Lex Fridman Podcast · 2025-05-24 · 211 min

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

Lex FridmanJames Holland

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TL;DR

World War II was ultimately a contest between systems, not simply generals, weapons, or battlefield courage. Holland’s central lens is the neglected operational layer—factories, shipping, maintenance, intelligence, training, medical care, and supply chains connecting strategy to combat. Tactical brilliance could change a month or perhaps several years, but this was ultimately “a war of numbers,” and the Axis could not match Allied throughput.
Barbarossa paired ideological certainty with impossible unit economics. Germany attacked across an immense frontage with only 17 Panzer divisions among more than 100 formations, roughly 2,000 vehicle types, inadequate rail capacity, and less air support than it had used against France; one cited division fell from about 180 tanks to 16 by July 15, 1941. Stalin’s purges and catastrophic decisions let Germany advance far beyond what its system could sustain, but the Hunger Plan’s projection of deaths in the “tens of millions” meant pragmatism could never replace Nazi ideology.
Propaganda became a force multiplier because Goebbels controlled both the message and its distribution. By 1939, 70% of German households had radios, while cheap receivers roughly 9 by 4 by 4 inches and public loudspeakers reached much of the remainder; entertainment carried the repeated subtext that Germany was supreme, Hitler infallible, and Jews and Bolsheviks existential enemies. Fridman’s modern analogy is AI-amplified social media: a small artificial boost can trigger real participation until “now you’re chanting.”
Appeasement was less a personality defect than a decision under radical uncertainty—though repeated concessions increased the eventual risk. Chamberlain faced a population Holland says was 92% against war in 1938, no British treaty obligation to Czechoslovakia, and an air-defense system still being completed; Holland therefore calls Munich understandable without calling it right. Once Hitler occupied the rest of Czechoslovakia in March 1939, Chamberlain withdrew the benefit of the doubt and guaranteed Poland.
Britain’s understated advantage was a balance sheet of global access, industrial optionality, and institutional preparation. It held 33% of world merchant shipping and could access roughly another 50%, had the largest navy, stockpiled critical commodities, and could contract for overseas supplies that continental powers could not reach. Its integrated radar, observer, control-room, and fighter-command network meant only one of 138 RAF airfields was disabled for more than 48 hours during the Battle of Britain.
The Sherman-versus-Tiger comparison is Holland’s clearest case against optimizing a product while ignoring the production-and-service system. Germany built 1,347 Tigers against roughly 49,000 Shermans—a 36-to-1 ratio—while the Tiger demanded special railway tracks, heavier recovery equipment, more fuel, and rare mechanical competence. The Sherman was familiar to automobile-trained crews, maintainable, agile, and fast to fire: “You didn’t need to destroy the Tiger tank. You just needed to stop it operating.”
Coalition execution reached its zenith on D-Day, when heterogeneous institutions converted scale into synchronized action. The operation assembled 6,939 vessels—including 1,213 warships and 4,127 assault craft—roughly 12,000–12,500 aircraft, and 155,000 troops landed or dropped within 24 hours; about 242 minesweepers opened lanes without losing an invasion ship to a mine. Once the bridgehead held, Allied superiority in men, airpower, shipping, and matériel made Germany’s defeat effectively irreversible.
The deepest risk lesson is that prosperous institutions can decay into atrocity with shocking speed. Germany moved within a decade from democracy and extraordinary cultural and scientific achievement to dictatorship, aggressive war, and industrialized murder; Holland’s warning is that peace, civil freedom, and restraints on extremists are not permanent assets. His counterweight is equally specific: “The vast majority of people are good people who want to live peacefully,” while human ingenuity retains an “infinite” capacity to solve problems.

Digest · the substance, structured for research

1. The global catastrophe becomes legible one ordinary life at a time

Holland begins with the war’s genuinely global character: deserts, Arctic waters, oceans, skies, jungles, hills, beaches, the Russian steppe, and Ukraine. More than geography, though, its pull is the intimate counterfactual: “If I’d been 20 years old, how would I have dealt with it?” Would he have served in an army, air force, or destroyer—and dealt with the separation?
Tank crewman Sam Bradshaw left Liverpool for four years, was badly wounded in North Africa, then shot in the neck in Italy. He returned to a mother whose hair had turned gray, a little sister now grown, and a school destroyed by Luftwaffe bombs. Feeling severed from civilian normality, he reenlisted, entered Europe with another unit, and became one of the first British soldiers at Belsen.
Bradshaw’s sharpest story concerned letters, the intermittent bundles that connected tank crews to “the sort of details of this day-to-day banal life.” One friend’s family correspondence became a squadron-wide soap opera—until a Dear John letter destroyed the future sustaining him. Bradshaw warned him not to do anything rash; two days later, the man was killed in the next engagement, a “self-fulfilling prophecy” Bradshaw had seen coming.
For Holland, that is the war’s human truth: “ordinary everyday people doing extraordinary things” inside an alien environment. It also explains his preference for long interviews. Thirty-minute oral histories often capture rehearsed memories; only sustained questioning reaches the “nuts and bolts” of fear, attachment, adaptation, and decisions that make no sense outside the experience.

2. Nazi expansion was an extermination project, not a rational land grab

The Hunger Plan was not an SS tangent but central Wehrmacht planning. Germany’s inefficient agriculture could not support its ambitions, so officials including General Georg Thomas and food minister Herbert Backe proposed taking Soviet food while newly urbanized populations went without. Thomas’s projected consequence was deaths in the “tens of millions,” discussed as an operational requirement rather than a moral barrier.
Holland locates the plan inside Hitler’s binary worldview: Aryan northern Europeans were the master race; Jews and Bolsheviks formed a supposed global conspiracy; Germany had been “stabbed in the back” in 1918. Every choice became “them and us,” with only two outcomes—“a thousand-year Reich or Armageddon.” The clarity was politically effective precisely because it removed complexity, compromise, and doubt.
Lebensraum joined ideology to material ambition. Unlike Britain’s maritime empire, Germany would build a continental empire across Europe and into Asia, seize Ukraine’s agricultural production, displace or starve Slavic populations, and settle Germanic peoples. Operation Barbarossa therefore cannot be separated into a normal military campaign plus regrettable Nazi excesses: the campaign’s purpose was itself ideological and racial.
Holland rejects counterfactuals claiming Germany could have won by recruiting more Ukrainians or retaining Jewish scientists. That “misses the entire point”: Hitler was not a pragmatic leader who happened to make discriminatory errors. Exclusion, dispossession, and extermination supplied the war’s premise, so abandoning them would have meant abandoning the Nazi project itself.

3. The operational layer decides whether strategy can reach combat

Fridman draws out Holland’s three levels of analysis. Strategy defines the political objective—take Moscow, defeat an enemy, reshape the world—while tactics are the “coalface of war,” where pilots, tank crews, and infantry conduct kinetic fighting. Operations connect them: “factories, economics, shipping, supply chains—it’s how you manage your war.”
That framework prevents false comparisons between countries. Britain, an island with a maritime empire, privileged the Royal Navy and global reach; the United States likewise approached war from two oceanic seaboards. Germany, a continental power, centered its army. Each force reflected geography, economic structure, and political aims, so raw division or tank totals cannot reveal equivalent capabilities.
In September 1939, the US Army numbered roughly 189,000 and ranked 19th, “sandwiched between Portugal and Uruguay,” while Germany fielded about 3.5 million. Holland’s point is not that America was weak: maintaining a huge standing army consumes food, barracks, training space, and workers who could instead build matériel. Western strategy increasingly favored technology and mechanization—“steel, not our flesh.”
Hitler’s operational weakness was compounded by his inability to inhabit an opponent’s perspective. He interpreted Britain through Germany’s land-centric model, underrating naval power, merchant shipping, overseas reserves, and strategic airpower. Holland’s recurring test is simple: however skilled the front-line commander, “if you haven’t got the backup, it’s not going to work.”

4. Barbarossa’s mechanized spearhead concealed a largely unmechanized army

The phrase “Nazi war machine” misleads because mechanization was concentrated in a narrow spearhead. Barbarossa began with 17 Panzer divisions among more than 100 attacking divisions, and a Panzer division itself was combined arms: tanks, motorcycle scouts, armored cars, truck- or half-track-borne infantry, and motorized artillery. Less than 20% of the attacking force provided the high-speed cutting edge.
Germany entered the Soviet Union with roughly 2,000 vehicle types, each requiring different plugs, leads, distributor caps, and replacement parts. Distance then added combat losses to ordinary mechanical attrition. Smolensk fell by mid-July, yet Holland says the 16th Panzer Division had only 16 tanks operational by July 15 from an establishment near 180: the advance was “winning itself to death.”
After the early surge, formations that had crossed immense distances in weeks advanced barely another 100 miles over several months. The Soviets destroyed resources during retreat, while the Germans lacked trucks, spares, fuel, and recovery capacity. The problem was not insufficient courage at the tip but a tail unable to replenish what speed consumed.
Soviet railway gauge was wider, forcing Germany to reposition every rail over captured mileage. Soviet locomotives were also larger and traveled farther between water and coal stops; German Kriegslok locomotives needed more frequent servicing, requiring infrastructure that did not exist. Holland calls the complexity “absolutely boggling”—and stresses that planners had not properly reckoned with it.

5. Soviet self-harm let an unsustainable invasion advance too far

Stalin’s purges imprisoned or executed roughly 22,500 officers, including three of five marshals, decapitating a force that had pioneered areas such as airborne operations. Replacements who looked competent in peacetime could fail under combat pressure, and a culture of paranoia made honest reporting dangerous. The disastrous war against Finland—Soviet casualties were about five times Finland’s—encouraged Hitler’s contempt.
Stalin then ignored abundant warnings of the German attack. Holland argues Soviet incompetence, rather than German strategic genius, explains much of Barbarossa’s opening success. The Red Army possessed enough men to prevent a decisive German victory, but surprise, poor command, and repeated refusal to trade territory for force preservation produced encirclements on a staggering scale.
Kyiv became the central example. Zhukov urged withdrawal behind the Dnieper, a formidable defensive barrier; Stalin refused to abandon the Soviet Union’s third city. Told “back me or sack me,” Stalin sacked him, and roughly 700,000 more Soviet troops were captured. Stalin rehabilitated Zhukov and learned, but only after catastrophic losses.
Fridman presses the familiar counterfactual: had Hitler kept Army Group Center moving, could it have taken Moscow from roughly 100 miles away? Holland’s answer remains that Germany “should never have got close.” A narrower, concentrated thrust might have reached farther, but the actual three-pronged force lacked the operational mechanics to conquer such a vast landmass.

6. Hitler’s early victories taught him the wrong lesson about genius

Holland flatly rejects the description of Hitler as a military genius. The operational concept for defeating France came from Erich von Manstein, while Heinz Guderian drove the armored execution. Hitler adopted their success as his own, but Holland apportions France’s fall “50% brilliance” in German operational art and “50% French failure and incompetence.”
On paper, France presented a daunting opponent: a larger army, more tanks, roughly twice Germany’s artillery, and comparable air strength before adding Britain, Belgium, and the Netherlands. German senior officers initially saw the western war as a potential disaster. Their eventual victory did not validate every future gamble; it validated one audacious plan against a system unable to react.
Success nevertheless confirmed Hitler’s contempt for cautious Prussian generals. Surrounded by sycophants and committed to willpower, destiny, and boldness, he began believing “everything is possible.” The failure to knock Britain out in 1940 then accelerated his timetable: an eastern campaign once imagined for 1943 or 1944 was brought forward to June 1941.
Ideology corrupted military planning directly. A German staff exercise concluded Barbarossa would not work; when the result reached Keitel, the response was effectively, “Go back and make it work.” The revised plan worked only on paper. Holland’s distinction is severe: Hitler possessed political and propagandistic talents, but attention to maps and memory for units could not replace staff training or logistical reality.

7. France had the assets to fight but not a system capable of decision

Fridman accuses Holland of being “too nice” to France, arguing it could have driven toward Berlin while Germany was committed in Poland. Holland agrees the western frontier was almost open and says a serious French-British move might have destabilized Hitler, whose commanders considered the Polish gamble catastrophic. Instead, the Saar “offensive” became little more than reconnaissance before retreat.
France had been traumatized by World War I on its own industrial soil, losing roughly three times as many dead as Britain. That memory created extreme risk aversion, but Holland’s paradox is that “by being risk-averse, you’re actually taking a far greater risk.” Fragmented coalition governments supplied no political will, and military leadership remained old, top-heavy, conservative, and shaped by static warfare.
The industrial contradiction was striking. France was Europe’s most automotive society, with about eight people per vehicle, versus 47 in Germany and 106 in Italy; its roads and railways were excellent. Yet commander-in-chief Maurice Gamelin’s headquarters reportedly had no radio. Telephone lines failed under bombing, refugees clogged roads, and motorbike dispatches returned after the tactical situation had expired.
French planners assumed armored forces could not traverse the Ardennes and intended to meet Germany in Belgium, hold it, bring reserves forward, and counterattack. But every message passed slowly from high command through army groups, armies, corps, and divisions. German formations, connected by radio, isolated and destroyed units whose commanders were effectively “rabbits in headlights.”

8. Goebbels turned radio distribution into a national control surface

Holland calls Goebbels, not Hitler, the regime’s closest thing to a genius of war. By 1939, roughly 70% of German households had radios, an unparalleled European penetration rate and close to America’s. The regime filled the remaining gaps with receivers in apartment stairwells, cafés, bars, and public squares, while controlling cinema, newspapers, and broadcasting through the Propaganda Ministry.
The Deutsche Kleinempfänger—roughly 9 by 4 by 4 inches, molded in Bakelite and cheap enough for mass ownership—was “as outrageous as the arrival of the iPod.” Radios had previously been aspirational furniture for affluent homes; Nazi design made reception ubiquitous. Once the endpoint was ubiquitous, the state could repeatedly deliver the same emotional architecture.
Programming was not constant Hitlerian shouting. Light entertainment, humorous programs, Wagner, and Richard Strauss made the medium habitual, while the underlying message remained fixed: Germans were superior, Jews and Bolsheviks threatened survival, Hitler was a genius, and national triumph was inevitable. Holland’s bleak observation is that “most people believe what they’re told repeatedly.”
Fridman maps that mechanism onto AI bots and social media: automated accounts and humans operating many phones can boost a message until real supporters make it genuinely viral. A modest synthetic push becomes an authentic feedback loop, then mass excitement, chanting, and “the 1984 two minutes of hate.” Holland agrees that technologies change, but patterns of human behavior recur.

9. Economic shocks and simple enemies opened the door to extremism

Fridman distills Holland’s formulation: “The Treaty of Versailles created Hitler, and the Wall Street crash and the Great Depression brought him to power.” Hyperinflation, Versailles humiliation, dependence on American loans, and then sudden unemployment made the Weimar system appear incapable. Hitler arrived as recovery began and claimed jobs, rearmament, and renewed national confidence as evidence of personal deliverance.
The Nazis won roughly 37% in July 1932, then declined before Hitler became chancellor in January 1933 with about one-third of the vote. Conservative elites believed they could manipulate him inside government. After becoming chancellor, Hitler used the Enabling Act; when President Hindenburg died the following summer, Hitler eliminated the presidency and converted a minority electoral position into a totalitarian state.
Goebbels’s own conversion illustrates Hitler’s method. A frustrated, disabled intellectual with a doctorate in German literature, Goebbels initially entertained borrowing ideas from Soviet organization and doubted Hitler’s rigidity. Hitler courted him personally—attention, dinner, flattery—and Goebbels reversed himself, adopting the leader as the quasi-religious “messiah figure” he had been seeking.
Hitler fused Frontgemeinschaft, the fellowship of veterans allegedly betrayed in 1918, with Volksgemeinschaft, an ethnic-cultural national community. Jews and communists supplied the necessary enemy. Mein Kampf was, in Holland’s assessment, incoherent and “unreadable,” but its conclusion was unmistakable: those enemies caused Germany’s problems, war was natural and necessary, and victory would produce the thousand-year Reich.

10. Rearmament advanced through incremental violations and theatrical bluff

Versailles restricted Germany’s army, navy, weapons, and prohibited an air force, but rearmament began clandestinely. Manufacturers produced tank components abroad and returned them to Germany; armored training occurred in the Soviet Union; the Luftwaffe was publicly announced in 1935 although aircraft such as the Messerschmitt 109 were already under development in 1934. Hitler kept testing “what can I get away with?”
Remilitarizing the Rhineland in 1936 was the decisive demonstration that treaty violations would meet little resistance. Britain and France were economically weakened, reconsidered Versailles’s harshness, and lacked political appetite for another war. Every unopposed step taught Hitler that formal agreements imposed no real constraint.
Milch showed the French air-force chief an airfield lined with perhaps 50 Messerschmitts, then drove him circuitously to another field while the same aircraft relocated there. The visitor returned convinced France could never defeat Germany: operational capability had been increased by “mind games” without adding a single plane.
The great rallies, uniforms, steel helmets, swastikas, and synchronized crowds performed the same function internationally. Hitler’s peaceful acquisitions—the Rhineland, Austria, Sudetenland, then Czechoslovakia—ironically frustrated a leader “spoiling” for violent proof of his destiny. He was an “arch-gambler,” and the absence of punishment kept raising both his confidence and his stakes.

11. Munich bought time while confirming Hitler’s appetite

Chamberlain made three trips to meet Hitler in September 1938, culminating in the Munich conference with Hitler, Mussolini, and French premier Daladier—but no Czechoslovak government representative. Hitler received the Sudetenland and promised no further territorial conquests. Chamberlain did not necessarily trust him, Holland argues; he chose to extend one final benefit of the doubt.
Britain had no treaty obligation to Czechoslovakia, unlike France, and Holland cites 92% public opposition to war. Chamberlain had supported naval modernization, air expansion, and the world’s first integrated air-defense system, but Britain was not ready for a continental war. Holland’s deliberately hedged judgment: Munich was “understandable,” neither demonstrably right nor clearly the best available choice.
The human theater mattered. Hitler had home advantage at the Berghof, yet Munich crowds cheered Chamberlain because ordinary Germans, like ordinary Britons, did not want war. Hitler resented the reception. Both leaders entered with confidence—Hitler as autocrat, Chamberlain as representative of the world’s preeminent empire—but radically different assumptions about power and constraint.
Chamberlain’s privately drafted declaration that Britain and Germany should never fight produced the infamous paper waved on his return. When Hitler occupied the rest of Czechoslovakia in March 1939, the experiment ended: “No more benefit of the doubt.” Britain formalized its guarantee of Poland, a warning Hitler discounted but nearly every senior German commander and Hermann Göring took seriously.

12. Britain’s hidden balance sheet made Chamberlain stronger than he looked

Britain entered the crisis with roughly 194 destroyers, 15 battleships, seven aircraft carriers, and another six in development. More important than hull count was commercial reach: it had 33% of global merchant shipping and could access perhaps another 50% through Greek, Norwegian, Canadian, and other fleets—more than 80% of world shipping in Holland’s framing.
That reach enabled advance stockpiling of bauxite, copper, tungsten, and other essentials. Britain could offer overseas suppliers above-market multiyear purchases of rubber or strategic materials, securing flows inaccessible to Germany. The empire also had extensive informal assets: British ownership in Argentine railways, ports, ranches, and farms generated influence without formal annexation.
In 1938, sterling—not the dollar—was tied to the gold standard, and Britain led a global empire unprecedented in size. Chamberlain therefore entered Munich not merely as a predictable elderly gentleman with umbrella and homburg, but as the political representative of enormous maritime, financial, and commercial power. Hitler’s narrow worldview made that strength easy to misunderstand.
Holland argues later historiography projected Britain’s postwar decline backward. Narratives written during the 1970s–1990s often cast wartime Britain as depleted, dependent on America, and peripheral to an Eastern Front that shed most German blood. That framing overlooks the 1939 starting point and confuses subsequent geopolitical rank with the capabilities Britain actually brought to the war.

13. Poland exposed Hitler’s gamble and the democracies’ missed Soviet opening

Hitler summoned senior commanders to the Berghof after the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact and announced an almost immediate invasion of Poland. They were appalled: coordinated air-ground exercises remained incomplete, planning time was minimal, and Britain’s guarantee created the two-front danger Germany had hoped to avoid. Poland became a proving ground where many defects surfaced even as it was overrun in 18 days.
Fridman notes that the immediate gamble succeeded; Holland answers from April 1945: ask Hitler in the Führerbunker whether September 1, 1939 still looked wise. The invasion triggered the total ruin of Germany, even if Hitler would have blamed weak generals and repeated the decision. He had perhaps 10–15% doubt that Britain and France would declare war, then let destiny override it.
The larger missed opportunity came in Soviet negotiations. Britain and France sent low-ranking representatives to Moscow without adequate authority, treating Moscow disrespectfully. The Soviet demand to cross Poland against Germany looked like a license to occupy it—and probably was—but Holland judges the failure to pursue a serious face-to-face bargain potentially “much more grievous” than Munich.
Stalin and Hitler treated their nonaggression agreement cynically. Each expected eventual conflict but wanted time; partitioning Poland restored Soviet influence while freeing Hitler’s eastern flank. Holland believes war between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union was inevitable from Hitler’s accession, though which side would fire first—and precisely when Stalin intended to be ready—remained unsettled.

14. Churchill reached power by default as France came under attack

Churchill was a towering but distrusted backbencher: former chancellor, persistent critic of dictatorship, and advocate of rearmament, yet burdened by Gallipoli, the General Strike, the abdication crisis, heavy drinking, and a reputation for hotheaded judgment. War returned him to the Admiralty, placing Britain’s senior service under the politician most visibly demanding action.
His proposal to mine Norway’s coastal leads sought to interrupt Swedish iron ore shipped through Narvik to Germany. Britain and France delayed from September 1939 until April 1940, then began mining as Germany invaded Denmark and Norway. The collision exposed paralysis and helped convince the political establishment that Chamberlain, however capable in peace, was not the necessary wartime leader.
Lord Halifax was the expected successor: former Viceroy of India, widely trusted, and considered a safe pair of hands. He felt physically sick at the responsibility and declined. That left Churchill, who accepted the office as the mission of his life rather than through a popular election.
Churchill became prime minister on May 10, 1940, leading a cross-party national government on the same day Germany launched Case Yellow against France and the Low Countries. The historical verdict now feels inevitable; contemporaries saw a loose cannon inheriting power by default amid political turmoil, with no assurance that his temperament would meet the emergency.

15. The “Churchill as chief villain” thesis fails Holland’s causal test

Fridman gives a good-faith version of Darryl Cooper’s claim that Churchill was the war’s “chief villain”: by refusing settlement, he allegedly transformed limited German expansion into global war and multiplied suffering. Holland’s first objection is chronological—Chamberlain’s government made the Poland decision while Churchill was out of government.
More fundamentally, Hitler did not need Churchill to make him invade the Soviet Union; ideological war in the east was foundational. Holland is also “absolutely certain” Hitler intended to subdue France or strip it of democracy. Britain might temporarily have coexisted with a German-dominated continent, but unchecked success would have increased Hitler’s resources and appetite rather than fixed a durable boundary.
Fridman shifts from ideals to a realist test: which policy minimizes total suffering? Holland argues British withdrawal would have improved Germany’s odds in the Soviet Union and prolonged enslavement and killing. The Pacific analogy is Japan: without Allied resistance, access to Southeast Asian resources could have strengthened a campaign that had already killed 20–30 million Chinese.
Holland accepts the narrower critique that Churchill-versus-Hitler mythology has been overused to justify later interventions. “Oversimplification of anything is a mistake”; Churchill himself appeased Stalin repeatedly. Yet nuance cannot erase causal distinctions: “The moment the war stopped, the bombing would stop,” whereas victory on Hitler’s terms would have accelerated racial killing.

16. “Steel, not our flesh” explains Allied strength and Allied destruction

Western strategy sought to avoid another generation of mass infantry slaughter. Only about 14–15% of an Allied army was infantry, while roughly 45% served in transport, cooking, supply, repair, and other service roles. The popular image is the rifleman leaving a landing craft; the operating reality was the immense tail delivering ammunition, medicine, food, fuel, and replacement equipment.
Better first aid, evacuation, surgery, and rehabilitation returned wounded troops to service. Mechanization moved supplies and firepower, while strategic bombing tried to disrupt factories, homes, railways, and workers before ground forces encountered the output. Holland’s phrase “big war” means deliberately making the supporting system much larger than the element directly exposed to enemy fire.
That logic produced a moral problem rather than a clean absolution. Destroying German infrastructure could reduce Allied infantry deaths, but it also killed civilians and devastated cities. By 1943, Holland says, the easy moral contrast had blurred: a justified cause could still employ destructive means, and political leaders remained obligated to prioritize their own populations.
Fridman’s pushback preserves the danger of self-exoneration; Holland’s answer preserves asymmetry. Allied actions could be wrong, excessive, or tragic without becoming equivalent to a program of conquest and extermination. “At what point is doing bad stopping you from doing good?” remains a real question, but it does not make every belligerent’s objective interchangeable.

17. Winning the peace requires filling the power vacuum

Holland carries the institutional lesson into Iraq: decapitating a strong regime creates a vacuum, and failing to plan reconstruction invites worse actors into it. His answer to Donald Rumsfeld’s “we don’t do reconstruction” is blunt: “You freaking well should do.” If a government chooses regime change, battlefield victory does not end its responsibility for the resulting system.
In northern Helmand in 2008, Holland met an Afghan whose willow trees had been cut down for a British helipad. Asked about foreign troops, the man replied, “If they stay, great—but they won’t.” The Taliban had been brutal, but he could leave his wallet unattended for a week; his test was whether the newcomers could provide equally durable order.
The anecdote exposed the mismatch between Western promises and local priorities. Liberal education and social freedom could not simply be imposed without understanding ethnic, cultural, and security conditions. Afghanistan seemed to be developing a path, Holland argues, before the West exited at the critical moment and undid much of what its intervention had attempted.
By contrast, the post-1945 rehabilitation of West Germany, Italy, and Japan produced thriving democracies. Despite unparalleled destruction and displacement, the victors had absorbed the lesson of World War I: defeat had to be followed by reconstruction and a legitimate order, not merely punishment and withdrawal.

18. The 1939 military leaderboard concealed severe capability mismatches

Britain and the United States dominated naval power; France, Japan, and Italy also fielded substantial fleets. Italy’s navy was its most modern service, but lacked aircraft carriers and radar. Modern battleships could not compensate for missing technologies, limited industrial depth, dependence on British coal, restricted access to oceans, and inadequate merchant shipping.
Mussolini wanted a Mediterranean and North African empire, not a general European war. The May 1939 Pact of Steel was an unequal marriage of convenience partly motivated by fear of German designs on Italy. Each dictatorship expected freedom within its sphere, not sustained joint campaigning, and Hitler retained unmistakable dominance despite a genuine personal liking for Mussolini.
In June 1940, Mussolini judged France finished and Britain likely to follow, so he entered before the spoils were allocated. The timing proved catastrophic. Britain remained at war, and by February 1941 a small British force in Egypt had overrun two Italian armies and captured roughly 133,000 prisoners.
Japan’s initial air quality was formidable because front-line pilots arrived with at least 500 flying hours, versus roughly 150–170 for British or German pilots. The pipeline produced an “elite of the elite” but not enough depth. France, meanwhile, owned thousands of aircraft but fragmented them among regional commands, letting the Luftwaffe mass locally and destroy them in “penny packets.”

19. Britain’s integrated air defense made raw Luftwaffe numbers less decisive

The RAF separated fighter, bomber, coastal, and training commands rather than distributing each capability across regional air fleets. Fighter Command then integrated coastal radar, overlapping Observer Corps stations, identification-friend-or-foe signals, filter rooms, sector controls, radios, weather data, and readiness boards into a single updating picture.
Radar supplied a rough incoming plot; trained observers refined aircraft numbers, altitude, and direction. Information entered the Fighter Command filter room and returned to sectors, where map-table markers continuously changed. Ground controllers could tell pilots to fly at “angels 18”—18,000 feet—on a specified vector and expect contact, replacing random patrols with directed interception.
Airfields were prepared with bulldozers, graders, earth, and repair material, while fighters launched before bombs arrived. Of 138 RAF airfields in Britain, Holland says only Manston was disabled for more than 48 hours during the entire summer of 1940. Bombing grass and empty runways could not destroy the functioning defense network.
Germany had no equivalent home-defense system because it assumed it would always be the aggressor. That organizational belief became a material vulnerability. The Luftwaffe could have similar or superior aircraft totals yet possess less useful information, less efficient interception, and no resilient architecture for defending the Reich when the strategic direction reversed.

20. The Battle of Britain was an industrial victory, not a last stand

Holland rejects the myth that “the Few” were Britain’s last line against invasion. Fighter Command was the first line; the world’s largest navy was the second. Germany proposed crossing the Channel in river barges, only one in three motorized, against overwhelming naval opposition. Holland sees “absolutely no chance on earth” of a successful invasion.
The battle was not one-way punishment. RAF bombers attacked German airfields across the Pas-de-Calais and Normandy at night, disrupting sleep and forcing each nominally 12-plane German squadron to leave perhaps two fighters behind. Bugged Luftwaffe prisoners at Trent Park complained constantly about the supposedly beleaguered enemy bombing them.
Britain’s best monthly comparison came in July 1940: 496 new Hurricanes and Spitfires against 240 German single-engine fighters, already better than two to one. By late October, Germany’s single-engine fighter force had fallen from roughly 750 to below 200, while Britain’s rose from around 650 to well above 750.
The production divergence kept widening. Holland gives total wartime aircraft output of roughly 132,500 for Britain and 315,000 for the United States. The Luftwaffe’s legend came from its role at the front of Blitzkrieg, but continuous use made it the most abused German service and prevented recovery once its qualitative advantage began eroding.

21. Training pipelines converted Allied scale into durable combat quality

By late 1943 or early 1944, an American pilot could arrive in Britain with around 350 hours accumulated under clear skies in Florida, California, or Texas. Britain similarly used Canada, South Africa, and Rhodesia for uninterrupted training. Geography protected fuel supplies, instructors, aircraft, and schedules from bombing and bad continental weather.
A US squadron might carry 40–45 pilots and a similar depth of aircraft while launching no more than 16 at once. New arrivals spent 10 days to two weeks acclimatizing, listened to veterans, flew low-risk “milk runs,” then graduated to Berlin or the Ruhr. Rotation converted classroom competence into combat experience without consuming novices immediately.
Luftwaffe pilots entered front-line units with 150–170 hours in 1940 and, Holland says, sometimes around 90–92 by 1944. Fuel scarcity, weather, bombing, and few two-seat conversion trainers compounded the problem. The Messerschmitt 109’s torque, high wing loading, and narrow undercarriage made a first solo flight a dangerous “leap of faith.”
Holland cites something like 2,400 aircraft and pilot losses in the air and about 3,400 accidents during the opening months of 1944. Whatever the exact category boundaries, the mechanism is his point: insufficient training creates losses before tactical skill matters. “The Second World War, more than any other conflict, is a war of numbers.”

22. The Sherman beat the Tiger by optimizing the whole system

At about 5:30 p.m. on June 26, 1944, near Fontenay-le-Pesnel in Normandy, a Sherman encountered a Tiger head-on. The Sherman commander was experienced and already had an armor-piercing round chambered. It could not penetrate the Tiger, but impact on the gun mantlet caused spalling that hit the driver in the head, leaving him unable to see and forcing the commander inside, sharply reducing visibility.
The Sherman then fired high-explosive rounds; Holland says ten hits landed within roughly 30 seconds before the Tiger fired once. Its crew surrendered. The lesson was not that Sherman armor or gun power exceeded the Tiger’s, but that readiness, visibility, loading speed, crew experience, and first-shot tempo could make paper specifications irrelevant.
Sherman advantages included agility, manageable ammunition, a gun-stabilizing gyro, and a commander’s turret override. Its controls resembled an American manual-transmission car—clutch, throttle, gear shift, and steering brakes—so a population already familiar with automobiles supplied trainable drivers and mechanics. Germany had 47 people per vehicle against America’s roughly three.
Scale closed the argument: about 49,000 Shermans were built against 1,347 Tigers, or roughly 36 to one. Tigers required transport tracks to fit European railways, combat tracks after unloading, larger hoists and trucks, more fuel, and specialized repairs. Germany’s own Georg Thomas eventually protested: “We have to stop making such complete and aesthetic weapons.”

23. Germany had probably lost by December 1941, before Stalingrad made it visible

Holland’s stark comparison uses two arbitrary dates. Around June 15, 1941, Germany’s sole active enemy was Britain and its empire; by December 16 it faced Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States. Whatever later “wonder weapons” appeared, Germany could not compete with the combined population, resources, industrial capacity, and global access of those three systems.
The Soviet situation was nevertheless desperate. Huge factories, grain, coal, and territory had been captured; Holland says steel production fell about 80% during 1941–42. Britain and the United States sent extraordinary quantities through Arctic routes and Alaska, while Soviet mobilization created roughly 80 divisions in the second half of 1941—more divisions than Britain fielded throughout the war.
As Stalin relaxed control and commanders absorbed battlefield lessons, Hitler tightened his own. A former lance corporal with no staff-college education increasingly micromanaged fronts from maps, removing the local freedom that had been a German strength. Formations fought with declining matériel and “one hand behind their back” in operational decision-making.
Hitler’s 1942 pursuit of Caucasus oil epitomized strategic fantasy. Even intact fields would require refining, pipelines, tankers, railway capacity, and secure transport back to Germany; the few relevant pipelines pointed back toward the Urals, and captured railways were already overloaded. Holland is astonished that German planning asked how to seize the oil but apparently not the load-bearing question: “Then what?”

24. Stalingrad and North Africa broke Germany on different dimensions

After diverting resources into Crimea and Sevastopol, Hitler split the 1942 offensive between the Caucasus and Stalingrad. Von Bock objected that dividing the mission made no sense and was dismissed. The city’s name trapped Hitler psychologically in a brutal street fight where home advantage, close terrain, summer heat, and winter cold consumed his forces.
Fridman emphasizes the human nightmare of door-to-door urban warfare; Holland emphasizes the operational cause of Sixth Army’s destruction. American—and to a lesser extent British—trucks enabled Zhukov’s great encircling movement while German forces were fixed inside the city and dispersed toward oil they never reached. “It is not the street fighting that destroys Sixth Army. It is the encirclement.”
The Soviet pincers met in November 1942, making escape effectively impossible; surrender followed in early February 1943. Goebbels answered with his Sportpalast call for “total war,” turning defeat into a national survival narrative. Germans were depressed because they understood that the violence unleashed in the east could now return home.
North Africa imposed a different but simultaneous catastrophe. Holland cites 2,700 Luftwaffe aircraft destroyed there from November 1942 to May 1943; from June through October, encompassing Kursk, Germany lost 702 aircraft in the east versus 3,744 over the Mediterranean. Stalingrad carried the greater psychological shock, but troop totals alone do not determine strategic weight—Guadalcanal proves the same point.

25. The Holocaust advanced through bureaucracy, technology, and participation

Holland rejects the claim that ordinary Germans knew nothing. Soldiers carried cameras, photographed villages burning, Jews being brutalized, and partisans executed, then sent images home through developers. Returning troops talked. Auschwitz itself had been incorporated into the expanded Reich, where German settlers lived near the camp and understood what surrounded them.
Roughly half of the six million Jewish victims, Holland says, were killed by bullets. Mass shooting was changed partly because perpetrators found face-to-face killing traumatic; after Himmler witnessed an execution, the regime sought a supposedly more “humane” process—meaning humane for executioners, never victims.
Zyklon B did not make death clean. Holland describes victims stripped and humiliated, families separated immediately after transport, then realizing inside the chamber that no shower was coming. Suffocation could last 20–25 minutes as lung capillaries failed; those dying later watched the first victims and understood, amid pain and panic, what awaited them.
Prisoners were forced to remove hair and teeth, move bodies, and support cremation; ash and bone fragments remain around destroyed crematoria. Fridman calls the mechanism the “banality of evil”: mundane tasks, specialized technologies, and hierarchy implement ideology one step at a time. Holland’s warning is Germany’s speed of descent—from democracy, Beethoven, Goethe, science, and engineering to “unspeakable inhumanity.”

26. Overlord was won before D-Day through coalition preparation

The December 1941 Arcadia conference favored getting Americans to Britain and across the Channel quickly, but neither partner was ready in 1942. Roosevelt accepted Churchill’s alternative: land in Vichy North Africa, gain experience, test commanders and equipment, then close the pincer with forces from Egypt. Tunisia’s fall in May 1943 left forces positioned for Sicily and Italy.
At the Trident conference that month, America demanded an end to open-ended Mediterranean opportunism and secured commitment to a May 1944 cross-Channel invasion. Italy still offered Foggia’s airfields and another route for tightening pressure, but command structures were separated so leaders fighting the current campaign would not simultaneously plan the next.
Air superiority was Overlord’s prerequisite. The Allies needed to destroy Seine and Rhine bridges, railway marshalling yards, and the Reichsbahn network so Germans already on the continent could not reinforce faster than men crossing from England. Low-level bridge attacks required suppressing German fighters across a broad zone, making the battle for Germany’s aircraft industry inseparable from Normandy.
The Schweinfurt–Regensburg raid of August 17, 1943 sent 324 heavy bombers, lost 60, and badly damaged roughly 130—unsustainable without escort. The P-51 Mustang, developed from sketches to reality in 117 days, became decisive after receiving the Rolls-Royce Merlin engine and drop tanks, extending range beyond 1,400 miles. By late May 1944, Holland says the nearest German fighter opposition was 500 miles from the beaches.

27. D-Day sealed the war, but Berlin exposed how fragile peace remains

D-Day represented the “zenith of coalition warfare”: 6,939 vessels, including 1,213 warships and 4,127 assault craft; roughly 12,000–12,500 aircraft; and 155,000 troops landed or dropped in 24 hours. All three service commanders were British, roughly two-thirds of aircraft and landed troops were British or Dominion, and Canadians “punched massively above their weight,” while much of the US Navy fought in the Pacific.
Around 242 minesweepers opened lanes through coastal minefields in five operations without losing an invasion ship to a mine—navigation achieved without GPS or computers. Bad weather scattered forces and increased casualties, especially on Omaha; proportionally, Holland says Canadians suffered most. The Allies missed some maximal first-day objectives, but those assumed ideal conditions, and Holland calls the outcome an “unqualified success.”
Berlin’s fall and Hitler’s bunker suicide completed the trajectory. Holland finds Downfall convincing because abundant testimony captures Hitler’s last days; Lex highlights the bunker-era delusion that Hitler’s reputation might initially suffer but posterity would recognize the good he intended.
Holland’s final lesson is vigilance: economic crisis predicts political upheaval; extremists cannot safely be invited into government on the assumption they will be controlled; freedoms and peace are not permanent. Ukraine’s trenches and destroyed vehicles show how quickly modern scenes can resemble 1944. His hope is that most people seek peaceful lives—and that the human mind’s ability to devise answers remains “infinite.”

James Holland

And you see that manifest itself on D-Day, where you've got 6,939 vessels, of which there are 1,213 warships and 4,127 assault craft, 12,500 aircraft. 155,000 men landed and dropped from the air over a 24-hour period. It is phenomenal. It is absolutely phenomenal.

Lex Fridman

In Volume 1 of The War in the West, your book series on World War II, you write:

“The Second World War witnessed the deaths of more than 60 million people from over 60 different countries. Entire cities were laid waste. National borders were redrawn. And many millions more people found themselves displaced. Over the past couple of decades, many of those living in the Middle East or parts of Africa, the Balkans, Afghanistan, and even the United States may feel justifiably that these troubled times have already proved the most traumatic in their recent past. Yet, globally, the Second World War was and remains the single biggest catastrophe of modern history. In terms of human drama, it is unrivaled. No other war has affected so many lives in such a large number of countries.”

So what, to you, makes World War II the biggest catastrophe in human drama in modern history and, maybe from a historian's perspective, the most fascinating subject to study?

James Holland

The thing about World War II is it really is truly global. It's fought in deserts. It's fought in the Arctic. It's fought across oceans. It's fought in the air. It's in the jungle, in the hills, and on the beaches. It's also on the Russian steppe and in Ukraine. So it's that global nature of it.

I just think where there's war, there is always incredible human drama. For most people, and certainly in my case, you get drawn to the human drama of it. It's that thought that, gosh, if I'd been 20 years old, how would I have dealt with it? Would I have been in the army? Would I have been in the air force? Would I have been on a Royal Navy destroyer? How would I have coped with it, and how would I have dealt with that separation?

I've interviewed people who were away for 4 years. I remember talking to a tank man from Liverpool in England called Sam Bradshaw. He went away for 4 years, and when he came home, he'd been twice wounded. He'd been very badly wounded in North Africa, and then he was shot in the neck in Italy.

Eventually, he got home. When he came home, his mother had turned gray. His little baby sister, who had been 13 when he left, was now a young woman. His old school had been destroyed by Luftwaffe bombs. He didn't recognize the place.

And do you know what he did? He joined up again and went back out to Europe. He was one of the first people in Belsen. What was his justification for joining right back up? He just felt completely disconnected from home. He felt that the gulf of time and his experiences had separated him from all the normalities of life.

He felt that the normalities of the life he had known before he'd gone away to war had just been severed in a really cruel way that he didn't really feel he was able to confront at that particular point. But he decided to rejoin. He couldn't go back to the 3rd Royal Tank Regiment, so he went back to a different unit. He went from the Italian campaign to the European theater.

He didn't see so much action at the end, but, like a lot of British troops, if you were in a certain division at a certain time, you ended up passing very close to Belsen. You suddenly realized, “Okay, this was the right thing to do. We did have to get rid of Nazism. We did have to do this, because this is the consequence.”

It's not just the oppression, it's not just the secret police, and it's not just the expansionism of Nazism. It is also the Holocaust, which hadn't been given its name at that point, but you're witnessing this kind of untold cruelty.

I've always thought a lot about Sam. He's no longer with us, but he was one of the first people that I interviewed, and I interviewed him at great length. I know you like a long interview, Lex, and I totally get that, because when you have a long interview, you really start getting to the nuts and bolts of it.

One of the frustrations for me when I'm looking at oral histories of Second World War veterans is that usually they're put on YouTube or on a museum website, and they're 30 minutes, or an hour if you're lucky. You're just scratching the surface. You never really get to know them, and you feel that they're just repeating stuff they've read in books themselves after the war.

I leave feeling frustrated that I haven't had a chance to grill them on the kind of stuff that I would grill them on if I were put in front of them.

Lex Fridman

So, Tank Man, what was maybe the most epic, the most intense, or the most interesting story that he told you?

James Holland

I do remember him telling me—funnily enough, it's not really about the conflict—I remember him telling me about the importance of letters. There was this guy who, literally every few weeks, would get letters. The post would arrive intermittently. There was no regular post. It was supposed to be regular, but it didn't come around regularly, so you might suddenly get a flurry of 5 all in 1 day.

There was this guy in a different tank troop who was a good friend of his in the same squadron. British have squadrons for their armor, which Americans would have as a company.

Lex Fridman

I should say that in your book, one of the wonderful things you do is use the correct term in the language for the particular army involved, whether it's the German, British, or American.

James Holland

That's not to be pretentious. That's really just because you're dealing with so many numbers and different units, and it can go over your head. You can get consumed by the detail if you're not careful, and as a reader, it can be very unsatisfying because you just can't keep pace with everything.

One of the things about writing in the vernacular—German, or in the American spelling “armor” rather than “armour,” as we Brits would spell it—is that it immediately tells the reader, “Okay, this is American. I've got that,” or “This is German. I've got that,” or Italian, or whatever it might be.

But to go back to Sam, there was this guy in his squadron, and he'd get his letters from his girlfriend, his wife. It was like a soap opera. We all just waited for his letters to come in so we could find out whether his daughter had got to school okay, or won the swimming contest, or whatever it was. The details of this day-to-day, banal life were absolute catnip to these guys. They absolutely loved it.

And then the letter arrived—the “Dear John” letter—saying, “Sorry, I found someone else, and it's over.” His friend was absolutely devastated. It was the only thing that was keeping him going: this sense of continuity of home, this foundation of his life back at home.

Sam said he could see that he was in a really bad way, and he thought, “He's going to do something stupid.” He went up to him and said, “Look, I know it's bad, and I know it's terrible, and I know you're absolutely devastated, but you've got your mates here. Just don't do anything silly. Maybe when it's all over, you can patch things up or sort things out.”

“You've got to understand it from her point of view. It's a long way. You haven't seen her for 2 years. This kind of stuff. Just don't do anything rash.”

Of course, in the next engagement, 2 days later, he was killed. Sam said it was as if he just knew that was going to happen. He said it was a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy.

That's something I've never forgotten—that story. It's about human drama. That's the truth of it, and how people react to this totally alien situation. For the most part, the Second World War is fought by ordinary, everyday people doing extraordinary things. I think that's something that's so fascinating.

Lex Fridman

I suspect—I think, instinctively, I'm quite slapdash. I think I would have bought it, literally. I don't think it would have ended well for me. I'm just a bit careless.

James Holland

Yeah. I think I also have an element in me where I can believe in the idea of nation and fight for a nation, especially when the conflict is as grand.

Lex Fridman

There are things worse than death.

James Holland

Yes, as the propaganda would explain very clearly, but also in reality.

Lex Fridman

So a nation—you know, France and Britain were perhaps facing the prospect of being essentially enslaved. The Soviet Union was facing the prospect of being enslaved, literally. I mean, it was very clearly stated what they were going to do.

James Holland

They're going to repopulate the land with Germanic people. Well, they're not just going to do that. They're also going to starve lots and lots of Soviet individuals to death by the Hunger Plan, for example, which is planned really very callously. This is not SS units or anything like this. This is the Wehrmacht.

This is the economic division of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, the German combined general staff. General Georg Thomas and Herbert Backe, who's the kind of minister for food, come up with it. They say, "What are we going to do? We haven't got enough food," largely because German farming is inefficient. They think, "Well, this is part of it. We'll go in and take the food."

There's been this colossal urbanization of the Soviet Union since the revolution in 1917, so these people in the cities simply aren't going to get their food because we're going to take it all. That's going to lead to a lot of deaths. Tens of millions is the phrase that Georg Thomas used.

Lex Fridman

So let's talk about the Hunger Plan. How important was the Hunger Plan to Nazi ideology and to the whole Nazi war machine?

James Holland

It's central to the whole thing. This is all about this notion that's embedded into Hitler's mind and into the minds of the Nazi Party right from the word go: there is a big sort of global conspiracy, the Jewish-Bolshevik plot. I mean, it's completely misplaced—that Jews and Bolsheviks go hand in hand somehow. They don't, obviously.

The whole ideology is to crush this. Part of the way the Nazis think, the way Hitler thinks, is that there's them and there's us. We are the white Northern European Aryans. We should be the master race. We've been threatened by a global Jewish-Bolshevik plot. We've been stabbed in the back in 1918, at the end of the First World War. We need to overcome this.

This is an existential battle for future survival. It's a terrible task that has befallen our generation, but we have to do this. We have to overcome this or else we have no future. We will be crushed. It's absolutely cut and dry.

One of the things about Hitler is that he is a very black-and-white, them-or-us, either-or kind of person. It's always one thing or the other. It's a thousand-year Reich or it's Armageddon. There is no middle ground. There's no gray area. It's just one or the other. That's his worldview.

The reason he came to the fore was the crystal-clear clarity of his message, which is: we've been stabbed in the back; there is a global plot; we have to overcome this; we are naturally the master race; we have to reassert ourselves; we have to get rid of global Jewry; we have to get rid of global Bolshevism; and we have to prevail, or else. But if we do prevail, what an amazing world it's going to be.

Every speech he gives always starts the same way. It always starts from a kind of negative and always ends with an incredible positive, this sort of rabble-rousing crescendo of—if you're in the front row—spittle, halitosis, and gesticulation. I mean, you've seen pictures of him. I don't know if you've ever seen him, but he's almost trying to grab the air and clutch it to him. You can see the venom coming out of his mouth just in a single still photograph.

There are apps you can get now where you can translate his speeches, and by today's standards you would just think, "What a load of absolute wibble." I mean, just total nonsense. But you have to put yourself back in the shoes of people listening to him in 1922 or 1923, or indeed 1933, and see how captivating that is to a certain part of the population.

So, to go back to your original point, Lebensraum is absolutely part of it. What you do is you crush the Bolsheviks, you crush world Jewry, and then you expand. Britain has had this incredible global empire. Germany needs that too. Germany's stuck in Europe. It doesn't have access to the world's oceans, so we're not going to be a maritime empire. We're going to be a landmass empire—the whole landmass of Europe and into Asia. That's going to be us.

We're going to take the breadbasket of Ukraine and use that for our own ends. We're going to make ourselves rich, but we're also going to spread our people. We're going to spread the Aryan Northern master race throughout Europe and into the traditional Slavic areas, and we will prevail and come out on top.

You have to understand that everything about Operation Barbarossa, the planned invasion of the Soviet Union in June, is totally wrapped up in Nazi ideology. I've read historians who say, "If only Hitler had realized that the Ukrainians had been quite happy to fight on his side. If only he'd actually brought some of these Jewish scientists into the Nazi fold, then Germany might have prevailed in World War II." You think, well, you're missing the entire point. That's just never going to happen because this is an ideological war.

Lex Fridman

Yeah. This is not a pragmatic, rational leader.

James Holland

No. I mean, part of his effectiveness, we should say, is probably this singular belief in this ideology. There are pros and cons for an effective military machine. Probably having that singular focus is effective.

Except that when you're making military decisions, if those decisions are always being bracketed by an ideology which is fundamentally flawed from a pragmatic point of view, as much as from an ethical or reasonable point of view, you're opening yourselves up for trouble.

This is a problem he has with Barbarossa. They realize very early on in 1941, when they're wargaming this whole operation, that it's not going to work. There are people like General Paulus, who's on the general staff at the time. He's in charge of wargaming this, and he goes, "This isn't going to work."

Keitel, who is the chief of the OKW, goes, "No, no, no, no. Go back and make it work." He goes, "Okay." So he comes up with a plan that does work, but it's bogus. It just doesn't work because they don't have enough motorization.

They go into Barbarossa with 2,000 different types of vehicles. Every single one of those vehicles has to have different distributor caps, different leads and plugs, and all sorts of different parts. The interoperability of the German mechanized arm is super inefficient.

You've got huge problems because they think, "Well, we took France in 1940, and that's one of the most modern countries in the world, with one of the greatest armies and armed forces in the world, and we did that in 6 weeks. So the Soviet Union—look, they struggled against Finland, for goodness' sake. How hard can it be?"

What you're failing to understand is that attacking the Soviet Union is over a geographical landmass 10 times the size of France, just on the frontage. You haven't really got much more mechanization than you had in May 1940, when they attacked the Low Countries and France. You've actually got fewer Luftwaffe aircraft to support you, and you simply do not have the operational mechanics to make it work successfully.

It is largely down to the incompetence of the Red Army and the Soviet leadership in the summer of 1941 that they get as far as they do. Barbarossa should never have come close to being a victory.

Lex Fridman

Let's talk through it. Operation Barbarossa, which you're mentioning—we'll go back. I've jumped ahead 2 years in the war. This is June 1941, Operation Barbarossa, when Hitler invades the Soviet Union with, I think, the largest invading force in history up to that point, collectively.

There are 3 prongs: Army Group North, Army Group Centre, and Army Group South. North is going to Leningrad. Centre is the strongest group, going directly toward Moscow. South is going toward and targeting Ukraine and the Caucasus.

Can you linger on the details of this plan? What was the thinking? What was the strategy? What were the tactics? What was the logistics? There are so many things to say, but one of them is that you often emphasize the importance of 3 ways to analyze military conflict: the strategic, the operational, and the tactical. The operational is often not given enough time and attention, and it's the logistics that make the war machine really work successfully or fail.

James Holland

Yeah, that's absolutely spot on. It's interesting because the vast majority of general histories of World War II tend to focus on the strategic and the tactical.

The word "strategic," just for those who don't know, refers to your overall war aims: get to Moscow, whatever it might be, conquer the world. That's your strategy. The tactical side of things is the coalface of war, the attritional bit: the pilot in his Spitfire, the tank crew, the soldier in his foxhole.

The operational level is the level of war that links the strategic to the tactical. It is factories, economics, shipping, supply chains, and how you manage your war. One of the things where I think people have been guilty in the past—historians have been guilty in the past—is judging warfare all on the same level.

But obviously, every competent nation has a different approach to war because of the nation they are, the size they are, and their geographical location. Britain, for example, is an island nation. Its priority is the Royal Navy, which is why the Royal Navy is known as the senior service. In 1939, it's easy to forget now, when you see how depleted Britain is today, but it had comfortably the world's largest navy: something like 194 destroyers, 15 battleships, 7 aircraft carriers, and another 6 on the way.

America has the Pacific Ocean and the Atlantic Ocean; it has 2 seaboards. It has the second-largest navy in the world, but a tiny army. The US Army in September 1939 was the 19th largest in the world, sandwiched between Portugal and Uruguay. It's incredible. It's about 189,000 strong, which might seem reasonably large by today's standards, but is absolutely tiny by 1939 standards.

Germany, meanwhile, has an army of about 3.5 million in 1939. These are big differences, but America is coming at it from a different perspective, and Britain is coming at it from a different perspective. Britain's empire is all about shipping; it's a seaborne empire.

There's also another point, which is that having large armies is inherently impractical and inefficient. The larger the army, the more people you've got to feed, the more barracks you've got to have, and the more space you've got to have for training. You're taking more people out of your workforce to produce tanks and shells and all the rest of it because they're tramping around with rifles. There's an argument that it's really not a very good way of doing things.

So, very much, the British way—and subsequently the United States way, and the way of Britain's dominions and empire—is to use steel, not our flesh, as a principle. The idea is that you use technology, mechanization, modernity, and global reach to do a lot of your hard yards. That's the basic principle behind the strategic air campaign.

When we talk about the strategic air campaign, we're talking about strategic air forces operating in isolation from other armed forces. A tactical air force, for example, is an air force that offers close air support for ground operations. A strategic air force has nothing to do with ground operations; it's just operating on its own. That's your bomber force, or whatever: your B-17s and B-24s of the US Army Air Forces flying out of East Anglia, bombing the Ruhr industrial complex of Germany.

It's important to understand that, when you compare Britain to Germany, for example, you have to have at the back of your mind that Britain is coming at it from a completely different perspective. One of Hitler's failures, I would say, is that he always views everybody through his own very narrow worldview, which is not particularly helpful. You want to get inside the head of your enemy, and he's guilty of not doing that.

So, when you're talking about Operation Barbarossa, to go back to your original question, you're dealing with an operation on such a vast scale that the operational level of war is absolutely vital to its chances of success or failure. It doesn't matter how good your individual commanders are at the front. If you haven't got the backup, it's not going to work.

The problem the Germans have is that, yes, they've got their 3 million men on the front, and they've got their 3,000 aircraft and all the rest of it. But what you need to do is break it down and ask who is doing the hard yards. The way the German war machine works is that the machine bit is only the spearhead.

People always talk about the Nazi war machine. In a way, it's a kind of misnomer because you're suggesting that it's highly mechanized and industrialized and all the rest of it. Nothing could be further from the truth. The spearhead is, but the rest of it is not. This is the fatal flaw of the German armed forces throughout the whole of World War II, really, but even at this early stage.

In Barbarossa, you're talking about 17 Panzer divisions out of 100-odd that are involved in the initial attack. A Panzer division is not a division full of Panzer tanks. It is a combined-arms, motorized outfit. There are scouts on BMWs with sidecars, armored cars, infantry, grenadiers, Panzergrenadiers—which are infantry in half-tracks and trucks—motorized artillery, motorized anti-aircraft artillery, motorized anti-tank artillery, and, of course, tanks as well: Panzers.

But tanks are a really, really small proportion of the force. You're talking about less than 20% of your attacking force being those spearhead forces, and inevitably they're going to be attrited as they go. You're going to take casualties, and not only battlefield casualties. You're also going to have mechanical casualties because of the huge spaces involved. You simply can't function indefinitely.

In the initial phases of Operation Barbarossa, what you see is that they surge forward, and the Red Army has absolutely no answers to anything. Stalin, weirdly, hasn't heeded all the warnings that this attack is brewing. There have been plenty. Incidentally, Smolensk falls on July 15; in less than 4 weeks—3 and a half weeks—it is just incredible. They've overwhelmed the rest of what had been Poland, surged into what is now Belarus, and Army Group Center is moving forward. Army Group North is thrusting up into the Baltic. It's all going swimmingly well.

But then, over the next several months, they barely go 100 miles, and that's because they're running out of steam. The 16th Panzer Division, by the time it's involved in taking Smolensk on July 15, 1941, has 16 tanks left—16 out of what should have been 180. It's just being attrited. They can't sustain it.

They can't sustain it because, as the Russians fall back, as the Soviet Red Army falls back, they do their own scorched-earth policy. They also discover that the railway line has a different track gauge. The Russian gauge is slightly wider, so every single mile, every yard, every foot, every meter of Russian railway that they're capturing has to be moved a couple of inches to the left to make it fit the German Kriegslok, the standard train locomotive of the Reichsbahn.

Just imagine what that's like. Soviet trains are bigger, so they can take more water, which means the water stops are fewer and farther between. When the Germans come in with their trains, their Kriegsloks are smaller, so they have to be rewatered more often and recoaled more often. It's absolutely boggling just how complicated it is and how badly planned it is because they haven't reckoned on this. They're having to think on their feet.

Lex Fridman

I love the logistical details of all this because, yes, that's a huge component of it, especially when you cover that much territory. But there is a notion that, if Hitler hadn't stopped Army Group Center, it could have pushed all the way to Moscow. It was only maybe 100 miles away from Moscow. Is that a possibility? Because it had so much success in the early days pushing forward, do you think it's possible that, if Hitler, as we mentioned from a military-blunder perspective, hadn't made that blunder, they could have defeated the Soviet Union right there and then?

James Holland

My own view is that they should never have got close. The Red Army has plenty of men to be able to see off anything that the Germans can do. The capture of Kyiv, for example, in September 1941 was a catastrophe for the Soviet Union and should never have happened.

Zhukov is saying to Stalin, "We've got to pull back across the Dnieper. We can't possibly do this." Stalin says, "You can't abandon Kyiv. It's the third city in the Soviet Union. No way. Absolutely not." Zhukov says, "We're just going to be overwhelmed. We can't hold this. Either back me or sack me. Back me or sack me." So Stalin sacks him.

Obviously, as we know, Zhukov gets rehabilitated in pretty quick order, and Stalin does learn the lessons very quickly thereafter. But the opening phase of Barbarossa has been a catastrophe. As a consequence of Stalin refusing to let his men retreat back across the Dnieper, which is a substantial barrier and would have been very difficult for the Germans to overwhelm had they moved back in time, another 700,000 men are put in the bag. That's just staggering numbers.

There are so many things wrong with the Barbarossa plan. It's just too much over such a vast area. You're talking about 2,500 miles or something of frontage. If you put your Panzer groups, which are these spearheads, all in one big thrust straight across on a much narrower front—let's say 400 miles rather than 1,200—they might have just burned straight through to Moscow. They really caught the Red Army unprepared.

Lex Fridman

Yeah. Is there something to be said about the strategic genius of that, or was it just luck?

James Holland

No, I don't think so.

I think what's happened is you've had the Soviet purges of the second half of the 1930s, where they've executed or imprisoned 22,500 officers, including 3 out of 5 marshals, and God knows how many army commanders. So you've completely decapitated the Red Army in terms of its command structure.

Lex Fridman

So before that, would it be fair to say it was one of, if not the greatest army in the world?

James Holland

Well, there was a lot of experience. There's a lot of experience there, but also technology and material.

Lex Fridman

Yeah.

James Holland

The size of the army, the number of people that they mobilized.

Lex Fridman

Yeah.

James Holland

And they're the first people to adapt, to create airborne troops, for example. So, yes, I think there is an argument to say that. But the decapitation is absolutely brutal. If you've decapitated an army, you've then got to put new guys in charge. Someone who looks on paper like a half-decent peacetime commander might not be a very good wartime commander. They're different disciplines and different skills, and when it comes to it, you don't know that until you're tested. It's very hard to judge.

Of course, Stalin exists in a sort of vacuum of paranoia and suspicion all the time, which is unhelpful when you're trying to develop strong armed forces. So they go into Finland at the end of 1939, and they get really badly hammered. They do take the Karelian Isthmus and some ground, but at huge cost. I mean, the casualties are 5 times worse than those of the Finns, and it's a humiliation.

Hitler sees that and thinks, “Okay, we're not up to much cop.” Then Hitler loses the Battle of Britain and thinks, “I can't afford to fight a war on 2 fronts.” One of the reasons why Germany loses the war in 1914–1918 is that it's fighting on the Eastern Front but also fighting on the Western Front at the same time. We've got to avoid that, but I've got to get rid of Britain.

Britain hasn't come out of the fight. Britain is still fighting at the end of 1940, having won the Battle of Britain. So maybe I'll go into the Soviet Union now, while the Red Army is still weak. We're not 100% ready ourselves, but let's hurry the whole thing forward, because originally he'd been thinking of planning an operation in 1943 or 1944.

So the idea is you take Poland out, you take out France and the Low Countries, you conquer most of Western Europe, and you knock out Britain. Therefore, you don't have to worry so much about the United States, because they're on the other side of the Atlantic. That then buys him the time to rebuild his strength for the all-out thrust on the Soviet Union.

The failure to subdue Britain in 1940 changes all those plans and makes him think, “Actually, I'm going to go in early.” He's also been hoisted by his own petard because he starts to believe his own genius. Everyone told him that he wouldn't be able to beat France and the Low Countries. Everyone told him it wouldn't work out when he went into Poland. Everyone was really nervous about it.

“Go hang, you cautious, awful, aristocratic Prussian generals. I'm the best at this. I've told you. I've shown you. I'm the genius.” He starts to believe his own hype. Of course, this is a problem. He's surrounded by sycophants and people who are constantly telling him he's this incredible genius. So he starts to believe it, and he thinks everything is possible.

He's very much into this idea of the will of the German people. This is our destiny, and it's either the thousand-year Reich or Armageddon. Momentum is with us, and we need to strike it. Only by gambling, only by being bold, will the Germans prevail—all this kind of nonsense. That's why he goes into the Soviet Union in June 1941 rather than a couple of years, or even 3 years, later.

Lex Fridman

Yeah. He really hated the Prussian generals, huh?

James Holland

Yeah, he hated them.

Lex Fridman

Is there a case to be made that he was indeed, at times, a military genius?

James Holland

No, I don't think so. None of the plans—I mean, even the plan for the invasion of France and the Low Countries—is his. The concept is von Manstein's, and the execution is Heinz Guderian's. Guderian is the pioneer of the Panzer force, the Panzer thrust, this idea of the ultramechanized, combined-arms Panzer arm spearhead doing this kind of lightning-fast thrust. It's not Hitler's idea. He adopts it and takes it as his own because he's a Führer and he can do what he likes, but it isn't his.

Up until that point, until that plan is put forward to Franz Halder, who is the chief of staff of the German army at that time, Halder is just thinking, “How do we get out of this mess? This is just a nightmare.” They know that France has got a larger army. They know that France has got more tanks. They know that France has got double the number of artillery pieces. It's got parity in terms of air forces. Then you add Holland, then Belgium, then Great Britain, and that looks like a very, very tough nut to crack.

The reason why France is subdued in 1940 is 50% brilliance on the part of the Germans and their operational art in that particular instance, and 50% French failure, really, and incompetence.

Lex Fridman

I mean, there is a kind of genius to being able to see and take advantage of, and set up, the world stage in such a way that you have the appeasement from France and Britain. Keep the United States out of it. Just set up the world stage so you could plow through everybody with very little resistance.

James Holland

Well, yes—geopolitical genius if it works, but it doesn't. That's the problem. He goes into Poland on the assumption that Britain and France will not declare war. He is not prepared for Britain and France declaring war on Germany.

Lex Fridman

Right. He thinks they won't.

James Holland

That's right. So, miscalculation, blunder.

Lex Fridman

But then France does, right? And France does not successfully do anything with this incredible army that it has.

James Holland

It has size, but one of the problems that France has is that it's very, very top-heavy. It's very cumbersome in the way it operates. There's no question that it's got some brilliant young commanders, but at the top, the commanders are very old. Most of them are First World War veterans—Weygand, Gamelin, General Georges. These people are all well into their 60s. General Georges is the youngest army commander, and he's 60. It's too old to be an army commander. You need to be in your late 40s, early 50s.

They're too consumed by conservatism and the old ways. What they assume is that any future war will be much like the First World War. It'll be attritional, long, and drawn out, but static. Actually, they're right on 2 parts of it. It is, as it turns out, going to be long, drawn out, and attritional, but it's going to be mobile rather than static. That's a big miscalculation.

Lex Fridman

So here's my question. I think you're being too nice on France here. When Germany invaded Poland, correct me if I'm wrong, but it feels like France could have just gone straight to Berlin. They literally did basically nothing. I think part of that—and I think you described it as well—was the insanity of Hitler creating this psychology with the propaganda, creating this feeling that there's this Nazi force that's unstoppable. France just didn't want to step into that. Maybe they were legitimately—I hesitate to say these words—scared of war.

James Holland

100% they are. France has been totally traumatized by the First World War. It's fought on their land. It's fought in their industrial heartland. They lose 3 times the number of people killed that Britain does. Britain's traumatized by it, but not to the same degree that France is. France—there is just no stomach to do that again.

That makes them risk-averse. By being risk-averse, you're actually taking a far greater risk. That's the irony of it. The truth is also that there isn't the political will. A successful military can only be successful if there is political will at the top.

The problem with France in the 1930s is that it's very politically divided. It's a time of multiple governments, multiple prime ministers, coalition governments—really extreme coalition governments—drawn from the left and the right as well as the center. This is not a coalition of 2 parties. This is a coalition of multiple parties, and no one can ever agree on anything.

It's amazing that the Maginot Line is even agreed on, this incredibly strong defensive position along the eastern side of France, on the border with Germany, which is largely impregnable. But the problem is the bit that's not impregnable, which is the hinge where the Maginot Line ends and starts turning in a kind of north-northwest direction, toward the border with Belgium. What they should have done is build border defenses all along the northern border with Belgium, because Belgium refused to allow any Allied troops into its territory.

It was neutral. France should have said, “Okay, fine. Well, then we’ll defend our own territory. We’re not going to come to your rescue if you get invaded. That’s your payoff.” As a consequence of that, we are going to stockpile everything, so we’re not going to be drawn into neutral territory should Germany invade from the west.

But they don’t do that because of the psychological damage of having fought a war in exactly that area a generation earlier. That’s the problem. When Germany is so weakened by the invasion of Poland, there is literally nothing left. The back door into western Germany is completely open.

So they do what they call the Saar Offensive, but it’s not. It’s a kind of reconnaissance in force, where they go across the border, pick their noses for a few days, and then trundle back again. It’s embarrassing. What you’re seeing there is a nation that’s just not ready for this, that’s scared, that’s politically divided, which then has a knock-on effect on the decision-making process, and which is just consumed by military complacency.

That’s the big problem. The commanders at the very top of the French regime are complacent. They haven’t bought into modern ways. They haven’t looked at how contemporary technology could help them. I mean, it is absurd, for example, that there isn’t a single radio in the Château de Vincennes, which is the headquarters of the commander-in-chief of the French armed forces, General Maurice Gamelin. It’s just unbelievable, but that is the case, and there’s no getting away from that.

It’s all the more ironic when you consider that France is actually the most motorized society in Europe. It’s the second most motorized society in the world after the United States, by some margin, it has to be said. It has a fantastic transportation system. The railway network is superb. There are 8 people for every motorized vehicle in France, which is way above Germany, where in 1940 that figure is 47, for example. It’s 106 in Italy.

So, France is very mechanized—very mechanized. Come on, guys, pull your finger out, get it together. They just don’t. They’re incredibly slow and cumbersome.

What they think will happen is that the Germans won’t think of going that way. They won’t do a pincer movement because you can’t possibly take motorized forces through the Ardennes. That just is not possible, which is the hinge area between the end of the Maginot Line—the northern part of the Maginot Line, which runs down the eastern border of France—and the northern bit.

So, what we’ll do with that hinge around the town of Sedan is move into Belgium. We’ll meet the Germans before they get anywhere near France. We’ll hold them, and while we’re holding them, we’ll bring up our reserves. Then we’ll counterattack and crush them. That’s the idea behind it.

But the problem is that they don’t have a means of moving fast, and their communication systems are dreadful—absolutely dreadful. They’re dependent on conventional telephone lines, which dive bombers and whatever are absolutely wrecking. Suddenly, the streets are clogged with refugees, and people can’t move. The telephone lines are down. There are no radios.

You’re then dependent on sending dispatch riders on little motorbikes. General Maurice Gamelin sends out a dispatch rider at 6:00 in the morning. By 12:00, he hasn’t come back, so you send another one. Finally, the answer comes back at around 9:00 at night, by which time the Germans have advanced another 15 miles, and the original message that you sent at 6:00 that morning is completely redundant and has passed its sell-by date.

That’s happening at every step of the way. You’ve got overall command headquarters, then you’ve got army group, then you’ve got army, then you’ve got corps, then you’ve got division. The consequence of all that is that the French just can’t move. They’re just stuck. They’re rabbits in headlights, and the Germans are able to move and destroy them in isolation.

Meanwhile, they’re able to use their excellent communications to very good effect. You were talking about the genius of war. It’s not Hitler that’s a genius. If anyone’s a genius, it’s Goebbels, the propaganda chief. Their ability to harness that makes them the kings of messaging.

They don’t have X, they don’t have social media, but they do have new technology. That new technology, that new approach, is flooding the airwaves with their singular message, which is always the same and has been ever since the Nazis came into power. They’re using radios.

I think radios are really key to the whole story because there is no denser radio network anywhere in the world, including the United States, than Germany in 1939. So, while it’s really behind the times in terms of mechanization, it is absolutely on top of its game in terms of communications.

Seventy percent of households in Germany have radios by 1939, which is an unprecedented number. That is only beaten by the United States, and only just. It is greater than any other nation in Europe.

In terms of flooding the airwaves, it is the densest. Even for the 30% who don’t have radios, that’s not a problem, because we’ll put them in the stairwells of apartment blocks, we’ll put them in squares, and we’ll put them in cafés and bars.

The Nazi state controls the radio airwaves, just as it controls the movies and the newspapers. All aspects of the media are controlled by Goebbels and the Propaganda Ministry, and they’re putting out the same message over and over again.

It’s not all Hitler’s ranting. It’s entertainment, light entertainment, some humorous shows. It is also Wagner, of course, and Richard Strauss. It’s a mixture, but the subliminal message is the same: we’re the best, we’re the top dogs, the Jewish-Bolshevik plot is awful, and that’s the existential threat to us. We have to overcome that. We’re the top dogs militarily. We’re the best. We should feel really good about ourselves. We’re going to absolutely win and be the greatest nation in the world ever. Hitler’s a genius.

That is just repeated over and over and over again. And, for all the modernity of the world in which we live today, most people believe what they’re told repeatedly.

Lex Fridman

If you just repeat, repeat, repeat over and over again, people will believe it. If you’re a die-hard Trump supporter, you want to believe that, and you’ll believe everything he says. If you’re a die-hard Bernie Sanders man, you’re from the left, you’ll believe everything he says because it’s reinforcing what you already want to believe.

But the scary thing is that radio is the technology of the day. The technology of the day today, which is a terrifying one for me, is AI on social media. You can have basically bot farms, which I assume are used by Ukraine, by Russia, and by the U.S.

I would love to read the history written about this era, about the information wars. Who has the biggest bot farms? Who has the biggest propaganda machines? When I say bot, I mean both automated AI bots and humans operating large numbers of smartphones with SIM cards, which are just able to boost messages enough that they become viral. Then real humans with real opinions get excited.

It’s like this vicious cycle. So, if you support your nation, all you need is a little boost, and then everybody gets really excited. Now you’re chanting, and now you’re in this mass hysteria, and now it’s 1984’s Two Minutes Hate, and the message is clear.

That’s what propaganda does: it really clarifies the mind. That is exactly what Hitler, the Nazis, and Goebbels are doing in the 1930s.

James Holland

Yeah. They’re doing it in the 1920s as well, but more effectively once they come into power, of course. Hitler is so fortunate that he takes over the chancellorship in January 1933, at a time when the economy is just starting to turn, and he’s able to make the most of that.

If you’re German and you’ve been through hyperinflation in the early 1920s, you’ve been through the humiliation of the Versailles Treaty, which was a terrible error in retrospect, and you’ve then emerged into a kind of democratic Weimar Republic based on manufacturing—Germany’s traditional genius for engineering, manufacturing, and the production of high-quality items.

Then you have the Wall Street crash, and the loans coming in from America, which are propping up the entire German economy, suddenly get cut off. You’ve suddenly got depression again and massive unemployment.

Suddenly Hitler comes in, everyone’s got jobs, they’re rebuilding, and they’re growing their military. The message that’s coming out is, “We’re the greatest, we’re the best, we’re fantastic.”

I was telling you earlier on about Hitler’s speeches, starting dark and ending in hope and light, and the sunlit uplands. That’s what you’re getting. You’re suddenly getting this vision of hope. You’re thinking, “By God, actually, this is really working.”

Okay, so I’m not sure that I particularly buy into the anti-Semitic thing, but we’ll sweep that under the carpet because, overall, I’ve now got a job, I’ve got money, I’ve got my new radio. And this is the genius of the Nazis, for example.

So they have the German receiver to start off with, the Volksempfänger, and then they have the Deutscher Kleinempfänger, which is the German little receiver, the little radio. These are genius. This is as outrageous as the arrival of the iPod. I mean, remember that suddenly you didn't have to have a Sony Walkman anymore; you could have something really, really small and miniature and listen to thousands and thousands of songs all at once. What an amazing thing.

The Deutscher Kleinempfänger is 9 inches by 4 inches by 4 inches. It's made of Bakelite, and everyone can have one because it's super cheap. It's just incredible. No one else had done that because, up until that point, radios, generally speaking, were aspirational. They had sort of walnut lacquer at the front, and you had them if you were middle class and showed them off to your neighbors to show how affluent and well-to-do you were.

But suddenly everyone can have one, and if everyone can have one, then everyone can receive the same message. This is the whole point about the Hitler Youth as well. The young guys are the most impressionistic, they're the least risk-averse, so they're the most gung-ho and the most full of excitement for the possibilities of life. Their minds are also the most open to suggestion.

So you get the youth, you hang on to them, and a whole generation of young men are brought up thinking about the genius of Hitler, how he's delivering us this much better nation, and how he's returning our—overhauling—the humiliations of the First World War, overcoming the stab in the back that happened in 1918, et cetera. As a young 16-year-old German, you're thinking, “Yeah, I want a piece of that.” And, hey, guess what? They got really cool uniforms. Come and join the SS and get the thrill. What's not to like? You can see why it's so clever.

What's so interesting is that propaganda today is still using those tenets that Goebbels was using back in the 1930s. This is why I would say that history doesn't repeat itself. Of course it doesn't. It can't possibly repeat itself because we're always living in a constantly evolving time, but patterns of human behavior do. What you always get after an economic crisis is political upheaval. Always, always, always.

Some people are in a worse-off position than they were financially before, and they're thinking, “Well, the current system doesn't work. What's the alternative?” In the case of now, we in the West first faced the financial crisis of 2008. Then we've had the double whammy of COVID, and that has been incredibly unsettling. So we're now in a situation of political turmoil.

Whether you're pro-Trump or anti-Trump, what he's offering is something completely different. He's saying, “The old ways don't work. I'm going to say what I think. I'm just going to come out. I'm not going to bother with all the sheen of diplomacy and the mealy-mouthed words that politicians always use, where you can't trust anyone. I'm just going to tell you as it is.”

Obviously, people respond to that. You can understand why that has an appeal. If the country already feels broken, and here's someone who is going to be a disruptor and change the way you go about things, you can see why a reasonably large proportion of the population is going to go, “I'll have a piece of that, thank you very much.” And especially when the country is in an economic crisis, like Germany was.

Lex Fridman

I think you've written that the Treaty of Versailles created Hitler, and the Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression brought him to power. And, of course, the propaganda machine that you describe is the thing that got everybody else in Germany on board.

James Holland

Yeah, it's amazing how he comes in with 33% of the vote. He had 37% of the vote in July 1932. So again, this is another period of turmoil, just like it is in France, where you're having constant different kinds of coalitions and different chancellors, leaders of Germany. It's very possible he wouldn't have come to power.

Well, he said, “We will only take our seats if I can be chancellor. Otherwise, forget it. I'm not coming into any coalition.” So then the government falls again in January 1933, and they have the election. The Nazi vote is down from where it was the previous summer. But this time they go, “Okay, Hitler can be chancellor, but we'll manipulate him.” How wrong they were. He's manipulating everyone.

Then Hindenburg, who is the president, dies the following summer, and Hitler is able to get rid of the presidency. There is no more president of Germany. There is just the Führer. He has an Enabling Act, after which all the other political parties are disbanded, and suddenly you've got a totalitarian state, just like that.

Lex Fridman

I think there's a lesson there. There are many lessons there, but one of them is: don't let an extremist into government.

James Holland

Yes.

Lex Fridman

And assume you can control them.

James Holland

Yes.

Lex Fridman

The arrogance of the existing politicians who just completely screwed it up. There is a real power to an extremist. A person who sees the world in black and white can really gain the attention and the support of the populace.

James Holland

Yes, especially when there's resentment about the Treaty of Versailles, when there's economic hardship, and if there's effective modern technology that allows you to do propaganda and sell the message. There's something really compelling about the black-and-white message.

It is because it's simple. What Hitler does throughout the 1920s is stick to this. There is actually, when he comes out of prison—he's arrested after the Beer Hall Putsch in November 1923, charged with treason, which he has committed because he's attempting a coup, and sentenced to 5 years, which is pretty lenient for what he's done. He then gets let out after 9 months.

The Nazi Party is banned at that point, but then comes back into being. In the year that follows, there is a substantial debate about where the party should go. There are actually a large number of people who think they should be looking at how the Soviets are doing things, taking some of the things they consider to be positive out of the communist state and applying those to the Nazis.

Hitler goes, “No, no, no, no, no, no. We've just got to stick to this Jewish Bolshevik thing. This is how we're going to do it.”

Goebbels, for example, is a not very successful journalist. He does have a PhD in German literature. He's very disaffected because he was born with talipes, which is more commonly known as a club foot. He's disabled and can't fight in the First World War. He's very frustrated by that, and he's in deep despair about the state of Germany in the early 1920s.

He's looking for a political messiah, a sort of quasi-religious messiah. He thinks it's Hitler, then discovers that Hitler isn't open to any ideas at all about any deviation, but then sees the light. Hitler recognizes that this guy is someone he wants on his side, and so he makes a real special effort: “Come on, come to dinner. I think you're great.” All this kind of stuff.

He wins him over, and Goebbels has this complete volte-face. He discards his earlier view: “Yeah, Hitler's right. I was wrong. Hitler is the messiah figure that I want to follow. I want to follow the hero-leader.”

They come on board, and they absolutely work it out. Hitler completely wins out. All dissenters within what had been the German Workers' Party drop away. It becomes the National Socialist German Workers' Party, becomes the Nazis. He emerges as the absolute undisputed Führer, the leader of that party. What he says goes, and everyone toes the line behind him.

Part of the genius of that—Hitler does have some genius; I just don't think it's military—is the simplicity of the message. What he's doing is that kind of us-and-them thing that we were talking about earlier. It's the either-or. It's “my way or the highway.” It's “this is the only way.” This is how we get to the sunlit uplands. This is how we create this amazing master race, this unification of German peoples that dominates the world and is the preeminent power in the world for the next 1,000 years.

Or it's decay and despair, being crushed by our enemies. Our enemies are the Jews and the Bolsheviks, the communists. What he taps into as well is Frontgemeinschaft and Volksgemeinschaft. There is no direct English translation of Volksgemeinschaft, or indeed Frontgemeinschaft, but in its most basic form it's community: a people's community or a front veterans' community.

So the Frontgemeinschaft is: we are the guys. We're bonded because we were in the trenches. We were in the First World War. We were the people who bravely stuck it out, saw our friends being slaughtered and blown to pieces. We did our duty as proud Germans, but we were let down by the elites, and we were let down by this Jewish-Bolshevik plot. We were stabbed in the back.

The myth of the stab in the back is very, very strong. So we're bound, we're bonded by our experiences of the First World War and the fact that we did what we should and what we could. We didn't fail in what we were doing.

We were failed by our leaders and by the elites. So that's Frontgemeinschaft. Volksgemeinschaft is this sense of national unity. It's a cultural, ethnic bonding of people who speak German, who have a similar outlook on life. Again, that just reinforces the us-and-them, good-and-evil dynamic. It reinforces the black-and-white worldview.

Then you add that to this very simple message, which Hitler is repeating over and over again: Communists are a big threat. Jews are a big threat. They're the enemy. You have to have an opposition in the them-and-us kind of process, and that's what he's doing. People just buy into it. They go, “Yeah, we're together. We're Germans. We're a brotherhood. We've got our Volksgemeinschaft.” So he cleverly ties into that and taps into that, but they're an irrelevance by the late 1920s. By 1928, he's not going to get a deal for Mein Kampf, Part Two. He's impoverished, the party's impoverished, and the numbers are down. They're, at best, an irrelevance, we should say.

He wrote Mein Kampf at this time, when he was in prison. He writes most of Mein Kampf in Landsberg Prison, and then he writes the rest of it in what becomes known as the Kampfhäusl, which is this little wooden hut in the Obersalzberg. You can still see the remnants of that. Unfortunately, there are still little candles and stuff in the woods left by neo-Nazis and what have you, but that's where he wrote the rest of it.

It was Jean-Jacques Rousseau who said, “Man has his greatest force when surrounded by nature.” That was something that Hitler took very much to heart. There was a mentor of his called Dietrich Eckart. Eckart introduced him to the Obersalzberg and the beauty of the southeast Bavarian Alps around Berchtesgaden. That was his favorite place on the planet, and that's where he eventually bought the Berghof with the royalties, it has to be said, from Mein Kampf, which went from being almost pulp to suddenly being a runaway bestseller, unfortunately.

Lex Fridman

Can you actually comment on that? It's a shitty manifesto, as far as manifestos go. I think there's a lot of value in understanding, from a first-person perspective, the words of a dictator, of a person like Hitler, but it just feels like such a shitty manifesto.

James Holland

It's banned in a number of countries. You don't need to, because no one's going to read it—it's unreadable. It's very untidy, very incoherent, and there's no narrative arc, to use a writer's phrase. But it does give you a very clear overall impression at the end of it: The communists and the Jews are to blame for everything.

Lex Fridman

But there's also the component of predicting basically World War II there. So it's not just that they're to blame. He's hungry for war. He thinks that this is the natural state, that we have to have this terrible conflict, and once the conflict's over, Germany will emerge victorious and then there will be the thousand-year Reich.

James Holland

I mean, I'm finding myself, in talking to you, repeating this: It's Armageddon, or the thousand-year Reich. It comes up because it's unavoidable. That's how he's speaking the whole time. It's just this same message over and over and over again.

Lex Fridman

It's a pretty unique way of speaking, sort of allowing violence as a tool in this picture where there's a hierarchy, where there's a superior race and inferior races, and it's okay to destroy the inferior ones.

James Holland

Usually politicians don't speak that way. They just say, “Here's good and evil. We're the good guys.” Maybe we'll destroy the evil a little bit.

Lex Fridman

No, here there's a complete certainty about a very large number of people—the Slavic people—that they just need to be removed.

James Holland

Well, they need to be made an irrelevance. We have to take the land, and if that kills millions of them, fine. Then they can sort of squish their way over to Siberia. It doesn't matter where they go, or wherever they go. I don't care. We just need to populate this land that belongs to the German people.

Lex Fridman

Yeah, because they're the superior people.

James Holland

There's no question that he glorifies violence and war. He's absolutely chomping at the bit. In a way, I think he's a bit disappointed that, in the 1930s, the conquests that he does undertake are also peaceful. In March 1938, he goes straight into Austria—there's the Anschluss. Not a shot is fired. In 1936, he goes into the Rhineland, reconquers it, retakes it from the occupying Allied forces, and not a shot is fired. He takes the Sudetenland; not a shot, or barely a shot, is fired. Then he goes into the rest of Czechoslovakia in March 1939, and again, barely a shot is fired.

It's a bit disappointing. He wants to be tested. He wants to have the wartime triumph. You can see him being frustrated about this in the Munich crisis in 1938. He wants to fight. He's absolutely spoiling for it. He's desperate to go in, all ready and gung-ho. He's built his Luftwaffe, he's got his Panzers, and he's got his massive armed forces. He wants to test them, get this show on the road, and prove it. He is an arch-gambler.

Lex Fridman

Hitler—you make it seem so clear. But all the while, to the rest of the world—to Chamberlain, to France, to Britain, to the rest of the world—he's saying he doesn't want that. He's making agreements. Everything you just mentioned, you went through it so quickly, but those are agreements that were made that he's not going to do that. He does it over and over. He violates the Treaty of Versailles. He violates every single treaty, but he's still holding meetings. So maybe can you go through the lead-up to the war—September 1, 1939? What are the different agreements? What is the signaling he's doing? What is he doing secretly in terms of building up the military force?

James Holland

Yes. Under the Treaty of Versailles, you're allowed only a very, very limited armed force. There are restrictions on naval expansion, restrictions on the size of the army, and restrictions on the weapons you can use. You're not allowed an air force. But he starts doing all this clandestinely. Krupp, which is in the Ruhr and is a big arms manufacturer, is producing tanks elsewhere and parts elsewhere, in the Netherlands, for example, and then shipping them back into Germany. They're doing Panzer training exercises in the Soviet Union at this time. There's all sorts of things going on.

The Luftwaffe is being announced to the world in 1935, but it's obviously been in the process of developing long before that. The Messerschmitt Bf 109 single-engine fighter plane, for example, is created in 1934. They're doing all these things despite the treaty. The truth is, he's just constantly pushing: What can I get away with here?

Of course, Britain, France, and the rest of the world—the rest of the Allies—are all reeling from the Wall Street crash and the Depression as well. Have they got the stomach for this? Not really. Perhaps, on reflection, the terms of Versailles are a bit harsh anyway. Maybe we don't need to worry about it. There's just no political will to fight against what Germany's doing. Then he gets away with it.

He suddenly starts realizing that he can push this quite a long way because no one's going to stand up to him, which is why he makes the decision in 1936 to go back into the Rhineland, which has been occupied by French Allied troops at that point. He just walks in: “Do your worst.” No one's going to do anything because there isn't the stomach to do anything.

Lex Fridman

That was a big step in 1936, remilitarizing the Rhineland. That's a huge step of, “Oh, I don't have to follow anybody's rules, and they're going to do nothing.”

James Holland

He's looking at his military, and he's also looking at the response. One of the things they do is really clever. They get hold of the head of the Armée de l'Air, the French Air Force, and they invite him over. Milch, who is the second-in-command of the Luftwaffe, invites him over: “Come and see what we're up to. We're your European neighbors. We're all friends together,” this kind of stuff. “Come and see what we've got.”

He takes him to this airfield. There's a row of Messerschmitt Bf 109s all lined up, like 50 of them. The head of the French Air Force looks at him and goes, “Gee, that's impressive.” Milch goes, “Well, let me take you to another airfield.” They go off on a circuitous route out of the airfield, a long, circuitous route in the Mercedes. Meanwhile, all the Messerschmitts take off from that airfield and land at the next airfield. “Here's another.” They're all the same aircraft.

The commander-in-chief of the French Air Force goes back to France and goes, “We're never going to be able to beat Germany.”

Lex Fridman

You were alluding to this earlier: How much is this sort of chutzpah, this ability to portray the mechanized Moloch?

James Holland

Yeah, it absolutely cows the enemy. They're increasing the effectiveness of their armed forces purely by propaganda, mind games, and talking the talk.

We might all think the military parades that the Nazis put on looked rather silly by today's standards, but look at what that looks like if you're the rest of the world. You're in Britain, you're still recovering from the Depression, and you see Triumph of the Will. You see some of that footage, and you see these automatons in their steel helmets, and you see the swastikas, and you see hundreds of thousands of people all lined up, shouting “Sieg Heil” and all the rest of it. You're going to think again before you go to war with people like that.

It's also hard to put yourself in the mind of those leaders now that we have nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons have created this kind of cloak of safety from mutually assured destruction. You think, surely, you will not have a million- or two-million-soldier army invading another land—just a full-on, gigantic hot war. But at that time, that's the real possibility.

You remember World War I. You remember all of that. So, yeah, okay, there's a mad guy with a mustache. He's making statements that this land belongs to Germany anyway because it's mostly German-populated. And, like you said, the Treaty of Versailles wasn't really fair. You can start justifying all kinds of things yourself.

Maybe they've got a point about the Danzig Corridor. They are mainly Germans, German-speaking people there, and it's disconnected from East Prussia. I can sort of get it. Maybe they've got a point. Is Poland really a thriving democracy anyway? Not really. By the late 1930s, it's not. It's, to all intents and purposes, a dictatorship in Poland at that time.

It's not right that you just go and take someone else's country. Of course, you can't do that. But you can see why, in Germany, people are thinking they've got a point. You can also see why, in France and Britain, they're thinking, “Do we really care about the Poles? Is it worth going to war over?” But there's bigger things at play by this point.

Lex Fridman

That's the point. Yeah. But before we get to Poland, there is this meeting in September 1938. Chamberlain made 3 trips to meet with Hitler, which culminated in the Munich Conference on September 30, where Chamberlain, Hitler, Mussolini, and Daladier, the prime minister of France, met to discuss the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia without any of the government officials of Czechoslovakia participating. Hitler promised to make no more territorial conquests, and Chamberlain believed him.

James Holland

He chose to believe him, I think, is the point. So Chamberlain gets a very bad press.

Lex Fridman

Uh-oh.

James Holland

Well, no, I'm not—no, it's not really. I just think there's too much retrospective view on this. That's fine, because the whole point of history is that you can look back and judge decisions that were made at a certain point through the prism of what subsequently happened, which, of course, the people making the decisions at the time can't do because they're in that particular moment.

I don't think Chamberlain did trust Hitler, but he wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt. Britain was not obliged to Czechoslovakia at all. France was. France had signed a treaty with Czechoslovakia in 1924, but Britain had not. So there was no obligation at all for Britain to do this.

The only reason why Britain would go to war over Czechoslovakia is because of the threat of Nazism and the ramifications of not going to war with it. But Chamberlain's interesting, because in 1935 he was Chancellor of the Exchequer, and when they started to think, “Okay, we really do need to rearm,” he was very much in favor of substantially expanding and rebuilding the Navy—updating existing battleships and so on—and also developing the Air Force.

There's not really much argument for having a large army, because if you have a large army, you've got to maintain it. Britain is a small place. Where do you put them? You've also got to transport them. That's complicated. You've got to train them. You've got to house them. You've got to feed them. All this kind of stuff. There's a sort of impracticality about having a large army.

Whereas navies are great because you can keep them at sea, and they can be on the water. Air power is viewed in very much the same way that naval power is viewed: we're an island nation, we have global assets, and air power gives us a flexibility that an army doesn't.

He is all for backing the expansion of the Air Force and the Navy in the 1930s. Then he subsequently becomes prime minister and sticks to his guns on that. It is he who enables the Air Force and the Air Ministry to develop the first fully integrated air defense system anywhere in the world.

There is not an air defense system in Poland, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, or France. There is one in Britain. Britain is the only one. Frankly, it pays off big time in the summer of 1940, so you have to give him credit for that.

Britain, interestingly, is also the world's leading armaments exporter in the 1930s, which is amazing when you think everyone complains about the fact that we weren't rearming enough. Actually, we were. We had all the infrastructure there, and we were expanding that infrastructure dramatically. I say “we” only because I'm British.

They were doing that, but in 1938 Britain wasn't ready for war. Now, you can argue that Germany wasn't ready for war either, but Chamberlain was prime minister in a democracy—a parliamentary democracy—where 92% of the population were against going to war in 1938.

There is not a single democratic leader in the world that would go against the wishes of 92% of the population. Now, you could say, “Well, he should have just argued it better and presented his case better,” and all the rest of it. But at that point, there was no legal obligation to go to the defense of Czechoslovakia.

Czechoslovakia was one of these new nations that had been created out of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles. Who was to say that we in Britain were able to judge the rights and wrongs of that? How fantastic would it be to go to war with a nation a long way away for people whom we know very little about, et cetera, et cetera?

I'm paraphrasing his quote, but I'm not saying it was the right decision. I'm just saying I can see why, in September 1938, he was prepared to give Hitler the chance.

Now, I do think he was a bit naive. What he also does is this really interesting thing: he goes over to Hitler's flat and completely ambushes him. He goes to his flat on the afternoon of September 30 and says to Hitler, “Look, I've drawn up this agreement here, and this is to continue the naval agreement that we've already made. By signing this, you are saying that Germany and Britain should never go to war with one another.”

Hitler goes, “Yeah, whatever,” and signs it. Chamberlain comes back, lands at Heston, and waves his little piece of paper—“Peace for our time” and all the rest of it—which obviously comes back to bite him in a very big way.

But it's interesting that when Hitler subsequently goes and moves in, France and Britain decide, in rather the same way that there's been discussion about deciding that large portions of Ukraine should just be handed over to Russia without consulting Ukraine a few weeks ago, that it is incredible that France, Britain, and Italy, with Germany, are deciding that, yes, it's fine for Germany to go in and take the Sudetenland without really consulting the Czechs. It's a similar kind of scenario, really, and it's equally wrong.

But when Germany then goes and takes over the whole of Czechoslovakia in March 1939, that's the bottom line. That's the point where Chamberlain goes, “Okay, I've given him the benefit of the doubt. No more benefit of the doubt. That's it. He's crossed the line.”

So you reinforce your agreement with Poland. You do a formal agreement: “Okay, we will uphold your sovereignty. If you are invaded, we will go to war with you.” That is a ratcheting up of diplomacy and politics in a very, very big way.

That decision to make a treaty with the Poles is not heeded by Hitler, but it's heeded by literally every one of his commanders. It's also heeded by Göring, who is his number 2, the commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe, the president of Prussia, and the second-most senior Nazi. He's going, “This is a catastrophe. This is the last thing we want to be doing: going to war against Britain and, indeed, France.”

Lex Fridman

The Munich Conference is a pretty interesting moment, I would say, in all of human history, because you've got the leaders of these larger-than-life nations at the center of the most dramatic brewing conflict in human history: Chamberlain, Hitler, Mussolini, Daladier. It's interesting when these larger-than-life leaders are in the room together. Is there something that you know about their interactions?

James Holland

Yeah, I think one of the things that's interesting is that Hitler has home advantage, because it's on his turf. To start off with, the first meeting is at the Berghof, his beloved place in the Obersalzberg overlooking Berchtesgaden in the Alps.

So he’s pretty confident because this is my manor, this is my turf. I’m not going to be bossed around by these guys. But Chamberlain, for example, is going there thinking, “I’ve been around the block. No one can teach me anything. I’ve been a politician for ages. I’m not going to be cowed by this sort of Austrian upstart.” So they’re both coming at it with a slight sense of superiority, a kind of conflict.

Interestingly, when you get to the actual meetings at the Führerbau in Munich a couple of weeks later, Chamberlain is cheered by the crowds when his car comes in, when he goes to his hotel, and when he’s moving from his hotel to the Führerbau. There are crowds cheering him, waving Union Jacks, all this kind of stuff. Hitler does not like that at all. Not at all. It puts him on the back foot.

That’s because the German people don’t want war. In the same way that the British people don’t want war, nor do the German people. The difference is that Hitler is a dictator and an autocrat and has the devotion of the people, so he can do what he wants in a way that Chamberlain can’t. Chamberlain’s hands are tied because he is an elected prime minister, an elected political leader, and he’s not head of state.

There is no question that it is Hitler and Chamberlain who are the top dogs in this particular discussion. Daladier takes a back seat. Even Mussolini, although he’s there, doesn’t want war either. He wants to be left alone to do his own thing without anyone getting in the way, but it’s not in his interest to have a European war. So he’s trying to avoid it.

You really see that the alpha males in the room are Chamberlain and Hitler. It’s really interesting because Hitler has this slightly gravelly voice, very pale blue eyes, and such distinct features—a quite long nose. He always said this is why he had his mustache, to disguise the big nose. I was saying to you earlier, before we started recording, that he does have a sense of humor. It’s maybe not one that you and I would tap into, but he does have one.

Whereas Chamberlain sounds like an old man. He’s silver-haired and looks like your archetypal British gentleman, with his rolled-up umbrella, his Homburg hat, and all the rest of it. They’re both caricatures in a funny sort of way. And yet the consequence of these discussions, these great events happening, is that whichever way the Munich Crisis comes out, you’re absolutely going one step closer to war. It’s just whether the war is going to happen next week or a year hence. The Munich Crisis obviously doesn’t stem the inevitability of war at all; it just heightens it.

Lex Fridman

Do you think there are words that Chamberlain should have said, could have said, that would have put more pressure on Hitler, intimidated Hitler more?

James Holland

It’s a really tricky one. It’s such a difficult one because you’re always looking at it through the lens that the enemy has a vote, and you don’t know what that vote is going to be or what it’s going to look like.

There’s no question that Europe, the rest of Europe, is cowed by the impression of military might that the Germans have put out. They certainly fear that Germany is stronger than it actually is. On the other hand, they’re also going, “Germany doesn’t have natural resources. It doesn’t have access to the world’s oceans. It shouldn’t be able to win a war.” So they’re contradicting themselves at the same time.

On the one hand, they’re saying, “Oh, God, you don’t want to take on all those Nazis and all those swastikas and those automaton stormtroopers.” On the other hand, they’re saying, “Actually, Germany doesn’t have much in its basket. It’s got quite a lot of weaknesses, and we should be able to prevail. We’ll just impose an economic blockade and then it’ll be stuffed.”

Britain is not ready to fight a war in 1938, but nor is Hitler, nor is Germany. One is canceling out the other, but it’s very easy to say that in hindsight. At the time, with people digging trenches in Hyde Park in central London, barrage balloons going up over London, children being evacuated from the cities, and 92% of the population not wanting to go to war, you can see why he takes the course he does.

I suppose that’s what I’m saying. I’m not saying it’s necessarily the right decision, but I think it’s an understandable decision.

Lex Fridman

But what about even just on the human level? If I go into a room with a British gentleman versus going into a room with Trump, it feels like it’s so much easier to read and manipulate the British gentleman. Trump-like characters—it seems like Hitler is similar. Churchill is similar. It’s like this guy can do anything. There’s something terrifying about the unpredictability.

James Holland

Yes. It feels like there’s something very predictable about Chamberlain.

But also, one has to take a step back and think about what Britain represents, and therefore what Chamberlain represents, in 1938. Britain has the largest empire the world has ever known. A third of the world is pink, as the saying goes. That saying comes from the atlas of the world, where all British territories are colored pink.

On top of that, Britain has lots of extra-imperial territories as well. There’s this incredible map of global shipping in 1937, with little ant lines of ships going out. One of the strongest ant lines is going down to Argentina and South America from Britain, down past West Africa and through the South Atlantic. That’s because Britain owns most of Argentina. It owns huge farming estates and ranches, the railway system, and many of the port facilities.

You didn’t even need an empire. You just needed the facilities that overseas trade and possessions can give you. Britain not only has the largest navy; it also has the largest merchant navy. It has 33% of the world’s merchant shipping and access to a further 50%—Greek, Norwegian, and Canadian shipping that it can access.

If you’ve got access to more than 80% of the world’s shipping, that puts you in an incredibly strong position. Actually, all sorts of other things have been going on. While Britain might not have been creating a huge army or producing enough Spitfires up until this point, it has also been stockpiling bauxite, copper, tungsten, and huge reserves.

Because Britain has this huge global reach, because it has its empire and its extra-imperial assets, it can strike bargains that no one else can strike. It can go into various countries around the world and say, “I want you to guarantee me, for the next 5 years, every bit of your rubber supply. I will pay over the asking price to secure that.” It’s doing that in the 1930s. So when war comes, it has everything it possibly needs.

Now, you always need more because it’s suddenly turning into a proper, global, long-drawn-out war. But that is a huge advantage.

It is with that mindset that Chamberlain is going into those talks and thinking, “I’m not going to get a war over Czechoslovakia, and who cares about them? But I am going to show Hitler that I mean business.” Hitler is going, “Who’s this stuffy guy with his white hair? I don’t give a toss about him.” He’s coming at it from a completely different perspective.

I think one of the things that’s so interesting, from a dramatic point of view and from a historian’s point of view—or even a novelist’s point of view, in the case of Robert Harris writing his book about these negotiations, which I don’t know if you’ve read, but it’s terrifically good—is the fact that you’ve got 2 men, 2 alpha males, going to those negotiations from totally different perspectives and vantage points.

I think it’s very easy for people today to forget how elevated Britain was in the late 1930s. The gold standard was tied to the pound, not the dollar. Britain was the number 1 nation in the world at that time, and it just was. It’s so diminished by comparison today that it’s hard to imagine it.

One of the interesting things about the historiography, about the narrative of how we tell World War II, is that so much of it has been dictated by the shift in power that took place subsequent to 1945. When people were starting to write these major narratives in the 1970s and ’80s and into the 1990s, they were doing it through the prism of a very different world.

One of the reasons why you have this narrative that Britain was a bit rubbish and hanging on the coattails of the Americans, that all the blood was spilt on the Eastern Front, and that Germany had the best army in the world and was only defeated because Hitler was mad—that traditional narrative emerges through the prism of what was going on in the 1970s and ’80s and the changing world, rather than looking at it through the prism of the late 1930s or early 1940s.

So there is this moment of decision.

Lex Fridman

When do you think—what lesson do you take from that? When is the right time for appeasement, to negotiate, for diplomacy, and when is the right time for military strength, offensive attacking, for military conflict? Where's that line? Where's that thing?

James Holland

Well, I think it probably was when it was. I mean, Poland. Honestly, I'm not sure it would have been the right decision to go to war in 1938. I can't predict, because you can't second-guess how things are going to play out. You just don't know.

But I'm not sure Chamberlain made the wrong decision. I'm not saying he made the right decision. I'm being a bit wishy-washy about this. You could have threatened it more.

Lex Fridman

Imagine Churchill in those same meetings.

James Holland

Yeah, but Churchill also appeases. He appeases Stalin all the time. The idea that Churchill's this big strong man who never appeases and is gung-ho for war is wrong.

Churchill's out of the government at that time. He recognizes that you can't trust Hitler, and he recognizes that Nazism is bad. But because he's out of the government, he doesn't have a window on exactly where Britain is at that particular time in the way that Chamberlain does.

So I suppose what I'm saying is that Chamberlain is better placed to make those decisions than Churchill is. Which, again, doesn't mean that Chamberlain is right and Churchill is wrong. It's just that it's a massive jump to go to war in 1938 when you've got a handful of Spitfires, a handful of Hurricanes, and you haven't got enough. Your air defense system isn't properly sorted at this point.

Your navy is strong, but what's that going to look like? If you do go to war, there aren't going to be armies sweeping into Germany. It's just going to be accelerated industrialization for a year. So even if you go to war in 1938 over Czechoslovakia, Czechoslovakia will not be saved. France and Britain will not be going and invading Germany. That is absolutely not going to happen.

So what's the point? If you're not going to do that, why didn't you accelerate your rearmament thereafter, get your ducks in a row, and then consider it? After all, even in September 1939, they don't really do anything. We talked about the Saar Offensive, which isn't really an offensive at all. It's firing 1 round of machine-gun fire and scuttling back again. They don't even do that then, though. They're still buying time in 1939.

Britain is only just about ready to take on the onslaught of the Luftwaffe in the summer of 1940.

Lex Fridman

Well, nobody's ready for war.

James Holland

No.

Lex Fridman

You always want more than you've got at any time, even when you're winning. But they were really not ready. Even, like you mentioned with Barbarossa, Nazi Germany's really not ready.

James Holland

Not ready. Nobody's really ready except France, I swear. France. France have radios. Fine, but come on. Come on.

When Nazi Germany invades Poland, it's terrible. I also think that if France had gone in with some force, with some British troops as well, that easily could have brought down Hitler. Most of his senior commanders are just thinking, "What the hell is going on? This is a catastrophe."

To a man, even Göring is thinking this is a terrible idea. They are absolutely not convinced. When Hitler does his big talk to his senior commanders, he asks them all to come to the Berghof to brief them about the invasion of Poland.

It's just after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 22. He calls them all to the Berghof and says, "Come in mufti. Come in civilian suits." They all turn up, and he gives them this huge speech and says, "This is the moment. This is the time. This is what we're going to do."

They're all going, "What? You're kidding me. We're going to Poland on August 26? That's the plan? In 2 days' time? Where's the plan? Where's the..." The whole point is that they were emerging and growing militarily, but they were supposed to have all these exercises where they coordinated the ground forces—the Panzer spearhead—with operations in the air with the Luftwaffe. None of that happens.

Poland becomes the proving ground, and they discover that there are lots of things that don't work and lots of things that are wrong. It's flying in the face of all military convention that he does this without any kind of warning.

Even by September 1, after this 5-day delay of last-minute negotiations, the negotiations are thrust upon Hitler by people like Göring, Mussolini, and the Italians, who are going, "Oh my God, don't do this. Don't do this. There's got to be a solution." Hitler is absolutely chomping at the bit.

Lex Fridman

Well, in that case, from a dark militaristic perspective, his bet paid off.

James Holland

Well, except that it ended in ruins in May 1945, with the total collapse of Germany. So you could say the worst decision he ever made was going into Poland in September 1939.

Lex Fridman

Depends where you look at it.

James Holland

But yes, it's successful in that Poland's overrun in 18 days. There are so many counterfactuals here. If you had said to Hitler on April 30, as he's taking the pistol from his holster on his sofa in the Führerbunker, "So, Adolf, September 1, 1939—still backing yourself on that one?" he might have had a different view.

Lex Fridman

The guy's insane and full of bluster, so he probably would have said, "Yeah, do it all over again."

James Holland

Yeah, I'm sure he would have done as well. "The conquest of Poland was not a mistake. The Soviet Union was not a mistake. It's just some of the other people I was let down by—by people not being strong enough."

Yeah. Of course. That's exactly what he'd say: "Wasn't my fault."

Lex Fridman

He might have quietly made some different decisions about Barbarossa. Maybe the timing would be different. Maybe it would be an all-out central thrust rather than splitting into 3.

James Holland

Yeah. Yeah.

Lex Fridman

But he was very sure, it seems like—maybe you can correct me—that Britain and France would still carry on with appeasement even after he invaded Poland.

James Holland

Absolutely. He was completely convinced by it. There was clearly a 10% to 15% level of doubt, but what the heck, he was going to do it anyway.

He ratcheted himself up into this idea that this is the moment. He had to do it now. This is fate. He was 50, and he could be taken out by an assassin's bullet. He had this important life's work that he had to do. There could be no more delay. This was his mission, and it was the mission of the German people.

Either the German people had the will and the spirit to be able to pull it off, or he was wrong and therefore they didn't deserve to be a thousand-year Reich. It was black or white, us or them, either-or. It's the same all the time.

Lex Fridman

Can you tell the story of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939? Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union make an agreement, and that leads us, just like you mentioned, to Poland in a matter of days. How compact everything is is really fascinating.

James Holland

It's a beautiful summer in Europe, the summer of 1939. It's one of those glorious summers when it never seems to rain. It's just sunshine, sunny day after sunny day. It's like that golden summer of 1914 as well, where the sky always seems to be blue and there are fluffy white clouds. But the storm clouds of war, to use that cliché, are brewing.

The Russians have reached out to Britain and France and said, "Come on over. Let's negotiate. Let's see what we can do." There is just no stomach for that at all.

If ever there was a mistake, I think Britain and France should have been a bit more into realpolitik than they were. It was such an opportunity to snooker the Third Reich, and they didn't take it.

In many ways, they saw the westward spread of communism in exactly the same way that the Nazis saw the threat of the westward spread of communism—as something every bit as repellent as Nazism. They didn't want to be getting into bed with these guys. Of course, they had to change tack on that one in the summer of 1941, in very quick order.

That's the whole point about Churchill appeasing Stalin. It's all very well people saying, "Churchill wouldn't have appeased Hitler in the 1930s," but he does appease. He appeases all the time. They missed that opportunity.

The French and British delegation was made up of third-tier commanders and generals going over. It was a shit show—excuse my French—but it was just nonsense that they weren't ready for it. They weren't prepared. The British guy, Admiral Drax, didn't have any authority. The whole thing was a complete joke. It was never going to get anywhere.

Lex Fridman

You tell the story of this quite beautifully, actually. Again, it's such a human story. It seems like Stalin and the Soviets have already made up their mind.

James Holland

But I don't think they have.

Lex Fridman

Wait, wait, wait. I mean, you described quite well that they value in-person meetings.

James Holland

Yes. Chamberlain should have just gone to Moscow. Get on a plane. It’s such a simplistic notion, perhaps, but that could have changed the trajectory of human history right there. I really think it could have. I think that’s a much more grievous mistake than Munich.

Lex Fridman

Why are leaders so hesitant to meet? I’m told now by a bunch of diplomats that there’s a process: first, you have to have these diplomats meet, and they have to draft a bunch of stuff. I sometimes have this simplistic notion: Why not meet? Why not meet? I think there is a human element there, of course, especially when there’s this force that is Hitler.

James Holland

Well, yes, because we humans like to interact, and you want to see people in 3 dimensions. I’m sure that’s why you always, quite rightly, insist on doing your podcast face-to-face, because you want to get the cut of someone’s jib. You want to be able to see them, and you want to see the intonation in their expression, the whites of their eyes, and all that kind of stuff. That just makes a difference, of course, because we’re fundamentally animals, and we want to be sizing people up. It’s much easier to do that when you’re a few feet away from each other than it is on a video screen or through the prism of someone else.

Lex Fridman

Yeah. But there’s also—you see the humanity in others. It’s so much easier to talk shit about others when you’re not with them. Military conflict is the extreme version of that. You can construct these narratives that they’re not human, that they’re evil. You can construct a communist ideology and project onto them the worst possible version of a human. But when you meet them, you’re like, “Oh, they’re just a person. They’re just a person.”

James Holland

Well, it’s the world’s great tragedy that it’s only a few people who want to go to war, and the vast majority want to live happy, contented lives, getting on with their neighbors. It has been ever thus. It’s those few who ruin it for everybody else.

But anyway, to go back to Moscow, back in August 1939, they go half-cocked. They’re disrespectful to the Soviet Union as a result of that, and it gets nowhere. Had they been able to put on a really firm offer there and then to the Soviet Union, the Soviet Union would probably have come in. The big thing is that the Soviet Union said, “This is a big stumbling block.” The Soviet Union said, “Yeah, but we want to be able to march through Poland if we get threatened by Germany.”

Both the British and the French just smell a massive rat there. They’re basically saying, “If we agree to that, what we fear is that the Soviet Union will just march into Poland and go, ‘Yeah, but you said we could,’ and take it.” Which they unquestionably would have done, but it probably would have stopped the World War.

Lex Fridman

They’re willing to appease Hitler. They’re not willing to appease Stalin in that situation.

James Holland

Well, they’re not willing to appease anybody by that stage. That’s the point.

Lex Fridman

Well, they appeased Hitler because they did for the year before, but now there’s a bottom line, which is Poland.

James Holland

So it’s changed. That’s why. But anyway, the bottom line is that there’s a reluctance on the part of the French and the British to negotiate with the Soviet Union because they’re communists. They don’t like them, don’t trust them, worry about what they’re going to do with Poland, and they’re jumping out of the fire into the water. It doesn’t come off, and as a consequence of that, the Soviet Union continues to pursue more wholeheartedly, more vociferously, the opportunities that the Germans are offering, which is this split of Poland, because the Soviet Union wants that part of Poland back in its own sphere of influence, and it doesn’t want to go to war just yet.

The agreement is that they won’t attack each other, essentially. At that point, Hitler’s hands are untied. He no longer has to worry about the threat from the Soviet Union. He has clear plans to go into Poland, and he doesn’t believe that France and Britain are going to go to war over Poland. He’s wrong about that, obviously, but France and Britain, despite going to war with him, still do nothing. So he’s got away with it.

Lex Fridman

Do you think Stalin actually believed that?

James Holland

No. He believed it in the same way that Hitler believed it: that it was a cynical, convenient bit of realpolitik for now. I think the Soviet Union was as determined to get rid of the Nazis as the Nazis were determined to get rid of the Soviet Union. I think whoever fired first was not decided at that point. But I do think that from the moment Hitler takes power in 1933, a conflict between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany is inevitable.

Lex Fridman

So either direction, you think it’s inevitable?

James Holland

Yeah, I think there’s a huge amount of evidence for that.

Lex Fridman

Stalin probably wanted it in 1942 or 1943?

James Holland

Yeah, something like that. They’re doing exercises and building out their armed forces. He’s not ready yet because he knows he’s done the purges, and he’s got to get his army and his armed forces back into shape. So they have this incredibly cynical agreement, but at that point, Hitler’s hands are untied. He no longer has to worry about the threat from the Soviet Union. He has clear plans to go into Poland, and he doesn’t believe that France and Britain are going to go to war over Poland.

Lex Fridman

Who was Churchill, and how did Churchill come to power at this moment?

James Holland

Churchill is this absolutely towering figure in British politics, who was first a minister in the noughties of the 20th century, first of the Liberals and then of the Conservatives. He’s a former Chancellor of the Exchequer. He’s a towering figure, but he’s been in the wilderness because he’s out of favor with the Stanley Baldwin government. He’s out of favor with Chamberlain, but he is this towering figure.

He has been very outspoken as a backbencher, which basically means you’re not a minister, you’re not in the Cabinet, you’re just an ordinary member of Parliament. But you’re also an ordinary member of Parliament who has had ministries of state and who is this towering figure, so he’s listened to in a way that other backbenchers aren’t. He has been saying, “We need to stand up to the dictators. We need to do this. We need to rearm more heavily.”

When war is declared, he’s brought back into the Admiralty, in charge of the Navy, which is Britain’s senior service. Suddenly, he’s there, and what happens is that Britain doesn’t really do anything. It’s very difficult working with France because France is so politically fractured that they can’t make any decisions, and when you can’t make any decisions, you’re just impotent.

Churchill first mentions going into Norway and mining the Leads. The idea is that you’re making life very difficult for the Germans to get iron ore out of Sweden. Their main source of iron ore is up in the northern part of Sweden, in the Arctic Circle. It then goes on a railway through the northern tip of Norway and gets shipped down the west coast of Norway into Germany and into the Baltic.

Churchill suggests in September 1939, “Why don’t we mine the Leads?” The Leads are these passageways out of the fjords in the north into the North Sea. Why don’t we mine those and stop the Germans from taking this? Everyone goes, “Well, yeah, that’s quite a good idea,” but they can’t decide. The French are nervous that if they do that, the Germans will retaliate and bomb France and all this kind of stuff.

No decision is made until April 1940. They go up to start mining the Leads on exactly the same day that the Germans invade Denmark and Norway, so they’re caught off guard. At that moment, it’s seen as a failure of Chamberlain’s government. There’s a mounting realization that, no matter how good or competent he was as a peacetime prime minister, he’s not a wartime prime minister. He hasn’t served in the armed forces himself, and he doesn’t really understand it. It needs a different set of hands.

His government falls on the 9th of May. It becomes inevitable that he’s going to have to resign, and the obvious person to take his place is Lord Halifax, who is in the House of Lords, but you can still be a prime minister. He is, without question, the most respected politician in the country. He’s a former Viceroy of India, and he’s seen as an incredibly safe pair of hands: a man of resolute, sound judgment, and so on.

But he doesn’t want to take it. He feels physically ill at the prospect and doesn’t want this responsibility. He’s also not really a military man. He has a slightly withered hand, which prevented him from doing military service, and he just blanches at this moment. That really leaves only one other figure who could possibly take on this position, and that’s Churchill.

When Chamberlain resigns on the 9th of May and Halifax says it’s not for him, the only person who’s going to slip into that position is Churchill. He becomes prime minister, and he accepts it gladly. He feels like it is his mission in life. This is his moment: cometh the hour, cometh the man.

But he comes with a huge amount of baggage. He’s known as a man who drinks too much, whose judgment hasn’t always been great. He was Chancellor during the time of the General Strike in 1926. He backed Edward VIII during the monarchy crisis, when the king wanted to marry Wallis Simpson, the American divorcee. His judgment has been brought into question, and he was the man who came up with the idea of the Gallipoli campaign, which was an ignominious failure.

There are issues over him. He’s seen as a hothead and a man who doesn’t have the kind of sound judgment of Halifax. The jury is very much out, and I think it’s again one of those things where you have to put yourself in the position of looking at this through the prism of what people were thinking in May 1940.

Yes, he was considered a talented politician, but he was also seen as a loose cannon and by no means the right person in this hour of darkness. It is coincidental that on 10 May 1940, when he takes over as prime minister, he becomes prime minister not through an election but by default, as the head of a new National Government. So it is no longer a Conservative government but a national, cross-party coalition government for the duration of the war, which includes members of the Liberal Party and also the Labour Party, as well as Conservatives. It is by no means certain that he is going to be able to deliver the goods.

It is also coincidental that this is the same day that the Germans launch Case Yellow—Operation Yellow—the invasion of the Low Countries and France. These are tumultuous events, to put it mildly. It is also the case that only a couple of weeks before, Paul Reynaud had taken over as prime minister of yet another coalition government in France from Daladier. Political turmoil is very much the watchword at this time for the Western democracies, just at the moment that the Germans are making their hammer blow into the West.

Lex Fridman

This might be a good moment to bring up this idea that has been circulating recently, brought up by Darryl Cooper, who hyperbolically stated that Churchill was the “chief villain” of the Second World War. To give a good-faith interpretation of that, I believe he meant that Churchill forced Hitler to escalate the expansion of Nazi Germany beyond Poland into a global war. So Churchill is the one who turned this narrow war—Czechoslovakia, Austria, Poland—into a global one. Is that accurate?

James Holland

No, I don’t think it is, not least because the decisions over Poland were made by Chamberlain’s government, when Churchill was out of government. Churchill wasn’t even involved in that decision-making process at the time.

No, I don’t think so. I go back to Britain’s position in the world in 1939. If you say, “We are going to defend the sovereignty of Poland,” and then you don’t, that looks really bad globally. Britain’s prestige would plummet and would lead to all sorts of problems. You are giving carte blanche to dictators to run amok and take whatever territory they want. You are risking a future upheaval of the global order away from democracies and into the hands of dictators.

In the West, people believe in democracy and believe in the advancement of the freedoms of people. To echo the words of Roosevelt in August 1941, they’re aspiring to a world free of want and fear. Now, obviously, there are still some issues with the form that democracy takes in the 1930s. It’s not democratic for everyone. Try saying that if you’re in Nigeria, or India, or whatever, or if you’re in the Black southern states of the United States. But the aspirations are there, and I think that’s an important distinction.

By saying that Churchill is the chief warmonger of the Second World War, I think it is ludicrous. It’s the same thing about the bombing. The detractors of the strategic air campaign always go, “Yeah, but the Germans had the Holocaust. Weren’t the Allies just as bad, killing all those civilians?” It’s like, “No, because the moment Hitler stopped the war, the bombing would stop.” The moment the war stopped in Hitler’s favor, the killing would continue and be accelerated.

Lex Fridman

So, the thing you mentioned initially is the sort of idealist perspective: Britain can’t allow this warmonger to break all these pacts, be undemocratic, murder a large number of people, and conquer territory. That’s idealistic. But if we look at a realist perspective, what decisions would minimize the amount of suffering on the continent in the next years?

One of the arguments that he’s making—I happen to disagree with it, to put it mildly—is that Churchill increased the amount of suffering. Churchill’s presence and decisions. So we’re not talking about an idealistic perspective; we’re talking about the reality of the war, of Stalin, of Hitler, of Churchill, of France, and of FDR. Did Churchill drag Hitler into a world war? Did he force Hitler to invade the Soviet Union? Did he force Hitler to attack Britain?

James Holland

Well, no, because Hitler was always going to invade the Soviet Union unless the Soviet Union invaded Germany first. So that was always going to happen. No one asked Hitler to invade the Low Countries and Norway and Denmark, or to attack Britain. He does that, of course, because he’s not given a free hand in Poland, but there’s no question that Hitler would also have wanted to subdue France, or certainly turn France from a democracy into a totalitarian state as well. I’m absolutely certain about that.

I think there’s pretty definitive evidence. It’s obvious from everything he’s said, from everything he’s written, from everything, everywhere, that he was going to invade the Soviet Union no matter what.

Lex Fridman

Yeah, and France most likely. Yes, also, he would have done a deal with Britain. Britain could have coexisted. So, actually, is there a possible reality—I don’t know, maybe you can correct me on this—where Hitler basically takes all of Europe except Britain?

James Holland

Yes, but then he would have got so strong that he would have turned on Britain as well. The fear is that if you let him do this, then he gets greedy. He wants the next one, then he wants the next one, then he wants the next one, and then he wants to take over the whole world.

That is the fear of the British. That is the fear of the Americans. That’s the fear of President Roosevelt, who’s got a very difficult case on his hands, because he came into power also in January 1933 as president of the United States on an isolationist ticket, with a retrenchment, with a kind of step away from the European old order: it’s time for the Europeans to be on their own.

It all sounds very familiar right now. Suddenly, he’s got to do this gargantuan political volte-face and prepare the nation for war, because he also fears, like Churchill fears, like Chamberlain feared as well, that Hitler’s designs are not purely on Eastern Europe and Lebensraum, but would get ever bigger. I don’t doubt that they were right. I think if he’d prevailed in the Soviet Union, he’d always have wanted more, because his whole concept is the master race.

Lex Fridman

Yeah. I think it should be said that if we measure human suffering, if there was not Britain on the other side, if it was not a two-front war, the chances of Hitler succeeding in the Soviet Union would be much higher—or at least it would be a more prolonged war—and there would be more dead, more enslaved, and more tortured people in all of this.

James Holland

Yes, and ditto if the Allies hadn’t got involved against Imperial Japan. It would have been catastrophic. I mean, 20 to 30 million Chinese were dead anyway. With American and British intervention, what was it going to be in China without that? And elsewhere?

The reason why Japan invades French Indochina, now Vietnam, and Hong Kong, Malaya, Singapore, and Burma is because it’s not winning in China and needs more resources, because it’s resource-poor and America has cut off the tap. So it’s going into these countries to get what it needs: rubber and oil, natural resources, precious ores, and all the rest of it. If it had been unchecked, it would have done so, and then it would have absolutely built up its strength and overrun the whole of China with even more deaths.

I think one of the interesting things about the Second World War is that lots of wars, and why people get involved in them, are extremely questionable. But I think there is a moral crusade to what the Allies are doing that I think is entirely justified.

What I think is interesting also is that as the war progresses, if the Allies are supposed to be a force for good, how come they’re doing so much bad? At what point does doing bad stop you from doing good? At what point are you doing good but also doing bad at the same time? Such as the destruction of cities, the destruction of monasteries on outcrops in southern Italy, the killing of civilians, and the loss of civilians. These are difficult questions to answer. Sometimes they’re also incredibly interesting, and I think that moral component starts to blur a little bit by the middle of the war, by 1943.

It’s easy to have a fairly cut-and-dry war in North Africa, in the deserts of North Africa, where the only people getting in the way are a few Bedouin tribesmen or something. But once you start getting into Europe, or getting into highly populated countries in the Far East, that’s a different kind of fish, because the scale of destruction is absolutely immense.

It is also the job of political leaders to look after and defend their own peoples first and foremost. So what you’re doing is trying to protect your own sovereignty and your own people before you’re protecting other people. That’s what leads to the whole way in which the Western Allies are prosecuting the war: to try and minimize the number of deaths of their own young men as much as they possibly can while, at the same time, winning the war.

And that means bringing lots of destruction to your enemies, but also trying to minimize it. The way you bring lots of destruction to your enemies is by using immense firepower and this concept of “steel, not flesh,” which I mentioned earlier, and technology, so that you don't have to bring too many of your young men to bear and you don't have a repeat of the slaughter of the First World War.

It is really interesting that, in our mind's eye, when we're thinking of the Western Allies in the Second World War, probably the first thing that comes to mind is Americans jumping out of landing craft on Omaha Beach on D-Day, for example. Those are infantrymen. They're the front line—the coalface of that. They're the first people going into the enemy's fire.

We tend to think about guys in tanks, infantrymen with their Garand rifles, machine guns, or whatever. That's what springs to mind. Yet, actually, they're a comparatively small proportion of the army. No more than 14% to 15% of any Allied army is infantry.

Forty-five percent are service corps troops: driving trucks, cooks and bottle washers, and people lugging great big boxes of stuff. That's because, by that stage, the Allies have worked out a way of war. It's what I call “big war”: this concept of a very long tail of logistics, the operational art, making sure that people have the absolute best you possibly can provide, great medical care, huge advances in first aid and medical care for troops, getting them back onto the battlefield, and using firepower, technology, and mechanization to do a lot of your hard yards.

That's the principle behind strategic bombing. If you can go over and bomb and destroy infrastructure, civilians, and households, that makes it much harder for Krupp to make those Panther tanks and Tiger tanks, or whatever it might be, and guns. You're disrupting the transportation system in Germany. You're making life difficult for them to do what they need to do, and that means it's going to be easier for those 14% to 15% of infantrymen who've got to jump out of landing craft to do their job. You're trying to keep that to a minimum.

You'd have to say, broadly speaking, that's a very sensible policy that makes an awful lot of sense. The consequence of that is a huge amount of destruction. Maybe that's what Darryl Cooper's driving at, but no one asked Hitler to invade Poland. That is the bottom line. No one asked Germany to go to war. No one asked Hitler to come up with these ludicrous ideologies.

Lex Fridman

There are complex ethical discussions here, just as you describe, which are fascinating. War is hell, and there are many ways in which it is hell.

Just for a little bit, to steel-man where Darryl Cooper might be coming from: since World War II, the simplistic veneration of Churchill—sort of saying “Churchill good, Hitler bad”—has been used as a template to project onto other conflicts, to justify military intervention. His general resistance, and the resistance of other people like libertarians, for example, to that overly simplistic veneration of somebody like Churchill has to do with the fact that it seems to be used by neocons and warmongers in the military-industrial complex in the United States and elsewhere—using Hitler way too much, using Churchill way too much—to justify invading everywhere and anywhere.

James Holland

I do agree with that. I think oversimplification of anything is a mistake. Life is nuanced. The past is nuanced. It's okay to be proud of certain things, and it's okay to be disgusted by other things. That's absolutely fine.

We have a complicated relationship with our past. It doesn't need to be black and white. Life is not a straight line. Of course, as you know, the Allies make plenty of mistakes in World War II. Overall, I think they made the right calls.

I think one of the things that's really interesting is that the Allies, for the most part, use their resources much more judiciously and sensibly than the Axis powers do, and that's good because that means they prevail.

There are so many lessons from World War II that could have been brought into the history of the last 30 years but weren't. If you decapitate an incredibly strong leader, you get a power vacuum, and if you don't have a solution for that power vacuum, lots of bad elements are going to sweep into it in very short order—which, of course, is exactly what happens in Iraq.

Donald Rumsfeld goes, “We don't do reconstruction well.” You freaking well should do. If you're going to take on this particular challenge, you've got to see it through. That's simply not good enough.

It's not good enough to go into Afghanistan and say, “Okay, we're going to change things around. It's going to be great. All the women are going to have an education. They won't have to cover up their bodies anymore. Anything goes. We love liberalism. It's great. Let's make Kabul into a thriving city once more.” And then suddenly bug out. What's going to happen? You're going to undo everything.

I remember being in Northern Helmand Province back in January 2008. British troops had just taken over an absolute dump of a town called Musa Qala. I remember talking to this Afghan guy. He just had all his willow trees chopped down to make room for a helipad that the Allies wanted, and they put those cages with rubble in them—the protective wall. Is it called HESCO? I think it was called HESCO, anyway.

I said to him, “What do you think about the British being there?” He just shrugged at me, lifted up his hands, and said, “Well, if they stay, great, but they won't.” He said, “I'll tell you what: the Taliban weren't great. They weren't fantastic. But I could leave my wallet, and no one would touch it. I could leave it on a wall for a week. Will they bring that kind of order? Will we have peace here? They've just chopped down my willow trees. Thanks a lot.”

You're seeing a total lack of understanding of the culture and ethnic differences. You're trying to impose a kind of Western-centric view onto a nation that isn't ready for that.

There are ways in which it looked like Afghanistan was starting to emerge and there was a path, and then, just at the critical moment, the West moves out, with catastrophic consequences.

What you have to say, though, is that in the West, post-1945, the rehabilitation of Italy, Japan, and West Germany was really good. The consequence of all that destruction and all that turmoil was thriving, high-producing democracies, which burst forth into the second half of the 20th century and into the 21st century in pretty good order. The lessons of the previous generation from the First World War had been learned, even though the scale of destruction and the displacement of people was unprecedented.

Lex Fridman

In 1939, what was the state of the militaries? What were the most powerful militaries on the world stage at that time?

James Holland

In terms of naval power, Britain, as we've already discussed, and the United States. France has a pretty large navy. Japan has a pretty large navy. Italy has a pretty large navy.

But Italy's navy is by far and away the most modern aspect of its 3 services: air, land, and sea. It doesn't have any aircraft carriers, and it doesn't have any radar. They've got modern battleships and battle cruisers, but without key modern bits of technology.

Lex Fridman

So Italy is really not ready for war.

James Holland

Oh, it's so not. It's so not. Again, both Hitler and Mussolini lack geopolitical understanding. That's because they're so focused on their narrow worldview and view everything through that prism, but they can't see the bigger picture.

Lex Fridman

We should say that Mussolini—maybe you can correct me—but I don't think at any point he wants a war.

James Holland

He doesn't want a war. What he does want is his own new kind of Roman Empire, which extends over the Mediterranean—certainly the eastern part of the Med, half of the Mediterranean—North Africa, all the way down to East Africa, controlling the Suez Canal. That's what he wants.

Lex Fridman

I think he made it clear—I mean, there's always this little-brother-jealous-of-Hitler kind of situation, because he wanted absolute power the way Hitler did, but didn't have it.

James Holland

Doesn't have it. And, yeah, there's a monarchy, often forgotten. It's amazing. So there's always this limit, and Hitler, quite brilliantly, once he gets some power, takes it all completely. He completely emasculates Mussolini.

He likes him, though. It's really weird. Even when Mussolini is about to fall in July 1943, Hitler has a meeting at Feltre, literally just a few days before Mussolini tumbles, and he does that because he likes Mussolini. He likes him as a man and thinks he's being his friend, and he respects him to a certain extent, even though he definitely views himself as top dog. Hitler does, that is.

It's curious because I don't think Hitler particularly likes anyone, really, but he does seem to like Mussolini.

But anyway, the problem with Mussolini is that Italy is very impoverished from the First World War, you know, and that, of course, leads to the rise of fascism and the overthrow of parliamentary democracy, and why Mussolini takes power in the first place. Again, there’s been this terrible disruption, there’s been a financial crisis that leads to people looking at an alternative.

What’s the alternative? Well, Mussolini is going, you know, “We can be proud Italians again.” Lots of chest-thumping, wearing great uniforms, all the rest of it. People kind of think, “Well, you know, I’ll have a piece of that,” and it kind of works. Apparently, the trains work on time under him, and so on and so forth.

But he just gets ahead of himself, you know, and actually, the writing’s on the wall in 1935 when he goes into Abyssinia. Again, these are, by first-world European standards, effectively primitive tribesmen in Abyssinia. They have quite a tough fight there. They do prevail, but it’s not a complete walkover, and they get a bit of a bloody nose at times, which they shouldn’t have done.

They’re just not ready. They don’t have the industry. They’re tied up into the Mediterranean. They don’t have access to the world’s oceans. They do have some merchant shipping, but not a huge amount. They just don’t have what is required.

They’re dependent on Britain for coal. Britain is the leading coal exporter in the world in the 1930s. So Britain’s approach to fascist Spain and fascist Italy has been very much a stick-and-carrot approach. It’s like, “We’ll let you do what you do as long as you stay in your box, and we’ll continue to provide you with supplies and coal and whatever it is you need as long as you don’t go too far.”

That’s why Mussolini is very anxious in 1938 and again in 1939 to be the power broker and not let Germany go to war. But Germany and Italy sign the Pact of Steel in May 1939, where they become formal allies. This is Hitler and Mussolini, Italy and Germany. But it’s always a very unequal partnership right from the word go.

One of the reasons Mussolini signs it is because he fears that Germany has designs on Italy. It’s not because he thinks, “Oh, these guys are great. They’re our natural bedfellows.” It’s so that he can—what it is, it’s a mutually convenient pact whereby Germany gets on with whatever it wants to do up in Northern Europe and Eastern Europe, and Italy is given a free hand to do whatever it wants to do.

They’ll just watch each other’s backs. They have borders—you know, Austria and Italy border one another—and they’ll just do their own thing and kind of help each other out with supplies and stuff. But basically, they won’t—they’ll be their own. It’s a kind of marriage of convenience. They’re never expecting to be fighting alongside each other on the battlefield. Not really.

There is a kind of obligation to do so, but it’s an obligation with no expectation of ever actually happening. From Mussolini’s point of view, the Pact of Steel is just sailing your flag to one particular mast and trying to cover your back. So long as he plays his cards right, he can still get his coal supplies from Britain. He doesn’t have to worry about that. The pact still doesn’t make any difference to that.

The problem for him is that in June 1940, he thinks that France is about to be defeated and that Britain will surely follow. So he thinks, “Ah, I’ve got some rich pickings. I can take Malta. I can take British possessions. I can overrun Egypt. Now is my time.” But he also needs to join the fight before France is completely out of the fight. Otherwise, it looks like he’s a Johnny-come-lately, and he won’t get those spoils because the Germans will go, “Yeah, you can’t have all this stuff. You’ve turned up too late. You need to be in the fight.”

So he does it at what he thinks is the perfect timing. It turns out to be catastrophic timing because, of course, Britain doesn’t exit the fight. Britain is still there. By February 1941, a very, very tiny British army in Egypt has overrun 2 entire Italian armies and taken 133,000 prisoners in North Africa.

Lex Fridman

So you mentioned, in the sea, who were the dominant navies? Who was dominant in the air?

James Holland

In the air, it has to be the Luftwaffe, and it is also the Imperial Japanese, both in the Imperial Japanese Navy and the Imperial Japanese Army. They both have air forces. One of the reasons for that is that the quality of the pilots in Japan is extremely high because it’s so difficult to get to the top position.

You’re going to your frontline squadrons with at least 500 hours in your logbook. To put that into some perspective, a British RAF or Luftwaffe pilot would be joining their frontline squadrons with 150 to 170 hours in the logbook. These guys are disciplined to within an inch of their lives. There are academic tests as well as physical endurance tests. They are the elite of the elite, and they are extremely good.

The problem they have is that there are a good number of them, but there aren’t that many. The Luftwaffe is the largest air force in the world in 1939, but it is already at parity with Britain in aircraft production. The French have a similarly sized air force, but they’re very, very badly organized.

They’re organized into different regions, and one region doesn’t really talk to another. When Case Yellow, the German invasion of the west, starts, France’s air force is spread throughout France and has its own little area. You have one bunch of fighters and bombers in that block in the Marseille area, another block on the Brittany coast, another block around Sedan, and another one there.

Consequently, they’re never able to bring their full strength to bear. Although they’ve both got about 3,500 aircraft on paper and about 2,500 that are fit to fly on any one given day, the Luftwaffe, because it’s the aggressor, can choose how to mass its aircraft, where to attack, and when.

In other words, the Luftwaffe can send overwhelming numbers of bombers and fighter planes and pulverize a French airfield and catch them napping. Because the French don’t have a defense system, they can’t see whether they’re coming. Their only hope is to take off, just stooge around the sky, and hope they bump into some Luftwaffe aircraft. Of course, that’s inherently inefficient, and they get destroyed in penny packets rather than en masse.

The difference with the RAF is that the RAF isn’t organized on an air force basis, where you have each air corps or air fleet with a handful of bombers, a handful of fighters, and a handful of reconnaissance planes. They have different commands. They have Bomber Command, Fighter Command, Training Command, and Coastal Command, and they all have very specific roles.

They’re structured in a completely different way. That’s because they’re an island nation, because they see their role militarily in a different way, and because the rearming that Britain has done in the 1930s is all about defense. It isn’t about aggression at this point, or about taking it to the enemy. It is showing you’re tough, but also, first and foremost, getting your ducks in a row and making sure that you don’t get defeated.

This is the principle behind the world’s first fully coordinated air-defense system: the radar chain, the Observer Corps, the control rooms, and interesting technology such as identification friend or foe, IFF. You have these control rooms, a map table, and a tote board in front of you where you can see what squadrons are airborne and what state of readiness they’re at, whether they’re engaging the enemy. Little lights come on to show you that. You can see weather maps and the cloud ceiling. You can see all of that at a glance.

Then, down in front of you, is a massive map of southern England. You’ve got crews moving plots across it. Through a combination of radar, which picks up a rough idea of what’s coming toward you, and the Observer Corps, you have overlapping Observer Corps stations all over Britain, covering every single inch of airspace over Britain. They’re looking up into the air, seeing how many aircraft there are and at what height they are.

You have a little thing called a parallelograph, which is a piece of equipment that helps you judge altitude. You then ring through that information. It all comes into the control room, along with the information from the radar stations, which is going into a single filter room at Fighter Command headquarters. That information is then pushed straight back out to the sector stations.

This information is being updated all the time. You have a plot, and it looks like it might be enemy bombers, 30-plus, for example. That’s constantly being adapted. As more information comes in, you will change that, and then you can see that actually it’s only 20 aircraft, or 22 aircraft, or whatever.

You’re updating that, and that little figure is put on your plot and moved across, so you can see where they are. Because you can identify your own aircraft, you can then see where they are moving. The guys in the air are also on the radio to ground controllers in these control rooms, and they’re saying, “If you proceed at Angels 18—18,000 feet—on a vector of 150 degrees, you should be seeing the enemy bombing formation any moment now.”

And what that means is that you’re not on the ground when the enemy are coming towards you with their bombers to hit your airfield, which means you’re in the air. All they’re doing is hitting a grass airfield, which you’ve already got bulldozers and diggers and graders and lots of scalpings and earth ready to fill in the potholes. It means you’re good to go.

And it means, as a consequence of all that, when the Germans do launch their all-out assault—Adlertag, Eagle Day—on 13 August 1940, the British are ready. They can see them coming, they know what to expect, and they can anticipate. It means that they’re not being caught with their trousers down on the ground.

As a consequence of that, of the 138 RAF airfields there are in Britain, only 1 of them is knocked out for more than 48 hours in the entire summer of 1940. That’s Manston, on the tip of the Kent coast, which is abandoned for the duration.

So, these are the 2 biggest air forces. The 2 biggest air forces—the Luftwaffe, we should say, the German, legendary, terrifying air force. Maybe they’re slightly believing their own hype. There’s no question about it. The rest of the world is also right: they’ve just had it too easy.

They don’t have ground controllers. They don’t have an air defense system in Germany, because why would you need an air defense system? We’re going to be the aggressor. There’s no scenario where we’ll have to defend the airspace of the Third Reich because we’re on the offensive. They just haven’t prepared it.

So there’s that clash, the Battle of Britain, the clash of air forces. What explains the success of Britain in defending? Well, you and everyone always say, “The Few were the last line of defense against the Nazi hordes,” and all this kind of stuff. It’s all rubbish. They’re the first line of defense.

The second line of defense is the Royal Navy, which is the world’s largest. There is absolutely no chance on Earth that a German invasion force made up of Rhine river barges—1 out of every 3 is motorized and the other 2 aren’t—is ever going to get successfully across the English Channel. Even if they did, they would be repulsed. There’s just no chance.

It’s often forgotten that while the Luftwaffe is coming over and bombing Britain every single day, so is the RAF going over and bombing Germany. One of the problems that the Germans have is that these bombers need fighter protection. Fighter planes are there to protect the bombers, and they don’t have much fuel.

The Messerschmitt Bf 109E, the Me 109E model of 1940, is the mainstay of the German fighter force in the summer of 1940. They don’t have much fuel, so they need to conserve it, which means they need to be as close to Britain as they possibly can. That’s why the majority of them are all on airfields hastily created in July 1940 following the fall of France, in the Pas-de-Calais, which is the closest point, where the Channel is narrowest, and also in northern Normandy. That’s where they’re flying from.

What that means is that even if you’re completely rubbish at bombing—which the British are in 1940; they haven’t developed those navigational aids that create untold accuracy by the end of the war—you can barely miss. If you go over to the Isle of Wight, or over to the Pas-de-Calais, it’s literally just 1 huge, great hub of fighter airfields.

Consequently, every single German squadron, which is only 12 airplanes strong on establishment and very often even fewer than that, always has to leave 2 airplanes behind to defend its own airfield.

It’s really interesting when you look at prisoner-of-war statements from Luftwaffe aircrew that have been downed. They’re all bugged at a holding place called Trent Park. You can see the transcripts of these conversations. They’re all going on about how annoying it was that the RAF were over every night and they couldn’t sleep, and that if only they would just shut up and leave them alone and not bomb them.

This is just part of the narrative of the Battle of Britain that’s completely left out. It’s always the stock image, you know, the plucky few against the Nazi hordes and all the rest of it. It’s a complete misnomer.

By that time, aircraft production in Britain is massively outpacing the Germans. The best ratio that the Germans achieve in 1940 is in July 1940, when the British produce 496 new Hurricanes and Spitfires, single-engine fighters, and the Germans only produce 240 single-engine fighters. That’s the best ratio. The British are outproducing the Germans 2 to 1.

What that means is that by the end of October 1940, when the Battle of Britain is officially designated as being over, the single-engine fighter force of the Luftwaffe is less than 200, from 750 or whatever it was at the beginning of July. Whereas the British fighter force had been 650 or whatever at the beginning of July, it’s now well over 750. Britain is outproducing the Germans by a massive degree, and that continues. That’s a ratio that just increases as the war progresses.

Britain produces 132,500 aircraft in the Second World War. America produces 315,000.

So why is there this legend of the Luftwaffe? Because it’s the spearhead of the Blitzkrieg. It has to do with the Blitzkrieg. The Luftwaffe becomes the bogeyman of the Third Reich. They’re blamed for everything, but that’s because they’re completely abused.

They’re the only part of the Third Reich’s armed services—the only part of the Wehrmacht, the Wehrmacht being the Navy, the Army, and the Air Force—that is in constant use the whole time, or constant abuse, I should say.

In Britain and America, they rotate their pilots really, really carefully. By the end of 1943, you would have the 8th Fighter Command, for example, part of the Mighty Eighth, the 8th Air Force operating in Britain. In a squadron that would have 16, you would never have more than 16 airborne from a squadron at any 1 time. You would have 40 to 45 pilots to service 16 in the air, and a similar number of aircraft.

By that stage of the war, by 1943, a young fighter pilot coming to a Thunderbolt squadron or a Mustang squadron, for example, at the end of 1943 or the beginning of 1944 would have 350 hours of flying, because you can train in America—in Florida or California or Texas or wherever. You can process many, many more people because the training is much more intense and you’ve got clear skies.

It’s not a question of, “We’d like to take you out, Fritz, this morning, but it’s a bit cloudy, and the RAF are over, or the US Air Force are over, so we can’t fly today.” In Germany, pilot training and aircrew training are constantly being interrupted by the war, by shortage of fuel, by inclement weather, et cetera, et cetera.

In America, you have none of those problems. Britain, because of its global reach, also has training bases in what was Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe; in South Africa; and in Canada as well. You’re able to process these guys much better. You’re able to give them more training, so when they come, they’re the finished article as pilots.

They’re not the finished article as, say, a bomber pilot or as a fighter pilot, but that’s okay because you join your squadron of 40 other guys, with 16 airborne. The old hands take you up a few times.

So you arrive at, let’s say, some airfield in Suffolk, in East Anglia, in England, and you’ll have 10 days to 2 weeks acclimatizing and getting used to it. The old hands will put you through your paces and give you some tips. You can pick their brains while you’re having some chow and listen in on some briefings.

Then the first mission you do will be a milk run over to France, where the danger is pretty minimal, and you can build up your experience. By the time you’re actually sent over on a mission to Berlin or Bremen or the Ruhr or whatever, you’re absolutely the business.

Qualitatively and quantitatively, you are just vastly superior to anything the Luftwaffe has got. The Luftwaffe, by that stage in 1944, has new pilots coming to frontline squadrons with less than 100 hours in their logbooks—90 or 92 hours, something like that. It’s not enough, and they’re just being flung straight into battle and getting absolutely slaughtered.

Also, because their machines are quite complicated, there are no 2-seaters, really—no 2-seater trainers. The first time you’re flying in your Focke-Wulf 190 or your Messerschmitt 109, it’s this horrendous leap of faith, which you, as a young, bright Luftwaffe fighter pilot, know you’re not ready for. It can bite you.

Something like a Messerschmitt 109 has a very high wing loading, so it’s very maneuverable in the air, but it’s got these tiny wings. It’s got this incredible torque, this Daimler-Benz DB 605 engine with a huge amount of torque, and it just wants to flip you over.

If you’re not used to it, and it’s got a narrow undercarriage as well, you could just crash. So, in the first couple of months of 1944, they lose something like 2,400 aircraft in the air and pilots, and about 3,400 are accidents.

Lex Fridman

So, it has to do with training, really. Yeah, not training enough.

James Holland

It's training and resources and supply. The Second World War, more than any other conflict, is a war of numbers. There are differences—decisions that generals can make. There are moments where particular brilliance and bravery can seize the day, take the bridge, hold the enemy at bay, or whatever.

But ultimately, you're talking about differences which might make a month's difference, 6 months' difference, maybe even several years' difference. Ultimately, there's a certain point in the Second World War where the outcome is absolutely inevitable, because the guys that lose can't compete with the numbers that the guys who are going to win have. In that sense, you could think of World War II as a battle of factories.

Lex Fridman

Yes. What does it take to win the battle of factories—to out-manufacture the Allies in military equipment?

James Holland

It's efficiency, really.

Lex Fridman

I was thinking, let's take the example of the Sherman tank, for example—the mainstay of the Western Allied forces, and a fair number of them sent to the Soviet Union as well, for that matter. I think you've said it doesn't get the respect it deserves.

So, the Sherman tank has the 75-mm main gun, which is a sort of medium-velocity gun that fires a shell at around 2,000 feet per second, compared to the notorious, infamous German 88-mm gun, which can fire at around 3,000 feet per second. On paper, a Tiger tank coming around the corner and a Sherman tank coming around the corner should be no match at all.

The Tiger tank is 58 tons. It looks scary, and it is scary. It's got a massive gun and really thick armor. The Sherman tank doesn't have as thick armor, and it doesn't have a gun that's as big. It should be an absolute walkover.

And yet, at about 5:30 p.m. on Monday, June 26, 1944, a Sherman tank came around the corner of a road called Rue de Mouen, in the little village of Fontenay-le-Pesnel in Normandy, came face-to-face with a Tiger tank, and won. How does this happen?

James Holland

Well, I'll tell you how it happened. The commander of the Sherman tank was experienced and had one up the spout. What I mean by that is he had an armor-piercing round already in the breech. As soon as he saw the Tiger tank, he just said, “Fire.”

That armor-piercing round did not penetrate the Tiger tank. It was never going to. But what it did do was hit the gun mantlet, which is a bit of reinforced steel just where the barrel is entering the turret. That caused spalling, which is little shards of molten metal that then hit the driver of the Tiger tank in the head.

He was screaming, “Gott im Himmel,” or whatever, and couldn't really see. The moment they got hit, the commander of the Tiger tank retreated into the turret of the Tiger. The moment you retreat into a turret, you can't see. You can see because you've got periscopes, but your visibility is nothing like as good as it is when you've got your head above the turret.

Immediately after that, the armor-piercing round from the Sherman tank was followed by a number of high-explosive rounds, which are rounds that detonate. They have a little primer charge, and then there was a second charge, which creates lots of smoke. In the first 30 seconds, 10 rounds from that Sherman tank had hit the Tiger tank before the Tiger tank had unleashed a single round itself, and the crew then surrendered.

You didn't need to destroy the Tiger tank. You just needed to stop it operating. If it hasn't got a crew, it's just a chunk of metal that's inoperable. That's all you need to do.

What that tells you is that experience counts, and training counts. The agility of the Sherman tank also counts. It's a smaller shell, therefore it's easier to manhandle, which means you can put more in the breech quicker.

There are features on a Sherman tank, like the fact that it's the first tank to have a gun-stabilizing gyro, which means it's more effective on the move. There's also an override switch on the underside of the turret, so that the commander, if he just sees something out of the corner of his eye, can immediately start moving the turret before the gunner, who is down in the belly of the turret, can react.

There are many different factors, but the main fact of all is that there were 1,347 Tigers built. There were 49,000 Shermans. So, that means there were 36 Shermans to every single Tiger.

Lex Fridman

You actually have an incredible video. You talk about this a lot, from different angles, about the top 5 tanks and then the bottom 5 tanks of World War II. I think—was it the Tiger that made both the top 5 and the bottom 5?

James Holland

The problem with a Tiger tank is it's really huge.

Lex Fridman

We should say that you keep saying “the problem,” but one of the pros of the Tiger tank is that it's very huge. The psychological-warfare aspect of it is terrifying.

James Holland

Yes. I don't know what the other pros are. I mean, I guess the 88-mm high-velocity gun and all the rest of it is pretty fearsome, but there are pragmatic problems. The big problem is the Germans are incapable of mass production on a scale that the Americans could do. Frankly, even the British could do it. They're just not in that league.

The reason they're not in that league is because they're in the middle of Europe. They don't have access to the world's oceans. They don't have a merchant fleet. They can't get this stuff. It hasn't gone terribly well in the Soviet Union. They can't process it, and they're being bombed 24 hours a day.

All their factories are having to split them all up, and that is inherently inefficient, because you're then having to move different parts around. You're then having the whole process of having to travel from one place to another to get stuff. You haven't got much fuel.

The consequence of that is that you think, “Okay, we can't mass-produce, so let's make really brilliant tanks.” But they've lost sight of what a really brilliant tank is. To their eyes, “really brilliant” is big, scary, with a big gun and lots of armor.

Actually, what conflict in World War II shows you is that you need more than that. You need ease of maintenance, and you need reliability. The problem with having a bigger tank is that the maintenance equipment is more complex. You need a bigger hoist, which then means you need a bigger truck, which then uses more fuel.

For example, the Tiger tank is so big that it doesn't fit on the loading gauge of the European railway system. So, they have to have different tracks to roll onto the wagons that will then transport them from West Germany to Normandy. Then they have to take them off, take off the tracks, put on the combat tracks, move them into battle, and hope that they don't break down.

The problem is, when you start the war, Germany is not very automotive, and you've only got 47 people for every motorized vehicle in Germany, compared to 3 in the United States or 8 in France. So, you've got lots of people who don't know how to drive. That also means you haven't got lots of garages and mechanics and gas stations, and so on.

You're then creating an incredibly complex beast, but you want that complex thing to be as simple as you possibly can make it. That's the beauty of the Sherman tank. All those guys in America are used to driving stick cars. There are 3 people for every automobile, and that includes the old and children. Almost every young man knows how to drive.

When you get into a Sherman tank, it's got a clutch, it's got a throttle, and the brakes are the steering mechanism. The clutch is where you would expect the clutch to be. It's got a manual shift. You put your foot on the clutch, shove it into second gear, and off you go—or reverse, or whatever.

It literally couldn't be easier. Anyone who can drive a stick car could drive a Sherman tank. Seriously, not everyone can drive a Tiger tank. It's incredibly complex. It really, really is, and that comes with a whole host of problems.

Of course, you don't have the numbers. You don't have the numbers. You've got 1,347 of them. You've got 492 King Tigers, which are even bigger. At a time when you're really short of fuel and really short of absolutely everything, those shells are huge and harder to manhandle.

There are weird little things that the Germans do. For all their design genius, the loader is always on the right-hand side. In the 1920s and 1930s, children were taught to be right-handed. You weren't allowed to be left-handed, so you were right-handed. You want to be on the right-hand side of the gun, so you can take the shell from your right and swivel it into the breech from your right side.

But the loader in a Jagdpanzer or Panther or a Tiger is always on the right-hand side of the breech, which ergonomically makes no sense whatsoever. Why do they do this? I've never found an answer to this. There are all these little things.

As a soldier coming up against a Tiger tank—you’re an American GI and you're coming up against a Tiger tank—you don't care about the fact that it's difficult to maintain or the problems involved in trying to get it to the battlefield. All you care about is this monster in front of you. It's squeaking and clanking away, it's incredibly scary, and it's about to blow you to bits.

That's all you care about, and quite understandably so. But those who are prosecuting the war at a higher level, and historians who subsequently come and look at all this stuff, do need to worry about all these things.

I remember the name Georg Thomas, the architect of the Hunger Plan. I found the minutes of this meeting, which I think was either on 4 December or 5 December 1941. It was just before the Red Army counterattacked outside Moscow in the winter of 1941, and it was a meeting about weaponry. This is a verbatim quote. He says, “We have to stop making such complete and aesthetic weapons.” In other words, we had consciously been building overengineered and aesthetically pleasing weapons up until this point, and they sort of half-manage it, but don’t quite.

We could probably talk for many hours about each of these topics.

Lex Fridman

We could talk for 10 hours about tanks.

So, like I said, we could probably talk for many hours about each of these topics, but let’s look at some of the battles, and maybe you can tell me which jumps out at you. I want to talk to you about the Western Front and definitely talk about Normandy. But there was the Battle of Midway in 1942, which was a naval battle. There’s the Eastern Front—Stalingrad, probably the deadliest battle in human history. Then there’s the Battle of Kursk.

James Holland

Yeah.

Lex Fridman

Which is a tank battle—the largest tank battle in history, probably the largest battle period in history: 6,000 tanks, 2 million troops, 4,000 aircraft.

James Holland

Mhm.

Lex Fridman

And then that takes us also to the Battle of the Bulge and Normandy and the Italian campaign that you talk a lot about. What do you think is interesting to try to extract some wisdom from before we get to Normandy? Do you find, as a historian, the Battle of Kursk or the Battle of Stalingrad more interesting? Stalingrad is often seen as the turning point.

James Holland

Well, I think so. It’s really interesting. They get through 1941. Barbarossa doesn’t happen as the Germans hope it will. The whole point is to completely destroy the Red Army in 3 months, and that just doesn’t happen.

I think you can argue, and argue convincingly, that by, let’s say, the beginning of December 1941, Germany is just not going to win. It just can’t. Let me tell you what I mean by that. If you take an arbitrary date, let’s say 15 June 1941, Germany at that moment has 1 enemy, which is Great Britain, albeit Great Britain plus the Dominions and Empire. Fast-forward 6 months to, let’s say, 16 December. It’s got 3 enemies: Great Britain, the Dominions and Empire, the USSR, and the USA. It is just not going to win. For all the talk of wonder weapons and all the rest of it, it just isn’t going to. It has lost that battle.

Having said that, the Soviet Union is still in a really bad situation. It is being helped out hugely by supplies from the United States and from Britain—unprecedented amounts of material being sent through the Arctic or across Alaska into the Soviet Union at that time. It is absolutely staggering how much Roosevelt and Churchill commit to trying to stem the flow in the Soviet Union.

For all the announcements and pride that the Soviet Union has about moving factories to the other side of the Urals—which they do in 1941—huge amounts are overrun intact by the Germans in the opening stages of Barbarossa. There are colossal losses. The grain has gone, coal has gone, entire factories have gone, and steel production goes down by about 80% in the Soviet Union in 1941 and into 1942.

So, in 1942, despite the vast numbers of men they have at their disposal, they’re still in a really bad way. They create 80 new divisions in the second half of 1941, for example. Britain never has 80 divisions in the entire Second World War. A division is, as a rule of thumb, 15,000 men.

That is because of Stalin’s meddling, the woeful state of the Red Army in 1941, and so on, which we’ve already touched upon. In 1942, the Soviet Union is still in a really bad way, but Germany is in a really bad way, too. It’s the attrition it suffered in 1941; it’s whittling itself to death in 1941.

It’s having these huge, great encirclements, like the encirclement of Kiev in September 1941, capturing the best part of 700,000 additional Red Army troops. But in the process of doing that, it is constantly being attrited, both in battle casualties and in mechanical casualties. It just can’t cope. The scale is just too big. With every moment, ultimate victory slips away from the German forces.

So Hitler’s personal handling of the battle increases. You can say what you like about him, but he just hasn’t had the military training to do that. He might have amazing attention to detail. He might have an enormous capacity to remember units and where they are on a map. But he was only a lance corporal in the First World War. He’s never been to staff college. He might have read lots about Frederick the Great—I’ve read lots of history, but that doesn’t mean to say I’d be a competent field marshal.

He is not the right person for the job at all. He micromanages, and he looks at figures and doesn’t understand what it’s like at the actual front, at the coalface. He is stifling the very thing that made the German army effective, which is the ability to give commanders at the front the freedom on a long leash to be able to make decisions—battle-command decisions. He’s taken that away from them.

So he’s basically making them go into battle with decreasing amounts of supplies and firepower, and with one hand tied behind their back in terms of the decision-making process. That is not a good combination.

The other problem is that he decides, rather than going for Moscow in 1942, to go for the oil fields. Basically, there’s a kind of cooling-off period in the winter because of the conditions. But everyone knows—the Soviet Union knows, the Red Army knows—that the moment spring comes, there’s going to be another major offensive in the summer. That is absolutely as certain as day following night.

The problem the Germans have is that they just don’t have enough. They have less than they had when they launched Barbarossa the previous year. The Soviet Union has more. It is better prepared. It knows what’s coming now. It’s learning some of the lessons and starting to absorb them. Stalin, coincidentally, is pulling back from his very tight leash, while Hitler is doing the opposite and increasing his micromanagement and control freakery.

What Hitler decides is that rather than going for Moscow, he’s going to go for the oil fields. This is absolutely insane, because what’s going to happen when they get to the oil fields? Does he really think the Soviet Union is going to let those oil fields come into German hands intact? Even if they do get them intact, what are they going to do with that oil?

Oil needs to be refined. Where are you going to refine it? They don’t have any—or they don’t have many—oil refineries. How are you going to ship that oil to where you need it to be, to the factories in the Third Reich, process it into gasoline and diesel, and then get it to your U-boats, your tanks, and your armored units? How are you going to do that? How do you transport it from the Caucasus, which is a long, long way away from Berlin? How are you going to do that?

There are no pipelines. There are only some pipelines, and they’ve been built with American money and American engineering. They’re going backwards toward the Urals, not forwards. They have no more rail capacity whatsoever. They just don’t have the oil tankers.

It is absolute la-la land. It’s incredible that, when you look at the detailed literature that the Germans have, no one is asking this question in the spring and summer, or early summer, of 1942. No one is asking the logistics question in particular: “Okay, it’s great that we’re going to go to the Caucasus and get all this oil, but then what?” No one is asking that question, nor is anyone asking how you provide resources and feed the soldiers and all that kind of stuff.

So, first of all, they get distracted by going into the Crimea and say, “Well, we’ve got to do that first.” They have to get Sevastopol and the Crimea, which they do. Then they have to push on, and suddenly looming in front of them is Stalingrad, on the banks of the Volga.

This industrial city, which has Stalin’s name—Hitler goes, “Okay, what I’m going to do now is split my forces, so half of you can go south toward the Caucasus, and the rest of you can confront Stalingrad.” Von Bock, who’s the commander, just goes, “That’s nuts. That makes no sense whatsoever. You’re splitting the mission.” So he fires him.

Suddenly, they get into this assault on Stalingrad, and it becomes this sort of street fight. Street fighting is the worst kind of fighting. The reason why the Israelis have just blown everything up in Gaza is because otherwise you can’t see. You need a field of fire. Fighting in a built-up area is horrendous.

Lex Fridman

Yeah. To clarify, we’re talking about urban warfare—door-to-door, building-to-building.

James Holland

It's incredibly difficult, and home advantage is colossal in this instance. Of course, it's piping hot when they attack in kind of August into early September, and then it suddenly gets very, very cold. At the same time, American mechanization—and slightly British mechanization, but primarily American trucks—enables Zhukov to plan this great pincer movement.

The Russians will hate me for saying this, and I probably will get a whole load of bots on the back of it, but the truth is, it is not the street fighting that destroys the Sixth Army. It is the encirclement, the subsequent encirclement. The Germans have been sucked into this street battle in Stalingrad. They cannot give up. They cannot back down. They cannot pull out. They've got to destroy this city.

Meanwhile, while their backs are turned and while most of their forces are going off to the Caucasus on a wild goose chase for absolutely zero oil, incidentally—and they never get remotely close to Baku—this huge pincer movement is being planned. It is only possible through mechanization from the United States. That is the big turning point, because from that moment onwards, the Germans are on the back foot. They're basically going backwards.

There are small counterattacks. There is obviously the Kursk salient, for example, but it's game over. The catastrophe of the final surrender obviously happens at the very beginning of February 1943. The writing's on the wall at the end of 1942, by November 1942, when the 2 Soviet fronts meet up. Then there is no possible chance of escape for the Sixth Army. They are consigned. They are toast.

At the same time that is happening, disaster is unfolding in North Africa because Hitler has insisted on massively resupplying the Mediterranean theater. The problem there is that the amount of equipment lost in North Africa is greater than it is at Stalingrad. I don't think you could argue that psychologically, Tunis is a greater loss than Stalingrad. It absolutely isn't, but you have to see them in tandem: this is 2 fronts, the Eastern Front and the southwestern front. This is the first time that the Americans have been on the ground against Axis forces, and they lose big time.

The Allies become masters of the North African shores on May 13, 1943, and it is a catastrophe. In that time, 2,700 Luftwaffe aircraft have been destroyed over North Africa between November 1942 and May 1943, and overall in the subsequent summer as well. It's really interesting: the Luftwaffe loses 4,446 aircraft between June and October 1943. This includes the Kursk battle, which takes place in July 1943. In that period, the Luftwaffe loses 702 aircraft over the Eastern Front, but 3,744 aircraft over the Mediterranean.

I think one of the lessons about studying the Second World War is that one has to be careful not to assign strategic importance to boots on the ground. It can be of great strategic importance, but not necessarily. No one would argue, for example, that Guadalcanal is not an absolutely game-changing battle in the Pacific War, and yet the number of troops compared to what's going on on the Eastern Front, or even the Western Front, is tiny in comparison.

It is absolutely true that the most German blood is lost on the Eastern Front, but that doesn't mean to say that it's more strategically important than the Western Front. It's not saying that the Western Front is more strategic either. It's just that you have to be balanced about this. The psychological blow of Stalingrad is immense, and you cannot belittle that.

Lex Fridman

I mean, there's the—we went over it really fast—but there is a human drama element. But when we're talking about the operational side, the material loss of a battle is also extremely important to the big picture of the war. We often don't talk about that because, of course, with war, the thing to focus on is the human drama of it, because we're humans.

James Holland

I also think what's interesting is the Nazi high command's response to Stalingrad, which is not to go, "We're screwed." It's to double down. Goebbels, for example, gives his infamous speech at the Sportpalast in the third week of February 1943, where he goes, "Are you ready for this? This is now total war. The war is coming. This is a fight for survival. We're all in it together. You are in this as well. Every single one, every single German—this is a fight for survival, and we are now in total war."

Everyone is just so depressed by this. They realize that they are going to reap what they have sown, because everyone knows what's been going on on the Eastern Front. During the first part of the war, the Germans have loads and loads of cameras. They're really into photographing everything, taking cine footage of everything. It's all part of recording the greatness of the Reich and the triumphs of the Reich. They want it recorded.

All this stuff is made very, very cheaply, a bit like the radios, so there are lots of them, and people are sending it all back. The people who are developing the stuff are all seeing it, people are talking about it, and then it's being sent to families and they're all seeing it. They're seeing pictures of Jews being rounded up and beaten, Ukrainian partisans being executed, and villages being torched. Everyone knows. They all know.

Lex Fridman

This whole idea is, did they really know what was going on?

James Holland

Yes, they do know what's going on, to a lesser or greater detail. Of course, there are some people who don't, a bit like people know about the news today. Some people do, some people don't. I never read a newspaper. I never listen to the news. So you have that, of course, but it is widely understood and widely known that really brutal things have been going on in the East.

Troops are coming back utterly traumatized by what they have taken part in and what they have witnessed—the kind of unspeakable brutality. This is war on a completely different level from anything that's been seen in recent years.

Lex Fridman

We should mention that the Western Front and the Eastern Front are very different in this regard.

James Holland

Yes. A lot of the Holocaust by bullets, and the Holocaust with the concentration camps and the extermination camps, is not in Germany and is not on the Western Front. It's in Poland and in the Soviet Union.

But don't forget that even Auschwitz, for example, is part of the new Reich. It is part of an area that has been absorbed into Germany. As far as they're concerned, this is no longer called by its Polish name. It's now called Auschwitz, which is a German name. It is part of Germany, and there are German people moving there into this Aryan model town. They all know exactly what's going on.

Lex Fridman

You, by the way, have a nice podcast series of 4 episodes on Auschwitz: the evolution of the dream of a model town that becomes a work camp, then becomes an extermination camp, and a big Buna factory for IG Farben, which never produces a single bit of rubber. This is something I would have to dive deep into. There's a book you've recommended, *KL*.

James Holland

Yes, it's just called *KL*. KL is concentration camp in German: K is for Konzentration, and L is for Lager. It's an exhaustive book, and I'm full of admiration for him for writing it, because of how difficult it must have been.

I was very depressed doing that work on Auschwitz, that deep dive. I found the whole thing utterly dispiriting. I've been there a few times, and it's ghastly. How he wrote a whole book on it, I don't know.

Lex Fridman

I think in the details, there are 2 ways to look at the Holocaust. One is *Man's Search for Meaning* by Viktor Frankl, sort of this philosophical thing about how a human being can confront that and find meaning, and what the human condition looks like in the context of such evil.

Then there is the more detailed question: how do you actually implement something like the Final Solution? You have this ideology of evil implemented, and at the fine detail, what are the different technologies used? What are the different hierarchies of humans in a camp? How do they function? What's the actual experience of the individual person who shows up at a camp?

Just get into the details. In those details, I think there's some deep, profound human truth that can emerge: the mundane, one step at a time, is how you can achieve evil.

James Holland

Yes, so you can get lost in the mundane. It's the banality of evil. It's incredible.

I think what is so completely horrific is that half of the 6 million were killed by bullets at the back of the head. The reason they stopped doing that, and wanted to stop doing that, was because the perpetrators were finding it so traumatic.

Himmler goes and visits an execution in Ukraine—or maybe he's in the Baltic states; I can't remember where he goes—but he witnesses some in the summer of 1941. He thinks, "Oh, that's horrible. They don't have to do that. I don't want my men having to do that. We've got to find a more humane way of doing it."

When you talk about a more humane way of doing it, that's humane for the executioners, not for the victims, because trust me, Zyklon B is not a nice way to go. It basically bursts all the capillaries in your lungs.

It's extremely painful, and you can no longer breathe, and it can take up to 20 or 25 minutes. For some people, it can take a couple of minutes. But all of those who are standing naked in that gas chamber are, first of all, extremely humiliated by this process. Then there's a sudden realization that they're not having a shower. They're actually being gassed, and they're all going to die.

Imagine what you're thinking as that process is happening. You might be the first, but even the first person is going to know, “I can't breathe, and I'm dying.” Everyone else is going to see the first few dying and then realize that this is what's going to happen to them. And you've got those minutes—sometimes many minutes—where you've got to contemplate that in extreme pain and panic. Just think about how cruel that is while being humiliated all the way through.

And so the inverted-commas “humanity” of the gas chambers is anything but. It's disgusting. And the fact that people could do this is just beyond belief. Then there's the fact that you are taking your Jewish prisoners and getting them to cut off all their hair and pull out the teeth of the dead before you put them on a lift and incinerate them.

If you go to Auschwitz now and you go to the collapsed, blown-up gas chambers, which the Germans destroyed before the Russians overran them in January 1945, you can still see some of the ash ponds. There are bits of bone still there from the ash. It's just utterly repulsive.

And imagine arriving on that train after that incredibly long journey, where you've had no comforts whatsoever. Again, you've had humiliations and privations—the privations you've had to suffer as a result of having to defecate in a bucket in the corner in front of other people. It's just horrendous.

And then you get there bewildered, and immediately your kids are taken away from you. Or you're a husband and wife who've been married 20 years, and you're separated just like that, sent off into different groups, straight to the gas chambers. The scale of cruelty is so immense. It's hard to fathom.

And the thing that I find really difficult to reconcile—and this is where I think the warning from history is important—is that Germany is such an amazing nation. It's the country of Beethoven and Strauss and Goethe, of incredible art and culture, and some of the greatest engineers and scientists who have ever lived. And look how quickly it flipped into the descent of unspeakable inhumanity, which manifested itself in the Holocaust and the gas chambers, and the executions into pits and tiny places and creeks in Lithuania or Ukraine or whatever.

It's just horrendous. This is from a nation which, a decade earlier, had been a democracy. It seems like, as a human civilization, we walk that thin line between good and evil. It's a thin line, and we have to walk it carefully.

Lex Fridman

Yes. One of the great battles in World War II on the Western Front is Normandy. I have to talk to you about Normandy: D-Day, the Normandy landings, the famous landings on June 6, 1944. This was an Allied invasion of Nazi-occupied Western Europe. What was the planning, and what was the execution of the Normandy landings?

James Holland

Well, when the Americans joined the war in December 1941, there was the Arcadia Conference a few days later between the British chiefs of staff and political leader Churchill, and Roosevelt and his own chiefs of staff, about what the policy should be. The policy is to get American troops over to Europe as quickly as possible, get them over to Britain, get them training, get them across the Channel as soon as possible, and start the liberation of Europe.

But the reality is that in 1942 the Americans just aren't ready. They've gone from having this incredibly tiny army, and it's still growing. They've got no battlefield experience. The British are still recovering. They're good on naval power. They're increasingly good on air power. But land power—they've had to make up for the loss of their ally, France, and expand as well.

So ground zero for both America and Britain has been June 1940, when France is out. Suddenly, that's the strategic earthquake, and that's the issue that needs settling. They need to completely realign everything that they'd fought in 1940. They've got to start again. But it also becomes clear that they're not really ready in 1943 either.

And one of the problems is that Molotov, who is the Soviet foreign minister, has come over to Britain in May 1942 and said, “We need you to do your bit and get on the campaign trail against the Germans and fight on the ground.” And the British are sort of going, “Well, yeah, but a cross-Channel invasion is not really going to happen. We know we're doing that in North Africa at the moment.”

Then he goes over to Washington, and the Americans go, “You know, we are definitely going to take the attack to the Germans in 1942.” They've made this promise. So in the summer of 1942, it becomes clear that they can't keep that. Churchill says, “Well, look, here's an idea. We've already got an army in Egypt. Why don't we land another one in Northwest Africa? That's run by Vichy France, which is pro-Axis French colonial territory. Why don't we take that? We can do that, and then we can meet in the middle. We can pinch around. We can conquer the whole of North Africa.”

“You can kill 2 birds with 1 stone, because you can get some experience fighting against Axis troops, test some of your equipment and commanders. What's not to like? And then we can see how it goes.”

So this is a kind of opportunistic strategy, whereas the Americans are very much, “We want to draw a straight line to Berlin, and that's the quickest way. Let's do it that way.” It's a different viewpoint, but Roosevelt understands that and agrees to it. That's where the whole North Africa–Mediterranean campaign comes from.

As a consequence of the huge commitment to Tunisia—3,500 aircraft, huge navies, 2 Allied armies in North Africa—by the time Tunisia is won in mid-May 1943, they think, “Well, we've got all this here. We might as well really try and put the nail into the coffin of Italy's war and get them out of the battle. Sicily is an obvious one. Let's go in there, and then we can take a view.”

But between Sicily happening and the fall of North Africa is the Trident Conference in Washington. That is where the decision is made. The Americans go, “Okay, enough of this opportunistic stuff. We get it. We buy it. But no more faffing around. May 1944, 1 year hence, we are going to cross the Atlantic.” And the British go, “Okay, fair cop. We'll do that.”

That is where Operation Overlord, as it becomes, gets given its code name, its operational name. That's when the planning starts. Serious planning starts at the beginning of 1944. One of the lessons from Sicily to Normandy is that you can't have commanders fighting 1 battle while preparing for the next one. So you have to have a separate command structure. That's okay because by this time you've got enough people who have experience with battlefield command that you can actually split it.

There are very good reasons for going into Italy, not least getting the Foggia airfields so that you can further tighten the noose around Nazi Germany. One of the great prerequisites for the Normandy invasion is total control of the air—not just over Normandy, but over a large swath of Northwest Europe.

Why is that? Because the moment you land in Normandy, the cat is out of the bag. It's then a race between which side can build up materiel quickest. Is it going to be the Allies, who've got to come from southern England—a slow journey across the sea over a distance of between 80 and 130 miles—or is it going to be the Germans, who are already on the continent? Well, clearly, on paper, it's the Germans.

So you have to slow up the Germans. How do you do that? You do that by destroying their means of getting there. Bridges—destroy all the bridges over the Seine, destroy all the bridges over the Rhine, hit the marshalling yards. The glue that keeps the German war machine together is the Reichsbahn, the German railway network. So destroy the railway as much as you possibly can and make it difficult for the Germans to reinforce the Normandy beachhead when it comes.

But the way you do that, in turn, is by very low-level precision bombing, and that has to be done by twin-engine, faster, smaller bombers going in low. The problem is that you can't go low and destroy those bridges if you've got Focke-Wulfs and Messerschmitts hovering above you. So you've got to destroy those, which is why you need to have air superiority over this large swath of Northwest Europe.

The problem is that while the industrial heartland of Nazi Germany is in the west, in the Ruhr area—which is very convenient for bombers coming out of Lincolnshire or East Anglia, on the flat eastern side of Great Britain—the aircraft industry is much deeper into the Reich, and it is beyond the range of fighter escorts for the bombers. The American daylight bombers who are going over are discovering that, despite being called Flying Fortresses, they're not fortresses. They're actually getting decimated.

Whenever their bombers go over in strength to try and hit the aircraft industry in Germany beyond fighter range, they get decimated—first, infamously, on the Schweinfurt–Regensburg raid on August 17, 1943, coincidentally the same day that Sicily falls to the Allies.

Also, coincidentally, it is the same day that face-to-face negotiations begin with the Italians for an armistice in Lisbon. On that day, of the 324 heavy bombers that the Americans send over to hit Schweinfurt and Regensburg, where there are a Messerschmitt plant and a ball-bearing plant essential for aircraft manufacturing, 60 are shot down and a further 130-odd are badly damaged. Even with the vast numbers of men and bombers coming out of America, this is too much. They can't sustain it, so they've got to find a fighter escort that's going to be able to escort them all the way into the Reich.

The race is on because, basically, if they haven't got control of the airspace by April 1944, it's game over. You can't do a cross-channel invasion; you have to have that control of the airspace beforehand. The race is on. Fortunately, they come up with a solution, which is the P-51 Mustang, originally commissioned in May 1940 by the British and developed from sketches to reality in 117 days. It's a work of absolute genius.

But the Mustang is saddled with a really bad engine. The Allison engine is just not right for that aircraft. It's not until a Rolls-Royce Merlin—which is the same engine that powers the Lancaster, the Mosquito, the Spitfire, and the Hurricane—is put into the P-51 Mustang that suddenly you've got your solution. That means it can now fly with extra drop tanks and fuel tanks. It's so aerodynamic and so good that the higher it goes with this engine, the more fuel-efficient it becomes. It can actually fly over 1,400 miles, which gets you not just to Berlin and back, but to Warsaw and back.

Suddenly, you've got that solution. Actually, by April 1944, they have cleared the airspace, and by the end of May 1944, just on the eve of the invasion—Operation Overlord—the closest German aircraft seen fighting Allied aircraft is 500 miles from the beachhead. It is absolutely job done.

Meanwhile, new, comparatively new ground-attack fighter planes like Typhoons and Tempests, and adapted P-47 Thunderbolts, are attacking the German radar stations all along the coastline. Germany does have an air-defense system, but they're destroying 90% of its effectiveness. In the intelligence game, they're winning that one as well. They're just much better because, in Germany, intelligence is power.

Hitler always has this kind of divide-and-rule thing going on, so you have parallel command structures, which is not conducive to bringing intelligence together. While much play has been made about the successes of Bletchley and codebreaking and all the rest of it, you have to see the decrypts that the Bletchley cryptanalysts do as just a cog. Those various cogs together—from listening services to photo reconnaissance to agents on the ground—add up to more than the sum of their individual parts. The intelligence picture is a broad picture rather than just codebreaking. Anyway, they win that particular battle as well.

What you see, really, with D-Day is, I think, the zenith of coalition warfare. What you've got is multiple nations that have different overall aims, different cultures, different attitudes, and different starting points, but they have all coalesced into 1 common goal. Until they've achieved that common goal, they put their differences to one side.

Much play has been made about Anglophobia among American commanders and Americaphobia among British commanders, but actually it's nothing. It's a marriage made in heaven compared to the way Germany treats its own allies, for example. What is remarkable about the Allies is that they're not actually allies; they're coalition partners. There's no formal alliance at all, and there is a subtle difference there. But what you see is them really pulling together.

You see that manifest itself on D-Day, I think, where you've got 6,939 vessels, of which 1,213 are warships and 4,127 are assault craft, along with 12,000 aircraft. In a 24-hour period, 155,000 men land and are dropped from the air. It is phenomenal. It is absolutely phenomenal.

While it is still seen as a predominantly American show, all 3 service commanders are British. Two-thirds of the aircraft are British, and two-thirds of the men landed are British and Dominion. You never forget the Canadians, who consistently punch massively above their weight in the Second World War—in all aspects, it has to be said: air, land, and sea. They're key in the Battle of the Atlantic, key in air power, key on D-Day, and indeed key in the battle for Italy as well. The Canadians should never be forgotten.

One of the reasons that it is the Royal Navy that dominates on D-Day is, of course, the incredibly enormous strength of the Royal Navy in the first place. But partly it's because most of the U.S. Navy is, by this stage, in the Pacific, fighting its own fight. It's not slacking by any stretch of the imagination; it is elsewhere, doing its bit for the overall Allied cause.

D-Day is just extraordinary, and despite the terrible weather—which is such a debilitating factor in the whole thing—it puts people off course and means many more people get killed on Omaha Beach than they might have done, and on other beaches besides, incidentally. In terms of lives lost proportionally, it is the Canadians who suffer the worst, more so than the Americans. It's just that there are fewer of them overall.

D-Day has to be seen as an unqualified success. It is absolutely extraordinary what they achieve. While they don't 100% achieve their overall D-Day objectives, the objectives are always going to be the outer reach of what can be achieved, and you'd need absolutely perfect conditions for that to happen. They don't get perfect conditions, but they're so balanced and they've thought of absolutely everything, including their logistical supply.

Even things like the minesweeping operation are extraordinary. It's the biggest single minesweeping operation of the entire war because there are huge minefields off the Normandy coast. Ahead of the invasion force, the minesweepers—which amount to, I think, something like 242 different minesweepers in 5 different operations—are arrayed opposite every single beach, creating lanes through these minefields through which the invasion force can go. Not a single ship is lost to a mine in the actual invasion.

That is phenomenal and can only be done with the greatest skill and planning, all in a period when there are no computers, no GPS, nothing. It is absolutely astonishing, and the scale of it is frankly mind-boggling.

Lex Fridman

Yeah. That was really the nail in the coffin, the beginning of the end for Hitler and for the European theater.

James Holland

Yeah. Once you get the beachhead, the only cause for doubt is whether they'll be able to secure that beachhead. The moment they get that beachhead, it is game over. There's no other way it's going to be because of the overwhelming amount of men and material that the Allies have compared to the Germans at this stage of the war.

Of course, you're being attacked on 3 fronts because there's the Italian front to the south, and in a very major way, you've also got the Eastern Front. Operation Bagration, which is launched that summer as well, is enormous.

Lex Fridman

So, let's go to the very end: the Battle of Berlin. Hitler sitting in his bunker, his suicide, Germany's surrender. You actually said that Downfall, the movie, was a very accurate representation. I think it is, really, except that Goebbels took cyanide and shot himself. Details, but I think it might be my favorite World War II movie, which is strange to say because it's not really about World War II; it's about Hitler in a bunker. But I think—was it Bruno Ganz? Wasn't there? I think he nailed him.

James Holland

Yeah. There are so many accounts of that. There's so much written about Hitler. There are millions and millions of his words that you can read. There are translations of many of his conferences. You can see what he's saying. You can get inside his head in a very clear way, much more clearly than you can with Stalin or just about any other leader, really.

So you have a very strong impression of what Hitler was like in the bunker in those last days. There are so many accounts of it, and it just feels like they nailed it. It feels like they've got it spot-on to me.

Lex Fridman

I mean, it's a fascinating story of an evil maniac and then this certainty crumbling, right? Realizing that this vision of the thousand-year Reich is— Hitler says, you know, “My reputation won't be good to start off with, but I hope in a few years' time that people start to realize all the good I was trying to bring.”

They're all the same, aren't they? You always believe you're doing good. There are so many deep lessons there. So now you have written so much, said so much, and studied this so much: what, to you, looking at World War II, are the lessons we should take away?

James Holland

Well, I suppose it's what happens when you allow these individuals to take hold of great power and great authority and make these terrible decisions. If you allow that to happen, there are consequences, and you have to recognize the moments of trouble when they arise. So when there are financial crises, you know that political unrest is going to come, and you need to be prepared for that.

You need to be able to see the writing on the wall. You can't be complacent. Complacency is such a dirty word, isn't it? You've got to keep your wits, and you can't take things for granted.

You've got to recognize, I think, that the freedoms we enjoy in the West are not necessarily permanent. You need to make the most of them while you've got them, cherish them, and consider what happens if the milk turns sour and what the consequences of that are.

I mean, it's actually worrying, because although I don't think it'll ever be a war on the scale of the Second World War, you've only got to look at pictures of those opening days of the war in Ukraine and see knocked-out Russian tanks and dead bodies, bloated bodies, all over the place. Put that into black and white, and it could be the road out of Falaise in 1944. It could be any number of German battlefields in World War II.

The similarities, the trenches, and the kind of people hiding in foxholes—that's horribly reminiscent, as are the huge casualties that they're suffering on both sides, whether they be Russian or Ukrainian. It's a shock. It's a shock to see that, and it reminds you of just how quickly things can descend.

That's the other thing: the point I was making about how quickly Germany descended from this amazing nation of arts and culture, science, development, and engineering into the Holocaust. Life is fragile, and peace is fragile. You take it for granted at your peril, and you take for granted at our peril that nobody will use nuclear weapons ever again. That's not a thing we should take for granted. No, sir.

Lex Fridman

What gives you hope about the future of human civilization? We've been talking about all this darkness in the 20th century. What's the source of light?

James Holland

The source of light is that I think the vast majority of people are good people who want to live peacefully and want to live happily and are not filled with hate. There are some brilliant minds out there, and I think the capacity for the human brain to come up with new developments and new answers to problems and challenges is infinite. I think that's what gives me hope.

Lex Fridman

James, I'm a big fan. This was an honor to talk to you, and please keep putting incredible history out there. I can't wait to see what you do next. Thank you so much for talking today.

James Holland

Thank you, Lex. It's a privilege to talk to you.