Dan Snow's History Hit - World War Two Showdown in the Mediterranean

Episode Date: July 13, 2021

By the summer of 1942 Malta had been under siege by Axis forces for over a year and the situation on the island was bleak with food and fuel almost exhausted. This vital allied foothold in the Mediterranean had to be held at all cost in order to prevent the collapse of the allied effort in North Africa where Rommel's forces were finding much success. In a desperate bid to prevent the loss of Malta, Winston Churchill ordered that a convoy like no other be dispatched to run the air and sea gauntlet in the Mediterranean. In August 1942 4 aircraft carriers, 2 battleships, 7 light cruisers, 32 destroyers, 11 submarines and a host of smaller vessels and aircraft accompanied 14 merchant ships as they attempted to battle their way to the beleaguered island fortress. The legendary Max Hastings joins Dan to tell the story of the incredible bravery and tenacity of the men who took part in Operation Pedestal.

Hi everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History. I'm just sitting in Horse Guards Parade in central London. Whitehall Horse Guards once the tilt yard for Henry VIII where he practiced jousting, more recently a parade ground, then slightly unglamorously a car park for civil servants. To my right I've got the back garden of 10 Downing Street, the Prime Minister's residence. To my left, and the reason I'm sitting here talking to you now is the vast Admiralty building, one of the biggest office blocks ever built when it was finished in the 19th century. A huge, huge headquarters for the Royal Navy, the most potent maritime force ever assembled to that point in history. I'm here because I'm filming a TV show for History Hit. You all know that I've started

the world's best history channel, History Hit. You go to historyhit.tv to sign up to a subscription. You're going to love it. Very timely last week, we had the English battling the Danes, and then we had the clash of Boudicca against the Romans. So, you know, historical resonance for both of the two big football matches. So please head over to historyhit.tv to subscribe. But I'm here today making a show which will be out later in the summer history history and it is actually coincidentally a perfect place to introduce this podcast because this is a podcast about an operation in 1942 that was dreamed up by the planners sitting in that building opposite me now. A massive lunge into the Mediterranean to relieve the island fortress of Malta which was being besieged by Axis forces. Malta was inconveniently placed. It was stuck

between Italian mainland, between Mussolini's base and then the Italian Axis armies and air forces and surface vessels in North Africa in the Tunisian and Libyan coasts. So it was a very easy place for the Axis to apply pressure on what had been a nodal point a key point of britain's maritime empire things were very rough by 1942 the population faced starvation and churchill decided he would not abandon malta to its fate instead he would strike deep into the mediterranean and risk substantial losses in order to bring its salvation in this podcast i'm very happy to have max hastings back on so max hastings is probably the best-selling military historian in Britain. He has just written a new book on Operation Pedestal which has been given to that Mediterranean operation. He is always very generous

with his time. It's always great to have him on the podcast and previous episodes he's talked about Vietnam, dam busters and just his experiences as a war correspondent. So please go back to our archive and have a look at those. But in the meantime, everyone, please enjoy this episode with Sir Max Hastings. And don't forget to go and subscribe to historyhit.tv. You'll love it. So, Max, thank you very much for coming back on the podcast. Always a pleasure, Dan.

Well, this time it's a great pleasure for me because you're getting your feet wet. You're talking about the Navy in this one, Dan. Well, this time it's a great pleasure for me because you're getting your feet wet. You're talking about the Navy in this one, finally. Well, I've written lots of books about the British Army and the Royal Air Force. And I've always wanted to do a full-length book about the Royal Navy. And I looked for one episode as a sort of platform on which to talk about the whole ethos of the Royal Navy in World War II. Because I've argued in several books that I think the Royal Navy was Britain's most effective fighting service of the war, more so than the British Army, and yes, even more so than the Royal Air Force. And the Navy, in a way, they get less credit for a lot of the stuff they did, because so much of it was repetitive. All those convoys, all those

evacuations at the early stages of the war at Dunkirk and then getting out of all sorts of other places, getting out of Greece, getting out of Crete and so on, and then convoying all those invasion forces. They did all sorts of stuff, but somehow they never got quite the credit, I don't think, at the end of the war that they deserved. Pedersil is such an interesting episode. Let's start with why it needed to happen. I mean, Malta was in the most ridiculously vulnerable place.

I mean, it's madness that the Germans and Italians weren't able to neutralise it. Everybody thought at the beginning of World War II that the British couldn't hope to defend Malta if Germany and Italy were against them, because obviously Italian air bases are just 60 miles away from Malta if Germany and Italy were against them, because obviously Italian air bases are just 60 miles away from Malta's target. But Churchill was determined, he was always determined, that this bastion of Britishness

had got to be held. And in 1942, his own position, people always think that 1940 was bottom of the barrel for Churchill. It wasn't. 1942 was bottom of the barrel, because by then the British people were getting exhausted. And although the Prime Minister kept making these wonderful speeches about all these glorious victories that were going to come, all he seemed able to deliver were defeats. And in that summer of 1942, we'd already had humiliation in Malaya and Singapore, a larger

British army being defeated by a smaller Japanese one. Tobruk had fallen to a smaller German army. Churchill was at a pretty low end. And when he was told that Malta would have to surrender in September because its 300,000 people could no longer be fed. He said, somehow, we have got to get the supplies to Malta at any cost. Now, the admirals thought this was bonkers. The admirals thought that after so many losses already, after so many disastrous convoys, that the risk of the sort of big ships that one would have to send to escort one more convoy through to Malta just wasn't worth it.

And there's no doubt in my mind, the admirals would have said, nope, we're not going to do this. But Churchill said, we're going to do this at any cost. So the largest fleet Britain sent to the Western War at any time in the war, two battleships, four aircraft carriers, seven cruisers, 30-something destroyers, eight submarines, all deployed to supply Malta before the leaves fell. Is this a very interesting example of where decision-making should sit at political and military levels? Were the admirals right? It was a gigantic risk to these

capital ships and the merchant fleet to send this convoy for sort of political reasons? Or do you think Churchill was right? Because politicians have a grasp of the more intangible when it comes to warfare. Historians have been divided ever since. Some very distinguished historians describe pedestal as a British defeat because the losses were so heavy. I don't agree. I think Churchill was right. What I was trying to do with all my books is to close my eyes to the 21st century and try and remember how things were then in August 1942. Now, we now know that the Russians achieved this terrific victory at Stalingrad in the winter of 1942. We know that Montgomery won the Battle of Alamein. We know that in November 1942, British and American forces landed in North Africa and

so on and so forth. In August 1942, they didn't know this stuff. The war was still in the balance. But at that time, all everybody could see was there was a good chance that the forces of evil, Germany and Italy, might well prevail. And so it was in that situation that Churchill felt it was vital to demonstrate to the world that Britain had the will to fight. You've got to remember, the Americans, for example, were beginning to think we were pretty pathetic. American opinion

polls, who did American people think were trying hardest to win the war? But of course, they said mostly Americans. But after the Americans, they said the Chinese. And after the Chinese, they said the Russians. And the British came nowhere because of all these defeats. Stalin mocked Churchill. He said, your navy runs away because of the disaster to convoy PQ-17. So Churchill felt that Britain had everything to prove, both about its willingness to prevail, but also about its willingness to suffer. So he was much less frightened of losses than the admirals were. It was an astonishing assemblage of ships.

It was the kind of carrier group that many people think were only seen in the Pacific War. Well, to send four aircraft carriers, and at the beginning, when they set out across the Atlantic, it was five British aircraft carriers. And Britain only owned seven carriers at that point, that we'd already lost four in the course of the war. And these carriers were absolutely vital to carrying on the war. So all the admirals could see was that if things went disastrously wrong, you could lose most of Britain's remaining carrier force. But the only way they had a hope they knew of getting to Malta was if they sent these carriers with the fighters on board to defend them against Axis air attack, because the

Axis had more than 600 aircraft, fighters, torpedo bombers, high-level bombers, at bases all around the Mediterranean. And sometimes when fleets put to sea, nobody was sure whether there was going to be a battle. When pedestal put to sea, they knew there was going to be an almighty battle. They knew that Axis German and Italian submarines were going to be there. They knew all these aircraft were going to attack. They thought that the Italian surface fleet might well come out and attack. So they had to send a force capable of taking on all this. But the price of sending all this stuff was all this stuff in the admiral's eyes.

And the admirals, I don't doubt if any of them slept at night all the time, pedestals at sea, thinking about just how bad things could be. And, of course, on their second day in the Mediterranean, the first day, nothing happened. And some of the young men on the ships, the beautiful August weather in the Mediterranean, they began to think maybe this is going to be a sunshine cruise. The second morning, they're watching one of the carriers flying off Spitfires that are flying straight through to Malta to reinforce Malta. And while they're watching all these nice Spitfires taking off on one of the carriers, suddenly everybody starts pointing. And another carrier, the carrier Eagle, is slowly starting to tilt to port. And within a couple of minutes,

it turns over. It's been hit by four torpedoes from a German U-boat. And eight minutes after that ship was sunk, all that's left is a lot of heads bobbing in the water. And that put the fear of God not only into the admirals, but into every man of that fleet. There were about 20,000 men in that British fleet sailing to Malta. And nearly all of them witnessed, all the ones who were on the upper decks, witnessed this terrifying sight. This huge aircraft carrier just going boom. And from that moment, Admiral Seyfried, who was in command, he knew that some admirals are always remembered, not for their great victories, but for their great defeat. And three or four months earlier, the battleship Prince of Wales, the battlecruiser

Repulse, had been sunk in about 15 minutes by Japanese torpedo bombers. And Admiral Phillips, who was in command, all everybody was going to remember him for was losing these two ships in the morning. Cypress that day, right, he's lost Eagle. What happens next? Well, you'll tell us what's happened next, I hope. But just quickly remind us, you've got all these naval vessels. But of course, the main event, in a curious way, are the merchant ships they're escorting. Tell me about them.

There were 14 of them. It was one tanker, very strong American built ship, Ohio, with a British crew aboard. But the tanker was vital because if the tanker didn't make it to Malta, there was going to be no more fuel to fuel the fighters to defend the place, to keep all the vital defense equipment going, to fuel the vehicles. So that tanker with 12,000 tons of fuel aboard had to get through come what may. And then you've got these 13 so-called cargo liners with 80,000 tons of cargo aboard. And to me, it's miraculous that they find guys, civilians, of course, to man these ships because

everybody knew that the Malta run was one of the most deadly. Everybody knew that these ships, their best speed is about 15 or 16 knots, 20 miles an hour on land, that they know they're going to have half the Italian and German Air Force on top of them. And these guys, especially the guys in the engine room, they never get enough credit.

If you are down by London Bridge and you go on board HMS Belfast, the museum ship cruiser that's still there, and you go down to the engine room there and you think, you're right down below the waterline. You've got two inches of steel between you and any torpedo mine that hits you. One of the pilots who was on the deck of Eagle when she turned turtle and went down, and he said one of the lingering memories was as they scramble for their lives to get off that ship as she tipped over, that they hear the screams coming up the

ventilators and the terrible shouts from all the poor guys trapped in the engine rooms, of course, most of whom died. So it's not surprising on those merchant ships, when they got a little bit asleep, they were wearing their life jackets and their bunks. They had all the lifeboats slung out on the davits, ready to drop immediately, because they knew that statistically, if the ship was hit, they probably got maximum 15 minutes to get off. Of course, you expect warships and the Royal Navy to go where they're sent. But the fact they could find all these merchant seamen to crew those ships for fiddling sums of money, they weren't paid much.

And to go out there and do this, those were incredibly brave guys. You're listening to Dan Snow's History. I'm talking to Max Hastings about the relief of Malta. More after this. Catastrophic warfare, bloody revolutions and violent ideological battles. I'm James Rogers and over on the Warfare podcast we're exploring the vast history of ferocious global conflict. We've got the classics. Understandably when we see it from hindsight the great revelation in Potsdam was really Stalin saying yeah tell me something I don't know. The unexpected. And it was at that moment that he just handed her all these documents

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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 and after the loss of the eagle things start going wrong for the convoy reading your book i was struck it feels like perhaps this is how war always is but it feels like one of those where

the side that makes the fewest mistakes ends up coming out on top. And what's also unfair is that, I mean, if you think of it as a football match, a lot of those naval officers were very keen football fans, that one thing that's very tough is you can go on successfully defending your goal most of the day, and then suddenly somebody gets lucky. And that's what happened the second day. 11th of August, they lose Eagle. The 12th, there's action all day, continuous procession of enemy bombers, U-boats, depth charges going off everywhere, fighters scrambling into the sky

all the time, dogfights over the convoy, hour after hour. And yet, by tea time that day, by about five o'clock, all that had happened, one merchant ship had been hit, was still afloat. They'd sunk two Italian submarines, rammed by Royal Navy destroyers. They'd seen off a hell of a lot more. So by the second day, all right, they'd lost Eagle, but they felt that things were really not going too badly. I mean, everyone was exhausted. They'd fired tens of thousands of rounds of ammunition. We'd lost some fighters. The other side had lost aircraft, but it wasn't too bad. But then,

the 24 hours that followed were among the bloodiest in the history of the Royal Navy. First of all, Lotus Stuka dive bombers descend on another carrier, Indomitable. And again, the whole fleet's watching while this stream of Stuka dive bombers just dive almost vertically out of the sky onto Indomitable. And they hit her three times. And she's submerged in spray and smoke and flame. And everybody thought she was going to go the same way as Eagle. They thought this is the end. Well, actually, miraculously, after 10 minutes of desperate suspense for every man in that fleet, the signal flashes from the bridge of indomitable situation under control. She'd lost 50 men dead. She could no longer fly off aircraft, but she was still afloat.

But at that point, Seyfried decided he got no choice. He couldn't risk his big ships, his battleships and carriers anymore. He got to turn them around towards Gibraltar. And so from there on, from about seven o'clock on that second day, the cruisers, the destroyers and the merchantmen are on their own. And they felt jolly lonely. Every man who was there recorded, as he saw, the battleships and the carriers on their own. And they felt jolly lonely. Every man who was there recorded as he saw the battleships and the carriers on their escorts disappearing in the opposite direction. They felt pretty lonely. But the first hour after the two forces separated, nothing much happened.

And Admiral Burrow, Harold Burrow, was in command of the cruiser squadron right through to Malta. He must have thought, well, maybe we've seen the last of the other side for today. But then, wham, wham, wham, in the space of a minute or two, one of the most devastating submarine attacks of the war. The British have got this terrible habit of regarding the Italians ridiculous. Italians had some very brave seamen, and especially some very brave submarine captains. And one of their submarines, Axum, commanded by a guy called Farini, he got right in close. Somehow the Aztec submarine detectors don't pick him up.

One torpedo hits the cruiser Cairo, which has to be sunk. Another torpedo hits Burra's flagship, Nigeria, which loses 50 people killed. And the admiral has to transfer to a destroyer. And Nigeria just about manages to stagger back to Gibraltar. But that's the end of half of the battle. And the third one hits the vital tanker, Ohio. And when they see the flame shooting up in the sky, again, every man in the fleet thinks, well, that's the end of that, a tanker ohio and when they see the flame shooting up in the sky again every man of the fleet thinks well that's the end of that a tanker but incredibly they managed to get the fires out with a bit of

help from all the seawater pouring into the side of the ship and she was one of the strongest ships of her kind in the world and she'd been built brilliantly compartmentalized so that even though of course one compartment's gone and all the fuel in it's gone and so on, all the rest are still there. So nobody was more surprised than Dudley Mason, the captain of the empire, but they're still there. But here is Admiral Burroughs thinking, God, a bit more of this and we really are in trouble. But they thought, well, dusk is coming, the end of the day.

Not a bit of it. Even as they're getting themselves sorted out after this devastating submarine attack. And perhaps nobody's paying as much attention as they should to the radar, massed enemy air attack. The same again, torrents of bombs falling down upon them and torpedoes. Ship after ship is hit. Three merchantmen go to the bottom.

I have to be sunk. Others are hit. It's a devastating half hour. Well, then darkness falls. And they think, well, perhaps you're going to have a bit of peace now. And by now, Burrow must have been a pretty rattled guy. I mean, like all these, you don't get to be an admiral in the Royal Navy at that period unless you're pretty tough. But as darkness fell, and they're still steaming east towards Malta, and they've got a couple hundred miles to go,

and maybe they're thinking in the hours of darkness they're going to have some peace. But then one massed Italian and German torpedo craft start attacking. And all through the hours that followed, through the hours of darkness, these torpedo boats come zooming at 40 or 50, through the hours of the dark, these torpedo boats come zooming at 40 or 50 miles an hour out of the darkness, loose their torpedoes, hit and hit and hit, merchant ships hit,

merchant ships sinking, a cruiser so badly hit that it has to be sunk. When dawn comes, the cook on one of the destroyers goes down below to the mess deck packed with hundreds of survivors from sunken ships. And he says cheerfully, the cook standing there in his apron, he said, well, we don't know where there's any convoy left after the night. Well, there was a bit of convoy left.

But by that morning of the 13th, the British had suffered devastating losses. Militarily, what's going on here? You're quite critical of the carrier-based interceptors, the fighters. You also point out that the anti-aircraft fire from the ships sounds kind of morale boosting and lets you think you're doing something, but didn't really do much against enemy air attacks. If it didn't actually shoot down many aircraft, does it at least break up the attacks? The best thing the barrages do, and, does it at least break up the attacks?

The best thing the barrages do and the fighters is they break up the enemy attack. The tragedy for the Royal Navy was they had some good aircraft carriers, but they never really picked the right fighters. And they went into the war with some good aircraft carriers, but very slow, not very effective fighters. For example, on pedestal, they had some Hurricanes, but not nearly enough of them. And even the Hurricanes, which had been great in the Battle of Britain two years earlier, were very slow at getting up to altitude to engage these German Junkers 88 bombers. And again and again, the pilots, and don't get me wrong,

I'm not critical of the fighter pilots of the fleet air arm, were incredibly brave and they did everything that man could do in fighting off these attacks, but they were only as good as the fighters they were flying and a lot of their fighters were just slower than the attacking aircraft, but they did terrific stuff. The Maraj, I'm afraid one finds again and again in wars and even the Americans,

with their huge fleet in 1945, they found that gunfire, the sky's a very big place. And the only really effective way of shooting down attacking aircraft is with good fighters. And of course, by 1945, the Americans had these huge carrier groups and hundreds of fighters. They could put enormous forces of fighters into the air. And the British, every single attack on pedestal, the fleet air arms fighters were heavily outnumbered by the Germans and Italians coming in. So all the time, they were struggling against the odds. And I think it's miraculous what they did, but they were right up against it. Let's skip to the end. How many of those vital merchant marine ships got into the Grand Harbour of Malta? Four of the 13 merchant vessels got into Grand Harbour Malta, and they delivered 32,000 tonnes of stores. Another 52,000

tonnes of stores were at the bottom of the Mediterranean. Every single ship, one could write a book about its experiences. But one of the most extraordinary episodes was the tanker Ohio, which was hit again and again. And by the morning of the 13th, it had been hit by air attack so often its engines were stopped. And it had a crashed German aircraft on its foredeck and another crashed Italian aircraft on its stern deck. And the last two days, it crept towards Malta with the destroyer lashed to each side. And how they made it, I mean, at a speed of sort of five or six knots, creeping across the Mediterranean, every minute expecting more submarines or torpedo craft, which miraculously didn't attack.

But they had to put up with more and more air attacks. And of course, every man on those ships knew that if the enemy got a direct hit on Ohio, that the chances were that not only would Ohio go up, but the destroyers alongside had to go up too. And there was a sort of madness. I mean, everybody was sleepwalking. They were so exhausted. Some of the gunners on Ohio who were sent aboard from the warship, they found a case of party hats. Some of them were manning their guns dressed in party hats. Some of the others got up and run, and some blokes so drunk they could hardly stand. And the captain of one of the destroyers, Penn, dealing with all his sleepwalking

crews, he brought his gramophone up on the bridge and linked it to the ship's broadcast system, and he played the most cheerful record he'd got, which is Glenn Miller's Chattanooga Choo-Choo, and he played it again and again and again and again. And you can imagine those scenes on those ships. And it was a sort of miracle. They figured out that Ohio was sinking. But the captain of the tanker, Dudley Mason, he said that it was sinking so slowly that if they could just keep her afloat for another 12 hours,

with all the pumps going from the destroyers pumping out water, they could just make it. And they did just make it so that on the morning of the 15th of August, when everybody had given up on them, and Churchill had been told to expect that Ohio would go to the bottom, they creep into Grand Harbor. And just as the destroyers cast loose, and as Ohio reached her birth, she slumps onto the bottom of Grand Harbor. But it doesn't matter anymore because they can offload. 85% of her cargo survived. All the aviation spirit, all the rest of it makes it. It was one of the great epics of the Second World War.

Ohio is one of the great epics and makes up for some slightly premature abandonments of some of the other epics and makes up for some slightly premature abandonments of some of the other vessels on pedestal. Well, you can't expect everybody to be heroes. And the one thing one has to make a wry remark about, there's a very old saying that every soldier, sailor and airman know, that the only person who knows what a decoration is worth is the man who won it, or nowadays the woman as well. Because sometimes wonderfully deserving people get decoration and sometimes wonderfully undeserving people get them for political reasons.

And that happened on pedestals that I feel captains and officers on the warships who almost always got the lion's share of the gongs and the poor devils in the engine rooms who were exposed to most risk and achieved some miracles, especially after the carrier indomitable was hit. They got very few awards. The Merchant Navy Commodore on board one of the warships, he lost his nerve in the middle

of the night when they were all being attacked by torpedo craft. And he said, this is no good. We're going to turn around and sail to Gibraltar. And he, with two merchant ships following him, started back towards Gibraltar. And only when a couple of destroyers chased after them and said, oh, no, you don't, they made him turn around. And those ships eventually did make it to Malta.

But the convoy Commodore, he got a DSO, along with some of the captains, who'd done incredibly brave things. And of course, it was in the Royal Navy tradition that you don't wash your dirty linen in public. When I was reading your book, I was very struck by this is a battle, unlike the Battle of the Saints in the American War of Independence or Trafalgar, where there's sort of tactical brilliance on the British side. This is a battle where the Royal Navy could have grind out a victory by just being very, very good seamen. You think about the Ohio, you mentioned at Dorm when there were cables hanging off the side, they'd taken it at a tow five times, a tow kept giving way,

they lashed destroyers to it. It strikes me as a product of centuries of British naval excellence. And just from the senior officers down to the stokers and the ship's boys, there was just this sort of ability, a seamanship that made the Navy a very potent force. I agree with you 100%. What one was seeing in the Mediterranean in August 1942 was the heritage of all those hundreds of years. And where you're absolutely right is that no great tactical genius was called for in the Mediterranean. All you had to do was keep plugging on despite these terrible losses. But one has to remember that successive previous convoys to Malta had turned back after suffering lesser losses than those that fell on pedestals. But Churchill had given the order.

Churchill said, at any cost, this convoy has dropped to get through. But you think of those guys on those ships, and especially the guys in the engine room, and after you've seen nine out of 14 of the merchant vessels go to the bomb, one or two of them blowing up. There was a scene on the morning of the 13th when one of the merchant ships was hit by a German bomb and blew up. And because there was a lot of petrol on her deck, the whole sea for about a square mile was just blazing sea. And there were survivors in

it. And the admiral sends a signal to one of the destroyers, Ledbury, and he says, survivors, but don't go into the flame. And Roger Hill, the captain of Ledbury, took absolutely no notice. He just drove his little destroyer straight into the flame with these ratings-playing hoses to keep the flames at bay while they dragged as many men as they could out of the water. And everybody watching, I mean, just watching in awe of this little destroyer in the midst of this blazing sea. And yes, this is the heritage of 200 years that you know, if you're an officer of the Royal Navy, you know that this is what's expected of you.

And the same way, Ledbury's cook, who was the captain of a water polo team, a guy called Charlie Walker, in the middle of all this, he came up on deck and he takes a look at what's going on. He just takes off his apron and dives into the sea and starts pulling out survivors. These people, yes, this is hundreds of years of the Royal Navy maintaining a great tradition, and they know this is what they're expected to do. And it's marvellous. So let's just finish on Churchill again, if we may. There's so much hagiography around Churchill, so much hindsight. There's so many debates raging in the present. But it strikes me, one of his great strengths was, as we've talked about,

his understanding, his instinctive grasp of how the battlefield and the global political landscape interacted with each other. Churchill understood the business of war better than any of his service chiefs. And he had a sense of the reality. War is about fighting. It was a very good scene I've recorded in the book, that in 1941, his private secretary, Doc Caldwell, went in to see Churchill to report that two cruisers had been lost in the Mediterranean, the Battle of Crete. And he commiserated with the Prime Minister, said, so sorry, Prime Minister. And Churchill turned on him. He said, what do you think we build the ships for? And he went on to give him a little lecture

about how deplorable it was. The Admiral's War is so frightened of losing ships. And Churchill understood you cannot win wars without fighting and dying. And this is an incredibly painful, brutal lesson. But he understood that. You can't be a wartime prime minister without being a very ruthless man. And of course, he was a very ruthless man. At the same time, he had a wonderful compassion at times, especially for the civilian, for the people of Britain and what they were enduring. But he always understood

that you could not fight and win a war without enduring painful losses. And although I entirely shared that Churchill did have many faults, did make many mistakes, but he remains probably our greatest war leader of all time. So, Max, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. What's the book called? The book is called Operation Pedestal, the fleet that battled to Malta in 1942. I found it one of the most thrilling and moving stories I've ever had the opportunity to write. Well, thank you very much for writing it. I feel we have the history on our shoulders. All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, all were gone and finished. Thanks, folks. You've reached the end of another episode.

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