Living History with Mat McLachlan

At a quarter past four in the morning on the 13th of June 1944, the world's first cruise missile fell out of the sky onto a railway bridge in the East End of London. It killed six people. One of them was 19-year-old Ellen Woodcraft. Another was her eight-month-old son. Their husband and father was a soldier in Normandy. He would not learn of their deaths for days.In this episode, Mat McLachlan tells the story of Hitler's V-1 — the buzz bomb, the doodlebug, the first robot weapon ever used in war. From the secret laboratories at Peenemünde to the photo-interpretation tables at Medmenham, from the Guards Chapel disaster on Waterloo Sunday to the Tempest pilots tipping flying bombs out of the sky with their wingtips, this is the eighty-eight-day campaign that brought a new kind of terror to a city that thought the Blitz was over.Through authentic voices from the summer of 1944, we hear George Orwell guiltily hoping the next bomb falls on someone else, the diarist Vere Hodgson writing that the brain of man has gone so far beyond his morals that the only thing to do is scrap him and begin again, and Field Marshal Alan Brooke recording his disgust as the Home Secretary panics in front of the War Cabinet. We meet R.V. Jones, the 28-year-old scientist who'd been hunting the V-weapons since 1939, and the Double Cross Committee that fed Berlin a brilliant lie that saved central London — at the cost of the working-class boroughs to the south. We follow Wing Commander Roland Beamont and the Belgian ace Remy Van Lierde hunting buzz bombs over Romney Marsh, and the Australian pilot Ken Collier who accidentally invented the wingtip technique that would become the defining image of the doodlebug summer.Why did Hitler refuse to aim the V-1 at the Allied invasion ports, where it might have changed the war? Why did the British government deliberately steer bombs onto Croydon and Wandsworth instead of Westminster — and keep it secret for thirty years? How did a robot bomb costing five thousand Reichsmarks come closer to ending the war than any other weapon Germany ever built? Mat explores these questions through the words of those who were there — the scientists, the pilots, the cabinet ministers, and the Londoners who lived under the buzz.A clear-eyed look at one of the most futuristic weapons of the Second World War, and the man who threw it away. Hitler had the world's first cruise missile. He used it to kill people in their beds. And he lost the war anyway.“Hitler, and all of us, hoped this new weapon would sow horror, confusion and paralysis in the enemy camp. We far overestimated its effect.” — Albert Speer, Nazi Minister of ArmamentsEpisode Length: 40 minutesFeatures: First-hand accounts from George Orwell, Vere Hodgson, Field Marshal Alan Brooke and Hans Speidel; Wing Commander Roland Beamont's recollections of hunting the V-1; the testimony of fireman Harold Chisnell from the Imperial War Museum sound archive; Hitler's confrontation with Rommel and Rundstedt at Margival on the eve of the Normandy collapse; and the story of the Double Cross deception that saved central London.Presenter: Mat McLachlanProducer: Jess StebnickiSail through history with Mat McLachlan! Join a 2027 history cruise: https://battlefields.com.au/history-cruises-2027Find out everything Mat is doing with books, tours and media at https://linktr.ee/matmclachlanFor more great history content, visit www.LivingHistoryTV.com, or subscribe to our YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/@MatMcLachlanHistory Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Every Anzac Day we tell the story of the men in the boats. This year, we're telling the story of the men on the cliffs above them.On April 25th, 1915, Deputy Officer Muharrem stood in a shallow trench above a small cove on the Gallipoli coast and watched 4000 Australian soldiers rowing toward him through the darkness. He had 160 men to stop them. No reinforcements. No artillery. No orders. Behind him, the German general commanding the Turkish army had galloped off to the wrong end of the peninsula, chasing a landing that didn't exist. The chain of command had collapsed. Muharrem was on his own.What happened next is one of the most remarkable stories of the entire Gallipoli campaign. Two Turkish colonels who didn't wait for permission to act. A desperate forced march across an open plain under naval gunfire. A single field gun manhandled onto a ridge by its exhausted crew. And a bluff that stopped the Anzacs from winning the day."The bastards will give us a go after all," said Lance Corporal George Mitchell, as the first Turkish bullets hit the water around his boat."I was very frightened," said Turkish Private Adil Sahin, shaken awake by a sentry as the boats appeared below him. "We didn't know anything about this invasion."Two armies. Two perspectives. One dawn that decided the fate of the entire campaign.Episode Length: 40 minutesFeatures: First-person accounts from Turkish defenders including Captain Faik, Private Adil Sahin and Lieutenant Colonel Mustafa Kemal; Australian voices from Charles Bean's Official History and Bill Gammage's The Broken Years; and material drawn from Mat McLachlan's book Krithia: The Forgotten Anzac Battle of Gallipoli (Hachette, 2024).Presenter: Mat McLachlanProducer: Jess StebnickiSail through history with Mat McLachlan! Join a 2027 history cruise: https://battlefields.com.au/history-cruises-2027Find out everything Mat is doing with books, tours and media at https://linktr.ee/matmclachlanFor more great history content, visit www.LivingHistoryTV.com, or subscribe to our YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/@MatMcLachlanHistory Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Eighty-five years ago, 14,000 Australian soldiers were surrounded in a dusty Libyan port by Erwin Rommel's Afrika Korps. They were outnumbered, outgunned and cut off from the world. Nazi propaganda called them rats caught in a trap. They took the name and made it their own.In this episode, Mat McLachlan tells the story of the Siege of Tobruk — 242 days that proved the German blitzkrieg could be stopped. Through the voices of the men who were there, we go inside the perimeter: the terror of a first night patrol, the nine-inch trenches of the Salient, the flies in the stew, the dust that turned sleeping men into waxed mummies, and the destroyers that slipped in through the darkness to keep them alive."Anybody that wasn't frightened was either a liar or a fool. We were all frightened, naturally. But we had a job to do and we did it." — Harley Brooks, 2/12th BattalionFrom Corporal Jack Edmondson's Victoria Cross action on Easter Sunday to the bond between a mother and her fallen son, from General Morshead's red hat to Bob Semple — the last Rat of Tobruk, who died in 2024 aged 102 — this is the story of ordinary men who refused to be beaten.And when it was over, the men who had conquered Europe had not conquered them.Episode Length: 27 minutesFeatures: First-person accounts from the AWM Keith Murdoch Sound Archive including Eric Brough MM (2/24th Battalion), Harley Brooks (2/12th Battalion), Max Thow (2/12th Battalion), Owen Curtis (2/12th Battalion), Alf Miller (2/4th Australian General Hospital), Jack Hawkes (2/28th Battalion) and General Sir Thomas Daly (18th Brigade HQ).Presenter: Mat McLachlanProducer: Jess StebnickiSail through history with Mat McLachlan! Join a 2027 history cruise: https://battlefields.com.au/history-cruises-2027Find out everything Mat is doing with books, tours and media at https://linktr.ee/matmclachlanFor more great history content, visit www.LivingHistoryTV.com, or subscribe to our YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/@MatMcLachlanHistory Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In the spring of 1918, Germany launched its greatest offensive of the war. The British Fifth Army collapsed under the weight of it. And somewhere in the chaos of that retreat, on a railway embankment west of a small French village called Dernancourt, four thousand Australians were told to hold the line against twenty-five thousand Germans.In this episode, Mat McLachlan tells the story of the Battles of Dernancourt, the 28th of March and the 5th of April, 1918, officially the strongest attacks faced by Australian troops in the entire war. Almost no one has heard of them.Through the words of the men who were there, we follow the desperate defence of the railway embankment that linked two vital French towns. We meet Sergeant Stan McDougall, a Tasmanian blacksmith who single-handedly repelled a German breakthrough, burning his hands on the barrel of a Lewis gun before picking up a bayonet and charging — earning the Victoria Cross and then, eight days later at the same spot, the Military Medal. We hear Lieutenant George Mitchell's devastating account of watching his comrades retreat down a bullet-swept slope, tears running down his face. We read the letter of a German soldier, intercepted by Australian intelligence, describing the enemy opposite as men who "glide about in the night like cats." And we discover the story of two wooden crosses, found months after the battle, where German soldiers had buried Australian dead and written above them: "Here lies a brave English warrior."Why is Villers-Bretonneux remembered while Dernancourt is forgotten? How did a handful of under-strength Australian battalions hold off multiple German divisions in the heaviest attack Australian forces ever faced? And what happened to the men of the 47th Battalion — who fought so hard at Dernancourt, only to be told two months later that their battalion no longer existed?A powerful and long-overdue tribute to the Australians who held the line at Dernancourt. In a battle their country forgot."The battle of Dernancourt will live long in the annals of military history as an example of dogged and successful defence." — General Sir John MonashEpisode Length: 30 minutesFeatures: First-person accounts from Lieutenant George Mitchell (Backs to the Wall), Private Ted Lynch (Somme Mud), Private Edmund Liddell, and Private James O'Rourke; the Victoria Cross and Military Medal citations of Sergeant Stanley McDougall; a captured German letter; and the remarkable story of the Dernancourt Cross, held today in the Australian War Memorial.Presenter: Mat McLachlanProducer: Jess StebnickiSail through history with Mat McLachlan! Join a 2027 history cruise: https://battlefields.com.au/history-cruises-2027Find out everything Mat is doing with books, tours and media at https://linktr.ee/matmclachlanFor more great history content, visit www.LivingHistoryTV.com, or subscribe to our YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/@MatMcLachlanHistory Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In 1945, a young American psychiatrist named Douglas M. Kelley was given an extraordinary assignment: evaluate the 22 most senior Nazis awaiting trial at Nuremberg and determine whether they were mentally fit to face justice. Among his patients was Hermann Göring, Hitler's second-in-command, who was charismatic, manipulative and utterly unrepentant.What Kelley discovered shook him to his core. Using Rorschach tests, IQ assessments and hundreds of hours of interviews, he concluded that these architects of the Holocaust were not clinically insane. They were psychologically normal: intelligent, ambitious opportunists who had made deliberate choices to pursue power at any human cost. There was no "Nazi mind." There was no psychiatric explanation that set them apart from the rest of us.It was a conclusion the post-war world didn't want to hear. And it destroyed the man who reached it.In this episode, Mat McLachlan talks to Jack El-Hai, author of The Nazi and the Psychiatrist, the book behind the 2025 film Nuremberg starring Russell Crowe and Rami Malek. Jack had unique access to Kelley's hidden personal papers: clinical notes, Rorschach results and private correspondence kept secret by the family for decades. He reveals the complex and ultimately fatal relationship between a brilliant psychiatrist and the most powerful Nazi to stand trial, and asks the question Kelley spent the rest of his short life trying to answer: if the men who built the Third Reich weren't monsters, what does that say about the rest of us?Episode Length: 40 minutesFeatures: Jack El-Hai discusses his research into Douglas Kelley's hidden archive, the psychology of the Nuremberg defendants, the Kelley-Göring relationship, the competing theories of the "Nazi mind" and why Kelley's warnings about authoritarianism went unheard until it was too late.Presenter: Mat McLachlanGuest: Jack El-HaiProducer: Jess StebnickiSail through history with Mat McLachlan! Join a 2027 history cruise: https://battlefields.com.au/history-cruises-2027Find out everything Mat is doing with books, tours and media at https://linktr.ee/matmclachlanFor more great history content, visit www.LivingHistoryTV.com, or subscribe to our YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/@MatMcLachlanHistory Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In March 1885, thirty years before Gallipoli, 770 men from New South Wales sailed for the deserts of Sudan — the first Australian soldiers ever sent to fight in a foreign war.In this episode, Mat McLachlan tells the forgotten story of Australia's Sudan Contingent — the part-time soldiers, weekend volunteers and colonial clerks who marched through Sydney in scarlet jackets to a crowd of 200,000, then crossed the world to serve alongside the Scots Guards and Grenadier Guards at Suakin. Through the soldiers' own words, we follow their journey from the excitement of departure to the brutal reality of an African desert — where the nights were more dangerous than the days, the enemy poisoned the waterholes, and the real killer wasn't bullets but disease.From Acting Premier William Bede Dalley's extraordinary decision to send troops without consulting parliament, to the Guards' bewildered reaction to their colonial allies, from Private Robert Weir's father farewell — "I look upon you as going to your grave" — to the cruel death of Martin Guest, who survived the desert only to die in the rain at his own homecoming parade, this is the story of an expedition that achieved almost nothing militarily but changed Australia forever.Nine men died. None of them in battle. All of them from disease. And out of those nine graves grew a tradition that would define a nation — the idea that when the call came, Australia would answer.Historian K.S. Inglis called it "The Rehearsal." It was — for everything that came after.Episode Length: 30 minutesFeatures: First-person accounts from Private Tom Gunning, Lieutenant William Cope, and Private Frank Walters; primary source letters from the Nepean Times and Sydney Morning Herald; and the remarkable story of how forty baskets of fish gave a Sydney beach its name.Presenter: Mat McLachlanProducer: Jess StebnickiReady to walk in the footsteps of those who fought? Join Mat McLachlan on an exclusive battlefield tour: https://battlefields.com.au/Find out everything Mat is doing with books, tours and media at https://linktr.ee/matmclachlanFor more great history content, visit www.LivingHistoryTV.com, or subscribe to our YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/@MatMcLachlanHistory Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In February 1951, while Australia slept, soldiers from 3RAR were crawling through knee-deep snow on frozen Korean ridgelines — fighting a war their own country barely noticed and has largely forgotten since.In this episode, Mat McLachlan tells the story of Operation Killer — the brutal UN counter-offensive that turned the tide of the Korean War. Through the voices of the men who were there, we follow 3RAR from the catastrophic Chinese intervention that sent 300,000 enemy soldiers smashing into UN lines, through the longest retreat in American military history, to the desperate hill-by-hill fightback that began on the frozen slopes above Chipyong-ni.From the corporal and two soldiers who stood up and charged fortified Chinese bunkers on the summit of Hill 614, to the stretcher bearers who carried their wounded mates down snow-covered mountains with no helicopter evacuation and no mechanical assistance, from Private Snow Dicker burying himself in rice straw to survive minus twenty-five degree nights to the sniper who called a Chinese bunker "Flinders Street Station," these are stories of endurance, mateship and raw courage in conditions that would break most people.How did a battalion that had retreated 320 kilometres in nine days rebuild itself into one of the finest fighting units in Korea? What did the battles at Hill 614, Hill 587 and Maehwa-san teach the men who would hold the line at Kapyong — the action that saved Seoul and earned 3RAR a United States Presidential Unit Citation? Mat traces the chain of battles that transformed a demoralised, frozen, under-strength battalion into a force the Chinese couldn't break.A powerful tribute to the Australians who fought in the Forgotten War — and a reminder that the men who held Kapyong in April first proved themselves on the frozen ridgelines of February and March, one hill at a time. Day after day. Without relief."Their courage, determination and loyalty were inspirations to me. I was never to meet their equal for the rest of my life." — Lieutenant Maurie Pears, 3RAREpisode Length: 27 minutesFeatures: First-person accounts from 3RAR veterans including Lieutenant Maurie Pears, Major Ben O'Dowd, Private Ian Robertson, and Captain Don Beard; the story of General Ridgway's transformation of the Eighth Army; and the chain of battles from Hill 614 to Kapyong that Australia has largely forgotten.Presenter: Mat McLachlanProducer: Jess StebnickiJoin Mat and his team on an exclusive series of river cruises to the battlefields of Waterloo, WWI, WW2 and Vietnam: https://battlefields.com.au/history-cruises-2027/Find out everything Mat is doing with books, tours and media at https://linktr.ee/matmclachlanFor more great history content, visit www.LivingHistoryTV.com, or subscribe to our YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/@MatMcLachlanHistory Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In February 1942, when the Japanese Imperial Army launched its assault on Singapore, 880 Australians would die in just four days—not in the surrender that followed, but in the desperate battle to defend the island.In this episode, Mat McLachlan reveals the forgotten story of the invasion of Singapore—four days in February 1942 that have been overshadowed by the surrender and the horrors of captivity that followed. Through authentic accounts and personal testimonies, we follow the opening days of the Japanese assault: the night of February 8th when 88,000 shells rained down on Australian positions; the 2/20th Battalion losing 548 men in twenty-four hours; and the burning oil at Kranji that sent the Imperial Guards through flames.From Lieutenant-General Percival's catastrophic refusal to build defenses because they were "bad for morale" to General Yamashita's stunning post-war admission that his entire attack was "a bluff—a bluff that worked," from Private Ray Colenso writing poetry about duty before dying on a northwestern beach to thirteen-year-old Soh Guan Bee surviving on sardines in a trauma that lasts eighty years, these soldiers and civilians faced an impossible situation with courage that has been largely forgotten.Why did Australian casualties make up seventy-three percent of battle deaths while forming only thirteen percent of the forces? How did the 2/20th Battalion hold a coastline they couldn't possibly defend? What happened when two million gallons of burning petrol sluiced into the Johore Strait? Mat explores these questions through the actual words of those who were there.A sobering testament to the Australians and civilians who fought during Singapore's opening days—and a reminder that before there were prisoners, there was a battle. Before there was defeat, there was courage."My attack on Singapore was a bluff—a bluff that worked. I had 30,000 men and was outnumbered more than three to one. I knew that if I had to fight for long for Singapore, I would be beaten." - General Tomoyuki YamashitaEpisode Length: 35 minutesFeatures: Accounts from the 2/18th, 2/19th, and 2/20th Battalions' war diaries, civilian testimonies from Singapore National Archives, General Yamashita's post-war admissions, and insights into the battle that history has quietly set aside.Presenter: Mat McLachlanProducer: Jess StebnickiReady to walk in the footsteps of those who fought at Singapore? Join Mat McLachlan on an exclusive tour to Singapore and the battlefields of Southeast Asia: https://battlefields.com.au/Find out everything Mat is doing with books, tours and media at https://linktr.ee/matmclachlan For more great history content, visit www.LivingHistoryTV.com, or subscribe to our YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/@MatMcLachlanHistory Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In November 1916, when the great Somme offensive ground to its bloody halt, over 20,000 Australians would become casualties not from enemy fire, but from the winter itself.In this powerful episode, Mat McLachlan reveals the forgotten story of the Somme winter of 1916-17—an ordeal that historian Bill Gammage called "the worst experience the AIF ever endured." Through authentic accounts and personal testimonies, we follow Charles Bean through the devastated moonscape near Gueudecourt on Christmas Day, where the mud was so terrible he couldn't bring himself to wish the men a Merry Christmas; Private Albert Edwards enduring his first 56 hours in two feet of water on an empty stomach; and Private Herbert Harris, recording that most of his mates hadn't had dry feet for a month and some didn't even have socks.From the trench foot epidemic that claimed ninety percent of the 27th Battalion to the frozen nights when tea froze solid before reaching the front lines, from Captain Harry Murray's Victoria Cross action at Stormy Trench to the German retreat to the Hindenburg Line, these men faced the most severe winter in northern France in thirty-six years.Why did more men become casualties from frostbite than from some battles? How did soldiers survive weeks in waterlogged trenches that sprouted grass from their sandbag walls? What kept them going through months of suffering designed to break them? Mat explores these questions through the actual words of the men who were there.A sobering testament to the Australians who held the line through the Somme's frozen hell—and a reminder that some victories come not from charging, but from simply refusing to break."We live in a world of Somme mud. We sleep in it, work in it, fight in it, wade in it and many of us die in it. We see it, feel it, eat it and curse it, but we can't escape it, not even by dying." - Private Ted Lynch, 45th BattalionEpisode Length: 28 minutesFeatures: Excerpts from Charles Bean's war diaries, Herbert Harris's diary entries, Albert Edwards's personal accounts, and on-location insights from the Somme battlefieldsPresenter: Mat McLachlan Producer: Jess StebnickiReady to walk in the footsteps of those who endured the Somme? Join Mat McLachlan on an exclusive river cruise that visits the battlefields of Waterloo, WWI and WW2 in 2027: https://battlefields.com.au/history-cruises/Find out everything Mat is doing with books, tours and media at https://linktr.ee/matmclachlanFor more great history content, visit www.LivingHistoryTV.com, or subscribe to our YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/@MatMcLachlanHistory Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On October 12th, 1917, Captain Clarence Jeffries led one hundred Australian troops toward a German machine gun position on the Passchendaele road. He'd already captured one pillbox that morning—exactly the kind of action that had worked brilliantly in September. But the ground had turned to liquid mud. The barrage was invisible. Everything was different. Jeffries was killed instantly, posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross for capturing ground that would be abandoned the next day.The Battle of Passchendaele represents the tragic final chapter of Third Ypres. In this episode, Mat McLachlan examines how an offensive that had proven the Western Front stalemate could be broken descended into one of history's ultimate symbols of futility.From the 66th Division's twelve-hour march through mud to reach their start line, to the 3rd Australian Division's 400-yard advance at the cost of 3,199 casualties, to General Currie's precise prediction of 16,000 Canadian losses—we witness the attacks that should never have happened. But we also confront the uncomfortable question: if September's battles taught the lessons that helped win the war in 1918, what does that mean for October's dead?Why did Field Marshal Haig continue attacking when every commander knew the ground was impossible? How did the same tactics that succeeded at Broodseinde fail so catastrophically at Passchendaele? What makes this battle both a vindication of tactical innovation and a monument to strategic delusion?"I thought the principle was to be 'hit, hit, hit, whenever the weather is suitable.' If so, that principle is thrown away at the first temptation." - General Hubert Gough, October 8th, 1917Episode Length: 43 minutesFeatures: Captain Jeffries' Victoria Cross action, the sunk cost fallacy at GHQ, why Currie's prediction was exactly right, and the bitter irony of September's success drowning in October's mud.Series Conclusion: The final reckoning of Third Ypres—triumph and tragedy, lessons learned and lives lost.Presenter: Mat McLachlan Producer: Jess StebnickiReady to walk the battlefields? Join Mat's exclusive European tours: https://battlefields.com.au/Find everything Mat is doing at https://linktr.ee/matmclachlan For more history: https://www.LivingHistoryTV.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.