Before The Storm: The Phoney War Begins (Part 1)

What is the truth behind the Nazi myth of German technological superiority? Why were German generals planning to kill Hitler? How well was Britain prepared for war in 1939? Join Al Murray and James Holland for part 1 of this new series on the 'Phoney War', and how complacency and hubris led to the shock fall of Western Europe to the Nazi German war machine in Spring 1940. Start your free trial at ⁠patreon.com/wehaveways⁠ and unlock exclusive content and more. Enjoy livestreams, early access, ad-free listening, bonus episodes, and a weekly newsletter packed with book deals and behind-the-scenes insights. Get your ticket for We Have Ways Fest 6 here! Get your WHW Merch here! Visit refundclub.co.uk/whw. Refund Club is a trading style of Sandsford Law Limited, authorised and regulated by the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA no. 8008114). Checking is free. A fee is payable only if your claim is successful. Eligibility: car finance taken out in the UK between 2007 and 2021. The average claim is around £829 per agreement; this is an average and not a guarantee of the amount you will receive. You can also claim yourself for free by contacting your lender or the Financial Ombudsman Service. A Goalhanger Production Produced by James Regan Editor: Lorcan Moullier Assistant Producer: Alfie Norris Exec Producer: Tony Pastor Social: @WeHaveWaysPod Social Producer: Harry Balden Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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• 1:31Speaker 00

  Hitler spoke for almost two hours and cited figure after figure without referring to a single note. What impressed me is his confidence in ultimate victory. Either he is bewitched, or he really is a genius. He outlines plans of action and cites dates with an assurance that does not admit of contradiction. Will he be proved right? In my opinion, the game will not be as simple as he believes. I return from Germany with the strong convictions that the first months of the war will lead the Germans to believe in victory, but the longer it lasts, the harder it will be. And that was me there, ventriloquising Count Ciano in his diary from the 2nd, 3rd of October 1939. Ciano, of course, Mussolini's son-in-law, Mussolini's foreign minister, and a major power player

• 2:14Speaker 00

  in the Italian government, and a witness to the beginning of the Second World War, and in fact, the phony war, as it's become known. And welcome to We Have Ways of Making You Talk with me, Al Murray, James Holland. And we are talking, aren't we, Jim, in this series about the bit of the war, sort of, not before the war, because there's obviously this stuff going on at sea, but we're trying to set the scene as things start to drift towards all going majorly kinetic on the continent in May of April and May 1940. So welcome, everyone.

• 2:48Speaker 03

  It's a fascinating period. And I think, you know, one of the things that we thought would be good with this one is to sort of set up where the main players are. And the main players at this stage are, you know, Britain, France, Germany, and Italy to a certain extent, I suppose. But, you know, how much has sort of myth got in the way of the reality? What were their armed forces like? What were their structures, more to the point? What was their kind of, you know, to coin a modern term, what was their resilience like in terms of setting themselves up for the war that was to come? I think one of the other things that I think is really, really interesting about this period is it's a time where almost everybody wants the war to not really get underway. They want it

• 3:31Speaker 03

  to all go away. And I would say that literally the one person who is not in that camp is Adolf Hitler. Everyone else, I mean, Ciano and Mussolini are in a complete state of gloom because they know they can't afford a long war. And they can't see how they could possibly beat Britain and France. And they can't see how Germany can either, to be perfectly honest. Most of the German commanders can't either. You know, this is the time where Franz Halder, for example, who was the chief of staff of the army and who we talked a lot about in our Barbarossa series, was part of an assassination plot to get rid of Hitler, to devoid the catastrophe that was inevitably going to come if it kicks

• 4:13Speaker 03

  off of the West. And so Halder took to keeping a pistol, a loaded pistol in his pocket, in case the opportunity arose where he could just shoot the Führer on the spot. But he kind of chickens out and he never does it and moves away from all that. Then you have another assassination temp on Hitler, beginning of November, and Georg Elsa, who, on the anniversary of the Beer Hall push, Hitler does a speech and he's got it all primed, he's set up the bomb, it's on a timer switch, it's all going to go boom and all the rest of it. Hitler unexpectedly cut short his speech by 13 minutes. And 12 minutes after he's left the building, boom, it goes up and kills seven people and, you know, wins

• 4:55Speaker 03

  the whole way to others and all the rest of it. So there is quite a lot of feeling in Germany at this time that if it does kick off of Britain and France, it's going to end in disaster. And Hitler is also, at this time, as a backdrop to this, post-Poland, is having a go at all his planners, and particularly the army, going, get me a plan to attack the West. We need to attack the West now before they can, you know, they've got too many factories, or they've, you know, rearmed too much and got ready. We need to strike while the arms hot, all this kind of stuff. So this is all the stuff that's going on. And it's a pretty, pretty kind of mental time, to be honest.

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  That's refundclub.co.uk/whw for your free cheque. And meanwhile, the British government and the French government are both thinking, if there's a way of not having to do this, perhaps, that would suit us fine. Because after all, they've sort of been, they have been dragged into events by, again, by Hitler and his action. And of course, the Soviet Union giving the Germans freedom of action with the Nazi-Soviet Pact in August of 39. And the French government have enough problems in the form of internal political instability. And the British government really, if it could possibly avoid it, because they know it's going to be ruinous, that a second global

• 7:13Speaker 00

  conflict that matches the last one they've had, that's basically game over for the British Empire and for the status quo. And they don't want, they don't want to disturb the equilibrium any further than they absolutely need to. Let's not forget, it's a conservative government in Britain who are trying, by any outcome possible, to avoid anything that might turf them out and cause a revolution, which is the, which is the thing that's been on conservative minds all this time. And so you have a real tension between the major players who are not interested in setting this off, but also preparing like mad. I mean, that's the other thing we have to remember, is that the British have been preparing like mad for this eventuality, actually. Building up their forces, laying down keels for warships, and really peddling

• 7:58Speaker 00

  hard to get up to speed. But although that's been policy for a different form of deterrents the British are hoping to, hoping to lay on the Germans, which of course hasn't worked. Because that's the other thing, is that the Germans have misread British intentions, just as the British have misread German intentions. You know, British intentions are to rearmed and be ready and fortress Britain and to create the impression that, and it's not an impression, to create a scenario where we are ready to fight a blockading war and to do it all again if we got to. But we'd rather not, let's be honest, we'd rather not. And that, that always strikes me as quite reasonable, but it's also based on a misapprehension of Germany again. There are so many currents flowing. And I think it's always rather unfair to call it the Sitzkrieg or the phony war. And of course,

• 8:41Speaker 00

  the Soviets are getting stuck into Finland too. So, you know, sort of offstage, there's another encounter and another player that, in our roundup there, Jim, we didn't include, fairly enough, the Soviets are not on the, sort of not on the menu here, because they're otherwise occupied.

• 8:57Speaker 03

  Yes, yes, they are. I mean, from Britain's point of view, there is a complete assurance of victory. No one's quite sure how long it's going to take, but there is an assumption that it's all going to be okay. And the reason for that is because of that economic blockade, which is imposed on the 3rd of September, 1939. And that means that, yes, surface vessels can run the blockade, they can get through it. But nothing meaningful. And the point is, there aren't ghost ships going through either. You know, this is not like sort of Russia in 2026. So the big problem is that Germany doesn't have a merchant fleet, so it can't get the resources it needs. No one has the resources in their own country that you need to fight a long, protracted war.

• 9:38Speaker 03

  And this is Germany's fundamental problem. So Britain, Britain looking at it logically rather than ideologically, and this is always a problem when you're assessing your enemy. You need to assess it from their ideological point of view as well as their pragmatic point of view. But from their pragmatic point of view, you know, Germany's got a massive problem on the sands because it doesn't have many natural resources, doesn't have access to the world's oceans. It's stuck in the corner, you know, in the middle of Europe. It's got a little sort of bit of narrow channels in the Baltic Sea, that little bit of North Sea. And in the North Sea, which is your access point to the Atlantic, is the Royal Navy. The Royal Navy is the world's largest and, you know, so there's good reasons why the British would think, you know, we've got this.

• 10:13Speaker 00

  Surely the Germans must know this, and surely the Germans don't want to suffer another defeat, and surely no one wants another one of these wars. I mean, this, I think what's really interesting is you can't forget that, and you can't forget the First World War is five minutes ago in real terms. It's 21 years ago, the end of the First World War. And that's the thing you have to remember about, you know, we need to see it from their point of view in those terms. Anyway, you wanted to talk about resilience, Jim, and states of preparation, so we should start with that.

• 10:40Speaker 03

  Well, I also think it's sort of relevant, but for now, as we're all sort of worrying about kind of what is the resilience for kind of any future conflict over here at the moment, all this stuff is quite relevant because you can see how people kind of manage their resources, manage their supplies and stuff in the 1930s and 40s. I thought it'd be fun to start with Eric Winkle Brown, you know, a guy that we've talked about on and off over the last seven years. Scottish pilot, fleet air arm, becomes the legendary test pilot in British aviation, in world aviation. I mean, no one has flown more types than him. 485, I think he's flown different types of aircraft in his career.

• 11:19Speaker 03

  But in the late 1930s, he is a Germanophile. His father is a former balloon observer and a pilot in the Royal Flying Corps. And he takes his son Eric to Germany for the 1936 Olympics. And he's been invited there by Göring and Ernst Udet. And Ernst Udet, because, you know, is this incredibly famous pilot, he's a sort of barnstormer in the 1920s. Great pals of Göring, ends up being the kind of procurement chief in the Luftwaffe, which ends up him actually taking his life eventually in 1941. But anyway, they become friends and he takes him up in a plane, Udet, and does an inverted flight over the airfield.

• 12:03Speaker 03

  And they're so low, he can, he almost can sort of scrape his head on the, you know, on the grass strip. And it's absolutely terrifying and thrilling in equal measure. Anyway, you know, Eric Brown, you know, he returns to Scotland for university, he's part of the University Air Squadron in Edinburgh. And then goes back to Germany in the summer of 1938 to work for the Foreign Office. It's all sorts of stuff that doesn't quite add up here, I have to say, and there's this sort of strong evidence to suggest he ended up fighting for Franco in the

• 12:34Speaker 03

  in the civil war and all sorts of stuff. But anyway, be that as it may, he's still in Germany when war is declared on the 3rd of September. And he's in Stalin Bavaria, and he's awoken by three SS officers who wake him up and go, "And the third will have to come for us because our countries are now at war." And so they gather his belongings, including his car, which is a very nice little, one of those little MGs. You still see them around, don't you occasionally? Red with a, or British racing green with a kind of the spoked tyre on the boot.

• 13:06Speaker 00

  The kind you park by your pond at your country house. If you have a, you need to have a pond outside.

• 13:12Speaker 03

  Exactly. Exactly.

• 13:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, a friend of mine's uncle said to him, "You know you're a gentleman when you have an MG parked by the pond out the front of your house."

• 13:24Speaker 03

  That's very good.

• 13:25Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 13:29Speaker 03

  I think I'll phone my jeep to him.

• 13:32Speaker 03

  Maybe, hmm. Anyway, so he's got his MG. And they take him and his car to a cell in Munich. He's freed three days later and taken to the Swiss border. And he's told he can have his car back. And he's really confused and he goes, "You've taken my boots, my money, my clothes. Why are you giving me my car?" And he's told, "Because we have no spares."

• 13:55Speaker 00

  Unbelievable. They can't get the spares for the MG, so the MG is no good to them. And this is the thing we've talked about several times, and particularly people will know this in the Barbarossa episode. And this is a point of comparison that we keep coming back to, which I think is really important. Which is that there are vehicle shortages in Germany because Germany isn't a, isn't a car economy at all.

• 14:15Speaker 03

  Not at all.

• 14:16Speaker 00

  1935, there's one vehicle per every 65 people in Germany. 1939, they've made an effort, but there's one vehicle per 47 people, even though there are autobahn.

• 14:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, the whole point of the autobahns is to have an east-west access to transport troops at a future stage where they have got lots of vehicles, but the autobahns have nothing on them.

• 14:36Speaker 00

  I wonder what they're for then, Jim? If you're building, you're building these motorways that go from east to west. What could they possibly be for? Hmm.

• 14:42Speaker 03

  Well, quite.

• 14:43Speaker 00

  It's a poser, isn't it? Whereas in Britain, it's in 1935, it's one vehicle per 23 people. In 1939, it's one vehicle per 14. So that the British start from a higher base and are making up quicker.

• 14:55Speaker 03

  Oh, and by the way, in France, it's one to eight. And in Italy, it's 106 people for every vehicle. So they're way behind. So one of the things that always slightly bugs me about betrayals of Berlin and stuff in the 1930s and 1940s, there's always way too many vehicles. I mean, I, I don't know if you've seen Babylon Berlin, which is this completely brilliant series.

• 15:15Speaker 00

  I have, yeah.

• 15:16Speaker 03

  There's too many cars, there's too many vehicles. There, it's just, it's absolutely polluting with vehicles.

• 15:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 15:22Speaker 03

  And it's the same with My Family's War or whatever it's called, Generation War. Again, there's just, there's just too many vehicles. You know, they would have been lots of trams, lots of S-bahn and U-bahn and all that kind of stuff, lots of trains, so lots of public transport. But there wouldn't have been lots of cars. And it is funny, I think, because, you know, there is this impression, isn't there, that Germany is all about modernity. It's all about, you know, this new Germany with its shiny swastikas and its huge great parade grounds and you know, automaton SS types and blah, blah, blah. And when we talk about the Blitzkrieg, we always talk about the Nazi war machine, don't we?

• 16:04Speaker 03

  I mean, that's the phrase that always comes up. And it's not really the case.

• 16:09Speaker 00

  But this is propaganda, Jim. This is, this is the point, is this is how effective Nazi propaganda is, is it's still working. When people talk in these terms and they think of Germany in terms of modernity and a war machine in terms of modernity, that's the propaganda of the time. That's Goebbels still speaking to you. And how effective his message was. Of course, there is, there's something to be said for the Allies then reflecting that propaganda because you don't want to admit to having been beaten by a horse-drawn army, do you? When you're trying to modernise and you don't, and you also need to make the case for modernisation and mechanisation. So you're going to go, "Well, what we need is more of what they've got." But you're quite right. Of 53 divisions in Poland, only 15 are mechanised in any way. The rest is horses.

• 16:53Speaker 03

  So that's 38 out of your 15 divisions.

• 16:55Speaker 00

  Yeah. And infantry, horses and infantry, rather than panzer, panzer thrusts and all that sort of stuff. It's interesting, isn't it? Because the invasion of Poland is ordered so suddenly, because after all, no one knows what Hitler's going to do next, least of all Hitler. Because it's ordered so suddenly. Well, no, that's the, you know, you've someone making decisions like that, the flick of a coin, backing himself into having to do it, in fact, is the thing, you know, because he prevaricates like mad. You know, it's little wonder that the French and the British are caught on the hop by the invasion of Poland because so are the Germans. So is the Wehrmacht.

• 17:34Speaker 03

  Yes, so true.

• 17:36Speaker 00

  And, you know, Case White's ordered so suddenly, that the test runs are going to do, the exercises they're going to do, the Germans are going to do, are simply flipped, flipped into being operations and it becomes, the test run becomes the invasion. And of course, you know, Poland, God bless it, and it fights hard and it's, it's not right to say that Poland just capitulates in the face of the German war machine because again, there we have, there we have Nazi propaganda sticking with us again. The Polands do what they can, but they can't be used as a yardstick for, you know, actually how good the Germans are. Because it's not a fair fight.

• 18:11Speaker 03

  Well, yeah, and the big problem is that mechanisation is going to be this huge, huge problem because this is, this is a modern age where mechanisation is going to be key. And the truth is that the Germans just don't have enough. They don't have enough trucks, they don't have enough cars, they don't have enough anything. They just don't have enough mechanisation. They don't have the wherewithal to be able to do this, to create this mechanisation. You know, and that's because of the 1920s and wheelbarrows of money and hyperinflation, then they, then they start to recover. But, you know, they lose everything in 1919.

• 18:41Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 18:41Speaker 03

  You know, the Versailles Treaty. So they've got to start from scratch, they've got to build up from scratch. And at the same time, they're building the Luftwaffe. And at the same time, they're building U-boats. And at the same time, they're building the Bismarck and the Schallhorst and the Niederau and the Admiral Hipper and blah, blah, blah, and the Graf Spee and so on and so forth, and creating these, this not big enough navy, but big enough to be able to pull, you know, to absorb a lot of your resources. And they're having to build ammunition and they're having to build guns and they're having to build everything else.

• 19:10Speaker 00

  Well, and run a normal economy as well. This is the other thing. This is why you end up with these guns or butter pinches in the German economy, isn't it? That, you know, you, you've also got to keep the consumer happy, you've got to make things tick over normally. And so that their economy is necessarily out of shape by all of this. And it's really well illustrated with the simple business of vehicles, isn't it?

• 19:30Speaker 03

  Well, it is, but you have to think of the kind of domino effects of having an underdeveloped automobile industry. And the big problem is, is you don't have many factories making them. If you're not, if you're not producing a lot or there's not as many as other nations, you don't have as many factories. And if you don't have as many factories, you don't have as much know-how. And if you don't have that many people driving cars, then there isn't that much need for petrol stations or gas stations. There's not that much need for garages and workshops that can repair your motor vehicle. So you don't have that many people who know how to do it. And you don't have that many people who know how to drive. So the problem is, is when you want to suddenly up your game and massively increase your number of vehicles,

• 20:15Speaker 03

  you don't have the capacity on any level. You don't have the infrastructure, you don't have the know how, you don't have the people who know how to repair them. You don't have the people who want to drive them. So you, you literally can't just click your fingers. And we touched on this, this character Adolf von Schell in the Barbarossa series. But he's a really interesting guy because he's one of the guys who's absolutely in the heart of the military vehicle shortage problem in 1939, when he's 46. A career soldier fought in the First World War, Belgium, big Western Front battles, blah, blah, blah, Eastern Front as well. Wounded four times, ordered to wire on cross First Cross twice. Remains in the Reichswehr after the war, becomes a captain in 1930, which is not particularly advanced.

• 20:57Speaker 03

  Ends up doing this, this weird instructing in the infantry school and fought Benning in the US.

• 21:03Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 21:04Speaker 03

  I mean, it's just amazing. But anyway, from his experience in America, he gets very into, drawn into the kind of the automobile industry over there, what mechanization can do, recognizes that this is Germany's way forward. So comes back to Germany and has this knowledge, you know, he's seen it firsthand in the United States. And, you know, he spent time at the Ford Motor Plant in Detroit and all the rest of it. So he's then appointed the under secretary in the Ministry of Transport in 1938. And he's noticed not only by Göring, but also by Hitler himself. And then when Göring announces his massive increase in, in rearmament rate in November, 1938,

• 21:44Speaker 03

  that is when Schell is, is plucked out and, and appointed the General Plenipotentiary of Motor Vehicles, which basically is a euphemistic title for basically saying you're in charge of running our pool of vehicles in the Wehrmacht. But, I mean, talk about poison chalices, you know, because his job is a simple one to coordinate and oversee the mechanization of the Wehrmacht. Well, okay, how are you going to do that?

• 22:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, and as you pointed out, Jim, they don't have the factories or the, or the sort of skill set, the knowledge base. I mean, the other thing is the motor industry is atomized, is privatized, isn't it? So how are you bringing about a national effort? Because after all, Germany itself was atomized. The idea of a unified Germany is really quite recent politically. So, so Germany itself is kind of, still kind of crazy paving, isn't it? In terms of the economic picture. And they're short on iron ore.

• 22:36Speaker 03

  Very much so.

• 22:37Speaker 00

  They've lowered a quota. Von Schell warns Göring in March that only 50% of truck orders will be able to be delivered by the beginning of 1940. They'll then have to lay people off, um, uh, because there's a lack of, a lack of work.

• 22:50Speaker 03

  Because they're going to be needed in the war.

• 22:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, because they're going to be needed for the war.

• 22:52Speaker 03

  Well, it's a lack of work, but also because they're needed as soldiers.

• 22:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. So here's your core problem of running a military economy alongside a so-called normal one. And he says, once this has happened and an increase in production is unimaginable for seven, several years, this would damage the motorization of the Wehrmacht, the reich and commerce from which it would hardly be able to recover.

• 23:11Speaker 03

  So this is for a matter of years, he's saying, years. So he's saying this in the spring of 1939. And he's saying, once this happens in 1940, and we haven't delivered enough, we're going to be stuffed for several years. Yeah. This is why so many people in the upper echelons of, of, of the Wehrmacht are going, don't go to war. This is all smoke and mirrors. It all looks very impressive. We've got away with it so far in the Sudetenland, then Czechoslovakia, before that Austria, before that the Rhineland. Let's not push our luck because we don't have the capacity for this.

• 23:46Speaker 00

  And he puts together this Schell plan. And the idea is, is, you know, this is what you're going to need to do. You're going to need to reduce the number of vehicle types from 131 trucks to 23.

• 23:57Speaker 03

  131 to 23. I mean, this is.

• 24:01Speaker 00

  I would say 23 is probably 22 many, isn't it? Well, well, you, you could argue that. And, and certainly when we look at what the Allies end up doing, where there are more or fewer types, as it were, you increase the number of vehicles to work with gas generators and solid fuel instead of petrol. Because you're, you're going to have fuel shortages and you, and you need the petrol for the basically the frontline combat vehicles. Encourage production of, of the militarized Volkswagen.

• 24:26Speaker 03

  But can you see a scenario in 1939 where you're going to have more and more vehicles in your, your ultra modern new army operating with gas generators?

• 24:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'd stick with the horses if I were you.

• 24:41Speaker 03

  It's not going to happen, is it?

• 24:43Speaker 00

  No, it's not. The Volkswagen Beetle is seen as the, you know, the Hitler car, isn't it? But that's a Ponzi scheme that the Germans.

• 24:49Speaker 03

  People's car.

• 24:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, but it's, but it's a Ponzi scheme. No one gets one. They pay into the pot for one, but no one gets one before the war. There is no VW Beetle. There's a prototype that gets, or show models that get shown off, but no one actually ever ends up with one because it's a con. And so you're then going to militarize this, this thing that doesn't really exist. I mean, the bucket car, the Kubelwagen.

• 25:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 25:13Speaker 00

  Is what we end up seeing in, you know, they're, they're the cars that of course explode the minute they fall in a ditch in Weriglsdau, whatever. They're made of dynamite Kubelwagons. But here's the thing, there aren't enough of these anyway. He wants to improve maintenance, so that, that's the creation of a home motor pool organization, which is, again, repair shops and garages are still privately owned, but they're under Wehrmacht control. I mean, this also requires a massive extension of state control, this, if nothing else. Although war always does. Compulsory requisitioning, so 50% of civilian trucks need to be taken in for military use. And this is all to come to fruition for 1942.

• 25:50Speaker 03

  So von Schell would be having a good conversation with Admiral Raeder, who's embarked on his Z Plan for the Navy, which is going to come to fruition in 1944. I mean, this is the whole problem with going into war in September, 1939. They're not ready and the, and the comparatively cheap victory of Poland is, is papering over are huge amounts of cracks, many of which have become apparent during the Polish campaign.

• 26:16Speaker 00

  Yeah. And what's interesting about this is that this part of Prussia, the part of Prussia bordering Poland, because after all, there's the lump of East Prussia inside Poland, as it were anyway. That's theoretic, you know, for want of a better word, the most backward part of Germany anyway. So there aren't the vehicles, there aren't the workshops, the roads in Poland itself are really bad. So you're straining your vehicles and inexperienced drivers don't know how to handle that kind of terrain.

• 26:42Speaker 03

  That's one of the biggest problems that no one ever thinks about is that these guys are not used to driving this stuff because they're not used to driving vehicles, you know, they're just, because they just don't exist.

• 26:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 26:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's a real problem. You just have this escalating, one thing leads to the next thing, which is the next problem, which needs to the next problem, you know?

• 27:01Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 27:02Speaker 03

  The example of Siegfried Napper is, is, is really interesting. So he's an artilleryman and he joins the German artillery as a 19 year old in October, 1936. His father had been a naval gunnerie officer in the First World War. And he'd always been compelled by an image of a modern mechanized formidable Wehrmacht. This is what he, he, he wants. And he's absolutely shocked when he joins the artillery though, because he's told first day, you know, what's the first job? He goes, go and clean out those stables, please. He's like, what? I'm not expecting stable blocks. What do you mean, you're still using horses? What about all the kind of vehicles I see in the newsreels and in the Wehrmacht magazines and stuff of the day? And, and he says to them, you mean they still pulled the artillery with horses?

• 27:46Speaker 03

  Yes, I am afraid so, replies his companion. I mean, you know, so instead of kind of, you know, speeding along the highways or the autobahns with kind of modern trucks and gun tractors, instead his job is to kind of muck out the stables every other day. And he says, I still could not believe it. I was actually in the horse drawn artillery. It all seems so backward in this modern age.

• 28:11Speaker 00

  Are they ever going to have enough horses though? It's the, it's the other thing.

• 28:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 28:14Speaker 00

  That in itself, I mean, the main advantage of a horse is if your lorry breaks down, you can't eat it, can you? Whereas if the horse has had it, you can, you can at least eat the horse.

• 28:25Speaker 03

  I suppose so.

• 28:26Speaker 00

  For when things aren't, aren't going as well.

• 28:28Speaker 03

  Silver clouds.

• 28:29Speaker 00

  Yeah. At the start of the war, Germany has 684,000 fully trained regular troops, another 410,000 reservists.

• 28:39Speaker 00

  Who are fully trained, then 709,000 reservists with rudimentary training, so probably know which end of the rifle is which. And then there's the older reserve pool, which is 1.7 million people, which includes First World War veterans. So blokes in their 40s.

• 28:55Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 28:56Speaker 00

  So the field army is two and a half million men, the replacement army is 1.2 million. So just at a glance, they can only really afford to do one thing at a time, the German army. They can't afford to be dealing with more than one emergency. And they're divided up as follows. So the division is the main unit of scale for the German army and, you know, for all armies, isn't it?

• 29:18Speaker 03

  Yes, the division is very much the unit by which we judge the scale of armies from the Second World War.

• 29:25Speaker 00

  Yeah. And so in a German division, there's 14,000 to 17,000 men, and this is before the big reorganisation that happens later on in the war, where they rationalise it all. And that's roughly the same for everyone else, the British, the French, the Americans, the Italian armies. And two divisions make a corps, two corps make an army. So a corps is a body, isn't it? A body of men, so to speak. Two divisions make a corps, a corps is an army, two armies are an army group.

• 29:50Speaker 03

  Yes, I mean, we should also add that you can have more than one, you have to have at least two, and you have to have at least two corps to make an army, but you could have five corps in an army.

• 29:59Speaker 00

  Or three and things, it can be triangular often, yeah.

• 30:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, and you could have six divisions in a corps, but you've got to have at least two.

• 30:06Speaker 00

  Divisions are made up of their corps regiments typically. So you'd have a panzer division, which is, its corps regiment is armoured, panzer grenadier, which is motorised, which means fellows in half-tracks and trucks, and infantry, which means footslogging, PBI. And then there's three regiments in a division, three battalions in a regiment, roughly speaking. There's 3,250 men in a regiment, 800 or so in a battalion. I mean, all of these figures are subject to variance.

• 30:35Speaker 03

  Bull part figures, bull part figures. This just gives people a sense of kind of, you know, the scale of this stuff. We always talk about all these corps and divisions and regiments and stuff, and I know we've talked about how they're made up in the past, but I think it's always good to kind of recap so that people have got a sense of how it all works. But as I say, divisions are very much the unit of size currency at this time.

• 30:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, so the German army in September 1939 has 106 divisions, but only half of these are what they call first wave troops, so the people sent to Poland, who after all are doing their rehearsal for real in Poland. And Knapper, our artilleryman, he becomes a keen horseman, so you know.

• 31:13Speaker 03

  By this time, he's a lieutenant, by the way, by this point, he's an officer.

• 31:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, and he gets to, he comes to love his horses. Him and the remainder of his regiment stay in their base at Plowen in South East Germany, waiting for their replacements. They then move over to the Luxembourg border and begin intense, an intense training programme, but there's still no Allied attack by the end of September. And Knapper and his mates, they joke that after the invasion of Poland, the whole war is now over. And, you know, I think, fingers crossed, lots of Germans think that, don't they?

• 31:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, a lot of them do.

• 31:44Speaker 00

  An awful lot of them do, and understandably, because they also know what calamity the First War was. And lots of Germans are sold on the idea that you need to reverse Versailles, but that doesn't mean you need to reverse Versailles by fighting a great big bloody war all over the continent. Hans von Look, who's.

• 32:02Speaker 03

  Great friend of the show.

• 32:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, I suppose so, yeah. I mean, the man who offered the odd tall tale, he doesn't share these thoughts really. He's a soldier who fought in Poland, and he wants the war to be ended politically now that the Polish campaign is over. And Gernot von Wollamont, who's the deputy chief of operations of staff at Oberkommando de Wehrmacht, so the, you know, basically right up at the top of things, he is really, he wants to negotiate, he wants to get on the phone to the British and the French, go, you know what, Poland crumbled, you aren't doing anything to protect Poland, let's just call the whole thing off. However, after the break, we will find out exactly how hard uphill Wollamont's point of view would be pushed, and whether he's got any chance of getting what he wants, as

• 32:48Speaker 00

  we look at the plans to strike west. We'll see in a moment.

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• 33:33Speaker 00

  Welcome back to We Have Ways of Making You Talk with me, Al Murray and James Holland. Now, Jim, we ended the first half with Gernot von Wollamont, who's the deputy chief of operations staff at OKW. So, you know, kind of as high up as you possibly can be within the army structure.

• 33:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, he's part of the plannings at the OKW. The OKW, just a reminder, is Oberkommando de Wehrmacht, which is the general staff, so it's a tri-service, an inherently good idea, but not used that way, but basically used as Hitler's mouthpiece for the most part. And Wollamont, of course, is one of those stars of The World at War, the 1970s Granada TV series. So he appears on that and wrote a great book, memoir, called Inside Hitler's Headquarters. So we get a lot from him, and he is very interesting about it all.

• 34:16Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 34:17Speaker 03

  But yes, so they have this, you know, immediately after Poland, everyone's sort of thinking, good, we got that done, hopefully we can all just sue for peace, we can negotiate, sit back, and that's the end of the war.

• 34:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, surely they're scared of us. Look at what we've just done. Surely they must be thinking, crikey, this is too big a prospect. However.

• 34:36Speaker 03

  But then General Keitel, who is the chief of staff of the OKW, informs them all that Hitler wants to launch an attack on the West immediately, which is what we were touching on right at the top of the series. And Wollamont is absolutely dumbstruck by this. I mean, he just thinks this is insane.

• 34:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 34:57Speaker 03

  Because Poland has exposed all these shortcomings in the Wehrmacht, and they're just not ready, they don't have enough to take on mighty France and mighty Britain. And Hitler has never discussed any of this with his senior generals, not even Göring, who is obviously the commander in chief of the Luftwaffe, but also effectively his number two.

• 35:15Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 35:17Speaker 03

  And it's worrying from the vehicle standpoint, the shortages are already accumulating, the Polish campaign has exposed a terrible lack of training amongst many of the divisions, but just not good enough. Hitler completely has failed to understand that the Wehrmacht needs time to build up its strength again, in the same way that he wanted to strike Britain and France before they'd had the opportunity to do the same. So he's kind of sort of saying, we need to be careful and make sure that Britain and France don't get too strong, so we need to strike while they aren't hot, but he needs to allow Germany to get efficient and strong, because they're not. So, you know, also, winter's coming, so that has a massive impact on the efficiency and, of course, operational capacity of all forces, because as we know, winters in the

• 36:01Speaker 03

  1940s were particularly bad. So what is exposed is Hitler's fundamental misunderstanding of the operational art of war. He's just looking at numbers, and he's seeing it from, you know, purely his own perspective. And this is one of Hitler's great failings, that he does always view everything through the prism of his own narrow worldview. And they're just not ready to go to war against the West in any shape or form in November, October, November 1939.

• 36:36Speaker 00

  It's interesting, this, isn't it, that Wollamont, he then takes things into his own hands, doesn't he? He tells the army general staff what Hitler wants to do, and despite being sworn to confidence, and the army does nothing with the tip-off, that amounts to nothing for Wollamont. And a week later, on the 27th of September, Hitler assembles the commander in chief, Keitel and Wollamont, and the Reich Chancellery in Berlin to announce this is what he's planning. And I think it's quite well known this now, is that Hitler's attention turns to the Soviet Union way before you might think it might, that he's in June, he's already going, right, that's what's next. This is certainly the way he operates, isn't it? His imagination completely outruns the people around him. He's always so far down the line with what he wants to do next, that it catches everybody

• 37:21Speaker 00

  out. So we should go and look at the state of the British, right? Because if he's going to attack the West, let's see what exactly that might amount to. So the British army has always aspired to be fully mechanised, doesn't it? Since the end of the First World War, the future is mechanisation. And obviously, there's been some kicking and screaming about that from cavalry people, but that's the direction of travel.

• 37:44Speaker 03

  By September 1939, it is the only fully mechanised regular army in the world. So that doesn't include the non-regular army, so the yeomanries, for example, like the Sherwood Rangers, they're still on their horses, but the regular army is 100% mechanised. It's the only army in the world that is.

• 37:59Speaker 00

  And also undergoing massive expansion, though. This is the other thing, is that the huge expansion that the government lays on it, it's, you know, it brings its own problems. The territorial army doubles from 13 to 26 divisions in March of 1939. This is all part of the, you know, grim expectation, there's a war coming. There's the National Service Act, which is passed after the outbreak of the war, which is full conscription, and the aim is to equip 55 divisions by the end of the second year of the war, which is 1941, including divisions from the Dominions, because they've got this other man pool they can draw on, but they know that's going to take time.

• 38:33Speaker 03

  I think one of the things that's quite interesting, Al, is everyone's hoping and praying that it can come to a negotiated peace, and, you know, they're not in for the long haul, and, you know, this is all filled, you know, peter out.

• 38:44Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 38:44Speaker 03

  But at the same time, they're having to plan for a long war.

• 38:47Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 38:48Speaker 03

  And very much part of Britain's strategy is the longer the war continues, the harder it will be for Germany to fight.

• 38:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 38:55Speaker 03

  Um, the more we will win because economically we'll be able to sustain it in a way that Germany won't. And so therefore we will win. So they're planning for a long term war, hoping for a short war.

• 39:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. Whereas the Germans are hoping for a short war because that's all they could do. And, you know, there's the field force which is going to go to France, it's going to be renamed the British Expeditionary Force in homage to the Army of nineteen fourteen. And by the end of September, you have a hundred and sixty thousand army personnel have been shipped to France with twenty two thousand vehicles. Ten thousand people from the Royal Air Force, thirty six thousand tons of ammunition, twenty five thousand tons of fuel. And although this expansion means there is a shortage of kit, and you know, my grandfather's letters homed from this period because he went, he shipped to France. You know, in, in, in the autumn of nineteen thirty nine, are all about how they're out, they haven't got the stuff and the, and the uniforms are old. And also how bad the winter is, his letters are full of how cold it is.

• 39:52Speaker 00

  Notwithstanding these things, the British Army is still the most modern in the world, but it is kind of drawing, it is writing checks it can't quite draw yet, but it's got. It has no horse drawn artillery. Infantry are taken from A to B in lorries and trucks. You've got lorries manufactured by Bedford and Morris because there is a motor industry in Britain. The artillery is good and it ought to be because artillery is one of the things that, that was really perfected in the First World War. And the guns have, um, you know, pneumatic tyres and are towed by low loaders and, and heavy tractors rather than horses. And we touched on this earlier, you know, German propaganda, which some people are still sort of under the influence of today, has been so successful.

• 40:35Speaker 00

  It's one of the reasons the British Army mechanises and modernises so rapidly is they're thinking, Christ, we've got to keep up with the Germans. Even though the Germans have.

• 40:43Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 40:44Speaker 00

  You know, the Germans, the Germans, of all they've had on display is the shot window rather than the full inventory. And it's that display that's encouraged the British to, to modernise. So, I mean, you're a big fan of the battle dress, Jim, of course, goes without saying.

• 40:58Speaker 03

  Well, it goes without saying, but a lot of the guys who are going over in, in sort of September, October nineteen thirty nine to France, they still haven't, you know, it takes time to change over your uniform. It doesn't just happen overnight. But the army is changing and the battle dress has been designed in nineteen thirty eight. And it's hard wearing cocky wool serge jacket, the short, it comes up to your, your navel, to your belly button. And there are buttons which attach it to the trousers. And the trousers in those days come up to your stomach. So the point is, is, is that they meet with a very, very small overlap. And the reason for this is because they're going to be mechanised, so you don't want lots of flappy bits getting in the way as you're jumping, leaping in and out of, of vehicles. All part of the battle dress is very tight and neat and serviceable.

• 41:42Speaker 03

  And what it's got is it's very, very roughly made. So, you know, this is, is not something to, you know, an exciter savour rotator or anything. But, but it's very generous onto the arm, so you can crawl on the ground very easily, you can lift your rifle up very easily and so on. So it's got contingency of room where it needs to. It's also generously supplied with pockets. So it's got two big breast pockets. And then it's got two big inside pockets as well, which are on the inside of the chest. And the trousers have got two normal pockets and then they've got a, a one on the side of the leg, which is also very, very generous. So you've got the pocket space that you would normally have from a longer tunic, but without having a longer tunic.

• 42:23Speaker 03

  And the point about the younger tuna is you can be saving yourself twenty to twenty four inches of wool. Just by not having a thigh length tunic. Because if you think about how, what that distance is between, you know, your navel and halfway down your thigh, you know, well, it's certainly a good foot, if not two feet. And so it's incredibly pragmatic and it makes lots of sense. And of course, because we associate it with dad's army and ineptitude and a whole kind of sort of. Narrative that suggests that sort of the British are old fashioned and, and, and all the rest of it.

• 43:05Speaker 03

  The modernity of the battle dress has been completely, completely ignored. But, you know, as the war progressed, more and more people adopted it. I mean, like the Germans, I, Americans.

• 43:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, but you've so many complaints about it being itchy and it not fitting and it, and also people hate being in the army. So they hate the uniform is where so much of that comes from.

• 43:26Speaker 03

  But, but this is no, it's no more itchy than the First World War uniform. I mean, the world has far resistance tendencies, you know, has, has, it is far resistant to a certain extent. It has, because of the sort of natural oils in it, it can also be slightly waterproof. It's warm and even when it's wet, it can be warm. It's uncomfortable, but it can still be warm. So there are lots of sort of pragmatic reasons for, for using wool serge rather than another material. The other one, of course, is because there's lots of sheep and, um, you know, that's why we have lots of, so, you know, it, it makes sense, you know.

• 44:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think so much of what's thought about battle dress comes from the interaction of conscripts with the army, full stop. They're not thinking this is a pragmatic piece of kit. They're thinking, I hate being in the bloody army. Um, I've had to give up my life.

• 44:14Speaker 03

  I hate wearing this itchy shit, yeah.

• 44:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. That extends to all equipment all soldiers are ever issued with. It's never good enough. It's never, you know, in the, in the modern parlance, it's never alley enough, you know. What is quite good though, is the, the new light machine gun that they've got, which is the Bren gun. In the First World War, the Lewis gun, which is not, not light by any stretch of the imagination, was the, was the, the section infantry manoeuvre weapon. Because after all, the idea is it's down in every infantry section is there is a Bren gun. And, you know, there, there's, there, cynics would also say that the British Army in the ends up, the infantry section's job is to manoeuvre the Bren gun forward. And that's what the other riflemen are actually for, is moving the Bren gun around. That's a cracking piece of kit. It's five hundred rounds per minute theoretically, but it's a magazine clip. So there's no way you're ever, that's ever going to happen.

• 45:02Speaker 00

  It's optimal rate is that rate because otherwise it might overheat and also you don't want to churn through ammunition. British Army has always been concerned about conserving ammunition. It's got a thick barrel, it's got a wooden grip.

• 45:14Speaker 03

  Well, and the advantage of the thick barrel is that it doesn't then melt very quickly. It doesn't lose its shape because it's thicker.

• 45:20Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 45:20Speaker 03

  It's got that wooden grip on the top of it, which you can lift it up, you know, so you can change it really easy as well.

• 45:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's a light machine gun operated by just one man. I mean, it's also, you know, let's not forget the British Army is also thinking, what's a good machine gun for the Hindu Kush? Right? They have other fish to fry, the British Army at this, at this period of history. They need a properly manned portable piece of light kit. And this is taken from a Czech design in Brno, in Czechoslovakia, and it's modified in Enfield, which is why it's called a Brno, isn't it? Um, every schoolboy knows that. And rearmament is focused on the Royal Air Force and the Navy. There is this feeling that you can't have another la, like massive man intensive meat grinder campaign like before.

• 46:02Speaker 00

  And you can't, you can't for lots of reasons. You can't because, you know, straight up humanitarian thing, you don't want to get a lot of your fellow, uh, citizens killed. Secondly, you want to, uh, your workforce intact after the disaster, don't you? And if you're chewing through young men, then you're, you're reducing your economic possibilities after the war. Thirdly, if you could possibly avoid getting lots of people killed, your society will be probably more stable afterwards. Because after all, the great era of revolution follows the First World War. It's a direct result of the calamity of those wars. And the, you know, the British have managed to avoid their revolution and they don't, they don't want another again. So, so you end up with this steel, not flesh.

• 46:42Speaker 03

  But fifthly, Britain can't have a large army because there's nowhere to put it. If you, if you've got a large army, you've got to base it somewhere and you've got to be able to transport it. How are you going to transport it? Because we're an island, we're a small island. So.

• 46:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 46:57Speaker 03

  Practically, you can't really have a very large army. You, you know, you can have a million or whatever, but, but, but, you know, there is a sound. Pragmatic reason for not having a large standing army.

• 47:08Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 47:08Speaker 03

  Um, and also where, you know, where, where we've renewed our, um, our military alliance with France and start of nineteen thirty nine. And, you know, France has got a huge army and it's on the continent already and, you know, they can do the army bit. That's the point, you know. So there are no plans at all to increase the army size by more than fifty five divisions. You know, despite Germany having a hundred divisions by September nineteen thirty nine, uh, and France having a similar number. And everyone is in agreement with this. And so the priority for defence spending in, in nineteen thirties, um, is the navy and the air force. And, you know, the, the consequence of this is by nineteen thirty nine, we have the world's fully owned, fully coordinated air defence system. No one else has an air defence system that is even remotely comparable to that of, um, of, of Great Britain.

• 47:54Speaker 03

  And we've got a, uh, the largest navy in the world and, and one of the most modern ones as well. So the army is small and modern and, and mechanised.

• 48:04Speaker 03

  But it is small.

• 48:05Speaker 00

  And its actual task is policing the empire, not fighting a continental encounter. Because after all, that threat's gone away, isn't it? It's been decided against and it's been ruled out. And as you say, Jim, the thing we can do is blockade with the navy. That's what we're blockade with the navy and the extension of the blockade through, you know, a putative strategic bombing campaign is the thinking, should it come to it? And obviously, the army has this fantastic system of regimental culture, which is, I think, when you start to look at it, obviously, this means that, you know, you've got hard pockets of loyalty within the army, people are loyal to their regiment. The regiments then all come with their etiquette, their traditions, their standards.

• 48:50Speaker 00

  If you're in an officer's mess, that probably means you have to be good at cricket, you probably have to be good at polo, if you're.

• 48:55Speaker 03

  Pick sticking.

• 48:56Speaker 00

  Pick sticking, exactly, exactly, and all that sort of stuff and drinking gin. And the cavalry is still massive social cachet within the army, doesn't it? Still looks down on the tank corps as a novelty and a bit grubby and lacking the sort of finesse and lots of cavalry people are very, very, very unhappy about how they have to mechanise, drag kicking and screaming, really. I mean, to the point where members of the Royal Scots Grays, they lobby Parliament against mechanisation in 1938 and write angry letters to the Times.

• 49:29Speaker 03

  That's just amazing, isn't it?

• 49:30Speaker 00

  It is incredible, but it also, it shows that, you know, that regimental tradition has its pluses and its minuses, and that's one of its minuses, isn't it? Is that they can't see the wood for the trees in that instance. But tanks are really important, and I think the thing is, is again, German propaganda credits the Germans with all the tank thinking, but that's just not the case. And there's been an awful lot of thought and debate in Britain and particularly within the Royal Armoured Corps, who have no money and yet have been doing the thinking and working really hard on what they want and come up with a doctrine. And it's interesting because the infantry tank cruiser tank doctrine is also an industrial policy, is that that's the other thing to remember about is that you're leaning into

• 50:14Speaker 00

  the fact different factories will be good at different things and should specialise in different things, rather than trying to get everyone to do the same thing. So, you know, the infantry tank, you know, the Matilda II, which we end up with, has the thickest armour of any tank in the world.

• 50:29Speaker 00

  You know, which means German gunnery can't deal with it when the crunch comes. And the two pounder is the most advanced anti-tank weapon at the start of the war in the world as well. The field version is a brilliant bit of kit, the gun carriage on that is absolutely fantastic. That allows you to traverse the gun through 360 degrees, super portable. The cruiser tank, they haven't quite got right yet, but the idea is, you know, you are, you've got different people specialising, so different people working on it, rather than relying everyone to get the same thing right. It's very, it's not just a doctrine in terms of military doctrine, it's an industrial policy. And by the beginning of the war, they've got the Matilda II, the cruiser tanks on their way and the two pounder gun, which is a really awesome piece of kit.

• 51:13Speaker 03

  And the field artillery is really good, you know, 25 pound, there's nothing wrong with that at all. I mean, it's arguably the best field gun of the war. So, you know, they're in good fettle, it's just they haven't got a lot of stuff, that's the point. And so by August 1939, it is literally only the Ominery regiments that are still using lots of leather and horses. Regiment like the Sherwood Rangers Ominery, they do feel a bit archaic. They're certainly not representative of the rest of the armed forces as a whole, I'd say.

• 51:37Speaker 00

  They're in Palestine, aren't they, where, you know, do you need tanks or is being able to zip about on a horse probably as useful, given their possible role there?

• 51:47Speaker 03

  Well, yeah, and they just don't have enough tanks anyway, so, you know, I mean, it's kind of irrelevant.

• 51:51Speaker 00

  But, so, there's no panic in this part of the war, no real impetus to do anything, because the French army is enormous, British sovereignty isn't under threat, and in fact, it's German maritime sovereignty that's under threat, really, in this stage of the war, quite comprehensively. There are also, there are also 16 new ordnance factories that were authorised in March, there's 29 more authorised in December.

• 52:15Speaker 03

  Just to reiterate the point, on the 1st of September 1939, there are only six ordnance factories in the entire United States.

• 52:22Speaker 00

  Yes, in sleeping giant news, yeah. But half of all government expenditure is planned for arms in the crossover from 1939 into 1940.

• 52:32Speaker 03

  So we've gone from defence spending, this is really interesting, so it's 3% in 1935, goes up to 3.54%, I think in 1936, 38. And by 1940, it's 42%?

• 52:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, amazing. And we're talking about the largest global economy in the world at that point that's doing that. That's the, you know, not Britain now, don't think of it as Britain now, think of it as this gigantic global order at our disposal. Anyway, that's a look at Germany and a look at the British as the phony war sort of beds in. Join us for our next episode as we'll move on, we're going to have to look at the French, aren't we, Jim?

• 53:13Speaker 03

  Going to have to.

• 53:14Speaker 00

  We're going to have to, I'm afraid. We hope you've enjoyed this. If you want to hear the next episode immediately, then become a Patreon, go to the We Have Ways of Making You Talk Patreon, become a member where there's tonnes of stuff up, loads of audiobooks lately, I've been recording a tonne of stuff to go with our recent series about Urden disaster, yeah, a lot of it, very illuminating. And even the poems of Richard Spender, Lieutenant Richard Spender, the Rupert Brooke of the Second World War has been described, as I recorded some of those too, which are worth listening to. We will, we will see you for our next episode as the phony war continues in its phony fashion. Cheerio.

• 53:46Speaker 03

  Cheerio.