The Bombing War
Dan Snow's History Hit
History Hit
4.7 • 13.7K Ratings
🗓️ 1 March 2020
⏱️ 57 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
75 years ago this Spring, the aerial assault on Germany was reaching a crescendo as city after city was devastated by British and American bomber fleets. History Hit TV have just launched a major documentary to mark this anniversary featuring veterans and historians like Max Hastings and Victoria Taylor. In this podcast one of our contributors, the hugely popular James Holland, joins me to talk about why and how the bombing reached such catastrophic levels and whether it actually shortened the Second World War.
From the earliest days of the war when the RAF confined themselves to dropping propaganda leaflets to the murderous bombing on Pfrozheim in late February 1945 which utterly destroyed most of the medieval city and killed a third of its population, James talks me through what both sides hoped to achieve from aerial bombing and how they went about it.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History. I'm really proud of this |
| 0:04.0 | podcast today because this podcast is part of a really ambitious project we got. |
| 0:08.5 | We commissioned one of our most expensive and best documentaries yet on the |
| 0:14.6 | bombing war in the second world war. This month marked the 75th anniversary of |
| 0:20.4 | the bombing of Dresden, the 75th anniversary of the bombing of Fort |
| 0:23.7 | Time, less well known about, but even more devastating, even more deadly per |
| 0:27.5 | capita than the assault on Dresden. So we want to look at the bombing war. Right |
| 0:31.7 | the way through from 1939 with this leaflet drops we filmed in Coventry to talk |
| 0:36.6 | about the German blitz against that town in 1948 years ago this year and all |
| 0:41.6 | the way up to 1945. What did the bombing do? What did it achieve? Did it help |
| 0:47.0 | us to bring the war to a conclusion quicker than might have been the case? |
| 0:50.8 | Otherwise, we've got some big hitters in this documentary, got James Holland, got |
| 0:54.6 | Max Hastings, got Paul Beaver, we got Victoria Taylor, we've got Victor Gregg |
| 0:59.4 | talking about Dresden, we got all sorts of people so I'm really really proud of |
| 1:02.7 | this documentary. Proud of the whole team for getting it out hasn't been easy. |
| 1:05.4 | This podcast is accompanying that. This is the unedited and brilliant James Holland |
| 1:10.0 | talking to me at length about the bomber war and it was excerpts from this |
| 1:14.0 | interview that we then incorporate into our documentary. This is James Holland |
| 1:17.0 | he's been on the pod many times, he's the boss of the Chalk Valley History |
| 1:20.2 | Festival, the Glastonbury for history here in the UK, his best selling book on |
| 1:24.9 | D-Day was on everybody's Christmas list last year and he is currently |
| 1:30.6 | punching out a new book this time on the battle for Sicily but he took time |
... |
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