Achtung! Achtung! Hello and welcome to the first ever live performance. That word's

doing a lot of work of we have ways of making you talk. For those of you who think you've

stumbled into some sort of un-structured bar room chat between two World War history

nerds, I congratulate you on your powers of perception. However, this is actually a podcast

featuring the brilliant historian, Mr James Holland and me, the, well I'm a fisherman

in the great Sea of Life, Al Murray. This is how it works. People ask us questions about

World War II. We try and answer them. On occasions we have been known to ramble off on

outrageous tangents. I hope you'll forgive us. James! Yes, hello and welcome to all of you

at the Saturday of the Chort Valley History Festival. Yay! So yes, we'll be taking your

questions shortly but first we've got some observations and corrections from our regular

listeners that we need to discuss and address. Don't we, Al? Okay, yes. So first of all,

Mark Roberts writes to us and if you like the sound of this question give it an anticipatory

ooo, right? Yeah. And I may come to one of you and say what do you think of this? Because

you know, James and I, we don't read. We're not definitive. You know what you're talking

about. I've not really. I mean sometimes I do, sometimes I don't. Okay, after reading

Leo McKinstrew's excellent Operation Sealine, I wondered if the war could potentially have

been shorter had the Germans decided to invade England in 1940. Given their lack of prep

it seems it would have been a disaster. James, what do you think? Well, yeah, I completely

agree with him that I do think it would have been a complete disaster. I mean, it's bonkers

what they were doing. I mean just think about the preparation for Operation Sealine. So

to start off with, Hitler has got the first combined services general staff, the OKW,

Oberkommando-de-Vermat, which is inherently a good idea. Yeah. But he doesn't use it in that

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