Dan Snow's History Hit - The Government and the Military in Times of Crisis

Episode Date: June 15, 2020

The Covid crisis has seen a huge deployment of UK armed forces personnel to assist the civilian government. Named Operation RESCRIPT it has seen soldiers, sailors and aviators fulfil a wide range of tasks. I wanted to get a sense of the different challenges that the forces face when operating on home soil, and whether their conventional training prepares them for these. As I was working on this podcast President Trump announced that he was considering ordering the army into action against protestors in American cities. Suddenly the whole issue of military-civilian relations seemed to be even more important. In this episode I talked first to Lieutenant General Tyrone Urch, the Standing Joint Commander who is in charge of carrying out any military aid to the civil authorities. Then I asked Robert Evans, head of the Army Historical Branch, about the historical context for today, be it disaster relief or law enforcement. Subscribe to History Hit and you'll get access to hundreds of history documentaries, as well as every single episode of this podcast from the beginning (400 extra episodes). We're running live podcasts on Zoom, we've got weekly quizzes where you can win prizes, and exclusive subscriber only articles. It's the ultimate history package. Just go to historyhit.tv to subscribe. Use code 'pod1' at checkout for your first month free and the following month for just £/€/$1.

Hi everybody, welcome to Antinous History. Interesting podcast. I wanted to do this podcast a few weeks ago on the role of the British Armed Forces in supporting the civilian government as it relates to Covid. Huge numbers of troops deployed to help the government weather this storm. This podcast became even more relevant when Donald Trump suggested using the army in the US to restore order, quote-unquote, on the streets, which raised the

possibility of large scale deployment of US forces onto urban streets in support of government or state governments. And so for all these reasons, I thought now would be a great time to talk about how armies support civilian governments. What role they play, are there lines? Is there anything they won't do? I got a chance to talk to Lieutenant General Tyrone Urch, the Standing Joint Commander, which is a very cool title. So he's responsible for the planning and execution of any contingency operations within the UK or territorial waters. And that means all military aid to civil authorities. And after you hear from Lieutenant General Urch, you'll hear from Robert Evans,

who's a historian. He's head of the Army Historical Branch. Huge thanks to him and the whole team at the Army Historical Branch for going back through the archives, digging up the data and sharing it with us,

all of us on this podcast. Operation Rescript is the name of the huge deployment of UK Armed Forces personnel during this Covid crisis. And it felt like a really good time to explore that relationship between military and civilian government on home soil. If you want to join the thousands of people who are subscribing to History at the Moment, please head over there. It's got all of the back episodes of this podcast exclusively available on there.

You also get access to our live Zoom records, our Zoom webinars. We got on this week with the excellent David Carpenter, who's the world's leading expert on Henry III, overlooked Plantagenet king, squished between his appalling useless father and his unbelievably

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Thank you so much for everyone for your support. If you want to go and join up, it's History Hit TV. Use the code POD1, P-O-D-1. You get a month for free and then you get a second month for just one pound, euro, dollar, whatever currency you're paying in. In the meantime, everybody, enjoy this episode of the podcast with General Tyrone Urch and Robert Evans. Okay, General, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Great to be here. Thanks very much indeed, Dan.

Did you ever think that you would be helping to run the military assistance to the civilian government in the event of a giant pandemic? Categorically, absolutely not, no. As the standing joint commander for the United Kingdom, we spend our whole life planning for contingencies. That's kind of our job in support of the government. Anything the government wants us to do, we kind of turn our hand to. And we have lots and lots of different contingency plans on the shelves that we have used over the years. But we didn't anticipate this one. But there's something about being in the forces. You train for everything apart from the actual mission you're going to be required to do, it seems to me. Yeah, it's a very good point.

So we didn't have a COVID-19 coronavirus contingency plan, that's for sure. But we did have a flu pandemic plan, a contingency plan that we might have used had that have been needed. And of course, we use that as the basis for our contingency planning in support of the government. And it's gone pretty well, really. Give me a sense of the scale. How many people have you got involved? And where does this kind of rank in terms of the armed forces support for the civilian government in recent British history? Well, I've been in the army 36 years and Operation Rescript, which is the code name we've given to supporting the government in its fight against coronavirus, is probably the biggest deployment I've seen in 36 years, having been involved with UK resilience operations. D-Day, as we call it, not 6th of June,

this is the 28th of February D-Day, which is when we received orders from the Ministry of Defence to stand up an initial force to support the government. And that put about 20,000 military personnel from the three services, the Royal Navy, the British Army and the Royal Air Force, personnel from the three services, the Royal Navy, the British Army and the Royal Air Force, on notice to support the government. So 20,000. And in my time in the army, I've never seen those sort of numbers on standby to deploy in support of the government. We all saw the pictures of building nightingale hospitals and things like that. But when you say standby, what other tasks back in late February did you think you might be having to carry out? I mean, was there a sense of preventing infrastructure collapse and things like that?

Well, I'm not sure what we really did expect. We weren't really sure. We knew what we were good at in the military and in the army specifically. You know, we're really good at planning, to go back to your earlier point, you know. And I've always said planning is everything. The plan is nothing. And a plan never survives first contact with the enemy is what we say when we're on operations. And so contingency planning for what-if-ing, crystal ball gazing is what we are really, really good at. And we're also then really good at executing plans and helping other people deliver, you know, high-tempo resilience operations. And that was our first task, really. We knew we had to try and help the other government departments,

those that wanted it and needed it. And so we put commanders, really high-quality men and women, into government departments. So we went into the National Health, we went into the Department for Health and Social Care, we went into the Ministry of Justice and the local communities and helped them with their planning. And then right down at the lowest level in the local resilience forums, 38 of those in England alone and in the three devolved administrations, we put a thousand planners out there to help them come up with their ideas.

to help them come up with their ideas. And as you pointed out, the things we then got involved in, Nightingale Hospitals, delivering PPE to the community, testing, of course, and then we drove ambulances, we decontaminated ambulances, and we've pretty much been doing everything that the government sort of wanted us to do. You probably joined, I'm putting words into your mouth, but you probably joined the army, do war fighting, and you found yourself called upon now to perform a very, very different task. How does your personal training and also the

training of the people underneath you, how does it differ from preparing people to go on kinetic operations abroad, to go and fight people abroad? I think the way that we train and develop our people, particularly our officers and our non-commissioned officers, the way that we do that has proven to be the field, that training and knowledge that we give them, backed up by all that experience that the British Army now has on operations, you know, if you're really old like me, then it's kind of Northern Ireland, Bosnia, Kosovo, and then into Iraq. If you're younger than me, it's kind of probably Iraq, Afghanistan. That's where they've learned how to do things, you know, at pace, tempo, kind of under fire. And the only difference really is there isn't an enemy shooting at you. But the issues with UK operations and COVID-19 coronavirus operations, you know, the fear of the unknown and not knowing what's coming is pretty common to whether you're on a UK operation

or whether you're overseas supporting the government. And it's that sort of resilience, energy, discipline, sense of humour that our soldiers have that has kind of won the day so far on this operation. Are there different pressures to those operations that we talk about, say, for example, you know, in Helmand or in southern Iraq? As a commander, are there different pressures? Or as you point out, actually, are they kind of similar in some ways? Oh, they're similar in so many ways. So as the standing joint commander for Rescript, coronavirus 19, 20,000 military people under under command something in the order of about 4 000 deployed every day doing different tasks but much of what my training has allowed me to

do on a daily basis is exactly the same as it was when i was in iraq and bosnia northern ireland and when our younger commanders were in afghanistan know, the ability to analyse a problem, to come up with courses of action, to be flexible, to execute a plan, are pretty much the same skill set that the British Army and Defence uses every single day, and have been hugely helpful in this operation. And in many ways, it's been more stressful because of the unknown, a bit like when we were on an operation called Morlop, which was the nerve agent poisonings in Salisbury and Amesbury. Some of this has been quite frightening for our soldiers, and their moral and physical courage to get on and do things

in an environment, in a biological, chemical environment, has been really quite humbling. So we haven't been shot at, clearly. We're not in a hot, dusty place overseas. But we are in the UK, and many of these soldiers return home to their families every night. And that has been quite a stress as well. Whereas if you're in Afghanistan or somewhere else, you kind of go away for the six months, maybe longer. Although it's a long time away, sometimes it's easier to make that adjustment for yourself while you're away, knowing your family is kind of looked after. And it's definitely easier. I speak from personal experience.

You know, it's definitely easier for your family to associate you and live with their lives while you're away. associate you and live with their lives while you're away. But being in this close contact with an operation, working very long hours, some of the soldiers, you know, have been double shifting from six o'clock in the morning till 10 at night, and then going home has been quite stressful. And that is quite new. Have you sustained casualties? We have cases of COVID-19 in the armed forces, yes, but not very many. And the infection rate in the British Army, I can speak for as a soldier, but as the joint commander here in the headquarters and across the force, the infection rate has been less than 1% of the force.

And that's down to a number of things. One is, you know, brilliant force protection measures. You know, we are absolutely ruthless in the way that we look after ourselves and our teams, not just issuing them sort of PPE, do something or not to do something, you know, in the military, as you will well appreciate, they normally, normally tend to do those things. And so we've been very, I won't say lucky because we've driven it, but our infection rate and our casualty rate has been exceptionally low, much lower than anywhere else in the country. What about frustrations? It can't be easy going in and working with these other organisations, whether it's national health or local government. Have there been culture clashes? Has it been a challenge for your men and women to go in and work alongside people? Gosh, yes. It has been a real challenge, but not with a capital C and not in an issues way. It's just that we kind of do things differently. And it was lovely to speak to

high ranking graded people in the National Health and the Department for Health and Social Care, asking them what we bring to the party. And, you know, we bring tempo. We're used to working hard, long hours. We're used to working 24-7. We bring resilience. We bring discipline. These are their words, by the way, not mine. We bring discipline. You know, when there's a meeting at eight o'clock, we're there and we can work through the night and we can put three shifts on a day if we had to. An ability to think outside the box and a sense of humour are the things that government departments have noticed that we have brought to the party. But we do do things completely differently. noticed that we have brought to the party. But we do do things completely differently. And so it's been a meeting of minds. And we have both learned an awful lot from each other going forward. You know, we call it command and control. You know, it's a simple concept for us.

Every corporal in the British Army and above knows what command and control is, knows who his boss is, and knows whether he or she, when they're giving an order, he knows what to do about it. That is not quite the same in government and with civil servants and civil society necessarily. And so we have been 100% in support of other government departments not doing this ourselves. And we've been really clear, you know, we've been very overt about that. Whatever you would like us to do, we will do in support of you. But we got some good ideas, which you might want to listen to. And this is really is now a symbiotic relationship going forward. Recently, Donald Trump and then a guarded response from the Joint Chiefs in the US has put

the issue of military personnel on the streets to support government attempts to restore order, disperse demonstrations. That's something that we thought we'd probably condemned to the past. Is that something you've been thinking about in the event COVID had an attritional effect on national morale, on infrastructure, that would have been a kind of law and order role for you guys? What I would say is that COVID-19 is a specific operation, which, you know, we have pretty much mobilised a huge contribution from across defence, from the three services, to support the government.

It hasn't quite unfolded in the way that we had anticipated in terms of mass. More, it has been more about subject matter experts and niche experts in planning terms, logisticians, medics, engineers, that sort of thing. But in the business as usual category of my job, we support the government and other government departments in floods, in fires, which is pretty pertinent at the moment. Floods clearly in the winter and snow melt. We are doing bomb disposal operations on a daily basis, probably around the country. And we're also supporting the Home Office with counterterrorism operations, both intelligence and in operations.

office with counter-terrorism operations, both intelligence and in operations. So my answer is we are prepared to do anything that the government wants us to do, but we currently have no plans to support the police with public order, for example. There is no requirement for us to backfill the police in that role. They do not need us to do that. But we can support the police in many other ways by releasing authorised firearms officers to do higher priority tasks, for example. And so, you know, armed police on the streets is a very rare occurrence, but is a plan, but we have no plans to do it at the moment. Your counterparts around Europe, I mean, Northern Italy, you saw army personnel on the streets taking part in enforcing lockdown and things like that. Do you have feelings about that? I mean, are you quite glad you weren't

called on to do that? It obviously puts the army direct public facing role and the possibility of misunderstandings and escalation, things like that. Well, I have my own personal views, which I won't air here, Dan. But, you know, as I said, we're here to support anything the government wants us to do. But at this particular moment in time, we have no plans to do that. And I'm glad we were able to support the government in the ways that it asked us to do, you know, in terms of construction, logistic support, medical aid, etc. And that is suited our skill set extremely well. Tyrone, what's been your biggest contribution that you've made, you and your men and women have made in the last few months? I think the real success is that we have helped save lives. And I know that to be a fact because I talked to the National Health

Service and government departments, and I talked to regional directors in the NHS. directors in the NHS. It was a great example a month or so ago when ventilators and PPE were dumped on a regional director's floor office and he had no way of distributing them across the region and phoned our local commander. We had 10 regional commanders, joint military commanders we call them, 10 of those throughout the United Kingdom, seven in England, and then three in the devolved administrations. And because of those permissions that the Secretary of State gave me to delegate permissions, we were able to deploy on a phone call from the regional director to distribute ventilators, PPE,

and a whole bunch of other stuff that was required and that night those pieces of equipment were being used and genuinely saved lives and if it hadn't been for the military those people would have died and that's from the regional director in the National Health Service so we can all sleep soundly at night knowing we've done a decent job, we've worked hard, thought this through, and here to support and do anything more that the government needs us to do. Brilliant. General Taronach, thank you very much for coming on the pod. Thank you very much, Dan. It's been a pleasure. Thank you. Land a Viking longship on island shores, scramble over the dunes of ancient egypt and avoid the

poisoner's cup in renaissance florence each week on echoes of history we uncover the epic stories that inspire assassin's creed we're stepping into feudal japan in our special series chasing shadows where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive but to conquer whether you're preparing for assassin's creed shadows or fascinated by history and great stories listen to echoes of history a ubisoft podcast brought to you by history hits there are new episodes every week. of course, to have armed service personnel on the streets of your own country. A decision no government takes lightly. But as you'll hear, the range of tasks they've been asked to perform over the last hundred years is dizzying. Robert, thanks so much for joining me on the podcast.

It's good to be here, Dan. Thanks for having me. When you look back at the recent history of the British Army, we all think of fighting hot wars in Helmand and Iraq. How important, in fact, are the kind of operations that we're seeing at the moment? Like how much time and effort is spent actually on these domestic operations supporting civilian government? Well, it's interesting, Dan. I think it's one of those things that when you look back, it's almost hidden history, because it's something that the army does that always gets forgotten in favour of the you know the large famous military campaigns but when you look back the army's been doing this

almost since it came into existence the nature of it changes and the frequency of it changes but it's something that's pretty much always been there. What's the correct terms to use I mean when you're training or or when officers and men are preparing for a career in the army how do you describe this type of work to them? One of the difficulties with this is because it goes on for so long, you will see that the very in-house military terminology changes an awful lot and could be quite technical and meaningless to most sort of lay people. So when I'm talking about it, I will generally use the description military assistance to the civilian authorities as a blanket term to describe the military helping out in different guises on the mainland. Presumably, we don't like to talk about the 18th century when military assistance probably involved shooting quite a lot of rioters and things. But let's come into the modern period.

If I could, Dan, just before we go into that, I think it's probably worthwhile just looking at some of those 18th century issues a little bit, because generally agreed the British Army comes into existence with the restoration of Charles II. And he gets the funding from Parliament for a very small number of what are called guards and garrisons. Because, as you all know, in Britain, there'd always been this dislike of a standing army. And that's for two reasons. The first one is, after the Civil War, the political suspicion that a standing army would give the monarch a tool to re-establish royal prerogative powers. But also, more broadly, amongst the general population, because the army was very heavily associated with the sort of extreme puritanical austerity that was imposed during the Commonwealth. with the sort of extreme puritanical austerity that was imposed during the Commonwealth. So the reason that that's important is that the standing army itself has always been relatively small compared to most other nations. And in fact, it's also fair to say that not only was it small, but most of it for most of its life was garrisoned outside of the UK. So that Great Britain never had a large reservoir of troops based in the UK to use for civilian assistance.

And the element that gets used probably the most in those 18th, 19th century period is the militia and the yeomanry. Now, although they're part of the British army, very interestingly, it isn't until the second half of the 19th century in the reforms after 1856 that the yeomanry and the militia in terms of machinery and government come under the jurisdiction of the war office prior to that they are under the jurisdiction of the home office so you can see very much although they have a spectrum of roles last resort homeland defense being the main military one in fact the machinery government tells you that the law and order element that they're there to do for the government is probably the most important one in the government's mind. And although regular army units do get used, what you tend to find

is this combination of the local militias and yeomanry that get used in these sorts of times with whatever the closest regular unit happens to be. So but let's come through to the 20th century now I mean I mean I don't know but you can tell me how much is law and order a part of training and planning I mean the army hasn't had to move onto the streets to protect law and order presumably in Britain in Northern Ireland as opposed as a separate and rather tricky case but in Britain for a very long time, has it? No, that's right. So if you look at Peterloo, it's the most notorious incident, but the largest demonstration that armed and military ever deal with is the Gordon Riots in 1780.

So although most of the civil disorder that they deal with after they're created up until the 20th century, generally the causation for that would be the Industrial Revolution and social change. The largest riot, the Gordon riots, is a riot that's in support of anti-Catholic legislation. And interestingly, if the laws had been passed, then Catholics would have been allowed to join the British Army because they weren't at that point in time. And the demonstrators believed that then they would have been able to plot treason and overthrow the government. But that's probably the largest riot. It went on for days. 15,000 troops, a mixture of regular and militias, were deployed into London to restore order at the orders of the

king. And around 400 to 700 civilians were killed. Everybody's pretty much agreed that these are the most destructive riots that London ever experienced, which is some pretty stiff competition. Of course, the reason the military has to do that, and through the Corn Riots, Peterloo Massacre, and the People's Charter, the Chartist movements in the first half of the 19th century, is because there is an absence of a police force. So I think it's generally accepted by all parties that using the military to perform functions normally done by civilian organisations is a matter of last resort and only when there's no other alternative. So what you see prior to 1829 is there simply is no other

alternative. So it's the militia, the yeomanry and the regular army if there's civil disorder, widespread civil disorder. So what happens when the police forces start to get formed, Metropolitan Police in London is the first one in 1829, that's not a light switch moment and then the army can just stand back. It's a zone of transition over the 19th century as the police forces are established and then they come up to strength and then they're gradually able to actually take over the mantle of civil law and order. But the military in particular still stay in that sort of line of business so that the last time that the military deployed weapons on the streets of the mainland is 1926

from the general strike they don't have to use those weapons and there's actually very few disturbances and none that the troops get involved in so it's 1926 supporting that is the last time far as we can tell the last time troops essentially doing a law and order purpose get involved on the mainland is 1911. Two incidents in 1911, both strikes. strikers attempted to free fellow protesters from police vans. And then a few days later, in Llanelli, where there was a rail strike, two civilians were shot and killed by soldiers as they attempted to disrupt a train carrying strike breakers. So those were the last two times where the military deployed in that public order police support role actually have carried weapons and then used them. And then the very last time that a civilian is shot by a soldier on the mainland took place during the police strike of 1919 in Liverpool and

looks that to all intents and purposes that was an accident so there'd be large-scale rioting in the city and were deployed to restore order obviously some quite nasty fighting that took place on the 2nd of August 1919 there was looting taking place near Liverpool docks and a civilian attempted to drag a soldier from a lorry by his rifle and the rifle discharged and accidentally killed the civilian. Aside from law and order, how does the army transition into supporting civilian government not in a law and order way? What are the big operations that are remembered in this context from the 20th century? Yeah, so I think what you

see is, as the police come up to speed, they no longer require the army assistance to maintain and restore law and order. And the crux to this seems to be to us as industrial disputes, because the army's role changes there. So after 1945, the military are very heavily involved in industrial disputes, but not there to deal with unrest. So as far as we can tell, between 1945 and 2014, we think that the military deployed on about 57 occasions to assist with limiting the negative effects of strike action, probably the best way to put it. And of course, what that meant was that the military contribution changes from manpower to do law and order, into manpower to assist to mitigate the negative effects of the strikes.

But increasingly over time, that becomes skills and equipment that the army are bringing to the table as well. So if you look at that between 1945 and 1980, there are what the military help with what I very crudely categorise as strikes in the utility areas. So the soldiers aren't being used for normal industrial disputes, if that makes sense. or normal industrial disputes, if that makes sense. So what I mean by that is disputes that involve petrol tanker drivers, railway workers, power workers, refuse workers, postal workers, coal workers, dockers. So the sorts of things that India in the middle of the 20th century was seen as sort of critical elements of national infrastructure to keep civil society moving. And over that period, and prior to 1980, there are 29 occasions where the military come in and help. You can see a broad line after 1980 where that

becomes less the case. The largest time, between 1945 and 1949, there were a series of dock strikes and troops were used to maintain the flow of goods into the country. I mean, obviously, this country recovering from the very traumatic experience of the Second World War, everybody's trying to rebuild the economy and normalise. In November 1945, you have 21,000 troops were deployed. And as far as we can see, we think this is the largest number of troops that were probably ever deployed and certainly were ever deployed on strike duties. So that's kind of essential economic. What about natural disasters? I would imagine would have been some pretty big deployments there. Yes, it does as well. Again, what happens after 1980 is that the character of the strikes that the military are coming in to help with

seems to change. And again, I would very crudely categorise those as they become emergency service strikes. So ambulance fire and prison officer strikes. And between 1945 and 2014, there were 28 of those that required military assistance. And yes, although the military are there providing numbers of people, they're also there then to drive ambulances, provide ambulances and provide fire engines and fire crews. And so in fact, if you look at that, it seems to be fire strikes after 1980 that are the most frequent and during the most military manpower. So in 2002, 2003, bear in mind this is just before the invasion of Iraq, there were 19,000 military personnel, so the second largest commitment after the Dock strike, that were employed on national firefighting duties.

But you're right, then the third element that we would broadly categorise as environmental stroke disaster relief, and it's particularly after 1945 that you see the military become involved in that. So our figures are slightly skewed on this one. We can't get into our archives at the moment. But between 1952 and 2014, we think that the military assisted the civil authorities on about 85 occasions to cope with the effects of natural and man-made disasters. And those split roughly down the middle. So 45 times with natural disasters and about 40 times with what we would

broadly categorise as man-made disasters. So the natural disasters that people will probably most be familiar with, because again, they're quite recent in the memory, but they do go back all the way to 1952, is flooding, but also severe snow. And of course, what the military does then is involved in building emergency flood defences when necessary, evacuates civilians, it distributes aid and clears routes. So may remember in 2009 you had the 200 Royal Engineers who built what was known as Barker's Crossing which relinked the two halves of Wakington in Cumbria that had been split in two so over the remaining 40 occasions so really sort of the non-natural disasters it were there's a huge spectrum of things that the military do and I'm

only going to give you a sample of those here. You have the two foot and mouth outbreaks, one in 1968 and one in 2001, where the military provide the civil authorities with manpower but mostly with a command and control system to allow the civil authorities to deal with the crisis. They're also involved in animal carcass disposal. You then have the air crash in Lockerbie in 1988, where military personnel from all three services were used to recover bodies and wreckage. Aberfan in 1966, the tragedy there where all the schoolchildren were killed, where military personnel come in and they help to clear the tip slide and also body recovery. In 1995, off the burn, there's a forest fire,

and over 120 military personnel are deployed, essentially amateur firefighters, to try and combat the fire and assist the regular fire service. As you're giving me this list, it just makes me think, the military are just this strange backstop. Is there ever an occasion where the military have gone, sorry, we've got no expertise in this whatsoever. We've got no, we can't help you with that. Not that we can see. And I think you absolutely hit the nail on the head there.

Because, you know, again, as we said earlier, civil assistance and the military coming in to help the civilian authorities doesn't get much profile. It's always something that the public and the government of the day expects the army to do. It's always something that the public and the government of the day expect the army to do, almost irrespective of whatever the issue is. Yeah, if the civilian authorities can't cope, well, then we'll have the army come in as a backstop to do the best it can. And, you know, the history tells you that it normally does a pretty good job. Both the public and the government expect the army to step up and deliver when needed, whatever that need is. Robert, just before you leave, do you have any note of what the army has done during previous pandemics? I wonder if either the Russian influenza of the 1880s or influenza of 1918-19,

you haven't stumbled across the army being involved then? No, we haven't. And with Spanish influenza, it's very, very interesting because, of course, it's very difficult to get into detailed information, good quality information, because of the censorship that was applied to the issue very, very quickly, and hence why it's called Spanish flu. But we do know there were significant very early outbreaks in the main British transit camps in France, and they may have been the first ones in Europe. The epidemiology is still very much up for dispute amongst the medical professionals, but it could certainly be the case that that's where the first outbreaks were. And we have looked before for different reasons just to see what we could see

about Spanish influenza and those outbreaks. Very, very little that we could see. It could be at the National Archives, which is where all that information would be, that you can definitely see the hand of censorship makes it very difficult to penetrate into what the military did at that point in time. Well, thank you very much indeed. Your successors will no doubt be studying this period and adding a fascinating chapter to the history of the British Army and its civilian assistance. Thank you very much, Dan. Hi everyone, it's me, Dan Snow. Just a quick request.

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