The WW2 Podcast

Germany had invaded the Soviet Union, Japan had attacked the United States, and the British Empire was under pressure across the globe.
Yet by the end of 1942, the strategic initiative had begun to slip away from the Axis. The change was not the result of one decisive battle. Instead, a series of victories and defeats across different theatres began to come together, while the Allies were learning how to make their enormous industrial and economic advantages count.
So what actually happened during those twelve months? Why did the Axis fail to turn their early successes into victory, and how did the Allies learn to fight the kind of global, industrial war that ultimately defeated them?
To discuss that, I'm joined by historian Jonathan Parshall, whose book 1942: Crux of War examines this crucial year and argues that 1942 was the last point at which the outcome of the war was genuinely uncertain.
 

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The Great Escape is one of the most famous stories of the Second World War. But how much do we really know about the men who took part?
In March 1944, Allied prisoners of war at Stalag Luft III attempted to get 200 men out of the camp through a tunnel they had spent months constructing. Seventy-six men escaped before the tunnel was discovered. Only three reached safety. Fifty were later murdered by the Gestapo.
The story became famous through Paul Brickhill, himself a former prisoner of war and escaper, whose book The Great Escape was published in 1950. Almost two decades later, it became one of the most famous war films ever made.
But behind the familiar story were 76 individual men, each with their own reasons for escaping, experiences on the run and, in many cases, remarkable stories of what happened afterwards.
I'm joined by Dave Robertson from the podcast For You The War Is Over, which tells the stories of men who escaped from German prisoner-of-war camps. Its long-running series on the Great Escape has just concluded after almost 100 episodes, covering every one of the escapees, speaking to their families and interviewing historians.
We talk about the men behind the famous story, what happened to them after they escaped, and what the Great Escape really meant.
 

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In the winter of 1944, the Schnee Eifel became the scene of some of the fiercest fighting on the German-Belgian border.
American forces had already fought their way through this difficult, wooded terrain once. Then, in December, the Germans launched their Ardennes offensive, catching the Americans by surprise and trapping two regiments of the 106th Infantry Division in the Schnee Eifel.
The fighting would continue into 1945 as American forces returned to the area and finally pushed the Germans back.
Today I'm joined by Craig S. Chapman, author of Javelins in the Half-Light: The Schnee Eifel Battles, 1944–45, to look at the three battles fought around the Schnee Eifel, what happened there, and why this relatively remote corner of the battlefield became so important.
Javelins in the Half-Light is also available on Audible and Spotify.

Thousands of Polish soldiers, refugees and civilians came to Britain after the fall of Poland, expecting eventually to return home. But as the war ended, victory brought a very different reality: Poland was now under Soviet domination.
So how did Polish communities in Britain maintain their identity during the war, and what did victory mean for people who could no longer return home?
To explore this, I'm joined by Juliette Bretan, a researcher, writer and broadcaster specialising in Britain and East-Central Europe.

When the United States entered the Second World War, American air power was still developing. Four years later, the United States was operating thousands of aircraft, supported by an enormous industrial and technological effort, and had produced the B-29 Superfortress, the most advanced bomber of the war.
At the centre of that transformation was General Henry "Hap" Arnold.
Arnold had been involved in American military aviation from its earliest days, and during the Second World War he became the driving force behind the expansion of the US Army Air Forces. The B-29 was perhaps his greatest gamble. It was enormously expensive and technologically ambitious, and Arnold was prepared to push American industry to build an aircraft that did not yet exist.
The result was the Superfortress, a bomber capable of flying farther, higher and carrying a heavier bomb load than anything that had come before it. Ultimately, B-29s would carry the atomic bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Today I'm joined by A. J. Baime, author of "Bird Men: The Rise of American Airpower and the Machine That Ended World War II", to look at Hap Arnold, the rise of American air power and the extraordinary story of the B-29 Superfortress.
 
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