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

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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 for more information.

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/

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 for more information.