#470 – James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles
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The following is a conversation with James Holland, a historian specializing in World War two, who has written a lot of amazing books on the subject, especially covering Western Front, often providing fascinating details at multiple levels of analysis, including strategic, operational, tactical, technological, and, of course, the human side, the personal accounts from the war. He also cohosts a great podcast on World War two called We Have Ways of Making You Talk. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description or at lexfreeman.com/sponsors. It's the best
thing about World War two is it really is truly global. You know, it's fought in deserts. It's fought in in in the Arctic. It's fought across oceans. It's fought in the air. It's in jungle. It's in the hills. It is on the beaches. It's also on the Russian Steppe, and it's also in Ukraine. So it's it's it's that global nature of it. And I just think, you know, where there's where there's war, there is always incredible human drama. And I think for most people, and certainly the true in my case, you get drawn to the human drama of it. It's that thought that, you know, gosh, if I'd been 20 years
What was his justification for that, for joining right back?
He just felt completely disconnected to home. He felt that the the gulf of time, his experiences had separated him from all the normalities of life, and he felt that the the the normalities of the life that he had known before he'd gone away to war had just been severed in a really kind of cruel way that he didn't really feel he was able to confront at that particular point. But he decided to rejoin, couldn't go back to the third World Tank Regiment, so went back to a different unit and went from kind of the Italian campaign to European theater. Didn't see so much action at the end, but, you k
So Tank Man, what what was maybe the most epic, the most intense, or the most interesting story that he told you?
Well, I do remember him telling me, funny enough, it's not really about about the conflict. I remember him telling me about the importance of letters. And there was this there was this guy who literally, every few weeks, you know, post would arrive intermittently. There was no kind of regular post. So it was supposed to be regular, but it it didn't come out regularly. So you might suddenly suddenly get a flurry of five all in one day. But he said there was this guy and, in his tank, a member of a different tank troop. He was a good friend of his in the in the same squadron. He had British half
should say that in your book, one of the wonderful things you do is you use the correct term in the language Yeah. For the particular army involved, whether it's the German or the British or the American. Well,
that that's not to be pretentious. That's that's really just to so so that because you're you're dealing with so many numbers Yeah. And different units, and it can go over your head, and you can get sort of consumed by the detail if you're not careful. And as a reader, it can be very unsatisfying because you you just can't keep pace of everything. So one of the things about writing in the vernacular German or or in the American spelling, or more rather than or or more as we would Brits would, spell it. Is it just immediately tells the reader, okay, this is American. Okay. I've got that. Or thi
Yeah. I think I also have an element in me where I can believe in the idea of nation and fight for a nation, especially when the conflict is as grand. The
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