Dan Snow's History Hit - Warships

Episode Date: August 18, 2022

Today we are talking warships: from the revolutionary Tudor ships to modern aircraft carriers, and all the innovations along the way.In this episode of Patented: History of Inventions Dan, a self-confessed Maritime history nerd, joins Dallas on a whistle-stop tour of nearly 200 years of naval history. From the rise of wooden warships, to how these feats of engineering were built and how they transformed the world, forever.This episode was produced by Emily WhalleyThe senior producer is Charlotte LongEdited and mixed by Seyi AdaobiIf you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe to History Hit today!To download the History Hit app please go to the Android or Apple store.

Hi there History Hit listeners. I'm really happy that Dallas Campbell has joined Team History Hit. He's one of the best broadcasters out there. He makes science shows, people watch them, they're great. He has a knack of enthusing about things that you never remember to get excited by. And that's what he does on patented history of inventions. He talks about the things that have transformed our world. You know, our story is really one of inventions. It's about these apes with these opposable thumbs working stuff out. So from bronze to iron to putting a drone on Mars, we're just on one mad helter-skelter journey. Who knows where it's going to end? But if you want to

have a few guesses, you might want to see where we've come from. Check out Patented, a history of inventions with Dallas Campbell wherever you get your pods. I basically once went to an aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf during the Iraq war and I landed on this little plane. What plane? You landed on an aircraft carrier? They have a little supply plane called a mail plane and we landed on the arrestor wire like that and then the aft door slowly opened, the ramp opened, I was like whatever you don't think about Top Gun, whatever you don't think about Top Gun, and we landed and it was this like the sun was low in the sky. There was an orange haze. The silhouettes of everyone on the decks were backlit. There were planes taking off going on combat missions and there were people like throwing shapes and doing that kind of weird stuff. And I was like, Tony Scott absolutely crushed this.

It is what it is to be on an aircraft carrier. That opening sequence is unbelievable. Ahoy, ahoy there and welcome to Patented, a podcast all about the history of inventions, brought to you from History Hit. I'm Dallas Campbell. It's a pleasure to have your company today, and a pleasure to have the company of my fellow History Hit presenter, who'll be joining me for this episode, none other than the History Hit supremo, our glorious leader, episode, none other than the history hit supremo, our glorious leader, Dan Snow. Now, Dan, as you probably know, is a huge maritime history nerd. And he joins us today to talk about the rise of warships, wooden warships, how these feats of engineering were built, and how they transformed the world over the course of nearly 200 years. This episode, well, it's a real tour de force.

We cover a great trench of history. Dan is going to take us from the first Tudor ships all the way through to modern-day aircraft carriers and everything betwixt and in between. Hello, welcome to the show, Dan Snow. Oh, it's an honour to be here. Long-time fan, first-time contributor. First time caller. Our glorious leader has joined us for this. It's lovely to have you. How are you?

Good, man. Really good. Hey, we're going to talk about warships. You know what I just did? I just went onto the Royal Navy website. It's brilliant, the Royal Navy website. Anyway, I was looking at HMS Elizabeth, because when I was thinking about the origins of warships. You know what I just did? I just went onto the Royal Navy website, which it's brilliant, the Royal Navy website. Anyway, I was looking at HMS Elizabeth, because when I was thinking about the origins of warships, I thought, well, where are we now with warships? And of course, HMS Elizabeth. And then I watched, you did a nice little piece about it, of you walking around. It's an amazing bit of kit. Actually, you just sort of think about the history of warships. It's like the fact that we can now build something like that. I mean, it's like 300 metres long, 40 aircrafts. What's it like on board? It's that, I mean, it's like 300 metres long, 40 aircrafts.

What's it like on board? Is it incredible? It's astonishing. I mean, it's just a floating airport, really. It's a gigantic runway and down below with hangars. And the aircraft carrier is the direct descendant of the kind of warships we're talking about today. It's the ability to project force anywhere in the world.

It's about taking sovereign territory. Yes. That is an airfield. You don't have to have an empire. You can park that somewhere useful, and then you can project your force your aid your military force what your violence whatever you want to do from that platform and the thing is dallas it's a key point about warships is that nearly all of the world's

population live very close to the sea we're a literal species a coastal species particularly traditionally now we've got a place like las ve, which shouldn't even be there. That doesn't have many warships. Doesn't have any warships. But traditionally, if you think about the great cities and whether it's Tokyo, even Beijing was because of the water system in China. But you know, Shanghai, Tokyo, Paris, London, New York, LA, these are ports, right? Because that's how we move ourselves and stuff around traditionally. And so that aircraft carrier is an example of where you can just go and have a presence kind of anywhere you want to be in the world. Actually, that word you used, projection, is really important.

How much is having like the biggest warship as a sort of symbol of where you are in the world? In fact, actually on the Navy website, it certainly talks about that. It's like this is a symbol of Britain in the world. So as well as a kind of military power, it has this sort of symbolic power too. They get very excited about that. Like I am in very dodgy territory because I'm on the whole a fan of aircraft carriers, but I do also accept that there is this kind of always this nagging, any student of history has to accept that we are very good at fighting and winning the last war. Aircraft carriers were absolutely the engine of war in the pacific war against japan in the second

world war you know building aircraft carriers flying for planes off them striking targets on islands and everything essential that's how the americans crept across the surged across the pacific and defeated japanese empire but its opponents have said you know we do have things called hypersonic missiles now so obviously like the war in ukraine and the black sea has been the jury's out it's a bit scary for big grey ships floating around the water. He actually said that, didn't he? You know, when we announced HMS Queen Elizabeth, he was saying, oh yes, well, it's a big thing. So I'm glad they've made it big so we can hit it. Yeah. And the argument is that you surround it with slightly smaller grey things that can

intercept. You know, there's all sorts of, obviously, like tanks. I mean, we're in this modern war, it's really hard. And as theians have showed what thought to be on the world's most sophisticated and well-funded militaries six months ago is totally bulls up so the answer is we don't really know and should we have invested the billions of dollars or pounds that the hms queen elizabeth and the prince of wales cost in building a ginormous fleet of drones thus thus putting off, you know, like a billion drones. It's a really good question. And actually, the war in Ukraine at the moment, it raises all these questions. We did an episode about tanks. And it's again, when I think of tanks, I think of the First World War and the Second World War. You know, they seem to be a very 20th century thing.

And seeing tanks again in the 21st century on a battlefield in Europe just seems so peculiar. And, you know, when you think about exactly drones and how modern warfare has got things like aircraft carriers, and it's like, yeah, where do they fit in? And it's weird, actually, because the Russians, when their big ship sunk, the Moscow, quite recently, it was this great symbol of just how fragile the Russian army seems to be at the moment and how out of date it seems to be. Yeah and in the same way that when two British battleships which are ships that don't carry aircraft but carry big guns like the ones we're talking about today these two big ones were sunk in the end of 1941 by Japanese aircraft off the Malaysian peninsula that was seen as the end of an era and so the question is whether we are going to be in a

different time now where big very very expensive capital ships you know with lots of people on board lots of equipment on board whether they are now approaching obsolescence and whether it's going to be unmanned vehicles right on the sea and that's true of container ships as well like maybe actually rather than sticking all of your containers on one normal ship and taking them to san antonio felix so what if they will just go in little autonomous little self-driving pods and then the whole sea will be full of them. Or just not bother having a war at all. That's the dream, right? I mean, on my optimistic days,

and there are a few of them at the moment, but on my optimistic days, I think, if I was President Xi or I was one of these people, I would say, modern war is clearly, unimaginably, we're in such a rapidly changing era. Like, if I was the richest, powerful man on earth, which Putin was one of and President Xi, I'd be like, you know what?

Don't roll the iron dice, buddy. Just enjoy it. You've got you've got a very good life exactly and also there's no way back from this it's not like he can like do something and then suddenly join the g20 meetings again it's over and you know what that's exactly what in the first world war a great german industrialist said to kaiser villheim he's like what do you want you're a kaiser you march around you've got a huge big massive looking empire you have the nice uniform covered in medals, you have unlimited sexual opportunities. What do you want? What do you want? What are you doing? Let's tell Putin that. But then these idiot old men, they roll it all, they gamble it all.

And in the case of the Romanovs, they end up dead in the basement. In the case of Kaiser Wilhelm, he ends up living in a little hotel on the Dutch seaside. And that's what I find amazing about this. Anyway. We learn nothing. Actually, the thing that really struck me being on the Royal Navy website, you know, they said the HMS Queen Elizabeth,

three billion quid it costs to make. Elon Musk's about to buy Twitter for 44 billion dollars. Look how many battleships he could build if he wanted to. And private fleets were a thing in the period we're going to talk about actually while we're talking about queen elizabeth we'll go back in time because do we start with queen elizabeth can we go even further back because i was thinking around about the sort of 15 something yeah 15 something but her grandpa say i mean there's a time you basically got this little part of the world g Eurasian Peninsula, this little tip, it's the peninsulas on the peninsula, okay?

Europe is a bit of a backwater. And then the real backwaters are like the tip of Iberia, Devon, Cornwall, Brittany, Normandy. I mean, these places are at the absolute limit of the Eurasian landmass. It's arse end, we call it. Arse end. And in the space of 40 years, they go from that

to being the most dynamic and important place because of ship technology. Ship technology allows people to go out into the ocean and discover two entirely new continents full of people who already live there, but discover for the Europeans and the Eurasians. Effectively, kind of discover Western and Southern Africa as well. So you add that. And on top of all those, gold in West Africa, gold in Mesoamerica, gigantic opportunities for settlement and agriculture and enslavement, mind-blowing opportunities.

But on top of all that, the world's richest fishing grounds. No one even knew was there. The cod of the North Atlantic, the Grand Banks, the mackerel that's in North Atlantic. So suddenly this place, it's a bit like oil being discovered in the desert of Arabia. Everyone's like, oh, no Grand Banks, the mackerel that's in the North Atlantic. So suddenly, this place, it's a bit like oil being discovered in the desert of Arabia. Everyone's like, oh, no point going to the desert. Suddenly you're like, oh, no, they're the richest people in the world.

That was weird. And it's very similar. So discovery of the new world. So you've got people like, obviously, Francis Drake, John Hawkins, people like that. Tell me about the ship technology. So what did we have when we were at the arse end of things? And then suddenly it's like, oh my god, we've discovered a whole new continent and gold and everything and everything else and we suddenly become rich how did this sort of ship technology change and

this is the point this is why it's perfect for your podcast because this is what it's about a technological but it's actually about the things that i love when your guests talk about this podcast it's about technology meeting ambition and meeting the other factors around it. Context. Context, buddy. That's right. And it's about religious further, and it's about printing presses and knowledge dissemination, all that kind of stuff as well.

But basically, these ships, you go from two sort of kind of ships. In the north of Europe, you get your Viking ship. Yeah. All right? It hasn't changed for a long time. It's a holiday. Overlapping planks. Yeah, exactly.

Overlapping planks, a, exactly. Overlapping planks, a bit like your garden shed. So you make a garden shed of planks which are attached to each other, overlapping, and you still see rowing boats made, let's say, clinker-built things. They're powered by big square sails, and they just float along with the wind behind them, okay? Down in the Mediterranean,

you get a different kind of ship being built, which is potentially called Carvel, which is you build a skeleton of a ship with braces and struts and everything, and then you lay planks flush along the sides of those. So no gaps between the planks, like flush, no overlapping bits. And that's like how you might build something a bit nicer in your garden shed. If you build a little wooden outhouse or something, you might make it like that. And that has great efficiency gains in

terms of load bearing and your ability to make them much bigger northern european boats you get too long they start flexing because they don't have this rigid internal skeleton they flex they snap in half you can't put too much stuff in them so basically you get the development of these new ships which kind of call carack or galleon eventually and basically they can further. They're more resilient in massive waves. You can put more stuff in them. You can put more cannons on them. You can put more crew on them. And you can sail them in different ways. You can sail upwind, downwind, a bit more efficient. So suddenly, there's an explosion. When that maritime technology is put together, people like Magellan, people like the Portuguese, Columbus, and everyone coming after them, it goes nuts.

Were we building the same sort of ship? Are the Spanish and the British and the French all building a similar kind of boat? You bet they are. You bet they are. Because this is the key thing about the context in Western Europe, is although we know now that God was an Englishman

and wanted the British Empire to kind of win, it wasn't entirely clear at the time, right? Spain and Portugal were far ahead. So God was not necessarily English at that point. Well, that's what British people told themselves in the 18th century before people at us on Twitter. Anyway, so basically Cabot, John Cabot, the Englishman who goes to Newfoundland, makes the first journey across the Atlantic for the English. He's not an Englishman. He's Italian. And Columbus, Italian. Columbus goes to the Portuguese. He goes to the English.

And then eventually he goes to Spain, saying, give me some money. I want to go and see what happens if you sail west. And loads of people are like, nah, no thanks. The Spanish let him do it. So there's different patrons, different pots of money, different opportunities for creativity. And you're competing. You're constantly stealing.

And you're constantly spying. During Queen Bloody Mary's reign, we used to call her Mary I, her husband was Spanish. So English mariners were allowed, we used to call her Mary I, she, her husband was Spanish, so English mariners were allowed to go down to Spain and learn from the Spanish. Well, big mistake. Because when her sister took over, that information was shut down,

all the books had to be put, but that information had already been disseminated in England. So knowledge about new ways of marking your position at sea, measuring the height of the sun, trying to fix your position, tidal patterns. I mean, that stuff's essential. If you want to sail around the Western Sahara, you've got to go miles out to sea, and then you go back in. If you try and go on the coast, you smash into a sandbank.

If you try and sail to Asia, around the Cape of Good Hope, you've got to touch Brazil. You've got to high-five Brazil with your right hand because of the weather patterns in the South Atlantic, and you get stuck in the big areas of zero wind. That knowledge, people are like, oh, it turns out we can go to Asia, but you've got to go via Brazil. Oh, that's useful. And these are these lads leaving Bristol armed with that information. So it is essential, that competition and the stealing of ideas. And that comes down to shipbuilding, comes down to navigational bits and bobs, and the knowledge itself. That's what I love about this, is that that particular theme, that idea, in all innovation, doesn't matter what you're talking about, it's exactly the same.

It's never just one person. It is, well, things like political context. It's the sharing of ideas. I mean, even, you know, I talk about space rockets a lot. And you look at the sort of history of the space, it's exactly that. Great example. Exactly the same. Things like sort of Concorde, the fact that sort of we built Concorde

and the Russians built exactly like some kind of... Surprise, surprise. And the Russians built a space shuttle exactly the same things like sort of concord the fact that sort of we built concord and the russians built exactly like some surprise surprise and the russians built a space shuttle exactly the same it's all that sort of stuff let me let me ask you a question so this sharing of boat technology which is sort of for britain it's improving britain's you know suddenly we're becoming an empire we're defeating the spanish and the armada and all this all this kind of famous stuff was there a sort of name behind the building of ships if we think of you know space rockets we think of Wernher von Braun and people like that is there a kind of an architect who was sort of thinking about how are we going to build ships that could protect themselves and protect precious cargo and that kind of thing in the British tradition you've got the Pett family Phineas Pett i think was the dad and you've got a guy called

matthew baker who's working in the under queen elizabeth and they're coming up with new ideas i mean it's incremental improvements it's it's quite incremental but those two are famous within the english tradition i'd say and they've got a great expression they built race built galleons i love race built galleons and it said one of them said it should have the head of a cod and the tail of a mackerel um and that's what they kind of look like but that's probably the two kind of key english ones i think it can be actually your point about the russians i mean what's great about the space race is a bit stressful because there's only kind of two real players right what's key about this period you've got dozens of different loads of people so it's even more

dynamic and it makes you think about kind of monopolistic you know why we should be breaking up the big tech companies because in it to be creative to be innovative yes you're the expert on this but you probably the more players as long as they can reach a certain scale the better and so in in holland you actually have different navies within what we now would describe as holland and they're competing against each other in holland it's a complete bonkers that's interesting and in and to a certain extent, dockyards in England are doing the same. And actually, you mentioned protect yourself. We haven't talked about the key thing. Well, you know, we're talking about warships. We mentioned the HMS Queen Elizabeth at the beginning, 40 aircraft, you know, the F-35s and helicopters,

all this kind of stuff. What would the armament on a ship in this Tudor time, what would it look like? You know, I always imagine sort of Captain Pugwash ships with sort of cannons sticking out funny enough they look a bit more like Captain Pugwash ships like you're slightly rounder with cannons sticking out slightly odder angles than it would say HMS Victory which is a sleek yeah um is the kind of perfection of what you see developing in this period so the HMS Victory is is the most sophisticated and extraordinary object created by human beings to that point in history but it's a kind of a sleek gun platform three decks of guns all modular interchange guns can be guns can come and go whereas the earlier ships something like Mary

Rose is quite haphazard there's guns of different sizes there's kind of holes cut in the hull wherever the shipwright and the captain think they might be able to squeeze another gun I mean these are it's a really transitional period so it's a bit more haphazard. But the guns on there are essential because it's not just the sailing technology. It's the fact that on those ships are bronze and iron guns, powered, if you like, by gunpowder, that fire projectiles up to kind of 400 or 500 meters. And again, guns came from the east, but they enter this supercharged period of development in the west because we think now of various things but one of them is this competition so in ming

china there is not this same competitive instinct for canon because the state has a monopoly on canon production and it sort of slowly develops and evolves, and it's kind of quite genteel. In Europe, your survival as a city-state or as a polity, as a princedom, as a bishopric, as a kingdom, depends on the absolute latest, what you can do, your gun founders improving things all the time. So Scotland is not talked enough in this concept. Scotland actually spurs Henry VIII to build his more modern navy. Scotland produces the two best warships ever produced in Britain to that point. And Henry VIII is absolutely mortified. This kind of poor kingdom on his border, which his brother-in-law controls. And suddenly they're producing these ultra warships with cannon at Gavala.

Why Scotland? Whereabouts in Scotland? Well, in the case of Scotland, you see, because they had... The King of Scotland was currently waging a sort of a mini campaign of conquest in the Western Isles against these sort of overmighty local magnates who were like, you know, we're not interested in taking our orders from Edinburgh. And so Scotland needed naval power in and around the Scottish coast. Henry VIII is like, what's going on here? And so what he does is he gets experts from abroad. He develops local expertise. He spends money. He develops local expertise. He spends money.

He creates a navy, as well as creating warships. He's founding cannons in the Weald and Kent. He's also creating that sexiest of things, which you will love because you love innovation, which is bureaucracies, which means it doesn't depend on individuals being brilliant. It's just the grim grinding. There's an office, and there's paperwork,

and there's an archive, and there's a process and there's a budget. And that can be the most creative and wonderful thing. And it's not just some brilliant guy just inventing warships down in Chatham or in Portsmouth. There's office holders and there are dockyards that are being paid for and supplies that are being laid in in the medium to long term. Baltic pine being brought in. These are the unsexy but super exciting ways in which you can ensure that that innovation is continued and accelerated. And so, yeah, so Scotland,

so it's even within this little island of Britain, which doesn't even take up a centimetre of China, there's two competing kingdoms who are trying to outdo each other. And the results are quite fantastic. And we'll be back after this short break. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Eleanor Janaga.

And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings. Normans, kings and popes, who were rarely the best of friends,

murder, rebellions, and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit wherever you get your podcasts. and presumably almost like an arms race you're going to see all this new innovations happening all over britain you're going to see it happening all over europe in the sort of warship context i'm just trying to imagine sort of how deadly a warship would be you say the cannons would fire

sort of what 500 meters they would fire projectile so fire a projectile. So you'd have to sort of pull up alongside another ship. Well, you can do two things, of course. One, as I said at the beginning, remember that all the world's riches and all the world's seats of power, most of them, were concentrated along the shore. So if you go to the Indian Ocean and you go to the Malabar Coast or Bengal, you astonish the local rulers by turning up with your ship and threatening to destroy their city, to pound their palace into dust, to completely interrupt their trade. Because these are life support mechanisms, so like your space example. Barrel technology, by the way, buddy, very exciting barrelling. Pickle herring, and you can take it all the way around the world and gnaw on minging

pickled herring for the rest of your life. I'd never thought of that, actually, the importance of pickling. The fact that you don't have to come back to shore and you can just carry on and sail along. It's a bit like having a nuclear reactor in your submarine. It means you can just keep on going. It is exactly like that. And so these Asians and these Americans, indigenous societies are like these Europeans. They don't just turn up and sit off our coast smashing our

things with their cannon they can sit there seemingly forever for months at a time now that's difficult and you do get scurvy of course and ships do rot and but you're able to stay at sea you're not dependent on the vikings went to sea unbelievable worries but then they pulled their boats up on the beach and did some repairs and got some food and then they launched the next day the ancient athenians on their tri-rooms did the same sort of thing you can go to cochin and you stay there you throttle their trade by smashing merchant ships up with your cannon you threaten to bombard their shore positions which is terrifying you can move along the coast you land your men with cutlasses and muskets and you can actually project power inland

and that's just one ship let alone of course when you get more and more ships. So that ability of the Europeans to project force in ships with cannon, that changes the world and makes Europeans into global hegemons. And other states are kind of left standing by this, really. We've got a few minutes left. I just want to talk about the other big major technology innovation. It's the ships becoming made of iron, ironclad ships. So is Warrior the first one? I always think of Warrior, but maybe there's earlier ones. Great example. So the French launched a ship called La Gloire,

La Glory, which is sort of a wooden ship, but with metal plating on the sides. So suddenly you had armour plating in our arms race. It's like, crikey. It's a nightmare. Just when other nations were like, OK, look, if we could build these unbelievably sophisticated ships with all the kind of incredible institutional knowledge required to operate them we might be able to do

that the ottomans kind of try and do that and so you know you can see kind of people trying to just of course what's also going on in europe at the time is the industrial revolution which by the way the navy is the biggest single customer of these early factories and things eisenbard kinder brunel's dad who invents the production line what's he doing he's making blocks and tackle for the Navy. Early steam engines, what are they doing? They're pumping out mines to create iron ore for the Navy. So the Navy is a gigantic, like the US Pentagon buying all the semiconductors or whatever in the Cold War.

You're basically going, we don't really have a computer industry yet, but we kind of want one and we can use some of our muscle. And like Biden now directing US defence to try and support renewables where it can. So actually, there's a tonne of money there which can support industry in that way. So basically, steam power engines, of course, are a huge product of this, but so is armour plating. And the British go one step

further in the 1860s and the Gloire. They make a ship entirely of iron. They're not iron platings, the whole thing's made of iron. It's an iron skeleton, an iron frame, and an iron plating to make up the size. And that ship is unbelievable because that ship makes every other ship in the world at the second it's launched obsolete, at that exact second, which is pretty mental. And although it causes a problem, and this is something that I'm sure you'll be familiar with in computer versus and weapons and contemporary weapons, because it A, makes every ship in the world obsolete, great. The problem is you then have to restart the arms race from zero.

Well, that's it. It's one of those resetting moments where everything that's come before, just forget it, you're in a museum now. There's just no point in having wooden ships made of wood anymore because... So Britain's like, yay, oh, we now have to build loads of these bloody things

because the Prussians could go, oh, thanks, now we'd have to build a wooden navy. So we can just start by building that one. So actually you end up with another arms race immediately. And then, oh my God, Warrior is obsolete within 10 years, 14 years, obsolete. And actually that's something you recognise today probably with phones or whatever else. But you go from world-changingly revolutionary to obsolete in far less than someone's space or someone's career.

You know, it's unbelievable. Okay, Warrior wasn't the first ironclad ship or iron ship. Why was it so revolutionary? Why do we celebrate it so much? Because wasn't the first ironclad ship or iron ship why was it so revolutionary why do we celebrate it so much because it was the first iron built throughout ship it was powered by the largest engine to that point that they've been created in the history of the world it had guns on it that were cutting edge in fact they were so cutting it didn't quite work so it was the package but it was on sink you couldn't sink that ship cannonballs bounced off it but then rapidly artillery artillery technology changed. Exploding shells, armour-piercing shells do go from warrior.

Within 50 years, you've got dreadnoughts. It's unbelievable. Within 50 years, you've got these dreadnoughts that are firing shells that weigh a tonne 15 miles away. And then within another 15 years, you've got aircraft flying off ships, carrying bombs, that can travel 200 miles. So then you're in a world of pain. Actually, what was the first aircraft carrier i have no idea well there were some dodgy sort of

attempts to sort of backfill aircraft carriers right so you get these weird semi-obsolete ships initially they would ping a seaplane off the bows that would then land on the water next to it and be craned back on it but the first first recognisable one that we would recognise is probably HMS Argus right at the end of the First World War, which can launch and recover aircraft. And then you get lots of building between the wars. You get the big famous American and Japanese and a few British ones.

Yeah, and of course that classic documentary about aircraft carriers. I think it was called Top Gun. You may have seen it. Very good documentary. I'm familiar with that one. I basically once went to an aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf during the Iraq War. And I landed on this little plane.

What plane? You landed on an aircraft carrier? They have a little supply plane called a mail plane. And we landed on the arrestor wire. And then the aft door slowly opened. The ramp opened. I was like, whatever you don't think about Top Gun. Whatever you don't think about Top Gun.

And we landed. And it was just like the sun was low in the sky. There was an orange haze. The silhouettes of everyone on the decks were backlit. There were planes taking off for combat missions, and there were people like throwing shapes and doing that kind of weird stuff. And I was like, Tony Scott absolutely crushed this. It is what it is to be on an aircraft carrier. That opening sequence is unbelievable. It's a good film. As we were recording this, I should point out the new Top Gun Maverick film is coming out, which is why it's in my mind. So I went back and watched the original. Brilliant. And then from planes, you get missiles, right? So then you can launch missiles

off ships, which turn ships into platforms that can strike thousands of miles. And then suddenly we're at HMS Queen Elizabeth. Before you know it, we go from HMS Warrior to Modern Battles. Actually, as we sort of draw this to an end, we're kind of back to the beginning, really, which is sort of what is the future? And you make an interesting point at the beginning about, well, with the rise from the Industrial Revolution to the Digital Revolution, are things like warships completely pointless now,

given we have hypersonic missiles and drones? And what is the point? You know, we just wasted three billion quid on building this great ship. I used to be a bit more nervous about that. But now, after we then wasted 35 billion quid on a test and trace system for covid didn't work i feel a bit more hot cough so i'm like let's get some carries the chinese still build lots of aircraft carriers people still be there guys we're still building tanks but there is also a thing which is it's

very difficult for military planners and i was very clever for historians could be so rude about them all in the past but it's very difficult to go let's unilaterally scrap this thing that we know has worked up till now was proved very useful in Iraq and various places and let's replace it with something we don't really know what it is yet and so that's why you've got to ride multiple horses when you're in acquisition year when you're planning for these things and I think like tanks if you're going to move across the killing zone which is a battlefield riven with supersonic shards of razor sharp steel high explosives tanks are useful in that context if they're armored if they're protected properly if they're surrounded by the right kind of kit

aircraft carriers continue to be useful they will come a point probably when manned aviation is no more with us and when for example electronic interdiction becomes more important than dropping bombs on people i don't know you'll be able to take drones off they'll be be solar powered. They'll fly around. They have no issues with endurance like we do when our little humans are in there and need to go for a pee and eat some food and things. And I suspect we'll be in a very different world and they'll be maybe much smaller, much cheaper, far more numerous. I mean, how interesting. The story of war until now has been going from tons and tons and tons of ships into fewer and fewer and fewer

and fewer more powerful ships. How interesting if we reverse that and we get autonomous cheaper vast swarms of ships and drones in the future won't that be fascinating you know what's interesting is presumably there are people other than yourself and me who are thinking about exactly this kind of stuff good luck some terrifying Strategy people and politicians and whoever and academics who are considering the future of war and trying to work out what to do. I know. And it's so easy to sound super clever

and talk about how Philip of Spain screwed it up and Matthew Baker's race-built designs for gangs. You feel so smart. Oh, look at us. Aren't we clever? But I mean, to do that today, to be working in military procurement today must be terrifying.

Terrifying. It's really interesting as we end this, just thinking about the war in Russia and Ukraine. And in a way, it does seem like, I think it was such a surprise just how poorly the Russian army is doing. We always think of harking back to the Cold War, but it's quite interesting how badly they're doing and how rusty and decrepit some of their equipment looks actually in action. Yeah, and how expensive it is. War is incredibly, incredibly expensive. And in the West, we spent trillions, trillions, trillions of pounds in Afghanistan. And that was not a big conventional war like Russia. I mean, the Russians are spending unimaginable amounts of money. And it's very difficult. Technology is changing so rapidly. And these weapon systems cost unimaginable amounts of money. I mean, the risk is sounding

like a kind of tree hugger. It is very hard to see the economic case for war. It really is. It's madness. Hey, you know, the interesting thing is we've just crammed about 500 years of history comprehensively into half an hour. Thank you very much for stopping by. Cheers, bud. Good luck with everything. And I'll see you soon. Thanks, man. Well, that's it. Thank you very much for joining us today. I hope you enjoyed that.

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