James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles | Lex Fridman Podcast #470

And you see that manifest itself on D-Day, where you've got 6,939 vessels of which there are 1,213 warships, (inhales deeply) 4,127 assault craft, 12 and a half thousand aircraft. You know, 155,000 men landed and dropped from the air in 24-hour period. It is phenomenal. It is absolutely phenomenal.

The following is a conversation with James Holland, a historian specializing in World War II, who has written a lot of amazing books on the subject, especially covering the Western front, often providing fascinating details at multiple levels of analysis, including strategic, operational, tactical, technological, and of course, the human side, the personal accounts from the war. He also co-hosts a great podcast on World War II, called We Have Ways of Making You Talk. This is a Lex Fridman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description or at lexfridman.com/sponsors. And now, dear friends, here's James Holland. In volume one of The War in the West, your book series on World War II, you write, "The Second World War witnessed the deaths of more than 60 million people from over 60 different countries. Entire cities were laid waste. National borders were redrawn, and many millions more people found themselves displaced. Over the past couple of decades, many of those living in the Middle East or parts of Africa, the Balkans, Afghanistan, and even the United States may feel, justifiably, that these troubled times have already proved the most traumatic in their recent past. Yet, globally, the Second World War was, and remains, the single biggest catastrophe of modern history. In terms of human drama, it is unrivaled. No other war has affected so many lives in such a large number of countries." So, what to you makes World War II the biggest catastrophe and human drama in modern history? And maybe from a historian perspective, the most fascinating subject to study?

The thing about World War II is it really is truly global. You know, it's fought in deserts, it's fought in, in the Arctic, um, it's fought across oceans, it's fought in the air, um, it's in jungle, it's in the hills. It is on the beaches. (laughs) Um, it's also on the Russian Steppe and it's also in Ukraine. So it's, it's, it's that global nature of it. And I just think, you know, where there's, where there's war, there is always incredible human drama. And I think for most people, and certainly their true in my case, you get drawn to the human drama of it. It's that thought that, you know, "Gosh, if I'd been 20 years old, how would I have dealt with it?" You know, "Would I have been in the Army? Would I have been in the Air Force? Would I have been on a, you know, Royal Navy destroyer? Or, you know, how would I have coped with it? And how would I have dealt with that separation?" I mean, I've interviewed people who were away for four years. I remember talking to a tank man from, uh, from Liverpool in England, called Sam Bradshaw. And he went away for four years, and when he came home, he'd been twice wounded. He'd been very badly wounded in North Africa, and then he was shot in the neck in Italy. Eventually, got home. When he came home, his mother had turned gray. His little s- baby sister who had been, you know, 13 when he left, was now a, a young woman. His old school had been destroyed by Luftwaffe bombs. He didn't recognize the place. And do you know what he did? He joined up again. Went back outta Europe and was one of the first people in Belsen, so you know ...