The Danger Zone (DZ)

On 17 February 1864, as the American Civil War was nearing its end, the USS Housatonic, a sloop of war, was sunk. The Housatonic was on station as part of the Union naval blockade of Charleston harbour, South Carolina – stopping Rhett Butler blockade running. It’s sinking gave it a place forever in military history. The first ship ever sunk by a submarine - the Confederate submarine –the H. L. Hun...

In this Danger Zone - I'm going to introduce you to the man who was James Bond, Captain Jack Aubrey, Rambo and Winston Churchill all rolled Into one. You know his name, but you almost certainly don't know who he really was. Tag words: James Bond; Captain Jack Aubrey; Rambo; Winston Churchill; Captain Arthur Phillip; Royal Navy; American Revolution; Botany Bay; Yves-Joseph de Kerguelen; Lou...

Over the past decade terrorists have killed an average of 21,000 people around the world each year. Global deaths from terrorism over the past decade have ranged from 8,000 in 2010 to a high of 44,000 in 2014. In 2017 terrorism was responsible for 0.05% of global deaths. 95% of terrorist deaths in 2017 were in the Middle East, Africa or South East Asia. In most Western countries terrorism is the c...

So who was the man, or men, who were the true life inspirations for Ian Fleming’s James Bond? Ian Fleming denied that it was him. The head of British spying operations in the United States, a man known by the code name Intrepid – William Stephenson – said that when Ian Fleming was sent to boot camp he hesitated when he was ordered to kill – so not the stuff of a 00 agent licensed to kill.  Bond’s...

Ian Fleming had seen a lot of behind the scenes of the intelligence organisations of England and the Americans. He’d seen how they operated at the very top. He’d played a key role in helping the Americans to get their intelligence organisation up and running, but now he was going to do his first work in the field. Then he had to go to the spy training school where secret agents are taught how to k...

Where, in the recesses of the mind of Ian Fleming, did James Bond come from? In my last programme I talked about Ian Flemings early days. How he grew up, unsettled, but finally found his niche in intelligence. In this programme I’ll tell you about Ian Fleming’s wartime experiences. The people he worked with including Roald Dahl (the author of children and adult novels), the famous British singer N...

He was 38 years old when he was born in 1953. He never ages. He never loses. Like Dr. Who he’s continuously being reborn – in body and mind as he moves effortlessly through the passing decades since the movie Dr No was released in 1963. Was this fictional character modelled on a real person. Is that even possible? Perhaps he’s a composite of more than one person. Or is he just pure fiction? Let’s...

This programme is a true story that you probably have never heard before. And what a story it is! In 1940, after Hitler had invaded Poland and England and France had declared war on Germany, England and France were about to enter into a war with Russia. Given that there was no differences that matter between how evil Nazi Germany was, and how evil Communist Russia was, this would have made a lot o...

Shock & awe – words we came to know in March 2003 with Operation Desert Fox. A revolutionary new military tactic using revolutionary new weapons. But were the shock & awe tactics new or had they been around for a long time. Let me illustrate my point from long long ago – about 480BC. The great Chinese military strategist, Sun Tzu, found one technique for achieving this which he recommended to his...

Who, or what, was responsible for killing more Nazi officers than died in active combat? This is a fascinating and incredible story. It involves Adolf Hitler, who avoided the death that so many German officers suffered from this cold-blooded killer even though he was a number of times in its sites. Ferdinand Porsche comes into this story too amongst others. Stay tuned because you won’t want to mis...

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...