Antony Beevor: History and Hubris

[Music] ladies gentlemen it is my very great pleasure to welcome you to the Athenaeum on behalf of the wheeler Center for their for an event that I for one have been greatly looking forward to this conversation with my distinguished guests Antony Beevor multi-award a multi warded writer of well over a dozen works eight of those seminal and groundbreaking accounts of arguably the most terrible event in human history the Second World War here's one of the world's most preeminent military historians has sold millions literally millions of books exploring not just the battles in terms of their tactics and from the points of view of generals and commanders but what it must be like to experience the horror of war for real ordinary soldiers men and women and civilians and other previously unvoiced people sir Anthony's visceral yet authoritative words takes the reader for better or for worse into the terrible more of battle we have read his accounts now of the cataclysms of d-day Stalingrad the fall of Berlin the Ardenne offensive and others now Sir Anthony has turned his attention to the battle many schoolboys I hope you won't mind me doing this and schoolboys of my era learned about in the blockbuster film the accuracy of which I will ask you about later a bridge too far the doomed 1994 Battle of Arnhem in his new book and what what a ripper it is to Arnhem the battle for the bridges Sir Anthony beaver welcome I'm not sure to what extent it would illustrate us outlining the battle itself we for those of you not familiar we should just give a little pricey of it the airborne carpet I'll let you just well a potpourri over after the Battle of Normandy there was a terrible victory euphoria in the headquarters of the Allied armies not just Montgomery but Patton and Bradley even as well this idea suddenly that the German army was collapsing and the war would end by certainly by Christmas 1944 the trouble was that they had misunderstood the July plot the Stauffenberg attempt to blow up Hitler on the 20th of July they thought that this signified the disintegration of the German army what other army had tried to blow up their commander-in-chief but in fact the failure to kill Hitler actually meant that the Nazis the SS had to total grip over the Val marked from that moment onwards and that the war in fact would go on until Hitler himself was dead but the Allies were sort of convinced that things could be by a sort of desperate bid could be accelerated the end could be brought ahead they charged all the way from the line of the River Seine all the way to the German frontier into Belgium and were even close to the Dutch frontier and this is when the idea for Operation Market Garden this was Montgomery's idea of dropping what was called the Allied airborne army with three and a half Airborne Division's two American one British and a Polish independent parachute Brigade in a line from going north from the Belgian frontier all the way to get across the River Rhine at Arnhem because they felt once they were across the Rhine the main barrier to Germany then the war would come to an end very very rapidly and like in all questions of warfare vanity sometimes plays a part and vanity certainly played a part I'm afraid here Monte was determined to get across the Rhine before Patton to his South and Bradley there was a tremendous anglo-american rivalry in that sense and he while doing this came up with this plan very very rapidly and they thought that sort of it was a tremendous gamble which would be paid back in in full but unfortunately it turned into a terrible disaster well in fact early on in the book Anthony you make no bones about the outcome by saying it was simply a very big quote it was simply a very bad plan right from the start and right from the top if it was a bad plan was it nonetheless a good idea no it's a very simple answer to that one the trouble was that Monti out of he he was very narrow-minded to put it mildly I suggested in the Ardenne book in fact that Montgomery had high-functioning Asperger's he was unable to listen to anybody else's opinion once he got a thought in his head and what he failed to discuss at all what's the whole question of how an airborne operation should work he'd never really been involved even in the invasion of Sicily he'd never really been involved in the airborne planning at all and he'd even been told by General Eisenhower the supreme commander and by his end bosses back in Britain Field Marshal Brook and the war minister the Ministry of Defence war ministry war office he would even mean told that all airborne operations had to basically be planned by the air side ie they were the ones who knew the distances they were the ones who knew what could be achieved but Montgomery derided and despised the Air Force purely because in the invasion of Normandy our chief marshal and traffic Li Mallory had suddenly panicked at the last moments thinking that the airborne operation was can be a total disaster and Monti was convinced that to quote Monty he was a gutless bugger and say Monty was not going to listen to the airforce even though he had no experience of airborne operations and so he thought he would lay down the plan and then he sent on the 10th of September general boy browning who was the British airborne commander back to England who basically imposed Monty's plan on the first allied airborne army and they had to say well I'm sorry you know your calculations are wrong basically the distance is greater than you realize so therefore we can't get two gliders behind each aeroplanes the days are shorter so he can only get one lift in the first day now this was um key thing because it meant that they would have to leave behind half of the force just to guard the drop zones and the landing zones for the next lift to come in the following day gently losing the element of surprise oddly losing the element of surprise and also in the case of the British 1st airborne there were eight miles away from their main objective the bridge at Arnhem and they had to cross the head to cross the host city of Arnhem to get to it it was a very bad plan just I I just like to speak to Montgomery a little more Barry Pitts one of my early favorite historians in his wonderful three-volume account of the desert war the crucible of war I think he calls it pays pays a lot of attention to Montgomery's planning and execution of Alamein to the port to the point of obsession even quoting that Montgomery's catchcry was always show me the plan show me the plan and yet Arnhem was seemingly thrown together in little more than a fortnight what it are we getting the cart before the horse was Montgomery not that kind of general to begin with or or if he was what had happened to Montgomery in the end of two years general Bradley in fact remarked about the planning for market garden because Montgomery was famous especially amongst the Americans for being overcautious as you say planning every minor detail and not moving until he was absolutely convinced that everything was in place but in fact wasn't just when the desert war wasn't Churchill urging him to go go go on Monty kept holding off saying Monty was right in that particular sense he was right to insist that they shouldn't go until they were certain to victory yeah but it was other things we are early which contributed to the victory but in the case of Market Garden Monty was so desperate to get ahead of the Americans to get across the Rhine that he seemed to lose his usual particular meticulous attitude to planning and as a result general Bradley when he heard about the plan said afterwards he said you know one would have been even because Monty was so famous for his quotient said one would have been less surprised if Monty had reeled in drunk as a famous teetotaler Monty was famous he heard one would mean less surprised to be reeled in drunk you know into headquarters rather than see how reckless this particular plan was and when he became aware of that reckless in the sand and is it fair to say that he almost not disowned but distance himself from it I say that because in your in in the book you talk of a meeting at the waning in the waning days an important meeting in the waning days of the battle with Eisenhower and Bradley and so forth - which Monty did not even show up he sent his deputy that didn't have any didn't have even plenipotentiary powers that's absolutely true I mean the trouble was that actually Monty realized by then that he would be getting some pretty contemptuous looks across the table from Patton and Bradley because having boasted that sort of this was going to be Monty's way of ending the war rapidly it was turning into a disaster and everybody knew it by that particular stage so Monty kept out of the way and when it came afterwards to the fact that they had from withdraw the remnants of the British 1st airborne across the River Rhine it had been a disaster they'd gone in they'd gone in you know eleven thousand strong and any about two thousand came out Monty then tried to pretend that it had been a success yeah and Prince Bernhard the Dutch commander-in-chief said my country cannot afford another Montgomery victory which was as you might imagine and in fact our chief marshal Tedder who was Eisenhower's deputy it was far more devastating when Monty claimed that he'd have been a 90 percent success because they got 90% of the way to Arnhem which of course meant that that would have been a total failure Tedder said well one can jump off a cliff with even greater success until the last three inches it's not the fall that hurts you the very son to the battle itself Antony I'm sorry to allude to that film but I know many in the audience may have seen the film a bridge too far in 1977 and it is spectacular I mean it and one thinks of what it must have been like that it was a Sunday wasn't a clear Clow cloudless day just about over Holland perfect conditions perfect conditions and an Amada of Sterlings and Dakota's arrive over this absolutely it was a largest airborne operation ever ever mounted yes yes yes so that was the day that the British first aired or borne division who had been looked over at d-day hadn't they they had not jumped at d-day no they'd been held in in reserve yeah as he day so they were desperate to get into the war they were desperate to get into war because the poor poor guys I mean you know they've been stood - all together well some people say 15 some people say 17 times in some cases actually getting onto the aircraft ready to take off for one operation after another which was canceled at the last moment and this was particularly during that time when Patton was charging forward and and you know they did that every single jump which was planned to jump ahead of Patton's troops Patton's troops had already got that by the time they took off so from that point of view yes they were desperate together they landed not just parachutes but the air landing brigades which basically these big old wooden gliders and nothing sounds more terrifying of an operation in the second war than being a soldiers stuck in one of those old balsa wood gliders coming down on and often they crashed and the casualties are terrible however they did they did land but immediately and according your book they realized that the resistance the strength of the German resistance was far greater than what a what had been anticipated what had been anticipated of the German resistance in this part of Holland Antony well well it's got to be been a lot of solid unit of theories encounter series yes there were two SS Panzer divisions there Hans dolphin and the frundsberg SS Panzer divisions no no no they've been in Normandy I mean there have been in Russia then they were in Normandy they been beaten smashed not quite to a pulp but really greatly reduced in Normandy now the through ultra they knew they were roughly in the area these two divisions but they didn't think that they were gonna be that strong and they weren't him anyways I mean sometimes some of the historians have exaggerated how many tanks the were there in fact they only had three serviceable tanks but they had quite a few assault guns the point was that actually they it was the very core the fact that even though they may have been reduced hugely in strengths I mean down to 3,000 per division instead of over 20,000 but the point was that with our officers and NCOs other troops could be grafted onto them and could therefore be very effective in defense and what we underestimate and certainly what the planners underestimate it was that the Germans were brilliant at reacting from recovering from disaster general sosabowski the commander of the Polish Brigade kept on saying at every one of the briefing sessions but the Germans generals the Germans it was as if the British had tickley forgotten the German capacity to recover from defeat and get themselves together and organized and here it was astonishing the bulk of the people go on about they dropped on two Panzer divisions in cetera et cetera that the Panzers actually came from Germany during the night I mean the as soon as they order came through they were loading Panzer Tiger tanks onto railway flats and sending them off through the night I mean it was that form of organization that form of predation prioritization I'm afraid neither of which for British virtues the Germans certainly had them they were had this operation been expected in this part of Europe but by the Germans was we say they didn't have the element of surprise but speak to that a little what what was what what did they think was going to be happening there well they never expected such a long distance run remember you've got to remember they were they were trying to drop these paratroopers up to 70 miles or in some cases and even in ninety miles behind the German lines now nobody had ever done that before it was a huge risk from that point of view and the idea was that the 30 corps of general Horrocks led by the guards armored division was going to charge up this one single road talk of that road all the way all the way to get to Arnhem to relieve the paratroopers on the ground because the whole point about paratroopers is they've got the advantage of surprise but they want no heavy weapons or very few heavier weapons to hold off a major counter attack and because they thought the German army was in disintegration they thought that this risk was worth taking yes that road let's talk to that road that eventually became known as hell's highway that's really not astonishingly this very idea of punching up this road to attack central Holland and you you talked about in the book in the in the the Dutch military officers school if you had suggested this very plan that the Allies were planning you would have been sacked from being or soon seriously demolish be failed immediately failed and mainly because it was considered such a glorious thing to do this one Road either either side was utterly unsuitable for Armour is that's right yes because you had flood plains on either side Paul Dolan as it was as a Dutch cool it and you have this one Reyes Road now if you're going to try and send an army with twenty six thousand vehicles on a single Road how wide how wide are we talking to this road well should we say half the width of this theater I mean this stage now yes yes and so I mean I'm we're and because it was raised if tanks had to go off the side they'd never get back up again I mean it was it was that bad and the moment they crossed the Dutch frontier this is within the first five minutes of the advance from the Belgian frontier they were ambushed by German anti-tank gun 9 Sherman tanks of the Irish Guards were set ablaze immediately they had to then bring up dosa tanks to push him off out of the way you know down the slide so the advance could continue but I mean that gave you an idea of how easy it was for the Germans to ambush this particular read now Montgomery was warned by Dutch officers that he was totally unsuitable but he still went ahead with it and this is of course his also refusal to prioritize the clearing of the history of the Scheldt River which was this maze of I mean that wasn't clear till the till 9:45 was it no no it was cleared well in the end the first ships were able to get through by the end of November but I mean admiral ramsey who was the chief naval officer of the whole of the allied and presence in europe was Eisenhower's chief naval officer it was furious I mean he kept on going on at Montgomery's saying and it's one thing we've you've liberated Antwerp that's great which was the largest deepwater port in northern Europe at that stage which they could use but you haven't liberated the shoulder ste and the Germans still had part of their 15th army on it and in the end by the time it was mainly the Canadians who actually suffered the casualties clearing it if it had been done straight away but Monty wanted to get across the Rhine that was his obsession and so he thought well that can all be sorted out later and that was a very bad mistake and even Monty even Monty had to admit that that was a mistake in his memoirs and he did not admit mistakes usually the first part of the book III must say that the the the machination x' between the west and allies at this time it to me it almost resembles one of those sort of a dysfunctional boardroom or something like that there's sort of very powerful people who basically detest each other and have completely different visions yes and I think Eisenhower achieved an extraordinary amount in keeping this sort of very these very disparate characters together now one could say that Eisenhower should have put Monty back in his box more firmly at an earlier stage but anyway it but you know I'm afraid that the whole whole situation and those sort of rivalries certainly did not help the war effort and he did more damage that and later the Arden counter-offensive to Allied American or to British American relations than any other incident yes and to that just to just to illustrate just briefly the British and the Americans had very different ideas of how to push the Germans out of occupied Europe it was the the the because it gives Arnhem some kind of context I think the Americans had a broad any wrong with the Americans had a very broad stroke a broad push idea and the British had a very sort of a specific pushing into various German strongholds and then doing it that way is that roughly correct yes the trouble went back I mean all the whole of British strategy in the Second World War was totally different the American one British strategy basically went back to the 18th century Churchill no seriously Churchill and then one's got to understand Britain as an island nation with a relatively very small population was never going to get itself involved in a major continental Wolf straight off it used the advantage with the power of the Royal Navy to wear down their enemies particularly in the Mediterranean but what was called a peripheral strategy before they would then defeat the enemy whether the French usually the French or later on said the Germans on the continent of Europe the Americans on the other hand had a continental strategy which goes back really to the American Civil War they believed it was hard pounding with major clashes between the major armies on the European continent and that was why they always wanted to have d-day Churchill never wanted to do the cross-channel invasion Churchill always wanted to come up through Italy he tried that idea of the first war and it didn't quite well I think there was something called Gallipoli I just heard of which Churchill had certainly but it had always been the idea in a way was to attack north from the Mediterranean and sort of if you like encircle your enemy in that particular way rather than launch head-on and this is what he was hoping to do through Italy because he was afraid of course of the Soviet advance from the east and the Soviet occupation of the whole of Central Europe and by going up through Italy he thought that they could then launch the major attack through northern he through northeastern Italy through the Ljubljana gap actually this would have been a crazy idea because the terrain I mean is bad enough fighting the way up the length of Italy the outlines and it would have been even worse but this was very much sort of his vision the Americans rightly prevented that because by then they were in the driving seat and the British were very much the junior partners and that's why Churchill had no option especially after the Tehran conference at the end of 1943 to agree to the pressure from Stalin above all who was demanding an attack through northern Europe and that was why we had d-day and that's why we had the advance into Belgium and across into into Germany in the West from the West now the real problem was that the British Monti particularly felt that he should lead the attack and in a way this was sort of a desperate attempt to regain British prestige and Monti to become once again the land forces commander which he had been at the time of d-day and was up until the 1st of September 1944 when Eisenhower took over so as I said he did not take very well at all which he didn't take well and Churchill the trouble was the British press played a terrible part in all of this because they felt that sort of you know Monti was our hero we want to support our hero and the Americans are trying to do him down and this created very very bad relations with the Americans and it was the reason also why Churchill felt that Montgomery should be promoted to Field Marshal which was actually a five-star gem file star rank when Eisenhower he had four stars so you can imagine how how really I'm angry the American generals were I mean you should read Patton's diary on the subject of what he thought of that tell me what is it so he said this field-marshal thing it really makes you sick I mean you know he and he and Brad were absolutely mad and all the rest fit in one can understand can understand it it was a bad move it was back to the battle did this on this this sunny day we talked about the sunny Sunday when these thousands of British and the Americans landed the same day the no I mean I should have said in fact the whole point was to align the if we'd like to roll this carpet this was Browning's phrase this airborne carpet say you had one hundred and first Airborne dropping at Eindhoven just north of the of the frontier of the Dutch frontier and then the 82nd airborne under General Jim Gavin at Nijmegen and then the British first airborne and the idea was what you knew you charged up through that particular line joined up the dots and hold the bridges before the Germans commander bridges before the germs could counter-attack yes yeah and from then you could sort of push into the well the industrial across the Rhine and you industrial heart of Germany yeah so what is astonishing is that they didn't land on top of the bridges they had to trick they had to hike basically for miles and miles was the American Air Force said the bridges were too well flack by anti-aircraft guns and said that they should they could only land a distance away what what distance we talking we're talking about over eight miles so I mean by the time that you've actually got out of your aircraft either landed by parachute assembled your battalions and March them off you know that can take quite a long time in itself and these are these are men carrying their own body weight again in equipment yup and of course in the then they had to get the the jeeps out of the gliders most of which a crash-landed and therefore had to be sort of almost pulled apart so that you could actually get the Jeep out and the anti-tank guns out and all the rest of it so that all of that took time and in fact it is certainly true that the they weren't as fast off the mark as they should have been but where they were just again very unlucky was that there was this training battalion of SS yeah commanded by one very ambitious SS officer called sip craft and he was able just to slow them down enough to give time for the other SS divisions to send in their men to create this blocking line to prevent them getting through to Arnhem that'll end getting through anywhere close to the bridge and there was only one battalion which managed to slip through along the bank of the Rhine and hold one end of the paper one in the bridging of course never got to the other side and they never got to the other side and this was for those who've seen the film but I was no no no I mean the film to be honest I'm to be fair as well it's a lot better than many Second World War movies I mean there have been some real shockers but I was very amused in American archives to find that there was some furious letters from a Trojan cook and Julian Cook was one the one played by Robert Redford in the film who led I mean one of the most bravest incidents the whole of the Second World War a paddling in daylight across the widest river in Europe at the time this is the valve in these little canvas boats against absolute devastating fire with huge casualties but they did it and they wanted anyway here in this American archive I found this thing about some major cook complaining bitterly about being played by Robert Redford I thought miss I don't know most men would've been rather flattered but any would have again the battle was as you described in the book I mean this is where the film fails because this battle was incredibly bloody yes and incredibly brutal did your descriptions of of pretty the Americans taking the town of Nijmegen and holding it well they actually continued to hold it didn't though that that was one of the young enduring victories if you will on the battle they actually held no but it was brutal it was I mean Americans were extremely brutal in ways that I mean often you reading some of the accounts of what they did to the German prisoners I mean shooting unarmed German surrenders prison with white flag to expect that behavior to be done by the Germans not the Americans well I mean there were certain amount of that even in Normandy the American paratroopers were conditioned in their training to be utterly aggressive if that was a British guards officer who watched them in action who said I think they're fed either on ground amytal raw meat and I mean when they got to I mean I described how and it's fascinating from these some of these personal accounts of the way that having crossed this river I mean in what must have been one of the most terrifying moments of the head of the Second World War having survived that crossing they then had this metamorphosis from total fear to total self-confidence and they surged forward with bloodlust and what those involved in it actually described therein feelings I mean that they are now far up on such adrenaline that they just can't stop shooting they shoot down 267 men trying to surrender on the railway bridge they're captured on that sort of trap they're on both sides it was a total massacre I mean any of these boys some of them I mean certainly is for example you know some of the more senior officers when necessary shooting those trying to surrender but I mean many of them were just gunning down anybody even as they stuck up their hands or anything like that and I mean the British were pretty shocked by that I mean come on the British All Army ISM we know this in the first world war two I mean all armies shook far more prisoners than one realizes and on the whole I think military historians in the past have been guilty about trying to cover this up especially from when they're talking about the shooting of them by their own countrymen but I mean there are moments when one sees it gets really out of control it happened in the yard end to I mean in in the yard in that Americans went on about the Malmedy Massacre where the SS massacred a lot of their American prisoners who'd surrendered but they had their own but they hadn't covered that one up almost as bad over 60 were simply gonna gunned down yeah and there were many other incidents but that was partly because they felt it justified after the SS killing their guys count comrades that morning he said there's always gonna be this vicious circle I mean the Canadians also in Normandy not killed a lot but that was after 70 of their men including one company commander have been beheaded idss yo you will get these you will get these incidents it depends very much on the officers keeping control and SEOs keeping control but sometimes you know the bloodlust will be there and it's very very hard to make moral judgments in retrospect when you have not actually been in those conditions the battle went on for the next was it was it ten days you know your - yes nine days and the accounts in the second half of the book Antony are so are extraordinary it really is just a moments of extraordinary bravery when the British and Americans realized that there was simply no way that they were going to win and that they had the tail the scales have tipped against them it seems quite early in the battle and whether they knew it or not it did not stop their fighting spirit oh goodness no and I think that one's always seen I think certainly win when talks about the British is that on the whole they've always been much better in defence and in attack I think the American paratroopers were extremely good in attack - that was a Vantage but that was also as a way that they had on to a sudden degree being sort of brainwashed in in their training I mean the American paratrooper training was incredible in that particular way and I did produce this sort of bloodlust but it was no doubt about the bravery and the courage but not just of the soldiers it was also the civilian in a way the Dutch civilians did everything they could of going out into the street under fire to pull the wounded into their houses to look after them and then the Germans executing a quite a few of them during the course of the battle and this is where I think it leads onto one of the greatest tragedy of war which is the failure to win that particular battle means that the Dutch civilians who have done so much to help the Allies whether it was a question of carrying their supplies whether it was even digging trenches for them I mean they came forward to offer help in every possible way and the way that the Dutch rail women stopped the trains from bringing German supplies and so forth and they were often executed as a result so I mean the German revenge afterwards was terrified this is what I didn't realize I had no idea that the whole the entire 150 odd thousand inhabitants of the city of Arnhem which is a big town it was a big town were expelled yes to a man woman and child in much of this city had been shattered of course and then he was looted comprehensively yes and then smack and then then often burnt down I mean what was for me was one of the most moving things of all was that the mayor of Arnhem I made mark roof insisted on having the launch of my book in the Dutch tradition which was very first one to come out in in the in the the cathedral the grote kerk of Santa Serbia's and there you have around on the walls the pictures of how it had been destroyed during the fighting and it all has been completely restored and rebuilt and I think still for the people of and particularly this year it's the 75th anniversary the way that the airborne veterans will be welcomed back considering what the Dutch suffered as a result of this disastrous operation I think it's one of the most generous acts of the heard of the Second World War indeed and because they had taken the risk of when the when their liberators arrived of helping them and then it failed so the rep you do retribution towards those who had been even suspected of helping the British or the Americans was terrible they lost everything yes I mean you know but not only with our houses looted systematically the jerk the Nazi justification was this was this was repayment for all of the bombing of Germany by the Royal Air Force and the US Air Force and so they they stripped the houses and then set them on fire and so Arnhem had to be completely completely rebuilt you nonetheless talk of some peculiar are moments of chivalry nonetheless between the English and the Germans well I think it was not so much chivalry in the case of the waffen-ss I think they were trying to clean up the reputation I mean say that what they wanted to show was that even though they were notorious for the war crimes that they had committed in on the particularly they want you to show how Hitler like how how chivalrous you're quite right they were on the Western Front and in fact it was interesting that the commander of the Hohenstaufen hearts wrote to work at the commander of the very first Airborne Division from his prison camp to say will you surely we are being investigated as members of the SS we are being investigated as war criminals will you not give us a testimonial to share to say how well we treated you when we beat you at Arnhem and he didn't he didn't yes yes yes but oh but not just one but several moments of British medical officers holding a Red Cross flag and crossing openly into the German lines and being received and able to that though there was even a truce that lasted for four hours that that they didn't even tell Hitler about because they know he would have been enraged is that correct yes that is correct actually the I'm in the SS corps commander obergruppenfuehrer Petrik was much more civilized than most of the other SS commander Sampson I doubt about that he actually came from the Vermont and was not it was not sort of just an SS officer in that particular sense and so he permitted that particular truce for the handing over of wounded and so forth and Hitler if he had found out would have been absolutely apoplectic so there is an element of true truth in it and but I mean it well it was to a large degree hoping that they could sort of slightly clean up their reputation well the overall German commander was a general modal wasn't it who was a fanatical Nazi even though it wasn't in the SS infected me blow his brains out with in the end of the war because he yes he did yeah exactly the surrender couldn't bear to surrender yeah mmm-hmm what if anything did it achieve in terms of the Allied the Western Allied strategy against Nazi Germany in the Second World War well it didn't really achieve anything because the trouble was at that area between the river váh this isn't between Nijmegen really and Arnhem was dead ground in the sense that it was flood plain they were dug in there was a sort of a battle which continued we're sort of artillery firing both directions it was a stalemate and in fact it lost quite a lot of time and a lot of effort with the British Second Army sort of bogged down in that particular position others had suggested to Montgomery that they he shouldn't try to attack north across the Rhine at Arnhem he should have tried to attack eastwards across the Rhine at Veysel which is where finally he did cross the Rhine but not until the following spring not until the following March so you know it was a lot of time was wasted and it was a cold muddy very cold and nasty winter which they all endured but without any with very with very little hope and so you cannot say I mean people quite often are so how many did did did for example the ultra intercepts you know shortened the war did this linked in the war it's impossible to tell we've got to be realistic and understand I think that the the war was more or less decided on the Eastern Front and it much more depended on what the Soviet armies were doing 80% just over 80% of all of the German casualties occurred on the Eastern Front and that was where the war was going to be decided but the great irony there of course was that if the Americans hadn't been so generous by giving the Red Army more just on half a million military vehicles Americans were still got to Berlin much much before the before the Russians because it absolutely transformed the mobility of the Red Army but that's one of the paradoxes of the Second World War after Arnhem the British and the Americans still had another eight or so months of defeating Hitler fighting side by side how did Arnhem affect their relationship it certainly didn't help war but it was much more after the our day and when Montgomery tried to claim that he'd won the whole of the battle that anglo-american relations really took a nosedive how did that manifest itself well he there was this on in January and 1944 Montgomery insisted on having this press conference and he said oh I really want to sort of you know praise Eisenhower and all the rest of it and the press conference very quickly became one of Monti claiming that he'd won the battle of the Ardenne and you can imagine how much that angered the Americans who'd fought the Battle of the odd end and in fact very soon afterwards just before the ultra conference general Marshall had to tell Churchill that none of his generals would ever serve under Montgomery again under any circumstances and the British were sidelined up to North Germany in the advance in the advance into Germany and while the Americans did the sort of main operation said the British were completely sidelined as a result afterwards goodness and hundreds of in the book hundreds of fascinating anecdote so many voices I just want to talk a little bit of your your of how you put the book together where did you where did you dig where nobody has dug before to give such a comprehensive picture of this engagement well it's a question once got to do the work of the Co face and the Co face of the archives here we had five nationalities involved we had obviously a British American German Dutch and also polish and you know you've got a tackle all the archives now obviously I didn't speak Dutch but I had a great Dutch friend and we worked together in the Dutch archives I'm sure your polish is fluent my produce no I'm afraid my parish is absolutely not good but I had already worked with a great friend who was who's worked in the military archives in Warsaw and so we worked together on the Polish archives and also in because the bulk of them funny enough were in London still because of the Sikorsky Institute and so forth and of course the American archives which have a fabulous amount of material there it's purely a question of you know if you've got to be able to spend the time in the archives and and then it is question of the marshaling process of getting getting the material in in place there's no point doing yet another book on and the same subject which everybody else has done if you're going to be coming up and you the same material and the same sources every single time and you know I I one of the reasons why I decided to do this particular book was that I've been rather irritated by previous books which had very very little about the suffering of the Dutch civilians so it was vital to do all of the Dutch archives of which there is a normal amount of material private Diaries of letters and so forth and also you know to really make sure that you've covered the other archives and all the other countries otherwise there's no point doing next year oh no sorry it's 75 is the fifth anniversary of Arnhem seventy-five years since the war finished I'm reminded of that of that quote by who and a British historian whose name escapes me on a television chat show on the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution when he was asked how do we looking back assess the French Revolution - which is his answer was well it's a little early to tell I wonder if the Second World War is going to resonate down through history as that event did what do you think well I'm always intrigued I mean for example when the book came out in in Holland on Arnhem the Dutch journalists interviewed me it all sort of said almost shaking their heads in disbelief why is it that the Second World War seems to be even more popular as a subject or fascinating as a subject today than even say 20 years ago yes and it's a very good question and I mean I think there are a number of reasons that one can point to I think that it was a question of fact that the real element the real central point core if you like of all human drama is moral choice and actually the Second World War offered more moral choice than almost any other period in history whether your country was occupied whether you had the courage or the generosity to shelter Jews or hide members of the resistance or whatever it might be if you were in an occupied country but even even those were all those involved in the second had to face major I think questions of that sort in themselves and also because we've been living in this sort of a period of peace which has gone on for so long whether it will not on whether it will in the future is a different matter but this period of peace where we lived in a post military environment a health and safety environment and I think people were fascinated by the question are still are you know what would I have done would I have had the courage to do to do this or to take that decision or whatever it might be and I think that's why it still still has that sort of resonance that it does have we seen the last of the days when masked men in uniforms will line up on battlefields in divisional strength or is warfare change for what we have in a way partly because armies are so much smaller yes than they were and I'm afraid the terrifying consequence of that is not necessarily what you would expect it means that now nobody can really know army in the world is big enough to form a frontline and therefore it services and nobody at the consequence of that is urban warfare even the Swiss Army is preparing for urban warfare because that is going to be the focus of combat in the future and it's terrifying because obviously it's going to involve civilians even more than in the past you've really got to look at the lessons that were taken out in the battle for Mosul I mean I've been involved in conferences of the British Army conferences on the whole subject of urban warfare where what they found actually is the years that the lessons from the Battle of Mosul are exactly the same in most cases is the battle for Stalingrad I mean this is why we were doing more of these different conferences on the subject and I'm afraid that actually is likely to be the future of warfare if we happen to see it just to the future and Nabal before you and we will get to some questions from you ladies and gentlemen in a moment Europe as you said has enjoyed this extraordinary for the first time in centuries the notion of england and france and germany going to war with one another is absolutely unthinkable but i don't need to remind you that things are changing as historian with an eye to the long game do you follow the do you agree with this school of thought that there is a disintegration a kind of a new tribalism coming into Europe I'm Fred sir yes history never repeats itself you know there can be resemblance it's a cliche is it well it no no it's an important one because you find all too often that sort of politicians particular American and British ones I'm afraid wanting to sound Roosevelt you know Churchillian will often invoke the Second World War like George Bush trying to compare 9/11 to Pearl Harbor I mean it's disastrous when they start doing that because the consequences can be so appalling well that turning a terrorist attack into a war yes precisely but what we are we are going to see I think is we are entering a very dangerous period from the point of view that we are seeing a lack of confidence in democracy I mentioned that in Britain we the latest poll showed that just over 50% 53% apparently are looking towards want to have a strong leader prepared willing to break the rules in Germany it's over 40 percent Sweden is about the lowest in Europe with any 30 percent but I mean that gives you an idea of the frustrations the fears what is happening is that obviously the extremes whether extreme left or extreme right and the two of them are actually joining up in the case of the relation and in some of the cases of the sort of protest groups in in Britain where you get extreme left and extreme right now this was nothing like this happened in the 30s so we are in a different era completely different game if you like in that particular way and what frightens me is that with global warming we've only got to see another wave of emigration of refugees basically coming north from Africa or from the Middle East and you know the European lifeboat is actually again now find itself commanded by the extreme right on anti immigration so I think we're into a in democratic terms we're into a very dangerous era in in the course of the few years and on that cheery note without even mentioning the B word once I'd like to thank you properly later but please for a wonderful guests around any be bored no thank you thank you so much [Applause] now ladies and gentlemen we have got this on a few minutes ago but would love some questions from you yes sir Samantha I'll make sure I become terribly enraged when I come across some details of spear and the situation with him we virtually die very comfortably 82 and I'm wondering is as a historian and the facts that you have us to go through to write these books and so on whether it's been enough well work down on the slave labor to meet you miss appear with the Rockets cetera that's my first question all right can we do just one question at a time I think that's a great question Sir Anthony you're absolutely right I mean a lot of work has been done certainly and the way that spear managed to get away with it fair was brilliant at his trial the way that he came up with a sort of preemptive confession when every other Nazi was trying to pretend they'd done nothing wrong Speer said yes yes and confessed and as a result he never was sentenced to death it was any a relatively comparatively short period of him imprisonment and he managed basically to Bluff his way I think he persuaded himself that somehow he hadn't been involved with all of this but you are absolutely right I mean in terms of the slave labor in the tunnels making the v2 rockets and all of the people working for him were treated as badly as any concentration camp prisoner and we don't know exactly but we've got some reasonable statistics I think on exactly how many people died of starvation overwork and you ssin working for schmear in the in his underground factories what I think has always been very striking was the way the when Speer was interrogated by American officers just after the end of the war but one thing that Speer was almost offended by was the way he said you know history he said history always emphasizes terminal events and this meant that Speer was regretful of the fact that the earlier achievements as he swore it of National Socialism building the motorways the autism ultra route Lee and getting rid of unemployment in Germany he felt all of these were going to be forgotten there any gonna remember the squalor of the collapse of the Third Reich well actually I think he was 100% wrong because I think nothing is more indicative of a regime than the manner of its downfall and nothing could be more dead grotesque than the downfall of the Third Reich but anyway thank you thank you for your question the Kaiser is EPs a nothing about the Kaiser he just went to Norway after the war Ned Holland to the Netherlands yes man why has there any anything written about the episode horrors inflicted oh well have you ever sort of thought of doing some work on that well no I've left the First World War to hover to other other other historians but yes it's certainly true I mean what we under we tend to forget about and we it's a fact that for example the Kaiser during the First World War wanted to starve all the Russian prisoners of war to death so you know should we say there was a certain a certain ideological basis for the development of Nazism I think we should have seen the development of Nazism perhaps at an earlier stage when one remembers elements of that but the Kaiser was let off in that particular way and he just basically let spent the rest of his life in a very comfortable retirement hmm thank you for the talk it's very enjoyable mr. beaver I'm just wondering if you have any viewpoint on the rehabilitation and employment of Nazi scientists and war criminals after the Second World War such as the man who headed NASA and what we have earned von Braun and other war criminals who were rehabilitated and employed by the West after the war what your perspective is on that sort of thing and on the Japanese side I mean that was what said terrifying was really odd yes the Americans you know unit 731 and they are Harbin which were they were carrying out the most appalling experiments on prisoners on Chinese but also on certain number of Allied prisoners of war almost as bad as what was carried out at Dachau and by Mengele he was let off by MacArthur so that American feel like American military science if one could call it that could profit from their discoveries on basically the sort of the torture and the killing and the experiments carried out on on prisoners during the war the same thing happened very much with scientists German scientists at the end of the Second World War in in Europe there was a an absolute obscene scramble between the Russians and all the Soviets and the Western Allies in grabbing all of the scientists they could get hold of just in case they could sort of learn something in what was obviously going to be the new Cold War following the hot war paperclip they called it an operation exactly it was an operation paperclip you know there was also operation Borodino which was the Soviet attempt to build an atomic bomb and there they were desperate to get the German not just to get the German scientists even though the German scientists have been following a false lead on their attempt to get the atomic bomb but they were also trying to get all the uranium and actually my most a lot of it had been transferred down to the Black Forest without them realizing so actually the French got hold of it actually the second bomb dropped on Japan was mainly made out of uranium belgian yuri uranium from the belgian congo which the germans had stolen from the Belgians and which then the Americans got back from the Germans was basically contributed to the second bomb on Nagasaki that's your next book no no I'm not doing the Far East I'll ask you then yeah yes sir who in your opinion were the best General in World War two well a lot of people have sort of said manche dine on the German side and was no doubt about it he was if you like a strategic and tactical genius in many ways that doesn't mean that he was an admirable man I mean most people suspect actually he was his real name was Levinsky and most people thought that he was probably Jewish but it was hidden and he actually he came out with more anti-semitic orders to his troops and almost anybody else but he was probably I would have said probably the greatest tactician or strategist of the Second World War in terms of impressive ones I would have said very much general bill slim in Burma who was who was loved by his troops quite rightly and also I think I think Nimitz was an admirable an admirable Admiral sorry it wasn't an bad phrase but anyway he was a very impressive impressive man he was not one of those egotist I mean it was unbelievable the way you want to remember that many of these commanders have been totally ignored they nobody ever heard of them when the war started and suddenly they were being treated as film stars and for some of them it completely turned their heads and they started to see themselves as they saw suddenly they saw leadership as a form of charisma now and with all of these journalists and movie reel newscast teams there one of the worst apart from MacArthur who course was notorious for his egotism it was actually General Mark Clark in Italy who had a team of over 50 in his public relations things to make sure that all photographs were taken from his best side because he was very proud of his rim and profile and he was determined to capture Rome so his staff officers started referring to him referring to him as Marcus Aurelius Clockers so most of us here read your books what do you read I have an absolute binge on friction on novels as soon as I finished the book and delivered it in all the rest of it because when I'm actually working on a book I rarely are reading books on that subject I'm not like my dear friend Max Hastings and they're not necessary sometimes the most popular person in Australia but my dear friend Max who is has that sort of mind which I can only admire and envy where he can actually switch his mind from one thing to another in a matter of minutes I'm an old stick-in-the-mud and I have to sort of get into mode and mood and all the rest of it and if I'm working on a particular subject and subject is the Russian Civil War I will only read about the Russian Civil War and because I find that you know if I then had to get into a conference on a previous book it takes me if days afterwards before I can really get back into it I wish I was better in that what's a lot of darkness to keep in your head - Anthony I mean riding the the Berlin book my goodness me I haunt you at night when you're working on I mean some of the stories you uncovered a complete they were and I mean there is that hope thing I remember Mike Max and I had a shall we say a fairly acrimonious debate with Neil Ferguson when he accused us of writing war pornography and being controversial and we thought that well frankly Neil being controversial coming from you that's a bit rich but it is true and I mean some of the stuff I mean particularly were right on the Berlin books on the stuff was so appalling that you you felt even you couldn't actually include it I was very lucky I had Catherine Mayer Adele who went through the material and advised me but you do need you're so close to the material you can hardly judge sort of you know what what are the limits of horror that you can include hmm oh yeah I see a flashing light in front of us thank you you've told us about a battle that the Allies obviously totally you know messed up messed up in on the Western Front other equivalent battles that the Russians messed up Oh God I mean that the cruelty the cruelty the ruthlessness when the great Russian counter-attack Soviet counter-attack at Stalingrad operation Uranus was being organized they decided to have a diversion on the central part of the front called Operation Mars and this gives you an idea of the total callousness of Stalingrad of Stalin himself they sent three armies into the attack with virtually no artillery support whatsoever but worst of all they deliberately passed the plans of the attack to the Germans in advance through a double spy through a double agent called denna daf and all of this has been written about and described by the head of the NKVD special task section anyway they have well so that the Germans would not move any troops down to the south to reinforce the Stalingrad front they were trying to pin them in the center and they sacrificed two hundred and forty six thousand casualties which was more than all of the allied casualties for d-day and the whole of the Battle of Normandy up until August purely sera is to create a diversion well I think that gives you a pretty good idea of the brutality and the total pity the pitiless news of the Soviet Union during that particular period and the Bevo's Arnim the battle for the bridges this is the book would you please to thank our distinguished guest tonight Sir Anthony people Michael thank you very much visit wheeler center.com for the best in books writing and ideas from Melbourne Australia and the world [Music]

Channel: WheelerCentre

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Keywords: Ideas, Melbourne, Australia, Conversation, The Wheeler Centre, Victoria, Writing, Antony Beevor, History, World War Two

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Length: 61min 41sec (3701 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 20 2019