World War 2 Podcasts
“It is victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be; for without victory, there is no survival.” - Winston Churchill, May 13, 1940
World War Two was a conflict unlike any other. For six years between 1939-1945 the Western Allies fought against the German-led Axis powers in a fight for Civilization.
Here is a selection of Travels Through Time podcasts that focus on the fraught years of the war. They look at some of its central characters - Winston Churchill, Adolf Hitler, Dwight D. Eisenhower - and they examine the horrors of the Holocaust.
1945
We talk to the extraordinary Holocaust survivor and resistance fighter Selma van de Perre.
At the age of ninety-eight, three quarters of a century after she was liberated from the Ravensbrück Concentration Camp, Selma tells her remarkable story to the New York Times bestselling author Ariana Neumann.
As 1945 began the greatest conflict in human history was drawing to a close. But with the war in the west almost over, a new question was increasingly being asked. It was one to which Joseph Stalin, Winston Churchill and Franklin D Roosevelt all had different answers. What was going to happen next?
1944
After her father’s death in September 2001 Ariana Neuman began to unravel the mystery of his early life.
The trail led from Venezuela into the heart of the Third Reich in the 1930s and 1940s. It took Ariana to her Jewish grandparents in Prague and the camps of Terezín and Auschwitz.
This deeply moving episode tells the absolutely extraordinary story of her father, Hans, a young Jewish man from Prague, who managed to outwit the Nazis and survive the Holocaust.
Operation Overlord was one of the critical moments of the Second World War.
It began on 6 June 1944 when the Allied forces landed around 150,000 troops on the beaches of Normandy in France.
Within a year of the landings Europe was liberated, the NAZI regime was totally defeated and its figurehead Adolf Hitler was dead.
1944 began with a sense of expectation. For some time Hitler’s Nazi war machine had been faltering and throughout 1943 Britain had been filling with US soldiers in anticipation of some kind of assault on the European continent.
In this episode, bestselling historian James Holland takes us back to that crucial year. We travel to Gold Beach on D-Day and then into the country lanes of Normandy on the trail of the Sherwood Rangers.
The recovery of Burma is one of the most daring and absorbing stories of the Second World War..
In a series of astonishing military advances in 1941-2, Japan seized control of Burma. On the cusp of 1944, General ‘Bill’ Slim address his revitalised 14th Army, with his plan to wrest control back.
Eminent historian Robert Lyman takes us back to the scene of the action.
We are familiar with the stories of the landing beaches in Normandy. We know less about the covert series of special forces operations that happened in the crucial weeks that followed.
In this tense and dramatic episode, the Sunday Times No. 1 bestselling author Damien Lewis takes us back to the scenes of two special missions that took place in the aftermath of the D-Day landings.
They were undertaken by SABU-70, a twelve-man, elite unit of the SAS.
In this fascinating episode we talk to the game developer David Milne about his historical work on the hugely popular real time strategy game Company of Heroes 3.
Milne takes us back to the Mediterranean theatre of World War II, from Tobruk in North Africa to Ortono and Anzio in Italy, as we learn how games developers faithfully research and evoke the past.
1943
The campaign in North Africa played a central part in the opening phase of the Second World War. In May 1943 the fighting resulted in victory for the Allied forces.
The capture of Tunis on 7 May 1943 marked the first liberation of an occupied city since the start of the war. As Anthony Tucker-Jones explains in this episode, it was a hugely significant event.
At the heart of the action, as ever, was Winston Churchill.
1942
The Holocaust is the bleakest, blackest, most disturbing moment in our human story.
It involved the systematic murder of millions of Jews, minority and vulnerable groups by the Nazis during their reign of terror in Europe in the 1940s.
In this episode, Wolfson prize-winning historian Mary Fulbrook examines some of the personal stories.
The Fall of France in 1940 took the whole world by shock. The consequences were particularly grave for France’s Jewish population.
By 1942 rounds ups had become routine and every Jewish family was facing its own personal dilemma, including that of the heiress Béatrice de Camondo.
James McAuley tells Béatrice’s story.
1941
He was one of the most extraordinary communist underground operatives of the twentieth century.
Richard Sorge ran a Soviet spy group in Tokyo from the 1930s onwards that achieved astonishing access into the Nazi war machine.
In this thrilling episode, Owen Matthews takes us back to 1941 to see Sorge, the ‘spy to end all spies’, operating in Japan during the most dangerous months of the Second World War.
1940
In seventy two hours in the middle of May 1940, Britain’s political leadership was transformed.
Out went the undistinguished, dithering government led by Neville Chamberlain, known for its failed policy of appeasement.
It was replaced by a new regime of ‘growling defiance’, headed by the pugnacious and polarising Winston Churchill.
In September 1939 the Nazis invaded Poland from the west and, almost simultaneously, the Soviets attacked from the east. Caught in the chaos were thousands of Polish officers who vanished into the prison camps of the USSR.
In this episode the writer Jane Rogoyska explains the mysterious and contested fate of these prisoners.
In this episode the acclaimed author Roland Philipps takes us into the streets of France on the eve of occupation.
We follow the fortunes of one extraordinary female double agent - Mathilde Carré - whose life embodies the moral ambiguity of this period of French history.
One aspect of Churchill’s wartime life has received very little historical scrutiny until now.
That is his relationship with his cook.
In this fascinating episode of Travels Through Time, the ‘queen of food historians’ Dr Annie Gray takes us inside Number Ten Downing Street, as the bombs fell in 1940, to meet the magnificent Georgina Landemare.
1939
The winter of 1939 was bitterly cold in Berlin. Along with the outbreak of hostilities, Berliners had to deal with the hardship of rationing and nightly blackouts as they braced themselves for a second conflict with France and Great Britain.
Bestselling novelist Simon Scarrow takes us back to this world.
The run-up to the outbreak of the second world war is a familiar story to many of us – from Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement of Adolf Hitler to Winston Churchill’s powerful opposition to the policy.
Less well-known, however, is that Churchill was supported by a group of gay MPs who were themselves among the first to warn Britain of the danger the Nazis posed.
Video
The Eyes of the World are Upon You (1944)
"General Dwight D. Eisenhower gives the order of the Day. "Full victory-nothing else" to paratroopers in England, just before they board their airplanes to participate in the first assault in the invasion of the continent of Europe."