Ep237: HMAS Sydney, Victory at Kokoda and the Australians at Bougainville

At a quarter past four in the morning on the 13th of June 1944, the world's first cruise missile fell out of the sky onto a railway bridge in the East End of London. It killed six people. One of them was 19-year-old Ellen Woodcraft. Another was her eight-month-old son. Their husband and father was a soldier in Normandy. He would not learn of their deaths for days.

Every Anzac Day we tell the story of the men in the boats. This year, we're telling the story of the men on the cliffs above them.

Eighty-five years ago, 14,000 Australian soldiers were surrounded in a dusty Libyan port by Erwin Rommel's Afrika Korps. They were outnumbered, outgunned and cut off from the world. Nazi propaganda called them rats caught in a trap. They took the name and made it their own.

In the spring of 1918, Germany launched its greatest offensive of the war. The British Fifth Army collapsed under the weight of it. And somewhere in the chaos of that retreat, on a railway embankment west of a small French village called Dernancourt, four thousand Australians were told to hold the line against twenty-five thousand Germans.

In 1945, a young American psychiatrist named Douglas M. Kelley was given an extraordinary assignment: evaluate the 22 most senior Nazis awaiting trial at Nuremberg and determine whether they were mentally fit to face justice. Among his patients was Hermann Göring, Hitler's second-in-command, who was charismatic, manipulative and utterly unrepentant.