Well, welcome to We Have Ways of Making You Talk. I'm James Holland and I'm sitting

beside my great pal and colleague I suppose you should say. Professor Peter Cadyc Adams

and Peter Owl and I are going to the bulge. It's the 75th anniversary and you have written

the most superb book about it. I mean, I can't think of a more comprehensive and definitive

account of this battle, not even the official history that was written all those years

ago because obviously quite a lot more information has sort of come to light and of course

you have your amazing own perspectives because you first went to the bulge battlefield

as a young teenager when in, no, what you were sublime weren't you? You just joined the

army, 1989, 1979 something like that. I first went to the bulge battlefield in 1977. So

I was 16. That's amazing. And what was it like then? Was it still kind of sort of

bit bashed about or was it sort of tattered up by then? Well, there you have it. I mean,

the fascinating thing about the bulge battlefields is they haven't changed. They haven't changed

in 1977 and they haven't changed today. Okay, so some of the trees have been filled but

they've been replaced. So straight away you get the atmosphere of battle. And because it's a poor

part of France, Belgium and Luxembourg, it's never really been developed. No one's been building

there for, it's been forest forever. And so straight away you get a sense of what it was like in 1944.

And of course, all the guys dug in mostly in the forest because they could use the logs for overhead

protection and that's where they needed to be to dominate the roads and all their foxholes are

still there. And all the litter that they left their ration papers and all the shrapnel that was

thrown at them and all sorts of other bits of pieces, mangled helmets and entrenched tools were

certainly there in huge quantities in the 1970s, which I remember. And they're still around now

if you can, if you can find them. I mean, you're discouraged from going to look but you inevitably

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