Before The Storm: The Phoney War Begins (Part 1)

**Al Murray** (0:02)
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**SPEAKER_2** (0:24)
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I'm not giving up. I am selling the building.
The final season of FX is the Bear.

**Al Murray** (1:07)
Everything's either going to be OK.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:09)
No, stop. Or not.

**SPEAKER_3** (1:12)
We are outgunned and we are outmanned. We have each other.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:18)
FX is the Bear, the final season. All episodes now streaming on Disney+.

**Al Murray** (1:36)
Hitler spoke for almost two hours and cited figure after figure without referring to a single note. What impressed me is his confidence in ultimate victory. Either he is bewitched or he really is a genius. He outlines plans of action and cites dates with an assurance that he does not admit of contradiction. Will he be proved right?
In my opinion, the game will not be as simple as he believes. I returned from Germany with the strong convictions that the first months of the war will lead the Germans to believe in victory, but the longer it lasts, the harder it will be.
And that was me there ventriloquizing Count Ciano in his diary from the second, third of October 1939 Ciano, of course, Mussolini's son-in-law, Mussolini's foreign minister, and a major power player in the Italian government and a witness to the beginning of the Second World War, and in fact, the phony war as it's become known. And welcome to We Have Ways of Making You Talk with me, Al Murray, James Holland. And we are talking, aren't we, Jim, in this series about the bit of the war, sort of not before the war, because there's obviously this stuff going on at sea, but we're trying to set the scene as things start to drift towards it all going majorly kinetic on the continent in May of April and May 1940 So welcome everyone.

**James Holland** (2:53)
It's a fascinating period. And I think one of the things that we thought would be good with this one is to sort of set up where the main players are. And the main players at this stage are Britain, France, Germany, and Italy to a certain extent, I suppose. But how much has sort of myth got in the way of the reality? What were their armed forces like? What were their structures? More of the point. What was their kind of, you know, to coin a modern term, what was their resilience like in terms of setting themselves up for the war that was to come? I think one of the other things that I think is really, really interesting about this period is it's a time where almost everybody wants the war to not really get underway. They want it to all go away.
And I would say that literally the one person who is not in that camp is Adolf Hitler. Everyone else. I mean, Ciano and Mussolini are in a complete state of gloom because they know they can't afford a long war and they can't see how they could possibly beat Britain and France. And they can't see how Germany can either, to be perfectly honest. Most of the German commanders can't either. This is the time where Franz Halder, for example, who was the chief of staff of the army and who we talked a lot about in our Barbarossa series, was part of an assassination plot to get rid of Hitler, to avoid the catastrophe that was inevitably going to come if it kicks off of the West. And so, Halder took to keeping a pistol, a loaded pistol in his pocket in case the opportunity arose where he could just shoot the fuhrer on the spot. But he kind of chickens out and he never does it and moves away from all that.
Then you have another assassination temp on Hitler beginning of November and Georg Elser, who on the anniversary of the Beer Hall push, Hitler does a speech and he's got it all primed. He's set up the bomb, it's on a timer switch, it's all going to go boom and all the rest of it. Hitler unexpectedly cut short his speech by 13 minutes and 12 minutes after he's left the building, boom, it goes up and kills seven people and brings a whole lot of others and all the rest of it. So there is quite a lot of feeling in Germany at this time, that if it does kick off of Britain and France, it's going to end in disaster. And Hitler is also at this time, as a backdrop to this post-Poland, is having a go at all his planners, and particularly the army, going, give me a plan to attack the West. We need to attack the West now before they've got too many factories or they've rearm too much and got ready. We need to strike while the arms are hot, all this kind of stuff. So this is all the stuff that's going on, and it's a pretty kind of mental time, to be honest.