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Welcome Dan Snow's history at so time of the week when you celebrate an episode from one of our sibling podcast. This week, it's History World Wars, its great podcast in which we talked some of the best historians working in the First and Second World War and occasionally a bit wider than that. And we repeat some of the classic episodes from our archive. This time we've got human rights advocate, author and presenter Tara Moss on the podcast. She's researched the lives of women who became war correspondents, private detectives, nurses and other jobs during the Second World War.

In this episode, Tara talks about their stories of bravery and she talks about her own grandmother who survived the Nazi occupation of Poland. It's a fascinating episode and I hope you enjoy it if you do enjoy it. I've got to check out the World Wars podcast wherever you get your pots. And if you really love podcasts, come and watch us recording one life. Get a history hit dotcom slash tool. We will be in a major city in Britain near you.

Simple as that. So come along this autumn and hang out with us. Be great to see you. But in the meantime, enjoy this episode of The World Wars with Tara Moss.

All right, thank you so much for coming on the World Wars. How are you doing? I'm well, thank you, James. This is a real pleasure. Well, it's a pleasure for us to have you on the podcast. And I'm especially excited to talk about your new book, a novel which is a first for us, the war widow set in the 1940s. But before we delve into that, tell us a little about yourself. How did you get into writing about this period of history?

Have you always been a bit of a 1940s buff?

Do you have a soft spot for this history?

That is precisely the case. I'm really someone who grew up on stories from World War Two, and I've always been drawn to this era, whether it's the film noir of the period, the classic Hard-Boiled of the period, or just the personal stories and documentation from the time, it was a time of so much upheaval and social change, political change. So it's a really fascinating and rich era to look into. But I guess as a kid, I was drawn to it because I was hearing those family stories.

And of course, so many of us have family histories tied to this time that would be almost impossible not to in our family tree because of the huge impacts of this war. For me, the stories mostly came from my mama and papa, who my mother's parents. They were in human store at the time when the Nazis came and occupied Holland. And because my oppa was considered an able bodied man, he was taken and put into slave labor as a lot of men were at that time.

Their neighbors, many of whom were Jewish, were, of course, put on trains and never seen again. And they spoke about that. And that was very difficult for them. But thankfully for my own Opah, they weren't identified as being Jewish. So he was sent off to this munitions factory to work. And my Oma had a couple of young children already at the time. So you can imagine having the man of the family taken away your little village.

And and Starp is occupied by the Nazis. And she would bravely smuggle flour and sugar in the hollows of her bicycle and would cycle across Holland all the way to Berlin to deliver these ingredients to my Opah because he was a baker by trade and he used to bake bread in the munitions ovens to bribe the foreman. Eventually he bribed the Nazi foreman to give him a day pass, and he used that to escape. So he used his day pass and he escaped the factory and returned to Holland at night on foot, which took him many, many days and spent the rest of the war essentially in hiding.

So I grew up with those stories of these really brave and resilient, ordinary people that I guess we just don't hear enough about when we're talking about this era. I mean, if they're the war stories that you've grown up with Torana, wonder why you've become fascinated with this topic. Tell us a little bit about their experience living in Newman's Dorff, because that's near Rotterdam. Right. And one thing that I know about Rotterdam during the Second World War is that they didn't have a good time of it.

It's one of the rare occasions where it wasn't the allies that destroyed a European city, but it was the Luftwaffe. They blitzed that city. I think almost 100000 people were left homeless. What was life like for them?

Well, you're right about them being blitzed and Newman's stroke in that area. It's to important, as you mentioned. And during the war, a huge bomb actually came in through their roof, landed in the family home, didn't go off. It was faulty. And so their home still is standing today. And I had the pleasure of visiting as an adult, had gone as a child. And I don't remember very much of that first visit. But I went back as an adult a few years ago and met several of my extended family, all of whom look exactly like me.

It's so interesting when you meet people and immediately recognize that family resemblance. And they were taking me through this home where my home and Opah had been living, where a bomb had come right through the ceiling and they showed me where it had landed and it didn't go off. And that's the reason they survived. And that's the reason why that house still stands there today. And it's still part of the same family. There's still that connection to place. But like you said, many people became homeless and there were huge areas of Holland that were flooded intentionally to drive people out or to really knock back any resistance to the occupiers.

And it was an incredibly difficult time for the people living there. Again, many of the people left in those buildings were either elderly or were women looking after young children. The men had already been taken away. And I just think what incredibly resilient people to have survived that experience, and that is the so long shadow of war. We still see today that intergenerational trauma and memory is still there, you know, 75 years later. Well, I think one of the remarkable figures you just mentioned there is your grandmother.

How far was that bike ride? I have not got a firm figure for you, but it took days and several checkpoints. That's actually an interesting thing to consider. It was often women who were couriers for their resistance as well, because it was safer for them to go through the checkpoints. But that's not to say it was safe at any point. They could be pulled over. Any of those soldiers could decide what they were going to do with you.

So it was an incredibly dangerous and brave thing to do, but it was really what got me out of that munitions factory, slave labor. It's what saved many citizens and that's what kept the resistance moving, was often women on these icicles going through checkpoints, trying to seem as harmless and friendly as possible to make it through past these armed Nazi soldiers. That's extraordinary. Yes, such bravery.

How did they escape? How did they make it out of Nazi occupied Holland?

Well, thankfully for them, they spent most of the rest of the war really in hiding and in darkness. So certainly my outputted. So they were pretending essentially that he hadn't returned because although he might not have been high on the list for the Nazis, there was a sense that if they knew he was still there, they were going to come and take him and he wouldn't come back. So he spent the rest of the war really in hiding when the war ended.

Thankfully, a lot of countries were taking immigrants, and that is actually how they came to Canada. There was a boat one day leaving for Canada and the next day leaving for Australia. They just wanted to get on the next one. And so they ended up coming to Canada. If it had been swapped around, maybe they would have come to Australia and my mum would have met an Australian man and I would be someone different. So, yeah, the chads and the randomness is really something they came across with a suitcase and three small kids.

And my OPA went in to work as a baker, taken in by a business that was happy to support him. And eventually they moved from the interior of Canada. They moved west to Victoria, where I am now. So I've returned to my hometown and to those roots and I can drive these streets and see where they set up their new life completely as aliens removed from the culture that they knew, the language that they knew, and the sense of place that they were used to.

What was it like for an immigrant coming into Canada at that time, because we forget this was one of the largest movements of human beings in history in one fell swoop across the world, so many people going to Australia and to Canada and to Britain. What was it like for them stepping ashore into Canada?

Oh, they were fortunate in that people who came across who were Dutch were not pinpointed as a particularly difficult cultural group. So they were fortunate in that way. They weren't coming across as Jewish people. They weren't coming across as Germans. Of course, we had internment camps here for the Japanese and for Italians. And so they were lucky. It's really roulet when conflict breaks out and those people in positions of power are making decisions that impacts all these regular citizens.

So you can have fought for the country in World War One and World War to be incarcerated because of your background. That's how random it is. So for them, the move here was really being broken off from their culture and their sense of place. I think it was my Opas brother and that side of the family stayed in New and Starp, as I mentioned. So there's still that family connection there. But they were removed from everyone that they knew.

And really the feeling at the time was one of assimilation being the only way to survive. So for the most part, you didn't talk about the war. You avoided speaking your own language if you could. You tried to take on the traditions of where you were. And of course, we lost a lot of cultural heritage through that process. There are some anomalies where there were groups of people who held on to the culture or a lot of that happened.

Later, though, when it started to be more recognized that that heritage actually was very valuable and needed to be held onto at the time, immediately post-war. It was strictly survival. It was like find a country where you can earn your bread, learn that language, fit in, keep your head down and stay alive. That was it. A very sadly, in their later years my home and I've since passed on, they started to sing Rashon as they got older in the past, in the present, mixed a little bit in their minds because they're getting to be in their 90s.

We discovered that they were actually rationing and it wasn't completely out of necessity. It was such an imprint on them that time of having to ration that they slipped back into that as a sense of comfort and survival for them. So you just never know how people are going to be psychologically impacted by these events, even many, many decades later when you don't have to ration. But you do find that kind of sad, but very fascinating. It just shows the immense impact that war has on the human psyche throughout the lifetime, doesn't it?

Thank you for giving us a little glimpse into your family history there, because now I can see just how much this influences your work as well and how this novel really is a labor of love. So let's jump in to this book. Tell us where are we in the war?

So the war widow takes place in 1946 in Sydney, Australia. The central character, Billy Walker has returned from Europe. She returned in 2004 when her father, who was a private inquiry agent, fell ill. So when we pick up events, we find her with this agency that she's restarted her father's private inquiry agency. She could be the only woman at the time operating as a private investigator. She frequently gets mail that sent to Mr Walker because it's so unusual for a woman to be working as a spy on that day.

By the way, she's not a complete anomaly and that those women did exist. We just really haven't heard of them and they were rare. So they were certainly outnumbered by the men in the field, but they did exist. We just haven't watched films about them and read books about them for the most part. So she has started her private investigation agency and really nineteen forty six is just such a fascinating period for the fallout from World War Two. That long shadow of war we were talking about got massive political change.

You've got people's lives that have been fractured and changed irreversibly. Their fortunes have been changed. They have lost loved ones and they find themselves now just needing to get on with things and everything is different. Billy, being a former war correspondent during World War Two course, wants to get back into the newsrooms and they won't have her. They encouraged all the women news reporters to go home and start cooking for their husbands. Thank you very much for your time.

Once the men started returning from the war and it was very much frowned upon in general to not make enough room for the returned soldiers, which I can understand to an extent. But it meant that many women who experienced the independence of wage for the first time and who were very skilled at this work or just kicked out on the basis of their sex. So Billy Walker can't return to the newsroom after all this exciting work as a war correspondent in Europe.

She's back in Sydney, Australia, and she goes, well, I'm not going to go off and cover etiquette or the Easter show for a local paper. I'm going to find some puzzles to solve. And she reopens her late father's investigation agency.

What was life like in Sydney after the war? Because we don't focus enough on Australia's contribution to the war. The amount of people who died during the war, of course, fighting in the European and Pacific Theatre. And, of course, they lived under the threat of constant invasion. So was Sydney a place that was down in the dumps in nineteen forty six, or was it a place that was coming back to life like the roaring 40s? It wasn't quite the roaring 40s yet, but things were just starting to move forward.

There was something called the famous six o'clock swill. It actually started after World War One as an attempt to stop the returned soldiers from going to the pub and drinking themselves into a stupor each night. They wanted men to go home to their families, so they actually had a cutoff time of six o'clock. This ended up backfiring a bit because it became the six o'clock swill work finished at five. And for that hour that the bars were open, it was a binge drinking fest for all the men in the city.

Women weren't really let into those bars or that social experience. So we're talking about men going out and just getting absolutely sloshed. So you have this need to let off steam to vent a little bit. After all these changes from World War Two, there's a lot of restriction still. There's restrictions on gas coupons. So they still had rationing for petrol. So you couldn't go for a drive in your car out into the beautiful Australian outback unless you were pretty good at saving coupons.

You couldn't get a drink after a certain hour. It was pretty hard to find work. Many of them men and also some of the nurses who returned were injured. So there were a lot of people with disabilities. There are a lot of people with what was called disfigurement at the time. So facial differences and scarring these issues are mentioned in the war. Widow Billy Walkers, assistant or secretary, his name's Samuel. He's a disabled vets. So he had an injury from the war, from the Italian thermos bomb that blew off several of his fingers and killed his comrades.

But for someone like that, a very able and capable young man with a lot of skills, it was very hard for him to find work. So it was actually pretty tough at the time. But things were starting to return to normal. There was discussion of dropping the petrol rationing. A lot of the lifts in the city started at the first floor rather than the ground floor throughout the year. So throughout the war, to save the electricity and the power, they would have to walk up the first flight or two.

And they just at this period when the war widow opens, we see that they've just started letting the lifts go from the ground floor. So it's kind of an indication that there's an attempt at recovery. There's a new era beginning, and people really want to put the war behind them. But it's the impacts are going to continue for some time.

And it's that sort of detail that I think is amazing in the book because it's true to the history. It's also a deeply political and social commentary in many ways as well. And of course, like you say, Billy is based on some real life figures, some pretty badass journalists and pieces. So maybe you could tell us about a few of them. Absolutely.

I'm fascinated by this period, as you know. And I guess I'm particularly fascinated by the stories of the women from the time because their stories tend to be untold or untold. Some of the women that I find really extraordinary are people like Virginia Hall. Her story really deserves to be known. She was an American woman, actually, who was turned down by the American Foreign Service because of her disability. She had had a hunting accident before the war and she had a wooden prosthetic.

She called Cuthbert. I love that Cuthbert. But during the war, she ended up becoming a spy in German occupied France, and she emerged from the war as one of the most decorated and celebrated spies of World War Two. So she really changed the view of what women were able to do during the war. Those people like Nancy Wake. She killed a Nazi with her bare hands. She was New Zealand born, Australian raised, famous resistance fighter, and she did most of her work in France because Australia, like many countries of the US included, they really didn't allow women to get involved in combat.

So they sort of alternate routes. They'd end up working for the French Resistance and end up working for these other allies in order to get their hands dirty and to get out into the field. And that's the sort of work that Billy Walker has done. She's been a war correspondent. She's been out right with her finger on the pulse and getting her hands dirty during the war. One of the great stories, I think, is of Lee Miller, who is one of the most fascinating and inspiring women I've read about from this period.

She was a Vogue fashion model and involved in the surrealist movement, and she was a great photographer. There are quite a number of famous images of her done by the surrealists of the time, including Martinrea. But during the war, she was a war correspondent, photographer, and she worked for the U.S. Army. Now, women were able to take photographs of the U.S. Army, but they weren't able to take photographs of combat or conflict. So I think all night long and in the siege of St.

Malo in 1944, she was the only one present with a camera and she covered the conflict as it erupted spontaneously. I mean, this is a war. Conflict is happening. So she covered this. She took brilliant photographs. And when the siege ended and she was able to get out with those very valuable images, she was arrested by the U.S. Army for breaking the terms of her accreditation because she was a woman and she'd taken photographs of conflict. She was also really the photographer took a lot of the most famous and disturbing images we've seen of Dachau and Buchenwald concentration camps.

And she was one of the first to witness a napalm bomb, for example, and she took photographs of that, though those images were forbidden to be shown until after the war. So you have a woman whose images have really changed the international understanding of the war, of what happened of the Holocaust and the price of this conflict.

But Lee Miller isn't necessarily someone his name immediately jumps to mind. When you're thinking about this period, she should be, I think, should be the kind of person that would get on very well with Billy Walker, who was similarly motivated to document the human rights atrocities of World War Two, to try to sway public opinion to get the U.S. involved in the war, for example, and to change the course of the war. So there's some pretty fascinating women out there.

I urge your listeners to look up a very famous image of Lamela taken by David Sherman when they went into Hitler's apartment. This was apparently the same day or a day after Hitler had suicided in the bunker. They broke into his apartment. And there's this image of her having come back from Dachau, where she took photos of these extraordinary atrocities, the real horrors of Nazi Germany. And she took off her combat boots that were soiled with the dirt and ashes of Dachau and got into his bath and based herself in Hitler's bathtub.

And there's an image of the proud portrait of Hitler that he's got of himself there. And his pristine bathroom is dirty. His sanctified space has been broken in on by this woman. And the dirt of the ashes of countless victims have kind of soiled this perfect little space that Hitler had prepared for himself. And it's this real. Her son talked about how she was sticking two fingers up to Hitler. And on the floor, there's her boots covered with the filth of what his regime did.

And she's trodden all over his face and really said, this is over, you're over. You have no power here anymore. It's a very powerful image and an iconic image. And yeah, I think women like Virginia Hall, like Florence Finch, like Jane Val, like Lee Miller and Nancy Wake really inspire me and inspire the character of Billy Walker.

Yeah, because Billy is also pushing through and breaking down these limitations put on women in society as a result of the war and a post-war world. And it sounds like that's exactly what the female figures who inspired you were doing in so many levels with the controls put on them over what they could do, what they could see, what role they could portray, and then, of course, the censorship of the war itself. So let's jump in to Billy's story a bit and the task that faces her without giving too much away.

What world does Billy find herself in when she's a P.I.?

As an interesting bit of trivia, she's at that time weren't allowed to use the term detective. It was almost the only piece of legislation relating to the trade. In fact, almost anything went. But you weren't allowed to call yourself a detective or a private detective. So bit different than their U.S. counterparts. It seems that the police force in Australia were much more cautious about the term. So they didn't lot of using that. She finds herself doing standard bread and butter work of the time, which is marital work, divorce, work.

You needed to have proof of adultery to get a divorce. But when we open this novel, we find she's got a little bit more of an interesting story to grab onto. She's got something unusual. It's a missing persons case. At first, it seems like, again, the kind of standard that would come into her office. A woman comes in and her teenage son is missing. And that is the type of work that she might be likely to see.

But as she gets involved in this case, she realizes this quite a bit more complex than it originally seemed and quite a bit more dangerous as well. And without giving too much away, we end up kind of following along this path of Nazi war criminals of the world or Nazi leaders. It was all. And call that again, looking at the fallout and aftermath of the war exchange of goods smuggling items away from their original owners and the fact that so many of these war criminals escaped to countries like Australia or down to South America and places where they could live without ending up in the docks and taken to trial.

And that was really what was happening at the time. The top figures, people who are considered to be the top figures in the Nazi regime, of course, were on trial. But that was a very small number really compared to the actual number of war criminals and people who committed atrocities during World War two. So you have this really interesting scenario where the big names are missing. So, you know, a lot of them are in the dock, but it's a few big names who were not found.

But a whole lot of others are out there and they're just making new lives and often making those new lives on the backs of people they victimized during World War Two. It takes us into that whole world.

You're listening to News Stream. We've got an episode of The World Wars on Now with Tara Moss. More coming up after this. I'm very happy this episode Dance Knows History is brought to you by Hello Fresh with Hello Fresh. You get fresh, obviously pre measured ingredients and mouthwatering seasonal recipes delivered right to your door. This is what we've all been waiting for, folks. My kids are about to turn into a piece of pasta. It's all I can cook.

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Don't miss this out people. This is a special offer. Get involved. Hello Fresh America's number one meal kit. Is this based on any real life facts that you came across in history because and this is where your book so fantastically touches on issues that are overlooked by history as well, is that during the Second World War, one of the groups that really did flourish was criminals and organized crime. In Britain, for example, they opened the prisons for so many people.

And let's just say the authorities were busy elsewhere. So they're able to get a grip on society and then post-war, of course, that's pretty hard to tackle. So is this what your story is based on? And were war criminals also able to then seamlessly blend into the underworld? Absolutely they were.

And disappointingly often they were welcomed. You know, there were a lot of people with views very different than what we would consider mainstream views today regarding Hitler, regarding the Nazi regime, regarding even what happened. There wasn't even the same level of understanding of actually the true extent of the Holocaust. One point three million people murdered and the circumstances around that, a lot of that was not very well understood. So many of these people were welcomed and that was even a view that the war is over.

A soldier does with a soldier's soldier do they're just following orders and go on your way. And they didn't want to really know. So this story is in part about following those atrocities, following and looking at the human rights atrocities and how victims were not given justice and how the perpetrators were often supported by the system. And like you said, is often an underground system, criminals and Nazi war criminals. Well, they had a lot to offer each other.

And really, the people who lost out, of course, is those who needed to have justice for what was done to them or to their family members. This story also really focuses on issues of inequality across multiple levels. So we've touched on how for Billy Walker, she's a woman P.I. and she has to be very careful about how she's perceived that she's even made her office smaller to rented out to male returned vets so that she doesn't seem to be taking opportunities from them.

It's kind of a social balancing act for her to be a woman independently working as her own boss. And we look at a few different areas relating to the pay gap and other things women were experiencing. But it also looks at issues of race that looks at issues of disability and these cultural issues so that each character in the book is impacted by their social status at that time, and that social status is driven by the perceptions of that group as Greek citizens, there's Italians, there's women, disabled vets and Aboriginal women in particular.

Shila, who's a Rajouri woman. She's one of my favorite characters in the book. And I really felt that you couldn't set a book in Australia during this period and touch on human rights abuses without talking about the human rights abuses that have been rife against the Aboriginal population there. So all of these stories kind of interweave and I think give an overall picture, I think in an entertaining book, a suspenseful book. It's a novel, but it does touch on all these real life situations and aspects of the time, the context of nineteen forty six for those people.

And I guess that's part of what really drove me to write it the way that I did.

And as so many other powerful female figures from the history of the Second World War that Billie could be based on as well. And you've obviously mentioned a good few of those. But when I think about the roles that women had to perform during the war, the boots they had to step into, I think about, of course, the female police forces who would have had to deal with the organised crime and everything else that's going on, or the nurses who would also be a target in war as well.

Was Billie inspired by these groups? Absolutely.

In fact, I'm going to read a very quick paragraph from the war widow when Billy is being asked if she's a woman detective for the police force, she's trying to get information from an informant and she's not. She's a P.I., but it spurs on this thought for her. Billie was on a first name basis with the famous special sergeant, First Class Lillian Armfield, who joined the force in 1915 and through her knew well enough the struggle. The female recruits hadn't even uniforms and weren't paid overtime like the men.

Nor were they entitled to either superannuation or a pension. They had to sign contracts stating that they wouldn't be compensated for any injuries suffered in the line of duty, couldn't join the police association and had to resign if they married. One of the reasons Lillian never had with all that, it was a wonder so many women were keen to sign up. But the applications always far outnumbered the spaces allotted I. I found all those details just fascinating, imagine working under those conditions in a job that, as you've alluded to, is actually quite dangerous in the 40s because there is a lot of crime.

Talk about the restrictions. I mean, people want to get a hold of grog. They want to vent after the war. People have been psychologically harmed through this period and they're looking for escape. They're also financially experiencing a lot of hardship. So that is breeding a lot of crime. And it is a dangerous time to be a policewoman. And yet they're banging on the door saying, please let more of us in. And they were always such a small group that they allowed and touching on the nurses.

You know, we have told and should continue to tell the stories of what happened to so many soldiers during the war. I think the stories of nurses are perhaps less often told. And one of the most disturbing stories about Australian nurses would be the massacre that took place at the beach. Raje, a group of Australian nurses who were evacuated out of Singapore when the Japanese were going to occupy. They managed to escape on this ship. The ship was bombed by the Japanese, though, and many of the people on board did not survive.

However, there were twenty two nurses who survived in the water. They were taken ashore and they gave themselves up. Unfortunately, they weren't received the way you would hope that they would have been, and they were gunned down on the shores that day. Disturbingly, 75 years later, it's become clear that they were also raped before they were gunned down in the shallow waters. Vivien Bullwinkle was the only of the nurses to survive, and quite by chance, she was shot through the middle.

But the bullet didn't hit any vital organs. She fell into the water and washed ashore and survived. As a result, the Japanese had left by the time she came to on the shores and she eventually walked through the jungle until she found a as it turned out, it was a concentration camp, a camp for that. She did survive the war and was able to tell her tale. She was instructed, though, by the Australian government not to reveal that the women had been sexually assaulted before they were murdered.

So for seventy five years, this important element of what those women endured and went through and suffered through was left out. And I find this again and again and stories from the time that the women, either whether it's Bletchley or some other group of incredible women, are either instructed not to speak of it at all, or there's elements of this story that they're told to completely keep secret. And a lot of these stories went to people's deathbeds, Vivien Bullwinkle story.

She was actually intending to tell the truth of what happened to those women before they were murdered. She died, though, before she was able to go public. She did tell a journalist, and this is a really chilling part, he was sworn to secrecy. But her uniform that she was wearing her nurse's uniform when she was shot in the waters is in the Australian War Memorial Museum, where it was last time I checked. And it has the whole strip from where she was shot and they discovered that actually the holes didn't line up.

So if she had been shot through the middle, they should have lined up. And this further proved that the sexual assaults have taken place because it lined up. If the bodies was ripped open, the buttons also had been removed. So Vivian had had to continue to wear that nurse's uniform as a post, as a prisoner of war that she'd been assaulted in, that she'd been shot in. And she had really attached new buttons with a different thread.

And all of these the fabric, that uniform and that history was all told eventually. But it took 75 years for that history, that truth to come out. That is remarkable, and it just shows you that just because there's been a silence about a topic doesn't mean that silence is politically neutral or far from on a pressing. I suppose. That's right.

It's so disturbing if we think of the thousands of women who did die in World War Two in conflict situations, they weren't themselves combatants, but they were killed by enemy fire. You think of them, but then you think of the many others who died during World War Two due to conflict, but in a way that was considered artificial. You know, they were resistance carriers or they were taken by the Nazis as part of the Holocaust and talking about hundreds of thousands, if not millions of women whose stories are really not accounted for.

When you talk about the people who have died from World War Two and directly from that conflict, the ripple effect is so much larger.

Thank you so much, Tara. Thank you for taking us through a fascinating history of your own family, the history of Australia and Canada and of the Dutch, and, of course, the journey with Billy Walker and the remarkable real life inspirations behind. I really do think that this book is a cracking thriller and a really novel twist on a 1940s detective novel. So tell us, where can people buy it so you can get it in any good bookstore?

And if they don't have it, just ask for it to be ordered today. The wonders of technology mean that you can be even in lock down somewhere in the world and you'll be able to download your copy on ebook or have it delivered safely to your door. And it's really stories and books, I think that helped to keep us going in difficult times like so many of us are experiencing around the world with this pandemic. I want to listen to audiobooks.

I want to have books in my hands and they take us to a different time to different places, even when we can't travel to those places at the moment. I hope you enjoy the war with our fantastic.

Tara, thank you so much. Thank you, James.

And allow us to create a strong bond in the history of our country. My God. And. Thank you for listening to this wonderful history podcast, The World Wars. We've got many more episodes on its own feet. Just go to wherever you get your podcasts and subscribe to the World Wars. Thank you.