Today (25 April) marks Elbe Day, the date in 1945 when American and Red Army soldiers met each other for the first time on the banks of the Elbe near the German town of Torgau. The two sides had been advancing for weeks from west and east respectively: Torgau was the point at which they finally cut Germany in two. Some two weeks later the Russians would take Berlin and the war in Europe would be over. Elbe Day tends to be overshadowed by VE Day on May 8 (May 9 in Russia) and has not always been officially recognised. In recent times the Russian invasion of Ukraine has tarnished the memory of that historic meeting, and in 2022 the Biden administration cancelled the joint ceremonies to mark the event. Today, as Trump seems set on a rapprochement with Putin's Russia (despite the ongoing Ukraine war), the anniversary is being reinstated in Washington - though Russian propaganda (in the shape of the official government newspaper Pravda ) has been quick to use the event to trumpet its message that Nazism is again rearing its head in Europe - especially in Ukraine, Poland and the Baltic states, where the Kremlin claims to see 'revanchist' anti-Russian initiatives on the march again. Russia, Pravda staunchly proclaims, as the country that suffered the most in WW2, 'will never allow the lessons of the past to be forgotten'. We can easily dismiss such obvious special pleading, but the unique resonance of the Meeting on the Elbe is worth remembering, not just as a symbol of the wartime Allies celebrating victory over Hitler's Reich but as a moment when ordinary comrades-in-arms were able to fraternise in the knowledge that, after years of war, peace lay just round the corner. In keeping with many such historic moments, however, the Elbe get-together (which both sides had plenty of time to prepare for) was rather less glorious and more cack-handed than one might think. In the first place, the American GIs failed, as agreed beforehand by the two armies' top brass, to make their approach known by firing a green-coloured star shell. Instead, not having an American flag to hand, they painted a white sheet in a poor approximation of the stars-and -stripes. Not surprisingly, the Russians at first thought the Yanks were Germans playing a trick. In the end, one man from each side was sent forward to the centre of a damaged bridge that crossed the Elbe. The two men embraced awkwardly and gave 'V for Victory' signs. It was only the next day that a more formal meeting took place in which dozens of soldiers from both sides smiled for the cameras and shook hands, swearing to forsake war in the name of their fallen comrades. In place of the partially destroyed bridge over the river, Soviet and US squaddies together built a new one - a bridge of friendship. That was then. Today that bridge seems a long way off. If you think you know about WW1 and WW2, it's time to think again. www.unknownwarriorspod.co.uk An Understanding History Podcast

The Russian exclave of Kaliningrad, a tiny territory that is home to Russia's Baltic fleet and a nuclear-capable missile force, has long been regarded as the 'achilles heel' of NATO's eastern frontline. Cushioned between Lithuania to the north and Poland in the south, the city-region is separated from Putin's ally Belarus by some 100 kms along a wooded corridor called the Suwalki Gap. This would suggest that Kaliningrad is isolated and vulnerable, especially as the war in Ukraine has seen Finland and Sweden join NATO, making the Baltic essentially a NATO lake. But this home to some 1 million Russians remains a powerful militarised hub which, it's alleged, has been responsible for recent hybrid warfare in the region - including GPS-jamming of civilian aircraft and the cutting of undersea communications cables. Some argue that if the Russians could seize the Suwalki Gap, then they could badly disrupt NATO's supply lines to the Baltic states. Yet for many hundreds of years this Russian territorial fortress was German, initially Prussian, and known as Konigsberg, the capital of Germany's easternmost province of East Prussia. Kings had been crowned in the city and the philosopher Immanuel Kant had lived there. After the First World War, East Prussia was separated from Germany by the so-called Danzig Corridor, and removing this obstacle to German national unity was a prime reason why Hitler invaded Poland in 1939. It was near Rastenburg, deep in the Masurian Forest some 90 kms south-east of Konigsberg, that Hitler established his eastern front HQ known as the Wolfsschanze or Wolf's Lair - site of the July 1944 bomb blast that failed to kill the Fuhrer. By that date, however, the Red Army had pushed back German forces in the east and crossed into the German Reich itself. By January 1945 Soviet troops had taken all of East Prussia and were besieging Konigsberg, which Hitler had designated one of his 'fortress' cities - that is, to be held to the last man. Outnumbered and outgunned - the Soviets bombed unopposed from the air and shelled the city from some 250 artillery pieces every kilometre - Konigsberg put up a remarkable defence that lasted until April 9 (80 years ago yesterday) when its commander General Otto Lasch finally surrendered along with 90,000 troops - though not before several of his peace envoys had been killed by their own side, fanatical Nazis who saw surrender as treason. In the event, Hitler ordered Lasch to be hanged in absentia - the general survived the war to write his memoirs. Tens of thousands of the city's civilians died in the siege and Red Army deaths in the East Prussian campaign amounted to over 126,000, 40% more than in the final battle for Berlin. Not surprising then, perhaps, that at Potsdam, at Stalin's request, Konigsberg became part of the USSR, even though both Poland and the Baltic states were then occupied by the Red Army and would remain within the Soviet bloc for the next 45 years. The fact that the city's port was ice-free all year round (unlike other Russian naval bases) clearly made it strategically important for the Soviets. In 1946 the city was renamed Kaliningrad: any remaining Germans were expelled and the territory was repopulated with Russian-speaking Soviet citizens. The dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, following on the earlier independence of Poland and Lithuania, left Kaliningrad as the curious Russian outpost it is today - as beleaguered as its German predecessor at the end of WW2 (current EU sanctions mean the city can only be supplied by sea) but posing both a symbolic and a real threat at the heart of NATO and the EU. If you think you know about WW1 and WW2, it's time to think again. www.unknownwarriorspod.co.uk An Understanding History Podcast

The mass deportations of illegal immigrants currently under way in Trump's America - a process that seems both brutal and carelessly random in its execution - is highly likely to catch up in its broad sweep large numbers of innocent individuals , many of them actually born in the US, whose only crime is that their parents or grandparents originally came from foreign countries. It's hard to see how this could be otherwise in a country which for many generations has seen successive waves of immigration from all over the world. For very different reasons, Europe was also a massive melting pot at the end of the Second World War (WW2), with millions of displaced people separated from their homelands in German slave-labour or POW camps. At the Yalta conference of February 1945, Stalin had agreed with Roosevelt and Churchill that all Soviet citizens found outside the USSR at the end of the war should be repatriated in exchange for Allied servicemen (much fewer in number) caught up in previously German-occupied territory (i.e. most of eastern Europe) that was now held by the Red Army. The problem was that large numbers of former Soviet citizens (notably from Ukraine) had fought with the Germans against the USSR, most of them nationalists hoping to liberate their people from Stalinist oppression: they naturally had no desire to return to a regime which would likely execute them as traitors. Thus began a Trumpian wave of forced repatriations to the Soviet Union. In the post-war chaos, but mainly because of the heavy-handed determination of the Western Allies to do their duty by the letter of the Yalta agreement, these violent deportations led to the cruellest of tragic reckonings for tens of thousands of individuals. Among the worst cases, kept secret by the British and US authorities for decades after the war, was the fate of the Cossacks. Their communities had been brutally persecuted by Stalin, and many (some 250,000, it's estimated) fought alongside the Germans from 1943 onwards. At the war's end, they had retreated, with their women, children and old folk, to sectors of Austria and Germany held by the British and Americans. Technically, many Cossacks were not Soviet citizens, having left Russia after the 1917 revolution or the civil war that followed. Nevertheless, despite assurances from both their British and American hosts that they would not be sent back, thousands of men, women and children were placed under guard in trucks or locked in cattle wagons and delivered to the Soviet zones. No one, certainly not the British or Americans, had any doubt what fate awaited these people, and as word spread among the Cossacks, terrible scenes of suicide and attempted suicide took place (sometimes involving whole families together). These distressing scenes were replicated across Europe and even in America, in fact wherever 'Soviet' displaced persons were being held in detention before their forced repatriation to the USSR. Appeals to the Geneva Convention fell on deaf ears and Allied soldiers engaged in the deportations, many dismayed by what they had to do, were told to follow orders (in some cases at pistol point) and sworn to secrecy. The Betrayal by the British of the Cossacks at Lienz, Austria, in 1945 (Private Collection) If you think you know about WW2, it's time to think again. www.unknownwarriorspod.co.uk An Understanding History Podcast

It's hard to know what kind of world we are entering in the Trump era - except that it will undoubtedly be volatile and very different from the one we've been used to for so long. That said, taking the longer view, there are some striking parallels with the new world orders which emerged at the end of the First and Second World Wars. The key post-war settlements of Versailles (1919) and Yalta/Potsdam (1945) respectively were agreed at the behest of great powers (the war's winners) which, though they spoke the language of national self-determination and democratic freedoms, essentially imposed the new international system which was to supersede the collapsed empires that the two conflicts brought about. In both cases too, a multiplicity of nation states came into being or were reinstated, leading to new resentments (notably from Germany and, arguably, Japan after WW1) or fresh 'spheres of influence', which amounted at worst to widespread repression (the Soviet bloc in eastern Europe after WW2), at best to a diplomatic and economic imperialism presided over by the USA. This is, broadly, not that far from today's strongest states (most of them autocracies, the United States now included) imposing their will on the smaller nation states which come within their orbit. But the big difference from Versailles and Yalta is two-fold. Firstly, these settlements came at the end of long, costly and destructive world wars. Because of that, the presiding big powers were at pains to establish a different world order that would avoid such wars in the future. In the event, the League of Nations was deeply flawed (not least because the USA did not officially join it) and the UN has certainly not always been effective, but at least they represented an acknowledged rules-based international system and spawned multiple offshoots (in which American influence and money was significant) that, in a quieter way, led to global improvements in peace, disarmament, health, education and poverty. The second point is this: the new world order in both 1919 and 1945 was essentially an American hegemony. Ostensibly, yes, Washington was isolationist after WW1, but it nevertheless played a considerable role in world affairs, if only because the American dollar held such sway. By 1945, as a major victor in WW2 and the richest economy in the world, the USA emerged as a veritable superpower which went on to play a commanding role on the international stage, ultimately outlasting its principal Cold War rival, the Soviet Union. Looking back, few can doubt that the 20th century, even into the 21st, was America's time. In 2025, we can see all this changing as rival great powers (China, Russia, Saudi Arabia et al) challenge America's dominance, both separately and together, in a more multipolar system in which all states, big and small, will pursue their own best interests. Trump's response - seemingly personal, even whimsical - is to start dismantling the world order which served America so well for so long. In doing so, he is not, unlike his predecessors at Versailles and Yalta, hoping to avoid future world conflicts or improve an ailing international system. On the contrary, his intentions are brutally transactional, to exact the best deal for America, whatever it takes, even if this antagonises close and enduring allies. This is an explosive change from past certainties and seems likely to lead to more conflict rather than less. But if the Donald thinks it will make America stronger, how weak does he really believe his country has been for the last century and more? Churchill, Truman, and Stalin at Potsdam, 1945 If you think you know about WW1 and WW2, it's time to think again. www.unknownwarriorspod.co.uk An Understanding History Podcast

In much of the recent commentary about the blatantly pro-Russian American position on talks to end the 3-year war in Ukraine, the favourite historical parallel has been to Munich 1938 , when appeasement of Hitler by Britain and France effectively allowed a much less powerful country in Europe (democratic Czechoslovakia) to be sidelined from the negotiations about its own future and subsequently swallowed up by the dictatorship that was the Nazi Reich. Rightly or wrongly, 'Munich' has since become a byword for appeasement and betrayal. But actually a better analogy from the same period of history would be the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939, not least because of the cynical way in which two large adversarial powers with utterly opposing ideologies (fascism and communism) shocked the world by suddenly cosying up in order to partition Poland between them by brute force. This act of premeditated state destruction was admittedly a secret memorandum within what purported to be a mutual non-aggression treaty, but Poland's removal was its real goal - and Stalin used the pact as cover to take over the vulnerable Baltic states as well. This bears a remarkably direct comparison with what Trump and Putin seem to be up to today, with Ukraine being sidelined from peace talks and at grave risk of becoming a US mineral colony on the one hand and, on the other, being denied the security safeguards to prevent Russia attacking it again - in short, a Ukraine with precious little if any national sovereignty at the end of it all. Whether Ukraine will yet take a meaningful part in its own future remains to be seen. One only hopes that the rest of Europe will step up to defend it, in every necessary way, as their rhetoric proclaims. In September 1939, when Stalin and Hitler simultaneously invaded Poland from east and west, Britain and France, bound by treaty to defend Poland's neutrality, did declare war on Germany a few days later - but they did not send troops (they were not ready to), indeed did not confront the Wehrmacht at all until it invaded France 8 months later. By then Poland had long been erased by its German and Russian occupiers. If you think you know about WW2, it's time to think again. www.unknownwarriorspod.co.uk An Understanding History Podcast

As we approach Holocaust Day and the 80th anniversary of the Red Army's liberation of the death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau, a few thoughts come to mind about this subject, which is at once hugely familiar to most of us and yet widely simplified and misunderstood. In the first place, what we now call ' The Holocaust' did not emerge as a specific term to signify the extermination of the European Jews during World War Two, certainly not in public discourse, until at least the late 1970s and early '80s. Before then, the subject was the preserve of scholars and academics, in particular (though not wholly) Jewish scholars. Indeed, it's a surprise to learn that the stories told by the survivors of the death camps did not really have a proper hearing until, firstly, the Eichmann trial in Israel in 1961 (where survivor testimony from 100 witnesses was a critical part of the proceedings), and then at the so-called Frankfurt Auschwitz trials in Germany between 1963 and 1965, which in total heard from 181 survivors of the notorious death camp. In striking contrast, the Nuremburg trials of 1945-46 heard from hardly any survivors, focusing instead largely on the crimes of the Nazi leadership. If you might have thought that the survivors' stories would have compelled attention at the point of liberation, you would be wrong: the simple fact was that at the war's end in 1945, there were so many millions of victims of all kinds and such widespread devastation that the tragedy of the Jews of Europe (even if fully understood as such at the time) was just one among countless others. People simply didn't want to know: they were anxious to forget the war and move on with their lives (as indeed were many Jewish survivors too, who migrated as soon as possible to the new state of Israel after 1948). So the singular and shocking nature of the Jews' fate only emerged slowly into the second half of the 20th century. Given this context, the centrality of Auschwitz to the present-day Holocaust narrative is perhaps understandable: it had repeatedly stood out in surviving testimony, much of it from the survivors of over 434, 000 Hungarian Jews deported to Auschwitz in 1944 (that is, late in the war) - the largest national group to be sent to the camp, of whom 80% were gassed on arrival, leaving 20% (most assigned as slave labour) to live to tell the tale. But Hungarian Jewish survivors, like their French, German and Dutch counterparts, reflected the more affluent, educated and cosmopolitan Jewish communities from which they sprang. They had little in common with poorer Jewish communities, mainly scattered across Soviet territories to the east of Europe, who were religiously orthodox and mainly spoke Yiddish. It was these Jews who, after June 1941, bore the brunt of Operation Barbarossa and who were killed in far greater numbers, mostly by shootings, than those who died in the death camps. Indeed, three-quarters of the 6 million Jewish victims of the Holocaust were already dead by the time an ever expanding death camp at Auschwitz came into full operation in the summer of 1943. Today we associate the Holocaust almost exclusively with Auschwitz and other Nazi death camps, but the truth is that the vast majority of Jews killed never set foot in a concentration camp - and most camp victims were not Jews. Listen to Episode 5 of Unknown Warriors to find out more about how today's historians have established a much more nuanced and complex Holocaust narrative. If you think you know about WW2, it's time to think again. www.unknownwarriorspod.co.uk An Understanding History Podcast

Traditionally, New Year marks a moment when fresh resolutions are made that anticipate a better tomorrow. During wartime, however, even the best-laid plans and hopes can be cruelly dashed amid chaos, destruction and uncertainty. Present-day Ukrainians know this only too well, and it was certainly true, for all sides, in World War Two. It's no accident that both the Nazis and the Allies tended to use the turn of the year to announce new initiatives that would, depending on their situation, consolidate present success or reverse disappointing failures. From 1939 to 1942, Hitler regularly made a major public speech in January, usually in the Berlin Sportpalast, celebrating German military triumphs and threatening further destruction on his enemies. Conspicuously, in the New Years of 1943 and 1944 - when the tide was turning decisively against the Axis, respectively at Stalingrad and then as the Red Army crossed the pre-war Polish border - the Fuhrer was silent, re-emerging belatedly in January 1945 to make two defiant radio addresses that could not hide the scale of German defeat. The Allies tended to hold strategic planning summits around the end of one year and the start of the next - successively in Washington (December-January 1941), Casablanca (January 1943) and Teheran (November-December 1943) - before the pace of Axis retreat made them redundant, leaving the Potsdam conference of July-August 1945 to focus on the new post-war world order. One thread that features in all three earlier Allied summits was planning for D-Day: thus Washington agreed on a strategy of 'Europe first', Casablanca (in the midst of Operation Torch in North Africa) established an Anglo-American team to work on the details of the operation, while Teheran set an actual date for the landings of May 1 (later moved to early June as Overlord was scaled up). Yet all these plans were bedevilled by bitter Anglo-American divisions and the realities of war, not least the loss to the Japanese of all American, British and Dutch territories in the Far East in the early months of 1942 and the bloody, grinding pace of the Allied campaign in Italy in 1943-44. In contrast to Hitler, Stalin made few public pronouncements (perhaps the most famous was his defiant radio address of July 1941 as the Red Army reeled before the onslaught of Barbarossa ), confining himself largely to orders of the day directed at his generals, both threatening and exhortatory in tone, but single-mindedly focused on holding on and pushing the enemy back. He, no more than the other leaders in this war, could not predict the outcome with any certainty, but at least the Big Three used their yearly get-togethers as a way of staying together until the job was done. Whatever else divided them, defeating Hitler was their common priority - and in the event that proved to be one resolution that, stuck to through thick and thin, was fulfilled to make a better tomorrow. If you think you know about WW2, it's time to think again. www.unknownwarriorspod.co.uk An Understanding History Podcast

It's clear that the Allies did eventually defeat the Axis powers in WW2, but how and why this came about is still debated - and too often simplified. And, indeed, what did victory really mean in 1945? After all, in eastern Europe, certainly by 1947, a Nazi tyranny had been replaced by a repressive Stalinist system. Because we are so used to the fact of Allied victory in WW2, we tend to forget that there was nothing inevitable about this outcome. By early 1942, the Germans and their Axis partners had occupied most of western, central and northern Europe as well as the Balkans, Greece, much of North Africa, and huge swathes of Soviet territory reaching as far east as Moscow and Leningrad. By the same point, in the Far East the Japanese had conquered a third of China's population and, having overrun all the south-east Asian colonies of Britain, France and the Netherlands, as well as the US-owned Philippines, they now posed a direct threat to Australia and British India. In the ensuing three years, the Allies slowly reversed the tide, but even as late as February 1945, after heavy Allied casualties in north-west Europe, the Combined Chiefs of Staff were gloomily predicting that the war against Germany would go on till November of that year (it actually ended in May), while the conflict with Japan would not be finished until 1947 - in fact, the two atomic bombs and the successful Soviet incursion into Manchuria saw Japan surrender in August 1945. Hindsight is a fine thing, but at the time, for the actors on the ground, likely outcomes were often murky and uncertain - until they weren't. Explore these issues with the historian RICHARD OVERY in Episode 2 of the new series of Unknown Warriors , which updates the familiar narratives of WW2 in the light of new research and changed perspectives . If you think you know about WW2, it's time to think again. www.unknownwarriorspod.co.uk An Understanding History Podcast

The charge was made, during WW2 and afterwards, that the Jews put up only passive resistance to their fate, going like lambs to the slaughter. But this ignores the fact that even Jews in the Polish ghettos, until late in the day, simply could not believe that the daily transports were taking them to camps, not to work , but to exterminate them. Brutal German reprisals certainly inhibited active Jewish resistance, as did the ever present fear of betrayal: it's a shock to learn that in the Netherlands, for example, some 60% of Jews in hiding were betrayed to the Germans - Anne Frank among them -suggesting widespread anti-semitism (in all, some 75% of Dutch Jews were transported to their deaths , the highest rate in western Europe). So acts of Jewish defiance tended to be individual and low key, such as escaping from transports or ghettos. That said, large-scale Jewish resistance did happen as the full horror of German intentions sunk in. The Warsaw ghetto uprising of April 1943 was a quite deliberate Jewish last stand: at the end most of the surviving fighters, holed up in a bunker, killed themselves and their families. Revolts by Jewish prisoners also took place in the death camps of Treblinka and Sobibor , with scores escaping to freedom. But a large, carefully planned uprising at Auschwitz-Birkenau in late 1944 failed: all escapees were recaptured and up to 700 Jewish inmates were killed in the brutal aftermath. You can learn more about Europe-wide resistance to the Nazis during WW2 by listening to Episode 7 of the new series of Unknown Warriors. If you think you know about WW2, it's time to think again . www.unknownwarriorspod.co.uk An Understanding History Podcast

As we contemplate a world in which the status quo is now fragmenting into adversarial power blocs, it's worth reflecting on the astonishing dominance of the United States over the course of the last 80 years or so. This can be attributed almost wholly to America's remarkable performance during the Second World War. It was not just that it was a victor in both Europe and the Pacific. More critically, it was the only country in the conflict to experience both an agricultural and industrial boom - which was mightily assisted by the fact that the US mainland never came under direct attack from its enemies and so thrived in conditions tantamount to peacetime. By pumping vast sums into the war economy, Roosevelt's administration effectively ended the US Depression. The pre-war New Deal had not made much of a dent in American unemployment, but the war changed all that. The lowest earners doubled their wage packets, so almost all Americans could afford to eat well at a time when hunger haunted war-ravaged Europe and Asia. US servicemen, whatever their ordeals in combat, were royally supported by a vast logistics machine that saw frontline troops allocated an extraordinary 4,800 calories a day: their meat ration was twice that given to British soldiers. And in the Pacific, for every four pounds of food supplied to Japanese soldiers, American GIs received four tons (that often included refrigerated ice cream, Coca Cola and Wrigley's chewing gum)! As the latter two brand names suggest - Coca Cola had a near monopoly selling soft drinks to the US forces at home and abroad while Wrigley's won the contract to supply its gum in every GI's K ration - American businesses received a huge boost from the war. Even Lend Lease, so vital to British and Soviet survival during the war, was a two-way street for the US, garnering it important influence and trade concessions, not to mention access to Britain's strategic naval bases and technical know-how. By contrast, for that other great winner of the war, the Soviet Union, the cost of victory was so enormous (at least 27 million dead) that it amounted to defeat - in hindsight, the country probably never really fully recovered, making the eventual culmination of the Cold War in 1990 a more than likely outcome. It was not, of course, the 'end of history', but it underlined, once again, America's global hegemony for which WW2 had laid powerful foundations. Listen to Eps 4, 8 and 9 in a new series of Unknown Warriors that explores fresh perspectives on the Second World War. If you think you know about WW2, it's time to think again. www.unknowwarriorspod.co.uk An Understanding History Podcast

By mid-October 1940 (84 years ago now), the so-called Battle of Britain had long morphed into what we have come to call the Blitz, a prolonged period lasting until May 1941 during which German bombers made regular and damaging raids on British ports and cities. But this popular narrative - popular with Brits because the BoB saw off a German invasion of Britain and the Blitz showed that we could 'take it' - has tended to obscure a more significant story, namely the emphasis placed on bombing by the British war machine of WW2. Thus the first German bombing raids on London are usually seen as a retaliation for British raids on Berlin in late August 1940, but in fact British bombers had been in action over German cities since mid-May that year - and, indeed, at the height of the Battle of Britain in August 1940 RAF Bomber Command would fly roughly double the number of missions over Germany as did the Luftwaffe over Britain. This would not have surprised British planners at the time, for the centre-piece of British offensive war strategy, devised and consolidated throughout rearmament in the 1930s by a sophisticated scientific-industrial base, was to develop a bombing force powerful enough to take the war to the enemy. The British army was too small to do this and the Royal Navy's job was to defend Britain and its imperial sea lanes. Until D-Day then, bombing was, in effect, the only possible Allied Second Front in Europe, and Churchill argued as such to Stalin. The problem was that for a good part of the war Allied bombing, both British and American, was both simply too inaccurate to do the job properly (a late 1941 report found that only 15% of RAF bombers dropped their payloads within 5 miles of the target) and incurred very high rates of loss in terms of planes and air crew. By 1944 technological innovations had largely surmounted these setbacks and Allied bombing really did then start to play a significant role in degrading the German war effort. In the process, tens of thousands of German civilians were killed and many German cities reduced to rubble - on a scale far greater than the Blitz - but such wholesale destruction was implicit in the whole bombing programme from its outset (and, indeed, was exported by the USAAF's Curtis Le May to Japan in 1945 as the hugely destructive firebombing of Tokyo and other cities was capped by the dropping of the two atomic bombs). So Spitfires and Hurricanes were the glamorous face of Britain's air war - and were rightly praised for their achievements in 1940 - but heavy bombers were always intended to be the real WMD of the British offensive in WW2. Listen to Episode 1 of the new series of Unknown Warriors about the Second World War. If you think you know about WW2, it's time to think again. www.unknownwarriorspod.co.uk An Understanding History Podcast

It was at the beginning of October 1943 that a drama played out in Denmark which had no parallel in any other German-occupied country in western Europe. October 1 marked the close of Rosh Hashanah and most Jewish families would have been at home - which was why the date was chosen by the Germans to implement a countrywide round-up of Danish Jews prior to their deportation to death and concentration camps. In fact, three days earlier the Jewish community had received a tip-off about the German operation, so most Danish Jews had already gone into hiding. Sweden, Denmark's neutral neighbour, simultaneously declared that it would take in any Danish Jews who wanted to come. And so, over the course of some three weeks, the Danish underground, with help from the general population, managed to smuggle Jews to the coast where fishing boats ferried them across the short gap to Sweden. In this way, over 7000 of the 8000 Danish Jews reached safety, along with almost 700 non-Jewish relatives. Less than 500 Danish Jews were deported, but the majority of these survived the camps after skilful diplomatic intervention from both Sweden and Denmark during 1944. As a result, a good 90% of Denmark's Jews survived the war. This contrasts starkly with the Netherlands which lost 75% of its Jewish population to the Holocaust - and, equally, with France and Italy where at least 50% of Jews survived. What lies behind these figures is how complex this over-arching phenomenon we now call the Holocaust was, with different factors determining different outcomes in different countries. Sweden's readiness to take the Danish Jews was obviously crucial. But we know also that the Germans more or less turned a blind eye to the rescue operation, partly because the Danish government and monarchy had remained intact after occupation and in late 1943 Germany had more pressing problems on other fronts. The Netherlands, by contrast, had largely lost its sovereignty under German occupation; in France, significantly, it was foreign Jews living there (mostly Polish refugees) who tended to be arrested and deported, with Vichy France largely insisting that any Jews who were French citizens must not be touched. So the popular notion of the Holocaust as some monolithic German programme driven from Berlin is now seen as deeply flawed. Local factors - local populations, national governments, the timing of events - played a huge part. If you think you know about WW2, it's time to think again. www.unknownwarriorspod.co.uk An Understanding History Podcast