The Danger Zone (DZ)

The Danger Zone (DZ)

By Paul FordyceHistory
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The Danger Zone (DZ) episodes

  • DZ Season 30 Part 01 Blackbird. First and Final Part.
    In this programme I’m going to share with you the story of the most remarkable plane ever.
    One pilot described this experience during a flight. It was just him and his Reconnaissance Systems Officer. The plane carried a crew of only two. It was a
    moonless night. They were flying at just over 25.5 kilometres altitude. Your average commercial airliner flies at about 3 kilometres. The pilot wondered
    what the sky would look like if he turned off the lighting on his instrument panel. He was amazed to see a bright light outside from his window. It took a few
    moments for his eyes to adjust. What he was looking at was a gleaming thin stripe – the Milky Way. Clusters of sparkling stars. Shooting stars flashed
    across the visible sky every few seconds like a heavenly kind of fire works display. He looked down at his instrument panel again. He didn’t need artificial
    illumination. It was illuminated by the powerful celestial glow outside.
    Despite the fact that he was flying at nearly 3,200 kilometres per hour, the stars of the Milky Way looked to him as if they were standing still. He was humbled in the presence of God Almighty. He was seeing, like only a handful of us will ever see, the living proof of Psalm 19 – “The heavens declare the glory of God”.
    And all of this from a plane that had had its design start in the 1950s by a man who had created the legendary P-38 Lockheed Lightning twin tailed World War II fighter, the F104 Starfighter and the U-2 spy plane – Kelly Johnson. The name of the plane. Well for now you’re going to have to guess.
    Tag words:
    Blackbird SR-71; Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum; President Reagan; F-111 Fighter Bombers; Brian Shul; Gary Powers; U-2; Safronov; Order of the Red Banner; Mikhail Gorbachev; Pratt & Whitney J58 engines; BF Goodrich; US Air Force; F-18 Hornet; P-38 Lockheed Lightning; Kelly Johnson; F-5; SR-72;
    Son of Blackbird;
    ;
    20 min
  • DZ Season 029 Part 01 Whose World War II? Who Won? Who Really Won? First and Final Part.
    In a weak moment, of sympathy for the German Führer, Adolf Hitler, that he had been dealt with too harshly by history for killing a mere six million Jews and many millions of Poles and others, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the famous Soviet dissident who spent many years in Stalin’s gulags, commented that Stalin killed many times the number of people that Hitler had, and most of them were his fellow Russians. And there is scarcely a word said against him.
    Hitler again got all of the attention for starting World War II, but is that fair? Historian Sean McMeekin, in his book “Stalin’s War”, says that World War II should be more fairly seen as starting in 1931 and ending in 1989 when the Soviet military occupation of Eastern Europe finally came to an end. Well that’s not strictly true. North Korea is still occupied by a regime that Stalin imposed on it. The same with Vietnam, at a stretch. The man who should get most of the credit for bringing about the Second World War, and then gaining the most from it, was Joseph Stalin. All Stalin lost was maybe 25 million people, and what does that matter in the grand scheme of things. What Sean McMeekin has to say makes a lot of sense and I’m going to share his thoughts with you in this programme.
    Tag words: Stalin’s War; Sean McMeekin; World War II; Adolf Hitler; Joseph Stalin; Russian Empire; Czars; Winston Churchill; Roosevelt; Pearl Harbour; Chiang Kai-Shek; Operation Barbarossa; Battle of Khalkin Gol; Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto; Matsuoka; Hans Krebs;
    23 min
  • DZ Season 028 Part 04 The Maddest Man of WW2. Could the British Ambassador to Washington be Trusted? Maybe he was a Nazi Spy. Final Part.

    One question you have to ask about the famous 1950s/1960s ad man, David Ogilvy, the greatest advertising man the world has ever seen, the first among the so-called “Mad Men” as they were labelled in the recent TV series about the Madison Avenue advertising industry, is what was he up to spying on the British

    Ambassador, his own boss, in Washington DC. Was David a double agent for the Nazis? That and many other questions will be answered in this programme – in
    fact I can guarantee you that by the time you get to the end of this programme you’ll be curiously refreshed. If you want to know what that means you’re going
    to have to listen.

    Tag words: David Ogilvy; Mad Men; William Stephenson; British Security Co-Ordination; Ian Fleming; James Bond; Road Dahl; Charlie and the Chocolate Factory; James and the Giant Peach; Noel Coward; Madison Avenue; Viscount Halifax; Mahatma Gandhi; Luftwaffe; Herman Göring; Joseph Goebbels; Adolf Hitler; Berchtesgaden; Neville Chamberlain; Winston Churchill; Benito Mussolini; Intrepid; Confessions of an Advertising Man; Gallup; Jennett Conant; Irregulars; Schweppes Tonic Water; Joan Alexander; Ethiopian Baptist Church; Chateau de Touffou; Sir Martin Sorrell;

    23 min
  • DZ Season 028 Part 03 The Maddest Man of WW2. Using Opinion Polls to See if Roosevelt Would Win.

    I remember, like it was only yesterday, when all the young people, the Millennials, were attacking Donald Trump as president. These cool people wanted to change the world. They were rightly sick up to their teeth with our world being run by old white guys. With the presidential elections coming it was time to make a millennial shift, so to speak, and make a revolutionary changing of the guard. So now that the American elections are over they got their way. They replaced Donald Trump, a 74 year old white guy, with Joe Biden, a 77 year old white guy – who somehow doesn’t meet the offensive and unacceptable offence of being an old white guy. You know I just had it in my mind that they were looking for something else than what they ended up with. Obviously I misunderstood what their goal was and honestly I still haven’t got it.

    But what about those polls? What was going on there? How did they get it so wrong? Or did they get it wrong?

    Sorry, you might be having trouble keeping up. I’m not talking now about the 2020 US presidential elections, I’m talking about the polls that were conducted in 1944 on the questions of who would be the next president and who would be the vice-president.

    But you know the really scary thing! A lot of the lessons from the 1944 US Presidential election are pretty well identical to the lessons from the 2020 elections – 76 years later.

    Anyhoo – Joe Biden always struck me as being a cool white rapper. He has a lot in common with Eminem – and I guess that was why Joe Biden used one of his song for his election campaign – it fitted him like a glove.

    Tag words: David Ogilvy; Mad Men; the Great Depression; Gallup polls; British Security Co-Ordination; William Stephenson; Rockefeller Foundation; Public Opinion Research Project; Opinion Research Division; Intrepid; Camp X; Nazis; Standard Oil; IG Farben; Dow Chemical; CIA; OSS; Tom Dewey; Roald Dahl; Vice-President Wallace; Charles Marsh; Dewey; Gerard B Lambert; Roosevelt; Nicholas Konstantin Roerich; Harry S Truman; Isaiah Berlin; Irving Berlin; Lord Halifax;

    24 min
  • DZ Season 028 Part 02 The Maddest Man of WW2. David Ogilvy Becomes a British Spy - Spying on America.
    David Ogilvy would become the greatest ad man in history after the end of World War 2 – but in 1940, as England goes into an unequal struggle with Nazi Germany he has to succeed at his toughest, most important assignment ever – he has to convince Americans to help arm England so that it can defend itself, and an even bigger challenge for him, if he can, he has to get America to join the war against Nazi Germany. As a spy for England working in America these would be the most important things he ever did which hardly anyone would know about. But before the war started David Ogilvy was going to Hollywood with Dr Gallup to help the movie studios better serve their audiences.
    Tag words: Dr Gallup; RKO Radio Pictures; Walt Disney; Snow White; Cary Grant; Katherine Hepburn; Bringing Up Baby; Anne of Green Gables; David Ogilvy; Hollywood; The Little Minister; Sylvia Scarlett; William Randolph Hearst; Citizen Kane; Orson Wells; Joseph Kennedy; Prohibition; President Roosevelt; Public Opinion Research Project; British Security Co-ordination; William Stephenson; His Majesty’s Secret Service; The Confessions of an Advertising Man; Rolls Royce Silver Cloud II; Apple; The Merriam-Webster Dictionar; snail mail; Jennet Conan; The Irregulars; Roald Dahl; Charlie and the Chocolate Factory; James and the Giant Peach; Gerard B Lambert;
    28 min
  • DZ Season 028 Part 01 The Maddest Man of WW2. David Ogilvy- Goes to America and Invents the Gallup Poll.
    In 2007 a new TV series went to air – “Mad Men”. It was called Mad Men because it was about the, mostly, men in the advertising industry on Madison Avenue. The series was the creation of Matthew Weiner. He’d been one of the writers on the The Sopranos series. The other actors in the series were unknowns. Jon Hamm was the first amongst them.
    Mad Men had a slow start. The first season wasn’t popular with the audiences. But importantly it was popular with the critics – who says critics never do anything good! It picked up the Golden Globes for the Best Drama Television Series, the Best Actor (Jon Hamm). That year it also picked up a total of six other awards. Those successes got the series into the public eye.
    Springing from those successes the series went on to another 6 seasons. It’s success let AMC, the production company that made the series, produce other hugely popular series like “Breaking Bad”, “The Walking Dead” and “Better Call Saul”.
    The advertising industry on Madison Avenue owes its existence to the maddest man of all. The maddest man in World War 2. A Scotsman by the name of David Ogilvy. His career came from the vital work he did as a spy for England in World War 2. He worked with Ian Fleming (the creator of James Bond), Roald Dahl (famous children’s author – think “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”) and a man called Intrepid (the code name for William Stephenson) – that’s who these Danger Zone programmes are all about.
    Tag words: David Ogilvy; Confessions of an Advertising Man; Madison Avenue; Charles Lutwidge Dodgson; Lewis Carroll; Through the Looking Glass; Jennet Conant; The Irregulars; Oxford University; Fettes College; Keith Feiling; Great Depression; Aga stoves; C.F. Hathaway Company; Ellerton Jetté; Lewis Douglas; President Roosevelt; Baron George Wrangell; Dr Gallup; Arrow Shirts; Ethel Barrymore: Ruth Gordon; Harpo Marx; Katherine
    Hepburn
    21 min
  • Season 027 Part 01 DZ Treblinka. First and Final Part.
    In the last week of July 1944 units of the Red Army’s 1st Byelorussian Front overran the abandoned site of an SS Death Camp known as Treblinka – more
    precisely the Germans called it Treblinka II. Treblinka I was a labour camp for people that were not to be exterminated on arrival.
    Vasily Grossman, a non-practising Jew, was with these Red Army units. He is the outstanding Russian novelist of the 20th Century. He served throughout
    the whole war, known to us as World War II but to the Russians as the Great Patriotic War, as a journalist on the Krasnaya Zvedzda (The Red Star).
    It was the official newspaper of the Red Army. But it was also read widely in the Soviet Union by a people anxious to know what was happening in the war.
    When the Russians arrived at Treblinka II they found forty survivors from the Camp. The Camp had been shut down in August 1943. There was no-one who could get eye-witnesses to tell their story like Vasily Grossman could. He immediately interviewed the survivors to learn what they could tell him about what had happened here when it was operating. One mystery that puzzled him was how 800,000 Jews could have been exterminated in a camp which only had an SS staff of 25 men. He found the shocking answer to that question.
    He called his account of Treblinka “The Hell Called Treblinka”. It was later quoted to the Nuremburg International Military Tribunal that tried the top Nazis for war crimes. What I am about to tell you from this article is the most shocking thing that I have ever read. You may prefer not to continue listening. It’s a story that needs to be told for the new generations that do not believe or understand the depths that human beings descended to during the time that this Death Camp operated. It’s a story that people of the generation born during or after the war have probably never heard before as well – it is nothing like what happened at Auschwitz – it is much more shocking.
    Tag words: Vasily Grossman; Treblinka; Death Camp; Warsaw Ghetto; Sukhomil; Zepf;
    26 min
  • DZ Season 026 Part 02 The Night They Burned Tokyo Down - Atomic Bombs Are Nothing Compared to this! Final Part.
    During World War 2, the giant DuPont company in America had developed a new house paint. The problem for DuPont was that the paint would spontaneously burst into flames.
    The flaming culprit in the paint was a substance which was a left over residue once all of the oil had been extracted – a chemical called divinylacetelyne. Perfect. Normally for many products the left overs are what you throw away, dispose of, but one of the great things about oil is that from its leftovers we get so many amazingly usable products – like plastic that saved whales from extinction in the 1800s. Back then the bone from whales, called baleen, had many of the properties of plastic. Plastic made from oil extracts was far better all round than the baleen from whales. Since the baleen wasn’t need any longer, vast
    amounts of plastic could be produced from oil residue. With the population of the world growing, all of the whales would have been hunted to extinction and
    there would never have been enough baleen anyway. Plastic was cheaper and available in whatever quantities you needed.
    The DuPont company’s chemical, divinylacetelne was good for burning but the scientists found that they could improve dramatically on that. They came up with something better. They found that if you mixed gasoline with aluminium naphthalene plus aluminium palmitate you got a really killer inflammable, weaponizable, substance. That name was way too big to use everyday though, something shorter was needed. So they took the na from naphthalene and the palm from palmitate and you’ve got – ta da napalm.
    And the new commander of the XXIst Bomber Group was going to be able to put this to good use.
    Like Lt-Col Bill Kilgore says in Apocalypse Now - he loved the smell of napalm in the morning.
    Admiral Isoroku Yamamto, the brilliant Japanese admiral, who had planned the attack on Pearl Harbour but warned the Japanese leaders who ordered him to plan that attack, that after launching that attack, which he reluctantly planned, "I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve."
    He had lived for many years in the United States and knew what the Americans were capable of. He knew what he was talking about.
    Even before the war began, while the planning and practice for the attack at Pearl Harbour was under way, he made another comment: “Tokyo will probably be burnt to the ground.” These were prophetic words.
    Tag words: tatami; Dugway Proving Ground; Antonin Raymond; thermite incendiary; General Hansell; Twenty First Bomber Group; Curtis Le May; B-29; Operation Meetinghouse; Hosea 8:7; General Stonewall Jackson; Tokyo; napalm; United States Strategic Bombing Survey; General Lauris Norstad; Henry
    Stimson; Conrad Crane; General Douglas MacArthur;
    22 min
  • DZ Season 026 Part 01 The Night They Burned Tokyo Down. Bombing Japan from a loooooong way away.
    I’m guessing a lot of you have heard of the DuPont company. They make all sorts of paints, amongst other things. A lot of you people have probably had your house painted using DuPont paint.
    In the early 1940s, DuPont had this new paint that they were working on. They were using an additive made from a by-product of oil, waste called divinylacetylene. They mixed it with a pigment which made the paint dry into a tough, thick adhesive.
    It was great. There was really only one tiny problem with their new paint. Not a killer selling point – in fact it was quite the opposite. After the paint had
    been applied to a surface, it had an unfortunate tendency to burst into flames. I think I can safely say, even without engaging expert product/sales research
    people that not many people want to use a paint that will burn their house down.
    In this programme I’m going to talk about that paint. Turns out that it was better than the atomic bomb and how!
    Tag words: Pearl Harbour; Albert Einstein; Adolf Hitler; Nazi Germany; B17 Flying Fortress; Wright Brothers; Manhattan Project; President Roosevelt; B29 Superfortress; Enola Gay; Twenty First Bomber Group; Haywood Hansell; American Army Air Force; General Lauris Norstad; DuPont
    22 min
  • DZ Season 025 Part 01 Chamberlain at Munich. Gullible? Cowardly? Human? Genius? First and Final Part.
    I’ve done a programme before based on a book by Ben MacIntyre called “The Spy and the Traitor” – a true story about the most important spy who defected to the West from the Soviet Union. He leaked information to the West that probably averted an all-out nuclear war.
    Ben has also written a number of other true life books about spies and spying, in World War II and in the Cold War. So I was interested to see that he’d written an article for The Times newspaper about the Munich Agreement that the British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, with French Prime Minister Daladier negotiated with mediation by the Italian Fascist leader, Benito Mussolini in September 1938. The newspaper article was prompted by a movie on Netflix about Neville Chamberlain and this incident. The movie’s called “Munich: The Edge of War”.
    Ben McIntyre concludes that Chamberlain wasn’t taken in by Hitler – well not entirely. He says that England wasn’t prepared for war at that time. Following Munich, MacIntyre tells us that Chamberlain took steps to speed up the rearmament of England. He brought in conscription, doubled the size of the Territorial Army, ordered more bombers and created the Ministry of Supply, to co-ordinate the provision of equipment for all three branches of the armed forces. Ben summed his point of view up by paying this tribute to what Chamberlain had achieved by averting war in September 1938:
    “The Britain that faced Germany in September 1939 was far better prepared for war than it had been a year earlier”. All of this seems to have some merit but there were other things that made all of those points seem to me to be of small consequence compared to what Chamberlain had given away at Munich. I'm going to test that against the evidence.
    Tag words: Neville Chamberlain; Adolf Hitler; Herman Goring; Sudetenland; Czechoslovakia; Tatra mountain range; Luftwaffe; high octane ethyl petrol; American Standard Oil; tetra-ethyl lead; Chief of the German Army General Staff Ludwig Beck; General Franz Halder; General Erwin von Witzleben; Things to Come; HG Wells; Guernica; Sir Basil Liddell Hart; Munich Treaty;
    18 min

About The Danger Zone (DZ)

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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…