This country is at war with Germany.

We shall go on to the end.

I remember the sheets of flame which came up and almost blinded us from our guns.

Welcome to the World War II podcast. I'm Angus Wallace and joining me today is Matthew Huff.

Now last month we were down to record a live episode of the podcast at the Imperial War Museum,

but at the last minute the IWM postponed the event.

As Matthew and I were all prepared to discuss Harold Alexander and his road to Supreme Command, we thought we might as well have our chat anyway and record it. Matthew is a postgraduate researcher at the University of Leeds, whose research focuses on Harold Alexander and ideas around Supreme Command in the Mediterranean

theatre toward the end of the war. Thanks for joining me, Matthew. So if we are going to look

at Harold Alexander and his road to Supreme Command, we should perhaps start with who Alex was.

What shaped him? I assume he must have seen action during the First World War.

He has, I suppose you could say, a good First World War, if that's a phrase you can use.

He was involved in pretty much, you know, like a checklist of major battles on the Western Front.

He was with the Irish Guards, wounded twice, fought at the Battle of Luz, Somme, Cambrai.

Interestingly, what I think Marks him out is different from a lot of his colleagues later on,

is that during the First World War, at no point was he in any kind of staff role. He was

constantly leading from the front and seems to have been very good at it, and was singled out for praise in the regimental history of the Irish Guards by Rudyard Kipling, whose son was a fellow officer.

By the end of the war, about the age of 27, he was a lieutenant colonel and was in temporary command of a brigade in 1918.

So he clearly kind of excelled in this role of, you know, leading in the trenches.

It's quite a remarkable war service from 1914 sort of all the way through

because a lot of people join a bit later or they get injured and then get a different job,

but he's there all the way through.

What is also interesting in him, at the end of the war, it's not like he's had enough. He comes back for more, but this is

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