The Danger Zone (DZ)

I guess like me you often find yourself lying awake in bed, wondering what the world would be like today if Adolf Hitler, instead of answering the call to be the saviour of Germany (a job he ended up doing really badly) had decided to follow his natural bent for comedy and had instead become a stand up comedian. In this Danger Zone programme I’m going to look at the jokes that Hitler told, and the...

The attack on Pearl Harbour had not been the success the Japanese needed. In the modern war that was shaping up in the Pacific aircraft carriers were the key weapons. For the Japanese mastermind of Pearl Harbour, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, he needed to finish what he‘d started. If he didn’t he knew that the war was lost. So now the stage was set for a number of key players, who very likely would ha...

On 12 September 1918 a tank attack was led by Colonel George S. Patton – the legendary leader of American tank forces in France in World War II. Patton was just a young colonel in World War I. He walked along the top of American trenches, with an American infantry brigade sensibly taking shelter in their trenches. Sensible because a creeping German artillery barrage was moving their way. Patton co...

The Emperor Napoleon has an important connection with Cairns, and there are some other interesting ones he has with Australia too. In this programme I’m going to tell you about both, and where you can go and see the large, unmissable relic from Napoleon in Cairns. Tag words: Emperor Napoleon; Boney; Betsy Balcombe; Elba; Treaty of Fontainbleau; Louis XVIII; Colonel Neil Campbell; Lord Castlereagh;...

The 20th Century, from about 1949, when the Soviet Union detonated its own atomic bomb, made using stolen intellectual property from the American Manhattan Project, with the help of some of the scientists who worked on that project and were spies for the Soviet Union, until 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed, the world lived in fear of a nuclear holocaust. This fear was not based on theoretical...

What’s World War III going to look like? Not that I want to see. It’s not going to look like anything we’ve ever seen before. One of the hottest selling books amongst the top level people at the Pentagon since 2016 has been “Ghost Fleet” written by PW Singer and August Cole. These guys aren’t the writers of your typical boy/man political/war thrillers, like Tom Clancy’s “Red Storm Rising”. Singer...

International Womens’ Day. Some women have their praises sung and their achievements recognised. But not all women. After all International Womens’ Day is very much something that the feminist movement has instituted and that is a movement that only recognises women of the left. To paraphrase one of Joe Biden’s remarkable comments during the 2020 US Presidential election, if you ain’t on the left,...

If you’ve ever seen the movie “Zulu” with Michael Caine you’ve seen the story about how a handful of British soldiers stood up against a large army of Zulu warriors defending a place called Rorke’s Drift. If you’ve ever heard of Breaker Morant, or seen the movie of the same name, you’ve seen a movie about the Boer War which was fought in South Africa in 1900. It’s not a war that most people have h...

Here’s a murder mystery that you’ve possibly never heard about. A cold case. The possible murder of Dr Todt, committed at Hitler’s headquarters (built by Dr Todt’s organisation) from which Hitler conducted the war against Russia. The HQ was called the Wolfschanze. Hitler’s knickname was Wolf – so the HQ was called the wolf’s lair. It was located in East Prussia. The murder victim (if this was a mu...

Technology and science have let us kill people far more efficiently than we ever could before. The guillotine of the French Revolution allowed the socialists to use mechanical means to exterminate their class enemies, the aristocracy (and vastly more numbers of other people who fell foul of the these revolutionaries). The guillotine was the precursor of the far more efficient Nazi extermination ca...

In January 1944, Vasily Grossman, a non-practising Jew, entered the town of his birth, Berdichev in the Ukraine, to finally confirm that his mother had been murdered by the Nazis. It was the first time he’d been back there for a long time. Soon after the German invasion of Russia on 22 June 1941, he’d left his mother and other members of his family there because his wife, Olga Mikhailovna, had ref...

The time had come for the SS to perfect its skills. It wasn’t easy. Things worth doing never are. A Panzer Division had showed up for a rest and re-fit – pretty much right in the middle of where the SS was to conduct its mass executions. So a huge live variety extravaganza was turned on for the men at night, plus showings throughout the day of the latest release movie. Beautiful Ukrainian girls ke...

How to quickly and efficiently kill the 30,000 Jews at Berdichev was the problem that had to be solved. It was important to get it right because, if they could, they could do it on a far bigger scale at the next place where they’d already planned to do a mass extermination of Jews, a place called Babi Yar near Kiev. So how did the SS tackle this first time problem of mass murder? How did the avera...

Everything has to start somewhere. This programme’s about the first day of the holocaust. Not the efficient extermination camps like Auschwitz. But men working hard days organising the digging of deep pits (just the right length), ammunition (you don’t want to run out half way through), organising Jews to the site and then shooting them all day long (you need plenty of Schnapps for the men) until...

After World War 2 Churchill said: "The only thing that really frightened me during the war was the U-boat peril. I was even more anxious about this battle than I had been about the glorious air fight called the ‘Battle of Britain’”. But that wasn’t true. The U-Boat activity, sinking shipping heading to England, was annoying and needed the defences bolstered to counter it, but it was nothing more t...

The Tom Hanks movie, “Greyhound”, tells the dramatic story of a much older man, Commander Krause (played by Tom Hanks), but still a rookie as a naval commanding officer, taking his first command at sea. Like many in World War II Commander Krause came into the Navy from civilian life. In the movie he’s appointed as the commander of an American Fletcher Class destroyer. More than that he’s put in ch...

In this programme I’m going to share with you the story of the most remarkable plane ever. One pilot described this experience during a flight. It was just him and his Reconnaissance Systems Officer. The plane carried a crew of only two. It was a moonless night. They were flying at just over 25.5 kilometres altitude. Your average commercial airliner flies at about 3 kilometres. The pilot wondered...

In a weak moment, of sympathy for the German Führer, Adolf Hitler, that he had been dealt with too harshly by history for killing a mere six million Jews and many millions of Poles and others, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the famous Soviet dissident who spent many years in Stalin’s gulags, commented that Stalin killed many times the number of people that Hitler had, and most of them were his fellow Rus...

One question you have to ask about the famous 1950s/1960s ad man, David Ogilvy, the greatest advertising man the world has ever seen, the first among the so-called “Mad Men” as they were labelled in the recent TV series about the Madison Avenue advertising industry, is what was he up to spying on the British Ambassador, his own boss, in Washington DC. Was David a double agent for the Nazis? That a...

I remember, like it was only yesterday, when all the young people, the Millennials, were attacking Donald Trump as president. These cool people wanted to change the world. They were rightly sick up to their teeth with our world being run by old white guys. With the presidential elections coming it was time to make a millennial shift, so to speak, and make a revolutionary changing of the guard. So...

David Ogilvy would become the greatest ad man in history after the end of World War 2 – but in 1940, as England goes into an unequal struggle with Nazi Germany he has to succeed at his toughest, most important assignment ever – he has to convince Americans to help arm England so that it can defend itself, and an even bigger challenge for him, if he can, he has to get America to join the war agains...

In 2007 a new TV series went to air – “Mad Men”. It was called Mad Men because it was about the, mostly, men in the advertising industry on Madison Avenue. The series was the creation of Matthew Weiner. He’d been one of the writers on the The Sopranos series. The other actors in the series were unknowns. Jon Hamm was the first amongst them. Mad Men had a slow start. The first season wasn’t popular...

In the last week of July 1944 units of the Red Army’s 1st Byelorussian Front overran the abandoned site of an SS Death Camp known as Treblinka – more precisely the Germans called it Treblinka II. Treblinka I was a labour camp for people that were not to be exterminated on arrival. Vasily Grossman, a non-practising Jew, was with these Red Army units. He is the outstanding Russian novelist of the 20...

During World War 2, the giant DuPont company in America had developed a new house paint. The problem for DuPont was that the paint would spontaneously burst into flames. The flaming culprit in the paint was a substance which was a left over residue once all of the oil had been extracted – a chemical called divinylacetelyne. Perfect. Normally for many products the left overs are what you throw away...

I’m guessing a lot of you have heard of the DuPont company. They make all sorts of paints, amongst other things. A lot of you people have probably had your house painted using DuPont paint. In the early 1940s, DuPont had this new paint that they were working on. They were using an additive made from a by-product of oil, waste called divinylacetylene. They mixed it with a pigment which made the pai...