The Danger Zone (DZ)

He was 38 years old when he was born in 1953. He never ages. He never loses. Like Dr. Who he’s continuously being reborn – in body and mind as he moves effortlessly through the passing decades since the movie Dr No was released in 1963.

Was this fictional character modelled on a real person. Is that even possible? Perhaps he’s a composite of more than one person. Or is he just pure fiction?

Let’s go into the world of national and international interests, where the highest stakes imaginable is the only game in town that he plays in. And danger is ever present. In this series of programmes I’ll reveal all and the creator of James Bond, Ian Fleming.

Tag words: Dr Who; James Bond; Ian Fleming; Salman Rushdie; The Satanic Verses; Ayatollah Khomeini; fatwa; Muslims; Cat Stephens; Yusuf Islam; Peace Train; Chitty Chitty Bang Bang; Enid Blyton; Valentine Fleming; Queen’s Own Oxfordshire Hussars; Distinguished Service Cross; Winston Churchill; Eton; Oxford University; Peter Fleming; Grenadier Guards; World War II; Daniel Craig;  Casino Royale; David Niven; Peter Sellers; Woody Allen; Sandhurst military academy; Kitzbühel; Ernan Forbes-Dennis; Reuters; Bernard-Rickatson-Halt; Stalin; Rowe and Pitman; Rear Admiral John Godfrey; Sir Reginald “Blinker” Hall; Naval Intelligence; Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve; M; Admiral Darlan; Captain Cedric Holland; Charles de Gaulle; King Zog of Albania; Bletchley Park; Alan Turing; Enigma code machines;

This programme is a true story that you probably have never heard before. And what a story it is! In 1940, after Hitler had invaded Poland and England and France had declared war on Germany, England and France were about to enter into a war with Russia. Given that there was no differences that matter between how evil Nazi Germany was, and how evil Communist Russia was, this would have made a lot of sense. What the British and the French were planning would have drastically altered the course of World War II. Now, pull up a chair, or just keep driving around, for the next hour, and I’ll tell you exactly how this almost happened.

Tag words: Vladimir Putin; Nazi Germany; Communist Russia; Finland; Phoney War; Anglo-French Supreme War Council; Field Marshall Edmund Ironside; Joseph Stalin; Vozhd; René Massigli; Mao Zedong; Lavrenty Beria; Oshtashkov; NKVD; Vasily Blokhin; Katyn massacre; Édouard Daladier; Neville Chamberlain; Hugh Macphail; Lockheed 14 Super Electra; Casablanca; Ilsa Lund; Ingrid Bergman; Victor Laszlo; Paul Henried; Ugarde; Peter Lorre;Cloudy Joe; Royal Air Force; Alan “Tubby” Dixon; Blenheim Mk IV bombers; Middle East Command; Batumi oil fields; Adolf Hitler; General von Manstein; Heinz Guderian; Hamilton Fish III;

Shock & awe – words we came to know in March 2003 with Operation Desert Fox. A revolutionary new military tactic using revolutionary new weapons. But were the shock & awe tactics new or had they been around for a long time.

Let me illustrate my point from long long ago – about 480BC. The great Chinese military strategist, Sun Tzu, found one technique for achieving this which he recommended to his emperor. The emperor asked him if it would work on women. He said it would. So the emperor told Sun Tzu to prove his point by turning his concubines into a precision marching troop.

At Sun Tzu’s request the emperor had the concubines summoned before him. Sun Tzu told them that they would now be trained to be a military marching troop. They laughed at him. He had the head concubine beheaded. He asked again. The ladies still laughed at him. The next most senior concubine was beheaded. Before you knew it the concubines had been turned into one fine precision marching drill team. Beheading people to inspire fear and submission was the idea that he had been promoting to the emperor. He’d made his point.

So it was that in 2003 the Americans updated Sun Tzu’s tactics with a metaphorical style of beheading of their own – the launching of their high tech aerial attack on Baghdad on 19 March 2003 - a prelude to the beginning of Operation Desert Fox. In this programme I’m going to be talking about what could have been Hitler’s war winning shock and awe.

Tag words: Shock & awe; Operation Desert Fox; Sun Tzu; Adolf Hitler; Lancaster Bomber; Boeing B-17; V-1; Hanna Reitsch; Nazi Germany; Nuremburg Rally; 1936 Berlin Olympic Games; Triumph of the Will; Olympia; Leni Riefenstahl; Professor Focke; Me-163 Komet; Me-262; Robert Ritter von Greim; Herman Göring; German Blitz; Peenemünde; Bletchley Park; Dr R.V. Jones; Werner von Braun; V-2; Cruewell; von Thoma; General Ismay; Bodyline Committee; Crossbow Committee; Lord Cherwell; Winston Churchill; Third Reich; General Walter Dornberger; NASA; National Medal of Science; Apollo series;

Who, or what, was responsible for killing more Nazi officers than died in active combat? This is a fascinating and incredible story. It involves Adolf Hitler, who avoided the death that so many German officers suffered from this cold-blooded killer even though he was a number of times in its sites. Ferdinand Porsche comes into this story too amongst others. Stay tuned because you won’t want to miss this one.

Tag words: Nazi; Adolf Hitler; Hans Ledwinka; Paul Jaray; Erich Übelacker; Zeppelins; Hindenberg; Steyr; Tatra; Czechoslovakia; T11; T77; T87; Ferdinand Porsche; T77a; Christa Schroeder; Volkswagen; KdF-Wagen; Kraft durch Freude; John Steinbeck; Jay Leno;

I guess like me you often find yourself lying awake in bed, wondering what the world would be like today if Adolf Hitler, instead of answering the call to be the saviour of Germany (a job he ended up doing really badly) had decided to follow his natural bent for comedy and had instead become a stand up comedian.

In this Danger Zone programme I’m going to look at the jokes that Hitler told, and the jokes that Hitler was told that had him holding his sides, convulsing with laughter and struggling not to pee himself.

Tag words:

The attack on Pearl Harbour had not been the success the Japanese needed. In the modern war that was shaping up in the Pacific aircraft carriers were the key weapons. For the Japanese mastermind of Pearl Harbour, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, he needed to finish what he‘d started. If he didn’t he knew that the war was lost. So now the stage was set for a number of key players, who very likely would have been visitors to Cairns depending on how things worked out for Yamamoto, to tangle with each other - - in a struggle for life and death. Victory and defeat.

On the American side the important men were Admiral Frank Fletcher and Rear Admiral Aubrey B Fitch.

On the Japanese side it was Admiral Takagi.

In this Danger Zone, I’m going to tell you about this struggle for our freedom that took place in May 1942 in the Coral Sea – not too many kilometres away from Cairns.

Tag words: Pearl Harbour; Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto; Admiral Frank Fletcher;Rear Phelps Admiral Aubrey B Fitch; Admiral Takagi; World War II; Battle of Midway; Battle of the Coral Sea; Port Moresby; Shokaku; Zuikaku; bombing of Darwin; Ceylon; Carrier operations; Shoho; Yorktown; Port Moresby; Admiral Crace; HMAS Hobart; Lexington; Lady Lex; New Guinea; USS Sims; Neosho; Combat Air Patrol; USS Phelps; Admiral Nimitz; Lt. Cmdr. H. J. Pfingstag; Paul Allen; Bill Gates;

On 12 September 1918 a tank attack was led by Colonel George S. Patton – the legendary leader of American tank forces in France in World War II. Patton was just a young colonel in World War I. He walked along the top of American trenches, with an American infantry brigade sensibly taking shelter in their trenches. Sensible because a creeping German artillery barrage was moving their way. Patton commented that the commanding general of those infantry, General Douglas MacArthur, was standing on a small hill near him. Patton walked over to him and together they stood watching the enemy artillery explosions as they came closer … and closer. Patton wrote that he thought both of them wanted to take cover but didn’t want to show fear in the presence of the other. One shell exploded close to them covering them in dirt. Patton remained standing but visibly flinched. MacArthur said to him: “Don’t worry Colonel. You never hear the one that gets you.” Patton wrote to his family that he thought MacArthur was the bravest man he’d ever met.

So let’s find out how MacArthur came to be staying at Room 80 at the Hides Hotel in Cairns?

Tag words: Colonel George S Patton; General Douglas MacArthur; Bataan Peninsula; Corregidor; Philippines; President Roosevelt; World War II; Tokyo Rose; PT boat; Mindanoa; B-17 bomber; Arthur MacArthur; Jean MacArthur; Del Monte; Trans Australian Airways; TAA; DC-3; Alice Springs; Darwin; Australian Army; Terowie Railway Station; Adelaide; Melbourne; I shall return; Kooinga; Dick Marshall; Spencer Street station; Menzies Hotel; Trustees Executive & Agency Co Building; Supreme Commander South West Pacific Area; Victoria Barracks; General Brett; Hides Hotel; General George C Kenney; Allied Air Forces Southwest Pacific Area; corn cob pipe; Cairns; General Gordon Bennett;

The Emperor Napoleon has an important connection with Cairns, and there are some other interesting ones he has with Australia too. In this programme I’m going to tell you about both, and where you can go and see the large, unmissable relic from Napoleon in Cairns.

Tag words: Emperor Napoleon; Boney; Betsy Balcombe; Elba; Treaty of Fontainbleau; Louis XVIII; Colonel Neil Campbell; Lord Castlereagh; Charles Dickens; David Copperfield; Benjamin Franklin; For the want of a nail the shoe was lost; Louis XVI; French Revolution; Congress of Vienna; St Helena; l’Inconstant; HMS Partridge; Golfe-Juan; Marshal Ney; bring Napoleon back to Paris in a cage; Grenoble; Vive l’Empereur; Waterloo; HMS Swiftsure; Great Barrier Reef; Ben Cropp; HMAS Cairns; William Balcombe; Cinques Bouteille; Sir Hudson Lowe;

The 20th Century, from about 1949, when the Soviet Union detonated its own atomic bomb, made using stolen intellectual property from the American Manhattan Project, with the help of some of the scientists who worked on that project and were spies for the Soviet Union, until 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed, the world lived in fear of a nuclear holocaust. This fear was not based on theoretical scientific models, not based on dubious assumptions, like climate change, this was based on the real fact that the it was known that the number of nuclear warheads in the world, if they were all used at the one time, would wipe out every human on the planet many times over – although as the title to the 1967 Jams Bond movie tells us, that would be more than enough because “You Only Live Twice”.

In my last programme I talked about nuclear war and how the world changed because of it. But since the 1980s, when the IBM Peanut was first launched into the world, the first desktop computer mass produced by a major company, the software powering those computers has gotten smarter and smarter, now coupled with the internet and cloud computing etc. Today we depend on them for almost everything. Which means that if you can attack key computers, you can come really close to winning a war without needing to use too much weaponry, and certainly not nuclear weapons. Although there’s a catch there that still make nuclear weapons something you have to take into the equation if you’re fancying trying to win a cyber war.

So how would a Third World Cyber War play out? Until it’s fought no one’s going to know. World War I and World War II weren’t anything like the experts had predicted.

One possible answer to that question is found in the fictional account of how a cyber war could run written by two cyber warfare experts.

One of the hottest selling books amongst the top level people at the Pentagon since 2016 has been “Ghost Fleet” written by PW Singer and August Cole. They’re both experts in cyber warfare and consultants to the US government and military at the very highest levels. So when they imagined a cyber World War III, it is worth everyone’s time to sit up and take notice and to consider the way that such a war could be fought, based on their expertise.

Some of the things that happen in the book seem incredible, seem like it has to be a work of the wildest science fiction, but it’s not. Every trend and technology discussed in the book is real – and it either already exists or is being developed right now.

So let me share with you how Singer and Cole see World War III happening. Some glimpses from their novel. If you’re really interested, get the book.

The Chinese are the bad guys and they’re called the Directorate – you need to read the book to understand why.

Tag words: Soviet Union; atomic bomb; Manhattan Project; IBM Peanut; Ghost Fleet; PW Singer; August Cole; the Directorate; COIL; Chemical Oxygen Iodine Laser; Chinese Communist Party; CCP; F-35 Raptor stealth fighter; micro-chips; KC-135; Davis-Monthan Air Force; Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles; ICBMs; Clive James;

What’s World War III going to look like? Not that I want to see.

It’s not going to look like anything we’ve ever seen before. One of the hottest selling books amongst the top level people at the Pentagon since 2016 has been “Ghost Fleet” written by PW Singer and August Cole.

These guys aren’t the writers of your typical boy/man political/war thrillers, like Tom Clancy’s “Red Storm Rising”.

Singer is a consultant to the US military, the intelligence community and even Hollywood (maybe that counts for more than the other two). Just kidding, most stuff that comes out of Hollywood, as far as authenticity is concerned, is absolute rubbish.

Singer’s top selling non-fiction book is “Wired for War”. It’s about the robotics revolution and how warfare is likely to develop in this century.

August Cole, the co-writer for Ghost Fleet, is a writer, analyst and consultant, and was a former defense industry reporter for the prestigious Wall Street Journal. He’s also a senior fellow with the Atlantic Council – a think tank that looks at our world at the international level, and how things will develop. Cole’s focus is on exploring the future of warfare.

In their novel, “Ghost Fleet”, they look at how they imagine World War III could start and how that war would be fought.

It’s a terrifying story. I’ll be talking about that in this and my following programme.

Tag words: World War III; Ghost Fleet; PW Singer; August Cole; Tom Clancy; Red Storm Rising; Wired for War; Stanley Kubrick; Dr Strangelove; George C. Scott; General “Buck’ Turgidson; Peter Sellers; Merkin Muffley; Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper; B-52; Cuban Missile Crisis; President Kennedy; Curtis Le May; Hiroshima; Nagasaki; Apocalypse Never; Michael Shellenberger; Victor Weisskopf; Neil Bohrs; NATO; Warsaw Pact; John Lewis Gaddis; Kenneth Waltz; Robert Oppenheimer;