Dan Snow's History Hit - Untold Stories of War

Episode Date: June 5, 2020

I was delighted to be joined by James Rogers - a war historian, fellow of the London School of Economics, and presenter of History Hit's Untold History series. One of James' films explores HM Factory Gretna, a munitions factory built by the Ministry of Munitions in response to the Shell Crisis of 1915. He told me about the fate of these factory workers - predominantly women - who laboured to produce cordite, an explosive described by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle as 'Devil's Porridge'. We also discussed the overlooked story of German POWs in the south of England, and the legacy of their lives after the war. 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 Dan Snow's History Hit. Very lucky to have Dr James Rogers back on the channel. He's a historian, he's a writer, he's a broadcaster. He's a professor at the Danish Institute for Advanced Study and a fellow of the London School of Economics. You'll have heard him on here before, he was talking about the history of drone warfare. It's a lot longer and a lot more complex and interesting than you might think. He's made a series of programs for History Hit TV. We're very lucky to have him on the channel on the untold stories of war, often involving the engineering, the weapons development, the technology side of the First and Second World Wars. He's got a new series out on History Hit TV. So I wanted to get him on the podcast,

ask him about what he had discovered. And he was as brilliant as always you go and check out his documentaries go to history hit tv you get all the back episodes of podcast on there you also get hundreds of history documentaries we got more documentaries never at the moment we got more subscribers never we're incredibly grateful for all the support you've given us particularly during this lockdown so please head over there use the code pod one pod one and you get month for free check it. And then you get your first month, just one pound, euro or dollar after that. So it's a pretty sweet deal. You can binge watch all of James Rogers' shows on there. Thanks for the feedback this week.

We've had a couple of podcasts out on slavery in America and its enduring legacy. Fascinating stuff there. Nice to see lots of teachers and educators recommend that for their students. You could be giving us at Team History hit no higher compliments so thank you for all of that as well in the meantime everyone here's james rogers james thank you very much coming back on the podcast thanks for having me on well you won last time i think talking about grimsby and the extraordinary bombing of Grimsby and the new weapons that were unleashed there. But you've moved on. What are we talking about this time?

Yeah, well, we've been recording the new series of Untold Histories for, of course, History Hit TV. And we've been investigating a couple more forgotten, marginalised and silenced aspects of the Second World War and actually the First World War as well. Since we recorded the episode on butterfly bombs and Grimsby, we're now looking at some of the legacies of the Second World War and looking at how prisoners of war were treated in the UK, and then how they transitioned into life, so in the UK, and some heading back home after the Second World War. And then we have a second episode on H.M. Gretna, which was the largest munitions factory in the world, built during the First World War. I've actually been to the site of Gretna.

Was there an accident there or was there a near accident? I can't remember. Yeah, I mean, there were a few accidents at HM Gretna. They were dealing with this potent cordite explosive called the Devil's Porridge, which was created to try and mitigate the shell crisis that was reported from May 1915 onwards. This idea that soldiers were rationed to three bullets each and there was a desperate attempt made by the Minister of Munitions, Lloyd George of course, who becomes the Minister of Munitions, to create these giant factories where this new potent explosive that replaced gunpowder could be made, but it was dangerous. So there were explosions that happened there. People lost arms, they lost eyes, they had a number of lasting illnesses.

And yeah, there were explosions that made at least one of the buildings collapse. That's right. And it's an extraordinary place, isn't it, Gretna? Because it's very remote. Why was that site chosen? Well, I think it was chosen due to its remoteness. there was a lot of space there to build out as well there was an ability to link it into the rail links as well especially those crossing over the tidal estuary there so there was good connections to get things in and out of the area and there was a workforce that they could bring in from the local area to populate this munitions factory. I mean, they needed at least on site 30,000 workers, 12,000 of which at least were predominantly young women.

Where did those young women come from? There are some population centres fairly near, but no, huge cities. Yeah, I mean, they came from all over Britain. They came from all over Britain. But lots came from the, you know, majoritively working class cities and areas of Northumbria, around Manchester and Liverpool, and up into Scotland as well. Some came from the Highlands and Islands and just from all around the north of England and Scotland.

So this history really unites those two parts of the UK. Often big government-led interventions in the private sector have sort of slightly mixed results or try to roll out incredibly complex, I don't want to make any modern parallels, but you know trying to roll out incredibly complex things that government perhaps wasn't traditionally responsible for, it can lead to problems and inefficiencies. I mean, what's your judgment on how effective those huge factories were? This was pretty effective. The way in which this was put into place was in a coordinated and expert manner.

They brought in experts from across the Commonwealth. I mean, we've got experts coming in from Australia and South Africa and New Zealand who had been working on the chemical production of things like chordites. And they were brought in to really make this process work well and work quickly and in a seamless fashion. They had everything planned down to the locomotives, which were fireless steam engines. So they'd be pumped full of steam beforehand and then the steam would be slowly released to make the engines move

but without having the combustible material inside them so that they wouldn't set fire to anything. And then you had the nitroglycerin come in and the gun cotton and the petroleum jelly and the solvents all come in into different processes in the factory, stage by stage production, making sure that, you know, these two things didn't meet in the same room, but could be done swiftly and easily out to these fireless engines that could then move them down to separate factories

where this potent explosive could be put into shells and into bullets so that they could really feed these hungry guns on the front line of the First World War. It's astonishing, isn't it, the volume of shells that were required. There's some extraordinary story from 1915, isn't there, that one gun fired during the course, I think it was Neuve Chapelle, fired the equivalent of virtually the entire output of artillery shells in the whole of the Boer War or something. I mean, it's just an order of magnitude larger than any munitions outlay that

had gone before. Yeah, exactly. And this is why factories like this existed. And it's why they had to be the largest ammunitions factory in the world. But of course, one of the things that I found fascinating about looking into this history was the effect that it has on the people that worked there as well. I mean, this factory didn't stop. This was working 24 hours a day, seven days a week. I was recording up there during Storm Dennis, and I got a firsthand account of just what the weather was like up there as well, trying to work in these conditions. And so it took the toll on the local population. But, you know, the government also had to put measures in place

to make sure that these people were working to the best of their ability and that there was, you know, no spies coming in to see what was going on on site or they weren't being distracted unnecessarily. And so a lot of social control measures were put in place. And the personal stories here are quite fascinating, but also bordering on the disturbing as well. Because these young women had their social lives policed, but also their morality policed as well. So like I say, from a pejoratively working class background, these young women were overseen by wardens, by the UK's largest ever all-female police force of 150 female police officers, who were from a middle to upper class background. And they were policing how these young

women behaved in the cinemas, in the dance halls. They would be searched in and out of the buildings. There wasn't allowed to be doors on bathrooms. So this was very much, almost you could say, a military regime for these young women who were working in this factory. Oh God, is that right? I mean, and what was the concern that their morals would be corrupted? Oh Dan there's accounts of hugging and maybe someone they were courting at the train station and being forcibly pushed apart and then the man being arrested. There are accounts of these female police wardens walking up and down the back of the cinemas with a stick and making sure that there was nothing untoward going on. The major worry here being that some of these

young women could give away these important war secrets as well if they were courted by the enemy. You know what? It's like, what did you do during the war, Dad? You know, I went around with a stick beating amorous young couples apart. I mean, that's very bizarre, isn't it? Yeah, what did you do during the war, Mum? I think in this case as well. This was overseen, like I say, by this female police force and by female wardens. And it was a strange social situation and social mix because then these women have to go into work and work with some of the most potent chemicals that exist. And although the government did their best to put protective clothing in place, you know, they gave them gloves, they gave them rubber-soled boots so

that this mix of nitroglycerin wouldn't sink into their skin, in reality it did anyway. And you had accounts of toxic jaundice, quite widespread accounts of toxic jaundice, of women who became addicted to some of the chemicals and would chew on elements that they were putting into the gun cotton, into the devil's porridge mix. And, you know, this caused liver failure, it caused the rotting of teeth. And then, like I said before, you have the risk of explosions as well that would really maim and injure and in cases kill people as well. So we talk a lot about the risks on the front line of the First World War, but some of the injuries that you see coming out of places like HM Gretna, injuries to lungs, the poisoning that's happening here, the injuries to the human body, you would see on the battlefield.

And this is something that we haven't really looked at in our collective history. And it's a story that we thought was important to tell through Untold Histories. Do we have a number, or is there a sense of just the casualties that were sustained on the home front in industry? Because it must have been gigantic. And that's not including the years lost of life, presumably from lungs that were shot or strain on the body. You must have been shortening these people's lives. Land a Viking longship on island shores. Scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence.

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Yeah, this is something that I asked while I was talking to some of the experts that are down at the fantastic Devil's Porridge Museum that's located in Gretna. People like Judith and Richard who work there and lead the archives. And they were saying to me that, you know, some of these people who worked in the factory, they would go on and live long lives. I spoke to some of the relatives of the people who worked there as well. So like I said, some of these production parts of the factory were modular. So it I said, some of these production parts of the factory were modular. So it really was a luck of the draw about where you were placed as a factory worker. So some were moving barrels around or perhaps just moving the chemicals from one place to the other, where there were those who were mixing the chemicals. And it's those who were

perhaps most severely affected. And we have the cases of those young women who are working there from the age of 16 or 17, like Agnes Gardner, who actually were dead relatively young. You know, we're talking 24, 25, 26, and developed these prolonged lung issues as they went through life. So we don't know the exact numbers because, again, these weren't recorded afterwards. And actually, the provisions for healthcare, which were very good during the time that these people worked in the factory were immediately cut off when they were given next to no notice that the factory would be shut. So we don't have these records of what happens in the intervening years after the war to these people who gave so much to the war effort. Yes, I was going to ask that. That's fascinating.

I mean, presumably they just dropped when the factory closed, that was it. Pay stopped, no benefits, you're off. Yeah, that's it. I mean, if you'd worked there for an extended period of time, you were given a small badge to show that you were part of this war effort. But, you know, there was no medals given out

for the sacrifice that was made in this factory and those like it. And, I mean, after the war, you don't need to keep making such levels of munitions. So time to shut up shop. I mean, there's been a military site there up until today. But, I mean, it's largely mothballed. As you said, you visited there, you've seen it's just a closed down First World War site. you said you visited there you've seen it's it's just a closed down first world war site and also unlike the soldiers i mean not that soldiers being demobilized into 1920s britain had fantastic care but at least there might be a regimental association there'd be some comradeship

you might meet up occasionally there might be some support there presumably these young women just thrown back on a train and expect to get on with their lives yeah the fascinating thing here is that gretna was created for this factory so beforehand gretna didn't exist yet gretna green of course which we all know about as the place you go and elope but gretna as a township didn't exist so you had a few farms that were there, but all the buildings that you see when you go to Gretna were built in 1915, 16. They are from that period and purposely for housing these thousands of workers that are coming into the area. Once that ends, there is very little work there. So you have to leave the area. So you're right, these communities fragment as people move back around to the parts of the country that they came from. While I've got you, let's talk about your other project with the

prisoners. Talk me what you found there. Yeah, so this for me is a bit of kind of personal family history as well, because I come from Peterborough in Cambridgeshire, and all around that area was a lot of places where prisoners from the Second World War worked on farms in Cambridgeshire and in Norfolk. And my half-siblings, their grandfather, was one of these Germans, prisoners of war, who stayed there after the Second World War and met a local woman and had a family and settled down. family and settle down. But anyone I speak to about this doesn't know kind of what happened to their grandfather, where they were kept, what their lives were like. And so for me, I really wanted to investigate this hidden aspect of Second World War history. And so I managed to get in contact with a couple of the former prison camp sites. And one of the most well kept of these, Camp 83, up in Yorkshire, just outside York, Eden Camp. And I wanted to go there and just see what it was like for the prisoners who were kept

there and what their day-to-day life was like and then what happened to them after the Second World War and some of the problems that they had to deal with. So in this episode we were able to investigate that. I'm a bit of a geek. I've also been to Eden Camp like you. I love it up there. What were some of the most interesting things you found? For me, it became interesting to realise this was a problem that the British had to deal with very quickly. Because of our advances from 1942-43, successes in the Battle of El Alamein, and then our push through North Africa, our ability to keep hold of Malta and to shut off Rommel's supply of resources from Italy round into North Africa. This meant that, you know,

our victories led to taking up a lot of prisoners. And these had to be processed and this was a dilemma. And so lots of these Italian and German prisoners were sent back to the UK for processing. The most severe, ardent Nazis were categorised as the black category of Nazis, and some of those were sent up into camps in Scotland, or far away into Wales, or into North America, into Canada, and into New York, actually. And this was so that they had less chance of making it back to Nazi Germany. But those who were seen as the grey and white category of prisoner were put to work in Yorkshire at Eden Camp. A lot of the Italian prisoners, those who were Romanians and Bulgarians who had been hoovered up into Hitler's army,

were put to work on farms. And it was fascinating to find out just how they integrated well with the local community. Of course, these weren't career soldiers. They had been craftsmen and farm workers as well. And they were able to make things that they could sell to the local community or just gift to the local children. And they were actually accepted quite well. There's a few reasons for that. I mean, why would you want to be specifically harsh to the local children and they were actually accepted quite well. There's a few reasons for that. I mean, why would you want to be specifically harsh to the prisoners that are being kept in your local community? By that point, we didn't know we were going to particularly win the war. So these people could indeed one day be ruling over our country. But there was also just this kindness

that seemed to come through as well. And very much a different picture to the stereotypical one we'll see of prisoners kept behind barbed wire fences in prison camps. These people were working with and in the local communities. And then after the war, many of them wanted to stay. And, you know, not everyone was able to. And they stayed until around 1948, not particularly without controversy because of course the war had ended so a number of prisoners were meant to go back but Britain needed them to keep the food supplies coming in to rebuild our damaged towns and houses and so we kept them for perhaps longer than we should have under the Geneva Convention and then a lot were forcibly sent back to where they

came from. But some were successful in their appeals to stay. And they made their lives here, and they made their families in the UK. But this wasn't without hardship itself. Because of course, as the Iron Curtain rose in Europe, and you had the start of the Cold War, there were also a number of people from places like Romania who couldn't go back to their families that were in those countries. And so there's a lot of letters and accounts and personal stories of those who had to leave their old families behind and start again. And for those people, it became very, very painful. And it's for that reason that we really don't know or hear about these personal stories. Not until now, until we move through to the generation of children who want to hear

about their parents or talk about their lost histories and their family histories. And so it really comes now as a ripe time to hear these stories. You know what, James, I learned that fact from your film. And I was embarrassed because I've always portrayed the Russians, the Soviets kept back prisoners from, for example, Stalingrad. So 1955, and I always said, you know, this is classic, this kind of barbaric behavior. And when I watched your film, I was pretty shocked. I shouldn't be. I don't know why I was. Whenever you believe in British or exceptionalism of any kind, you're usually wrong. So thank you for enlightening me on that. It's very moving, isn't it? Imagine the vagaries of life and war. You're taken prisoner on the battlefield and you end up falling in love and settling in the land of your captors. Yeah, absolutely. These men who

settled here had such humility as well and just wanted a peaceful life. There were some who I heard the stories of and listened to their aura histories where they said that they just sought to work and to provide for their new families here and that they never sought promotion in their factories for example because they never wanted to be above British workers and they never felt that they should be in that position and that for me is something which is hard to fathom, hard to think about but it shows this respect and this longing just for peace after such a brutal war, and the feeling of how lucky they were. You look at some of the camps in Belgium where potshots were taken at prisons of war who had been kept there and revenge attacks on prisoners as

well. You know, these people realised that they were, in some ways, pretty lucky to end up where they ended up. Well, thank you very much, James. If you want to learn more about those stories, where can people watch them? Well, they can subscribe to History Hit TV, of course. It's so nice to hear someone else say that. God. They'll be available there, yeah. They'll be available on History Hit TV, yeah, man. Thank you so much. It's so good collaborating with you as ever. What's your next project? I'm looking forward to getting you on and talking about your next book or your next big bit of research. We're doing a few things at the moment. We're doing something called learning in lockdown

and trying to get academics and teachers recording podcasts and videos to work on specific topics that help with GCSE and A-level revision. And we've done five of those now. And then we're going to start filming the next series of Untold History, where after discussions with a colleague and friend of mine, Professor Caroline Kennedy-Pipe, we really focused on this idea that there were important small islands in the Second World War that had big impacts and big consequences, and their stories hadn't been told. So we want to look at Iceland and Malta and small places like Bornholm, which were in Denmark, but they were held by the Soviet forces. So these are the things we want to investigate next. Can't wait for that, buddy. Thank you so much. It's such an honour to have you working with us

at History. It's fantastic. Thanks, Dan. I hope you enjoyed the podcast. Just before you go, bit of a favour to ask. I totally understand if you don't want to become a subscriber or pay me any cash money. Makes sense. But if you could just do me a favour,

it's for free. Go to iTunes or wherever you get your podcast. If you give it a five-star rating and give it an absolutely glowing review, purge yourself, give it a glowing review. I'd really appreciate that. It's tough weather, the law of the jungle out there, and I need all the fire support I can get. So that will boost it up the charts. It's so tiresome, but if you could do it, I'd be very, very grateful. Thank you.