Dan Snow's History Hit - Moscow 1941: Hitler's Nemesis with Jonathan Dimbleby

Episode Date: December 9, 2021

While the allies reeled from the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour and Hitler's declaration of war on the United States, a ferocious battle was also raging across the icy steppes of Russia in early December 1941. Hitler had launched his invasion of the Soviet Union in June of that year - Operation Barbarossa- the largest and deadliest in modern history. The German army was no match for the sheer number of soldiers sent by Stalin or the brutal conditions of a Russian winter. By the time Hitler's army reached the gates of Moscow on the 2nd of December, millions from both sides had died. In June this year, Dan was joined by historian and veteran broadcaster Jonathan Dimbleby to discuss the beginning of Operation Barbarossa and the German offensive. Jonathan joins Dan once more to, this time, look at Stalin's response, what was going on in the city during the Battle of Moscow and why the Soviets ultimately succeeded in defeating the Germans. You can listen to the first part here: https://podfollow.com/dan-snows-history-hit/episode/e1cf197bb81f0354bac4f8d2e8c19b27be871511/viewPlease vote for us! Dan Snow's History Hit has been nominated for a Podbible award in the 'informative' category: https://bit.ly/3pykkds

Hi everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History. Eight years ago this week, the 20th century, the whole of the modern world was being shaped. The battleships, the American Pacific Fleet, lay on the bottom of the Hawaiian naval base at Pearl Harbor. The greatest carrier strike group ever assembled had been sent by Japan to try and neutralize the American Pacific Fleet. The USA, the world's most important economic and industrial power, was now in the Second World War. Congress declared war on Japan after their

surprise attack at Pearl Harbor, and days later, Adolf Hitler would declare war on America, bringing it in to the European war. We've got podcasts on that coming up. We're going to be looking at the 80th anniversaries that were coming at us thick and fast at the moment. But meanwhile, whilst America, Britain, and other allies reeled from Japanese attacks, on the Eastern Front, possibly decisive clash was taking place in that terrible war within a war. In unimaginably cold temperatures, millions of men were hurling themselves at an enemy that would decide the fate of the Soviet capital Moscow and possibly decide the fate of the Second World War. On the 2nd of December 1941, a German recce unit reached the Volga-Moscow Canal. They captured a key bridge on that canal and they were now 19 miles away from the Kremlin

in Moscow. It was as close as Adolf Hitler's forces would get to the capital of his Soviet nemesis. It was really the high point of the German assault into the Soviet Union, the largest, deadliest military operation in history to that point. German casualties were approaching, well, about three-quarters of a million. The Soviets had lost millions of men killed on the battlefield, captured and starved to death, or wounded. The two sides were now exchanging blows at the gates of Moscow. Now, you'll remember our podcast with Jonathan Dimbleby, one of Britain's leading broadcasters. We talked to him in June of this year for the 80th anniversary of the beginning of that offensive and I want to get him back on the podcast, talk about this

update, talk about the forgotten turning point of the Second World War really, something that people don't talk about as much as they should. The moment outside Moscow 80 years ago when everything turned. We're going to look in this podcast at Stalin's response to Operation Barbaros, the invasion. We're going to be looking at how and where Stalin found ever more troops and supplies from, and what happened within the city itself, as it found itself on the front line, exposed to German bombing. If you want to head over to History Hit TV, you can watch a pair of documentaries there. The second one's about to drop, about Lieutenant Friedrich Sander. He was a panzer officer in the German Wehrmacht as he is invading the Soviet Union.

It's got the most extraordinary diary recently discovered by a friend of history at German military historian, Rob Schaefer. We've got an actor reading up that diary and we've got footage, sound and visual footage from Operation Barbarossa. It's proving one of the most popular TV shows ever. Part two is about to drop.

So please head over to History Hit TV. You can just go to the website historyhit.tv. You'll be able to join the thousands of other people watching Barbarossa, The Lost Diaries. But in the meantime, here's Jonathan Dimbleby. Enjoy. First of all, let's have a quick recap. We got Jonathan Dimbleby. We're very lucky. He's just written a big history of Barbarossa. He talked to me on June the 22nd about Hitler's reasons for attempting to invade the Soviet Union, why he thought he might win, and why he did it then. I think he indicated preparations in the summer of 1940 that Barbarossa was on the agenda, the invasion of Soviet Union was on the agenda. If you go back to Mein Kampf, was on the agenda. If you go back to Mein Kampf, the demand for Lebensraum, which of course was there strongly in the German psyche in any case, after they had had limbs severed as a result of

the Treaty of Versailles, when I say limbs, I mean the borders, and the resentment and the feeling of humiliation that he fueled by demanding space to the east, along with regarding the Bolsheviks, the Bolshevik-Jewish conspiracy as the principal enemy. So I do think that that was his intention. When it would happen was always in question. Early on in the war, he hoped he could cut a deal with the British. After all, they were Anglo-Saxons. They were very like the German Ary he hoped he could cut a deal with the British. After all, they were Anglo-Saxons. They were very like the German Aryans. They could kind of come to terms. British wanted a global empire. We wanted Europe. Surely they would do a deal. And there was always

a chance that that might happen, incidentally, until Churchill became prime minister. When that was clearly not going to work, and when the combination of defeat in the Battle of Britain alongside the clear evidence that he could not invade successfully across the channel, then he turned his attention to the Soviet Union. And he was in a hurry. He was in a hurry because the economics were against him. Germany was not a growingly powerful state. It was a weakening powerful state. And he had to move. And I think in 1940, he made the early noises about it, but there were a whole series of triggers which led to him making the final decision towards the end of 1940. That was Jonathan talking to me back in June of this year. Let's talk to him again now,

and we can get deeper into Operation Barbarossa, and particularly the battle for Moscow. Jonathan, thank you very much for coming back on the podcast. I'm very delighted to be with you again. We're talking now in December, 80 years on. I read descriptions of the battle for Moscow. I read them in your book and other sources. What was going on now across vast swathes, hundreds of square miles of Western Russia was unimaginable for the people caught up in it, soldiers and civilians alike. It was a nightmare of almost unbelievable proportions. The German armies had advanced from June in 1941 all the way to within 40, 50 miles of the capital.

There had been unbelievable barbarism the whole way through on a scale which defies any understanding unless you realize the deep hatreds and contempt that was involved on either side. It was a campaign that I think has no rival in history. It was also, of course, you may want to talk about it, also of extreme importance to the outcome of the Second World War. But in December, the weather was unspeakable. And it was so bad that you had the German tanks bogged down in the wet. And then it would become suddenly very cold. So you would go from mud clogging every vehicle, horses.

There were by now only less than half the original number, so only 250,000 horses laboring in the mud, pulling artillery, falling over out of the traces, dying, being killed. You had the Germans in a state of exhaustion, near exhaustion, lacking supplies, lacking food, lacking clothing, because when the weather turned from deep wet and cold, it turned to ice and snow with temperatures plummeting from zero, minus 10, minus 20, minus 13, up to minus 40. So frostbite had become an immense problem for the German armies. The Soviet armies, which were very large in number, they drive on Moscow by the Germans, involved 75 infantry divisions, and they had been decimated in this advance. So when you get to, I'm just going to check here, I want to find, get sure I've got this

quote right. This was the mood of the Germans, first of all, on the weather. Here's General Heinrichi, who was an infantry commando in Guderian's 2nd Panzer Army. He was a very brilliant strategist, as it happens. He became very renowned after the war and was one of the few of the leading figures who wasn't tainted by his deep commitment to Nazism and the eradication of Judaism.

And he said in late November, I doubt we'll reach Moscow this winter. Everyone is sick of this year and would love to go home on leave since there's no end in sight. It will be going on even for next year. Russia is crumbling, but not yet broken. His boss, Guderian, who was the most swashbuckling of all the panzer commanders in the Second World War, not excluding Rommel, although they were practically peers, he was outspoken, independent. He broke all the rules. He got sacked.

Later in the war, he came back to great prominence. But he said this is about his own panzer army, the panzers having been at the forefront of the advance on Moscow, the icy cold, the lack of shelter. This is a letter to his wife. The shortage of clothing, the heavy losses of men and equipment, the wretched state of our fuel supplies. They were down to one day's fuel supplies because the gap between the baseline and the front line had grown so huge. You're talking 600 miles. All this makes the duties of a commander a misery. And the longer this goes on, the more I am...

This is Guderian. When I read this for the first time, I was kind of astonished. I'm crushed by the enormous responsibilities which I have to bear. The Soviet position, so far, from June, they had already lost 3 million men, 3 million. But by the beginning of December, they still had 4 million men at the front, more men than they had at the beginning because the reserves were so huge. And that was more important by far than the weather, which I touched on, which certainly had an effect. Harrowing accounts there. Tell me, Jonathan,

about this decision to go for Moscow, because this is something I find fascinating about Barbarossa. Should it be advancing on a broad front? Should they focus on the great breadbasket, the industry of Ukraine and the Caucasus? Should they take out St. Petersburg? And the decision was eventually made, no, after much messing about, we need to strike, launch a massive armored spearhead directly at the Soviet capital. How much was Hitler involved in that decision and how difficult was that decision to come to? Well, Hitler's involvement in the decision, his indecision was absolutely fundamental. He completely ruled. The commanders at the front, the commander of the army group center, Bock, who was leading the attack on Moscow, sought to resign and didn't

because no one else would go with him way back in September because of what he thought were absurd decisions being made by Hitler, impossibilist demands. As you get further on, you have both the commander on the Army Group North and Army Group South, both those commanders agreeing with him. They believed that they did not have the resources to, as you've just outlined, to take Leningrad on the one hand, to take Kiev, that they did take Kiev, but they couldn't send the resources needed to plunder the Ukraine and reach the oil. They tried it later in the onslaught of 1942-43 and failed. They knew that their resources were not powerful enough. They knew that the Soviet army, for all the preconceptions they had that it was

poorly led, that it was demoralized, was actually a formidable force. And it was resisting far more fiercely, bitterly, and hand-to-hand fighting where necessary than they had ever imagined. Even into late November, December, Hitler was asking unspeakably absurd demands that they were going to have to encircle Moscow. At this point, the same point that the commanders of the front were saying, we're going to have to halt. So the decisions were Hitler's. The inability to resist those decisions was the German generals beneath him. Those surrounding him immediately were completely craven creatures. The frontline commanders weren't craven, but they could see no way of saying no that would be effective. There was a division right at the very beginning between

the military and Hitler and his immediate entourage of Keitel, the Wehrmacht commander-in-chief on the one side, and the army on the other side of the east. And Hitler wanted to do all three. They thought they could do it very quickly. It soon emerged that it was going to take much, much longer. That was the point at which army group center, supported by the other army groups, said, we've got to go for Moscow. We decapitate Judeo-Bolshevism in Moscow, and the Soviet Union will crumble. Hitler said, we need the resources in the south. And in any case, I need to destroy St. Petersburg, Leningrad, as it had become. And that was unresolved, until in the end, they decided that Moscow would have priority. But even at that point, Hitler was then asking

the central front supported by the other two fronts to achieve the impossible by December. When you look at it in a detached way, as a military operation, you think, how on earth did any military force, a government leading it, make such absurd decisions and move in such a counterproductive and self-destructive way? And the answer is Hitler. You listen to Dan Snow's history. I've got Jonathan Dimbleby on talking about Operation Barbarossa. More after this. Ancient history fans, this is our moment. Subscribe to The Ancients now to get your weekly goodness of ancient history. We've got the big topics.

So through this material, we're actually looking at this entangled sum of hundreds and thousands, in fact, of stories of life across ancient Eurasia. We've got the big names. The Romans, of course, become so powerful, and the Romans conquer the whole of the Mediterranean world. And Hannibal was the one who challenged the Romans the most. We've got the big discoveries. And these are the only surviving boxing gloves from the Roman Empire.

And we even have some groundbreaking new archaeological detective stories. Bards of Cleopatra. I had never come across any such thing before. Subscribe to The Ancients on History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. 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.

Let's talk about his counterparty there, Stalin. I mean, in your research, how close was Stalin to leaving Moscow? How panicky did the Soviet Supreme Command get about their capital city? The answer is very nervous indeed. Can I go back to October briefly? In the middle of October, up until then, the propaganda machine of the Soviet Union, which was very effective in the sense that it repeated itself a great deal, and it was always talking about how the fascist beast was being deterred and that victory would prevail. Suddenly, in the middle of October, it goes out from the broadcasting institutions all over the country, and particularly in Moscow Moscow that the capital was under threat. There was total panic. The announcements came out like every Soviet citizen is now instructed to stand firm and fight to the last drop of blood and on the 9th of October, this is you have to

remember they've been told everything was going fine at the front although they were very suspicious and dubious because reports did come back from family members and so forth. They were told to mobilize all their forces to repel the enemy's offensive. Not surprisingly, there was anarchy and panic, which I could elaborate. point agreed that the seat of government should be evacuated some 900 miles to the southeast towards now Samara. Foreign embassy staff were summoned and told to leave that very evening. This was on the 15th of October. There were huge crowds at the stations. Many more people were just voting with their feet. Workers and peasants had horse-drawn carts, the grand limousines of the powerful, party functionaries commandeering trucks, documents being burnt, and so forth.

And there are two, I think, quite intriguing sidebars to this, if you think of our familiarity with their names. Sakharov was then a 21-year-old physics student. And in the middle of this chaos, he went to his university and asked the proctor, the key figure there, with a group of other students, what can we do to help? What can we do to support? He said, run for it, get out of here. And he was instructed to leave and in fact ended up east of the Urals. And the other was Shostakovich who had been summoned back from Leningrad where he started to write his famous Leningrad symphony the seventh to Moscow and now had to be evacuated from Moscow and he was sent to the train station and there was a compartment which was kept for the different artistic groups the Bolshoi and so on and he was there with his family with his wife and children

and cases and he couldn't find his way onto the train they eventually got on the train he got on the train and he left all the cases behind and he described two things one is how people very kindly provided him with clothes because he was a very eminent figure already of course and how he could no longer think about that symphony he couldn't work at all he was been numbed did finish it eventually in early in the next year so you have Moscow in chaos then Stalin says I'm not leaving and all the sycophants around him had all agreed they had to leave said no of course not of course we'll all stay with you. So the Politburo stayed, but the whole administration left.

I mean, Berea had been, who was possibly the most hideous of all the dreadful people around Stalin, torturer, murderer, unspeakable character, was the most cowardly of them all, not perhaps surprisingly. And he, as they were going up the stairs, to have this very crucial meeting with Stalin on the 15th, 16th. He said, we're all going to have to leave here, otherwise we'll be killed, we'll die. And people nodded around him. When he got in there, Stalin said, what do you think?

And Molotov spoke, defense commissar, and said, I think we should stay. Everyone then nodded as they saw Stalin approving. So they stayed. I don't think Beria was very happy about that, but that's what happened. So Stalin was very clear. He offered key leadership at moments. I mean, he was a ruthless monster, but he was very good in decisive moments like that. And he stayed. He actually put up in the underground station, one of the big underground stations in Moscow, where the facilities had been prepared for him, office space, bedrooms, et cetera. And the planes and the train that was standing by to take him down to Samara, in case that's what he opted, was stood down and he stayed.

And that made, I think, psychologically quite a big difference alongside a very ruthless state of siege to prevent a disaster. But one more thing on that, interestingly how thin the veneer of a socialist dictatorship was. Mobs were stopping cars before the state of siege, pulling people from them, beating them up, taking what they wanted, looting, old people being pushed aside in queues for food by young people, and an outbreak of anti-Semitism, with people shouting, beat the Jews. And there's a particular case of a college administrator, a group of Jewish staff burst into his offices, and this is his description their lips were trembling they were all white the

scoundrels they were demanding that I sign their papers for evacuation I turned down I was disgusted by this herd of short short-legged fat faces there is pretty ugly stuff was going on in one way or another. But order was restored by state of siege and anyone shot was suspected of being a looter or in any way critical of the regime. And the people were shot. Order was restored. And meanwhile, the retreat to Moscow continued by the Soviet armies. But it was a more measured retreat. It was hideous, hideous situation on the battlefield, absolutely unspeakable. There were two huge encirclements about 200 miles from Moscow by the Germans, one at Bryansk and the other at Vyazma. And hundreds of thousands of Soviet Soviet troops were taken prisoner. A footnote to that, of the 3.3 million Soviet soldiers who died in captivity, 2 million were taken in the first six months of 1941. 2 million. The kind of struggle after that encirclement, as the Russians had to escape the encirclement, the commanders, the generals at the front, Konev was to the fore, saying we need to break out of

here. Stalin refused. Stalin, rather like Hitler, was saying stand fast. The result is this huge encirclement. As they retreated, they finally did break out. It was a terrible killing spree in which they were the victims, hideous descriptions. There was also a continuation and an exacerbation of the atrocities committed by both sides. If your listeners can bear to hear this, I think it's important because it reinforces the clear view that this was unlike anything that was on the Western Front. Stuff like this did not actually happen on the Western Front. Here is a Barompkin who was an ordinary soldier who described what happened when they were able to fight their way back into a village, because there were a lot of villages falling, civilians being killed in hundreds of thousands during this whole process. And they managed to regroup, infused, he wrote, by Stalin's indomitability. And we resolved to

meet violence with violence. Once towards the end, the enemy pushed us out of the village we were holding and began shooting us down. But we regrouped, then took the village back. We seized five of the German soldiers and literally ripped them apart with our bare hands, our teeth, anything. One man was even using a table leg to smash a skull in. We killed them in a frenzy of hatred. Then conversely, the Germans doing very similar things. Countless hundreds of villages that they moved through, they punished once they got through the civilians for allegedly supporting the Soviet forces, their own country, people. And there was a little village unmarked on the map called Mikhalovska. The soldiers were ordered to fan out around the village. Anyone who was regarded as behaving suspiciously was to be

shot. Civilians, this was an order, were to be strung up to act as a warning to others. One of the German officers was rather dismayed by this and raised it with his commander, who said, no, no, no, no, he was rebuked. It's a valid response. It will act as a deterrent. And then that officer, his name was Rupp, who was deeply opposed to it, watched what happened. And he heard mass graves being dug, animals being led away. And then the gunshots, children screaming, the houses on fire. I knew it was a massacre. This is pretty dreadful stuff. But the German advance continued through the bad weather that we've discussed.

And they reach quite close to Moscow. And at that point, Stalin asks Zhukov, who is the greatest figure probably in Soviet military history, and he's treated dreadfully by Stalin. When things go wrong, he's sat and he's immediately reappointed to a more senior job because he's the only person who can cope. Anyway, there's a phone call between Zhukov and Stalin. Stalin says to Zhukov, in terms, says, can we hold Moscow? Tell me honestly, as a party member. Zhukov replies, yes, we can hold Moscow. And Stalin says, I'm glad you say that. And Zhukov then says, but I need more forces. By this time, he has under his command, incidentally, 12 armies under his overall leadership. He's got nine reserve armies. the defensive ring which he had constructed or ordered the construction of around Moscow. And Stalin gave him as much as he could of those resources, and the line was held. And as a result,

the exhaustion of the German troops, the conditions in which they were operating, the total demoralization, even amongst the army commanders at the front, meant that they were thwarted. And they had to stop. And by December the 6th, they had halted. And in fact, some of the German units had broken and run. They knew that it wouldn't happen. And you have Bock, he reports, And you have Bock, he reports, formally reports, the fighting of the last 14 days has shown that the notion of the enemy in front of the army group has, quotes, collapsed as a fantasy. And halting at the gates of Moscow is tantamount to heavy defensive fighting against numerically far superior force. The attack thus appears to be without sense or purpose, especially as the time is approaching when the strength of the units will be exhausted. He was still not permitted to withdraw. That's why they broke and ran.

So Jonathan, this week, 80 years ago this week, that was being written, that German offensive ground to halt, and Zhukov was able to start launching his extraordinary counterattack. Are we talking now about the high watermark of the Third Reich? every kind, that from that point, it was inconceivable that Hitler could have a military victory over the Soviet Union. Soviet forces were growing in size. Militarily, they were growing in might with weaponry. The German forces were weaker. That did not stop Hitler, of course, believing that he could achieve his objectives, which is why the war went on, costing millions upon millions of more lives on the Eastern Front. But Hitler at that point and sometime in those last few months, I mean, you can't put a fixed date on it. One can say that Hitler was broken in terms of his ability to defeat the Soviet Union. And that, of course, had huge implications, because that meant the Soviet Union would emerge victorious from that

conflict against Hitler. No one knew how long it would go on. And that had fantastically important repercussions for the whole future of Europe. Why is the Battle of Moscow? Has it been overlooked? I mean, our telling of the 20th century often doesn't really include this. What at the time, I think, was arguably the largest single battle ever fought by human beings at the gates of the Soviet capital. The Wehrmacht suffered its first catastrophic military reverse on land. Obviously, the Battle of Britain was a defeat in the air earlier. But this is a hinge point of not just the Second World War, but the 20th century, I think, isn't it? I believe it so to be, and I share the view that it's remarkable that relatively little attention has been given to it. Much more attention is now being given to it by

German historians and by Russian historians, particularly since the archives became more available in the 90s, where they're closing down again now, the Western historians, I think, inevitably, and there are some distinguished exceptions, are focused to a huge degree, and I don't have any objection to that either, have understandably focused on the Western front in all its dimensions. And that's perfectly proper, because it was critically important to defending democracy in the end, in defending democracy and freedom in what became Western Europe after the end of the Second World War. But there is absolutely no gainsaying, and people like Max Hastings have said this as well, that the war was won and lost

on the Eastern Front. Others have said, Anthony Beaver has said in his introduction to his book on Stalingrad, that if Moscow 1941 was the military turning point, Stalingrad was the psychological turning point. Stalingrad, because that led that long retreat back, which, with a few exceptions of battles that were won in the meantime, led to the Germans being defeated right back into Berlin. And lastly, talking about the beginning of that defeat, just from now, 80 years ago, into January, just briefly, Army Group Centre comes close to collapse. I mean, the whole thing, the human suffering, the breakdown of command, the whole thing, the human suffering, the breakdown of command, the small units fighting where they stood surrounded, both sides advancing almost blind through the coldest months of the coldest winter of the 20th century thus far, the fighting that followed the stopping of the German advance is just as awful. Yep, it continued. I don't think it is possible, actually, when you look at the detail

of it, to exaggerate the scale of horror. You have the Germans retreating. They reached, what, 50 miles from the capital. All the armies in the front, the panzer armies, the infantry, In the front, the panzer armies, the infantry, the artillery are all together in a more or less chaotic way, retreating in very, very difficult conditions. Behind them, the Soviet armies, soldiers bent on vengeance, seeing the total destruction wrought partly by their own people, but largely by the Germans of villages and towns and communities and the bodies dead and frozen with Germans trying to hack the dead legs off some of their own compatriots in order to melt the legs in front of fire so that they could have boots to keep them warm. Now, this was the scale of what was happening. Total demoralization, total sense it was all over, bar the belief amongst an extraordinarily bizarre number of them

that somehow Hitler would have the answer, that all would be well because Hitler was still in command. And that little residual faith stopped a total rout and a willingness to obey Hitler that you can go back so far. He did it very, very reluctantly. You can go back so far and you can all. They actually went back about 150 miles or so from Moscow, never got close to Moscow again. And he set off on other ventures in 1942, once the winter turned into spring and summer. Jonathan, that was a tour de force. Thank you for all your wonderful quotes and research that you shared with us.

Everyone, go and buy your book. What's it called? Tell us again. It's called Barbarossa, How Hitler Lost the War. I'm trying to paperback, incidentally, in the spring. Well, there you go. There you go, everyone. Like Hitler, launching... Well, actually, that's an inappropriate gag.

I was going to say, you're launching a renewed offensive. All you have to say is, cheap at the price. Yes, exactly. Cheap at the price. Thank you so much for coming back on. Thank you very much indeed. My great pleasure. I feel we have the history on our shoulders.

All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, all were gone and finished. Thanks, folks, for listening to this episode of Danston's History. As I say all the time, I love doing these podcasts. They are the best thing I do professionally. I feel very lucky to have you listening to them. If you fancied giving them a rating review obviously the best rating review possible would be ideal it makes a big difference to us I know it's a pain but we'd really really be grateful and if you want to listen to the other podcasts in our ever-increasing stable don't forget we've

got Susanna Lipscomb with Not Just the Tudors that's flying high in the charts we've got our medieval podcast Gone Medieval with the brilliant Matt Lewis in the charts. We've got our medieval podcast, Gone Medieval, the brilliant Matt Lewis and Cat Jarman. We've got the ancients with our very own Tristan Hughes. And we've got warfare as well, dealing with all things military. Please go and check those out wherever you get your pods. you