Transcript for James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles | Lex Fridman Podcast #470

This is a transcript of Lex Fridman Podcast #470 with James Holland. The timestamps in the transcript are clickable links that take you directly to that point in the main video. Please note that the transcript is human generated, and may have errors. Here are some useful links:

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James Holland (00:00:00) And you see that manifest itself on D-Day, 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 a 24-hour period. It is phenomenal. It is absolutely phenomenal.

Introduction

Lex Fridman (00:00:27) The following is a conversation with James Holland, a historian specializing in World War II, who has written a lot of amazing books on the subject, especially covering the Western front, often providing fascinating details at multiple levels of analysis, including strategic, operational, tactical, technological, and of course the human side, the personal accounts from the war.
(00:00:51) He also co-hosts a great podcast on World War II, called We Have Ways of Making You Talk. This is the Lex Fridman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description, or at lex fridman.com/sponsors. And now, dear friends, here’s James Holland.

World War II

Lex Fridman (00:01:13) In Volume One of the War in the West, your book series on World War II, you write, “The Second World War witnessed the deaths of more than 60 million people, from over 60 different countries. Entire cities were laid waste, national borders were redrawn, and many millions more people found themselves displaced. Over the past couple of decades, many of those living in the Middle East, or parts of Africa and the Balkans, Afghanistan, and even the United States, may feel justifiably that these troubled times have already proved the most traumatic in their recent past. Yet globally, the Second World War was and remains the single biggest catastrophe of modern history. In terms of human drama, it is unrivaled. No other war has affected so many lives, in such a large number of countries.”
(00:02:11) So what to you makes World War II the biggest catastrophe in human drama in modern history, and maybe from a historian perspective, the most fascinating subject to study?
James Holland (00:02:22) 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 that global nature of it.
(00:02:44) And I just think, 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, “Gosh, if I’d been 20 years old, how would I have dealt with it? Would I have been in the Army? Would I have been in the Air Force? Would I have been on a Royal Navy destroyer? Or how would I have coped with it? And how would I have dealt with that separation?”
(00:03:08) 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, and then, he was shot in the neck in Italy, eventually got home.
(00:03:27) And 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, so …
Lex Fridman (00:03:49) What was his justification for that, for joining right back?
James Holland (00:03:52) 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, 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.
(00:04:14) But he decided to rejoin, couldn’t go back to the Third Royal Tank Regiment, so he went back to a different unit. It went from, kind of the Italian campaign, to the European theater. Didn’t see so much action at the end, but a lot of British troops, if you were in a certain division at a certain time, you know, ended up passing very close to Belsen, and you suddenly realize, “Okay, this was the right thing to do. We did have to get rid of Nazism. We did have to do this, because this is the consequence. It’s not just the oppression, it’s not just the secret police. It’s not 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.
(00:04:55) And I’ve always sort of, I think a lot about Sam. I mean, he’s no longer with us, but he was one of the first people that I interviewed, and I interviewed him at great length. And I know you like a long interview, Lex, and I totally, totally get that. Because when you have a long interview, you really start getting to the nuts and bolts of it.
(00:05:14) One of the frustrations, for me, when I’m looking at oral histories of Second World War vets is usually, they’re kind of, they’re put on YouTube, or they’re put on a museum website. They’re 30 minutes, an hour, if you’re lucky, and you’re just scratching the surface. You never really get to know it, and you feel that they’re just repeating kind of stuff they’ve read in books themselves after the war, and stuff.
(00:05:36) I always leave, kind of 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 (00:05:44) So tank man. What was maybe the most epic, the most intense, or the most interesting story that he told you?
James Holland (00:05:53) 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, the post would arrive intermittently. There was no kind of regular post, 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.
(00:06:18) But he said there was this guy in his tank, a member of a different tank troop. He was a good friend of his in the same squadron. You had British half squadrons for their armor, which is,Americans would have a company.
Lex Fridman (00:06:32) I should say that in your book, one of the wonderful things you do is you use the correct term in the language for the particular army involved, whether it’s the German or the British or the American.
James Holland (00:06:42) Well, that’s not to be pretentious. That’s really just 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.
(00:06:58) So one of the things about writing in the vernacular German, or in the American spelling, or more, rather than our mauer, as we Brits would spell it, is it just immediately tells the reader, “Okay, this is American, yeah, okay, I’ve got that. Or, this is German, I’ve got that, or Italian, or whatever it might be.”
(00:07:17) 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, 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 whether his daughter had got to school or something, won the swimming contest, or whatever it was.” The sort of details of this day to day kind of banal life was just absolute catnip to these guys. They absolutely loved it.
(00:07:49) And then, the letter arrived, the Dear John letter saying, “Sorry, I’ve 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 sense of this sort of continuity of home, this sort of foundation of his life back at home.
(00:08:12) Sam said he could see he was in a really, really bad way, and he thought, “He’s going to do something stupid.” And he went up to him, and he said, “Look, I know it’s bad, and I know it’s terrible, and I know you’re absolutely devastated, but you’ve got your mates here, just don’t do anything silly. Maybe when it’s all over, you can patch things up or sort things out.” And he said, “You’ve got to understand it from her point of view. It’s a long way. You haven’t seen you for two years,” this kind of stuff, “so just don’t do anything rash.” And of course, the next engagement, two days later, he was killed. And he said it was just a kind of, he just knew that was going to happen. So it was a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy.
(00:08:49) That’s something I’ve never forgotten, that story, and I just thought, “It’s about human drama, that’s the truth of it,” and how people react to this totally alien situation. For the most part, the Second World War is fought by ordinary everyday people doing extraordinary things.
(00:09:10) And I think that’s something that’s so fascinating. I think, instinctively, I’m quite slapdash, I think. So I think I would’ve bought it literally. I don’t think it would have ended well for me. I’m just a bit careless.
Lex Fridman (00:09:25) Yeah, I think I also have an element in me, where I can believe in the idea of nation, and fight for a nation, especially when the conflict is as grand.
James Holland (00:09:38) There are things worse than death.
Lex Fridman (00:09:39) Yes, as the propaganda would explain very clearly, but also in reality, yes. So a nation, France, Britain, was maybe facing the prospect of being essentially enslaved. The Soviet Union was facing the prospect of being enslaved, literally.
(00:09:58) I mean, it was very, very clearly stated what they’re going to do. They’re going to repopulate the land with Germanic people, so …
James Holland (00:10:06) 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, and not by the, this is not SS units or anything like this.
(00:10:21) This is the Wehrmacht, this is the economic division of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, the German combined general staff. General Georg Thomas comes up, and Hermann Backe, who’s the, kind of Minister for Food. They come up, “What are we going to do? We haven’t got enough food,” largely because German farming is inefficient, and they think, “Well, this is part of Lebensraum. We’ll go in and we’ll take the food.”
(00:10:50) And there’s been this colossal urbanization of the Soviet Union since the revolution in 1917. “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.

Lebensraum and Hitler ideology

Lex Fridman (00:11:11) So let’s talk about the Hunger Plan. How important was the Hunger Plan and Lebensraum to Nazi ideology, and to the whole Nazi war machine?
James Holland (00:11:20) 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 that somehow dovetail. They don’t, obviously.
(00:11:44) And the whole ideology is to crush this. 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 a 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.
(00:12:27) And one of the things about Hitler 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 is no, there’s no middle ground, there’s no gray area. It’s just one or the other. And that’s how, that’s his worldview.
(00:12:45) 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. But if we do prevail, oh, what an amazing world it’s going to be.”
(00:13:17) So he starts with this. Every speech he does, always starts with the same way, always starts from a kind of negative, and always ends with an incredible, positive, this 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. I mean, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen pictures of him. He’s almost, he wants to grab the air and clutch it to him.
(00:13:42) You can see 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, by today’s standards, you would just think, “What a load of absolute wibble,” I mean, just total nonsense.
(00:14:03) But you have to 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, yeah, to go back to your original point, Lebensraum is absolutely part of it. 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.
(00:14:32) Germany’s 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 landmass of Europe, and into Asia, that’s going to be us. 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.
(00:14:53) 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.
(00:15:06) 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, I’ve read it, that historians will go, “If only Hitler had realized that the Ukrainians have been quite happy to kind of fight on his side, if only he’d actually brought some of these Jewish scientists into the Nazi fold, then Germany might have prevailed in World War II.”
(00:15:35) And you kind of think, “Well, you’re missing the entire point. That’s just never going to happen, because this is an ideological war.”
Lex Fridman (00:15:41) Yeah, this is not a pragmatic rational leader.
James Holland (00:15:46) No.
Lex Fridman (00:15:46) I mean part of his effectiveness, we should say, is probably the singular belief in this ideology. There’s pros and cons. For an effective military machine, probably having that singular focus is effective.
James Holland (00:16:03) 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 …
Lex Fridman (00:16:17) Yeah, ethical.
James Holland (00:16:19) Reasonable point of view, you’re opening yourselves up for trouble. I mean, this is a problem he has with Barbarossa. They realize very early on, in 1941, when they’re war gaming this whole operation, that it’s not going to work.
(00:16:34) So there’s people like General Paulus, who’s on the staff at the time. He’s in charge of war gaming this, and he goes, “This isn’t going to work.” And Keitel, who is the chief of the OKW, goes, “No, no, no, no, no. Go back and make it work.” He goes, “Okay.” So he comes back with a plan that does work, but it’s bogus. I mean, it doesn’t work, because they don’t have. They don’t have enough motorization.
(00:17:04) They go into Barbarossa with 2,000 different types of vehicle. Every single one of those vehicles has to have different distributor caps, and different leads, and plugs, and all sorts of different parts.
(00:17:19) The interoperability of the German mechanized arm is super inefficient. So you’ve got huge problems, because they kind of think, “Well, we took France in 1940, and that’s one of the most modern countries in the world, with one of the greatest armies and armed forces in the world, and we did that in six weeks.” So, Soviet Union, look, they struggled against Finland, for goodness sake. I mean, how hard can it be?
(00:17:45) But what you’re failing to understand is that 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 and 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.
(00:18:10) I mean, it is largely down to incompetence of the Red Army and the Soviet leadership in the summer of 1941 that they get as far as they do. I mean, Barbarossa should never have come close to being a victory.

Operation Barbarossa

Lex Fridman (00:18:24) Let’s talk through it. So, Operation Barbarossa that you’re mentioning, and we’ll go back-
James Holland (00:18:28) Yeah, we’ve jupmed straight into ’41.
Lex Fridman (00:18:29) … to ’39 and ’40, straight into it.
James Holland (00:18:31) I’ve eaten off two years of war.
Lex Fridman (00:18:33) So this is June 1941, Operation Barbarossa, when Hitler invades the Soviet Union with, I think, the largest invading force in history, up to that point.
James Holland (00:18:45) Collectively, yeah.
Lex Fridman (00:18:46) And there’s three prongs, Army Group North, Army Group Center, Army Group South. North is going to Leningrad. Center is going, it’s the strongest group, directly towards Moscow, and South is going and targeting Ukraine and the Caucasus.
(00:19:02) So, can you linger on that on the details of this plan? What was the thinking? What was the strategy? What was the tactics? What was the logistics? There’s so many things to say, but one of them is to say that you often emphasize the importance of three ways to analyze military conflict, of the strategic, the operational and tactical. And the operational is often not given enough time attention, and it’s the logistics that make the war machine really work successfully, or fail.
James Holland (00:19:35) 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.
(00:19:49) 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.
(00:19:59) The tactical side of things is, that’s the coalface of war. That’s the attritional bit. That’s the following in his Spitfire, the tank crew, the soldier in his foxhole, it’s the actual kinetic fighting bit.
(00:20:11) 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. 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.
(00:20:44) So Britain, for example, is an island nation. Its priority is the Royal Navy, which is why the Royal Navy is known as the senior service. And 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.
(00:21:13) America, it’s got the Pacific Ocean, it’s got the Atlantic Ocean, it’s got two seaboards. It has the second-largest navy in the world, but a tiny army. I mean, the US Army in September 1939 is the nineteen1h largest in the world, sandwiched between Portugal and Uruguay. And it’s just incredible. It’s 189,000 strong, which might seem reasonably large by today’s standards, but is absolutely tiny by 1939 standards. Whereas, Germany’s got an army of three and a half million in 1939. So these are big, big, big differences.
(00:21:48) But America’s coming at it from a different perspective, Britain’s coming apart, from a different perspective. Britain’s empire is all about, it’s a shipping, it’s a seaborne empire.
(00:21:59) Whereas, there’s also another point, which is having large armies is actually inherently impractical and inefficient, because the larger the army, the more people you’ve got to feed, the more 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.
(00:22:21) So there’s an argument saying, actually, it’s really not a very good way of doing things. So very much, the British way, and subsequently, the United States way, and the way of Britain’s dominions and empire, is to use steel, not our flesh, as a principle. Because the idea is that you use technology, mechanization, modernity, global reach, to do a lot of your hard yards. That’s the basic principle behind the strategic air campaign.
(00:22:48) 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. 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 Eighth Air Force, flying out of East England, bombing the industrial complex of Germany, or whatever it might be.
(00:23:17) So it’s important to understand that when you compare, you have to have in the back of your mind that 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 want to get inside the head of your enemy, and he’s sort of guilty of not doing that.
(00:23:41) So when you’re talking about Operation Barbarossa, to go back to your original question, Lex, 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.
(00:24:02) And the problem that the Germans have is yes, they’ve got their three million men on the front, and they’ve got their kind of 3,000 aircraft, and all the rest of it. But actually, what you need to do is break it down.
(00:24:15) And who is doing the hard yards of that? The way that the German war machine works is that the machine bit is only the spearhead. 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.
(00:24:38) And this is the fatal flaw of the German armed forces 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 the 100-odd that are involved in the initial attack. Well, 17, a Panzer division is not a division full of Panzers, tanks.
(00:25:02) It is a combined arms motorized outfit. So, 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. Of course, it is tanks as well, Panzers. But those are a really, really small proportion of, 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 are going to take casualties. Not only that, you’re not going to just take battlefield casualties, you’re also going to have mechanical casualties, because of the huge spaces involved. You just simply can’t function.
(00:25:53) 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.
(00:26:09) And Smolensk falls on the 15th of July, in just less than four weeks. It’s just incredible. Three and a half weeks, Smolensk has gone, they’ve done, 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 thrust up into the Baltic. It’s all going swimmingly well.
(00:26:29) But then, the next several months, they barely go a hundred miles, and that’s because they’re running out of steam. The 16th Panzer division, for example, by the time it’s taken Smolensk, involved in taking Smolensk on the 15th of July, 1941, the following day, it’s got 16 tanks left, 16 out of should have 180. So it’s just being attrited. 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.
(00:27:03) 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 loading gauge is slightly wider. So every single mile, every yard, every foot, every meter of the capturing of Russian railway has to be moved a couple of inches to the left, to make it fit the German Kriegslok, in the standard train of locomotive, of the Reichsbahn. Just imagine what that’s like.
(00:27:31) 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 Kriegsloks are smaller.
(00:27:43) So they have to be re-watered more often, and re-coaled more often. 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 (00:27:57) I love the logistical details of all of this, because yes, that’s a huge component of this, especially when you’re covering that much territory. But there is a notion that if Hitler didn’t stop Army Group Center, it could have pushed all the way to Moscow. It was only maybe a hundred miles away from Moscow. Is that a possibility?
(00:28:20) Because it had so much success in the early days, pushing forward. Do you think it’s possible that if Hitler, as we mentioned from a military blunder perspective, didn’t make that blunder, that they could have defeated the Soviet Union, right there and then?
James Holland (00:28:38) Well, my own view is that they should never have got close. The Red Army has plenty of men to be able to see off anything that the Germans can do. The capture of Kyiv, for example, in September 1941, was a catastrophe for the Soviet Union, and should never have happened.
(00:28:56) I mean, Zhukov is saying to Stalin, ” We’ve got to pull back across the Dnieper.” So I was going, “No, you can’t possibly do that. You can’t abandon Kyiv. It’s the third city in the Soviet Union. You just can’t, no way. No, absolutely not.” And he goes, “Well, 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.
(00:29:22) Obviously, as we know, Zhukov gets rehabilitated in pretty quick order, and Stalin does learn very quickly, thereafter, to learn the lessons. But the opening phase of Barbarossa has been a catastrophe. 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, that’s another kind of 700,000 men put in the bag. I mean, that’s just staggering numbers. But yeah, I mean, there’s so many things wrong with the Barbarossa plan, too much of it. It’s just such a vast area. I mean, you’re talking about, kind of, 2,500 miles or something, of frontage.
(00:30:13) Maybe if you 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 much more narrow front of, let’s say, 400 miles, rather than 1,200, then they might have just sort of burnt away straight through to Moscow.
Lex Fridman (00:30:32) They really caught the Red Army unprepared.
James Holland (00:30:36) Yeah.
Lex Fridman (00:30:36) Is there something to be said about the strategic genius of that, or was it just luck?
James Holland (00:30:46) No, I don’t think so. I mean, what’s happened is, you’ve had the Soviet purges of the second half of the 1930s, where they have executed or imprisoned 22,500 officers, of which, three out of five marshals, God knows how many army commanders, et cetera, et cetera. So you’ve completely decapitated the Red Army, in terms of its command structure.
Lex Fridman (00:31:12) So before that, would it be fair to say it was one of, if not the greatest army in the world?
James Holland (00:31:18) Well, there was a lot of experience. There’s a lot of experience there, that’s for sure.
Lex Fridman (00:31:21) But also, technology material, the size of the army and the number of people that are mobilized?
James Holland (00:31:28) Yes. Yeah, and they’re the first people to adapt, 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.
(00:31:42) And someone who looks, on paper, like a half decent peacetime commander might not be a very good wartime commander. They’re different disciplines and different skills, and you don’t know that until you’re tested. It’s very hard to kind of judge. And of course, Stalin is existing in a vacuum of paranoia and suspicion all the time, which is unhelpful, when you’re trying to develop a strong armed forces.
(00:32:06) So they go into Finland, in back end of 1939, and they get really badly hammered. They do take about 50, they get the Karelia Peninsula, and they do take some ground, but at huge cost. I mean, the casualties are five times as bad as those of the Finns, and it’s a humiliation.
(00:32:25) So Hitler sees that, and thinks, “Oh, okay, they’re not up to much cop.” Then Hitler loses the Battle of Britain, 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.
(00:32:43) “We’ve got to avoid that, but I’ve got to get rid of Britain. And Britain hasn’t come out of the fight. Britain is still fighting in the backend 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. We’re not 100% ready ourselves, but let’s hurry the whole thing forward.”
(00:33:00) Because originally, he’d been thinking of planning an operation in 1943 or 1944. So the idea is, you take Poland out, you take out France and 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 on the other side of the Atlantic.
(00:33:17) That then gives him, buys him the time, to kind of rebuild up his strength for the all-out thrust on the Soviet Union. The failure to subdue Britain in 1940 changes all those plans and makes him think, “Actually, I’m going to go in early.”
(00:33:30) And he’s also been kind of, he’s hoisted by his own petard, because he starts to believe his own genius. Everyone told him that he wouldn’t be able to beat France and the Low Countries. Everyone told him that it wouldn’t work out when he went into Poland, everyone was really nervous about it. “Well, go hang you, cautious, awful aristocratic Prussian generals. 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.
(00:33:59) And of course, this is a problem. He’s surrounded by sycophants, and people who are constantly telling him that he’s this incredible genius. So he starts to believe it, and he thinks everything is possible.
(00:34:07) And he’s very much into this idea of the will of the German people, “This is our destiny, and I have a will.” As I say earlier on, it’s the thousand-year Reich, or Armageddon, “but momentum is with us, and we need to strike it, and only by gambling, only by being bold will the Germans prevail,” and all this kind of nonsense. And so that’s why he goes into Soviet Union in June 1941, rather than a couple of, or even three years later.
Lex Fridman (00:34:33) Yeah. He really hated the Prussian generals, huh?
James Holland (00:34:35) Yeah, he hated them.

Hitler vs Europe

Lex Fridman (00:34:36) Is there a case to be made that there, he was indeed, at times a military genius?
James Holland (00:34:42) 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.
(00:34:50) The concept is from Manstein’s, and the execution is Guderian’s, Heinz Guderian. Heinz Guderian is the pioneer of the Panzer force, of the Panzer thrust, this …
James Holland (00:35:00) … pioneer of the Panzer force, the Panzer thrust, this idea of the ultra mechanized combined arms, Panzer arm spearhead doing this kind of lightning fast thrust. It’s not Hitler’s idea. He adopts it and takes it as his own, because he’s the führer. He can do what he likes, but it isn’t his. 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, Halder is just thinking, “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, and know that France has got double the number of artillery pieces. It’s got parity in terms of air force. And 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% brilliance of the Germans and their operational art in that particular instance, and 50% French failure really, and incompetence.
Lex Fridman (00:36:05) I mean, there is a kind of genius to be able to see, and take advantage, and set up the world stage in such a way that you have the appeasement from France and Britain, keep the United States out of it, just set up the world stage where you could just plow through everybody with very little resistance. I mean, there is a kind of-
James Holland (00:36:29) Well, yes, if it works.
Lex Fridman (00:36:30) … geopolitical genius.
James Holland (00:36:32) If it works.
Lex Fridman (00:36:32) Right.
James Holland (00:36:32) But it doesn’t. That’s a problem. I mean, he goes into Poland on the assumption that Britain and France will not declare war. He is not prepared for Britain and France declaring war on Germany.
Lex Fridman (00:36:45) Right.
James Holland (00:36:45) He thinks they won’t.
Lex Fridman (00:36:46) That’s right. So miscalculation, blunder. But then France does, right? And then France does not successfully do anything with this incredible army that it has.
James Holland (00:37:01) 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 commanders are very old. Most of them are first World War veterans, whether, I mean, Weygand, Gamelin, General Georges, these people, they’re all well into their 60s. General Georges is the youngest army commander and he’s 60. It’s too old to be an army commander. You need to be in your late 40s, early 50s. And they’re too just consumed by conservatism and the old ways. And what they assume is that any future war will be much like the first World War. It’ll be attritional, long and drawn out, but static. But actually they’re right on two parts of it. 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 (00:38:04) Here’s my question. I think you’re being too nice on France, here. So when Germany invaded Poland, correct me if I’m wrong, but it feels like France could have just went straight to Berlin.
James Holland (00:38:18) Yeah, they absolutely could have.
Lex Fridman (00:38:21) And I know you said, “It’s very top-heavy,” and you’re saying all of these things, but they literally did basically nothing.
James Holland (00:38:28) Yeah, they were appalling.
Lex Fridman (00:38:32) And I think a part of that, and I think you described this well, maybe you could speak to that, is the insanity that is Hitler creating the psychological, with the propaganda, creating this feeling that there’s this Nazi force that’s unstoppable, so France just didn’t want to step into that. Maybe there were legitimately, I hesitate to say these words, but scared of war.
James Holland (00:39:00) A hundred percent they are, because France has been totally traumatized by the first World War.
Lex Fridman (00:39:00) By World War.
James Holland (00:39:06) 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. So that makes them risk averse. 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, really very extreme coalition governments from the sort of drawn from the left and the right as well as the center.
(00:39:53) And 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. It’s amazing that the Maginot Line has even agreed, this incredibly strong defensive position down the western side of France border with Germany, which is kind of largely impregnable. But the problem is the bit that’s not impregnable, which is the hinge where the Maginot Line ends, and it sort of basically starts turning towards in a northerly direction and the border with Belgium.
(00:40:24) And what they should have done is built border defenses all along the northern coast of Belgium, because Belgium refused to allow any allied troops into its territory. It was neutral. And France should have said, “Okay, fine. Well, then we’ll defend. We’re not going to come to your rescue if you get invaded. That’s the payoff. And the consequence of that, we are going to stop [inaudible 00:40:50] 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.
(00:41:05) Germany is so weakened by the invasion of Poland. There is literally nothing left. The back door into Western Germany is completely open. And so they do what they call the Saar offensive, but it’s not. It’s a kind of reconnaissance in force where they go across the border, pick their noses for a few days, and then trundle back again. And it’s embarrassing. And 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. There is this, the commanders at the very top of the French regime are complacent. They haven’t bought into modern ways. They haven’t looked at how contemporary technology could help them.
(00:42:02) I mean, it is absurd, for example, that there isn’t a single radio in the Chateau de Vincennes, which, it’s the headquarters of the commander in chief of the French armed forces to General Maurice Gamelin. I mean, it’s just unbelievable. But that is the case. 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. It has a fantastic transportation system. Railway network is superb. There are eight people for every motorized vehicle in France, which is way above Germany, which is in 1949, that figure is 47, for example.
Lex Fridman (00:42:48) What?
James Holland (00:42:48) It’s 106 in Italy.
Lex Fridman (00:42:49) So France is very mechanized, like-
James Holland (00:42:51) Very mechanized. So come on, guys, pull your finger out, get it together. And they just don’t. They’re incredibly slow and cumbersome. And what they think is what will happen is the Germans won’t think of going, 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 eastern border of France 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 they don’t have a means of moving fast.
(00:43:37) And their communication systems are dreadful, absolutely dreadful. They’re dependent on conventional telephone lines, which dive bombers and whatever are just absolutely wrecking. Suddenly the streets are clogged with refugees and people can’t move. So then telephone lines are down, there’s no radios, so that you’re then dependent on sending dispatch riders on little motorbikes. General Maurice Gamelin sends out a dispatch rider at six o’clock in the morning. By 12 o’clock he hasn’t come back, so you then send another one. Finally, the answer comes back, 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. 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.
(00:44:30) So the 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 move them, destroy them in isolation. 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 that they are the kings of messaging. They don’t have X, don’t have social media, but they do have new technology. 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, than Germany in 1939.
(00:45:28) 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 an unprecedented number. That is only beaten by United States and only just. So it is greater than any 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 cafés and bars. And the same stuff, the Nazi state controls the radio airwaves as it does the movies, as it does 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.
(00:46:23) 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. 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 a genius.” And that is just repeated over, and over, and over, and over again. And for all the modernity of the world in which we live in today, most people believe what they’re told repeatedly.
Lex Fridman (00:47:07) Yeah.
James Holland (00:47:07) They still do. If you just repeat, repeat, repeat over and over again, people will believe it. If you are a diehard Trump supporter, you want to believe that, you’ll believe everything he says. If you are a diehard Bernie Sanders man, you’re from the left. You’ll believe everything he says because it’s reinforcing what you already want to believe.
Lex Fridman (00:47:30) But the scary thing is radio is the technology of the day. The technology of the day today, which is a terrifying one for me, is I would say AI on social media. So bots. You can have basically bot farms, which I assume is used by Ukraine, by Russia, by US. I would love to read the history written about this era about the information wars, who has the biggest bot farms, who has-
James Holland (00:47:30) Yeah, that’s-
Lex Fridman (00:48:00) … the biggest propaganda machines? And when I say bot, I mean both automated AI bots and humans operating large number of smartphones with SIM cards that are just able to boost messages enough to where they become viral, and then real humans with real opinions get excited also. It’s like this vicious cycle. So if you support your nation, all you need is a little boost. And then everybody gets real excited. And then now you’re chanting, and now you’re in this mass hysteria.
James Holland (00:48:33) Right.
Lex Fridman (00:48:33) And now it’s the 1984 Two Minutes of Hate. And the message is clear. I mean, that’s what propaganda does is it really-
James Holland (00:48:40) Well-
Lex Fridman (00:48:40) … clarifies the mind.
James Holland (00:48:42) And 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. And if you’re Germans, and you’ve been through hyperinflation in the early 1920s, you’ve been through the humiliation of Versailles Treaty, which was terrible error, in retrospect.
(00:49:16) And you’ve been through, then having got through that, you’ve emerged into a democratic Weimar Republic, which is based on manufacturing. Germany’s traditional genius 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.
(00:49:51) 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.” I was telling you earlier on about Hitler’s speeches, starting with the dark, starting dark and ending in hope, and light, and the sunlit uplands, that’s what you’re getting. You’re suddenly getting this vision of hope. This is sort of, “My God. Actually, this is really working. Okay, so I’m not sure that I particularly buy into the kind of anti-Semitic thing, but 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.” And then this is a genius about the radios, for example. So they have the German receiver to start off with, the [German 00:50:38] and then they have the [German 00:50:41], which is the German little receiver, little radio. These are genius. This is as outrageous as the arrival of the iPod. I mean, remember that? Suddenly you don’t have to have a Sony Walkman anymore. You can have something really, really small and miniature, and listen to thousands, of thousands, of thousands of songs all at once. What an amazing thing.
(00:50:58) And the [German 00:51:00] 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. And no one else has said 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. And you can also.
(00:51:30) And this is the whole point about the Hitler youth as well. 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 opened to suggestion. So you get the youth, you hang on, you get them. 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, overhauling the humiliations of the first World War, were overcoming the stab in the back that happened in 1918, et cetera, et cetera. And as a young 16, 17-year-old German, you’re thinking, “Yeah, I want a piece of that. And hey, guess what? They’ve got really cool uniforms, and come and join the SS, and get the throw line. What’s not to like?” You can see why it’s so clever. And what’s so interesting is propaganda today is still using those tenets that Goebbels was using back in the 1930s.
(00:52:34) And this is why I say that 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 behaviour 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, the current system doesn’t work. What’s the alternative?” So in the case of now, we in the West, first of all, we’ve faced the financial crisis of 2008. Then we’ve had the double whammy of COVID. And that has been incredibly unsettling. And so we’re now in a situation of political turmoil. And whether you are pro-Trump or anti-Trump, what he’s offering is something completely different. And 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 mouth words that politicians always use, where you can’t trust anyone. I’m just going to tell you as it is.”
(00:53:36) And obviously people respond to that. You can understand why that has an appeal. And if the country already feels broken, and here’s someone who is going to be a disruptor, and going to change 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 (00:53:55) And especially one of the countries in the economic crisis like Germany was, I think you’ve written that the Treaty of Versailles created Hitler and the Wall Street crash and the Great Depression brought him to power.
James Holland (00:53:55) Yes.
Lex Fridman (00:54:11) And of course, the propaganda machine that you describe is the thing that got everybody else in Germany on board.
James Holland (00:54:18) Yep. It’s amazing, 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 (00:54:37) So it’s very possible he wouldn’t have come to power.
James Holland (00:54:40) 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. The Nazi vote is down from where it was the previous summer, but this time they go, “Okay, Hitler can be chancellor, but we’ll manipulate him.” How wrong they were. 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 führer, him and he gets rid of, he has, actually, Enabling act, which is where all other political parties are disbanded, and suddenly you’ve got a totalitarian state, just like that.
Lex Fridman (00:55:31) I think there’s a lesson there. There’s many lessons there, but one of them is don’t let an extremist into government and assume you can control them.
James Holland (00:55:42) Yes, the arrogance of the existing politicians, you just completely screwed it up.
Lex Fridman (00:55:46) I mean, there is a real power to an extremist. There’s a person who sees the world in black and white can really gain the attention and the support of the populace.
James Holland (00:56:03) Yes.
Lex Fridman (00:56:04) Especially when there’s a resentment about like Treaty of Versailles, when there’s economic hardship, and if there’s effective, modern technology that allows you to do propaganda and sell the message. There’s something really compelling about the black and white message.

Joseph Goebbels

James Holland (00:56:20) 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 it is the Beer 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. 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 things that they consider to be positive out of the communist state, and applying those to the Nazis.
(00:57:16) 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, Joseph Goebbels, he’s a not very successful 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 sort of quasi-religious messiah, thinks it’s Hitler, then discovers that Hitler is 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 goes to him, makes a real special effort.
(00:58:17) “Come on, come to dinner. I think you’re great,” All this kind of stuff. Wins it about over. And Goebbels has this complete vault fast, discards his earlier kind of, “Hitler’s right, I was wrong. Hitler is the kind of messiah figure that I want to follow. I want to follow the hero leader.” And they come aboard and they absolutely work. And Hitler completely wins out of all dissenters within what had been the German Workers party, drop, 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. I just don’t think it’s military, but he does have some genius. And a question about is the simplicity of message.
(00:59:06) What he’s doing, it’s that 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. This is how 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 its 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 [German 00:59:44] and [German 00:59:48]. There’s no direct English translation of [German 00:59:51] or indeed [German 00:59:52], but in its most basic form, it’s communities, it’s people, community or front veteran’s community.
(01:00:01) So the [German 01:00:02] is, “We are the guys. We are bonded because we were in the trenches. We were in the first World War. 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 Bolshevik plot. We were stabbed in the back.”
(01:00:26) The myth of the stabbing in the back is very, very strong. So, “We’re bound, we’re bonded by our experiences 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, by the elites.” So that’s [German 01:00:47]. [German 01:00:49] is this sense of national unity. It’s a cultural, ethnic bonding of people who speak German, who have a similar outlook on life. And again, that just reinforces the us and them.
Lex Fridman (01:01:05) Good and evil.
James Holland (01:01:05) It reinforces the black and white worldview. And then you add that to this very simple message, which Hitler is repeating over and over again, “Communists are a big threat. Jews are a big threat. They’re the enemy.” 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 a brotherhood. We’ve got our [German 01:01:38].” So he cleverly ties into that and taps into that. But they’re an irrelevance by the late 1920s. By 1928, he’s not going to get a deal for Mein Kampf Part II, he’s impoverished. The party’s impoverished. Their numbers are down. They’re at best an irrelevance.
Lex Fridman (01:01:59) Which is say he wrote Mein Kampf at this time, when he was in prison.
James Holland (01:02:02) Well, he writes most of Mein Kampf in Landsberg prison. And then he writes the rest of it in what becomes known as the [German 01:02:10], which is this little wooden hut in the Obersalzberg. 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 whatnot, what have you. But that’s where he wrote the rest of it. I mean, it Jean-Jacques Rousseau who says, “Man has his greatest thought when surrounded by nature.” That was something that Hitler took very much to heart. There was a mentor of his called Dietrich Eckart. Dietrich Eckart introduced him to the Obersalzberg and the beauty of the southeast Bavarian Alps around Berchtesgaden. And that was his favorite place on the planet, 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 (01:03:02) Can you actually comment on that? It’s a shitty manifesto as far as manifestos go. I think there’s a lot of values to understand from a first person perspective, the words of a dictator, of a person like Hitler. But it just feels like that’s just such a shitty-
James Holland (01:03:18) Yeah, I mean 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. I mean, it’s very untidy. It’s very incoherent. There’s no narrative arc, to use a writer’s phrase. I mean, but it does give you a very clear, the overall impression you get at the end of it is the communists and the Jews are to blame for everything.
Lex Fridman (01:03:43) Yeah, but there’s also the component of predicting basically World War II there. So it’s not just they’re to blame for everything.
James Holland (01:03:51) Oh, no. He’s hungry for war.
Lex Fridman (01:03:52) Right.
James Holland (01:03:52) 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, “It’s Armageddon or the Thousand-Year Reich. It’s because it’s unavoidable, because that’s how he’s speaking the whole time. It’s just this same message over, and over, and over, and over again.
Lex Fridman (01:04:17) It’s a pretty unique way of speaking, allowing violence as a tool in this picture, that there’s a hierarchy, that there is a superior race and inferior races, and it’s okay to destroy the inferior ones.
James Holland (01:04:32) Yeah.
Lex Fridman (01:04:32) Usually politicians don’t speak that way. They just say, “Well, here’s good and evil. We’re the good guys. And yeah, maybe we’ll destroy the evil a little bit.” Now here is like there’s a complete certainty about a very large number of people, “The Slavic people, they just need to be removed.”
James Holland (01:04:52) “Well, they need to be made in irrelevance. We have to take it. We have to take it. And in fact, if that kills millions of them, fine. Then they can sort of squish that way over to Siberia or- “
Lex Fridman (01:04:59) Right. It doesn’t matter where they go.
James Holland (01:05:00) ” … Kamchatka, wherever they go. I don’t care. But they- “
Lex Fridman (01:05:01) “We just need to populate this land that belongs to the German people.”
James Holland (01:05:06) Yeah.
Lex Fridman (01:05:06) “Because they’re the superior people.”
James Holland (01:05:07) There’s no question that he glorified violence and war. 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. March 1938 goes straight into Austria. There’s the Anschluss, not a shot is fired. 1936, goes into the Rhineland, reconquers that, retakes that over 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. And it’s a bit disappointing. He wants to be tested. He wants to have the wartime triumph. You can see him being frustrated about this in the Munich crisis in 1938. He wants to 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 is got his Panzers now. He’s got his massive armed forces. He wants to test them. He wants to get the show on the road and prove it. He is an arch gambler, Hitler.

Hitler before WW2

Lex Fridman (01:06:17) You make it seem so clear, but all the while to the rest of the world, to Chamberlain, to France, to Britain, to the rest of the world, he’s saying he doesn’t want that. He’s making agreements. Everything you just mentioned, you just went through it so quickly. But those are agreements that were made that he’s not going to do that. And he does it over and over. He violates the Treaty of Versailles. He violates every single treaty. But he still is doing the meetings. So maybe can you go through it, the lead up to the war, 1939, September 1st, what are the different agreements? What is the signaling he’s doing? And what is he doing secretly in terms of building up the military force?
James Holland (01:07:05) Yes. So part of the Treaty of Versailles, is you’re allowed very, very limited 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. There are people in, Krupp has got, for example, which is in the Ruhr, a big armaments manufacturer. 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 has been announced to the world in 1935, but it’s obviously been in the process of developing long before that. The Messerschmitt 109, a single engine fighter plane, for example, is created in 1934. So they’re doing all these things against it.
(01:08:08) And the truth is, he’s just constantly pushing, “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. So have they got the stomach for this? Not really. And, “Perhaps actually on reflection, the terms of Versailles Treaty are 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 of it. 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, “Do your worst.” And no one’s going to do anything because there isn’t a stomach to do anything.
Lex Fridman (01:09:03) That was a big step in 1936, remilitarizing the Rhineland. I mean, that That’s a huge, huge step of like, “Oh, I don’t have to follow anybody’s rules and they’re going to do nothing.”
James Holland (01:09:15) And he’s looking at his military and he’s also looking at response. So one of the things they do is really, it’s very clever. So they go over the head of the army of the air, Armee de L’Air, which is the French air force, and they invite him over. And Erhard Milch, who is the second command of the Luftwaffe invites him over. “So, come and see what we’re up to. You are our European neighbors, we’re all friends together,” this kind of stuff. “Come and see what we’ve got.” And he takes him to this airfield. There’s a row of Messerschmitt 109s all lined up, sort of 50 of them. And the head of the Armee of the Air looks at it and goes, “Krikey, that’s impressive.” And Milch goes, “Well, let me go and take you to another airfield.” And they go out of the back route out of the airfield, and that’s long, circuitous test route in the Mercedes. Meanwhile, all of-
James Holland (01:10:00) … the airfield and is a long circuitous route in the Mercedes.
(01:10:03) Meanwhile, all the Messerschmitts take off from that airfield, going to land on the next airfield. Here’s another one, and they’re all the same aircraft. And the commander-in-chief of the army of Vienna goes back to France and goes, “We’re never going to be able to beat Germany.”
(01:10:15) Earlier, you were alluding to this earlier on, how much is this, just this chutzpah of this ability to kind of portray the mechanized Moloch? Yeah, it absolutely cowls the enemy, so the increasing the effectiveness of their armed forces purely by propaganda and by mind games and by talking the talk.
(01:10:46) 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 are 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. 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 seig heiling and all the rest of it, you are going to think again before you go into war with people like that.

Hitler vs Chamberlain

Lex Fridman (01:11:13) It’s also hard to put yourself in the mind of those leaders now that we have nuclear weapons. So nuclear weapons have created this kind of cloak of a kind of safety from mutually shared destruction that you think surely you will not do a million or 2 million soldier army invading another land, right? Just full-on gigantic hot war.
(01:11:48) But at that time, that’s the real possibility. You remember World War I, you remember all of that. So okay, there’s a mad guy with a mustache. He’s making statements that this land belongs to Germany anyway, because it’s mostly German-populated, and like you said, Treaty of Versailles wasn’t really fair, and you can start justifying all kinds of things for yourself.
James Holland (01:12:16) Yeah, yeah, yeah. And maybe they got a point about the Danzig Corridor. They are mainly Germans, German-speaking people there, and it’s disconnected from East Prussia, they’re saying, I sort of get it. Maybe they’ve 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.
(01:12:36) 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, “Do we really care about the Poles? I mean, is it worth going war over?” But there’s bigger things at play by this point. That’s the point.
Lex Fridman (01:13:02) Yeah, but before we get to Poland, there is this meeting, September 1938. So Chamberlain made three trips to meet with Hitler, which culminated in the Munich Conference.
James Holland (01:13:17) Yeah, on the 30th of September. Yeah.
Lex Fridman (01:13:19) Where was Chamberlain, Hitler, Mussolini and Daladier, prime minister of France. They met to discuss essentially Czechoslovakia without any of the government officials of Czechoslovakia participating. And Hitler promised to make no more territorial conquests, and Chamberlain believed him.
James Holland (01:13:38) He chose to believe him, I think, is the thing, is the point. It’s very interesting. So Chamberlain gets a very bad press.
Lex Fridman (01:13:46) Uh-oh.
James Holland (01:13:47) Well, no. No, it’s not really uh-oh. I just think there’s too much retrospective view on this. 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.
(01:14:11) So I don’t think Chamberlain did trust Hitler, but he wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt. 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 what the ramifications of not going to war with him.
(01:14:40) But the problem is, is that Chamberlain is interesting because in 1935, he was Chancellor of the Exchequer 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.
(01:15:05) 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. There’s a kind of impracticality about having a large army.
(01:15:20) Whereas navy is great because you can keep them at sea, and they can be on the water.
(01:15:25) 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 assets and air power gives us the flexibility that an army doesn’t.
(01:15:39) So he is all for backing the expansion of the army, of the air force and the navy in 1930s. Then he subsequently becomes prime minister and sticks to his guns on that.
(01:15:47) 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. 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.
(01:16:11) 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.
(01:16:33) 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, where 92% of the population were against going to war in 1938. There was not a single democratic leader in the world that would go against the wishes of 92% of the population.
(01:16:59) 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 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? 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.
(01:17:30) 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 a chance.
(01:17:40) Now I do think he was a bit naive, and what he also does is this really interesting thing. So he goes over to Hitler’s flat, completely ambushes him. Goes to his flat on the afternoon of 30th of September and says to Hitler, “Look, I’ve got this, I’ve drawn up this agreement here, and this is to continue the naval agreement that we’ve already made. And by signing this, you are saying that Germany and Britain should never go to war with one another.” Hitler goes, “Yeah, whatever,” signs it.
(01:18:12) Chamberlain comes back, [inaudible 01:18:13] and waves this little piece of paper, peace in our time and all the rest of it, which obviously comes back to bite him in a very big way.
(01:18:20) But it’s interesting that when Hitler then subsequently goes and moves and that they, France and Britain decide in rather the same way that there’s been discussion about deciding that large portions of Ukraine should just be handed back, 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 Sudetenland without really consulting the Czechs. It’s a sort of similar kind of scenario really, and it’s equally wrong. 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 than doubt. That’s it. This is 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. If you are invaded, we will go to war with you.”
(01:19:27) And that is a ratcheting up of diplomacy in 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.
(01:19:48) And it’s also heeded by Goring who is his number two, and who is obviously a commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe and is president of Prussia and all the rest of it and is the second-most senior Nazi. And 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 (01:20:13) The Munich Conference is a pretty interesting moment, I would say in all of human history, because you got the leaders of these bigger-than-life nations and the most dramatic brewing conflict in human history, Chamberlain, Hitler, Mussolini, Daladier. It’s interesting when these bigger-than-life leaders are in a room together. Is there something that you know about their interactions?
James Holland (01:20:43) Yeah, I think one of the things that’s interesting is that Hitler’s got home advantage because it’s on his turf and the start off at the first meeting is at the Berghof, his beloved place in the Obersalzburg overlooking Berchtesgaden in the Alps. So he’s pretty confident because, “This is my manor, this is my turf. I’m not going to be bossed around by these guys.”
(01:21:03) But Chamberlain, for example, he’s 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.”
(01:21:15) So they’re both coming at it with a slight kind of superiority kind of conflict.
(01:21:23) Interestingly, when you get to the actual meetings at the [inaudible 01:21:27] 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 [inaudible 01:21:40]. There are cars cheering him, waving Union Jacks, all this kind of stuff.
(01:21:44) Hitler does not like that at all, not at all, puts him on the back foot. 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.
(01:21:58) 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. 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.
(01:22:24) Daladier takes the back seat. Even Mussolini, although he’s there, he doesn’t want war, either. He wants to be left alone to do his own thing without anyone getting in the way. But he doesn’t want, it’s not in his interest to have a European war so he’s trying to avoid it.
(01:22:37) 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 voice and very kind of pale blue eyes and such distinct features, quite a long nose. And he always says this is why he has the mustache is to kind of disguise the big nose. As I was saying to you earlier on before we started recording, he does have a sense of humor. It’s not one that you and I would kind of tap into, but he does have one.
(01:23:09) Whereas Chamberlain, he sounds like bit like an old man. He’s sort of silver-haired, and he looks like your sort archetypal kind of British gentleman with rolled-up umbrella and his Homburg hat and all the rest of it. So they’re both sort of caricatures in a funny sort of way.
(01:23:24) And yet, the consequence of these discussions, these great events happening, you are absolutely going, 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 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. It just heightens it.
Lex Fridman (01:23:49) Do you think there are words that Chamberlain should have said, could have said that put more pressure on Hitler, intimidate Hitler more?
James Holland (01:24:01) Yeah, it’s a really tricky one. It’s such a difficult one because you’re always looking at it through… 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 cowled by the kind of impression of military might that the Germans have put out. They certainly fear they are stronger than they actually are.
(01:24:27) And then on the other hand, they’re also going, “Yeah, but Germany doesn’t have natural resources, doesn’t have access to the world’s oceans. It shouldn’t be able to win a war.” So they’re kind of contradicting themselves at the same time. So one minute they’re sort 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 to kind of able to prevail, blah, blah, blah. We’ll just impose an economic blockade, and then it’ll be stuffed.”
(01:24:59) 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, but at the time, where people kind of digging trenches in Hyde Park in Central London and barrage balloons going up over London and children being evacuated from the cities and 92% of the population not wanting to go to war, you could see why he takes the course he does.
(01:25:25) I suppose that’s what I’m saying. I’m not saying it’s necessarily the right decision, but I think it’s an understandable decision.
Lex Fridman (01:25:29) Oh, but what about even just on the human level? If I go into a room with a British gentleman versus going to a room with Trump, it feels like it’s so much easier to read and manipulate the British gentleman.
(01:25:46) Because Trump is like Trump-like characters. It seems like Hitler is similar, Churchill is similar. It’s like this guy can do anything. There’s something terrifying about-
James Holland (01:25:57) Unpredictability, yeah.
Lex Fridman (01:25:59) Yeah, it feels like there’s something very predictable about Chamberlain.
James Holland (01:26:02) 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.
Lex Fridman (01:26:14) Yeah, yeah. We shouldn’t forget that, right?
James Holland (01:26:17) Third of 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.
(01:26:24) And on top of that it has lots of extra imperial territories as well. So if you look at, there’s this incredible map of global shipping in 1937, and there’s these little landlines of ships going out, and one of the strongest landlines is going down to Argentina and South America from Britain. So down past West Africa and down in Southern Atlantic, and there it is.
(01:26:47) And that’s because Britain owns most of Argentina. It owns huge great farming estates and ranches. It owns the railway system. It owns many of the port facilities. So you didn’t even need an empire. You need the facilities that overseas trade and possessions can give you.
(01:27:04) 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% Greek, Norwegian, Canadian shipping that it can access. So if you’ve got access to 80, in excess of 80% of the world shipping, that puts you in an incredibly strong position.
(01:27:27) And actually all sorts of other things have been going on. 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 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.
(01:27:50) 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.
(01:28:09) Now it always need more because it’s suddenly turning into a kind of proper global long drawn-out war. But that is a huge advantage.
(01:28:18) So it is with that mindset that Chamberlain is going into those talks and thinking, “Okay, well, I’m not going to get a war over Czechoslovakia. Who cares about them? But I am going to show Hitler that I mean business.” 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.
(01:28:37) 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 terrifically good, 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.
(01:29:01) And I think it’s very easy for people today to forget how elevated Britain was in the late 1930s. 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, and it’s so diminished by comparison today that it’s hard to imagine it.
(01:29:26) 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. And when people were starting to write these sort of major narratives in the 1970s and ’80s and into the 1990s, is through a prism of a very, very different world.
(01:29:49) And so, one of the reasons why you have this narrative that Britain was a bit rubbish and hanging on the shirttails of the Americans and all the blood was spilt in eastern front and Germany had the best army in the world and was only defeated because Hitler was mad and blah, blah, blah, that kind of traditional narrative, 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.
Lex Fridman (01:30:19) So there is this moment of decision. What lesson do you take from that? When is the right time for appeasement, to negotiate, for diplomacy? And when is the right time for military strength, offensive, attacking, for military conflict? Where is that line? Where’s that-
James Holland (01:30:45) Well, I kind of think it probably was when it was. I mean-
Lex Fridman (01:30:51) Poland.
James Holland (01:30:52) Yeah. Honestly, I’m not sure it would’ve been the right decision to go to war in 1938. I can’t predict because you can’t second-guess how things are going to play out because you just don’t know.
(01:31:07) But I’m not sure that Chamberlain made the wrong decision. I’m not saying he made the right decision. I’m being a bit wishy-washy about this.
Lex Fridman (01:31:16) You could’ve threatened it more. Imagine Churchill in those same meetings.
James Holland (01:31:22) Yeah, but Churchill also appeases. I mean, he appeases Stalin all the time. So the idea that Churchill is this big strong man and never appeases, and he’s gung-ho over war, Churchill’s out of the government at that time. He recognizes that you can’t trust Hitler. He recognizes that Nazism is bad. But he, 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.
(01:31:49) I suppose what I’m saying is Chamberlain is better placed to make those decisions than Churchill is, which again, doesn’t mean that Chamberlain is right and Churchill is wrong.
(01:32:02) It’s just that’s a massive punt to go to war in 1938 when you still don’t have, you’ve got a handful of Spitfires, you’ve got a handful of Hurricanes, you haven’t got enough. Your air defense system isn’t properly sorted at this point. Your navy is strong, but what’s that kind of look like, I mean, if you do go to war? Because it’s not going to be army sweeping into Germany. It’s just it’s going to be accelerated industrialization for a year. So even if you go to war in 1938 over Czechoslovakia, Czechoslovakia will not be saved. France and Britain will not be going in and invading Germany. That is absolutely not going to happen.
(01:32:44) So what’s the point, I mean, 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, even in September 1939, they don’t really do anything. I mean, we talked about the kind of Saar Offensive, which isn’t really an offensive at all. It’s firing a 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 Britain is only just about ready to take on the onslaught of the Luftwaffe in summer of 1940.

Invasion of Poland

Lex Fridman (01:33:19) Well, nobody’s ready for war.
James Holland (01:33:21) No, and you always want more than you’ve got at any time, even when you’re winning.
Lex Fridman (01:33:25) But like really not ready. Even like you mentioned with Barbarossa, Nazi Germany is really not ready.
James Holland (01:33:34) Not ready.
Lex Fridman (01:33:36) Except France. I swear, France-
James Holland (01:33:41) [inaudible 01:33:41]
Lex Fridman (01:33:41) Fine. But come on, come on. When Nazi Germany invades Poland, I mean-
James Holland (01:33:49) Yeah, it’s terrible. It’s terrible 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’ve happened is, is that would’ve, that easily could’ve brought down Hitler because most of his commanders are, his senior commanders are just thinking, “What the hell is going on? This is a catastrophe.” I mean, to a man.
(01:34:12) I mean, even Goring is thinking this is a terrible idea. They are absolutely not convinced. And when Hitler does his big talk to his… He asked all his senior commanders to come to the Berghof to brief them about invasion of Poland, it’s just after the Ribbentrop Molotov back to the 22nd of August. He calls them all to Berghof and says, “Come in mufti, come in civilian suits.”
(01:34:34) They all turn up, and he gives them this kind of huge great speech 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?”
(01:34:51) 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.
(01:35:04) 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. But it’s flying in the face of all convention, military convention that he does this without any kind of warning.
(01:35:21) And even by the 1st of September where there’s been this kind of five-day delay at the last-minute negotiations. The last-minute negotiations are thrust upon Hitler by people like Goring and by Mussolini and the Italians going, “Oh my God, don’t do this. Don’t do this. There’s got to be a solution,” he was absolutely chomping at the bit.
Lex Fridman (01:35:42) Well, in that case, from a dark militaristic perspective, his bet paid off.
James Holland (01:35:49) 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 1930. Depends the way you look at it, but I mean, yes, it’s successful in that Poland is overrun in 18 days.
Lex Fridman (01:36:05) And there’s so many counterfactuals here.
James Holland (01:36:08) But I mean if you were to say to Hitler on the 30th of April as he’s sort of taking out the pistol from his holster on his sofa in the Fuhrerbank and going, “Yeah, so, Adolf, 1st of September 1939, still backing yourself on that one?” I mean, he might have a different view.
Lex Fridman (01:36:24) The guy’s insane and full of blunder so he probably would’ve said, “Yeah, do it all over again.”
James Holland (01:36:29) Yeah, I’m sure he would’ve done as well.
Lex Fridman (01:36:31) Conquest Poland was not a mistake. Soviet Union was not a mistake.
James Holland (01:36:35) No.
Lex Fridman (01:36:36) It’s just some of the-
James Holland (01:36:37) Other people. “I was let down by people not being strong enough.”
Lex Fridman (01:36:39) Yeah, the Prussian generals are all-
James Holland (01:36:41) Yeah, of course. That’s exactly what he’d say. “It wasn’t my fault.”
Lex Fridman (01:36:45) He might have quietly done some different decisions about Barbarossa. Maybe the timing would be different.
James Holland (01:36:53) Maybe that all out central for us, rather than kind of splitting into three.
Lex Fridman (01:36:56) Yeah.
James Holland (01:36:56) Yep.
Lex Fridman (01:36:56) But he was very sure, it seems like, maybe you can correct me, that Britain and France would still carry on with appeasement even after he invaded Poland.
James Holland (01:37:06) Absolutely. He was completely convinced by it. There was clearly a sort of 10 to 15% level of doubt, “But what the heck, I’m going to do it anyway.”
(01:37:18) He’d ratcheted himself up into such a lava 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. 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.”
(01:37:43) Or “I was wrong, and, therefore, we don’t deserve to be a Thousand-Year Reich. We don’t deserve to be the master race, black or white. [inaudible 01:37:52] same all the time.”

Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact

Lex Fridman (01:37:55) So can you tell the story of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in 1939? So they make an agreement, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, and that leads us, just like you were mentioning, in a matter of days, how compact everything is. It’s just really, really fascinating how crooked-
James Holland (01:38:12) It’s a beautiful summer in Europe, summer of 1939. It’s one of these glorious summers that sort of never rains. It’s just sunshine, sunny day after sunny day. It’s like that sort of golden summer of 1914 as well, where sky always seems to be blue, fluffy, white clouds, everyone sort of, you know, but this sort of the storm clouds of war, to use that cliche, are kind of brewing.
(01:38:39) 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 that’s Britain and France should’ve been a bit more into realpolitiks than they were. It’s such an opportunity to ensure that, to snooker the Third Reich, and they don’t take it. Because 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.
(01:39:26) Of course, they 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, it’s all very well people saying, “Well, Churchill wouldn’t have appeased Hitler in the 1930s,” but he does appease. He appeases all the time, and they miss that opportunity.
(01:39:49) And the French and British delegation is third-tier commanders, generals going over. Yeah, it was a shit show. I mean, yeah, excuse my French, but I mean, it’s a nonsense that they’re not ready for it. They’re not prepared. The British guy [inaudible 01:40:06] doesn’t have any authority. The whole thing’s a complete joke. It’s never going to get anywhere.
Lex Fridman (01:40:12) You tell the story of this quite beautifully, actually. Again, it’s such a human story. I mean, it seems like the Stalin and the Soviet-
James Holland (01:40:22) They’ve already made up their mind.
Lex Fridman (01:40:23) But-
James Holland (01:40:23) Well, I don’t they have. I think what they-
Lex Fridman (01:40:25) Wait, wait, wait. I mean, you described quite well that they value in-person meeting.
James Holland (01:40:30) Yes.
Lex Fridman (01:40:31) So Chamberlain should have just gone to Moscow.
James Holland (01:40:34) Yeah, get on a plane.
Lex Fridman (01:40:40) Maybe it’s a simplistic notion, but that could’ve changed the trajectory of human history right there.
James Holland (01:40:46) I really think it could’ve done. I think that’s much more grievous mistake than the Munich.
Lex Fridman (01:40:51) Why are leaders so hesitant to meet? I’m told now by a bunch of diplomats that, “No, no, no, no. There’s a process. At first, you have to have these diplomats meet, and they have to draft a bunch of stuff.”
(01:41:07) I sometimes have the simplistic notion, like, why not meet? Why not meet? I think there is a human element there, of course, especially when there’s this force that is Hitler.
James Holland (01:41:23) Well, yes, and because we, humans, we like to interact, and you like to see people in three dimensions, and 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 and the expression and the whites of their eyes and all that kind of stuff.
(01:41:46) And that just does make a difference, of course, because we’re fundamentally animals, and 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 (01:42:02) Yeah, but there’s also just, you see the humanity in others. It’s so much easier, you see this in social media, it’s so much easier to talk shit about others when you’re not with them-
James Holland (01:42:13) Yes.
Lex Fridman (01:42:13) … and military conflict is the extreme version of that. You can construct these narratives that they’re not human, that they’re evil, that they’re… You can construct communist ideology, all these… You can project onto them the worst possible version of a human. But when you meet them, you’re like, “Oh.”
James Holland (01:42:36) They’re all just a person.
Lex Fridman (01:42:37) They’re just a person.
James Holland (01:42:38) 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 ruin it for everybody else.
(01:42:52) But anyway, to go back to Leningrad, back in August 1939, they go half-cocked. They’re disrespectful to Soviet Union as a result of that. It gets nowhere. Had they been able to put on a really, really firm offer there and then to the Soviet Union, Soviet Union would’ve probably come in.
(01:43:13) I mean, the big thing is, is that the Soviet Union said, “This is a big stumbling block.” The Soviet Union said, “Yeah, but we want to be able to march through Poland if we get threatened by Germany.”
(01:43:25) But the British and 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’ve done, but it would’ve stopped the World War, probably.
Lex Fridman (01:43:42) They’re willing to appease Hitler. They’re not willing to appease Stalin in that situation.
James Holland (01:43:46) Well, they’re not willing to appease anybody by that stage, that’s the point.
Lex Fridman (01:43:49) Well, they appeased Hitler because-
James Holland (01:43:51) They did, but you have [inaudible 01:43:52] there’s a bottom line, which is Poland, so it’s changed. That’s the point.
Lex Fridman (01:43:58) Right, right.
James Holland (01:43:59) But anyway, the bottom line is they don’t, there is a reluctance on the part of French and the British to negotiate with the Soviet Union because they’re communists, don’t like them, don’t trust them, worry about what they’re going to do with Poland, are they’re going to be jumping out of the fire into the kind of water, and it doesn’t come off.
(01:44:18) And as a consequence of that, Soviet Union continue to pursue more hardly, more and more vociferously the opportunities that the Germans are offering, which is the split of Poland. Because Soviet Union wants that part of Poland back in its own sphere of influence, and it doesn’t want to go to war just yet.
Lex Fridman (01:44:42) And the agreement that they won’t attack each other, essentially.
James Holland (01:44:46) Yep.
Lex Fridman (01:44:46) You think Stalin actually believed that?
James Holland (01:44:49) No, he believed it in the same way that Hitler believed it, that it was a cynical kind of convenient bit of realpolitik 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-
James Holland (01:45:00) … Nazis as the Nazis were determined to get rid of the Soviet Union. I think whoever fired first was not decided at that point, but I do think that from the moment that Hitler takes power in 1933, a conflict between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany is inevitable.
Lex Fridman (01:45:13) So either direction, you think it’s inevitable.
James Holland (01:45:17) Yeah.
Lex Fridman (01:45:17) I think, yeah, there’s a huge amount of evidence for that. Stalin probably wanted it, what, in ’42, ’43?
James Holland (01:45:23) Yeah.
Lex Fridman (01:45:23) Something like that?
James Holland (01:45:24) Yeah. And they’re doing exercises and stuff and building out, but he’s not ready yet because he knows he’s done the purges and he’s got to get his armed forces back into shape and all the rest of it. So they have this incredibly cynical agreement, but at that point, Hitler’s hands are untied. 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 he’s got away with it.

Winston Churchill

Lex Fridman (01:45:57) Who was Churchill, and how did Churchill come to power at this moment?
James Holland (01:46:02) Well, Churchill is this absolutely towering figure in British politics. He’s first minister in the naughties 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, 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. But obviously you are an ordinary member of parliament, but you’re also an ordinary member of parliament who has had ministries of state and who is this towering figure. So he’s listened to in a way that other backbenchers aren’t.
(01:46:54) And he has been saying, “We need to stand up to the dictators. We need to do this. We need to rearm more heavily,” and blah, blah, blah. So when war is declared, he’s brought back into the admiralty in charge of the Navy, which is Britain’s senior service, and 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 are just impotent. And so Churchill first mentions going into Norway mining the leads. So the idea is that you’re making life very difficult for the Germans to get iron ore out of Sweden. Their main source of iron ore is up in the northern part of Sweden in the Arctic Circle, and then goes on a railway through the northern tip of Norway and then gets shipped down the west coast of Norway into Germany, into the Baltic.
(01:47:48) So Churchill suggests, in September 1939, why don’t we mine the leads? Which the leads 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 taking this? And everyone goes, “Well, yeah, that’s quite a good idea.” But they can’t decide, and the French are nervous that if they do that, the Germans would retaliate in bomb France and all this kind of stuff. So no decision is made until April 19, 1940. They go up to start mining the leads on exactly the same day that the Germans invade Denmark and Norway, and so they’re caught off guard. And at that moment, really it’s seen as a failure of Chamberlain’s government. And there is a 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.
(01:48:36) He’s not served in the armed forces himself. He doesn’t really understand it. It needs a different set of hands. 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 could still be a Prime Minister. And he is, without question, the most respected politician in the country. He’s the 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 is also not really a military man. He’s got a slightly withered hand, which has prevented him from doing military service.
(01:49:23) 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 Chamberlain resigns on the 9th of May and Halifax says, “It’s not for me,” the only person who’s going to step 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 outcome of the man. But he comes with a huge amount of baggage. He’s known as a man who drinks too much, whose judgment hasn’t always been great. He was Chancellor during the time of the General Strike in 1926. He backed Edward VIII over the monarchy crisis when the King wanted to marry Wallis Simpson, the Catholic divorcee, et cetera, et cetera. So his judgment has been brought into question. He is the man who came up with the idea of the Gallipoli campaign, which was an ignominious failure, blah, blah, blah.
(01:50:18) So there are issues over him. He is seen as a hothead and a man who doesn’t have the sound judgment of Halifax. So the jury is very much out. And I think, again, it’s one of those things where you have to look at this through the prism of what people were thinking in May 1940. Yes, he was considered [inaudible 01:50:38] politician, but he is seen also as a loose cannon and by no means the right person in this hour of darkness. And it is coincidental that the 10th of May 1940, when he takes over as Prime Minister, becomes Prime Minister, not through an election, but by default of a new nationalist government. So no longer a conservative government, but a nationalist 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 is going to be able to deliver the goods.
(01:51:20) And it is also coincidentally the same day that the Germans launched Case Yellow, Operation Yellow, the invasion of the low countries in France. So these are tumultuous events, to put it mildly. And it is also the case that only a couple of weeks before, Paul Reynaud has taken over his Prime Minister of yet another coalition government in France from Daladier. So political turmoil is very much the watchword at this time for the Western democracies, just at the moment that the Germans are making their hammer strike into the West.
Lex Fridman (01:52:00) This might be a good moment to bring up this idea that has been circulating recently brought up by Darryl Cooper, who hyperbolically stated that Churchill was the quote, chief villain of the Second World War. To give a good faith interpretation of that, I believe he meant that Churchill forced Hitler to escalate the expansion of Nazi Germany beyond Poland into a global war. So Churchill is the one that turned this narrow war, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Poland, into a global one. Is that accurate?
James Holland (01:52:41) No, I don’t think it is, not least because the decisions over Poland were made by Chamberlain’s government when Churchill was out of government. So Churchill wasn’t even involved in that decision-making process at the time. No, I don’t think so. Again, I go back to Britain’s position in the world in 1939. 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. It would lead all sorts of problems. You are saying that you are giving carte blanche to dictators to just run amok and take whatever territory they want. You are risking a future 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.
(01:53:37) To echo the words of Roosevelt in August 1941, they’re responding to a world free of want and fear. Now obviously, there are still some issues with the form that democracy takes in the 1930s. It’s not democratic for everyone. Try saying that if you are 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. It’s the same thing about the bombing. The detractors of strategic air campaign always go, “Yeah, but 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. The moment the war stopped in Hitler’s favor, the killing would continue and be accelerated.
Lex Fridman (01:54:37) So the thing you mentioned initially is the idealist perspective of well, Britain can’t allow this warmonger to break all these pacts and be undemocratic, murder a large number of people and do conquests of territory. That’s idealistic. But if we look at the realist perspective, what decisions would minimize the amount of suffering on the continent in the next 50 years? So one of the arguments that he’s making, I happen to disagree with it, to put it mildly, is that Churchill increased the amount of suffering, so Churchill’s presence and decisions. So we’re not talking about idealistic perspective, we’re talking about a realistic. The reality of the war of Stalin, of Hitler, of Churchill, of France and FDR, did Churchill drag Hitler into a world war? Did he force Hitler to invade the Soviet Union? Did he force Hitler to then attack Britain?
James Holland (01:56:03) 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. No one asked Hitler to invade the low countries and Norway and Denmark and attack Britain. He does that, of course, because he’s not given a free hand in Poland. But 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 (01:56:40) So I think there’s pretty definitive evidence, it’s obvious from everything he’s said, from everything he’s written, from everything everywhere, that he was going to invade the Soviet Union no matter what. And France? Most likely yes also.
James Holland (01:56:55) He would have done a deal with Britain. Britain could have coexisted.
Lex Fridman (01:56:59) So actually, there is a possible reality, I don’t know, maybe you can correct me on this, where Hitler basically takes all of Europe except Britain.
James Holland (01:57:10) Yes, but then he would have got so strong that he would have then turned on Britain as well, because the fear is that if you let him do this, then he gets greedy. He wants the next one, then he wants the next one, then he wants the next one, and then he wants to take over the whole world. That is the fear of the British. That is the fear of the Americans. That’s the fear of President Roosevelt. We haven’t even touched on this yet, but he has a very difficult case on his hands because he has come into power also in January of 1933 as President of the United States on an isolationist ticket with a retrenching, with a step away from the European old order. It’s time for the Europeans to stand on their own. It all sounds very familiar right now.
(01:57:58) And suddenly he’s got to do this gargantuan political [inaudible 01:58:01] 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. And I don’t doubt that they’re right. I think if he’d prevailed in the Soviet Union, he’d have always wanted more, because his whole concept is the master race.
Lex Fridman (01:58:29) Yeah, I think it should be said if we measure human suffering, if there was not Britain on the other side, if it was not a two-front war, that the chances of Hitler succeeding in the Soviet Union is much higher, or at least a more prolonged war, and there would be more dead, more enslaved and more tortured in all of this.
James Holland (01:58:52) Yes and ditto. If the Allies hadn’t got involved against Imperial Japan, it would have been catastrophic. 20 to 30 million Chinese dead anyway with American and British intervention. What’s it going to be in China without that? And elsewhere. 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, its 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.
(01:59:55) So 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, 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? Such as destruction of cities, destruction of monasteries on outcrops in southern Italy, killing of lots of civilians, et cetera, et cetera. 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 middle of the war, by 1943. It’s easy to have a fairly cut-and-dry war in North Africa, in the deserts of North Africa, where the only people getting in the way are a few Bedouin tribesmen or something.
(02:01:10) 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 color of fish because the scale of destruction is absolutely immense. But it’s also the job of political leaders to look after and defend their own peoples first and foremost. And so what you’re doing is you’re trying to protect your own sovereignty of your own people before you’re protecting other people. And so that’s what leads to the whole way in which the 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.
(02:01:56) 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, 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. So it’s really interesting that in our mind’s eye, when we’re thinking of 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 cold face, they’re the first people going into the fire of the enemy. And we tend to think about guys in tanks, infantrymen with their Garand rifles or machine guns or whatever. That’s what springs to mind.
(02:02:48) Yet actually they’re a comparatively small proportion of the army. So no more than 14 to 15% of any army, Allied army, is infantry. 45% are service corps, service troops, driving trucks and cooks and bottle washers and people lugging great big boxes of stuff. And that’s because by that stage, the Allies have worked out the way of war, which is to use is what I call big war, this concept of a very long tail, logistics, the operational arts, 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. 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.
(02:03:37) 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 Panzer tanks and tiger tanks or whatever it might be, and guns, and you’re disrupting the transportation system in Germany, 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 14, 15% of infantry when you’ve got to jump out of a landing craft to do their job. And you’re trying to keep that to a minimum. 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 Darryl Cooper’s driving at. But no one asked Hitler to invade Poland. That is the bottom line. No one asked Germany to go to war. No one asked Hitler to come up with this ludicrous ideology.
Lex Fridman (02:04:30) There’s complex ethical discussions here about just as you described.
James Holland (02:04:36) Which are fascinating.
Lex Fridman (02:04:37) Which are fascinating. And war is hell, and there’s many ways in which it is hell. Just for a little bit, the steel man, what Darryl, where he might be coming from is since World War II, the simplistic veneration of Churchill, so saying Churchill good, Hitler bad, has been used as a template to project other conflicts to justify military intervention. And so his and other people like Libertarians, for example, resistance to that overly simplistic veneration of somebody like Churchill has to do with the fact that that seems to be by neocons or warmongers in the military industrial complex in the United States and elsewhere, using Hitler way too much, using Churchill way too much to justify invading everywhere and anywhere.
James Holland (02:05:42) Well, I do agree with that. I think oversimplification of anything is a mistake. 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. And of course, the Allies made 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.
(02:06:28) 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 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. So Donald Rumsfeld is going, “We don’t do reconstruction.” Well, you freaking well should do. If you’re going to take on this particular challenge, you’ve got to see it through. That’s simply not good enough. It’s not good enough to go into Afghanistan and go, “We’re going to change things around. It’s going to be great. All the women are going to have education. They 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. Because what’s going to happen? You’re going to undo everything.
(02:07:31) And this is a bit of a segue, Lex, but I remember being in northern Helmand Province back in, when was it? January 2008. And British troops had just taken over an absolute dump of a town called Musa Qala, and I remember talking to this Afghan guy. He just had all his willow trees chopped down to make room for a helipad the Allies wanted, which they put those cages with 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?” And he just went and shrugged at me and lifted up his hands and said, “Well, if they stayed great, but they won’t.” And he said, “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 the wall and no one would touch it. I could leave it on a wall for a week and no one would touch it.” He said, “Will they bring that kind of order? Will we have peace here? They’ve just chopped down my willow trees. Thanks a lot.”
(02:08:39) You’re seeing a total lack of understanding of the culture, ethnic differences. You’re trying to impose a Western-centric view onto a nation which isn’t ready for that. Now, there are ways in which it looked like Afghanistan was starting to emerge, and there was a path, and then just at the critical moment, the West moves out with catastrophic consequences. 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. The consequence of all that destruction, all that turmoil was thriving, high-producing democracies, which burst forth into the second half of the 20th century and into the 21st century in pretty good order. So the lessons of the previous generation, from the First World War, had been learned, even though the scale of destruction, the displacement of people is unprecedented in 1945.

Most powerful military in WW2

Lex Fridman (02:09:57) In 1939, what was the state of the militaries? What were the most powerful militaries on the world’s stage at that time?
James Holland (02:10:04) Well, in terms of naval power, 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, the 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. So they’ve got modern battleships and battle cruisers, but without key modern bits of technology.
Lex Fridman (02:10:32) So Italy is really not ready for it.
James Holland (02:10:34) Oh, it’s so not. It’s so not. It’s just, again, both Hitler and Mussolini, they lack geopolitical understanding. That’s because they’re so focused on their narrow worldview, and they view everything through that prism, but they can’t see that bigger picture.
Lex Fridman (02:10:51) And we should say that Mussolini, maybe you can correct me, but I don’t think at any point he wants a war.
James Holland (02:10:57) He doesn’t want a war. What he does want is he wants his own new Roman Empire, which extends over the Mediterranean, certainly the eastern half of the Mediterranean, North Africa, all the way down to East Africa, controlling the Suez Canal. That’s what he wants.
Lex Fridman (02:11:13) And I think he made clear that he was … There was always this little brother, jealous-of-Hitler situation because he wanted absolute power the way Hitler did.
James Holland (02:11:24) But doesn’t have it.
Lex Fridman (02:11:24) He doesn’t have it. And he described-
James Holland (02:11:26) Because he’s the king.
Lex Fridman (02:11:26) Yeah, there’s a-
James Holland (02:11:27) Monarchy. Often forgotten. It’s amazing.
Lex Fridman (02:11:31) So there’s always this limit. And Hitler, quite brilliantly, once he gets some power, he takes it all, complete.
James Holland (02:11:41) He completely emasculates Mussolini. And he likes him though. It’s really weird. Even when Mussolini is 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, and he respects him to a certain extent, even though he definitely views himself as top dog. Hitler does, that is. So it’s curious because I don’t think Hitler particularly likes anyone really, but he does seem to Mussolini. But anyway, the problem with Mussolini is Mussolini’s Italy is very impoverished from the First World War, 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, it’s that there’s been this terrible disruption. There’s been financial crisis. That leads to people looking at an alternative.
(02:12:42) What’s the alternative? Well, Mussolini is going, “We can be proud Italians again,” lots of chest thumping, wearing great uniforms, all the rest of it. And people think, “Well, I want a piece of that,” and it works, and proverbially the trains work on time under him, and so on and so forth. But he just gets ahead of himself. And actually the writings on the war in 1935 when he goes into Abyssinia, and again, what effectively are by first world European standards primitive 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, and they shouldn’t have done.
(02:13:22) 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 Britain’s approach to fascist Spain and approach to fascist Italy has been very much stick and carrot. It’s like, we’ll let you do what you do as long as you stay in your box, and we’ll continue to provide you with supplies and coal and whatever it is you need as long as you don’t go too far.
(02:14:05) And so that’s why Mussolini is very anxious in 1938, and again in 1939, to be the power broker and not let Germany go to war. But Germany, 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. And one of the reasons Mussolini signs it is because he fears that Germany has designs on Italy. It’s not because he thinks, oh, these guys are great, they’re our natural bedfellows. It’s a mutually convenient pact whereby Germany gets on with whatever it wants to do up in Northern Europe and Eastern Europe. Italy is given a free hand to do whatever it wants to do. They’ll just watch each other’s backs. They have borders, Austria and Italy border one another, and they’ll just do their own thing, and they’ll help each other out with supplies and stuff. But basically they’ll be their own … It’s a marriage of convenience.
(02:15:09) They’re never expecting 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 it ever actually happening. And so from Mussolini’s point of view, the Pact of Steel is just sailing your flag to one particular mast and trying to cover your back. And so long as he plays his cards right, he can still get his coal supplies from Britain, and he doesn’t have to worry about that. And 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.
(02:15:48) And so he thinks, ah, I’ve got some rich pickings. I can take Malta, I can take British possessions, I can overrun Egypt and now is my time, but I also need to 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, “You can’t have all this stuff. You’ve turned up too late. You need to be in the fight.” So he does it in what he thinks is the perfect timing. And it turns out to be a catastrophic timing because of course, Britain doesn’t exit the fight. Britain is still there. And by February 1941, a very, very tiny British army in Egypt has overrun two entire Italian armies and taken 133,000 prisoners in North Africa.
Lex Fridman (02:16:26) So you mentioned in the sea who were the dominant armies. Who was dominant in the air?
James Holland (02:16:33) 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 for that is because the quality of the pilots in Japan is extremely high, because it’s so difficult to get to the top position. You are going to your frontline squadrons with at least 500 hours in your logbook. To put that into some perspective, a British RAF or Luftwaffe pilot will be joining their frontline squadrons with 150 to 170 hours in the logbook. So these guys are disciplined within an inch of their lives. There are academic tests as well as physical endurance tests. They are the elite of the elite, and they are extremely good.
(02:17:20) 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 the French have a similar size 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 when Case Yellow, the invasion German invasion of the West starts, France’s army of the air is spread throughout France and has its own little area. So you have one bunch of fighters and bombers in that block in the Marseille area. You have another block on the Brittany coast, and you have another block around Sudan, and you have another that.
(02:18:07) So consequently, they’re never able to bring their full strength to bear. So 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, the Luftwaffe, because they’re the aggressor, could choose how they amass their aircraft and where they attack and when. 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. And because the French don’t have a defense system, they can’t see whether they’re coming. So their only hope is to take off and just hope they stooge around the sky and hope they bump into some Luftwaffe. Of course, that’s inherently inefficient, and they get destroyed, and they get destroyed in penny packets rather than en masse.
(02:18:56) The difference with the RAF is the RAF is not done on an Air Force basis where each air corps or air fleet has a handful of bombers, a handful of fighters, a handful of reconnaissance planes. They have different commands. 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 re-arming that Britain has done in the 1930s is all about defense. It is not about aggression at this point, not about taking it to the enemy. It is showing you are tough, but also first and foremost, getting your ducks in a row and making sure that you don’t get defeated.
(02:19:43) So this is the principle behind the world’s first fully coordinated air defense system, which is the radar chain. It is the observer corps, it is control rooms, 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-
James Holland (02:20:00) … 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 stage of readiness they’re at, whether they’re engaging the enemy, little lights come on and show you. You can see weather maps, you can see the cloud ceiling, you see all that at a glance. Then you are on a dais and then down in front of you is a massive great map of Southern England. You’ve got croupiers, sort of moving plots, so you can, through a combination of radar, which picks up a rough idea of what’s coming towards you combined with the Observer Corps, you have overlapping Observer Corps 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.
(02:20:43) 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. So this information is being updated all the time. So you have a plot and it looks like it might be 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.
(02:21:21) So you’re updating that and that little figure is put 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, the guys in the air are on the radio to ground controllers, who are in these control rooms and they’re saying, “Okay, well if you proceed at angels 18, 18,000 feet on a vector of 150 degrees, you should be seeing your enemy bombing formation any moment now.” And what that means is that you are not on the ground when the enemy are coming towards you with their bombers to hit your airfield, which means you are 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 scalping and earth ready to fill in the potholes. And it means you’re good to go.
(02:22:13) And it means as a consequence of all that, when the Germans do launch their all out assault on Adlertag, Eagle Day on the 13th of August 1940, the British are ready. 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. As a consequence of that, of the 138 RAF airfields that there 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 was abandoned for the duration.
Lex Fridman (02:22:48) So these are the two biggest Air Forces?
James Holland (02:22:51) So those are the two biggest Air Forces.
Lex Fridman (02:22:52) So Luftwaffe, we should say German, I mean they’re like the legendary, the terrifying Air Force.
James Holland (02:23:02) They are.
Lex Fridman (02:23:04) Maybe-
James Holland (02:23:05) They’re slightly believing their own hype. There’s no question about it.
Lex Fridman (02:23:08) Well, the rest of the world is also, right?
James Holland (02:23:09) They’ve just had it too easy. So they don’t have ground controllers, they don’t have an air defense system in Germany because why would you need an air defense system, we’re going to be the aggressor. There’s no scenario where we’ll have to defend the airspace of the Third Reich because we’re on the offensive. So they just haven’t prepared it.
Lex Fridman (02:23:27) So there’s that clash, the Battle of Britain, the clash of Air Forces. What explains the success of Britain in defending?
James Holland (02:23:36) Well, everyone always says, the few were the last line of defense against the Nazi hordes and all this kind of stuff, and it’s all rubbish. They’re the first line of defense. Second line of defense is the Royal Navy, which is the world’s largest, and there’s 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 will be repulsed. There’s just no chance. 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.
(02:24:28) And the Messerschmitt-109E, the Emil, as a model of 1940 is the mainstay of the German fighter force in the summer of 1940. And 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 at its narrowest and all the rest of it, and also in the Northern Normandy, and that’s where they’re flying from.
(02:24:59) But what that means is that even if you are completely rubbish 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. You can barely miss, if you go over to the Pas-de-Calais. It is literally, it’s just like one huge great kind of hub of fighter airfields. 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.
(02:25:36) And it’s really interesting when you look at prisoner war statements from Luftwaffe ground crew that have been downed, they’re all bugged in 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 if only they’d just shut up and leave them alone and not bomb them. This is just part of the narrative of the Battle of Britain that’s completely left out. It’s always the stocky, the plucky few against the Nazi hordes and all the rest of it. And it’s a complete misnomer.
(02:26:04) And by that time, aircraft production in Britain is massively outpacing the Germans and the best ratio that the Germans achieve in 1940s, July 1940, when the British produced 496 new Hurricanes and Spitfires, single-engine fighters, and the Germans only produced 240 single-engine fighters. That’s the best ratio. And of course, that is the British outproducing the Germans 2:1. And 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 Luftwaffe is less than 200, from 750 or whatever it was in beginning of July, whereas the British fighter force had been 650 or whatever at the beginning of July, is now well over 750.
Lex Fridman (02:26:53) And Britain is outproducing?
James Holland (02:26:55) Yeah, to a massive degree. And that continues, and that is a ratio that just increases as the war progresses. Britain produces 132,500 aircraft in the second World War. America produces 315,000.
Lex Fridman (02:27:12) So why is there this legend of the Luftwaffe?
James Holland (02:27:16) Well, because it’s the spearhead of the Blitzkrieg.
Lex Fridman (02:27:18) So it has to do with the Blitzkrieg?
James Holland (02:27:19) It has to do with the Blitzkrieg. The Luftwaffe becomes kind of the bogeyman of the Third Reich. 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, only part of the Wehrmacht, the Wehrmacht being the Navy, the army, and the Air force, that is in constant use the whole time, or constant abuse, I should say.
(02:27:45) In Britain and America, they rotate their pilots really, really carefully. By the time that you’ve got the eight Fighter Command, for example, part of the Mighty Eighth, the Eighth Air Force operating in Britain, by the end of 1943, you would have, in a squadron, that would have 16, you would never have more than 16 airborne from a squadron at any one time. You would have 40 to 45 pilots to service 16 in the air and similar number of aircraft, which means you’re not overusing these guys.
(02:28:15) And what would happen by that stage of the war, by 1943, 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 of consecutive flying because you can train in America, in Florida or California or Texas or wherever, you can process many, many more people because the training is much more intense because you’ve got clear skies. So it’s not a question of, “Oh, we’d like to take you out Fritz this morning, but it’s a bit cloudy and oh, the RAF are over or Air Force are over, so we can’t fly today.” So in Germany, 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, now Zimbabwe and South Africa, Canada as well. And so you are able to process these guys much better.
(02:29:17) You’re able to give them more training, so that when they come, they are absolutely the finished article as pilots. Well, they’re not the finished article, as they say, a bomber pilot or as a fighter pilot. But that’s okay because you join your squadron of 40 other guys with 16 airborne, and the old hands kind of take you up a few times. So you arrive at, I don’t know, let’s say some airfield in Suffolk in East Anglia in England, and you’ll have 10 days to two weeks acclimatizing, getting used to it. The old hands will put you through your paces, give you some trips, tips. You can pick their brains while you’re having some chow and listening on some briefings. Then, the first mission you do will be a milk run over to France where the danger’s kind of pretty minimal and you can build up your experience, so that by the time you’re actually sent over on a mission to Berlin or Bremen or the Ruhr or whatever, you are absolutely in the business.
(02:30:11) So qualitatively and quantitatively, you are just vastly superior to anything the Luftwaffe has got. The Luftwaffe by that stage, in contrast, 1940, new pilots coming to frontline squadrons with 150, 170 hours in their logbooks, less than a 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 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 are not ready for this and it can bite you. And something like a Messerschmitt-109 has a very high wing loading, so it’s very maneuverable in the air, but it’s got its tiny wings. It’s got this incredible torque, this Daimler-Benz DB 605 engine with this 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.
(02:31:18) 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 (02:31:30) So it has to do with training, really?
James Holland (02:31:32) Yeah.
Lex Fridman (02:31:33) Not training enough?
James Holland (02:31:33) 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, that 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. 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’s 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.

Tanks

Lex Fridman (02:32:18) So in that sense, you could think of World War II as a battle of factories?
James Holland (02:32:25) Yes.
Lex Fridman (02:32:26) What does it take to win in the battle of factories out manufacturing military equipment against the allies?
James Holland (02:32:36) It’s efficiency really. So I always think, 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.
Lex Fridman (02:32:48) I think you’ve said it doesn’t get the respect it deserves maybe.
James Holland (02:32:52) It doesn’t get the respect it deserves. So the Sherman tank, the 75-mm main battle gun, which that’s medium velocity, can fire a shell around 2000 feet per second compared to the notorious infamous German 88 mm, which can fire at third fast again, like 3000 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. 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, doesn’t have a gun that’s as big. It should be an absolute walkover. 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 Rue Massue, a little village called Fontenay-le-Pesnel in Normandy, came face to face with a Tiger tank. And one, how does this happen?
(02:33:47) Well, I’ll tell you how it happened because the commander of the Sherman tank was experienced, had one up the spout. So what I mean by that is he had an armor piercing round already in the breech. 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. 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, gotten him or whatever, and he 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, you can see ’cause you’ve got periscopes, but your visibility is nothing like as good as it is when you’ve got your head above the turret.
(02:34:42) 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. 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. 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.
(02:35:18) 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 easy to manhandle, which means you can put more in a breach 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. 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. So that means there’s 36 Shermans to every single Tiger.
Lex Fridman (02:35:59) So you actually have an incredible video. You talk about this a lot from different angles about the top five tanks and then the bottom five tanks of World War II. I think, was it the Tiger that made both the top five and the bottom five?
James Holland (02:36:13) The problem with the Tiger tank is really huge.
Lex Fridman (02:36:15) We should say that you keep saying the problem, but one of the pros of the Tiger tank-
James Holland (02:36:20) It’s very huge.
Lex Fridman (02:36:21) … is the psychological warfare aspect of it is terrifying.
James Holland (02:36:25) Yes.
Lex Fridman (02:36:26) I don’t know what the other pros, I guess yeah, the 88 mm high velocity and all the rest of it-
James Holland (02:36:32) It’s pretty fearsome, but there are pragmatic problems. The big problem is the Germans are incapable of mass production on a scale, but Americans could do. Frankly, even the British could do. 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. They can’t process it, and they’re being bombed 24 hours a day. And so all their factories are, they’re having to split them all up and that is inherently inefficient because then having to move different parts around and you then having the whole process of having to travel from one place to another to get stuff, you haven’t got much fuel.
(02:37:14) So the consequence of that is that what you do is you think, “Okay, well ,we can’t mass produce, so let’s make really brilliant tanks.” But they’ve lost sight of what a really brilliant is. 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. 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 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. So they have to have different tracks to roll onto the wagons that will then transport them from A to B, take them from West Germany to Normandy, then they have to take them off, then they have to take off the tracks, put on combat tracks, then move them into battle and hope that they don’t break down.
(02:38:12) The problem is when you start the war, it’s 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. And it also means you haven’t got lots of garages and mechanics and gas stations and so on. And so you are 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. 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 can be easier.
(02:39:10) Anyone who can 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’ve got 1,347 of them, you’ve got 492 King Tigers, which are even bigger and at a time where you are really short of fuel and you are really short of absolutely everything. And those shells are huge and they’re harder to manhandle and weird little things that the Germans do, for all their design genius, the loader is always on the right-hand side. Now, in the 1920s and 19 teens and thirties, children were taught to be right-handed. 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 breach from your right side.
(02:40:05) But the loader in a Jagdpanther or Panther or a Tiger is always on the right-hand side of the breach, which ergonomically makes no sense whatsoever. Why do they do this? I’ve never found an answer to this. So there’s all these little things, and as a soldier coming up against, you are 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, 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.
(02:40:41) 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, I found there’s 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 unaesthetic weapons.” In other words, we’ve constantly building over-engineered and aesthetically-pleasing weapons up until this point and they sort of half manage it, but don’t quite.
Lex Fridman (02:41:31) We could probably talk for many hours about each of these topics. We could talk for 10 hours about tanks. I encourage people to listen to your podcast, World War II Pod, We Have Ways of Making You Talk. It’s great.
James Holland (02:41:47) Yeah, we also do, we 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 turn it into a real hub of anyone who’s interested in this subject. It’s a place where they can go and find out just a whole load more.

Battle of Stalingrad

Lex Fridman (02:42:17) I love it. So like I said, we could probably talk for many hours at each of these topics, but let’s look at some of the battles and maybe you can tell me which jumps out at you. I want to talk to you about the Western Front and definitely talk about Normandy. So there’s the Battle of Midway in 1942, which is a naval battle. There’s Eastern Front Stalingrad, probably the deadliest battle in human history. Then there’s the Battle of Kursk, which is a tank battle, the largest tank battle in history, probably the largest battle period in history, 6,000 tanks, 2 million troops, 4,000 aircraft. And then that takes us also to the Battle of the Bulge in Normandy, the Italian Campaign that you talk a lot about. So what do you think is interesting to try to extract some wisdom before we get to Normandy? Do you find, as a historian, the Battle of Kursk or the Battle of Stalingrad more interesting? Stalingrad is often seen as the turning point.
James Holland (02:43:23) Well, yeah, I think so. It’s really interesting. So they get through in 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, beginning of December 1941, Germany is just not going to win, it just can’t. 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. For all the talks of wonder weapons and all the rest, it’s just not going to, it has lost that battle.
(02:44:24) Having said that, Soviet Union is still in a really, really bad situation. It is being helped out a huge amount by 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 because for all the announcements and 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, really colossal losses, huge amounts. So the grain is gone, coal is gone, entire factories have gone. Steel production goes down by 80% in the Soviet Union in 1941 and in 1942. So in 1942, despite the vast amount of numbers of men that they have at their hands, they create 80 new divisions in the second half of 1941, for example. Britain never has 80 divisions in the entire Second World War, division being about, rule of thumb, 15,000 men.
(02:45:42) So 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. 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, capturing the further best part of 700,000 Red Army troops, et cetera, et cetera. But in the process of doing that, it is constantly being attrited, both in battle casualties but in also mechanical casualties too, just can’t cope. The scale is just too big.
(02:46:27) 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 [inaudible 02:46:41] like about him, but he 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, 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 statistics and figures and doesn’t understand what it’s like at the actual front, the coal phase. So he’s stifling the very thing that made the German army effective, which is the ability to give commanders at the front the freedom on their leash to be able to make decisions and battle command decisions, and he’s taken that away from them.
(02:47:30) So he’s basically making them go into battle with decreasing amounts of supplies and firepower and with one hand behind their back in terms of decision-making process. And that is not a good combination. The other problem is that he decides rather than going from Moscow in 1942, ’cause basically there’s a cooling off period in the winter because of the conditions, but everyone knows, the Soviet Union know, the Red Army knows that the moment spring comes, there’s going to be another offensive, another major offensive in the summer, that is absolutely as certain as day following night, et cetera. 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’s better prepared, it knows what’s coming now. It’s kind of learning some of the lessons, starting to absorb the lessons. Stalin coincidentally is pulling back from his very tight leash in the way that Hitler is doing the opposite and increasing his micromanagement and control freak-ery.
(02:48:29) What Hitler decides is rather than going for Moscow, he’s going to go for the oilfields. This is absolutely insane because what’s going to happen when they get to the oilfields? Does he think really that the Soviet Union are going to let those oilfields come into German hands intact? Even if he does let them get in intact, what are they going to do with that oil? Oil needs to be refined. Where are you going to refine it? They don’t have many oil refineries. How are you going to ship that oil to where you need it to be in the factories in the Third Reich and into your process into gasoline and then get it to diesel and get it to your U-boats, get it to your tanks, get it to your armored 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?
(02:49:20) There’s no pipelines. There’s only some pipelines that have 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’s absolute la-la land. 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.
Lex Fridman (02:49:46) The logistics question in part?
James Holland (02:49:48) 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 (02:49:55) Nor how do you provide resources and feed the soldiers and all that kind of stuff? I mean, it’s…
James Holland (02:50:00) So the Case Blue, 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 the 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. 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 von Bock who’s the commander, just goes, “That’s nuts. That makes no sense whatsoever. You are splitting the mission.” So Hitler fires him. So suddenly they get into this assault for Stalingrad and it becomes this sort of street fight. Street fighting is the worst kind of fighting. The reason why the Israelis have just blown everything up in Gaza is because otherwise you can’t see, you need a field of fire. This is fighting in a buildup area, it’s horrendous.
Lex Fridman (02:51:01) To clarify, we were talking about urban warfare, door-to-door, building-to-building.
James Holland (02:51:05) 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. 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 Sixth Army, it is the encirclement, the subsequent encirclement.
(02:51:45) So the Germans have been sucked into this street battle in Stalingrad, cannot give up. We cannot give up, we cannot back down, 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 pincer movement is being planned and it is only possible through mechanization from the United States. 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 Kursk Salient, for example, but it’s game over. The catastrophe of the surrender of, the final surrender, the writing’s on the wall at the end of 1942, by November 1942. When the two Soviet fronts meet up, then there is no possible chance of escape for Sixth Army and they are consigned, they are toast.
(02:52:53) 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 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. But you have to see them in tandem, as this is two fronts. 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.
(02:53:35) The allies become masters of the North African shores on the 13th of May 1943, and it is a catastrophe. 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, the subsequent summer as well, it’s really interesting, the Luftwaffe lose, between June and October 1943, so this is including the Kursk Battle, which that takes place in July 1943, in that period, the Luftwaffe loses 702 aircraft over the Eastern Front, but 3,704 aircraft over the Mediterranean.
(02:54:13) 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. 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 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 in the Western Front, and it’s not saying that the Western Front is more strategic either. It’s just you have to be balanced about this. The psychological blow-over for Stalingrad is immense, and you cannot belittle that.
Lex Fridman (02:55:02) I mean, there’s the…
James Holland (02:55:00) It’s immense, and you cannot belittle that.
Lex Fridman (02:55:02) I mean, we went over it really fast, but there is a human drama element.
James Holland (02:55:08) Yes, yes.

Concentration camps

Lex Fridman (02:55:09) When we were talking about the operational side, the material loss of a battle is also extremely important to the big picture of the war. And we often don’t talk about that because, of course, with war, the thing to focus on is the human drama of it-
James Holland (02:55:25) Yes.
Lex Fridman (02:55:27) … because we’re humans.
James Holland (02:55:28) 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. Then so Goebbels, for example, gives his infamous speech in the Sportpalast in third week of February in 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. 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.”
(02:56:02) 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. They’re really into photographing everything, taking cine footage of everything, still part of the recording the greatness of the Reich and the triumphs of the Reich. They want it recorded.
(02:56:26) So all this stuff is a bit like the radios, is made very, very cheap, so lots of them have it, and people are sending it all back. And the people that are developing this stuff are all seeing it, and people are talking about it, and then it’s being 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.
(02:56:55) This whole idea is do they really know what was going on? Yeah, they do. They do know what’s going on, to lesser or greater detail, of course. There’s some people who don’t. And a bit like people know about the news today, some people do, some people don’t. “Oh, I never read the newspaper. I never listen to the news.” 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 are 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 seen in recent years.
Lex Fridman (02:57:35) Yeah, we should mention that the Western Front and the Eastern Front are very different in this regard.
James Holland (02:57:40) Yes.
Lex Fridman (02:57:41) So a lot of the Holocaust by bullets, the Holocaust with the concentration camps and the extermination camps is not in Germany, is not in the Western Front. It’s in Poland, it’s in the Soviet Union.
James Holland (02:57:54) 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, 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, air comma, model town, and they all know exactly what’s going on.
Lex Fridman (02:58:18) Yeah. You, by the way, have a nice podcast series of four episodes on Auschwitz, the evolution of the dream world town that becomes a camp, a work camp, then becomes an extermination camp.
James Holland (02:58:35) On a big boon of factory for IG Farben, which never produces a single bit of rubber.
Lex Fridman (02:58:41) So, this for sure is something I would have to dive deep in. There’s a book you recommended, KL.
James Holland (02:58:50) Yes, it’s just called KL. It’s about the whole concentration camp system, because K is Konzentration, in German. Lager is a camp. It’s an exhaustive book, and I am full of admiration for him for writing it, just because, jeepers, it must have been so… I mean, I was very depressed doing that work on Auschwitz, that deep dive. I just found the whole thing utterly dispiriting. And I’ve been there a few times, and it’s ghastly. So, how he wrote a whole book on it, I don’t know.
Lex Fridman (02:59:21) I think in the details, there’s two ways, I think, to look at the Holocaust. One is Man’s Search For Meaning, but Viktor Frankl, this philosophical thing about how a human being can confront that and find meaning. And what does the human condition look like in the context of such evil?
(02:59:45) And then there is the more sort of detailed, okay, well how do you actually implement something like the Final Solution? So, you have this ideology of evil implemented.
James Holland (02:59:59) Yes.
Lex Fridman (02:59:59) And at the fine detail of, what are the different technologies used? What are the different humans and the hierarchy of humans at a camp? What’s the actual experience of the individual person who shows up at a camp? Just get into the details, and in those details, I think there’s some deep profound human truth that can emerge. The mundane one step at a time is how you can achieve evil, and you can get lost in the mundane.
James Holland (03:00:33) Yes, the banality of evil, it’s incredible. I think what is so completely horrific is that half the 6 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.
(03:00:55) Himmler goes and visits an execution in Ukraine, or maybe it’s in the Baltic states, I can’t remember where he goes, but he witnessed some in the summer of 1941. He thinks, “Oh, that’s horrible. They don’t have to do that. I don’t want my men having to do that. Got to find a more humane way of doing it.” When he’s talk about a more humane way of doing it, humane for the executioners, not for the victims.
(03:01:16) Because, trust me, Zyklon B is not a nice way to go. 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.
(03:01:32) But all of those who are standing naked in that gas chamber, first of all, extremely humiliated by this process in the first place. 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.
(03:01:46) 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.” 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 (03:02:14) While being humiliated all the way through.
James Holland (03:02:17) While being humiliated all the way through.
(03:02:19) 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 beyond terrific. 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 the 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, and there are bits of bone. Yeah, they’re still there, from the ash. It is utterly repulsive.
(03:03:02) And imagine arriving from that train on that incredibly long journey, where you’ve had no comforts whatsoever. Again, you’ve had humiliations and privation, the privations you’ve had to suffer as a result of that, of having to defecate in a bucket in the corner in front of other people. It was just horrendous.
(03:03:18) And then you get there bewildered, and immediately your kids are taken away from you. Or your husband and wife who’ve been married 20 years, 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.
(03:03:35) 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. 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 manifested itself in the Holocaust and the gas chambers and those executions into pits and tiny places and creeks in Lithuania or Ukraine or whatever. I mean, it’s just horrendous. And this is from a nation which, a decade earlier, had been a democracy.
Lex Fridman (03:04:29) It seems like, as a human civilization, we walk that Solzhenitsyn line between good and evil, and it’s a thin line, and we have to walk it carefully.

Battle of Normandy

James Holland (03:04:39) Yes.
Lex Fridman (03:04:41) One of the great battles in World War II on the Western Front is Normandy. I have to talk to you about Normandy,
James Holland (03:04:52) Have to talk about it.
Lex Fridman (03:04:53) D-Day, the Normandy landings, the famous on June 6th, 1944. This was a Allied invasion of Nazi occupied Western Europe.
James Holland (03:05:03) Yep.
Lex Fridman (03:05:03) What was the planning? And it was lengthy planning. What was the planning? What was the execution of the Normandy landings?
James Holland (03:05:09) Well, the decision to finally go in… That 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 and Churchill and Roosevelt and his own chiefs of staff, about what the policy should be. And the policy is to get American troops over to Europe as quickly as possible, get them over to Britain, get them training and get them across the channel ASAP and start the liberation of Europe.
(03:05:38) 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. The British are still recovering. They’re good on the naval power. They’re increasingly good on air power, but land power they’ve had to make up from the loss of their ally, France, and expand as well.
(03:05:59) So, 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 thought in 1939. They’ve got to start again.
(03:06:17) But it’s also becomes clear that it’s they’re not really ready in 1943 either. One of the problems is that Molotov, who is the Soviet foreign minister, has come over to Britain, in May 1942, and said, “We need you to do your bit and get on the campaign trail against the Germans and fight on the ground.” And the British were going, “Well, yeah, but cross-channel invasion is not really going to happen. We know we’re doing that in North Africa at the moment.”
(03:06:39) Then he goes over to Washington, and the Americans go, “We are definitely going to go and take on the attack to the Germans in 1942.” They’ve made this promise. So the summer of 1942, it becomes clear that they can’t keep that. So Churchill says, “Well, look, here’s an idea. We’ve already got an army in Egypt. Why don’t we land another one in Northwest Africa. That’s run by Vichy France, which is pro-Axis French colonies. Why don’t we take that? We can do that, and then we can meet in the middle. We can pence around. We can conquer the whole of North Africa. You can kill two birds with one stone. It’s because you can get some experience fighting against Axis troops, test some of your equipment and commanders. What’s not to like? And then we can see how it goes.” So, this is a opportunistic strategy.
(03:07:24) Whereas the Americans are very much, “We want to draw a straight line to Berlin, and that’s the quickest way. Let’s do it that way.” So it’s a different viewpoint, but Roosevelt gets that and agrees to that. So, that’s where the whole North Africa-Mediterranean campaign comes from.
(03:07:39) And as a consequence of the huge commitment to Tunisia, three and a half thousand aircraft, huge navies, 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 really try and put the nail into the coffin of Italy’s war, get them out of the battle. Sicily is an obvious one. Let’s go in there, and then we can take a view.”
(03:08:01) But between Sicily happening and the fall of North Africa is the Trident Conference in Washington, and that is where the decisions made. The Americans go, “Okay, enough of this opportunistic stuff. Okay, we get it, we buy it, but no more faffing around. May 1944, one year, hence, we are going to cross the Atlantic.” 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.
(03:08:32) Serious planning starts at the beginning of 1944. One of the lessons from Sicily to Normandy is that you can’t have commanders fighting one battle whilst preparing for the next one. 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 with 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.
(03:09:00) 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 men and material quickest. 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 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.
(03:09:36) Well, how do you do that? Well, you do that by destroying their means of getting there, so bridges. Destroy all the bridges over the Seine. Destroy all the bridges over the Loire hit the marshalling 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 British head, as and when it comes. 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 you can’t go low and destroy those bridges if you’ve got Focke-Wulfs and Messerschmitts hovering above you. 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.
(03:10:21) 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 flats, east side of Great Britain, the aircraft industry is much deeper into the Reich, and it is beyond the range of fighter escorts for the bombers.
(03:10:42) 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. 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-Regensburg 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.
(03:11:13) But on that day of the 324 heavy bombers that the Americans send over to hit Schweinfurt and Regensburg, where there are 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 that are coming out of America, this is too much, 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.
(03:11:43) 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. 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.
(03:12:07) But to start off, it’s harnessed with a really bad engine. The Allison engine is just not right for that aircraft. And it’s not until a Rolls-Royce Merlin, which is the same one that powers the Lancaster, the Mosquito, and the 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. It can actually fly over 1400 miles, which gets you not just to Berlin and back, but to Warsaw and back. So, suddenly you’ve got that solution.
(03:12:39) 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 (03:12:55) Wow.
James Holland (03:12:55) 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 90% of their effectiveness.
(03:13:18) And in the intelligence game, they’re winning that one as well. They’re just much better because, in Germany, intelligence is power, so people tend to… 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.
(03:13:33) 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 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 [inaudible 03:13:52], 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.
(03:14:03) And what you see, really, with D-Day, I think, is the zenith of coalition warfare. 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. And until they’ve achieved that common goal, they’re going to put differences to one side. Much play has been made about Anglophobia amongst American commanders and America phobia amongst Ally 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.
(03:14:40) 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, and there is a subtle difference there. But what you see them is that 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 and a half thousand aircraft, 155,000 men landed and dropped from the air in 24-hour period. It is phenomenal. It is absolutely phenomenal.
(03:15:22) And while it is still seen as a predominantly American show, all three service commanders are British. Two-thirds of the aircraft are British. Two-thirds of the men landed are British and Dominion.
(03:15:35) 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. They’re key in the Battle of the Atlantic. They’re key in air power. Their key D-Day and, indeed, in the battle for Italy, as well. So, the Canadians should never be forgotten.
(03:15:55) But one of the reasons it is the British Navy that dominates in D-Day is because, of course, the incredibly enormous strength of the Royal Navy in the first place, but partly because most of the U.S. 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 overall allied cause.
(03:16:18) But D-Day is just extraordinary, and despite the terrible weather, which is such a debilitating factor in the whole thing. I mean, it puts people off course. It 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 lies lost, proportionally, it is the Canadians that suffer the worst, more so than the Americans. It’s just it’s fewer of them, overall.
(03:16:43) 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, 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, they’ve so thought of absolutely everything, and their logistics apply.
(03:17:09) I mean, even things like the minesweeping operations, it’s the biggest single minesweeping operation of the entire war because there’s huge minefields off the Normandy coast. 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 through these minefields through which the invasion force can go, not a single ship is lost to a mine in the actual invasion. That is phenomenal and can only be done with the greatest of skill and planning, and all in a period where 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 (03:17:50) Yeah, and that was really the nail in the coffin, the beginning of the end for Hitler, now, for the European theater.
James Holland (03:18:00) Yeah, once you get the… 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. And, of course, 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 enormous.

Lessons from WW2

Lex Fridman (03:18:33) Let’s go to the very end, the Battle of Berlin, Hitler sitting in his bunker, his suicide, Germany surrender. You actually said that Downfall, the movie, was a very accurate representation.
James Holland (03:18:49) I think it is, really, except that Goebbels took cyanide, didn’t shoot himself.
Lex Fridman (03:18:53) Oh, details, but I think it’s probably… It might be my favorite World War II movie, which is strange to say because it’s not really about World War II. It’s about Hitler in a bunker, but…
James Holland (03:19:06) What was his name? Bruno Ganz, wasn’t it? I think he nailed him.
Lex Fridman (03:19:12) Yeah.
James Holland (03:19:13) 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. There are translations of many of his conferences. You can see what he’s saying. You can get inside his head in a very clear way, and much more clearly than you can Stalin or just about any other leader really. So, what 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, and it just feels like they nailed it. It just feels like they’ve got it spot on, to me.
Lex Fridman (03:19:54) I mean, it’s a fascinating story of a evil maniac, and then in this certainty, crumbling, realizing that this vision of the thousand-year Reich is…
James Holland (03:20:11) And Hitler says, “My reputation won’t be good to start off with, but I hope in a few years time that people start to realize that kind of all the good I was trying to bring.”
Lex Fridman (03:20:18) Yeah.
James Holland (03:20:19) And that sort of…
Lex Fridman (03:20:20) They’re all the same, aren’t they? You always believe you’re doing good.
James Holland (03:20:20) Yep.
Lex Fridman (03:20:24) And there’s so many deep lessons there. So, now, you have written so much. You have said so much. You have studied this so much. What to you, looking at World War II, is the lessons we should take away?
James Holland (03:20:41) 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. You have to recognize the moments of trouble when they arise. So when there are financial crisis, you know that political unrest is going to come, and you need to be prepared for that. You need to be able to see the writing on the wall.
(03:21:12) You can’t be complacent. Complacency is such a dirty word, isn’t it? 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… 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. I mean, that’s the overriding theme.
(03:21:46) Because, although I don’t think there will 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 knocked out Russian tanks and dead bodies, bloated bodies all over the place. Put that into black and white, and it could be the road out of Falaise in 1944. It could be any number of German battlefields in World War II. And the similarities in the trenches and the people hiding in foxholes, that’s horribly reminiscent, as are the huge casualties that they’re suffering on both sides, whether they be Russian or Ukrainian.
(03:22:24) And it’s a shock. It’s a shock to see that. It reminds you of just how quickly, I think, things can descend. I mean, that’s the other thing. 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 peace is fragile, and you take it for granted at your peril.
Lex Fridman (03:22:57) And you take for granted, at our peril, that nobody will use nuclear weapons ever again. And that’s not a thing we should take for granted.
James Holland (03:23:08) No, sir.
Lex Fridman (03:23:09) What gives you hope about the future of human civilization? We’ve been talking about all this darkness in the 20th century. What’s the source of light?
James Holland (03:23:20) 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. 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 infinite. I think that’s what gives me hope.
Lex Fridman (03:23:50) James, I’m a big fan. This was an honor to talk to you, and please keep putting incredible history out there. I can’t wait to see what you do next. Thank you so much for talking today.
James Holland (03:24:02) Well, thank you, Lex. It’s a privilege to talk to you.
Lex Fridman (03:24:06) Thanks for listening to this conversation with James Holland. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description or at lexfridman.com/sponsors.
(03:24:15) And now, let me leave you some words from Winston Churchill. “If you’re going through hell, keep going.” Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.