This country is at war with Germany.

We shall go on to the end.

I remember the sheets of plane that came up and almost blinded us for my guns.

Hello, welcome to another episode of the World War Two Podcast.

As some of you may know, I'm also a First World War historian,

and the academic history of the war can be very different from the public perspective,

which dwells on the first two years of the war.

Forgetting the victories of 1917 and 1918 is not new.

It is something that the British Army did during the interwar period.

Added to this corporate amnesia, there was very little discussion in Britain

on who the Army might be expected to fight.

All this culminated in 1939 with a British Army unprepared for war

and the defeat in France in 1940.

Join me once more is Rob Lyman, who with Richard Danett,

has written a compelling account of the mismanagement of the British Army

from the end of the First World War to the start of the next.

Robert, welcome back. I thoroughly enjoyed victory to defeat.

It may well be my book of the year.

Let's start with 1918, when people think of the First World War,

especially in Britain, they tend to think of those first two years,

which include the Battle of the Sun.

But as you point out in the book, the key year is 1918,

...