The Danger Zone (DZ)

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...

I’ve done a programme before based on a book by Ben MacIntyre called “The Spy and the Traitor” – a true story about the most important spy who defected to the West from the Soviet Union. He leaked information to the West that probably averted an all-out nuclear war. Ben has also written a number of other true life books about spies and spying, in World War II and in the Cold War. So I was interest...

In November 1940 during the dark days of World War II, when it looked like Hitler had won the war, Australia, which didn’t even have a car industry, decided to design and build a tank. It turned out to be one of the best tanks in the world at that time. This incredible, success, story is told for the first time, in detail, in a book written by Cairns’ own, Jason Belgrave, assistant manager at the...

In November 1940 during the dark days of World War II when it looked like Hitler had won the war, Australia, which didn’t even have a car industry, decided to design and build a tank. It turned out to be one of the best tanks in the world at that time. This incredible, successful, story is told for the first time in detail in a book written by Cairns’ own, Jason Belgrave at the Australian Armour a...

In April 2016, the Australian government entered into a very weird contract with the French company, DCNS to convert DCNS’s nuclear powered submarine model into diesel powered submarines for the Royal Australian Navy. DCNS had to know that even if they were able to get a submarine that had been designed as a nuclear powered submarine into a working diesel powered submarine the results would most l...

There’s nothing worse than a bad neighbour. Your life can go completely down the toilet. Sometimes moving away is an option – and that’s an option often worth taking. But sometimes you don’t even have that choice. For example, if you’re Finland or the Ukraine, and your neighbour is Russia. Or you’re Tibet, or Vietnam, or India, and your neighbour is China.  Today’s programme is about a tiny countr...

Taika Waititi claimed to have made Oscar history as the first indigenous New Zealander, Maori, to win an Oscar. Well it turns out that he’s half indigenous. His mother is Jewish. Sometimes he uses her surname as a professional name – Cohen. Shopping for the best ethnicity has become an important part of our world today. Ironically this isn’t so different to the issues discussed in his Oscar winnin...

One of the ritziest hotels in New York before and during World War 2, was the Hotel Pierre. It was a real life Café Americain from Casablanca. Filled with doubtful and flashy characters with Nazi-Fascist-Vichy backgrounds and connections. The hotel had been bought by John Paul Getty after a waiter had been rude to him when he was a guest. Getty bought the hotel so he could sack him. When Getty bou...

This company designed the most produced fighter aircraft of World War II for the Nazis. The first operational jet fighter – faster and more heavily armed than any Allied fighter. Became part of the first modern European consortium to design jet passenger aircraft and many other types, is a serious challenge to Boeing’s monopoly. Made the first commercially viable digital fly-by-wire aircraft and t...

What have Krispy Kreme Donuts, Prêt-à-Manger, Kylie Jenner Cosmetics, Coty Cosmetics, Calvin Klein Cosmetics, Dr Pepper, Jacobs Dowe Egberts (Moccona Coffee for instance) and Durex Condoms got in common? The Nazi Party and the holocaust. Don’t believe me? Then you’d better stay tuned in. And by the way – there are lots of songs with the words “Krispy Kreme” in the lyrics. Tag words: Nazi Party; Ad...

Ferdinand Porsche – the man behind the amazing iconic German brand who brought new standards of excellence to racing and sports cars, invented and manufactured the world’s first hybrid car in 1898 as well as designing an all electric car. He designed the first Volkswagen beetle or Adolf Hitler. Designed the legendary World War II German Tiger tank, as well as the world’s heaviest tank ever, the 20...

In 1945 it looked like Nazi Germany had lost the war, but there was a huge BUT - the new Škoda flying saucer looked unbeatable and light years ahead of anything the Allies could put into the skies against it. It could fly at 2900 kph. The fastest Allied plane could only fly at less than half that speed. It could stop in mid-flight and hover. It could fly in any direction from wherever it was. It w...

Toward the end of his life Henry Ford was talking to a young kid by the name of John Dahlinger (more about him later in the programme). Henry was telling the kid how great his education had been when he was a boy, in a single-room schoolhouse. The kid listened to this stuff and then said “But sir, these are different times, this is the modern age and …” Henry cut him off before he could finish. “Y...

His eyes burnt into hers. “There's a very fine line between pleasure and pain. They are two sides of the same coin, one not existing without the other.” Said Christian Grey to Anastacia Steele in “Fifty Shades of Grey”. It was a sentiment that the owners of the publisher, Random House, came to understand during World War 2 when they were working with the Nazis. Tag words: Gütersloh; Westphalia...

The Adidas story is the story of an amazing man by the name of Adolf (Adi) Dassler – a man who revolutionised sports from World War I, through Nazi Germany and into the post-war world. He was the Michaelangelo of sports shoes. His equally amazing wife, Käthe, in an incredible story, saved the Adidas factory at the end of World War II from being flattened by the Allies, then Adi and Käthe transform...

This programme’s about a piano salesman who on the one hand helped the greatest armed forces on earth to a righteous victory and on the other hand helped the commission of one of the most vile crimes against humanity in history. So the lesson is, think twice before you invite a piano salesman into your house – you could be biting off more than you can chew. This piano salesman was born in 1874 whe...