Episodes

  • #64 They had the wrong guns - Ep 4 Nightmare in the Trenches 1914-16

    #64 They had the wrong guns - Ep 4 Nightmare in the Trenches 1914-16
    May 28 2025
    On the eve of the Somme the British had far too few artillery guns, and most of the ones they had were the wrong sort. They needed five times as many heavy guns before they could launch an attack. The few big guns they did have were grossly inaccurate, sometimes missing a target by one mile. They were firing shells that were not fitted with delayed-action fuses which meant the German machine-gunners were safe in their deep underground bunkers. And yet British schoolchildren are still taught it was a surprise that the bombardment that preceded the infantry attack failed so catastrophically. (R)

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    41 mins
  • #63 The generals never studied how to attack trenches - Ep 3 Nightmare in the Trenches 1914-16

    #63 The generals never studied how to attack trenches - Ep 3 Nightmare in the Trenches 1914-16
    May 21 2025
    The British Army wanted to throw men against machines. Its generals had not thought about how to cross 100-200 yards of open space with wire entanglements. They had been offered plenty of designs for armoured tractors with caterpillar tracks but had ignored them. It was Churchill, head of the Royal Navy, who eventually funded the development of the first ‘tank’. But they arrived late at the Somme and were so badly deployed they couldn’t save lives. And that wasn’t the worst of the problems the British army had created for itself. (R)

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    40 mins
  • #62 They refused to take orders - Ep 2 Nightmare in the Trenches 1914:16

    #62 They refused to take orders - Ep 2 Nightmare in the Trenches 1914:16
    May 14 2025
    Unlike the Royal Navy, the British Army proved itself over the course of decades incapable of taking new ideas on board: trench warfare, the machine gun and the tank to name a few. And at the heart of the problem was that too many men in the army refused to take orders. Not the rank and file, you understand, who were executed for any refusal to march into a hail of bullets. But the officers. The reason was that they regarded themselves as gentlemen – and gentlemen could not be bossed around. (R)

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    38 mins
  • #61 They just pretended to shoot - Ep 1 Nightmare in the Trenches 1914-16

    #61 They just pretended to shoot - Ep 1 Nightmare in the Trenches 1914-16
    May 7 2025
    1 July 1916. Had British Corps commanders understood machine gun warfare they would not have sent British infantrymen across No Man’s Land unprotected from the German machine gun crews. In fact we explain why the British army need never have been in the position it was in on the Somme, scrabbling about at the bottom of hills, peering up at German fortifications in all the strategic locations. We look at its refusal to take trench warfare seriously even though it had been around for 60 years. (R)

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    40 mins
  • #109 A quietly brilliant palace coup - Ep 3 - 2 May 1937: the king, his wife, their Führer, the lobster

    #109 A quietly brilliant palace coup - Ep 3 - 2 May 1937: the king, his wife, their Führer, the lobster
    Apr 30 2025
    We complete our exploration of the dark shadows in the background of Cecil Beaton’s sunny photograph. The laws of the time made it perfectly possible to prevent Edward VIII from marrying Wallis Simpson. Then there wouldn’t have been any point in abdicating. But nobody even tried. Did the yet-to-be-crowned king himself manufacture the crisis? Or had Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, by never revealing the private letters he had from Wallis Simpson, carried off a very British palace coup? (R)

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    33 mins
  • #108 'I wish, myself, to talk to Hitler' - Ep 2 - 2 May 1937: the King, his wife, their Führer, the lobster

    #108 'I wish, myself, to talk to Hitler' - Ep 2 - 2 May 1937: the King, his wife, their Führer, the lobster
    Apr 23 2025
    As the newly appointed king, but not yet crowned, Edward VIII secretly told the Nazis he admired, that he was going ‘to concentrate the business of government in himself…. Who is king here? Baldwin or I?’ Did Prime Minister Baldwin get rid of the King because he was too pro-Nazi, as Hitler’s ambassador to Britain, von Ribbentrop, maintained? Or was there another reason? (R)

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    26 mins
  • #07 That Dress - Ep 1 - 2 May 1937: the King, his wife, their Führer, the lobster'

    #07 That Dress - Ep 1 - 2 May 1937: the King, his wife, their Führer, the lobster'
    Apr 16 2025
    2 May 1937. Cecil Beaton photographs for American Vogue the twice-divorced American heiress soon to marry the ex-King Edward VIII. Wallis Simpson wears a Schiaparelli ‘waltz dress’ with a Salvador Dali red lobster down her skirt. The setting is a French chateau belonging to the American businessman who a few months later will mastermind the Windsors’ honeymoon tour of Germany. But what – other than Wallis Simpson - connects all these people? (R)

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    24 mins
  • #111 A live donkey or a dead lion? - Ep 4 Amundsen vs Scott - a very British failure

    #111 A live donkey or a dead lion? - Ep 4 Amundsen vs Scott - a very British failure
    Apr 9 2025
    Amundsen reached the South Pole a month before Scott, but his story never captured the imagination of the English. They wanted heroic tales of desperate survival in appalling conditions - even if those conditions were of their own making. Scott went on to be glorified in the First World War by men like Haig who used young men as German cannon fodder because he believed British spirit was stronger than the polar cold, or German bullets.

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    39 mins
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