← WW2 Pod: We Have Ways of Making You Talk
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Thank you for listening to we have ways of making you talk. Sign up to our Patreon to receive bonus content, live streams and our weekly newsletter with money off books and museum visits as well. Plus early access to all live show tickets. That's patreon.com we haveways.
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B
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Songs but they sound pretty sweet to.
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Achtung. Achtung. Welcome to we have ways of making you talk with me, Al Murray and James Holland as we drift into the autumn. Jim, we thought we'd do some war waffle.
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B
Basically old school war waffle.
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A
Old school war waffle. After our epic Battle of Britain series and in the wake of we have ways Fest, of course. By the way, we recorded this before the festival, so any references to how amazing.
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B
But it was brilliant, wasn't it?
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A
But it was absolutely brilliant. I tell you, some of the conversations I had on the Saturday afternoon were really, you know, the quality of the punter.
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B
Oh, it was. It was just lovely seeing all those. Those people, wasn't it?
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A
Yeah, it was fantastic. And after we did our Douglas Barda episodes, Anatomy of a Hero, which I. Which I enjoyed enormously. I've gone back to reading Reach for the sky right now.
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B
Oh yeah, go on. How Is it. Is it full of hyperbole?
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A
Well, there's a really. One thing that really made me laugh yesterday. I was in a car going somewhere. I really was really laughing. And the driver must have thought, what's going on here? Right. So Reach for the Sky. It's not a thin tome. It's kind of 400 pages.
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B
Yeah.
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A
You know, it's about. It's about Douglas Barter, the legless aerobatic war hero pilot who of course, as we know, is shot down. It's a really funny bit when Barter Bada is brought from one of the POW camps to a tribunal where they're basically. He escapes from a hospital. So the. So the Germans put the. The people in the hospital on trial. Right. And there's a bit where he thinks he's got a Belgian man servant or something that he's been given and he says, this is going to be. This is just shows. Shows how. How this book is making me hys. There's a bit. Barda turns to the. The servant and says, vous et belge? Barda asked eagerly. Nein, said the little man, unwinking, ich bin Deutsch. Right. But the best thing about it is it has a Footnote, right. Footnote 4 with Deutsch. I clicked on that. German. Apparently it means German. And you're back. It's page 363 of 448 pages about a war, a Second World War hero. And the idea.
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B
Well, you know, I mean, someone who's interested in the Second World War and who's reading about a legless fighter race might not know that Deutsch is German. And then imagine the confusion.
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A
I was roaring with laughter, this, in the car yesterday. And I could see the driver, the driver thinking, what is. What is his problem? But some of the text is really like, quite. It's quite interesting, you know, it's of its age, but, you know, he admits his fault, Sparta and all this sort of thing, but like, does he. Well, well, yeah, but they're extremely well qualified. Right.
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B
You know, so they're faults, but dressed up as kind of as attributes.
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A
Yeah, exactly. So, stung by humiliations and the frustration of captivity, Barda was now an unappeasable terrible. Until he escaped. That was pride's only defense. Already with Rumpel and the timid Sonderfuhrer, he had recaptured some ammo prop in scenes that were barely believable but authentic. I don't know what you mean. Right. One might suppose that the Germans had made allowances and that he possessed. Had he Possessed his own legs. Their tolerance would have frozen. Yet even with his legs, Bada would probably have behaved in much the same way. Because the demon was spurring him on well before the reading crash. And one doubts whether the Germans themselves would have reacted more firmly. Because this clause, his pulverizing dynamism turned on full flood will daunt any civilized man.
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B
I wonder when he read the draft of it, what he.
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A
What he did.
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B
Yes, I think this is fine.
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A
That's exactly what. That's exactly what I was going to say. Imagine. Oh, thanks, Paul. Yeah, I am like that. Yes, my pulverizing dynamism will daunt any civilized.
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B
There's no suggestion that he came back to him and said, you can't possibly write this vomit worthy crap. This is so embarrassing. I mean, the whole point. Don't you know it's verboten to shoot a line?
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A
Yeah, well, yes, exactly. And the whole thing, you know, it's all this culture, the RAF cultures. It's for verboten's shooter lines is sort of gentleman's club and all this sort of thing. And the whole that. That pros in it is like the most insane line shooting. I just really, really came to love the style right now.
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B
You need to read the Dam Busters.
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A
Yeah, well, yeah, I bet it's like that as well, isn't it?
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B
Just wait till Leonard Cheshire takes over. Oh, my goodness me. Honestly, whatever eulogizing he has for Douglas Barter, it is as nothing to how he paints Leonard Cheshire, let me tell you.
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A
Really Fantastic. Okay, well, I'm gonna have to bite them because there's just. There is something just about. Imagine writing that and going. Yeah, I think. I think that's kind of captured the essence of the guy. There's this really wonderful, you know, when he's. When he's being interrogated. It's Brickell. Brickell says he was not especially perturbed, insulated perhaps by the illogical English arrogance bred by orderly decades of eminence which assumed privileges and immunity from illegal international violence. It's just another planet. And then. And then. I mean, he sums the whole thing up. Just basically says his secret is simple and sounds trite. It is merely that he will not yield.
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B
You're wrong, Barda. No, I'm not.
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A
No, I'm not.
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B
Back down. No.
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A
I simply will not yield.
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B
I will not yield. That's the new T shirt we need. We need that picture of him kind of getting his leg over onto the Hurricane.
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A
Yeah.
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B
You know that photo of him with his stiff legs. We need that Going, I will not yield. Okay, I think that's going to come. My new favourite phrase.
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A
After the war, he went round the world with Jimmy Doolittle. Because they both worked for Shell. They flew around the world together, like promoting Avgas, basically.
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B
Did they become besties?
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A
Absolute besties.
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B
But Dolittles. Of an altogether different order of.
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A
I know.
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B
I mean, he's much more modest.
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A
It's a bizarre pairing. Anyway, I just thought, because, you know, you can't rely on that memoir really for. You can get a rough outline of what happened. But what if you want to glance into the times, if you want to glance into the way people talked about stuff, or some people talked about stuff after the war, there it is, right. It's absolutely amazing.
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B
Well, you know, I. I sort of think Corelli, Barnett and AJP Taylor all start to kind of make a bit more sense writing in the 60s. They're reacting to this kind of unbelievably jingoistic, kind of triumphant. Yeah, we could do no wrong. We're all marvellous chaps.
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A
Brick Hill calls him the. The greatest tactical fighter pilot of the war.
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B
Yeah, okay. That's quite a claim.
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A
Deutsch means German, page 363.
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B
Well, that's another T shirt, isn't it? Making me cry. Anyway, how are you? You've been having fun, haven't you? Because you're doing Spitting Image stuff and you're also biffing around doing Apache Sim.
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A
Well, I had an amazing day yesterday. So Ollie Mercer, who's the Corsar Major at the Army Air Corps Middle Wallop, saying, we've got our. We've got our Warrant Officers Annual Conference, as they call it. Do you want to come? And, you know, amazingly, it fell on a day where I could say yes. So I went up to Middle Wallop yesterday morning. And the thing about the Army Air Corps is it's Glider Pilot Regiment legacy, although their two legacies are the artillery pilots flying spotter planes in those squadrons and then the glider pilot wings. And the glider pilots tended to be staff sergeants. They were staff sergeants or above. You know, that's just the way they. The way they organized it. And so the pilots. You've got all these star warrant officers who are pilots and all the other jobs that obviously that the Army Air Corps are part of in their seven regiments. It was just so fascina. I'm in the warrant officer's bar and the guy looking after me, Simmo, goes, you want to come through? Oh, you need to see this room. And it's The Arnhem Room, Jim. It's the Arnhem Room. And it's so and so's Sting guy.
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B
So immediately you felt you were amongst friends, you'd found your tribe.
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A
Oh, just. It was so cool. Right. What's really interesting is I met. There was a guy from 9 Squadron, Royal Engineers, who's retraining as a pilot. So basically they learn how to fly helicopters 120 hours or something, and then they learn how to fly the Apache. Once they can fly it without thinking about it, then they learn the weapon systems. It's so interesting. But you remember we were talking about how simple airplanes used to be, actually, and how learning to fly probably wasn't that big a deal. Right. When you think of those guys who are flying this helicopter without even thinking about it while. And they've got that monocle thing on with all the information on their eye, and they're scrolling through all the systems, you think like a completely different ball game. And obviously, flying interceptors, like, and all the aerobatics is a big deal, but like, the multitasking they're doing, the fact that they have to be just flying completely instinctively, which is, after all, the thing that so many of those pilots that we looked at in the Battle of Britain series talk about. You just need to be able to fly with it completely. Flying has to be totally second nature, right? But these guys flying has to be totally second nature. And then running these systems as well, they have to, you know, because they've got all the different missile types and selections and what. How the missiles can home in. And so one of the boys was who showed me that was. It was a former commander and he said, basically, I'm sat there on the ground in, you know, in a ditch in Afghanistan, and I watch these helicopters fly over and blow everything up and think, yeah, that. That looks like more fun than this. I think I'll switch. And they had loads of people coming in from different parts of the IS army to learn to fly. And then. And then they took me to. They've got a historic flight, their historic flight there. So, you know, collection of stuff. They got an Oster, lots of Cold War helicopters.
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B
The museum's pretty good, if I remember.
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A
And the museum is excellent. It's had a revamp. They've had some money spent on. It is. It's fantastic. You know, they've got a replica horse and they've got a chunk of a real horse. So they've got a Hadrian, a wacko, they've got a part of a hamilcar which of course was being used as a shed. You know, all the usual stories of that, but the history sort of co mingling of the, the people flying Osters who tended to be Royal Artillery officers, you know, doing the spotting, how many of those planes were shot down in Normandy, all this sort of stuff and that little self sustaining part of the Army Air Corps because the Army Air Corps in the war was Parachute Regiment was part of the Army Air Corps. Which is why on the, on the CWGC Graves it says Army Air Corps Parachute Regiment because they are part of the Army Air Corps. So the, you know, the banter is you're part of us, we came before you. Inevitably it's the internal army banter. So it's that the glider pilot regiment, it's the people flying the artillery spotting which. And we' talked so much about how artillery was integral to the way the British did. Did things. So they're integral to that, you know, they're part of how we're winning. It was brilliant. And then I went and flew on the Apache simulator.
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B
Yeah, that looked great.
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A
Fun round part of Korea. I was the guy at the front like picking what we were going to blow up. Basically totally immersive for about an hour. We were flying for about an hour and it's completely immersive. You're completely convinced you're doing it as you move around in the cockpit. It's brilliant.
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B
So what you're seeing doesn't look, doesn't look digitized. It looks real, does it?
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A
It looks right on the cusp of. It doesn't look completely real. But it's just, it's like what the lank simulator looked like. And we were talking about that and one of the pilots goes, oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Last year or something I went, I went over the Mona down 100ft in my Apache. You're like, you fiend. And he'd gone down onto, down onto the lake at 100ft between the towers. So done it properly. So not like us in our Cessna three years ago. We sort of fooled around at 2,000ft with all the alarms going off. No, absolutely incredible. It was a really, really brilliant day. But I would recommend to anyone army fly Museum, it's really, really good. You've got some good stuff there. And they're, you know, the Cold War stuff they did. And it was just really, really very interesting talking about how and now drones are coming in and they're back to spotting the way they were spotting with balloons and then aircraft that look like they're made of Bicycles. But then actually, the functions never change. What you need is eyes on things and you look. You're just looking for ways to do that and move on to do that. So anyway, and yeah, the other thing.
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B
About Middle Wallop, they've still got hangers, they still got hangars from Second World War, before the war, and they've got the. I think I'm right in saying it's the only dispersal. No, apart from the one at Northolt, it's the only other dispersal hut that's left over from the Battle of Britain, which is a little square bungalow at the end of the airfield that you probably wouldn't have been down to see. But that is it. And you got a gift, did you?
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A
Yes, I got this amazing thing.
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B
609 Squadron, David Crook and Company.
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A
So when the warrant officers leave the mess, they get given, like a mini replica of the Corps battle on us. It's beautiful. Normandy landing.
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B
Yeah.
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A
Merville Battery, which, of course, the gliders didn't actually land on the Merville Battery. Luckily for everyone in those gliders, I think it's fair to say the rhine, northwest Europe, 44 to 45. So that's. That'll be the spotting planes. Falkland Islands, Pegasus Bridge, Arnhem, southern France, landing in Sicily, Gulf 1991, and then Sicily 1943 as well, because there's obviously the two components that go into the Army Air Corps. And then Iraq, 2003. That's a heck of an item, isn't it? And my second favorite core, I think is fair to say. I did, though, get on the table because they were going. They do this thing where they pass around if you leave your space or you leave your name.
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B
Were you there for lunch and dinner or just.
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A
Yeah, I went. There was a Sergeant's best dinner in the gym, but basically you have a little name thing on your place. And what they do is they nick them and then they write stuff. It gets passed up to the Sergeant Major to read out. So it's basically. They're all joking about each other. I didn't have my nick. Someone had a replica of mine but accused me of impersonating an officer. So I. I got on the table at the end and told them I was from the Corps of Engineers, which, after all, was the midwife of the Army Air Corps.
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B
Did they all cheer or do they boo?
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A
I got a fair bit of booing thanks to Major John Rock. There would be no Army Air Corps putting people into gliders that went. As you might expect. I had to jump off the table. So I Did my feet and knees together and did a parachute roll off the table as a way of demonstrating.
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B
I bet that went down absolutely storm, didn't it?
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A
Yeah, it did, yeah. Yeah. It was all. It's all good clean fun. Their history, you know, because they were. They were wound down after the war because. Because what are you going to do with gliders? And they're basically waiting for helicopters and then they get going again after the. After the war. And there's a. You know, the experimental helicopter unit we're on. We're at se. We're literally the army and the navy are working together going, what on earth do we do? These helicopters. Fascinating Whole thing. Anyway, that was my day.
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B
Well, what fun.
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A
Yeah, yeah, it's a gas.
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B
Well, I've just been sat here writing videos on myself because I've got Covid. It's really boring.
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A
That's a bit. A bit retro.
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B
Yeah, very retro. I even have one of those little kind of. Do you know those little plastic things with the two lines. Yeah, stuff.
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A
Did you stick up a thing on your nose?
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B
Yeah, stuck everything up my nose.
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A
No one wants have to do that.
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B
And the other thing is, is I had to get out instructions because I actually couldn't remember, which is why the brain is so clever. Because basically things that you don't like doing, it just, you know, just goes, bleep arrays. Don't need that. Yeah, yeah. So I got to get instructions again. But anyway, so all very boring. But on the other hand, I suppose it does mean I'm sort of getting on my book.
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A
Yes.
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B
I have been doing a bit of a YouTube trawl. So I watched that extraordinary footage which I've sent to you. The Lost German Girl, which by all accounts is incredibly famous. But I'd never seen it. I'd never even heard of it. This incredibly striking girl, looking absolutely washed out, walking down this road somewhere in Czechoslovakia near Pilsen, and she just looks totally defeated and she's got a massive welted eye.
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A
Yeah.
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B
So obviously someone's whacked her one or, you know, and the inference is that someone's done a bit worse. Yeah, it's absolutely shattering, isn't it? I mean, just. Just. So I watched that and then it's like, who is the lost German girl? And then he realizes like 15 YouTube programs on the lost German girl, all speculating who she is, but of course no one knows.
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A
Okay. I mean, that's interesting, isn't it? Because we have a lost American girl, don't we? Fritz Berline's fancy Who was that?
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B
Anyway, so I'm feeling very haunted by that. And then I watched at your recommendation, David Willey's brilliant piece on. Ah, just so fascinating. And isn't it amazing how everyone assumes it's Major Dennison. There was, we can reveal like David's revealed, there is no Major Denison.
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A
They can't find him. He doesn't exist. And it means denim smock. It's news flash over. And all the stuff about the step in smart that they copy off the falchion Jaeger because you know that they capture some falchion Jaeger, don't they in 1940 and they bring him to Britain and they pump them for information and, and one of the things they do is they copy the step in smock and then decide they don't like that. And then there's the Windak, isn't there.
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B
The one that Monty's wearing.
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A
Yeah, with the lined collar and all that and the full length zip.
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B
It's got slightly lined collar. It's got a ribbed lined collar. It's slightly different. It's got slightly different material. Looks very, very cool. But same same camo pattern. And I think that's what, I think that if we can, if we can try and find one, we should, that's the one we should do at Avray.
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A
I couldn't agree more. Part of the approach they've got to the subject of the Denison is that were they painted by hand? No, probably not. It's too difficult. You'd never deliver the numbers. It's so interesting because this is how things crystallize ideas, don't they? You know, actually, hang on a minute, think about that. It's a lot like when we were talking about the Battle of Britain again. The myth that pilots got on squadrons with no time on Spitfires or whatever or with five minutes on Spitfires.
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B
Oh my God. You know, it's so hard. You know, I get this every time I mention Mark Clark. I. I mean seriously, you can say something about him and he goes, ah, everyone knows he's the worst general of the war. You know, he might have been tricky, he might have been an arrogant son of a gun, but he wasn't the worst general of the war. I mean, where does this come from? It's just a sort of, it's just this sort of. It becomes a sor. Of an accepted truth which is based on nothing.
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A
Yeah, yeah, yeah. But repeated enough that it sort of bakes in, doesn't it? I mean it's like the thing about Daphne Du Maurier and the red and the maroon beret. Right.
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B
Never happened.
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A
Well, yeah, but they have a letter at the Airborne Forces Museum from her saying it's not true. I didn't pick the maroon beret, but I love the story and I hope people carry on telling it. So.
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B
Who did pick the maroon, Barry? It's probably boy Browning, wasn't it?
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A
Yeah, but. Or an Aid or whatever, you know, it just sort of. It's fuzzy. They didn't write everything down. We need to take a quick break now. We'll be back with more 100% high octane AV gas only war waffle. At blinds.com, it's not just about window treatments. It's about you, your style, your space, your way. Whether you DIY or want the pros to handle it all, you'll have the confidence of knowing it's done right. From free expert design help to our 100% satisfaction guarantee, everything we do is made to fit your life and your windows. Because@blinds.com the only thing we treat better than windows is you. Visit blinds.com now for up to 50% off primetime deals and free professional installation rules and restrictions apply. Welcome back to. We have ways of making you talk. Jim and I are wall waffling. I mean, one of the things I did do on my way to Middle Wallop is I read there's quite a good, a quite a good history of like how they put two special air service together, you know, and turned it into 1st Parachute Brigade, all that stuff. Right. The very beginning of Airborne Forces. You, the Air Ministry and I know we, because of sort of Sholto Douglas's antics and stuff. We're not really mad about the Air Ministry. They're absolutely amazing stuff that happens. So Churchill writes that memo, we need a parachute landing force of 5,000 men. We need it now. Right. And what happens is the Air Ministry basically, ah, no way bombing, bombing is going to win the war. So we are not going to give you any planes. There's a guy called Pilot Officer Louis Strange who's then promoted to flight lieutenant, who's a buccaneering First World War pilot. There's a story about him. He's trying to fix a jammed machine gun on his plane and the aircraft inverts while he's doing that and he's hanging out the cockpit by his fingernails, you know, manage somehow. The plane flips back around, he lands back in the cockpit, like completely mental that he's accused of having no respect for process, for procedure. And he says, I have if it proceeds, right? That's his motto. So he has respect for procedure if it proceeds, right? So he's in there. They won't give them a plane. The RAF won't give this new landing school, this parachute school has been set up a plane. They've just refused. So he goes to Vickers and basically says, I need a Whitley. I've been sent by the landing school and circumvents all the bureaucracy and goes and gets one. And he's like that. They get into this thing where the Air Ministry are just going, you can't have that transport plane. KLM have got eight Dakotas, but we need them for something else. And they're just delay, obfuscation, obfuscation, delay. And then they say, you can have a bomber or two, and that's because they want bombers one way or another. So they'll give the airborne people bombers, because then they've got bombers. And then of course, they won't let them have them. And Churchill is then sent to this event where they do a demonstration of what they've got. And it's like four sports gliders sort of thing, Couple of hot spurs. Strange has this thing where basically a bunch of people parachute a load of men lying down on the drop zone who will then all leap up as though they parachuted as well, to fake the numbers, right? Churchill gets back to Downing street and goes, that's 500, not 5,000. What's going on? What's really interesting is the War Office take it up and are really, like, pushing to fix the problem of what they're going to do with airborne soldiers. So it's Air Ministry versus War Office, basically, for the first year, year and a half. And it's fascinating.
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B
Where were you reading all this?
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A
It's a book called Paras by William Buckingham. Oh, him, yeah, yeah, yeah.
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B
He did that really good one on.
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A
Yeah. And a 48 and the D day plus one book as well. You know, like, it's not just about D Day, it's about the next day. He really is right down in the weeds of all this stuff. And his thing as well is that basically the train, aasium, all the training stuff is all Polish and the British just nick it. They go, well, we'll use that. We'll have that. That works.
- [23:21]
B
Might as well, he says.
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A
But then, of course, the irony down the lines. The polls are then excluded, pushed about, blamed for when things go wrong in Arnhem, and yet they've been completely exploited. But the stuff between the Air Ministry and the War Office is really, really interesting. And he's got right into the bureaucracy. All these memos going backwards and forwards. And then Churchill basically saying, my mistake with this. To think that simply writing a thing and saying this must happen would work and that I could drive this through myself. And actually what I need is someone at the War Office to take charge of it completely and make it work. And that's. Then what happens is it's transformed because he keeps being fobbed off. The Air Ministry want to use gliders and rather than parachute troops, because then they haven't got to train anyone to parachute, they haven't got to use aircraft to train people to parachute. They're always trying to just like, never give up any airplanes. It's really interesting process. And also is the thing we talked about with the Battle of Britain, everyone pulling together, everyone towards a common aim. And it's the Air Ministry going, no, absolutely not. We're not doing it.
- [24:16]
B
So one of the things I was doing while I was lying in bed yesterday, I was watching. I was. I went back to watch the rest of the Battle of Britain film. The guy who plays Leigh Mallory is the same guy who plays the dastardly traitor in Where Eagles Death.
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A
I said, it's him.
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B
Course it is. How can you cast anyone else?
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A
Fantastic. Really funny.
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B
Except in that one, he's got a moustache, but you can almost see the sweat on his brow. Again, really funny.
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A
What is? He's being dastardly.
- [24:44]
B
Yeah, of course he is, yeah.
- [24:45]
A
Brilliant.
- [24:45]
B
Portray the country. But obviously, you know, at the moment, we're sort of prepping for. For Malta as well. And what's been amazing about revisiting that is how wound up I've been getting about the lack of Spitfires going to the Middle east in 1941.
- [24:59]
A
It's bad, isn't it?
- [25:00]
B
I can't even begin to tell you how C list the command structure is on Malta in 1940, 41.
- [25:05]
A
Why, though?
- [25:06]
B
Because people haven't been tested in war and because it's. It's on the attention of the. Of the chiefs of staff, it's on the attention of Churchill. But who do you get to go out there? And it's a. It's an island posting and it's in the middle, you know, oh, he'll do. You know, it's that kind of thing. And. And it is amazing that in the whole time that Hugh P. Lloyd is. Is in charge until the point where Tedder, who is at this point in early 1942, Air Officer Commanding RAF Middle east, goes, hang On a minute, what the hell is going on in Malta? I mean, why aren't they doing better? What's the problem over there? Problem is, is in the same time, it takes a Spitfire to get to 25,000ft, it takes a hurricane. It can only go 15,000ft. That's not good enough, you know, because it is just as simple as that. It's not that there's anything inherently wrong with the. With the very stable gun platform. You know, all of that. We know all about the Hurricane. It could be great, but it can't climb fast. And the one thing you need to do in Malta is climb fast. That outstrips literally everything. I find it absolutely staggering that Hugh Pugh Lloyd, who is the air officer commanding throughout the whole of 1941, really, because I think he comes in at the end of 1940, is not saying, hmm, you know what we really need here? We need something a fighter that can climb a little bit. A little bit faster. I mean, it's literally the first thing you. You come up against. So there is. Muncheberg is a. I think he's JG27. He commands a. A group in JG27. They have 43 nil in three weeks against Hurricanes. Jeepers, they don't lose a single map. They don't lose a single map.
- [26:34]
A
That is unbelievable. Imagine being in those squadrons, though, those Hurricane squadrons.
- [26:38]
B
So, God, at what point, as an air officer commanding, are you not thinking, hmm, what's going on here? Are our pilots really that bad? And then when Tom Neal says to him, so what we really need is Spitfires, and he goes, bad workman blames James Tools. That's when Tom says, you know, that's the closest I ever came to decking a senior officer.
- [26:55]
A
God almighty.
- [26:56]
B
I mean, how can you think like that? And I've been through all the. All the letters and messages and, you know, signals that Lloyd sent, he, repeat, says, I need more fighters, I need more fighters. At no point does he specify what fighters he needs. At no point does he say, the problem we've got at the moment is the Hurricane is just no good because it can't climb fast enough. You literally would have thought this is like the first thing you'd say.
- [27:19]
A
Well, yeah, but that. You know, there are a lot of people who don't understand how this works in the Royal Air Force up there.
- [27:25]
B
Well, he doesn't. He goes on a bomber background. But. But equally, if you've been. If you had been given the posting of AOC Malta, wouldn't you think the Most important job here is going to be defending the island, and that involves fighters. That's what defence is about. So perhaps I need to bone up. Maybe it'd be a good idea to go and talk to Keith park, who's now at training Command, and say, you know, have you got any tips? I'm going to Malta. That's not a big leap of imagination, is it, to do that? Go and talk to some fighter pilots. You can go and talk to some fighter pilots. Go and talk to fricking Bada. The point is, what are the issues in fighting? Okay, so it's range, height, time over the combat zone. What are you trying to do? Okay, looking at Sicily, so where are our enemy going to come from? Well, they're coming from Sicily. How long does it take to fly from sicily to Malta? 15 to 25 minutes, depending on which part of Sicily you're coming from. Okay, so 15 minutes. So I need to make sure that I've got a plane that can get higher than 25,000ft, which is the kind of optimum range that someone becoming from Sicily in 15 minutes. Is a Hurricane going to do that for me? No. So what's the answer? Maybe some Spitfires. And then you see that there were 11,797 Spitfires built between the end of October. So between the 1st of November 1940 to the 31st of December 1941, 11,797 Spitfires built, 8,442 Hurricanes. Why do you need 12,000 Spitfires going across the Channel to get destroyed? I mean, why isn't someone going, this is a really, really shit idea. Let's send them to the Middle east, where actually we have an active campaign in the middle, where that extra speed and rate of climb will be really, really beneficial. Why isn't someone thinking that?
- [29:03]
A
Where the lessons that we learned with the Dowding system this year are applicable again, not a dissimilar situation. They are trying to form fighters up into wings, aren't they, to meet the Germans as well? So there's also that, that complication that's rather than simply intercepting because Woody Woodall ends up there. The Duxford controller.
- [29:21]
B
Well, but do you know why Woody Woodall ends up there? Okay, so what happens is Tedder sort of goes, hang on a minute. Why is everything so bad in Malta? What the hell's going on? And I can't get anything out of Lloyd. So he then sends Basil Embry over there, who's one of his aides or whatever, you know, on his Staff, and he's the epic guy who's escaped from France. Embry goes over there, spends literally three days there. He goes around, talks to people and he comes back, he goes, right, this is what you need to do. You need to have some more radar, mobile radar on there. You need a proper ground controller. You need a ground controller who knows what he's doing. There's all the facilities there. There's a fantastic setup at Lascaris. There's a kind of these underground shelters. Do that. And you need Spitfires, and you need lots of Spitfires to intercept the enemy bombers and fighters before they reach the island. That's the whole point. You want to get them before they drop their bombs. You know, it's the same principle of attacking them before they get to London in the Battle of Britain. Okay, so he is a group captain at this point. Hugh Pu Lloyd is an Air vice marshal. Why hasn't Hugh P. Lloyd identified that a year earlier? Why does it take until February 1942 for a much more junior officer to point that out in literally a nanosecond? And on the 9th of March, the first 15 Spitfires arrive. It is just astonishingly crap how bad they are. I mean, really, it's just. You can't believe it. But anyway, looking forward to getting over there, making sure that people know exactly where I stand on this.
- [30:39]
A
Well, but the thing is, though, Jim, you can see it though, if in the Royal Air Force, what's happened is you've ousted the people who created the fighter defense system and then who actually ran it effectively from things. If you, you know, darting's. Darting's been given the flick, park's been sidelined, and the people who've taken their places and made sure that they're having a muscled in don't know what they're doing. There's going to be an awful lot of, you know, transmission of that knowledge is, is impeded, isn't it? Hugh Pu Lloyd isn't going to call Dowding, isn't he, and say, how did you do it? The info last. It's not going to happen. Yeah, because we talked in the Barter episode, we talked about how, you know, the small thing of Barda wanting to fly wings because he's got his first World War hat on, leads to this. There's a disconnect within RAF fighter doctrine and tactics that takes two years to solve. And you, you think, how consequential would it have been had they taken three, you know, three squadrons of Spitfires to Malta in December of 1940?
- [31:33]
B
In 1940. Been a game changer.
- [31:35]
A
Been an absolute game changer. You know, they've sent tanks to the Middle east, haven't they? You sent 150 tanks to the Middle east, even while things are really kicking off still in the Battle of Britain. But they've got the nous to do that. That someone hasn't gone. Well, we just, you know, we need to send three squadrons with all the pilots. We need all the stuff of Spitfires in November, once things have calmed down, the daylight stuff is tailing off. And maybe the raf, maybe. If I'd come on and think, well, maybe come the spring, the Luftwaffe will try again in daylight, but they don't. It doesn't happen. And in fact, they're running the circuses and rhubarbs, where they make all the mistakes that the Luftwaffe makes the previous year, where they've no aim. They aren't even doing the circuses and rhubarbs in the hope that there might be an invasion. They're just doing it to do something, to look busy. Right. The worst reason for doing anything, they're doing it to look like the war's carrying on. Right.
- [32:23]
B
Well, I think. I think the reason is simple. I think. I think it's just that you've got, you know, in all walks of life, we all know this, you've got lots of people who are pretty average and actually pretty incompetent as well. The more I meet of kind of sort of highfalutin, important people, the less impressive they all seem, I think, is my view on it. I mean, some people obviously are really, really impressive, incredibly charismatic and clever and all the rest of it, but. But, you know, I just think a lot of people are just a bit crap and it's wartime and it's just.
- [32:53]
A
Yeah, wartime is no exception. And that's the thing. Cream might rise to the top, but as it works its way through an awful lot of milk.
- [33:02]
B
Milk, for instance.
- [33:06]
A
Milk had risen to the top, hadn't he?
- [33:09]
B
Yeah.
- [33:11]
A
Really, though you think of the strategic effect if that had happened in the.
- [33:15]
B
End of 1940, what you should have done in 1941. Without question of doubt. 1941 should have. Absolutely. There was plenty of opportunities. There were convoys that were getting through unscathed in 1941. So that is your moment to send out loads and loads and loads of Spitfires. So you send out your absolute pack, the Carland, you pack it with spares of aviation fuel and ammunition, all the bits you need, and so then you don't have to have operation Pedestal, because you've already got cracked it. And then that means that any effort that the Luftwaffe do is got. It's got to be double, triple, quadruple what they do put at Malta, which they can't afford, that then creates a whole host of other sort of strategic options. Worst case scenario, you lose lots and lots of Spitfires. You're losing them doing crappy rhubarb, so you might as well lose them with something that's worthwhile. I mean, my views, I think it would have changed everything. It would change North Africa, would saved a whole, a whole load of hassle. And I think, I think there are some brilliant people doing brilliant things in. For the British war effort in 1941, pioneering new trade links the development of Freetown, for example, on the west coast of Africa, into a sizable port out of nothing. That's genius. The work that's going on in the Battle of the Atlantic, there's absolutely no question that that is brilliant and that is where the focus is. But the ref. The RAF is riven by these internecine rivalries and power grabs because air power is less established, because it's newer, because the possibilities are, I suppose, broader.
- [34:43]
A
Yeah.
- [34:44]
B
But it seems to me incredibly short sighted to have not appreciated the incredible achievements of Downing and Park in 1940. You know, I know Churchill does. I know, I know that portal kind of lavishes praise on park and all the rest of it, but that Sholto Douglas and Leigh Mallory in particular are allowed to kind of sort of hold firm on this is just absurd. What is everyone doing? And why have they taken their eye off the ball so badly? What's brought this about? And why are they convinced by this nonsensical rhetoric? I mean, just crazy. And how can someone like Lloyd, he might have been very good in a training command, might have been very good in India or wherever he was before, and might have been perfectly acceptable as a. In Bomber Command. Why is he not called out earlier when he's so obviously out of his depth in Malta? Yeah, I mean, he's a, he's a courageous fellow, no one could doubt that, but he's just, he's not, not sharp enough. He hasn't got the brains to be able to do the job that's required or think laterally. You know, he does this many other things as well. There's a sort of, you know, lack of attention to detail.
- [35:45]
A
Yeah, well, our producer James has popped up saying, never would have happened in the senior service. So there you go, everyone. There's your mention of the Royal Navy?
- [35:54]
B
Yeah. Everyone says we don't talk about Royal Navy, it's because the Royal Navy are perfect. We haven't got anything to.
- [35:59]
A
Exactly. There's nothing to say about when the trains run on time. No one complains. Right? Right. This is the simple truth. Right.
- [36:05]
B
Yeah. You know, when you're sinking U boats.
- [36:08]
A
There'S been a lot of fun chatting. We hope you've enjoyed this discursive war waffle.
- [36:12]
B
Well, I think it's been a little bit for everyone on that one, hasn't it?
- [36:14]
A
Yeah, But I think you having Covid and us doing war waffle really takes us back to sort of, you know, episode 72 13, when everyone's eating their indigestible sourdough that they've baked and drinking much too much red wine in the morning.
- [36:29]
B
Yeah.
- [36:29]
A
As you say, we block the bad parts from our memory, but the good parts remain. Thanks, everybody, for listening. We will see you all again very soon. Cheerio.
- [36:38]
B
Cheerio, Chissy. Cheers. You are not luminous, Watson, but you.
- [36:50]
A
Are a conductor of light.
- [36:54]
B
Here they are.
- [36:55]
A
Dr. Mortimer, I presume?
- [36:57]
B
Yes. Hi, John.
- [36:58]
A
Dr. John Watson. Who is your client? He was my client, Sir Charles Baskerville.
- [37:11]
B
Keep reading. A local shepherd.
- [37:15]
A
Noted. I saw first that of the maid. Hugo Baskerville passed me thence on his black mare, and there behind him, running.
- [37:23]
B
Mute upon his track, such a hound.
- [37:25]
A
Of hell that, God forbid, should ever be at my heels. I wish I felt better in my mind about it. It's an ugly business, Walt. An ugly, dangerous business.
- [37:39]
B
And the more I see of it.
- [37:40]
A
The less I like it. I shall be very glad to have you back safe and sound in Baker Street. Passport. Hello. Goal. Hanger presents. You're not sure. Sherlock Holmes. I'm Henry Baskerville from one of the.
- [37:58]
B
Biggest audio dramas of all time.
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A
Does it bother you? Like in a creepy kind of way? Like in there's an evil giant hound.
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B
That likes the taste of Baskerville's kind of way. The seminal gothic novel by Arthur Conan Doyle.
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A
They're watching.
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B
Who? Who?
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A
Who are watching? It's not safe. I could just make out its pitch black form. Welcome to deepest everything, a hellish void. Darkest for this piercing yellow glow of eyes. Dartmoor. What do you want of giant fang?
- [38:34]
B
No.
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A
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B
The hound of the Baskervilles.
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A
Listen now.
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B
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A
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