But he is also listed on the Tiefel Memorial on actually the same pier and face as Samson, 7B.

Well, that's fascinating.

That means I'm going to get to see two next time I go.

And why no known grave, it's difficult to talk about, but the battlefield was physically torn apart.

By September, it's pretty muddy.

Bodies are sinking into that mud.

They're being pounded into that mud.

So the question is then what does that memorial look like now? And now that we know the people behind the names, what's an experience like that?

Despite the corrosion, that means it's been lost fairly early in its life.

Dan, where did the coin come from? That coin came from about three inches below this marker that we've put in here, right on the top of the lowest piece of material in the ditch.

So we've still got a fair way to go to get right to the bottom, but it's looking good.

So maybe that lower fill is

Although Dan, who excavated it, needs convincing.

Well, it's still a big ditch and it's still a deep ditch.

And if it's linked with farming and landscape and field systems, for instance, I think it's just too big and it's too clean.

It still looks a bit like

But Samson does not return.

Oh, that's tough.

I just feel like we're getting to know him.

And suddenly we've, we've, um, I kind of, I, it was strange.

I sort of forgot the starting point of this podcast.

I was getting, I was getting into his life story and, and it's a reminder.

Yeah.

So could you just for our listeners, can you give us a bit of an overview of Forrest, Dan?

But I mean, you went to Dudley Castle for this series, didn't you? And so there's this, the kind of insight there about how he's operating from an early stage.

Yeah, Dudley Castle is, is a interesting place because it actually belonged to a distant cousin of his.

It'd gone down a different line, and then the cousin was running short of money, and Dudley lent him money, uh, uh, in, on, on no doubt terms that are very favorable to himself, and then foreclosed on the mortgage, basically.

Just g- ejected his cousin from the castle.

So there's a Dudley in Dudley Castle now.

He's ruthless and quite, and quite effective.

And I guess if you're a king, you want people, you've got a reasonably small pool of people that you can select from to do things for you, and you want people that are gonna get the job done.

What do you think?

But when you're presenting, when you're putting together your ideas for history, how do you start with them and how do you reflect on it? Do you write scripts or do you extemporise and as you're presenting, explore the idea?

Well, so much, Jason, that's interesting in there.

I think just on your first point about the Math Monday and all that sort of stuff, I think, isn't it interesting also how this year, suddenly with the pandemic, Black Lives Matter, awareness of violence towards women that we've all had here in the UK recently, And maybe around, you know, big government versus little government.

Oh, maybe big government's back.

It's kind of useful when there's a giant pandemic on.

And also, sorry, I keep thinking of the list, but also the reemergence of like great power rivalry between China and the US, between arguably China, Russia and the US.

Suddenly, those things that I wouldn't have been sensitive to if I'd written it when I was writing a book about the Battle of Quebec 10 years ago, suddenly I'm like, should I have talked about slavery more in this book? Like, it's kind of weird.

It's not very nice, to be honest.

Right.

You did it by boat.

A-And, and you see this, you know, at the very dawn of our species.

You see it with Stonehenge, what-whatever.

You, i-a-and, and it's, and it's so the, the sea, if you looked out to the sea, now it looks empty.

One enormous container ship, you know, come past carrying the entire gross national product of a small country every week.

But the rest of the sea looks quite empty.

[laughs]

Mm-hmm

...

both to the East Indies and to the Americas, just nightmarish, you're obviously constantly thinking how to make your ships better.

And you're constantly thinking how to navigate more effectively.

And so there's a bunch of breakthroughs.

Uh, the, the great advantage that Europe has, people, people, um, have used, used China as a counterexample here, is that Europe is incredibly competitive.

So you've got...

So why did we lose the United States?

What's his background story, by the way?

So he was not from a particularly wealthy family.

So in the, in the Navy, as I've said a thousand times in this podcast, so I apologize to anyone listening, it was, it's one thing in the Army to be, you, you give all the, lot, lot of com- You can, you can let the king's son command an army.

You can let, uh, scions of very aristocratic families command an army.

You don't need much training, 'cause all you've gotta do when you're in charge of a group of men with muskets is stand ramrod straight when bullets are whipping 'round your ear.

And, and it's an old expression, officers show men how to die, sergeants show men how to fight.

Oh.

And he collapses, and then he collapses onto deck.

Yeah

... and therefore the ship's just gonna fall apart.

You know, the, the whole thing operates on you've got to trust the person above you, that that you think he knows what he's doing.

And if you come to that decision, well, I mean, I, I can't imagine how intense that cauldron...

You're bumping shoulders with each other all the time.

You're like, you're in a football crowd with these officers.

Uh, you know their smell.

Mm

Yeah

...he hasn't, he hasn't learned much from his experiences.

Um, he hasn't grown.

He hasn't learned.

Uh, and he says, "Ultimately, you know, the Jews have undone me, and, uh, and I was right all along." You know, it's just aston...

It's an astonishing document.

It's chilling.

Ha- hand to hand, basically

... an easy alliance?

Well, listen, the-- I think, look, this is a really bold point.

I'm gonna get on my little soapbox here.

We love our history.

We love the fact that we, uh, have been largely-- We, we were briefly very dominant all over the world, and it's a very fascinating, wonderful story.

Britain's greatest successes came as part of coalitions, right? It, it was a coalition that won the Battle of Waterloo.

There were, there were Prussians, there were Dutch, as you say, there were all sorts of people from Germany, the endless people.

Wow.

Mm-hmm

... and he's gonna go into the Pacific.

Now, why is he gonna go to the Pacific? Because Spanish money is int- the whole Spanish imperial project is dependent on this massive mountai- literal mountain of silver in Peru, and that, that gets mule trained down to the coast in, in what is now Lima, in the, in the c- on the coast, and then it sails up the coast to Acapulco.

Uh, well, it's a very...

It's to Panama, where it's then put, say, over the isthmus, another mule train, and then it sails off to Spain across the Atlantic.

Or they, it plugs into East Asian trade 'cause the Spanish also in the Philippines, they trade with China and various other places.

And, and so there's a huge trading highway to Acapulco in Mexico, uh, over to the...

Uh, let's go to a break, and then we're gonna find out how exactly they go about doing this.

And you were saying you were kind of lost for words, having one channel of the year.

Yeah, I'm lost for words because it's, you know, we're all hearing a lot of bad news about the industry at the moment.

We're all a bit atomized because we're all, it's more working from home.

There's less, I don't know, it feels like there's less interaction.

And I've been feeling a bit sad about the state of the industry.

And you come into this room, you see these sizzles, you see these showreels, you see the talent that's on display, you see the impact this country has internationally.

You see the effect of the brilliant people that work in this industry every day.

Is this the future of the industry as far as you're concerned?

Def- definitely.

Well, I, I...

No, because I think actually what polit- politics needs less sort of overconfident, posh blokes with square jaws who don't really know what they're talking about, but say it with, like I've just done, say it with great emphasis and certainty, right? I think we need area specialists.

If I went to politics, really seriously problem, I would just sit there dreaming about, like, how to invade France and build...

I'm, I'd be like, and how to build big buildings to myself.

And that presumably has happened a hell of a lot.

Oh, yeah, of course.

I mean, uh, Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of China, was bu-buried with his concubines, uh, q- uh, servants in, in, in his great, by the way, unexcavated sort of pyramid in China, which is the most amazing known archeological site on the planet, which has never been excavated.

[laughs]

And maybe that's rude, maybe it's wrong.

Now, I don't, we don't tell them, "Oh, I don't wanna hear what you got to say." But the first sign of, "Well, this is what Daddy's money could buy." One guy said just a few days ago, he said, "Yeah." He said, "I didn't wanna go to all the trouble of pinpointing everything on this truck, so Dad just give this shop," I think, like, "250,000 or something and the truck, and said, 'Do something with it.'" Who, who wants that? I want things done my way, and the way to get that done is to do it.

We have a rule, [laughs] funny little insert here.

We have a rule, if she's doing it, she does it her way.

If I'm doing it, I do it my way.

No fussing.

Yeah.

In the spring of 1942, the US Eighth Air Force begins construction on dozens of air bases, transforming a quiet corner of East England into one of the most vital fronts of the entire Second World War.

It's flat.

It's perfect for air fields.

So you get this massive, massive influx of American bombers carrying the most destructive weapons ever produced, and just as strikingly, young American airmen.

It's also home to over a million people.

Hamburg is a real center of aircraft production.

So for the Americans, there's lots of specific military industrial targets they can attack.

But the Brits look at the types of housing there, and they think they're very vulnerable to fire.

So campaigning in the Mediterranean will not only knock over one of the three big Axis powers, Mussolini's Italy, it will also open a back door to Hitler's Germany.

And the American commanders are saying, "Why? Let's just go straight for Berlin.

What are we doing? Why are we dancing around the edges here with this Mediterranean nonsense?" And they think that Franklin Roosevelt is being persuaded by Churchill's pretty words.

One up and two to go.

However, the liberation of Rome is going to be entirely, you know, overshadowed because the next day is going to be the launch of D-Day.

And Roosevelt can't say anything about it.

The Afrika Korps' success has left Prime Minister Winston Churchill depressed and politically vulnerable.

Churchill looks like he's lost his touch.

He faces two no confidence motions in Parliament, both of which he wins.

But as one Labour MP says, "Well, you keep winning the debates, but you lose the battles." Winston Churchill is in need of victories.

Roosevelt and Churchill will meet numerous times throughout the war, and derive great benefit from face-to-face meetings.

Churchill can now play the part of the great imperial warlord that so far he's been only through his speeches.

Now he can do it on the ground, and he does what he does best, which is he rolls out the maps and talks about grand strategy with the US president.

Like you just show up there, you know, it's like

you had, it feels normal to you as a kid.

Right.

But, but some people get a really nice hand and some people don't.

So I was dealt a really great hand.

And just two things about that upbringing, I'd say.

One is, this is related to this conversation about education.

Is that why you're like so fulfilled in your, like what you do professionally? It's gotta be because you're like helping people grow.

I think they were, they were astonished that a, a non-European race could defeat Europeans in battle.

They didn't consider Asian people capable of what the Japanese are doing.

After the Japanese land in Malaya, Singapore's governor, Sir Shenton Thomas, allegedly says, "Well, I suppose you'll have to shove the little men off."

The Japanese are very good at night attacks, and so nights are horrific.

Imagine being a 19 or 20-year-old American kid, and you're in a foxhole, maybe with one other person, right? One guy sleeps, the other is on watch, and you can hear the other foxholes with your compatriots, but they're not visible in the dark.

And remember, these islands are really black as night, and you hear screaming from another foxhole.

[screaming] [bomb exploding]

They want to have some sort of peace treaty with Germany.

Halifax is saying, "We have to face facts here.

We have to face reality.

Adolf Hitler has won in Europe.

We can still preserve our independence, we can still preserve our empire, if we make a deal with Hitler.

And the way to do that is talk to an intermediary." Well, that's the Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini.

He might be a broker to negotiate a peace between Britain and Germany.

In the coming months, he'll institute the first peacetime draft and call for the production of 50,000 war planes.

Mm-hmm.

And the Middle Colonies, the Southern Colonies, they, they may be a little more Tory, they may be a little more relaxed about the idea of the British Empire, and there is perhaps some truth in that idea.

And they thought, "All we need to do is just build a wall between these two groups." So we've got a, "Let's get a force moving down from Canada, advancing south towards Albany, down that great invasion corridor that's seen so many armies marching to and fro over the, over the decades.

We'll get an army marching from Lake Ontario east towards Albany," so that's another prong coming in from Lake Ontario, coming towards Albany.

"And then we get a force moving up from New York, where we've captured New York and, and, and passed New Jersey, so they come due north up the Hudson Valley.

And so from three different directions we kind of arrive at Albany, and we cut off New England from the rest of the colonies." The problem is, none of those forces do what they're supposed to, and none of them arrive at the right time, and none of the commanders do what they're supposed to do.

And they're not getting the Navy 'cause of the French.

Well, this is the killer fact, Don.

Dan, what state are things in for the British at the time of Yorktown?

Well, it's just this, it, it's this old problem, which is the British Army can move around America, sometimes carried by ships, this overwhelming maritime strength.

Other times they'll march, they'll march up through the Carolinas into Virginia.

But the problem is that every time they go somewhere and they liberate somewhere, [laughs] or they, or they, they get the Union flags out, as Jonathan says, and the crowds all come out and say, "Okay, fine, King George, we're back," the minute they leave town, like the Viet Cong in Vietnam, or, or like the Taliban, I guess, in Afghanistan, the Patriots, the rebels just drift back in and, and reassert their control.

So, so you end up with marching this big distance.

The British armies march all the way into this p-part of Virginia, and they haven't got anything to show for it.

What they then try and do is they do whatever British, they do exactly what British armies have always done.

And they're not getting the Navy because of the French.

After all, nuns were supposed to be married to Christ, right?

Good point.

I'm aware at the moment we're still talking about Europe and I, I know that you deal with, uh, lots of things going on outside Europe as well, so I want to come to that.

But I just...

I'm interested in this idea, something we talked about before, how the, how the idea of female sexuality, enjoyment of sex, orgasming, how does that change over the centuries? Like, was there ever a time when you suspect the orgasm gap was narrower or possibly inverted? I mean, what, what's, what, what's your sense of how it, things have developed over the centuries?

So where did people learn about it in the past? I mean, if the Queen of France didn't have all the information, where did people learn about it?

Yeah, there's a great moment in a Stefan Zweig book that I read the other day about how the, the Second World War came about, and he's just musing about his childhood.

And he said what was really fascinating.

I mean, that's what, almost getting on for almost 200 years ago, and that could be, that [laughs] that could be lifted straight from one MP just told me someone tweeting online.

Yeah, i- isn't it interesting how s- the, the past can feel, it doesn't feel that long, far away sometimes.

And I agree, the 1850s is fascinating.

You get un- Parliaments, you get war, overseas crises.

I mean, you do get, you get six Prime Ministers in seven years in the 1850s.

But look, there's a deeper point here as well, right? If you look at Britain's, roughly speaking, Britain's trajectory, yes, there were, there is chaos.

There is what appears to be chaos.

Is there a, whether, whether politically or in history generally, are there bits that you're just not interested in 'cause nothing happens?