The Danger Zone (DZ)

The Danger Zone (DZ)

By Paul FordyceHistory
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The Danger Zone (DZ) episodes

  • DZ Season 051 Part 02. Humanity in War. A Greater Love - To Give Your Life for Your Enemy. Final Part.
    In the Bible Jesus gave us this quote that is often used today, even by unbelievers – 
    John 15:13: Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.Will I think today’s story tops that. Stay tuned and tell me what you think? Am I right?
    Tag words: Greater love has no one than this to lay down one’s life for one’s friends; 30th US Infantry Division; Frau von Reventlow; Stephen Ambrose; Band of Brothers; The Victors. The Men of World War II; Werner Kleeman; Dachau concentration camp; JD Salinger; The Catcher in the Rye; Ernest Hemingway; General Eisenhower; Hürtgen Forest; Battle of Agincourt; Shakespeare; Henry V; 275th Infantry Division; 116th Panzer Division; Russell Weigley; General Courntey Hodges; Friedrich Lengfeld; Wilde Sau; Wild Boar;
    18 min
  • DZ Season 051 Part 01. Humanity in War Me 109 with an easy kill of a B17 Flying Fortress Bomber - Will He Take the Shot?
    On 20 December 1943, so close to Christmas, two men met – in mid-air, in two different aircraft. About 304 metres above the ground. One was a German by the name of Oberleutenant Fritz Stigler, fighter ace, flying a German, an Me-109G fighter, flying for Hitler’s Third Reich and the other was an American, 2nd Lieutenant Charles (Charlie) Brown, flying an American B-17 four engine bomber, well just enough of it left to let you call it a B-17 bomber, with only one engine still working, and most of the crew severely wounded or dead. Charlie Brown’s plane was a sitting duck. With this German fighter next to him there was nothing he could do that could save him or his crew from being blasted out of the sky. What happened next was unbelievable.
    Tag words: Oberleutenant Fritz Stigler; fighter ace; Me-109G fighter; Adolf Hitler; Third Reich; 2nd Lieutenant Charles (Charlie) Brown; American B-17 Flying Fortess bomber; Great War; Lufthansa; Luftwaffe; Gerhard Barkhorn; Richard Bong; Messerschmitt Me 109F; Afrika Korps; North Africa; Jadgeschwader 27; Leutnant Gustav Roedel; Caterpillar Club; 379thBombardment Group; Ken Burns; The War; Focke-Wulf; Ye Olde Pub; Jagdverband 44; Me-262; Knight’s Cross; West Virginia Wesleyan College; Purple Heart; Gathering of the Eagles;
    28 min
  • DZ Season 050 Part 01. Should Dr Mengele (the Angel of Death at Auschwitz) Have Been Honoured with the Nobel Prize for Medicine? First and Final Part.
    Ever wondered why all those hard working Nazi scientists and doctors in the death camps never won a single Nobel Prize for medicine or science among the lot of them. They did so much hard work into all sorts of problems concerning the human body suffering battle injuries and terrible diseases. They were helped by Jews, Russians and all of the other unwilling prisoners who had their lives taken from them for science? You think I’m joking? Well you know that old saying (maybe you don’t) that many a truth is said in jest. If you have a curious mind you won’t want to miss this Danger Zone programme. Stick around.
    Tag words: Nazi scientists; Nobel Prize; Adolf Hitler; Hadamar; Michelle Williams; Golden Globe Award; First World War; Rhineland Bastards; Aryan race; Eugen Fischer; Human Hereditary and Race Hygiene; Mein Kampf; Third Reich; Doctor Sigmund Rascher; Dachau; Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler; Dr Bickenbach; Dr Josef Mengele; Hitlerjugend; Bullenhuser Damm; SS; Keio University in Tokyo; Unit 731; Lieutenant-General Ishii Shiro; Maruta; Bill Bryson; The Body: a Guide for Occupants; Dr Carl Clauberg; Auschwitz; Block 10; German Chamber of Medicine; The Medical Questions in Marine & Winter Emergencies; Dr Karl Gebhart; Dr Fritz Fischer; American Environmental Protection Agency; EPA; Todd Thorslund;
    26 min
  • DZ Season 049 Part 01. What is the name of the Nazi Warship in Service with the US Coast Guard today? First and Final Part.
    In April 1933, Annmarie Kohler, a doctor in the town of Pirna wrote about how ‘fanatical’ the staff at her hospital had become. Kohler said ‘They sit around the radio and when the “Horst Wessel Song” is played … they all stand up and perform the raised-arm Nazi salute.’ That salute became a part of every day life for many German families during the time Hitler was the leader. A letter was sent to the ‘honourable Führer’ from a family in Mannheim in March 1933 which read: ‘Our little Rita would like to send her regards to the Führer with a Heil Hitler! For that reason, we have taken the liberty of enclosing a photo of her performing the German salute. She is ten months old and is the youngest of five. Whenever we show her a picture of Uncle Adolf, she immediately salutes.’
    In this programme I’m going to tell you who Horst Wessel was, and how the US Coast Guard comes to be still operating this very Nazi tall ship today. Stay tuned. So you’ll know the music, called the Horst Wessel.
    Tag words: Annmarie Kohler; Horst Wessel Song; Nazi Party; National Socialism; Adolf Hitler; Rudolf Hess; Horst Wessel; Communist; Red Front; SA; Sturm Abteilung; Sturm Abteilung; Joseph Goebbels; Heinz Neumann; Erna Jaenicke; Ali Höhler; Erwin Rückert; Der Angriff; Horst Wessel Lied; Third Reich; World War 2; Blohm und Voss Shipyard; Bismarck; Parteiadler; Gorch Fock Class; Kaiserliche Marine; Tido Holtkamp; B-17 bombers; Bei Mir Bistu Shein; St Louis Blues; Billi Holliday; Albert Leo Schlageter; swastika; US Coast Guard; Eagle; President Truman; President Nixon; President Kennedy
    30 min
  • DZ Season 048 Part 01. Submarine Stories That You Will Not Believe. First and Final Part.

    On 17 February 1864, as the American Civil War was nearing its end, the USS Housatonic, a sloop of war, was sunk. The Housatonic was on station as part of the Union naval blockade of Charleston harbour, South Carolina – stopping Rhett Butler blockade running. It’s sinking gave it a place forever in military history. The first ship ever sunk by a submarine - the Confederate submarine –the H. L. Hunley, named after its inventor. Unfortunately for the crew, all 8 of them perished. But how? Well the submarine was found in 2000 – about 300 metres from where the Housatonic had gone down.

    When it was recovered the eight man crew were found sitting (their skeletons) at their stations as if nothing had happened. Initially, the discovery of the submarine only deepened the mystery. The crew were seated at their stations along a hand-crank that drove the cigar-shaped craft. They hadn’t attempted to escape when their submarine began to sink. One historian said: “If anyone had survived, they may have tried to release the keel ballast weights, set the bilge pumps to pump water, or tried to get out the hatches, but none of these actions were taken.”
    The crew had suffered no visible injuries, no broken bones and the air hatches were closed. Except for a hole in the conning tower and a small window that may have been broken, the sub was remarkably intact. Speculation about their deaths had included suffocation and drowning but if that had happened they wouldn’t have been found at their posts would they
    In 2017 Dr Rachel Lance and her team, after three years of experiments, at Duke University finally found out how the crew had died. The weapon that this early submarine carried was a copper keg containing about 6kg of gunpowder, which in those days they called a torpedo (same name but very different today) The torpedo was at the end of a 6 metre pole at the front of the submarine. The weapon was delivered by ramming the submarine into the hull of the target ship. The powder charge in the keg would then explode, sinking the ship, as had happened.
    The blast from this explosive barrel created a shock wave great enough to instantly rupture the blood vessels in the lungs and the brains of all of the crew. Dr Lance said: “This is the characteristic trauma of blast victims, they call it ‘blast lung’. You have an instant fatality that leaves no marks on the skeletal remains. Unfortunately, the soft tissues that would show us what happened have decomposed in the past hundred years.”
    So yes they had a submarine in the American Civil War – just the one. Warfare had now taken its first faltering steps to going under the waves.
    In this programme I’m going to talk about submarines, sea monsters, a submarine that was so full of shit that it sank, and how a submarine taught Vladimir Putin how to rule – forever – well until death do him part.
    Tag words: American Civil War; USS Housatonic; Rhett Butler; H. L. Hunley; Dr Rachel Lance; Duke University; Vladimir Putin; sea monster; World War I; Loch Ness monster; Daily Mail; Robert Wilson; Smithsonian Museum of Natural History; HMS Coreopsis; U-Boat; UB-85; Kapitan Günther Krech; Gary Campbell; Thomas Crapper; Sir John Haringon; Queen Elizabeth I; Alexander Cummins; crap; Type VII U-Boat; U-1206; Kapitan Karl-Adolf Schlitt; Kursk; Stalingrad; K-141; Oscar II Class nuclear powered cruise missile carrying submarine; Vladimir Putin; Edward Snowden; Lt. Captain Dimitri Kolesnikov; Mammoet; Northern Fleet; apparatchnik; Communist; George Orwell; Larry King; Nadezhda Tylik; Sergeant Sergei Tylik; Prime Minister Ilya Klebanov; The Intercept; KGB;


    30 min
  • DZ Season 047 Part 01. James Bond, Captain Jack Aubrey, Rambo and Winston Churchill All Rolled Into One. First and Final Part.

    In this Danger Zone - I'm going to introduce you to the man who was James Bond, Captain Jack Aubrey, Rambo and Winston Churchill all rolled Into one. You know his name, but you almost certainly don't know who he really was.

    Tag words: James Bond; Captain Jack Aubrey; Rambo; Winston Churchill; Captain Arthur Phillip; Royal Navy; American Revolution; Botany Bay; Yves-Joseph de Kerguelen; Louis XV; Comte de La Pérouse; Guillotine; King George III; Van Diemen’s land; Major Ross;


    16 min
  • DZ Season 046 Part 01. What Does the London Blitz in World War II Teach Us About Muslim Terrorism? First and Final Part.
    Over the past decade terrorists have killed an average of 21,000 people around the world each year. Global deaths from terrorism over the past decade have ranged from 8,000 in 2010 to a high of 44,000 in 2014. In 2017 terrorism was responsible for 0.05% of global deaths. 95% of terrorist deaths in 2017 were in the Middle East, Africa or South East Asia. In most Western countries terrorism is the cause of less than 0.01% of deaths. In the West there’s widespread public concern about terrorism. More than half of people surveyed have said that they’re worried that they might be a victim. The perception of just how much terrorism is really happening is grossly exaggerated in the West by our traditional media and the even more hysterical and politically driven social media.
    So what is the real ability of terrorism to seriously disrupt a population in a modern Western country? There’s a great story on this exact topic in Malcolm Gladwell’s book “David & Goliath – Underdogs, Misfits and the Art of Battling Giants” and that’s what I’m going to be looking at in this Danger Zone programme.
    Tag words: terrorists; Malcolm Gladwell; David & Goliath – Underdogs, Misfits and the Art of Battling Giants; Things to Come; HG Wells; War of the Worlds; World War II; Battle of Britain; The Blitz; General Franco; Guernica; Picasso; Herman Göring; Battle of Britain; British Foreign Minister Arthur Henderson; Luftwaffe; Winston Churchill; RAF; Handley Page bomber; Wellington Bomber; Adolf Hitler; Sir Basil Liddell Hart; John T. MacCurdy; The Structure of Morale; Nicolaus von Below;
    23 min
  • DZ Season 045 Part 04. Ian Fleming - the Real James Bond? Here Are the Top Two Guesses. Final Part.
    So who was the man, or men, who were the true life inspirations for Ian Fleming’s James Bond? Ian Fleming denied that it was him. The head of British spying operations in the United States, a man known by the code name Intrepid – William Stephenson – said that when Ian Fleming was sent to boot camp he hesitated when he was ordered to kill – so not the stuff of a 00 agent licensed to kill. 
    Bond’s coldness to women, certainly in his books and in his early movies, is definitely Ian Fleming who was severely damaged when the first serious love of his life, and he, broke up.
    I talked about Ian’s brother, Peter, who was an awesomely famous explorer before World War II and a man who played an important part in training and conducting undercover operations in German occupied Europe, but he doesn’t seem to have been the man either. So let’s look deeper into the mystery of who was the true James Bond.
    Tag words: Ian Fleming; James Bond; Patrick Dalzel; Royal Navy; Narvik; Boden; Norway; skøyter; King Haakon VII; Conrad Fulke Thomond O’Brien-ffrench; Maquis of Castelthomond; Royal Canadian Mounted Police; Mountie; Battle of Mons; August Abad; Neu Brandenburg; Cathleen Mann; Sir Mansfield Smith-Cumming; Secret Intelligence Service; MI6; Colonel Stewart Menzies; World War I; Bolshevik Russia; SIS; ST36; Comrade Leo Krassin; Comrade Pieter Ilych Lenin; Prince of Wales; King Edward VIII; Mrs Wallis Simpson; 16th/5thQueen’s Lancers; Maud; Kitzbühel; Austria; Riksgranzen; Lapland; Artic Circle; Nazi Germany; Peter Fleming; Markwert.; Claude Dansey; Auric Goldfinger; Erno Goldfinger; The Man with the Golden Gun; Francisco Scaramanga;
    25 min
  • DZ Season 045 Part 03. Ian Fleming - the Real James Bond? I Need to Tell You About Ernest Cuneo.
    Ian Fleming had seen a lot of behind the scenes of the intelligence organisations of England and the Americans. He’d seen how they operated at the very top. He’d played a key role in helping the Americans to get their intelligence organisation up and running, but now he was going to do his first work in the field.
    Then he had to go to the spy training school where secret agents are taught how to kill, how to blow up bridges and how to do all of those other things you’ve seen in the James Bond movies – this was for real.
    Tag words: Ian Fleming; James Bond; British Security Co-Ordination; William Stephenson; Type B Cipher Machine; Baron Oshima; Adolf Hitler; Pearl Harbour; Admiral Kimmel; Casino Royale; Duexiéme Bureau; Le Chiffre; Baron Ismay; Major-General Sir Colin Gubbins; Lord Beaverbrook; Special Operations Executive; Winston Churchill; Dunkirk; Clementine Churchill; Ernest Cuneo; Wild Bill Donovan; OSS; FBI; J Edgar Hoover; Robert Jackson; Paul McCartney; A.J. Taylor; Camp X; the Farm; McKenzie King; Bickham Sweet-Escott; Ivar Bryce; Goldeneye;
    23 min
  • DZ Season 045 Part 02. Ian Fleming - The Real James Bond? Wild Bill Donovan's Gift to Fleming - 38 Colt Police Positive revolver "For Special Services"
    Where, in the recesses of the mind of Ian Fleming, did James Bond come from? In my last programme I talked about Ian Flemings early days. How he grew up, unsettled, but finally found his niche in intelligence. In this programme I’ll tell you about Ian Fleming’s wartime experiences. The people he worked with including Roald Dahl (the author of children and adult novels), the famous British singer Noel Coward, the greatest 5th Avenue advertising man ever – a Scot by the name of David Ogilvy; the outstanding British rebel of noble birth, a man born to European nobility, whose great grand-father was the founder of the American chemical giant, W.R. Grace & Co, who was tall, dark and handsome to the point of absurdity, he looked like an Aztec prince and was often mistaken for a film star – Ivar Bryce. He was a man of whom Lord Louis Mountbatten, a distant uncle, said “It’s terrible, the advantages he’s had to overcome”. This is a rip-roaring story – the cauldron out of which James Bond steps immaculately in his tuxedo, every hair in place.
    Tag words: Ian Fleming; James Bond; Roald Dahl; Noel Coward; David Ogilvy; Ivar Bryce; W.R. Grace & Co; Lord Louis Mountbatten; William Stephenson; M; Winston Churchill; British Security Co-Ordination; Admiral Godfrey; St Ermin’s Hotel; Pearl Harbour; H.G. Wells; Somerset Maugham; Winnie the Pooh; A.A. Milne; Walter Winchell; Walter Lippmann; Telekrypton ciphering machine; J Edgar Hoover; FBI; President Roosevelt; New Deal; Vincent Astor; Fighting 69th; Wild Bill Donovan; Nazi Germany; Joseph Kennedy; Office of Co-Ordinator of Information; OSS; Office of Strategic Services; 38 Colt Police Positive revolver; For Special Services;
    23 min

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Paul conducts the guided tour at the Australian Armour and Artillery Museum, Cairns every Saturday at 10:30 am. Paul’s tour’s like what Carlsberg says about their beer, probably the best tour of an…