James Holland

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He might have amazing attention to detail, he might be able to understand, have an enormous capacity to remember units and where they are on a map, but he was only a half corporal in the First World war. He’s never been to staff college.

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But actually what conflict in World War II shows you is that you need more than that. You need ease of maintenance, you need reliability.

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But the main fact of all is of 1,347 Tigers built, there were 49,000 Shermans. So that means there’s 36 Shermans to every single Tiger.

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But 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 are going to win.

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And by that time, aircraft production in Britain is massively outpacing the Germans and the best ratio that the Germans achieve in 1940s, July 1940, when the British produced 496 new Hurricanes and Spitfires, single-engine fighters, and the Germans only produced 240 single-engine fighters.

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Well, everyone always says, the few were the last line of defense against the Nazi hordes and all this kind of stuff, and it’s all rubbish. They’re the first line of defense.

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I think there are so many lessons from World War II that could have been brought into the history of the last 30 years, which weren’t, such as 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 that in very quick order, which of course, is exactly what happens in Iraq.

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Yet actually they’re a comparatively small proportion of the army. So no more than 14 to 15% of any army, Allied army, is infantry. 45% are service corps, service troops, driving trucks and cooks and bottle washers and people lugging great big boxes of stuff.

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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.

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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.

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And I think by saying that Churchill is the chief warmonger of the Second World War, I think, is ludicrous.

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I think whoever fired first was not decided at that point, but I do think that from the moment that Hitler takes power in 1933, a conflict between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany is inevitable.

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I mean, if ever there is, I think, a mistake that’s Britain and France should’ve been a bit more into realpolitiks than they were. It’s such an opportunity to ensure that, to snooker the Third Reich, and they don’t take it.

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And so, one of the reasons why you have this narrative that Britain was a bit rubbish and hanging on the shirttails of the Americans and all the blood was spilt in eastern front and Germany had the best army in the world and was only defeated because Hitler was mad and blah, blah, blah, that kind of traditional narrative, that narrative emerges through the prism of what was going on in the 1970s and what was going on in the 1980s and the changing world, rather than looking at it through the prism of the late 1930s or early 1940s.

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But Chamberlain was prime minister in a democracy, a parliamentary democracy, where 92% of the population were against going to war in 1938. There was not a single democratic leader in the world that would go against the wishes of 92% of the population.

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And this is why I 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 behaviour do. And what you always get after economic crisis is political upheaval, always, always, always.

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And I think radios are really, 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.

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And 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.

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There is just no stomach to do that again. So that makes them risk averse. And by being risk averse, you’re actually taking a far greater risk. That’s the irony of it.

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

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

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So people always talk about the Nazi war machine. In a way, it’s a kind of misnomer, because you’re sort of suggesting that it’s highly mechanized and industrialized, and all the rest of it. And nothing could be further from the truth. The spearhead is, but the rest of it is not.

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So when you’re talking about Operation Barbarossa, to go back to your original question, Lex, you’re dealing with an operation on such a vast scale, that that 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.

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Whereas, there’s also another point, which is having large armies is actually inherently impractical and inefficient, because the larger the army, the more people you’ve got to feed, the more barracks you’ve got to have, the more space you’ve got to have for training, the more people you’re taking out of your workforce to produce tanks and shells, and all the rest of it, because they’re tramping around with rifles.