the mindset of the appeasers is basically Remain.
And the mindset of the kind of Churchill faction is basically Brexit.
And you may think of me unfair, but it's about appetite for risk.
Yes.
And it's about the bigger picture.
So what...
Oh yeah.
We wanted to talk more about, didn't we, about just how bloody evil the communists were.
Yeah.
They don't get enough attention in this narrative.
As I said, they have very effectively whitewashed themselves, which they did very effectively even at the time.
As I said before, they gave themselves this propaganda narrative of Of coming in to sort of clean up after the collapse of this ridiculous Polish state, as they would have put it.
That's really not the case.
It is a military invasion.
It's very obviously that.
And they...
Like in so many aspects of the Soviet Union's past, it basically has had a free pass.
It has been allowed to get away with things.
Because they were one of the allies.
Is that the reason?
Effectively.
We forget, and this is very much the subject of the previous book, which was The Devil's Alliance, that we forget that for the first two years of the war, so the first third of the war, You know, Stalin is effectively Hitler's ally.
This has been airbrushed from our own narrative.
Yes.
I think we traditionally kind of imagine that Stalin, either we think that he was on our side, or he was neutral and just kind of waiting to come in on our side.
But he's absolutely on the other side.
Yes.
You know, actively collaborating with Berlin.
So, you know, this is something we need to rewrite in our own history as well, which I tried to do with the last book.
And you can see it very clearly in the Polish campaign, you know, that they do come in as effectively allies of Hitler, invade on the 17th of September.
And just as the Germans are carrying out race war in the West, which they are in the Western areas of Poland, you know, the Soviets are already doing class war in the East.
So they're already separating.
The officer class, if they're taken prisoner, essentially, you're lucky if you survive the experience.
People taken out and shot.
They're already sifting populations on a class basis.
In the same way as the Nazis are doing it on a race basis, they're doing it on a class basis.
So if you're a landowner, if you're a dangerous intellectual or a merchant or whatever...
You could be in, or you'd be in more serious trouble than otherwise, you know.
So they're already committing race, class war.
Just, just, do you not think, Roger, that essentially the communist argument has won in a way that, you know, I'm not saying the Nazi argument was a good one that should have won, but...
Even now, we culturally find it less upsetting that people are imprisoned or even shot for their class for being posh than they are for being Jewish or anything else.
There is this kind of...
Put it another way...
One of the few minorities that you can still have a go at is kind of stupid toffs or whatever.
They're fair game.
You can never say things about races anymore.
No, that is true, I think.
That element, yes.
I mean, that's a...
A component of the much disputed cultural Marxism, I suppose, that we live with at the moment.
Do you think that the reason that Stalin and Hitler so hated one another's ideologies...
It was a bit like a people's front of Judea, Judean people's front thing, that basically Nazism and communism much, much closer than either side would acknowledge, except apart from the race stroke class details.
Okay.
That's a good point.
And I think this is one of the points that I think we traditionally misunderstand.
If you talk about far left and far right, and you imagine from that typology, which of course comes from the period of the French Revolution...
When you talk about the far left and far right, you imagine it a linear scale, and the two are as far away from each other as they could possibly be.
And that's really not the case.
It's much more helpful in a sort of visual sense to imagine it as a horseshoe, or even as a complete circle.
But I would say horseshoe, because I think there is a divide.
It's very difficult to cross from one to the other.
What is the key divide?
But those two, they're both essentially wanting to remake society, if necessary, with violence.
Actually, violence is, certainly in the case of the Nazis and the fascists, is something that is to be welcomed as a sort of purifying element.
Soviet communism doesn't really have that, but it's willing to use war amongst other peoples to create the chaos necessary to foster communism.
So there's a willingness to use war either personally or by proxy.
The division, I suppose, is that you very rarely see a direct crossover between the two.
There are some examples, but it's rare to cross between the two.
Because I think it's still seen.
If you're on the fascist side of that horseshoe… Your fundamental belief or your belief system is that of race fundamentally.
Yeah.
And that is, it's difficult to switch over to have as a guiding principle as the prism through which you see the world being one of class because they are fundamentally, you know, incompatible.
Yes.
But once we accept that divide, beyond that, there are many, many similarities.
Yeah.
Yeah.
What was the other thing we were going to talk about that we hadn't discussed enough?
About sort of the British, Anglo-French, but particularly the British betrayal of the Poles.
Oh my goodness.
Which is something that again needs to come out.
And this sort of airbrushing of the Poles by extension.
So...
I mean, on the betrayal thing, the British and the French do come in and they sign military agreements and they say that they're going to come to the aid of the Poles in the event of foreign aggression.
And then they do pretty much precisely nothing, as we've described.
And it's interesting to see, and I do this in the book, you see how...
Their narrative of what they're doing, the British and the French politicians, how that shifts, even during September 1939 itself, it shifts to a narrative of, well, we can't do anything for you now, so we're going to help to restore an independent Poland at some point in the future.
Right?
And of course that doesn't really help the Poles in the short term at all.
And actually they don't really succeed in that either because part of, you know, the necessary alliance to defeat Hitler is effective to ally yourself with Stalin, who's also anti-Polish.
Stalin's not going to allow an independent Poland, which he doesn't.
No.
So you effectively then have to collude in another betrayal of Poland at the end of the war, you know, at the Yalta Conference and so on, where Poland is basically given over to Stalin.
So that's another betrayal on the British side.
Again, it's rather forced on the British.
So in a sense, we didn't have the clout to, you know, contradict Stalin and Roosevelt, who's cuddling up Stalin at the time.
So that's another betrayal.
And then the other one that often sticks in Polish throats is the free Poles that had come over, escaped from 1939, the airmen, the Polish army in the West, all of those who had escaped.
British troops.
Brilliantly heroically.
And brilliantly.
They took Monte Cassino, they were at Narvik, they were, you know, the 303 squadron in the Battle of Britain, Tobruk, Arnhem.
I mean, how many examples do you want?
And they took, you mentioned Monte Cassino, didn't you?
Yeah, yeah.
So they were the ones They ultimately, they finished the Battle of Monte Cassino, which is remarkable.
And of course, what was the mount in the Falaise Gap that they closed this massive tank battle?
Yeah, absolutely.
The Battle of Falaise Gap.
The Poles are absolutely instrumental there as well.
So they are at our sides almost at every turn.
The Polish Navy fights alongside the Royal Navy, is incorporated into the Royal Navy effectively.
How many...
The Polish Army of the West, how did they escape?
How did they...
They get out basically through, during the September campaign in September 1939, the Polish plan was to execute effectively a fighting withdrawal down towards the southeast.
In the southeast, there were two friendly frontiers that the Poles had, both of which were very narrow, very sort of geographically narrow.
One to the north, which is Lithuania, or northeast to Lithuania, and one to the southeast, which was Romania.
And the plan was basically to execute a fighting withdrawal to the southeast in the hope that by the time the British and the French come in, the Germans would be obliged to withdraw troops and the Poles could then rally.
That's the plan.
Yeah, right.
Of course, they could never withdraw fast enough against the Germans.
The Germans have more vehicles and they're moving faster and all the rest of it.
And of course, the British and the French never come in, so they're doomed.
Yeah.
But a good number, and particularly politicians, the mathematicians that end up at Bletchley Park, Ziegalski and Rejewski and the rest, they all get out through the southeast through Romania.
A lot of the airmen got out through Romania, who end up in 303 and other squigglies.
So that's the route out for most people.
The route into Lithuania, which some tried, becomes a dead end because Lithuania is annexed by the Soviet Union in the 1940s.
So they're stuffed.
And they get killed, do they, by the Soviets?
It's interesting, actually.
Lithuania has...
I mean, that's a fascinating story in itself, how Lithuania turns temporarily into a haven upon which then the doors are closed.
But there's a story of Jews getting out of Lithuania.
So one of the great heroes of the righteous among the nations and so on.
Is a Japanese consul in Kaunas, who was basically giving out visas to Jews.
A lot of them were Polish Jews who had escaped north into Lithuania.
How interesting.
And he's doing that in 1940, at the time that it looks like, you know, when the Soviet annexation is happening.
He realizes that this route out had become a cul-de-sac.
And he started essentially, literally, just giving out signed visas.
Wow.
Remarkable story.
How many Poles did get out to fight on?
In total, I think it's about 130,000.
It's quite a lot.
Quite a lot?
Yeah, it's quite a lot.
So out through that route.
They were sort of temporarily interned by the Romanians, but the Romanians were not very good at interning people, so they tended to escape.
Good old Romanians.
They got by ship, got west.
They fought in France, then they fight in the Battle of Britain.
And this is another thing that is frustrating because they were there at every turn.
You know, as I said, Tobruk, Monte Cassino, Narvik, Battle of Britain, Arnhem, the list goes on.
And yet we just airbrushed them.
We're not interested.
Do you think that the reason that the Poles fought so spectacularly well or heroically throughout the war...
Was a reflection of what they'd been through in 1939, or was it just that they're Poles, and this is what Poles do?
It's a bit of both, I think.
Poland does have a very rich military tradition, you know, so going back to the...
Gates of Vienna.
Absolutely, Gates of Vienna, 1683 and beyond, you know.
So what were they called?
The winged hussars.
The winged hussars.
And they had what?
They had sort of special...
Yeah, supposedly they had...
Again, it's disputed as to precisely what it was.
But the stereotype is that they had this sort of construct as part of their armour, effectively, which was a sort of a large winged framework upon which it had real feathers, you know, that was perched on their backs as they were riding that was perched on their backs as they were riding into battle.
And who was their leader?
In 1683, Jan Sobieski was the king of Poland then, who, you know, took Vienna.
but that was pretty much peak Poland wasn't it That was very much peak Poland.
And Poland then was the largest state in Europe.
You know, it was the largest, you know, one of the wealthiest, you know, stretched from the Baltic to the Black Sea.
It was huge.
So, and then, of course, the collapse, like, if that was the sort of the flow tide, the ebb was spectacular, because within 100 years, Poland had ceased to exist.
This, what I hadn't really...
We learn stuff in history at school, but we don't really learn anything about Central European history.
And we should, and we should, I think.
Well, yeah, I could certainly see that rather than learning about gender studies.
Well, yes, let's not go there.
But, yes, I had no idea that Poland was just, had been squeezed out of existence.
Yes, yeah.
I mean, it's the rise of, effectively, it's the rise of Russia and Prussia.
So it's like a preview of what happened in the war?
Absolutely.
And I mean, the echoes are all over the place.
This is why I did that chapter where I sort of look at the long tail into the 19th century and beyond, because you kind of need to appreciate that.
What a lot of Poles see in 1939, when the Soviets invade, they say, oh my God, this is another partition of Poland.
There's these partitions in the 18th century, where Poland is sort of chunk by chunk, is taken by its neighbours in these three partitions.
And at the end of that process, in 1795, Poland doesn't exist.
It's wiped from the map.
And they see, there's a very common narrative of 1939, which sees that German and then Soviet invasion as a fourth partition.
And it's hard to disagree with that.
And it didn't really end the misery for the Poles until 1989.
Absolutely, yeah.
Which Charles Moore suggested, actually, not unintelligently, was the real end of the Second World War.
Yeah, I think, I mean, certainly from a Polish perspective, you know, that you can see that, and it's very true, because they essentially swap, you know, one occupation or two occupations at the beginning of the war, German and Soviet, then it becomes one occupation, German only.
And then they're effectively occupied again.
So from 1945, you know, there's some brief, brief, very brief flowering of some sort of independence.
But under Soviet control, it was only ever going to be brief.
It's pretty much under Soviet control from 1946, 1947, all the way to 1989.
And that is another occupation, effectively.
It must...
You teach at a Polish university.
Do you...
Is this sort of...
Is there any resentment over how shafted the Poles have been?
There is.
And there's an element of that, and you hear it a lot, sort of Polish voices, particularly in 39.
You know, that betrayal, as they would put it, it does rankle.
I mean, I think we have to, as I said before, we have to temper it by an understanding of what would have been possible.
Yes.
But I think still, it is a betrayal, at least in spirit, in a sense.
Yes.
Yeah.
Moral betrayal.
And I think it does rankle.
I mean, I find it quite remarkable still that the Poles are so, you know, fundamentally kind of pro-British because they do, there is an affection there for our country.
But do they hate the Germans and the Russians or do they...
Or not really?
I think there is.
I mean, there's certainly that animus is still there and it won't go away.
I mean, if you bear in mind, our death toll in the Second World War as Britain's is about 330,000.
It's about a third of a million.
Which is bad enough.
As a proportion of our population.
It's minuscule, really.
It's tiny.
The Polish death toll military and civilian in World War II is upwards of five million.
What was the population?
It's one in five of the population.
So this is much more serious.
So for them, you know, World War II... We think World War II is, you know, sort of almost the prism through which we see the world, I think, in many ways, still.
You know, you can imagine how much more intense that feeling is for the Poles.
Yeah.
So that would help to explain why they're not really willing to sort of forgive and forget, in a sense, of the Germans.
I mean, the Germans at least have expiated their guilt to some extent.
What, by inviting in 1.2 million refugees?
Well, that's another bone of contention between the two.
Let's expiate their guilt by making things worse.
Well, I mean, that is part of this process.
The Germans, they have this remarkable process which has been going on really since the 1960s.
Which is called Vergangenheitsbeveltigung, which is a wonderful German word.
One word, wonderful word, which means the process of coming to terms with the past.
So it's sort of confronting your past.
And that has meant that Germany has resolutely confronted its history, looked it in the eye, is brutally honest about its own history.
And in a sense, you can see the migrant crisis was a part of the process of forgetting the political, right?
In a moral sense, right?
Yeah, sure.
So that was all part of it.
That's all ongoing.
So you can see that, you know, for the Poles, yes, okay, they still have an animus against the Germans, but at least the Germans have, to some extent, expiated their guilt.
The other side haven't even begun.
The Russians?
The Russians.
Yeah.
So what the Soviets did to the Poles during the war, maybe it's not quite as egregious a case as what the Germans did, but still, you've got class war in 1939, you've got two years of occupation, which was hideous, with rampant class war, you know, a million Poles deported to Siberia in that period.
Then you've got the return of the Soviets in 1945.
You've then got a sort of 20-year occupation effectively.
And the Polish economy and society being set back by a generation at least in the process of communism.
So there's a lot there that should be expiated.
Things like Katyn, the failure of the Soviets to do anything to aid the Warsaw Rising.
There are so many chapters.
Oh, the Warsaw Uprising is just so depressing when you realise that the Allies just didn't go in to help.
Yeah, of course.
And that the Russians sat on the bank of the...
Absolutely, sat on the Vistula and watched.
On the Vistula and watched.
Yeah, yeah.
But they had no intention of...
Bastards.
They knew that the nationalist Poles are effectively their enemies, so they were never going to help.
And so...
So there's lots of chapters there that really rankle.
And the interesting thing is, as I said, the Germans have expiated their guilt to some extent.
And the other side, Moscow, has not even begun to address the fact that it might have ever done anything wrong in that period.
Yeah.
If anything, you know, you had this brief, very brief flowering under Yeltsin, who's an interesting character.
You know, in our sort of Western view, we see Yeltsin as a clown and a drunk.
Yeah.
Which, to some extent, he was, but...
Yeltsin, I think history will actually be kinder to Yeltsin because they will see his period of rule in Russia as one in which he did actually try, as well as being a clown and a drunk, to recreate a new narrative of Russian history, to actually look the history in the eye, to be honest.
Yeah.
And since the advent of Putin in 2000, that's gone into reverse.
And it's still in reverse now.
So at some point, like the Germans with their Vergangenheitsbeveltigung, Russia, as the successor state of the Soviet Union, it proclaims itself to be that, it has to look itself in the eye and say, these are the things we did well, these are the things we did badly, and be honest.
And it's nowhere near doing that now.
That's a fundamental problem.
Just briefly before we go, and this is a far too big a subject to deal with in five minutes, but what I like about your books is that they seem to me to be pure history, dispassionate, involved, but pretty much objective.
You seem to be the model of the kind of historian that we should be promoting and reading and celebrating.
Thank you James, you're very kind to hear.
I worry that history is increasingly, like my field in literature, is increasingly being hijacked by...
By politics, by particularly social justice warrior politics.
We recently had the debate on the BBC about whether Anglo-Saxon is now an acceptable term.
My father-in-law, who read history at Cambridge, sent me his latest copy of the Cambridge History magazine and there was an undergraduate on the cover.
Who was talking about her greatest contribution, or her greatest memory of her time studying three years of history at Cambridge, and it was decolonising the curriculum.
Do you find as a historian that you're increasingly drawn into these political wars?
I mean, is it possible to do your job without...
I think, I mean, is it possible to do my job without all of that?
Honestly, yes, because I'm freelance.
Because I don't really get involved in academic history.
But if you were an academe, you'd probably be stumped.
In academe, you would have no choice.
It'd be very difficult to stay aloof from all of that.
So I can happily, you know, sail on and do my thing.
And as long as I find a market and I can convince publishers, then I keep going.
Yeah.
I mean, to some extent, I think we have to be a little bit careful, but to some extent there are some correctives that needed to happen.
You know, the idea of, you know, history was a sort of a...
Because of the traditional dominance of the male in society, history was a history of men.
So there's something that has to change in that respect.
And there's been a corrective of re-inserting women into history.
You're losing me there, Roger, because from there it's a terrifying short step to what's happened to the Imperial War Museum, Which is that it's now become the museum of kind of the domestic war.
I know.
And this has, I think, now that we are now, you know, it's...
Way too far the other way.
It's going too far the other way.
So there was a corrective to be made.
But then gender history becomes, you know, a beast of its own.
And that's all, I think...
It should occupy a relatively small part in the smorgasbord of history.
But as it is, it's far too large.
And my worry is that it displaces what I would call proper history, which is diplomatic history, military history, all the traditional histories, the real essence of what was going on and trying to understand the past.
We don't necessarily understand the past well by viewing everything through a prism of 2019.
Of where we are in 2019.
Yeah.
That doesn't help us.
I mean, part of history is understanding it on its own terms, how it was, not seeing it through a modern prison.
So please give me hope before we close this podcast.
Do you think there's going to be a backlash to this?
Because the way I look at it...
The liberal arts subjects are pretty much being wiped out in the same way that Polish culture was in 1939.
I hesitate to give you hope on that one.
My fear is the same one that you have.
But I think there is hope in that, you know, there are still books being written that are from beyond academia.
I mean, this is part, I think, of almost the marginalization of academia by itself.
So increasingly, it's putting itself into a narrower, narrower ghetto.
Yes.
And hopefully the space in the public conversation can be filled by others from beyond academia.
Yes.
And much more sensible voices.
Yeah, academia is writing itself out of the narrative in the same way that the BBC is, with its wokeness.
Yeah.
So, well, it's a case of get woke, go broke.
Yes.
We can but hope.
Say I had a child, which I don't, but I wish I did, wanting to read history.
Mm-hmm.
Are there any universities where it's not?
Or any colleges where it's not?
Completely ruined.
I think there's a, I think there's a, I mean my daughter's just going through and doing, looking into doing, studying politics actually.
Yeah.
And we've had the experience of going to, you know, going to open days and things like that.
A lot of it is, it's very obvious that they sort of conflate politics with activism.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
You know, that's, it's not just the study of politics, it's actually becoming an activist.
Yeah, yeah.
It's almost, that's the sort of career path.
And that I think is probably indicative of where a lot of liberal arts are.
I couldn't speak for academia as a whole.
So nowhere?
There's nowhere safe?
I fear.
But hopefully there are still some bastions of sensible thinking out there.
Well, anyway, Roger.
Roger Morehouse, author of Interallia, First to Fight, The Polish War, 1939.
Great book.
Give it to your dad and then buy a copy for yourself because it's, you know, perfect Christmas present for any chap or chapess who's interested in that kind of stuff.
Thank you very much.
My pleasure.
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