The Danger Zone (DZ)

He was the most popular man in the Australian Imperial Forces by the end of the First World War. He’d been amongst the first men to land at Gallipoli and he was one of the last to leave those dreadful shores. He served on the bloody Western Front until late in 1917. 1917 was the worst year of the war for the Australians. 55,000 casualties, 38,000 at Passchendaele alone. He was always amongst the w...

The world we live in today has been inspired out of the teachings of the Christian faith. And so it was that as part of that tradition, in 1912, the Presbyterian Church commissioned the Reverend John Flynn to look into the needs of bush communities in remote outback Australia. The Australian Inland Mission (AIM) was set up in 1912 as a result of his recommendations. Then in 1928 a new and exciting...

On 14-15 April 1912, the mighty, unsinkable, Titanic struck an iceberg in the Atlantic Ocean. It took just 2 hours and 40 minutes for the Titanic to sink. 1,500 lives were lost. But the size of that maritime disaster was dwarfed on 30 January 1945, when the Germans were carrying out the largest seaborne evacuation in history – 2 million people fleeing the onrushing Russian forces. One of the ships...

On 14-15 April 1912, the mighty, unsinkable, Titanic struck an iceberg in the Atlantic Ocean. It took just 2 hours and 40 minutes for the Titanic to sink. 1,500 lives were lost. The people who died with the sinking of the Titanic died alone – in the middle of a vast ocean. But the sinking of the Titanic was not the greatest disaster at sea with the greatest loss of life. In today’s programme I’m g...

There have been three naval military disasters where the loss of life was greater than the 1,500 lives lost in the sinking of the Titanic. The stories are incredible. Over the next three programmes I’ll talk about them, beginning with the riverboat sinking on the Mississippi River in 1865 just as the American Civil War drew to a close – the worst maritime disaster in American history. Tag words: T...

Between 1929 and the early 1930s, the Communist government in the Soviet Union had conducted a policy of genocide against the peasant farmers of the Ukraine, called the kulaks. One of the benefits that was promised to come from getting rid of those vermin, those blood-suckers, would be the establishment of collective farms. Food production would be increased. Everyone would be happy. From each acc...

Today many people tell us that we should forget about history, we don’t need it. But then those same people tell us about all of the sins of our past that we must be deeply ashamed of today. If they say history doesn’t matter, then why are they telling us that we should be ashamed of our history. Slavery. Colonialism. There’s far more interesting history to talk about than those old issues. That h...

At the end of the magnificent funeral service for Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, a lone piper stood playing a piece. The piece is known by the name “ The Flowers of the Forest ”. In Eric Bogle’s moving song, No Man’s Land , he asks the unresponsive Private William McBride, whose gravesite he’s standing next to, “ Did they play the Flower o’ the Forest ” at his funeral . The Flowers of the F...

In my last programme I told the story of the ANZACs heading to Egypt and then the first day’s landings on Gallipoli. At the end of that programme I told you that by night time the commanders on the ground had some surprising feelings about how the landings had gone. I said that I’d talk about that in the next programme. So here I am. Let me tell you about what our generals thought about the Gallip...

In 1995 the TV Series “Mr Bean” went to air for the first time. It was a strange programme. Mr Bean was mostly silent – with only a handful of words being spoken by him throughout the whole three series. The audience reaction to him varies a lot. I think the cleverness of the wordless comic actions is brilliant and I love the show. My wife finds Mr Bean to be an incredibly nasty human being, which...

The remarkable thing about chess is that you can’t lose. I mean you’re looking down on the board. You can see every piece that your opponents has and where they are. You can see every piece that you have and where they are. Does it get any better than that! You can’t lose. But is that the right way to look at it? Because that’s how some of the top military people in the US thought it worked when t...

This series of programmes is all about how war has improved all of our lives. And this programme’s all about how modern heart surgery happened thanks to war and because of one man’s struggle to overcome what, up to and during World War II, was an area of surgery that no right thinking surgeon would do. Heart surgery. The heart’s an incredible pumping machine. It’s the size of a grapefruit, it beat...

Back in the happy days before the white imperialist invaders came to Australia’s shores everyone was happy, healthy and contented. Well maybe I’m exaggerating a bit. If you weren’t healthy then you would die. A hunter gatherer community, that lived from day to day, needed everybody to be contributing to making their society work. So if you weren’t healthy, and couldn’t keep up when your clan moved...

Human beings have always known about blood. In civilisations since the earliest stone age hunter gatherers until today, too much blood has been spilt. But what we’ve known about blood has, for most of time, been completely wrong. Thank God we finally got it right. This programme’s about the world that war has made so in this programme I’m going to tell you a bloody good story – which is what war i...

War has shaped all of our lives. You may not like it. You might think that war is evil. That war must come to an end. But whatever you think, every day of your life, and throughout every day more than you’d like to think, so many of the things that you do or get the benefit of, have been shaped or come out of war. Anyway enough of that depressing talk. How about you just go into that coffee shop t...

In September 1939, Czechoslovakia was betrayed to Adolf Hitler by the British and the French. It had been done for the most noble of motives, in an effort to avoid another war with Germany. They had thrown Czechoslovakia to the ravenous beast that Adolf Hitler was. It turned out to be rather unsuccessful in avoiding disaster as 60 million people died in World War II rather than a few thousand that...

On 8 May 1945, the German commander of Prague, General Rudolf Toussaint, signed an instrument of surrender with the Czech resistance. The deal was that the resistance would let the German armed forces leave the city without being shot at. Toussaint lamented: “ Who am I now? A general without an army. All I can do is go home and sit in the ditch and look at the blue sky”. The next morning a convoy...

Queen Libussa was a legendary witch in central Europe. But you won’t have heard of her. She lived a thousand years ago. One day, in a trance like state, while she was standing on the edge of a cliff, looking down at the River Vltava and the forest on its far side, she spoke a prophecy saying: “ I see a great city. Its glory will touch the stars ”. Then she said to one of her courtiers, “ In the fo...

In last week’s programme I did the first part of a programme remembering the 60thanniversary of the beginning of Australia’s involvement in the war in Vietnam. A war to stop the brutal Stalinist regime of Ho Chi Minh from taking over the democratic country of South Vietnam. I was joined for that programme by Gary McKay (now with Mat McLachlan Battlefield Tours), a nasho, who served in Vietnam as a...

Time flies when you’re having fun. 31st July 2022 is the 60thAnniversary of Australia committing troops to the war in Vietnam. I was university student during those heady days and I was totally sucked in by that slick left wing propaganda machine. The left, the same people who had sold Hitler as being a good guy, until Germany invaded Russia, then made the tens of millions of their own people who...

By the end of World War II, the 125,000 men of Bomber Command weren’t just forgotten but were shunned. There was a deep sense of shame at the devastation that had been inflicted on Germany and its cities by what is called the indiscriminate area bombing campaign. I can understand the mood as being something like I experienced when the war in Vietnam came to an end. The brave men and women who serv...

On 9 November 1934, five years before World War 2 began, a schoolboy in the German city of Dresden, wrote an essay on aerial warfare. He imagined what would happen if some enemy decided to bomb his city. He wrote: “ The sirens howled and the people fled into their air-raid shelters. The bombs fell with deafening noise, blowing in windows and destroying all the houses.. Vast flames rage over Dresde...

Your everyday working life is, or was if you’ve retired, getting up out of bed, getting dressed for work and then heading off. At the end of the day you’d come home. It would be a shocking experience if you, or any of your work mates suffered some sort of reasonably serious work place accident. That would really throw you. But if you were a crew member of a Lancaster bomber flying regular bombing...

In Don McNaughton’s book about his father’s wartime experiences when he was the mid-upper gunner on a Lancaster bomber during World War 2, retold in “ Lucky Pommie Bastard ”, he talks about the night, some time after his father had passed away, that he and his mother watched a programme on TV about the British bombing campaign against Germany in World War 2. His mother told him she found it helpfu...

In 1939 the cost of travelling by cruise ship from Australia to England was beyond the wildest dreams of your average Australian. Overseas travel was an absolute luxury and only for the very richest people. Most Australlian workers at this time got one week’s paid annual leave. Not much good if you wanted to spend two months sailing to England and then spend another two months sailing back. There...