The Danger Zone (DZ)

This series of programmes is all about how war has improved all of our lives. And this programme’s all about how modern heart surgery happened thanks to war and because of one man’s struggle to overcome what, up to and during World War II, was an area of surgery that no right thinking surgeon would do. Heart surgery.

The heart’s an incredible pumping machine. It’s the size of a grapefruit, it beats slightly more than once a second, 100,000 times a day. Depending on how long you live, it can have up to 3.5 billion beats in a lifetime. Your heart pumps out blood with enormous force. If your aorta is severed your heart will send a fountain of blood 3 metres up into the air.

It was only during World War II, and because of one remarkable man, that surgeons began to perform surgery on the heart. Until then it had been a no-go area. After the war, heart surgery was revolutionised.

This is an amazing story.

Tag words: heart surgery; World War II; President Franklin Delano Roosevelt; Joseph Stalin; Winston Churchill; Dwight E Harken; US Army Medical Corps; defribillator; intra-aortic ballon pump; pacemaker; Werner Forssmann; National Socialist Party; Adolf Hitler; Nazi Party; National Socialist German Physicians’ League; Leonard Hayflick; 

Back in the happy days before the white imperialist invaders came to Australia’s shores everyone was happy, healthy and contented. Well maybe I’m exaggerating a bit.

If you weren’t healthy then you would die. A hunter gatherer community, that lived from day to day, needed everybody to be contributing to making their society work.

So if you weren’t healthy, and couldn’t keep up when your clan moved on, then you weren’t of much use and you would soon die.

So life in Australia before the arrival of the English was unforgiving. It takes a society that can farm and produce more than enough for each day, that can store the surplus for the future, to be able to allow people who aren’t contributing to what’s available for everyone to stay alive.

But things weren’t all fun in England at the time when Governor Philip brought the First Fleet to Australia. His job was to set up a small penal colony on the east coast of Australia. Period. He wasn’t a conqueror. He set up the new colony at Sydney Cove, not Botany Bay which had seemed like the place to aim for from Captain Cook’s reports of his first voyage. There were no plans of conquering the continent. The spread of settlers across Australia got totally out of hand. It was the result of individuals who decided that they actually liked living in Australia and would like to make a real go of it. And it was the sheep brought to Australia that made that spreading out from Sydney happen.

For at least half of the people who were left back in England, and probably much more than that, things weren’t in a lot of respects nearly as good as they were for the nomadic Aborigines living in Australia. The Australian aborigines mostly had a warm climate so that they didn’t need heavy clothing to keep them warm for a good part of the year, without which they’d die. Generally the aborigines had a plenty of food. They had a level of medical help that was no better and no worse than what most Europeans living in rural villages had. But things in Europe were on the cusp of a monumental change that would radically alter the balance between living in Europe in the eighteenth century and living in the Australia of 60,000 years before. The industrial revolution.

But even with those changes that the industrial revolution brought, having people live in the crowded European cities of the industrial revolution, with poor to no sanitation, appalling air quality, terrible diet, was having a dramatic effect. It was an effect that it turned out to be one that governments couldn’t ignore. It was because of war and the threat of war that these health and fitness problems were going to be soon addressed and eventually fixed. This is the story of how we all got to have gyms and fitness centres everywhere, good food, and healthy living that took advantage of all of the advances that had been made through the industrial revolution but had not yet delivered better lives to everyone.

Tag words: Second Boer War; British Army; The Committee on Physical Deterioration; Charles Bean; Generals without brains and an army without physique; Field Marshall Haig; Pompey Elliot; Trades Union Congress; Labour Representation Committee; Labour Party; Workers’ Compensation insurance; Karl Marx; Das Kapital; Governor Philip; First Fleet; Sydney Cove; Botany Bay; industrial revolution; Mark Zuckerberg; Yuval Noah Harari; Homo Deus; Rudyard Kipling; Great War;

Human beings have always known about blood. In civilisations since the earliest stone age hunter gatherers until today, too much blood has been spilt. But what we’ve known about blood has, for most of time, been completely wrong. Thank God we finally got it right.

This programme’s about the world that war has made so in this programme I’m going to tell you a bloody good story – which is what war is all about after all – about how we finally got to understand blood and save millions of lives.

Tag words: Shylock; William Shakespeare; Merchant of Venice; Galen; Roman Empire; David Bentley-Hart; Paracelsus; William Harvey; Exercitato Anatomica; Richard Lower; George Washington; Arthur Coda; Royal Society of London; Karl Landsteiner; Carl von Ossietzky; Plasma; Charles Drew; Dr John Beattie; John Scudder; Blood for Britain; Blitz; American Red Cross; Out for Blood; Anastasia Lunquist; Ernie Pyle; Major General Norman T. Kirk; 

War has shaped all of our lives. You may not like it. You might think that war is evil. That war must come to an end. But whatever you think, every day of your life, and throughout every day more than you’d like to think, so many of the things that you do or get the benefit of, have been shaped or come out of war.

Anyway enough of that depressing talk. How about you just go into that coffee shop there and get your starter for the day – a nice cup of coffee. Sit down. Make yourself comfortable. Why not get a croissant – with ham and cheese. Maybe a sweet croissant if that’s more your style.

Why am I talking about croissants? Well the first people who sat down to enjoy a croissant did it because something marvellous had just happened. It was the year 1683 and people were sitting down to try the newest pastry delight. It had been created to celebrate the ending of the danger of the Christian world being conquered by the invading armies of Islam. Until just then it looked like that was going to happen. But thanks to the arrival of the brilliant Polish army, their amazing looking winged hussars, and the armies of the Holy Roman Empire, the army of the Ottoman Empire, commanded by Merzifoniu Kara Mustafa Pasha, was decisively defeated. The threat of Islam to Europe now slowly and forever re-traced its steps back to modern Turkey where they had come from. Their battle standards, the crescent moon, became immortalised in the crescent moon shaped pastry delight of the croissant the same shape that we still enjoy today.

So what else to we have to thank war for? It’s going to take some time to answer that but let me get started.

Tag words: Ottoman Empire; Merzifoniu Kara Mustafa Pasha; Islam; penicillin; Alexander Fleming; Robert Koch; Max von Pettenkofer; cholera; Barry Marshall; Nobel Prize; Howard Florey; Therapuetuic Research Corporation; Boots Pharmaceutical; Glaxo Laboratories; Wellcome Foundation; Adolf Hitler; Albert Einstein; President Franklin Roosevelt; Ernst Chain; Albert Alexander; Mary Hunt; Nazi Germany; Reinhard Heydrich; The Man with the Iron Heart; Himmlers Hirn heißt Heydrich; Himmler’s brain is called Heydrich; Auschwitz; Treblinka; Wannsee; Nazi death camps; Operation Reinhard; Dr Morell; Winston Churchill; D-Day; staphylococuccus aureus; golden staff; bacteria; 

In September 1939, Czechoslovakia was betrayed to Adolf Hitler by the British and the French. It had been done for the most noble of motives, in an effort to avoid another war with Germany. They had thrown Czechoslovakia to the ravenous beast that Adolf Hitler was. It turned out to be rather unsuccessful in avoiding disaster as 60 million people died in World War II rather than a few thousand that might have died if they had instead called Hitler’s bluff. Although it was then more likely that his generals would have removed him in a coup.

It would be 50 years, though, before the Czechs would be able to breath the air of freedom again.

This is the third part in the series on poor Prague. This is the part where the Czechs at last were able to throw off the cruel slavery of Communism and win their independence in what is known as the Velvet Revolution. This is the story of the Velvet Revolution.

Tag words: Czechoslovakia; Adolf Hitler; Prague; Communism; Velvet Revolution; Richard Fidler; The Golden Maze. A Biography of Prague; The Seven Wonders of Czechoslovakia; Prague Spring; Tiananmen Square; Chinese Communist Party; CCP; Lech Walesa; Solidarity Movement; Iron Curtain; East Berlin; Gunter Schabowski; Berlin Wall; Nazi; Gestapo; Red Berets; Martin Schmid; Vaclav Havel; Wenceslas Square; Melantrich building; Marta Kubišová; Long live Marta; Miroslav Stepan; Letna Plain; St Vitus’ Cathedral; Hradcany; St Agnes; Overthrow of Communism; Communist Party; Ladislav Adamsec; Karel Kryl; Karel Gott; Karel Kryl; Alexander Dubcek;

On 8 May 1945, the German commander of Prague, General Rudolf Toussaint, signed an instrument of surrender with the Czech resistance. The deal was that the resistance would let the German armed forces leave the city without being shot at. Toussaint lamented: “Who am I now? A general without an army. All I can do is go home and sit in the ditch and look at the blue sky”.

The next morning a convoy of German armoured vehicles and trucks left the city. One brutal totalitarian regime had left.

That same afternoon a column of the Red Army arrived in the city. The Czechs had just switched one cruel oppressor for another – the Communists. It would be another 44 years before they would win their freedom from that one, with one brief period when a false illusion of hope would lift their spirits, only to be cruelly dashed. This programme looks at that oh so brief period of hope.

Tag words: Prague; General Rudolf Toussaint; Red Army; Prague Technical University; Strahov Dormitory; Leonid Brezhnev; Communist Party; Antonin Novotny; Alexander Dubcek; Hungarian Uprising; Action Programme; Prague Spring; Eastern Bloc; Vasil Bilk; Petro Shelest; Europarty; Shirley Bassey; Goldfinger; Big Spender; Narodni Street; Moody Blues; Mala Strana; Charles Bridge; The Nights in White Satin; Jaroslav Kovaricek; Oldrich Cernik; Warsaw Pact; Czechoslovakia; Hlavka Bridge; Vinoharadska Street; Wenceslas Square; A Prayer for Marta; Marta Kubišová; John Amos Comentus; Velvet Revolution; ABC Radio National; Russian State Symphony Orchestra; Albert Hall; Serendade in E; Dvorák;

Queen Libussa was a legendary witch in central Europe. But you won’t have heard of her. She lived a thousand years ago. One day, in a trance like state, while she was standing on the edge of a cliff, looking down at the River Vltava and the forest on its far side, she spoke a prophecy saying: “I see a great city. Its glory will touch the stars”.

Then she said to one of her courtiers, “In the forest below there is a clearing. There you will find a man making the best use of his teeth at midday. That is the place where this city will be founded.”

The courtier did as the Queen had bade him, descended from the cliff and rode into the forest. There he saw some men. They were building a house but it was midday, so they had taken a break to eat their lunch, (making the best use of t heir teeth as she said) well all except for one man. He was still working, sawing a block of wood. The courtier went up to him and asked: “What are you making?”. He replied: “A threshold for a house”. In the Czech language the word for a threshold is a prah.

Libussa’s prophecy was right. The city that grew up on that sight is today called Prague, in the English, which means threshold - praha.

In these programmes I’m going to tell the story of three very dramatic moments in the life of that great and beautiful city. The misfortune of Czechoslovakia in 1938, was the gift to the world today of one of the great cities of Europe, left intact from the devastation of World War 2. So I should begin my story in 1938 and leave the mystical Queen Libussa on her cliff.

Tag words: Queen Libussa; River Vltava; Prague; Praha; Czechoslovakia; Bohemia; King Wenceslas; Adolf Hitler; President Hindenberg; Edvard Benes; President Woodrow Wilson; Vladimir Putin; Great Depression; Sudetenland; Tatra mountains; Nazis; Konrad Henlein; Lord Halifax; Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain; President Biden; Blum; Edouard Daladier; Josep[h Goebbels; Lord Runciman; Berchtesgaden; Benito Mussolini; Prime Minister Syrovy; Winston Churchill; Ukraine;

In last week’s programme I did the first part of a programme remembering the 60thanniversary of the beginning of Australia’s involvement in the war in Vietnam. A war to stop the brutal Stalinist regime of Ho Chi Minh from taking over the democratic country of South Vietnam.

I was joined for that programme by Gary McKay (now with Mat McLachlan Battlefield Tours), a nasho, who served in Vietnam as a 2ndLieutenant in charge of a rifle platoon. He extended his time in national service so that he could serve with the Australian forces as they withdrew from that country. There is no more dangerous time for soldiers than when they are withdrawing, especially like here when the enemy knows that you are pulling out. Gary became engaged in a fierce battle, the last Australian battle of the Vietnam War, with regular North Vietnamese units on 21 September 1971. By then the 3 battalion task force had been whittled down to 2 battalions, and the Australian tank support had been withdrawn.

4 of the 5 Australian killed were in Gary’s platoon. The Australians expended over 140,000 rounds throughout that contact. Gary was awarded the Military Cross.

Today he conducts battlefield tours of Vietnam (with Mat McLachlan Battlefield Tours), as well as writing many insightful books into that war and other instances of actions by first responders. He is also involved in the never ending battle to get justice for the veterans that fought in that war.

OK let’s push on with the interviewDZ 60th Anniversary of Australia’s Involvement in the Vietnam War 31 July 1962

By the end of World War II, the 125,000 men of Bomber Command weren’t just forgotten but were shunned. There was a deep sense of shame at the devastation that had been inflicted on Germany and its cities by what is called the indiscriminate area bombing campaign. I can understand the mood as being something like I experienced when the war in Vietnam came to an end.

The brave men and women who served Australia and the United States in the Vietnam War became the objects of disgust and even hatred That was to be the fate of the men and women who had served in Bomber Command during World War 2.

It took people of great courage and conviction to bravely battle to turn this thing around and to have the vital achievements of the men of Bomber Command, which made winning World War 2 possible, recognised.

One of the people who was most dedicated to the cause of erecting a lasting monument to the brilliant achievements of Bomber Command, correcting the mistreatment that those men received at the end of World War 2, was the late Robin Gibb of the Bee Gees. He was the president of the memorial’s heritage foundation for many years and a driving force in making the memorial’s realisation happen.

Shortly before his death, Robin Gibb got to visit the nearly complete Bomber Command Memorial in Green Park at the end of Piccadilly near Hyde Park Corner. He scrambled up ladders so he could take the full tour of the 15 metre high Memorial. When he came face to face with the 3 metre high crest emblazoned with the words “Bomber Command Royal Air Force”, the full impact of what he had accomplished hit him. He said:

“This is honestly the proudest thing I’ve ever done. It was so important to finally see the brave airmen who risked their lives every night to fly bombing raids over Germany and shorten the war were finally honoured, and now it is happening. This memorial is bigger than even the Wellington Memorial and will still be here long after we are gone. It will last forever.”

Robin Gibb died from the cancer that had hounded him for many years on 20 May 2012. Just over a month later, on 12 June 2012, the Bomber Command Memorial was formally dedicated by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II commemorating the contribution of the 125,000 aircrew of Bomber Command, including 10,000 Australians and our own Vic Trimble from Mareeba. 57,862 of them died performing this invaluable service, of self sacrifice, as Jesus said no greater love hath a man than to lay down his life for his friends. Just over 46% of all the aircrew died in performing this sacrifice for everyone in the world. Just think of it.

But because of the Christian nation that we live in, forgiveness is at the heart of our values and as the war neared its ends, the people in England and Australia began to see the horrific and extensive damage that Bomber Command inflicted as something to be ashamed of because they were moving to forgiving the Germans for the war.

We need to have a hard look right now at how Bomber Command contributed to winning the war to weigh up for ourselves whether their contribution to the war is a thing to be ashamed of, or to be grateful for.

Tag words: Bomber Command; Robin Gibb; Bomber Command Memorial; Vic Trimble; Albert Speer; D-Day; Richard J Evans; The Third Reich at War; Nazi; Heinrich Himmler; Ludoff von Alvensleben; Herman Göring; Count Ciano; Battle of the Bulge; Abraham; Genesis 22:18; Jesus Christ; God; Quentin Tarantino; Pulp Fiction; Norden bombsight; Judy Nickles;