Pod Insights Fin vs History I Prefer El Alamein’s Early Stuff (with Pierre Novellie) | Monty vs Rommel (Part 3/4) About this episode Strap in lads, all this sand will send our autism crazy.
Monty & Rommel (Part Three)
The show for people who like history but don't care what actually happened.
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Chapters:
00:00 - Rude But Correct
07:17 - The Mad PE Teacher
12:40 - Sliced Bread
13:30 - The British Experience
16:51 - Farting In A Lift
19:54 - The Bag’s Run Out
25:54 - The Gay Beret
30:46 - Yes And
35:34 - Ripped Nerds
41:08 - He’s A Gemini
44:35 - No Chill Out Room
47:30 - Hitler’s Aura
52:45 - Just Ignore Him
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Transcript 12,381 words · 7 speakers
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0:50 Speaker 02 What's the secret to being a great host this season? Keeping things deliciously simple, like mixing Simply Cranberry into a festive drink as guests arrive, or serving up a warm mug of Simply Apple on a chilly night. That means less time behind the scenes and more time in the moment with everyone. Crafted with real fruit, Simply juices and fruit drinks make any holiday drink effortless, inviting and completely delicious. Simply, say yes to simple.
1:31 Speaker 03 Welcome back to part three of Monty and Rommel. We are finally joined by one of our most long-trailled guests.
1:37 Speaker 04 Yeah, my god.
1:38 Speaker 03 The phenomenon, Pianavelli.
1:40 Speaker 04 I mean, there's a million things we could get him on to talk about. It was almost choice paralysis.
1:43 Speaker 03 Yes, it was.
1:44 Speaker 04 What you're gonna guest on. Because I mean, you could talk about nearly anything.
1:48 Speaker 03 And as we will find out, he will talk about all of it.
1:51 Speaker 04 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
1:51 Speaker 03 We were just talking about cattle bolt guns before.
1:53 Speaker 04 We were, yeah.
1:54 Speaker 03 We were being schooled on the logistics of a cattle bolt gun.
1:58 Speaker 04 Of a chagrin.
2:00 Speaker 03 Pianavelli, people don't know, one of my oldest friends in comedy, one of the greatest stand-ups of certainly our generation, and I mean that. And also, card-carrying artist.
2:11 Speaker 04 Yeah.
2:13 Speaker 03 And probably you and it's a toss up between you and Fern Brady as to when you got your diagnoses that I went the most like, oh, obvious. Yeah.
2:22 Speaker 04 Yeah.
2:22 Speaker 03 You know, it made so much sense.
2:23 Speaker 04 There was a game with how long before Pierre mentioned the tanks.
2:26 Speaker 03 Yeah, yeah. There was a game which was how long will Pierre before Pierre talks about military history in an insanely detailed way. You know military history better than anyone I know.
2:35 Speaker 05 Yeah, maybe. I don't know. You've met Al Murray now.
2:38 Speaker 03 Okay, fair enough. Yeah, fair enough.
2:40 Speaker 05 But okay.
2:41 Speaker 03 Before that.
2:41 Speaker 05 Before him.
2:42 Speaker 03 Yeah.
2:43 Speaker 05 Before Al's kind of horrifying universe level knowledge of World War Two.
2:47 Speaker 04 Also, first debut for jeans on the podcast. We've never had jeans on the show.
2:51 Speaker 03 That's true.
2:52 Speaker 05 I've gone for a kind of Robin Williams character look.
2:54 Speaker 03 Yes.
2:55 Speaker 05 I'm gonna say it's not your fault a lot.
2:58 Speaker 04 They're more laid back.
2:59 Speaker 03 Yeah. But we talked about Monty and Rommel. Now, we last episode, we got to Rommel had the first battle of El Alamein.
3:07 Speaker 05 Yeah.
3:08 Speaker 03 I imagine you know all about this.
3:09 Speaker 04 Are you more of a first or second El Alamein guy?
3:12 Speaker 05 A second.
3:13 Speaker 03 A second.
3:13 Speaker 05 I just don't know if there's like a hipster type. Actually, the first.
3:16 Speaker 03 I prefer just earlier stuff. Al Alamein one's got a lot going for it.
3:21 Speaker 03 So to recap, Rommel is on meth in the desert. He's pushed the Brits or he's sort of like Johan Cruyff. He's playing total football with tanks. He's pushed the Brits all the way back into Egypt on Operation Zonin Blumer.
3:35 Speaker 04 Morale is low.
3:36 Speaker 03 Morale's low. Tobruk has been relieved finally. The Australian rats.
3:42 Speaker 04 The rats, yeah.
3:43 Speaker 03 Not my words. They've been relieved by the RAF and at the first battle of El Alamein, it's ended in stalemate. And now the great hero, much as in this series, the great autistic hero has arrived.
3:56 Speaker 05 Yes.
3:57 Speaker 03 To save the Brits because we got a bit lost in the chaos last episode.
4:00 Speaker 04 It was just too many details about the kind of going back and forth in the desert. And we were losing morale at the end of the second episode.
4:06 Speaker 03 Yes.
4:06 Speaker 04 And we've flown in an autistic.
4:08 Speaker 03 Yes.
4:09 Speaker 05 Our own Monty.
4:10 Speaker 04 To boost morale, to be rude but correct about things.
4:14 Speaker 03 Oh, God. I so wish I had that label.
4:18 Speaker 04 Rude but incorrect.
4:20 Speaker 03 Yeah, yeah, no, it's just rude at the moment. I'm just rude, really hoping for some kind of label. Your opinion on Montgomery first before we crack into it? Or maybe your opinion on the North African theatre, which in my opinion is the most important theatre of World War II.
4:33 Speaker 04 Yeah, of course, it's the defining theatre, you'd say.
4:36 Speaker 05 Well, it's the best way to drain the enemy of resources is make them go to the desert for no reason and fart around.
4:42 Speaker 03 Are you aware of a game that we highlighted? You are aware of it.
4:45 Speaker 04 The huge board game.
4:47 Speaker 03 Did I not bet you on the last episode that he's heard of it?
4:49 Speaker 04 Yeah, it takes 20 years to complete.
4:51 Speaker 05 I want to play this so much and I couldn't find seven or eight people who would join us.
4:55 Speaker 03 You could find seven or eight people.
4:57 Speaker 05 Easily.
4:57 Speaker 03 Really?
4:58 Speaker 05 Ease now.
5:01 Speaker 03 Can you name them? Because I take issue with the idea there are eight people waiting to play the campaign for North Africa over 20 years.
5:09 Speaker 04 So it's a 20-year game and you need to choose your stage of life. Are you thinking like 60 to 80? Are you thinking, would you want to be a bit more composentist? Do you want to be a bit more, is it 40 to 60?
5:20 Speaker 05 I think you've just got to see it as, you know.
5:24 Speaker 04 This is my life now.
5:25 Speaker 05 This is my every second Sunday. As long as you do it for a full Sunday.
5:30 Speaker 03 That's going to take 40 years, though.
5:32 Speaker 04 No, it's every two weeks, isn't it?
5:33 Speaker 03 No, if you met every week.
5:35 Speaker 06 It's every two weeks. If you met twice a month.
5:38 Speaker 04 He knows.
5:38 Speaker 03 And he already knows. He knows everything.
5:41 Speaker 05 Twice a month, baby. And the problem with the, I know in the board game, the Italians, it's like they need more water and stuff because they're constantly boiling pasta and things.
5:51 Speaker 03 Genuinely, yeah, Christ.
5:52 Speaker 05 Which is mad.
5:54 Speaker 04 It's like a fucking chat GPT.
5:57 Speaker 03 Yeah, they base that on, yeah.
5:58 Speaker 04 Yeah, exactly.
6:00 Speaker 03 Yes.
6:01 Speaker 05 I just came in while I slept and they.
6:03 Speaker 03 You have, yes, you have to account for the evaporation of water, more so if you're British because they're using jerrycans rather than drums.
6:11 Speaker 03 But this theatre.
6:12 Speaker 04 No one's finished it.
6:13 Speaker 03 No one has ever finished it.
6:14 Speaker 04 Really?
6:14 Speaker 03 Supposedly, no one's ever finished it.
6:15 Speaker 04 We shouldn't tell them that.
6:17 Speaker 03 Because also, you will do it now for the next 20 years, and that is when you'll see, if you have any kids, that will be just, "Sorry, I was playing the campaign for North Africa."
6:25 Speaker 04 Fair enough, if you're fighting an actual war, maybe.
6:27 Speaker 05 The worst thing would be playing it for 18 years, and then you see on the news someone has finished it.
6:31 Speaker 03 Yes.
6:32 Speaker 05 And you're like, two years away.
6:33 Speaker 04 Yeah, 100%. But also, I don't know what the post-nut clarity will be like when you finish that game. Because it'll be like, "Well, that's it."
6:40 Speaker 03 20 years.
6:41 Speaker 04 And then you pack the board up.
6:42 Speaker 03 Then you make a new one called Barbarossa.
6:45 Speaker 04 Yeah. You have to have something go, because I think afterwards where it's like, "Well, I guess that's it."
6:50 Speaker 03 Yeah.
6:51 Speaker 05 Yeah, Invasion of Sicily. Roll dice to try and seduce the mafia into helping you.
6:55 Speaker 03 Husky, Operation Husky. Or you play a much shorter game, which is just dropping a bomb in Japan.
7:00 Speaker 04 Yeah. Was that sort of like?
7:02 Speaker 03 It's the opposite. It just takes one turn.
7:05 Speaker 05 It's two turns.
7:05 Speaker 03 Two turns.
7:07 Speaker 05 They thought it would only take one turn, and then it took fucking two.
7:10 Speaker 03 Ah, fuck it, another one. Why not? Why not? We're here now. Go on. So, yeah, we're in the desert, and as you say, this theatre is all about resources.
7:18 Speaker 04 Yeah.
7:19 Speaker 03 It's the most logistical of the...
7:21 Speaker 04 Yeah, so how do you think, compared to, you know a lot about World War II, how do you think is this part of World War II? Where does this rank with some of your favourite bits? Is this like B tier, A tier?
7:31 Speaker 05 It's, it gets, everything gets overshadowed by Normandy, right?
7:34 Speaker 04 Right.
7:35 Speaker 05 If you're from the West.
7:36 Speaker 04 Right.
7:36 Speaker 05 If you're Russian, you just think that you did it on your own, and you don't care about anything anyone else did. So whatever. But D-Day and all the, and Saving Private Ryan and all the video games. But it is, North Africa is great, because you've got like two, a supervillain and a superhero character.
7:51 Speaker 04 It's a spin-off, right?
7:51 Speaker 03 Yeah.
7:52 Speaker 05 Oh, man. And like, the thing that makes it difficult is the to-ing and fro-ing. It's exactly what you guys got demoralised by.
7:59 Speaker 03 End-to-end stuff.
8:00 Speaker 04 We've lost Tobruk again.
8:01 Speaker 03 Yeah. Yeah. It changes hands three times in the course of the war.
8:04 Speaker 04 Absolutely mad.
8:06 Speaker 03 And also, it's all, basically, the only inhabitable bit is a whatever, 100 miles strip. And everything else is desert.
8:14 Speaker 05 Yeah, and it's horrible to imagine. Like, being 40 degrees and like, the best place to be is, the best place to be is inside a metal tin.
8:25 Speaker 04 Yeah.
8:26 Speaker 05 It's horrible, horrible, horrible.
8:28 Speaker 03 So, after the first battle of El Alamein, the hipster's choice. Churchill decides to initiate the...
8:37 Speaker 05 Not everyone's heard of the First Battle of Al-Alemany, but everyone who has went on to fight the Second of
8:42 Speaker 04 If you were, hipsters are calling people out, girls calling, calling them out for wearing a t-shirt with the First Battle of Al-Alemany.
8:47 Speaker 05 It's because they primark sells them. Come on, have you even studied the First Battle of Al-Alemany?
8:50 Speaker 03 I'm going around Rough Trade wearing a t-shirt saying First Battle of Al-Alemany, and I'm getting nookie.
8:55 Speaker 05 Name three brigades.
8:56 Speaker 03 You best believe, you best believe I'm getting some Eighth Army tang, right? Now, Winston Churchill, after the First Battle of Al-Alemany, institutes the Cairo Purge, okay? He pushes for a complete overhaul of the leadership. So at this point, it's Orc, who is a repressed homosexual, he's gayman, to use the language of the time.
9:17 Speaker 04 I like saying gayman because it sounds like it's a position in the tank.
9:19 Speaker 03 It's also, it's
9:21 Speaker 04 Infantryman, you've got a gayman.
9:23 Speaker 03 But it also seems like that would be how you pronounce it in the old days.
9:26 Speaker 04 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
9:27 Speaker 03 Gayman.
9:29 Speaker 03 Now, his plan is for someone called, is it Gort, to take control? But Gort, right, is flying from, from London to North Africa to take up the role. His plane gets shot down because the Germans think that Churchill's in that plane.
9:43 Speaker 04 Right.
9:44 Speaker 03 So they think they've killed Churchill, because Churchill is going to North Africa, which he doesn't really need to be doing.
9:49 Speaker 04 Yeah.
9:49 Speaker 03 But anyway.
9:50 Speaker 04 Was there like a Churchill wraparound the plane with like a picture of him?
9:53 Speaker 03 Yeah, it's, yeah, it's, yeah, it was a tour bus, yeah.
9:57 Speaker 05 Churchill posted a selfie on board a private plane and they thought that's gotta be it.
9:59 Speaker 03 Was it Gort or Gott?
10:01 Speaker 04 Gott.
10:02 Speaker 03 Gott gets shot down.
10:03 Speaker 04 Yeah.
10:04 Speaker 03 Which means that, and enter Monty.
10:07 Speaker 04 Yeah.
10:07 Speaker 03 A difficult man.
10:09 Speaker 04 Yes.
10:09 Speaker 03 But the right man.
10:10 Speaker 04 A difficult pint.
10:11 Speaker 03 A difficult pint, no doubt.
10:13 Speaker 05 Anti booze.
10:14 Speaker 03 Yes, well, yeah.
10:15 Speaker 04 That's a very, that's as difficult pint as
10:16 Speaker 05 That's as difficult as it gets. I'm anti booze and I'm rude. You have to pick, you can't, you have to have both.
10:22 Speaker 03 That's true, actually. To be sober and rude is a real
10:25 Speaker 04 Just white knuckling it.
10:27 Speaker 03 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
10:28 Speaker 04 He seems like a rude guy. He's not like one of those rude for straight people who's just short with you. He'll sit and do a session of being rude.
10:34 Speaker 03 I'll tell you what I'm talking about.
10:36 Speaker 04 He's not leaving. He'll be rude all night. He'll keep going.
10:38 Speaker 05 He's the sort of person who follows up a question almost immediately with, "Well?"
10:42 Speaker 03 Yeah.
10:43 Speaker 05 There's a lot of that vibe coming from him.
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11:42 Speaker 02 What's the secret to being a great host this season? Keeping things deliciously simple, like mixing Simply Cranberry into a festive drink as guests arrive, or serving up a warm mug of Simply Apple on a chilly night. That means less time behind the scenes and more time in the moment with everyone. Crafted with real fruit, Simply juices and fruit drinks make any holiday drink effortless, inviting and completely delicious. Simply, say yes to simple.
12:12 Speaker 03 13th of August, 42, Monty takes command of the 8th Army. He immediately orders a no withdraw, or right, don't know fucking leaving. We don't go further back than this line.
12:25 Speaker 04 He makes everyone burn the pamphlets and instruction booklets on how to retreat in good order.
12:30 Speaker 03 Really?
12:31 Speaker 04 But that's one of his skills is morale boosting, right? So like symbolic things of saying like, we're definitely going to win, but stuff like that was actually pretty goaded.
12:40 Speaker 05 I think it's... It's such a morale boost for someone to come in and channel the maddest PE teacher you had.
12:47 Speaker 03 Yes.
12:47 Speaker 05 Because that's who you want, I think, in that situation.
12:49 Speaker 04 Wait, is it getting Big Sam in to avoid relegation?
12:51 Speaker 03 It's totally that. It's Mike Bassett, Tank Commander. It's what he is. It's totally that. It's 4-4-2. None of this fucking total football nonsense.
13:00 Speaker 04 We tried it with a European manager. It was too expansive. We don't know the players.
13:03 Speaker 03 Shore up.
13:04 Speaker 04 Get Sam in. Let's make sure we can survive.
13:06 Speaker 03 It's totally what he does.
13:08 Speaker 05 Up till this point, you've had a bunch of old guys with pipes and then a little weird man with a moustache shows up and is just incredibly rude about how fat and unfit everyone is. And makes everyone go on jogs. And it's not nice, but it does make you go, oh.
13:23 Speaker 04 Obsessed with fitness. But as we were saying, fitness is very different then because the body's, it didn't look ripped or anything.
13:29 Speaker 03 No.
13:30 Speaker 04 It's just a lot of star jumps, I imagine.
13:31 Speaker 05 Lot, so many star jumps. Like sprinting around with a rifle fully above your head.
13:36 Speaker 04 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
13:37 Speaker 03 Yeah. Climbing over a rope and then dropping down.
13:39 Speaker 05 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
13:40 Speaker 04 Trying to desperately turn tinned corned beef into muscle.
13:44 Speaker 03 Yes. But then that is actually, it's optimal, isn't it? Because there's no, there's no like sugar and stuff like there is now.
13:50 Speaker 05 Yeah.
13:51 Speaker 03 If you have soup, it's just soup. It doesn't have glucose in it, you might imagine.
13:55 Speaker 05 And there's no waste of like excess muscle where it's like, well, I can lift up this heavyweight. And it's like, well, if it's heavier than your rifle, you've wasted your time.
14:01 Speaker 03 Yeah, yeah.
14:02 Speaker 05 It's all you need to do.
14:03 Speaker 03 We tell you what we should do. We should place this, is what we always do, Pierre, is that we place a date with something, anything in history that happened before or after. I imagine you'd be very good at this. And it has become a sort of spectator sport where you try and get it as close as possible.
14:15 Speaker 05 Okay.
14:16 Speaker 03 It doesn't have to be though. You can, you can.
14:18 Speaker 04 We've had some people with like the Big Bang.
14:19 Speaker 05 Okay.
14:20 Speaker 04 And like the birth of Greg Wallace. It's like, you can like, you know.
14:23 Speaker 03 Do whatever you want. So 13th of August, 1942. Okay. What's that before, what's that after?
14:28 Speaker 05 Oh, yeah. 13th of August, 1942.
14:31 Speaker 04 It can be anything.
14:32 Speaker 03 Yeah, it can be anything.
14:33 Speaker 04 To be honest, if it, shoot from the hip, whatever comes out, it comes out.
14:36 Speaker 05 Okay. It's after sliced bread.
14:39 Speaker 04 Well, let's have a check.
14:40 Speaker 03 Send it out today.
14:41 Speaker 04 We're going to check that.
14:42 Speaker 03 After sliced bread.
14:43 Speaker 04 1928.
14:44 Speaker 05 There we go.
14:45 Speaker 04 Incredibly late for sliced bread.
14:47 Speaker 03 Very, very late for sliced bread.
14:49 Speaker 04 I feel I would have come up with that as soon as bread was invented personally.
14:52 Speaker 03 When was, when was the bread knife invented? Because was that the sixth August, 1928?
14:56 Speaker 05 Sorry to take a tangent, Pierre. No, no. I'm glad we're on to this because the reason I know when.
14:59 Speaker 04 1893.
15:00 Speaker 03 It took them 30 years to go from bread knife to sliced bread.
15:03 Speaker 04 What were they doing with the bread knife before?
15:04 Speaker 03 Don't know.
15:05 Speaker 04 Just talking.
15:09 Speaker 03 Sorry, so it's after sliced bread.
15:12 Speaker 04 Pre miniskirt. Pre miniskirt, the 60s.
15:15 Speaker 03 Surely, yeah, that's lovely. That's a lovely cushion. You were having a sandwich, but the women thankfully had their legs covered. So you could enjoy your sliced bread sandwich.
15:24 Speaker 06 64.
15:25 Speaker 03 64, Mary Quan.
15:26 Speaker 04 So sort of like, it was a belle epoque of the Western world, wasn't it? Sliced bread miniskirt before.
15:32 Speaker 03 Before the miniskirt ruined it.
15:33 Speaker 04 Before all moral values collapsed. We had the technology and dignity.
15:40 Speaker 03 Yes, exactly. We still had more social conservatism. Because 64 was, Charlie, when was the first divorce laws? I think it's 67, you know, the miniskirt started.
15:50 Speaker 04 It's Wilson's Britain.
15:51 Speaker 03 It is a train of events that altered, resulted in the family being, the family unit being shattered.
15:56 Speaker 06 69.
15:56 Speaker 03 69, Divorce Form Act, there you go, no fault concepts. Just basically, it was meaningless. Marriage was meaningless. Means nothing anymore. Look at the legs on that woman. I want a divorce.
16:08 Speaker 04 I don't care that my bread's sliced. My whole reality's collapsed.
16:12 Speaker 03 I want to put her up if you just slice the bread.
16:13 Speaker 04 This is all over.
16:14 Speaker 03 It's all over.
16:16 Speaker 03 Now, Monty's arrived, yes. Miniskirts are not yet a thing. They are introduced but sort of 12 years before Monty dies and you must imagine.
16:24 Speaker 04 It probably started his death, probably.
16:26 Speaker 03 I think so. I think he got ill when he saw the first miniskirt.
16:30 Speaker 03 So the conditions when he arrives, you've got, you've got sand going up everywhere. The flies, sinkholes that would just open up and just swallow of the.
16:38 Speaker 04 We've got a quote from Monty, actually. "Fine sand of the desert infiltrated everything, vehicles, weapons, food and bodily orifices." Said very seriously, I imagine.
16:46 Speaker 03 Sandstorms are stopping the fighting. Scorpions, spiders, the apparently, they all say in their memoirs, flies were the like worst. They were just constant flies, dead bodies, corned beef, flies.
16:57 Speaker 04 But then the Australians performed the best in this theatre, arguably. And that's probably because they're used to this sort of stuff. They got those hats with the corks and stuff. They're built for it.
17:06 Speaker 05 And you're saying to them, it's really hot and you're going to have to be really aggressive.
17:10 Speaker 04 Bang on, great, what else?
17:12 Speaker 03 Yeah. So, Monty's leadership style is the antithesis of Rommel's. Rommel is improvisational, speed, literally and metaphorically. Whereas Monty doesn't really want to attack unless.
17:24 Speaker 04 Jose Montenio.
17:25 Speaker 03 Jose, lovely, absolutely terrific. Jose Montenio.
17:31 Speaker 03 He only wants to attack when he absolutely knows for sure that he's going to win.
17:34 Speaker 04 Yeah.
17:35 Speaker 03 Yeah. Which when you put it like that, you're like, well, yeah.
17:37 Speaker 04 Yeah, me too.
17:38 Speaker 03 Yeah, I'd do that.
17:39 Speaker 05 It's mad that that's just, just being autistic enough to say, no.
17:44 Speaker 04 Yeah.
17:44 Speaker 05 Not yet.
17:45 Speaker 04 It's like a superpower. Defer, I was sure you like to know what the social plan is.
17:50 Speaker 05 Plan it, yeah.
17:51 Speaker 03 Yeah.
17:51 Speaker 04 You wanna know who's gonna be there? You wanna know your escape route?
17:55 Speaker 05 Yeah. Which Germans will be there? Which Italians will be there? What kind of weapons will they have? Come on.
18:01 Speaker 03 Yeah, I guess you don't wanna leave the house unless you know for sure you won't be humiliated.
18:05 Speaker 04 Yeah, who can I talk to about military history? Who can go blow for blow? You know, I need to know there's at least a couple of.
18:10 Speaker 05 How many Italian paratroopers will be there? That's what I want to know.
18:14 Speaker 03 Yeah. There was a table at your wedding of Italian paratroopers.
18:19 Speaker 03 That's a slur I use for, anyway. And the allied forces are completely fucked. They're exhausted. So, and Monty, as we saw when he was in World War One, you know, he has a pretty howering, I mean, there's no unhowering World War One experience.
18:34 Speaker 04 Yeah.
18:34 Speaker 03 But he gets shot in the lung.
18:36 Speaker 04 It's quite a British experience, I think. Being stuck under another body and just.
18:40 Speaker 03 Lying there while it's getting riddled with bullets.
18:42 Speaker 04 Yeah, yeah. And lie there for like two days.
18:44 Speaker 05 Wait till night time.
18:45 Speaker 03 Yeah, but generally just waiting for the sun to go down. Hello?
18:49 Speaker 05 Well, just thinking, I wonder what's happening with that lung of mine.
18:52 Speaker 04 Yeah.
18:52 Speaker 03 Yeah.
18:53 Speaker 04 An upper lip has never been so stiff.
18:54 Speaker 03 Yeah, the stiffest of upper lips and the nobliest of knees. It does also kind of look like my granddad. So I feel a very, a sort of sense of, I don't know. There's a grandfather links to him.
19:06 Speaker 04 Yeah.
19:07 Speaker 03 So he really cares about human life, which is actually quite rare amongst World War Two generals.
19:12 Speaker 04 Is it an empathetic thing or is it a tactical thing? It's, it's, it's hard to know.
19:16 Speaker 03 Yeah, he doesn't strike me as somebody who has much empathy.
19:19 Speaker 05 I think it's a.
19:19 Speaker 04 Bleeding heart sort of.
19:21 Speaker 05 It's a waste.
19:22 Speaker 03 Yes, it's resources.
19:23 Speaker 04 Yeah.
19:23 Speaker 03 The men are resources.
19:24 Speaker 05 And I've spent so long getting them good at cross country.
19:26 Speaker 03 Yes, yeah.
19:27 Speaker 05 What a shame to lose them.
19:28 Speaker 03 Well, many of them died during cross country.
19:30 Speaker 04 Yeah, the most, the most dangerous part of being in Monty's army is the training.
19:34 Speaker 05 Constant training.
19:34 Speaker 04 Some of them die.
19:37 Speaker 03 So after the first battle of Al-Araman, hipster's choice.
19:40 Speaker 04 Yeah.
19:41 Speaker 03 Rommel plans another offensive entitled Operation Surf.
19:45 Speaker 03 This would be the last big Axis offensive of the Desert Campaign.
19:50 Speaker 05 Yes.
19:51 Speaker 03 And so he basically tries to defeat the Eighth Army before Allied reinforcements arrive. Now, can you explain to our thick listeners and ourselves?
20:00 Speaker 05 Yes.
20:00 Speaker 03 What is going on in Crete at this time that's taking resources away? Like, why is the Allied, why are they not, why are we not pouring absolutely everything into the North African?
20:10 Speaker 05 They're sending a lot of stuff to Greece.
20:14 Speaker 04 Because there's loads of stuff going on in Greece at the minute.
20:16 Speaker 05 Churchill had a real boner for the idea of invading up through Greece and Yugoslavia for a while.
20:21 Speaker 03 What, into the German occupied?
20:23 Speaker 05 Soft underbelly.
20:24 Speaker 03 Right, yeah.
20:25 Speaker 05 He was on a real jag about it for a while and just wouldn't let it lie. And they thought they could save Greece from the Italians and they almost did. But then like always with the Italians in World War Two, they went, we need help suppressing the population. And Germany went, fine, we'll send people, we'll send someone to pick you up in an Uber.
20:42 Speaker 03 Well, we were saying, there's an argument the Italians lose Germany the war because they delay Barbarossa by six weeks, which ends up being crucial because the Italians don't have any plan at all. The only thing that Mussolini's thought of is, I want to ride bareback on a horse through Cairo and we'll just work the rest out.
20:59 Speaker 05 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
21:00 Speaker 03 And then they surrender immediately. So you were saying, their main weapon is that they're a liability to look after.
21:05 Speaker 04 To have 100,000 prisoners of war is a nightmare.
21:08 Speaker 03 It's a logistics nightmare.
21:09 Speaker 05 It's absolutely insane just to be like, we didn't have enough awful beef for us, really.
21:13 Speaker 03 Yeah, yeah.
21:14 Speaker 05 Now we've got to put you somewhere.
21:15 Speaker 03 And they're not even eating it.
21:16 Speaker 05 No.
21:17 Speaker 03 Because it's not made by my mom.
21:20 Speaker 05 That's their punishment, declaring war.
21:22 Speaker 03 That's a war crime.
21:23 Speaker 05 You have to eat British food.
21:24 Speaker 03 Yeah.
21:27 Speaker 05 They torture me, they torture me.
21:29 Speaker 03 He speaks from a tin, please.
21:31 Speaker 05 Bread, the slice.
21:34 Speaker 03 So Rommel's idea is to swing around south through the Qatari Depression. I don't know if you've struggled with Qatari Depression at any time. Round the British flank, cut, it's all about swinging around flanks, is it? Because you have this massive sand sea.
21:48 Speaker 05 Yeah.
21:49 Speaker 03 That's sort of an open, if you can use that, then you can kind of.
21:52 Speaker 05 And just infinity landmines.
21:54 Speaker 03 Yeah, well, yeah.
21:55 Speaker 05 Just.
21:56 Speaker 04 So both sides putting those landmines, mainly the Germans.
21:59 Speaker 05 Just constant, yeah.
22:00 Speaker 04 And still now Bedouins keep getting blown up. Just walking, walking to school and just.
22:05 Speaker 03 Bang.
22:05 Speaker 04 Yeah, gone.
22:06 Speaker 05 Up in the air.
22:08 Speaker 04 I mean, that's, I guess it's just, it seems quite reckless to me laying landmines. You don't really think about the future, are you?
22:13 Speaker 05 No, it's a...
22:14 Speaker 04 Because you just lay them down and it's just like, was this area just fucked now?
22:17 Speaker 03 It's farting in a lift and then just leaving, straight away. It's farting as the doors open, see it, doors closed, well, I don't know where else going. Fuck you then.
22:23 Speaker 05 Yeah.
22:24 Speaker 04 It's like you're saying a dumb waiter with a fart and a dumb waiter up to the top floor.
22:27 Speaker 03 And Princess Diana's next campaign, had she lived, was about people who fart in lifts and then...
22:30 Speaker 04 Was it?
22:31 Speaker 03 Yeah, she was big on that, really big on that. You had a big blue ribbon. Anyway, so we get to the Battle of Al Am El Haifa.
22:39 Speaker 04 Yeah.
22:39 Speaker 03 Or Haifa. Does this set you off? You know what that is?
22:42 Speaker 05 Yeah, on the ridge, they...
22:44 Speaker 03 Brilliant, on the ridge. Go on, talk us through the Battle of Al Am El Haifa.
22:48 Speaker 05 They, they knew that Rommel was gonna do this broadly.
22:51 Speaker 03 Right.
22:51 Speaker 04 Because of the Enigma Code?
22:53 Speaker 05 Yes.
22:54 Speaker 04 Yeah.
22:54 Speaker 05 Yeah, we're reading all their posts.
22:56 Speaker 04 Because this is the first time the Enigma Codes come into proper effect.
23:00 Speaker 03 Is it? I thought that had happened in Battle of Britain somewhat.
23:02 Speaker 05 There's Ultra and then there's Enigma, or the other way around.
23:05 Speaker 03 Right.
23:05 Speaker 05 But what was useful here was they realized, the Germans had been getting loads of stuff for ages from the American ambassador. The Italians had broken the code by going into the embassy in Rome and finding it in a desk or something. But pathetic.
23:18 Speaker 03 Yeah.
23:19 Speaker 05 And then he'd been telling America all the cool stuff from Cairo and that had been fucking everything up. They figured that out. And then, they always knew when the Germans were sending ships full of fuel, they always knew who was where, they always knew. I mean, it was mad, the amount. They knew when Rommel was back in a spa having little fish eat his toes or whatever.
23:36 Speaker 04 And the revisionism about Monty, because he was obviously, he saw himself as a genius.
23:39 Speaker 03 Yeah, and that's the narrative for the first few years.
23:41 Speaker 04 And then slowly, when people revisited his, his legacy in the 60s, they kind of put a lot more into the fact that he just had the Enigma Code. He basically had the cheat code.
23:50 Speaker 03 We will also, we will get to why people decide that it wasn't him with what he says in the 60s. We'll get to that, we'll get to that next episode.
23:56 Speaker 05 But he was smart, because if, if you know that Rommel's coming up for the south, they, he left it very like empty in the big, open shitty bit that is like hard to defend.
24:04 Speaker 03 Yeah.
24:04 Speaker 05 And just covered a ridge overlooking the area with anti-tank guns and, and, and tanks dug in, tanks and...
24:09 Speaker 03 Yeah, he dug in tanks, so that what, like the...
24:11 Speaker 04 Hold down.
24:11 Speaker 03 The barrel would stick out.
24:13 Speaker 04 Yeah.
24:13 Speaker 03 And then it would essentially be like an anti-tank gun, but it's a tank in...
24:16 Speaker 04 Cover the front and sand.
24:17 Speaker 05 Bags and wood and.
24:18 Speaker 03 Is that gonna be cooler to be in the tank if it's covered in sand or really hot?
24:22 Speaker 05 After one night, I think, cold, but in the day you're like, I hate this so much. I hate this so much.
24:28 Speaker 03 Cause the tanks are small.
24:29 Speaker 05 Fuck, man, I just.
24:31 Speaker 03 You have to be, they're like jockeys, right? You have to be a certain size to fit in a tank, do you?
24:34 Speaker 04 Yeah, but all tiny back in the day, weren't they? They were all pretty small.
24:38 Speaker 05 I think it helped the lack of nutrition.
24:40 Speaker 04 Apart from the head of the SAS, David Sterling was six foot six. He was fucking huge back then.
24:44 Speaker 05 It must have been like having an ent.
24:46 Speaker 04 Yeah.
24:48 Speaker 04 I've come to fight the Germans with you.
24:50 Speaker 03 So, uh, Mont, this is Monty's first battle in command, 30th of August to the 5th of September. So, yeah, he leaves this kind of trap for Rommel around the south.
24:58 Speaker 05 Yeah.
24:59 Speaker 03 Uh, and then they, I guess they stumble into it. Would you say it's a kill zone?
25:02 Speaker 05 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
25:03 Speaker 04 Would you say it's a kill zone?
25:03 Speaker 05 Would you say it's a?
25:04 Speaker 04 I'd say so. Well, then I'd say it's a kill zone.
25:05 Speaker 03 I'd say it's a kill zone then.
25:07 Speaker 05 And Rommel's not got enough fuel. So every time he does anything with tanks, he's using up like.
25:11 Speaker 04 Yeah.
25:12 Speaker 05 The last bit of petrol.
25:14 Speaker 03 Yeah.
25:14 Speaker 05 And it has to work and it just doesn't.
25:16 Speaker 03 And as, as we know.
25:17 Speaker 04 The bags run out.
25:18 Speaker 05 Yeah.
25:20 Speaker 03 As we know from the, from the board game, you have, you have to plan enough fuel. This is a theatre of war about logistics and supplies.
25:29 Speaker 05 Yeah.
25:29 Speaker 03 And his, his supply line is all the way back to.
25:32 Speaker 05 Tripoli.
25:32 Speaker 03 Yeah, Tripoli.
25:33 Speaker 05 Yeah.
25:34 Speaker 03 Uh, and we're, we're on the Patreon, uh, which we'll be sticking around for. We're talking about the SAS.
25:38 Speaker 05 Yeah.
25:39 Speaker 03 By this point, they've become quite effective at disrupting Rommel's supply lines.
25:42 Speaker 05 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Dicking around.
25:44 Speaker 04 But it was a trial and error. We talked about this on the.
25:46 Speaker 03 Yeah, the, the start is quite funny.
25:47 Speaker 05 Cause it begins with them just jumping out of planes and breaking their legs just into a sandstorm.
25:54 Speaker 03 Just, just jumping out of a plane.
25:55 Speaker 04 You've got to work this stuff out, as I say many times.
25:57 Speaker 03 Do you need a parachute? Yes, we do. Turns out we do.
26:01 Speaker 04 It's easy to say with hindsight, that's a bad idea.
26:02 Speaker 03 Not all sacred cows should be slaughtered. Parachutes, parachutes work. So, yeah, we're, we're looking at a map now. I imagine, I imagine Pierre, this is the kind of stuff you've got in your room.
26:11 Speaker 05 Hmm. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
26:13 Speaker 03 You've framed in your.
26:14 Speaker 04 We're just tattooed all over me like a business break.
26:18 Speaker 05 Never forget.
26:19 Speaker 03 Do you understand how to read these sorts of things? When I'm reading military F G books, I find them quite choppy. And then I get to things like this and it breaks my head a bit, these charts.
26:28 Speaker 05 I think a box with a cross in it is an infantry regiment and a box with a cross in a kind of circle is a tank. It's like the shape of a tank from World War One.
26:36 Speaker 03 Oh, yeah. Okay, I see. Right.
26:38 Speaker 05 And then there's like a thing with a parachute in is parachutists. And then there's a couple of others where I sort of don't really know what the hell they're about.
26:43 Speaker 03 But how do you tell what order the arrows are moving in? Or is it, are you not meant to? I always find them quite hard to read.
26:48 Speaker 05 That is hard. Sometimes they're nice and they do a kind of different color or kind of cross hatching or something. But often, especially if it's like a single day, you just think, okay, I guess I get it, whatever.
26:58 Speaker 03 Yeah. So.
27:00 Speaker 05 Look at all these arrows.
27:01 Speaker 04 I'd go round.
27:03 Speaker 05 They, yeah, they.
27:04 Speaker 04 I'd just go really far, like no one's down there. So I'd go all the way down there and then I'd go up.
27:08 Speaker 03 I guess they didn't have this.
27:09 Speaker 05 Well, there's, no, but there's, no, but that's, that's what, that's what he did. That's what he did. That's the ridge. You see that, that little line there above the big, the top red line?
27:17 Speaker 04 Yeah, but there's only one, I get most, all of them really fast down there. And then I come back up and then.
27:24 Speaker 03 It's a running theme, your retrospective military.
27:26 Speaker 04 It always seems, whenever I look at these, it always seems a lot easier.
27:29 Speaker 03 Yeah.
27:29 Speaker 04 What'd you say? Just go there.
27:30 Speaker 03 But they're running, they're running out of fuel and planes are coming and fucking with them from Malta.
27:34 Speaker 04 Phoebe, can you go on the research and find that image of, I think this, but it has the different countries of the regiments? Cause it's quite funny, cause the Greeks are.
27:42 Speaker 03 Being used, yeah. The Greeks are here.
27:44 Speaker 04 Yeah, cause it's quite, which, yeah, look at this. And I would, if I was Rommel, I would view that Greek Brigade as sort of like the Ardennes Forest as a sort of break in the Maginot Line. Where you can ease, I mean, that's.
27:56 Speaker 03 I mean, why, why are we lining up?
27:59 Speaker 04 Look at the Greek Brigade. It's just a load of plastic chairs.
28:01 Speaker 05 They're also using the anachronistic South African flag.
28:05 Speaker 04 Yeah.
28:06 Speaker 05 Which is a bit naughty.
28:07 Speaker 03 Well, hang on, but this, is this not, is this not.
28:09 Speaker 04 That's during naughtiest Africa though.
28:11 Speaker 05 That's naughty flag, yeah, but naughty flag wasn't in yet.
28:13 Speaker 04 Oh, okay.
28:14 Speaker 03 Oh, I see.
28:15 Speaker 05 So back then it should have just been like, you know, it's like the naval ensign for Union, Jack in the corner, classic, whatever. That, that wasn't the flag.
28:21 Speaker 03 That's the apartheid flag.
28:22 Speaker 04 Yeah, yeah, big time.
28:23 Speaker 03 So, so Phoebe has deliberately chosen apartheid era. It's fine, it's fine. She's dyslexic. I don't think that counts with flags though. I think, I think flags were invented to help dyslexia.
28:33 Speaker 05 I think people online, when they make these diagrams, just choose that flag to minimize that amount of Union Jacks on the visual field.
28:41 Speaker 03 So Monty, how does that battle end, the Alpha Ridge? Is it, is it, so Rommel retreats, I imagine?
28:48 Speaker 05 Rommel has to pull back. They, they lose roughly equal numbers of tanks, but that's the first time that the German tanks haven't just steamrolled at everything. So it's seen as like a stalemate slash victory.
28:58 Speaker 04 Have the Shermans come in yet? Have the American Sherman tanks?
29:01 Speaker 03 Yes, I think so, yeah. I believe so.
29:03 Speaker 05 This is the, even though we did it without the help of the American.
29:05 Speaker 03 Not Ben Sherman, Charlie, no, not Ben Sherman.
29:08 Speaker 05 It's not loads of Ben Sherman shirts coming in and it's like, fuck, these guys look awesome.
29:12 Speaker 03 They look good to be first.
29:13 Speaker 05 I'm gonna, I can't.
29:15 Speaker 04 It's good for morale.
29:15 Speaker 03 Yeah, it is good for morale. Monty brings in Ben Sherman. Yeah, what, the Sherman tanks, what were we using before?
29:22 Speaker 05 Matildas, Valentines.
29:23 Speaker 03 Matildas, what a great name.
29:25 Speaker 04 Is this British tanks, right?
29:26 Speaker 05 Those are British, yeah.
29:27 Speaker 04 Yeah, and the best tanks were the German tanks, but now the Americans have invented a better tank than the Germans and we're getting those ones.
29:33 Speaker 03 Kind of, yeah. The Sherman's useful because it's just like fucking Lego. Just stick it together from old bits and like, if it gets blown up, often the crew survive and just get out the back.
29:42 Speaker 05 I think Bill Burr said, we basically McDonald's them.
29:45 Speaker 03 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
29:46 Speaker 05 Which is such a funny, because that's what they did. Like, they were Donald's Russia. Like, they just fucking.
29:52 Speaker 03 A hundred percent.
29:53 Speaker 05 They just built them like a fucking hamburger.
29:56 Speaker 03 So, Rommel said, or a German said, "The sand was alive with fire. Every ridge seemed to hold guns waiting for us." So, into a trap essentially. Rommel retreats. And at this point, Monty's reputation is enhanced. Now, let's just chat a bit about his kind of look. Because he makes his own, again, it's all part of this aura.
30:16 Speaker 05 He's an influencer. He's very brand away.
30:18 Speaker 03 Yeah, yeah, totally.
30:19 Speaker 05 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
30:20 Speaker 03 He gets, he wears a black beret, big shorts. This is the high point for British big shorts.
30:25 Speaker 05 Big shorts.
30:26 Speaker 03 After this, the shorts get longer. They become trousers and we, we lose our grip on it.
30:30 Speaker 05 We lose something.
30:31 Speaker 04 The press in World War II plays a much bigger role than World War I. You don't really have these sorts of celebrities, sort of the birth.
30:37 Speaker 05 This black berets is armored divisions. So it's like the tank guys are like, yeah, he's one of ours. It's like a kind of nod to them. They get a real kick out of that.
30:46 Speaker 03 But then, you know, with the SAS, they started wearing beige berets. But then when they would go back to Cairo after missions, fights would break out because they're all very difficult men. And they would get laughed at as being big sissies, gamens, for having white berets. And then fights would break out. So they had to then go to red berets.
31:04 Speaker 05 Right. Yes, yeah. It's also like, it's such a funny trap to give the maddest, toughest men in your military.
31:12 Speaker 03 The gayest hat.
31:12 Speaker 05 That starts fights.
31:16 Speaker 03 But Monty also with his big shorts had a fly whisk. I did not know this. I thought, I didn't know this was a thing. I presume it's a fly swatter. But I imagine this is what the fly swatter originated from.
31:30 Speaker 05 I think the fly whisk is a deterrent and the fly swatter is a killer.
31:34 Speaker 03 Right, I see.
31:36 Speaker 05 Also, there's an element of, you know, it's just.
31:38 Speaker 03 It's much more.
31:40 Speaker 05 It's trying to swag it out a little bit. I think it's trying to aura farm a little bit.
31:43 Speaker 03 A horse's tail, yeah. But it's much more impressive and.
31:46 Speaker 05 But every general chose like recognizable thing, like Patton was always seen with the, well, I guess is that just not the normal helmet, I guess. Yeah, but you're not still, it's like, it's like a helmet, you'd wear like a general's hat as opposed to a service helmet. And he seemed to be wearing a helmet indoors all the time. It always looked a bit weird. He always looked like.
32:05 Speaker 03 Was he autistic as well?
32:06 Speaker 05 He sort of looked like a liveroo driver picking up McDonald's. He had two pearl handled revolvers on each hip. You've got to.
32:15 Speaker 03 That is pretty cool.
32:16 Speaker 05 That's real Uday Hussein.
32:17 Speaker 03 Yeah, but Monty and him don't get on. Two difficult men.
32:21 Speaker 05 And I think it's Monty's fault, to be fair. We have to concede.
32:25 Speaker 03 Yeah, but I don't think Monty got on with anyone.
32:27 Speaker 05 No, no, doesn't seem that way.
32:29 Speaker 03 But he didn't need, he wasn't there to get on with them. He was there to get a job done.
32:32 Speaker 05 It's very morale boosting to have any general that was willing to do even one thing that a normal soldier would do. There's some German general that would always insist on still having like an infantry issue rifle with him.
32:43 Speaker 03 Now, the Desert Air Force plays an increasingly dominant role as well. By the time Monty wants air supremacy before he will attack at second battle of.
32:55 Speaker 05 I would as well.
32:56 Speaker 03 Yeah. Again, it sounds very obvious when he does it.
32:59 Speaker 05 That's a priority. I really would like that.
33:02 Speaker 03 But again, this is because the Germans have failed to knock out Malta.
33:05 Speaker 05 Yeah.
33:06 Speaker 03 There, I guess, is Greece too far to be launching air raids? Probably is.
33:11 Speaker 05 Yeah, but it's being able to like rebase stuff, right? You can hop from wherever to Malta to North Africa and back again.
33:19 Speaker 03 Yeah, so there's a big old Malta becomes very important. It's one of the first things in the game. You have to raid Malta. That's one of the first parts of the 100 turns that is one turn.
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34:58 Speaker 03 But also, so the Enigma Code at this point has been cracked by Alan Turing.
35:04 Speaker 04 So again, another autism, British autism, fucking.
35:07 Speaker 05 It's world leading.
35:07 Speaker 04 World leading.
35:09 Speaker 03 Well, it's what wins the war ultimately in this theatre.
35:12 Speaker 04 Fucking, yeah.
35:13 Speaker 05 Not wasting our time funneling these kids into chess matches or something.
35:15 Speaker 03 No.
35:16 Speaker 04 Monty and Turing is fucking.
35:17 Speaker 03 Yeah.
35:19 Speaker 04 Andy Cole and Dwight York.
35:21 Speaker 03 So that means that we can constantly stop supplies reaching Rommel. He runs out. Now Rommel is absolutely knackered after El Hafa. This is when he goes back to Germany, September 42. He has been on speed for 18 months.
35:42 Speaker 04 A long time.
35:43 Speaker 03 Too long.
35:44 Speaker 04 In 40 degrees.
35:45 Speaker 03 Yeah, yeah. And he's also, now, what his leadership style, right, is that he's very, you know, because he was in World War One as well, and both him and Monty felt in World War One that the top brass were too disconnected, there was too big a chain of command. Although the Germans' whole thing actually was more about improvisational chaos. They were starting that in World War One.
36:04 Speaker 04 Improv, guys.
36:05 Speaker 03 They're an improv troupe.
36:05 Speaker 04 There's a yes and sort of.
36:06 Speaker 05 The one improv troupe.
36:08 Speaker 04 Yarunt.
36:11 Speaker 04 Snap! The Yarunt doctrine.
36:13 Speaker 03 Yeah, yeah, they were Yarunters, yeah.
36:16 Speaker 03 But, so Rommel's thing is that he rides in the front line in an armoured car with an escort. And, sorry, not a South East Asian woman. I mean, a guy with a gun, the opposite of an escort, really.
36:32 Speaker 04 That's what you're into, I guess.
36:33 Speaker 03 Sorry, it's just, every time I think of that, one of the first Gary Delaney jokes I ever heard, "Fill the escort up with diesel, she died." Anyway, phenomenal joke. So Rommel's fucked, but his replacement cannot, he tries to mimic Rommel's leadership style. So there's a guy called General Gorg Schumer. Now, he's a fat guy.
36:57 Speaker 04 Sounds fat.
36:58 Speaker 03 He sounds fat.
36:59 Speaker 04 George Schumer? Yeah, it's very Augustus Gludie sort of name.
37:03 Speaker 03 Sturmer.
37:04 Speaker 04 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
37:05 Speaker 03 So he's, now he has high blood pressure. There he is. Yeah, he doesn't look great, does he? He has high blood pressure and he comes in in 42 and he try, if he, first thing he does, I think this is maybe, maybe El Alamein second battle has started at this point. It's the first day.
37:22 Speaker 04 Yeah.
37:23 Speaker 03 So, so Monty opens with a fucking 10 hour barrage, barrage, sorry, 10 hour barrage on the German front lines. And the first instance is Operation Lightfoot and this is because as Pierre said, they put so many mines down.
37:38 Speaker 04 Yeah.
37:38 Speaker 03 So they, do they take their shoes off and try and walk through them?
37:41 Speaker 04 So the mines are mainly anti-tank mines. So if you're, if you're, a guy won't set it off.
37:45 Speaker 03 Right. Okay, fine. So they creep.
37:47 Speaker 04 Still a reassuring thing to be told.
37:49 Speaker 03 No, they creep through.
37:50 Speaker 04 We're quite sure, probably.
37:51 Speaker 03 Yeah, they creep through and they try and disable these mines, I guess after the bombardment or during it. I don't know.
37:57 Speaker 04 Just after, yeah, I think.
37:59 Speaker 03 But I think a lot of people still die and it takes a long, long time. But this is where Sturmer, Rommel's replacement, he comes to the front line, but he accidentally goes to, falls into like by the allied guns. He's not in an armored car. He's just in a Jeep. The driver, a commander, gets immediately shot in the head by an anti-tank gun. So his head blow, like collapses, like explodes.
38:24 Speaker 04 His head's gone. He's lost his head.
38:25 Speaker 03 He's lost his head, right?
38:26 Speaker 04 Is Paul Gascoigne, his head's gone.
38:28 Speaker 03 Yeah, he's there just being like, come on.
38:30 Speaker 04 He's, he's not, he's not in a fit.
38:31 Speaker 03 The driver does like a three point turn and immediately tries to get out of there. The force in which he turns means Sturmer falls out of the car and he's hanging on to the car like this while this gunfire drives.
38:41 Speaker 04 He's already red faced, gets even redder.
38:42 Speaker 03 He's really fat, red faced, high blood pressure and he's, he then, he arrives back behind the lines and he realises that the, the, the general's no longer attached to the car. And then three days later, they find his body in the desert with no bullet wounds, no scratches. He just had a heart attack from stress.
38:57 Speaker 04 Really?
38:57 Speaker 03 Yeah. It's just a fat guy fell out of a car and had a heart attack.
39:00 Speaker 04 This is a pure farce.
39:02 Speaker 03 Yeah, but that, but that.
39:03 Speaker 04 That's the general.
39:04 Speaker 03 Yeah, so that's Rommel's replacement.
39:05 Speaker 04 It's Christ.
39:06 Speaker 03 But then it's funny to think that that must be how so many people died.
39:09 Speaker 04 Yeah.
39:10 Speaker 03 In the war. It was also, it was an incredibly, yeah, very stressful place.
39:14 Speaker 04 And if you smoke 80 a day, like everyone does.
39:16 Speaker 03 Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
39:18 Speaker 04 There's also the idea of the general. We're talking about the, there's only a couple of generals that stand out in World War Two.
39:22 Speaker 03 Yeah.
39:22 Speaker 04 It's funny just thinking about all these other generals who.
39:25 Speaker 03 Could not, yeah, exactly. There's a reason you haven't heard of Sturmer.
39:31 Speaker 04 Like, is there like, does he have a philosophy on military history? We don't really know what Stuma is.
39:35 Speaker 03 He may well have written a book about it. Be as fat as possible. And don't wear a seatbelt.
39:41 Speaker 05 Just drive around.
39:42 Speaker 03 Yeah, yeah. So anyway, so this is, this is the first, the first day after the second battle of El Alamein starts, which is, what's the date of that? 23rd of October, 42. Right, so Hitler frantically contacts Rommel, who is in like a spa town somewhere.
39:58 Speaker 05 Yeah, they love it.
39:59 Speaker 04 He's having a love of steam.
40:00 Speaker 03 He's having a sauna in, what, I guess this would be South Germany? Is that, that's pretty unaffected for me?
40:04 Speaker 05 He's doing German healthy things. He's doing jumping jacks, he's in a sauna, he's drinking loads of mineral water.
40:09 Speaker 04 He's in the Grand Budapest Hotel, basically.
40:11 Speaker 03 To be fair, I do wanna make a point.
40:14 Speaker 04 I would like to change the film a little bit.
40:15 Speaker 03 I do wanna make a point that German 40s wellness, if you can strip the politics out of it, does look the vibe.
40:21 Speaker 04 One of the many things they've lost, they've been ruined by the Nazis. They had a couple of things that were good.
40:25 Speaker 03 Baby bath water, again.
40:28 Speaker 04 I want a warm bath water of theirs.
40:29 Speaker 03 Let's not throw anything out, let's just have a bath.
40:31 Speaker 05 They've kept the cultural enthusiasm for nudity.
40:34 Speaker 03 Yes, exactly. Something about, you know, doing jumping jacks in the Alps.
40:39 Speaker 05 Yeah.
40:39 Speaker 03 Nude.
40:40 Speaker 05 Yeah.
40:41 Speaker 03 I'm into.
40:42 Speaker 05 Like a, like a chewing gum advert.
40:44 Speaker 03 Yeah.
40:45 Speaker 05 It's anti-freshness.
40:46 Speaker 03 It's the front of, it's the front of a fucking milk bar, that's where I wanna live.
40:49 Speaker 05 Yeah.
40:50 Speaker 03 And now I'm, I'm going to David Lloyd in a basement with flashing lights, being shouted at by Tyreek, you know.
40:56 Speaker 04 Maybe the wrong side run the war.
40:59 Speaker 03 What could have been? Anyway, so, yeah, Hitler frantically gets Rommel back to the front lines, even though Rommel has not yet, I guess, what purged himself of, of 18 months of speed.
41:12 Speaker 05 No, yeah.
41:13 Speaker 03 Somehow he gets back pretty quickly.
41:15 Speaker 05 With a few, few days, I think.
41:17 Speaker 03 Is he?
41:17 Speaker 05 Yeah. I think so.
41:19 Speaker 03 So.
41:20 Speaker 05 But shit's gone down by the time he's back. He's missed some big stuff.
41:23 Speaker 03 So what's happening at this point? At this, in the second, we're in the second battle of El Alamein now.
41:28 Speaker 05 Stuma's fallen.
41:28 Speaker 03 Which is, which is, Stuma has fallen.
41:30 Speaker 05 Stuma has fallen.
41:31 Speaker 04 Stuma burst like a big sausage.
41:36 Speaker 03 His casing burst.
41:37 Speaker 05 His casing burst.
41:37 Speaker 04 Germans are the most satisfyingly fat people on the planet.
41:40 Speaker 03 We've said this before.
41:41 Speaker 04 Americans, there's like a bubbly second fat. Germans, the pills and a sausage build.
41:46 Speaker 03 The rotundness.
41:49 Speaker 04 The quickest to draw fat people, because it's just that.
41:51 Speaker 03 Snowman.
41:52 Speaker 05 Overlapping circles. Yeah, and there's a shininess to them.
41:56 Speaker 03 Yes, there's a sheen.
41:57 Speaker 04 Permanently embarrassed cheeks.
41:58 Speaker 05 A glow.
41:59 Speaker 03 Yeah, it's like a pregnant glow.
42:01 Speaker 05 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
42:01 Speaker 03 For fats.
42:02 Speaker 05 Yeah.
42:02 Speaker 03 Oh, you're glowing.
42:03 Speaker 05 You're glowing. Have you been promoted?
42:07 Speaker 03 So Rommel arrives back, yeah, three days later.
42:10 Speaker 05 He's Mr. Love of Stuff.
42:12 Speaker 03 Yeah, so what's happened?
42:13 Speaker 05 The Aussies have taken a whole bunch of little hills.
42:16 Speaker 03 Right, and these are like, these are like dunes, right?
42:19 Speaker 05 Because it's the desert, yeah, they're like three metres high.
42:21 Speaker 03 So I find this quite hard to visualise.
42:23 Speaker 05 Yeah.
42:23 Speaker 03 The, because it's not like, you know, I can visualise, like you were saying, in Normandy, I can visualise a small French village that I've been to on holiday.
42:31 Speaker 05 Yeah.
42:31 Speaker 03 When I go there, I can go, right, there's a bell tower, there's a sniper up there, the tank is rolling through, I can see it all happening.
42:36 Speaker 05 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
42:37 Speaker 03 The café chairs are still out there. In the desert, I mean, I've never been to the desert, but also it's just, it's just sand, right?
42:42 Speaker 04 It's gone on the second day, right? It's like, nothing's been put in, that's it.
42:45 Speaker 05 And it's like maximum visibility.
42:48 Speaker 03 Yeah, and it's open.
42:49 Speaker 05 You just imagine a rolling desert leading up to what looks like the horizon, but actually a gentle slope means it's about three metres higher than where you are, and so you're dead. They could just see you.
42:59 Speaker 03 What is, what is like holding a position? How are you saying, go and get that hill?
43:03 Speaker 04 There's ridges, right?
43:05 Speaker 05 There's a few like big, big ridges that are like, oh shit, that's really worth getting, that's like 25 metres high.
43:11 Speaker 03 Right.
43:12 Speaker 05 Above sea level. But yeah, a lot of it is just like, our dune was slightly higher, so we could just machine gun them to bits.
43:16 Speaker 04 I'm so sorry, Charlie's got an important question.
43:18 Speaker 06 How thick is sand?
43:21 Speaker 05 How thick is sand?
43:22 Speaker 06 Can't you just burrow and be a mole, like throw, go through the sand?
43:25 Speaker 05 I think it just blows away. This sand apparently is like flour, they say. It's really fine.
43:30 Speaker 03 Right.
43:30 Speaker 05 Like horrifyingly fine sand.
43:32 Speaker 04 Like flour.
43:32 Speaker 06 So you can't crawl at all?
43:34 Speaker 05 You can crawl, but they could just see you. They could just see you in there.
43:37 Speaker 03 Yeah.
43:38 Speaker 05 It's not always very deep sand.
43:39 Speaker 04 Yeah, I'd like to see you try crawling up to the front lines and them just seeing you the whole way.
43:43 Speaker 03 This is SAS thinking.
43:44 Speaker 05 Yeah.
43:45 Speaker 03 You know, which, before it worked, but how bad.
43:47 Speaker 05 But how thick is the sand?
43:48 Speaker 03 Yeah.
43:49 Speaker 05 These are the questions you have to ask.
43:50 Speaker 03 Yeah, yeah, exactly. Let's burrow in.
43:52 Speaker 05 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
43:53 Speaker 03 Everyone dies. Okay, it didn't work.
43:54 Speaker 05 Sure, yeah, but now we know.
43:56 Speaker 03 We've got to, we've got to try things.
43:59 Speaker 05 I think the hills the Aussies take are decent, like 20 metres high or something.
44:02 Speaker 03 Yeah.
44:02 Speaker 05 They do pretty well.
44:03 Speaker 03 And also why I like this theatre of war is that it's probably is the last great hurrah of empire and that it's a, we win this without the Americans and there's Australians, there's Indians, Africans.
44:15 Speaker 05 Yeah.
44:15 Speaker 03 And it's also, it's men in big shorts.
44:17 Speaker 05 It's a rainbow coalition.
44:18 Speaker 03 It is the rainbow coalition.
44:19 Speaker 05 Yes. The empire, that's what you call it.
44:22 Speaker 03 I am an ally for this rainbow flag.
44:26 Speaker 03 Right, and they, they, it's men in big shorts who have, have learned authority in India.
44:32 Speaker 05 Yes.
44:33 Speaker 03 You know, using the landscape and also as we discussed in the SAS series, you have a regiment called the Long Range Desert Group, who were there anyway before the war.
44:42 Speaker 05 Yeah.
44:42 Speaker 03 Charting the desert.
44:43 Speaker 05 Yeah.
44:43 Speaker 03 So, you know, the whole, the idea of the British Empire being full of scholars who like to chart data is a secret weapon.
44:51 Speaker 05 Definitely. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
44:52 Speaker 03 In this, that Rommel doesn't have.
44:54 Speaker 05 Hobbyists.
44:54 Speaker 03 Yeah, totally.
44:55 Speaker 05 But it's, it's, it's not, it's the same people who now do bouldering.
44:59 Speaker 03 Hundred per cent.
45:00 Speaker 05 Rip to nerds.
45:01 Speaker 03 Yeah, yeah.
45:02 Speaker 05 Rip to nerds. You've got a master's degree and you just love suffering. Yeah, the rock climbers boddest because they've got the nerd face, they've got the rectangle glasses, but they're built like Jesus.
45:11 Speaker 03 Yeah.
45:12 Speaker 05 You meet, you see someone who looks like an embarrassing geography teacher, he's a sniper who speaks seven languages.
45:17 Speaker 03 Yeah.
45:18 Speaker 05 This is the magic of the.
45:20 Speaker 03 Yeah, we have lost something actually, not being at war. So Rommel arrives, back on the 25th, was it, of October, and from this point it becomes really grim and attritional, it's, you know, it's Mourinho against Pep, but he's shrunk the pitch.
45:38 Speaker 03 So the Axis communications start to break down because, as you say, Monty has got so many more resources at this point, which is why he's attacked, that he's just draining Rommel every time, the longer the battle goes on. Then we get to the phase between the 26th and 31st of October, which is, gets described as barbaric, where close range artillery are blowing men apart.
46:00 Speaker 05 Yeah.
46:01 Speaker 03 Men get squashed by tanks.
46:04 Speaker 05 It's just the worst thing you can imagine.
46:07 Speaker 03 There's a film, is it Saving Private Ryan or Band of Brothers where that happens?
46:10 Speaker 06 It's um, All Quiet on the Western Front.
46:13 Speaker 05 Yeah, that happens in that as well.
46:14 Speaker 06 That's the worst war film I've ever seen in terms of like actually what it would be like.
46:17 Speaker 05 Yeah.
46:18 Speaker 03 I think I've seen that.
46:19 Speaker 04 You've not seen All Quiet on the Western Front?
46:21 Speaker 03 Oh, the German one? No, I keep trying to suggest it. Amanda keeps saying no.
46:25 Speaker 04 It's amazing.
46:27 Speaker 06 They get really excited to go to war and then they all...
46:29 Speaker 03 Yeah, I do want to see that one.
46:31 Speaker 05 It's very good.
46:31 Speaker 03 But the snap, the snapping, the sound in the film of a man being squashed by a tank is...
46:36 Speaker 06 Their face just like caves in.
46:38 Speaker 03 It's not good.
46:39 Speaker 05 It's so, it's, it's bad. It's not a nice to be shot.
46:43 Speaker 04 You could ever be smug, like. I don't need the haircut.
46:46 Speaker 03 Oh, well, I'm having a massage. A bit more pressure, actually.
46:51 Speaker 03 Yeah, I like it, fun.
46:56 Speaker 03 Yeah. It descends much like the Falklands into kind of fist and knife fighting.
47:02 Speaker 05 Run up a small hill, jump into trench.
47:05 Speaker 03 And sandy stuff as well. It's pretty grim.
47:08 Speaker 06 I think directly fighting someone with your fists or like a hammer or a knife would maybe be the most sad and scary way of going, do you think?
47:15 Speaker 03 It is crazy how, you know, this...
47:18 Speaker 04 It's intimate.
47:19 Speaker 06 It's so sad.
47:20 Speaker 03 This war, like, there's so much artillery, machinery. It's the sort of, in many ways, the peak of industrialized warfare because every war since, people have basically been holding stuff back.
47:31 Speaker 05 Yeah.
47:32 Speaker 03 It's unfair. It's bad. Delete country.
47:36 Speaker 05 Delete.
47:36 Speaker 03 Yeah.
47:37 Speaker 05 We're gonna reformat.
47:38 Speaker 04 In this...
47:39 Speaker 03 Yeah, yeah. It's basically the same as playing a video game.
47:42 Speaker 05 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
47:43 Speaker 03 Anyway, this, like, the fact that you would just, you would just throw your gun away and then just, then just start fighting a random guy like it's a pub.
47:50 Speaker 05 You have to pick up a spade and try and chop someone with it.
47:52 Speaker 03 That's crazy.
47:53 Speaker 05 Again, 40 degrees. It's just the heat of it.
47:57 Speaker 03 Yeah.
47:57 Speaker 04 Sometimes in tunnels under the ground as well.
48:00 Speaker 03 Yeah.
48:00 Speaker 04 Fighting, yeah. It's crazy.
48:02 Speaker 03 So, now the Allies are benefiting from the fact that they're pretty close to Cairo and Alexandria, so the supply route's a lot shorter.
48:09 Speaker 05 Yeah.
48:09 Speaker 03 It's a long, long way back.
48:11 Speaker 05 Yes.
48:12 Speaker 04 And Gaddafi...
48:14 Speaker 03 Gaddafi is born.
48:14 Speaker 04 Is, is he born?
48:16 Speaker 03 1942.
48:17 Speaker 04 Forty-two.
48:18 Speaker 05 Wow.
48:18 Speaker 04 What, what, what?
48:19 Speaker 03 He's, so Gaddafi, for reference, is about four months old.
48:22 Speaker 04 Four months old, there's a four-month Gaddafi amongst all of this.
48:25 Speaker 06 And he's a Gemini, apparently.
48:26 Speaker 03 He's a Gemini.
48:27 Speaker 04 Makes sense, it all makes sense.
48:28 Speaker 03 It makes sense.
48:29 Speaker 04 Well, yeah, he would be, wouldn't he?
48:30 Speaker 03 Yeah.
48:30 Speaker 04 He would be, he would be.
48:32 Speaker 05 Couldn't figure, he didn't know what he wanted. You Middle Eastern or you African?
48:35 Speaker 04 Yeah.
48:35 Speaker 05 Come on, Gaddafi.
48:36 Speaker 03 Gaddafi, listen, don't, don't get me back on to Gaddafi.
48:39 Speaker 04 Let's not start on Gaddafi, we're done.
48:40 Speaker 03 We'll never finish this. We're on the second battle of El Alamein and we're talking about Gaddafi. You know, people's listening, their prostates won't handle this.
48:48 Speaker 04 Yeah.
48:49 Speaker 03 The second November onwards, we get to Operation Supercharge, which is Monty's final offensive.
48:55 Speaker 04 Big push.
48:56 Speaker 03 This is the decisive phase of El Alamein. This is where basically Rommel gets defeated.
49:00 Speaker 05 Yeah, across the entire line, everyone's been doing, at the northern bit that actually matters with the railway and the ports and the bits where you can live.
49:07 Speaker 03 Yeah, so, sorry, when we say El Alamein, we mean a stretch of, I don't know, 100 miles?
49:13 Speaker 05 Yeah, at least.
49:13 Speaker 03 Maybe, at least, it's quite a big stretch, a gap between a depression of sand, which is inexcusable, and the coast.
49:19 Speaker 05 Yeah.
49:19 Speaker 03 Right.
49:19 Speaker 05 And at the very top, the Aussies have made good headway, the Highlanders have, but everyone else has kind of taken bits but not cracked it.
49:26 Speaker 03 Right.
49:27 Speaker 05 And Monty takes a bunch of troops out, I think the Kiwis mainly, and he figures he can remove enough of them to create a new attacking force.
49:36 Speaker 03 Yeah.
49:36 Speaker 05 To do Supercharge.
49:37 Speaker 04 How are the Kiwis in battle? For me, I'd, I wouldn't trust them as much, just in the ard and they're just a bit polite, you know? These are the, these are the old Kiwis.
49:46 Speaker 05 Oh, right.
49:48 Speaker 03 These are the guys that found Australia too woke.
49:50 Speaker 04 Right.
49:50 Speaker 03 And founded New Zealand.
49:51 Speaker 04 Yeah.
49:55 Speaker 03 Yeah, so what happens now, I think, is that they get a, he gets a tank regiment, 150 tanks maybe, and he says, we're going to punch you through the Axis lines and you should expect 100% casualties.
50:09 Speaker 05 Yes.
50:09 Speaker 03 It's basically a suicide mission.
50:11 Speaker 05 Yeah.
50:12 Speaker 03 And in the end, it's 75% casualties, they lose 120 tanks, I imagine that means the people in them go as well.
50:18 Speaker 05 Not necessarily, but it's not great news. You can kind of dip out the back.
50:23 Speaker 04 If it's starting to burn up or something.
50:25 Speaker 03 Yeah. So this is Brigadier John Currie is told to that. And so it's basically like one last push, a seven hour aerial bombardment, a four hour artillery barrage and.
50:38 Speaker 04 Wait, wait. So this is the Brits going, breaking through the line. But that's very unMonty to risk.
50:42 Speaker 03 But no, but no, but then he goes right with one push and a hundred percent casualties will actually break them.
50:47 Speaker 04 Okay. So it's quite rare for him to actually do.
50:49 Speaker 03 I guess he picks his moment.
50:51 Speaker 05 And there's another armored regiment behind the one that they think will be wiped out, ready to go. And they basically just look at it and go, look, with all the bombing and stuff, D minus as much as you can, but just fucking go for it.
51:01 Speaker 04 Go for it. Charge the light brigade sort of stuff.
51:03 Speaker 03 Yeah. And so this, this is the charge that ultimately gets in behind Rommel, which means that Rommel's encircled, which is the, the sort of death trap, right?
51:12 Speaker 04 Maybe you wonder that. Maybe he likes that sort of stuff.
51:14 Speaker 03 Maybe. He's on speed creative once. He's been in Burghain recovering. I've learned some new stuff. Getting in behind is not that bad, actually.
51:22 Speaker 05 Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's no chill out room in the desert, Rommel.
51:26 Speaker 03 There's no chill out room in Burghain either. You think there is and then, and then.
51:29 Speaker 04 Cause their idea of what a chill out room is being fisted by four men. So. That's not how I like to unwind, actually.
51:34 Speaker 03 That's a break for these guys.
51:39 Speaker 03 Now, so Rommel contacts High Command and says, we've been, our lines have been pumped through, we're basically surrounded. Hitler says, victory or death. You don't retreat. Direct order to Rommel. Now Hitler at this time is quite distracted. He's got a lot on famously.
51:58 Speaker 04 As well.
51:58 Speaker 03 He, he had to have ADHD. He had a sunflower lanyard on and Stalingrad happened, which is his big.
52:06 Speaker 04 And also ADHD meds were not invented yet, were they? Were they Charlie? LVance and stuff like that.
52:11 Speaker 03 Well, yes, it's pervotin.
52:12 Speaker 05 The pervotin would be the closest thing to it.
52:14 Speaker 04 Yeah. So I imagine it's quite hard for him to focus on one thing. It's a new lens.
52:17 Speaker 03 Thirty seven, actually.
52:18 Speaker 04 Okay. Well, he probably should have been taking some of that so he could focus on multiple fronts.
52:22 Speaker 03 Yeah. But he's also micromanaging Stalingrad. I don't know if he's doing that by this point.
52:26 Speaker 04 He's hyper focused on it.
52:28 Speaker 03 Yes. I know he probably is because this is November. Yeah. So this is where he's.
52:31 Speaker 04 Can you stop micromanaging me, Hitler?
52:33 Speaker 03 He now hits his gravitas.
52:35 Speaker 04 I need to be like.
52:36 Speaker 03 Can you just give me some space?
52:37 Speaker 04 Yeah, you're just like, yeah, sort of backseat driving it.
52:40 Speaker 03 But that's the problem is that he then, he then tries to organise an airlift in Stalingrad. I don't know whether this is the right time or there might be later on, which is impossible to achieve.
52:49 Speaker 04 The trend of the rest of the war is that the tilt of the war is happening in North Africa and Barbarossa. The whole first phase of the war happened one way and the whole second phase of the war happened pretty much the same way.
53:00 Speaker 03 The turning point is El Alamein.
53:02 Speaker 04 It is, this is it.
53:03 Speaker 03 It is El Alamein.
53:04 Speaker 04 Hitler, it goes so well. Hitler thinks he's a genius and then he never backs down. And all of the Nazi failures happen the same way, basically from here on out.
53:12 Speaker 03 Yes.
53:13 Speaker 05 They're gambling on if we win Stalingrad and the Soviet Union implodes, then we'll make peace with the Western powers.
53:19 Speaker 04 Right.
53:19 Speaker 05 They're hoping that that's like.
53:21 Speaker 03 Are they, even now, they still think they want Britain to come to the table?
53:24 Speaker 04 What now?
53:26 Speaker 05 Even out there somewhere now.
53:28 Speaker 03 Even now, they think, they think they're at peace.
53:31 Speaker 05 Incredibly sunburnt Germans still out there now.
53:34 Speaker 03 In the Alps, doing star jumps in the Alps.
53:37 Speaker 05 Little prune.
53:37 Speaker 03 Yeah.
53:38 Speaker 05 No, they really think like, once, once we demonstrate that and we defeat them in the east, then they'll come to their senses. The very least they'll leave us alone.
53:47 Speaker 03 Have you watched, I'm sure you have, the new Tom Hanks 20 part series on World War Two?
53:51 Speaker 05 No, I haven't seen it.
53:52 Speaker 03 Have you? I've started it. It's, it's.
53:54 Speaker 04 It's on Netflix.
53:55 Speaker 03 It's on Now TV.
53:57 Speaker 04 Because I've watched a couple of 20 part series of World War Two. I wonder what this new 20 part series of World War Two is going to tell me about World War Two, that the other 20 part series.
54:04 Speaker 03 I thought, I thought, I'll put.
54:05 Speaker 04 What's the new take?
54:06 Speaker 03 Listen, Amanda was out and as, as ever, I've, I watched Band of Brothers again for the fifth time recently. I've watched the World at War twice in the last year. So I was like, do you know what? It's a new one and it's very fast paced.
54:18 Speaker 04 Maybe the ending's different.
54:20 Speaker 03 Maybe, maybe, maybe they win. Maybe they win this time. But it is actually, it's, it's actually very well done. It's, it's, you know, because there's no, there's no veterans in it.
54:32 Speaker 04 Yeah.
54:32 Speaker 03 But no, they, they just rattle through it and they tell the story.
54:36 Speaker 04 You age badly, brother.
54:37 Speaker 03 Yeah, come on.
54:39 Speaker 03 Look like wet scrambled egg. No, it's made for a more kind of online generation, right? So just narratively, it's quite, how they choose to do it. So I've only watched the first few episodes.
54:51 Speaker 04 Have they got like KSI doing talking heads?
54:54 Speaker 03 Tom Hanks does an opening sort of piece of prose to camera that is very, it's just very good. Just the writing is very good and you're pissed off. And he's Tom Hanks. And then also I started watching episode one and then I fucking, I'd obviously watched just all three. I was just having a great time. Man, they came home cum everywhere. Tom Hanks on the screen, oh, what do you want me to do? You can't leave me.
55:17 Speaker 04 Was it like World War Two for Zoomers or was it actually decent?
55:21 Speaker 03 No, I don't know. Well, I'd be interested in that. I mean, it would, to tell you nothing really.
55:26 Speaker 04 Were they saying things like, it had a lot of aura?
55:29 Speaker 03 Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, actually.
55:34 Speaker 04 It's giving.
55:36 Speaker 03 Yeah.
55:36 Speaker 05 He knife mugged the SA.
55:42 Speaker 04 It's giving genocide.
55:44 Speaker 03 No, he Holocaust maxed, he did. But, no, it had, it was allegedly. But yeah, no, it was, it was good. It's just well done. I mean, it's nothing, it's nothing. I'm watching this thinking like, there's nothing I don't really know.
55:58 Speaker 04 Yeah.
55:58 Speaker 03 But it's just presented in a nice way. And they have actually digitally enhanced a lot of footage and photos that I hadn't seen before. So.
56:06 Speaker 04 When digitally enhanced is, oh, you mean make it brighter and yeah. Not like AI them, so it's like.
56:11 Speaker 03 No, no.
56:12 Speaker 04 They're like dancing and doing TikToks and stuff.
56:14 Speaker 03 It's not those things you always see.
56:15 Speaker 04 Like you see like Monty going like.
56:17 Speaker 03 No, it's always, it's always like people always keep sending me reels of like Hitler's been spotted at a football game. It's just an AI guy in a crowd, but it's Hitler.
56:24 Speaker 04 People keep sending you that. Oh, yeah. The shit we get is crazy.
56:28 Speaker 03 I just, I just showed you a Nazi mother's cross downstairs.
56:31 Speaker 04 Yeah, that's true. I get loads of shit anyway, but I get some shit because they think I'm sort of the soft underbelly to get into you sometimes.
56:37 Speaker 03 Really?
56:38 Speaker 04 They think, like, they'll send me stuff because they don't, they assume that you won't respond, but they think that there's a chance. He's like, can you show Finn this? And of course it'll be just the same Hitler thing.
56:47 Speaker 03 Hitler again, yeah.
56:49 Speaker 05 It's really important to me that Finn sees this blurry AI rendering of Hitler.
56:54 Speaker 03 Hitler watching Charlton, yeah, all right.
56:56 Speaker 04 They're bleeding out.
56:57 Speaker 05 Please, get this, get this.
56:59 Speaker 03 Right, anyway, so Hitler says Rommel, you don't retreat. And this, as we said, Rommel's not actually a Nazi, although, yeah, he's one of the more Nazi guys who's ever lived, in that he fought for them, but Rommel-
57:14 Speaker 04 He is a Nazi.
57:15 Speaker 03 Yes, but he's also, he's-
57:20 Speaker 03 He's not loyal to Hitler in the way that the Göring is, or other generals are.
57:24 Speaker 04 Well, you're saying he sort of did it with like, you're a Nazi.
57:27 Speaker 03 No, no, firstly, this is the only theatre of war with no war crimes. It's the only theatre with no war crimes in World War II, right?
57:34 Speaker 04 Is it? It's a gentleman's-
57:35 Speaker 03 It's the most cricket, it's the most gentlemanly of the theatres. The only thing, the closest thing to a war crime actually is the SAS early stuff, where they gunned down people.
57:45 Speaker 04 Even that's debatable.
57:46 Speaker 03 Exactly, exactly, it's not actually, they're soldiers, so it's not really a war crime.
57:49 Speaker 04 Because I back myself militarily, it's weirdly, my instinct when I was thinking some of the problems here, because I'm always trying to think, what would I do? With the, trying to clear the minds, my first instinct was to get those 100,000 Italian prisoners of war and make them walk through it. But that would be a war crime.
58:02 Speaker 03 Yeah.
58:02 Speaker 04 So maybe, it's lucky I wasn't-
58:04 Speaker 03 Yeah.
58:05 Speaker 04 Because my first instinct was war crime.
58:10 Speaker 03 See? You're so quick to judge.
58:11 Speaker 04 It's true, it's true. It's not as easy, like, you might say, you know, because that was-
58:15 Speaker 03 People in glass houses.
58:16 Speaker 04 I'd have sorted it out, 100,000 walking in a line, like they're searching for missing bodies.
58:18 Speaker 03 Imagine the fucking noise, one of those Italians stepping on a lamb, my Christ.
58:23 Speaker 03 Anyway, so Rommel basically ignores Hitler and he retreats to try and save the force.
58:29 Speaker 04 Yeah, just ignore him. He leaves all the Italians behind because they don't have any vehicles.
58:33 Speaker 03 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
58:34 Speaker 04 And he's like, yeah, good luck, okay?
58:35 Speaker 03 Yeah, but Italians, I mean, they love surrendering so-
58:37 Speaker 04 They'd be right here.
58:38 Speaker 03 They love surrendering so much, they don't have any tanks. They just, they're basically World War One force. All they have is pasta kitchens.
58:46 Speaker 04 Yeah.
58:46 Speaker 03 It's farcical, it's absolutely farcical.
58:50 Speaker 03 So 3rd November 42 is the final breakthrough. Rommel's fuel shortages are critical. Rommel then decides, fuck Hitler, we're going back. Fuck Hitler, man. Fuck him. He's not what he's talking about. So he chooses to retreat. Now, so they all begin withdrawing westward to Libya to avoid encirclement. So I guess it's just still so hard to visualize. The tanks have broken through, so Monty has started to encircle. But I guess the encirclement is such a large area that Rommel can see what's going on and decides over a matter of hours.
59:24 Speaker 04 How are they mapping? Are they mapping with reconnaissance planes?
59:27 Speaker 05 Yes. Yeah, yeah. Rommel's particularly keen on us having a big Storch plane fly around. And he often sometimes goes up in it himself.
59:34 Speaker 03 Oh, really?
59:34 Speaker 05 Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's the desert, right? So you can just see.
59:37 Speaker 04 It's outrageous, yeah.
59:39 Speaker 03 Christ. Anyway, so this withdrawal signals Allied victory. And it is the first defeat of German forces in World War II.
59:50 Speaker 04 And the big Churchill quote?
59:52 Speaker 03 The big Churchill quote is, "Before Alamein, we never had a victory. After Alamein, we never had a defeat."
59:57 Speaker 04 Goes hard.
59:58 Speaker 03 Yeah.
59:58 Speaker 05 Nice.
59:59 Speaker 03 It is the most important theater of World War II. The Second Battle of Al-Alemany, it all rests on this, yeah? The Soviet stuff's a sideshow, okay? The Second Battle of Al-Alemany has been won. Monty has come in, he's defeated Rommel. Rommel is now in freefall. The stage is set for the collapse of Axis control in North Africa. In our next episode, Pierre will still be here to go through Operation Torch. Monty and Rommel in Italy. Rommel's asparagus. He knows what that means. And the way Rommel meets his end is extraordinary. It's great stuff. And also the stuff Monty says in the 60s is equally a lot of fun.
1:00:42 Speaker 03 He lived too long.
1:00:43 Speaker 04 Commanders should die in war.
1:00:45 Speaker 03 Monty lived too long.
1:00:46 Speaker 04 I couldn't believe when I saw how long Monty lived. The fact that he's in the fucking Thatcher's Britain?
1:00:51 Speaker 03 No, no, no.
1:00:53 Speaker 04 Just 80?
1:00:53 Speaker 03 Heath. He's in Wilson's, Wilson's second term.
1:00:56 Speaker 04 Callahan, I'm sure.
1:00:56 Speaker 03 76. No, he goes 76.
1:00:58 Speaker 04 76, right.
1:00:59 Speaker 03 Wilson's getting pegged by Marcia with Monty in the House of Lords. Anyway, that's on the next episode, which is already on our Patreon, where for £3 a month, you can join a community of people who, yeah, will probably-
1:01:12 Speaker 04 Light-minded individuals.
1:01:13 Speaker 03 Who will probably play that board game.
1:01:15 Speaker 04 Yeah, yeah.
1:01:17 Speaker 03 But if not, we'll see you next time for the conclusion of our epic Monty and Rommel series. Until then, goodbye.
1:01:22 Speaker 04 Goodbye.
1:01:22 Speaker 05 Bye-bye.
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Previous Italy’s Greatest Weapon Is Surrender | Monty vs Rommel (Part 2/4) Next Captain Tom, Garden Fox (with Pierre Novellie) | Monty vs Rommel (Part 4/4) Page updated October 29, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated