Conflict of Interest | Series 2

James Taylor: This is Conflict of Interest from Imperial War Museums.

Clip: The attention of an anxious world is focused on East and West Germany and Berlin. From now on crossings into free Berlin will be will be fugitive affairs.

Russell Tovey: I am Russell Tovey and I am an actor. You might see my face on various BBC dramas, like Years And Years or Being Human. Google me, you'll find it.

Paris Agar: So I'm Paris Agar. I'm a senior curator here and I'm part of the Cold War and late 20th century conflict team.

James Taylor: Russell has joined Paris at the Imperial War Museum London to try and understand one of the most important and symbolic structures of the Cold War, the Berlin War.

Clip: I take pride in the words Ich bin ein....

James Taylor: Stasi, the GDR, checkpoint Charlie, the iron curtain just some of the words associated with this place, which holds momentous significance in conflict history, but how are they all connected and how much further does the story go. On our way, we'll explore iconic items from the museum's collection and meet someone with in depth knowledge of the moment the wall came down.

John Kampfner: You had these young border guards, they had their rules. But what happens when nobody's abiding by the rules for the first time in your life, you've never seen it before in your, in your life, you have no idea what to do. Just imagine if one person had done the wrong thing.

James Taylor: So that we all can, for at least one moment in time, understand what happened, when, and how it was allowed to happen. All this in under an hour. I'm James Taylor and this is conflict of interest. Cappuccinos in hand, we begin in the Imperial War Museum's Cafe. Where Paris and Russell are thrust together to find out what Russell already knows.

Paris Agar: When you think of the Berlin WaLL,

James Taylor: yeah.

Paris Agar: What comes to mind?

Russell Tovey: Right, I, I remember the war coming down. I remember being a kid. I was born in 1981. I remember David Hassel half singing On The Top Of It, and half of the people around me thinking that was cool and half the people thinking that was odd. And Mikhail Gorbachev, I remember as a kid again, mainly on a spitting image but on the, on the news of this port wine birthmark stain, he had a bald head and he had this big kind of, it looked like the USSR on his head. And I just remember, you know, I'm obsessed with art. I just remember all the graffiti or the artwork and how fascinating inspiring that was and the stories about towers, refugees, political lines. Checkpoint Charlie. That's something that always kind of is a tourist destination now, but something that felt like it was really, uh, important. Um, Kreisberg for some reason.

Paris Agar: Yes. Yeah.

Russell Tovey: Trabants the cars, I think. Yeah. What else?

Paris Agar: Yeah, I feel like you know a lot more then I thought you might.

Russell Tovey: Right. Okay.

Paris Agar: No, that's very, very impressive. Okay. We'll actually cover a lot of the words you've just said.

Russell Tovey: Okay, great

Paris Agar: in the rest of this podcast,

James Taylor: Paris and Russell begin their ascent of the museum across the galleries past rockets and spitfires. And much like the objects around them, they mean business.

Russell Tovey: Now you ask me about what I know. So Germany lost the war, the allies. So that'd be UK, America, France, and then you had the Soviet Union being Russia. Uh, former USSR. They all had claim over Germany because they had all collaborated in bringing Germany down, right?

Paris Agar: They were working together to overthrow the Nazi regime. They put theological differences aside

Russell Tovey: aside, right

Paris Agar: and then obviously this came to the fore once their mutual enemy was overthrown.

Russell Tovey: So how come there was a decision that they would say, you have this part of Germany and we have this part. Who decided that and why was that so simple?

Paris Agar: Yeah, it seems simple to us now, but actually it was a lot of long conversations, actually. A lot, a lot of it took place at what's what's called the Potsdam Conference. So this is a conference that happened at the end of the second World War where all of the allies were represented, and they came together and decided how Europe essentially was going to be divided amongst the victorious Nations. So West Germany became known as the Federal Republic of Germany or the FRG. And that was controlled by Britain, by the United States and by France.

Russell Tovey: Mm-Hmm.

Paris Agar: And then you had East Germany, which is known as the GDR. That was a, a satellite state of the Soviet Union and then Berlin itself was deeply within East Germany itself, divided between those Nations.

James Taylor: Russell and Paris arrive at the first object of the day where they interrogate these early divisions a little more carefully.

Russell Tovey: We are looking at a sign now, which is a rusty black sign, a meter by meter size says warning, 'End of British sector. You are forbidden to proceed beyond this point.' So I assume this is from West Berlin going into East Berlin.

Paris Agar: So this actually predates the war, which is interesting. Oh, so this is actually a warning to say you are now leaving the British sector, which is in West Berlin, and you are entering the Soviet sector in East Berlin. There was a requirement for these kind of warnings before the Berlin War, because in fact, Germany had been the flashpoint for the end of the Second World War.

Russell Tovey: Mm-Hmm.

Paris Agar: They had armed guards at the border and they did have the ability to be able to shoot if you passed without the correct paperwork. This is why we have it in the museum, is a kind of representation of how serious those postwar divisions were in Berlin.

Russell Tovey: And this is the Brits going, we've got your back right now, but go any further. We can't look after you.

Paris Agar: Yeah, exactly.

Russell Tovey: And so how does Berlin factor in with the Cold War?

James Taylor: It is an excellent question and one that Katrin Schreiter. A senior lecturer from King's College London can help Russell figure out.

Katrin Schreiter: I'm a specialist in German Cold War history. I recently published a book on that looking at East and West Germany's relationship through design and trade and how the American and the Soviets really create different Germans in east and west.

Russell Tovey: Mm-Hmm.

Katrin Schreiter: Paris earlier mentioned that the Soviets and the Americans had different. Ideological outlooks when they started to discuss what a post-war Europe should look like. These ideological differences came back to the fore very strongly. The US wanted to leave a capitalist imprint, was interested in creating new markets obviously. Most of Europe was destroyed. People needed stuff, and the Americans were happy to deliver that.

Russell Tovey: Capitalism.

Katrin Schreiter: Yes. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union wanted to impress a Soviet. Uh, socialist or communist imprint on Europe.

Russell Tovey: So what was the GDR really and why, why were they formed and what was their kind of wants and needs?

Katrin Schreiter: The GDR was a socialist state. It was founded, uh, once the war collaboration between the Soviet Union and the Americans broke down. The people who, uh, were put in power, were tasked with building a new state right in the image of the Soviet Union.

Russell Tovey: So no Germans were given any positions higher than..

Katrin Schreiter: No, these were Germans that that had left.

Russell Tovey: Oh

Katrin Schreiter: The Nazi state because the communists were the first ones that were persecuted by the Nazi regime. And then finding refuge in places like Moscow or elsewhere and then was. Kind of parachuted back into Germany after the war ended to build up an East German state.

Russell Tovey: Isn't it? Is communism, socialism when there's one kind of government rule and everybody's given the same. You are limited by how much you can advance in life, whereas the Western ideal was more about the freedom to create your own wealth, your own opportunities.

Katrin Schreiter: Yes that's the outcome out of, uh, it ideologically speaking, communism is the belief that there is no private property that everything belongs to the people, to the state, not to the state, to the people.
Russell Tovey: Oh, okay.

Katrin Schreiter: However, under Lenin and then Stalin, this was bastardized into state communism as we know it from the Cold War where a party takes over control of a country and claims to represent the will of the people until the people are educated enough to take over the responsibility for the common good. They used to call themselves democracies.

Russell Tovey: Mm-Hmm.

Katrin Schreiter: Centralized democracies.

Russell Tovey: Mm-Hmm.

Katrin Schreiter: Because the party was the leader, but they have nothing in common with the democracies from the American or the British. Uh, more any western, um, European continental model.

Russell Tovey: Mm-Hmm.

Paris Agar: It's interesting you say that because East Germany being called the German Democratic Republic is obviously a really interesting point when you talk about the meaning of, of democracy there.

Katrin Schreiter: Exactly. They claim to be democratic because of this representation of the people's will that they wrote on their banner but when you look at actually how it panned out, you see very little self-determination.

James Taylor: And the major representation of that was of course, the Berlin Wall itself, time for another object.

Russell Tovey: So we're looking now at an aerial view of what the war would've looked like running between East Berlin and West Berlin.

Paris Agar: Yes, exactly. So we're looking at a model here from the 1980s now that this is kind of showing what the war looked like just before it actually came down, but the war changed so much over time.

Russell Tovey: What I love about Berlin now is that there's peripherally, there are lines sometimes in areas where the original wall stood. And what's incredible is that you can stand there and imagine it. And actually the original architecture's still there. And these walls were really clumsily put up it seems. They literally just bombarded them up and they were in the middle of buildings.

Paris Agar: Yeah. They were, they, they took over the whole landscape, not just streets, but also houses. The border system also crossed rivers across the city. When it was first constructed on the 13th of August, 1961, it was in fact mostly barbed wire and, and bricks formed this border system. And then over time, the wall was formed of L-shaped concrete blocks that all formed together. So they made a reinforced steel, they were over three meters high. Um, so it was, it was a really sophisticated system, as you can see.

Russell Tovey: Who paid for that?

Paris Agar: The GDR East Germany.

Russell Tovey: That must have cost a fortune.

James Taylor: In 1948, a currency crisis, amplified tensions between East and West. The Soviet Union began a total blockade of railway road and waterways into Berlin, and the allies responded with the famous Berlin airlift.

Clip: More planes, more food, more raw materials.

James Taylor: Over 11 months, American and British forces flew across the city over 250,000 times, dropping crucial supplies to the West Berliners below. The allies were now determined to establish West Berlin as a showcase for capitalism, and over the next few years, the region experienced something of a boom. But Russell remembers that things in the East were all together different.

Russell Tovey: I remember seeing photos of people trying to escape from East Berlin to West Berlin, and there'd be a house in the middle, and they'd go into the house on one side of the wall, and then they would jump out the window at the back on the other one and then people discovered that the Soviets discovered that, and then they boarded everything up and then you weren't allowed to live near the the wall if there was a building there, right?

Paris Agar: No, absolutely. That there were a lot of derelict houses alongside the wall, and that is the reason why the wall was constructed in the first place because many people in their thousands per day at, at some points, skilled laborers, professionals were leaving East Berlin and fleeing into West Berlin, the more affluent area as they thought it.

Katrin Schreiter: Yes. So anyone who could already immigrated between 49 and 61, more than 250,000 people actually immigrated during that time. That is the dimension we are talking about here. Wow. So in a country with, at that time about 15 million inhabitants, uh, you start getting visible drainage

Russell Tovey: depletions

Katrin Schreiter: depletions yes.

Russell Tovey: And I guess you would call 'em refugees. People were fleeing the Soviet controlled area of East Berlin to West Berlin daily.

Paris Agar: So this is what this model is showing is that you have one wall and then you have a, a strip in the middle, which is formed of sand, and then you have another wall. So this strip in the middle was known as the death strip.
And, and it has that name for, for the exact reason you are thinking

Russell Tovey: and that this section in between the two walls that had sand in, because what? That would show up footprints or...

Paris Agar: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So it was, it was constantly raked. You can see in the model, here's little watchtower, and this is obviously where people would, would look out over the wall system. You had search lights at night.

Russell Tovey: Wow.

Paris Agar: You had armed guards with their dogs, anti vehicle systems, all to deter people from, from moving from one to the other.

Russell Tovey: These are all employees of East Berlin.

Paris Agar: Yeah.

Russell Tovey: So there's no on, on the West side, there's nobody there doing security. There's nobody there watching over this, stopping helping the Soviets to do their job.

Paris Agar: There is some patrol on the west side alright, but East Side is, is the main patrol system. They would be policing this system. They were called the Volkspolizei. So the, the people's police,

Russell Tovey: how many people were.. have died trying to, how many refugees have died trying to escape East to West?

Paris Agar: Yeah, so the official line was never shoot to kill, but between 1961 and 89, the, the period that the war was up, um, over 140 people died at the waLL

Russell Tovey: by being shot,

Paris Agar: mainly by being shot. But in that time, you, you did have 5,000 successful escapes. That was quite a lot, that managed to get through this system.

Russell Tovey: And once you got through, they couldn't have claim on you. They couldn't go you East.

Paris Agar: They, they couldn't get you back.

James Taylor: Together, Paris, Russell, and Katrine make their way to the second floor gallery just in time to catch the third object of the day being wheeled in. A sketch by the artist Ronald Searle best known for his irreverent illustrations of the girls at St. Trinian's and Molesworth.

Russell Tovey: It looks like something you'd see in a newspaper, like a satirical sort of comic strip, and you've got, uh, two women, one holding a handbag the other one looks like she's waving like a hanky. This either feels like the wall's just gone up and they're, they're mourning the loss of their friends and family. Or this feels like something that happened on a regular basis just to check in because there was no ways of communication.

Paris Agar: It's exactly that, Russell.

Russell Tovey: Oh

Paris Agar: So what we're seeing here is actually the very first kind of iteration of the wall and as you can see, there's kind of concrete blocks with bricks led on top of each other, and then you have barbed wire. But as you correctly pointed out, there's two women here. One of them stood on a stool and what she's doing is waving a hanky over the wall. Um, people used to actually meet at certain points in the wall for waving meetings. So actually there's no telephone lines between west and east between 1952 and 1971. So what they would do is actually write letters to each other, and they would say, I'll be here at this particular point in the, in the street, and I'll wave to you.

Russell Tovey: And, and these women would've turned up with a stall at this point and just carried that around with them to stand up. And they would've, yeah, exactly. And they would've said, I'll meet you Thursday. At 1:00 PM every Thursday I'll be there and I wave at you.

Paris Agar: I'll wave at you. Yeah. And there's another woman stood next to her and she's looking down into a tissue and she, she's kind of presented to us very, very upset. And what Ronald is showing us here is the emotion that this, that this wall, that this divisive wall is, is causing.

Russell Tovey: And they had no warning. They like, you got 24 hours to kind of reconvene, get your families together and get on, which choose your alliance.

Paris Agar: Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. It didn't have any warning that it happened overnight happened between the night of the 13th and 14th of August, 1961. So there was, there was no warning there.

Russell Tovey: And families were divided for decades.

Paris Agar: Yes, exactly.

Russell Tovey: Wow.

Clip: This German police stands at the Brendan Burg gate. All communication between the eastern sector and those of the west has been cut as though by a knife before it West Berlin. Stand stunned.

James Taylor: Despite this heavy personal toll, it has been suggested that the war kept the Cold War from turning hot, but as Russell is about to find out, war can be waged in many ways onto another object.

Russell Tovey: So we're looking at a painting now. It looks like the Berlin Wall, and you can see a tower there. You can see the division that there's a big gap. There's a, I can see the, the world famous Berlin Landmark of the television tower.

Paris Agar: Yeah, so what you're seeing here is a watercolor by an artist called Paul Hogarth, and he was actually commissioned by the Imperial War Museums to go to Berlin in 1980 to kind of document what the landscape was looking like and what the changes in architecture were looking like as well. So, as you rightly pointed out on the right hand side at the top of the picture, you can see the TV tower at the first.

Russell Tovey: Sputnik innit?

Paris Agar: Yeah, exactly. So what we're actually seeing, just, uh, to describe it, is a kind of needle with a, with a ball on the top, with another needle on the top so it's kind of like piercing the sky. It was built in 1969. It's now the icon of Berlin really

Russell Tovey: yeah.

Paris Agar: It's, you know, the architectural icon, but what it was was the Soviet powers showing that this is newness, this is symbolism of, of communism. This is their architectural feat. We are placing our mark within this landscape.
Russell Tovey: I didn't realize that was in east. I assume if there's a TV tower it'd be in the west.

Paris Agar: On the East you had very much the kind of communism way of life, you had large scale buildings on the West, you had, uh, modernism, brutalism the newest forms of architecture.

Russell Tovey: This is at the same time as the race to land for get the first man on the moon.

Paris Agar: Exactly, exactly.

Russell Tovey: So I guess this is forward thinking futurism, you know,

Paris Agar: absolutely

Russell Tovey: spaceships. Wow.

Paris Agar: Yeah each of the sides had a, had an independence, had an identity after the second World War. Berlin itself was totally in ruins. So it was a kind of like a, a, a chance for each of these Nations to kind of create a new city, a new country in their image.

Interestingly, when the wall goes up, it all becomes about height. It all becomes about how you can show each other over the wall. So in terms of when, in 1969, you then had the TV tower constructed, that was the ultimate height.

Russell Tovey: Yeah.

Paris Agar: You had the height in Berlin. You know that this is the city that is at the, the center of differences between the superpowers. Everybody's looking at what, what's going to happen in terms of negotiations, in terms of freedom, of movement, all of those kinds of things. And architecture is exactly the same. People are looking to see what, what is the latest from both of them.

Russell Tovey: Wow.

Paris Agar: How, how are they going to move the, these places forward?

Russell Tovey: Amazing.

James Taylor: As it happened in East Berlin, there was one very well known way to move forwards, but only if you were lucky enough to get one.

Russell Tovey: The Trabant car, which is well known for being an East Berliners vehicle. Why has that become a symbol of that time and was that the only car that you could drive?

Katrin Schreiter: There were a couple of other models like Lada, for example, um, that you could ride, but even though it was basically made out of cardboard

Russell Tovey: Yeah. someone said it's Papier-mâché. It was like,

Katrin Schreiter: yeah.

Russell Tovey: So it must have been super cheap to make.

Katrin Schreiter: Yes. Uh, it was not expensive to make. The production culture in East Germany is one that's marked during that time, I mean, throughout the entire duration of the GDR, actually one of lack of resources, lack of good management and material.

Russell Tovey: And I guess also most of their budget went on barbed wire and the making the ball, so, and getting people to work there but...

Katrin Schreiter: Yeah, building cars took forever. People were on waiting lists for years to get a car. And people were of course, keen to have one to be at least mobile within the eastern block.

Russell Tovey: Mm-hmm.

Katrin Schreiter: And therefore, it was laden with a lot of symbolic power.

James Taylor: But the problems facing East Germans did not stop at material scarcity. There were a lack of basic freedoms too.

Russell Tovey: Was there a certain level of brainwashing in work? because we see it in North Korea. What we are shown, what we get gets through to us is that it feels like the will of the people is completely governed, like haircuts, naming of your children. Again, freedom of movement is completely run by the state and they seem to idolize it. Was there a certain brainwashing that was believed in that time?

Katrin Schreiter: Yes, you couldn't avoid it. You couldn't escape it. People were forced into different careers that they didn't want to

Russell Tovey: Mm-hmm.

Katrin Schreiter: Have um, they were limited in their freedom of movement.

Russell Tovey: Mm

Katrin Schreiter: and in our case, the, the Berlin Wall specifically, it was unfree. Uh, mass organizations were created from the youngest age. There were pioneer groups, and of course there the ideology would be be taught to the students in school. Also in university, every student had to take the subject Marxism, Leninism, and you had to learn about the ideology. That actually created also, uh, one of the push factors for defecting East Germans who wanted to go to West Germany. The free university Berlin, that then was in West Germany, was founded by students who were tired of taking this indoctrination.

Russell Tovey: I guess it feels like a a religion of some sorts, and then you go, I wanna start my own church. I want to have a splinter religion. But you're being forced by the state. This is what you have to believe.

Katrin Schreiter: Yes, of course. If you grow up, if you're socialized in this belief system, eventually you absorb it, right? Yeah, it's, it's difficult to escape it.

James Taylor: As we've discovered, east Berliners lived under a totalitarian system in which basic freedoms were heavily restricted by the East German government and at the heart of this system of control was the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit or in English, the Ministry for State Security, more commonly known as the Stasi. They were one of the most repressive secret police agencies in the world, and they kept surveillance files on millions of ordinary East Germans. The Stasi was famous for its practices of psychological warfare and subversion, wiretapping, bugging and smear campaigns against anyone suspected of having the incorrect views. And by the 1980s, the cracks was starting to show. This became particularly evident during one star-studded evening of music in West Berlin in the summer of 1987.

Russell Tovey: Just had a surprise viewing of David Bowie, uh, music video of his song Heroes. Why would that be significant to the Berlin War and the Cold War?

Paris Agar: Well, in 1987, so only a few years before the wall came down, there was a, a concert in West Berlin just outside the Reichstag, and it was called Concert for Berlin. And you had David Bowie, we've just seen, um, performing, you had Genesis, you had the Eurythmics, and it was like an incredible performance.

Russell Tovey: David Hasselhoff to be,

Paris Agar: but the actual location of the concert was very near to the Berlin Wall itself. So you had East Germans in, in East Berlin wanting to experience this incredible concert. Something that they weren't able to experience themselves. So they, they came in their hundreds wanting to listen. It was debated as to whether, you know, speakers were turned towards East Berlin to see if, you know, on purpose to kind of incite this, people wanting the reunification to happen, that the western media reported that they could hear people from the east shouting down with the wall.

Russell Tovey: Did the East try to shut the concert down?

Paris Agar: They didn't have the power to do that. The only power that they had was to prevent people from listening, and a lot of them were, were prevented, some were arrested.

Russell Tovey: Wow.

Paris Agar: This is a kind of symbolism of, of what was happening in terms of the, the cultural situation, the West as opposed the East. And this being only a couple of years before the war came down, it's, it's now kind of said that, you know, David Bowie , had a, had a party

Russell Tovey: catalyst

Paris Agar: bringing the wall down because he was, you know, performing to his audience of West and East Berliners.

Russell Tovey: That's crazy, isn't it? That's music changing the world.

Clip: General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, tear down this wall.

Russell Tovey: But why did that change happen? Why was there a

Paris Agar: yeah

Russell Tovey: change suddenly appearing.

Katrin Schreiter: Yeah. The, the question of why all of this happened in 89 is quite an interesting one. There was a change in leadership in the Soviet Union, which started a course of reform of communism, still communism, but more open, more transparent, more responsive to the people. So that was going on there. The GDR actually didn't follow that course. Erich Honecker, who was in charge at the time, he thought not much of glasnost and perestroika which were about transparency in political and in economic terms, and more leniency when it comes towards censorship of the press. Instead, he was supportive of the Chinese crackdown in Chinaman Square.
Um, meanwhile encouraged. By the new Soviet course, you see one after the other Eastern European satellite state like Poland or Hungary start to open up, there's more and more room for civil rights movements who challenged the regime and say, you know, we wanna have proper elections. So these challenges were going on elsewhere, and that also inspired and emboldened East Germans in their requests, um, in order to appease the swelling crowds on the streets. The GDR government eventually made some little concessions, started to introduce some new features for more transparency. For example, a press conference where they invited the international press, but they weren't very skilled in doing these press conferences. And so on the day when the wall came down, there was a press conference where the East German government announced new travel rules saying that East Germans would now be able to travel to the West which was exactly like you look now in astonishment at me, uh, was greeted with the same astonishment, but with from the journalists in the room who started to ask questions. However, the person who was leaving the press conference hadn't been briefed properly and when this would come into effect and he started to go through his notes and couldn't find the answer and just said, well, I guess immediately.

Russell Tovey: On live TV?

Katrin Schreiter: On the news. It was broadcast later on in the West, um, in West Germany, and East Germans could watch West German TV from the early seventies onwards, so they could really see this unfolding almost in, in real time.

Russell Tovey: But was it a mistake then this guy made, was it not met?

Paris Agar: Yeah.

Russell Tovey: So were, were they planning on letting the East into the West.

Katrin Schreiter: Well, only with a visa, you know, going through an entire bureaucratic process, being of course scanned for, you know, whether or not you'd be somebody who potentially might flee the republic or if you are a trustworthy citizen, who would, you know, come back

Russell Tovey: back.

Katrin Schreiter: So it was meant to, you know, be more of a, um, goodwill. Slow process. Yeah. Slow process and a goodwill sign, and not something that would allow people to go back and forth. As they then did without any kind of proper bureaucratic procedure. Eventually because crowds became bigger and bigger and the demands for the opening of the border became louder, and the border guards had no other choice but to let people go through.

John Kampfner: Well, I'm John Kampfner. I was editor of The New Statesman and BBC, and at the time I was the Daily Telegraphs Berlin correspondent on the evening itself, the famous press conference. I was in Leipzig, but I heard it on East German radio. So I just get in my car and leg it back to East Berlin and there was a crossing point in the north of East Berlin called Bornholmer Straße is where it, it first took place, but I went to the iconic Brandenburg gates and people really beginning to climb up on it. It's always been, you know, the, the place that you would imagine if something. Dramatic was going to happen.

Russell Tovey: What were the people like? What was the feeling like? Was there like, was it scary? Was it exhilarating?

John Kampfner: Let me just briefly take you back 151 years earlier, 1848. The year of revolutions across Europe and outside the palace in Berlin, a single soldier of the Kaiser, let off a round of weapons killing people who were protesting by mistake, ostensibly and history changed. That could have happened on that night where we were in 1989. You had these young border guards, many of them conscripts because you had to do national service. They had their rules and rules are rules, but what happens when nobody's abiding by the rules for the first time in your life? You've never seen it before in your, in your life, you have no idea what to do. There was panic in the high command. They didn't know what to do, they didn't know how to respond. So anything could have happened that night. And the people, it now, now when you see the pictures, it all looks so peaceful and everybody's sort of chilling out with sort of bottles of, of German champagne arms around each other and stuff. Just imagine if that hadn't been the case, if one person had done the wrong thing. So it very quickly, as soon as you kind of crossed over this threshold, when you realized that there were just so many people there, that it was all over. That's when people completely relaxed. So there was this absolute stream of people to begin with, but they were scared. They were genuinely didn't know what to do. Once they had managed to get away with it, then you had the absolute flood of people coming and started greeting people and everybody went to the sort of off licenses to get, you know, we were just buying all these, these German sort of

Russell Tovey: Yeah. Get drunk. Yeah,

John Kampfner: right whatever and inviting them to their homes and... it was like a sort of imagine a country winning the World Cup times 50. You know, it was just mayhem. It was party time. One of the endearing things was a lot of East Germans who went over the wall to celebrate. They went back to work next morning.

Russell Tovey: It just went back over.

John Kampfner: But you just walk back at sort of four in the morning with a, you know, still drunk or with a huge hangover or whatever, and you would turn up at your factory at sort of nine o'clock and a lot of people thought, God, this is amazing, but what happens tomorrow?

Russell Tovey: Yeah.

John Kampfner: Are they, is it gonna stay open? Was this just one giant mistake or was I just having

Russell Tovey: a dream

John Kampfner: was I just dreaming?

Russell Tovey: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Kampfner: And is this not going to happen? And this is why I've just got such incredible admiration for Germany because what happened in that period may have been random, and it was, and it may have been bizarre, but it could easily not have happened that way.

Clip: They're here in the thousands. They're here in the tens of thousands. Occasionally they, the wall must go thousands thousands of German come, make, become....

James Taylor: As well as the fall of the Berlin wall change swept the entire eastern block. Culminating one by one in the fall of communism in Poland, Hungary, and others, right up until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The Cold War was over, at least for now, but more on that in another episode. We're approaching the end of our trip around the museum, but before we go, we have one final stop.

Russell Tovey: There is an actual piece of the Berlin Wall that is out the front of the Imperial War Museum. When did that enter the collection and how long has it been there?

Paris Agar: Yes, it came into Imperial War Museums collection in 1991, so only a couple of years after the fall of the wall. It actually has some graffiti emblazoned on the front, and it says The Words Change Your Life.
Now these are written by an artist called Indiana. That was his artistic name, but his actual name is Jurgen Grosser, and he was an East German, and in the months following the fall of the wall, he chose to paint over 200 individual sections with these motivational slogans.

Russell Tovey: So that's typical of all of the ones that he did. He did an open mouth with text on all of them.

Paris Agar: Exactly, yeah. They're all over the world now. There's, there's ones in Chile, one's in America. So ours says, Change Your Life. Others said, Act Up, Culture Attack, Save Our Earth. This this was him saying, this is how we should move forward. He was a kind of voice for the next movement, if you will, the, the kind of dawn of a new age.

Russell Tovey: Were they all still part of the intact wall at this point?

Paris Agar: Yes, so they were, our section is from a street in, in West Berlin called Lauchner Dam, it was in the Kreuzberg district., and uh, we know the exact point where it came from in Berlin.

Russell Tovey: Is it, is it documented, like in photography?

Paris Agar: It is. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. So, so as he was doing these incredible slogans and painting them all, and he, he did over 200 sections, seven months. So it's quite a feat. There were lots of photographs of him and they were so kind of, these, the paint work they did was so bright that, that, you know, they, they stay in the memory, they kind of imprinted.

Russell Tovey: Iconic and why were they all in English?

Paris Agar: Yeah. So he thought that it was more of a kind of universal language that his, that his messages were spread wider.

Russell Tovey: And when we see the graffiti that only appeared on one side,

Paris Agar: that's right on the west side.

Russell Tovey: And were were the east or the Soviets really annoyed that their war was getting...

Paris Agar: In 1984 was the very first proper artworks appeared on the wall. And these are by an artist called Thierry Noir. He's a French artist who'd, who'd come over and he was living in West Berlin and it was his way of defying this structure in the city was, was to paint on top of it. And he paint painted. He has a, a very interesting motif of kind of colored heads that he would paint on the wall.

Russell Tovey: You see it now still?

Paris Agar: Yeah, exactly. He's, he's world famous. Yeah. And um, and this was his way of saying. I don't want the war here, but when he was first there that he would get told off by the, the guards. He, he was in a lot of trouble and it was a very risky business for him and people thought that he was a spy and, and sort

Russell Tovey: and even on the west, were they angry that he was doing this?

Paris Agar: They, they were, they were angry at the fact that he was putting himself at risk very early on. And so when he first started doing it, they would paint over his work, like kind of whitewash it. But then as time went on and more artists got interested and uh, areas of West Berlin, you mentioned Kreutzberg earlier.

Russell Tovey: Yeah.

Paris Agar: Were hubs for artists.

Russell Tovey: That's where it first started, wasn't it?

Paris Agar: Yeah, exactly. This was the way that they were expressing themselves on this blank canvas right in front of them.

Russell Tovey: So it was like Banksy at the, at the time. Yeah.

Paris Agar: Yeah.

Russell Tovey: Wow.

Paris Agar: And it's really interesting because after the war came down, the wall was then split up into these different sections and sold all over the world and then the, the money that's, that came from the border system then went back into the GDR as it was then.

Russell Tovey: Who was people were buying them as what, like ephemera from

Paris Agar: Yeah, exactly.

Russell Tovey: Oh, okay. So like trophy hunting from it rather than actually reusing the wall in their own structures

Paris Agar: somewhere into museums. Some went into private collections.

Russell Tovey: How much would it be to buy a section? The wall there?

Paris Agar: Well, you can still buy them now. There's actually a, there's scrapyards in Berlin where you can still purchase. No. If you fancied one. Yeah. If,

Russell Tovey: how much, so you're saying there's still sections up of the Berlin wall with this graffiti on that you can see as a tourist?

Paris Agar: Yeah.

Russell Tovey: Why, why have they remained?

Paris Agar: Because they are now the symbol of the Cold War. They are now a symbol of this, of this pivotal moment in history. They, they act as ours does. This is why we've positioned our Belling war section right outside the entrance to the Imperial War Museum. They act now as a gateway into that period of history, into that understanding those international tensions at that point and, and the tensions that are coming to the fore now.

Russell Tovey: So. John was saying bits of the wall survive. Why? Why was it important that they were kept like preserved in place?

John Kampfner: It was incredibly important, and at the time there were big arguments. People were coming in, they were hacking away from mementos as well, but so many people, particularly in the East, just wanted to get rid of the whole thing. This wall has kept us hemmed in for 28 years. Our lives have been ruined by it. We just want to forget all about it and move on. But that would've been a complete whitewashing of history and history is there to remind us about what happens and to enable us to try to enable us to learn the lessons of it and to have got rid of it, to have imagined a way a Berlin that had no physical memory of this wall. You know, they talk about the wall in the mind, and I remember the wall. And no matter how much they build, you have to have living standing memorials to the great events, the horrific events, but it's just really important that people remember where it was.

Russell Tovey: Well, wow, this has been amazing for me. I still have about a million other questions to ask? I think I can put my hand up and go. I'm a geek. I'm a Berlin wall geek like Paris and Katrina. It's been, uh, a really enlightening, fascinating, brilliant and exciting afternoon, so thank you.

James Taylor: And with that, at time at the museum has come to an end. Thanks again to our guests, Russell Tovey, Katrin Schreiter, and John Kampfner, as well as our IWM curator this week, Paris Agar. If you want to learn about more fascinating conflicts around the world, make sure to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. My name is James Taylor. The producer was Lauren Armstrong Carter at Rethink Audio with support from Eleanor Head Daniel BenChorin and the IWM Institute team at Imperial War Museums. Thank you for listening and goodbye.

Phil Wang: I'm Phil Wang. I'm a comedian. Uh, you may have seen me on, uh, Taskmaster or on my Netflix standup special, "Philly Philly Wang Wang".

Maria: My name is Maria. My specialism is in photographs related to colonial conflicts.

Maria: I saw a, a standup set I think that you were doing. Yeah. Um, talking about your body and the fact that you were kind of okay with your body.

Phil Wang: Oh yeah. I dunno why that clips out there. I dunno why Netflix clipped that bit up.

Maria: Like it was mildly humorous.

Phil Wang: Exactly, exactly. Mildly humorous. Don't worry. This will be a very mild podcast.

James Taylor: Phil has joined Maria Creech, at the Imperial War Museum London, to try and understand one of the lesser known conflicts from the Cold War era.

James Taylor: In this episode, we tackle, The Malayan Emergency.

James Taylor: [Newsreel playing in background]

James Taylor: "Communism, hearts and minds". "Jungle warfare". "The new villages".

James Taylor: Just some of the phrases associated with this conflict. But how are they all connected, and how much further does the story go?

Carl Hack: It's a pretty unforgiving environment. You could be shot at at any second, and when it does happen, it may be over in seconds.

James Taylor: On our way, we'll explore iconic items from the museum's collection and meet someone with an in-depth knowledge of the conflict, so that we all can for at least one moment in time, understand what happened when, and crucially why. All this in under an hour. I'm James Taylor, and this is Conflict of Interest.

James Taylor: We begin in the Imperial War Museum's Cafe, where Maria is about to find out what Phil already knows about the Malayan Emergency.

Phil Wang: The Malayan Emergency is, quite relevant to me because I grew up in Malaysia. I didn't grow up in Malaya itself. I grew up in East Malaysia, North Borneo, Sabah, in the city of Kota Kinabalu.

Phil Wang: Uh, my father is a Chinese, Malaysian and native Bornean, and my mother is from Stoke-on-Trent, who's an archeologist who went out there. My life and my birth is very much tied into Malaysia's colonial history. I, I know we had some of our own sort of insurrections in Borneo, although I'm also very foggy about the Malayan emergencies.

Phil Wang: What I'm more aware of, let me set the scene, Maria. It's the end of the Second World War and Malaya remains a British colony. Um, but as with many colonies, not everyone is happy about that. And some in Malaya are so unhappy about that, that they've decided to become communists and want to oust the British and replace them with a Southeast Asian communist utopia.

Phil Wang: That is the extent of of my awareness really.

Maria: Great. I mean, you set the scene pretty well, to be honest.

James Taylor: Maria escorts her guest through the museum and eventually they find themselves in front of the first object of the day, a colonial map of British Malaya, so that Phil can see where the action was taking place.

Phil Wang: It's a handsome map. Singapore there is magnified as it needs to be and deserves to be to be frank. The Straits of Malacca right there, the busiest, busiest shipping lane in the world? Yeah, it's lovely stuff.

Maria: Yes, exactly. So yeah, British Malaya is the term that the British use to describe the set of protectorate states.

Maria: So it includes the Malay states and Singapore. Borneo and Sarawak were kind of seen as separate entities.

Phil Wang: Mm-Hmm mm-Hmm mm-Hmm. So, Maria, what were the British in Malaya for in the first place. I guess it was part of the British Empire, right?

Maria: Yes, exactly. The British had established, um, indirect rule in the territories since the kind of late 18th century.

Maria: It's a region that's very rich in natural resources. And so they were keen to set up trade relations.

Phil Wang: Mm-Hmm. We're talking great food. Lovely beaches.

Maria: Yeah, the beaches. That's, that's it. Um, so they set up rubber plantations and they kind of introduced rubber to the region and

Phil Wang: Rubber wasn't native to the region.

Phil Wang: Okay.

Maria: No, it was kind of part of their larger project of extraction and, uh, exploitation, I guess.

Phil Wang: A botanical garden was set up in Singapore to try out these new plants. I know, I learned, I know this.

Maria: Yeah, that's, yeah, that's, that's right. Yeah.

Phil Wang: One of the, maybe the first botanical gardens. One of the first botanical gardens.

Maria: Ah, have you visited before?

Phil Wang: No, no. I. No, I just, I, from time to time, I just look up colonial history of Southeast Asia. Well, I do for Malaysia and Singapore. I just look, yeah.

Maria: Yeah. There, there's a lot to, to kind of, discover there.

Phil Wang: There's a lot's to go over, yeah.

Maria: Yeah. So, so yeah, they set up the rubber plantations and this whole system of racialised, uh, labour structure as well, kind of very much depended on control of the land and the resources. And a lot of that funded industrialisation of Britain during the 19th century. And another profitable resource was tin.

Phil Wang: As kids we used to go to a tin mine for holidays in Kuala Lumpur. Well, ex tin mine. Going to a tin mine for holiday sounds like abuse. It was no longer a tin mine. It's now called Sunway Lagoon, and it's, um, the country's largest theme park. Tin to family fun.

Maria: Mm-hmm.

James Taylor: Tin and rubber trading was an attractive prospect to many in Asia and not because of its rollercoasters. It was a hugely profitable industry. By 1930, millions of Chinese and Indian migrants, had arrived in malaria looking for work. But just a few years later, the world was at war and the resource rich territory of Malaya, had been taken from Imperial Britain by Imperial Japan.

James Taylor: To help Phil understand what happened next, we are joined by a new conflict expert.

Carl Hack: I'm Carl Hack. I'm a professor of history at the Open University. I was born in Singapore and taught there for many years and have interviewed people from the Malayan Emergency as varied as special branch officers, and the leader of the Malayan Communist Party.

Phil Wang: Carl, obviously the Malayan Emergency comes hot off the heels of the Second World War. The Second World War was as, as far as I'm aware, as transformational in Southeast Asia, Malaysia as anywhere else in the world.

Carl Hack: Yeah, absolutely. During the war you have Japanese occupation. So from 1942 to 1945, the Japanese occupied Malaya. Coming on top of the colonial population, which was mainly Malay. Uh, by 1948 it was about 49% Malays and a population that was partly Chinese, about 38% with the rest mainly Indians. When the atomic bombs are dropped on the Japanese, initially what happens is the Malayan Communist party's fighters, the Anti-Japanese Army come out and liberate towns and set up stalls and, and local governments.

Carl Hack: And then the British follow in afterwards.

Phil Wang: Okay. Okay. Well, the, the communist parties, the Malayan Communist Party got there first.

Carl Hack: The Malayan Communist Party got there first.

Phil Wang: But once Japan surrendered, they were out.

Carl Hack: Yes, they did. Which, which was both a good thing for them and also a bad thing because when they moved into towns, many or some Malays were quite angry about this. Especially when the communists started, uh, prosecuting people they felt had helped the Japanese, which included Malay policemen. So it sparked, uh, racial killings of Malays and Chinese for several months after the end of the war.

Phil Wang: Doesn't sound like communist to be vindictive? I'm just being, I'm not being serious.

Carl Hack: So initially the communists commit to what they call a united front that is cooperating with other parties on an anti-colonial front, organising trade unions. And the British allowed some communists on advisory councils. But over time, between 1945 and 48, tensions between the British colonial authorities and the Communists increase. Uh, the Communist organised strikes, there's some intimidation.

Carl Hack: The British then deport some communists. Uh, the communists organised more violent strikes, which then police combat by removing unionist leaders or even charging, uh, strikers armed with hose and bricks, uh, and beating them with batons so that deaths are caused. So by 1948, the history of conflict and bitterness between the two is, is becoming quite significant.

Phil Wang: So, the Malayan communists that come out, there's the British then take what they've quote unquote liberated off their hands. And I guess this is a source of some animosity.

Clip: The grim spectre of international communism hovered over our fair land. Then it happened. Murder. Panic. Pillage. Arson. Malaya was engulfed in a life and death struggle.

James Taylor: At the time, Malaya's communists were campaigning for a Malayan independence and some within their ranks looked to Britain's new rival, the Soviet Union for support. Something Phil wants to untangle in a little more detail.

Phil Wang: So is this, is, is this movement, is there movement, is it independence first, communist later? Is it, is it mainly about independence from the British or is it mainly about the spread of communism or is it just a bit of both?

Carl Hack: I think it's a bit of both. And it depends who you are in the party. There'll be many people who, supporters of the Malayan Communist Party, who are supporters because they're Chinese and Anti-Japanese. There'll be others who are supporters because they're anti-colonial, but for the top party leaders and cadres, it's both.

Carl Hack: It's you want to obtain independence in a united front, preferably with other parties, and then you will work towards socialism and a communist state.

Phil Wang: Yep.

Carl Hack: This is the classic Leninist two stage revolution.

Phil Wang: Right.

James Taylor: Phil, Maria, and Carl, begin to slowly meander through the museum corridors on their way to the second object on this journey of discovery.

Phil Wang: Now I've come across this name, uh, Chin Peng, which in South London dialect just means a good looking chin. Who is his Chin Peng guy? And, uh, what did he want? What were his objectives?

Carl Hack: Chin Peng is the person who became Secretary General of the Malayan Communist Party in 1947 and one of the longest serving leaders of a communist party anywhere in the world.

Phil Wang: Oh, really? That's a difficult record to break.

Carl Hack: He'd originally been very much Pro- Chinese, Chinese Nationalist. When he was young. He even wanted to go and fight for the Chinese Nationalists, but was told he was too young to go.

Phil Wang: Yeah.

Carl Hack: And then he concluded, well, the best people to fight the Japanese in China were the communists, so he became a communist.

Phil Wang: He, his main, his sort of political primer is independence from the Japanese, or well freeing the Chinese from the Japanese or protecting the Chinese from the Japanese. And he, and sort of communism becomes for him the philosophy that will do

Carl Hack: that. His aims after the war were were to unite with other parties to gain independence.

Carl Hack: But in the shorter term, before the emergency is declared, what he's trying to do is set up unions to get better wages and conditions. He's trying to cooperate with other parties to make sure there's a good deal for all races.

James Taylor: Malaya in the mid 1940s was a highly diverse society. British had established longstanding ethnic hierarchies across the land, which allowed them to divide and rule.

James Taylor: This left a legacy of ethnic tensions. But while Malayas communists were overwhelmingly Chinese, racial sectarianism was not a part of their ideology. Something Phil is about to find out.

Phil Wang: So was the Malayan Communist movement also a little bit, anti-Malay?

Carl Hack: No absolutely, absolutely not. I think there were some Malays who had great difficulty, you know, as Muslims, as people with a Malay tradition, or people who supported their sultans. There were many Malays who had a problem with communism, but the Malayan Communist Party was sincerely Malayan. It believed Singapore and Malaya should be reunited. Mm-Hmm. It believed in full and equal citizenship for everyone. It was willing to support a Malayan culture in which the Malay language would still be important, and there would still be protection and development for Malays. So they, they were genuine nationalists who wanted to become a genuine, multi communal party. The problem was overcoming those divides and the memories of that, interracial fighting after the war in some places was very, very difficult.

Phil Wang: So why did the Malayan Emergency kickoff? What started this conflict?

Carl Hack: Partly it was, it was the Malayan Communist Party deciding that the United Front policy had failed. So they tried very hard to get the British to return to a policy of full citizenship for Chinese and a fully multi-communal constitution. And the British wouldn't, they stuck to, if you like, appeasing the Malays and a new federation, which gave them Malays more power.

Carl Hack: So the communists concluded if despite organising nationwide strikes having a united front, they could not have any influence on that process. What was the point politically? Secondly, in terms of trade unions, there was a spiral whereby the communists increased the use of intimidation and putting their organisers in and getting other organisers out increased strikes, and the British in return used trespass law to keep communist organisers off estates rubber plantations. Used arrest and strike breaking. And tightened labour legislation. So in 1948, the British were about to introduce new labour and trade union rules, which would've weakened the communist control on the trade unions, that's secondly. A third reason is they discover their previous secretary general Lai Teck, is a traitor. So the man who's been telling you to have a united front and use politics, turns out to have been working for the British before the war.

Phil Wang: A quisling.

Carl Hack: Worse. The British before the war, the Japanese, during the war.

Phil Wang: Double quisling.

Carl Hack: And the British again after, three.

Phil Wang: Triple quisling.

Carl Hack: The Malayan Communist Party say they tracked him down and he was strangled to death by, uh, communist members from another country.

Phil Wang: So we have, we have the political reason, we have the trade union reason, we have the, the traitor. Um, and so what, what, what's the fourth catalyst?

Carl Hack: Well, well, arguably those would've been sufficient reasons itself. But the final reason is that internationally, this is the year of the Berlin Airlift and the change in international communist policy. So the international line from Moscow changes to saying, there will ultimately have to be conflict between the West and communists. So, now, not only do you think you've got good reasons to try and move towards violence, but you think that that fits the international communist line. So rather like Lenin in 1917, you think it's okay to have a spark to the revolution because everything around you might ultimately help.

Phil Wang: Sure, sure. So, so it felt like this was a global communist moment.

James Taylor: So we have communists gearing up for conflict, but what about the British?

Maria: The line that British authorities gave as their justification for, uh, declaring war was that three rubber plantation managers had been murdered by guerrilla, communist guerrilla fighters.

Phil Wang: And these are British plantation managers?

Maria: These are British plantation managers based in Perak. This was splashed across newspapers, uh, in Britain at the time to rile up the British public in, in support of emergency declaration.

Phil Wang: And was this true, that three plantation managers were killed by by the Malayan Communist?

Maria: So yes, but there's also some reason to be sceptical that that was the sole catalyst.

Phil Wang: So the British were looking for a reason, and this was in a way convenient.

Carl Hack: So by June, 1948, there had been a fair number of these killings, and on the 15th of June, the British had already decided, or the authorities in Kuala Lumpur had decided to declare an emergency. It so happens that the very next day, three British planters are killed. In addition, two, Chinese are killed that day, but for some reason, most of the authors don't bother mentioning them.

Phil Wang: Right.

James Taylor: A state of emergency was declared locally on the 16th of June and soon made nationwide. But one more thing has occurred to Phil, and that's the nature of the name given to this conflict.

Phil Wang: Now, we've thrown around the word war here, but it's, it's officially called the Malayan Emergency, which strikes me as unusual. I, I can't recall another conflict or war being called officially "The Emergency".

Carl Hack: The reason it's called an emergency is that almost all colonies and most states have laws that allow the government to declare an emergency in the case of civil breakdown, in order to secure law and order.

Phil Wang: Mm-Hmm.

Carl Hack: Malaya had such laws. So an emergency was due to be declared to allow them to bypass normal controls. So detain people without trial, uh, to execute the people they capture.

Phil Wang: Mm-Hmm.

Carl Hack: In a war, of course, that would be totally unacceptable and a war crime. So in the Malayan case, they execute something in excess of 200 captured communists in the end.

Carl Hack: So in actual fact, what the British have done is they've decided to declare an emergency so that they can detain people without trial and have other emergency laws in order to deal with the rising tide of violence that comes from the MCP's decision.

Phil Wang: Right, a way of suspending their own laws about, um, the level of force they were able to use within the colleagues.

Carl Hack: Absolutely. Most states would have some provision for emergency law and that was the case with Malaya.

Maria: Yeah, yeah, exactly. And there there are other examples of emergencies during this period in Kenya, for instance. Britain also declared an emergency that was fought in 1952. Also in a Aiden later in Cyprus.

Maria: These are kind of anti-imperialist conflicts, and some had involvement of communist forces too. But the use of the term emergency has definitely adds to the kind of general public's confusion around whether these conflicts are actually wars or not.

Phil Wang: Because ‘emergency’ sounds more like sort of humanitarian crisis than a war with two sides.

Maria: Exactly. So some of it has had the effect of downplaying the genuine violence and destruction that has taken place during, during these periods.

James Taylor: And with that sobering thought. Phil is guided back through the galleries towards a door that says IWM Staff only. Phil, Maria and Carl reach the Orpen Boardroom. So named because it's hung with paintings by famous wartime artist William Orpen, where Phil is met with his next IWM collection item.

Clip: At Compound Norton , a village 40 miles north of Kuala Lumpur, a company, The 1st Battalion, Worcestershire Regiment get ready for a patrol. Their job? To hunt down red terrorists from the jungle nearby. A 20-year-old private Sid Latham from Altrincham loads up. The patrol is ready to move.

Phil Wang: I love a bit of Pathé cinema. There was some black and white, uh, a black and white newsreel from 1953 and it depicted some British soldiers setting off from a town, a little village called Kampong Norton, which is hilarious, because "Kampong" is just Malay for village. And this village has just been named after some guy called Norton, I imagine, 'cause Norton's not a Malay word. So some guy called Norton, built a village, um, and they call it Kampong Norton. And there's a bunch of British soldiers getting in a truck. And the truck, the van has driven them into the jungle where they're off to fight some communists.

Carl Hack: There's a distinction between the early and the later periods of the emergency. So in the earlier periods, a lot of the fighting is on the jungle edge or even around the approach to Chinese villagers or squatters who the communists are using to help supply them and support them. But the communists are always trying to get support in those villages.

Phil Wang: Right, right, right. How were the communists fighting this war?

Carl Hack: The communist tactics varied over time, so in the early emergency, they were actually surprised by the declaration of emergency. They'd hoped they'd have several months to prepare the grounds with killings, recruitment, and so on. So initially for the first few months, individual communist groups would attack police stations or burn down rubber stores, sabotage, ambushes, trying to have supporters in the new villages and build up political support so that, when the Cold War changed course, they were hoping to make life so difficult in some of the Ulu or upriver areas that the British would in effect semi withdraw and they could build little bases and build them up. The Communist headquarters orders many of their units, to go deeper into jungle, to have jungle plantations and the British actually follow them into the jungle.

Phil Wang: Gosh, I must have been horrible fighting in that jungle. I grew up in Sabah and it's just so equatorial and hot. There's no change in season. It's just hot and humid all year long. It's like 30 degrees every day, and then you've gotta carry a gun and be scared of dying all the time. As on top of that and the mosquitoes and the malaria.

James Taylor: Phil's train of thought is interrupted by a member of IWM's Archives team, who places a white box in front of him.

Phil Wang: So a special object handling lady is here and she's unwrapping out of some crinkly old paper, a hat. It's a lovely hat. It's to describe, it's like a bucket hat. It's actually something, a gen z'er would wear at a Dave concert, but it looks older, but you could totally rave in that.

Maria: This is an example, um, of, uh, a hat that British soldier would've worn fighting in the Malayan jungle. This one, which was, uh, worn by Lieutenant David McMurtrie, who served in the first Battalion Somerset Light Infantry while on operational service in Kuala Lumpur. And that was between 1953 and 1955. So the middle of the emergency.

Clip: From the air, jungle country looks quite lovely, doesn't it? Smooth velvet like. Down below it tends to look different. Those hills weren't so flat after all. And those trees look more like a primeval forest than a place where men can live.

James Taylor: Items of clothing like this hat, would've given their owners a certain degree of protection from the elements. But British forces fighting in Malaya still had to contend with insects, swamps, heavy rainfall and unbearable humidity. Fighting an insurgency in the jungle couldn't have been further from a Dave concert.

Phil Wang: So was this how the majority of this conflict played out? Was it guerrilla warfare in the jungle? Spikes in pits. Traps swinging off of trees. You know, full rainforest Home Alone.

Carl Hack: I don't know about that, but certainly, yes. Most units would've spent hours and hours in either ambush, you know, not allowed to smoke, not allowed to put after shave on with the mosquitoes, biting them. And probably most of these ambushes would result in nothing. Yeah. Uh, or they'd be involved in patrols where they might go out for two or three days or longer if they were air supplied. Perhaps down to section, you know, 12, 13 men moving through jungle undergrowth, if they're lucky with an Eben tracker or someone else to help them.

Phil Wang: And these are the British operations?

Carl Hack: These are the, these are the British operations. But of course. These are people, even if they've been familiarised with the jungle while in Malaya, it's a pretty unforgiving environment. You could be shot at at any second. Yeah. When it does happen, it may be over in seconds, so you absolutely have to be ready.

Carl Hack: I think at one point in the campaign, they send orders out saying, you need your safety latches off on an ambush, for instance, because if you don't, the communist will hear you change your safety lock, and that may spoil the ambush.

Phil Wang: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Carl Hack: So there's an incredible amount of time waiting, patrolling, wondering,

Maria: And I'll, I'll add that it was kind of a, a pretty paranoid environment, um, because a lot of the fear of ambush took place in one's mind. The documents that looks at the experience of jungle warfare, the strong sense of the invisible enemy, the enemy could be anywhere. Um, and British forces retaliated in preemptive ways, burning entire villages that were presumed to be kind of high doubts for communists or where they'd heard rumours.

Phil Wang: Mm-Hmm.

Carl Hack: In 1949, this gets a little bit more bureaucratized and organised. So initially in 48 to 49, the British try very repressive policies, and there are 16 operations in 1949, which round up an entire village and detained them en masse, and then the village is burned. Uh, any animals that can't be taken are shot.

Carl Hack: Including pets are shot sometimes and people are compensated.

Phil Wang: Just, just to keep them from being used by the, the communists?

Carl Hack: Those 16 villages in each one there's something like a police charge sheet, which will say "This village has seen so many incidents. Uh, so many times communists have been seen in the village." So this is a draconian policy that hits mainly women and children 'cause of course, most of the men are in the jungle. By 1950, that doesn't happen. By 1950, it's almost entirely resettlement, where you put people inside fences.

Clip: Yong Peng, everlasting peace, as the Chinese call it, is showing every sign of living up to its name. Not long ago, this thriving new village on Malaya's main highway was a trouble spot plagued by communist terrorists. Now after resettlement, it is a centre of new industries and prosperous agriculture and happy family life.

Clip: What a contrast there is now in the life of these smiling people.

James Taylor: Resettlement to these new villages came with a degree of economic development intended to undermine support for the insurgents. But the happy, idyllic image depicted in British propaganda often did not match reality. These were still internment camps surrounded by barbed wire, watchtowers, and armed guards.

James Taylor: Their goal? To survey control and break the link between insurgents and the local population.

Clip: The strain on the civilian population, European and Asiatic except perhaps in the towns is very severe. Situation is undoubtedly grave and success or failure in Malaya will affect all Southeast Asia.

Clip: Latest survival in the country is General Briggs, the newly appointed director of operations. We all hope he'll be able to shorten this seemingly endless struggle.

James Taylor: British Commander Harold Briggs developed a strategy which focused on disrupting communist support systems in rural areas amongst Malaya’s ethnic Chinese population. This Briggs plan outlined a program of forced resettlement.

James Taylor: All in all, its estimated that roughly 10% of the population were removed from their homes into camps called "New Villages".

Carl Hack: Something like 380,000 people are moved in 18 months. Ultimately, it's over 560,000. You've had your job moved, you've had your possessions moved. You have to stay inside the fence during curfew hours.

Carl Hack: So, you know, you have Chinese poets who write about, you know, being separated from being able to go and look for durians, that lovely spiky, smelly fruit everyone loves

Phil Wang: So smelly.

Carl Hack: And, and wander in the jungle. So it, it's a traumatic experience, but at the same time, you are being told it's going to improve your life.
You're telling these people ultimately you're going to get land and community centres and clinics. So initially these can be quite squalid. Yeah, they're a grid system of hearts with small plots, perhaps a police station to keep control with special constables who are probably mainly Malay. Uh, at least one layer of fence. Later it might be up to three and one electrified. Later watch towers.

James Taylor: As well as the use of force, the British also employed psychological tactics against the insurgents, as Phil is about to discover. Maria, hands him a letter.

Phil Wang: So I'm currently looking at, uh, an old piece of paper, and at the top is sort of that British seal with the lion and the unicorn holding a shield. And underneath it is a letter written entirely in what looks like sort of Arabic script. But I'm going to guess because it's a set in Malaysia that it's Jawi, which is the kind of Islamic script that Malay, uh, people learn. At least all the Malay kids in my school learnt while I was growing up there. Um, but it is, it has got a signature at the bottom, which looks to be a British name, so I'm guessing it is a letter written by someone British, from the British government, translated into Jawi for the local population.

Maria: Yeah, this is, this is an example of a safe conduct pass, which has been translated into Jawi.

Phil Wang: Yes!

Maria: Um, and the idea behind these passes was to drop them down from aircraft into the deep jungle to give guerrilla fighters the opportunity to surrender.

Phil Wang: Were the vast majority of surrenders due to these?

Carl Hack: Safe conduct passes were dropped in their millions. Over time, they changed. Initially the British have been executing people they capture.

Phil Wang: Yeah.

Carl Hack: They specifically have a surrender policy where they say, if you surrender, unless you have blood on your hands, you've been killing unarmed civilians, we won't execute you. Over time, over the course of the emergency, the British also drop leaflets, which typically show a killed insurgent, saying if you want to be like him.

Phil Wang: Yeah.

Carl Hack: Stay in the jungle.

Phil Wang: Yeah. Gotcha.

Carl Hack: If you wanna live, come out.

Phil Wang: Gotcha.

Carl Hack: By 1952, increasingly, the leaflets they drop are showing happy insurgents. It's groups who have surrendered before saying "surrender, and like us, you can be happy and you can be rehabilitated".

Phil Wang: Sipping Mai Tais on the beach.

Carl Hack: Or they may be tactical leaflets, so they may capture your leader.

Carl Hack: And the next thing you know, a leaflet’s fluttering down, addressed from your ex-leader or your ex-member saying, I've come in, I'm safe. And actually by the end of the emergency, some communists see surrender, earn large rewards, and the British try and make sure they get jobs after they've helped the security forces for a while.

Phil Wang: Right, so, in the carrot on the stick, this is the carrot.

Carl Hack: Well, it's a way out, uh, typically speaking, uh, of eliminations. And the word elimination for the British means anyone who was killed, captured, or surrendered.

Phil Wang: Yep.

Carl Hack: So of the communists or the insurgents eliminated every year, an average of about 20% or one in five are surrenders, but they're absolutely vital 'cause they're the people who bring you intelligence, as well as lowering the, the other side's morale.

Phil Wang: Well, as there were, were insurgents, deported, were captured communists deported from Malaysia, Malaya?

Carl Hack: Yes, they were. It was a British policy from 1948, really getting going the following year to deport as many of the communist supporters as possible.

Carl Hack: Though most people deported were actually supporters or villagers. So, something like 26,000 of the people who'd been detained without trial were deported.

Phil Wang: Where to?

Carl Hack: China mostly. And in addition, some dependents went with them. So the total figure is considerably higher if you look at the archives. In 1950, they were so desperate to increase the rate of deportation. Very few Chinese had citizenship because most Chinese,

Phil Wang: Of malaya, of British Malaya.

Carl Hack: Yeah because the majority were descendants of people who'd arrived from the 1930s and afterwards.

Phil Wang: Yep.

Carl Hack: Because Chinese tended to come over, intend to make money and go back. Mm. And that, of course, was stopped by the Malayan occupation and the conflict in China.

Carl Hack: So many of these people had not seen China, or if they had had very little link with it now, but they had no citizenship.

Phil Wang: Yeah.

Carl Hack: So the argument amongst some civil servants was, any state would deport non-citizens who were fermenting violence, and that's all we're doing.

Phil Wang: Yeah.

Carl Hack: But of course, the fact is they didn't have citizenship because the state, partly because of Malay sensitivities, was not yet willing to give more people citizenship.

Phil Wang: Yeah.

Carl Hack: Yeah. This, this policy reached a peak in about 1949 to 1952, 53. So as resettlement became large scale, deportations dropped off. 'cause you could control people by putting them in resettlements.

Phil Wang: So this this safe conduct pass is signed by, I can't quite read the signature. Who is that?

Carl Hack: Gerald Templer.

James Taylor: General Gerald Templer was flown into Malaya in 1952 and appointed to the role of High Commissioner by Prime Minister Winston Churchill. His predecessor, Sir Henry Gurney, had been assassinated by the MNLA, a huge blow to the British Colonial Administration.

Clip: It's now my duty to get out to Malaya as quickly as I possibly can.

James Taylor: Templer had one job. To defeat the Malayan insurgents. Over the years, Templer developed a campaign focused on undermining popular support for the communist guerrillas. He famously remarked that "the answer lies not in pouring troops into the jungle, but in the hearts and minds of the people". And his approach was twofold.

James Taylor: He developed economy, infrastructure, and healthcare on the one hand, but deployed harsh tactics on the other. Ordering tight controls on food supplies, mass interment and large scale deportations. He also authorised the first
use of Agent Orange, a toxic herbicide with major health effects that was later used in Vietnam, and which we'll explore in more detail in another episode.

James Taylor: But for now, it's time for the next object, which has just been placed on the table.

Phil Wang: Um, so there's a big flat box and it's just been opened and it's very thrilling. It's a flag. The flag is being unfolded. It's red. I can see a yellow star. It looks very Chinese. It's communist as hell to be frank.

Maria: Yes, that's correct.

Phil Wang: Yes. Nailed it again.

Maria: This is, uh, a communist flag. So this flag, um, was acquired by someone called Jack Barlow, who was an assistant superintendent of the special branch of the, uh, Malayan Police in 1953.

Maria: So it is most likely that this flag was part of the contents of a pack that was taken from, captured or killed, guerrilla fighters. And it was laid out and offered to the children of British police officers. So the intention was to offer it as a, a trophy or a souvenir.

Phil Wang: Um. Yeah. A sort of scalp in a way, yeah.

Maria: Exactly. The kind of, uh, fabric equivalent.

James Taylor: Britain's aggressive counterinsurgency measures were proving too much for the Malayan guerrilla fighters who became progressively weakened through the 1950s.

James Taylor: Over the course of the emergency, over 6,000 MNLA fighters had been killed by British forces and their allies. The insurgency was coming to an end.

Phil Wang: With this communist flag laid out before us like this, it feels, it feels so victorious. It feels like, uh, a symbol of the end of the conflict. Um, something that, you know, British soldiers might have held with, with pride after all those years of fighting. But how did this conflict end? And when did it end?

Carl Hack: The emergency itself came to a formal end in July, 1960. Uh, by that point, the insurgents were down to a very small numbers and only in large numbers at the border. So in theory, it came to an end in 1960 and they, they'd been ground down by that point. Uh, for the last few years, the British had launched huge operations against each communist district committee in turn, where they target all of the villages and all of the area around it until the committee broke and couldn't regenerate, and then they'd move on to the next one. So by July, 1960, there are so few insurgents left and so few incidents, they declare an end to the emergency. But in in reality, small numbers of insurgents continue at the border, basically doing very little for a few years until around 1968. This is the time of the cultural revolution. The Chinese encouraged them to build up again. And so there's the second Malayan emergency of 1968 to 89, when finally the remaining insurgents had peace talks and agreed to lay down their arms, and many of them actually returned to Malaysia afterwards.

Phil Wang: So the main body of this conflict of the Malayan Emergency was 12 years, essentially 1948 to 1960. But the, the, the, the soft tensions were there for a very long time up until

Carl Hack: Absolutely correct.

Phil Wang: Where's, where's our old friend Chin Peng in all this?

Carl Hack: Chiang left for China in about 1960, 61.

Phil Wang: He'd been leading the communist side the whole way from 1948 to 1960?

Carl Hack: Well, he continued leading The Malayan Communist Party. Then and throughout the second Malaysian or Malayan Emergency, he signed the peace agreements in 1989. He, he died, uh, I think peacefully in Thailand.

Phil Wang: Well, uh oh, really? In the last few years.

Carl Hack: Yes.

Phil Wang: And he was the leader up to that point?

Carl Hack: Yes. He remained the leader. 1947 until I think 2013 ish.

Phil Wang: Wow.

Carl Hack: I really did mean it when I said he was one of the longest, if not the longest serving head of a communist party.

Phil Wang: So what is the legacy of his conflict? How is it remembered? I, I mean, I'm almost inclined to say it isn't. 'cause I've, I don't know anything about it and I'm not, I've not met anyone who knows anything about it and is hardly ever mentioned.

Carl Hack: It depends who you are, doesn't it really? Um, if you're a member of the British public, you may not know anything or very little about it. After all, I think only a few hundred British soldiers died in this campaign. So. In a world in which the British fought many, many, many campaigns, some of them large scale, it's not surprising that much of the public don't remember it or indeed that it's not great. However, it is very much remembered by military practitioners, uh, because it's used as a classic example of the counter insurgency campaign, and it is very much remembered in itself.
Where of course the you, you can see the remains.

Phil Wang: Yeah. Obviously you said a few hundred, uh, British troops lost their lives, 1300 or so few, over a thousand colonial police. Uh, what about on the, the other side, the Malayan side? What was the loss of life like there?

Carl Hack: Was for, for the sake of this, I'll add people who are missing to those who are dead. Uh, almost 12,000 people died in total. The Army a few hundred, the police, 1300 odd insurgents, 6,700 and 3 and a half thousand plus civilians.

Maria: In recent years, there have been some revelations about individual acts of mass violence that took place during the emergency period by British forces. The most well known is, uh, the Batang Kali Massacre, which involved the um, murder of 24, um, civilians.

Phil Wang: Presumably in a, a village called Batang Kali?

Carl Hack: Village near Batang Kali.

Phil Wang: Okay.

Carl Hack: The relatives took it all the way through the courts, the Supreme Court, and then the European Court, and lost ultimately on a technicality that the relevant Human Rights Law didn't, or wasn't operative at that time in 1948.

Carl Hack: The British put so much pressure on villages and such a tendency to label villages that were helping the insurgents as bases, that there are instances of numbers of people being killed or killed running.

James Taylor: The Batang Kali Massacre was just one of several incidents of atrocities carried out in the chaotic early months of the emergency. It is almost time to leave this Conflict of Interest. But before we go, Phil considers what he's seen and heard.

Phil Wang: I've never heard of, uh, the Batang Kali Massacre or this particular conflict even, and I, I'm surprised I didn't know about this conflict at all. Yeah, I, I'm surprised that I wasn't taught very much history. The Malaysian history syllabus is quite focused on, from my experience on um, the old civilization of Malacca and independence, and that's about it. And everything between the two or outside of the two is not really touched on. So Malaysia is a unique one. It's this sort of, on the surface, very tranquil, almost idyllic kind of place in the beautiful trees and everyone lives sort of, a life at a slow pace, and there's all this great food. But under the surface, there is a, there is a, a very bloody history, with terrible things committed by people on all sides. By the British, by the communists, by the Japanese.

Phil Wang: You know, violence always begets violence and it has had its periods of great violence.

James Taylor: And with that, our time at the museum has come to an end. Thanks again to our guests, Phil Wang and Carl Hack, as well as our IWM specialist,
Maria Creech. If you want to learn about more fascinating conflicts around the world, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

James Taylor: My name is James Taylor. The producer was Lauren Armstrong Carter at Rethink Audio with support from Eleanor Head, Daniel BenChorin, and the IWM Institute team at Imperial War Museums. Thank you for listening and goodbye.

James Taylor: This is Conflict of Interest from Imperial War Museums. This episode contains material which listeners may find distressing. You can find more information in the show notes.

Nikita Gill: Hi, I am Nikita Gill. I am a poet and a writer, and I do a lot of work in mythology and folklore. From around the world, but specifically Hindu and Greek. I've got a big following on Instagram. I'm terrible at this. I just say I'm like a writer and a poet.

Niels Boender: Well, hi, I'm Neils. I've been working on Kenyan history for the past two years. The past two months I've been in Kenya. I've been doing research, been doing interviews with people that survived the conflict. I've been working with archival documents. I try and tell the story of Mau Mau, tell the story of Kenyan history in the context of the museum.

Nikita Gill: I actually know very little about this, so I am quite excited to learn more.

James Taylor: Nikita has joined our IWM specialist, Niels Boender in the Imperial War Museum in London to try and understand one of the most important conflicts from the post-second World War era. And in this episode we explore the Mau Mau Uprising in Kenya.

Clip: Mau Mau movement was an organization of the people of Kenya demanding their freedom.

James Taylor: Kikuyu, settlers, loyalists, colonialism, detention camps, just some of the words associated with this conflict. But how are they all connected, and how much further does this story go?

Rose Miyonga: Documents were burned somewhere, pushed out of planes into water. There was a deliberate coverup of the atrocities that happened during the Mau Mau war.

James Taylor: On our way, we are on earth iconic items from the museum's collection, and meet someone who has documented the experiences of the individuals and families who lived through the conflict in Kenya so that we can, for one moment in time, understand what happened when, and crucially why all this in under an hour. I'm James Taylor and this is Conflict of Interest.

Today we begin on the second floor of the museum's galleries surrounded by various artifacts of war where Neils uncovers what Nikita already knows about this moment in conflict history.

Niels Boender: Nikita, when you think about Kenya, when you think about this period, what comes to mind?

Nikita Gill: Oh, this is a difficult question because when I think of Kenya, it has a very close link to what I see in Kashmir in India, because I'm from Kashmir, I see partition, I see anti colonist uprisings. I see a very deep connection with British colonial history and empire. I see a people trying to recover from that, and most importantly, I wish I knew more about it.

Niels Boender: Do the words Mau Mau mean anything to you?

Nikita Gill: Oh, so I know a little bit about this. I know that it was an anti colonist rebellion and uprising. I know that it was quite brutally crushed. I know there were a lot of casualties. And I know that, I don't know how to pronounce that. I think it's the Kikuyu, Kikuyu people. So I know a little bit about the Kikuyu people, and I know a little bit about the Kenyan land and freedom army.

James Taylor: Nikita has touched on some important concepts, which we'll come to later, but Neils has just produced our first object and laid it carefully on the table in front of them.

Nikita Gill: This is a really beautiful leather and quite old book. It's actually got gold emboss pages. It's really actually something quite remarkable. I'm a big fan of old books. So inside it says, presented to the Church of the Torch Kikuyu by the members of witting w.., how do you pronounce that?

Niels Boender: So what this is, it's a New Testament Bible from the 1930s that was presented to this church, which is one of the major Presbyterian church or Scottish church in Kenya. And I think what this shows quite usefully is that the introduction of Christianity into Kenya is one of the jumping off points for this story that we're gonna try and explore as we go on.

James Taylor: To understand the Mau Mau uprising, we need to go back to the beginnings of British colonialism in Kenya and explore what the British were doing there in the first place.

Nikita Gill: That's a really good question, isn't it? Yes. What were the British doing in Kenya?

Niels Boender: The best place to start is in the 1880s. 1890s, where the British already had trading interests on the East African coast. This is the period of the scramble for Africa, new imperialism as the continent is being carved up between different powers. And what's interesting about the conquest of Kenya is that it almost happens a bit by accident, which is that the British are trying to build a railway from the coast to Uganda. And as they build the railway, they realize they have to find a way to make it profitable and to make it profitable, they basically conquer militarily, and this is quite a long period of military conquest, there's quite a lot of atrocities that happen. But in order to make this area profitable, they then introduce white settlers that get given basically for free, very large tracks of land either side of the railway. This is some of the most profitable agricultural land in Africa and that land gets alienated or stolen effectively. Often they pay a very small amount of money from the local people. And also on the question of religion, often it was small groups of people that were connected with the colonial state that began converting. There were mission churches, like the ones that might have used that Bible being set up, and then there were more independent churches, and it was actually the independent churches that broke free from the missionary churches that plaeyed an important role in anti-colonial agitation as well.

James Taylor: As we move through the 19th century, we see a growing number of colonial settlements and infrastructure springing up around the country, as well as the displacement of one group of people in particular, the Kikuyu.

Niels Boender: Kenya at this time is made up of a whole series of different ethnic groups, and the one that is maybe the most affected by that seizure of land are the Kikuyu.

And they're in central Kenya and they're one of the largest groups and they suffer a lot from this land being taken by white settlers and these large plantations, large farms being set up. And a lot of them end up as labourers on these farms, this process happens from about the 1890s all the way through to the Second World War.

James Taylor: In the 1940s, the colonies of the British Empire around the world began to clamor for independence.

Niels Boender: It was a very divided society, the presence of white settlers in what was called at the time the white highlands meant that every day was a racial experience for a lot of people. Racism was prevalent everywhere.
Everyday life for a lot of Africans was an experience of living on less and less land, particularly because so much land that had traditionally been available before colonialism was now occupied. And effectively, just like in apartheid South Africa, Africans have to carry this pass. It's called a kipande. This is a pass that you have to carry with you at all times that controls your movement and means that you can't be in certain places. So that feeling of almost claustrophobia for a lot of Africans was very prominent as they had less and less space to expand into. And then on top of that, there was the experience of political disenfranchisement. So since the 1920s, people had been asking for more political representation. Because Kenya did have a parliament of sorts. It was called the Legislative Council. But on the Legislative Council, there were only Europeans, some Asians and then there was a small group of Africans, one or two basically. So there wasn't sufficient political representation. And particularly in the 1940s, there becomes a real agitation for more political representation. And when that isn't fulfilled, that turns to more radicalism, more activism.

James Taylor: And just as in Malaya, India and elsewhere, anti-colonial sentiment began to take a firm hold in Kenya. In 1944, the Kenya Africa Union was founded to campaign for Freedom from the British three years in and the Kenya Africa Union and a new leader, Jomo Kenyatta. Kenyatta became one of Africa's most prominent anti-colonial campaigners. He would go on to become Kenya's president and the first African head of state. But tensions and disagreements had begun to surface fracturing this new independence movement. Younger Kenyan nationalists, particularly in the Kikuyu community, felt disillusioned by their elders, who they believed had shown a lack of progress in achieving justice and self-determination. This more radical faction felt armed struggle was the answer, and began a campaign of political violence. They became known as the Mau Mau and Nikita has a question about the origins of the name.

Nikita Gill: So what do the words Mau Mau actually mean?

Niels Boender: This is a very difficult question, and there are several theories, but I'd say the most common theory is it is a anagram that it's code because the phrase in Kikuyu. Uma. Uma means Get out. Get out, and that if you rearrange the letters, you get Mau Mau. So essentially it was a code word that people would say to each other to run away as the colonial police might arrive. But there are other theories that explain it. Another theory says it is a mistranslation of the Kikuyu phrase for our grandfathers, so a link to Elvis. But it's very important to say that that phrase was not one that people would've directly used. In the sort of runup, it was a term that got used afterwards by Colonial propagandists. There were many different names for the organization that emerged in the late forties and early fifties that would become Mau Mau. One term is the Kenya Land Freedom Army, and that was the name that was used mostly in the Nairobi context. It emerged, and this is where the complexity of the story coming in it term and it's predominantly used by the colonial propagandas, but then gets taken on by them themselves. That's the thing. It's a term that's appropriated by Mau Mau themselves afterwards, and that's why it's a term that we can use.

James Taylor: An important point and the perfect time to reveal the second object of the day. A grainy black and white film starts playing on a screen in front of Neils and Nikita.

Clip: The green hills of the Kikuyu tribe's fertile territory with their slumbering fetched villages are beautiful, almost beyond belief. Yet death stalks the winding roads, hatred and violence erupt in the fields and forests.
Black kills black and brother kills brother. Innocent tribes spoke are murdered in their homes by men of their own tribal blood. Even the approach roads in suburbs of the city of Nairobi are the scene of a bitter struggle between the forces of law and order, and an African terrorist organization, which calls itself Mau Mau. Mercifully, the troubled area in relation to the rest of Africa is a very small one. Even the four and a half million Africans who live in Kenya outside the peculiar territory are not involved.

Nikita Gill: The people of Kenya were shown to be troubled, but not by the British settlers, but more by what they called a terrorist organization, which was the Mau Mau organization. They were not shown to be freedom fighting rebels or anything like that. It was just shown that they were against the forces of law and order. So that's what we just saw.

Niels Boender: I think you've hit the nail on the head there and why I wanted to show you this video and what it shows is the myth making process that from the onset. The colonial government wanted to present it a certain way in a very racialized way as well, and that the creation of a narrative around Mau Mau, that as you identified that it is this backward looking tribal civil war rather than a wider sort of nationalist movement. For decades, the predominant memory of Mau Mau was what we saw in the video of this atavistic uprising.

Nikita Gill: Out of curiosity, what was the event that lit the match, the spark that set off the chain of events that led to the uprising?

John Lonsdale: Hello, I'm John Lonsdale. I'm a couple of generations older than Neils. I retired I think in 2004 or 2005 as professor of Modern African history at the University of Cambridge. Since then, I have been trying to write the books that I should have done when I was teaching. I first went out to Kenya as a schoolboy in 1953. My first night that I didn't sleep a wink because I felt that Mau Mau was out to get me. I was conscripted into the British Army in 1956. And opted to do my service in Kenya, and I learned then to live exactly on a par with African soldiers with whom I was out defending Kenyans against Ethiopians for two months in the Northern Frontier District. We lived together, we slept together, we crapped together in the same hole, which brings a great deal of racial equality I can tell you.

James Taylor: With the pleasantries outta the way, John is now free to tell Nikita about the catalyst for the Mau Mau uprising.

John Lonsdale: I think the real trigger, as far as Kikuyu's social history was concerned, was the fact that while in two previous generations, the Kikuyu they had worked as tenant labourers on White Farms with their own cultivation, with their own grazing, with their own goats, their own cattle, much greater polygamy, and were rather wealthier on the white highlands. But what really set things off was when having made great profits in the second World War, white farmers turned to tractors to plows to machines and try to get rid of their labor. And there was a tremendous degree of real hardship amongst a very large farm population amongst the Kikuyu who were pushed off what they thought was theirs on the white times that they thought they'd earned by their labor, and which the white patrons, the white farmers, were then denying them and pushing them back into impoverished reserves. So there was a really serious social disease going on of impoverishment of people who had previously thought of themselves as comparatively wealthy.

Nikita Gill: Doesn't impoverishment usually feed nationalism?

John Lonsdale: I think two things fed nationalism. One was the Bible as Niels has said. It's extraordinary how often the Kikuyu compare themselves to the children of Israel, how they compare the British governor to Pharaoh, how they compare, uh, British policemen to Egyptian taskmaster, how they compare themselves to the Israelites, enslaved by by the Egyptians. If you read Exodus in Kikuyu. You can see your own history in the history of the children of Israel, and it's a very, very powerful story indeed. So there's both the sense of history, I think very largely shaped by the Bible, that we are also chosen people by God, why are we being oppressed by the modern Pharaoh, by the modern Egyptian taskmasters. And at the same time, there's also the impoverishment and the slums of Nairobi are the breeding ground for a great deal of discontent, particularly amongst the young who can't find a job and who can't marry. It's a real crisis of masculinity amongst the Kikuyu because you cannot marry as a proper kikuyu unless you've got property on which your wife can then cultivate for the family. There's a real masculine crisis going on amongst young Kikuyu who cannot get the property to marry, who cannot see how they can become proper adults, and one of their slogans is 'ithaka na wiathi', which means self-mastery freedom through property. This, of course, is, is what the white settlers have got. I think one's got to understand, that's a mix of biblically taught nationalism and coming up from below a great deal of misery, particularly amongst young men.

Nikita Gill: What were the first acts of violence that were carried out?

John Lonsdale: Mostly by radical young Kikuyu against those Kikuyu who would not join them. It was seen as a kind of a youthful revolt against their elders. The elders who of course controlled the property, controlled the land, controlled the cars which one had to have for marriage. It's very much of a youthful uprising, as much within Kikuyu society as against the colonial state.

James Taylor: And John has his own theory about the meaning of the name Mau Mau.

John Lonsdale: Mau Mau, as far as I'm concerned, means the greedy eaters. People who greedily as young men ate the authority over others that only should belong to elders. There is an attempt to to create authority, which had previously not existed, I think. So the first violence was against fellow Kikuyu, who would not take the oath of unity to join Mau Mau. And of course, the oath was always very powerful as a concept in Kikuyu society that if you swore an oath and you lied, then you would expect either you or a member of your family to die or be otherwise, uh, incapacitated within the next four planting seasons. So there's a great deal of violence owed in secret, often by force, uh, often against people's will, often at the barrel of a gun.

Clip: The Mau Mau oath ceremony has many degrees and variations, each of them cruel and best deal, almost beyond belief. It aims at securing sworn allegiance to the terrorist society and pledges the initiates to do the Mau Mau's bidding in his campaign against Christianity and against law and order. Revolting orgies, the drinking of blood, and even the eating of human flesh form part of the more involved rituals, the object being to so degrade the initiate that no atrocity will be beyond him when called to action. These depraved ceremonies are conducted by oath administrators. Usually men accredited with supernatural powers, who with all the ritualistic devices of their calling, bind the initiates to the oath with witchcraft and with fear. So the Mau Mau initiatives led to believe that if he breaks his word of allegiance, the supernatural power of the oath will kill him.

James Taylor: Nikita, John and Neils start walking through the museum to find their third object.

Nikita Gill: We're just going on a little walk and there are suits, historical suits, and there is a massive Is that a tank? No, it's not. It's not a tank. Oh my god. It's funny because my grandfathers, they're both in the Indian Army.
Well, they were both here and if they heard me describe that as a tank, I'd probably be excommunicated from the family.

James Taylor: Nikita turns to John for some more context on the white settler response to the Mau Mau uprising.

Nikita Gill: John, what was the British reaction to the uprising?

John Lonsdale: Well, I think you've got to distinguish between the British settlers in Kenya and popular opinion at home. As far as the settlers were concerned in Kenya, they were absolutely dumbfounded by the rising. They had brought, so they thought, civilization to Kenya, they had stopped tribal fighting. The population was rising in numbers, which was generally a good sign, and they couldn't understand why on earth the Kikuyu in particular were rising because the Kikuyu had done the best out of colonial rule so far as the white settlers were concerned. They were the best educated people. They made the most money by supplying food and charcoal to Nairobi. Kikuyu were in every household. They ran most offices. They were known as the cleverest and also the most devious people in Kenya, and it was the deviousness that particularly struck the settlers.

James Taylor: In October, 1952, simmering tensions culminated in the Mau Mau assassination of a loyalist Kikuyu Tribal chief. In response, the British authorities declared a state of emergency in Kenya, but the violence would only get worse. On January the 24th. 1953. One event changed the way the settlers and the public back home in Britain viewed the conflict entirely. Roger Ruck a farmer. Esme Ruck, a local doctor and their 6-year-old son, Michael, were massacred by the Mau Mau in their home. Photos of Michael's body and bloodied bedroom were splashed across the British press to the horrified shock of its readers, despite the fact that very few settlers were killed over the course of the conflict. The Mau Mau became synonymous with a terrifying evil overnight.

John Lonsdale: The really terrible thing was that Mau Mau struck in one's household. It was the kitchen boy or the shamba boy, the garden boy who one had to fear. So it was the extreme intimacy of the violence, which struck settlers that they were being attacked by people who they had befriended, who they'd paid to look after them, to look after their children, and it's the worst kind of treachery that it should be your domestic servants who are turning against you.
There was absolute fury and a great desire, of course, to retaliate in kind amongst the white settlers, and I think that is the origins of a great deal of the dirtiness of the war because it was so intimate. As far as British public opinion was concerned then of course a lot of people were taken in by propaganda.

James Taylor: At this point, the group reach a large chest of draws tuck around the corner of the gallery which holds a series of objects lying in one of the draws is an unassuming flint colored square.

Nikita Gill: It looks a little bit like something I've actually seen in my grandfather's house. Almost looks like a stamp, like a, like it almost looks like a stamp and it is. I think it is a stamp and it is, I don't actually know what it says on there sorry.

Niels Boender: This is a hand stamp and I think this is the best item we have in the collection because this is a stamp that was used by Mau Mau fighters in the forest. And I think what it shows us, and this is a very important thing, is when we looked at the British propaganda, you've got this impression that this was a very backward looking, reactionary tribal movement. But in fact, there was a lot of organization that went on. They formed a set of political organizations, one of which was called the Kenya Parliament, which was essentially a meeting of the literate leaders of the movement in which they wrote letters to the governor, they wrote letters to the Prime Minister, they wrote letters to the Queen, articulating this alternative vision of post independence Kenya based on land and freedom. And I think that when you look at the, the things that they produced. For instance, this stamp, it shows that they had documentation. They had a whole complex network of post boxes and messengers, and there was this whole infrastructure going on. And this stamp in particular, it says in Kikuyu, the translation of it is the blacksmith is the shield of the people. And what you have is an image of a spear, a shield, and a mountain, and all those elements have some meaning. So for example, the mountain is Mount Kenya. That the Kikuyu you look towards as a kind of religious symbol.
The slogan, the blacksmith is the shield of the people is illustrative, I think, of the way in which the Mau Mau made their own weapons. They made their own firearms. They made their own swords and shields. And they had a whole separate group of people that were working on making these weapons in sort of secret factories in the forest. So I think what it shows is this complex bureaucracy, this alternative government that they were trying to form all just because of this stamp.

James Taylor: It's time to move. Once again, Nikita is led through the IWM staff only door towards the museum's open boardroom. And once they've settled in, they talk tactics.

Nikita Gill: So what were the actual tactics used by the British and the Mau Mau during this uprising?

Niels Boender: The conflict occurred, I would say in several theaters, but the aspect that was most prominent, the one that people would've seen in their propaganda videos was the war in the forest, so to speak. So that was, they were called gangs at the time, but gangs of Mau Mau, that could be anywhere from six men to several hundred that lived in the forest and would come out periodically to attack the basis of colonial power. And this is a good moment to introduce the, so-called Home Guard and the Home Guard were effectively pro British or loyalist Kikuyu. Often they were colonial servants, chiefs and headmen, and because they were under threat, they were the main targets of the Mau Mau. They were sort of. Packed together in these fortified positions, the Home Guard posts and the beginning of the war is essentially Mau Mau attacking these home guard posts in order to get weapons and the home guards defending themselves. And that's effectively how the conflict occurred. After that, when the British brought in more troops from Britain, as well as from other parts of Africa, the King's African rifles, the conflict became much more search and destroy operations by the British in the forests. As part of that, they used the RAF quite substantially, and one of the things they did is they declared prohibited zones. So there were whole parts of Kenya, particularly around the forest, where anyone could be killed as long as they were there. So we don't know how many civilians died in that process, but there was fairly indiscriminate bombing. The Americans used similar techniques in Vietnam. This was how counterinsurgency was done at that time.

James Taylor: Suddenly one of the IWM archive team appears at the far end of the room.

Nikita Gill: There is a trolley coming towards us, and on that trolley there are two boxes and it says, staff use only. One of the boxes. The long one is being laid on the table. This is an object which has been removed and placed on the table. Am I right in calling that a sword?

Niels Boender: This is what was called a simi, which is a traditional Kikuyu sword. And as you can see, I think what this illustrates is that they relied on a whole set of weaponry, including traditional weaponry because the Mau Mau, unlike resistance organizations in places like Vietnam, in places like Israel, Palestine didn't have access to foreign support. So all the weapons they used had to be either sort of traditional agricultural equipment, or they had to be traditional weaponry that they could forge themselves or they had to be rifles that they sort of made in these factories in the forest or had to be stolen from settlers and British security forces.

Nikita Gill: I think what's really beautiful about it's, I shouldn't be calling weapons beautiful, but yes, I think after what you've just told me, the fact that this could have possibly been forged, I think there's a real craft to that, isn't there? It's got a leather sheath, I'd like to say, and it looks like a really hefty item. Like it looks like it could do a lot of damage.

Niels Boender: But also think about the. Brutality of it. The fact that often this was a conflict which we maybe don't think about in the 20th century, but it was hand to hand at times, ambushes of say, colonial patrols in the forest, very bloody. And particularly because they often lacked firearms, they would have to close with the enemy very quickly, and as you can imagine, that was terrifying for both sides. That was terrifying for the soldiers patrolling through the forest. And every second someone could jump out with a sword and vice versa.

James Taylor: Once they've reflected on this intense and frightening thought, Nikita, Neils and John, greeted by our third and final guest of the day.

Rose Miyonga: Hello, my name is Rose Miyonga I am doing a PhD at the University of Warwick about memories of the Mau Mau war in post independence Kenya. So I've done interviews mainly with women who lived through the Mau Mau war. To try and understand what the everyday experience of the Mau Mau war was for them and to understand the impacts of that. I also have a personal connection to Kenya because I was born there and my father is Kenyan. I grew up in post-colonial Kenya if post-colonial counts in the nineties and the two thousands. I was just gonna pick up on what Neil said about that idea that. There's this sort of pervasive sense of fear. When I was talking to these women who had lived through the war, they spoke a lot about this sense that at any moment someone could jump out at you, and that was something that both sides played on was this sense of fear and the pervasive threat of violence as much as the actual violence itself.

Nikita Gill: Just speaking on women and children, what was the impact on them specifically?

Rose Miyonga: The way that the Mau Mau was fought and the way that the counterinsurgency was run, it became a totalizing experience. So it wasn't just the fighters in the forest in that conflict. It also was something that was extremely intimate and that came home as well. So for women and children, that looked like a forced villagization project, which essentially forced pretty much every Kikuyu family into fortified villages. Those villages usually then became the sites of quite intense violence. So sexual violence was pretty prevalent and forced labour was also very prevalent.

Nikita Gill: That's absolutely devastating actually, because you read about sexual violence being used as a weapon of war. Would you say that was what was happening there?

Rose Miyonga: Yes, 100%. One of the most sort of shocking and upsetting examples that people often gave me was that women would be raped with glass bottles, which kind of served, served multiple purposes because it was both to inflict violence and fear onto these women, but also to try and ensure that their fertility was affected. And connected to that people also talked about pregnant women having their bellies chopped off, which again was about a desire to to affect fertility and affect the ability of new generations of Mau Mau fighters from being born.

Niels Boender: I think it's very crucial to recognize this extreme local violence was occurring between people that knew each other. The people that were committing these atrocities that Rose has talked about were often local home guards, local loyalists, and the incredible violence that occurred, for example, when someone was in their detention camp and someone's brother wanted to use that opportunity to take their land. And that internal conflict was then projected onto this explosion of violence and this license to use violence. So you have very intimate homegrown conflicts that become weaponized on this massive scale, and you can only imagine what legacies that leaves after the emergency, what that does to families. How do you put a society back together after that?

Nikita Gill: You're eliminating an entire future generation in many ways through that process. That's horrific. I'm sorry, I just, I need a minute. Did the British exploit that divide? Did they use that?

Rose Miyonga: The short answer is yes and no. The longer answer is that there was a deliberate attempt of the British to keep their hands as clean as possible. So one of the reasons that Home Guards were so useful was that then the British could step back and say, look, we are actually not the architects of this violence. But what's happening is there's actually a, a civil war among the Kikuyu.

James Taylor: As we've heard the Mau Mau intensified attacks on the settler population. As well as any Kikuyu suspected of loyalty to the Colonial administration, Kikuyu servants lost their jobs, settlers armed themselves, the Home Guard was strengthened and heightened security measures were put in place on the Kikuyu reserve. But the violence reached new heights in March, 1953 when a Mau Mau raid on the village of Lari left nearly 100 people dead.

John Lonsdale: It was the massacre of those children, and I think that most turned British opinion against Mau Mau. Those bodies were real and it wasn't a cooked up massacre it was a real one. Left wing opinion in Britain said, look, this of course is the fruit of white supremacy. This is what happens when natives turn against their white landlords and the settlers are themselves to blame and it's time we put things right and got out.

James Taylor: With political pressure mounting, the British government came up with a plan to quell the uprising, the use of forced villages and detention camps. These villages were built to house civilian populations and designed to disrupt local support for the Mau Mau. Over time, a campaign of fourth resettlement took place where it's estimated over a million people were moved out of their homes and into rudimentary villages.

Niels Boender: One element of this villagization process that's very important is to say that this was something that was learnt over the course of several of these colonial emergencies. It was implemented in Malaya and the people that implemented in the Malayan emergency, they then came to Kenya and implemented it there.

Rose Miyonga: The main characteristic of the villagers was a big trench that usually surrounded the villagers, and this served mainly the purpose of keeping Mau Mau and civilians separate. Part of the Mau Mau operations, which included women and children, was quite sophisticated supply lines. Women and children were responsible for supplying food and other material to the forest and also for conveying information. So once the British sus this, they wanted to keep the two factions apart. So what happened was usually the women were forced to dig these trenches themselves. There was often a sort of panoptic watchtower where home guards were able to sort of look over the entire space of the village. Within those villages, women and children had their individual households. Of the people that I interviewed, only two of them had actually been in detention camps. The others had lived in forced villages, which to be honest, take a very similar form, although perhaps slightly less violent on a day-to-day basis. I spoke to one woman in particular who was actually from Meru, another ethnic group that was involved in the Mau Mau war, and she had been in a detention camp for six years in total, although she'd been moved around this pipeline where you get moved around based on your suspected or assessed level of allegiance to Mau Mau and whether you've been converted sufficiently. Life outside the camp continues, but life within the camp continues. You know, people did find ways to live vibrant lives. There was a vibrant culture of letter writing, of political organization of songs and material culture and newspaper writing that comes out of, of the detention camps as well. So although there is mass institutionalized violence and although it's a very difficult life, there are other dimensions to that life as well.

James Taylor: Our IWM archivist places another box on the table.

Nikita Gill: It's a sage green box. I love that color. Sorry, I, I needed to mention that. Oh, so what's been pulled out of the box is a helmet. It's a dark green helmet.

Niels Boender: This is a helmet that was donated by someone the museum interviewed in the eighties, and he was actually a prison commander. His name was Terrence John Image. He commanded a prison camp. And this is a way of introducing the discussion of the sort of detention camps side of Mau Mau, which is a side that has been looked at because it's where a lot of the atrocities occurred. And the estimates differ but essentially over the course of the emergency, at least a hundred thousand, perhaps even as high as 150,000 Kikuyu, but also other groups, went through a set of camps. These camps were sometimes called the pipeline, which I think is a very appropriate phrase because it meant that uh, you were funneled through multiple camps depending on how quote rehabilitated you were, to what extent you had confessed your allegiance to Mau Mau, to what extent you had confessed taking these Mau Mau oaths. But these camps were an archipelago across Kenya. There were dozens and dozens of these camps, and some of the camps were in far flung places on islands in Lake Victoria meant to be sort of exile. There were other camps that were very close to people's home where you could meet your family. Both men and women were in these camps that were specific camps for women. And one of the things that's very important to stress is a lot of excessive violence occurred here. The process by which detainees were interrogated was called screening, and a lot of the violence occurred punitive beating, for example. And one thing that's also important to say here is that the colonial government didn't just know that this happened. They actually institutionalized it. In 1957 because the emergency at this point is coming to its end, and the British government in London is saying, you need to release these people as soon as possible. They basically try and accelerate the process of rehabilitation, which just means beating people up until they confess. And this is where multiple deaths occur. The Colonial government tries to suppress reports about these deaths, and this all comes to a head in 1959 at Hola, which is a camp very far away from where the Kikuyu live on the coast, where 11 detainees are beaten to death.

John Lonsdale: And as more and more came out about the atrocities in the detention camps, the then Tory government very nearly fell in Parliament because of the way in which they were under attack, not only from Labour and particularly Barbara Castle, but also on their own side, including most interestingly, Enoch Powell. He said, look, you know, if we can't do the decent thing in Africa then where can we be decent? It was an extraordinary moment when the decision was taken that we cannot go on in Kenya with the risk of continual atrocity, dirtying, the name of the Empire of which we were once so proud, and that is the moment at which the conservative government says, right the quicker we can get out, the better.

Niels Boender: This is the sort of new story that eventually ends the emergency and leads to the government deciding that maybe the risk of having more of these atrocities is more damaging than just getting out of it as soon as possible.

Nikita Gill: Damaging in regards to their own reputation.

Niels Boender: Exactly,

James Taylor: yes.

Nikita Gill: I see. Okay.

James Taylor: Our time at the museum is nearly at its end. It's time to look at how the conflict drew to a close and the painful legacy it's left behind today.

Nikita Gill: So how did the conflict end and when did it end?

Niels Boender: It ends in multiple stages while it begins in 1952. By 1956, the capacity of the Mau Mau sort of groups in the forest to conduct operations has basically been run down by the British forces, by the RAF. In 1956, the recognized main leader at Man called Dedan Kimathi gets wounded, arrested, tried very quickly in court and then executed. That's one thing that I should stress as well is that over a thousand Mau Mau are hung, which is more than any other post-colonial emergency. So in 1956, you could say the sort of shooting water side of it is over, but there remain at that point about 70,000 Mau Mau detainees. So the next three years is this process that we've talked about this, the quote is pushing people down the pipeline. But after 1959, after the Hola massacre, it still lasts for another six or seven months. It's only in February, 1960 that the state of emergency is formally declared ended, which is exactly around the time the Lancaster House Conference is held, which begins to set out a timeline towards Kenyan independence. Some now remain in detention even after that. The last Mau Mau detainees aren't released until Kenya's independence in 1963, and the first president of Kenya, Joma Kenyatta is also detained during this period, and he isn't released until August, 1961. So this lasts for a very long time.

James Taylor: There's an important part of the story that hasn't yet been touched on. How did the Mau Mau uprising fit in with the wider mainstream Kenyan independence movement? Neil's weighs in with some thoughts.

Niels Boender: While the emergency is going on. Kenyan politics isn't frozen. You get a new set of nationalists, a new group of leaders that emerges during the 1950s so that when the state of emergency ends in 1960, there is a whole nationalist movement that already exists. There are uncomfortable compromises as these radicals that have been in the forest for years have to find their place in this nationalist movement that is going to conferences in London that is supporting democratic parliamentary politics. So there are clashes between those two. And it becomes quite complex. There is a group of people who think that Mau Mau has been forgotten, that they haven't been recognized, and a lot of the former Mau Mau feel that themselves because the post-colonial government feels that if they allow this division between Mau Mau and loyalists to continue, then that will tear the country down. So they argue for reconciliation, for forgiving and forgetting. But a lot of the former Mau Mau feel that that's a betrayal and that tension continues to this day.

Rose Miyonga: One of the things that became symbolic of the Mau Mau fighters was wearing their hair in dreadlocks. And as a child in the nineties and early two thousands growing up in Kenya, I went to a Kenyan national school. We were
banned from wearing our hair in dreadlocks, so there was still this pervasive ban on explicitly referencing things associated with the Mau Mau.

Nikita Gill: So it wasn't just like forgiving and forgetting, it's just like a a very contentious.

Niels Boender: Yes, forgetting was enforced.

Nikita Gill: Yeah.

Niels Boender: Sometimes. Some Mau Mau were rewarded. They got positions in government, but whenever ex detainees showed a political motivation, so when they formed organization, whenever they try to rally together as ex-Mau Mau, that's what got suppressed. In the past 20 years or so, it's taken a slightly different turn, which is now Mau Mau are celebrated as heroes, but without the kind of reforms or rewards that you might associate with it. So they're now adopted into the national story, but without giving them land, for example.

Nikita Gill: Oh, wow. Okay, so in regards to reparations or say the idea of reparations,

Niels Boender: so lots of Mau Mau because of all the things we've talked about, were left at the end of the emergency as the poorest, the most destitute members of Kenyan society, and many of them carried that for the next decade.
Only after 2002 when Kenya became a democracy again, it became more acceptable for Mau Mau to organize themselves. And these were octogenarians by this point on the whole. One of the things they did was they lodged a lawsuit in the UK. A UK law firm helped them, and they had a high court case in the UK that started in 2011. The first thing that happened is it led to the British government having to admit that it had stolen documents from Kenya, colonial documents. The second big thing that happened is that the court ruled that the British government was liable and the British government actually paid compensation to these people. And the third thing that happened is that William Hay, who at the time was the foreign secretary, stood up in parliament and formally apologized for what had happened in Kenya, for the atrocities, specifically in the camps.

Clip: They've been waiting almost half a century, but Kenya's, Mau Mau liberation fighters finally have an apology from the country's colonial era rulers. We understand the pain and grievance felt by those who were involved in the events of the emergency in Kenya. The British government recognizes that Kenyans were subject to torture and other forms of ill treatment at the hands of the colonial administration. The British government sincerely regrets that these abusers took place,

Niels Boender: but there's still plenty more to be done. There are still thousands of now very old veterans who feel that they too deserve rewards. And the apology only went so far as referencing the fact that incidents happened in the camps. It wasn't an apology for all the other things British colonialism did in Kenya or around that time. So there are lots of other lawsuits and movements going on.

Rose Miyonga: There was a deliberate coverup of the evidence of the atrocities that happened during the Mau Mau war as part of a wider operation, which was nicknamed Operation Legacy. One of the outcomes of the high court case was the final revelation of the documents that evidenced the violence, not only that happened in Kenya, but that happened in about 25 other countries across the British Empire. So in the Kenyan case, the archival documents that would've been passed on to the incoming Kenyan government were instead stolen, many were destroyed. Documents were burned. Some were actually pushed out of planes into water, and then the ones that weren't destroyed, but that were thought could be dangerous in the hands of incoming Kenyan nationalist governments were transported back to Britain and were held in a secret archive at the Foreign Commonwealth Office. Those documents have now been declassified and are publicly available to view at the UK National Archives in Kew.

James Taylor: As the conversation draws to a close, as sadly it must, John has some final thoughtful reflections on changing attitudes to colonial history and how this has impacted his personal experience out in Kenya.

John Lonsdale: I. I was brought up to think that the Empire was a good thing, but I think the, the rethinking about empires, in fact a generation older than me now, my father who had devoted his life to the Empire and had, had spent five years in prison defending it against German aggression, said when it came out that it was very strongly suspected that the judge who convicted Jomo Kenyatta, who was being mentioned as the sort of the hero of the nationalist movement when it was suspected that the judge who convicted him of managing Mau Mau had himself been bribed. My father at the time said, my God, if we are bribing judges, then the Empire is not worth defending. This was a man who'd been brought up as a child of the Empire, was an extraordinary moment. So this revised view is not of my generation alone where we had to do a lot of rethinking, but it did certainly affect people of my father's generation as well.

Nikita Gill: I think I've learned a lot and I really appreciate, um, knowing so much more now about something I knew very, very little about, like literally like Wikipedia history is a lot more complicated. A lot of people think that history is a story and you turn the page and you forget, but history is more like physics, every action in the past has a reaction, so I really appreciate that. Thank you.

James Taylor: And with that, our time at the museum has come to an end. Thanks again to our guests, Nikita Gill, John Lonsdale, and Rose Miyonga, as well as our IWM specialist this week, Niels Boender.
If you want to learn about more fascinating conflicts around the world subscribe now to Apple Podcast, Spotify, or wherever you listen. My name is James Taylor, the producer was Lauren Armstrong Carter at Rethink Audio with support from Eleanor Head, Daniel BenChorin, and the IWM Institute team at Imperial War Museums.
Thank you for listening and goodbye.

James Taylor: This is Conflict of Interest from Imperial War Museums.

Eddie Izzard: My name is Eddie Izzard. People would know me from, uh, nowhere really well just wandering around and go, oh, isn't that, isn't that Eddie Izzard? So I am just a person who's gonna ask questions of experts about Korea, the Korean War in particular.

Hilary Roberts: My name's Hillary Roberts and I'm curator of photography in the late 20th Century Conflicts team here at IWM. My job is together with others, give you some sense of how it happened and what its consequences were.

James Taylor: Eddie has joined our curator, Hillary Roberts, aboard one of IWM's landmark sites, HMS Belfast, to try and understand one of the major conflicts of the Cold War era. And in this episode, we explore the Korean War.

Clip: North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States. Breaking news that headline, North Korea issuing its newest threat.

[A clip in Korean]

Clip: They will be met with Fire and Fury, like the world has never seen.

James Taylor: Kim Il Sung, Truman, the 38th parallel, the United Nations. Just some of the names and phrases associated with this conflict, but how are they all connected and how much further does the story go?

Owen Miller: It really changed from being almost a civil war to being a war that people at the time thought was gonna be the third World War.

James Taylor: On our way, we'll explore iconic items from the museum's collection and meet someone who actually fought in the Korean War so that we can all, for at least one moment in time, understand what happened when, and crucially why. All this in under an hour. I'm James Taylor, and this is Conflict of Interest. We begin out in the open air standing on a steel gangway, which connects HMS Belfast to London South Bank.

Eddie Izzard: London is, is humming all around us and Tower Bridge is on our... the Tower London, very noticeable, visible landmark. And also in front of us this HMS Belfast, which is moored here permanently is a, uh, a part of the Imperial War Museum, and it's a gray day, which London or maybe the UK, maybe the north of Europe, actually is good at gray weather. We could have not had wars back in the old days and just talked about the weather.

James Taylor: Before the rain catches up with them, the pair head down the walkway, and onto the busy deck of HMS Belfast. On route, we find out what Eddie already knows about Korea.

Hilary Roberts: Eddie, you've not been to the Korean peninsula as I understand it. So what words come to mind when you think of that region?

Eddie Izzard: So, South Korea, I would say a democratic South Korea, a lot of business enterprise pop pop groups, young pop groups, boy, boy bands and girl bands, which the whole world is sort of cutting on to. North Korea, dictatorship has been for many years and always threatening to unleash into continental ballistic missiles, which I assume is long list for nuclear warheads. Always threatening things and doing what dictatorships do, mind control and everyone's has to... and again, lots of people marching in straight line

Hilary Roberts: choreography of power

Eddie Izzard: yes, and it's, um, one has got to understand what's behind that.

James Taylor: From the main deck, Hillary and Eddie make their way down a long and slightly precarious ladder into the bowels of the ship.

Eddie Izzard: Now, come down from the upper deck though on the, from the main deck, which is the outer deck of the, uh, of HMS Belfast. I do remember seeing in films that a lot of this, um, people would put their feet up on sideways, go forwards down, and they would slide down very fast in emergencies. There's a lot of white, the, the electronic things which are attached are all painted light blue. Stand out from the whiteness and phones, old dial phones. Yeah, I remember dial phones from my years. If you're growing up and you're a young person from anywhere in the world listening, then a dial phone won't make any sense to you. But this was attached to the wall and we used to dial things and used to turn, turn it around in a circle and clicks would happen.

James Taylor: We are getting slightly off topic, but luckily the admirals quarters and our first object are nearby. Once seated, Hillary begins to tease out Eddie's knowledge of the Korean War itself.
Hilary Roberts: Tell us what you already know about the Korean War.

Eddie Izzard: Hillary, I'll tell you, it was before Vietnam, which gets a lot more press these days. So for me it's early fifties, 1952 seems to ring a bell in my head. Somewhere around there. I think the aggression came from the north. I was gonna say communist forces against, inverted against democratic forces, in inverted commas, but M*A*S*H the film and then the TV series is, is set in that conflict in the Korean conflict. UN came in as a peacekeeping force, but it's got stuck. The, the whole peacekeeping thing has not moved since that time, but it's in this sort of wary deante between North and South and North threatening belligerence, which is what dictators do.

Hilary Roberts: That's a great idea. That is really what people generally understand. Uh, Korea as a whole has been in the news regularly, off and on as new weapons come to mind as tensions go to and fro. So it's not a forgotten conflict, but the nature of what happened I think is probably misunderstood because the point you made about the M*A*S*H television series.

Eddie Izzard: Yeah

Hilary Roberts: which I grew up with, its setting Korea, but actually it tells you more about Vietnam, which was something rather different. So you know, you have a very good general knowledge of the conflict.

Eddie Izzard: Well, I was gonna be in the forces, and I think with a military mind, which sounds very odd as someone who hasn't been in the military, but that's just how I think. I, I can't explain. Well, I came out as trans back in 1985, and if you remember, back to 85, coming out as trans then was very toxic. So I try, I've, I've inhaled a lot of military history since Alexander to now.

Hilary Roberts: Uh, which is something that perhaps the public who know and love you wouldn't expect.

James Taylor: But Eddie is a little less sure about the geography, something she wants to clarify before they get started.

Eddie Izzard: Where is Korea? because I know it's in what we consider the far East from a British perspective, but what are the countries around it?

Hilary Roberts: So Korea is a peninsula region in East Asia and consists of the Korean peninsula, the mainland right, and thousands of islands in the surrounding waters. It's bordered by China, to the northwest,
Eddie Izzard: right.

Hilary Roberts: And Russia to the northeast.

Eddie Izzard: Ah.

Hilary Roberts: It is separated from Japan to the east by the Korea Strait and the Sea of Japan. So those three countries, China, Russia, which at the time of the Korean War was of course the Soviet Union. Yep. And Japan, which at the time of the Korean War was occupied by the Americans.

Eddie Izzard: Yeah

Hilary Roberts: were the countries who were closest to the conflict and liable to be most affected by it.

Eddie Izzard: Gotcha. So tell me what was happening in Korea? What was the political situation in Korea before the Korean War?

Hilary Roberts: So from 1910, Korea had been governed by the Japanese Empire. It was part of Japan. It was not known as Korea, as known as Joseon. And during the Second World War, obviously it was affiliated with Japan. But it was not really until the final stages of the war that Koreans were expected to actively fight for the Japanese. They were required to support Japan's war industry. So many of them were conscripted to work in factories and deported to do that, but by the end of the war, a number of Koreans were serving with the Japanese armed forces. Now, in 1943 at the conference of Cairo, the question of what would happen to Korea came up in discussions between the United States and the United Kingdom. In other words, Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, neither of them knew very much about Korea. Nevertheless, they were in the position of making decisions. So it was suggested at that point that Korea would. Become an independent united nation.

Eddie Izzard: Right

Hilary Roberts: but not at once because it was felt that after so long under Japanese control, it didn't have the infrastructure and the leaders and the basic systems to function.

Eddie Izzard: Right

Hilary Roberts: and so it was decided that the United Nations, which would come into being at the end of the war, would act as a trustee during this process of transition.

Eddie Izzard: Okay

Hilary Roberts: Now at the end of the war when Japan was defeated in August, 1945, obviously Korea was no longer under their control. There was a sort of a very quick decision, what should we do now?

And the Soviet Union, Stalin and America, the American forces decided to separate Korea into zones of influence. Temporary zones of influence along the 38th parallel, which was chosen because it was halfway down the peninsula.

Eddie Izzard: Right.

Hilary Roberts: They didn't intend a permanent division. This was temporary.

James Taylor: This feels like a good time to bring in another expert who can help us understand the tensions in Korea after the Second World War.

Owen Miller: Hello, my name's Owen Miller. I'm a lecturer in Korean studies at SOAS in the University of London.

Eddie Izzard: Wow. Your lecturer in Korean studies, just in specific. Wow so you really know I can ask you everything.

Owen Miller: Let's try. Yeah.

Eddie Izzard: So Owen, I didn't know that Korea was under Japanese, uh, control all these.... after World War II. What did the, the civilians in Korea feel about how the country was being partitioned or this...

Owen Miller: yeah, I mean, it was a, it was a horribly kind of ironic moment for Koreans. I think it was liberation in August, 1945, but at the same time it was immediate division and occupation. After the Second World War, you have decolonization, sweeping the world or not just the defeated powers, their colonies, ideally being decolonized, also the winning power. I mean the countries that supposedly won the war, like Britain and France. It also became a big issue, as we know with India and so on, another country that was, was partitioned because of decolonization, so that decolonization is part of it. And for Koreans, it was not going the way they wanted. So they got rid of one occupier immediately occupied by two countries. So they saw it really as a new colonialism, right? They were very dismayed by the idea of trusteeship. You know, this is a very patronizing idea. Uh, and then on top of that, you immediately have another complication, which is the Cold War. So the Cold War begins in, usually people say 1947. And that immediately complicates because you have that hardening of this division between the Soviet Union and, and the Americans.
And, and both the Soviet Union and the Americans immediately begin to see their part of the Korean peninsula not as a temporary occupation, but as uh, a place where they need to have a friendly buffer state for the foreseeable future.
In August and September, 1948, the two Koreas were actually established. So the two Korean states that we know today. Yeah, that's the Republic of Korea in the South and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea in the north. They were established respectively in August and then September, 1948. And along with of course, when you've established new states along with that, you become all the other things, flags and, and armies and so on, and, and both countries had established armies under the tutelage of their occupiers. The Korean people's Army in the north was really established under the tutelage of the Soviets with, you know, Soviet training, uh, training colleges, and so on. And then in the South you have the, uh, Republic of Korea Army that is established by the Americans. But this then led to really quite serious civil conflict within the Southern Zone. You didn't see it in the Northern Zone. For various reasons, but you'd saw it in the Southern Zone and that led to very serious conflict. This bag I have with me today is a commemoration of the Jeju Uprising, which began in 1948, and Jeju is the biggest island off the coast of, of Korea, and there was very serious uprising, which was eventually suppressed by South Korean troops with the help of the Americans, but it, it then led into some gorilla warfare developing within South Korea. You know, that's an important background to the war, which began in June, 1950.

Eddie Izzard: So in June, 1950, why did that happen? And what was, what was happening to start that off?

Owen Miller: The beginning of the war, we have to go back to the year before when Kim Il Sung, the leader of North Korea, who had essentially been installed by the Soviets as their preferred leader. And he decided already in 1949, he didn't want to stand the situation of divided Korea. He wanted to unite Korea under his own rule. And to do that, he needed to attack and invade South Korea. And to do that, he needed the backing of the Russians and the Chinese. So he in 1949, began to go and visit Stalin and, and talk to Mao and say, are you gonna back me if I invade and, and, and unify my country?

Hilary Roberts: I mean, he had Cause didn't he? Because the United States was showing signs of disengaging.

Owen Miller: Yeah.

Hilary Roberts: From the south.

Owen Miller: Yeah so I think there was, there's in his famous or infamous speech, I think it was made by Truman in early 1950, in which he sort of expressly put the Korean Peninsula outside the defense perimeter of the Americans in the Pacific region. Um, so Kim Il Sung was going to Stalin constantly saying, please, please let me invade, please. And Stalin and the Russians really didn't wanna be involved, not directly involved. And, uh, one of the reasons he, he agreed that was on the basis that Mao's forces would really substitute if necessary for the Soviet Union. And, you know, the KPA, the North Korean Army was far superior at, at that point to the ROK Army. And you end up with the KPA driving south into South Korea and taking Seoul within a few days, taking the capital. Um, and then of course the Republic of Korea, Army trying to fight back. So if the Americans had not decided to
arrive in July of 1950, the war would've been over. There's pretty much no doubt about that.

Hilary Roberts: The arrival of the Americans was a factor in the extent to which the Soviets and indeed the Chinese were willing to engage openly,

Eddie Izzard: ah

Hilary Roberts: in the conflict. So here you had the potential of nuclear powers confronting each other,

Eddie Izzard: right

Hilary Roberts: and the whole conflict spiraling very quickly out of control with devastating consequences. Um, when Kim Iil Sung's forces invaded South Korea, the immediate response of the Americans was to seek authority from the United Nations to respond.

Owen Miller: To put it in a very simple way, you could see that when the war began in the summer of 1950, it was a civil war between two countries, both claimed they should be the whole of Korea. By the end of that year, it really changed from being a conflict on the Korean Peninsula, almost a civil war to being very much an international war, and it always kept that kind of dual character. It's something that historians spend a lot of time puzzling over with the Korean War, which is it, but actually you don't have to choose. It was definitely both. It was definitely a civil war and an international war, and even war that people at the time really thought was gonna be the Third World War.

Clip: On Sunday, June 25th, communist forces attacked the Republic of Korea. This attack has made it clear beyond all doubts that the International Communist Movement is willing to use arm invasion to conquer independent nations. An act of aggression such as this, it creates a very real danger to the security of all free nations and communist invasion was lost in great forest.

James Taylor: It's time to bring in our first object of the day. Hillary places what looks like a photograph in Eddie's hands.

Hilary Roberts: It is quite an interesting photograph.

Eddie Izzard: It's a collage, looks like

Hilary Roberts: it is indeed a collage. It says a montage made up of dozens of photographs.

Eddie Izzard: Um, there's a person who looks like a, a Korean citizen that maybe a someone from rural area who's pointing up at the sky there. And then you've got various soldiers, the, the some with American helmet. Some with more British helmets. They've got some down to towards the bottom. We've got some naval officers. We've got what look like Korean forces in military uniforms as well. So there's not only the rural citizens there, but there's, there's a depiction of Korean people in, in combat, someone, I mean, it's one of the

Hilary Roberts: most complex examples of photo montage in our collections.

Eddie Izzard: Yeah.

Hilary Roberts: And so actually producing that work, we we'll have taken a considerable amount of time.

Eddie Izzard: You can imagine how many okays have had to happen all the way up to presidential level in different countries, okaying it and people United Nations saying, yeah, okay, let's go with that one.

Hilary Roberts: Well, probably a lonely man in a dark room, but you know, today, of course, with the digital technology, we take this sort of thing for granted in those days, film and darkroom processing, and in Korea where you are dealing with very hot, stuffy damp conditions. It's really tricky piece of work to produce. Um, the United Nations, you know, it was, uh, at this point in time as an organization, it was very wet behind the ears. And the whole purpose behind this montage was to celebrate the fact that for the first time nations of the United Nations were working together in this, in the context of this conflict, this is the first time that the United Nations had deployed a force in war.

James Taylor: After North Korea's invasion of the South on the 25th of June, 1950, the United Nations Security Council adopted a resolution calling on them to immediately cease hostilities and withdrawal to the 38th Parallel the line dividing North and South Korea, when Kim Il Sung refused the UN called its member states to intervene militarily under the structure of a force called the UN Command. The United Nations led by the USA was concerned that if North Korea's invasion went unchecked, it would provoke similar communist aggression elsewhere in the world. And suddenly the Korean War became a major international conflict.

Owen Miller: Just only a couple of days after the war broke out at dawn on the June the 25th. So two days later.

Eddie Izzard: What year again?

Owen Miller: 1950.

Eddie Izzard: 1950.

Owen Miller: So, and June the 27th I believe is the first time when the United Nations met to discuss this. Um, I, I think we do have to be honest here and say that this was largely an American war, so it's certainly significant that many countries fought in it, but they were doing this, I think, out of any sense of obligation to the US or out of a sense that they might get something in return for it from the US countries like Ethiopia, places like. Turkey, Turkey and Greece both fought in the war, which I find amazing on the same side. Um,

Hilary Roberts: it's actually a remarkable situation because it's the first iteration of trying to legitimize going to war in a foreign country.

Owen Miller: Yeah.

Hilary Roberts: Um, I mean, what happened was that in security council resolution number 82, the United Nations condemned what North Korea had done and then a security council, resolution 83 was passed, which recommended member states provide military assistance to the Republic of Korea. Now, the Security Council has a small cohort of permanent members, including the United States, Britain and France.

Eddie Izzard: France,

Hilary Roberts: and the Soviet Union

Eddie Izzard: yeah

Hilary Roberts: The remarkable thing about it is that at this particular point in time, the Soviet Union was boycotting the United Nations in protest at its refusal to recognize the legitimacy of Mao's regime in the Republic of China and mainland China.

Eddie Izzard: Right.

Hilary Roberts: So this was a lesson which I think the Soviet Union learnt through bitter experience. You know, if you boycott something, then things will go ahead without you having any control. So we ended up with 21 separate nations actually fighting in Korea,

Eddie Izzard: including UK.

Hilary Roberts: Including the UK and a further 16 supplying humanitarian aid.

Clip: In Korea. United Nations troops push on and the cautious advance against the communists, and it's up to the infantry to clear out the pockets of diehard communists.

James Taylor: The Korean War didn't start well for the UN at the outset of the conflict. Kim Il Sung's, communist Northern forces were significantly superior in manpower and equipment to both South Korea and the UN. And after suffering major territorial losses, the combined South Korean and forces were pushed all the way back to the Pusan perimeter, a defensive line at the southernmost tip of the Korean Peninsula. South Korea was on the brink of defeat, and the war looked lost until the tide was turned at the Battle of Inchon on the 15th of September, 1950.

Owen Miller: I think the next significant event is the Inchon Landing, which is obviously very famous. It was widely seen as a decisive and very well planned and thought out military action, which was designed by General MacArthur, and this was to split the North Korean forces in two by landing at Inchon, which is the port near to Seoul, so right in the middle of the peninsula and it was very successful. It managed to do what it intended to do and force the North Korean forces back and the UN forces then began chasing them up the peninsula towards the border with China, which is at two Rivers, the Yalu River and the Tumen River.

James Taylor: The Battle of Inchon is widely seen as one of the riskiest, yet most successful military operations in history. Under the leadership of General Douglas MacArthur, US Marines launched a surprise amphibious landing at the strategic port of Inchon. The terrain was incredibly unfavorable for a landing, and many senior generals considered the operation impossible, but it was a resounding success.

Clip: A mighty fleet steams off Korea on board men are busy. It's good to be busy when you're waiting, and a dirty rifle can mean death. They're passing out ammunition now. Something big's about to break. While the rest of the world fears a collapse of the United Nations front in Korea, MacArthur is striking back at the very heart of the enemy landing craft leads....

James Taylor: After the landings, US and South Korean troops were able to break out of the Pusan perimeter chatter, the North Korean defenses, and retake South Korea's capital, Seoul, and they continued to push North.

Hilary Roberts: And that was a red flag for China. And that was the point when Chinese forces became involved.

Owen Miller: The entry of the Chinese forces in October, November, 1950. Um, that's a really big turning point. And the Chinese really then took the leading role on the, on the North Korean side, fighting the UN. The Soviet Union then provided aid of various kinds, but really, no, no Russians fought in the war, apart from, um, some pilots actually did.

Hilary Roberts: They flew in Chinese uniforms and they flew aircraft with Chinese markings. The aircraft themselves were mixed, so Russian,

Owen Miller: so that was the extent of the direct Soviet involvement, but it was real. And, and of course they were there backing the Chinese and the North Koreans. Gotcha. So it's at that point, it becomes, is it any longer just a defensive action or a police action as the Americans called it to recover South Korea? Or does it become then almost an offensive war to, to liberate the whole of North Korea and to do the reverse of what Kim Il Sung was trying to do?
James Taylor: It's time for another object. An IWM archivist appears armed with two boxes which are placed in front of them.

Eddie Izzard: Well, it looks like a birthday cake, but isn't a birthday cake. It's just being presented. Oh, things. These are items. So the actual, so this is an item, which looks like a bag to me. Looks like a looks, no maybe just a bag. And come and touch this. I can give you gloves. Oh, we need gloves. Need gloves to touch things. So I'm gonna. I'm gonna do just one glove and I'll, and with my nails, I'm probably gonna rip through. Okay. I'm pulling. Hillary, you're gonna have a look at this as well. And Owen, have you, do you want a glove? There's a glove under there if you want one.

Owen Miller: Okay, let's go for it, let's look.

Eddie Izzard: One handed glove. So this looks like a backpack.

Hilary Roberts: Yes.

Eddie Izzard: Is this a facsimile or is an actual.

Hilary Roberts: It's a genuine one.

Eddie Izzard: Wow. So this would've been made in North Korea?

Hilary Roberts: Well, it was made in, in China we believe. It's a very simple, very light, not particularly robust rucksack in which the North Korean soldier would've been expected to carry personal possessions, water, food, everything. And it is a sample of the kind of equipment that the North Korean forces had in 1950. Uh, their uniforms were equally simple and lightweight. So none of the sophistication of the Western, I mean, if you look at the straps, they are, yeah, the straps just tied, hand tied. Um, there are no buckles, there's no metal anywhere in this. There's nothing..

Eddie Izzard: Just stitching.

Hilary Roberts: It is literally a hand sown sort of bag.

Owen Miller: Obviously they had some supplies coming from China and, and the Soviet Union, but shortages were just such a huge problem for North Korea in the war.

Hilary Roberts: They, they really were, and indeed, on both sides, because of course, South Korea in the prelude to the war had been in such a state of chaos.

Eddie Izzard: Right

Hilary Roberts: So yes, equipment supplied by third parties, friendly countries, and weapons, of course was absolutely vital. But yes, this one was made in China and supplied by China.

James Taylor: China directly entered the Korean War In October, 1950, China's leader Mao Zedong ordered hundreds of thousands of Chinese troops under the banner of the Chinese people's volunteer army to cross the Yellow River from China into Korea. Their goal was to repel the UN forces, which had crossed the 38th parallel and were advancing into North Korea. Eddie begins to unwrap a second object.

Eddie Izzard: So this is Body Armor. Is it from North or the South?

Hilary Roberts: This is American Body Armor. It's the M 69 fragmentation vest.

Eddie Izzard: It's heavy.

Hilary Roberts: It weighs eight pounds.

Eddie Izzard: Eight pounds.

Hilary Roberts: And the key thing about the material is that it's nylon,

Eddie Izzard: right

Hilary Roberts: but prior to this, the Western allies used body armor in those times, most of the protection came from metal.

Eddie Izzard: So this is just lay layers and layers and layers of nylon.

Hilary Roberts: That's right. And the aim is that it will stop shell fragments.

Eddie Izzard: Right

Hilary Roberts: or small arms fire. At least it will not kill. It's designed to save lives. Not every American soldier had this in Korea. There was, you know, some resistance to actually being weighed down in the heat of all cold of Korea work with something like this. You know, imagine trying to hike through mountain terrain for miles in blistering heat wearing one of these.

Eddie Izzard: Yeah.

Hilary Roberts: But soldiers were told this jacket will save your life. I mean, the contrast between our first object, the very simple, straightforward, cheap light rucksack and this marvel at the time of the most modern military technology where they've done their ballistics research and they're using this new artificial material nylon. It gives a very good sense of the equipment of the opposing sides and what the nature of the war was.

Eddie Izzard: But it's an interesting thing for my analysis of warfare, it's morale and motivation is more important than anything. And I think Vietnam proved that in their thousand years of fighting off the French before they refer off the Americans, they just kept going and they had the will and the political will in the north, and they just wouldn't stop fighting. Now, what is this?

James Taylor: At this point, a brightly colored square of fabric is carefully lifted from a box and placed on the table between Hillary and Eddie.

Hilary Roberts: This is a handkerchief which was produced by the Chinese people's volunteers. So in other words, those, uh, from Republican China who were serving in Korea. And it was distributed in the context of Christmas as a Christmas greeting to United Nations troops in 1951. And so what you have there around the edge is a slogan which says, from the Chinese people's Volunteers, Korea 1951, demand peace, stop the war. And I can't read that upside down. So Eddie turns it up for me. It's no disgrace to quit fighting in this unjust war, withdraw all foreign troops from Korea, leave Korea to the Koreans. So you know, that's a very, very plain message to English speaking troops in Korea. Then you have Christmas greetings and drawings, which all follow the same sort of theme.

Eddie Izzard: And there's one image here and it's obviously trying to encourage people why fight for him. And there's a picture of someone who looks more Asian than, than British. So do you know anyone know who that 'him' is there?
Owen Miller: I would say its a generic depiction of a capitalist, you see has a dollar on his tie there. Uh, but it, it is a, it is a campaign of propaganda, which is trying to get into the hearts and minds of the American troops, and I mean this image here is most fascinating to me, which shows it says underneath it in the corner of the handkerchief; those who love you want you back home, safe and sound. And above that slogan is a group of very blonde haired young children, and I think grandparents and, and even a baby. All of them with blonde hair.

Eddie Izzard: They actually have yellow hair. I think they're the Simpsons family.

Owen Miller: Yes quite possibly. Yes. So this is what a Chinese propagandist thinks, an American family, a typical American family looks like, and they're trying to get their, get to the heartstrings of the American soldiers. They also did, I mean this is obviously not aimed at black soldiers, but they had propaganda specifically aimed at American Black soldiers.

Eddie Izzard: They weren't allowed to fight in the Second World War officially, but they were, and they, I don't think in, in the Korean War, but yes, in by the Vietnam War.

Owen Miller: They, they were fighting in the Korean War.

Hilary Roberts: They were,

Owen Miller: but they were segregated.

Eddie Izzard: It was insane because Black soldiers, African American soldiers fought in the American Civil War, which ended in 1865, which an insane thing that happened in America having fought a whole, you know, it's about a hundred thousand of them having fought...

Hilary Roberts: They were known as B, the Buffalo soldiers, the segregated regiments.

Eddie Izzard: Right, right.

Owen Miller: So it is very much, this is really playing on segregation, playing on the lack of civil rights and the fact that, you know, we are, we we're the ones who are really on your side, the Chinese, we are communists, we believe in equality for all. Your government does not believe in that.

James Taylor: The team is on the move once again, back up the ladder and through winding corridors onto the deck of HMS Belfast, where Hillary wants to tell Eddie a little more about the history of the ship and the important role it played during the Korean War. They stop at a large wooden plaque with brass lettering.

Eddie Izzard: So we have a plaque here, which has ah, the, the where HSB Belfast source service in the Arctic in 1942 in the Arctic. Wow.

Hilary Roberts: So HMS Belfast was constructed in the Second World War and saw action of the beaches of D-Day in 1944. It had an interesting career during that time, as you can see from the commemorative board here, it has battle honors, the Arctic Convoys of 1943 Normandy, 1944 D-Day, and then you have Korea 1950 to 1952, and it arrived off the coast of Korea in July, 1950. So very soon after the fighting started and the ship was there off and on for two years. It became known by the Americans as the straight shooting ship. Because its gunnery was so accurate, it fired thousands of shells. And if you look up above the board, you can see three of its six inch guns now it has 12 of those altogether, and they were used to bombard targets on land, so railways, defenses, roads, whatever needed to provide cover and it fired more shells during the Korean War than it did during the entire second World War.

Eddie Izzard: Right. If ships bombarding land forces or land installations, it's very difficult for the opposing people in those situations. If you, if you assume that they're hitting the right targets, it's very difficult for the opposing forces to get back at the plane. They have to actually send airplanes in to stop the, the, the ship and the guns can be massive, huge things such just these massive shells coming in from the boats, just like freight trains coming in and they're just causing massive destruction. They were just, these things could bring a lot to bear in a situation, a military situation,

Hilary Roberts: the, the, the part played by the Royal Navy in Korea was very important because Korea is a peninsula with hundreds of miles of coastline and it's very easy for an army to become cut off, you know, a penzer movement, and so landings and evacuations were all part of the war. So Belfast's job was not only to bombard, but also to protect and to assist. It's worth noting that neither the north nor South Korea had much in the way of a navy.

James Taylor: As Hillary finishes that thought, a third guest walks towards them.

Eddie Izzard: Hi Brian. Nice to meet you.

Brian Parritt: I'm a fan. I'm a fan.

Eddie Izzard: Thank you very. And you're brigadier.

Brian Parritt: Yeah. Yes,

Eddie Izzard: Brigadier General we should say general, shouldn't we?

Brian Parritt: The Americans do, but

Eddie Izzard: why don't we? I don't know why we don't

Brian Parritt: mean

Eddie Izzard: we're gonna call you General. General Brian.

Brian Parritt: My name's Brian Parritt. I was a regular Army officer commissioned in early 1952, like my father and grandfather and great-grandfather. I went out by boat to Hong Kong to join 20th Field Regiment in December. Uh, the Colonel got the whole regiment together, uh, and he said, I've been posted to Korea and you're all coming with me. And we landed in Korea in December, 1952 and took over in the line on Christmas Day in 1952 and were there for a year.
James Taylor: It's time to head back inside after a stroll along the ship's 187 meter deck, Hillary, Brian and Owen find themselves in the Grand Morgan Giles room surrounded by naval paintings and portholes to further explore Britain's role in the Korean War.

Eddie Izzard: Can anyone tell me what was, uh, Britain's part? Know the kingdom's part in the Korean War?

Hilary Roberts: So, 1950 Britain is still recovering from the Second World War, which had ended in 1945. It was a time of austerity. A lot of people had just been demobilized from the armed forces and were reservists. They were trying to rebuild their lives and in some cases rebuild their homes because they had been obviously bombed during air raids. So it was a very difficult time for Britain financially. Britain was borderline broke and so there wasn't a lot of money to go around, but it had many countries, its former Empire, which was morphing into a commonwealth to support, and there was an act of conflict going on in Malaya. So it's fair to say that politically the thought of going to war in Korea was not something that, you know, prompted an awful lot of enthusiasm for Attlee's Labor government. But Attlee himself saw it as fulfilling Britain's responsibilities to the United Nations, but also reinforcing Britain's relationship with the United States because at this point in time, the Soviet Union was transforming into an opponent rather than an ally.

Eddie Izzard: Yeah.

Hilary Roberts: And in terms of securing Britain, Europe and the rest of the world. Atley felt that Britain needed to do its part. Britain eventually supplied the fifth largest force to Korea in terms of manpower. But Brian, you were in the Army at the time, serving with the royal artillery. What was that like?

Brian Parritt: Well, we were the largest contingent, but we started, as you know, the intelligence that was available and misinterpreted about the strength of the, uh, North Koreans and even that they were going to attack. And so when Truman said, we will go, we had isolated units in Hong Kong, as you say, in Malaya. But there was really no form body available to go into, undertake a large combat operation, and they went, was sent without artillery support or armored support, and they were called the Woolworth Brigade because they had to borrow everything from the Americans.

Hilary Roberts: And you were a mixture of professional soldiers, regulars, reservists, those who had served in the Second World War and were called up again, and then there were national servicemen who were doing a short period of compulsory military service. How did all that blend together?

Brian Parritt: There would be a, an infrastructure, say my own troop of NCOs, senior Sergeants and WOs, who had all been in the desert or through Italy and some through Normandy and so on. But there was a few senior ranks, uh, and there were one or two, a very small number of actually regular gunners, but 75% of them were young men called up aged 18 to 20 and did a bit of basic training on a, on a ship for a month out to the far east and then put into this combat. But no, none of the conscripts were allowed to go until they were 19.

Clip: Soon another troopship will be slipping out from an English port dropping down on the tide toward the ocean beyond. For them comes a sharp break with familiar things, and as they set sail the cheers and songs hide mixed emotions. No new thing for Britain this sending of men to the far corners of the earth. What is new is the kind of force she sends a hardcore of professionals, and for the rest, young man called up for national service. This is something that affects the life of every man in Britain of military age. They all must serve their time in the armed forces. Those who were soldiers, for example, must serve with Britain's great reserve force. The territorial army, like this young man here, his days work over. He's turning up for one of the compulsory training parades. The skill and knowledge he is acquired as a national serviceman must be kept up to date, or there is no telling when he might be needing.

Hilary Roberts: This is a public information film, which was made by the successor to the Ministry of Information, the Central Office of Information, which tells the Nation all about what it means to be a national serviceman. It's called They stand Ready?

Eddie Izzard: Yeah. They're getting called up onto, uh, ships to go out. Is that, was that to Korea or was that to..

Hilary Roberts: Yes, that that, that's right. Um, they were being sent halfway around the world.

Brian Parritt: Take, took a month? Yes.

Hilary Roberts: Goodness Me

Brian Parritt: And the troops would train by firing over the back of the ship and so on. But they were really not combat training ready for hitting Korea in straight into action.

Eddie Izzard: I take it, it's, it's really difficult to train people. I was, I watched Band of Brothers, the series and now you've got people who are obviously gonna be in the, in the American Airborne and they went through a lot of training, but still, until you're under fire....

Brian Parritt: No, it's a good point. It was a pre Korea training camp in Kure in Japan.

Eddie Izzard: Oh, right.

Brian Parritt: So they would do simulated attacks and simulated ammunition fired, well actual ammunition fired at them to give them a bit of flavor. These national servicemen didn't get long training. They were thrust in at a very short notice comparatively, I mean, the gun as you get to practice firing on your guns and movement. It isn't the same as looking at a, a hoard of guys coming at you with bayonet and sitting in a trench with a rifle and so on.

Eddie Izzard: So, but Hillary, what was the po I, I see that, that that video and it showed people getting on, on onboard ships, but why did they make that?

Hilary Roberts: I think the film could be described variously as public information or propaganda.

Eddie Izzard: Right

Hilary Roberts: During the Second World War, the Ministry of Information had established a routine of producing public information films or soft propaganda, which showed British forces always in a a positive light and their successes. The Central Office of Information will have made this film because national service, of course, was something that some young men took to like ducks to water and others of course didn't.

James Taylor: Brian recounts his own experiences at the Third Battle of the Hook, a major confrontation between British and Chinese forces. Which took place in 1953 in an important strategic region of North Korea.

Brian Parritt: The Hook was a hill, which, uh, dominated the valleys in order to strike down to Seoul. The Chinese wanted to take it, so three times they launched these extremely heavy attacks by mortaring shelling for a long time and then by the Chinese charging up the hill with their bayonets to take it. And were you in, were you wounded in

Eddie Izzard: in that battle? Yes.

Brian Parritt: The Chinese swarmed up the hill, but we firing those VT shells, which burst in the air,

Eddie Izzard: right

Brian Parritt: We splattered down, and if you are running up a hill, it was pretty deadly to the Chinese, so very sensibly they started digging caves in the hills in front of it, so that would have less vulnerable time between getting out of their cave and reaching our barbed wire,

Eddie Izzard: right

Brian Parritt: and so they were putting all their soldiers in, leaving them a night. Next night they'd be ready, poised to come. And it was decided that they'd send out a company attack to go out one night and blow up the caves. And I was the young gunner officer with the fire plan to support the tack. So I went down the day before

Eddie Izzard: yep,

Brian Parritt: into the paddy and registered those targets.

James Taylor: At this point, Brian produces an object of his own. It's a ledger of references, numbers and notes scrolled on grid paper. A list of targets and caves.

Eddie Izzard: Well, you General Brian's about to get out. Ah,

Brian Parritt: that's the um, thing I was carrying.

Eddie Izzard: This is all the details here. I can see all grid references. This is all your handwriting? Yeah.

Brian Parritt: Yes.

Eddie Izzard: And remarks at the thing on rates and that just down the left hand side there's red and blue pencil,

Brian Parritt: which would gives the targets. Yes. And that night we went out through the wire, through no man's land. Um. With the sappers who had charges on poles, which were gonna put into the caves and blow them up. And being a very efficient officer. When I got in the dark and black hook, I hadn't brought a bloody torch. Um, halfway along there, we ran into a minefield and it, it was a pretty big, uh, you know, noise and lights and the two guys next to me were killed. I was knocked over but we went on and the, the infantrymen went forward on their own and put the charges in and blew the caves up.

Eddie Izzard: How were you wounded?

Brian Parritt: Through the legs.

Eddie Izzard: The legs. That's the stick, the walking stick.

Hilary Roberts: I mean, it was a lucky escape, wasn't it? All, all the way through. I mean, so many young men were taken prisoner in those circumstances, right by the Chinese, and often we're never seen again. So, you know, it's wonderful that you came through and you're still with us today.

James Taylor: We're approaching the end of our trip around this floating museum. But before we go, we have one last object to explore.

Hilary Roberts: So I'd like to show you our final object from the collection, which is an aerial propaganda leaflet, which is really quite lurid in its colors, but it basically is dropped by South Korean forces on the North.

Eddie Izzard: So we've, it's a, it's a big, like an A5 leaflet. It's got Chinese, it's Chinese script on the, the bottom. But the picture is, and this is, this is coming from the South's point of view yeah?

Hilary Roberts: Yes.

Eddie Izzard: Yeah. So you've got an oppressive figure that's leaning over. You've got a face mask that looks like Joe Stalin, Joseph Stalin, a leader of, uh, Soviet Russia has been pulled to one side and behind that there was a green face with fangs. And then there's people in the, in the foreground in chains, baby in chains of mother and a and a father, I think is like a family unit. And they are chained up and basically the North is gonna come and enslave you, I think is the feeling that's coming out of that.

Hilary Roberts: Yes. On the back there are Chinese characters, which I unfortunately cannot read, but one way or another the message gets through.

Eddie Izzard: That seems to have a glib question, but, uh, the civil population of Korea, what was the effects of all this war and all this death in different ways from the air land forces going backwards and forwards? How did the civilians survive all this? What was the effect on them?

Owen Miller: It's hard to know where to start with this. It was a really. A devastating war for civilians. I, I don't know whether you can get into sort of, uh, league tables of wars, uh, and how they affected civilians, but I think it would be fair to say the Korean War was one of the worst of the 20th century for civilian population. It led to millions of, um, civilian deaths. I would boil it down to four main reasons why it was so devastating. I think the first thing is, is the very mobile frontline over the first year of the war, moving back and forth, up and down the peninsula. So you imagine a mobile frontline moving at speed, you have then hundreds of thousands of refugees moving in the, in the wake or in front of that line of advance. That movement was very destructive and it scattered people and it led to the hundreds of thousands of divided families, which still exist today in the two Koreas because they were ended up on either side of the, the front line. The second thing I would say is aerial bombardment. I mean, the, the aerial bombardment of North Korea was quite astonishing that the Americans dropped more bombs from the air on North Korea than they did in the Pacific War. So I mean, they ran out of targets effectively. They sort of flattened every, every city, every industrial area in North Korea, they use nepalm, et cetera. Things that we associate with the Vietnam War, actually, they began to do already in the the Korean War. A third thing I would say is, is the civilian massacres, massacres were carried out by all sides in this war, perhaps most notoriously by the ROK government in the summer of 1950 at the beginning of the war, when they effectively tried to eliminate people that they thought could be a fifth column behind the lines, anyone that they considered to be communists sympathizers but that obviously swept up many people who had absolutely nothing to do with it. Final thing, fourth thing, and this rather depressing list is it was an internecine ideological war. Between two sides that had hardened ideological positions and you had to choose one of those sides. What if you didn't want to be a communist or a supporter of the ROK or capitalist side, you know? It was very, very difficult, you had to pick a side, if you think about it. Seoul was occupied and liberated four times, and each time that happened, everyone in the city had to decide. And I've talked to people and and heard their accounts of what that was like. You had to be on a side. And then when it was occupied again. You had to hide whatever evidence there was that you were on the other side and that you were aiding the communists or aiding the, the, um, Americans or whatever. So that hardened ideological war split in families down the middle. That's another, I think, very deadly feature o of the war and one that's lasted in both North and South Korea.

James Taylor: The Korean War was one of the most violent and destructive conflicts of the modern era with almost 5 million killed, and virtually all of Korea's major cities destroyed. After years of a brutal stalemate between North Korean, Chinese, south Korean, and UN forces, an armistice was signed in 1953. The terms involved the creation of a Korean demilitarized zone following the 38th parallel and the re-division of Korea into North and South. But as Eddie soon finds out, this doesn't mean the conflict was resolved.

Eddie Izzard: So how did the conflict officially end? Was it, is this 1953 we're talking about?

Owen Miller: Yes. July. So I think, yeah, the, the end of the war was with this armistice disagreement in July, 1953 and this was really signed between the, the UN side, the Chinese and the North Koreans. The South Koreans did not sign this armistice agreement. I think, if I remember correctly, that's largely to do with. The, uh, the leader of, of, of South Korea. His reluctance, actually, he, he wanted the war to go on. He wanted to pers... you know, prosecute the war to their bitter end. That wasn't gonna happen. Um, but the, this is always now famously described as being a war that's not over because there is not a peace agreement between North and South Korea and South Korea did not even sign up to the armistice. I, I think for both sides, big legacy is divided families, parents and children, brothers and sisters, and so on. They're dying now. And the last chance for some of them to be reunited is, is passing as we speak. There's no postal service between North and South Korea. There's no telephone service, there's no video links, there's no way for people to contact each other, and that's been true for the last, uh, 70 odd, odd years.
In terms of the legacy, I think the legacy in South Korea, uh, is one really of national trauma which affected generations. For families that meant poverty, alcoholism, domestic violence, all of those things that can come as the legacy of war when families and individuals are dealing with that trauma that the whole family's experienced.

Eddie Izzard: This is on both sides?

Owen Miller: I'm sure it's on both sides, but what we know about is the South Korean side. Our access to information about what goes on in North Korea is much more limited. So the official way it's described in North Korea is the great victorious Fatherland Liberation War. That is the title of the great huge War Museum, which I've been to in Pyongyang. Um, and, and North Korea is a highly militarized society, even to this day in which a war lives on, in people's uh, minds, and in which America is always there as the number one enemy, which the North Korean state can always use to mobilize people. They don't mention so much how negative it was in terms of the devastation that North Korea suffered.
It, it suffered devastation on a scale that South Korea did not suffer because South Korea was not subject to an air war in the same way. And of course, that completely changed the urban landscape of North Korea. You know, the, the old urban landscape barely exists in North Korea, it was pulverized by bombing, but it also created a tabular rasa. So you go to somewhere like Pyongyang. It's a modern new city that was built since the 1950s. They redesigned the city and and built a whole new city with Soviet and Eastern European aid. I think in North Korea. It very much helped to strengthen Kim Il Sung's position as well. The war in a way helped to create the great cult of personality. It helped him to eliminate his rivals within the North Korean Communist movement, and he became what we know today, this supreme unchallenged leader who then passed down power to his, to his son, and then to his grandson.

[A clip in Korean]

Clip: They will complete their plan to quote "attack waters near Guam by mid-August."

James Taylor: Just before we go, Eddie takes a moment to reflect on her day on HMS Belfast.

Eddie Izzard: Uh, I think a lot of people go through life being quite uninformed and just making decisions based on emotions, so it's good to have actual information on board and I didn't know much about the Korean War. I knew the basic outline I knew roughly where it was, but it's, it's great to have come along to be an HMS Belfast, which took part in that war and to be able to, to fill in a lot of the blanks and figures and details and, and what was going on at the time, before and after, and what's unfortunately continues to go on in, in Korea, in the North and the South, which is hopefully in a much better position. Thank you.

James Taylor: Thanks again to our guests, Eddie Izzard, Owen Miller, and Brian Parritt, as well as our IWM specialist this week, Hillary Roberts. If you want to learn more about some of history's most complicated conflicts, subscribe now wherever you get your podcasts. My name is James Taylor, the producer was Lauren Armstrong Carter at Rethink Audio with support from Eleanor Head, Daniel BenChorin, and the IWM Institute team at Imperial War Museums.
Thank you for listening and goodbye.

James Taylor: This is Conflict of Interest from Imperial War Museums.

Cerys Matthews: Yeah, so I'm Cerys Matthews, usually musician, DJ, you know, my interests are pretty wide. Nature, history, languages, uh, anything that's interesting, which is, I find most things interesting.

Hilary Roberts: My name is Hilary Roberts. I'm Senior Curator of Photography here at IWM, and I'm part of the late 20th century conflict team.

Cerys Matthews: Oh, it's lovely to meet you. Roberts. Anybody in the family?

Hilary Roberts: There are Welsh connections, but I don't speak Welsh, unfortunately.

Cerys Matthews: I do. We're covered.

James Taylor: Cerys has joined Hilary Roberts at Imperial War Museum, London to try and understand one of the better known conflicts of the Cold War era, the Vietnam War.

Clip: It is the arena where communist expansionism is most aggressively at work in the world today.

James Taylor: The Viet Cong, napalm, Ho Chi Minh, the Gulf of Tonkin. Just some of the words and phrases associated with this moment in conflict history, but how are they all connected, and how much further does the story go?

Kim Phuc Phan Thi: I heard the noise and suddenly, the fire was everywhere.

James Taylor: On our way, we'll explore iconic items from the museum's collection and meet a special guest with firsthand experience of the conflict so that we all can, for at least one moment in time, understand what happened when, and crucially, why. All this, in under an hour. I'm James Taylor, and this is Conflict of Interest. This time we begin in the Imperial War Museum's, bustling galleries where surrounded by tanks and bombs, Hilary discovers what Cerys already knows about this conflict.

Hilary Roberts: So Cerys, when you think about Vietnam.

Cerys Matthews: Yeah.

Hilary Roberts: Today and the Vietnam War in particular.

Cerys Matthews: Yeah.

Hilary Roberts: What comes to mind? What do you understand by the war in Vietnam?

Cerys Matthews: As for the, the war itself? Wow. The images, the imagery, um, the, the little girl running towards the camera with no clothes on, Napalm flames, families, mother's eyes, children, straw, and the fire. And then the, the, the veterans and, and then the perspective of somebody like Muhammad Ali. Why are we fighting this war?

Cerys Matthews: What have I as a black American with the civil rights issues we've got here? What have I got to do with this war? I'm, I'm very excited to be here and to try and understand the jigsaw of it all. So, I guess we should start at the very beginning.

James Taylor: Cerys has a few questions about the history of Vietnam, before the war.

Cerys Matthews: Vietnam somewhere. I'd ideally love to go. We've been planning a cycling trip there for a while. My father went some years ago and just fell in love with the people and the place. I haven't been yet. So I wanted to ask, you know, if you could talk about where Vietnam is geographically and what was going on there before?

Cerys Matthews: What we know as the Vietnam War.

Hilary Roberts: Well, condensing a thousand years of history is not an easy thing to do, but Vietnam is a long, thin country on the edge of the Southeast Asian peninsula. It's got China to its north, it's got Cambodia and Laos to the west, and to the east is the South China Sea, which is well over a thousand miles of coastline.

Hilary Roberts: So that's a very, very long seaboard frontier. And to the southwest, is the Gulf of Thailand. So connections with Thailand is sort of also there. And within a, a short sailing distance, there's the Philippines and Japan.
The story of Vietnam, uh, is a long one and heavily influenced by its neighbors. For many years, its culture was influenced by China. But it was a monarchy, so it had a succession of kings and, uh, princes and so forth until the 19th century when it became a French colony.

Cerys Matthews: Colonialism, here we go.

Hilary Roberts: Colonialism indeed, which like so much in that part of the world, was a catalyst for seismic change. So, Vietnam became part of French Indochina, along with Laos and Cambodia.

Cerys Matthews: Why did France end up there particularly? What was it after?

James Taylor: The colonial territory of French Indochina was established in the 1880s, driven by France's demand for resources, raw materials, and cheap labor. What is now modern day Vietnam, was an important source of rubber, tea, rice, coffee, pepper, coal and tin for the French colonialists. Like other empires, they used divide and rule tactics to control the populations of modern day Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. But the Second World War became a catalyst for dramatic change in the region.

Hilary Roberts: Moving on to the Second World War, of course, in 1940, France was partially occupied by Germany. There was the Vichy regime, which collaborated or was Germany. What happened to French colonies? Well, in the case of Vietnam and the other countries of French Indochina, they came under Japan's control. Initially, it was by permission of the Vichy regime. The, the Imperial Japanese Army moved into Vietnam and was allowed to stay there and use its resources, but, in the final stages of the Second World War, Japan took over complete control of the country, and the result of that was an absolutely devastating famine, which killed about 2 million people, but also acts as a trigger for nationalism within Vietnam.

James Taylor: In the 1930s, Vietnamese resistance fighters had sought to set up a united front against colonial rule. One of the key figures was Ho Chi Minh, a revolutionary and a communist who in 1941, United the Vietnamese anti-colonial contingent into a single force called The Viet Minh, to fight against the Japanese and French occupation. After the end of the Second World War, Ho Chi Minh declared the establishment of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, an independent socialist state, with a claim to the whole of the country. But the French had other plans.

Cerys Matthews: Okay, so how successful was he?

Hilary Roberts: Well, you have the allies. They see Indochina as a French colony. Ultimately to return to the control of France and the French attempt to exert control over its former colony. But France is just emerging from occupation. So, really with America funding the heft of all of this.

Hilary Roberts: Ho Chi Minh had declared independence on the 2nd of September, 1946 and you have, therefore, a period of just under 10 years where there is constant turmoil, which culminates in the battle of Dien Bien Phu, at which point the French are defeated and are no longer in the picture. And this is from this point onwards, this is where America takes over the baton in terms of propping up the non-communist regime, which has evolved in response to Ho Chi Minh's, sort of, pro-communist stance. But this was all being conducted against a background of increasing tensions in a Cold War context.

Cerys Matthews: This is post Second World War now?

Hilary Roberts: So this is right at the end of the Second World War. They decide to divide the country roughly halfway down the middle, and the aim for this division is to facilitate the removal of the Japanese from the country because you've got lots and lots of Japanese soldiers there.

Hilary Roberts: They need to be disarmed and they need to be repatriated and also assessed for things like war crimes. So, it's decided that Chiang Kai-shek, who is head of non-communist China at this point in time, will oversee this process in North Vietnam. And that Lord Mountbatten, who was head of Southeast Asia command of Britain, would oversee the process in the south of the country. So this division was intended to be temporary and functional. It had a, a specific purpose, but just like Korea before it, divisions have a way of becoming permanent and becoming exploited for other purposes.

Cerys Matthews: It's reminded me of the split of Germany to the east and west and the results of that.

Hilary Roberts: Indeed. So whatever the intentions of the allies of the Second World War in dividing this country, other events and the different agendas of Vietnamese internal politics, culminated in another story entirely.

James Taylor: Cerys and Hilary start their walk around the museum. Through the winding galleries and large balconies to the Orpen boardroom, where they find this week's conflict expert waiting for them.

Aurelie Basha: I am, uh, Dr. Aurelie Basha and I'm a lecturer in American History and my research focuses primarily on the Vietnam War, so I'm thrilled to be here.

Cerys Matthews: Glad you're here 'cause it's starting to hot up. If I'm right, now we've got Ho Chi Minh for the people in Vietnam. We've got China trying to control the north bit of Vietnam. We've got, is it France or all of the Western allies trying to get, getting on top of the south of Vietnam and, and we talk about Ho Chi Minh, how did he get involved with communism?

Aurelie Basha: So, I mean, during the second World War, he works with the United States. Before the CIA you have a thing called the OSS and they're, you know, what they do is they have basically what becomes CIA agents behind enemy lines working with local militias, all kind of around, including in Europe, right? And in Asia. And they recruit local nationalist figures, militias, who are fighting against the Japanese, and one of the people they recruit is Ho Chi Minh. So you have photos during the War of Americans standing side by side. It's very much touch and go, which way the Americans are gonna go. And certainly Ho Chi Minh, when he's declaring independence, thinks the Americans are on his side.
Aurelie Basha: Franklin Roosevelt at the time is going around saying, we support self-determination of the people around the world and quite accidentally two flights, kind of two Air Force jets kind of ,well what becomes the Air Force, fly overhead as Ho Chi Minh is declaring independence and so he like, you know, the crowd cheers, 'cause they think, here are the Americans supporting us. And that could have been the way it goes, but that's not the way it goes.

Cerys Matthews: What, what, what did happen if they thought the Americans were gonna support his leadership, what did happen

Aurelie Basha: So if you even look at his Declaration of Independence, the first thing he does is he quotes the US Declaration of Independence, the Constitution back to them, right? So it's very much oriented to external audiences and to the Americans in particular, and also trying to prevent the French from coming back. 'cause it's a question of whether the French will try to reassert themselves and in the end they do. Right? They do come back and they do fight. And by that point, I mean you've had other podcasts about this. It's the Cold War, the situation has changed. Franklin Roosevelt is dead. Other kind of, it's the fifties in the United States, people are terrified of communism. So, Americans start to be concerned about this and the French, by, you know, the latter years of the French War do a really good job of saying, wow, we're fighting the same, you know, threats, right? This is not a nationalist threat, this is a communist threat. Plus, the North Vietnamese absolutely are intent and focused on unification, right? And so you have Ho Chi Minh who some, in some ways has a leg up. Right, because he declared Independence in 45. He's had years to start to build a state, right? And in the south you have Diệm that emerges as the kind of political savvy. Plus, he's a guy who is nationalist credentials. So he's seen as somebody who could potentially compete against Ho Chi Minh and the Americans start to furiously send in aid, try to build and kind of build, have an equally competitive political idea, have a state that's able to do as much as Ho Chi Minh. But very quickly they realised that's not something they can do, but what they could do is try to have a solid South Vietnam. And so they start to back Diệm, and that is where kind of the United States, I think if you say, when does the war begin? In some ways, that's when the Americans become the lead player in South Vietnam.

James Taylor: It's time for the first object.

Cerys Matthews: It's not much smaller than I am. Oh gosh. It's a pair of legs?

Hilary Roberts: No.

Cerys Matthews: What is it? I'm a little worried now.

Hilary Roberts: What's gradually being revealed here is a set of American Air Force flying overalls, and these belonged to a pilot who served in Vietnam. His name was Lieutenant Colonel Dalton.

Cerys Matthews: Do we know how tall Dalton was 'cause that looks like quite small? Did he survive?

Hilary Roberts: And he survived. He did indeed. And between 1967 and 1972, he flew 361 bombing missions during six tours of duty of Vietnam. So he piloted one of the largest bombers that has ever seen military service, a B-52 Strato-fortress. And you will see these in films of the Vietnam War. It could, a B-52 could carry a huge payload. And so, Dalton wore these overalls while he was flying his B-52 from his base in Guam to Vietnam, North and South. So the mission would last for about 12 hours, and during that time, he would unload a very heavy payload of bombs on Vietnamese cities and also the countryside.

Cerys Matthews: When did it turn into an all out war and what was the American involvement?

Aurelie Basha: So they're supporting the French, there's Nation building exercises, and kind of in, up into the early sixties, you have initially John F Kennedy, who's president. He's, he's, you know, here, there's disagreements amongst historians and certainly in my book, I, I put that he was not interested in going militarily into Vietnam. He was somebody who had fought and in the region and understood the implications of that. And so you see advisors putting to him, we should send in troops, a bunch of times. And every time he essentially turns it down. In the fall of 63, two things happened and to happen within a couple weeks of each other. Diệm is assassinated with complicity of the United States. He's not cooperating, he's not following their orders because he is a nationalist, like he's not kind of listening to his leaders. And really three weeks later, John F Kennedy is assassinated himself in, in, in Texas and comes out as somebody else, a very, very different person. Lyndon Johnson, with the stereotypes of kind of a Texan, who's much more prone to ideas of machismo and proving his toughness and is much more seduced, by these ideas that you could use military power to great effects and solve the issues in Vietnam, and you see them almost looking for an excuse to do something militarily in Vietnam. By 1964, that event is a ship that is bombed in The Gulf of Tonkin.

James Taylor: The Gulf of Tonkin incident was one of the most significant events of the entire war. On August the second, 1964, a US destroyer ship was conducting a covert intelligence mission in the waters of The Gulf of Tonkin, near North Vietnam. The ship encountered North Vietnamese torpedo boats and a brief skirmish ensued. Two days later, US ships embarking on a similar mission, opened fire as a result of radar signals that indicated the threat of another attack. But there were no torpedo boats to be seen. They were shooting at phantom targets. The incident was used by the US Johnson administration, to justify a full and direct intervention in Vietnam and the initiation of open warfare against the North Vietnamese. This escalation led to Operation Rolling Thunder, a sustained campaign of bombing against North Vietnam that became the most intense air and ground battle of the entire Cold War. Approximately 643,000 tons of bombs were dropped on North Vietnam from 1965 to 1968, with devastating consequences.

Aurelie Basha: So it's a, it's a beautifully kind of American way of, of fighting because you don't actually send in your troops yet, you do it from the sky, it's a show of force as a signal.

Cerys Matthews: And just, just to remind us, this is a largely rural area now. So what were they bombing?

Aurelie Basha: That's the thing. And throughout, that's the thing. 'cause throughout they don't have very good intelligence. So if you don't know what you're bombing and where you're bombing, it's just gratuitous violence.

Cerys Matthews: Well, especially now when you see all the video footage that we can see that the satellite images, the, the, the country is vast.

Hilary Roberts: Yeah. I mean, the key point about, I think the whole conflict in Vietnam was that the Americans had no, clearly visible enemy. It was a guerrilla army that they were up against for the most part. I mean, the North Vietnamese forces did have a regular army, which did partake in the fighting, but there was also this sort of guerrilla army, which we called The Viet Cong, which was really sort of civilians in daytime and guerrillas by night who conducted this clandestine campaign and the indiscriminate bombing, you know, was one of the reasons why this particular form of warfare was adopted by Ho Chi Minh and used to great effect. And from 1965 onwards, president Johnson is sending troops into Vietnam.

Clip: At times, a good deal of what's happening in Saigon doesn't seem real. The city is caught between a kind of peace and a kind of war. Alright, who's wounded? Alright, give some cover. Get him back here. Get him back here if you can. Can you move him?

James Taylor: The Johnson administration was responsible for the mass mobilisation of US troops, many of them conscripted. By the end of his presidency in 1969, over 500,000 American soldiers were stationed in South Vietnam. But how did the communists retaliate? It's time for another object.

Cerys Matthews: So we've got a massive poster, a gentleman at the foreground with a, well, it looks like a massive rifle and a grenade, and he's throwing in posture. And then behind him, two very fierce looking females, little young girls by the looks of it, one with a crossbow and the other one with, again, with a rifle. So who, who made this and, and what's it say at the bottom?

Hilary Roberts: I can't begin to pronounce the words that the characters actually mean, but this is a poster produced by the North Vietnamese. The slogan at the bottom reads, Get Out of South Vietnam. And essentially, what this does is this associates the Army with the irregular fighters. It shows that it's, it's a war in which the entire population is involved regardless of age or gender.

Clip: The Viet Cong have become adept not only at moving fast themselves, but at slowing the Vietnamese Army down. These bamboo spikes can pierce a GI boot and do. These are irregular troops of the Viet Cong, people from the villages in the universal black peasant costume. The kind of enemy, very hard to know who can fight for the Viet Cong at night and slip back into the villages in the daylight, and the man trap. No correspondent who has ever ventured into the South Vietnamese countryside doubts the effectiveness of these lethal traps, carefully covered over their invisible, and they do their damage.

James Taylor: The Vietnamese guerrillas used classic insurgent tactics by embedding themselves in sympathetic rural populations and striking at will at unsuspecting South Vietnamese or US forces. They relied extensively on military aid from the USSR, and at one point China and utilised a network of underground tunnels to house troops, transport supplies, lay booby traps and mount surprise attacks.

Cerys Matthews: Hang on. So, so did the tunnels start getting built as a direct reaction to these bombs coming from the air? Did it start immediately?

James Taylor: It's a good question and one that can be answered in part with the introduction of our third object of the day.

Cerys Matthews: Okay. So we've got an object, which is about 30 centimeters high. It's kind of a tube that I can see in the tissues coming away from it. Got an idea what this might be, it better not be loaded or alive. Oh my gosh, I'm a little nervous now. It looks like a grenade coming out and.

Hilary Roberts: That's exactly what it is.

Cerys Matthews: It's kind of a short German one. Short stout German rather than the round allies shape.

Hilary Roberts: That's what it's modeled on but if, if you look at it, it's.

Cerys Matthews: Oh my gosh, it's not made of metal.

Hilary Roberts: No, no, no. It's actually a homemade hand grenade. So this is a stick grenade, and they were a standard part of equipment, certainly for the German armies during the two World wars but this was made in the jungles of Vietnam. Grenades were often strung from plants in the jungle trees and so forth. They were armed and ready to explode, and if there was any movement, if anybody touched it accidentally without seeing it, it would go off and it would cause catastrophic injuries.

Cerys Matthews: Well, it looks, it looks well rustic. You can see that the, the, the sort of flat nail heads that keeps the top onto the bottom bit.

Hilary Roberts: And it's quite small. So, you know, the mass produced stick grenades, which are a feature of the Second World War German Army. Much longer.

Cerys Matthews: Yeah.

Hilary Roberts: Much longer. And so, you weren't going to waste your time or materials on this. You were going to use whatever came to hand. But speed of production and economy of materials was really, really important. And many of these would've been carved in, uh, the jungles or in the caves because, you know, there were entire communities living in cave networks, which were entire complexes and they made homemade weapons there indeed, as, as well as sort of treating casualties and so forth. So it's, it's a very interesting object and quite a, quite a rare one to see.

Cerys Matthews: I wonder how effective these are, Aurelie.

Aurelie Basha: How effective?

Cerys Matthews: Yeah.

Aurelie Basha: I mean, obviously. It, it goes to a broader point of how does that kind of weaponry defeat, you know, a, a country like the United States with all we were talking about bombing and we saw, we saw this Air Force, you know, with all this incredible equipment, right?

Aurelie Basha: It's not the weapon itself, in some ways that's effective. It's the people who are kind of what it shows about who's fighting on the other side, right? They know their territory better, they're adaptable. So for instance, the Americans bringing in helicopters and initially that's absolutely terrifying 'cause what do you do against these, you know, these helicopters? Well, you can adjust very quickly. It's helpful if you have Chinese training, right? Plus what this shows and what the poster before that shows is they're motivated, right? I don't know if you've seen it, full metal jackets, right? So they said this is gonna end up in an urban warfare where you're gonna have to destroy this city, lose a bunch of troops and all it's gonna take is one sniper right to to that, that actually cancels out all that military power. But one sniper that knows where to sit, where to stand is way more motivated and knows where you are moving, right? If you're super motivated, if you're adapting very quickly, you know, including figuring out where the weakness of your opponent is.

Aurelie Basha: North Vietnam is fighting for its survival. Everybody's mobilised because it's your nation that's at stake.

James Taylor: As we saw in our Malaya and Kenya episodes, cutting insurgents off from the local population was a crucial aspect of fighting a guerrilla war. As a result,

South Vietnamese president Diệm, supported by successive US governments attempted a policy of resettling populations into enclosed purpose-built villages.

James Taylor: This was called, The Strategic Hamlet Program.

Aurelie Basha: The idea is that you would take kind of these villages that were being infiltrated by the Viet Cong and relocate them into safe villages. It's called Strategic Hamlets, that would be secure, and so you would progressively build that out in what was supposed to be kind of clear and hold. And so you would build that safe area outwards. In practice, what does that actually mean?

Cerys Matthews: Infiltration?

Aurelie Basha: Yeah. So first of all, exactly, I mean like it's predictable. Not only are those Strategic Hamlets themselves infiltrated, but you're also, mass. You know, it's a program of mass relocation of populations away from their ancestral homes and their kind of area. So this is not necessarily something, in so far as your goal is to kind of expand security and gather people's hearts and minds. This is not a way that's effective. In Malaya, it was a little bit easier because the insurgency where they were is a different kind of ethnicity, in many cases. In Vietnam, those ethnic separations don't exist, so it's much, much harder. Again, the issue of bad intelligence comes in. It's much, much harder to know who is the problem, right? And are you putting them inside? I mean, there are plenty of cases of, you know, Hamlet chiefs who turn out to be kind of Viet Cong operatives.

James Taylor: Due to lack of resources and invisible enemy and poor planning, the use of Strategic Hamlets ultimately failed. By contrast, another tool of warfare was being used at the same time. Agent Orange was a chemical used over a decade to clear forest cover and eliminate crops for Vietnamese insurgents.

Cerys Matthews: We haven't actually discussed when Agent Orange came into the scene. At what point?

Aurelie Basha: Yeah, so this is something I've spent a lot of time with indirectly because the, the man that I wrote my book about, Robert McNamara, he was the president of Ford Motor Company, so he was a businessman, and before that he'd worked on the bombing program in Second World War. Where he looked at how you can make it more effective. So he was seduced, uh, by mechanical solutions, you know, technological solutions and initially, you know, it's quite chilling. The defoliation and the programs that kinda Kim talked… they started in the Kennedy administration. 'cause you hear officials in the Kennedy administration openly call Vietnam a laboratory. Right? For different kind of techniques. And so they test out all sorts of things, some of which are kind of silly, right? It's using animals with ear headphones and like, you know, but some of them are much more grim. And so it's not just Agent Orange, it's a whole host of kind of herbicides and everything.

James Taylor: The US program, code named Operation Ranch Hand, sprayed a range of herbicides across 4.5 million acres of the country. Agent Orange, containing the deadly chemical dioxin, was the most commonly used herbicide. It was later found to be responsible for a range of critical health issues, including cancer, birth defects, and psychological and neurological complications, which continue to affect the people of Vietnam to this day.

Aurelie Basha: The herbicide program does hit a kind of a hurdle fairly early on in, in the Kennedy administration where a few members of his cabinet are quite, and, and you know, including some of these British advisors are quite vocal about how counterproductive this could be in so far as you're damaging the kinda land that people are drawing their subsistence from. And it's frightening, right? And it's not, this is not how you win the hearts and minds of people, right?

Cerys Matthews: You're seeding hate.

James Taylor: Another weapon used by the US in South Vietnam was just as deadly. One of the most notorious weapons used during the Vietnam War, napalm was a volatile mix of chemicals used as a powerful incendiary bomb. It had previously been used in devastating campaigns against Japan in the Second World War and North Korea in the Korean war. But in Vietnam, it quickly became a symbol of the war itself. Its impact was catastrophic, leading to severe burns and skin damage, as well as multi-organ system failure, and often death. To try and understand the human consequences of this terrible weapon, our speakers are introduced to a special guest.

Kim Phuc Phan Thi: My full name is Kim Phuc Phan Thi, but people know me as Napalm Girl. You know when you talk about Vietnam War, they remember Napalm Girl.

Cerys Matthews: One of the most powerful images of any conflict has to be Kim, that photograph of you. I would love to ask you first about your memories of what led up to that moment, if that's not too hard a question.

Kim Phuc Phan Thi: I remember in my childhood, I live with my family. I have eight siblings and I'm number six. My mom has the best noodle restaurant in town, and we live in a very nice house. We had everything. Food trees in the backyard and a lot of animals around. And every time I came home from my school, I got into my, my house, I was so, so happy. And I still remember I climb on the guava tree and I love it. And I was just like a monkey. And then threw that fruit to my friends.  Oh, we have so, so much things to enjoy, like everyone. That is our life before the war.There was Vietnam War, this happened long time before, but it was far away from my village until June 8th, 1972. Vietnamese North soldiers came, and my mom, she saw so many soldiers there and she knew that something wrong. My mom thought that the temple was, is the safe place, you know, holy place. That would be fine. We moved to the temple and stayed there for three days with the South Vietnamese soldiers. Then I remember very, very well on the third day on June 8th, after lunch, we just allowed to play in the nearby the bomb shelter. Then suddenly the soldiers, Division 25, I remember that they saw the colour mark inside of the temple area. That mean that they indicated the temple was going to be bombed. So they asked the children run. And I remember I saw the airplanes was so loud, so, so fast, and I just stood right there. I didn't run. I should run, but I just stood right there and I turned my head. I saw the four bombs landing and then I heard the noise and suddenly the fire was everywhere around me. The fire just burned off my clothes and I saw the fire over my left arm, and I used my right hand, just wrap it up. At that moment, I was so terrified, and I still remember my thought. Oh my goodness, I, I would be ugly. I got burned. But at that moment, I was so terrified I didn't see anyone around me, but smoke and fire. I ran out of that fire, then I saw my brothers. Then we kept running and running and running until I was so tired to run anymore. Then there was a soldier. One of them gave me some water to drink and I scream out "too hot too hot". He tried to help me. He pour, he poured the water over me, over my body, then I passed out. After that, I didn't remember anything else.

Cerys Matthews: I just, thank you, for reliving that for us. It mustn't be easy. It just makes, puts you in your shoes or somehow just the… How old were you?

Kim Phuc Phan Thi: My birthday in April 6th and June 8th. I got burned. It means I just turned nine.

Cerys Matthews: You were a child.

Hilary Roberts: Vietnam is the conflict in which the role of the press in holding politics and the making of war to account, really comes into its own. The concept of photojournalism and journalism as truth telling, is at its peak in Vietnam with journalists of every nationality, you know, sort of risking their lives and in some cases losing them. The reporting of the war impacted on public opinion to the point that you had violent protest demonstrations in which, you know, musicians such as John Lennon participated in Grosvenor Square outside the American Embassy.

Hilary Roberts: So, you know, the reporting of the war impacted on public opinion worldwide, not just in America, not just in Australia, which was fighting, but even in countries which had no direct involvement and it was engaged to the point that popular culture, artists, writers, literature, filmmakers.

Cerys Matthews: Boxers.

Hilary Roberts: Yes. You know, started to create content creative work, which protested against America's involvement in Vietnam, but also protested against war in general.

Cerys Matthews: And we're talking what, what year, in the early seventies did the press, the mainstream press start turning against?

Hilary Roberts: Earlier. Earlier. So I would say at this point in terms of the reporting of the war, that one of the key turning points was 1968 and the reporting of The Tet Offensive.

Clip: The new communist campaign in Vietnam continues. Just after midnight their time, a band of Viet Cong Raiders blew up a power installation and attacked two police stations in Saigon. Other small bands still roam the city. The Viet Cong are reported to be in complete control of a militant Buddhist headquarters less than a mile from the center of town. And there are reports that the National Liberation Front has formed a revolutionary council to run Saigon. At nearbyAir Force Base, which is also American military headquarters, sporadic sniper fire continues to be heard. At Hue, the old Imperial Capital 400 miles to the north, the Viet Cong is holding on to part of the town as well as half the city of KonTum in the central Highlands. Along the northern coastline, Nha Trang and Quy Nhon have come under fresh mortar fire. And earlier today, South Vietnamese president, Thiệu, declared martial law. It all amounts to the most ambitious series of communist attacks, yet mounted spreading violence into at least 10 provincial capitals, plus American air bases and civilian installation, stretching the entire length of the country. None had greater psychological impact than the assault on The American Embassy.

James Taylor: The Tet Offensive was a major escalation in the conflict and one of the largest military campaigns of the Vietnam War. Some 85,000 troops under the command of the North Vietnamese government conducted simultaneous attacks on military and civilian targets in South Vietnam. With their ultimate goal being the downfall of the US backed South Vietnamese government. While the offensive was ultimately unsuccessful, it dramatically affected the outcome of the war, shaking the confidence of the US government and American public. Suddenly, the war seemed a lot less winnable. It's at this point, we hear from one final speaker. One of the world's foremost war photographers who was there documenting the Tet Offensive fighting in the ancient citadel of Huế.

Don McCullin: My name's Don McCullin and I'm a photographer and I've devoted a fair chunk of my life covering international conflicts and many, many wars around the world. When I got to Vietnam, by then, of course, The Tet was in full swing. The American Embassy was being attacked, and you know, I got there slightly late because the airplane I was on was diverted to Hong Kong so I was five days late getting into The Tet uh, situation. But The Tet situation went on for, you know, two or three weeks afterwards. So I went to the, the Imperial City of Huế and by the time I got there, the Tet Offensive had kicked in. So I went to a place called Phu Bai after Da Nang, where they, the Marines were grouping to go in and I joined the Fifth Battalion in the US Marines and spent nearly two weeks in that battle of Huế, to liberate the um, Imperial City. But the American Marines were totally surrounded by the North Vietnamese and were shelling them on a daily basis and who were committing awful atrocities. They were murdering any government officials and university people and any one of intellectual value. Um, and they, the marines, they were using phantom jets, which were dropping napalm. They were using artillery within the surrounding areas. And, and by the time that battle was over, I walked away looking just as much as the man in the shell shock picture, uh, myself, really? I looked at myself in the mirror and it wasn't, uh, difficult to see how when you've not slept and you've been under shell fire and sniper fire and more artillery and napalm, I, it, you know, it is not, not difficult to see how quickly, you know, a human, a person can deteriorate. They were also using journalists for their own propaganda use. So during the Vietnam War, you went to the five o'clock follies. Uh, it was a press gathering that took place every day at five o'clock. And, and, and the Americans were in, in control of that. And of course they were showing you, um, and giving you numbers of so-called, you know, losses. The losses according to their view of, you know, they would show you images of dead people that, that had been killed that day in the battle. Well, I used to look at some of these, those images of dead people, and you could tell without a shadow of doubt, they were simple farmers going about their daily lives. And so, uh, one knew right away that what you were looking at were pure and simple atrocities. War crimes, for want of you know, another word. So they expected you to swallow that and go away and show them as the winners, not the perpetrators of, you know, war crime and allowed you to use the helicopter services if it was a kind of, the London underground or a taxi service, or Uber, you know?  And I think the Americans, it was slightly naive because the war went on far too long. They made a huge mistake. You know, war as we all know, is totally futile and there are never any winners. They published my pictures in The Sunday Times. People were, you know, say interesting things about my pictures. But I'm, I've always been of the opinion to this day, and I'm speaking totally truthful, that my work really never ended a war. Every time a war ended, there was another one waiting in the wings.

James Taylor: And with that sobering thought from Sir Don McCullin, it's time to bring in our final object of the day.

Cerys Matthews: Yeah, no. So it's, um, it's not your ordinary recruiting poster. It's turned that on its head because it's a, it's a skeleton coming out of a broken piece of paper, a broken poster, which declares, "I want you for US Army nearest recruiting station". But it's a dead person. It's a skeleton.

Hilary Roberts: Yes. I mean, it's inspired by the Uncle Sam recruiting poster and obviously the genesis of that was the First World War poster featuring Lord Kitchener, sort of, and I want you. So it's a very well known motif, which the, the artist has developed to provide a very, very strong, anti-war message.

Cerys Matthews: When did the tides start to turn then for the American population? When did they start to say, this is not our war, like Muhammad Ali?

Hilary Roberts: Yeah.

Cerys Matthews: Famously said. Why should an African American who has got his own civil rights stuff going on, go and set his life on the line for a, a country that doesn't give me any rights at home, why should I go to Vietnam? It's not our war.

Aurelie Basha: Yeah, I mean, I think that the tide, actually, most Americans don't care despite the kind of popular conception that there's this mass movement against the war. Richard Nixon even later says, there's a silent majority that supports me, and actually he's right. But actually what really changes things is the draft and the fact that there's a whole raft of a population, not the wealthy, not the Donald Trumps right, or the, or the, you know, "bone spurs", whatever they can get out of it. They're either in college or they can pay a doctor in Brooklyn to say that they're not physically capable of going to fight. But the poor and the, you know, the middle class, the working class Americans, are being shipped off, you know, whole classes, right? Whole graduating classes are being shipped off to fight in Vietnam, 'cause they don't have the privilege of getting out of that. And that, as you say, connects because in parallel to that and the two join up, in parallel to that, you have a civil rights movement, right? The year before, so the Voting Rights Act in the United States, people are galvanising around social issues, whether it's women's issues, race, all these minorities, but these are the minorities that are being shipped out much more indiscriminately. So you're absolutely, it becomes, in some ways, the oil right, that flashes.

[Newsreel playing in background]

Aurelie Basha: The mood has shifted, right? Lyndon Johnson, it destroys his political career. And so he says, "I'm, I'm out." Right? And he says he is not gonna be seeking reelection. The Democratic party has collapsed under the tensions of being kind of in some ways to blame for The Vietnam War so who am who comes out? Richard Nixon. And Richard Nixon comes out. Saying he's gonna go for peace. He also very quickly announces a program of "Vietnamisation", which essentially means we're gonna bring our troops back, 'cause that's ultimately what Americans really care about. And we're gonna get the South Vietnamese to do the fighting for them. We'll give them lots of equipment, we'll accelerate our training programs and they can fight and we'll just support them, including through air bombing.

Clip: I realise that it is difficult to communicate meaningfully across the Gulf of four years of war. But precisely because of this Gulf, I wanted to take this opportunity to reaffirm in all solemnity, my desire to work for a just peace. When you are trying to assist another nation defend its freedom, US policy should be to help them fight the war, but not to fight the war for them. I laid down in Guam three principles as guidelines for Future American policy toward Asia. First, the United States will keep all of its treaty commitments. Second, we shall provide a shield if a nuclear power threatens the freedom of a Nation allied with us, or of a Nation whose survival we consider vital to our security. Third, in cases involving other types of aggression, we shall furnish military and economic assistance when requested in accordance with our treaty commitments. But we shall look to the Nation directly threatened to assume the primary responsibility of providing the manpower for its defense.

James Taylor: The drawdown of US troops under President Nixon, took place from 1969 to 1973. But despite Nixon's stated goal of Vietnamisation at the end of the war, this remains an extremely violent period of history in the region Nixon's administration ordered large campaigns of bombing in North Vietnam, which often crossed over into Cambodia and Laos. Nevertheless, hundreds of thousands of US troops withdrew from Vietnam during this period, culminating in a ceasefire in 1973, and the release of all American prisoners of war by North Vietnam.

Aurelie Basha: In January 73, peace comes for the United States. So the Americans are out, it's no longer their problem. They withdrew their troops. The American POWs all came home right, um, to great fanfare and in Vietnam itself, um, in Vietnam, there's no such thing as peace, right? The war, not even a day of peace really, right? The war went on in some ways as normal.

Cerys Matthews: So the North Vietnamese against the South Vietnamese.

Aurelie Basha: So for a time it was really just the insurgency in the south that kept going, right, but then within two years you have kind of North Vietnamese tanks kind of rolling through that South, and within two years South Vietnam collapses and really for a decade after the country. So if you think about it, we said, you know, when does the war begin, for the Vietnamese, you know, it started with the Japanese. And so actually it's decades and decades. So Japanese, the French, the Americans, and then amongst themselves, and then they go to war with Cambodia and then with China, right? So it's not really until the eighties that this is a country at peace.

James Taylor: It's nearly the end of our time at the museum. But before we go, the team reflects on the legacy this conflict has left behind.

Cerys Matthews: What does this all teach us? Are there any lessons? Have we learned anything?

Hilary Roberts: When I was a a child, I, I'm the same age as, as Kim, and her photograph I saw as a 9-year-old in my newspaper. It certainly shaped some of the choices I've made in my life. Photography played a crucial part in the story of My Lai.

James Taylor: The My Lai massacre in March, 1968 was one of the worst incidents of violence committed against civilians during the Vietnam War. Between 347 and 504 people were killed by soldiers from the US Army with many of the victims, women and children.

Hilary Roberts: And American soldiers were put on trial held to account, but the photographs of that were taken by a military photographer, an American military photographer, Ron Haeberle, who carried two cameras, black and white and color. He filed his black and white pictures through the official channels, ended up in the Pentagon. They have never seen the light of day and sometime later, his color photographs, which he retained, reached the public domain, and that brought about a public scandal. It certainly impacted on American consciousness of its own morality, started self-questioning. Could it be confident that it was always in the right? The fact is those pictures did change perspectives, and not only in America, but round the world, holding government and war makers to account and push America back into an isolationist state of mind. It took on the role, if you like, of the world's policemen in Korea. Vietnam is where that confidence is shattered. The consequences of that, I think, um, lasted for decades. On the military side, I think one of the elements which comes through is the difficulty of fighting asymmetric war. In other words, you know, mass technology against irregular forces, which are invisible. The second is the importance of, quote, an exit strategy if you are going to intervene in another country. But the American involvement in Afghanistan cited as, you know, its current Vietnam. That particular story maybe suggests that some lessons haven't been learned.

Cerys Matthews: The layers of involvement of politics and responsibility. It's just to me, everything I'm listening to within context of everything, it's just history repeating itself and it's very hard to, to, to keep hope. It's very hard to be positive when you, you listen and you recognise repeated patterns. Yeah. I think until humans change, this story's not gonna change, so I think we should go to the pub. Yeah.

James Taylor: And with that, our time at the museum, that's come to an end. Thanks again to our guests, Cerys Matthews, Aurelie Basha, Phan Thi Kim Phuc, Don McCullin, as well as our IWM curator this week, Hilary Roberts. If you want to learn about other important conflicts from around the world, subscribe to Conflict of Interest, wherever you get your podcasts. My name is James Taylor. The producer was Lauren Armstrong Carter. At Rethink Audio with support from Eleanor Head, Daniel BenChorin, and the IWM Institute team at Imperial War Museums. Thank you for listening and goodbye.

James Taylor: From Imperial War Museums, this is Conflict of Interest.

John Beales: I'm John Beales. Here at the IWM, I'm specifically researching the experiences of the British Armed Forces in the Falklands War.

Katherine Parkinson: Hello, I'm Katherine Parkinson, and I'm an actress, sometimes described as a comedian, but I feel that it's a bit presumptuous to say that, and I've been in TV shows like the IT Crowd and Doc Martin, but that was quite a few years ago. In case you can't remember me from it because I've aged, it's real privilege to be here when it's empty. It's like that film night at the museum. It feels quite eerie and quite quite a privilege.

James Taylor: Katherine Parkinson has joined IWM specialist John Beales at Imperial War Museum London to try to understand what are the major conflicts since the second World War.

And in this episode, we are tackling the Falklands war.

Clip: ... in the Falkland islands is escalating quickly. The heavy units of the biggest British battle fleet assembled in a quarter of a century sailed out of Portsmouth fully to fight. Its mission to retake the Falkland Islands if diplomacy fails to do the job.

James Taylor: Argentina, British Armada, Thatcher, self-determination, just some of the phrases associated with this conflict, but how are they all connected and how much further does the story go?

Richard Gough: 22 members of 199 crew were killed in action as a result of the fires and the bomb damage, so you get dressed to survive.

James Taylor: On our way, we'll explore iconic items from the museum's collection and meet someone with an in-depth knowledge of the conflict so that we all can, for at least one moment in time, understand what happened when, and why. All this in under an hour. I'm James Taylor, and this is Conflict of Interest.  e begin in the Imperial War Museum's Cafe, where we find out what Katherine already knows.

John Beales: Katherine, when you think of the Falklands conflict, which words come to mind?

Katherine Parkinson: I would probably say Simon Weston actually. That's the first thing that I think of because he was a very visible face of the Falklands. I do have a personal memory of hearing Harrier Jets. My dad told me that that's what they were when we were in the Brecon Beacons on holiday so I do remember that. And I think of Thatcher and the Sun, the, I remember the gotcha and the sort of the press response to the Falklands conflict. But beyond that, I don't know the details and um, I'm looking forward to asking you questions to find out more.

James Taylor: Like many of our listeners, Katherine is a child of the eighties, and John is interested to know what she remembers of this decade whilst the group wander in search of their first museum object.

John Beales: Falklands conflict occurs in 1982. So can you think about what was going on culturally, socially, in terms of music, film, fashion at that time?

Katherine Parkinson: Well, you'll be surprised to know that I was alive very young,

John Beales: obviously very young.

Katherine Parkinson: Very young. But I, I think of shoulder pads and lots of makeup and I dunno what year Diana and Charles got married, but I always think of that wedding dress and, uh, you know, good music as well coming out of the flares and the, the slightly less appealing fashion of the seventies and into something a bit more kind of vibrant and, and quite theatrical.

John Beales: So the conflict then is quite an incongruous interlude and it takes really people by surprise and people are quite shocked by what happens

James Taylor: having arrived at their destination in the main galleries. Katherine is handed a map by member of the IWM team to make sure she's got her geography straight.

Katherine Parkinson: Right. So we've got the Atlantic on one side, and then on the Chile side it's the Pacific. So where are the Falklands?

John Beales: So they're in the South Atlantic.

Katherine Parkinson: Correct.

John Beales: They're 8,000 nautical miles from the United Kingdom. Uh, the Argentine mainland closest point, it's about 380 miles away. So it's a long, long way from UK proper.

Katherine Parkinson: Straight of Magellan. I remember learning about Magellan at school. And what sort of, um, population would there be?

John Beales: At the time of the conflict, just under 2000 people. So they're small. It's quite, I suppose, insular, very remote. It's quite climatically, quite challenging environments, lots of sheep farming, fishing, so economically well-developed place, the islanders English speaking, but with a very distinct accent. More like maybe a New Zealander, but they very much see their, their legacy ancestry as as being, being British.

Katherine Parkinson: And that would be exclusively the case, would it? Or is it the majority of the Islanders that would identify as British?

John Beales: At the time of the Argentinian invasion, the islanders all, pretty much all see their ancestors being British. In the 19th century, there are some residents who have come from Argentina, as it became, majority of people perceive themselves and behave, and all their, all their, their thoughts and alliances are, are with Britain.

James Taylor: But these alliances represent a much larger dispute and a controversy that goes back nearly 350 years. Between the 16th and 19th centuries, diplomatic and military standoffs took place between France, Spain, Argentina, and Britain. In that time, all four countries had won and lost the land. But were all convinced they discovered it first. By 1830, Britain had recaptured the Falkland Islands once again where they've exercised de facto sovereignty ever since. But Argentina has long disputed Britain's claim to the Falklands. They argue that before 1830, they were given legal rights to the islands by colonial Spain under a principle known as uti possidetis juris and that the islands are rightfully theirs.

John Beales: If you go back to the 19th century and, and, and legacies of Empire, Argentina perceives Britain's occupation of Ireland, which is obviously much closer to its own territories, to be part of that imperial legacy and be to be sort of a anachronism, their dispute is the really, in essence that that Argentina is an independent nation, that the, the islands really are within their sphere of influence and that, um, Britain should not have a claim to the island. And Britain's claim is, I suppose, in essence, primarily about the right for, um, self-determination for the Islanders who see themselves being British.

Katherine Parkinson: Mm-Hmm.

John Beales: And are part of Britain's overseas territories.

Katherine Parkinson: Mm-Hmm. And at the time, why did Argentina invade the Falklands on the 2nd of April, 1982?

James Taylor: A critical question and the perfect time to bring a third expert voice into the mix.

Helen Parr: My name is Helen Parr. I'm a professor of history at Keele University, and I wrote a book about the Falklands called Our Boys, the Story of a Paratrooper.

Katherine Parkinson: At the time when it all kicked off, Argentina had was a sort of a military dictatorship and was it true that people were going missing and Galtieri was perhaps trying to distract from the economic and the sort of situation at at home.

Helen Parr: The cause of the Argentine claim to the Falkland Islands, the Malvinas, is very deeply held in Argentina, uh, because of overthrowing colonial authority in Latin America. And president Galtieri who'd come to power in December, 1981, leading the military hunter, the the dictatorship was becoming extremely unpopular in, in Argentina because of hyperinflation and also because of really widespread protests about the, the repression and the violence of the regime. So. I think he saw occupying the Falkland Islands as a way of, uh, building popularity for his rule and for the dictatorship, and I think they underestimated what the British response would be.

John Beales: Part of Argentina's thinking appears to be based on what's going on in Britain, which is that it's a a period of economic depression, massive defense cuts, which will see the HMS Endurance, the only Arctic Patrol ship removed, one of the three aircraft carriers will be sold off. Both of the amphibious, uh, assault ships, which the Royal Marines use, they're going to go and they're going to be up to 10,000 cuts in personnel. So it seems to signal to Argentina that Britain doesn't either have the capability or the desire to militarily respond to an invasion.

Helen Parr: And many of the Argentine troops who found themselves on the islands expected that they were there to liberate the islanders from colonial oppression. They didn't anticipate that the reaction that that was to come.

Clip: Argentina is beefing up the invasion force that last Friday captured the islands, a 40 ship British Armada primed for possible war set sail for the Falklands and the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Carrington, resigned trying to take some of the heat off Prime Minister Thatcher by assuming blame for not preventing the Argentine invasion.

Katherine Parkinson: What was the reaction and how was Thatcher's decision to send in troops perceived domestically.

Helen Parr: When news reached Britain that the islands had been, um, occupied, invaded, uh, there was a real sense of shock because the British had not anticipated that the Argentines might, might retake the islands with force.
So the, the day after the occupation, um, it was a Saturday, Saturday, 3rd of April. The House of Commons was recalled, so it doesn't usually sit on a Saturday, so it was an indication of the urgency of the event and politicians from both political parties, both main political parties, were united in condemning the invasion. British territory had been occupied, had been taken by force, and that really, that really changed the nature of the debate in the United Kingdom about the, the, the Falkland Islands. It was really striking that, you know, the leader of the opposition, Michael Foot, um, on the left of the Labor Party, had been one of the founding members of the campaign for nuclear disarmament, for example, he spoke very strongly in favor of dispatching a task force, um, of meeting force with force, um, of not appeasing a dictator and of the upholding the right of the people of the Falkland Islands to self-determination.

Katherine Parkinson: Mm.

Helen Parr: So. When the task force was initially dispatched, there was cross party support for that response to the occupation.

James Taylor: It's time for another object this time in the form of a video. As Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher responds to the Argentinian invasion on BBC News Night. At the time, Britain was assembling a naval task force to retake the Falklands and Margaret Thatcher must prepare the Nation for war.

Margaret Thatcher: I feel so deeply and strongly that we have to regain the fork lands for British sovereignty.

BBC News Night Presenter: How far...

Margaret Thatcher: it's still British. It is still British, and the people still wish to be British under their allegiance to the crown. How far we are assembling? I think the biggest fleet that's ever sailed in peace, time, excellent fleet, excellent equipment, superb soldiers and sailors to show our quiet professional determination to retake the Falklands because we still regard them as sovereign British territory, and the fact that someone else has invaded them does not alter that situation.

BBC News Night Presenter: And if that fails, what are the political consequences?

Margaret Thatcher: I am not talking about failure with the kind of fleet and the kind of people we have assembled and talking very quietly about succeeding in a very quiet, I hope British Way.

Katherine Parkinson: It's a good blow dry. I didn't appreciate her blow dry at the time. It's interesting that colonialism versus defending self-determination, isn't it? It's interesting how she turns that on its head, but you know, I'm sure this was a great move for her popularity because this would've looked like a great act of strength, but I, I, I liked calling it a very quiet, British response.

Helen Parr: I mean, yeah, a quiet British response, very distinctively wasn't, uh, is, is very easy to forget how unpopular Margaret Thatcher was in early 1982. Unemployment had hit 3 million for the first time in the post-war period. And I mean, Margaret Thatcher's future as Prime Minister was was very very far from certain and amongst the conservative party, even amongst the conservative cabinet, she had lots of opponents who really weren't sure that this kind of curious figure of Britain's first female prime minister, whether she really could last the distance.

Katherine Parkinson: Mm-Hmm.

Helen Parr: Um the Falklands War changed all that. So the image that we have of Margaret Thatcher as the Iron Lady, that really comes from the success of the Falklands War. When news came that the islands had been occupied, it looked like a terrible failure on the part of the British to have allowed this to happen. So Margaret Thatcher must have been very much aware that her future really did hang in the balance.

Katherine Parkinson: What is the, uh, task force that she's referencing there when she says they're gonna put that together? What's she actually talking about?

Helen Parr: It's assembling a fleet of Royal Navy vessels, um, requisitioning civilian ships in order to, to take troops to the islands, um, bringing troops together, parachute regiment, Royal Marines go off in the first instance, getting together uh. Uh, the air support that they would need. It's an enormous logistical effort. It's a Saturday when the Harris of Commons convenes, by the Monday, the, the ships start to sail.

Clip: The United Kingdom as a maritime Nation by geography placed at the focus of the busiest sea lanes in the world and beside the main deployment route for Soviet warships is the natural leader of NATO's European navies. And indeed will provide most of the readily available forces in the Eastern Atlantic in the event of a conflict. Our fleet is the largest after the superpowers, and as such provides a very effective contribution to NATO in the eastern Atlantic area. The Royal Navy is a balanced, modern, and efficient force ready at any time to play its part in the defense of our country.

James Taylor: The British government had no contingency plans for an Argentine invasion of the islands. So their military response was rapidly assembled with whatever forces could be pulled together. The eventual naval task force consisted of 127 warships, submarines and requisition merchant ships carrying troops, aircraft, and equipment. On the 30th of April, 1982, the task force imposed a 200 mile total exclusion zone around the Falklands prohibiting all aircraft and ships from any other country from entering. And with that, the British Special Forces, the Royal Air Force and Fleet Air Arm began their attack of Argentinian ships and defenses. Back at IWM. Another voice joins the throng to add a new and unique perspective. His name is Richard Gough, a Royal Navy veteran called up to fight in the Falklands conflict.

Richard Gough: In 1982, I was a petty officer gunner serving on board the Type 21 Frigate, HMS Ardent which was based out of Plymouth.

Katherine Parkinson: Nice to meet you. What was it like at the time preparing for the war?

Richard Gough: It was quite surreal. My ship, like a lot of Royal Navy ships, was back in Plymouth in Davenport Dockyard for Easter leave. I was actually working on board the ship when the news of the Argentinian invasion came in.
The biggest problem that we had to start with was where were the Falklands? We didn't know. There had been some rumors a few days before and you know, it was that the, these events could be happening, but everyone thought that we were talking somewhere off Scotland. We had no internet. We couldn't look it up on Google you know, we, we just didn't know. And it was quite hard for a lot of people because only months earlier we'd had the defense cuts where quite a few ships were going to be removed from service, but around eight to 10,000 sailors had redundancy notices in their pockets to quite demoralizing time for the fleet. But actually, this sudden shift to prepare for war was like an adrenaline shock to everyone. There was so much focus on getting other ships ready. That all the professionalism kicked in, everything that we'd been trained for. The benefit that Britain had is that all of its armed forces were professionals, you know, there was no conscripts. There were people that had signed up to do this job, and so there was suddenly a huge commitment to be, I'm gonna do my job, I'm gonna be professional, even though we didn't know what was gonna come next.

Katherine Parkinson: This might be a bit of a silly question, but were you scared?

Richard Gough: Oh, absolutely not. I was 23. I'd been in the Navy since I was 16. I'd spent all the years previously training to be a professional gunner in the Navy. I was gonna get to do my job.

James Taylor: Helen, John, and Katherine are on the move once again through the museum's galleries As they walk along. Katherine is passed a black and white photo of an aircraft, which is taking off from the deck of an aircraft carrier.

Katherine Parkinson: What's happening here?

John Beales: Yeah, so this is a, a senior board, one of the aircraft carriers. Um, we've got HMS Hermes and HMS Invincible and the Sea Harrier becomes sort of the iconic representation of the Air War. But of course it's an Air War, largely delivered by the Royal Navy. There are in fact, uh, raw Navy air squadrons operating the Sea Harrier, and then there's, they're also joined by an RAF fighter squadron who are operating a ground attack variant of, of the Harrier.
But this aircraft becomes central to the success of the British operation and becomes the focus of media attention because the journalists are based upon the aircraft carriers because that becomes the center of operations. So they get an awful lot of attention.

Katherine Parkinson: It was a real triumph for the Royal Navy and, and the defense cuts that had happened before. Did that just kind of, uh, rectify that after the event or..?

John Beales: So the HarrieR at this point is an untested weapon and its capabilities are proven. It gets taken up, for example, by the United States Marine Corps. Uh, the Falklands conflict as a whole results in significant review of Britain's military capabilities, its need for, uh, an out of area operations capability, which of course are all going to be cut in the original defense review. And there, there are changes and so the the amphibious assault ships are saved. The third aircraft carrier is retained in, in its pursuit of a sort of a missile based technology, attention's not being paid sufficiently to close air defense. And there's a requirement to provide, uh, different types of weapon systems. And so there's a, a real review of, of ships that are designed for the future.

James Taylor: As John notes, the Harrier was a resounding success story to come outta the Falklands conflict. Much of Britain's ability to retake the Falklands rested on pilots and aircraft, but its air forces were outnumbered six to one. Nevertheless, Harrier was still able to outstrip the Argentinians numerically superior fighters. But as Katherine is about to find out. The situation was not cut and dry for Britain's forces in the Falklands.
Katherine Parkinson: So in a sense, were we under prepared for the fight that we had to fight?

Richard Gough: We weren't really under, under prepared. We were just not the right fit immediately for the role that we'd been tasked with, that the Royal Navy was a NATO under submarine warfare specialist unit that worked as part of NATO in the North Atlantic. It was very focused on anti-submarine warfare hunting and killing submarines. So to suddenly go to a battle where you are not gonna have your NATO colleagues providing air cover to find yourself operating alone with a lack of anti-air weapons. We had a single sea, a system, and a single gun that was more designed for bombardment than anti-air warfare. So a lot of the ships had to make do and mend and use small arms on the upper deck to fight aircraft, um, and anything they could get in the air to try and, um, distract the Argentinian pilots, including the firing of illuminate flares to make it look you were firing a missile at the aircraft.

James Taylor: As Katherine, Helen, Richard and John continue to walk the museum's hallways, they look up and find their third object hanging from the ceiling. It's a large missile.

Katherine Parkinson: What an amazing piece of engineering, I would say that is, is a two, six foot people standing on top of each other. Lengthwise. And it's got Aérospatiale...

John Beales: Aérospatiale, yes. So it's a French made missile. And because it's French made and France is part of the NATO alliance and because the Royal Navy is equipped with the shipborne variant of the Exocet, it's not a weapon it's, it's expecting to encounter.

James Taylor: This Exocet missile, was designed to attack and destroy warships and became one of the deadliest weapons used by Argentinian forces in the Falklands conflict.

John Beales: This version is actually fired from on land. Argentina manages to take the firing module from one of its ships and fly onto the Falklands, and they, they basically improvise a firing mechanism. And one of these, uh, missiles actually hits HMS Glamorgan, which is the announcement broadcast all ships, that there's a suspicion of an Exocet launch and they begin to turn the ship rapidly to try and present its narrowest profile to the missile.
Unfortunately, they don't quite make it and they are struck by an Exocet close to its helicopter hangar and a number of the crew are killed.

Katherine Parkinson: Yeah, it's just sort of the perfect shape to do its job. I can believe it can do a lot of damage.

Richard Gough: I fired about five of these missiles during various exercises, incredibly capable weapon system, and used, um, to take our enemy units over a range of about 22 nautical miles.

Katherine Parkinson: What's actually involved in firing it for you?

Richard Gough: So it's, it's called a fire and forget missile. So once it leaves the ship or the aircraft or the land base variant, you can't talk to it anymore. You can't destroy it in flight, you can't update it. The missile will go to a box area of where it believes the target is. So if the target is 10 miles away, it will get to about nine miles and only then turn on its search radar and it will know that based on an algorithm of, I'm going at this speed, this is what you told me. If it finds a target that matches that criteria, it will then lock onto it and push home. And it has a fuse that will allow it to detonate quite close to the target or actually as it hits the target.

Katherine Parkinson: And so would it this sort of thing be used now without much of an upgrade? Would it be unchanged?

Richard Gough: Well, if the Navy got rid of the weapons system, um. A number of years ago and replaced it with the American Harpoon system, which has also come to end of life in the Royal Navy, and a lot of its units don't actually have an offensive anti-ship weapon system at sea anymore.

James Taylor: And with that, they're off once again in search of their next object. But a few things catch Katherine's eye along the way, which trigger some more colorful memories from the 1980s.

Katherine Parkinson: Oh, this, I mean, this is amazing. I was a huge fan of spitting image growing up and this is, uh, Margaret Thatcher's puppet. I remember actually buying a hand puppet of this spitting image shop, and I remember the box saying, you get the free puppet inside with this box and thinking that was very funny. Um. It's not a flattering portrayal. I think there's a lot to admire about Margaret Thatcher. But I have to say, even watching that clip you showed me earlier, the slightly rovingly mad eye is, is not that much of an exaggeration in the puppet. Uh uh, maybe it's a quality you need to be a leader, but, uh, there's a mania going on there, isn't there?

Helen Parr: Well, one of the things that's interesting about it is that she's wearing a man's suit, and that's perhaps such a comment on the time, isn't it? because if you think about Thatcher, in the context of the Falklands conflict, not only is she. You know, the first female leader of the Conservative party, the first female prime minister, she's virtually alone amongst her cabinet in not having military experience.
So virtually all the men in the cabinet have fought in the Second World War or have done national service subsequently.

Katherine Parkinson: Mm-Hmm.

Helen Parr: So she is acutely conscious of her lack of military experience and to have to direct that knowing that there's people who've been decorated for their service in the second World War amongst some of her conservative opponents, it emphasizes what a tight rope.

Katherine Parkinson: So this was her way of proving that she had the right sort of masculine qualities to triumph in martial warfare, just like the men around her, I guess. But...

Helen Parr: yeah, I think so.

Katherine Parkinson: Do you think a popularity would've gone downhill if the Falklands hadn't happened?

Helen Parr: It's really hard to know what would've happened had there been no Falklands war. The Labor Party was quite split. The left had become quite prominent. The Labor Party manifesto in 1983 was referred to as the longest suicide note in history. So. You, you can never know whether the 1983 general election would've been different had there been no Falklands war. But there is no doubt that the Falklands War transforms the mood.

Katherine Parkinson: Mm. I mean, I, I grew up in a house like a lot of people with, uh, a parent absolutely hating Thatcher. But I know from my point of view as a girl that having a queen on the throne and, you know, a very impressive woman in charge of the country, um. I can remember my mom trying to tell me about sexism and honestly thinking it was the other way round. So, at least in, in that regard, I, I feel grateful to have grown up, you know, with a woman in charge.

Helen Parr: It's quite interesting, isn't it, because she would never have openly called herself a feminist or aligned herself with actively supporting other women in politics.

Katherine Parkinson: No.

Helen Parr: But the fact of there being a female Prime Minister must somehow made a difference,

Katherine Parkinson: and there was a feminism in that, wasn't there, not even affiliating with your sex.

James Taylor: Katherine and Helen are given the front page of the Sun Newspaper, published on the 4th of May, 1982. It is perhaps one of the most infamous newspaper front pages in British press history. It reads, 'Gotcha Our lads sink gunboat and hole cruiser'. It refers to the sinking of the Argentinian light cruiser General Belgrano in May, 1982 by a British submarine, an incident which led to the loss of 323 lives. The headline was widely condemned by British society, though some believed the sun had captured, not created the nation's mood. In this febrile time of conflict and patriotism.

Katherine Parkinson: So this is the headline that my dad, when I was chatting to him about this, reminded me that the Sun had gotcha. He said that the press largely remained neutral, but that the Sun had a very patriotic interpretation of the events.

Helen Parr: So it's the time when there's really fierce rivalry between the tabloid newspapers. So there's quite long period from between the the fleet set sale until there's the first casualties when there's a sort of air of reality and the, the... you know, there's nothing really to report. The journalists, they can't even report where the fleet still is.

Katherine Parkinson: Yeah

Helen Parr: so there's lots of of stories that are expressed in very patriotic, even perhaps jingoistic language. And the headline that we just saw there, it's probably the single most famous newspaper headline of the entire Falklands war after the Argentine cruise of the General Belgrano was, was hit and sunk. The sun initially went with the headline 'Gotcha' and what was interesting about that is that they had to retract that headline, so it was printed in the evening editions in the first edition of the paper. They then had to, to retract it, but the headline that they subsequently published was, did 1,200 RGs die? That headline must have come from the criticism that the headline 'Gotcha' was too dismissive of the Argentine loss of Life, but the easy way with which Argentines were referred to as. Oh, geez. There was an outcry about it.

James Taylor: Katherine and the gang have settled into the comfortable seats of the museum's Orpen Boardroom. A white box appears from the side of the room, is placed on the table in front of them, and an object is carefully unwrapped.

Katherine Parkinson: Okay, so what's this? This looks like a, a sort of snood, um. I think that's a word snood with Captain, written in red across where I presume the forehead would be a little pocket down, um, on one side and then the netted area, um, where the mouth would be.

John Beales: It's an anti-flash hood and in conjunction with a pair of gloves, uh, which are made from a, uh, chemically impregnated material so that it's non flammable. They, in essence, form the only protective clothing issued to raw navy personnel. So on this one, the word captain is marked on it. because obviously when it's worn fully, you can't really tell who is, is who. And there's a mesh section, which pulls up over the face, so you can breathe.

Katherine Parkinson: Oh, the whole face, the eyes as well.

John Beales: So the only, in essence, only the eyes are are exposed, uh, there are no goggles really issued to them. So part of the problem is if you look at it, it's slightly grubby. And bear in mind, this is one actually worn by a captain of a ship in, in the, in the Falklands. These things can't be washed because of the, the chemical they're impregnated with, because obviously it will reduce their their effectiveness. So they become dirty, they get smelly. Those who are working in certain areas of ships, you're gonna get contamination with oils which are flammable when they're worn commonly like this over clothing when ships are, are hit by bombs or missiles. Quite a lot of the crews find out that the hoods are actually blown off. But we've already described the fact that the eyes are still remain exposed. So there are a lot of eye injuries to naval personnel. There are facial flash burns, and also because of the, the nature of explosions, a lot of this, this clothing is burnt off. One of the other problems is that as part of cost cutting Navy clothing has changed in the few years beforehand and what had been a uniforms that were made from cotton become a cotton and a manmade fiber mix, and they burn and they melt. And so there are large numbers of burn casualties on the ships that hit. The hospital ship Uganda is told to expect that in a war, which they believe will be missile base, that most entries will be from penetrating like shrapnel type injuries. But in fact, the majority of, uh, casualties from ships suffer burns.

Katherine Parkinson: What's the pocket for?

Richard Gough: So the pocket would hold, uh, a small tube of ear defenders that that could be used in noisy situations and would be instantly available.

James Taylor: The object turns Katherine's attention to one of the most difficult frontiers of this conflict. The fighting at sea conducted between Britain and Argentina.

Katherine Parkinson: How was the war fought by sea?

Helen Parr: I think it was very tough. So first of all, it's a long way to the Falkland Islands. So the, the ships have to travel 8,000 miles just to get there. It's the South Atlantic winter. So the conditions, uh around the Falkland Islands are, are very difficult. Seas can be very heavy. It's very cold. There's a lot of wind, and the task force comes under quite a heavy attack from the Argentine Air Force. A number of ships are bombed. Bombs strike and, and, and don't explode, and three of the ships were hit by ex except missiles. So it's a difficult engagement.

James Taylor: The Naval campaign was crucial to the ultimate success of Britain's operation to retake the Falklands without the Royal Navy, there would've been no capability to take out aircraft, which flew over mainland Argentina and vital for Britain's plans for amphibious troop landings onto the islands.

John Beales: There was a 127 ships involved.

Katherine Parkinson: I was just gonna say that I'd written down that number.

John Beales: 127 ships involved of which about a third are Royal Navy. The rest are from the Royal Fleet Auxiliary, whose job it is to support the Royal Navy. And so there'll be fuel tankers and uh, logistic ships. But the other ships are ones which are ships taken up from trade. They are there are fishing trawlers, which are used as minesweepers. There are roll on roll ferries, which are normally taking people from the east coast of Britain across to mainland Europe. There are cruise liners, so there's, there are a whole range of different experiences for the the raw navy. The expectation is obviously that they are Britain's senior military service. There's a longstanding tradition of competence, skill, and history, which they draw upon. The initial perception is that the Argentinian, uh, Air Force and, uh, Navy pilots, some of whom are equipped with the Exocet missile, uh, pose the greatest threat. And after the British submarine, conqueror sinks the ARA Belgrano, very quickly there's a retaliation, and HMS Sheffield is hit by an Exocet missile. And it sends shock wave, not only through the Royal Navy, but also through, uh, the British public, because the Sheffield is a type 42 destroyer. It's the most advanced ship within it, and it sunk without firing a shock.

James Taylor: The sinking of HMS Sheffield, which killed 20 sailors was a pivotal moment in the conflict. It showed that Argentina's Exocet missiles, could doom Britain's naval campaign to failure. Victory was far from guaranteed. John passes, Katherine, another black and white photo. This one showing smoke bluing up from a sinking ship.

Katherine Parkinson: So there's a photo and there's, uh, an explosion at one end of the boat and then a, a support boat is out by the side of it. So what's happening here?

Richard Gough: So the picture we're looking at is actually my ship HMS Ardent on on the 21st of May. It's a type 21 frigate. You can see at the port stern of the ship is as a result of three different Argentine air raids. So this is the result of an ongoing multi air attack. So this area of the ship is over the main propulsion system. This meant that a lot of, uh, crew, in fact 22 members of 199 crew, uh, were killed in action as a result of the fires and bomb damage you can see the flight deck would've normally had a helicopter on it. On the first air raid the bombs when they hit the ship um took out the after seek out air defense system and blew the helicopter away from the deck and killed um quite a few members of the crew on that flight deck. Ardent was operating alone. Um, it was part of its mission that day. It was to operate alone with no air cover, uh, because the job that they were given was to carry out naval bombardments, which is firing at a target up to 14 miles away. Uh and tasking was to pin down the Argentine Pucará aircraft at Goose Green Airport. Now this was vital because intelligence showed that the Argentinians had napalm bombs. Napalm bombs, um, awful. They explode and spread flame, um hadn't really been used since Vietnam, but the Argentinians had them. If they'd been able to take off from Goose Green Airport, why troops were trying to be landed, the landings would've just failed instantly. We had no air cover really to speak of, and, uh, that that would've changed the course of the day.

Katherine Parkinson: So where were you when that photo was taken?

Richard Gough: So, although you can't see in the photograph, I was on the foxhole, which is the pointed bit of the front of the ship. Um, I had worked with a couple of people to drop anchor at the orders of the Captain, Commander West, and that was to put the ship in a stable state, stop it from moving because we had lost control of the engine control systems in steerage. So we'd dropped anchor and I was up there. The picture shows the survivors dressed in their orange once only suits, which is the suit that you are either carrying or is available on on the upper deck. And the idea of donning the once only suit which is bright orange, covers your head, is so you can go into the water and survive for a period of time. We didn't know right away if we were gonna be putting the life rafts into the water and jumping in, so you get dressed to survive. Um, just said, Yarmouth, this is Ardent take off my men.

James Taylor: While Katherine takes a breath to digest what she's just heard, another object is quietly wheeled in.

Katherine Parkinson: Wow so some, um, very smart boots that look like they would be too big for me. Yeah, some smart black leather boots.

John Beales: So this is the, uh, the DMS boot direct molded sole. It's a standard issue for British soldiers and Royal Marines. It's a short, uh, thin leather ankle boot. It's got a toe section, which is, you know, highly polished. And so it's deemed to be great for, for parades for marching in. But the ground conditions in the, in the Falklands are very, very difficult. It's, er, peat.

Katherine Parkinson: But now I'm surprised. I'm very surprised.

John Beales: So the ground conditions, uh proved to be very problematic for the British ground forces, uh, and large numbers of troops very early on start to develop trench foot, right? Of course, it's misnomer that trench foot comes from being in trenches. It comes from the feet being wet and cold and within a couple of days of the landings as, uh, British forces are, um, establishing their beachhead around San Carlos water. So if you imagine you've been in the bath for a long while, you are feet start to wrinkle. Well, that's after a few minutes or an hour or so. These people are on shore for 25 days or so, and their feet are wet pretty much the whole time. So people start to complain very quickly of swelling of the feet of pain and there's a mixture of reduction in circulation because of the cold. And this leads to problems with discoloration of the feet, swelling the feet, and excruciating pain and this becomes one of the sort of common experiences, which is probably not so well known, uh, amongst the general public today. The legacy of it is that large numbers of troops return with an ongoing problem. They have numbness of their feet for months, years, and many veterans now will say that they have a susceptibility to the cold, which originates from the, the blood supply and nerve damage caused by their experiences in the Falklands.

Katherine Parkinson: So how, how was the war fought by land?

Helen Parr: Well, the conditions on the Falkland Islands were very difficult, as we've just heard, as well as the, the wetness underfoot, it's also, it's winter, it's, it's dark, it's very cold. Wind rolled constantly, and the, the troops were always outside, so they couldn't, there was nowhere for them to go to be resupplied. They had what they, what they had. They just had to manage with that. So the parachute regiment, firstly, they fight quite a difficult battle at Darwin and Goose Green, which is towards the south of the islands. And then the parachute re regiment then fight again, uh, in the hills around Stanley, firstly, at, at Mount Longdon. The Battle of Goose Green is slightly different because it's separate to the push onto Stanley. Uh, most of the battles take place in. In the series of hills around Stanley, the capital towards the end of the war, parachute regiment, fight on Mount Longdon, scotts guards fight on Tumbledown, uh, the Royal Marines fighter, Mount Harriet and, and Mount Kent, and then the Parachute Regiment fight again at at Wireless Ridge. And it's the combined force of those, of those battles, uh, that eventually pushed the Argentines to surrender.

Katherine Parkinson: Of course, you, because you think Argentina, you don't think of it as being inhospitable in terms of climate, but it's quite near Antarctica and must have been very cold and...

Helen Parr: It's very remote because they're so exposed. There's no trees on the islands, for example. So the, the light is. Is incredibly clear. And so sometimes you would get those really bright and star filled nights, but other times it would just be dark and foggy.

Katherine Parkinson: So Helen, how did the conflict come to an end and what, what, what situation was left in Argentina?

Helen Parr: It came to an end because the Argentine forces on the Falkland Islands were compelled to surrender and that was a difficult decision for the Argentine high military command to take because they had embarked on this military adventure in order to secure and augment their popularity in Argentina and the military adventure had ended in unambiguous defeat, return of the sovereignty of the Malvinas, the Falkland Islands to Britain. So for them to accept the surrender, um, was incredibly significant. When they returned to Argentina to the Argentine mainland, it was almost as if they tried to ignore the the defeat had happened, and that had some dreadful consequences.
So the, the, the defeat in the Malvinas brought Galtieri's presidency to an abrupt end, and within a year the dictatorship had fallen and democracy was restored in Argentina. But the dead, the Argentine dead who'd fallen on land had been left in the Falkland Islands, and the British forces had spent a great deal of time and effort, identifying, locating, burying their own dead and thinking about the, the sort of the services of, of burial and how to, how to handle the bodies. And that same amount of care and attention was not there in the Argentine forces. So a British Army colonel actually ended up doing a lot of the work in locating, where it was possible, the Argentine dead. And they were, they were buried in an Argentine cemetery in the Falkland Islands, um, near Darwin. And of the 220 graves there at the time that, that they were, that they were buried, at least half of those graves were Argentine soldier known only to God. And it was only in 2016 that the Argentine government agreed to begin the process of using new DNA techniques to try to exhume and, and identify the bodies. It's only really now I think there's two or three remains, which still remain identified, but now nearly all of the of the dead have been been identified. So it's a very difficult story in Argentina. On the one hand, it brings the dictatorship to an end, but on the other hand, it, it leaves these horribly difficult personal legacies, uh, that last until the present day.

Katherine Parkinson: And, and as you say, there's, they still claim a sovereignty over the Falklands.

Helen Parr: Absolutely so as far as Argentina is concerned, the Falkland Islands is Argentine territory, it's part of the Argentine constitution that the islands belong to Argentina. It was part of the sort of the foundation of the Argentine Nation, and that's why it's such an important issue for them.

Katherine Parkinson: And presumably the people that live there now, do they still claim British identity as much as they did back in the eighties?

Helen Parr: I'd say, I'd say even more than they did back in the eighties. So one of the legacies of the war for the Islanders is that the Falkland Islands economy has been liberalized. They were given rights over fishing licenses, uh, for example, and, and that's enabled the Falkland Islands economy to become much more prosperous than it was pre 1982. It was, it was very impoverished. Um. The Falkland Islanders have also, understandably, I think, taken a lot of effort in their self-government, so they're a self governed territory. They held a referendum relatively recently, which reiterated their desire to remain British. So in that sense, to the sovereignty issue, who doesn't appear very close.

Katherine Parkinson: Um, so when the conflict ended, Richard, what was it like going back home?

Richard Gough: So it was a huge event. Us coming into Southampton, covered by the press, almost on a rolling news, a concept we hadn't really seen before. Lots of interviews, lots of coming to meet us, being greeted as we came off the Southampton by someone dressed, uh, in full Bulldog best to be British outfit, giving out roses to everyone as they left the ship. It, it was a bit of a, a media rush and a media circus, and I had quite a few of my family members waiting for me to take me home. All I had was some new items of uniform the Navy had flown out to us the night before to actually make us look more sail alike as we came off, um, the Southampton because up until then I had the clothes I was in when we abandoned ship and a pair of white overalls, someone on the camera had donated to me, and we all got these temporary ID cards and royal travel cards that didn't have photographs. They were just stamped with Falkland survivor and off we went.

Helen Parr: So I was recently involved in a, a trip to Buenos Aires, uh, that was organized by Geoffrey Cardozo, who was the British Army colonel, who undertook a lot of the identification of, of the Argentine dead, and through that work, he's obviously developed extensive contacts in, um, in Argentina. The trip was about, for people who'd been. Involved in the conflict for veterans on both sides to look for ways to find some sort of personal healing through meeting veterans from the other side. It was profoundly moving to see servicemen on both sides of the conflict coming together and talking and exchanging their stories, hugging each other because you know that 40 years ago they were trying to kill each other. And what one of the Argentines said, and it's something that's, that really stayed with me, is he said that meeting British veterans, it made me see they are just the same as me. That personal connection, they're all human beings, we're all human beings. Just put in those positions by the circumstances of the conflict in 1982.

James Taylor: It's almost time to leave this Conflict of Interest, and Katherine reflects on her time at Museum today.

Katherine Parkinson: It's been an absolute privilege to talk to you because so often when you study history, you get the dates and the facts and the numbers and its statistics, but just the detail that you've talked me through, you know, the social history side of it is just really interesting and makes you understand it and, and empathize with it in a whole different way, so thank you.

James Taylor: And with that, our time at the museum must come to an end. Thanks again to our guests, Katherine Parkinson, Richard Gough, and Helen Parr as well as our IWM specialist this week, John Beales, to get to grips with more of the world's biggest and most complicated conflicts. Subscribe to Conflict of Interest wherever you get your podcasts. We'll be back in a few weeks with a new episode about the historical roots of the war in Ukraine.
My name is James Taylor. The producer was Lauren Armstrong-Carter at Rethink Audio with support from Eleanor Head, Daniel BenChorin and the IWM Institute team at Imperial War Museums. Thank you for listening and goodbye.

Sophie Duker: Hi, I am Sophie Duker. I'm a comedian and writer. You might have heard me talking about politics on Frankie Boyle's New World Order, or licking up sherbet on Channel 4's Taskmaster.

Carl Warner: Hello, I'm Carl Warner. I'm the Principal Curator at Imperial War Museums, and I'm responsible for the teams of curators that look after the objects that you see around you.

James Taylor: Sophie has joined curator Carl Warner, the Imperial War Museum, London, to try and understand one of the major conflicts of our times. And in this episode, we explore Ukraine.

Clip: We are deciding what we want. We are deciding what we'll do about our independence.

James Taylor: Crimea, Donbas, Euromaidan, Yanukovych.

James Taylor: Just some of the names and terms associated with this conflict.

James Taylor: But how are they all connected, and how much further does the story go?

Clip: 24 hours.

Clip: Russia has deliberately and repeatedly violated the sovereignty of Ukraine.

James Taylor: On our way, we'll explore the museum's collection and meet some people with in-depth knowledge of the conflict. So we can all, for at least one moment in time, understand what happened when, and crucially why. All this in under an hour. I'm James Taylor and this is Conflict of Interest. We begin at the cafe in Imperial War Museum, London and Sophie is enthusiastic about the day ahead.

Sophie Duker: Okay, this is gonna be fun because I come from a position of not knowing much. Obviously in recent months, Ukraine has been very much at the fore of everyone's consciousness, and I realised the main things that I knew about Ukraine, apart from recently winning Eurovision is the blue and yellow flag and Mila Kunis, and she has become really vocal in being a sort of like Russian speaking, Ukrainian identifying celebrity, and has raised over 30 million for Ukraine. So, I think she's probably the most famous Ukrainian I know, but I think her identity as well probably ties into what we're gonna speak about today.

Carl Warner: I knew her as the voice of Meg in Family Guy. I didn't realise that story. So

Sophie Duker: Meg's key to this whole conflict.

Carl Warner: Absolutely. I think, I think we can, yeah, we can agree on that. Yeah. Let's, let's, let's, let's take it down that direction.

James Taylor: It's a start, but Carl is keen to quiz his guest on her knowledge of Ukraine beyond Eurovision and Mila Kunis.

Carl Warner: Sophie, what sort of things do you actually kind of really know about Ukraine? I mean, have you been exposed to the kind of stories that, that we might be talking about today? Did you think about what we might be talking about today?

Sophie Duker: I did some like classic millennial research, which means that I watched, I think, a couple of explainers on YouTube. But I think the thing that I find quite interesting about Ukraine is it seems to occupy a sort of mythic quality in the sort of political narratives of people both in Russia and in Ukraine. Um, and do think of it as being contested territory, a place with conflict and violence, which isn't a great association to have with the country. But I think the idea that Kiev and Ukraine are sort of key to a sense, to some people of Russian identity as something that I found very interesting and the way in which Ukraine as like a national figure is something to be exchanged between different Nations, like a sort of prize or courtesan or bargaining chip. It sort of seems that it's constantly at the mercy of larger bodies or coalitions and doesn't have that many opportunities for self-determination.

Carl Warner: I think that's, that's absolutely right. I think one of the, the crucial things that we try and explain across the whole gamut of 20th and 21st century conflicts is there are different reasons why Nations become that sort of bargaining chip where there is a resource that another Nation, another empire wants to take out of that place. And it's continually contested for that reason. Or it might be that it's in a particularly strategic location, it's a vital port, it's a vital, you know, area to control access to another one. But of course, what that means is that for the people in places like Ukraine is they kind of spend a century or more where their lives are at the mercy of, of outside influences.

James Taylor: In order to understand the current crisis in Ukraine, we need to look at its past and a fight that goes back centuries. For hundreds of years, Ukraine was the center of the Kievan Rus', a state with Kyiv as its capital that was the predecessor to the modern Nations of Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine. Following its collapse in the 13th century, Ukraine has been contested by its neighbors in every direction. Poland, Lithuania, Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire had all laid claim to the land. And in the 17th century, a sense of Ukrainian ethnic identity began to emerge, culminating in a rising Ukrainian nationalist movement in the 20th century. But despite this, Ukraine was subsumed into the Soviet Union where it remained until 1991. Experiencing the hardships of World War, terror and famine along the way. Back at the museum, Sophie and Carl set off in search of their first object. And for Sophie, there's one question that simply can't wait.

Sophie Duker: What I would love to know is how Ukraine became independent. How Russia relinquished control of Ukraine, or lost control of Ukraine. What was the event that made that happen?

Carl Warner: Like any of these things, it's not a straightforward one word answer and one glib response might be to say, well, which independence? Because at various points in Ukraine's history, it's had moments of of independence, so at the end of the First World War, for example. But essentially it becomes a part of the USSR, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, one of the two dominant global powers for the duration of the Cold War, and of course that's made up of Russia and Ukraine and Kazakhstan, all these different, uh, republics and client states almost. Now, as you, as you probably know, uh, you'll have heard the very words, "glasnost" and "perestroika". You know, the, the dissolution of the Soviet Union was for many different reasons, economic, political, social, military, lots of different things. But it kind of led to a buildup, a, a kind of a critical mass as states started to sort of look at becoming independent, you know, look at moving away from that centrally controlled model. And then at that point, you know, it was kind of like, well, where do these states that are starting to move towards independence, where do they stack their chips?

James Taylor: In 1991, two years after the fall of the Berlin War, the Soviet Union began to come apart. Social and economic reforms brought in by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, had failed to stop ethnic separatism and economic decline. In December, 1991, a referendum was held in Ukraine on the question of its independence. An overwhelming majority of 92.3% of voters approved the Ukrainian Declaration of Independence, and the Soviet Union collapsed soon after.

[Newsreel playing in background]

James Taylor: This was a seismic event in world history, forever changing the future of Ukraine. Years later, Russian president, Vladimir Putin, would call the collapse of the Soviet Union, "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century". For hardliners in Russia, the loss of its former Soviet neighbors, especially Ukraine, was a disaster.

Carl Warner: Ukraine, they declare independence. Other states follow, and essentially that establishes for the next decade conversations about what an independent Ukraine means. But the underlying point about Russia having what was known in the Cold War as kind of buffer states, so states that existed between it and the west, never really goes away. And there is always still a conception that ethnically Ukraine is, they're, they're brother Russians, you know, they're Russian speaking. It's a very connected place. Institutions like the European Union, advertise the fact that they are increasingly able to deliver the sorts of social and economic benefits that the common market and all those things deliver. There is absolutely a sense that Ukraine begins to look westwards rather than Eastwood. And in all of those newly independent states, there is a sense of optimism that recognising the national identity of a location is part of that journey into these more democratic norms away from centralised control of the economics, the military, all of that kind of thing. And of course, for Russia or for presidents of Russia, from Yeltsin to certainly Putin, that becomes an increasingly problematic thing. This, this family member is suddenly not looking at you anymore. They're looking over the other side of the room at at something better.

Sophie Duker: Yeah.

James Taylor: As they've been talking, Carl has led Sophia away from the busy galleries and behind the scenes at the museum, to show her the first object of the day. It's a large printed photograph of a crowd of people.

Sophie Duker: I'm like, let me see how badly I misread this photo. The people in the crowd, men and women seem really jubilant, excited, a sense that something big has happened and they're holding up a black and white photograph of a quite stern looking dude who looks like a statesman or politician who is covered with fake blood splatters. But they seem pretty happy about it.

Carl Warner: Do you recognise the stern dude?

Sophie Duker: Stern dude? I don't. Who is he?

Carl Warner: Well, this is, uh, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov. So Lenin, the founder of the Russian Revolution. Exponent of Karl Marx, and basically the foundational figure for the Soviet Union.

Sophie Duker: He's literally a bloody commie.

Carl Warner: He literally is.

Sophie Duker: You can't see the photo, but there's a lot of blood.

Carl Warner: Yeah. Yeah. The red is not just under the bed. The red is all over his face. But the crucial thing here, the other, the other thing to look at is that there's plenty of red on Lenin, but if you can just see, the sort of the dominant colors around him. There's red and black, but if you look at the headband of the chap in the front,

Sophie Duker: It's uh, yeah, there's a blue and yellow headband that the guy with quite an impressive mustache is wearing.

Sophie Duker: So I'm guessing Ukrainian pride?

Carl Warner: Exactly. So, this is basically the way in which the Ukrainians greeted independence, greeted the dissolution of the Soviet Union, greeted the end of of communist rule. Ukraine suffered incredibly under Soviet control. It, it suffered at various points in its history, both because of that relationship and its position. So when Germany and the Soviet Union were at war, it was across Ukraine that most of that war was conducted, causing the deaths of millions of Ukrainians. So The Holodomor, for example, was a, some say genocidal famine that was instigated by the Soviet Union in Ukraine. And of course, Ukraine was known as the breadbasket of the Soviet Union. One of the conceptions of the Ukrainian flag is it represents wheat and sky. You know, it's this incredibly rich, fertile area that provided a huge amount of, of the sort of the resources for the Soviet state. And as you can see here, a great deal of both hope in the eyes of the people there and rejection of the past represented by Lenin.

Sophie Duker: So, as you said, Ukraine was the breadbasket of Russia, but then the fall of the Soviet Union happens. They can be fully independent, catch up on 90210. What is life like?

Carl Warner: Well, I think to answer that question, we should bring in Olga.

James Taylor: Appearing on a screen in front of our guests is Olga Tokariuk, a Ukrainian journalist, activist, and expert, dialing in all the way from Ukraine. Although Olga is focused on the war we are seeing today, she also has memories of this historic moment in time.

Olga Tokariuk: Uh, I was, uh, very young, a small child when the Soviet Union collapsed. I was six in 1991 when this happened, and one of my first memories, political, so to say, was going to a referendum together with my parents to vote for Ukraine's independence. Uh, it was this question asked to all people in Ukraine, "do you support Ukraine's independence from the Soviet Union?" And I remember that my parents were going to vote yes. I knew that. They told me so, and I felt somehow like very proud and I felt that this was something very important that they were going to support Ukraine's independence. I was born in Western Ukraine, and in fact, more than 90% of Ukrainians voted yes in that referendum in all regions of Ukraine. People in the east and in Crimea, the overwhelming majority in these regions voted yes. So there was this feeling, you know, of um, celebration, happiness and like a new beginning. There was this feeling somehow that, now the history is starting anew for Ukraine and all these decades and centuries of oppression are finally over and we’ll be able to build our own state. And actually, you said that Ukraine was a bread basket of Russia, well, Russia exploited Ukraine to be its bread basket. Ukraine was divided for many centuries between different states. So, Ukraine's history is not only connected to Russia's history, it's also connected to the history of Poland, to the history of Lithuania, to the history of Austria. So finally having this own independent state felt like a milestone and a very, very important achievement. And even me, small at the time, just 6-year-old, somehow I felt this, that it was like something to work on, to hold on to, to develop.

James Taylor: As you can imagine, Olga has witnessed transformation in Ukraine over the past two decades. But early reforms to change the old Soviet system to a new capitalistic economy, were hard on the people, and on Olga herself.

Olga Tokariuk: In the middle of the nineties, the new rulers of Ukraine, of independent Ukraine, they were trying to rebuild the economic model, but all these uh, uh, factories and plants, the heavy industry that was still there in the Soviet Union that was owned by the state now had to be privatised. That was very kind of a wild uncontrolled because the rule of law system was not very well established. You know, there was no like independent oversight. The judiciary system was not functioning. So it happened that all this industry, all these Soviet relics, they ended up, uh, in the hands of very few, but not for the enrichment of people. And I remember, you know that economic hardship also, how we in our household didn't have enough food. For example, meat, there were electricity shortages. It was cut off several hours a day, usually in the evenings when people consume it most. So one of my childhood memories is staying with my parents, with my sister at the candlelight and playing board games because there was not enough electricity, so it was a difficult period in the nineties from the point of view of the economy. But then Ukraine started to grow stronger and by the year 2000 the economy was getting more steam, changes to some political transformation as well. And then I graduated from my school and went to study in Kyiv in Ukraine's capital to study journalism. It was the year, 2002, and in two years, the Orange Revolution happened, which I participated in as many Ukrainians. A whole new period of life started for me personally, but also for Ukraine.

James Taylor: We'll come back to the Orange Revolution a little later. Carl wants to show a second object to Sophie. It's an old map of Eastern and central Europe. With Ukraine at its centre.

Carl Warner: What we see in front of us now is a map of Ukraine. And you've noticed at the bottom, this word keeps coming up again and again and again in the story of the Soviet Union, the story of Russia, the story of Ukraine, and that's Crimea. Looking at that map, is there anything that strikes you as, as a particular reason why that particular area might be so crucial to the way we understand Ukraine?

Sophie Duker: Um, it feels like Crimea is probably a strategically important territory for both Russia and Ukraine because it gives them access to, well, there are several ports in Crimea, or at least towns that I can see that gives them access to the Black Sea.

Carl Warner: Yep.

Sophie Duker: Yeah, it's connected to both Russian mainland and to Ukrainian.

Carl Warner: So essentially you're, you're absolutely right. And Olga, I wonder if you, you want to comment on that one of the crucial things is the strategic importance of having a warm water port, and that's one of the reasons why it's so contested.

Olga Tokariuk: Yeah. Well, Crimea is a peninsula. It's connected to Ukraine's mainland. In fact, it wasn't connected to Russian mainland until Russia built Kerch Bridge a couple of years ago, they built this bridge so it's not connected to Russian mainland. And Crimea is a very picturesque and scenic piece of Ukrainian land. You know, it's the only part of UK Ukraine that has something that resembles a Mediterranean landscapes and Mediterranean type of climate. There is a beautiful sea. There are beautiful mountains, beautiful nature, something that is really unique and which is not present on the rest of Ukrainian territories. But then in fact, um, Crimea actually has a quite unique history compared to the rest of Ukraine and also to the rest of Russia.

James Taylor: As Olga and Carl have said, Crimea is a peninsula in the Northern Black Sea with huge strategic value to the countries that surround it. Like Ukraine, Crimea was held by Russia from the late 1700s and contained its own ethnic groups who have a strained history with independence and occupation.

Olga Tokariuk: So historically Crimea belonged to different empires like the Ottoman Empire and then to Mongol Empire and for the last, uh, 300 years before the 20th century, it was part of Russian Empire. The autonomous population of, uh, Crimea, Crimean Tatars, they also suffered a lot during the Soviet rule in the 1940s. There was this replacement of a population. A lot of Russians arrived to live there since the World War 2. Thousands of Crimean Tatars were forcibly deported from Crimea, from their homes to the Soviet Republics of Central Asia, such as Uzbekistan, and they were only able to return to their land and to their homes in the 1990s, when the Soviet Union collapsed.

James Taylor: In 1954, Soviet leader Mikhail Kristoff issued a decree to transfer control of Crimea from Russia to Ukraine. A largely symbolic gesture made for unclear reasons at the time, but which would have major consequences for the present day.

Olga Tokariuk: Crimea's transfer to Ukraine in the 1950s, this was a political decision taken by Nikita Khrushchev, Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. So now they are living again this tragedy when they see their own land being seized by hostile power. And another particular thing about Crimea was the location there of the Russian Black Sea Fleet. So it was a Russian military base, something that was decided with the collapse of the Soviet Union and it was later reconfirmed by several Ukrainian presidents. It was allowed for Russia to keep there its military base, and as we've seen in 2014, this was something that facilitated the annexation of Crimea because Russia was militarising the peninsula, acting out of those military bases. And in 1991 when Ukrainians voted for independence, more than 50% of the population of Crimea supported this decision. This was, of course, a much lower number than in the rest of Ukraine because Crimea, let's say, had this separate history, so it had like this kind of separate decision.

James Taylor: Flash forward to the mid noughties, and another major event is about to dramatically change the course of Ukrainian and world history. Our guests are played a clip.

[Eurovisoin clip playing in background]

Sophie Duker: Oh, um, I was hoping it was gonna be Mila Kunis, but it is not. It was some footage of Ukraine's entry for Eurovision in 2004, which consisted, I would say, of like nostalgic dress on stage. Uh, there was some like furs and people shaking their bum bums. That's what I, that's what I retained from the clip.

Olga Tokariuk: We've seen, uh, Ruslana, Ukrainian singer performing at the Eurovision stage with a song called Wild Dances. Ruslana was one of the biggest pop stars of the early 2000s in Ukraine, and the person who, if we connect her to Orange Revolution, was also the one who was speaking there on stage, who was supporting the protestors?

Olga Tokariuk: So she was, this kind of pop icon, face of the Orange Revolution. In my personal experience, uh, this was the first revolution in Ukraine that I participated in.

James Taylor: The Orange Revolution was a wave of large scale protests across Ukraine in response to widespread corruption, voter intimidation and electoral fraud in the 2004 presidential election. This was the fourth presidential election to take place in Ukraine following independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. And its final stages were contested between opposition leader, Viktor Yushchenko and incumbent Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych.

Olga Tokariuk: Viktor Yushchenko was considered, um, pro-European, pro-Western, pro-democracy candidate and Viktor Yanukovych was seen as a pro-Russian candidate representing old corrupt leads. And, uh, uh, the particularity of this campaign was that it was very dirty. It was a very dirty campaign in which some political tricks, uh, technologies were used. For example, uh, Yanukovych's campaign, uh, tried to accuse Yanukovych of being an American spy, of wanting to bring to power some radical elements and at some point, Yushchenko was even poisoned during this campaign, in what was suspected to be people linked to Russia. So everything was more or less okay. Of course, if we turn a blind eye to the poisoning of Yanukovych going to this dirty campaign until the second round of elections and in the second round of elections, uh, widespread irregularities were reported. Um, there was a clear attempt to rig the election, and I actually witnessed that with my own eyes because I was working as an observer in Luhansk region of Ukraine. So it's the most eastern, the easternmost region of Ukraine, bordering Russia. And I volunteered to be an election observer there at a polling station. And in fact, what we saw and what happened to us personally is that many of us were kicked out of the polling stations before they closed and before the vote count began, so that we cannot oversee how, you know, how that vote count is done. Some of our team were also taken to forests where the pneumatic weapons were fired next to their head. So people were like, observers were abducted from polling stations, or they were just kicked out, as me. Like, they were just told that you can't stay. And, and this was happening, especially in those eastern parts, eastern regions of Ukraine, Luhansk, Donetsk, that were seen. As like being on the firm control of Yanukovych and his people. I was, uh, 19 when it happened and studying journalism at Kyiv's National University of Taras Shevchenko. This Orange Revolution, uh, began because people were unhappy with the results of the elections, which they saw as rigged. The next day after the vote, when the electoral commission in the morning announced the result according to which Jankovic won this election, people knew that it wasn't the case, that the election was rigged because they've seen it, they read it in the media, they've seen the, the polls before the elections, and they knew that it just can't be true. So people flocked to a square, the central square of Kyiv, Maidan Square, and that's how the Orange Revolution started. And I was there too. I was volunteering there as a, this journalism student. I was working in a press center at Maidan and was distributing leaflets with the latest news to the protestors because at the time we didn't have smartphones. So, the media center volunteers, they were printing these leaflets with the latest news, and I was one of those who were distributing them to protestors somehow so, being in the center of this historic event and I felt at that moment that it was really something historic. And of course it was filling me with a lot of hope and inspiration and also given me firsthand experience that people have power and that people can change the course of history.

Clip: Hundreds of thousands of pro-democracy Ukrainians in the streets today protested against the results of the presidential election.

Clip: Far from backing down, Yushchenko is called for a nationwide strike. Warning, the country is on the verge of civil war.

James Taylor: At this point, Sophie is introduced to one final guest. Someone who witnessed this crucial period of Ukrainian history on the ground, but from a different perspective to that of Olga.

Samir Puri: I'm Samir Puri and I've worked in Ukraine extensively, uh, as an election observer in 2004 in the Orange Revolution, and then 10 years later for a year in the Donbas as a ceasefire observer in the first round of the conflict. And I'm the author of a book called Russia's Road to War with Ukraine. As you can tell from my accent, I'm definitely not Ukrainian, I'm a Londoner, and I observed with the OSCE all three rounds of the Orange Revolution as it became known.

James Taylor: Following the reports of widespread fraud in the first round of the election between Yanukovych and Yushchenko, international election observers were called in to ensure the next round would be fair.

Samir Puri: Second round, I went to the city formerly known as Dnipropetrovsk, now renamed Dnipro, to remove its Russian sounding name. Bit further in the east, not in the Donbas, in Dnipropetrovsk, at least in 2004, it still felt a bit more Soviet or post-Soviet, should I say, in terms of how it was developed. Few more kind of grim-faced apparatchiks who, one I remember very clearly, myself and my Hungarian observation partner pulled up at the polling station and they ran inside saying "The Americans are here" really loudly. Obviously I'm, I'm not American, neither is my Hungarian colleague, but it was just a blanket characterisation of internationals. And I've got with me my old accreditation badge, which, uh, was certified by the Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which meant that they couldn't kick us out and we are able to stay during the vote counts. And that's where we spotted the manipulation of voters lists, dead voters' names being put into the list so you can have additional votes being cast. And something we, we saw with our own eyes, voters being bust between polling stations all to cast extra votes for Yanukovych, the more Russian Eastern leaning side candidate. So when we got back to Kyiv on the long overnight train from Dnipropetrovsk, my much older colleagues who'd been sort of from different parts of the world observing stolen elections all around the world, seen election violence in in all parts of the world, they said, "oh, you know, Samir, the Russians are never gonna accept this". If the Supreme Court, uh, forces a rerun of this election, the Russians will send their armed forces. Of course, they were 10 years after date with that prediction, and we got to Maidan, we got to the Orange Revolution as you're describing it, and you got a feel, just like a music festival with a big stage and tent, but in the snow. It was freezing. The other thing I noticed about this is that it was very good natured. It wasn't a violent protest. There was no violence at the time. There were nerves because the riot police were surrounding the parliament building and at night when they moved ranks, their shields clattered with the front rank as the back rank stood forward, the protestors all jumped in their shoes, 'cause you never knew what was gonna come next. The other observation I'd have is that it was certainly not a spontaneous protest, and here I think is some of the interesting Russian views of contention. Not my views, but views Putin and others have voiced, uh, since 2004 is that, "Look at this. Where did this gigantic music stage come from? Where did these tents come from? Where did all this food come from?" And it turns out, and there's been a lot of work on the Orange Revolution that, you know, the Americans didn't fund the political parties that Yushchenko represented, but they certainly helped to train the student groups and the NGOs that helped to put this into action. It basically meant that while the Russians were trying to steal the election through the dirtiest of tricks, poisoning, uh, Yushchenko and tampering with the ballot counts, and especially the voting in the east. The west was also involved in trying to foster a Ukrainian democracy by basically helping the more pro-Western candidate. And that's not me making a judgment on it, but it means that to kind of bring this story to sort of its culminating point when the second round, the runoff was deemed fraudulent for all the reasons we've mentioned, and it was rerun, I think on Boxing Day 26th, December, 2004, uh, and then Yushchenko won, so the Pro Western candidate won. Putin sat back in the Kremlin and said, "well, look at this. That's your democracy for you. You just keep rerunning it till the guy you want wins." Again, not my view, but you can start to see some of the roots as to why in the Kremlin, some of the hardcore securocrats around Putin and Putin himself, came to this view that actually this was something that the West was in it to win it as well as the Russians, and it was a kind of a zero sum game over Ukraine's ultimate political destiny.

Sophie Duker: Oh, oh my God, this is so exciting. Not exciting, but exciting.

James Taylor: But in the power struggle between Russia and the West, it's sometimes easy to overlook the role of the country where this struggle is taking place.

Olga Tokariuk: For Putin, I think he never took seriously the agency of Ukrainians, and he still doesn't. So for him, all this support that was there but he persuaded himself that this is something that Ukrainians would not be able to do without external support. He perceives, uh, uh, all popular uprisings everywhere as being orchestrated by America or the West. So, while of course there was a, uh, and there is a Western support Ukrainian civil society, we can't assume that it wasn't a bottom up protest in a sense that it was the Ukrainian people who went to the Square first.

Samir Puri: Absolutely agree with you, but nearly half the population did vote for Yanukovych. And so I think we always have to remember that when we speak for Ukrainians coming to Maidan, we're speaking about some Ukrainians coming to Maidan. And that's ultimately why there's, there's an issue with regards to Ukraine. Not to mean that Putin is correct, of course he's, you know, he's very self-serving. But I think, uh, Ukraine is a country in transition certainly reflected a variety of opinions even in 2004.

Olga Tokariuk: Oh, absolutely and Yanukovych won the elections in 2010 in a free and, you know, fair election because half of the country, as you said, supported him.

Sophie Duker: Oh. Uh, there is a lot going on. I found this very invigorating hearing about this Orange Revolution and these protests that took place in 2004. I have heard of this period, I think it's this period, referred to as the Ukrainian Spring. Can anyone tell me more about that and what that refers to?

Samir Puri: So, the guy who lost the Orange Revolution, Yanukovych. Somehow in 2010, won an election fair and square. So Russia's man or the Russian leaning candidate actually won. And we won't go into all the details as to why that is, but one of the reasons is he got a lot more support from Russia. Another reason, this is some very pro-Russian rich oligarchs helped to fund his campaign.

Samir Puri: They even brought on one of Donald Trump's future campaign advisors to help advise his campaign Paul Manafort. Um, Yanukovych bungled the job terribly. He tried to play both Russia and the EU off at the same time. He'd said to the EU, "I'll join you guys". He said to Russia, "I'll give you lots of access to the Black Sea port, uh, in Crimea, and you know, I'll buy your cheap gas". It all came down tumbling on his head. He was also immensely corrupt as well. And so for Ukrainians, who'd seen the Orange Revolutions gains kind of squandered over the best part of the decade, they came back out onto the streets in the winter of 2013, specifically because Yanukovych reversed his decision to join the EUs Accession Agreement. He was about to sign it. He suddenly decided not to and took a more lucrative deal from Russia and a lot of ukrainians who really wanted Ukraine to become more Western leaning, more integrated with the European continent, not just through Eurovision, but through something a bit more economically meaningful and culturally meaningful, then decided to come back out onto the streets.

James Taylor: Carl hands Sophie another photograph. This time with a familiar face in it.

Sophie Duker: I can see a group of about seven people who look like their students, look like young students because they're mainly happy. Um, they're holding blue and yellow flags that one of them looks like an EU flag, the other one's got something in the center that I don't recognise. And on the far left, it looks like Olga?

Sophie Duker: Is that correct?

Olga Tokariuk: Yeah.

Sophie Duker: Um, celebrity sighting. So I'm guessing that these are young Ukrainian students or observers.

Olga Tokariuk: Well, in, in fact, you are almost right. We were not students at the time. We were in our, mostly late twenties. So it's me and.

Sophie Duker: So youthful.

Olga Tokariuk: It's me and a group of my friends and colleagues, mostly civil society activists, journalists, writers, translators, engineers, different young professionals, and it's the very first days of the Revolution of Dignity and this protest, when it was still about the EU integration of Ukraine. And this closer, closer relationship between Ukraine and EU, and I want to stress that it was not an Accession Agreement, it was an Association Agreement, which wouldn't mean Ukraine's immediate entry into the European Union, it would just mean stronger, mostly economic cooperation with the EU. It was for many of us, like kind of a last hope or one of the final hopes that regardless of all like really terrible Yanukovych policy, if this agreement is signed, he'll be somehow tied to the EU and Ukraine will be tied to the EU and we'll be able to transform to continue with the democratisation. So for a minority, which like me and my friends represented, it was about the EU, but for a majority of people who joined this protest later, it was mostly about domestic grievances. So when he refused to sign this agreement, people went out to the street and after these protestors, tens and hundreds who were there in the very first days and first week of the elections, after they were beaten up very harshly by the riot police, it's only then when tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of people flocked to the streets. At that point, it became about so much more than just the EU. At that point, it became about the corruption in Ukraine, about lack of rule of law, about police brutality, and about all other problems that were only exacerbated under Yanukovych's rule.

James Taylor: The uprising in Kyiv's Maidan Square was initially peaceful. But attempts to curb the protest by Ukraine's Riot Police quickly turned into a harsh and brutal crackdown as security forces began firing on the crowds. Olga, who was there at the time, was able to capture this escalation of violence on her phone.

Clip: It is actually quite dangerous to be here because there are the, there are the explosions which are not clear what they are. They're heard from the side of the police barricades and there are reports of the police using rubber bullets against protesters and also the police using the tear gas and, and also this morning, so actually. Let's say I am, and it's unclear, you hear, you can hear the shouting and the explosions. It really looks like a war scene. I can't believe this is going on in my country. This situation has escalated to this extent, and I blame him personally for what's going on in Ukraine.

Sophie Duker: So we've just heard, um, the last clip. Can you tell us what the footage is about? 'cause you sound incredibly impassioned, understandably, during that clip.

Olga Tokariuk: Yeah, well, you know, it's, it's a weird feeling to listen to myself, what I was saying during the, the revolution in 2014 about the war scene because I, I could have never imagined that actually there will be a real war in my country later that year and a full scale war, eight years later. So, but that's how it started in a way, yeah. With the crackdown, with the police brutality, Yanukovych against protestors. After several weeks and months of peaceful protest, it was transformed because of the actions of the police, which was under control of, uh, Yanukovych. They started first throwing stun grenades and, um, firing rubber bullets at protestors. And then they used live rounds. So the first people were killed in Maidan in, uh, late January of 2014. And then in the end of February, crackdown came, which killed about 100 protestors and also members of the security forces.

Samir Puri: Yeah. Uh, what happened in Kyiv was pretty dramatic, and shortly after this took place, Yanukovych was actually deposed. He fled. He fled to Russia. He was, his position was completely untenable because whether or not he gave the order to mount this crackdown that Olga's describing, so many people died in the capital. That that was it.

James Taylor: The Euromaidan protests in 2014 marked another watershed moment in the history of Ukraine and its relations with Russia. The massive wave of protest was known as the Revolution of Dignity, and many Ukrainians celebrated it as a victory for democracy and human rights in their country. But across the border in Moscow, Russian President, Vladimir Putin, saw things very differently.

Samir Puri: When Yanukovych fled, people in Kyiv were delighted. The bad guy's been knocked out. He's fled to Russia. He's taken some of his loot with him. The rest of it lies back in Ukraine for everyone to see his corruption. But out in the East were, especially from regions where Yanukovych was from and regions that didn't necessarily held the same views as other Ukrainians from across the rest of the country, there were counter protests. Now, there wasn't enough in this, I think, to bring Ukraine to any kind of civil war. So it's very clear that Russia's malign hand was played, and in particular as, as is now well known, uh, a series of Russian intelligence officers and military personnel just slipped over the border into the Donbas territory and started to support these uprisings and these anti- Maidan protests. So there's a protest in Kyiv, there's counter protests in the east, and then Russia starts to fund the protest in the east. And this spiraled into an insurgency. So, a proper war. And the Russian military intervened on occasion, and I was part of a big mission that had patrol bases on either side of this rapidly formed frontline. We weren't peacekeepers, weren't armed, didn't have a mandate for that. But to try to monitor on, on the situation, try to foster some kind of dialogue between the different sides, and to try to prevent the situation from getting much worse.

James Taylor: In early 2014, following the Euromaidan protests and Revolution of Dignity, Vladimir Putin gathered his security chiefs for an urgent meeting.

[Newsreel playing in background]

James Taylor: His order was we must start working on returning Crimea to Russia. In February that year, Russian troops entered Crimea and annexed the territory, forcibly claiming the area as part of Russia. Shortly afterwards, armed Russian backed separatist groups in the Eastern Donbas regions began an insurgency against Ukrainian government forces. And in August, 2014, the Russian military itself directly joined the Donbas conflict.

Samir Puri: Russia kicked into gear with a pre-planned operation to annex the aforementioned Crimean Peninsula, which they did so I think starting on the 27th of February, 2014. It was a very slick operation from a military perspective. Ukrainian soldiers were basically overwhelmed by the Russian garrison, which was already there. The war was a, it was a very odd conflict. So the first year, 2014 to 15, it was really dynamic. And the two big cities, the bigger cities in the Donbas, Luhansk city and Donetsk city, were taken over by the Russian backed separatists and they formed these, uh, I think as early as March, April, 2014, the so-called Luhansk People's Republic and Donetsk People's Republic propped up by Russia and by, uh, Russian money and, and Russian soldiers as well. Russia never admitted it was involved in any of this, even though it's blatantly obvious that it was involved in all of this and tried to say that Yanukovych had been deposed illegally in Kyiv and that there was a parallel will of the people taking root in the regions of the closest to Russia, and also that Crimea was overwhelmingly of the opinion it wanted to actually join Russia.

Samir Puri: So Crimea was annexed in March, and then the war kind of trundled on after that. And I think it's important to point out that some Ukrainians in the East did willingly join these separatist movements. There were some families in the Donbas who had been separated by this conflict. You might have, for example, an older brother who actually wants to join Russia, who has taken up arms in the name of Russia's proxy war. You had other family members, some of them might serve the Ukrainian armed forces, or I even heard of one married couple that were basically getting divorced over this 'cause her husband was actually quite into the idea of rejoining Russia. Why is this? Well, one thing is just the proximity of time to the Imperial collapse. We've mentioned 1991 with the USSR finishing. Some people had direct memories of the USSR, very clear memories. It is still young at the time in 2014, some have had nostalgia. Others, and I have to be very careful how I say this 'cause it's not a language issue. There are many Russian speakers all over Ukraine who had never been persecuted. Certainly the Donbas, which is the industrial areas of Ukraine. We've heard how in the Soviet Union, other areas of Ukraine were impoverished, subjected to this manmade famine, almost genocide. I've got lots of friends who are Donbas natives, who I worked with as translators, drivers, and everything else in this mission, they would actually say that we were a mining district. We were actually industrialised by the USSR. They invested in us. It wasn't very populated before the 1750s or thereabouts. And it's really awful because many countries when they break apart from their imperial masters, in other parts of the world, they have violence straight away. Uh, there's sort of lingering issues of hatred.
Actually Ukraine was peaceful between 1991 and 2013 and 14. And then all of a sudden with Russia's malign hand, these, I think, natural contrasts and regional differences that Ukraine probably could have worked through in a peaceful fashion if it wasn't for, for Russia's designs on the country, were turned by Russia into the reason for a war, which began in 2014, and has rumbled on in some way, shape, or form ever since, until, of course, it magnified beyond all expectation at the start of 2022.

James Taylor: Olga also reflects on how she thinks we got from the events of 2014 to the crisis unfolding in 2022.

Olga Tokariuk: Russia has never accepted Ukraine as an independent state and Putin on several occasions he said that the collapse of the USSR was “the biggest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century”. So he tried for years and the first decades of Ukraine's independence to control Ukraine from within. So there were a lot of pro-Russian political forces, a lot of Russian money, a lot of Russian influence have firsthand experience also of how Russian citizens and nationals were appointed to high positions in Ukrainian TV stations and were trying to shape the narrative. So, Russia was, was trying to control Ukraine from within, and when it failed, then it instigated the war. But the vast majority of Ukraine's territory was under the government's control, and a lot of change and transformation has been happening there in these eight years, even despite the war. A lot of economic recovery and economic growth, especially in some innovative sectors like IT. Also democratic reforms that were voted and implemented started from decentralisation, going to land reform, a reform of public procurement, which really made it much more transparent and free of corruption. Ukraine was transforming and it actually signed that association agreement with the EU after Yanukovych fled. So Ukraine was getting closer to the European Union. It was getting closer also to NATO, more and more West oriented, and that is one of the reasons why Russia launched this invasion in 2022, a full scale invasion to stop that because it was desperate that it failed to somehow bring Ukraine back into Russia's orbit in any other way.

James Taylor: As Olga says, Ukraine made significant progress in the years after 2014 to reorient itself towards Europe and the West, including important anti-corruption efforts, judicial reforms, and the rapid growth of its technology center. But in the Donbas region, the conflict had never stopped.

[Gunshots playing in background]

James Taylor: And few could have anticipated the full scale Russian invasion on the 24th of February, 2022 that has caused such catastrophic suffering and loss of life.

Clip: It was very scary. My youngest son ran and shouted "Faster, faster, we are being shot at. We won't be saved." And we came here. Now he's afraid to go outside.

Clip: He says, "mom, anything but that." My older son cries out for me at night.

James Taylor: Amidst the ongoing war, no one knows what the future will hold for Ukraine. But for Sophie, a deeper understanding of this conflict and its history has provided much needed context for what is still to come.

Carl Warner: Sophie, I wonder whether, um, what we've done today, where we've been, the things we've looked at, the things that you've heard from Olga and Samir, how that's kind of changed the way you've, you've thought and, and whether there are any gaps that we can continue to fill?

Sophie Duker: It's been incredibly instructive to understand not only about the key points that led to where we are today, but also get a sense of the literal geography of it and the perceived allegiances of figures like Yushchenko and what Russia has strategically done. I don't know, I think it feels like coming back to what I said when I was walking around with Carl about this sort of mythic quality to Ukraine and it's being exploited by Russia and people like Putin to advance this paternalistic sense that not only could Ukraine not survive by itself, but that the rights of essentially what he perceives as Russians or Russian speakers in the East are under threat from this self-serving West focused European movement within the country. I think one of the most like distressing things, and one of the most human things is that in this history, in this short snippet of the conflict, there's no real point of respite within living memory for most adults in Ukraine. It feels that there is a constant recall back to a moment of tension or of protest or of, you know, austerity that has been caused directly by this constant bargaining over, over the region. So it seems like a sort of depressing, sort of depressing recurrence of something that has been so consistent since 1991. Today has definitely filled in lots of gaps for me. It gives a kind of more real tangible sense of what's been happening over the last 20 years.

James Taylor: We've almost come to the end of our journey around the museum, but just before we go, Sophie has a final question to help us all develop that deeper understanding even further.

Sophie Duker: Olga, if I want to learn more about Ukraine, if I want to kind of go deeper into the history of conflict, where should I go next?

Olga Tokariuk: Yes. Well, I will recommend to start from history books and some of my preferred historians, Ukrainian historians are Serhii Plokhii. He's from Harvard University, and his book The Gate of Europe is something that explains in very simple terms, the connection that Ukraine had with Europe. Uh, of course books of, uh, Timothy Snyder and Anne Applebaum, on the 20th century history of Ukraine, how Ukraine was torn between two evil empires between Nazi Germany, between the Soviet Union, how it suffered being this blood land, as Timothy Snyder calls it. Um, and the documentary that I would recommend to watch, it's called The Earth Is Blue as an Orange. The Director is Iryna Tsilyk, and it it's an award-winning documentary that won at Sundance Film Festival and it, it tells a story of a family in Donetsk region, very close to the contact line. Well, obviously it was shot several years ago, so before the full scale invasion started and people were still living there. So it's a film about the life of people in this very difficult situation. They still dream, they still have plans for the future. They have a very close-knit family, it's a very touching film. And listen to some Ukrainian music. You've listened to Ukrainian entry at Eurovision 20 years ago, but recent Ukrainian entries were also very good. Ukraine has a very good techno scene. Onuka is another band that I recommend, and somehow through that music you can feel also Ukraine's, uh, history and spirit.

James Taylor: And with that, our time at the museum has come to an end. Thanks again to our guests Sophie Duker, Olga Tokariuk and Samir Puri, as well as our curator this week, Carl Warner. My name is James Taylor. The producers were Matt Hill and Lauren Armstrong Carter at Rethink Audio, with support from Eleanor Head, Daniel BenChorin and the IWM Institute team at Imperial War Museums. Thank you for listening and goodbye.