James Holland
Appearances
American History Hit
1945: America & Victory in Europe
And so little pockets like getting over the bridge at Remagen and stuff is actually kind of slightly unsettling the apple cart. Mm-hmm. The main effort is going to be in the north in the sphere of 21st Army Group, to which the US 9th Army, under Bill Simpson, who's brilliant, by the way, is attached. And this is Operation Plunder. And then there's going to be an airborne drop with the 17th.
American History Hit
1945: America & Victory in Europe
Where's Patton at this point? So Patton is in 3rd Army. So he is getting ready to cross as well. And he's been preparing this since the previous October. Yeah. So the way he tells the story is that his guys just bounce around with no fuss while Monty had this kind of, you know, big preamble and amassed all this. I mean, you know, that is just total nonsense because the genius of Patton
American History Hit
1945: America & Victory in Europe
Yes, he was a great tactical commander, i.e., you know, he was a fighting spearhead kind of, you know, gung-ho kind of guy. But I think his real genius was in his operational skill. And what I mean by that is how you organize your troops, how you plan, how you prepare. He had bridging teams and bridging experts and engineers all lined up to cross the Rhine since previous October.
American History Hit
1945: America & Victory in Europe
Well, he trained in tank work with Eisenhower. Right, exactly. So he's further to the south and they get across kind of the day before Operation Plunder. So they get across on the 22nd.
American History Hit
1945: America & Victory in Europe
So it's the third week of March, basically. Okay. And they're all across. And then following that, so you have Remargan on, I think it's, if I remember right, it's the 7th of March. Then you've got Operation Plunder, 23rd of March. You've got Patton getting across on the 22nd of March. Then further to the south, you've got 6th Army Group, which is US 7th Army and the French 1st Army.
American History Hit
1945: America & Victory in Europe
They're getting across again in the kind of last week of March as well. And it's important not to forget the 6th Army Group because 7th Army, US 7th Army and the French 1st Army, they do really, really well, but they're kind of Because everyone's obsessed with Patton, they kind of tend to get cut out of the story and the narrative.
American History Hit
1945: America & Victory in Europe
Yeah, I think everyone is really, really shocked because he has been this great leader. He's arguably the greatest president America's ever had. He's certainly in the top handful. And he's a titan. I mean, he's a titanic figure. He's the only president to have served four terms or almost four terms. How hands-on was he with military strategy? Very, very hands-on.
American History Hit
1945: America & Victory in Europe
He has this superb personal military advisor called Admiral Leahy. And, yeah, he works very, very closely with that. You know, he's a military man anyway. You know, he's a Navy man. He gets it. He understands it. He has this terrific geopolitical understanding. And he's got this great vision for world peace that's going to follow afterwards, which I think is incredibly admirable. And...
American History Hit
1945: America & Victory in Europe
He was Machiavellian and underhand at times and completely ruthless, but he was fundamentally a good man. He wanted the world to be a better place when he left the world than when he was born into it. And I think you can argue that he pulled that off. Truman is really, really interesting. The reason he gets Truman is because Roosevelt knows that he needs to win.
American History Hit
1945: America & Victory in Europe
the november 1944 election you know he needs to continue this job and some of the other potential candidates were um henry wallace who's the existing vice president he's sort of seemed a bit too left jimmy burns has got kind of issues with you know he's not so popular in the deep south and and so on so there was issues so the reason he goes with truman is truman is just completely neutral everyone likes truman but he's a domestic politician from missouri independence missouri
American History Hit
1945: America & Victory in Europe
You're a classic kind of folksy kind of homegrown guy who kind of offends nobody. But does that put him in a really good position to be the leader of the kind of largest, richest nation in the world by 1944 and to lead the free world into the post-war era? And there's a lot of question marks about that. And a lot of people don't think he's going to do it.
American History Hit
1945: America & Victory in Europe
But I would argue that he does it with bells on. I think he's unbelievable.
American History Hit
1945: America & Victory in Europe
They're on the Elbe. I mean, the Elbe was reached on the 11th of April. So they've done the job. The job's done. But the atomic bomb. I mean, Truman doesn't know about the Manhattan Project. He doesn't know about the atomic bomb when he becomes president. He doesn't know about ongoing brewing problems with the Soviet Union. All these he has to kind of shoulder and burden.
American History Hit
1945: America & Victory in Europe
And he doesn't want to be president. He didn't want to be vice president. He does it out of a sense of moral duty, of Christian moral patriotic duty.
American History Hit
1945: America & Victory in Europe
He has carried it to that point. Literally the day after reaching the elbow. Great man. But I would argue that I think Truman is a surprise in how good he was. And he was, you know, There are some flaws in his presidency, don't get me wrong. But out of that comes a continuation of the ethos of Roosevelt. Out of that comes the Marshall Plan.
American History Hit
1945: America & Victory in Europe
The Marshall Plan, the only time ever in the history of the world where the victors have financially helped the vanquished.
American History Hit
1945: America & Victory in Europe
They know about the death camps much earlier in the war, but the average soldier doesn't. You know, this is not sort of stuff that you bandy about. It's really interesting because Churchill makes a speech in the summer of 1940 where he talks about, you know, if we prevail, we will return to sunlit uplands.
American History Hit
1945: America & Victory in Europe
But if we fail, you know, we will descend into a new dark age made more sinister by the perversions of modern science. You know, he doesn't know about Zyklon B at that point, but this is what we're talking about.
American History Hit
1945: America & Victory in Europe
And it's a real shock because, you know, one has to remember that before the arrival of the Nazis, before the First World War, I mean, Germany is this place of unbelievably rich culture, of music, of science, of literature, of art, of engineering, of a proud nation, of a brilliant military heritage and, you know, super creative, yet just like that. Yeah.
American History Hit
1945: America & Victory in Europe
You know, 12 years, less than 12 years, they've descended into the Holocaust. And it's horrible. It's so grotesque. The contempt for human life is so appalling. The cruelty, you can't imagine it. And, you know, even things like Zyklon B, that is to be more humane for the executioners, not for the executed. You know, you're all crammed naked together. That's humiliating.
American History Hit
1945: America & Victory in Europe
Different age groups in a concrete room. You're being gassed. It's not a particularly quick death.
American History Hit
1945: America & Victory in Europe
It's horrific. It's incredibly painful. All your capillaries and your lungs burst. You're gasping for air. Your whole chest is heaving in pain. And some people can take up to 20 minutes. And you know there's nowhere out. And you're watching other people dying. And you know that's your fate. It's unspeakably cruel.
American History Hit
1945: America & Victory in Europe
And then the Allied troops are getting into Buchenwald and Belsen and Dachau and they're seeing these emaciated people and they're seeing defecation all over the place and disease and rife with typhus and typhoid. And the whole thing is just unspeakable. And of course people are shocked.
American History Hit
1945: America & Victory in Europe
You know, it's one thing going to war and you have kind of sort of basic notions of kind of Geneva Convention and all that kind of stuff. Then you see that. Off the charts. I mean, how can you contemplate that? How can you process that? Of course, they're absolutely devastated. They're completely shocked. And of course, it's why they've been doing it.
American History Hit
1945: America & Victory in Europe
If ever you want to kind of raison d'etre for going to war, it's that. And for all the kind of moral ambiguity of the war, the bombing of cities and towns, mostly by allied guns or by allied bombs, when you get to Buchenwald and you see this pitiful example of human deprivation and misery...
American History Hit
1945: America & Victory in Europe
It's so bizarre. And I think it's a really, you know, history never repeats itself. Of course it doesn't because this is now and that was then. Yeah. But patterns of human behavior do. And I think one of the things that's so fascinating about it and so alarming is the fragility of democracy.
American History Hit
1945: America & Victory in Europe
You know, how can a nation as advanced and sophisticated and a kind of foundation of high culture like Germany descend into this monstrous, despicable regime so quickly?
American History Hit
1945: America & Victory in Europe
Yes, it was. And by then, it's a foregone conclusion. It's only a matter of time. So yes, it was worked out that it was going to be split up.
American History Hit
1945: America & Victory in Europe
That was already set up. Yeah, so of course, it's a huge great resentment by the Soviet Union because they've got into Berlin and they didn't really want then to kind of allow Americans and British and French.
American History Hit
1945: America & Victory in Europe
Yes. But my point is, again, is that one has to contextualize those huge casualties that the Red Army suffers. The Red Army approach is to have this huge battering ram. You swing it back and And then you just go, wham, straight into the enemy. Lots of violence. Everyone dies. There's lots of carnage. There's lots of carnage to yourself.
American History Hit
1945: America & Victory in Europe
Then you have to kind of pause because your units are so depleted for three months. And then you kind of pull the battering ram back again. And you swing it again and repeat. But the problem with this process is that it's incredibly costly in terms of... But particularly manpower. And it doesn't have to be that way. They've got all the kit in the world. They've got all the artillery.
American History Hit
1945: America & Victory in Europe
There's a much better plan than the one they're doing, which is much less manpower heavy. And they don't do it. So, yes, they do have a huge amount of casualties going into Berlin. But I would argue that with a better plan, better trained men and people that weren't quite so expendable, they could have done it for a heck of a lot less manpower and a heck of a lot less of a cost.
American History Hit
1945: America & Victory in Europe
I mean, where- Yeah, so once they get across the Rhine, Eisenhower makes a decision that he's not going to attack Berlin. He's going to get to the Elbe and then he's going to stop. So it's kind of interesting because by the beginning of February, the Western allies are still 250 miles from Berlin and the Red Army is only 50 miles.
American History Hit
1945: America & Victory in Europe
By the 11th of April, which is when Bill Simpson's 9th Army reached the River Elbe, they're both about 50 miles away because the Russians haven't moved since beginning of February. Right. Whereas, obviously, the Allies have. So, you know, it's absolutely within the grasp of Eisenhower and the Western Allies to go into Berlin, and they would have got there first.
American History Hit
1945: America & Victory in Europe
But there's absolutely no question about it because the Germans would have not fought anything like as hard against the Allies. The Allies would have fought much more efficiently. Right. And they would have taken Berlin because no one wanted to be taken by the Russians because you reap what you sow.
American History Hit
1945: America & Victory in Europe
And back in 1941 and into 1942, they treated the Soviet Union so brutally that what do you expect when it comes back?
American History Hit
1945: America & Victory in Europe
It is, but it doesn't need to be. That's my point. So the only reason the Red Army have such casualties in the final battle is because it's a really badly planned battle and because the commanders have absolutely no regard for the lives of their men. I mean, Red Army loses something like 900,000 casualties between 16th of April and the 2nd of May.
American History Hit
1945: America & Victory in Europe
I mean, that's like nearly a million in a fortnight.
American History Hit
1945: America & Victory in Europe
I'm not going to go any further. And the reason is because he doesn't want any further loss of life amongst the Western forces. And the reason he doesn't want that is because he wants to conserve him because it's all over. The second is because he thinks they're going to have to go to the Pacific. Wow. Interesting.
American History Hit
1945: America & Victory in Europe
It's not about Europe. As far as they're concerned, they've crushed Nazi Germany. That was their kind of number one priority as laid out in the Arcadia Conference in December 1941. And it's job done. You know, Germany is defeated. Hitler goes on the 30th of April, but it's all over.
American History Hit
1945: America & Victory in Europe
Whether the Western allies end up with an extra 50 miles of Germany or that 50 miles goes into the hands of the Soviet Union, So what? It's not his concern. His concern is winning the war as quickly as possible for the minimum amount of loss of life.
American History Hit
1945: America & Victory in Europe
Well, I think so, yes, because the front line ends on the River Elbe, as Eisenhower agrees. And that's a division between what becomes East Germany and what becomes West Germany. The finishing line isn't baked in by Yalta. It is baked in that there's going to be a division of Berlin, but it hasn't been agreed who is going to capture Berlin.
American History Hit
1945: America & Victory in Europe
And it's still odds on that it's going to be the Western Allies at this point. But then Eisenhower lets Stalin know that he's not going to contest Berlin. that he is going to stop at the river Elba, which is to say it's kind of 50 miles to the kind of west of Berlin. And that then becomes the kind of Iron Curtain.
American History Hit
1945: America & Victory in Europe
Then there's a whole lot of horse trading that's been going on the previous autumn about Italy and Greece and the Balkans and all the rest of it. So Churchill goes to Stalin in Moscow and says, okay, let's thrash this out. And it's agreed that Greece will remain in the orbit of the west, but the Balkans won't. Interesting. You know, that decision is all made then.
American History Hit
1945: America & Victory in Europe
Well, actually, Don, it's a little bit mixed because actually the surrender is signed in the early hours of the 7th of May. Stalin's really annoyed about this because the Germans surrendered to the West. They surrendered to Eisenhower's headquarters. And they go, no, no, no, no, it can't be a property surrender until we have our own surrender in Berlin.
American History Hit
1945: America & Victory in Europe
And that's going to happen at one minute past midnight on the 9th of May. But then the Germans broadcast about the surrender and the cat's out of the bag and everyone starts partying on the 7th of May. So, Churchill and Truman agree that victory in Europe Day will be celebrated on the 8th of May. But actually, ironically, it's the one day there isn't a surrender. And reactions are really mixed.
American History Hit
1945: America & Victory in Europe
For the Western allies, there's euphoria and street parties and ticker taking in Times Square and all the rest of it. There's a kind of mild celebration in a lot of the troops in Europe. And then there's a kind of sort of, well, what was the point in the first place then if we've got to this? Then there is the anxiety about Japan. Plenty of people still fighting in the Pacific.
American History Hit
1945: America & Victory in Europe
I mean, you know, there's people still fighting on Okinawa. You know, there's no victory day for them. They're still fighting the Japanese. And ditto, you know, British troops in Burma and so on. So... It's a completely mixed reaction. And for those people who've... I remember talking to a lady who lived in my village who'd lost her fiancé who'd been shot down in his bomber.
American History Hit
1945: America & Victory in Europe
And she said she spent the whole of the day just in tears. Right. Because that was that. And it's very interesting. When you look at Truman's... victory speech that he gives on the morning of the 8th of May, coincidentally his 61st birthday that day. It's pretty muted. Yeah, I can read it. There's a job still to be done.
American History Hit
1945: America & Victory in Europe
It really, really is. And the other thing is, is he knows he's a new president. He hasn't been in office quite a month by that point. Yeah. And he knows there's all sorts of problems brewing with the Soviet Union. You know, there is a complete clash of worldview. Yeah. And there is a huge burden of the Japan. Yeah.
American History Hit
1945: America & Victory in Europe
Oh, Don, thank you for having me on. I really appreciate it.
American History Hit
1945: America & Victory in Europe
Well, that's an extremely good question. It's really down to the control that Hitler has over the Third Reich and over the German people, which is total and complete. You know, he's an absolute autocrat. Yeah. And... Hitler's always been very clear. I mean, the one thing you can say about him is he never speaks in grey areas at all. It's always one thing or the other.
American History Hit
1945: America & Victory in Europe
He's a complete either-or kind of person. Always has been. Either the Aryan race will rise up or will be consumed by Bolsheviks and Jews. Yeah. Either we'll have the thousand year Reich or it'll be Armageddon. You know, you are the German people. You know, you have to have the will in this struggle for survival.
American History Hit
1945: America & Victory in Europe
You know, and if we if our generation gets over this terrible struggle and burden now, then there will be a thousand years of glorious Aryan peace, blah, blah, blah. And the German people had bought into this completely. Well, they have, because in the 1930s, Hitler comes into power in January 1933, just at the moment that the economy is starting to change. He's able to capitalize on that.
American History Hit
1945: America & Victory in Europe
And suddenly, you know, they're feeling good about themselves again. You know, he's creating jobs. He's building up the military again. And that's sort of very much part of the kind of the old Prussian imperial German kind of... way of thinking. So that's a big tick. Then he takes back the Rhine land without a shot being fired. Then he takes the Sudetenland without a shot being fired.
American History Hit
1945: America & Victory in Europe
Austria is morphed into the Third Reich with the Anschluss. Then he takes the rest of Czechoslovakia and not a shot's been fired ever again. This guy's a genius. It's great. We're top dogs again in the centre of Europe. What's not to like?
American History Hit
1945: America & Victory in Europe
And then, of course, it all goes pear-shaped when he invades Poland and Britain and France kind of hold out on their pledges and they do go to war with Germany as a result of that and it's the start of the Second World War. But to start off with, it all seems to go quite well.
American History Hit
1945: America & Victory in Europe
You know, they've overrun Poland and there's lots of people in Germany who kind of think, yeah, well, you know, we should be there because lots of German speakers. And, you know, the Baltic coast, you know, we need to link East Prussia, which is this little sort of isolated pocket around Königsberg, the ancient Hanseatic port of Königsberg. You know, so let's link that up again.
American History Hit
1945: America & Victory in Europe
You know, so they're all feeling quite good about that. And then there's, you know, enormous victories of the low countries of Scandinavia and mighty France subdued and everything. And it looks like Hitler's this genius. Beginning of July 1940, everyone's going, hooray. Swastikas lining the streets, have ticker tape in Berlin and all the rest of it. Seems like he's got all the answers.
American History Hit
1945: America & Victory in Europe
But of course, he overreaches himself. And like a lot of autocrats, he surrounds himself by people, yes men and sycophants and state of paranoia and all the rest of it, none of which is conducive to making good decisions. And the absolute catastrophic decision he makes is going to the Soviet Union in 1941. And he only does that because he's lost the Battle of Britain.
American History Hit
1945: America & Victory in Europe
So he's got Britain still hovering in the wings, doesn't want to have a war on two fronts, Hovering on the other side of the Atlantic is the brilliant and mighty America with all its huge potential, manpower, resources, access to the world's oceans, and all the rest of it. So those are two pretty big, big enemies.
American History Hit
1945: America & Victory in Europe
So the problem is the cupboard is already clear from all the gains that he's got in the Blitzkrieg stage. Yeah. He's nicked all the cars from France and trucks and factories and oil and food reserves and all the rest of it. And the cupboard's bare again. I mean, they've been like kids in a sweet shop. So he thinks, well, what do we do?
American History Hit
1945: America & Victory in Europe
And he says, well, the only way we're going to get all the supplies we need is to go into the Soviet Union. You know, he's originally planning that for kind of 43, 44. But he goes and said in June 1941, it's a terrible plan. You know, they kid themselves that they're doing quite well because the Red Army is so...
American History Hit
1945: America & Victory in Europe
unspeakably awful and terrible and so they do get very close to Berlin by the end of the year but consider this take an arbitrary date like let's say the 16th of June 1941 at that point Nazi Germany has got one enemy in the world Great Britain albeit Great Britain plus dominions and empire yeah And then fast forward it six months to, say, the 16th of December 1941.
American History Hit
1945: America & Victory in Europe
Suddenly Nazi Germany has got three enemies. It's got the USSR, it's got the United States of America, and it's got Britain plus Dominions and Empire. And I would argue that you're never going to win from that point.
American History Hit
1945: America & Victory in Europe
Yeah, and they're brilliant at this. So it's really, really interesting because they're actually nothing like as automotive as most people think they are. Everyone talks about the Nazi war machine of the Blitzkrieg years. Actually, they weren't very automotive at all. And they're quite down the pecking order.
American History Hit
1945: America & Victory in Europe
I mean, it will be no surprise to anyone listening in the US that America is the most automotive society in the world in 1939. They're off three people for every motorized vehicle in the United States in 1939. That figure is eight in France. So France is comfortably the most automotive. It's 14 in the UK. It is 47 in Germany.
American History Hit
1945: America & Victory in Europe
And so that's a problem because what that means is you haven't got that many people who know how to drive. You haven't got many You know, gas stations. You haven't got many factories churning out this stuff. So if you suddenly want to kind of escalate that into kind of war, you've got a problem because you can't mass produce because you don't have the capacity to do so.
American History Hit
1945: America & Victory in Europe
But where they have the most, they have the densest radio network of any nation on the planet by 1939. And they've been really, really cunning. So in the early 1930s, for example, they create the Deutsche Fanger, which is a German radio. And then they create the Deutsche Kleinen Fanger.
American History Hit
1945: America & Victory in Europe
Which is the German little radio. And this is about as revolutionary when it comes in in 1935 as the arrival of the iPod. Up until that point, radios are aspirational and they kind of come with a sort of walnut veneer and, you know, you only get them if you're middle class. But what Germany realizes is if they control the whole media, then they can start to really... warp people's minds.
American History Hit
1945: America & Victory in Europe
It's the same as taking over Twitter or something. So what you do is you have this radio, which is nine inches by four inches by four inches, made of Bakelite, super cheap. And even if those who can't afford it, you put them in stairwells and apartment blocks and in public squares and all the rest of it. And you're just churning out the same old nonsense the whole time.
American History Hit
1945: America & Victory in Europe
So it is partly Hitlerian speeches with Spittel and all the rest of it, but it's also kind of light comedy moments. And it's sort of, you know, Wagner as well and other speeches and other talk programs and discussion programs. But the subliminal message is the same. We're cool. We're German. We're the best in the world militarily. Jews are awful. Bolsheviks, communists are awful. Slavs are awful.
American History Hit
1945: America & Victory in Europe
It is our destiny to take over the world. We need to do it. We're top dogs. And it just people start if you repeat stuff enough. People believe it. So the reason they're still going is because Hitler has this grip and because they've all bought into it to start off with.
American History Hit
1945: America & Victory in Europe
Then suddenly there's this halfway point, which is early 1943 in the surrender of Stalingrad, when everyone suddenly thinks, ah, OK, we're not going to win here. So then it's kind of everyone's maximum effort. And if you don't do the maximum effort, you're going to have the Russian hordes coming here and they're going to rape and pillage and, you know, savage you.
American History Hit
1945: America & Victory in Europe
And it's going to be Armageddon, which I warned you about. So what's the alternative? You know, so that's why they're keeping on fighting. Fear mentality.
American History Hit
1945: America & Victory in Europe
Yeah, kind of. I kind of wonder whether too much emphasis has been put on Yalta. In a way, a more significant one is Tehran, which happens at the end of 1943. And that's the first time that kind of the big three, Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill meet together. And that's in Iran. Stalin has agreed with the Western allies, Roosevelt and Churchill, that the only unconditional surrender will do.
American History Hit
1945: America & Victory in Europe
So that's already worked out. What's sort of being worked out at Yalta is... is that there is clearly going to be effectively an iron curtain over Europe when the war is over, one which is in the sphere of communism and the Soviet bloc and one which isn't. And Roosevelt knows this and Churchill knows this and they're trying to get as many concessions as possible.
American History Hit
1945: America & Victory in Europe
And what Stalin agrees to is, yes, there will be free and fair elections in these countries like Czechoslovakia and Poland once the war is over. But Churchill knows perfectly well that that's never going to happen. Roosevelt knows that's probably not going to happen. But they've got to get him to say it. Right. And he does say it.
American History Hit
1945: America & Victory in Europe
But they all know by this point that by the time the war is over in Europe, there's still going to be the war against Imperial Japan. That is hovering over every decision the Western allies make in 1945. And no one is expecting to be using atomic bombs on Japan at this stage. Right. So...
American History Hit
1945: America & Victory in Europe
What they are expecting is to have to invade Japan, because what the lessons of the war in Japan have showed them is that the closer they get to Japan, the harder the Japanese fight. And that is why, you know, out of 18,000 Japanese on Iwo Jima, I think it's 250 are taken prisoner. Out of 12,000 on Peleliu, 360 are taken prisoner. So in other words, Japanese fight to the death.
American History Hit
1945: America & Victory in Europe
And that means a lot of casualties. That means when you get into Japan itself... You know, we're looking at several million casualties. And that is a terrible burden for the Western allies, particularly the United States, which is taking over the lead in terms of... Well, it's always been at the forefront in terms of operations in the Pacific rather than Southeast Asia.
American History Hit
1945: America & Victory in Europe
They just want to get Germany done and dusted. And there is going to be no stomach for fighting Stalin. So what the line is at the end is going to be the line. And they can say, we want to have free foreign elections. And Stalin can go, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. But they all know that's not going to happen. The other thing to point out is by this stage, Roosevelt is a very, very sick man.
American History Hit
1945: America & Victory in Europe
I find it absolutely astonishing that the Americans agree to hold it in Yalta. Just by virtue of the travel. They should have pushed back on it and said, no, we'll meet in Malta or we'll meet in America. So they should have gone to Washington.
American History Hit
1945: America & Victory in Europe
The guy was at the edge of death. He's on the edge of death. So his arteries are furring up. Yeah. And so that is what's weakening him. I mean, he's 63 when he dies. Have you seen pictures of him at the artery? He looks like an 80-year-old. You know, he is absolutely spent, this titanic figure with his extraordinary visions for peace. Mm-hmm. which he's been working on since the 1930s.
American History Hit
1945: America & Victory in Europe
You know, the Good Neighbour Policy, Four Freedoms of January 1941, the Atlantic Charter of August 1941, Bretton Woods, the creation of the IMF, an international monetary fund, the World Bank. This idea that he is absolutely wedded to that...
American History Hit
1945: America & Victory in Europe
Low tariffs, free trade, prosperous neighbors means a prosperous nation for America in which America can dominate and be the number one and richest nation in the world through others' prosperity. And also the historical truth that prosperity breeds peace, financial disharmony breeds war.
American History Hit
1945: America & Victory in Europe
Right. Well, it's going to happen in the free world, but it's not going to happen behind the Iron Curtain. You know, the balance of power has changed. Stalin was a rabbit in headlights when the Germans invade Soviet Union in June 1941. He recovers his metal in pretty quick order. And thanks to... predominantly U.S. lend-lease, he's turned the corner.
American History Hit
1945: America & Victory in Europe
I mean, Russian listeners won't like me for saying this, but the encirclement of the German sick farmer at Stalingrad in Operation Uranus is thanks to the 78,000 U.S. trucks and lorries and other vehicles that enabled him to do that, because otherwise they wouldn't have been able to do it.
American History Hit
1945: America & Victory in Europe
So Roosevelt and Britain, you know, America and Britain have done the right thing in helping their enemy's enemy is our friend kind of principle. But as the war, the conclusion of the war is getting nearer, first of all, America particularly has got other problems on its hand, i.e. dealing with Imperial Japan. The second thing is the new world order they've got to sort out.
American History Hit
1945: America & Victory in Europe
This is a time for compromise because you're not going to have a continuation of the European war against the Soviet Union.
American History Hit
1945: America & Victory in Europe
Yeah, yeah. So the United Nations, it's all the chat. But I mean, the Soviet Union invited to Bretton Woods, for example, which is this economic conference where they agree on the IMF and the World Bank and they declined to come. Of course. Of course they do.
American History Hit
1945: America & Victory in Europe
Yes. You know, the term sort of crimes against humanity and genocide and stuff like that. You know, these are new terms that are emerging at that period.
American History Hit
1945: America & Victory in Europe
Yes. So the first crossing is the beginning of March where they get across the bridge at Remagen. But actually, you know, this froze Eisenhower because Eisenhower wants everyone to pull up to the Rhine, then pause. gather their strength, get over. What he doesn't want is any reverses.
American History Hit
1945: America & Victory in Europe
So he doesn't want a kind of a pocket over the other side of the Rhine, which can then be reduced and into which you have to then pour other resources to make sure it doesn't. He wants to maintain that balance. And actually, Eisenhower, by the beginning of March, is really... Well, from the moment of the Battle of the Bulge, he really takes a grip and becomes the overall commander.
American History Hit
1945: America & Victory in Europe
He is the guy who is dictating the overall strategy on the Western Front by this point, and he's doing it very directly. And He wants to be methodical. And from his point of view, because of the huge burden of going into Japan, he wants to preserve as much manpower as possible. So Britain and America have always had this principle of steal not our flesh as much as you possibly can.
American History Hit
1945: America & Victory in Europe
So you're limiting the number of casualties and number of people in the coal face as you Absolutely keeping that to the bare minimum by the use of mechanization, industrialization, new innovation and technology and all the rest of it to do a lot of the hard yards for you. So they want to be methodical. They don't want to kind of wastelize unnecessarily.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
It's squeaking and clanking away and it's incredibly scary and it's about to blow you to bits. That's all you care about and quite understandably so. But those who are protracting the war at a higher level and historians that come subsequently and look at all this stuff, they do need to worry about all these things. I remember the same Georg Thomas, the architect of the hunger plan.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
I found this minutes of this meeting, which I think was either on the 4th of December or the 5th of December, 1941. So it's just before the Red Army counterattacks outside Moscow in the winter of 1941. And it's a meeting about weaponry. And this is a verbatim quote. He says, we have to stop making such complete and ascetic weapons.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
General Georg Thomas comes up, you know, and Hermann Bacher. They come up with the, who's the kind of minister for food. They come up, you know, what are we going to do? You know, we haven't got enough food, you know, largely because German farming is inefficient. And I think, well, you know, this is part of Liebensruhe. We'll go in and we'll take the food.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
In other words, we've consciously been building over-engineered and aesthetically pleasing weapons up until this point. And they sort of half manage it, but don't quite.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
Yeah, we also do. We've got a new YouTube channel and website called World War II Headquarters. There are lots of walking the ground and videos of that and all sorts of stuff and little explainers of going around tanks and stuff and the weaponry and documents and photographic archives. So the idea is to sort of turn it into a kind of real hub of...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
Anyone who's interested in this subject, it's a place where they can go and find out just a whole load more. I love it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
Well, yeah, I think so. I mean, it's really interesting. So they get through 1941. Barbarossa doesn't happen as the Germans hope it will. The whole point is to completely destroy the Red Army in three months, and that just doesn't happen. And I think you can argue and argue convincingly that by, let's say, the beginning of December 1941, Germany is just not going to win.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
it just can't and and let me tell you what i mean by that so if you take an arbitrary date let's say the 15th of june 1941 germany at that moment has one enemy which is great britain albeit great britain plus dominion empire fast forward six months to let's say the 16th of december it's got three enemies it's got great britain dominion empire ussr And the USA. It is just not going to win.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
And there's been this colossal urbanization of the Soviet Union since the revolution in 1917. Yeah. So they're just not going to get their food, these people in these cities, because we're going to take it all. And that's going to lead to a lot of deaths. Umpteen millions is the phrase that Georg Thomas used.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
For all the talks of wonder weapons and all the rest of it, it's just not going to. It has lost that battle. Having said that, the Soviet Union is still in a really, really bad, bad situation. It is being helped out a huge amount by Russia.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
supplies from the United States and from Britain, just unprecedented amounts of material being sent through the Arctic or across Alaska into the Soviet Union at that time. It is absolutely staggering how much is committed by Roosevelt and Churchill to try and stem the flow in the Soviet Union.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
Because for all the announcements and the pride that the Soviet Union has about moving factories to the other side of the Urals and stuff, which they do in 1941, huge amounts are overrun intact by the Germans in the opening stages of Barbarossa. I mean, really. you know, colossal losses, huge amounts.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
So, you know, the grain has gone, coal has gone, entire factories have gone, steel production goes down by kind of, you know, 80% in the Soviet Union in 1941 and into 1942. So in 1942, despite the vast amount of numbers of men that they have at their hands, I mean, they create 80 new divisions in the second half of 1941, for example.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
I mean, Britain never has 80 divisions in the entire Second World War, division being about, rule of thumb, 15,000 men. So, you know, despite that, and that is because Stalin's meddling, the woeful state of the Red Army in 1941, et cetera, et cetera, which we've already sort of touched upon. So 1942, it's still in a really bad way, but Germany's in a really bad way too.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
The attrition it suffered in 1941, it's winning itself to death in 1941. So it's having these huge great encirclements like the encirclement of Kiev in September 1941, you know, capturing the further kind of best part of 700,000 Red Army troops, et cetera, et cetera.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
But in the process of doing that, it is constantly being attrited, you know, both in battle casualties, but in also mechanical casualties too. Just can't cope. The scale is just too big. And what happens is with every moment that the German forces, that ultimate victory slips away, so Hitler's personal handling of the battle increases. And, you know, you can say what you like about him, but he...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
just hasn't had the military training to do that. He might have amazing attention to detail. He might be able to understand, have an enormous capacity to remember units and where they are on a map. But he was only a half-corporal in the First World War. He's never been to staff college. He might have read lots about Frederick the Great.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
I mean, I've read lots of history, but that doesn't mean to say I'd be a competent field marshal. So he is not the right person for the job at all. And he micromanages and he looks at figures and figures and doesn't understand what it's like at the actual front, the coalface.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
So he's stifling the very thing that made the German army effective, which is the ability to give commanders at the front authority. the freedom on their leash to be able to make decisions and battle command decisions. And he's taken that away from them. So he's basically making them go into battle with decreasing amounts of supplies and firepower
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
and with one hand behind their back in terms of decision-making process. And that is not a good combination.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
The other problem is that he decides rather than going for Moscow in 1942, because basically there's a kind of cooling off period in the winter because of the conditions, but everyone knows the Soviet Union, the Red Army knows that the moment spring comes, there's going to be another offensive, be another major offensive in the summer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
That is absolutely as certain as, you know, day following night, etc. The problem that the Germans have is they just don't have enough. They have less than they had when they launched Barbarossa the previous year. The Soviet Union has more. It is better prepared. It knows what's coming now. It's kind of learning some of the lessons, starting to absorb the lessons.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
Stalin, coincidentally, is pulling back from his very tight leash in a way that Hitler is doing the opposite and increasing his micromanagement and control freakery. And what Hitler decides is rather than going for Moscow, he's going to go for the oil fields. And this is absolutely insane because what's going to happen when they get to the oil fields?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
I mean, does he think really that the Soviet Union are going to let those oil fields come into German hands intact? Even if he does let them get in intact, what are they going to do with that oil? I mean... Oil needs to be refined. Where are you going to refine it? They don't have many oil refineries.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
How are you going to ship that oil to where you need it to be in the factories in the Third Reich and process it into gasoline and then get it and diesel and get it to your U-boats, get it to your tanks, get it to your armoured units? How are you going to do that? How do you transport it from the Caucasus, which is a long, long way away from Berlin, How are you going to do that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
Essential to the whole thing. This is all about this notion that is embedded into Hitler's mind and into the minds of the Nazi party right from the word go is there is a big sort of global conspiracy, the Jewish Bolshevik plot. I mean, completely misplaced that Jews and Bolsheviks go hand in hand and somehow dovetail. They don't, obviously. And the whole ideology is to crush this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
There's no pipelines. There's only some pipelines. They've been built by American money and American engineering, and they're going backwards towards the Urals, not forwards. They have no more rail capacity whatsoever. They just don't have the oil tankers. So it is absolute la-la land.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
It is incredible that when you look at the detailed literature that the Germans have, no one is asking this question in the spring and early summer of 1942. The logistics question in part. No one is saying... Okay, it's great that we're going to go to the Caucasus and get all this oil, but then what? No one is asking that question.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
So the case blew. First of all, they get distracted by going into Crimea and they go, well, we've got to do that first. So they have to get Sevastopol and Crimea, which they do. And then they have to push on. And at this point, suddenly looming in front of them is Stalingrad on the banks of the Volga, this city, this industrial city, which has Stalin's name.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
And Hitler goes, okay, what I'm going to do now is I'm going to split my forces so half of you can go south towards the Caucasus and the rest of you can confront Stalingrad. And Bock, who's the commando, just goes, that's nuts. That makes no sense whatsoever. You're splitting the mission. So Hitler fires him. So suddenly they get into this assault for Stalingrad.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
And it becomes this sort of street fight. Street fighting is the worst kind of fighting. I mean, the reason why the Israelis have just blown everything up in Gaza is because otherwise you can't see. You know, you need a field of fire. This is a fighting in a buildup area is horrendous. Yeah, to clarify, we're talking about urban warfare, door to door, building to building.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
It's incredibly difficult. And home advantage is colossal in this instance. And, of course, it's piping hot when they attack in kind of August into early September, and then it suddenly gets very, very cold. And at the same time, American mechanization, and slightly a British mechanization, but primarily American trucks, are enabling Zhukov to plan this great pincer movement.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
So it is, you know, and Russians will hate me for saying this, and I probably will get a whole load of bots on the back of it, but the truth is... It is not the street fighting that destroys Sikfami. It is the encirclement, the subsequent encirclement. So the Germans have been sucked into this street battle in Stalingrad. We cannot give up. We cannot give up. We cannot back down.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
We cannot pull out. We've got to destroy this city. Meanwhile, while their backs are turned, and while most of their forces are going off to the Caucasus on a wild goose chase for absolutely zero oil, incidentally, and they never get remotely close to Baku, This huge great pencil movement is being planned, and it is only possible through mechanization from the United States.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
And that is the big turning point, because from that moment onwards, the Germans are on the back foot. They're basically going backwards. There are little small counterattacks. There is obviously the curse salient, for example, but it's game over. You know, the catastrophe of the surrender of the final... I mean, the writing's on the wall at the end of 1942.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
But by November 1942, when the two Soviet fronts meet up, then, you know, there is no possible chance of escape for Sig Farmy. They are consigned. They are toast. And their final surrender obviously happens at the very beginning of February 1943. But that's all over. And then at the same time that that is happening, disaster is unfolding in North Africa.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
Because Hitler has insisted on massively resupplying the Mediterranean theater. And the problem there is the amount of equipment that is lost in North Africa is greater than it is at Stalingrad. I don't think you could argue that psychologically Tunisia is a greater loss than Stalingrad. It absolutely isn't. You have to see them in tandem. is this is two fronts.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
This is Eastern Front, Southern Western Front, and this is the first time that the Americans have been on the ground against Axis forces, and they lose big time. The Allies become masters of the North African shores on the 13th of May, 1943, and it is a catastrophe.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
And in that time, 2,700 aircraft have been, Luftwaffe aircraft have been destroyed over North Africa between November 1942 and May 1943. And overall, there's subsequent that summer as well. It's really interesting. The Luftwaffe loses between June and October 1943. So this is including the Kursk battle, which takes place in July 1943.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
Part of the way the Nazis think, the way Hitler thinks, is there is a them and there's us. We are the whites, Northern European Aryans, We should be the master race. We've been threatened by...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
In that period, the Luftwaffe loses 702 aircraft over the Eastern Front, but 3,704 aircraft over the Mediterranean Front. So I think one has to also, one of the lessons about studying the Second World War is one has to be careful not to assign strategic importance to boots on the ground. It can be of great strategic importance, but not necessarily.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
No one would argue, for example, that the Guadalcanal is not an absolutely game-changing battle in the Pacific War, and yet the number of troops compared to what's going on in the Eastern Front or even the Western Front is tiny in comparison. So
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
It is absolutely true that the most German blood is lost on the Eastern Front, but that doesn't mean to say that it's more strategically important than the Western Front. And it's not saying that the Western Front is more strategic either. It's just you have to kind of be balanced about this. The psychological blovo of Stalingrad is immense, and you cannot belittle that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
And I also think that what's interesting is the Nazi high command's response to Stalingrad. which is not to go, we're screwed. It's to double down. So Goebbels, for example, gives his infamous speech in the Sports Palace in third week of February, 1943, where he goes, are you ready for this? This is now total war. The war is coming. This is a fight for survival. We're all in it together.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
You are in this as well. Every single one, every single German is now, this is a fight for survival. And we are now in total war. And Everyone is just so depressed by this. I mean, they realize that they are going to reap what they have sown. Because everyone knows what's been going on in the Eastern Front. Because first part of the war, Germans have loads and loads of cameras.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
They're really into photographing everything, taking cine footage of everything. It's all part of recording the greatness of the Reich and the triumphs of the Reich. They want it recorded. So all this stuff is a bit like the radios. It's made very, very cheap. So lots of having... And people are sending it all back. And...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
You know, the people that are developing this stuff are all seeing it and people are talking about it. And then it's been sent to families and they're all seeing it. And they're seeing pictures of Jews being rounded up and beaten. And they're seeing Ukrainian partisans being executed. And they're seeing villages being torched. And everyone knows. They all know. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
global jewish bolshevik plot we've been stabbed in the back in 1918 at the end of the first world war we need to have to overcome this is an existential battle for future survival it's a terrible task that has befallen our generation but we have to do this we have to overcome this or else we have no future we will be crushed it's absolutely cut and dry and one of the things about hitler
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
This whole idea is, you know, do they really know what was going on? Yeah, they do. They do know what's going on. You know, to lesser or greater detail, of course, you know, there's some people who don't and, you know, a bit like people know about the news today. Some people do, some people don't. Oh, I never read the newspaper. I never listened to the news.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
You know, so you have that, of course, but it is widely understood and widely known that really brutal things have been going on in the East. And troops coming back utterly traumatized by what they have taken part in, what they have witnessed, the kind of unspeakable brutality. This is war on a completely different level to anything that's been kind of seen in recent years.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
Yeah, but don't forget that even Auschwitz, for example, is part of the new Reich. It is part of an area which has been absorbed into Germany. So as far as they're concerned, this has now got, you know, it's now no longer got the Polish name. It's now called Auschwitz, which is a German name. It is part of Germany. And there are German people moving there into this, you know, air comma model town.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
And they all know exactly what's going on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
And a big Booner factory for IG Farben, which never produces a single bit of rubber.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
Yes, it's just called KL. It's about the whole concentration camp system because K is concentration in German. Lager is a camp. It's an exhaustive book and I'm full of admiration for him for writing it just because Jeepers, it must've been sort of, I mean, I, I was very depressed doing that work on Auschwitz, that deep dive. I just found the whole thing utterly dispiriting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
Um, and I've been there a few times and it's ghastly. Um, so how he wrote a whole book on it, I don't know.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
It's incredible. I think what is so completely horrific is that half the six million were killed by bullets to the back of the head. And the reason they stopped doing that and they wanted to stop doing that was because the guys, the perpetrators, were finding it so traumatic. Himmler goes and visits an execution in Ukraine and Or maybe he's in the Baltic States.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
is that he is a very kind of black and white, them or us, either or kind of person. It's always one thing or the other. It's a thousand year Reich or it's Armageddon. There's no middle ground. There's no gray area. It's just one or the other. And that's his worldview.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
I don't know where he goes, but he witnessed some in the summer of 1941. He thinks, oh, that's horrible. You know, I don't have to do that. I don't want my men having to do that. I've got to find a more humane way of doing it. When he's talking about a more humane way of doing it, humane for the executors, executioners, not for the victims, because... Trust me, Zyklon B is not a nice way to go.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
Basically, it's bursting all the capillaries in your lungs. It's extremely painful. And you can no longer breathe. And it can take up to 20, 25 minutes. Some people, it can take a couple of minutes. But all of those who are standing naked in that gas chamber, first of all, extremely humiliated by this process in the first place.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
Then there's a sudden realization of that they're not having a shower. They're actually being gassed and they're all going to die. Imagine what you're thinking as that processes you because you might be the first, but you're still going to even the first person is going to know that I can't breathe and I'm dying.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
Everyone else is going to see the first few dying and then going to realize that is what's going to happen to them. And you've got those minutes. sometimes many minutes, where you've got to contemplate that. And that's in extreme pain and panic. And just think about how cruel that is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
While being humiliated all the way through. And so, the inverted commas, humanity of the gas chambers is anything but. It's disgusting. And the fact that people could do this is just...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
beyond horrific and then the fact that you are taking your jewish prisoners and getting them to cut off all the hair pull out the teeth of the dead before you put them on a lift and incinerate them if you go to auschwitz now and you go to the collapse of blown up gas chambers which the germans destroyed before the russians overran them in january 45 you can still see some of the ash ponds
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
And there are bits of bone there, but still there from the ash. It is utterly repulsive. And... Imagine arriving from that train on that incredibly long journey where you've had no comfort spots whatsoever.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
You've had, again, you've had humiliations and privations, you know, the privations you've had to suffer as a result of that, you know, having to kind of defecate in a bucket in the corner in front of other people. It's just horrendous. And then you get there bewildered and immediately your kids are taken away from you or your, you know, husband and wife who've been married 20 years.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
They're separated just like that. sent off into different groups straight to the gas chambers. I mean, the scale of cruelty is so immense. It's hard to fathom. And the thing that I find really difficult to reconcile, and this is where I think the warning from history is important, is that Germany is such an amazing nation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
And the reason he came to the fore was because of the crystal clear clarity of his message, which is we've been stabbed in the back. There is a global plot. We have to overcome this. We are naturally the master race. We have to reassert ourselves. We have to get rid of global Jewry. We have to get rid of global Bolshevism. And we have to prevail or else.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
You know, it's the country of Beethoven and Strauss and of Goethe and incredible art and culture and some of the greatest engineers and scientists have ever lived. And look how quickly it flipped into the descent of unspeakable inhumanity, which manifests itself in the Holocaust and the gas chambers and the executions into pits and tiny places and creeks in Lithuania or Ukraine or whatever.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
I mean, it's just horrendous. And this is from a nation which a decade earlier had been a democracy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
Well, the decision to finally go, when the Americans joined the war in December 1941, there's the Arcadia Conference a few days later, a week later, between the British chiefs of staff and political leaders, Churchill and Roosevelt and his own chiefs of staff, about what the policy should be.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
And the policy is to get American troops over to Europe as quick as possible, get them over to Britain, get them training, and get them across the Channel ASAP and start the liberation of Europe. But the reality is that in 1942, the Americans just aren't ready. They've gone from this incredibly tiny army. They're still growing. They've got no battlefield experience.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
The British are still recovering. They're good on the naval power. They're kind of increasingly good on air power. But land power, they've had to kind of make up from the loss of their ally France and expand as well.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
So kind of ground zero for both America and Britain has been kind of June 1940 when France is out and suddenly that's the strategic earthquake and that's the issue that needs settling and they need to just completely realign everything that they'd fought in 1939. They've got to start again. But it also becomes clear that they're not really ready in 1943 either.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
And one of the problems is that Molotov, who is the Soviet foreign minister, has come over to Britain in May 1942 and said, you know, we need you to kind of do your bit and get on the campaign trail against the Germans and fight on the ground. And the British are going, well, yeah, but, you know, cross-channel elevation is not really going to happen.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
We know we're doing that in North Africa at the moment. Then he goes over to Washington and says, And the Americans go, you know, we are definitely going to go and take on the attack to the Germans in 1942. They've made this promise. So in the summer of 1942, it becomes clear that they can't keep that. So Churchill says, well, look, I've got, here's an idea.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
You know, we're in, we've already got an army in Egypt. Why don't we land another one in Northwest Europe? We can, Northwest Africa, we can, that's run by Vichy France, which is pro-Axis French army. colonies. Why don't we take that and we can do that and then we can meet in the middle, we can pince around, we can conquer the whole of North Africa.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
You can kill with two birds with one stone because you can get some experience fighting against Axis troops, you know, test some of your equipment and commanders, you know, what's not to like and then we can sort of see how it goes. So this is a kind of opportunistic strategy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
Whereas the Americans are very much sort of, you know, we want to draw a straight line to Berlin and that's the quickest way and let's do it that way. So it's kind of a different viewpoint. And But Roosevelt kind of gets that and agrees to that. So that's where the whole North Africa Mediterranean campaign comes from.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
And as a consequence of the huge commitment to Tunisia, you know, 3,500 aircraft, huge navies, you know, two allied armies in North Africa by the time Tunisia is won in mid-May 1943, they think, well, we've got all this here. We might as well kind of really try and put the nail into the coffin of Italy's war, get them out of the battle. You know, Sicily is an obvious one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
Let's go in there, and then we can take a view. But between Sicily happening and the fall of North Africa is the Trident Conference in Washington. And that is where the decision is made. The Americans go, OK, enough of this opportunistic stuff. Let's just, okay, we get it, we buy it, but no more faffing around. May 1944, one year hence, we are going to cross the Atlantic.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
But if we do prevail, what an amazing world it's going to be. So he starts with this, you know, every speech he does always starts the same way. Always starts from a kind of negative and always ends with an incredible positive. A sort of rabble-rousing crescendo of, if you're in the front row, spittle, halitosis, and gesticulation. I mean, you've seen pictures of him.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
And the British go, okay, fair cop, we'll do that. So that is where Operation Overlord, as it becomes, gets given its code name, its operational name. That's when the planning starts. Serious planning starts at the beginning of 1944. And one of the lessons from Sicily to Normandy is that you can't have commanders fighting one battle whilst preparing for the next one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
So you have to have a separate command structure. And that's okay, because by this time, we've got enough people that have got experience of battlefield command that you can actually split it. There are very good reasons for going into Italy, not least getting the Foggia airfields. so that you can further tighten the noose around Nazi Germany.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
And one of the great prerequisites for the Normandy invasion is total control of the airspace, not just over Normandy, but over a large swathe of Northwest Europe. Why is that? Because the moment you land in Normandy, the cat is out of the bag. And it's then a race between which side can build up metamaterial quickest.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
Is it going to be the Allies who've got to come from southern England, which is a distance of a slow journey across seas and a distance between kind of 80 and 130 miles away? Or is it going to be the Germans that are already on the continent? Well, clearly on paper, it's the Germans. So you have to slow up the Germans. Well, how do you do that? We do that by destroying their means of getting there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
So bridges... destroy all the bridges over the Seine, destroy all the bridges over the Loire, hit the marshaling yards. The glue that keeps the German war machine together is the Reichsbahn, the German railway network. So destroy the railway as much as you possibly can and make it difficult for the Germans to reinforce the Normandy bridgehead as and when it comes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
But the way you do that in turn is by very low level precision bombing. And that has to be done by twin engine, faster, smaller bombers going in low. But the problem is, is you can't go low and destroy those bridges if you've got Fokker, Wilson, Messerschmitts hovering above you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
So you've got to destroy those, which is why you need to have air superiority over this large swathe of Northwest Europe to do that. The problem is that while the industrial heartland of Nazi Germany is in the West, is in the Ruhr area, which is very convenient for bombers coming out of Lincolnshire or East Anglia on the east flat east side of Great Britain,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
The aircraft industry is much deeper into the Reich, and it is beyond the range of fighter escorts for the bombers. And the American daylight bombers who are going over are discovering that despite being called flying fortresses, they're not fortresses. They're actually getting decimated.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
And whenever their bombers go in strength over to try and hit the aircraft industry in Germany, beyond fighter range, they get decimated. First, infamously on the Schweinfurt Regenbosch raid on the 17th of August, 1943. coincidentally the same day that Sicily falls to the Allies, and also coincidentally the same day that face-to-face negotiations begin with the Italians for an armistice in Lisbon.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
But on that day, of the 324 heavy bombers that the Americans send over to hit Schweinfurt and Regensburg, whether a Messerschmitt plant and also a ball bearing plant, which is essential for aircraft manufacturing, they lose 60 shot down and a further 130-odd really, really badly damaged. And even for the vast numbers of manpower and bombers are coming out of America. This is too much.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
So they can't sustain it. So they've got to find a fighter escort that's going to be able to escort them all the way into the Reich. And the race is on. Because basically, if they haven't got one airspace by April 1944, It's game over. You can't do a cross-channel invasion. You have to have that control of the airspace beforehand. So the race is on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
I mean, I don't know if you've ever seen pictures. He's almost, he wants to grab the air and clutch it to him. You can see the kind of the venom coming out of his mouth just in a single still photograph. I mean, it's amazing. There's apps you can get now where you can translate his speeches. And it just sounds, you know, by today's standards amazing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
And fortunately, they come up with a solution, which is the P-51 Mustang, which has originally been commissioned in May 1940 by the British, developed from sketches to reality in 117 days. It's a work of absolute genius. But Stoll is harnessed with a really bad engine. The Allison engine is just not right for that aircraft.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
And it's not until a Rolls-Royce Merlin, which is the same one that powers the Lancaster, the Mosquito, and Spitfire and Hurricane, is put into the P-51 Mustang, that suddenly you've got your solution. Because that means it can now fly with extra drop tanks and fuel tanks. It's so aerodynamic and it's so good, the higher it goes with this engine, the more fuel efficient it becomes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
It can actually fly over 1,400 miles, which gets you not just to Berlin and back, but to Warsaw and back. So suddenly you've got that solution. And actually by April 1944, they have cleared airspace. And by the end of May 1944, just on the eve of the invasion, Operation Overlord, the closest German aircraft that is seen fighting Allied aircraft is 500 miles from the beachhead.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
So it is absolutely job done. Meanwhile, comparatively new ground attack fighter planes like Typhoons and Tempests and adapted P-47 Thunderbolts are attacking the German radar stations all along the coastline, because they now do have an air defense system, they're destroying kind of 90% of their effectiveness. And in the intelligence game, they're winning that one as well.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
They're just much better because In Germany, intelligence is power. So people tend to, you know, and Hitler always has this kind of divide and rule thing going on. So you have parallel command structures, which is not conducive to bringing together of intelligence.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
And while much play has been made about the successes of Bletchley and code breaking and all the rest of it, actually, what you have to do is you have to see the kind of the decrypts that the Bletchley cryptanalysts do as just a cog. And those various cogs together from listening services to photo reconnaissance to agents on the ground to also...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
the cogs collectively add up to more than some of their individual parts. And so the intelligence picture is a broad picture rather than just code breaking. But anyway, they win that particular battle as well. And what you see really with D-Day is I think is the zenith of coalition warfare.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
What you've got is you've got multiple nations who have different overall aims, different cultures, different attitudes, different start points, but they have all coalesced into one common goal. Mm-hmm. And until they've achieved that common goal, they're going to put differences to one side.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
Much play has been made about kind of Anglophobia amongst American commanders and Americophobia amongst British commanders. But actually, it's nothing. It's a marriage made in heaven compared to the way Germany looks after its own allies, for example. And what is remarkable about the allies is they're not actually allies. They're coalition partners. So there's no formal alliance at all.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
And there is a subtle difference there. But what you see them is you see them really, really pulling together. And you see that manifest itself on D-Day, I think, where you've got 6,939 vessels, of which there are 1,213 warships, 4,127 assault craft, 12,500 aircraft, 155,000 men landed and dropped from the air in 24-hour period. It is phenomenal. It is absolutely phenomenal.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
And while it is still seen as a predominantly American show, all three service commanders are British. It is most of the aircraft, two-thirds of the aircraft are British. Two-thirds of the men landed are British and Dominion. You never forget the Canadians who consistently punch massively above their weight in the Second World War. In all aspects, it has to be said, air, land, and sea.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
You just think, what a load of absolute wibble. I mean, just total nonsense. But you have to kind of put yourself back in the shoes of people listening to him in 1922 or 23, or indeed 1933, and see how kind of captivating that is to a certain part of the population. So to go back to your original point, Liebensraum is absolutely part of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
They're key in the Battle of the Atlantic. They're key In air power, they're key at D-Day and indeed in the Battle for Italy as well. So the Canadians should never be forgotten. But one of the reasons it is the British Navy that dominates in D-Day is because, of course, the incredibly strong
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
enormous strength of the Royal Navy in the first place, but partly because most of the US Navy is by this stage in the Pacific fighting its own fight. So it's not slacking by any stretch of the imagination. It is because it's elsewhere doing its bit for the kind of overall ally cause. But D-Day is just extraordinary, you know, and despite the terrible weather,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
which is such a debilitating factor in the whole thing. I mean, it puts people off course, means many more people get killed on Omaha Beach than they might have done, and on other beaches besides, incidentally. And actually, in terms of lives lost, proportionally, it is the Canadians that suffer the worst, more so than the Americans. It's just there's fewer of them overall.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
D-Day has to be seen as an unqualified success. I mean, it is absolutely extraordinary what they achieve. And while they don't 100% achieve their overall D-Day objectives, you know, the objectives are always going to be the outer reach of what can be achieved. And you'd need absolutely perfect conditions for that to happen. And they don't get perfect conditions. But they're so balanced.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
They're so thought of absolutely everything. and their logistics supply. I mean, even things like the minesweeping operation. It's the biggest single minesweeping operation of the entire war because there's huge minefields off the Normandy coast.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
And ahead of the invasion force, the minesweepers, which amount to, I think, something like 242 different minesweepers in five different operations opposite every single beach, creating lanes for... Through these minefields through which the invasion force can go, not a single ship is lost to a mine in the actual invasion.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
That is phenomenal and can only be done with the greatest of skill and planning. And all in a period where, you know, there are no computers, there's no GPS, there's nothing. I mean, it is absolutely astonishing. And the scale of it is just, frankly, mind boggling.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
Yeah. The only cause for doubt is, will they be able to secure that bridgehead? The moment they get that bridgehead, it is game over. There is no other way it's going to be because of the overwhelming amount of men and material that the Allies have compared to the Germans at this stage of the war.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
And of course, you know, you're being attacked on three fronts because there's the Italian front to the south. And of course, in a very major way, you've also got the eastern front. And Operation Bagration, which is launched that summer as well, is...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
I think it is, really. Except the gobbles took Sun. I didn't shoot himself.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
I think it was named Bruno Gantz, wasn't it? I think he nailed him. Yeah. There's so many accounts of that. There's so much written about Hitler. There's millions and millions of Hitler's words that you can read. You know, there are translations of many of his conferences. You can see what he's saying.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
So what you do is you crush the Bolsheviks, you crush world Jewry, then you expand. Britain has had this incredible empire, global empire. Germany needs that too. Germany is stuck in Europe. It doesn't have access to the world's oceans. So we're not going to be a maritime empire. We're going to be a landmass empire, the whole of Europe. landmass of Europe and into Asia. That's going to be us.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
You can get inside his head in a very clear way, much more clearly than you can Stalin or just about any other leader, really. And so one has a very, very strong impression of what Hitler was like in the bunker in those last days. There's so many accounts of it. Yeah. it just feels like they nailed it. It just feels like they've got it spot on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
Like realizing that this vision of the third thousand year Reich is, and Hitler says, says, you know, my reputation won't be good to start off with, but I hope in a few years time that people will start to realize that kind of all the good I was trying to bring. Yeah. That's whatever.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
Well, I suppose it's what happens when you allow these individuals to take hold of great power and great authority and make these terrible decisions. If you allow that to happen, there are consequences. And you have to recognize the moments of trouble when they arise. When there are financial crisis, you know that political unrest is going to come and you need to be prepared for that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
You know, you need to be able to see the writing on the wall. You can't be complacent. You know, complacency is such a dirty word, isn't it? You know, you've got to keep your wits and you can't take things for granted. You've got to recognize, I think, that the freedoms we enjoy in the West are...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
They're not necessarily permanent, and you need to make the most of them while you've got them and cherish them and consider what happens if the milk turns sour and what the consequences of that are.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
I mean, that's the overriding thing, because although I don't think there'll ever be a war on the scale of the Second World War, you've only got to look at pictures of those opening days of the war in Ukraine and see sort of knocked out Russian tanks and dead bodies, bloated bodies all over the place, put that into black and white. And, you know, it could be the road out of Falaise in 1944.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
It could be, you know, any number of German battlefields in World War II. And the similarities and the trenches and the kind of people hiding in foxholes and, you know, that's horribly reminiscent, as are the huge casualties that they're suffering on both sides, whether they be Russian or Ukrainian. And, you know, it's a shock. It's a shock to see that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
Um, and it reminds you of just how quickly I think things can descend. I mean, that's, that's, uh, that's the other thing, you know, that point I was making about how quickly Germany descended from this amazing nation of arts and culture and science and development and engineering into one of the Holocaust. I mean, life is fragile and, and peace is fragile and, you know, it's, uh,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
You take it for granted at your peril.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
And we're going to take that land. We're going to take the breadbasket of Ukraine. We're going to use that for our own ends. We're going to spread our... We're going to make ourselves rich, but we're also going to spread our peoples. We're going to spread the Aryan northern master race throughout Europe and into the traditional Slavic areas. And we will prevail and come out on top.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
The source of light is that I think the vast majority of people are good people. who want to live peacefully and want to live happily and are not filled with hate. And there are some brilliant minds out there. And I think the capacity for the human brain to come up with new developments and new answers to problems and challenges is enormous. infinite, and I think that's what gives me hope.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
Well, thank you, Lex.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
And so you have to understand that everything about... Operation Barbarossa, the planned invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, is totally wrapped up in The Nazi ideology and people, you know, I've read it that historians will go, if only Hitler had realized that, you know, the Ukrainians have been quite happy to kind of fight on his side.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
You know, if only he'd actually brought some of these Jewish scientists and kind of into the Nazi fold, then Germany might have prevailed in World War Two. And you kind of think you're missing the entire point. That's just never going to happen because this is an ideological war.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
Yes, except that when you're making military decisions... if those decisions are always being bracketed by an ideology which is fundamentally flawed from a pragmatic point of view as much as a kind of... Ethical. You know, a kind of reasonable point of view, you're kind of opening yourselves up for trouble. I mean, this is a problem he has with Barbarossa.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
You know, they realized very early on in 1941... when they're wargaming this whole operation, that it's not going to work. And so, you know, there's people like General Paulus, who was on the general staff at the time. You know, he's given a kind of, you know, he's in charge of kind of wargaming this. And he goes, this isn't going to work.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
And Keitel, who is the chief of the OKW, goes, no, no, no, no, no, no. go back and make it work. He goes, okay. So he comes up with a plan that does work, but it's bogus. I mean, it's just, it doesn't work because they don't have enough. They don't have enough motorization.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
You know, they go into the Barbara Ross with 2000 different types of vehicle, you know, but every single one of those vehicles has to have, you know, different distributor caps and different, uh, leads and plugs and all sorts of different parts. The interoperability of the German mechanized arm is super inefficient. And so you've got huge problems because
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
They kind of think, well, you know, we took France in 1940, and that's kind of one of the most modern countries in the world with, you know, one of the greatest armies and armed forces in the world. And we did that in six weeks. So, you know, Soviet Union, look, they struggled against Finland, for goodness sake. I mean, how hard can it be? You know, but what you're failing to understand is that...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
attacking the Soviet Union is over a geographical landmass 10 times the size of France, just on the frontage. And you haven't really got much more mechanization than you had in May 1940 when they attacked the low countries in France. And you've actually got less Luftwaffe aircraft to support you. And you just do not have the operational mechanics to make it work successfully. I mean, it is...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
Largely down to incompetence of the Red Army and Soviet leadership in the summer of 1941 that they get as far as they do. I mean, you know, Barbarossa should never have come close to being a victory.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
Yes. We've jumped straight into 1941.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
I've eaten off two years of war.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
Yeah, that's absolutely spot on. And it's interesting because the vast majority of general histories of World War II tend to focus on the strategic and the tactical. So what do I mean by that? Well, the strategic, just for those who don't know, that's your overall war aims. Get to Moscow, whatever it might be. Conquer the world. That's your strategy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
The tactical side of things is that's the coalface of war. That's the attritional bit. That's the... following his spitfire, the tank crew, the soldier in his foxhole. It's the actual kinetic fighting bit. The operational bit is the level of war that links the strategic to the tactical. So it is absolutely factories, it's economics, it's shipping, it's supply chains, it's how you manage your war.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
And one of the things where I think people have been guilty in the past, historians have been guilty in the past, is by judging warfare all on the same level. But obviously every competent nation has a different approach to war because of the nation they are, the size they are, their geographical location. So Britain, for example, is an island nation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
Its priority is the Royal Navy, which is why the Royal Navy is known as the senior service. And, you know, in 1939, it's easy to forget it now when you see how depleted Britain is today. But in 1939, it has comfortably the world's largest navy. There's something like 194 destroyers. I think it's 15 battleships, seven aircraft carriers, and another kind of six on the way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
America, it's got Pacific Ocean. It's got the Atlantic Ocean. It's got two seaboards. you know, has the second largest navy in the world, but a tiny army. I mean, the army, the US army in September 1939 is the 19th largest in the world, sandwiched between Portugal and Uruguay. And it's just incredible.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
It's like 189,000 strong, which might seem reasonably large by today's standards, but it's absolutely tiny by 1939 standards. You know, whereas, you know, Germany's got an army of three and a half million in 1939. So, you know, these are big, big, big differences. But America's coming at it from a different perspective. Britain's coming at it from a different perspective.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
You know, Britain's empire is all about, you know, it's a shipping, it's a seaborne empire.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
Whereas there's also another point, which is having large armies is actually inherently impractical and inefficient because the larger army, the more people you've got to feed, the more kind of barracks you've got to have, the more space you've got to have for training, the more people you're taking out of your workforce to produce tanks and shells and all the rest of it because they're tramping around with rifles.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
So there's an argument saying, actually, it's not a very good way of doing things. So very much the British way and subsequently the United States way and way of Britain's dominions and empire is to use kind of steel, not our flesh as a principle. The idea is that you use steel.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
technology mechanization modernity global reach to do a lot of your hard yards that's the sort of basic principle behind the strategic air campaign when we talk about the strategic air campaign we're talking about strategic air forces which are operating in isolation from other armed forces so a tactical air force for example is an air force which is offering close air support for ground operations
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
A strategic air force has got nothing to do with ground operations. It's just operating on its own. So that's your bomber force or whatever. That's your B-17s and B-24s of the 8th Air Force flying out of East England, bombing the rural industrial complex of Germany or whatever it might be. So it's important to understand that when you compare, you have to have in the back of your mind that...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
Britain compared to Germany, for example, is coming at it from a completely different perspective. And I would say one of the failures of Hitler is that he always views everybody through his own very narrow worldview, which is not particularly helpful. You know, you want to get inside the head of your enemy. And, you know, he's sort of guilty of not doing that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
So when you're talking about Operation Barbarossa, to go back to your original question, Alex, you're dealing with an operation on such a vast scale that that operational level of war is absolutely vital to its chances of success or failure. It doesn't matter how good your individual commanders are at the front. If you haven't got the backup, it's not going to work.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
And the problem that the Germans have is, yes, they've got their kind of, you know, 3 million men on the front, and they've got their kind of, you know, 3,000 aircraft and all the rest of it. But actually, what you need to do is break it down. And who is doing the hard yards of that? And the way the German war machine works is that the machine bit is only the spearhead.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
So people always talk about the Nazi war machine. In a way, it's a kind of misnomer because you're sort of suggesting that it's highly mechanized and industrialized and all the rest of it, and nothing could be further from the truth. The spearhead is... but the rest of it is not. And this is the kind of fatal flaw of the German armed forces.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
In the whole of World War II, really, but even in this early stage, because in Barbarossa, you're talking about 17 panzer divisions out of, you know, the hundred odd that are involved in the initial attack. Well, 17, a panzer division is not a division full of panzers, tanks. It is a combined arms motorized outfit. So...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
scouts on BMWs with sidecars, armored cars, infantry, grenadiers, panzer grenadiers, which are infantry in half tracks and trucks, mechanized. It is motorized artillery. It is motorized anti-aircraft artillery. It is motorized anti-tank artillery. And of course, it is tanks as well, panzers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
But those are a really, really small proportion of, you know, you're talking less than 20% of your attacking force are those spearhead forces. And inevitably, they are going to be attrited as they go. You know, you are going to take casualties. And not only that, you're not going to just take battlefield casualties.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
You're also going to have mechanical casualties because of the huge spaces involved. You just simply can't function. So what you see is in the initial phases of Operation Barbarossa, they surge forward. Red Army's got absolutely no answers to anything. Stalin weirdly hasn't heeded all the warnings that this attack is brewing. And there have been plenty, incidentally.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
At Smolensk Falls on the 15th of July, in less than four weeks, it's just incredible. Three and a half weeks, Smolensk has gone. They've overwhelmed the rest of what had been Poland. They've surged into what is now Belarus, taken Smolensk. This is Army Group Center. Army Group North is thrust up into the Baltic. It's all going swimmingly well.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
Out of... It should have 180. So... It's just being attributed. They can't sustain it. And they can't sustain it because as the Russians fall back, as the Soviet Red Army falls back, they do their own scorched earth policy. They also discover that the railway line is kind of a different loading gauge, so they've got to change it. So it's slightly the Russian...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
Loading gauges are slightly wider, so every single mile, every yard, every foot, every meter that they're capturing of Russian railway has to be moved a couple of inches to the left to make it fit the German Kriegsloch in the standard locomotive of the Reichsbahn. Just imagine what that's like.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
And also, Soviet trains are bigger, so they can take more water, which means the water stops in between are... Fewer and far between. So they have to, the Germans, when they come in their trains, their Kriegsloch are smaller. So they have to be re-watered more often and re-culled more often.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
So they have to, I mean, it's absolutely boggling just how complicated it is and how badly planned it is because they haven't reckoned on this. They're having to kind of think on their feet.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
Well, my own view is that they should never have got close, you know. Red Army has plenty of men to be able to see off anything that the Germans can do. The capture of Kiev, for example, in September 1941 was a catastrophe for the Soviet Union. It should never have happened. I mean, Zhukov is saying to Stalin, we've got to pull back across the Dnieper.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
Stalin's going, no, I can't possibly do that. You can't abandon Kiev. It's like third city in Soviet Union. No way. No, absolutely not. And he goes, we are just going to be overwhelmed. We can't hold this. And he says, either back me or fire me. Back me or sack me. So Stalin sacks him. Obviously, as we know, Zhukov gets rehabilitated in pretty quick order.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
And Stalin does learn very quickly thereafter to learn the lessons. But The opening phase of Barbarossa has been a catastrophe. And so as a consequence of Stalin refusing to let his men retreat back across the Dnieper, which is a substantial barrier and would be very difficult for the Germans to overwhelm had they moved back in time. You know, that's another kind of 700,000 men put in the bag.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
I mean, that's just staggering numbers. Yeah. But yeah, I mean, there's so many things wrong with the Barbarossa plan. You know, too much over... It's just such a vast area. I mean, you're talking about kind of, you know, 2,500 miles or something, you know, of frontage.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
You know, maybe if you kind of put your panzer groups, which are these spearheads, and you put them all in one big thrust and just go hell for leather straight across on a kind of, you know, much more narrow front of, let's say, kind of 400 miles rather than 1,200. then they might have just sort of burnt away straight through to Moscow.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
Or was it just luck? No, I don't think so. I mean, I think what's happened is you've had the Soviet purges of the second half of the 1930s where they've, you know, they have executed or imprisoned 22,500 officers of which, you know, three out of five marshals, you know, God knows how many Army commanders, et cetera, et cetera.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
So you've completely decapitated the Red Army in terms of its command structure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
Well, there was a lot of experience. There's a lot of experience there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
Yeah. And they're the first people to kind of adapt, you know, create airborne troops, for example. So, yes, I think there is an argument to say that. But the decapitation is absolutely brutal. If you've decapitated an army, you've then got to put new guys in charge. And someone who looks on paper like a half-decent peacetime commander might not be a very good wartime commander.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
They're different disciplines and different skills. And what comes to, you don't know that until you're tested. It's very hard to kind of judge. And of course, you know, Stalin is existing in a sort of, you know, a vacuum of paranoia and suspicion all the time, which is unhelpful when you're trying to develop a strong armed forces. So they go into Finland in, in,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
back end of 1939 and they get there you know they get really badly hammered they do take about you know 50 get the corellia peninsula and they do take some ground but at huge cost i mean the casualties are five times as bad as those of the fins and it's humiliation so hitler sees that and thinks okay they're not up to much cop then hitler loses the battle of britain
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
And he thinks, I can't afford to fight a war on two fronts. That's one of the reasons why Germany loses the war in 1914 to 18, is fighting on the Eastern Front, but also fighting on the Western Front at the same time. We've got to avoid that. But I've got to get rid of Britain, and Britain hasn't come out of the fight.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
Britain is still fighting in the back end of 1940, having won the Battle of Britain. And so maybe I'll go into the Soviet Union now while the Red Army is still weak. You know, we're not 100% ready ourselves, but let's hurry the whole thing forward. Because originally he'd been thinking of planning an operation in 1943 or 1944. So the idea is you take Poland out
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
You take out France in the low countries. You conquer most of Western Europe. You knock out Britain. So therefore, you don't have to worry so much about the United States because they're over the other side of the Atlantic. That then gives him, buys him the time to kind of rebuild up his strength for the all-out thrust on the Soviet Union.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
The failure to subdue Britain in 1940 changes all those plans and makes him think, actually, I'm going to go in early. And he's also been kind of, you know, he's hoisted by his own petard because he starts to believe his own genius. You know, everyone told him that, you know, he wouldn't be able to beat France in the low countries.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
Everyone told him that, you know, it wouldn't work out when he went into Poland. Everyone was really nervous about it. You know, well, go hang you, you cautious, awful, aristocratic Prussian generals. You know, I'm the best at this. I've told you. I've shown you. I'm the genius. I can do it. He starts to believe his own hype. And, of course, this is a problem.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
You know, he's surrounded by sycophants and people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
constantly telling him that he's this incredible genius so he starts to believe it and he thinks everything is possible and and he's very much into this idea of of the will of the german people you know this is our destiny and i have a will as i say earlier on you know it's a thousand year but momentum is with us and we need to strike it and only by by by gambling only by being bold will will the germans prevail and all this kind of nonsense and so that's why he goes into into
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
Soviet Union in June 1941 rather than a couple of or even three years later.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
Yeah, he hated them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
No. I don't think so. Because none of the plan, I mean, even the plan for the invasion of France and the low countries isn't his. The concept is von Manstein's and the execution is Guderian's, Heinz Guderian.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
So Heinz Guderian is the kind of – he's the pioneer of the panzer force, the panzer thrust, this idea of the ultra-mechanized combined arms, panzer arms, spearhead doing this kind of lightning fast thrust concept. It's not Hitler's idea. He adopts it and takes it as his own because, you know, he's a Führer. He can do what he likes. But it isn't his.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
So it's not, you know, and up until that point, until that comes into being, until that plan is put forward to Franz Halder, who is the chief of staff of the German army at that time, How do we get out of this mess? This is just a nightmare because they know that France has got a larger army. They know that France has got more tanks.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
They know that France has got double the number of artillery pieces. It's got parity in terms of air forces. Then you add Holland. Then you add Belgium. Then you add Great Britain. And that looks like a very, very tough nut to crack. I mean, the reason why France is subdued in 1940 is 50%.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
brilliance of the Germans and their operational art in that particular instance, and 50% French failure, really, and incompetence.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
Well, yes, if it works. If it works, but it doesn't. You know, that's a problem. I mean, he goes into Poland on the assumption that Britain and France will not declare war. You know, he is not prepared for Britain and France declaring war on Germany. He thinks they won't.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
It has the size, but one of the problems that France has is that it's very, very top heavy. It's very cumbersome in the way it operates. There's no question that it's got some brilliant young commanders, but at the top, the commander's very old. Most of them are First World War veterans, you know, whether, I mean, Weygand, Gamelan, General Georges, these people, they're all well into their 60s.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
General Georges is the youngest army commander and he's 60. You know, it's too old to be an army commander. You need to be in your kind of late 40s, early 50s. And they're too just consumed by conservatism and the old ways and what what they assume is that any future war will be much like the first world war.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
It'll be attritional long and drawn out, but static, but actually they're right on two parts of it. It is, as it turns out, it is going to be long and drawn out and attritional, but it's going to be mobile rather than static. And that's a big miscalculation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
Of war. 100% they are. Because France has been totally traumatized by the First World War. It's fought on their land. It's fought in their industrial heartland. They lose three times the amount of people killed that Britain does. Britain's traumatized by it, but not to the same degree that France is. There is just no stomach to do that again. And so that makes them risk averse.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
And by being risk averse, you're actually taking a far greater risk. That's the irony of it. And the truth is also there isn't the political will. And a successful military can only be successful if there is a political will at the top. And the problem with France in the 1930s is it's very politically divided. It's a time of multiple governments, multiple prime ministers, coalition governments.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
really very extreme coalition governments from the sort of drawn from the left and the right, as well as the center. And, you know, this is not a coalition of two parties. This is a coalition of multiple parties. No one can ever agree anything. I mean, that's the problem.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
And it's amazing that the Maginot Line has even agreed, you know, this incredibly strong defensive position down the western side of France, of border with Germany. which is kind of largely impregnable.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
But the problem is there's a bit that's not impregnable, which is the hinge where the Maginot Line ends and it sort of basically starts turning kind of towards in a kind of northerly direction and the border with Belgium.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
And, you know, what they should have done is built kind of border defences all along the northern coast with Belgium because Belgium refused to kind of allow any Allied troops into its territory. It was neutral. And France should have said, okay, fine. Well, then we'll defend, you know, we're not going to come to your rescue if you get invaded. That's the payoff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
And the consequence of that, we are going to stop piloting that and we're not going to be drawn into the neutral territory should Germany invade from the West. But they don't do that because of the psychological damage of having fought a war in exactly that area a generation earlier. And that's the problem.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
So when, you know, Germany is so weakened by the invasion of Poland, there was literally nothing left. You know, the back door into Western Germany is completely open. And so they do what they call the Tsar Offensive, but it's not. It's a kind of reconnaissance in force where they kind of go across the border, kind of pick their noses for a few days and then kind of trundle back again.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
And it's just, it's embarrassing. And that is, what you're seeing there is a nation which is just... not ready for this, which is scared, which is politically divided, which is then having a knock-on effect on the decision-making process, and which is just consumed by military complacency. And that's the big problem. The commanders at the very top of the French regime are complacent.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
They haven't bought into modern ways. They haven't looked at how contemporary technology could help them. I mean, it is absurd, for example, that there isn't a single radio in the Chateau de Vincennes, which is the headquarters of the Commander-in-Chief of the French Armed Forces, General Marshal Maurice Gamelin. I mean, it's just unbelievable. But that is the case.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
And there's no getting away from that. And it is all the more ironic when you consider that France is actually the most automotive society in Europe. It's the second most automotive society in the world after the United States. By some margin, it has to be said as well. You know, it has a fantastic transportation system. Railway network is superb.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
There are eight people for every motorized vehicle in France, which is way above Germany, which is in 1939, that figure is 47, for example. It's 106 in Italy. So France is very mechanized. Very mechanized. So come on, guys. Pull your finger out, get it together. And they just don't. They're incredibly slow and cumbersome.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
And what they think is when, what will happen is the Germans won't think of going, you know, they won't do a pincer movement because you can't possibly take motorized forces through the Ardennes. That just is not possible, which is the hinge area between the end of the Maginot, the northern part of the Maginot line, which runs down the western, sorry, the eastern border of France.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
And the northern bit. And so what we'll do with that hinge around the town of Sedan, we'll move into Belgium, we'll meet the Germans before they get anywhere near France, we'll hold them. And while we're holding them, we will bring up our reserves and then we'll counterattack and crush them. That's the idea behind it. But the problem is, is they don't have a means of moving fast.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
And their communication systems are dreadful, absolutely dreadful. They're dependent on conventional telephone lines, which, you know,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
dive bombers and whatever are just kind of absolutely wrecking suddenly the streets are clogged with refugees and people can't move so they're then you know telephone lines are down there's no radios so you're then dependent on sending dispatch riders on little motorbikes you know general uh morris gamelan sends out a dispatch rider at six o'clock in the morning um by 12 o'clock he hasn't come back so you then send another one
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
Finally, the answer comes back at kind of nine o'clock at night, by which time the Germans advance another 15 miles. And the original message that you sent at six o'clock that morning is completely redundant and has passed its sell-by date. And that's happening every step of the way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
So you've got overall command headquarters, then you've got army group, then you've got army, then you've got corps, then you've got division. So... Consequence of all that is that French just can't move. They're just stuck. They're rabbits in headlights. And the Germans are able to kind of move them, destroy them in isolation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
Meanwhile, they're able to use their excellent communications to very, very good effect. And you were talking about the genius of war. It's not Hitler that's a genius. If anyone's a genius, it's Goebbels, the propaganda chief. And it is their ability to harness... They are the kings of messaging. They don't have X. They don't have social media. But they do have new technology.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
And that new technology, that new approach is flooding the airwaves with their singular message, which is always the same and has been ever since the Nazis come into power. And it is using radios. And I think radios are really, really key to the whole story because there is no denser radio network anywhere in the world, including the United States and Germany, in 1939.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
So while it's really behind the times in terms of mechanization, it is absolutely on top of its game in terms of comms. So 70% of households in Germany have radios by 1939, which is crazy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
unprecedented number that that is only beaten by united states and only just so it is it is greater than any other other nation in europe and in terms of flooding the airwaves it is the densest because even for those who the 30 who don't have radios that's not a problem because we'll put them in the stairwells of apartment blocks we'll put them in squares we'll put them in cafes and bars and the same stuff the state that the the nazi state controls the radio airwaves as it does the movies as it does
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
Newspapers, all aspects of the media are controlled by Goebbels and propaganda ministry. And they are putting out the same message over and over again. It's not all Hitler's ranting. It's entertainment, light entertainment, some humorous shows. It is also Wagner, of course, and Richard Strauss. It's a mixture. But the subliminal message is the same. We're the best. We're the top dogs.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
Jewish-Bolshevik plot is awful. That's the existential threat to us. We have to overcome that. We're the top dogs militarily. We're the best. We should feel really good about ourselves. We're going to absolutely win and be the greatest nation in the world ever, and Hitler's the genius. And that is just repeated over and over and over and over again. And for all...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
The modernity of the world in which we live in today, most people believe what they're told repeatedly. Yeah, they still do. If you just repeat, repeat, repeat over and over again, people will believe it. You know, if you're a diehard Trump supporter, you want to believe that. You'll believe everything he says. If you are a diehard Bernie Sanders man... You know, you're from the left.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
You'll believe everything he says because it's reinforcing what you already want to believe.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
That is exactly... What Hitler and the Nazis and Goebbels are doing in the 1930s, well, they're doing it in the 1920s as well, but more effectively once they come into power, of course. And Hitler is so fortunate that he comes, he takes over the chancellorship in January 1933 at a time where the economy is just starting to turn. And he's able to make the most of that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
And if you're Germans and you've been through hyperinflation in the early 1920s, you've been through the humiliation of the Versailles Treaty, which was a terrible error in retrospect. And... You've been through then, having got through that, you've emerged into a kind of democratic Weimar Republic, which is based on manufacturing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
Germany's a traditional genius at engineering and manufacturing and production of high-quality items. They're merging through that. Then you have the Wall Street crash. And the loans that are coming in from America, which is propping up the entire German economy, suddenly get cut off and you've suddenly got depression again and massive unemployment.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
And suddenly Hitler comes in and everyone's got jobs and they're rebuilding and they're growing their military. And the message that's coming out is we're the greatest, we're the best, we're fantastic. You know, I was telling you earlier on about the speeches starting with the dark, starting dark and ending in hope and light and the sunlit uplands. You know, that's what you're getting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
You're suddenly getting this vision of hope. This is of, you know, my God, actually, this is really working, you know. Okay, so, you know, I'm not sure that I... particularly buy into the kind of anti-Semitic thing. But, you know, we'll sweep that under the carpet because overall, I've now got a job. I've got money. I've got my new radio, you know.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
And then this is a genius about the radios, for example. So they have the German receiver to start off with, the Deutsche Fanger. And then they have the Deutsche Kleinen Fanger, which is the German little receiver, little radio. This is genius. This is as outrageous as the arrival of the iPod. I mean, remember that. You know, suddenly you don't have to have a Sony Walkman anymore.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
You can have something really, really small and miniature and listen to thousands and thousands and thousands of songs all at once. What an amazing thing. And the Deutsche Kleinfanger is nine inches by four inches by four inches. It's made of Bakelite. And everyone can have one because it's super cheap. It's just incredible.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
And no one else has had that because up until that point, radios, generally speaking, are aspirational. They've got sort of a walnut lacquer at the front, and you have them if you're middle class, and you show them off to your neighbors to show how affluent and well-to-do you are. But suddenly, everyone can have one. And if everyone can have one, then everyone can receive the same message.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
And you can also, and this is the whole point about the Hitler youth as well. You know, the young guys, that's where they're most impressionistic. They're least risk averse. So they're most gung ho. They're most full of excitement for the possibilities of life. And they're also, their minds are the most open to suggestion. So you get the youth. You get them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
And so a whole generation of young men are brought up thinking about the genius of Hitler and how he's delivering this much better nation and returning our – overhauling the humiliations of the First World War. We're overcoming the stab in the back that happened in 1918, et cetera, et cetera. And, you know, as a young – 16, 17-year-old German, you're thinking, yeah, I want a piece of that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
And hey, guess what? They've got really cool uniforms and come and join the SS and get the fro line. What's not to like? You can see why it's so clever. And what's so interesting is
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
propaganda today is is still using those those tenets that goebbels was using back in the 1930s and this is why i would say say that you know history doesn't repeat itself of course it doesn't it can't possibly repeat itself because we're always living in a constantly evolving time but patterns of human behavior do and what you always get after economic crisis is political upheaval always always always because some people are in a worse off position than they were financially before they're thinking well you know the current system doesn't work what's the alternative so you know in the case of
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
of now we in the west you know we face first of all we face the crisis of 2008 financial crisis 2008 then we've had the kind of double whammy of covid and that has been incredibly unsettling and so we're now in a situation of political turmoil and whether you're whether you're whether you're pro-trump or anti-trump what he's offering is something completely different and
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
He's saying, the old ways don't work. I'm just going to say what I think. I'm going to come out. I'm not going to bother with all the sheen of diplomacy and mealy-mouthed words that politicians always use, where you can't trust anyone. I'm just going to tell you as it is. And obviously, people respond to that. You can understand why that has an appeal.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
And if the country already feels broken, and here's someone who is going to be a disruptor and going to change the the way you go about things. You can see why a reasonably large proportion of the population is going to go, I'll have a piece of that. Thank you very much.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
Yeah. It's amazing how he... Because he comes in with 33% of the vote. He had 37% of the vote in July 1932. So again, this is another period of turmoil, just like it is in France, where you're having constant different kind of coalitions and different chancellors, leaders of Germany.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
Well, he said, we will only take our seats if I can be chancellor. Otherwise, forget it. I'm not coming into any coalition. So then... the government falls again in January, 1933, they have the election.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
But this time they go, okay, Hitler can be chancellor, but we'll manipulate him. How wrong they were. You know, he's manipulating everyone. And then Hindenburg, who is the president, dies the following summer. And he's able to get rid of the presidency. There is no more president of Germany. There is just the Fuhrer, him.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
And he gets rid of, he has an Axis Enabling Act, which is where all other political parties are disbanded. And suddenly you've got a totalitarian state, just like that. I think there's a lesson there. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
Yes, the arrogance of the existing politicians who just completely screwed it up.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
It is because it's simple. And what Hitler does throughout the 1920s is he sticks to this. There is actually, when he comes out of prison, so there's the Birch Hall Putsch in November 1923. He gets charged with treason, which he has been because he's attempting a coup. And he gets sentenced to five years, which is pretty lenient for what he's done. And he then gets let out after nine months.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
The Nazi party is banned at that point, but then comes back into being. And the year that follows, there is then a substantial debate about where the party should go. And there are actually a large number of people who think that actually they should be looking at how the Soviets are doing things and taking some of the
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
some of the things that they consider to be positive out of the communist state, and applying those to the Nazis. And Hitler goes, no, no, no, no, no, no. We've just got to stick to this kind of Jewish Bolshevik thing. This is how we're going to do it. This is how we're going to do it. Goebbels, for example, who is very open, he's very, very... Joseph Goebbels, he's a not very successful...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
journalist. But he does have a PhD in German literature. He's very disaffected because he was born with talipes, which is more commonly known as a club foot. He's disabled. He can't fight in the First World War. He's very frustrated by that. He's in a deep despair about the state of Germany in the first part of the early 1920s. He's looking for a political messiah, a quasi
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
religious messiah, thinks it's Hitler, then discovers that Hitler's not open to any ideas at all about any deviation, but then sees the light. Hitler recognizes that this guy is someone that he wants on his side. And so then Hitler Goes to him, makes a real special effort. Come on, come to dinner. I think you're great. You know, all this kind of stuff. Wins it about over.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
And Goebbels has this complete volt fast. Discards his earlier kind of, yeah, you know, Hitler's right. I was wrong. Hitler is the kind of messiah figure that I want to follow. I want to follow the hero, hero leader. And they come on board and they absolutely work out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
Hitler completely wins out of all dissenters within the, what had been the German Workers' Party, becomes the German National Socialist Party, becomes the Nazis. He comes out, emerges as the absolute undisputed Führer of that leader of that party and what he says goes and everyone toes him behind it. And part of the genius of that... Hitler does have some genius.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
I just don't think it's military, but he does have some genius. There's no question about it. It's the simplicity of message. What he's doing, it's that kind of us and them thing that we were talking about earlier on. It's the kind of either or. It's kind of, it's my way or the highway. It's kind of, this is the only way. This is how we get to the sunlit uplands.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
This is how we create this amazing... master race of this unification of German peoples, which dominates the world, which is the preeminent power in the world for the next thousand years. Or it's decay and despair and being crushed by our enemies. And our enemies are the Jews and the Bolsheviks, the communists. And what he taps into as well is front Gemeinschaft and Volksgemeinschaft. And
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
And there's no direct English translation of Volksgemeinschaft or indeed Frontgemeinschaft. But in its most basic form, it's communities. It's people community or front veterans community. So the Frontgemeinschaft is... We are the guys. We're bonded because we were in the trenches. You know, we were in the First World War.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
We were the people who bravely stuck it out, saw our friends being slaughtered and blown to pieces. We did our duty as proud Germans, but we were let down by the elites and we were let down by this Jewish people. Bolshevik plot. We were stabbed in the back. The myth of stabbing in the back is very, very strong. So we're bound.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
We're bonded by our experience of the First World War and the fact that we did what we should and what we could and we didn't fail in what we were doing. We were failed by our leaders. and by the elites. So that's front Gemeinschaft. Volksgemeinschaft is this sense of national unity. It's a cultural, ethnic bonding of people who speak German, who have a similar outlook on life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
And again, that just reinforces the us and them. Good and evil. It reinforces the black and white worldview. And then you add that to this...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
very simple message which hitler is repeating over and over again communists are a big threat jews are a big threat they're they're the enemy you have to have a you have to have an opposition in the them and us kind of process and that's what he's doing and people just buy into it they go yeah we're together we're germans we're you know we're a brotherhood We've got our Volksgemeinschaft.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
And so he cleverly ties into that and taps into that. But they're in irrelevance by the late 1920s. You know, by 1928, you know, the... He's not going to get a deal for Mein Kampf Part II. You know, he's impoverished. The party's impoverished. Numbers are down. They're kind of, you know, a best and a relevance. We should say he wrote Mein Kampf at this time when he was in prison.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
He writes most of Mein Kampf in prison, in Landsberg prison. And then he writes the rest of it in what becomes known as the Kampfhausen, which is this little wooden hut in the Ober Salzburg. And you can still see the remnants of that. And unfortunately, there's still little candles there and stuff in the woods by neo-Nazis and what have you. But that's where he wrote the rest of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
I mean, it was Jean-Jacques Rousseau who says, man has his greatest thoughts when surrounded by nature. That was something that kind of Hitler took very much to heart. There was a mentor of his called Dietrich Eckart. Dietrich Eckart introduced him to the Obersalzburg and the beauty of the Southeast Bavarian region. Alps around Berchtesgaden. And that was his favorite place on the planet.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
And that's where he eventually bought the Berghof. With the royalties, it has to be said, from Mein Kampf, which went from being almost pulp to suddenly being a runaway bestseller, unfortunately.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
such a shitty yeah i mean you know it's banned in a number of countries you don't need to because no one's going to read it because it's unreadable um i mean it's it's very untidy it's it's very incoherent it's it's got no um there's no narrative arc to use the kind of you know right a writer's phrase i mean it's just it's but but it does give you a very clear you know the overall impression you get at the end of it is is is the kind of communists and the jews are to blame for everything
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
Oh, no, he's hungry for war. He thinks that this is the natural state, that we have to have this terrible conflict, and once the conflict's over, Germany will emerge victorious, and then there will be the Thousand-Year Reich. I mean... I'm finding myself in talking to you, I keep saying this kind of, you know, it's Armageddon all the thousand years. Right. It's because it comes up.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
It's unavoidable because that's how he's speaking the whole time. It's just the same message over and over and over and over again.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
Well, they need to be made an irrelevance. You know, we have to take it. We have to take it. And if that kills millions of them, fine, then they can sort of squish their way over to Siberia. Right, it doesn't matter where they go. Or Kamchatka, whatever they go.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
Yeah. Because they're the superior people. There's no question that he glorified violence and war. You know, he's absolutely chomping at the bit. And in a way, I think he's a bit disappointed that in the 1930s, the conquests that he does undertake are also peaceful, you know. March 1948 goes straight into Austria. There's the Anschluss, you know, not a shot is fired.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
You know, 1946 goes into the Rhineland, reconquers that, retakes that, over that from the occupying allies, not a shot is fired. He takes the Sudetenland, barely a shot is fired, and then goes into the rest of Czechoslovakia in March 1939, and again, barely a shot is fired. It's a bit disappointing. He wants to be tested. He wants to have the wartime triumph.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
You can see him being frustrated about this in the Munich crisis in 1938. He wants a fight. He's absolutely spoiling for it. He's desperate to go in. He's all ready and gung-ho. He's built his Luftwaffe. He's got his Panzers now. his massive armed forces. You know, he wants to test them. He wants to get this show on the road and prove it. You know, he's an arch gambler, Hitler.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
armed forces. There's restrictions on naval expansion. There's restrictions on the size of the army. There's restrictions on the weapons you can use. You're not allowed an air force. But he starts doing this all clandestinely. You know, there are people in Kruppersgott, for example, which is in the Ruhr, a sort of big armaments manufacturer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
They are producing tanks elsewhere and parts elsewhere in, say, the Netherlands, for example, and then shipping them back into Germany. They're doing... Panzer training exercises actually in the Soviet Union at this time. There's all sorts of things going on. The Luftwaffe is being announced to the world in 1935, but it's obviously been in the process of developing long before that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
The Messerschmitt 109 single-engine fighter plane, for example, is created in 1934. So they're doing all these things against it. And the truth is, is he's just constantly pushing forward. What can I get away with here? And of course, Britain, France, the rest of the world, the rest of the allies, they're all reeling from the Wall Street crash and the depression as well.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
So have they got the stomach for this? Not really. And perhaps actually on reflection, the terms of Versailles Treaty are a bit harsh anyway, so maybe we don't need to worry about it. There's just no political will. There's no political will to fight against what Germany's doing. Then He gets away with it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
So he suddenly starts realizing that actually he can push this quite a long way because no one's going to stand up to him, which is why he makes a decision in 1936 to go back into the Rhineland, which has been occupied by French allied troops. At that point, he just walks in, just goes...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
do your worst and network's going to do anything because there isn't the stomach to do anything that was a big step in 1936 remilitarizing the island i mean that that's a huge huge step of like oh i don't have to follow anybody's rules and they're gonna do nothing and he's looking at his military and he's and and he's also looking at response so one of the things they do is they
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
You know, it's really, it's very clever. So they get over the head of the Army of the Air, Armie de l'Air, which is the French Air Force. And they invite him over and they, Erhard Milk, who is the second commander of the Luftwaffe, invites him over. So come and see what we're up to. You know, we want to be, you're our European neighbors. We're all friends together, this kind of stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
Come and see what we've got. And he takes him to this airfield. There's a row of Messerschmitt 109s all lined up, like sort of 50 of them. And the head of the Army of the Air sort of looks at it and goes, that's impressive. And Milt goes, well, let me go and take you to another airfield.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
And they go off the sort of the back route out of the airfield and that's a long, circuitous route in the Mercedes. Meanwhile, all the Messerschmitts take off from that airfield, go and land on the next airfield. Here's another, and they're all the same aircraft. And the commander in chief of the army of the air goes back to France and goes, we're never going to be able to beat Germany.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
So you would earlier, you were, you were alluding to this earlier on, you know, how much is this sort of this, this, this justice huts part of, of this ability to kind of portray the, the, the, the mechanized Moloch. Um, yeah, it absolutely cows the enemy. So, so then the, the, increasing the effectiveness of their armed forces purely by propaganda and by mind games and by talking the talk.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
And, you know, you look at We might all think these military parades that the Nazis have looked rather silly by today's standards, but you look what that looks like if you're the rest of the world. You're in Britain, and you're still reeling from the Depression, and you see the triumph of the will.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
You see some of that footage, and you see these automatons in their steel helmets, and you see the swastikas, and you see hundreds of thousands of people all lined up and zeke-hiling and all the rest of it. You're going to think again before you go to war with people like that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
Maybe they got a point about the Danzig Corridor. They are mainly German-speaking people there. It's disconnected from East Prussia, which is just saying, I sort of get it. Maybe they got a point. And is Poland really a kind of thriving democracy anyway? Not really. By 1930, late 1930s, it's not. It's, to all intents and purposes, a dictatorship in Poland at that time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
I mean, it's not right that you just go and take someone else's country. Of course, you can't do that. But you can see why in Germany people are thinking they've got a point. You can also see why in France and Britain they're thinking, well, you know, do we really care about the Poles? I mean... You know, is it worth going to war over? But there's kind of bigger things at play by this point.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
That's the point.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
So it's very interesting. So Chamberlain gets a very bad press. Uh-oh. Well, no, it's not really uh-oh. It's... I just think there's too much retrospective view on this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
And that's fine because the whole point of history is you can look back and you can judge decisions that were made at a certain point through the prism of what subsequently happened, which, of course, the people that are making the decisions at the time can't because they're in that particular moment. So I don't think Chamberlain did trust Hitler, but he wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
Britain was not obliged to Czechoslovakia at all. France was. France had signed a treaty with Czechoslovakia in 1924. But Britain had not. So there was no obligation at all for Britain to do this. The only reason why Britain would go to war over Czechoslovakia is because of the threat of Nazism and the ramifications of not going to war with him.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
But the problem is that Chamberlain is interesting because in 1935, he was Chancellor of Czechoslovakia. And when they started to sort of think, okay, we really do need to rearm, he was very much in favor of... substantially expanding and rehabilitating the Navy, so updating existing battleships and so on, and also developing the Air Force.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
There's not really much argument for having a large army because if you have a large army, you've got to maintain it. Britain is a small place. Where do you put them? You've also got to transport them. That's complicated. You've got to train them. You've got to put them in barracks. You've got to feed them, all this kind of stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
There's a kind of sort of impracticality about having a large army, whereas navies are great because you can keep them at sea and they can be on the water. Air force is slightly different. Air power is viewed in very much the same way that naval power is viewed, that this is we're an island nation. We have a global – global assets and air power gives us the flexibility that an army doesn't.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
So he is all for backing the expansion of the army, of the Air Force and the Navy in 1930. Then he subsequently becomes prime minister and sticks to his guns on that. It is he that enables the Air Force and the Air Ministry to develop the first fully coordinated air defense system anywhere in the world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
There is not an air defense system in Poland, nor Norway, nor Denmark, nor the Netherlands, nor Belgium, nor France. There is in Britain. Britain is the only one. And frankly, it pays off big time in the summer of 1940. So you have to give him credit for that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
Britain, interestingly, is also the world's leading armaments exporter in the 1930s, which is amazing, really, when you think everyone complains about the fact that we weren't rearming enough. Actually, we were. When we had all the infrastructure there and we were expanding that infrastructure dramatically. I say we, I'm only saying that because I'm British. So they were doing that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
But in 1938, Britain wasn't ready for war. Now, you can argue that Germany wasn't ready for war either. But Chamberlain was prime minister in a democracy, a parliamentary democracy, when 92% of the population were against going to war in 1938. There is not a single democratic leader in the world that would go against the wishes of 92% of the population.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
Now, you could say, well, he should have just argued it better and presented his case better and all the rest of it. But at that point, there was no legal obligation to go to the defense of Czechoslovakia. Czechoslovakia was another of these new nations that had been created out of 1919 and the Versailles Treaty. Who was to say we in Britain are able to judge the rights and wrongs of that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
how fantastic it would be to go to war with a nation a long way away for people whom we know very little, et cetera, et cetera. I'm paraphrasing his quote. But I'm not saying it was the right decision. I'm just saying I can see why in September 1938, he is prepared to give him the chance. Now, I do think he was a bit naive. And what he also does is a really interesting thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
He goes over to Hitler's flat, completely confused.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
ambushes him goes to his flat on the afternoon the 30th of september and says to says to hitler look i've got this i've drawn up this this agreement here um and this is to continue the um the naval agreement that we've already made and and by signing this you are saying that germany and britain should never go to war with one another and it goes yeah whatever you know signs it yeah
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
Chamberlain comes back, lands at hand and waves his little piece of paper, you know, peace in our time and all the rest of it, which obviously comes back to bite him in a very big way. But it's interesting that when Hitler then subsequently goes and moves in, you know, France and Britain decide in rather the same way that there's been discussion about deciding that large portions of Europe
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
Ukraine should just be handed over to Russia without consulting Ukraine a few weeks ago. It is incredible, I think, that France and Britain and Italy with Germany are deciding that, yes, it's fine for Germany to go in and take the Sudetenland, you know, without really consulting the Czechs. It's a sort of similar kind of scenario, really. And it's equally wrong.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
But when Germany does then go and take over the whole of... Czechoslovakia in March 1939. That's the bottom line. That's the point where Chamberlain goes, okay, I've given him the benefit of the doubt. No more benefits of the doubt. That's it. He's crossed the line. And so you reinforce your agreement with Poland. You do a formal agreement. You go, okay, we will uphold your sovereignty.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
If you are invaded, we will go to war with you. That is a ratcheting up of... diplomacy and politics in a very, very big way. And it is that decision to make a treaty with the Poles is not heeded by Hitler, but it's heeded by literally every one of his commanders. And it's also heeded by Goering, who is his number two and who is obviously the commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe and is...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
The thing about World War II is it really is truly global. It's fought in deserts. It's fought in the Arctic. It's fought across oceans. It's fought in the air. It's in jungle. It's in the hills. It is on the beaches. It's also on the Russian steppe, and it's also in Ukraine. So it's... It's that global nature of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
president of Prussia and, you know, and all the rest of it. And, you know, is the second most senior Nazi. And, you know, he's going, this is a catastrophe. This is the last thing we want to be doing is going to war against Britain and indeed France.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
about their interactions? Yeah, I think one of the things that's interesting is that Hitler's got a home advantage, because it's on his turf. And to start off with, the first meeting is at the Berghof, his beloved place in the Obersalzberg overlooking Berkesgaden in the Alps. So he's pretty confident, because this is my manor, this is my turf, I'm not gonna be bossed around by these guys.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
But Chamberlain, for example, is going there thinking, I've been around the blocks. No one can teach me anything. I've been a politician for ages. I'm not going to be kind of capped out by this sort of Austrian upstart. So they're both coming at it with a kind of sort of slight kind of superiority kind of complex.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
Interestingly, when you get to the actual meetings of the Bernabeu in Munich a couple of weeks later, Chamberlain is cheered by the crowds when his car comes in, when he goes to his hotel, when he's moving from his hotel to the Bernabeu. There are cars cheering him, waving Union Jacks, all this kind of stuff. Hitler does not like that at all. Not at all. Puts him on the back foot.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
And that's because the German people don't want war. In the same way that the British people don't want war, nor do the German people. The difference is that Hitler is a dictator and an autocrat and has the devotion of the people. So he can do what he wants in a way that Chamberlain can't.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
Chamberlain's hands are tied because he is an elected prime minister, an elected leader, political leader, and he's not head of state. So there is no question that it is Hitler and Chamberlain that are the top dogs in this particular discussion. You know, Deladier takes the back seat. Even Mussolini, although he's there, he doesn't want war either.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
You know, he wants to be left alone to do his own thing without anyone getting in the way. But he doesn't want to sort of, it's not in his interest to have a European war. So he's trying to avoid it. So it is really, you see that the kind of alpha males in the room are Chamberlain and Hitler. And it's really interesting because Hitler's got this sort of slightly garrulous,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
voice and and very kind of pale blue eyes and such distinct features quite a long nose and you know he always says this is why he has moustaches to kind of you know disguise the big nose you know so this is saying to you earlier on before we started recording he does have a sense of humor it's not maybe not one that you and i would kind of tap into but but he does have one
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
Whereas Chamberlain is just sort of, you know, he sounds like a sort of, you know, a bit like an old man. You know, he's sort of silver haired and he looks like a sort of archetypal kind of British gentleman with his rolled up umbrella and his, you know, and his Homburg hat and all the rest of it. So they're both sort of caricatures in a funny sort of way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
And I just think, you know, where there's war, there is always incredible human drama. And I think for most people, and certainly the true in my case, you get drawn to the human drama of it. It's that thought that, you know, gosh, if I'd been 20 years old, how would I have dealt with it? You know, would I have been in the army? Would I have been in the Air Force?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
And yet the consequence of these discussions, you know, these great events happening, you know, you are absolutely going crazy. Even which way the Munich crisis comes out, you're taking a step closer to war. It's just whether the war is going to happen kind of next week or whether it's going to happen a year hence. But the Munich crisis obviously doesn't stem the inevitability of war at all.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
It just heightens it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
It's a really tricky one. It's such a difficult one because you're always looking at it through, you know, the enemy has a vote and you don't know what that vote is going to be and you don't know what it's going to look like. There's no question that the rest of Europe is cowed by the kind of impression of military might that the Germans have put out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
They certainly fear they are stronger than they actually are. And then on the other hand, they're also going, yeah, but, you know, Germany doesn't have natural resources, doesn't have access to the world's oceans. You know, it's kind of, you know, it shouldn't be able to win a war. And so they're kind of contradicting themselves at the same time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
You know, so one minute they're sort of going, oh, God, you don't want to take on all those Nazis and all those swastikas and those automaton stormtroopers. But on the other hand, they're then saying, but actually, Germany doesn't have much in its basket. It's got actually quite a lot of weaknesses, and we should be able to prevail, blah, blah, blah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
We'll just impose an economic blockade, and then it'll be stuffed. And Britain is not ready to fight a war in 1948, but nor is Hitler, nor is Germany. So one is sort of striking out the other. But it's very easy to say that in hindsight.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
But at the time, you know, with people kind of digging trenches in Hyde Park in the center of London and barrage balloons going up over London and, you know, children being evacuated from the cities and 92% of the population not wanting to go to war, you can see why he takes the course he does. I suppose that's what I'm saying.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
I'm not saying it's necessarily the right decision, but I think it's an understandable decision.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
Yes, I think that's true. But also one has to take a step back and think about what Britain represents, so therefore what Chamberlain represents in 1938. Britain has the largest empire the world has ever known in 1938. We shouldn't forget that. The world is pink, as the saying goes. And that saying comes from the kind of atlas of the world where all British territories are kind of colored pink.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
Would I have been on a Royal Navy destroyer? How would I have coped with it? And how would I have dealt with that separation? I mean, I've interviewed people who were away for four years. I remember talking to a tank man from Liverpool in England called Sam Bradshaw. And he went away for four years. And when he came home, he'd been twice wounded. He'd been very badly wounded in North Africa.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
And on top of that, it has lots of extra imperial powers. territories as well. So if you look at this, there's this incredible map of global shipping in 1937. And there's these little ant lines of ships going out. And one of the strongest ant lines is going down to Argentina and South America from Britain. So down past West Africa and down the Southern Atlantic, and there it is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
And that's because Britain owns most of Argentina. It owns huge, great farming estates and ranches. It owns the railway system. It So you don't even need an empire. You just need the facilities that overseas trade and possessions can give you. And Britain not only has the largest navy, it also has the largest merchant navy. It has 33% of the world's merchant shipping and access to a further 50%.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
Greek, Norwegian, Canadian shipping that it can access. So if you've got access to more than in excess of 80% of the world's shipping, that puts you in an incredibly strong position. And actually, all sorts of other things have been going on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
While they might not have been creating a huge army or producing enough Spitfires that they might want to up until this point, what they have also been doing is stockpiling bauxite and copper and tungsten and and huge reserves. And because Britain has this huge global reach, and because it has its empire and its extra imperial assets, it can strike bargains that no one else can strike.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
So it can go into various countries around the world and can go, okay, I want you to guarantee me for the next five years, every bit of your rubber supply. I will pay over the asking price to secure that. And it's doing that in the 1930s. So when war comes, it's got everything it possibly needs.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
Now, you always need more because it's suddenly turning into a kind of, you know, a proper global long drawn out war. But that is a huge advantage. So it is with that mindset that Chamberlain is going into those talks and thinking, OK, well, I'm not going to get a war over the Czechoslovakian. Who cares about them? But... But I am going to show Hitler that I mean business.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
Hitler's going, who's this stuffy guy with his white hair? I don't give a toss about him. And he's coming at it from a completely different perspective.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
And I think one of the things that's so interesting from a dramatic point of view and from a historian's point of view, or even a novelist's point of view in the case of Robert Harris writing his book about these negotiations, which I don't know if you've read it, but it's really, it's terrifically good.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
It's the fact you've got two men, two alpha males who are going to those negotiations from totally different perspectives and vantage points. And I think it's very easy for people today to forget how elevated Britain was in the late 1930s. You know, the gold standard was tied to the pound, not the dollar. And so... Britain was the number one nation in the world at that time, and it just was.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
And it's so diminished by comparison today that it's hard to imagine it. And I think one of the interesting things about the historiography, about the narrative of how we tell World War II, is that so much of it has been dictated by the shift in power that took place subsequent to 1945.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
And when people were starting to write these sort of major narratives in the 1970s and 80s and into the 1990s, it's through a prism of a very, very different world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
And then he was shot in the neck in Italy, eventually got home. When he came home, his mother had turned gray. His little baby sister, who had been 13 when he left, was now a young woman. His old school had been destroyed by Luftwaffe bombs. He didn't recognize the place. And do you know what he did? He joined up again. went back out of Europe and was one of the first people in Belsen.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
And so one of the reasons why you have this narrative that, you know, Britain was a bit rubbish and hanging on the shirt tails of the Americans and, you know, all the blood was spelt in Eastern Front and, you know, Germany had the best army in the world and was only defeated because Hitler was mad and blah, blah, blah. You know, that kind of sort of traditional narrative, it's...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
That narrative emerges through the prism of what was going on in the 1970s and what was going on in the 1980s and the changing world, rather than looking at it through the prism of the late 1930s or early 1940s. So there is this moment of decision.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
attacking uh for military conflict where's that where's that line where's that well i kind of think it probably was when it was i mean poland yeah honestly i i'm not sure it would have been the right decision to go to war in 1948 I just, I think it would, I can't predict because you can't second guess how things are going to play out because you just don't know.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
But I'm not sure that Chamberlain made the wrong decision. I'm not saying he made the right decision. I'm just like, I'm not, I'm being a bit wishy-washy about this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
Yeah, but Churchill also appeases. I mean, he appeases Stalin all the time. I mean, you know, so the idea that Churchill's this big, strong man and never appeases and, you know, he's gung-ho for war. Churchill's out of the government at that time. He recognizes you can't trust Hitler. He recognizes that Nazism is bad.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
But because he's out of the government, he doesn't have a window on exactly where Britain is at that particular time in a way that Chamberlain does. So I suppose what I'm saying is Chamberlain is better placed to make those decisions than
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
than churchill is which again doesn't mean that church the chamberlain is right and churchill is wrong it's just that's a massive pump to go to war in 1938 when you still don't have you know you've got a handful of spitfires you've got a handful of hurricanes you haven't got enough you know your air defense system isn't properly properly sorted at this point um your navy is strong but you know what's that going to look like i mean if you do go to war
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
It's just, it's going to be accelerated industrialization for a year. So, you know, even if you go to war in 1938 over Czechoslovakia, Czechoslovakia will not be saved. You know, France and Britain will not be going and invading Germany. You know, that is absolutely not going to happen. So, sort of, what's the point?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
I mean, you know, if you're not going to do that, why didn't you accelerate your rearmament thereafter? Get your ducks in a row. and then you can consider it. I mean, after all, you know, even in September 1939, they don't really do anything. I mean, we talked about the kind of the Tsar offensive, which isn't really an offensive at all.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
It's firing one round of machine gun and scuttling back again. But I mean, They don't even do that then. They're still buying time in 1939. And, you know, Britain is only just about ready to take on the onslaught of the Luftwaffe in summer of 1940. Well, nobody's ready for war. No, and you always want more than you've got at any time, even when you're winning.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
So, you know. What was his justification for that for joining right back? He just felt completely disconnected to home. He felt that the gulf of time, his experiences had separated him from all the normalities of life. And he felt that the normalities of the life that he had known
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
Because I also do think that had France gone in, in some force, with some British troops as well, had they gone in, what would have happened is that easily could have brought down Hitler. Because most of his senior commanders are just thinking, what the hell is going on? This is a catastrophe. I mean, to a man. I mean, even Goering is thinking this is a terrible idea.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
They are absolutely not convinced. And when Hitler does his big talk, he asks all his senior commanders to come to the Berghof to brief them about the invasion of Poland. It's just after the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact of the 22nd of August. He calls them all to the Berghof and says, come in mufti, come in civilian suits. They all turn up and he gives them this kind of huge great speech.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
And says, this is the moment. This is the time. This is what we're going to do. And they're all going, what? You're kidding me. What, we're going to Poland on the 26th of August? That's the plan? Like two days' time? Where's the plan?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
The whole point is that they're emerging and growing militarily, but they were supposed to have all these exercises where they're coordinating ground forces, the Panzer spearhead with operations in the air with the Luftwaffe. None of that happens. So Poland becomes the proving ground. And actually, they discover that there's lots of things that don't work and lots of things that are wrong.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
But, you know, it's flying in the face of all military convention that he does this without any kind of warning. And even by the 1st of September, where there's been this kind of sort of five-day delay. at those last-minute negotiations. The last-minute negotiations are thrust upon Hitler by people like Goering and by Mussolini and the Italians going, God, oh my God, don't do this, don't do this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
You know, there's got to be a solution.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
Well, except that it ended in ruins in May 1945 with the total collapse of Germany. So you could say the worst decision he ever made was going into Poland in September 1939. Depends which way you look at it. But, I mean, yes, you know, it's successful in that, you know, Poland's overrun in 18 days. There's so many counterfactuals here.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
But, I mean, if you were to say to Hitler on the 30th of April, you know, as he's sort of taking out the pistol from his holster on his sofa in the Führerbunk and going, you know, so... Adolf first of September, 1939, still backing yourself on that one. I mean, he might, might have a different view. The guy's insane and full of blunder.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
I was let down by, by people not being strong enough.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
Yeah. Of course. That's exactly what he'd say. Wasn't my fault.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
Maybe that all-out central for us rather than kind of splitting it into three.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
before he'd gone away to war, had just been severed in a really kind of cruel way that he didn't really feel he was able to confront at that particular point. But he decided to rejoin, couldn't go back to the Third World Tank Regiment, so went back to a different unit. Went from kind of the Italian campaign to European theater.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
Absolutely. He was completely convinced by it. There was clearly a kind of sort of 10% to 15% level of doubt. But what the heck, I'm going to do it anyway. He was just... He ratcheted himself up into such a laver of kind of, this is the moment. I have to do it now. This is fate. I'm 50. And I could be taken out by an assassin's bullet. I've got this important life work that I've got to do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
We've got to get on with it now. There could be no more delay. This is my mission. This is our mission of the German people. And the German people have got the will and the spirit to be able to pull it off.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
It's a beautiful summer in Europe, summer of 1939. It's one of these glorious summers that never rains. It's just sunshine, sunny day after sunny day. It's like that golden summer of 1914 as well, where the sky always seems to be blue, fluffy white clouds. But the storm clouds of war, to use that cliche, are brewing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
The Russians have reached out to Britain and France and said, come on over, let's negotiate, let's see what we can do. And there is just no stomach for that at all. I mean, if ever there is, I think, a mistake, Britain and France should have been a bit more into real politics than they were. It's such an opportunity.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
to ensure that, to snooker the Third Reich and they don't take it because, you know, in many ways they see the westward spread of communism in exactly the same way that the Nazis see the threat of the westward spread of communism as something that's every bit as repellent as Nazism and they don't want to be getting into bed with these guys. Of course,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
They kind of have to kind of change tack on that one in summer of 1941 in very quick order. And that's the whole point about Churchill appeasing Stalin. I mean, you know, it's all very well people saying, well, you know, Churchill wouldn't have appeased Hitler in the 1930s. But he does appease. He appeases all the time. And... They missed that opportunity.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
Didn't see so much action at the end, but like a lot of British troops, if you were in a certain division at a certain time, you ended up passing very close to Belsen and you suddenly realized, okay, this was the right thing to do. We did have to get rid of Nazis and we did have to do this because this is the consequence. It's not just the oppression. It's just not just the secret police. It's not
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
And the French and British delegation is third-tier commanders, generals going over. It's a shit show. I mean, excuse my French, but I mean, it's a nonsense. They're not ready for it. They're not prepared. The British guy, Admiral Drax, doesn't have any authority. The whole thing's a complete joke. It's never going to get anywhere.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
I really think it could have done. I think that's a much more grievous mistake than Munich.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
force that is hitler well yes and because we humans we like to interact yeah and and you like to see people in three dimensions and you know i'm sure that's why you always quite rightly insist on doing your podcast face to face because you want to get the cut of someone's jib and you want to be able to see them and you want to see the intonation in their
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
expression and the whites of their eyes and all that kind of stuff. And that just doesn't make a difference, of course, because, you know, we're fundamentally animals and we kind of, we want to be sizing people up. And it's much easier to do that when you're a few feet away from each other than it is on a video screen or through the prism of someone else.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
Well, it's the world's great tragedy that it's only a few people that want to go to war, and the vast majority want to live happily, contented lives, getting on with their neighbors. I mean, it has been ever thus. It's just, it is those few that kind of ruin it for everybody else. But anyway, to go back to Leningrad, back in August 1939, they go half-cocked,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
They're disrespectful to the Soviet Union as a result of that. It gets nowhere. Had they been able to put in a really, really firm offer there and then to the Soviet Union, the Soviet Union would have probably come in. I mean, the big thing is that the Soviet Union said, this is a big stumbling block.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
just the expansionism of Nazism. It is also the Holocaust, which hadn't been given its name at that point. But you're witnessing this kind of untold cruelty. And I've always sort of
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
The Soviet Union said, yeah, but we want to be able to march through Poland if we get threatened by Germany. Both the British and the French just smell a massive rat there. They're basically saying, if they agree to that, what they fear is that Soviet Union will just march into Poland and go, yeah, but you said we could, and take it, which they unquestionably would have done.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
Well, they're not willing to appease anybody by that stage. That's the point. Well, they appeased Hitler. They did, but there's a bottom line, which is Poland. So it's changed. That's the point. Right, right. But anyway, the bottom line is there is a reluctance on the part of French and British to negotiate with the Soviet Union because they're communists. They don't like them. Don't trust them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
worry about what they're going to do with Poland and they're going to be, you know, jumping out of the fire into the kind of water and it doesn't come off. And as a consequence of that, Soviet Union continued to pursue more hardly, you know, more and more vociferously the opportunities that the Germans are offering, which is the split of Poland.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
and it doesn't want to go to war just yet.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
No, he believed it in the same way that Hitler believed it, that it was a cynical kind of convenient bit of real politic for now. I mean, I think Soviet Union was as determined to get rid of the Nazis as the Nazis were determined to get rid of the Soviet Union. I think whoever fired first was not decided at that point.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
But I do think from the moment that Hitler takes power in 1933, a conflict between Soviet Union and Nazi Germany is inevitable.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
Yeah, and, you know, they're doing exercises and stuff and building out of it. He's not ready yet because he knows he's done the purges and he's got to get his army, you know, he's got to get his armed forces back into shape and all the rest of it. But, you know. So they have this incredibly cynical agreement. But at that point, you know, Hitler's hands are untied.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
think a lot about sam i mean he's no longer with us but um he was one of the kind of first people that i interviewed and i interviewed him at great length uh and i know you like a long interview lex and um and i totally totally get that because when you have a when you have a long interview you really start getting to the nuts and bolts of it one of the frustrations for me when i'm looking at at oral histories of of second world war vets is usually they're kind of
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
You know, he no longer has to worry about the threat from the Soviet Union. He's got carte blanche to go into Poland. And he doesn't believe that France and Britain are going to go to war over Poland. He's wrong about that, obviously. But France and Britain, despite going to war with him, still do nothing. So, you know, he's got away with it. Who was Churchill?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
Well, Churchill is this absolutely towering figure in British politics, you know, who's been his first minister in the kind of noughties of the 20th century and the first years of the 20th century. First of the liberals, then of the conservatives. He's a former chancellor of the Exchequer. He's a towering figure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
But he's been in the wilderness because he's out of favor with the Stanley Baldwin government. He's out of favor with Chamberlain. But he is this towering figure, and he has been very outspoken as a backbencher, which basically means you're not a minister, you're not in the cabinet, you're just an ordinary member of parliament.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
But obviously, you're an ordinary member of parliament, but you're also an ordinary member of parliament who has had ministries of state and who is his towering figure. So he's listened to in a way that other backbenchers aren't. And he has been saying, you know, we need to stand up to the dictators. We need to do this. We need to rearm more heavily and blah, blah, blah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
So when war is declared, he's brought back into the Admiralty in charge of the Navy, which is Britain's senior service and military. Suddenly he's there. And what happens is Britain doesn't really do anything. It's very difficult working with France because France is so politically fractured that they can't make any decisions. When you can't make any decisions, you're just impotent.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
And so Churchill first mentions going into Norway, mining the Leeds. So the idea is that you're making life very difficult for the Germans to get iron ore out of Sweden, their main source. Their main source of iron ore is up in the northern part of Sweden in the Arctic Circle.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
It then goes on a railway through northern tip of Norway and then gets shipped down the west coast of Norway into Germany, into the Baltic. So Churchill suggests in September 1939, why don't we mine the Leeds, which are the Leeds are these passageways out of the fjords in the north into the North Sea. Why don't we mine those and stop the Germans from...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
Everyone goes, well, yeah, that's quite a good idea, but they can't decide. And French are nervous that if they do that, the Germans retaliate and bomb France and all this kind of stuff. So no decision is made until kind of April 1940. They go up to start mining the Leeds on exactly the same day that the Germans invade Denmark and Norway. And so they're called off guards.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
And at that moment, really, it's seen as a failure of Chamberlain's government. And there is a kind of mounting realization that no matter how good he was or competent he was as a peacetime prime minister, he's not a wartime prime minister. You know, he's not served in the armed forces himself, doesn't really understand it, needs a different set of hands.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
And his government falls on the 9th of May. It becomes inevitable that he's going to have to resign. And the obvious person to take his place is Lord Halifax, who is in the House of Lords, but you can still be a prime minister. And he is without question the most respected politician in the country. He's...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
Former Viceroy of India, he's seen as an incredibly safe pair of hands, man of resolute, sound judgment, et cetera, et cetera. But he doesn't want to take it. He feels physically ill at the prospect, doesn't want this responsibility. He's also not really a military man. He's got a slightly sort of withered hand, which has prevented him from doing military service.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
And he just blanches at this moment. And that really leaves only one other figure that could possibly take on this position, and that's Churchill. So when...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
They're put on YouTube or they're put on a museum website. They're 30 minutes, you know, an hour if you're lucky. And they're just scratching the surface. You never really get to know it. You feel that they're just repeating kind of stuff they've read in books themselves after the war and stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
chamberlain resigns on the 9th of may and halifax says it's it's not for me um the only person who's going to slip into that position is churchill and he becomes prime minister and he accepts it gladly he feels like it is his mission in life this is his moment come of the hour come of the man but he comes with a huge amount of baggage i mean you know he's known as a man who drinks too much who's whose judgment hasn't always been great you know he was chancellor during the time of the general strike 1926 you know he backed edward the eighth over the uh
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
monarchy crisis when the king wanted to marry wallace simpson the divorcee catholic divorcee etc etc so you know his judgment has been brought into question you know he is the man who was he came up with the idea of the gallipoli campaign which was you know an ignominious failure blah blah blah so there are issues over him you know he is seen as a hothead and a man who doesn't have the kind of sound judgment of halifax so the jury is is very much out and i think it's again it's one of those things where you have to put yourself in the
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
You have to look at this through the prism of what people were thinking in May 1940. Yes, he was considered an Italian politician, but he is seen also as a loose cannon and by no means the right person in this hour of darkness.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
And it is coincidental that the 10th of May 1940, when he takes over as prime minister, he becomes prime minister, not for an election, but by default of a new nationalist government. So no longer a conservative government, but a nationalist crowning
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
cross-party coalition government for the duration of the war, which includes members of the Liberal Party and also the Labour Party, as well as conservatives, that it is by no means certain that he's going to be able to deliver the goods. And it is also coincidentally the same day that the Germans launched Case Yellow, Operation Yellow, the invasion of the low countries in France.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
So these are tumultuous events.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
events to put it mildly and it is also the case that you know only a couple of weeks before um paul reynaud has taken over as prime minister of yet another coalition government in france from from daladier so political turmoil is very much the watchword at this time for the uh for the western democracies just at the moment that the germans are making their kind of you know their hammer strike into the west
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
And, you know, I always kind of leave feeling frustrated that I haven't had a chance to kind of grill them on the kind of stuff that I would grill them on if I was put in front of them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
No, I don't think it is. I mean, not least because the decisions over Poland were made by Chamberlain's government, not when Churchill was out of government. So, you know, Churchill wasn't even involved in that decision-making process at the time. No, I don't think so. I mean, again, I go back to kind of Britain's position in the world in 1939.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
If you say we are going to defend the sovereignty of Poland and then you don't, that looks really bad globally. Britain's prestige would plummet, would lead to all sorts of problems. You are saying that you're giving carte blanche to dictators to just run amok and take whatever territory they want. You are risking a future of
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
upheaval of the global order away from democracies into the hands of dictators. In the West, people believe in democracy and believe in advancement of freedoms of people. To echo the words of Roosevelt in August 1941, they're aspiring to a world free of want and fear. Now, obviously, there's still some issues with form that democracy takes in the 1930s. It's not democratic for everyone.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
Try saying that if you're in Nigeria or India or whatever, or if you're in the black southern states of the United States. But the aspirations are there. And I think that's an important distinction. And I think by saying that Churchill is the chief warmonger of the Second World War, I think is ludicrous. You know, it's the same thing about the bombing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
Or the most interesting story that he told you? Well, I do remember him telling me. Funny enough, it's not really about the conflict. I remember him telling me about the importance of letters. And there was this guy who... Literally every few weeks, you know, post would arrive intermittently. There was no kind of sort of regular post.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
You know, the detractors of strategic air campaign always go, yeah, but, you know, Germans had the Holocaust, but weren't the Allies just as bad just killing all those civilians? It's like, no, because the moment Hitler stopped the war, the bombing would stop. You know, the moment the war stopped in Hitler's favor, the killing would continue and be accelerated.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
Well, no, because Hitler was always going to invade the Soviet Union, unless the Soviet Union invaded Germany first. So that was always going to happen.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
There's no question that Hitler would have also wanted to subdue France or certainly turn France from a democracy into a totalitarian state as well. I'm absolutely certain about that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
Yes, but then he would have got so strong that he would have then turned on Britain as well, you know, because he would, you know, the fear is that if you let him do this and then he gets greedy, he wants the next one, then he wants the next one, then he wants the next one, and, you know, then he wants to take over the whole world. You know, that is the fear of the British.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
That is the fear of the Americans. That's the fear of President Roosevelt, who's got a very, we haven't even touched on this yet, but he has a very difficult life. case on his hands because he's come into power also in January 1933 as president of the United States on an isolationist ticket with a retrenching, with a kind of sort of, you know, step away from the European old order.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
So it was supposed to be regular, but it didn't come around regularly. So you might suddenly, suddenly get a flurry of five all in one day. But he said it was this guy and in his tank, a member of a different tank crew. There was a good friend of his in the same squadron. He had British half squadrons for their armor. and which is Americans without a company.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
It's time for the Europeans to start on their own. It all sounds very familiar right now. And suddenly he's got to do this gargantuan political volt fast. and prepare the nation for war, because he also fears, like Churchill fears, like Chamberlain feared as well, that Hitler's designs are not purely on Eastern Europe and the Lebensraum there, but would get ever bigger.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
And I don't doubt that they're right. I think if he'd prevailed in the Soviet Union, he'd always wanted more. Because his whole concept is the master race.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
Yes, and ditto if the Allies hadn't gotten involved against Imperial Japan. You know, it would have been catastrophic. I mean, 20 to 30 million Chinese dead anyway, you know, with American and British intervention. You know, was it going to be in China without that? I mean... and elsewhere.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
Because the reason why Japan invades French Indochina, now Vietnam, and Hong Kong, and Malaya, and Singapore, and so on, and Burma, is because it's not winning in China, and it needs more resources because it's resource poor. And America has cut off the tap. So it's going into these countries to get what it needs.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
It's rubber and oil and natural resources and ores, precious ores and all the rest of it. And if it had been unchecked, it would have done so. And then it would have absolutely built up its strength and overrun the whole of China with even more deaths. So...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
I think one of the interesting things about the Second World War is lots of wars and why people get involved in them are extremely questionable. But I think there is a moral crusade to the Allies and what they're doing that I think is entirely justified. What I think is interesting also is that as the war progresses...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
You know, if the Allies are supposed to be on the force of the good, how come they're doing so much bad? And at what point is doing bad stopping you from doing good? And at what point are you doing good but also doing bad at the same time?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
Such as destruction of cities, destruction of monasteries on outcrops in southern Italy, you know, destruction of killing and loss of civilians, et cetera, et cetera. You know, these are difficult questions to answer sometimes. They're also incredibly interesting. And I think that moral component starts to blur a little bit by kind of middle of the war, by 1943.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
You know, it's kind of easy to have a fairly cut and dry war in North Africa, in the deserts of North Africa, where, you know, the only people getting in the way are a few sort of Bedouin tribesmen or something.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
But once you start getting into Europe or getting into the meat of highly populated countries in the Far East, for example, that's a different kettle of fish because the scale of destruction is absolutely immense. But it is also the job of political leaders to look after and defend their own peoples first and foremost.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
And so what you're doing is you're trying to protect your own sovereignty, your own people, before you're protecting other people. And so... That's what leads to the whole way in which the Western allies are protracting war is to try and minimize the number of deaths of their own young men as much as they possibly can, whilst at the same time winning the war.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
And that means bringing lots of destruction to your enemies, but also trying to minimize it. And the way you bring lots of destruction to your enemies is by using immense firepower and this concept of steel, not our flesh, which I mentioned earlier on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
and technology so that you don't have to bring to bear too many of your young men's lives and you don't have a repeat of the slaughter of the First World War.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
So, you know, it is really interesting that in our mind's eye, when we're thinking of, you know, the Western allies in the Second World War, probably the first thing that comes into mind is Americans jumping out of landing craft on Omaha Beach on D-Day, for example. Those are infantrymen. They're the front line. They are the coal face. They're the first people going into the fire of the enemy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
And we tend to think about guys in tanks, infantrymen with their Garand rifles or, you know, machine guns or whatever. That's what springs to mind. Yet actually, they're a comparatively small proportion of the army. So no more than 14% to 15% of any allied army is infantry.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
Well, that's not to be pretentious. That's really just to say that because you're dealing with so many numbers and different units and it can go over your head and you can get sort of consumed by the detail if you're not careful. And as a reader, it can be very unsatisfying because you just can't keep pace with everything. So one of the things about writing in the vernacular German
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
45% are service corps, service troops, driving trucks and cooks and bottle washers and people lugging great big boxes of stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
That's because by that stage, the Allies have worked out the way of war, which is to use what I call big war, this concept of a very long tail, logistics, the operational art, making sure that people have the absolute best you possibly can, great medical care, huge advances in first aid and medical care of troops, getting them back onto the battlefield.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
And you're using firepower and technology and mechanization to do a lot of your hard yards. So That's the principle behind strategic bombing. If you go over and bomb and you can destroy infrastructure and civilians and households, that makes it much harder for Krupp to make those Panther tanks and Tiger tanks or whatever it might be, and guns.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
And you're disrupting the transportation system in Germany. you know, you're making life difficult for them to do what they need to do, then that means it's going to be easier for those 15, 14, 15% of infantrymen who've got to jump out of landing craft to do their job. And you're trying to keep that to a minimum.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
And you'd have to say, broadly speaking, that's a very sensible policy that makes an awful lot of sense. The consequence of that is a huge amount of destruction. And maybe that's what Daryl Cooper's driving at. But no one asked Hitler to invade Poland. I mean, you know, That is the bottom line. No one asked Germany to go to war. No one asked Hitler to come up with these ludicrous ideology.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
Which are fascinating.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
Well, I do agree with that. I think oversimplification of anything is a mistake. You know, life is nuanced. The past is nuanced. It's okay to be proud about certain things and it's okay to be disgusted by other things. That's absolutely fine. We have a complicated relationship with our past. It doesn't need to be black and white. And life is not a straight line.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
And of course, the Allies make plenty of mistakes in World War II. Overall, I think they made the right calls. And I think one of the things that's really interesting is I think that the Allies, for the most part, use their resources much more judiciously and sensibly than the Axis powers do. And good, because that means they prevail.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
or in the American spelling, Armour, rather than Armour, as Brits would spell it, is it just immediately tells the reader, okay, this is American, okay, I've got that. Or this is German, I've got that. Or Italian or whatever it might be. But yeah, to go back to Sam. So Sam, there was this guy in his squadron and he'd get his letters from his girlfriend, his wife.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
I think there are so many lessons from World War II that could have been brought into the history of the last 30 years which weren't, such as You know, if you decapitate an incredibly strong leader, you get a power vacuum. And if you don't have a solution for that power vacuum, lots of bad elements are going to sweep into that in very quick order, which of course is exactly what happens in Iraq.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
So, you know, Donald Ronson going, we don't do reconstruction. Well, you freaking well should do. You know, if you're going to take on this particular challenge, you've got to see it through. You know, that's simply not good enough. You know, it's not good enough to go into Afghanistan and go, okay, we're going to change things around. It's going to be great.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
You know, all the women are going to have education. They won't have to wear kind of, you know, won't have to cover up their bodies anymore. Anything goes. We love liberalism. It's great. Let's make Kabul into a thriving city once more. And then suddenly bug out, you know, because what's going to happen? You're going to undo everything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
And I remember being in, you know, this is a bit of a segue, Lex, but I remember being in Northern Helmand province back in January 2008. And British troops had just taken over an absolute dump of a town called Musakala. And I remember talking to this Afghan guy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
He just had all his willow trees chopped down to make room for a helipad that the Allies wanted, which said, you know, put their kind of, you know, those cages with kind of rubble in the protective wall. Is it called HESCO? I think it was called. Anyway, I said to him, what do you think about the British being there?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
And he just went, shrugged at me and lifted up his hands and said, well, you know, if they stay, great, but they won't. And he said, you know, if they stay, then brilliant. But he said, I'll tell you what. He said, Taliban weren't great. They weren't fantastic. He said, but I could leave my purse on a wall and no one would touch it. I could leave it on a wall for a week and no one would touch it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
Thanks a lot. And you're seeing a total lack of understanding of the culture and ethnic differences you're trying to impose a kind of western centric view onto something which is just something you know onto onto a nation which isn't isn't ready for that now there are ways in which you know it looked like afghanistan was starting to kind of emerge and there was a path and then just at the
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
What you have to say, though, is that in the West, post-1945, the rehabilitation of Italy, of Japan, of Western Germany was really good. You know, the consequence of all that destruction, all that turmoil, was thriving, high-producing democracies which burst forth into the kind of second half of the 20th century and into the 21st century in pretty good order.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
So the lessons of the previous generation for the First World War had been learned, even though the scale of destruction, the displacement of people is unprecedented in 1945.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
Well, in terms of naval power, it's Britain, as we've already discussed, and the United States. France has a pretty large navy. Japan has a pretty large navy. Italy has a pretty large navy. But Italy's navy is, by far and away, its most modern aspect of its three services, air, land, and sea. But it doesn't have any aircraft carriers and it doesn't have any radar.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
And he said it was like a soap opera. He said, we all just waited for his letters to come in so we could find out, you know, whether his, you know, his daughter had, you know, got to school okay or something, you know, won the swimming contest or whatever it was. You know, the sort of details of this sort of day-to-day kind of banal life was just absolute catnip to these guys.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
So, you know, they've got modern battleships and battlecruisers, but without key batteries. modern bits of technology. So Italy is really not ready for war. Oh, it's so not. It's so not. It's just, again, both Hitler and Mussolini, they lack geopolitical understanding.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
You know, that's because they're so kind of focused on their narrow worldview and they view everything through that prism, but they can't see that bigger picture.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
He doesn't want a war. What he does want is he wants his own new kind of Roman Empire, which extends over the Mediterranean, kind of certainly the eastern part of half of the Mediterranean, North Africa, all the way down to kind of East Africa, controlling the Suez Canal. That's what he wants.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
He completely emasculates Mussolini. And... He likes him, though. It's really weird. Even when Mussolini's about to fall in July 1943, he has a meeting at Feltre just literally a few days before Mussolini tumbles. And he does that because he likes Mussolini. He likes him as a man and thinks he's been his friend.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
And, you know, he respects him to a certain extent, even though he definitely views himself as top dog. Hitler does, that is. So it's kind of curious, right? Because I don't think Hitler particularly likes anyone, really. But he does seem to like Mussolini. But anyway, the problem with Mussolini is Mussolini's Italy is very impoverished from the First World War.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
And that, of course, leads to the rise of fascism and the overthrow of parliamentary democracy. And why Mussolini takes place in the first place. Again, there's been this terrible disruption. There's been financial crisis. that leads to kind of people looking at an alternative. You know, what's the alternative?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
Well, Mussolini's going, you know, we can be proud Italians again, lots of chest thumping, you know, wearing great uniforms, all the rest of it. And people kind of think, well, you know, I have a piece of that. And it kind of works and, you know, proverbially the trains work on time under him and so on and so forth.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
But he just gets ahead of himself, you know, and actually the writings on the war in 1935 when he goes into Abyssinia and, you know, again, sort of what effectively are kind of by first world European standards, privative tribesmen in Abyssinia, they have quite a tough fight there. They do prevail, but it's not a complete walkover. And they get a bit of a bloody nose at times.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
And they shouldn't have done. And... They're just not ready. They don't have the industry. They're tied up into the Mediterranean. They don't have access to the world's oceans. They do have some merchant shipping, but not a huge amount. They just don't have what is required. They're dependent on Britain for coal. Britain is the leading coal exporter in the world in the 1930s. So...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
They absolutely loved it. And then the letter arrived, the Dear John letter, saying, sorry, I found someone else and it's over. And his friend was just absolutely devastated. It was the only thing that was keeping him going, this sort of sense of continuity of home, this foundation of his life back at home. And Sam said he could see he was in a really, really bad way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
Britain's approach to fascist Spain and approach to fascist Italy has been very much sort of stick and carrot. It's like, you know, we'll let you do what you do as long as you kind of stay in your box. And, you know, we'll continue to provide you with supplies and coal and whatever it is you need as long as you don't kind of go too far.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
And so that's why Mussolini is very anxious in 1938 and again in 1939 to kind of be the power broker and kind of not let Germany go to war. But Germany's just, you know, they signed the Axis Pact of Steel in May 1939, where they become formal allies. This is Hitler and Mussolini, Italy and Germany. But it's always a very, very unequal partnership right from the word go.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
And one of the reasons Mussolini signs it is because he fears that Germany has designs on Italy Yeah, it's not because he thinks, oh, these guys are great. You know, there are natural bedfellows. It's so that he can what it's a mutually convenient pact whereby Germany gets on with whatever it wants to do up in northern Europe and eastern Europe.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
Italy is given a free hand to do whatever it wants to do. They'll just kind of watch each other's backs. They have borders, you know, Austria and Italy border one another and they'll just do their own thing and they'll kind of help each other out with supplies and stuff. But basically they won't, they'll be their own It's a kind of marriage of convenience.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
You know, they're never expected to be fighting alongside each other on the battlefield. Not really. There is a kind of obligation to do so, but it's an obligation with no expectation of ever actually happening. And so from Mussolini's point of view, the Pact of Steel is kind of, you know, it's just sailing your flag to one particular mast and kind of trying to cover your back. And so long as he
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
plays his cards right. He can still get his coal supplies from Britain. He doesn't have to worry about that. The Pact of Steel doesn't make any difference to that. The problem for him is that in June 1940, he thinks that France is about to be defeated and that Britain will surely follow. And so he thinks, ah, I've got some rich pickings. I can take Malta or I can take British possessions.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
I can overrun Egypt. And you know, now is my time. But I also need to kind of join the fight before France is completely out of the fight. Otherwise, it looks like I'm a Johnny come lately. And I won't get those spoils because the Germans will go, yeah, you can't have all this stuff. You've turned up too late. You need to be in the fight. So he does it what he thinks is the perfect timing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
And it turns out to be a catastrophic timing because, of course, Britain doesn't exit the fight. You know, Britain is still there. And, you know, by February 1941, a very, very tiny British army in Egypt has overrun, you know, two entire Italian armies and taken 133,000 prisoners in North Africa.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
Well, in the air, it has to be the Luftwaffe. And it is also the Imperial Japanese, both in the Imperial Japanese Navy and the Imperial Japanese Army. They both have air forces. And one of the reasons that is because the quality of the pilots in Japan is extremely high because it's so difficult to get to the top position.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
You know, you are going to your frontline squadrons with at least 500 hours in your logbook. To put that into some perspective, you know, a British RAF or Luftwaffe pilot would be joining their frontline squadrons with 150 to 170 hours in the logbook. So it is that these guys are disciplined to within an inch of their lives. They are...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
There are academic tests as well as physical endurance tests. They are the elite of the elite, and they are extremely good. The problem they have is that there is a good number of them, but there's not that many. The Luftwaffe is the largest air force in the world in 1939, but it is already at a parity in aircraft production with Britain and Europe.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
The French have a kind of similar-sized army, but they're very, very badly organized. So they're organized into different regions, and one region is not really talking to another. And one of the problems that when Case Yellow, the German invasion of the West starts, France's army of the air is spread throughout France and has its own little area.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
So you have one bunch of fighters and bombers in that block in the Marseille area. You have another block in kind of... and the Brittany coast and you have another block in around Sudan and you have another that. So, so consequently they're never be there. They're never able to kind of bring their full strength to bear.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
So it's, although, although they've both got about three and a half thousand aircraft on paper and about two and a half thousand that are fit to fly on any one given day, um, The Luftwaffe, because they're the aggressor, can choose how they mass their aircraft and where they attack and at when.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
And he thought he's going to do something stupid. And he went up to him and he said, look, you know, I know it's bad and I know it's terrible. I know you're absolutely devastated, but you've got your mates here. Just don't do anything silly. Just, you know, maybe...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
So in other words, the Luftwaffe can send over overwhelming amounts of bombers and fighter planes and pulverize a French airfield and catch them napping. Because the French don't have a defense system, they can't see whether they're coming. So their only hope is to kind of take off and just hope they stooge around the sky and hope they bump into some Luftwaffe.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
And of course, that's inherently inefficient and they get destroyed. They get destroyed in penny packets rather than en masse. difference with the RAF is the RAF is not done on an Air Force basis where you have each air corps or air fleet has a handful of bombers, a handful of fighters, a handful of reconnaissance planes. They have different commands.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
So they have bomber command, fighter command, training command, coastal command, and they all have very specific roles. So they're structured in a completely different way. And that's because they're an island nation. And because they see their role militarily in a different way. And because the rearming that Britain has done in the 1930s is all about defense.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
It is not about aggression at this point. Not about taking it to the enemy. It is showing you're tough, but also first and foremost, getting your ducks in a row and making sure that you don't get defeated. So this is the principle behind the world's first fully coordinated air defense system, which is the radar chain. It is observer core. It is control rooms.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
It is interesting technology such as identification friend or foe, IFF, which is where you have a little pulse. So you have these control rooms, and you have a map table, and you have a tote board in front of you where you can see what squadrons are airborne, what state of readiness they're at, whether they're engaging the enemy. Little lights come on and show you. You can see weather maps.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
You can see it. You see the cloud ceiling. You see all that at a glance. Then you're on a dais, and then down in front of you is a massive great map of southern England. You've got Krupia's kind of moving plots.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
you know when it's all over you can patch things up or sort things out and he said you know you've got to understand it from her point of view you know it's a long way i haven't seen you for two years this kind of stuff you know so just just don't do anything rash and of course the next next engagement two days later he was killed he said it was just a kind of he could he just knew that was going to happen so it was a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy that's something i've never forgotten that story and i just thought you know
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
So you can, through a combination of radar, which picks up a kind of a rough idea of what's coming towards you, combined with the observer core, you have overlapping observer core stations all over Britain, covering every single inch of airspace over Britain, looking up into the air and seeing how many aircraft there are, and at what height they are.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
And you have a little thing called a pantograph, which is a piece of equipment which helps you judge altitude. You then ring through that. That all comes into the control room along with the information from the radar stations, which is going into a single filter room at fighter command headquarters, which is then being pushed straight back out to the sector stations.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
So this information is being updated all the time. So you have a plot and it looks like it might be, you know,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
enemy bombers 30 plus for example that's constantly being adapted so as more information comes in you would change that and then you can see that actually it's only 20 aircraft or 22 aircraft or whatever so you're updating that and that a little figure is put on the on your little plot and moved across and so you can see and then because you can identify your own aircraft you can then see where they are moving and you're also on um
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
The guys in the air are on the radio to ground controllers who are in these control rooms. And they're saying, OK, well, if you proceed at, you know, angels, 18,000 feet, you know, on a vector of, you know, 150 degrees, you should be seeing your enemy bombing formation any moment now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
And what that means is that you're not on the ground when the enemy are coming towards you with their bombers to hit your airfield, which means you're in the air so that all they're doing is hitting a grass airfield. which you've already got bulldozers and diggers and graders and lots of scalpings and earth ready to fill in the potholes. And it means you're good to go.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
And it means as a consequence of all that, when the Germans do launch their all out assault on Adler Tag, Eagle Day on the 13th of August, 1940, the British are ready. You know, they can see them coming. They know what to expect and they can anticipate. And it means that they're not being caught with their trousers down on the ground.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
And as a consequence of that, of the 138 airfields that are in, RAF airfields that are in Britain, only one of them is knocked out for more than 48 hours in the entire summer of 1940. And that's Manston on the tip of the Kent coast, which is abandoned for the duration. So these are the two biggest air forces.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
uh the legendary the terrifying air force they are maybe maybe they're slightly believing their own hype there's no question about well the rest of the world is also right they've just had it too easy so they don't have they don't have ground controllers they don't have an air defense system in in germany because why would you need an air defense system we're going to be the aggressor you know there's no scenario where we'll have to defend the
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
the airspace of the third Reich because we're on the offensive. So they just haven't prepared it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
Well, it's, I mean, you know, and everyone always says, you know, the, the few were the last, you know, the last line of defense against the Nazi hordes and all this kind of stuff. And it's just, it's all rubbish. They're the first line of defense.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
The second line of defense is the Royal Navy, which is the world's largest, and there is absolutely no chance on earth that a German invasion force made up of Rhine river barges one out of every three is motorized and the other two aren't, is ever going to get successfully across the English Channel. And even if they did, they would be repulsed. I mean, it's just no chance.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
And it is often forgotten that while the Luftwaffe is coming over and bombing Britain every single day, so is the RAF going over and bombing Germany. And one of the problems that the Germans have is that these bombers need fighter protection. Fighter planes are there to protect the bombers. And They don't have much fuel.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
And the Messerschmitt 109E, the Emil, as the model is of 1940, is the mainstay of the German fighter force in the summer of 1940. And...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
They don't have much fuel, so they need to conserve their fuel, which means they need to be as close to Britain as they possibly can, which is why the majority of them are all in airfields, which are hastily created in July 1940, following the fall of France, in the Pas-de-Calais, which is the closest point. That's where the channel is its narrowest and all the rest of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
It's about human drama. That's the truth of it. And how people react to this totally alien situation. You know, for the most part, the Second World War is fought by ordinary, everyday people doing extraordinary things. And I think that's something that's so fascinating. I suspect... I think I... Instinctively, I'm quite slapdash, I think. So I think I would have bought it, literally. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
And also in the Northern Normandy. And that's where they're flying from. But what that means is that even if you're completely rubbish at bombing, which the British are in 1940, they haven't developed those navigational aids that create untold accuracy by the end of the war. In 1940, they don't have that luxury. It's a target-rich environment.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
I mean, you know, you can barely miss if you go over to the Isle of, you know, over to the Palakala. I mean, it's literally, it's just like one huge, great kind of hub of fighter airfields.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
And consequently, that means that every single German squadron, which only is 12 airplanes strong on establishment, and very often even fewer than that, always has to leave two airplanes behind to defend their own airfields. And it's really interesting when you look at kind of prisoner of war statements from Luftwaffe crown crew that have been downed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
They were all bugged at a holding place called Trent Park. You can see the transcripts of these conversations. They're all going about how annoying it was that the RAF were over every night and they can't sleep. And, you know, if only they'd just shut up and leave them alone and not bomb them. You know, this is just part of the narrative of the Battle of Britain that's completely left out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
It's always the stocky conversation. You know, the plucky few against the kind of the, you know, the Nazi hordes and all the rest of it. And it's just it's a complete misnomer. And by that time, aircraft production in Britain is massively outpacing the Germans. And the best ratio that the Germans achieve in 1940 is July 1940, when the British produced 496 aircraft.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
new Hurricanes and Spitfires single-engine fighters, and the Germans only produced 240 single-engine fighters. That's the best ratio. Of course, that is the British outproducing the Germans two to one. What that means is by the end of October 1940, when the Battle of Britain is officially designated as being over, the single-engine fighter force of the Luftwaffe is less than 200.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
from 750 or whatever it was in the beginning of July, whereas the British fighter force had been 650 or whatever. The beginning of July is now well over 750. And Britain is outproducing. Yeah, to a massive degree. And that continues. And that is a ratio that just increases as the war progresses. I mean, Britain produces 132,500 aircraft in the Second World War. America produces 315,000.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
Well, because it's the spearhead of the Blitzkrieg.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
It's ought to do with the Blitzkrieg. The Luftwaffe becomes the kind of the bogeyman of the Third Reich. You know, they're blamed for everything, but that's because they're completely abused. They're the only part of the Third Reich's armed services, the only part of the Wehrmacht, the Wehrmacht being the Navy, the Army, and the Air Force, that is inconstant
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
use the whole time or constant abuse, I should say. In Britain and America, they rotate their pilots really, really carefully.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
By the time that you've got the 8th Fighter Command, for example, part of the mighty 8th, the 8th Air Force operating in Britain, by the end of 1943, you would have in a squadron that would have 60, you would never have more than 16 airborne from a squadron at any one time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
You would have 40 to 45 pilots to serve as 16 in the air and similar number of aircraft, which means you're not overusing these guys. And what would happen is by that stage of the war, by 1943, you know, a young fighter pilot coming to a Thunderbolt squadron or a Mustang squadron, for example, at the end of 1943, beginning of 1944, he'd have 350 hours.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
of consecutive flying because you can train in in america in florida or california or texas or wherever you've got you you can process many many more people because the training is much more intense because you've got clear skies so you're not it's not a question of of oh we'd like to take you out out fritz this morning but you know it's a bit cloudy and and oh the raf are over or you know the air force are over so we can't fly today so in germany
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
Pilot training is constant. Aircrew training is constantly being interrupted by the war, by shortage of fuel, by inclement weather, et cetera, et cetera. In America, you have none of those problems. And Britain, because of its global reach, also has training bases in what was Rhodesia and now Zimbabwe and South Africa and I'm in Canada as well.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
And so you're able to process these guys much better. You're able to give them more training. So when they come, they're absolutely the finished article as pilots. What they're not the finished article as is, say, a bomber pilot or as a fighter pilot. But that's okay because you join your squadron of 40 other guys for 16 airborne. And the old hands kind of take you up a few times.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
I don't think it would have ended well for me. I'm just a bit careless.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
So you arrive at, I don't know, let's say... some airfield in Suffolk in East Anglia in England. And, you know, you'll have 10 days to two weeks acclimatizing, getting used to it. You know, the old hands will put you through your paces, give you some tips. You can pick their brains during kind of while you're having some chow and listening on some briefings.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
Then the first mission you do will be a milk run over to France where the danger is kind of pretty minimal. And you can build up your experience. So by the time you're actually sent over on a mission to Berlin or Bremen or the Ruhr or whatever, you're absolutely in the business. So qualitatively and quantitatively, you are just vastly superior to anything the Luftwaffe's got.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
The Luftwaffe by that stage, in contrast, 1940, new pilots coming to frontline squadrons with 150, 170 hours in their logbooks. Less than 100, 100, 90, 92 hours, something like that. It's not enough. And they're just being flung straight into battle, and they're getting absolutely slaughtered. And they're also, because their machines are quite complicated, there's no two-seaters, really. So...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
No two-seater trainers. So the first time you're flying in your Focke-Wulf 190 or your Messerschmitt 109, it's this horrendous leap of faith for which you as a young, bright Luftwaffe fighter pilot know that you're not ready for this. And it can bite you. Something like a... a Messerschmitt 109, has a very high wing loading. So it's very maneuverable in the air, but it's got these tiny wings.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
It's got this incredible torque, this Daimler-Benz DB605 engine with its huge amount of torque. And it just wants to flip you over. So if you're not used to it, and it's got a narrow undercarriage as well, if you're not used to it, you could just crash. So in the first couple of months of 1944, they lose something like 2,400 aircraft in the air and pilots, and about 3,400 are accidents.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
It's training and resources and supply. And the Second World War, more than any other conflict, is a war of numbers. There are... differences, the decisions that generals can make. There are moments where particular brilliance and bravery can seize the day, take the bridge, hold the enemy at bay or whatever.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
But ultimately, you're talking about differences which might make a month's difference, six months difference, maybe even several years difference. But ultimately, there was a certain point in the Second World War where the outcome is absolutely inevitable because The guys that lose can't compete with the numbers that the guys are going to win at.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
Against the Allies. It's efficiency, really. So I was kind of, you know, I was thinking, let's take the example of the Sherman tank, for example, the mainstay of the Western Allied forces and a fair number of them sent to the Soviet Union as well, for that matter. I think you've said it doesn't get the respect it deserves, maybe. It doesn't get the respect it deserves.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
So the Sherman tank, the 75-millimeter main battle gun, which has a medium velocity, can fire a shell around kind of 2,000 feet per second compared to the notorious, infamous German 88-millimeter, which can fire at kind of third fast again, like 3,000 feet per second. But on paper, a Tiger tank coming around the corner and a Sherman tank coming around the corner, it should be no match at all.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
Tiger tank is 58 tons, looks scary, is scary. It's got a massive gun, got really thick armor. Sherman tank doesn't have as thick armor. It doesn't have a gun that's as big. It should be an absolute walkover.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
And yet at about 5.30 PM on Monday, the 26th of June, 1944, a Sherman tank came around the corner of a road called a Rue Massieu, a little village called Fontenay-le-Pesnal in Normandy, came face to face with a tiger tank and won. How does this happen? Well, I'll tell you how it happened, because the commander of the Sherman tank was experienced, had one up the spout.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
So what I mean by that is he had an armor piercing round already in the breach. Soon as he saw the Tiger tank, he just said fire. That armor piercing round did not penetrate the Tiger tank. It was never going to. But what it did do is it hit the gun mantlet, which is a bit of reinforced steel that you have just as the barrel is entering the turret.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
And that caused spalling, which is the little shards of little bits of molten metal, which then hit the driver of the Tiger tank in the head. And he was screaming, you know, gotten him or whatever. And, you know, we couldn't really see. The moment they got hit, the commander of the Tiger tank retreated into the turret of the Tiger. The moment you retreat into a turret, you can't see.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
You can see because you've got periscopes, but your visibility is nothing like as good as it is when you've got your head above the turret. Immediately after that, the armor-piercing round from the Sherman tank was repeated by a number of high-explosive rounds, which are rounds which detonate, have a little minor charge. Then there's a second charge, which creates lots of smoke.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
And in moments, in the first 30 seconds, 10 rounds from that Sherman tank had hit the Tiger tank before the Tiger tank had unleashed a single round itself. And... The crew then surrendered. So you didn't need to destroy the Tiger tank. You just need to stop it operating. If it hasn't got a crew, it's just a chunk of metal that's inoperable. So that's all you need to do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
And what that tells you is that experience counts. Training counts. The agility of the Sherman tank also counts. It's a smaller shelf, therefore it's easier to manhandle, which means you can put more in a breech quicker. There's features on a Sherman tank, like it's the first tank to have a gun-stabilizing gyro, which means it's more effective on the move.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
There's also an override switch on the underside of the turret so that the commander, if he just sees something out of the corner of his eye, can immediately start moving the turret before the gunner, who is down in the belly of the turret, can react. There's many different facts of it. But the main fact of all is of 1,347 tigers built, there were 49,000 Shermans.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
So that means there's 36 Shermans to every single tiger.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
I don't know what the other pros I mean I guess yeah the 88mm and all the rest of it you know it's pretty fearsome but there are pragmatic problems the big problem is the Germans are incapable of mass production on a scale that
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
Americans could do frankly even the British could do I mean they're just they're just not in that league the reason they're not in that league is because they're in the middle of Europe they don't have access to the world's oceans they don't have a merchant fleet they can't get this stuff it hasn't gone terribly well in the Soviet Union you know they can't process it and they're being bombed 24 hours a day and so all their factories are you know having to split them all up and that is inherently inefficient because you know then having to kind of move different parts around and you know you're then having the whole process of having to travel from one place to another to get stuff you
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
Well, they're not just going to do that. They're also going to starve lots and lots of Soviet individuals to death by the hunger plan, for example, which is planned really very casually. This is not SS units or anything like this. This is the Wehrmacht. This is the economic division of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, the German combined general staff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
you haven't got much fuel. So the consequence of that is that what you do is you think, okay, we can't mass produce, so let's make really brilliant tanks. But, They've lost sight of what really brilliant is. You know, really brilliant to their eyes is big, scary, big gun, lots of armor. But actually, what conflict in World War II shows you is that you need more than that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
You need ease of maintenance. You need reliability. And the problem with having the bigger the tank... the more complex the maintenance equipment is. You know, you need a bigger hoist, which then means you need a bigger truck, which then uses more fuel. So for example, the Tiger tank is so big that it doesn't fit on the loading gauge of the European railway system.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
So they have to have different tracks to roll onto the wagons that will then transport them from A to B, you know, take them from West Germany to Normandy, then you have to take them off, then you have to take off the tracks, put on combat tracks, then move them into battle and hope that they don't break down. The problem is when you have, you start the war,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
is not very automotive and you've only got 47 people for every motorized vehicle in Germany compared to three in the United States or eight in France is that you've got lots of people who don't know how to drive. It also means you haven't got lots of garages and mechanics and gas stations and so on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
And so you're then creating an incredibly complex beast, but you want that complex thing to be as simple as you possibly can be. And that's the beauty of the Sherman tank. All those guys in America, they're used to driving stick cars. There's three people for every automobile, and that includes the old and children. So almost every young man knows how to drive.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
And when you get into a Sherman tank, it's got a clutch, it's got a throttle, the brakes are the steering mechanism. The clutch is where you would expect the clutch to be. It's got a manual shift. You put your foot on the clutch and you shove it into second gear and off you go, or reverse or whatever. And it literally couldn't be easier.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
Anyone who could drive a stick car could drive a Sherman tank. Seriously. Not everyone can drive a Tiger tank. It's incredibly complex. Really, really is. And that comes with a whole host of problems. And of course, you don't have the numbers. You don't have the numbers. You know, you've got 1,347 of them. You've got 492 King Tigers, which are even bigger.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
And, you know, at a time where you are really short of fuel, you're really short of absolutely everything. And those shells are huge, and they're harder to manhandle. And weird little things that the Germans do, you know, for all their design genius, the loader is always on the right-hand side. Now, in the 1920s and 19-teens and 30s, children were taught to be right-handed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
You weren't allowed to be left-handed. So you were right-handed. So you want to be on the left-hand side of the gun, so you can take the shell from your right and swivel it into the breech from your right side. But the loader in a Yank Panther or a Panther or a Tiger is always on the right-hand side of the bridge, which is ergonomically makes no sense whatsoever. Why do they do this?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
I've never found an answer to this. But, you know, so there's all these little things. And as a soldier coming up against, you know, you're an American GI and you're coming up against a Tiger tank. You don't care about the fact that it's difficult to maintain or the problems involved of trying to get it to the battlefield. All you care about is this monster coming in front of you.