There are a few things that are catastrophically wrong with the movie, historically speaking. Kenneth Branagh plays someone who I think is supposed to be Captain Bill Tennant, who was a senior naval officer. He was sent over by Ramsay to oversee the naval evacuation, and he arrived there at about 5:30pm on 27 May 1940 which was a Monday, via the HMS Wolfhound.

He is standing on the jetty with the James D’Arcy character, who plays a generic British officer. Neither of whom are wearing tin helmets which is almost a court-martial offence. You wouldn’t be in the middle of a war-zone wearing soft caps. It’s slightly by the by, but it really grated. I wanted to say, “Ken, come on. Put a helmet on.”

This article is an edited transcript of How Accurate is Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk? with James Holland on Dan Snow’s History Hit, first broadcast 22 November 2015. 

Captain Bill Tennant arrives at Dunkirk

There’s actually a really nice story about Bill Tennant’s arrival. He had been working at the Admiralty the night before, and suddenly he’s told to report to Ramsay that morning of 27 May.

Then Vice Admiral Bill Tennant in 1945. Credit: Imperial War Museums / Commons.

He gets there about 9:30 and goes to the Dynamo room inside Dover Castle’s secret tunnels, which is incidentally why it’s called Operation Dynamo. Ramsay says to him:

Look, I have to be frank with you, if we get 45,000 men off we’re going to be doing well. There’s so many things against us. The Germans have taken Gravelines which means they’ve got onshore, coastal guns, so we can no longer take the shortest route, which was just 39 miles.

We now have to take over an 87 mild dogleg off Ostend or we’ve got to go for an unknown route of 55 miles through minefields. We’re going to have to lift them off the beaches. There’s no other way of doing it, the harbour’s absolutely wrecked, so the chances of getting more than 45,000 are frankly pretty slim.

This is really bad news.

When Bill Tennant gets over there the first thing he realises is that because he’s left in such a rush, he only has a tin helmet which doesn’t have any identification of rank or what he is.

Men of the 2nd Royal Ulster Rifles awaiting evacuation at Bray Dunes, near Dunkirk, 1940. Credit: Imperial War Museums / Commons.

He realises that he needs everyone to know very clearly that he is the senior naval officer, so he tears out an S, an N and an O from a cigarette packet and sticks it onto his helmet with fish oil. Now, I think that’s a really good scene and it could’ve been fantastic having Kenneth Branagh arriving and doing all that, and they choose not to, but that’s by the by.

But the real thing that grates is when James D’Arcy’s character thinks that the tide comes in every three hours, and hopes that the next one will bring a wave of ships, and Kenneth Branagh responds with a wry smile that they’ll have to wait six hours, and that “It’s a good thing that you’re army, and I’m navy, isn’t it?”

The whole thing is just absolute nonsense. It’s really bad history because the tides didn’t come into it at all. The jetty extended nearly at best part of a mile out into the sea and tides had no influence whatsoever.

The bottom line is that once Tennant quickly recognised that ships could possibly be moored up against that jetty, against that mole, everything changed and it happened successfully.

The Queen of the Channel came up and 904 men were disembarked on that night, and that had happened twice more by about 9:30am the following morning. There was just this constant shuttle of ships. Ships would come at two abreast, with people walking across one ship onto another ship as it was moored up against the east mole.

The Royal Navy’s role in evacuation

The idea that somehow the Royal Navy wasn’t pulling its weight and there weren’t enough ships involved is just ridiculous. There was no evidence that these were only being unloaded at night. The shuttle of ships was going on 24/7.

The only time there was no day line operations from the mole, was on the very last day of the British evacuation because the sky started to clear and so the Luftwaffe could see their target more.

But in actual fact, the mole was never ever hit by the Luftwaffe, not once. That’s the bit that really grates and the net result of that is that, ‘Oh, gosh. We can’t evacuate people from the mole very successfully, so, therefore, what are we going to do? Oh, I know. We’ll resort to the little ships.’

Well, there were 202 little ships and they did an absolutely amazing job in actually shuffling people from the beaches.

Three of the armada of ‘little ships’ which brought the men of the BEF from the shores in and around Dunkirk, to the safety of British warships and other vessels. Credit: Imperial War Museums / Commons.

No-one should belittle the part they play in our national heritage and the national story of Dunkirk, but they were just 202.

The Royal Navy also provided vast numbers of yachts and motor boats and landing craft and dockyard lighters and drifters and trawlers and all sorts of other things and it’s just misrepresentative.

It’s suggesting that somehow from the bleak prognosis of 45,000 men being evacuated at the beginning of the operation to over 300,000 in reality was largely down to the fact that the little ships came to the rescue. That is just completely and utterly wrong.

While it’s fantastic that people come away with a better understanding of Dunkirk, it’s a bit of shame that their understanding is then jaundiced towards thinking it was all about the little ships because it wasn’t.

The timescale given is one week, which is broadly correct because the Admiralty’s evacuation plan, Operation Dynamo, begins at 6:57 pm on Sunday, the 26 May 1940 and lasts a week. By the night of the 2 June, it’s all over for the British and the last remnants of the French troops are picked up by the 4 June.

This article is an edited transcript of How Accurate is Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk? with James Holland on Dan Snow’s History Hit, first broadcast 22 November 2015.

After the capture of Calais by fascist German troops, wounded British soldiers are brought out from the old town by German tanks. Credit: Bundesarchiv / Commons.

At the start of the operation the BEF is in dire straits. They have been corralled around this port of Dunkirk, France’s third-largest port, and the idea is to pick up as many of them as possible.

However, at the beginning of the operation, there wasn’t much hope that very many would be picked up at all, and what you don’t get in the film is any sense of what’s come before.

You’re only told that the British Army is surrounded, and they have to get out of Dunkirk, and that’s it.

The accuracy

In my book, The Battle of Britain, the idea that “The Battle of Britain” doesn’t begin in July 1940 is central to the thesis, and instead it actually begins with the Dunkirk evacuation because it’s the first time RAF Fighter Command are in operation over the skies.

That week is when Britain comes closest to losing the war: Monday, 27 May 1940, ‘Black Monday’.

One of the things that Dunkirk gets right is when you see from the perspective of the two Tommy’s and one Frenchman, I think their experiences are pretty close to what a lot of people would have been experiencing.

The Mark Rylance character coming across in his boat, in one of the famed little ships is pretty accurate. I think the sense of chaos and mayhem on the beaches is pretty accurate. The sounds and the amount of smoke and the visual context make it a really good taster.

A sense of scale

I was over in Dunkirk when they were filming it, interestingly, and I could see ships out at sea and I could see troops on the beaches and I could also see clouds of smoke over Dunkirk town. They basically bought the town for the duration of that sequence of filming.

Soldiers from the British Expeditionary Force fire at low flying German aircraft during the Dunkirk evacuation. Credit: Commons.

It was brilliant that they were actually using the real beaches themselves because it has a faint religious overtone and it is such a key part of British history and part of our kind of national heritage in a way.

So to actually do it on the right beaches itself is just fantastic, but actually, there just wasn’t enough of it. If you look at contemporary photographs or you look at contemporary paintings, they give you a sense of scale of it.

The smoke from the oil refineries was far heavier than was depicted in the film. There was much more of it. It poured some 14,000 feet into the air and spread out and created this huge pool, so that no one could see through it. From the air, you couldn’t see Dunkirk at all.

There were more troops than were depicted in the film and there were many, many more vehicles and particularly ships and vessels out at sea. The sea was just absolutely black with vessels of all sizes. Hundreds took part in the Dunkirk operation.

Wounded British soldiers evacuated from Dunkirk make their way up the gangplank from a destroyer at Dover, 31 May 1940. Credit: Imperial War Museums / Commons.

Ironically, although it’s big studio and big picture and although some of the set pieces were clearly incredibly expensive, in actual fact, it falls a little bit short in terms of depicting complete mayhem.

I think that’s because Christopher Nolan doesn’t like CGI and so wanted to have it as clear of CGI as possible. But the consequence is that it actually feels a little bit underwhelming in terms of the amount of mayhem and chaos. I should say here that I really, really enjoyed the film. I thought it was terrific.

You’d pairs of squadrons. 24 planes would fly over in turn and they were doing patrols over Dunkirk.

There were gaps when there weren’t any planes, but there was a lot of time where there were planes and the trick was to try and time it for when the Luftwaffe came.

The Luftwaffe, incidentally, was unable to fly over Dunkirk constantly because their airfields were still a long way back and they had very little time over the target zone.

They were flying over, dropping their bombs and then scooting back to Paris airfields, and even some airfields back in Germany. They had quite a long way to go, and the RAF was trying to marry all that.

Air battles during Dunkirk

The problem with the flying in the film Dunkirk is that they are flying in at zero feet.

A whole point about air-to-air combat is that you try and get the advantage of height. Typically you’d be flying over at around 24,000 feet and diving down on your enemy when you saw them.

It is perfectly okay to have a plane diving down after an enemy plane and shooting up near the surface of the sea. It was not to be encouraged under any circumstances, but it certainly did happen.

Men of the 2nd Royal Ulster Rifles awaiting evacuation at Bray Dunes, near Dunkirk, 1940. Credit: Imperial War Museums / Commons.

Most of the flying was at much greater heights than was depicted in the film. Also, Spitfires only had 14.7 seconds worth of ammunition whereas it seemed Tom Hardy had about 70 seconds in that film.

It’s a minor quibble though because I did think the flying sequences were absolutely fantastic.

Eventually, every single standing man on the beaches was lifted off.

General Alexander, who later became Field Marshal Alexander, and the supreme allied commander in the Mediterranean by the end of the war, was then a divisional commander.

He was left in charge of the BEF when Lord Gort who was the original commander in chief of the BEF evacuated on the 31 May.

We know everyone was lifted off, because Alexander went with Tennant in a launch on the night of the 2 June, calling out on a loudspeaker going, “Anyone there? Anyone there?”

They went all the way down the length of the beaches and when they were satisfied there was no one left then they said, “BEF successfully evacuated. We’re coming home.” And they did. It’s just absolutely phenomenal.

The ‘miracle’ of Dunkirk

There were a number of reasons why 338,000 rather than 45,000 were evacuated and one of them was the infamous halt order, where they stopped the Panzers coming in, so that the BEF was never completely cut off at an early stage.

The second reason was down to the 16 infantry battalions stoically and courageously defending the perimeter. They were behind this ring of canals, about 5 to 8 miles south of the town and there were some incredible actions there.

You don’t see any of them in the film, and I don’t think I have an issue with that, but that is one of the reasons why they were able to hold off the Germans for so long.

Battle map of 21 May – 4 June 1940, the Battle of Dunkirk. Credit: History Department of U.S. Military Academy / Commons.

One of the reasons why they thought they would only be able to evacuate 45,000 people was because they thought the window in which they could evacuate them was going to be very small.

They thought it would be somewhere between 24 hours and 72 hours, at the absolute most. In fact, it was a week. That was down to the stoic defence of the British who did an incredibly good job.

The second thing was the weather.

On 28 May, the weather just closed in. It was incredibly calm so the sea was flat as a board. There was no rising swell, so that bit in the film was inaccurate.

There was ten tenths, or full cloud cover for most of the evacuation and on top of that, you then had the smoke from the oil refineries.

That meant was that if you were on the beach looking up, the only time you would ever see an aircraft was if a Stuka dived incredibly low or a low-flying Junkers 88 or something swept in, but actually, that didn’t happen very often.

Soldiers from the British Expeditionary Force fire at low flying German aircraft during the Dunkirk evacuation. Credit: Commons.

Most of the time they were bombing blind.

You’d hear planes and you would see bombs coming down, and that made the people on the ground think there was no RAF above, but actual fact they were flying above the cloud base where obviously it’s nice and sunny and bright and you can see your target.

White-washing

With the problem of white-washing in the movie – you’re talking about the regular pre-war army and many of the non-white faces are in the Middle East and India.

There are obviously hundreds of thousands of them, and they played a vital role, but they weren’t really at Dunkirk.

There were a few, but this film is focusing on the experiences of just a handful of people and if you’re trying to take, a cross-section of sort of every man who was involved in that, I think that’s a completely fair depiction, to be perfectly honest.

It’s a very good movie. I thought it was a fantastic. As a spectacle, I thought it was fantastic.

I loved the aerial footage, even though it was inaccurate. It certainly is brilliant that “Dunkirk” is on the map in a major Hollywood studio movie.

I’m all over that like a rash. I thought it was really, really good, but misleading and just sort of falling a bit short. So for me, it’s a 7.5/10 rather than a 9.

Header image credit: The Withdrawal from Dunkirk, June 1940, by Charles Ernest Cundall. Credit: Imperial War Museums / Commons.

This article is an edited transcript of World War Two: A Forgotten Narrative with James Holland available on History Hit TV.

Germany’s success in the early stages of World War Two really stems from the bizarre collapse of the French Army in a very short period in the late spring and early summer of 1940. And, to be fair, German Army commander Gerd von Rundstedt and Hitler’s very clever “sickle cut” (as British Prime Minister Winston Churchill described the German manoeuvre through Allied defences in the Ardennes) idea was brilliant.

But it was two or three weeks’ of brilliance that lengthened the war by four years.

The German advance through northwestern Europe by noon on 16 May 1940.

Part German brilliance, part Allied failing?

The Nazis’ amazing victory in France and the West against the Low Countries was 50% German brilliance and 50% French failing. There was the mother of all traffic jams in the Ardennes. The whole forward plan for the German Army’s 16 mechanised divisions – which formed just a fraction of the total 135 divisions that invaded in 1940 – was total, total gridlock.

And Allied reconnaissance aircraft went over, saw it, reported back, and just went, “That can’t be true”, and ignored it.

Had the combined bombing efforts of the French army of the air and the British Royal Air Force taken those Germans divisions out then it would have all been over. 

You get the impression that the entire German offensive was clinging to victory by its fingertips. Had it not gone right, World War Two wouldn’t be remembered as the sort of titanic genocidal struggle that we now remember it as. Indeed, Germany would have been defeated there and then.

And the vast majority of the senior commanders in the Wehrmacht thought it was going to be a massive failure.

General Franz Halder, the chief of staff of the German Army, was the main architect of the Ardennes plan. He was a late convert but realised that the only chance the Germans had of winning was to do it that way.

If they went the traditional route, they weren’t going to win in France; it would be too long an attrition, too drawn-out.

But if they went the radical way of going through the Ardennes then there was a chance of winning – not a very high one, but at least it gave them a chance. And actually, as it turned out, it proved to be an incredibly extraordinary victory where just everything went pretty much right for the Germans as much as they also went horribly wrong for the French.

This article is an edited transcript of World War Two: A Forgotten Narrative with James Holland available on History Hit TV.

It’s actually extraordinarily surprising that the Wehrmacht (the armed forces of Nazi Germany) did as well as it did in World War Two. It is amazing that it got from Brittany to the Volga given that the German fighting machine was totally rubbish in lots of ways.

The Wehrmacht was good on a tactical level. Or, at least, the best of the Wehrmacht were. The big thing they had during the second half of the war was discipline.

But if you look at World War One, why did Germany sign an armistice in November 1918? It was because it had run out of money and wasn’t going to win.

Well, by that reckoning, you could say that by the middle of 1942, the Nazis should have been ready to surrender. But they didn’t.

It breaks all the codes of recent warfare that Germany would carry on in 1942 because it clearly was not going to win. Despite all the talk of wonder weapons and all the rest of it, it was not going to happen.

La-la land

What’s so amazing is that if you think about the war in the East and look at the Eastern Front and the German drive in the summer of 1942 down to the Caucuses, you have to wonder, “What are the Germans going to do if they get to those oil fields? What is going to happen?”.

First of all, the Russians weren’t going to let them get out there; they were going to destroy them first.

But just say the Russians didn’t, what was going to happen once the Germans got to Baku and Azerbaijan and they got all that oil? How were they going to transport it to the front? Because how you transported oil in World War Two was by ship. 

Well the Germans didn’t have any of that. They weren’t going to be able to get through the Mediterranean and out around the North Sea and back into the Baltic – that wasn’t going to happen. So the only way they were going to be able to get the oil out was by rail. But they didn’t have the rails.

There were no pipelines back into Germany. It was just bonkers, absolute la-la land.

So to really understand World War Two is to understand how the Germans kept going when all around their position was falling. And the truth was discipline and making do with less – all that sort of stuff. 

The squandered Heinkel 112

The Heinkel 112 in flight.

And yet, at the same time, they squandered so much. Before the war they had the world’s two best fighter airplanes by a country mile, and one of them they never used. The Heinkel 112 had a range of some 750 miles, the same armament as a Messerschmitt 109 and an inward-folding undercarriage.

So it was incredibly stable on the ground, which was really good news if you were a greenhorn straight from flying school.

It had elliptical wings like the Spitfire, an amazing rate of climb, and it was fast. In terms of performance, it was fractionally below the 109 and what a winning combination that could have been.

But instead the Germans binned it because Heinkel had a “whiff” of being Jewish about him, and Hitler didn’t like it. And so the Germans went for the Messerschmitt 110 instead, which was a two-engine fighter plane and a total dud.

This article is an edited transcript of World War Two: A Forgotten Narrative with James Holland available on History Hit TV.

Over the years, as the decades have passed, the narrative about Britain’s role and performance in World War Two has changed.

Tied into our collective narrative of the Second World War is that period at the end of the British Empire that saw the decline of Britain as a great power and the increase of America as a superpower, along with Russia becoming the enemy in the Cold War.

During that time, the only people who had ever fought the Russians were the Germans and so we listened to the Germans and followed their tactics because they had experience. And overall, what that has done is belittle Britain’s performance during the war.

By contrast, immediately after the war it was like, “Aren’t we great? Aren’t we fantastic? We helped win the war, we’re fantastic.” That was the era of The Dam Busters film and other great war films where Britain was repeatedly shown to be absolutely flipping fantastic. And then subsequent historians came in and said, “Do you know what? Actually, we weren’t that great,” and, “Look at us now, we’re rubbish.” 

A forgotten part of the narrative

And that’s where the whole “declinist view” has come in. But now that time has passed, and we can start looking at World War Two at the operational level, which is what’s really interesting. If you look at films from the day, it’s not all about frontline action – there’s as much coverage of factories and people producing aircraft as there is about people at the front.

Britain produced 132,500 aircraft during the war, as well as ships and tanks, and all that sort of stuff. It’s just that that is a forgotten part of the narrative.

But actually, when you do start to look at it, you realise that Britain’s contribution was absolutely enormous. And not only that, but some of the world’s great inventions came out of Britain. It wasn’t just that Germany was doing its rockets and interesting stuff like that; they didn’t have a monopoly over key inventions, everyone was doing it.

The Russians made amazing tanks, Britain had the cavity magnetron, the computer and all sorts of developments in radio technology, as well as Bletchley Park and the Spitfire. So everyone was doing amazing things – and not least Britain.

Britain’s biggest contribution

The Battle of Britain was a really, really key moment, in particular Britain’s ability to just sort of keep going and fighting. The Battle of the Atlantic was also pretty important in the overall war but the Battle of Britain was the decisive theatre of World War Two in the West.

And the interesting thing is that the Germans never really appreciated that. If Germany wanted to beat Britain and prevent America from getting involved, then it had to cut off the world’s sea lanes, and that’s something it never ever did.

So the Battle of Britain was a key turning point. It forced Hitler to turn East to the Soviet Union earlier than he would have liked, which meant he was consigned to fighting a war on two fronts.

And that was disastrous for Germany with its shortage of resources and all the rest of it. 

Intelligence was also an important part of the British contribution to the Allied effort in World War Two. And it wasn’t just Bletchley Park, it was the complete picture.

Bletchley Park and the decoding and all the rest of it was absolutely crucial, but you always have to look at intelligence – whether it’s British, American, or whatever – in its entirety. Bletchley Park was one cog of many. And when you put those cogs together, they collectively add up to much more than the sum of their individual parts.

It was also about photo reconnaissance, the white service, the listening service, agents on the ground and local intelligence. One thing for certain is that the British intelligence picture was streets ahead of Germany’s. 

This article is an edited transcript of World War Two: A Forgotten Narrative with James Holland, available on History Hit TV.

Contrary to what we’ve been brought up to believe in the UK, the Battle of Britain wasn’t actually that close – the German Luftwaffe was pretty hopeless. It was very badly led at the highest level, its general staff was in a complete mess and its intelligence was woeful. Really unbelievably bad.

That’s one of the really interesting things about the whole Nazi regime – just how bad its international intelligence was. Secondly, the Nazis just didn’t have enough planes. You can pretty much count on one hand the number of times that 100 bombers went over and hit a specific target in the Battle of Britain.

The number of planes that the Nazis were sending over wasn’t enough because what they were trying to do was to target airfields.

Britain wasn’t France

Now, before the Battle of Britain started, the Luftwaffe assumed the clash was going to be just like the fight in France where there had been no defence system. There had been radar in France, but it was very, very basic radar that was not coordinated whatsoever. There had been no early warning system in France or anything.

So the Luftwaffe could completely choose as and when it attacked. Its Messerschmitts and Junkers 88s, and its Dorniers and stuff could scream in, fly over an Allied airfield, shoot it up and hit most of the Hurricanes or Marines on the ground.

All the Allies could do in France was sort of take off and hope for the best, hope that they bumped into some Luftwaffe planes.

Thus, the Luftwaffe held all the aces in France.

But it was completely different in Britain because we knew when the Luftwaffe planes were coming and so we could get off the ground get into the air and actually shoot some of them down. And, more importantly, make sure that we weren’t shot up on the ground and destroyed on the ground.

An aircraft spotter with the Royal Observer Corps scans the skies for Nazi aircraft from a rooftop during the Battle of Britain.

So for the Germans, all that was a problem because if the enemy’s aircraft wasn’t on the ground to be destroyed then all they could do was bomb the airfield. But the British airfields were all grass and about 100 acres in size, which is big.

If the Germans were only attacking with 20 Dorniers, the amount of tonnage they could drop in total was about 30 tonnes. And 30 tonnes is nothing.

It would only be enough to make a few pockmarks around the field, which the British could quickly fill in with pre-prepared scalpings and soil and be good to go again within a few hours.

Over the entire course of the Battle of Britain, only one airfield was knocked out for more than 24 hours, and that was Manston. Manston was deliberately kept out of action because it was right on the tip of Kent and not needed, so there was no point in getting it back up and running. So the Luftwaffe was never even close to victory.

The failing of British intelligence

British intelligence on the Luftwaffe was pretty good, but the one failing was that they overestimated the strength of the German air force. They thought that German squadrons were based on British squadrons, which had 12 planes in the air but double that on the ground – so 22 to 24 total pilots and 20 to 22 total planes for every 12 planes in the air.

When the British were down to 75 per cent strength at the end of August 1940 and the first week of September, they were worried and thinking, “God, you know, we’re 75 per cent strength, that’s not enough. We can’t sustain that”. But that capacity still meant that each British squadron had around 16 to 18 pilots and aircraft, though the number of pilots was more of a problem than the number of aircraft.

By contrast, German squadrons only had 12 planes at full capacity – though very often operated with nine. And by the first week of September, quite a lot of the squadrons had only four or three or even no planes on a particular day.

The German problem was a shortage of planes because they weren’t producing as many as the British were.

In reality, the German situation was much worse than our intelligence thought it was. But that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. If you’re on the defensive, it’s quite good to overestimate your enemy’s strength.

The “henpecking” tactic

Quite often, German planes would come over to Britain for a raid and, while initially a squadron of 12 British planes might be attacking a formation of 100 Luftwaffe aircraft, over the course of the entire raid, the total British fighters attacking would number more than the German planes.

The classic example of that is 15 September 1940, which is known as Battle of Britain Day.

Two major raids took place on that day, with the first one peaking at around midday over London when about 75 to 80 enemy aircraft were met by about 275 British Spitfires and Hurricanes. So the ratio was massively in favour of the British Royal Air Force.

But, again, at the point of impact, a 20-year-old British pilot might have been one of only 12 attacking a German formation of 80-plus and he wouldn’t have necessarily realised that there was another wave of British planes flying out after him, tag-teaming almost.

Because our airfields were dispersed all around southern England, British aircraft weren’t all going to take off at the same time and form one big wing.

Instead, a squadron of 12 from Biggin Hill, say, would be sent up and would attack the German formation as they saw it coming in. But then another British squadron would also attack, and then another.

So the British would henpeck a German formation all the way as it came out, and the point would be to try and put the German planes off their aim and get them to get rid of their bombs early rather than drop them on London or whatever the target might be.

This article is an edited transcript of World War Two: A Forgotten Narrative with James Holland available on History Hit TV.

The rather brilliant Lieutenant Colonel (Retired) John Starling runs the amazing Small Arms Unit at Shrivenham, the staff college just outside Swindon. He has got an amazing archive of small arms, everything from Black Bessies to more contemporary weapons. And amongst it all is an incredible arsenal of World War Two stuff: machine guns, submachine guns, rifles, you name it.

The MG 42 machine gun

I went to visit John and we were going through all this stuff when I saw an MG 42 – what Tommies (British private soldiers) used to call a “Spandau”. It was the most infamous machine gun of the Second World War and I said, “That’s obviously the best small arms weapon of World War Two”, which was something that I’d read in a book. 

The MG 42 doesn’t necessarily live up to its reputation.

John just went, “Says who? Says who?”

And in the next five minutes completely deconstructed why the MG 42 wasn’t necessarily the best weapon at all. For starters, it was incredibly over-engineered and expensive to make.

It had this incredible rate of fire, but it also had all sorts of problems: too much smoke, barrels overheating and no handle on the barrel so the user had to kind of flip it open when it was really, really hot.

Each machine gun crew also had to carry around six spare barrels and the gun was really heavy and got through loads of ammunition. So it was great in the initial combat, but came with all sorts of problems.

And I just said, “Oh my God.” I had absolutely no idea about any of that; it was just a completely revelatory moment. And I thought, “Wow, that is really, really fascinating.” So I then went away and did lots more research into the over-engineering of weapons in World War Two.

The Tiger tank

Another example of German over-engineering is the Tiger tank. While the Allies’ Sherman tank had a four-speed manual gearbox, the Tiger had a hydraulically controlled, semi-automatic, six-speed, three-selector gearbox designed by Ferdinand Porsche. If it sounds unbelievably complicated, it was.

And if you were an 18-year-old recruit from Germany and put in one of those things, the chances were that you were going to mash it up, which is exactly what happened.

A Tiger I tank in the north of France. Credit: Bundesarchiv, Bild 101I-299-1805-16 / Scheck / CC-BY-SA 3.0

One of the reasons you were going to mash it up was because Germany was one of the least automotive societies in the West during World War Two. It’s a total fallacy that Nazi Germany was this sort of huge mechanised military moloch; it wasn’t.

Only the tip of the spear was mechanised, while the rest of the army, that vast army, was getting about from A to B on its own two feet and with the use of horses. 

So, if you’re not a very automated society, that means you don’t have a lot of people making vehicles. And if you don’t have a lot of people making vehicles, you don’t have a lot of garages, you don’t have a lot of mechanics, you don’t have a lot of petrol stations and you don’t have a lot of people who know how to drive them.

So if recruits get put into a Tiger tank then it’s a problem because it’s just too difficult for them to drive and they ruin it. 

This article is an edited transcript of World War Two: A Forgotten Narrative with James Holland available on History Hit TV.

War is understood to be fought on three different levels: strategic, tactical and operational. In fact, you can even apply that perspective to businesses. With a bank like HSBC, for example, the operations are the nuts and bolts – getting people computers, sending out new chequebooks, or whatever.

The strategic level is the overall worldwide view of what HSBC is going to do, while the tactical level is the activity of an individual branch.

You can apply that to everything, including World War Two. The interesting thing about that war, though, is that if you read most general histories of the Second World War, what they concentrate on is the strategic and tactical levels rather than the operational.

That’s because people think the economics of war and the nuts and bolts and the logistics is really boring. But it isn’t. 

A rifle shortage

Just like every other part of World War Two, the operational level is full of incredible human drama and amazing stories.

But once you apply that third level, the operational level, to a study of war, everything changes. For example, in 1940, Britain was defeated. Britain’s very small army had escaped from Dunkirk and come back to the UK in complete disarray.

The traditional view was, “We hadn’t prepared enough so therefore our army was in desperate straits and about to be invaded at any moment”.

To take a single example of the state Britain’s military was in, there was a rifle shortage in 1940. The most basic elementary requirement for any soldier and Britain didn’t have enough of them. The reason we were short of rifles is because on 14 May 1940, British foreign secretary Anthony Eden announced that he was going to launch the Local Defence Volunteers, which later became the Home Guard.

Members of the Local Defence Volunteers are inspected at the LDV’s first post in central London, near to Admiralty Arch, in June 1940.

By the end of August, 2 million people had volunteered to join the Volunteers, something that no one had been expecting. Before 14 May, no one had even thought about doing a home guard – it was a quick response to the crisis in France and, you could argue, a pretty good one.

So what did Britain do? Well, because of its enormous global purchasing power, it bought rifles from the United States. You could argue that that was a sign of weakness, but you could also argue that it was a sign of strength: Britain had a problem and it could solve it immediately by just buying rifles somewhere else. By the end of August, job done; everyone had enough rifles.

This article is an edited transcript of Imphal and Kohima with James Holland, available on History Hit TV.

One of the lesser known battles of World War Two was fought around Imphal and the neighbouring village of Kohima, in Nagaland, north-east India, in 1944.

Imphal and Kohima are sometimes regarded as separate engagements but it’s perhaps better to consider them as one big battle which took place in the spring and summer of 1944.

Having driven the British out of South-East Asia, humiliating them in Malaysia, Singapore and Burma, the Japanese were now pushing into the heart of the British Raj.

It was the task of William Slim, recently appointed as the commander of the British Army in the region, to repel these Japanese forces, led by General Renya Mutuguchi.

Two years of misery in the jungle

In 1942, the British had tried to get into Arakan in north-west Burma (now Rakhine State in Myanmar), but made an absolute hash of it.

Their misery was quickly compounded by a monsoon that completely destroyed whatever infrastructure was available in the jungle.

There were no roads, just muddy tracks, and when the monsoon came, you simply couldn’t pass them. It became very hard to supply the front line.

So the British were forced to wait another year until the monsoons were over and they could try again. But the monsoons hit again in 1943 and they still couldn’t do anything.

At that point, the morale of the army was at rock bottom and the physical condition of the men was no better. There was also lots of disease, particularly malaria, which further weakened the troops.

Of course, illness significantly eroded efficiency – soldiers had to be removed from the battlefront and transported quite a long way to hospitals in Bengal.

There was also an issue around skills. The soldiers weren’t properly trained for combat in Asia. They were still doing the standard infantry and artillery drills you’d use in Europe.

William Slim played a vital part in transforming British fortunes in South-East Asia.

Something had to change and, under the leadership of Slim, it did. The troops were properly trained, access to medical treatment was improved and strategy evolved.

Victory at the Admin Box

The first evidence that these changes might bear fruit arrived with a great victory in Arakan, in the early part of 1944.

The battle was fought at a site that was known to the British as the “Admin Box”. The Japanese tried to outflank the British and surround them, but the Anglo-Indian force held its ground and decimated the Japanese.

It was a triumph built on Slim’s decision to implement a newly defensive approach.

The Japanese troops were typically very lightly equipped, a tactic designed to maximise speed and mobility. But it meant that they had very limited supplies, including food. By standing their ground until the Japanese were exhausted, the British-Indian forces were able to defend the Admin Box and emerge victorious.

The strategy would go on to be the template for success at Imphal and Kohima.