Dan Snow's History Hit - 5. Story of England: Modern Warfare

Episode Date: May 25, 2023

From the First World War to the Cold War, conflict in the 20th century has been crucial in shaping England as we know it. This is the final episode of Dan’s epic adventure, taking him deep inside the famous White Cliffs of Dover with Gavin Wright, into the complex warren of tunnels that became the first line of England’s defence in WWII - overlooking the channel for the ships of modern invaders. He discovers how wars on distant frontlines changed life in England, from the very organisation of English society with Dan Todman, to the advent of modern medicine with Tim Cook. He then charts England's course from world wars to the Cold War, learning how the nature of conflict changed and speaking to Julie McDowall about the government's preparations for nuclear armageddon. He ends in York with Kevin Booth, underground once again in what was once a state of the art Cold War nuclear bunker, to look at how technology has changed England and the world.Produced by James Hickmann, Mariana Des Forges, edited and sound design by Dougal Patmore and artwork by Teet Ottin.If you want to get in touch with the podcast, you can email us at [e-mail], we'd love to hear from you!

It's the 1st of July, 1916. The British lines near the upper reaches of the River Somme in France are packed with anxious young soldiers. They stand shoulder to shoulder, one man pressed tightly against the next, clutching rifles close to their chests. Some smoke cigarettes to take their mind off the day ahead. All of them listen intently for a break in the artillery barrage that's been hitting German positions opposite them for a week. No Man's Land has been torn up by artillery fire into a moonscape of shattered trees and gaping shell craters.

As the sun rose higher in the sky, a call comes down the line to fix bayonets. A junior officer stares intently at his wristwatch, counting down the minutes until zero hour. At 7.30, shrill whistles pierce the silence up and down the line. Shrill whistles pierce the silence up and down the line. The solemn scene turns into a flurry of activity as the first wave of troops clamber up ladders and march towards German lines. Sergeants, corporals push more men forward for turning and heading towards the enemy trenches. But the British quickly realise that the artillery has failed to cause

any significant damage. The German barbed wire is intact. German defences have largely withstood the bombardment. Their lines are littered with deep bunkers dug into the air. As the British march forward, the defenders emerge, shaken but unharmed. They pour a deadly stream of rifle and machine gun fire into the advancing troops, grinding the British to a halt, inflicting horrendous casualties. By the end of the first day of the Somme, some 57,000 British soldiers were dead, wounded or missing. It's remembered as the bloodiest day in the history of the British military, and the hope for a quick, decisive breakthrough had been shattered.

The Battle of the Somme would ultimately drag out over five long months of attritional warfare. There would be a staggering 420,000 British casualties and over half a million German casualties before its end. The First World War was a devastating conflict that scarred the British national psyche. It touched the lives of every family who lost friends and relatives in the fighting, or were subjected to terrible living and working conditions on the home front. Its legacy is still with us to this day, in our politics, our culture, in the memorials that sprung up in every village, town and city, and the minutes of silence we observe every year on Remembrance Day. We started this series with the invasions of the Romans and the Normans,

conflicts that completely transformed England. A thousand years later, we find ourselves facing the same phenomenon. From the First World War to the Cold War, conflict in the 20th century was crucial in shaping England as we know it today. This is the final episode of my epic road trip adventure, and it's taking me deep inside the famous White Cliffs of Dover, into the complex warren of tunnels that became the first line of England's defence in World War II, overlooking the Channel for the ships of modern invaders. I'm ending it in York,

underground once again, inside what was then a state-of-the-art nuclear Cold War bunker. This series has been a wild ride and it's still not over. Welcome to episode five of My Story of England. This is Modern Warfare. In the Victorian era, conflicts had mostly been fought far away from England. Wars like the Crimean War, the Boer Wars, they took place on far-flung battlefields. They didn't touch the lives of people in Britain in the same way. They might be disastrous, gruelling affairs for the men who fought in them and their families, but by and large, British society remained untouched by the fighting itself. The front line was the front line, and what happened there stayed there.

The First World War changed everything. Because of its scale, the conflict forced its way into British homes to an unprecedented degree. Britain itself came under attack. Millions of men signed up to form the first modern civilian army and many families would lose loved ones or see their friends and relatives return with grievous physical and psychological injuries. Women stepped up to replace the men who'd left for the front lines, injuries. Women stepped up to replace the men who'd left for the front lines, taking on crucial jobs in factories and fields to support the war effort. After all of that, there was no way that Britain's citizens and veterans of the conflict would return to the pre-war status quo. The

experience of war had been too scarring, and the sacrifices too great. People began to demand social reform, from welfare provision to equal voting rights. While the war wouldn't bring about the downfall of the British Empire, it wouldn't in some sense exacerbate the disenchantment with imperial rule across many of Britain's colonies. With me to talk about the impact of the First World War is Dan Todman, Professor of History at Queen Mary University of London. Take me through, for example, the outbreak of the First World War. How does that start to change lives, obviously for those on the Western Front, but those living back here in Britain as well? Oh, that's a great question.

I think a key concept for us to think about when we're thinking about the impact that these big wars have on the history of England is about mobilisation. that these big wars have on the history of England is about mobilization. So when historians talk about mobilization, they're talking about the movement of resource from the civilian world, the pre-war world, into all sorts of things to do with actually fighting these conflicts. And that could be men in particular moving into the armed forces, women into the auxiliary forces, particularly in the Second World War. But it could also be the shift of resource from the civilian economy towards the production of material that's going to be required for fighting the war. One of the cliches we might have in our mind about the outbreak of the First World War is these lines of men waiting to join up, volunteers to join the army, who mainly join after news comes back of the apparent destruction of the

British Expeditionary Force, the regular force that had been sent to France and Flanders in 1914. So this idea that people are joining up, giving their service voluntarily to protect the nation at a moment of danger. But of course, as soon as you start to move men from civilian life into military life, that has all sorts of knock-on effects at home. So that could be at a very individual family level. The breadwinner has joined up and that family now needs some other means to support itself. It could be an economic impact. Maybe that man had a key job, railway driver's key example. And if they're not doing that, then actually the economy starts to falter at home.

And mobilisation, as you mentioned, of resources of peacetime economic activity. Although the Napoleonic Wars, we see gigantic amounts of shipbuilding and we see ironworks producing cannon, for example, carronades for the Navy, the Ops and muskets produced. Is there something about 20th century warfare that means really gigantic amounts of stuff need to be made. Yeah, well, I think that's absolutely right. And also that that stuff needs to be made for a long time with very complex, expensive processes, and that the field of operations of simultaneous high intensity operations has got bigger, I think. So all of that together means that the amount of

effort that's required is going to require much more control and direction from the state. So I think, you know, there's that famous explanation of the early modern world about the state makes wars and wars make the state. I think we could definitely see that for the 20th century UK. Let's start with the first one. Why does that change what people expect of the state in terms of welfare? Is it just this sense of, hang on, mate, we're in the trenches, we work really hard in a shell factory, you need to look after us from an old age pension, or you need to give us slightly better healthcare or give us a bit of a break on housing? Is that what's going on there? and after the war. And remember, I talked about mobilisation. I think there's a key moment that happens from 1917 onwards, which is about remobilisation. So more effort is required to win the war, this war that's been going on for a long time, the stakes have only increased

because it's been going on for so long and so many people have died. And that encourages some ideas both about how you might bolster the morale of the civilian population and fighting troops, and also a sort of idealistic sense of this ought to be a war for something better. And both of those push towards the preliminary mapping out of ideas for a better Britain after the war. You know, the beginnings of some thinking about reconstruction and things like that, lots of which will involve elements of the state taking more action. By modern standards, not a huge amount, but definitely more than had been present before the outbreak of war. And then I think if we look at the post-war period, so we talked about mobilisation, remobilisation. Now let's think about demobilisation. So you have

all these millions of men who have given service to their country and who have also learned how to fight. And the question of how you make sure that they convert back into good citizens, good citizens here being people who will not overthrow the state in a revolutionary fashion, as has recently been seen in Russia, that too encourages some intervention from the state. So if you look at the big increase in state provision, particularly the provision of a dole for unemployed men, that comes in really as a way to try to manage the process of men moving from the armed forces back into civilian employment. The idea that that might not be a smooth process, there'll be some time when they're unemployed,

and therefore there needs to be some sort of safety net for them. I would say that the people who win concessions, who make things better for the vast majority of the British population, it's not the dead servicemen. So this isn't something that's won in return for wartime sacrifice. It's trade unionists and live servicemen who come back, who have to be persuaded to remain part of the post-war settlement in some way. And what about, well there's lots of other groups, I guess some women get the vote in 1918. Is that more complex or is that just a kind of, it feels like a bit of a reward for wartime service? So reward for wartime service is definitely part of the rhetorical explanation for some women being given the vote in 1918.

Remember that both big parties have been thinking about and arguing about enfranchisement before the First World War. Both had sort of moved towards thinking that it might be a good idea, but they wanted it to happen on their terms. And the fear is you might widen the voting populace and do yourself a disadvantage. Saying that it's about wartime service is part of making the case. But look at who gets the vote, right? The vote is not given to young women, those who are actually most likely to have done service in munitions factories or in the auxiliary forces. It's given for the majority for women over 28. So it's women who are likely to have some investment in the system who will not vote for a revolution. It's a stabilizing factor. I think if we're thinking about sort of that grand sweep of

20th century history, it's really important to understand just how destabilized that moment between about 1917 and about 1926 felt that this was a point where there might be really radical change. And for people who were conservative or small-c conservative invested in the status quo, trying to manage that change in different ways, that's a key part of how Britain gets shaped through that middle 50 years. So from 26 through to about 76 is really the outcome of the settlements that are reached at the end of that difficult period at the end of the First World War. What about empire? Because technically, it's always fascinating, the territorial peak of the British Empire is often said to be in the early 1920s,

when Britain takes over previously German-held or Ottoman-held colonies, territories around the world. And yet we now also regard that as the sort of beginning of the end, part of its journey towards dissolution. Is anti-imperialism creeping in at that point? By winning a war against these great imperial powers, is Britain also discrediting imperialism itself? No, because it remains fundamentally invested in empire. There are high imperialists in the British government in 1918 who want to expand the empire as much as possible. That becomes increasingly difficult to sustain as a political project because of how much it will cost, where you're going to find the forces from to do it. There's definitely a trend against imperial expansionism or aggressive imperialism. That doesn't mean the same as aiming for the

end of the empire. And in fact, in some ways, the peak of the empire being tied together as an economic unit, for example, will come after the Great Depression in terms of thinking about trade barriers and things like that. So it's actually, in some ways, a more cohesive, in some ways, a more cohesive, though more limited project, maybe in the 1930s. And it's one, I think, which for all the crisis of 1919, and you see a crisis across the empire in that year, which is definitely linked to the experience of war and its aftermath. So in India, in Egypt, in Ireland, in all these places, the experience of war plays into a moment where imperial control is in crisis, and there's going to be fundamental constitutional change to try to adapt to that. But it seems like the British state is still fundamentally in control

of the timing. It manages to extricate itself from Ireland. It's a really important moment in the reformation of what the United Kingdom is after the First World War. They manage a new settlement with Egypt that will see Britain constitutionally in a different relationship, but actually still in control. They give some limited concessions in India. But in all these places, it looks like the empire is still strong enough to be maintained. And that, I think, is the big contrast you could draw with what happens to the British Empire from the middle of the Second World War when they lose control of the timing. Before we move on to the Second World War, it's worth talking a bit about advances in technology and science. The First World War

fuelled a murderous race between the rival powers to develop the most effective ways to kill one another. Tanks were invented, chemical weapons like gas were introduced to the battlefield, and aircraft went through a radical process of improvement. The infamous machine gun would carve out its place at the heart of modern infantry tactics during this period, but one of the best examples of scientific development was the caring for casualties rather than creating them. The field of medicine underwent rapid change between 1914 and 18, as doctors and nurses learnt new ways to treat a plethora of battlefield wounds and ailments. This would have a huge impact on civilian life after the war. and ailments. This would have a huge impact on civilian life after the war. A few months ago, I spoke to the Canadian historian Tim Cook, who's an expert on First World War life-saving innovations and the doctors and nurses who pioneered them. I think it's important to remember these were,

for the most part, civilian doctors, but they're brought into a military environment. They're in uniform. And maybe that sounds simplistic to say, but these are men of medicine who are all of a sudden responsible for the horrendous carnage on the Western Front, but also disease prevention, which is absolutely crucial, but also for enforcing military discipline. And that didn't always sit easy with them because it sometimes meant that they had to keep soldiers who were wearing down, who were on the verge of shell shock, for instance, in the line because they couldn't pull out everyone. Tim, you and I have talked about this before. It's kind of frustrating for historians of the First World War. It's seen as a time of complete stasis of conservative thinking, of backwardness.

And yet, even leaving aside infantry tactics, armor, aircraft, all that kind of stuff, artillery, just in the area of medicine alone, there can't have been many four-year stretches in the history of the world where medicine was transformed as radically as 14 to 18. Yeah, you're exactly right. It's strange because medical historians often write about the evolution of the practice and treatment, of course, but they almost leave out the two world wars, where, as you rightly say, there is this radical transformation. And how couldn't there be, right? I mean, the wounds and the carnage were unbelievable. And Dan, we've talked about this.

I know the eyewitnesses to history are so important to how you talk about history and how we learn about history. For me, I've had the pleasure and sometimes the horror, I guess, of reading thousands of letters and diaries and memoirs. And it's there where these poignant accounts come across the doctors who are just seeing these unbelievable wounds from shrapnel, from machine gun bullets, tearing bodies apart, destroying organs, shattering bones, chemical weapons, burning out lungs and blinding soldiers. And all of this, of course, it was up to the doctors and the nurses to care for these young guys. Too often in medical histories, it's almost like the war is happening somewhere over the horizon

but in fact no we know it was thousands or tens of thousands of young men fighting their way forward and during the course of the war as the evolution in tactics changes as weapons change as the tank is introduced in 1916 as chemical weapons become more frequent in 16 and 17, the nature of wounds change. And so the doctors need to address this. And there is this tremendous evolution, the introduction of blood transfusions, the use of the x-ray, radical surgery, because Dan, this is the age before antibiotics. And so almost every wound was infected. And so all of this is to give a brief glimpse into this evolution of treatment. What do you do with brain wounds? Abdominal wounds in 1915 are a death sentence, but by 1918, they're regularly saving soldiers. This is just part

of that evolution. But preventive medicine is also really crucial. Coming back to your initial point of, was there ever a period, a four-year period, where we learned so much about medicine? And I don't think there has ever been. Of the lessons of the Western front, with all of its brutality and death and carnage, is a new movement in public health. And I found that fascinating. There's a new movement of maternal health to save babies who are being born to replace the fallen soldiers from the Western Front. And I think, again, the contradictions of war. No one went to war in 1914 to save babies in 1922. And no one was studying the evolution of surgical care in 1916 to ensure that Canadians were better vaccinated in the 1920s.

And yet these are the lessons of war. And Dan, you and I have talked about this. You've studied war enough to know every war comes with its unintended lessons, and the war you think you're going to get is not the one that you do get. Where the First World War had laid the foundations for modern society in the UK, the Second built upon them. On the battlefield, a degree of mobility had been restored after the attritional warfare of the World War I trenches. Tanks, vehicles and aircraft had all been improved in the interwar years, and armies now wielded phenomenal mechanical power. Area bombing of cities became a key feature of the war. Divisions of combatants and civilians became blurred. In fact, many more civilians would die in this conflict than soldiers. The fighting varied a lot across theatres,

but in general, this was a much more mobile war, with the famous German tactic of blitzkrieg being the best example of this kind of thrust and counter-thrust. Britain spent the entire war as an island under siege, and the next stop on my journey is a great example of that. You're listening to my story of England. We'll be heading back underground after this short break. On American History Hit, we ride the wild Oregon Trail, delve deep beneath Central Park,

and fight the forgotten war of 1812. Join me, Don Wildman, and my expert guests as we uncover the stories that have shaped America in all its endless complexity. We'll follow John Wilkes Booth as he shoots President Lincoln and goes on the run. And we'll walk under the stars with Harriet Tubman as she finds her way to freedom. Follow America's story from the first Native people to footprints on the moon. On American History Hit, a podcast by History Hit, with new episodes every Monday and Thursday.

Follow us wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Eleanor Janaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mystery. To be continued... the best of friends. Murder, rebellions, and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. I've just arrived at the entrance, the underground tunnels here at Dover Castle. The amazing thing about Dover Castle is not only a magnificent medieval site, it's also got this fascinating World War II history that I'm about to see now, Burrowed into the White Cliffs of Dover, beneath the castle, ever since the medieval period really, added on in the Napoleonic Wars, there are a series of tunnels. These were repurposed in the Second World War.

They became headquarters. They became a nerve centre, just as in the First World War, but even more so in the Second. The home front became a theatre of conflict. There was rationing in Britain, there was censorship, conscription, there was bombing raids. And Britain, for many of the years, was in a constant state of tension. A Nazi invasion seemed to be just around the corner. And from where I'm standing now, I can literally see the port in France where that invasion might have come from.

It would be places like this here in Dover Castle where the military would orchestrate the defence of Britain. I'm joined at the tunnels by English heritage expert Gavin Wright to find out what they can tell us about the day-to-day life in a Britain under siege. Gavin, great to be back at Dover Castle, good to see you. Welcome, good to see you too Dan. Before we go into tunnels, tell me a bit about the history of the castle, a bit that people can see. Right, okay, so magnificent Dover Castle. Good to see you. Welcome. Good to see you too, Dan. Before we go into tunnels, tell me a bit about the history of the castle, a bit that people can see. Right. Okay. So magnificent Dover Castle, very visible up here on the outcrop. Always been a strategic place, of course, a pace of defence on the edge of Europe. So we've got a huge amount of history even before we get to the great keep of Henry II itself. But that's probably the

Piesta Resistance, that wonderful Plantagenet Castle standing up there on the outcrop there. But there's a lot more to Dover Castle than just the keep. Right, and there's a lot more underground as well. I can tell you that not just the castle, but the whole of the town is honeycombed with tunnels and caves, passages, cellars, all sorts of different places, which, of course, have been extremely useful to the residents of Dover over the centuries. I bet they have. They started mining these tunnels in the medieval period, did they? There were medieval tunnels here, yes, towards the north of the site, siege tunnels, really, or maybe Sally Forth tunnels at the time of Magna Carta.

tunnels, really, or maybe Sally Forth tunnels at the time of Magna Carta. They're fascinating. But there are also, of course, the Napoleonic tunnels that were built here originally just as barracks, but then were repurposed again and again. And of course, became so important in the Second World War. Right, well, let's head in and you can tell me more about what came of these tunnels in the Second World War. Excellent. Okay. Lead the way. Gavin, as we're heading to the entrance of the tunnels, you see a big anti-aircraft gun there.

I mean, people talk about being on the front line, but Dover was on the front line. It exchanged fire with German positions on the continent. Absolutely. I mean, they call this part of Kent Hellfire Corner in the Second World War for pretty good reason, because both the British and the Germans were firing their long-range guns at each other right across the English Channel.

The Nazi Germans would probably have been mainly focused on the western docks, the old port and harbour. But, of course, at the same time, most of the old maritime streets of Dover took a real pacing. Sad. So we've entered a tunnel now and we're going down, down, down. Yeah, we're going down now to a balcony which rather romantically looks out across the harbour but then is also the entrance to these fascinating casemate tunnels which were started here in 1797. So I've actually brought you into our mess room here. Back in the 18th century, this space would have been a dormitory for an awful lot of soldiers. It would have been damp and hot in the summer, cold in the winter. It would have been pretty grim in here, wouldn't it?

Yeah, I should think it probably would. I mean, there are stories of all those guys having to be crammed into a very small number of bunks, sometimes two to a bunk, not always there at the same time, but in shifts. So we know from the early health records of Dover in the early 19th century that the casemate tunnels were eventually deemed unhealthy, which I'm sure they were. That didn't stop the military using them in the Second World War, though. No, so pragmatically again. They were here already. The casemate tunnels are structurally so amazingly strong. I know, I mean, obviously it changes a lot during the war, but what was the plan for the casemates? Who was down here? So before the war,

the notion was that they needed to strengthen, beefen up the naval capacity in the south coast area. And Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsey, the great hero of Dunkirk, was invited to come down and set up a small, in effect, naval base within the tunnels, which, of course, later in the war proved to be so useful at the time of the evacuation of Dunkirk. Because the British Army defeated on the continent in May, June 1940, and suddenly Bertram Ramsey and his little team here in the tunnels, they're responsible for getting the whole army back in one piece from Europe. Absolutely.

So it seems maybe two days' notice to actually establish some way of getting the British Expeditionary Force, who were all trapped on the beaches of Dunkirk back here to the homeland. Admiral Ramsey, by all accounts, had the cool head and the good planning capability to be able to do that. Two days notice. Apparently. Plenty of time. Plenty of time. 300,000 men on a beach, hungry, cold, surrounded by Germans. Absolutely. No shipping. Absolutely. Absolutely. But we know quite a bit about Ramsey's character from some of the people who worked with him. These tunnels have been open to the public now for decades, nearly 30 years. So there's been time to meet that generation, particularly some of the Wrens, women for the Royal Naval Service, who, of course, would have been girls here in the 40s.

the Royal Naval Service, who of course would have been girls here in the 40s. Apart from telling you how cold it was, which was their main recollection, everyone seems to remember Ramsey as someone that was very well liked and respected, but everybody was in awe of the fact that he had such tremendous attention to detail. Sometimes bosses like that are hard to work for, but of course, those were the abilities that were so necessary for what he had to do. Dover is the heart of this network, but there's a defensive position right along these cliffs, isn't there? Dover Castle had become, I suppose, a nucleus of all the defensive positions on the coast around us. There were batteries and magazines and gun installations along the cliffs all the way around this part of Kent. And of course, a lot of the communication was coming

from the castle at that time. And I always love looking from the top of the keep, you can see the radar towers, top secret technology helping to protect Britain from aerial assault and invasion. Yes, absolutely. This part of the country still has all those remnants of that 1940s occupation. The radar, as you say, and all those gun installations all the way around us. But the people of Dover and the people living around here would have felt they were in a real militarised zone, particularly in 1940-41, wouldn't they? It was, I suppose, in many ways akin to what some of the people felt in the

big cities. Dover is a little town, but every street was affected in some way, notably, of course, by the shells that were coming across from the other side of the channel. But for a small town, high civilian casualties and a real feeling of being on the edge of war. And lots of accounts of dogfights going overhead, German aircraft crashing on the town into the sea. You'd have had front row seats at the Battle of Britain. The local newspaper, the Dover Express, were not able to report, of course, during the war because of restrictions. But after the war, they did a day by day account of what people had felt in this town. And as you say, those dogfights, all the things that they saw in the air.

There is a story, of course, from some of the older people in the town that they remember as children. And maybe it's good, isn't it, that children don't understand everything. Sitting on the cliffs of Dover, waiting for the flash of the shell in France, and then counting as it came over to land somewhere in the neighbourhood around here. Terrifying. The casemates in the Second World War were all partially open to the sea. Oh, really? So most of the blocking was done in the Cold War

when they were trying to establish the regional seat of government in the level below. Oh, my God, miserable. Put a wall on the office, lads. the love of the loyalties. Oh my God, miserable. Put a wall on the office, lads. Blinking back into the daylight now. Yeah. A bit of sunshine finally. It's a stupid thing to say again,

but every time I come here, I am surprised by how close France is. But far enough to frustrate the ambitions of Napoleon and Hitler. Absolutely. So once again, that's why we can still call Dover Castle the lock and key of the kingdom. The war that did so much change Britain certainly changed this little corner of England.

Yeah, and people quite sadly sometimes say that Dover hasn't really got over the war. And there is a certain element of that. The present population of the town isn't actually any more than it was in 1939. isn't actually any more than it was in 1939. So, as I said earlier on, it's a small town and really very, very different from how it was pre-war. Standing here listening to Gavin, I'm so struck by this seam of military history that runs through England's history

and the fact that so much of it happens in the same places. The place where William the Conqueror built his castle to lock down this new kingdom. The place where William the Conqueror built his castle to lock down this new kingdom, the place where Henry II built his magnificent statement royal fortress and the forces of his son helped to beat off the French invasion is the place that centuries later

would witness all this military activity in the Second World War. Like so many castles and forts and tunnels and casemates all around England, these ones were invaluable sites for the defence of the country centuries after they were first built. The Second World War ended in victory for the Allies, but as Gavin was saying about the town of Dover, it was a very different country than the one that declared war on Germany in 1939. Dan Tobman told me more about exactly how this

conflict shaped Britain. What is different about the Second World War for Britain? You get even greater levels of that mobilisation you talked about earlier. The first thing that matters is that it's the Second World War. So everybody knows what's coming in the sense of they have an idea of what a total war might mean. Whereas in the First World War, it takes a moment of crisis in 1915 and 1916 to lead to a dramatic increase in state power and compulsion of the nation. In the 1930s, that happens in the run up to the Second World War. to the Second World War. So a lot of things that the state is doing in the late 1930s, building new munitions factories or investing in aircraft plant or introducing conscription from March 1939, that's all happening before hostilities actually break out. The state's got, because it's had a bit more practice, is bigger and better at controlling

things because it's actually the personnel of the same. The people who'd cut their teeth on the First World War are the ones who are planning and implementing the plans for the Second World War. And so things like schemes of rationing, schemes for controlling prices, things which you only really see just starting to come in in 1918 in a not very coherent way, are much more cohesive and all-encompassing way from the beginning of the Second World War. Of course, that war goes on longer. It requires a different sort of mobilisation, even more than at the end of the First World War. The British are going to put the country's resources into building high-tech weaponry and giving that to service personnel,

rather than sending a really big army to engage in a blood fest in a major land war in Europe. And so the mobilisation that happens is as much into the factories as it is into the military. And why do you say that the Brits lose an element of control in the Second World War in a way that isn't true in the First World War? Do the Brits just run out of money or men in the great game of great powers? Well, I think there's two things. So the war accelerates a power shift that had been happening since the beginning of the 20th century in terms of the movement of strength and power across the Atlantic. We shouldn't overplay this. Britain and its empire is still an incredibly strong global power.

When superpower is coined as a neologism in 1944, it's meant to apply to three powers, USA, USSR, and the British Empire. And yet Britain's key need is for economic resources that it can only obtain from the United States. And in order to obtain those, it needs US economic support. It can't pay for them with exports and simultaneously mobilize its economy to produce the weapons that it needs to fight the war. So that's one element is that sort of transatlantic shift. And then there's another one that happens within the empire really from the ground up. And that's about whether Britain is able to offer the concessions and involvement in self-determination that would be required fully to mobilize parts of its empire above all India. And they have a real crisis moment in 1942 when the Japanese are on the doorstep of the Indian Empire. When Britain starts to make those concessions, it doesn't end up actually during the war being forced to hand anything over.

But the very fact that it's made them means that the idea of post-war independence is now a viable reality. It's going to happen. And then everybody starts planning on that basis. And that's a really dramatic change from 1937. is now a viable reality, it's going to happen. And then everybody starts planning on that basis. And that's a really dramatic change from 1937. If you look at the first Indian elections that happened after the introduction of the Government of India Act in 1935 and 1937, the British have set up, it's a very British way of doing it, this incredibly complex system, which is simultaneously giving much more democracy to India, and ensuring that the British are keeping control of all the key things about foreign policy and defence policy. And they divide up all the power in such a way that they're not actually going to be challenged. Within five years of

those elections, everybody knows that within another five years, there's going to be independence. And once everybody starts planning on that basis, the British aren't controlling the timetable anymore. Is there also something about if you're fighting, want to be imperial powers, Japan, Germany, Italy, and you're talking a lot about democracy and talking a bit about national self-determination, how you shouldn't... Is there something about discrediting empire itself? Is there a problem of just confidence in Britain?

It can't any longer go into India and behave like the Germans might have done in Ukraine. It just doesn't, it's not going to work. I think there's a question about whether there's the popular support to fight for the empire, particularly once the war is over. I think that's the big difference. And whether those soldiers who'd been mobilized to fight germany would continue fighting in order to um win back britain's overseas imperial possessions is a question that starts to bother the british elite from about 1943 onwards i mean as it happens they will while the war is actually going on but when when it finishes, I think that question of will they

fight the post-war independence movements is another matter. But of course, all of that is really a moot point if you've lost the Indian army. The manpower to keep control of the Eastern Empire in the conception of the British Empire, the way that it had worked from the 19th century onwards, it's not British manpower that's doing that, it's Indian manpower. So once India is going to be independent, you're not going to have the Indian army to do all of that work, then that becomes much more difficult to sustain. And it raises a totally different question about who's going to do the fighting. It's not like the British totally give up on empire. And even those people like Clement Attlee, who had been in their rhetoric, strongly their rhetoric, strongly anti-Empire, even during

the war, Attlee's hardly going to be giving away the British Empire after India's gone. And in some ways, you see a remobilisation of British imperial resource post-war in order to try and meet some of the challenges of that post-war world. But I think it's, in a way, for the UK population, it's more about the aspirations and the hopes that have been raised during the 1930s and during the war itself about what the post-war might look like. And there's, I think, an ambiguity within those that in lots of ways they depend on imperial resource to fund them. But at the same time, they don't involve going and being an aggressive empire overseas or sending sons or daughters to serve within the empire. So I think there's a tension

there, which maybe hadn't been there during the First World War. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings. Normans. Kings and popes. Who were rarely the best of friends. Murder.

Rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. And we see the welfare state. It's often dated to 1945, the huge Labour government victory and the development of the NHS very shortly after that. I mean, these are things that feel like a focus domestically rather than kind of mobilisation of the British people on far-flung imperial possessions. I think it's right to think of a particular sort of British nationalism being what defines the country in those decades immediately after the war.

being what defines the country in those decades immediately after the war. Nationalism meant in terms not just of talking about the nation, but in terms of focus on building things that are held at a national level, be that a national health service or thinking about reconstruction of other parts of the economy, like the export economy. And I also think there's a sort of a domestic turning inwards. You've had for the second time in the space of a couple of generations, this massively disruptive event. One which has separated families within the UK, where children have been evacuated or men or women have been posted to industrial or military jobs right over the UK.

It's also separated them across the planet when people have been on overseas service. There's a reaction against that in the late 40s through to the mid 50s, which is about people just wanting to come home and make homes and make houses and make families. And if you look at what's the hot political issue of the 45 election and the years afterwards, it's housing. Where are you going to put these servicemen who've come home? Are they going to rejoin their family who've been living in one-room lodgings with a landlady that they hate since they were bombed out in 1940?

Or are you going to build them a new home? What if you're going to build them a new home? With what? Everybody across the planet is competing for the resources necessary for reconstruction. You can only get them from America. You've got to pay dollars for them unless you can find a way to get them from within the Stirling area. But the key things are going to require some spending of dollars. How are you going to get the dollars? Are you going to remain reliant on US economic support to try and get out of the Second World War and go through that demobilization process or to re-equip your armed

forces to be able to participate in the global conflict which has arisen from the Second World War, which is the Cold War. We talked about growing British economic dependence on the US during the conflict. That continues for the period of reconstruction, but a good chunk of that will be spent not on retooling British industry or providing more things for the British domestic population, but on buying weapons in order to allow the British armed forces to participate in the Cold War. And how does democracy, how does society change class deference? Did the experience of the wars, the experience of huge numbers of people signing up, fighting in uniform,

does that change the way that people interact in civilian lives with authority, with the monarchy, with government? Hmm. So I'd answer that at two levels. At one level, the two world wars are like a massive affirmation project for the organisation of British society in the sense, and the Royal Family is a really good example of that, right? The Royal Family adapts successfully to what's a very dangerous moment for Royal Families across Europe. It rebrands itself as being an embodiment of the nation during the First World War. it manages to act as a force of stability within democratic change in the 1920s. Royal Family plays an important part in endorsing the expansion of the franchise and the acknowledgement of the need for change to meet the needs of the working class.

And then that's borne out in the Second World War. And look, outside of Ireland, we should always be able to keep re-emphasising that. But the mainland UK does not go through a violent regime change in this period. And that makes it very unusual in European comparison. At that level, the system works. And I think you see that when you see, say, at the end of the Second World War, the way that Labour and Conservative ministers, people who served together during the wartime period, have now been reconfigured into a Labour government and a Conservative opposition.

The way they come together to celebrate victory is really about democracy working. And look how different we are from all these other countries. We kept it together, we're strong, etc. So in that way, I think in some ways, it reinforces those patterns of deference. At another level, I think the wars accelerate something which was happening anyway, which was about a decline of some of those patterns of deference on a sort of more local level. And okay, they inculcate millions of men into patterns of structure and obedience and regulation that were involved in being in the armed forces, lots of which will carry over into civilian life. But also, the experience of that regulation encourages lots of people to be less different. And there's a degree to which the armed forces are a massive exercise in teaching men to look out for themselves.

So I think that sense of, well, I'll look out for my mob, just because I'm engaged in this great national project doesn't mean that I'm going to do you any favours, pal. So some of that carries through into that post-war existence as well. Now, lots of that would have happened anyway. And I think the last thing to say about this society that emerges from the First World War and fights the second, and is in some ways very well set up to be mobilised, is one in which there are strong patterns of deference and strong patterns of local authority that make it possible to guide people towards a total goal. In some ways, it's a positive democratic period that you're

building the basis for a post-war social democracy in which, again, wartime service will be used as a justification for giving more people more support. But at the same time, it's not a society which is very accepting of individual difference. You could use the experience of homosexual men as an example. Because the war creates such a desperate shortage of manpower, some gay men have an experience of more acceptance, for example, from their commanding officers in the army, because they don't want to lose a skilled member of their unit. And things like police persecution decline because there's so many fewer policemen and they're so busy chasing black marketeers and things like that so in some ways the wars create moments of freedom but overall the society that you're talking about is one in which to be different in ways which now we value you know in terms of individuality individuality is not seen as a positive attribute in the societies

that fought these great total wars and there's's an ambiguity there, isn't there, that they're fighting for a version of themselves, which many modern Britons now, were they to experience, would think was extremely oppressive. That individual difference makes me think about the post-war, about the second half of the 20th century, when we think of society as having become more tolerant, homosexuality legalized, women making giant strides ahead in equality in the workplace, still not at parity by the end of the century. I guess the same is true of different ethnicities arriving from around the world. How would you kind of characterize that trend in the second half of the 20th century? And is it linked in the same way that we just talked about in the first half of the century

to war, to external relations? Or are these things that are happening, well, that aren't necessarily linked to the wider struggle against the Soviet Union and its allies? struggle against the Soviet Union and its allies. So I think some of those trends are linked to a broader narrative of the 20th century, which is about the struggle for liberation. And you were absolutely right to make the point that once you've had a Nazi Germany, it recalibrates some of how prejudice looks. So I think there is some of that. I think it's also about shifts in global power, some of which are concomitant on the Cold War. But I think it's also to do with deeper social trends that are to do with things like democracy. What's the follow through of the democratic change where you're enfranchising more and more people? Is there inevitably a lead through into a struggle for

equality in terms of civil rights, and then a struggle for equality in terms of a wider set of rights and opportunities? The decline of the empire would radically change Britain's position on the world stage. Britain was still a major player, but as divisions between East and West solidified, and the Cold War kicked off in earnest, British strategy fell in line behind the Americans more and more. At home, the country moved away from notions of mass mobilisation as the nature of conflict changed. The looming threat of nuclear war was ever present from 1949 when the Soviets tested their first nuclear device. Nations could now be obliterated at the push of a button, regardless of how large and modern a country's army was.

There was no precedent for this. No blueprint existed for responding to weapons that could wipe out entire societies in a matter of seconds. The government tried to put a number of hypothetical and often mad-sounding contingency plans in place to protect people in the event of an attack. Julie McDowell, an author who specialises in the nuclear threat, had this to say about Cold War anxiety and the government's attempts to manage it. about Cold War anxiety and the government's attempts to manage it. So let's just talk about the context of when I was born, 1978 for example, and into the 80s. People forget there was pretty dark before dawn, wasn't it? In some ways the 80s was one of the darkest times of the Cold War and the nuclear threat. What was that threat? What would have been the effect of a general global thermonuclear war? The effect of a nuclear war, it changed over the course of the

Cold War. At the beginning, of course, we had the atomic bomb, which of course we saw used in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I'm not trying to lessen that horror, of course, but an atomic war would have been potentially survivable. It would have been hideous, it would have been horrific, it would have been the most destructive thing ever to happen, but it would have been potentially survivable but in the 50s we escalated up to the hydrogen bomb which made the atomic bomb look like well peanuts basically the hydrogen bomb can be as powerful as the scientist who designed it wishes it to be so when the hydrogen bomb came along it changed everything because atomic war planners and civil defence planners were no longer looking at something which was horrific, dreadful, but

survivable. It was now, in the hydrogen bomb era, something which was potentially world-ending, not only because of the blast and the firestorms and the fallout, but because of, as we later discovered in the later cold war the effect of nuclear winter the climatic effect that would come after an all-out nuclear war so when we move into the later cold war and we become clear about what hydrogen bomb warfare means it becomes obvious this is something which cannot be survived and therefore cannot be risked but of course we did risk it and we still are risking it. Did the government just accept the fact the whole country would be obliterated

and we'd be going back to the Stone Age? Or did they try and do what governments do, which is make plans and come up with arrangements in the event of a nuclear strike? They did try to make arrangements, even though behind the closed doors in Whitehall, it was obvious that an all out hydrogen bomb war would have been, as you say, putting us back to the Stone Age. And that was underlined to the government in what was called the Strath report, a top secret report in the 60s, which for the first time made it clear how hideous and unique the hydrogen bomb was.

So the government certainly knew by, as we're talking about the 1980s, what an all-out nuclear war would mean. I'm lost to defend the government, but to be fair to them, they couldn't exactly have said that to the people. They couldn't have went on Newsnight and said, yes, we're all done for, there's no hope. So they had to, I suppose, issue a white lie, a gentle lie to us and say, there is a way to protect yourself. There is a way to survive this. So the most famous example of their public information campaign was in the 1980s, in the early 80s, Protect and Survive,

which was a government leaflet accompanied by films, although the films were never released, which said you will be basically left to your own devices if it happens. There will be no public shelters, as there was during the blitz of course you will be left to yourself at home so therefore you have to very 1980s very thatcher right take responsibility sort yourself out don't expect us to help you you'll be left at home fortified at home so board up the windows or brick up the windows reinforce the exterior walls with sandbags or with wardrobes packed with boxes of books and clothing. Gather, of course, food,

water, first aid supplies, and allocate a room in your house, which is known as the fallout room. And that will be a room which is furthest away from outside walls, so therefore furthest away from all the horror that's unraveling outside. And in that fallout room, you must stay for two whole weeks. But even that wasn't sufficient to protect you. So the advice went further. It said, inside that fallout room, you should also create a little corner, a little cubbyhole almost. What you would do to create that is take interior doors off the hinges and prop them against the wall in this fallout room to create a diagonal and you crawl inside the diagonal space first having you know reinforced it with books mattresses bags of clothing and in that tiny space you must stay with

all of your family for 48 hours which is of course impossible it's a hideous thought but that was the advice because Fallout was going to be so strong for the first 48 hours that the only protection is to be in your house and in your house be inside your Fallout room and inside that Fallout room crawl into what was called the inner refuge so it's like Russian dolls inside inside inside at the very core of it there will be a family hunkering beneath their kitchen door propped against the wall. Now, of course, that's ludicrous that a kitchen door with a mattress atop of it and some bags of clothing will protect you from armageddon. But as I said at the beginning, to be fair to the government, they couldn't really

give us the truth because that would have caused mass panic and it would potentially have caused us all to become anti-nuclear activists and wanting us to lie down to the Soviet Union, I suppose. And that was unthinkable to the government in the 80s. So they did this feeble advice, of course, but really it was the only advice possible. It was either that or deliver the horrible truth. So I'm in a housing estate just outside York, modern buildings, and in front of me there's a big grassy mound with some classic British government sort of MOD concrete structures

sticking out of it. And here in front of me there's a big door. And inside that door, radiation hazard warnings, decontamination room. This, folks, if you haven't already guessed, is a nuclear bunker. I'm walking down into it now. As the nation came to terms with a nuclear-armed Soviet Union, buildings like this sprang up across the land, or rather underneath it. This is the final stop on my road trip to England. The first thing you notice as you enter the main part of the bunker is the noise, the plant room there, air conditioning whirring away, the sewage system blasting your excrement out into the sewage, which is above us now. This place had to be self-sufficient for a month

in the event of a nuclear strike, because the grid would go down, so they've got a backup generator there. They've got an air pressure system that keeps the pressure down here slightly higher than the air pressure above. That helps to stop radiation ingress. And then there are toilets here.

There is a telephone exchange. All looking brilliantly Cold War, 1960s and 70s. And the smells are like every military base I've been to from that period. There's a ladies' dormitory, some bunk beds, men's dormitory. And they live in a hot bunking, not many beds there. And then I enter here into an extraordinary operations room. And Kevin is here. Kevin from English Heritage, how are you? Very well thank you Dan, welcome. Very good to see you.

Now this room I've got to say, describing it for people listening, it's very Battle of Britain if people can imagine that right. There's a mezzanine level, there's a level down in the pit, you've got a map down there, a kind of plotting table and a big map on the wall. So you picture those films from the late 40s, 1950s, where you've got this huddle of, well, Wrens, I suppose, down there pushing their planes around on a large table. And it is that setup. Architecturally, you know, that's what inspires this place. It's all about identifying incoming threat, right? But unlike the Second World War, where it's bombers and fleets of bombers, this is intercontinental ballistic missiles. Yeah, I mean, the ROC, the Royal Observer Corps, they're there in the Second World War to spot planes. Their role is to identify the plane, its trajectory, how fast it's going, and think about where it's about to drop its

payload. They switch to this nuclear role, which in the early stage is still about planes. It's still about identifying a Russian bomber and where it's heading and in what trajectory. But technology speeds on, and before they know it, they're not looking for missiles anymore. They're looking for the impact. They're looking for what the missile does when it hits. And so this bunker is the government's eyes and ears.

Yeah, it's the information service for just what is happening out across the landscape as these horrific weapons detonate. And because there's mini bunkers around the country that are feeding into this one? 1,500 little concrete cells, 15 foot under the ground, three people running up and down ladders, checking equipment and realising that a large explosion's happened, phoning into a group control like this, consolidating that information and then passing it out to the rest of the country. We've had people on the podcast before that say, actually, what's the point of planning for nuclear war? Everything would have been destroyed.

What was the thinking behind this? Was it wishful thinking or was this a serious attempt to ensure continuity of government and save lives and support people in the event of a nuclear strike? Oh, I think this network, what's called UKOMO, the UK's Warning and Monitoring Organization, this network, when it's conceived in the mid-50s, is conceived with an entirely sort of hopeful, pragmatic, practical reality. They believed that this would work. But they were dealing with bombs at that time, which are kilotons. You're not dealing with multi, multi-megaton bombs

and hundreds of them, thousands of them. So by the time really this place is built in 61, you can argue whether or not it could possibly serve that purpose. But there's the other aspect to this, which is about the sense of the country's ability to respond, the sense of the country's capacity to withstand the onslaught, that in some way a nuclear war is shocking, but it's not unimaginable. We can progress through it.

And this sort of network is almost like a public relations exercise to an extent about our resilience in the face of the Soviet threat. It's a bit depressing if the government just gives up and says, nothing we can do, sorry lads. You can't just do that. They're forming civil defence at the same time in the 50s. That goes through what, to 1968? That whole idea of civilian and community planning, protect and survive. Would this have withstood a nuclear strike, do you think? Not if it landed on top of it,

and quite possibly not given the Soviet attack plan on the country, no. But if it was lucky and a bomb was more than 8 to 10 miles away and it wasn't a particularly huge bomb, yes, it would. And this idea of 1,500 bunkers, of 28 group controls nationally, the hope is that enough of it survives to still report information down, one should say, standard BT landlines. I mean... Right, so they weren't specially buried in concrete landlines? No, no, no.

Oh, I see. If your listeners are driving around and they see a line of telegraph poles going out in the middle of a farmer's field and it stops at a sort of strange lump in the middle of the field that's probably an ROC bunker so you've got this blue perspex like minority report with 1500 little observer bunkers on it and then these bigger nodes one of which we're in now and terrifyingly you've got a an exercise showing nuclear detonations on that map one just just north of Lincoln, one north of York, and big cones. What are those cones? Is that sort of the radiation? Yeah, the cones are these little finger-shaped plumes of radiation, which the scientists would know exactly how fast it's going

and how high it is and at which point it's going to drop its payload over which unsuspecting community. That exercise you just mentioned, that actually is the last exercise the observer corps officers did in 1991 before the whole system was closed down. So 1991, what, Cold War's over? Just lock the front door and disappear? Pretty much. And then eight years later, and the bunker had just been dormant for that period, and eight years later, English Heritage got access and made decision that it should be a scheduled monument. It hadn't flooded or anything? It had in places it flooded it was covered in mold there were mushrooms in here you know it really was the sort of dark dank imagination of

what a bunker should be. I'd love to have seen that. That period yeah five years four years of conservation but the thing about this bunker is we're stood here and just about everything you can see around you has never moved. Yeah. It's not one of those jobs where we've taken things out and then recreated a space. This space is the space of 1991. This is what the ROC left behind. You know, on this road trip, I've been from the south coast

right up to the northeast of England. And although such different buildings, and yet I'm really struck standing in here that they're doing a similar job, aren't they? It's still dealing with this security threat that we faced through our history and we continue to face from our fellow man. And whether you're talking about the Iron Age hill forts or Dover Castle on the cliff there or Henry VIII's gun batteries along the coast, this is just another evolution of that. It's just another network, another layered sequence of defence to spot the threat and deal with it. But one poignant thing about standing in here, it would have felt, I think, quite fun than 10 years ago. But now, you know, Vladimir Putin with nuclear sabre rattling, terrifyingly, perhaps this is a world we haven't actually left behind.

It does make a site like this feel that much more relevant, feel that much more immediate. much more immediate and you know for English Heritage to have a site where we have that immediacy of connection with people's current lived experiences is remarkable for us and it's a very significant learning tool for us all I think. I'm back above ground now, gulping down the fresh air and listening to the birdsong after a fascinating visit into what is a time capsule, an extraordinary relic of a period when we had to deal with the very real possibility of nuclear devastation. And that trip underground felt very different now with renewed superpower competition, renewed threats of nuclear exchange than I think it would have done a couple of years ago. Very thought-provoking indeed and sad in a way to think how many of the sites I've been to, how much of our landscape has been

shaped by this need to fight, to defend ourselves, to impose our will on others. We're such a violent species, war has been such a constant and the world of the 1990s when this bunker was shut down and we felt like we were moving into a very different place. We dared to hope that major wars were behind us. That world now seems to be receding from us. But this trip has also been an opportunity to look at the best things that we humans have done. The art, the ingenuity, the engineering, how we've managed to overcome so many of the natural obstacles placed in our path. It's been hugely inspiring in equal measure. And also, there's just so much to see. This island

has this incredible concentration of historical sites. So much history has happened here. We've got such a great record of it. It has been such a privilege to go from the south coast up to the northeast, seeing some of the places that take us back into the past and teach us about ourselves and of course i've only scraped the surface i've only been to a couple of dozen sites and there are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds more to explore and i will be doing so on this podcast please continue to send in your suggestions ds.hh at historyhit.com there'll be more road trips there'll be more podcasts

no part of history will be left unexamined huge thank you to English Heritage huge thank you to you all for listening and a huge thank you to the producers Marianne Desforges, James Hickman and Dougal Patmore for the editing as ever see you next time, folks. you