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

- And you see that manifest itself on D-Day,

where you've got 6,939 vessels,

of which there are 1,213 warships,

4,127 assault craft, 12,500 aircraft,

you know, 155,000 men landed and dropped from the air

in a 24-hour period.

It is phenomenal. It is absolutely phenomenal.

- The following is a conversation

with James Holland, a historian specializing

in World War II,

who has written a lot of amazing books

on the subject, especially covering the Western Front,

often providing fascinating details at multiple levels

of analysis, including strategic, operational, tactical,

technological, and of course the human side,

the personal accounts from the war.

He also co-hosts a great podcast

on World War II called "We Have Ways of Making You Talk."

This is the Lex Fridman Podcast.

To support it, please check out our sponsors

in the description or at LexFridman.com/sponsors.

And now, dear friends, here's James Holland.

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 and human drama in modern history?

And maybe from a historian perspective,

the most fascinating subject to study?

- The thing about World War II is it really

is truly global.

It's fought in deserts, it's fought in the Arctic,

it's fought across oceans, it's fought in the air,

it's in jungle, it's in the hills, it is on the beaches,

it's also on the Russian steppe,

and it's also in Ukraine.

So, it's that global nature of it.

And I just think where there's war,

there is always incredible human drama.

And I think for most people, and certainly true

in my case, you get drawn to the human drama of it.

It's that thought that, gosh, if I'd been 20 years old,

how would I have dealt with it?

Would I have been in the Army?

Would I have been in the Air Force?

Would I have been on a Royal Navy destroyer?

How would I have coped with it?

And how would I have dealt with that separation?

I mean, I've interviewed people who were away

for four years.

I remember talking to a tank man from Liverpool

in England called Sam Bradshaw.

And he went away for four years.

And when he came home, he'd been twice wounded.

He'd been very badly wounded in North Africa.

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, you know,

13 when he left, was now a young woman.

His old school had been destroyed by Luftwaffe bombs.

He didn't recognize the place. And do you know what he did?

He joined up again.

Went back out of Europe

and was one of the first people in Belsen.

So, you know?

- What was his justification for that,

for joining right back?

- He just felt completely disconnected to home.

He felt that the gulf of time,

his experiences had separated him from all

the normalities of life.

And he felt that the normalities of the life

that he had known before he'd gone away to war

had just been severed in a really kind of cruel way

that he didn't really feel he was able to confront

at that particular point.

But he decided to rejoin.

Couldn't go back to the 3rd Royal Tank Regiment,

so went back to a different unit.

Went from kind of the Italian campaign

to the European theater.

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 know, you ended up passing very close to Belsen,

you suddenly realized, okay, this was the right thing to do.

You know, 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 just not just the secret police.

It's not just the expansionism of Nazism.

It is also the Holocaust,

which hadn't been given its name at that point.

But you're witnessing this kind of untold cruelty.

And I always, you know, I've always sort of,

I think a lot about Sam.

I mean, he's no longer with us,

but he was one of the first people that I interviewed.

I interviewed him at great length.

I know you like a long interview, Lex.

I totally, 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 vets

is usually they're put on YouTube or they're put

on a museum website.

They're 30 minutes, an hour if you're lucky.

You're just scratching the surface.

You never really get to know it.

You feel that they're just repeating stuff they've read

in books themselves after the war and stuff.

And, you know, I was kind of 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 was put in front of them.

- So tank man, what was maybe the most epic,

the most intense, or the most interesting story

that he told you?

- Well, I do remember him telling me...

Funny enough, it's not really about the conflict.

I remember him telling me about the importance of letters.

And there was this guy

who literally every few weeks, you know,

the post would arrive intermittently.

There was no kind of regular post.

It was supposed to be regular,

but it didn't come out regularly.

You might suddenly get a flurry of five all in one day.

But he said it was this guy in his tank,

a member of a different tank troop.

He was a good friend of his in the same squadron.

He had British half-squadrons for their armor,

which Americans would have a company.

- I should say that in your book,

one of the wonderful things you do is you use

the correct term in the language

for the particular army involved,

whether it's the German or the British or the American.

- Well, that's not to be pretentious.

That's really just so that it,

because you're dealing with so many numbers

and different units.

It can go over your head,

and you can get consumed by the detail

if you're not careful.

As a reader, it can be very unsatisfying

because you just can't keep pace with everything.

So 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 it just 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 yeah, to go back to Sam.

So Sam, there was this guy in his squadron,

and he'd get his letters from his girlfriend, his wife.

And he said it was like a soap opera.

He said, we all just waited for his letters to come

in so we could find out whether his daughter, you know,

got to school okay or won the swimming contest

or whatever it was.

The sort of details of this day-to-day banal life

was just absolute catnip to these guys.

They absolutely loved it.

Then the letter arrived,

the Dear John letter, saying, sorry,

I found someone else, and it's over.

And his friend was just absolutely devastated.

It was the only thing that was keeping him going,

this sort of sense of continuity of home,

this sort of foundation of his life back at home.

And Sam said he could see he was in a really,

really bad way.

And he thought, he's gonna do something stupid.

And he went up to him and he said, look, I know

it's bad, and I know it's terrible,

and I know you're absolutely devastated,

but you've got your mates here,

just don't do anything silly.

Just, maybe when it's all over,

you can patch things up or sort things out.