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

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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 for more information.

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.