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Meet the embattled French WW2 leader who withstood the Nazis – and Winston Churchill
In June 1940, as France collapsed and Britain faced the prospect of resisting the Nazis alone, Winston Churchill searched for a French leader willing to keep fighting
In early June 1940, Europe was in freefall. Germany’s invasion of France and the Low Countries – launched in May 1940 – had overturned the presiding strategic assumptions of the First World War. Instead of the slow stalemate of trench warfare, German ‘Blitzkrieg’ tactics had combined tanks, aircraft and rapid manoeuvre to devastating effect. German armoured divisions had burst through the Ardennes and driven deep into France, prompting the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force from Dunkirk from 26 May, fleeing from the incoming Nazi military storm. Paris would then fall on 14 June. The French government was retreating in stages, and within weeks, the Third Republic – France’s democratic regime since 1870 – had effectively fallen. For Britain – now led by Winston Churchill, who had taken office only weeks earlier – the stakes seemed existential. Churchill had replaced Neville Chamberlain in May 1940, inheriting a war effort that was already faltering. If France were to leave the war, Britain faced the very real prospect of an attempted German invasion. If there was anyone within the French political or military establishment willing to continue the war from overseas (perhaps from North Africa, where France still possessed territory and troops) Britain needed that person to come to the fore. The individual who would rise to the moment, and come to symbolise Free France was not, at that moment, an obvious candidate. Churchill and de Gaulle’s first encounters in crisis Charles de Gaulle first came to London on 9 June, “which is when he first meets Churchill”, historian Richard Vinen explains, speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast. “Churchill likes him.” When de Gaulle fatefully arrived in London, he was far from the towering statesman who would come to define the coming decades of French history. He held the post of Under-Secretary of State for National Defence and War in the French government – a relatively junior position – and was little known outside France. Read more | How Nazi investigators used secret tools to create Hitler’s Holocaust ‘hitlist’ Churchill, newly installed as prime minister, admired de Gaulle. “He likes someone who displays resolution in the face of impending defeat,” Vinen says. They met again during the desperate consultations held as the French government retreated south. Churchill would later claim he recognised de Gaulle’s historic importance straight away, recalling that he had immediately referred to de Gaulle as “the Man of Destiny” – something that Vinen says de Gaulle always denied. However, de Gaulle certainly wasn’t the obvious – or desired – choice of leader for the French resistance. Not the obvious choice At this stage, the French cabinet was deeply divided between those who wished to continue the war from the empire and those who favoured seeking terms with Germany. “We sometimes think de Gaulle comes over to London in June 1940 and then he’s the leader of the Free French and that’s it,” Vinen says. “Actually, the British are always looking around to see if they can find someone more important.” Georges Mandel, France’s Interior Minister, commanded respect and was known as a determined opponent of Germany. “Mandel… is someone the British place a lot of hope in,” Vinen explains. He appeared to have greater political weight than de Gaulle. Read more | Did Hitler have a secret Jewish grandfather? Our DNA research has solved the mystery General Weygand was another possibility. Churchill had known him since the First World War. However, despite being regarded as a staunch nationalist and opponent of Germany, Weygand would later align with Marshal Philippe Pétain – the French First World War hero who would head the collaborationist regime based in Vichy. “Churchill is ruthless as a war leader,” Vinen says. “If he had found someone who suited British interests better, he would have backed that person and abandoned de Gaulle.” How de Gaulle’s life was shaped by Germany Why did Churchill stick with de Gaulle? Part of the answer, Vinen says, was his personality. De Gaulle had grown up in a nationalist Catholic family marked by France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. That war had led to the loss of Alsace-Lorraine to Germany and left a legacy of resentment and revanchism in French political culture. De Gaulle fought in the First World War, though was captured at the battle of Verdun in March 1916 and spent the rest of the conflict as a prisoner of war in Germany. “His whole life is about Germany,” Vinen says. “He takes it for granted that fighting Germany is something one should do.” Many French politicians in 1940 were hostile to Germany. The deeper difference that set de Gaulle apart lay in how he understood France itself. An abstract idea of France “The reason he wants to go on fighting in 1940 and others don’t is partly that he has a rather abstract view of France,” says Vinen. De Gaulle’s memoirs open with a famous declaration: “All my life I have had a certain idea of France.” That idea was an almost metaphysical belief of France as a country of distinct status and dignity. That meant that, in 1940, when many French leaders supported an armistice, de Gaulle was staunch in his will to resist. “De Gaulle’s idea of France is sometimes separate from the interests of particular French people,” Vinen explains. “It’s that idea of France as something special that he believes he is protecting in 1940, even if that means terrible sacrifices for the French.” Another of his statements captured this conviction: “France cannot be France without greatness.” Read more | Hitler's war on words: how the Nazis used art to bolster their murderous regime Years later, reflecting on the crisis of 1940, de Gaulle remarked that he had feared France might survive merely as “a nation of cooks and hairdressers”, a country reduced to comfort and domesticity, stripped of military and political stature. “He wants France to be a nation of soldiers and a nation of greatness,” Vinen says. That belief drove his refusal to accept defeat. On 18 June 1940, broadcasting from London, de Gaulle issued an appeal urging French soldiers, engineers and workers to continue the fight. Though heard by relatively few at the time, his appeal later became the symbolic foundation of the Free French movement. Churchill admired courage, and in 1940 de Gaulle displayed it unmistakably. Vinen suggests Churchill was “sentimentally attracted to him” for that reason. But that admiration didn’t prevent conflict between the two leaders. Nazi Germany | A short course from HistoryExtra Academy Member exclusive | Everything you need to know about Nazi Germany, guided by historian, author and broadcaster Laurence Rees. Explore the course now “De Gaulle and Churchill’s relationship was sometimes quite stormy,” Vinen says. There were “spectacular arguments” between them. Free French forces depended heavily on British resources and recognition, but de Gaulle resisted any suggestion that he was subordinate to London. Towards the end of 1942, Churchill again contemplated whether de Gaulle might be replaced by another French general. And in 1944, as preparations for the Normandy landings intensified, tensions resurfaced. Churchill regarded D-Day as a vast military operation requiring strict unity. But De Gaulle insisted that French authority and national pride be visibly restored on liberated soil. “They were at cross purposes,” Vinen explains. Those disputes, particularly before D-Day, “haunted their relationship and, in de Gaulle’s view, haunted the relationship between Britain and France for a long time afterwards”. Why Churchill stuck with de Gaulle Despite frequent doubts and frustrations, Churchill ultimately supported de Gaulle and retained him as an ally. Partly this was due to circumstance: alternative French figures either aligned with the Vichy regime or failed to establish credible independence. But it was also because de Gaulle embodied something irreplaceable. In the summer of 1940, when the French state sought an armistice with Hitler, de Gaulle was a figure who projected an image of unrelenting defiance. With France’s future in the balance, it was de Gaulle’s stubborn idea of France that gave him convincing heft. He withstood both the Nazis, and the doubts of allies who wondered whether someone else might serve them better. Richard Vinen was speaking to James Osborne on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.
What inspired the darkness of Lord of the Flies? The disturbing history behind the novel
The first TV adaptation of William Golding’s haunting 1954 novel Lord of the Flies premiered on BBC One in February 2026. This disturbing and mesmeric four-part series of the modern classic challenges viewers to ponder human nature. Here, we look at the history of Golding’s dystopian masterpiece, and the real-life events that inspired him to write it
William Golding wrote Lord of the Flies in the shadow of the 1930s’ ideological polarisation, the Second World War and the Holocaust. These had convinced him that evil was not an aberration but was deeply ingrained in the human condition. He recognised that the Nazis had not simply imposed their murderous regime through sheer force alone, but that millions of everyday people had acquiesced or enthusiastically gone along with it. And though many in the postwar years assured themselves that they’d never have participated in its savagery, Golding was less sanguine. Read more | The myth of the innocent bystander: conformity and complicity in Nazi Germany “My book was to say: you think that the war is over and an evil thing destroyed. You are safe because you are naturally kind and decent,” he wrote while reflecting on the success of Lord of the Flies. “But I know why the thing rose in Germany. I know it could happen in any country.” As the most destructive conflict in history gave way to the Cold War and the mounting threat of nuclear annihilation, Golding’s bleak verdict seemed apposite. In later years, he maintained that “man produces evil as a bee produces honey.” Who was William Golding? Golding was born in 1911 in Newquay, Cornwall and raised in Marlborough, Wiltshire. He trained as a teacher, gaining first-hand insights into boys’ hierarchies and social rituals – knowledge that would later inform the tribalism in Lord of the Flies. Serving in the Royal Navy during the Second World War, he took part in the D-Day landings at Gold Beach in June 1944. The experience was formative, as he witnessed the machinery and the immense destructive capacity of modern warfare. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/WilliamGolding1983-2a64892-e1772205569790.jpg" width="1500" height="1500" alt="Black-and-white portrait of author William Golding in 1983, showing the Nobel laureate with a full white beard and wispy hair, wearing a collared jacket and patterned cravat, looking directly at the camera with a thoughtful expression." title="Lord of the Flies author William Golding pictured in 1983 – the same year that he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature" /> This sense that civilisation had become eclipsed was widespread, and palpable in the titles of wartime novels such as Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon (1940). Everywhere, totalitarian dictators seemed to be ascendant and liberal democratic optimism in terminal decline. For Golding, the war had proved that ‘enlightened’ societies could descend into barbarism with terrifying speed. After 1945, he returned to teaching at Bishop Wordsworth’s School in Salisbury, but dreamed of becoming a published novelist. At home, he and his wife Ann would read island adventure stories to their young children. One notable example was RM Ballantyne’s imperialist romance The Coral Island (1857), in which shipwrecked boys triumph through Christian virtue and British nous. How was Lord of the Flies written and published? One evening, Golding jested that it would be a good idea to write a story about how a group of children would really behave under such circumstances. Encouraged by Ann, he set about exploring this idea, writing obsessively in school exercise books and borrowing the names of Ballantyne’s characters Ralph and Jack. Gradually, one of modern literature’s most unsettling novels took shape. The novel became a deliberate inversion of the colonialist hubris that underpinned Victorian adventure stories such as The Coral Island. Where Ballantyne’s shipwrecked boys export British ‘values’ to a ‘savage’ island and emerge morally triumphant, Golding’s revert to an inherent primal savagery. Without adult supervision, the uninhabited island is a crucible in which supposedly ‘civilised’ British children succumb to superstition, destruction and terror. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/552262-fdc53fa-e1772208213343.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A scene from the 2026 BBC One adaptation of Lord of the Flies shows a group of boys, their faces smeared with dark paint, shout and raise sharpened wooden spears as rain pours down in a tropical setting with palm trees and tall grass." title="A scene from the new BBC adaptation of Lord of the Flies shows the island's older boys – or 'big'uns' – wielding makeshift spears. As with Golding's original novel, the series shows the children resorting to increasing acts of violence. (Image by BBC/Eleven/J Redza)" /> Golding’s manuscript, originally titled Strangers from Within, was repeatedly turned down by London’s major publishers. By the time it had reached Faber & Faber it was already dog-eared and seemed set for yet another rejection, with one of the publisher’s readers scribbling on the accompanying cover letter: “Absurd & uninteresting fantasy about the explosion of an atom bomb on the colonies. A group of children who land in jungle country near New Guinea. Rubbish & dull. Pointless. Reject.” Fortunately, up-and-coming junior editor Charles Monteith recognised its power. However, he suggested drastic changes, cutting the original opening that detailed the boys’ evacuation amid a nuclear war. The result is the eerie beginning we know today: a ‘scar’ in the jungle, a crashed plane, and only hints of a global conflict. Read more | How have nuclear weapons shaped global politics? Unimpressed with the novel’s working title, another Faber editor, Alan Pringle, proposed Lord of the Flies. In a letter dated 25 February 1954, Monteith shared this suggestion with Golding, writing: “It comes, of course, from one of the most important and memorable episodes in the book and we all think it’s the sort of title which would make an impression and would help the book’s sales”. Taking its name from the demonic Philistine deity Beelzebub – whose name translates from Biblical Hebrew as ‘Lord of the Flies’ – the episode in the book to which Monteith refers sees a festering sow’s head impaled on a spike by the boys as an offering to the ‘beast’ they believe is stalking them on the island. Lord of the Flies was finally published by Faber & Faber in September 1954, to good reviews and modest sales. Has it been adapted before? There have been several film versions of Lord of the Flies, each reflecting the particular anxieties of its time, though the core themes in Golding’s original work have remained consistent. The first adaptation, directed by Peter Brook, was released in 1963 – the year after the Cuban Missile Crisis. Its stark black-and-white realism resonated in a world living under the shadow of the mushroom cloud, when the future of civilisation seemed terrifyingly precarious. In 1975, a Filipino adaptation, Alkitrang Dugo (‘Asphalt Blood’), was released – tellingly, during the authoritarian rule of Ferdinand Marcos. That president, elected in 1965, declared martial law in 1972, alleging communist insurgency. The long-term dictatorship that followed was marred by censorship, the imprisonment of political opponents and widespread human rights abuses – a suitably dark context for the genesis of this adaptation. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/GettyImages-1692666755-08352a2-e1772207150208.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Black-and-white photograph of a vast protest in 1970s Manila, with thousands of demonstrators crowding a city street near the Philippine Savings Bank building. Protesters hold banners and placards calling for democracy and opposing President Marcos, while a statue in the foreground overlooks the densely packed scene." title="Protesting Governmental Activities In Manila" /> In 1990, the story was reimagined with teenage American military cadets; this version was released just as the bipolar world order of the Cold War was coming to an end. Now, in 2026, the first adaptation for television brings the novel to a new generation in an age marked by renewed polarisation, populism and geopolitical tensions, and when questions about social media’s impact on young people are seldom out of the news. What is the novel’s legacy? Golding went on to a distinguished literary career, awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1983 and a knighthood in 1988. He died in 1993, by which point Lord of the Flies had become a staple of classrooms worldwide. It remains a bestseller, and has been translated into numerous languages and adapted repeatedly for stage and screen. The novel contends that civilisation is not a permanent achievement but a fragile arrangement, always vulnerable to fear and ambition. Read more | Why the modern age was born of bloodshed Perhaps its most poignant moment comes when, Jack’s tribe having set most of the island ablaze in their delirious hunt for Ralph, their bloodlust evaporates the second they come face-to-face with an adult in the shape of a Royal Naval officer. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/552289Ralph-d5f6732-e1772207350653.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Ralph, played by Winston Sawyers in the BBC adaptation of Lord of the Flies, stands shirtless among trees, his face and torso smeared with dirt and marked with scratches, looking off to one side with a tense, uncertain expression." title="Ralph (played by Winston Sawyers) in the new BBC adaptation of Lord of the Flies. The character, who is elected 'chief' at the start of Golding's novel, finds himself being hunted by the other boys as the story reaches its climax" /> Yet even at this moment of deliverance, Golding ends his novel on an ambiguous note. The officer, a man of war, gazes back towards his anchored cruiser – a moment that speaks to the ongoing conflict being waged away from the island by the ‘grown-ups’ whom the boys had so earnestly sought to emulate in their initial bid to maintain social harmony. In 1965, six boys from Tonga who stole a fishing boat were shipwrecked on the uninhabited island of ‘Ata, where they survived for 15 months through cooperation, prayer and shared labour until being rescued. Their solidarity is often seen as a real-life rebuttal to the pessimism of Lord of the Flies.
Before the Nuremberg Trials, this was Winston Churchill’s shocking plan for Nazi war criminals
As Europe lay in ruins following the end of the Second World War, Churchill’s instinct was to punish the surviving Nazi leadership without a trial. How was the decision made to stage the Nuremberg Trials instead?
In May of 1945, Allied forces pressed through Germany. With Adolf Hitler dead and Berlin fallen, the last remnants of Nazi military resistance were slipping away. As the Allied soldiers broke the Third Reich’s grip on Europe, they encountered scenes that defied belief. With each concentration camp liberated, the mountain of evidence of mass murder on a scale previously unimaginable grew taller. There was a question now looming large in the minds of the victorious Allies: what should be done with the remaining Nazi leaders, such as Hermann Göring, who had led Europe into catastrophe? There was no standing international criminal court, no established legal framework for prosecuting aggressive war, and no precedent for putting a defeated government on trial. International law in 1945 was largely concerned with relations between states, not criminal responsibility for individual political leaders. Some proposed that the most straightforward option would be to execute the surviving architects of Nazi rule and move on from a staggeringly awful chapter of European history. That was precisely the instinct of Britain’s wartime prime minister, Winston Churchill. So how did the Nuremberg Trials emerge from that backdrop? And how was Churchill convinced to support an unprecedented trial instead? Planning justice before the war had ended Nuremberg wasn’t conceived only after Germany surrendered in May 1945. The question of how to prosecute Nazi leaders had already been percolating for years. Reflecting on the origins of Nuremberg for a four-part HistoryExtra podcast series, international lawyer Phillipe Sands says, “Already in 1942, efforts were underway – with governments in exile in particular – committing to the prosecution of Nazi criminals for crimes committed on their occupied territories.” Nazi Germany | A short course from HistoryExtra Academy Member exclusive | Everything you need to know about Nazi Germany, guided by historian, author and broadcaster Laurence Rees. Explore the course now Read more | How Nazi investigators used secret tools to create Hitler’s Holocaust ‘hitlist’ In 1942, much of Europe was under Nazi occupation. Governments from Poland, Czechoslovakia, the Netherlands and other countries were operating in exile, largely from London. Reports of atrocities were reaching Allied capitals. The Holocaust was underway, even if the full scale of it wasn’t at yet clear. Mass shootings in Eastern Europe and the systematic deportation of Jews to extermination camps were already taking place. These governments wanted assurances that their suffering would not be forgotten once the war ended. They pressed Britain and the United States to commit, publicly and formally, to postwar accountability. In 1943, the Allies issued the Moscow Declaration, warning that those responsible for atrocities would be returned to the countries where their crimes were committed to face justice. This declaration marked one of the first collective Allied statements that punishment would follow victory. The question was: how? The Yalta turning point The decisive political moment came in February 1945 at the Yalta Conference, held in Crimea. There, the leaders of the three major Allied powers – Britain’s Winston Churchill, US president Franklin D Roosevelt, and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin – met to hash out a postwar settlement. With France and Belgium soon to be liberated, Germany’s defeat seemed assured – but the details of a prospective peace were unresolved. Borders, occupation zones, reparations and political reconstruction all were on the table. So too was the fate of captured Nazi leaders. “[At Yalta], Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin met and agreed that there would be a trial to deal with any surviving Nazi leaders,” says Sands, but that Churchill “had to be brought in, kicking and screaming”. “There’s written documentary material which makes it clear that Winston Churchill wanted them lined up and shot,” he notes. Read more | Did Hitler have a secret Jewish grandfather? Our DNA research has solved the mystery Execution would be, in Churchill’s eyes, “much more efficient, much quicker, much cheaper”. He was also wary of creating legal precedents that might later be used against British imperial actions. Roosevelt and Stalin, however, found themselves aligned. “For different reasons, Roosevelt and Stalin wanted a trial to show that we were different from the Nazis,” Sands explains. “That was symbolically very significant.” For Roosevelt, a public legal process would demonstrate that the Allied war effort had been grounded in law and justice, rather than revenge. For Stalin, whose country had suffered catastrophic losses, a trial would publicly document Nazi crimes and reinforce the extent of Soviet sacrifices. The Soviet Union had lost more than 20 million people during the war, and its leadership wanted international recognition of that loss. Churchill, then, was backed into a corner. “Once the two of them had joined forces on that, Churchill then accepted.” What would a ‘trial’ actually look like? Even after consensus emerged out of Yalta, enormous practical questions remained – especially as there was no international criminal code defining ‘crimes against humanity’. Who would be tried? On what charges? Under whose law? Who would judge? Where would the court sit? The answer to the last question, at least, soon became evident. The German city of Nuremberg had hosted vast Nazi Party rallies before the war and contained a courthouse complex large enough to hold an international tribunal. Read more | Hitler's war on words: how the Nazis used art to bolster their murderous regime The proceedings that followed were also designed to serve as a record. Prosecutors assembled films, documents, and witness testimony to create a detailed archive of Nazi crimes. The proceedings were conducted in four languages, and meticulously transcribed. The trial would go on to establish four central pillars of international law: that aggressive war itself could be criminal; that state officials could be held personally accountable; that systematic atrocities were punishable under international law; and that the victors wouldn’t resort to summary revenge. This legal language defined at Nuremberg would shape later tribunals and, eventually, the International Criminal Court. It was a far cry from Churchill’s desire for immediate execution. But for all of Nuremberg’s successes, the decision to subject the Nazis to the law didn’t resolve growing tensions between the Allies. The United States and the Soviet Union would soon find themselves on opposite sides of a global ideological divide that would define the next decades – a divide that would end back in Germany once more, when the Berlin Wall came toppling down. Phillipe Sands was speaking to David Musgrove on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.
How Nazi investigators used secret tools to create Hitler’s Holocaust ‘hitlist’
New research reveals that paper conservators and manuscript restorers helped make centuries-old records legible for Nazi racial investigations, demonstrating how highly specialised crafts became entangled in the machinery of the Holocaust
It was SS officers and concentration camp guards who implemented and actualised much of the genocidal policy that had been crafted by senior Nazi officials. The SS, led by Heinrich Himmler, oversaw the police, the concentration camp system and many of the administrative structures that carried out the mass murder of Jewish populations and minority groups. These officers may have been the most visible architects of the Holocaust during the Second World War. But many historians have long argued that the systematic genocide levelled against Europe’s Jewish populations could never have reached the scale that it did without the complicity and active aid offered by ordinary people in everyday professions. It was office administrators, clerks, railway workers and local officials whose work sustained the machinery of the Nazi state. Now, new research has added more occupations to that list: bookbinders, paper conservators and restoration specialists. According to findings by historian Dr Morwenna Blewett, first published in The Guardian, newly uncovered Nazi-era correspondence reveals a Europe-wide programme in which restorers repaired and chemically treated fragile archival documents so that they could be used to better trace Jewish ancestry. The work, she argues, helped Nazi authorities to compile genealogical records that functioned, in effect, as a bureaucratic “hitlist”. Uncovering Jewish ancestry In research that features in her upcoming book, Art Restoration Under the Nazi Regime, Blewett uncovered letters and administrative files showing how these expert restorers were recruited to clean and stabilise old church registers and civil records which documented local births, baptisms, marriages and religious conversions stretching back centuries. Many of these manuscripts had become illegible through years of decay. Rather than preserving them in accordance with proper conservation standards, restorers used aggressive chemical treatments, including saturating pages with glycerine or laminating fragile sheets, to temporarily clean the documents and make them readable – even though these processes would destroy their long-term preservation. Blewett’s research shows that Nazi officials described church books as an important source for proving Jewish descent, allowing the regime to determine who was considered Jewish under its racial laws. Read more | Did Hitler have a secret Jewish grandfather? Our DNA research has solved the mystery By restoring these records, the conservators directly enabled the identification of people who would then be targeted for deportation and murder. Dr Simone Gigliotti, a historian of the Holocaust and deputy director of Royal Holloway’s Holocaust Research Institute, says that the findings reinforce a broader historical understanding of how widely Nazi ideology penetrated professional life. Speaking to HistoryExtra, she says Blewett’s research “confirms the fact that very few industries: bureaucratic, medical, cultural, economic, industrial or artisanal, were untouched by Nazi ideology. Neutrality in the arts and crafts industries was an illusion.” The power of complicity Blewett’s discovery also helps to clarify the precise mechanisms that underpinned the early stages of genocide. Professor Christopher Browning is one of the world’s leading historians of the Holocaust. Speaking to HistoryExtra about the discovery, he says: “This new research does indeed illuminate the degree to which complicity in the Holocaust permeated even the most obscure professions in Germany. Historians have known this in principle, but not this particular example.” Dr Gigliotti similarly emphasises how deeply professional complicity extended beyond institutions of the Nazi state. “[Professional complicity] was very extensive, indeed, embedded into German society,” she explains. For the Nazis, the importance of tracing Jewish ancestry emerged after the Nuremberg Laws. Introduced in 1935, these laws stripped Jews of German citizenship and prohibited marriage or sexual relationships between Jews and so-called ‘Aryans’. Professor Browning explains: “Raul Hilberg, one of the founders of Holocaust studies, wrote in 1961 that the first major step in the Holocaust was the definition of the victim. The Nuremberg Laws defined ‘full’ Jews as having three or four Jewish grandparents, and so-called ‘Mischlinge’ [meaning ‘mixed bloods’] as having one or two Jewish grandparents.” This was a determination that required documentary proof. Because Germany lacked a unified national registry before the late 19th century, these records were scattered across thousands of local churches and synagogues. In many regions, especially in rural areas, parish records stretching back to the 17th or 18th centuries were the only surviving documentation of family lineage. Read more | “We analysed Hitler’s DNA – and what we discovered made us gasp” Professor Browning says: “For the Nazi bureaucracy to determine who was a Jew, or for individuals to document their ancestry as ‘free of Jews’, genealogy businesses sprang up to research old church and synagogue records. What this new research shows is that this, in turn, spawned an additional new business: the cleaning of these old records to make them readable.” The bureaucratic obsession with documentation, however, was not universal across Europe. Browning notes that such painstaking genealogical classification primarily applied to German Jews. In eastern Europe, where most Holocaust victims lived, “no one worried about the details of legal documentation to this degree.” “Being identified as Jewish by one’s neighbours or being suspected of being Jewish by appearance was sufficient to be killed,” he says. Creating a racial hierarchy through genealogy The German reliance on archival records also underlines a deeper contradiction at the heart of Nazi racial ideology. While the regime tried to extol a claim of scientific rationale behind its racial hierarchy, it ultimately depended on paperwork rather than biology. Professor Dan Stone, director of the Holocaust Research Institute at Royal Holloway, says Blewett’s findings reinforce a wider understanding of how central genealogy became to Nazi policy. Speaking to HistoryExtra about the research, he explains why it's not surprising that old ancestry documents became such a decisive tool. Read more | Hitler's war on words: how the Nazis used art to bolster their murderous regime “Because the Nazis couldn’t identify such a thing as a ‘Jewish race’ through scientific means (because no such thing exists), their definition of Jews as being people with Jewish grandparents meant that genealogical, as opposed to anthropological or biological, factors were crucial.” “The emotional pull of ‘thinking with the blood’ overrode any scientific findings about the complexity of race,” he says. Dr Gigliotti notes that this bureaucratic fixation produced one of the defining administrative features of the Holocaust: lists. “The Holocaust and its lists are inseparable,” she explains. “Lists of Jewish people selected for deportation, Jewish refugees waiting for visas but denied, Jewish deportees listed as having arrived at concentration camps, Jewish passengers appearing on shipping lists, and finally, that most consequential of lists, the Wannsee Conference list of Jewish communities across the world and their numbers by country. Lists classify, separate and isolate.” Professor Stone agrees that it was this level of organisation that was fundamental in turning abstract Nazi ideology into concrete action. "That there was a bureaucracy tasked with identifying the relevant genealogical records, both to prove who was a Jew and to adjudicate on claims for ‘Aryan status’, makes perfect sense.” Nazi Germany | A short course from HistoryExtra Academy Member exclusive | Everything you need to know about Nazi Germany, guided by historian, author and broadcaster Laurence Rees. Explore the course now
Following the footsteps of a WW2 prisoner of war
Historian Malcolm Gaskill discusses his great-uncle Ralph’s experiences as a PoW in Second World War Italy
Captured in Libya, imprisoned in Italy, and twice an escapee: historian Malcolm Gaskill's great-uncle Ralph's experiences of the Second World War were certainly dramatic. Yet he left behind little more than a few photos, a wartime memoir, and a few stories filtered through family legend. But through years of research, travel and a unique partnership with an Italian historian, Gaskill has pieced together a story of quiet courage and unexpected connections. Here, in conversation with Elinor Evans, he discusses the resulting book, The Glass Mountain, and the challenges of telling such histories.
Step inside Hitler's U-boats to witness the nightmarish reality of life on board
Hitler’s U-boats were a feared component of his naval strategy during the Second World War. But what was life aboard these weaponised submersibles actually like?
Slipping unseen beneath the Atlantic, German U-boats were a terrifying development in the naval battles of the Second World War. They threatened Britain’s supply lines and seemed to offer Nazi Germany a way to starve the island nation into submission. Britain – heavily dependent on imported food, fuel and raw materials – was particularly vulnerable to attacks on its merchant shipping. German naval planners believed that cutting these lifelines could force Britain out of the war without the need for a costly invasion. As such, German propaganda cultivated an image of U-boats packed full of elite sailors waging a high-tech, daring campaign beneath the surface of the sea. Successful commanders were celebrated at home, and early victories against poorly protected Allied convoys helped create the perception of the U-boat as a uniquely deadly naval weapon. The reality was very different. As historian Roger Moorhouse explains on the HistoryExtra podcast, life aboard a U-boat was overwhelmingly and relentlessly degrading. Far from being glamorous, the experience was often “thoroughly, thoroughly horrible”. What were U-boats? U-boat is a shortened form of the German word 'unterseeboot', meaning “undersea boat”. Although submarines were used by several nations during the First World War, Germany had employed them with particular effectiveness, sinking thousands of Allied ships. When war broke out once more in Europe, Germany’s experience had prepared them. The backbone of their fleet was the Type VII U-boat, which Moorhouse describes as “an updated version of the U-boats used at the end of the First World War” and, by later standards, “a pretty primitive weapon”. Read more | Hitler's war on words: how the Nazis used art to bolster their murderous regime These boats were not true submarines in the modern sense. “It was meant to spend most of its time on the surface,” Moorhouse says. “It’s basically a submersible rather than a submarine.” They could dive to attack or evade danger, but only for limited periods. “It can’t spend more than probably about twenty-four hours underwater,” he says, before batteries needed recharging. It was this limitation that defined U-boat warfare. On the surface, boats were faster and more comfortable, but dangerously exposed to aircraft. When submerged, they were slow, blind and vulnerable to depth charges. From the outset, U-boat crews lived with the knowledge that their survival depended on technology that was already being overtaken by Allied detection methods such as radar, sonar and improved air patrols. Claustrophobia at sea If the tactical constraints were severe, the physical environment was much worse. “In terms of interior size, I usually describe a Type VII as being about the size of two underground train carriages,” Moorhouse says. Engines, fuel tanks, batteries, torpedoes, food stores, bunks and a crew of around fifty men were all crammed within that narrow space. Every cubic inch was used for something specific. “There was only one place in a Type VII where two grown men could pass each other without awkwardly shuffling,” he explains. Privacy was non-existent, and senior officers lived under the same conditions as the rest of the crew. Read more | I've just been inside a Nazi monster's mansion – and what I found there was deeply haunting A typical patrol lasted around eight weeks, though some extended far longer. During that time, sailors slept in shared bunks on a rota system. There was no escape from the endless noise, and no opportunity to be alone for any moment. “The stress placed on U-boat crews was extreme, particularly because of the claustrophobia. They couldn’t leave the vessel. They couldn’t get fresh air.” Hunger and disease U-boats carried all the food they would require for an entire patrol, loaded wherever space could be found. “There was a lot of fresh food initially,” Moorhouse explains, “but that ran out after about two weeks.” After that, crews survived on tinned rations that were monotonous and nutritionally poor. Fresh water was rationed so tightly that washing was almost impossible. “At most, you might wash your face with fresh water.” Each sailor was issued with a single change of underwear for the entire patrol, and damp clothing rarely dried in the cold, humid air. The health consequences were stark. “They all developed skin conditions,” Moorhouse explains. Read more | 'Real life battleships': the secret game that countered German U-boat attacks during WW2 Scabies was a common condition, as was a painful infection known as ‘red dog’, which left raw, inflamed patches across the body. Scurvy – which had been the bane of pirates centuries before – returned once vitamin-rich food ran out. As Moorhouse says, “the health of the crew was horrific.” On top of that, veterans spoke of the ‘U-boat stink’: a nauseating mix of diesel fumes from leaking engines, mould from permanent damp, unwashed bodies, bad breath caused by scurvy, and vomit from chronic seasickness. “When you combine all of that,” Moorhouse says, “it was a deeply unpleasant existence.” Nazi Germany | A short course from HistoryExtra Academy Member exclusive | Everything you need to know about Nazi Germany, guided by historian, author and broadcaster Laurence Rees. Explore the course now Sleeplessness and fear To reduce the risk of air attack, boats often remained submerged during daylight hours and surfaced only at night. This imposed an artificial rhythm on life aboard, with watches and meals detached from normal patterns of day and night, producing chronic sleep deprivation that wore men down physically and psychologically. Read more | Bismarck: why was the WW2 German battleship so feared? In the early years of the war, when U-boats enjoyed notable successes, crews could at least believe that the suffering served a purpose. Even then, the risks were extreme. Moorhouse notes that the average statistical lifespan of a U-boat crew was between seven and nine patrols. By 1943, when Allied radar, sonar and air power had turned the Atlantic into a killing ground, that figure declined. “It dropped to between two and three patrols,” Moorhouse says. By late 1944, “it hovered around a single patrol”. Men sailing at that stage knew they were, statistically, embarking on a mission that would take them to their death. The toll of combat stress German naval doctors did attempt to study the psychological impact of U-boat service, but their findings were unwelcome. Moorhouse notes that “senior officers did not want to hear about it”, while sailors themselves resisted discussion because psychological suffering was interpreted as weakness in Nazi Germany’s military culture. Read more | The Stalingrad of Africa: the story of the battle for Tunis “One commander, Heinrich Blücher, suffered a nervous breakdown on patrol in 1943 and had to be removed from service. The most extreme case was a U-boat commander named Pittesch, who committed suicide during a depth-charge attack.” In all, around 75 per cent of men who served in the U-boat arm were killed during the war, making their casualty rates one of the highest of any branch of Germany’s armed forces. “The stress placed on U-boat crews was extreme,” Moorhouse concludes. Their stories, he says, remain “one of the untold stories of the war.” Roger Moorhouse was speaking to Spencer Mizen on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.
In the aftermath of WW2, why did FDR’s Latin American experiment end in abject failure?
Before the Cold War hardened into coups and counterinsurgency, the United States backed reformist governments across Latin America. The abrupt reversal of policy after 1945 wasn’t inevitable, but it reshaped the politics of the northern and southern American continents for generations
The Cold War in Latin America is sometimes seen as an inevitable extension of rivalry between two emergent superpowers – the United States and the Soviet Union – in the new geopolitical context created in the aftermath of the Second World War. But the Cold War antagonism between the US and its southern neighbours wasn’t a foregone conclusion amid the wider ideological conflict. In the decades before the Cold War took hold, the US pursued a markedly different relationship with Latin America that had embraced national sovereignty, tolerated economic nationalism and actively supported the leadership of left-leaning reformers. As historian Greg Grandin, Professor of History at Yale University, explains on the HistoryExtra podcast, this earlier period shows that more cordial relations were possible, and demonstrates how quickly they were abandoned. Why Latin America mattered before the Cold War “You can’t really understand the Cold War unless you understand Latin America’s role in the 1930s and 1940s,” Grandin explains. During those years, Latin American governments were active participants in an anti-fascist coalition that spanned the Atlantic world. Several countries broke relations with the Axis powers early; they restricted German and Italian influence and aligned diplomatically and economically with the Allies well before the Second World War formally reached the hemisphere. WW2 | The Big Questions Member exclusive | Historian and broadcaster Laurence Rees explains major moments of the global conflict in this five-part series. Listen to all episodes now This partnership between the US and Latin American governments emerged against a long history of tension. Since the late 19th century, Latin American states had protested a right claimed by the United States to intervene militarily and politically across the hemisphere via the Monroe Doctrine, a claim first articulated in 1823 that purportedly justified intervention in order to protect US economic and military interests. From occupations in Haiti and Nicaragua, to repeated interventions in Central America and the Caribbean, US power over Latin and Central America had often been wielded as a blunt tool. Until the early 1930s, the powers residing in Washington were keen to hold to that prerogative. Read more | Venezuela: a hundred years of turmoil It was the Great Depression of the 1920s and 30s that changed the calculus. US power on the world stage was weakened, and domestic reform took increasing priority. The shift in policy that followed under 32nd US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt represented a deliberate attempt to rebuild hemispheric relations on new foundations. FDR viewed Latin America as central to the global struggle against fascism. His policymakers understood fascism not as a uniquely European threat, but rather a system that could take root wherever economic crisis and political instability converged. So, US support for Latin America, both ideologically and territorially – with the latter’s strategically important resources and stretches of Atlantic coastlines – was seen as pivotal. FDR’s hemispheric experiment “Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected president in 1932 and inaugurated in 1933, and he presided over an enormous sea change in US policy towards Latin America,” Grandin explains. “For a long time, Latin American states had demanded that the United States give up its claimed right of intervention, recognise the absolute sovereignty of individual nations, and accept that the doctrine of conquest was no longer valid. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/GettyImages-517474988-2bc02f5-e1770740210619.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="President Franklin D Roosevelt talks with Prime Minister Winston Churchill on the lawn during the Casablanca Conference of January 1943." title="President Franklin D Roosevelt talks with Prime Minister Winston Churchill on the lawn during the Casablanca Conference of January 1943." /> “And Roosevelt, because of this recession of US power caused by the Great Depression, concedes. And in doing so, the whole game changes. The whole United States' relationship with Latin America changes completely. There's a sense in which the United States has accepted that conquest is no longer a valid justification for intervention.” Read more | Who was the greatest President of the United States in history? Just as important to this relationship was how Roosevelt understood reform. “There is also a sense that the New Deal [a series of sweeping US federal programs and public work projects implemented by FDR in the 1930s] is not just a domestic political experiment, but a continental one.” Across Latin America, governments were attempting to regulate capital, redistribute land, and build developmental states to address extreme inequality. Amid its own substantial change of ideology, Washington didn’t reflexively oppose these efforts. When Washington backed economic nationalism When Bolivia nationalised Standard Oil assets in 1937, the US didn’t intervene. When Mexico expropriated foreign oil companies a year later, FDR went further, providing funding for a national steel factory. Brazil received similar backing for industrial development. Such actions were extraordinary given the long-standing US practice of using diplomatic or military pressure to protect American corporate interests overseas. During the second half of FDR’s presidential reign, as Europe slid toward war, US strategists looked south with growing anxiety. “Their greatest fear was that Latin America could become ‘Spain writ large’,” Grandin explains. The reference was to the Spanish Civil War and the rise of authoritarian leader Francisco Franco. Many of the social conditions that fuelled fascism in Spain – concentrated land ownership, stark inequality, militant labour movements, and conservative Catholic nationalism – were present across Latin America. US officials feared that repression of reform movements would radicalise politics, opening the door to authoritarian or fascist outcomes. Read more | Francisco Franco: is it accurate to call the Spanish dictator a fascist? Washington feared fascist Europe to the east, fascist Asia to the west, and a potentially fascist Latin America to the south. Preventing that outcome required a deliberate choice. In response, says Grandin, “Roosevelt tilted towards the left in Latin America and supported reformers who were trying to build national developmental states.” The strategy largely worked. With the major exception of Argentina, “almost every Latin American country eagerly joined the Allied forces.” But following FDR’s death in 1945, it all changed. From 33rd US President Harry Truman onwards, and as the Iron Curtain descended across Europe, nationalisation and state-led development in Latin America would come to be treated as existential threats to the US. This was in sharp contrast to the 1930s and early 1940s, when they had been accepted as safeguards against fascism. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/GettyImages-515218942-8cb0cac-e1770739907376.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="President Harry S Truman speaks during a televised address from the Oval Office. As president from 1945 to 1953, Truman used radio and television to communicate directly with the public during a period of profound global change." title="President Harry S Truman speaks during a televised address from the Oval Office. As president from 1945 to 1953, Truman used radio and television to communicate directly with the public during a period of profound global change." /> From allies to enemies “The reason why you have to understand that period to understand the Cold War is that it shows how brutal and violent the turnaround was.” Up until the later 1940s, the US had supported many Latin American countries militarily. “It had sent guns, weapons, tanks, warships, and aircraft,” says Grandin. “It had trained and professionalised Latin American militaries in the name of fighting fascism.” Read more | What was the Truman doctrine? By 1947–8, the United States had transformed Latin America’s military capacity. Much of this assistance was delivered through wartime programmes such as Lend-Lease, which dramatically expanded US influence over regional armed forces. Then, almost overnight, the enemy changed. “All of a sudden, in 1947, Washington sent a clear signal that the fight is no longer against fascism. It's against the communists.” The Cuban Missile Crisis: World on the Brink Member exclusive | In this HistoryExtra podcast series, we explore the roots of the Cold War standoff and meet the key players in the confrontation. We track the pivotal 13 days at its centre, and the Cold War alliances that saw diplomatic tensions escalate to breaking point Listen to all episodes now Now, governments and movements that had been wartime partners were reclassified as dangers to hemispheric security. It was a seismic shift. Before the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) existed, US intelligence in Latin America was handled by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). In 1947, “[the FBI’s] focus shifted from monitoring right-wing movements to surveilling and repressing left-wing forces. And you see this in one country after another,” says Grandin. “The violence and abruptness of the shift triggered cycles of polarisation that unfolded through the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s.” Those cycles produced insurgencies on the left, authoritarian regimes on the right, and decades of repression that were later justified as Cold War necessity. For Washington, it was a reversion to the norm, ending FDR’s experimental approach to Latin American relations. Greg Grandin was speaking to Danny Bird on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.
Quality or quantity? With WW2 tanks, there was a surprising winner
Amid the industrial warfare of the Second World War, battlefield performance depended on precise logistics and the ability to absorb catastrophic losses. How did America, Germany and the Soviet Union approach this problem?
As much as the Second World War was determined by soldiers exchanging gunfire on the ground, it was also a war of logistics. Tanks were a weapon that demonstrated that fact clearly. Their battlefield effectiveness was in no doubt as weapons of destruction – but the same effectiveness depended on how many could be built, how quickly they could be replaced, and whether an entire industrial system could sustain their use over years of attritional warfare. As historian Mark Urban explains on the HistoryExtra podcast, this exposes a central tension at the heart of 20th century conflict. “You have a constant trade-off between quality and quantity,” he says. “And of course in the Second World War, you see that very clearly.” The industrialisation of warfare By 1939, major powers unmistakably understood that victory would be decided, in part, by the output of industrial capacity. Tanks embodied this shift in thinking. They were vital but complex machines requiring steel, engines, optics, fuel, spare parts, trained crews and dedicated transport networks. That presented a challenge, and in their solutions to this problem of resource, Germany, the United States and the Soviet Union each diverged in their approach. The American solution was rooted in mass production. The United States entered the war with unmatched industrial depth and applied its civilian manufacturing logic to military hardware. “The Sherman is an iconic tank design of the Second World War,” Urban explains. “And the Americans made 49,000 of them.” Read more | When and why did the US get involved in WW2? And, output reached extraordinary levels. “They were making more than 2,000 in a month,” Urban says. This stunning speed was achieved through standardisation and simplified designs, and a relentless emphasis on speed. Technically, the Sherman wasn’t exceptional. “If you look at the Sherman and you compare it to the German Tiger, in many ways it’s very inferior,” says Urban. “The gun is less powerful. The armour is less thick.” Crucially, however, the Sherman was replaceable. Crews were equipped with spare parts and knew how to fit them. When the machines were destroyed beyond repair, commanders could expect new reinforcements. It was a tank that was designed to be one cog in a vast logistical system. German engineering and the gamble on superiority Germany made a very different calculation. Its leadership placed faith in technological superiority as a substitute for a numerical advantage. “If one asks what the most impressive technological achievement of the German tank-design industry was during the war, many people would say the Tiger,” says Urban. “But they only made about 1,300 of those in the entire war. Compare that to the 2,000 Shermans a month coming off the production line.” There may have been fewer of them, but the Tiger I was undoubtedly formidable. It was clad with heavy armour and equipped with a devastating 88mm gun, that outmatched the Allied alternatives. “Hitler himself said it at a conference in 1942: that their superior technology could outweigh the numbers of their enemies. And that’s the philosophy behind the Tiger and some of the other vehicles the Germans made towards the end of the war.” This belief shaped the later phases of production. German tank designs became increasingly complex, slower to build, harder to maintain and increasingly vulnerable to shortages of parts and trained crews. “One-to-one against a Sherman, they would most times win,” Urban acknowledges. “But of course there were many more of the Shermans.” Listen: World War Two's Greatest Battles Did Allied victory in the Second World War really hinge on the battle of the Atlantic? In our five-part series, WW2's Greatest Battles, we're charting five of the pivotal moments that shaped the course of the conflict, with author and military historian James Holland. Listen to all episodes now The Soviet approach: mass, speed and expendability “As for the Russians, they made more than 50,000 of their T-34,” Urban says. The T-34 is often praised as a balanced design, combining mobility, protection and firepower. But its underlying logic was starkly pragmatic. The T-34 was intended to be a short-lived weapon. “It was only really designed to last a couple of weeks once it was in the field because they got knocked out so quickly anyway,” Urban explains. And that’s supported by the statistics; the scale at which these machines were destroyed was huge. “Another military historian, Steven Zaloga, has worked out that the T-34 was the most destroyed tank in history: the highest proportion of those produced were destroyed. They made over 57,000, and he reckons around 44,000 of those were destroyed in battle. “And if you’ve read a bit about Stalin’s Soviet Union, it comes as no surprise to learn that, for the Red Army, the machines – and the poor people inside them – were pretty much expendable. If they had to lose hundreds of them taking a particular position on the Eastern Front, so be it. That was the price, as far as they were concerned.” This was a brutal calculus that was matched by staggering organisational capacity. And it was put to the test when Germany expanded its eastern front. The Kharkiv tank factory When Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, vast industrial regions in the east were rapidly overrun. Much of Ukraine and Belarus, home to key factories, fell within weeks. One of the most significant losses was the city of Kharkiv in Ukraine, where the T-34 had been developed. “The Russians realised it was about to be overrun,” Urban explains. “They put all the machinery onto trains, all the staff, and they took them to the Ural Mountains. Three months after they’d moved out of Kharkiv, they were producing new tanks in the Urals.” This was only possible because of the Soviet system of total mobilisation. “Through industrial planning, through central control, through Gosplan [the Soviet Union's central agency responsible for economic planning], they could mobilise amazing resources and they can mobilise individuals.” But relocating factories created a new problem. “The new factories were in the middle of nowhere,” Urban says. “There weren’t enough people.” Read more | The 1943 battle of Kursk: was it the biggest tank battle in history? The Soviet solution, once again, relied on a numerical advantage. “All the guys who were being trained as tank crews, and there were women as well, got sent to the factory,” he explains. “The idea was that first they helped to build them,” Urban says. “And then after a month or whatever of working at the factory, they took their tank away onto the battlefield.” In some cases, crews fought in machines that they had personally assembled. “The driver’s understanding of the engine, or the gunner’s understanding of the gun, was pretty good because they’ve actually helped build them themselves,” Urban notes. “No other country had a system like that,” he adds. “The Germans, the Brits, the Americans – no one else did this.” Germany believed excellence could compensate for volume. The United States believed logistics and standardisation would win out. The Soviet Union believed in overwhelming output, whatever the human cost. “In the end, it’s that old truism: quantity has a quality all of its own.” Mark Urban was speaking to Emily Briffett on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.
Churchill and de Gaulle: a strange relationship
Richard Vinen traces the relationship between Churchill and de Gaulle, exploring their roles as wartime and peacetime leaders of their countries
After France fell in 1940, it was Charles de Gaulle who led the Free French forces against Nazi Germany and Vichy France. From the moment he assumed that position, de Gaulle was locked into a relationship with British prime minister Winston Churchill. The two men are the subject of the latest book by Professor Richard Vinen, The Last Titans, and here, in conversation with James Osborne, he shares his insights into the two men, their relationship, and their lasting impact.
Roger Moorhouse tells the story of the U-boat war from the perspective of the German crews themselves
"Statistically, they were on a suicide mission." That's Roger Moorhouse's assessment of the odds facing Hitler's U-boat crews in the final years of the Second World War. Speaking with Spencer Mizen, Roger relates the story of these missions from the German perspective – a tale encompassing scurvy, sleep deprivation, terror and acts of astonishing kindness. Roger Moorhouse is the author of Wolfpack: Inside Hitler's U-boat War (William Collins, 2025). Buy it now from Waterstones