Thank you for listening to We Have Ways of Making You Talk. Sign up to our Patreon to receive bonus content, live streams and our weekly newsletter with money off books and museum visits as well. Plus early access to all live show tickets. That's patreon.com slash we have ways strain and tiredness induce a sort of hypnosis. You seem to be moving in a bad dream,

persuaded not by terrors, but by an intolerable routine. You come off watch at midnight, soaked,

twitching, your eyes roar with the wind and staring at shadows. You brew up a cup of tea in the

wardroom pantry and strip off the top layer of sodden clothes. You do say,

an hour's intricate ciphering, and thereafter snatch a few hours sleep between wet blankets,

with the inflated life belt in your ribs reminding you all the time that things happen

quickly. And then every night, the 17 nights on end, you're woken at 10 to 4 by the Boeson's mate,

and you stare at the deckhead and think, my God, I can't go up there again in the dark and filthy

rain and stand for another four hours of it. But you can, of course, it becomes automatic

in the end. That, of course, was Nicholas Montserrat, not in the cruel sea, but in his memoir of his wartime career, three corvettes. Yes, I mean, the life on the ocean wave, right, Jim? Jeepers. Welcome to We have Waysa Weekie Talk with me, I'm Mary and James Holland, for our fifth episode of the Atlantic War. And this episode is entitled The Turning Point, James. Are we getting people's hopes up here? It's still only 1941. Yeah, a little bit. I think the corner is being turned. A little bit more of life on the ocean waves later on in this episode. But start off, I think it's worth just sort of considering where we're at. I mean, you know, it's all very well to look at these things dispassionately as I was doing at the end of the last episode. But just

consider where Britain is at the beginning of 1941. You know, it's unquestionably a brutally

tough winter for the British and her allies. It's always obviously tough out at sea in the winter

months and, you know, it's not being called the cruel sea for nothing. But yes, Britain's won the

Battle of Britain, but the country has taken an absolute pounding. I mean, you'll remember when we were doing our Blitz episode, how shocked you and I were, Al, about the scale of destruction and how, I know I for one, had been a bit kind of, well, I was nothing compared to what the Germans got later on in the war, but it's all relative, isn't it? No other nation had been hit as consistently by bombing as Britain had. And there was the trauma of defeat in Norway, first of all. That was traumatic. Then there's the defeat in France, even more traumatic. The retreat from Dunkirk, that was very traumatic. Then they're constantly coming under attack. Then there's a threat of invasion. There's the Blitz, you know, which has been going on since the 7th of September.

Some of Britain's greatest cities. You have huge holes in them, a piles of rubble, changed forever. And you've got the

losses at sea. You've also got the closing of the port of London and East Coast and the chaos

of the ports and the railway network.

You know, it's a lot to take on board. And Britain is a very different place from a year earlier.

I think what it was like at the beginning of 1940 and beginning what it was like in 1941.

These are two very different nations and Britain has been bashed about.

And the swirl of political discourse around this, I think it's quite interesting.

Although the press is tightly controlled, you do have the finger of blame being pointed at people in the public

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