Living History with Mat McLachlan

Ep267: The Rats of Tobruk, 1941

Eighty-five years ago, 14,000 Australian soldiers were surrounded in a dusty Libyan port by Erwin Rommel's Afrika Korps. They were outnumbered, outgunned and cut off from the world. Nazi propaganda called them rats caught in a trap. They took the name and made it their own. In this episode, Mat McLachlan tells the story of the Siege of Tobruk — 242 days that proved the German blitzkrieg could be stopped. Through the voices of the men who were there, we go inside the perimeter: the terror of a first night patrol, the nine-inch trenches of the Salient, the flies in the stew, the dust that turned sleeping men into waxed mummies, and the destroyers that slipped in through the darkness to keep them alive. "Anybody that wasn't frightened was either a liar or a fool. We were all frightened, naturally. But we had a job to do and we did it." — Harley Brooks, 2/12th Battalion From Corporal Jack Edmondson's Victoria Cross action on Easter Sunday to the bond between a mother and her fallen son, from General Morshead's red hat to Bob Semple — the last Rat of Tobruk, who died in 2024 aged 102 — this is the story of ordinary men who refused to be beaten. And when it was over, the men who had conquered Europe had not conquered them. Episode Length: 27 minutes Features: First-person accounts from the AWM Keith Murdoch Sound Archive including Eric Brough MM (2/24th Battalion), Harley Brooks (2/12th Battalion), Max Thow (2/12th Battalion), Owen Curtis (2/12th Battalion), Alf Miller (2/4th Australian General Hospital), Jack Hawkes (2/28th Battalion) and General Sir Thomas Daly (18th Brigade HQ). Presenter: Mat McLachlan Producer: Jess Stebnicki Sail through history with Mat McLachlan! Join a 2027 history cruise: https://battlefields.com.au/history-cruises-2027 Find out everything Mat is doing with books, tours and media at https://linktr.ee/matmclachlan For more great history content, visit www.LivingHistoryTV.com, or subscribe to our YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/@MatMcLachlanHistory ---------------------------------------- Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy [https://acast.com/privacy] for more information.

Ep266: Dernancourt, 1918 - Australia's Toughest Fight

In the spring of 1918, Germany launched its greatest offensive of the war. The British Fifth Army collapsed under the weight of it. And somewhere in the chaos of that retreat, on a railway embankment west of a small French village called Dernancourt, four thousand Australians were told to hold the line against twenty-five thousand Germans. In this episode, Mat McLachlan tells the story of the Battles of Dernancourt, the 28th of March and the 5th of April, 1918, officially the strongest attacks faced by Australian troops in the entire war. Almost no one has heard of them. Through the words of the men who were there, we follow the desperate defence of the railway embankment that linked two vital French towns. We meet Sergeant Stan McDougall, a Tasmanian blacksmith who single-handedly repelled a German breakthrough, burning his hands on the barrel of a Lewis gun before picking up a bayonet and charging — earning the Victoria Cross and then, eight days later at the same spot, the Military Medal. We hear Lieutenant George Mitchell's devastating account of watching his comrades retreat down a bullet-swept slope, tears running down his face. We read the letter of a German soldier, intercepted by Australian intelligence, describing the enemy opposite as men who "glide about in the night like cats." And we discover the story of two wooden crosses, found months after the battle, where German soldiers had buried Australian dead and written above them: "Here lies a brave English warrior." Why is Villers-Bretonneux remembered while Dernancourt is forgotten? How did a handful of under-strength Australian battalions hold off multiple German divisions in the heaviest attack Australian forces ever faced? And what happened to the men of the 47th Battalion — who fought so hard at Dernancourt, only to be told two months later that their battalion no longer existed? A powerful and long-overdue tribute to the Australians who held the line at Dernancourt. In a battle their country forgot. "The battle of Dernancourt will live long in the annals of military history as an example of dogged and successful defence." — General Sir John Monash Episode Length: 30 minutes Features: First-person accounts from Lieutenant George Mitchell (Backs to the Wall), Private Ted Lynch (Somme Mud), Private Edmund Liddell, and Private James O'Rourke; the Victoria Cross and Military Medal citations of Sergeant Stanley McDougall; a captured German letter; and the remarkable story of the Dernancourt Cross, held today in the Australian War Memorial. Presenter: Mat McLachlan Producer: Jess Stebnicki Sail through history with Mat McLachlan! Join a 2027 history cruise: https://battlefields.com.au/history-cruises-2027 Find out everything Mat is doing with books, tours and media at https://linktr.ee/matmclachlan For more great history content, visit www.LivingHistoryTV.com, or subscribe to our YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/@MatMcLachlanHistory ---------------------------------------- Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy [https://acast.com/privacy] for more information.

Ep265: Nuremberg - Inside the Nazi Mind

In 1945, a young American psychiatrist named Douglas M. Kelley was given an extraordinary assignment: evaluate the 22 most senior Nazis awaiting trial at Nuremberg and determine whether they were mentally fit to face justice. Among his patients was Hermann Göring, Hitler's second-in-command, who was charismatic, manipulative and utterly unrepentant. What Kelley discovered shook him to his core. Using Rorschach tests, IQ assessments and hundreds of hours of interviews, he concluded that these architects of the Holocaust were not clinically insane. They were psychologically normal: intelligent, ambitious opportunists who had made deliberate choices to pursue power at any human cost. There was no "Nazi mind." There was no psychiatric explanation that set them apart from the rest of us. It was a conclusion the post-war world didn't want to hear. And it destroyed the man who reached it. In this episode, Mat McLachlan talks to Jack El-Hai, author of The Nazi and the Psychiatrist, the book behind the 2025 film Nuremberg starring Russell Crowe and Rami Malek. Jack had unique access to Kelley's hidden personal papers: clinical notes, Rorschach results and private correspondence kept secret by the family for decades. He reveals the complex and ultimately fatal relationship between a brilliant psychiatrist and the most powerful Nazi to stand trial, and asks the question Kelley spent the rest of his short life trying to answer: if the men who built the Third Reich weren't monsters, what does that say about the rest of us? Episode Length: 40 minutes Features: Jack El-Hai discusses his research into Douglas Kelley's hidden archive, the psychology of the Nuremberg defendants, the Kelley-Göring relationship, the competing theories of the "Nazi mind" and why Kelley's warnings about authoritarianism went unheard until it was too late. Presenter: Mat McLachlan Guest: Jack El-Hai Producer: Jess Stebnicki Sail through history with Mat McLachlan! Join a 2027 history cruise: https://battlefields.com.au/history-cruises-2027 Find out everything Mat is doing with books, tours and media at https://linktr.ee/matmclachlan For more great history content, visit www.LivingHistoryTV.com, or subscribe to our YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/@MatMcLachlanHistory ---------------------------------------- Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy [https://acast.com/privacy] for more information.

Ep264: Sudan 1885 - Australia's First Deployment

In March 1885, thirty years before Gallipoli, 770 men from New South Wales sailed for the deserts of Sudan — the first Australian soldiers ever sent to fight in a foreign war. In this episode, Mat McLachlan tells the forgotten story of Australia's Sudan Contingent — the part-time soldiers, weekend volunteers and colonial clerks who marched through Sydney in scarlet jackets to a crowd of 200,000, then crossed the world to serve alongside the Scots Guards and Grenadier Guards at Suakin. Through the soldiers' own words, we follow their journey from the excitement of departure to the brutal reality of an African desert — where the nights were more dangerous than the days, the enemy poisoned the waterholes, and the real killer wasn't bullets but disease. From Acting Premier William Bede Dalley's extraordinary decision to send troops without consulting parliament, to the Guards' bewildered reaction to their colonial allies, from Private Robert Weir's father farewell — "I look upon you as going to your grave" — to the cruel death of Martin Guest, who survived the desert only to die in the rain at his own homecoming parade, this is the story of an expedition that achieved almost nothing militarily but changed Australia forever. Nine men died. None of them in battle. All of them from disease. And out of those nine graves grew a tradition that would define a nation — the idea that when the call came, Australia would answer. Historian K.S. Inglis called it "The Rehearsal." It was — for everything that came after. Episode Length: 30 minutes Features: First-person accounts from Private Tom Gunning, Lieutenant William Cope, and Private Frank Walters; primary source letters from the Nepean Times and Sydney Morning Herald; and the remarkable story of how forty baskets of fish gave a Sydney beach its name. Presenter: Mat McLachlan Producer: Jess Stebnicki Ready to walk in the footsteps of those who fought? Join Mat McLachlan on an exclusive battlefield tour: https://battlefields.com.au/ [https://battlefields.com.au/] Find out everything Mat is doing with books, tours and media at https://linktr.ee/matmclachlan [https://linktr.ee/matmclachlan] For more great history content, visit www.LivingHistoryTV.com [http://www.LivingHistoryTV.com], or subscribe to our YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/@MatMcLachlanHistory [https://www.youtube.com/@MatMcLachlanHistory] ---------------------------------------- Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy [https://acast.com/privacy] for more information.

Ep263: Korea - Operation Killer, 1951

In February 1951, while Australia slept, soldiers from 3RAR were crawling through knee-deep snow on frozen Korean ridgelines — fighting a war their own country barely noticed and has largely forgotten since. In this episode, Mat McLachlan tells the story of Operation Killer — the brutal UN counter-offensive that turned the tide of the Korean War. Through the voices of the men who were there, we follow 3RAR from the catastrophic Chinese intervention that sent 300,000 enemy soldiers smashing into UN lines, through the longest retreat in American military history, to the desperate hill-by-hill fightback that began on the frozen slopes above Chipyong-ni. From the corporal and two soldiers who stood up and charged fortified Chinese bunkers on the summit of Hill 614, to the stretcher bearers who carried their wounded mates down snow-covered mountains with no helicopter evacuation and no mechanical assistance, from Private Snow Dicker burying himself in rice straw to survive minus twenty-five degree nights to the sniper who called a Chinese bunker "Flinders Street Station," these are stories of endurance, mateship and raw courage in conditions that would break most people. How did a battalion that had retreated 320 kilometres in nine days rebuild itself into one of the finest fighting units in Korea? What did the battles at Hill 614, Hill 587 and Maehwa-san teach the men who would hold the line at Kapyong — the action that saved Seoul and earned 3RAR a United States Presidential Unit Citation? Mat traces the chain of battles that transformed a demoralised, frozen, under-strength battalion into a force the Chinese couldn't break. A powerful tribute to the Australians who fought in the Forgotten War — and a reminder that the men who held Kapyong in April first proved themselves on the frozen ridgelines of February and March, one hill at a time. Day after day. Without relief. "Their courage, determination and loyalty were inspirations to me. I was never to meet their equal for the rest of my life." — Lieutenant Maurie Pears, 3RAR Episode Length: 27 minutes Features: First-person accounts from 3RAR veterans including Lieutenant Maurie Pears, Major Ben O'Dowd, Private Ian Robertson, and Captain Don Beard; the story of General Ridgway's transformation of the Eighth Army; and the chain of battles from Hill 614 to Kapyong that Australia has largely forgotten. Presenter: Mat McLachlan Producer: Jess Stebnicki Join Mat and his team on an exclusive series of river cruises to the battlefields of Waterloo, WWI, WW2 and Vietnam: https://battlefields.com.au/history-cruises-2027/ Find out everything Mat is doing with books, tours and media at https://linktr.ee/matmclachlan For more great history content, visit www.LivingHistoryTV.com, or subscribe to our YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/@MatMcLachlanHistory ---------------------------------------- Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy [https://acast.com/privacy] for more information.